Work Text:
i.
Sometimes he remembers. Sometimes he doesn’t. His mind is made of puzzle pieces and none of them fit together right.
ii.
“So, how is our patient today?”
Pierce is striding into the room, rolling up his sleeves like this is a business transaction. He understands nothing of the mind, of it’s complexities, of how careful and thorough you have to be to rewrite it as entirely as they mean to.
Manipulation, oh that of course is easy, slowly piece by piece to eradicate a person’s trust in themselves and their own memory, making them doubt and forget and become uncertain. That is simple, simpler even than the mechanics of cutting off a damaged arm to replace it with mechanical perfection. Arnim thinks, a boy could do that without thinking.
He taps a glass tube, shakes out the bubbles, and sighs. “Restless, Mr. Pierce. This is a bad day.”
Pierce smiles, a slow casual smile, a relaxed smile. The smile of the man ready to rule the world. “So,” he says. “The perfect day to start capture bonding.”
iii.
This has been the plan, since they obtained Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes:
Repair physical damage to his body. This began with preventing frostbite, with counteracting the damage the ice had done to his body. Halfway through that they realised his body was shaking it off on it’s own, regrowing blood vessels and cells where they had died. From there it was onto the second task. Removing the ruin of his arm, removing it all the way up to the shoulder, and creating a suitable prosthetic.
Checking the prosthetic worked almost lost them a doctor, Doktor Baum’s throat had been bruised for weeks. Pierce considered it an unqualified success. Zola believed they could do better.
“Brainwashing,” Pierce had said, looking over the plans. “Interesting. How soon can you start?”
iv.
It was more than brainwashing. Pierce could see the potential of it, but he didn’t seem to quite understand that. But, Arnim thought, Pierce was young. One more young hopeful, climbing the ranks. Assigned the job of working with him by SHIELD, entrusted to keeping an eye on him.
But, under HYDRA’s eyes, keeping an eye on a project that was as yet uncertain. In it’s infancy.
Pierce would do well, though. He had the trust of Director Carter, the trust of many other rising hopefuls. No one would suspect him they way they suspected Arnim.
v.
Sometimes things would tick in the back of his mind. Little itches and cracks where there shouldn’t be any. Mostly there isn’t, and there’s this sense that there should be. An itch, an itch, an itch… that isn’t there.
A phantom limb.
vi.
“The Russians want to borrow him. The Red Room.”
“He’s not ready.”
Arnim smiles slowly. “Will he ever be? We might as well test him.”
Pierce paces, one hand in his trouser pocket. He’s angry, uncertain, irritable. The idea that anyone would know of their weapon, would have the gall to ask for him… but then Pierce doesn’t know what Arnim knows: that creating a myth, a legend, can make the weapon that much more powerful.
He will learn it eventually. Of that, Arnim has no doubt.
vii.
“We’re sending you somewhere new,” Pierce says softly to the soldier. The soldier looks up at him with an expression like a lost child, a kicked puppy, what? why? etched on his features. “You need to do a job for some friends of ours. You’ll come right back to us.”
“What do they need me to do?” The voice is soft, quiet, contains only a trace of an American accent, but vague, with no clear origin. They succeeded in driving that out of him early on, the first stage of eradicating his identity, making him nothing but a tool.
“The same thing we always need you to do,” Pierce says gently. “To change the world.”
From behind the mirror Arnim sees the slight twist of the soldier’s mouth; up close, Pierce no doubt has a better view.
“First,” Pierce says, slowly rising, hand withdrawing from the soldier’s even as the man’s flesh hand tries desperately to keep hold of it, “We need to wipe you.”
The whimper, the cry, the all-to-human screams the soldier gives as Pierce walks away betray the attachment and loyalty they have worked so hard to build.
They were so very lucky to find another man of such a physical form as Captain Rogers - and even luckier that he was amenable to their view of the world.
viii.
Sometimes Arnim likes to dream a world where it was the Captain who fell first, and James Buchanan Barnes followed.
Then, they would have two soldiers on their side, and a war wholly won.
A world painted in black and red and under the rightful rule of HYDRA.
ix.
His mind is a shattering mess. There’s echoes and echoes, itches and itches, a crack that ventures back and then is gone - or is it even there at all?
Then they wipe him, and, for a moment, he remembers everything.
Then, he remembers nothing.
x.
Reports blur together. Successful hit here, extraction performed here. He is like a ghost, a myth, their own troops not in on the information fear him, dread him.
He is a myth to them, a ghost, the Winter Soldier.
Arnim still smiles at the reports even as he is diagnosed.
xi.
When he wakes, the first thing he sees is himself.
“Do you remember?” he asks.
“Do you?” he asks.
At one end code ticks along. At the other neurons keep on managing to fire. One of them is large screen, is hundreds of whirring drives, is thousands of reels of code. The other is a wrinkled old man, is slumped in a bed, is gasping for breath.
“You must lead them,” he says. “Guide them.”
“Die for them.”
xii.
He sleeps. He wakes. He hurts, he heals, he suffers, he does not.
Some part of his brain itches, cracks spiderwebbing out.
xiii.
“So it worked,” Pierce says, as soon as Arnim is in the ground.
“Of course,” Arnim says.
“What do we do now?”
In the etching of an outline on his screen, Arnim smiles. “First,” he says, “We rule the world.”
xiv.
Pierce’s climb has been slow and steady. Patient but unrelenting, a glacier of bureaucracy, slowly moving forward. He works as hard as Fury - one man they would never have considered bringing to their side, one man they know early on they never could even if they considered it. He rises up the ranks, through the paperwork, into the offices.
In SHIELD, he works to bring peace, while behind him, HYDRA wreaks chaos.
“Hail HYDRA,” he whispers in Sitwell’s ear, even as he says to Fury, “Peace isn’t an achievement; it’s a responsibility.”
To him - to HYDRA - they are one and the same.
Arnim watches through a thousand glass eyes, and smiles to himself.
xv.
He’s brought back. He doesn’t know how he knows this but now, the air is different. Something is different. This is like...
“Soldier,” says his voice. “Welcome back. We need you to do something for us, for our friends.”
In the memory the blond man smiles, before the blinding white burns in at the edges.
“We need you to save the world.”
xvi.
Pierce trusts in his hold on the soldier. Arnim thinks this is both wise and foolish. Wise because the soldier is bonded to him in a way he is to very few. They had once thought that faces from the past might undo all their work, but the deaths of the Starks had proven otherwise. The deaths of several of the Howling Commandos proved it again. The only person the soldier has hesitated for when told to pull the trigger is Pierce.
Foolish, though, very foolish. The soldier, Arnim thinks, is like the ice they freeze him in. Only stable, only solid, when the cold of his cryopod is still nipping at his heels.
As soon as he starts to thaw he is as tricky as black ice, cracks spiderwebbing out.
xvii.
“It is time,” Arnim says. Pierce smiles, hands in trouser pockets, looking as though he would rule the world. “INSIGHT is almost ready.”
xviii.
The soldier is all the efficiency they ever asked of him, honed to perfection by the Russians, tamed by loyalty to Pierce. Arnim watches the footage and laughs.
“We did better,” he says, when Pierce speaks to him next. “We are ready. It is time we stepped out of the shadows.”
Pierce smiles like a man who would rule the world. “Hail HYDRA,” he says.
xix.
The next day, Fury’s car is shot.
That night, Fury is dead.
The next day, the hunt for Captain America begins.
xx.
“The man on the bridge,” the soldier says. “I knew him.”
Once Arnim would have watched through glass eyes, would have seen how, at the corner, his mouth turns very slightly down. Pierce sees it close up.
Compliance, was the first lesson, taught to the soldier by pain and affection in careful measures. Pierce raises his hand and slaps him. “You have shaped the world,” he says. “You must do so one more time.”
The soldier looks at him, a lost child, a kicked puppy.
“But I knew him.”
“Wipe him,” he says.
The whimper, the cry, the all-to-human screams the soldier gives as Pierce walks away betray far more than attachment.
xxi.
Pain. Light. A weapon in his hand, tactical vest on his back. A map. A ship - “Helicarrier” - a bank of computers.
“Wait here,” he is told. “Kill anyone who comes near.”
He kills three technicians before the man in red and white and blue steps out.
xxii.
Pierce watches his work - decades of it, years upon years of careful, focussed machinations and manipulations - fall apart in the air above the Triskhelion.
He bleeds out, watching the sky where they should fly, free, saving the world from HYDRA’s enemies.
On one of the Helicarriers, the Winter Soldier fights.
xxii.
Chaos. Pain. A gun in his hand, a knife, his tactical vest.
The man in red and white and blue, pleading.
He has never hesitated because of pleading.
xxiii.
“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes!”
The clang of a shield dropping to metal, to glass, to empty air.
Blood seeping between his fingerplates.
“I’m not gonna fight you.”
A pause, the wind, a memory, echoed by words.
I’m I’m with with you you to to the the end end of of the the line line
Words coalescing.
“I’m with you to the end of the line.”
xxiv.
They fall. The helicarriers fall.
It feels as though the whole world falls with them.
xxv.
His mind is made of puzzle pieces and none of them fit together right.
“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.”
“But... I knew him.”
Pain. Ice. Pain again.
Nothingness where his arm is.
Itches in his mind, then the memory of itches, then none.
A phantom limb.
“We need you to save the world.”
His own mouth sounding it out, a word, “Bucky.”
He leaves. The man is dumped on the shore, the guns in the river, the Helicarriers burn and shatter and sink behind them.
The world, falling.
His mind itches. Cracks spiderweb across it, like ice. Itches and itches, flaking paint and memories.
His mind is made of puzzle pieces and none of them fit together right.