Nothing More than Assets
{ @notcompliant -- plotted starter }
♔—- Loki didn’t remember much. Anything that Hydra wanted to keep from his memory, they did so by erasing it. His life on Asgard? Gone. His children? Nowhere to be found in his database. His brother? Friends? Mother? Hatred for his father? Even his own name?
None of it mattered to the mission. None of it mattered to his purpose. None of it helped him achieve his goals. And therefore, the people who declared themselves his owners simply took it from him.
Vaguely aware that he was not like other people, Loki understood on some unconscious level that he wasn’t human. He knew he possessed amazing abilities that could make him unstoppable in just about every scenario. Those natural enhancements made him a perfect asset, perhaps even better than the ones Hydra created for themselves.
But Loki couldn’t even remember how Hydra got their hands on him in the first place. All he truly found himself aware of at any given moment was who he answered to and what his target was. Other details naturally flooded in, like people he had to work with, layouts of the planet, weapon knowledge. Anything that Hydra deemed necessary for Loki to accomplish the goals they set for him, they allowed him to keep. Everything else?
Did he even have a name? People only seemed to refer to him by a number or a codename that brinked the edge of affectionate among the workers.
Wildfire.
That sounded oddly familiar...
Most days, Loki didn’t question it. In a sense, he’d been stripped of his free will and programmed to do the bidding of others. His old self would scream in protest and laugh at the irony of a God falling to the will of man, but he had no true feelings or understandings of such things--
Until they started to bleed through.
It always started with one question: If I am so powerful, why am I taking orders from those who are clearly beneath me? From there, his anger spiked and he had a tendency to lash out at the closest object or person as if something inside of him instinctually said fight! You need to fight! Soon to follow, flashes of imagery that made no sense to him would form in his mind, bombarding him with pieces of his old life that quickly sent his mind into overdrive.
After all, Loki lived over one thousand years. That much data trying to be uploaded at once was sure to fry a few circuits. Just as trying to delete it took not only a long time but a reoccurring process.
That was the problem with Loki. While Hydra’s techniques to wipe his memory worked, they didn’t work well enough to let Loki off of his short leash. They utilized for his strength, his strategy, and his ability to get work done quickly. Longterm assignments were completely out of the question. He’d gone rogue one too many times for his handlers to let him too far out of sight. Maintaining control over him proved to be harder and harder as they days went by and it got to the point that he wasn’t trusted out on his own for more than a few days.
The Winter Soldier, though... He was someone Loki always remembered. Considered Hydra’s best, it really came as no surprise that Loki had been handed over to Winter for training and it came as even less of a surprise that Winter often acted as one of Loki’s closest handlers when Hydra feared losing control of him. Loki got to know the other asset very well, or as well as two individuals with very little in terms of what they remembered could know one another.
Hydra never thought to delete Loki’s memories of the Winter Soldier, just as they never thought to delete Loki from Winter’s. Why would they? The pair worked so closely together so frequently that having to readjust to one another every time they were sent out seemed like too much of a hassle. Being able to form a trusted bond with a person you needed to rely on seemed like an important tactic, even to the individuals who willingly took individuals, experimented on them, and stripped away everything they were.
Sometimes, when Loki teetered on the edge of a breakdown, as the lines between what his employers wanted him to know as an asset and what he knew as an ancient being blurred and crossed, Loki would ask his handler peculiar questions, ones that agents quickly identified and likely attempted to teach the Winter Soldier to look out for as some sort of warning sign that Loki needed to be returned to a facility.
“Do you ever get the feeling that we shouldn’t be doing this?” he’d ask.
Or, “Why do we listen to people who wouldn’t stand a chance against us if we chose to stand up?”
Perhaps even, “There’s something else out there for us. We need to find it.”
Loki never remembered those moments. Every time he went in for a wipe, every time they attempted to recondition him again, they took more and more, hoping that they could weed out whatever made Loki so rebellious and so impervious to their influence. They were so ineffective at keeping him under their control and worse yet, they knew they couldn’t afford to let him regain control. It wasn’t just how valuable Loki was as an asset, but what Loki could potentially do to them if he slipped away from them and decided to seek vengeance.
They were so preoccupied with each bit they thought needed to be rooted out, they failed to see what was right under their noses.
In allowing Loki to keep most of his memories of the man who trained him and in allowing Winter to do the same, they formed a bond of something much more human than either of them were meant to feel. After enough time passed of them working together, something started to build. Love, in a strange, fucked up sort of way, and from that love, hope.
Hope for what? For a long time, Loki didn’t think either of them knew what that newfound blossom of warmth that spread through them was or even what it was trying to push them towards.
A better tomorrow, perhaps? One less bent on using them until they broke down too much to be salvaged?
Their latest assignment took an odd turn, though. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. A simple assassination. Some political figure who's name meant nothing to the pair. She was a target and nothing more, but in their venture to tracking her down, they ran into a few unexpected obstacles. They’d been gone for nearly four days before they ever even set their sights on the woman in question.
Far too long for Loki to be out for a single assignment. He rarely went more than two days without risking noncompliance to take over.
Normally, he would have shown the signs early on. One of those ever famous questions that tipped his handler off to the fact that he needed to be returned to a hidden base, and quickly. This time, Loki said nothing of the sort. He wanted to, even opened his mouth a few times to begin a thought, but quickly closed it again. Something willed him not to speak, not to give Winter that tip-off.
A faint memory prodded at his mind, an earlier mission where Loki had been sent on a similar assassination job. He’d hesitated to execute the target, turning his surprisingly vivid and emotion-filled emerald gaze to his partner in an almost pleading stance. He didn’t want to make the kill. He said something, but he couldn’t remember what. Winter hesitated for a moment, regarding Loki with an expression that seemed... genuinely concerned for his charge, before carrying out the execution himself. There was more to the memory. Loki knew there was, but whatever happened after that had been taken from him.
Logical deductions suggested that Loki had followed through with some sort of emotion-fueled thought or action or conversation, something that made him stand out from what he was supposed to be.
And if he did that here and now, he’d run the same risk.
So, he kept quiet, acted accordingly, only engaged his handler on a level that made sense for the position they both held. What he needed was time. Time and distance. The longer they were out, the easier it would be to slip away from Hydra’s ever watching eyes.
“You were screaming again” Loki stated, his tone flat as if he’d asked a more normal question like the position of the target.
He set down a large case and flipped it open. Pieces of a long-distance sniper rifle sat inside. Rather than pick it up and assemble it by hand, he waved a hand over the case. His magic did the assembly for him. He couldn’t explain it, didn’t have logical reasoning as to why it worked, but he found that if he willed something he wanted enough, it often populated into existence.
“Before we left the facility,” he added, taking up the rifle. Lifting the scope to his eye, Loki looked through it and then lifted a hand to adjust the scope. “24 hours prior to being dispatched for this assignment. They were hurting you. Again. Just like they always do.”
Lowering the weapon again, Loki turned to his handler.
“This assignment doesn’t matter. You know that, right? We do what they ask of us without question and we have no idea why we even do it. Who is this woman? Why do they want her dead? Why do we never ask these questions?”
He’d kept quiet about these thoughts for days now, silently suffered as more and more images and scenes played through his mind that made so very little sense to him. Only now that they were as far away as they would get before they were faced with returning to their tormentors did he dare speak up again.
“We cannot go back there. You know that, don’t you? We need to forget about this ridiculous assignment and just go. They do not have any power over us unless we give it to them. It needs to stop. We need to stop it.”
