Hydra didn't have a hold on him and as they scoured the underbelly of D.C., their power frayed without a central leader after Alexander Pierce's death, they could not find the man once known as Bucky Barnes. But he hadn't gone far and he also didn't have a name. After dragging the body of that strange but familiar man onto the shore, he bolted.
He swiped the wallet off a dead S.H.I.E.L.D agent, who was dark-haired and similar built. The man's name was Dimitri Visconti, irrelevant now that he was dead, but useful to use for the time being. There were a couple of bills, and a few credit cards that could be used for a few days before it would be caught on by the credit companies that the real Visconti was dead. And dead men can't buy now and pay later.
The man without a name lingered for a moment when he held up a picture of the man's family. In the picture, Visconti held in his arms a newborn child, and a toddler, maybe two or three, peered over. The man without a name, the man called The Winter Soldier crumbled it in his metallic palm and threw it on top of the limp body the memory once belonged to. For the first time in the fifty years, the whole life that he knew, he was not under directive from Hydra. The Soldier was not fed the hype of warfare and destruction. He was not poked and prodded to kill. He was not strapped to the chair and partially lobotomized every time something from the past showed up in his present. And now with his thoughts as the only ones controlling him and the fresh face of that stranger called Captain America, he began to sense something was amiss in his storyline.
The Soldier retreated to a Hydra safe house not far from where he dragged the Captain out of the water. Two low-level guards were waiting inside, and before they could alert someone in the upper tiers the Soldier laid them hard into the cement floor. Their fingers still wrapped around the triggers they never had the chance to pull. He knew with all the chaos boiling over outside that no one else would be here. His intuition was wrong.
First, he tasked himself with finding a cover. He was too noticeable in his shiny metal arm to get out of D.C. This was his only chance to fall off Hydra's map, the first time it ever crossed his mind that he had free-will. And freedom was something he was sure he would fight for. The guard's clothes wouldn't be a good uniform as they were S.H.I.E.L.D uniforms. He checked in the bathroom for anything remotely useful, but instead got trapped inside looking at the man in the mirror. His cuts and bruises slowly were healing. Whatever Zola had done all those years ago had boosted his immune system to overdrive. It was some sort of steroidal concoction for the white blood cells. He had lived for more than fifty years, but had barely aged more than five.
One of his first memories after waking up for the first time was Hydra forcing him to read. He read about war and the greatest warriors of all time. He read about myth and beliefs and obedience. He read about Athena popping out of Zeus' head just from being a thought.
"You're our Athena," they said to him.
He was clad in body armor in weaponry from day one. He wiped off the dried blood and soot from his face with a nearby towel he dampened.
In a second, he snapped his head away from the mirror to look out into the hallway where he heard the faintest echo. He slowly moved his body, a master of stealth. His first metal arm was not the top-notch technology he had attached to his body today, and it often made noises that gave out his position in early missions so he had learned to adapt to move with complete discreetness, unlike whoever had made the noise in the safe house.
The Soldier took several steps outside the bathroom when his eyes locked on to the figure. It was too small to be the Captain.
"Winter Soldier," she said.
The figure stepped close to him, slowly, her arms rose with her palms parallel to her chest. She wore a black outfit. The clenched fists he has loosened. Her voice was soft and she didn't appear as a threat. He was not used to conversations. His directive had always been to shoot and don't ask questions.
"I've seen you before," she continued.
He could make out that she wasn't the redhead who had nearly choked him earlier between her thighs, the Russian spy that he once shot to take out the engineer using her as a body shield. The Soldier exhaled with a sound. She was trying his patience.
"I saw you at the Hydra facility in Italy fifty years ago. You were different then, you had a different name. Do you remember who the man with that name was?" she asked.
The Winter Soldier remained silent. She came closer, on a second analysis of her character she was still not a threat. She stood almost face to face with him. She was tall and he didn't have to look too far down to look deep in her eyes. Her hair was brown and curly. Her skin was pale. She had a scar above her left eye. She lowered her hands slowly to her sides. The woman looked as young as he did, how could she be around fifty years ago.
"Do you want to learn who you are?" she asked.
Without realizing, he nodded, his chin just barely moving up and down. But it did.
"My name is Arianna Rossi. I lived in Azzano, Italy during World War II. When Hydra came in 1942, the men did not bother us at first. We thought we would have some protection. I was 17 years old. I had lost my fiancé and two brothers in the war. I thought I had seen the last of destruction in my family. The soldiers came and took me and the other young women in our town as prisoners. When I tried to escape, the soldiers sliced my face, and Dr. Arnim Zola saw that I was strong. He strapped me down and injected me with the same serum he used on you. And I've been living this life under the pandering of Hydra since then. How much can you tell me of your life?" The woman said.
The Soldier looked at her with curiosity. Inside his mind was bursting with flashing lights and white noise. All he could think about when he tried to look beyond his day one was lightening.
"I know nothing," he responded.
"Good, I'll give you a start." Arianna said.
She instructed him that she would be back in a half hour and he was to remain at the house. It took some clever convincing for him to trust that she would not be alerting anyone he was there. When she came back, promptly a half hour and a minute later she held a few shopping bags. "Change into a pair and get ready to leave here," she instructed.
Denim jeans, a plain white t-shirt, and a hoodie. He had never worn anything but camouflage and body armor. These clothes felt constricting. Arianna waited for him outside the bathroom, and when he came out she asked if she could touch his hair.
She pushed it back with some water and held it in place with a baseball cap. In the time he had spent changing in the bathroom she had also changed. She wore a t-shirt and jeans, and sneakers. She wore a hat too, to cover the scar above her eye. He started to leave for the door. Expecting they were now set to go.
"Hey, no, you can't go out yet, not with your hand exposed," she said. "It's silly, I know, you might not get this, but here," she pulled from a bag a single large brown glove. He scowled at her.
"It's a baseball glove. I think it's the only thing I could find that would fit over your hand in the stores. I have a baseball bat too. It shows we are going to a park to play baseball," she explained as she helped shimmy the glove over his left hand.
The glove was stiff from being brand new and it smelled like leather. She handed him the baseball bat and she herself held a baseball. When she gathered up the clothes he had changed out of, they loaded up a black SUV outside the compound and took off. The Soldier had spent the past 50 years sitting in rooms, studying targets and assassination plans. He spent his time hunting and stalking. Sometimes pawing at his mark to draw them into a corner. And if things didn't go as planned he had back-ups of back-ups. But he never let a target slip away. Hydra kept him locked up, pumping his head with carnage. And here he was now, taking orders from a strange woman.
She drove twenty miles outside of D.C. before stopping at the side of the road.
"Do you have any electronic devices given to you by S.H.I.E.L.D or Hydra?" her hands still gripped the wheel.
He thought for a moment, all he had left was a single blade and his arm. He knew the blade was clean, in Hydra weapons came and went. But his arm he was unsure about. He knew it wasn't just designed as a single powerful weapon. She watched him place his flesh hand on top of his other arm. The way his fingers grasped the sweatshirt cloth showed it was a foreign feeling. He was accustomed to the cold touch of the metal. Adrianna reached into her own pocket and pulled out a cell phone. From her bag she pulled out a small communicator used by Hydra sleeper cells.
"You have these?" she asked. Oh, right, the communicator. The Soldier pulled up the sleeve of the sweatshirt to reveal his metal arm. He turned it over and snapped out a single scale. Underneath the scale was the same communicator she had.
"Throw it out the window. They will know we are together, but it will throw them off our scent for at least a little while," she said as she lowered the windows.
After they discarded the devices they could be tracked with, she turned around, covered the tracks, and drove in a different direction. The car was silent for most of the ride. "Tell me, where you are taking me," the Soldier spoke, not as a question but as a demand.
"An organic farm," she responded.