Chapter Seven

Raine hated the way she felt wrapped in Bucky Bear's arms...warm and safe like she had always imagined it would be.

But it was a lie.

All of it had been.

Maybe not a lie, but an unforeseen outcome.

Uncle Arnim had been so sure of Hydra's success that their failure and defeat had not been something she had ever been prepared for. He had never even told her of this being a possibility.

Now she was trapped with Shield, the people she had been raised to believe would hurt and kill her. There was nobody left for her to trust. And even though he seemed to care a little about her at this moment, even Bucky Bear was not who she had always been led to believe he was. Was it possible that what he had yelled at her last night was the truth?

He had moved to them sit down on the bed without letting her go. Her own arms were wrapped around herself and she felt like she was trying to physically hold herself together…and failing miserably. It was becoming too much for her to deal with again. Discovering the crater where she believed her uncle was going to be waiting for her, seeing their apartment abandoned, finding her bedroom that she had grown up in filthy…she just wanted all of the hurt and pain to stop. The tears continued to flow and her body ached from the uncontrollable shaking.

"Raine," his voice was so soft and calm, reminding her of how he had sounded all those years ago. "I don't hate you. None of us do. We hate the fact that you have been lied to your entire life. We hate that your uncle lied and tricked you into helping him."

"He didn't…he wouldn't," she weakly tried to argue.

"But he did, Raine," he said calling her again by her more adult name. She already missed not hearing Rainedrop from his lips. "After talking with Steve last night I realized that because you were so young that I never tried to explain what I was going through at that time. I never told you that I was a prisoner. I never explained the tortures they were putting me through. Being an adult, I took for granted that you would understand those things…and you didn't. I'm sorry that I didn't try to make you see the truth then. Because of that, your uncle was able to twist the reasons that I was there to fit his own story for you."

There was no mistaking the sincerity of his voice. It was just so hard to hear it considering the words that were being spoken. Was he really telling the truth? But, why would he lie about something like that? She now understood that only a prisoner would be in a cell, and as he had yelled that at her last night Raine realized that was exactly where she had found him. All those times she had found him crying, she'd never asked why he had been. Was everything that she had learned of since waking up been the truth?

"Did my uncle really try to have all of those people killed?"

With her head resting against his chest, she could feel him taking a deep breath.

"Yes. Project Insight would have devastated this country like nothing else ever had. Anyone Hydra deemed a threat to them would have been killed, the area around them being destroyed and taking out anyone else nearby. Millions would have died."

"Why were they a threat?" she asked trying to understand the logic behind such an act.

"Some only because they would eventually become a threat. Steve told me that they were targeting a lot of smart people who could one day discover and bring Hydra down. Anyone that they felt they could not easily control would die so that they could enslave the remaining people. Steve was on that list, as well as a couple of friends of his. Even Sam would have been killed due to his being near Steve."

Uncle Arnim had always told her that evil people needed to be killed so that good people were able to live their lives without having to do that type of act. That was why Bucky Bear was needed to be the Fist of Hydra. To take out the evil that Hydra found. So, what had Hydra used him for while she slept?

Trying to sit up a bit, he released his hold on her and she regretted the loss instantly. Facing away from him and wiping the tears from her eyes, Raine knew that she probably looked a sight right now.

"You went on missions for Hydra, right?"

"Yes, I did," he told her.

"Then tell me about some of the people that you killed. Who were they and why were they a target?"

"Raine, I'm not going to…"

Looking him right in the eyes, the informed him, "If you don't tell me, then I have no reason to think that you are nothing more than compromised!"

His eyes narrowed at her hearing that. There was no mistaking the tenseness that his body now possessed at her request. Bucky Bear stood up and opened the door a crack, looked outside then closed it back. He wanted to make sure they were really alone. Was he trying to protect Steve from hearing about what he had done?

"There were politicians that Hydra wanted gone because they were in the way. One led a committee that was trying to keep the government from going to war with a small country. But Hydra needed the natural resources from there so he was eliminated and his replacement voted the way Hydra wanted. Another was a doctor that had just created a medical breakthrough with a new drug. It would cure hundreds of thousands afflicted with an ailment. But Hydra wanted to keep the research for themselves, not only profiting from it but only distributing it to those they deemed worthy."

Raine dropped her head a bit at hearing that. Hydra was supposed to help save people from the corrupt, not be one of them.

"One of the worst has to be when they sent me out to retrieve a case…from an old friend of mine."

"You knew your target?"

"Yes, we worked and fought together during the war, along with Steve. Howard was his name, as well as his wife Maria. I was ordered to kill them and bring back the case he had with him."

No…it couldn't be the same family she knew, could it?

"Do you remember if they had a small son named Anthony?" she hesitantly asked not really wanting the answer.

His questioning eyes came to her, probably wondering how she would know that.

"Yes, he's friends with Steve now."

Raine dropped her head again as she recalled the times she had played with and babysat the small boy she called her 'Little Grease Monkey'. He had been one of the reasons she had stayed awake after her uncle died. Being friends with him reminder her so much of how she had met Bucky. There should have been no reason for Hydra to want such a kind woman as his mother dead. Maria never would have been a threat to them.

"How do you know about them?" Bucky Bear asked her coming to stand too close.

"I met them here when I was woke up as my uncle was dying. Even being sick, Uncle Arnim was still working on other projects and sometimes I would have to get things created for him from the fabrication shop upstairs. One night, I went up to get a part for him and I found a little two year old boy at one of the worktables building a small robot from an Erector Set. Mr. Jarvis, his butler was sitting in one of the offices reading a book. I asked Tony what he was doing and he said that since his daddy was working late, that he was making a friend to play with."

"What did you tell them about who you were?"

"I explained that I was Arnim's niece who was there to take care of him since he was sick. Besides, it was the truth. I had no reason to lie to them. Everyone knew that he worked for Shield, so they didn't bother questioning me."

"What happened then?"

"For the next few months, Tony's dad worked on his projects while my uncle completed his. Tony would come here to make his mechanical toys and I would come up and play with him, just like you did with me. I would babysit him sometimes when his mother or Mr. Jarvis needed to run errands. After my uncle died, I stayed here for two years to help us catch up a bit in age before going back to sleep."

Bucky Bear then sat down next to her, so close that their hips were touching. Her hand twitched wanting to reach out and take his smooth metal one into hers.

"You lived down here alone for two years?" he ask so she simply nodded. He didn't look happy learning that. "Hydra has hurt the both of us in different ways. I'm sorry that I even mentioned them to you. If I had any idea that you knew them…"

"I want to know. If I really have been lied to, then I only want the truth told to me now. I don't care how bad it is."

They sat in silence for a few minutes before he spoke again.

"Raine, why did you come down here?"

"This is where we lived after coming to America. Once it was time to send you on missions, my uncle came here to work for Shield. He brought me with him. Except for the base where we were, this is the only other home I've ever known."

"How did you…with the cyro…" he tried to ask her, thinking she knew what he wanted to know.

"I was only in my cryo chamber for a couple of months at a time for a while. My uncle told everyone that I was away at school. He would work on new technology for it and kept perfecting it, as he called it. During the times I was awake, a lot of people had either moved on so I was new to them or the ones who knew me often commented about how young I still appeared."

"Do you have any idea how old you really are now?" he asked her.

Standing up, she lifted the edge of the mattress and slid her arm a long way underneath. Feeling her hands around the leather book, she smiled at knowing it was still there.

"I kept track of it in my diary," she told him sitting back down. Flipping towards the back where a page was earmarked, she showed him the list of dates. "These are the times that I was awake. This column adds them up, so as of the last time I went to sleep, I was only three months shy of turning twenty-five."

"So you only aged twenty-four years over the course of thirty-four years," he worked out.

"Almost twenty-five," she smiled while nudging her shoulder into his left one, "Don't cheat me out of those months."

Bucky Bear grinned over at her, "Dames usually don't want to be thought of as older."

"Well to me every month counts," she pointed out wondering he he realized that it was because she wanted him to see her as grown up.

"You didn't mind missing out on all of the changes happening around you?"

"Not really. At first I slept for shorter times so a lot of stuff was still familiar. But after my uncle died, the plan was to wake me up every couple of years for a few months to learn about new inventions over time. My uncle didn't want too long to go by and there be too great of a gap for me to be able to deal with. Which is exactly what happened to me."

"You said that you didn't go back under until after your uncle died. How did you do that? Who helped you?" he turned to ask her. "And how did you get inside of the Triskelion? It wasn't built back then, was it?"

It didn't sound like he was still mad or upset with her, and with Hydra seeming to be gone, what would be the harm in telling him the truth.

"No, I didn't get moved there until after it was build. It was the Hydra agent that was assigned to be my handler who worked inside of Shield who moved me. He was being groomed by Hydra command for a leadership role one day…Alexander Pierce."

"What?!" with that single word he was suddenly very angry again. Bucky Bear then stood up and grabbed a hold of her hand, dragging her from the room, through the den, and into the hallway before yelling, "Steve! Sam!"

Only a few moments later, the sound of heavy footsteps sounded from both sides of them. Steve came from the direction of her uncle's workshop and Sam was further into the laundry and storage area.

"What is it?" Steve asked rounding the corner and spotting them waiting.

"You're going to want to hear this," he said leading her back inside. Once they were all sitting down in the den, Bucky Bear told them, "I asked Raine how once her uncle had died how she had she gotten back into the cryo chamber and inside of the Triskelion. The Hydra agent that was assigned to be her handler was Pierce."

"What?" Steve sounded as stunned as Bucky Bear had been. "Are you sure?"

"Why would I have forgotten something like that? I only saw him two days ago," she could see that all three of them hadn't thought about the time difference when it came to her being asleep. "He was the one assigned to look over me for those two years after my uncle died, and he did, but Pierce was also the one who was supposed to wake me up for training. You know of him?"

"Pierce not only was a high ranking leader in Hydra, but he was also the one in charge of Project Insight. During all that happened, he became in charge of Shield for a short while, also ordering my death, which is what led to your uncle's," Steve informed her. "So Pierce knew about you being inside of the Triskelion because he put you there. Did anyone else know about you?"

"I don't know. Maybe the Hydra agents that he had move my chamber into the building once it was completed. He had others that worked with him, but my uncle assigned me to him saying to trust him when I was woken up…that he would never be corrupted and always loyal to Hydra."

"Well, he was. All the way to the end," Steve told her.

"Raine, Pierce was the one in charge of me once I was transferred to the American branch of Hydra. When Steve and I fought on the street, he recognized me and said my name. It started my mind to almost recall him. So when I mentioned knowing Steve, it was Pierce that ordered my mind to be wiped cleaned by the Chair. He was trying to erase Steve and any memory of him that may have come back to me."

"So if he was still around, why didn't he wake me up like he was supposed to?" she asked but none of them had a ready answer.

"We don't know," Steve finally told her. "But for whatever reason, he didn't. From what we do know, the room looked like it was updated in the early eighties but then never used. We may never know why since he's dead now. But he left you there frozen for forty years. And I would guess that he intended to leave you there a lot longer."

Raine really did not like hearing that. Her Hydra handler had betrayed her and her uncle for some reason. One of only two people she was supposed to have been able to trust.

"Lorraine, we found a lot of things down here. Some of them look like they could be dangerous. Was all of this your uncles?" Steve asked her to which she only nodded. "Shield is on the way here now to collect them and take them back to the Triskelion to study."

"And what about me? Can I just stay here?" she asked hopeful.

"Why would you want to stay here?" Sam then asked her.

"This is my home. Ever since I was twelve. All of my belongings are here. I won't disturb anyone."

The three faces all sadly staring at her did not give Raine a good feeling.

Bucky Bear was the one to break the bad news to her, "Raine, there is no way we are going to leave you down here to live. You are coming back with us to the apartment next to Steve's. I'll stay there on the couch with you for a while so that you are not alone."

Deciding to be a bit forward and take the chance, "You don't have to sleep on the couch."

"Yes, I do. Raine, I know what you expected from me, how you may feel about me right now, but…I don't feel the same way towards you. We are not…going to be together."

Hearing those words shattered a small piece of her soul. He didn't love her. And it sounded like he was confident that he never would. She was going to be alone in this strange world. What was she supposed to do now? All her training had been for learning how to be a wife, to care for someone. If she wasn't going to be with her Bucky Bear, then what was she supposed to do?

Realizing that he had continued talking about the apartment next to Steve's she turned her attention back to him.

"…you'll stay there unless something changes."

"But I don't know that place," she told him still hating the idea of leaving here. Here she knew, there was a strange place.

"You'll come to know it," Sam told her with a warm smile. "You were supposed to learn how to use new technology. Being there, we can help you with that…to get you comfortable with today's world. Besides, maybe you're a quicker learner than Steve? And wouldn't it be nice to have windows?"

Steve gave Sam an elbow to the side for his jest. Raine did have to smile at thinking about windows. Not being able to see outside was the only complaint she had ever given to her uncle.

"Come on, let's go wait on the surface for the others to get here," Steve told her.

"Can I bring some of my things with me?" she asked hoping they would at least allow that.

"Sure," Bucky Bear told her. "Let's go pack whatever you want."

He stood and then offered his hand to help her up before they headed down the hallway.

"So, what do you make of all of that?" he asked Steve as the two of them headed towards the stairs upwards.

"I'm not sure. I never would have guess that Pierce had any knowledge of Lorraine, even with her being in the Triskelion. But when you think about it, he was in the perfect position to have her disappear."

Sam thought that over for a moment.

"But why would he want her to?"

Steve didn't have an answer for him.

"Lorraine says that she was supposed to be there for the next step in Project Winter Soldier, once Bucky was to remain awake to train other super-soldiers. But it seems that Pierce wasn't going in that direction anymore. He intended Project Insight to give him the control that Hydra wanted. At that point, Bucky may have become unnecessary…which means that Lorraine definitely would have been."

"So he decided to just leave her there buried under the Triskelion and never wake her up. To let her just continue to sleep," he offered as they heard the sound of a Quinjet coming close.

"It would seem so," Steve told him. "But remember, Pierce was supposed to wake her in the eighties and he didn't. It seems that he decided early on for some reason not to."

"I feel sorry for her," Sam admitted aloud, to which Steve only nodded. "She's going to need a lot of help, and not only the kind to help her overcome the brainwashing that was done to her. She's going to have to get used to the modern world, just like you did, and probably how Bucky might still be trying to do."

Watching the Quinjet land, Steve told him, "Her entire existence revolved around learning to take care of Bucky, to be there in every way that a wife would be."

Sam knew how his face probably looked at hearing that.

"That's why she just asked him…she expected the two of them to…you know?"

"Yes. It sounded like she still did," Steve shrugged his shoulders. "But Bucky told me last night that it was not an option, just as he told her."

"You are going to be having a lot of interesting times very soon," he joked wondering how the two out-of-time gentlemen would deal with Lorraine.

"Well, let's deal with something easy like that laboratory of Zola's experiments and then worry about the rest of it later," he said as the clean-up crew started to file out of the jet and head towards them.