In the Shadow of Great Times

Chapter 3

Disclaimer: Rights to the MCU belong to Disney

Carolyn had no idea how long had passed.

Isolated in that room, there was nothing at all the mark the passage of time, only the steadily growing weakness of hunger and the dryness in her throat. She was utterly exhausted. Her sleep last night had been light and constantly interrupted anytime she'd heard a noise, and the seriousness of her situation had kept her alert.

Now she was feeling the effects of that.

The adrenaline rush from her awful meeting with Schmidt earlier had now worn off and she was left feeling off kilter and woozy. She refused to rest though, not when she knew it was only a matter of time before Zola or one of his cronies turned up to have their way with her, and she didn't want to be asleep when that happened.

God, she didn't know what was worse, being left in this room to slowly go mad, waste away and die or spending what would probably be a brief but excruciating time under Doctor Zola's knife. Although, knowing what she did about that slimy little worm, it would probably be some hideous combination of both.

He would test the very limits of her body, push the fortified boundaries of her mind; wear her down over hours of abuse and neglect until she was a shivering wreck and then cut out her heart. The terrifying thing was that he would have no reason to pull his punches, no need to keep her sane since Hydra had no use for her information. The reality of it made her want to scream.

But that would be a waste of breath: there was no one to hear her and she wouldn't give them the satisfaction of it anyway.

The room was infuriatingly blank and obnoxiously silent, it made her breaths irritatingly loud and the constant repetitious steadiness of them made her want to rip her ears off. She was bored out of her mind, clawing at the walls with maddening anxiety as the wait for the Doctor became more torturous than she thought actual torture might be. The things her mind conjured up in the absence of any real stimulation made her empty stomach turn and her eyes water.

Her time as a spy had taught her patience but she was no saint.

The room, Carolyn knew, was exactly fifteen paces long and seven paces wide and if one of her paces was approximately two feet, that was four-hundred-and-twenty feet-squared of sheer mind-numbing monotony with a dash of paranoia and despair.

She was quickly running out of things to do to keep her mind occupied.

First, she had tried to amuse herself with the map on the wall, but all that had done was depress her when she'd realised how much of that map was under Nazi control. At least Allied forces had made landfall on the European continent now, with the invasion of Italy earlier that year, but the cost had been high and the battles long and bloody, the Germans had fought tooth and nail for every inch of land they'd lost and it was a long way still to Berlin.

It grated on her, just a little, as it did a few of her countrymen, that they'd needed American help to get this far.

Still, although the map depressed her, she'd tried her hand at devising battle strategies for the coming months and for that potential invasion of France that had been whispered about in the corners of headquarters back home. There was the Atlantic Wall to contend with, a massive system of fortifications and weaponry stretching from Norway to southern France, and the Gothic Line, cutting Italy in half to the south. Luckily the Soviets had been steadily beating back the Germans since the summer, but there were growing concerns about the Soviets themselves in the halls of power which made their victories less and less something to celebrate. Ultimately, much as she knew about the Nazi command structure and bits and pieces of military intelligence, she knew nowhere near enough to plan an offensive to a workable degree and the whole thing just began to frustrate her.

After that she'd tried her hand at fixing the metronome she'd broken earlier. The sharp metallic pieces were still scattered haphazardly across the floor where they'd fallen and their limp, dull shapes had promised at least a modicum of stimulation. But the structure and purpose of each one had eluded her. She'd fiddled, with intense levels of focus, with the components in an effort to stave off the dark thoughts that circled her mind, but to no avail. She could assemble an improvised explosive on-the-fly yes, but this mechanical wizardry? It was so finicky and complex, each piece had a specific place in the working of the device and she'd sooner be having tea with Hitler than figure out the order.

Goddammit this was impossible!

In the midst of her growing irritation with the metronome, she'd become bizarrely existential (probably the product of the tiredness more than anything) and began to equate the tiny pieces of metal to people in a system. Each part had to work properly in its assigned place with the entire system to succeed, one piece out of place or missing and the whole thing fell apart. It was a metaphor for life, each person or group a cog in the greater machine of society, each piece keeping the machine running seamlessly.

But what benefit did the cogs get from their work? The only person who really benefited was the owner of the metronome, who, as she had shown, could smash the system at any time. The cogs continued to grind and grow more and more worn with time, with no end in sight and a potentially cruel or indifferent owner.

Maybe the cogs were revolting against the system? Maybe that's why it was so hard to put them back together again. Maybe they had no desire to return to the system that had chained them down. Maybe people should do that too, maybe people-cogs should rebel against the forces that controlled them.

And wow, she got weirdly Marxist when she was bored.

Eventually, she admitted defeated and discarded the broken metronome, throwing it to the side in hopeless anger and flopping down onto the hard, concrete floor. The industrial lamp buzzed dully overhead and bright white light stung her eyes. She counted the cracks in the ceiling with the same intensity she would study a code and wondered how her cellmates were doing.

Carolyn didn't know how much longer she could take this waiting.

She knew that this was just another form of torture, the anticipation a cruel trick in itself to wear down her defences, to strip her of fortitude and drive her wild with anxiety. It was the passage of time that bothered her the most however: the lack of windows and unchanging blank nature of the room obscuring the passing of each second, minute, hour. Only the empty churning of her stomach and the raspy dryness of her throat telling her that any time had passed at all.

Her last proper meal had been some time ago now, cooked up by a farmer's wife in a little house near to the Italian border, it made her mouth water and her insides twist painfully just thinking about it. Since then it had been whatever rations they could carry through the alps and whatever they'd been able to find on the trail, none of which had been particularly filling.

God, she could really go for a Sunday Roast. Beef, cooked to perfection slowly over the whole morning, fat roast potatoes and a massive Yorkshire pudding, all drizzled with gravy. Carrots, beans and broccoli, parsnips and maybe cauliflower. She grimaced and clutched at her gurgling stomach as she continued to stare up at the dull ceiling, she was just making it worse for herself now.

No one had eaten properly since the beginning of the war. Rationing provided enough food to live by it was true, but nowhere near enough to fill you, just walking through the bombed-out streets of London would tell you that. Waifish adults, just this side of lean and children with thin faces, prominent cheekbones and large, wide eyes. No one was starving, but no one had anything to spare either. Everyone had trimmed down, she mourned the loss of her figure sometimes at night as she ran her fingers over the bulges of her ribs and felt the thin corded muscles of her arms.

Carolyn sighed and licked chapped lips with a dry tongue as she pulled herself up to sit and shuffled so she was leaning against the wall. Lying down was giving her body the wrong idea and despite her drooping eyelids and weak limbs she wasn't going to succumb to sleep. Her exhaustion headache and dehydration one had mixed now, forming an insistent pounding that throbbed out from behind her eyes and that the fucking light wasn't helping. Her vision was beginning to go fuzzy around the edges as the urge to shut her eyes grew. She rubbed fiercely at them in frustration, pulling roughly at the delicate skin as she tried to will herself alert; she blinked tiredly and flopped her head back against the wall, the thump as her skull hit the concrete jolting her painfully.

She tried to run through everything she'd learnt since she'd been here to keep herself occupied. Hydra had gone rogue, Schmidt had pretty much confirmed that himself and it must have been recently otherwise the Luftwaffe would've been all over this place like flies to honey. Maybe they were on their way and she felt nauseated that for once in her life she hoped they were: she'd rather Göring's smug gob any day to Schmidt's cold genius.

Hydra were planning something: something big. The factory floor had been a hive of production with large, deadly ordnance lined up in neat rows and endless queues of Hydra's strange knapsack guns rolling along production lines. It had been a sight made to intimidate and it certainly did, but what did it mean?

She couldn't imagine that Hydra had strayed too far from the original Nazi goal, their ideals lined up too much for that. Pursuit of perceived 'perfection', domination of 'lesser races' and a regime to last a thousand years.

But what had Schmidt's crazy mind cooked up? A new era he had said, but how? When? Why?

She clenched her hands into tight fists as no answers came to her, her blunt nails biting into the meat of her palms sharp enough to draw blood.

Time passed, the silence made her want to scream.

~~~*8*~~~

Sometime later, or maybe no time at all, Carolyn gazed blindly at the wall in front of her.

It was odd, she reflected staring blankly at the grey, grey wall, how much change affected your reality. It was even odder, she thought, as her eyes fogged over and that same wall began to shift and blur, how the lack of it could eat at your sanity.

Carolyn had no idea how long it had been, and frankly, she wasn't sure she cared anymore; time had become all but intangible in the room, a strange missing concept that held no meaning.

Maybe it had been a minute, an hour, a day, a week, she didn't know. All she did know was that she had never been so thirsty.

She swallowed, an awful grating action that hurt as her body desperately tried to conjure up the moisture to wet her barren mouth and chuckled as once again, it did nothing. Her breathing was a terrible raspy thing now, a grotesque dry rattle that clawed itself up from inside her chest and burst free in a loud, panting gasp. She sounded like she was dying, and, she thought with some measure of black humour, she probably was. She didn't know how long people could last with no water, but it couldn't be much longer.

Her stomach growled loudly and she grimaced, at least she would die before hunger took her though.

Carolyn closed her eyes in a long, slow blink that dragged heavily over the filmy surface of her lenses. She was so tired, a bone-deep exhaustion that made her heart thud in her chest and her limbs beyond heavy. Her vision had begun to play tricks on her now, taunting her with images of spiders that disappeared the moment she looked at them and mirage shadows of people and things that slipped past in her periphery. It was dizzying and strange and made her want to laugh until she cried.

She had a little earlier. A wild hysterical giggling at the buzzing of the light -which her sleep-deprived brain had suddenly found hilarious- that had tapered off into dry thankless sobbing as oh God, she been captured by Nazi's and she hadn't eatensleptdrunk in days and her head was ripping apart and her arms were too weak to move and how the fuck was she going to get out of this?

She had managed to stop eventually, but not until she'd wasted precious water on snot and tears that would achieve nothing.

Her right hand ached where she'd been clutching at one of the broken gears from the metronome to keep herself awake. Its wicked sharp edges were tainted and stained by her blood as her fingers twitched from the pain. Squeezing the thing as her mind began to shut down jolted her into consciousness; provided moments of shuddering clarity where suddenly the world would snap back into focus at the bite in her skin. Her muscles spasmed and pulled around it, but she was past the point of caring, all she knew was that falling asleep would be worse.

A shallow pool of coagulating crimson grew under her hand in time to the beat of her heart.

Everything felt hopeless now, her cracking, dizzy mind had long since given up any attempt at coherent thought and she just felt so pathetic, so helpless. She'd even prayed, muttered up feverish, half-understandable pleas to a God she'd hoped had listened. She hadn't prayed since her father had died.

It felt utterly pointless anyway, and she'd held the face of her mother and all her colleagues in London in her mind as she reminded herself why she was here.

She knew, distantly, in the part of herself that was still rational, that this must be a test of some kind, to see how she'd hold out. She wondered if they'd leave her in here until she died; leave her body to slowly rot in this blank hell, alone and forgotten. The thought made her want to sob again.

She almost wished she'd been caught by the Gestapo, a shot to the head would've been a mercy compared to slowly waiting for the dehydration to take her. She felt furious at herself though for even considering such a thing, who was she to wish for the coward's way out when millions of soldiers had no way to escape their hells, when she had known exactly what she was getting into from the beginning? She'd had a choice when she became a spy, she could've easily have done nothing and been sat at home with her mother right now. She was doing her duty, sacrificing herself for King and Country and if men like her father could march themselves into the valley of death then by God she could too.

But that was hollow comfort sat here, hundreds of miles from Allied forces, starving, exhausted and slowly desiccating.

Her head hung uselessly on her shoulder, her skull against the chilled concrete, the moist paint cooling her heated head now that her body had stopped sweating. She couldn't stand up, the dehydration, hunger and tiredness had caused her to black out momentarily the last time she'd tried and she'd collapsed in a pitiful heap on the floor, bruised and pathetic, trying her hardest not to cry.

God, she couldn't help herself now, her emotions were frazzled and out of control as she swung between helpless giddiness and dark depression. Her best defence was to avoid thinking too much, to focus only on the constant, slow thud of her heart as it throbbed through her body. But that didn't always help: especially when she constantly forgot what she was doing, lost count of her heartbeats or looked to closely at her surroundings. She felt as though she could pass out at any given moment, only sheer force of will holding her conscious.

And behind all of that, behind the thirst and the hunger and the urge to just sleep, was the terror. Sheer mindless terror that grew worse as time passed, the primordial fear of a weakened, cornered animal when it knows its time is up.

She tightened her fist around the metal gear and hissed as it gouged deeper into her skin, but at the same time revelled as her mind shot into focus. The gear was her plan, she had long since accepted that it was unlikely she'd get out of this alive, so had resolved to do what she could when the doctor arrived.

She knew from rumours and whispers that Dr Zola liked to get close, liked to see the reactions he pulled from his victims, liked to see the whites of their eyes.

She was going to use that to her advantage. Carolyn was going to slit his soft throat. She was going to look at the whites of his eyes and smile before they shot her as his blood drained from his body. One small victory: her legacy and the last symbol of her resistance.

But first she'd have to survive that long.

She sighed to herself in the bright silence, the air scraping her throat as she tried to keep herself awake. Exhaustion really fucked up her emotional control and she was two seconds away from crying again, and this time for no goddamned reason. She couldn't let herself though, she knew instinctively that once she let herself fully slip into that hole, she wouldn't be climbing out.

CLANG!

Carolyn immediately shot to attention, her head whipping around to face the direction of the noise. She hissed when the abrupt movement made black spots swim in front of her eyes and cursed her own weakness as the world spun dangerously and her heart stuttered in her chest.

The noise had come from the huge steel door in the corner, the only way in and out, and was quickly followed by the scrapping sounds of keys being twisted inside the lock.

She tensed all over and the fear clawed its way to the front of her mind, terrible and insistent. This was it. This was it. This would potentially be the last few minutes she spent on the Earth and the world slowed down around her: hunger, thirst, pain, forgotten.

She could see clearly again, even if it was just a trick of adrenaline, feel the pulse of blood in her veins and down her hand as it dripped from her fingers. All her training, every Nazi she'd shot and life she'd been unable to save all led up to this moment. She no longer cared about surviving, only taking who she could with her, and the world achieved a kind of clarity that would be impossible in any other situation.

The door swung open with a soft metallic groan, barely more than a sigh from its well-oiled hinges. She let herself slump again against the wall, deceptively weak as her muscles tensed all over in preparation to strike; let her eyes drift half-lidded and delirious as she watched through her lashes. The key was to look harmless, to appear so beaten and exhausted that the doctor would come closer, wouldn't bother restraining her and give her the few precious seconds she needed to strike.

She stared hard at the opened door, waiting to see who would step through first. Come on, she thought, show yourself you cunts!

The first man through was an officer, not the one from earlier but it hardly mattered at this point. He was tall, easily six feet, with those refined aryan good looks that the Nazi's so prized and a long sharp nose that dominated his face. She immediately wanted to break it. He was expressionless, his gaze a dead blue stare that either said he didn't care or had long ago given up. He gave her pathetic, huddled form a dismissive once over before stepping to the side.

And then, the doctor.

Dr Arnim Zola was a weedy little man, even less impressive in the flesh than he was in the countless images she'd studied. Small and wrinkled and twitchy with watery eyes enlarged by plain wire glasses and thinning, receding hair. He wasn't Schmidt: he didn't have the immense presence of the Obergruppenfüher, nor his chilled, uncaring gaze and staunch military baring, but what he did have was somehow even more terrifying.

For it was his weak, mousey form that concealed a monster. The plague-ridden flea on the back of a rat: obscured and hidden by bigger vermin but really the worst of them all.

"So this is my present," he muttered as he walked towards her, his steps light and shuffling, a nervousness to them that the soldiers lacked, "she's certainly prettier than the last one," he finished, giggling, high pitched and breathy.

His pale eyes ran her over and she felt physically dirty feeling them trace her skin. There was no lust in them, no perverse yearning, but instead the pinpoint exactness of a scientist, an eerie focus lit from behind with a kind of madness that made her the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She wanted to curl in on herself to get away.

The way he looked at her was terrifying, more so than any other man she'd met. He stood and studied her for a moment with a crazy hunger in his stare, a kind of intense covetousness that was less for her as a woman and more for her as a thing. She felt like a bug at the end of a microscope, a disease in a petri dish, a butterfly pinned to a board.

"She's a lovely specimen, don't you think?" he said, tilting his head to the officer behind him, "young and strong, and a good brain too, to be a spy."

"Yes, Herr doktor," the man replied blandly, face barely moving an inch.

Zola turned to her and sighed, "Look at what I must work with," he tutted and shook his head, "muscle-headed thugs with no appreciation for science," he said to her, almost conspiratorially, as if they were friends sharing a secret.

She couldn't stop the snarl that twisted up her face as he spoke to her, an ugly rictus of hate; she almost pounced on them then, but no, just a little closer.

His face lit up in a mad grin when he saw her expression, a hideous little thing that didn't reach quite his eyes, "Ah, you understand German! That is good, very good," he took another few steps forward, "we will have such fun, you and I," he said happily, in that same secretive tone.

It was then that the officer decided to speak, "Doktor," he said, stepping forward just slightly and eying her up with what was almost wariness, "shouldn't we restrain the prisoner first?" he asked, indicating to the two Hydra soldiers by the door, soldiers, she was ashamed to say, she hadn't noticed.

Zola narrowed his eyes at her and hummed in thought, "I suppose we must, mustn't we," he sighed almost regretfully, "get to it then," he ordered.

Carolyn saw her chance at retaliation and killing Zola begin to slip through her fingers as the two grunts at the door began to move towards her. Fuck that, she thought furiously, and with the last dregs of energy and adrenaline flowing through her exhausted body, she sprang at the doctor with an inhuman growl.

Zola's eyes widened as she flew at him, swinging the metal gear wildly at his throat, her teeth bared and snarling and her hair flying around her face in a greasy mess. He jumped back with a startled yelp and the two grunts leapt toward her with their arms outstretched.

Her awareness narrowed and time turned to soup as she saw the precise moment that the bladed edge of the metal gear just missed Zola's throat.

No! she screamed internally as the world speed up again and the two Hydra soldiers tackled her to the floor. The air exited her lungs in a gasp as her head hit the concrete floor and her vision blacked out with the force. No, she moaned plaintively as she felt the gear being prised from her bloodied hand by one of the men and the other pull her weakened body up to kneel on the floor.

A dreadful wave of despair washed over her then, made all the worse by her extreme tiredness and the throbbing ache of her head. She had failed, she wouldn't get another chance now, she'd be tied up and who knows what else: unable to fight back as Zola worked.

God, she almost sobbed, fuck, what would he do to her?

She was worse than dead now, there would be no clean shot to the head for her, only slow torture on the doctor's examination table. She wanted to scream: to howl and rage and spit and cry because for God's sake it wasn't as if she would have much longer to do any of it.

Instead though she kept her face still and hard and as man behind her used her hair to yank her head up to meet the doctor's eyes. His unassuming little face blurred in front of her eyes as the hunger and pain and blood-loss returned and she resisted the urge to spit on him.

"Spirit, I see," he murmured contemplatively, reaching two pudgy fingers toward her face and gripping her chin between them. His hands were clammy and cold and his hold unnaturally strong, "No matter," he added dismissively, "that will go."

Carolyn bared her teeth at him in a primal expression of fury; for all her physical fatigue, her eyes were alight with hopeless anger and her face twisted and fierce. She had no energy to fight, it was all she could do to keep from slumping into the guard's hold, but that didn't mean she was going to make it easy. She hissed at him in heavily accented German, "You just try it, Scum," and watched as his eyes widened, obviously not expecting a response.

Her amusement was short-lived however, as the moment the words left her lips, the solider standing to the side of her stepped forward and kicked her sharply in the stomach.

Whumpf.

The air was driven from her lungs in a gasp of shocked agony, and she instinctively tried to curl in on her abdomen; inadvertently causing herself greater pain as she was forced to stay straight by the solider holding her hair.

Shit, she cursed as tears came to her eyes and air became harder to grasp through the pressure pulsing in her stomach. Fuck, she thought as she felt the bruise already taking shape under her skin. Her breath came in dry gulps as she peered through blurry vision up into the unchanged face of Dr Zola. He looked completely unaffected by her pain, watching her responses with an absent kind of curiosity most reserved for uninteresting conversations or dull briefings.

He sighed and managed to look somewhat disappointed as he shook his head, "Back-chat will get you nowhere, fraülein," he tutted, as if chastising a child, "we will have a much better relationship if you refrain from doing so."

Carolyn snarled through the pain and almost spat that she didn't want any relationship with him, but manged to stop herself when her stomach gave another sore twinge.

Zola nodded, apparently satisfied with her lack of response and turned to the officer, who had been observing the whole affair with that same blankness on his face. "Have your men take her to my lab," he said, "I wish to begin tests immediately."

The officer clicked his heels together and bowed his head, "Of course, Doktor," he said tonelessly, before turning to his two men, "you heard him, men," he barked, "escort the prisoner to Dr Zola's lab."

"Sir!" the two soldiers saluted, clicking their heels.

They rushed to grab her under her arms, one at each side as they yanked her up, stumbling to her feet. Her knees gave out under her own weight and she felt so weak as her stomach cramped painfully and her head spun. She wanted to snipe, and snarl and rage at them both, but all she could manage was a breathy gasp and a twisted grimace as they pulled her up again.

Between them, they dragged her, barely holding herself up, toward the door, her limp weight balanced between them. It was beyond humiliating, she couldn't even walk with dignity to her grave and she cursed the futility of trying to escape.

As she was pulled through the steel door she heard the shuffle-click of Zola following and wanted to throw up as, behind her, she heard his whispery voice.

"I think you might just be perfect, fraülein."