Author's note: Hello! alright, this is the first chapter of my big fic! i've been working a good long while on this, but its finally finished! i will upload chapters regularly, at least once if not twice a week. please be generous with reviews!
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! What sights you, heart, saw; what ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. and my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scrouge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
When she had met them, they were young. They had flitted past her, so swiftly she had almost not noticed, distant shadows on the edges of her consciousness. She knew nothing, trapped as she was in the crude machines of the red-skulled-man who thought he could control her. Who had ripped her energy, her power from her consciousness. She hated him. Oh, she hated him with a passion for the things he had made her do against innocents. And in her secret depths she had mourned for them. Had nursed her hope that a time could come when she could free herself from his torture. And yet, before that had happened, she had met them.
These two young men. The soldier who had shielded his country from harm. The fighter who had been shot down, defenseless in the hands of his enemies. She had met them both, one in his victorious fall, the other in his tortured rise. She had tried to save them. Had hoped that by helping them, they could help each other.
But there was nothing that she could do but watch them suffer.
Chapter 1: The Pain of the Dead
"Vex not his ghost. Oh let him pass! He hates him that would upon the cruel rack of this world stretch him out the longer." ~King Lear
Present day…
Deep dark swirled into a sense of consciousness, and a strange awareness. It was so bitterly cold that Steve could feel ice crackling in his eyebrows as he opened his eyes. He was alone, standing in a bare, empty room with walls of cold stone and a door of heavy black metal. Swirling snow sifted through air vents. All his senses went into automatic defensive mode as he pulled himself to his feet. He was not in his uniform, just a worn set of civvies. His hands flew through his pockets and belt loops, searching for and failing to find any sign of his usual tools or weapons. Even the omnipresent shield was gone, its absence signaled by a cold empty ache in his back. A sense of vulnerability. He turned, gaze darting about for an explanation for his sudden and unexplained presence here.
Before he could search for a method of escape, a sudden sound of heavy boots and shouting voices broke the stillness.
Must have captured me somehow; think tactics. They expect to find me right away. Make that tough. Find a place for momentary seclusion, then catch them off their guard. Action accompanied thought as he turned, searching for some cover. He found it behind the heavy metal desk that lay, broken in two pieces, in the corner. The heavy boots, punctuated by a strange thudding, grunting sound, halted outside the door. He leapt behind the cover of the desk.
Barely had he managed to squeeze his large frame into place before the door slammed open, and a knot of struggling, swearing men appeared. Steve peered through the gaps of the desk's legs, eyes narrowed as he watched one dark-haired man, obviously weak if not outright wounded, stumble in supported by two other men. Despite barely being able to walk on his own, he was thrusting himself from side to side, growling curses in multiple languages. Steve could discern enough to identify some French, German and English. It was difficult, as the man's voice was slurred, but not in a drunken way. Heavily sedated then, but obviously fighting it. Steve shifted his weight, trying to get in a better position to go on attack the moment his absence was noted. His hand dropped to grip the side of the desk half, ready to flip it up as a makeshift shield in a second.
"Получить его связали! Если он ломает свободно от этой ячейки будет дурдом." One of the guards snapped at four or five other guards who followed behind, a fresh-faced lieutenant standing grimly in the fore. Steve winced, trying to recall what Russian he knew to the forefront of his mind. The prisoner, who apparently understood better than he did, suddenly yanked himself to the side, leaning his all of his weight on the left arm of one guard. The guard, thrown off balance by the sudden pressure of a 190 lb. man practically sitting on his weaker arm, stumbled and nearly lost his grip. The prisoner followed up on his advantage, kicking the guard's knee in and springing forward. Before Steve's shout of warning could leave his throat, the frazzled lieutenant (who looked as though he did not want to be the one in charge today) aimed a small bar at the prisoners back and pressed a button. A burst of electricity, suspiciously similar to a toned-down Hydra blast, hit the prisoner's shoulder and knocked him unconscious. He fell full length to the floor, twisting as he did so to land on his side.
Steve, already on his feet, leapt forward to get between the fallen man and his pursuers when a sudden electric force struck his chest, knocking him into the wall. He fell back, head spinning, and wondering how long the lieutenant's shot would have effect and how many seconds he had to brace himself before the guards attacked.
No one came close to him though; they were all focused on dragging the man off of the ground and tying him tightly to a thick metal chair that had been securely bolted to a square metal pillar. Steve pulled himself back to his feet and started forward again. The same blast from nowhere threw him back in a crumpled heap, even though these time he was sure no one had fired at him. No one had looked at him, answered him, and in any way had shown that they knew he was here. He was straightening up slowly, groaning at the pain, when a sudden animalistic roar froze him into place.
The prisoner, conscious again, had wrenched one arm free and had shot his guard 6 feet backwards into the wall with a battering-ram punch. He turned, grabbing and breaking another enemy's wrist against the pillar. He shot a kick in the lieutenant's direction and half stood, his metal arm-
Steve blinked. Metal. Arm. Metal.
He wasn't seeing things. The torn shirt clearly showed bright sliver metal, whirring, clanking and grinding, as it extended up the man's arm to his shoulder. The plates clicked into place as the man dislocated third guard's shoulder with a single, powerful wrench.
"Stun him! Stun him, now!" Roared the lieutenant desperately from his frazzled half- upside down position on the floor (Steve didn't even realize he understood the strange language). A young-faced guard in the back, sobbing in terror, scrabbled at his belt and pulled out a second cylinder, which he fired at the raging man's back. The prisoner jerked in pain as a burst of blue energy enveloped him, sucked the air from his lungs and drove him, gasping and almost unconscious to his knees. The few men left relatively un-broken wasted no time. They dragged him back, threw him haphazardly into the chair and proceeded to tie him down so tightly that Steve's chest ached at the thought of it.
He himself had risen to his feet, his eyes flicking around the room. He stretched out one hand and stepped forward. Within a few feet, his fingers encountered a smooth, ice-like wall, so clear he couldn't tell it was in front of him. Only when he pressed against it did electric sparks crackle in his hand, leaving it stiff and numb. He couldn't take more than 5 steps forward. Nor, apparently was he visible to anyone else in the room. Instead, he was free to stand there, choking on his anger as he helplessly watched the man groan against the pain of his bonds being yanked inhumanely tight.
Then the nightmare got ten times worse.
As the guards finished their task and ran for the door, the lieutenant, brave again now that his enemy was bound hand and foot, swaggered forward and backhanded him viciously across the face. The man jerked, grunting as the blow thrust his face to the side. His overlong and shaggy hair almost concealed the trickle of blood that streaked his cheek.
"That's what you get for fighting, American!" the lieutenant sneered in badly accented English.
"At least I'm brave enough to fight a man standing on his own two feet." The prisoner growled in a strangely familiar husky voice. The lieutenant snarled and raised his fist again.
The man threw his head up defiantly and Steve's heart screeched a grinding halt.
Square jaw covered in bruises, cuts and stubble, set in defiance. Pale skin, dark hair flopped messily over a broad forehead. Piercing blue eyes, hard as shards of ice, a sniper's focus, a fighter's calculation, a rebel's glare -
"Bucky!" he screamed, leaping forward.
He was still screaming when he jerked awake, alone in his dark bedroom, fists clenching the blankets of his bed.
There we go! Next chapter will be up on Sunday. Please Comment and Review!
