Author's Note: DAMNIT. I promised myself I wouldn't start this until I was done with Simple! But I couldn't stop myself from writing the beginning ;_; This was originally posted on the ckm.

Anyway, this fic uses the MCU timeline, and will end up being a multiple POV story. Bucky does not end up working for Hydra at any point in this AU. I use some plot-points revealed by the Agent Carter TV series with regard to the MCU, the Red Room, and Leviathan/Department X. Other plot-point/references are from Brubaker's 2004 Captain America: Winter Soldier comic and Edmonson's 2014 Black Widow comic. Consider there to be blanket warnings for Graphic Depictions of Violence, Implied/Referenced Torture, and Implied/Referenced Child Abuse for all chapters. This chapter also contains minor character death.


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Chapter One

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Bucky wakes to ice and blood and cold fire in his limbs. There's a pressure at his jacket collar like a hand curled into the fabric behind him. He can't feel the wet chill seeping in through his pants as he's tugged away from the shore of the river.

He's being dragged somewhere. His head rolls forward bonelessly, chin resting against his chest. For a moment, he sees the trail of red in the snow off to his left, dark boots to his right. He doesn't think the men who found him are Allied troops.

Please, he prays. Please, God, don't be Hydra.


He wakes to a man on his left with a bone-saw buried in the mangled remains of his arm. The man's eyes crinkle at the corners like he's smiling behind the blood spattered cloth over his mouth.

"S-st-stop, please. . ." Bucky begs, his voice a horrified whisper. No one listens.


"James Barnes, sergeant, three-two-five-five-seven. . . three-two-five. . . seven-zero. . . Barnes, James. . . sergeant. . ."

He wakes to the sound of his voice in the sterile room. The lights are too bright and the colors all seep and fade into one another. Everything hurts. Someone asks him a question in a language he doesn't understand.

It isn't German. He doesn't know why that matters.


There's a doctor when he wakes. They ask him questions but he doesn't know what they want because he doesn't speak Russian. He screams for hours until his throat is raw and the noise dies out to whimpers and broken sobs.


He wakes strapped to a table.

"Сфокусируйтесь," someone says. A doctor in a white coat is looking down at him with a calm expression, clipboard in hand. His tongue is heavy in his mouth and he thinks he's supposed to respond. He wants to ask where he is, why they're hurting him. There's blood dried on his face, cracking when he opens his mouth to speak:

"Barnes," he croaks instead. It's a word. He doesn't know what it means. "James Barnes."

Why is that important?

"Three. Two. Five —" He doesn't remember the rest.

"Ещё раз."


He wakes with his hands around someone's throat and a loud, awful wailing sound ringing in his ears. The sound is coming from him but he doesn't know what it is or why it's happening. He's staring into the bulging eyes of a man in a white coat who is struggling against his grip. The man makes him angry, makes him ache in dark places deep inside.

His hands are mismatched, flesh and silver metal, both streaked red with gore. There is a body on the concrete floor. His feet are bare and wet. The man's neck snaps and the body goes limp. He drops it, stumbling back toward the wall.

There's yelling from the other side of the door. He sinks to his knees and tries to speak as men with guns file into the room.

Nothing comes out. He doesn't remember what he's trying to say.


He wakes to pain and death and the rush of water in his ears. There's a piano playing in the background, and the sound echoes in the empty halls, tumbles over the polished wood floors and along the high ceilings.

There's a man in a chair, twisting a silver ring on one finger. A young girl stands beside him. There's an armed guard by the door with a Kalishnikov.

"Сфокусируйтесь на звуке моего голоса, Солдат."


"Тяжелая тренировка."

The training is not hard. He doesn't know what he's training for.


He wakes to screams and tears and something warm on his hands that shocks him because he does not remember what warm means until now. It is something strange, an unfamiliar sensation. The weight of the knife in his hand is familiar.

The man with the silver ring is gone. The doctor with the smile and the bone-saw is gone. The girl beside him is not the same.

She takes the knife and hands him a gun.


He wakes in a bar, a piano playing behind him, laughter in his ears. There's a drink in his hands and he is wearing gloves. Someone asks him to dance in German. It makes his stomach twist but he smiles anyway and gets up from his seat.

He doesn't recognize his own voice when he agrees. The accent is American. He's never been to America.


He wakes on a rooftop behind a rifle. A man puts a hand on his shoulder and says, "Сфокусируйся, брат мой. Ты возводишь величие этой страны."

The bullet finds its mark. He disassembles the rifle, and tosses the man to his death. He is still standing on the roof, looking down at the broken body far below, when they retrieve him.


He wakes in an airport. The man with him is still not his brother. He rips the man's tongue out when he remembers that he's never had a brother.


He wakes in the desert surrounded by blood and spent shell casings. His clothes are burned and there's smoke drifting up from the remains of the building behind him. He misses the girl.


He wakes in the snow and thinks of the sound of a piano playing in an empty house.


He wakes in a warehouse with his mind hazy and his tongue heavy, mouth dry. The tank is empty and the air is cold. There is a woman. She tells him to focus, to stand, and he obeys. He must obey. She tells him that he must help his little sisters; they need their brother. She puts him on a train and takes him home.


He wakes with his with fingers in a little girl's hair, her voice sniffling, "Больно."

He makes her stop crying. A woman tells him that he must not hurt his sisters. She is his mother, and she knows best. He is not here to hurt them.


He wakes.

Why doesn't he ever sleep, he wonders. What is he waking from?


His mother oversees their training. There are guards at the big house to keep them safe. He has many little sisters. They are all so small, so strong, so beautiful. He is supposed to train them.

And their training is hard.


No one ever tells him their names. He learns them by listening to his mother and his sisters' tiny, soft voices in the dark. They speak in Russian, in English, in French. They whisper in German, in Pashtu, in Farsi. Their words are hushed in Tagalog, in Spanish.

Sophia and Darya are the youngest and the smallest. He doesn't let them train with the other girls because he's worried they will be broken too soon. Mariya is small for her age and is fascinated by the radio in their mother's office. Irina and Alina are a set of twins with blonde hair and dark blue eyes. Alina is a better shot and Irina has deft fingers for theft; they often try to take the other's place during testing because their mother cannot tell them apart. He knows which one is which because Irina still favors her left hand despite training to be ambidextrous.

Isolda smiles when she ties on her pointe shoes. He teaches her how to braid her hair before dance practice. Tatyana whimpers in her sleep sometimes, and once confided in him that she doesn't think she'll make it to graduation. Oksana is the most talented with a knife. Ekaterina is the strongest, but she is short-sighted and doesn't plan ahead during fights. Yelena is sly and quick on her feet. Natalia is the oldest, and their mother's favorite.

He does not have a name. He is a soldier in the Red Army and he has no need of a name. They call him 'Soldat' and tell him he has many sisters.

He is very protective of them all.


He is not allowed to speak to them outside of training. Sometimes he thinks he doesn't remember how to speak at all, but it becomes easier the longer he is awake.

At night, he whispers lullabies when they can't be overheard, tells them to be strong; he is their big brother and he will protect them from their mother and the guards.


They take his sisters away when they cry, and when they are taken, he can hear them screaming. Sometimes they call out for him.


He wakes with a muzzle.

They make him break, make him hurt, force him to bleed. His mother tells him that his sisters need him. He must train them to be strong, to survive. They must all focus. The training is hard.

He cannot speak. He does not know how and the muzzle impedes him further, cuts his mouth when he tries to open it. The taste of blood is familiar. His sisters do not startle when it drops off his chin to spatter their shoulders or their hair, when it tracks down their cheeks like red tear stains.

None of them remember how to cry.


The training is very hard.

The girls are too young, he thinks. Too small. He shouldn't be training them to kill. Tatyana breaks under his metal hand. They take her body from him, but not before he shatters the guard's bones and paints the room and hallway red with blood.

Everything hurts.


He wakes with his face wet. He is not awake for long.


He does not have a name. They call him 'Soldat' at the big house because he was a soldier in the Red Army a long time ago. He doesn't need a name. They tell him he has many little sisters, and that he must keep them safe.

They tell him that is all he needs to know.


His sisters are afraid of the guards. His mother hurts them. He must keep them safe.

It is all the soldier needs to know.

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Author's End Notes: RedKitten has graciously offered to assist me with my translations, for which I am immensely grateful! As always, I appreciate any and all help/insight from my Russkiy readers. So if you notice things that make it obvious that I am a dumb American writer whose only Russian experiences include an exchange brother named Vladimir and some Ukrainian friends, please tell me so I can fix it! The Russian in this chapter is as follows:

Сфокусируйтесь = Focus

Ещё раз = One more time

Сфокусируйтесь на звуке моего голоса, Солдат = Focus on the sound of my voice, Soldier

Тяжелая тренировка = The training is hard

Сфокусируйся, брат мой. Ты возводишь величие этой страны = Focus, my brother. You are building the glory of a nation

Больно = It hurts