The Mask: A Winter Soldier One-Shot
AN: This little fic emerged out of my musings about the Winter Soldier. I hope you enjoy it.
Disclaimer: I do not own the Winter Soldier or any of the related characters. Those rights belong to Marvel Entertainment. This story is a work of fanfiction and is for entertainment purposes only. I am not making any profit from this story.
They give him the mask before his first mission.
It is a simple thing – black and inflexible, designed to cover the lower half of his face. He puts it on at his handler's bidding, noting how it fits perfectly over the contours of his nose, jaw, and cheekbones.
The material is porous and he draws in a breath of the cold Siberian air that fills the gloomy room, noting the extra effort it takes to fill his lungs. His breaths sound strange to his ears, distorted and heavy. It reminds him of how his breathing sounds within the cryostasis chamber moments before he succumbs to the ice. Just thinking about it makes breathing even harder.
He removes the mask and the tension eases slightly, as if he has escaped from a confined space.
"What is it, Soldat?" his handler asks.
"I can't breathe properly." He wonders if taking the mask off was a mistake. After all, he wasn't told he could.
But his handler doesn't strike out. Instead he says calmly, "You will get used to it. Put the mask back on."
He hesitates, but only for a moment. To disobey an order means pain. He has learnt that the hard way, and he fears it. He will put up with any amount of discomfort to avoid the machine.
"This mask is to be worn on every mission," his handler tells him once it is back in place. "The Winter Soldier's identity must remain a secret if HYDRA is to bring freedom to the world."
He breaths in again, familiarizing himself with the mask, and nods once. "Da," he says, because he knows it's the only response that won't end in pain.
His handler nods approval. "Hail HYDRA."
"Hail HYDRA."
He has worn the mask for countless missions now.
Its feel, the way it affects his breathing – these things have become familiar to him. The mask gives him the freedom to go anywhere HYDRA sends him and not worry about being identified. He knows this is important to HYDRA, but he doesn't know why. What identity does he have to hide? He is simply the Soldier, the Asset.
But HYDRA has given him orders, and he is nothing if not obedient. The mask reminds him of that fact.
So the mask stays on.
Now he faces the American Embassy under a grey Moscow sky, crouched on the snow-covered rooftop of a building across the quiet street. The sleek body of a sniper rifle rests in his grip and he waits, gaze fixed on a sixth-floor window through the gun's scope.
A bitter wind tugs at his hair but he doesn't feel it. Flakes of icy snow are blown into his face and he's glad he has the mask to prevent him from inhaling it. It serves no other purpose on this mission. There is no one to see him up here.
A flash of color at the edge of his vision draws his attention downwards and he takes his eye away from the scope briefly to see it better.
It's a flag – an American flag on a pole near the embassy gate. The wind whips it in every direction, a flurry of red-white-and-blue cloth pulling against its ties.
He frowns slightly at the sight and refocuses on the window. He's seen the American flag before, but something about it tugs at his memory now, stirring up feelings of longing and … homesickness he doesn't understand. It's as if it means something important, but he doesn't recall what – like a word on the tip of one's tongue that simply can't be remembered.
He wants to know what it means, because somehow he knows it's important, but he forces himself to focus on the task at hand. The mission comes first.
A middle-aged man in a suit sits down at the desk in front of the sixth-floor window, his back to the glass.
At last.
He adjusts his aim ever so slightly to allow for the wind and–
He's in another gloomy place, a small room filled with the sound of the rushing wind and the rhythmic clatter of metal against metal: a train. A blond-haired man is moving towards him, a shield on his arm over his red-white-and-blue uniform – a uniform like the flag. The sight of the man fills him with relief and a sense of security.
"I had him on the ropes," he says as the stranger helps him up, even though he knows the stranger arrived only just in time.
The stranger almost smiles. "I know you did."
The wail of an alarm cuts through the image and he blinks as the world comes back into focus.
His shot has gone wild.
He's failed the mission.
No, no, no!
What just happened? his mind screams, but he doesn't know the answer. For a moment he freezes in place, struggling to untangle the warm emotions of the image with the current situation.
Then his training takes over, overriding the confusion. Now isn't the time to figure out what happened. Now is the time to adhere to mission protocol. He needs to get to his extraction point without being followed.
He stands swiftly and moves away from the edge of the roof, slinging the rifle across his back by its strap. There's a stairwell leading down into the building from the roof and he enters it, letting the door bang closed behind him. The lock is broken from when he came up this way.
Once inside, he takes the stairs two at a time. He's still several floors from the ground when the sound of raised voices reaches him, echoing up from further down the stairwell. The enemy is closing in faster than he would have expected.
He is reasonably certain he could get past his hunters without difficulty, but he's been told to avoid unnecessary casualties, so instead he retraces his steps until he reaches the landing of the floor above. There's a window there and he slams his cybernetic fist into it, shattering the glass.
Shouts ring out below and he works faster, clearing the broken glass away from the window and chucking his rifle aside. It will only slow him down in the escape ahead.
He removes a coiled wire rope from one of the pockets of his pants and fastens one end of it to the stretch of hand railing opposite the window. The other end he attaches to the front of the harness strapped around his chest and shoulders.
The sound of running footsteps grows louder as he climbs onto the windowsill. Then he turns away from the drop below and steps backwards out of the building, walking himself down the concrete wall. He keeps a tight grip on the thin wire with his metal hand, letting it run smoothly through his human fingers as he makes the descent.
He's still six floors up when the men chasing him – Russian special police, he notes – reach the window. He can see them taking aim at him with their machine guns. There's nowhere to go but down.
He lets go of the wire.
The fall lasts only a couple of seconds, but the landing is hard. He doesn't have time to recover before his feet skid out from under him on the icy sidewalk and he crashes onto his back. The air rushes out of his lungs and he struggles to draw a breath.
A searing pain flares to life in his right shoulder, galvanizing him into motion. He rolls to avoid further bullets from the men above, staggers to his feet and runs for the corner of the building.
He doesn't stop running until he's several blocks away in a deserted side street and the wail of alarms has faded to mere background noise. Then he presses his left hand to the side of a building, chest heaving, and looks down at his right shoulder for the first time.
The fabric of his jacket is slick with blood and he can feel it running down his arm. Lots of it. The bullet must have hit something important. His head feels light from the pain.
Without thinking, he rips the mask off his face.
He knows he's just broken a fundamental rule, but right now he doesn't care. He needs to breathe, to figure out what on earth happened back on the rooftop. The shot should have been perfect. Somehow he'd become distracted by … what? A hallucination? A memory? The blond-haired man feels so familiar, yet he has no idea who he was or why they'd been together.
He closes his eyes briefly, trying to see the image again, but it has already faded, the details of the man's face becoming blurred. The harder he tries to remember the scene, the faster it flees from his mind, leaving a deep ache in its place. He wants to remember, but he can't.
Focus! he chides himself, and he's not sure whether he's angry at himself for disobeying orders or for failing to remember. He's not sure it matters either way. He needs to return to his handlers to report and receive medical attention. The memory is a distraction.
Quickly, he pulls a strip of gauze from one of his pockets and knots it around his shoulder as best as he can over his clothes. It's not an ideal solution by any means, but time is not something he has an abundance of right now. He just needs to slow the bleeding enough to make it to the extraction point.
He looks at the mask lying at his feet in the bloodstained snow. He wasn't supposed to remove it here and he certainly isn't supposed to move in the open without it. They have drilled that into him – and punished him when he forgets.
Slowly, he reaches down and picks it up.
He reaches the extraction point half an hour later.
A grimy white van sits out back of a closed restaurant, its back windows painted over. He approaches it as a bearded man in civilian clothes climbs out of the cab to meet him. Despite the disguise, he knows the man is a HYDRA agent. A slight bulge in the agent's pocket marks the presence of a gun.
The agent nods a curt greeting and opens the side door of the van. "Get in."
He obeys, noting the presence of a second man in the back of the vehicle as he climbs in.
His handler – now a man named Karpov – looks him up and down, noting the blood-soaked bandage and the mask held limply in his metal hand. "Mission report."
He knows there will be consequences for not wearing the mask, even though no one saw him. There are always consequences for his failures. But he doesn't let the fear and the pain and the exhaustion he feels show on his face.
He doesn't need the mask to hide his emotions.
"Mission compromised," he says. "Target survived."
Karpov doesn't speak for a long moment. Then he asks, "Why did you remove the mask, Soldat?"
He hesitates. Maybe it was because he was struggling to breathe. Maybe it was because the pain of his wound clouded his judgment.
Maybe it was because in that brief memory of him and the blond-haired man, he knows he wasn't wearing it … and it felt right.
"I don't know," he says.
Karpov nods once, emotionless. "Put it back on."
And he obeys. Because he fears what will happen if he doesn't. Because he has been trained to obey orders. Because he is a good soldier.
"Hail HYDRA," Karpov says.
"Hail HYDRA," he replies.
When they return to base, they strap him into the machine once more, like he knew they would. He doesn't try to fight it, but as the machine starts up and the terror rises within him, he finds himself latching onto the faint vestiges of the memory of the blond-haired man with the shield. And somehow the image comforts him, just for a moment.
Then the overwhelming pain hits, and it claws the memory out of his grasp, tearing it apart beyond repair. And when his punishment is finally over, he no longer knows what it was he was so desperate to remember.
There is only HYDRA, and the next mission, and the mask.