"Something's wrong." Sterling stood at the window of their apartment, staring out over the city. They'd heard screaming and he'd gone to check out the commotion.
Sterling walked quickly toward his wife, pointing down the hallway to the nursery where their daughter was napping. "Get Ara. We have to g--" But before he could finish his sentence his body was flattened into the floor as a shadow quicker than a blink, the last thing he heard as he vanished was his wife's gasp.
As the shadow overtook him Sterling absolutely expected to die. He waited, tensing his body for pain or pressure of some kind, but a quiet stillness enveloped him instead. He opened his eyes cautiously, blinking the dimly lit room he'd suddenly found himself in into focus. It didn't take long for realization to hit him. As plain as the concrete wall before him was he would recognize these mundane details anywhere. What confirmed it, however, was a distant dripping of water and his own voice.
The voice was so small and weak Sterling almost didn't hear it. He turned slowly, his eyes misting, and found himself, about ten years younger, sitting strapped to a metal chair in the middle of an abandoned warehouse. His wrists, ankles, and neck were bound with leather straps that cut into his flesh as he had struggled. The blood that had crusted over his head and face had been washed away by several hours of waterboarding leaving his pale skin wet and cold. He was slumped forward as far as the strap around his neck would allow, beaten, exhausted, and nearly broken.
“I hate SHIELD…” Void Sterling whispered softly. His older self swallowed hard at the sound of the phrase spoken in such tortured tones. It had been so long since he had heard it uttered in such a way. He'd done so much healing since this day and yet here he was again.
“Good boy, now that I believed.” Merc's voice sounded from the darkness. Sterling remembered this moment. The shame that filled him. His void self looked up slightly, fear in his eyes at the realization.
He'd spent two days telling Sterling to say the three phrases. 'I hate SHIELD. No one in it can be trusted. SHIELD is a den of liars and murderers.' Each time he didn't believe him he was tortured further. This was the first time Merc believed him and it terrified him that he was starting to belief him too.
It was a moment that lived rent free in his brain. The moment he truly started to break, even before he realized it. He'd thought about this moment so much over the years. It had probably been a trick, make Sterling believe he was starting to break, to unconsciously believe, to scare him. It had worked. It had worked so well that this moment had become one of the lowest lows of his life. This memory was the one he looked back upon with the most shame. He'd given in. He'd let Merc infect him. He'd let Hydra win.
Surprise overtook Sterling as he heard his weak voice again. The scene was suddenly replaying itself. This fucked up puppet theatre was on a loop somehow. The thought shook him from his feelings of shame and gave him, instead, a puzzle to solve.
What was this? Was this in his head? Was this a PTSD episode brought on by whatever that darkness was? Curious. He stepped forward, circling the scene to observe the details. Was this dreamshare? He'd done a session of it with Ariadne in 2012 to uncover the repressed memory of his waterboarding, but this didn't feel quite the same. If this was a dream set to loop to torture him, what was doing it? That dark entity that had been turning people to shadows? Or had he died and this was some form of purgatory? He wasn't sure he believed in that, but there were a fair number of things he didn't believe in that had come to light as real in the last few years.
He watched the scene loop about five times, each time getting easier and easier to watch. He had revisited his torture in nightmares and therapy for years, right? This wasn't much different, right?
After the fifth time, Sterling decided to look around. The details were meticulous and perfect down to the timing of the water dripping in the background but they felt a little too... flat. Stepping closer to the walls, the void versions of himself and Merc chatting behind him, he found they were nothing but painted prop walls. Like he was on a movie set and his own mind had written the script. He followed the fake wall until he found the door that lead to the room Merc had originally left him in before setting him in that chair and he decided to try and open it to find the boundaries of this new reality. Neither his void self nor Merc seemed to react to his presence or stop him from exploring so he opened the door to try and leave.
