Just saw The Winter Soldier on Tuesday. WOW. Definitely don't own that bunch of raw nerves and feels and awesome.
He's an animal.
It's been years, decades even, since they took him and broke him. They had to work hard at first–he was tenacious and resisted them with every ounce of pluck a Brooklyn kid ever had–but they broke him in the end. No, they did more than break him. They shattered his mind like glass, discarded the shards they found, and forged him a new mind of metal with an arm to match.
They took him and broke him and turned him into a beast.
Speed of the panther, strength of a bear, slyness of a wolf–and the silent obedience of a trained dog. A dog who knows he'll be beaten if he shows his teeth.
The mind wipes are the worst. He's forced back, arms restrained by cold metal clamps, head seized by electronic fingers. Then the white fire lances through him, the fingers penetrating his consciousness and pulverizing any semblance of humanity his brief exposure to the world may have induced.
He's the asset, the ghost story, the Winter Soldier. And he's an animal.
They've tortured him, twisted him, totally rewritten him till he doesn't know friend from foe.
But he knew that man on the bridge.
He's an animal, true, but he's trapped. Trapped in metal and wires and fog and blood, cold and sharp and grey and red. His missions don't really free him from the cage erected around him, but they do let him see between the bars.
Then back to the chair, the clamps and the fingers, and the bars of his cage become solid walls as he screams with the agony of forgetting himself again. When he wakes up they tell him they need him one last time, and he obeys implicitly because that's what he does best.
The man claims to be a friend, but he's just another mission.
Or is he?
Something latent in the beast wakes up. One last glass shard not yet stolen pricks his mind. But it's almost too late.
The man sank almost beyond his reach in the river. Almost. Not quite.
He leaves the body on the bank–someone will find it, the guy has friends–and walks away. He doesn't know where to go at first; he's been trained to follow orders, not create them. But there's another stirring in the back of his mind.
He has a name to go on. That's his mission now–to find himself, to free himself once and for all from the collapsing cage.
He won't be an animal anymore.