Winter Captain

                                        "Do you know who you are?"
                                                                                 "I- I- I'm Steve Rogers."

                                                                                                                         "Wipe him."


                     He was a godson. The Captain, their greatest enemy, found frozen in the ice. As Peggy Carter struggled to build her SHIELD, as Howard Stark left his son behind to search for a friend, Hydra took the body of Steve Rogers and grew the Captain in his place. He is their greatest asset, their finest work. No memory of who he was, no knowledge of the peace he had strived for.
                                         "I am a soldier."
                    A half century of violence. Fifty years of killing. The world must fall before the new order and peace can be forged from the ashes. He has killed soldiers, politicians, watched cities burn. The shadowed fist, the quick knife, the spark that seizes the country and burns it down.
                                        "I am Hydra's soldier."
                     SHIELD has grown strong, and inside them, Hydra. Hidden in cryo-storage, their soldier sleeps, waiting for the right moment. They have waited this long. They will wait. Their soldier will wait. And Fury, Hill, the Avengers - they won't see it coming.
                                        "I am Hydra's."

for redchaos

When Barnes had found him outside of Bucharest, Rogers had tried to run again. He'd come back to his apartment, to find Barnes, in all his red white and blue glory, sitting at the kitchen table. "Stevie", had been the opening word, "what you been up to these days?" And it had been too much and too close and too unexpected. Threw his bag of groceries into Barnes' head, grabbed his go bag from under the bed, and dove out the window. Just like he'd planned.
Hadn't planned on the other Avengers being with Barnes, or the state police, or the guy with the cat claws.
He'd tried to run, and ended up arrested by the United Nations instead. The set up they secured him wasn't all that different from Hydra; chair, cuffs, glass walls, electronic voices from the speakers.
The UN wants to bring in a psychiatrist. Barnes brings in her instead.
"I remember you."

For quadblaster

"Asset."

Guns are spread before him, and knives, all sorts of death dealers and painful instruments. He's got a large knife in his hand, meant for carving up bodies until the features are unrecognisable. There's blood on the handle, but he stills his hands from cleaning as the Director comes into the room and says his name. He leans back, moving from his knees to his heals and then straightening up, until he's standing taller than the Director but still with the body language of being totally beneath.

As a weapon should be.

"Your work is needed. Bring your tools."

"Yes sir."

And he follows, carrying knives in his hands and his waist, guns strapped to his legs and across his back. He walks with a steady gate behind the Director, and the scientists and agents in the hallway ahead of them part like ants squirming as the fire burns. Fearful of the weapon in black, of the death he carries in his fists and the silent unnaturalness of his face. The mask makes him nothing, and the nothingness gives them fear. He would enjoy it, but he is still nothing now. The Asset is nothing. The missions give him everything.

They come to a stop in front of a heavy metal door, and through the glass window the Asset can see chains hanging down from the ceiling, and a man trapped in them, held back in the cold of the room. He looks to the Director, and the Director smiles. "Our latest intake. We were hoping to make him an Asset, like yourself."

"We need you to break him."

"How?"

His voice is hoarse from disuse, and the words come out strange from under the mask, garbled by the metal and plastic. There's no need to send more looks through the dirty glass at the man, no wait to see and judge how best to break the man. It's in the orders, in the role the Director tells him to pick up. This is how he becomes something more than nothing. The Asset ordered into the role of tormentor or relief or confessional or friend. He's played the roles all before. Been the one they use to twist and turn others who will serve Hydra.

The Director's smile is wide like a shark's.

"Teach him lessons. Try not to kill him."

The Asset steps through the door into the cell, and his footsteps ring heavily on the concrete floor.

for infligere

It had burned. He doesn't remember why, but he remembers the metal crashing and building, the glass falling from the sky, the way the flames had spun in the air. Twisting and falling as the explosions overtook it all. The building next, the fuel on the water dancing in harsh colours as it came down in crashing flames.

He pulled the man from the flames. Dove into the water and fire and pulled him out, left him on the river back with his shield in his arms and the feeling like it was his skull burning now. When he thought of the man's face, barely moving, looking dead if his hair wasn't blowing in the exhale of his lips, his thoughts burned and twisted. He knew the face. He didn't know the face. He hated the face. He loved the man.

He lets the fire burn away as he slips back into the city, hiding in alleys and stealing clothes to pull over his body armour, ducks his head and keeps quiet.

The ashes fall.

He sees his face on televisions and the man's face as well, and other faces. Faces he knows and faces that only make his thoughts turn to the burning feeling again. So he hides from the televisions as well. Ducks his head and keeps it down. Carries three guns in his belt, two more in the pockets of his oversized jacket, and looks away from cops carefully. The shadows grow smaller, the rings around the city tighten until he can feel the fire licking at his skin again.

They're getting closer, searching the city, and maybe it's not for him, maybe it just for all those others who escaped the burning fall of SHIELD and Hydra, but the searches are coming too close to him to be tolerated.

A cop finds him in the alley cleaning his guns.

Another body to the Winter Captain's list.

It's been three weeks since he pulled the man from the river, and while the city scrambles under the ashes, he picks the lock of a car and drives south. Memories of a safe house tickle at his mind, someplace new to lie low, another place to hide from the fires in the ruins of Hydra.

He has a gun in his hand as he picks the lock on the door.