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CHAPTER THREE
Dark Things

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~SIBERIA, RUSSIA – 1957~

One some level, Zuzana supposed that it had really only been a matter of time before they came for her, as they had come for her father before her.

She – and the world at large – had been all too aware of HYDRA, the science-based division of the Nazi military force dedicated to developing advanced weaponry and...other things. With the loss of the war and the collapse of the Third Reich, most of the world had gone about its business under the illusion that the Nazis, and all the horrors they had birthed, had been vanquished – wiped out, never to return. Those unlucky few knew differently.

Such was the nature of a strong ideal, no matter how wrong or radical. Something so insidious, when it managed to get its hooks so deep as to root into the very bedrock, would not be easily destroyed, even by flame.

Cut off one head, and all that.

It was not something she would have been upset to be wrong about.

Since the end of the war she had been living inside of an hourglass, sand running short around her – at once shadowed by an uncanny sense of the inevitable, and unknowing just when it would catch up with her until it did.

The first time Zuzana had met Doctor Arnim Zola had been in her own living room. She had come home to find him there – he and his retinue of guards – drinking her wine from her glasses upon her favorite chair, where he lay in wait like a short, bespectacled spider.

"Good evening, Fraulein Volin," he had greeted her as she was pressed into the empty chair across from him, "it is truly a pleasure and a privilege to meet you at last. My name is—"

"I know who you are, Dr. Zola."

"Ah, then I am honored. Jan spoke of me, then?"

If she had answered the question, it was only by virtue of a nod.

She wasn't fooled by his open body language and amiable words, nor by his casual use of her father's name – the same father that had abandoned his family and sold his soul to the very worst of humanity. There was nothing friendly about this conversation, just as there had been nothing friendly about being seized by armed men upon stepping inside her own kitchen to be dragged through her own house and sat there like a prisoner.

Arnim Zola was HYDRA. Argument could be made that he had been even before the death of its founder, Johann Schmidt. And HYDRA was as friendly as a venomous snake.

"I was hoping to reach out to you some time ago. We had a bit of trouble tracking you down—can you imagine?"

He said it with the same air of someone telling an amusing anecdote about having been clumsy in public or something of the like, but Zuzana had felt a chill crawl down her back.

While he hadn't come out and claimed that he knew she had been trying to avoid their notice, to hide as best she could in her position, somehow she thought his saying this was his way of letting her know that he did.

"Still, here you are!" He spread his hands in cheerful indication. "And I may finally issue an invitation for a great opportunity."

No. No, no, NO.

All too aware of the bodies, and the weapons they held, circled around her, she bit her tongue against the reflex to shout it. She knew perfectly well that refusal was not an acceptable answer. Nor a beneficial one. All protest would do was earn her a beating, and that was the best case scenario. She had been alive during the war – had lost a mother and a brother both to it. She had seen the conduct of the soldiers, both enemy and friendly, in the streets during the chaos toward the end. She knew how men like this operated.

"What kind of opportunity?" she hedged, though the words tasted of vinegar.

"The chance to be a part of the project your father founded before his untimely death," Zola answered, and the way he smiled at her from behind his thick, round spectacles he might have been offering a position with a prestigious university.

"My father and I studied very different things," she hurried to say, going so far as to insert a regretful lilt to her voice. False, but hopefully convincing enough. "I don't have the education or experience to—"

"Oh, no, no, Fraulein," he interrupted, "not to continue his work. Of course we know you are not Jan, and that your specialties aren't the same. No, the project is much broader in scope, and we have need of your particular expertise."

For all that it was language meant to flatter, Zuzana felt nothing but sick, heavy dread folding over her.

Certainly, there were some who would be honored and grateful for such an invitation, who would not need the underlying threat to coax them toward accepting. Plenty of scientists would have taken any such opportunity offered them, regardless of all the reasons they should not – moral or otherwise. Her own father, for one. And she couldn't fully say that she didn't understand the inclination, after all it could be brutally difficult to obtain funding and space and allowance to undertake study, especially for theories still new and relatively untried. But understanding had its limits, and one of those for her was the prospect of working for Nazi war criminals.

"You were said to have been a gifted student," said war criminal continued, "and are one of the youngest individuals to graduate having achieved such prestigious certifications. Your colleagues speak nothing but highly of your knowledge, and your skill with your patients is renowned."

Sitting forward in his chair, Zola reached across the space for her hands where they lay clenched together in her lap, cupping them between his own. It was a bastardization of something close and affectionate, and it brought bile rising to the back of her throat.

"We simply cannot do this important work without you," he implored her.

That had been the moment she knew her time was up, and that her life was no longer her own.

And now here she was: enclosed within a military fortress of steel and stone set within a wasteland of icy rock, surrounded by soldiers.

The observation room – thusly named due to its location and purpose, looking out on the examination room adjoined – was cold and cramped. A narrow rectangle of space barely worth being called a room at all, featuring little more than a row of chairs set along the wall-length window.

It was directly to one of these chairs she had been escorted and urged to sit by the soldiers that now stood flanking the door into the room, khaki uniforms belted at the waist, red and gold insignia at the right shoulders bright as fresh blood.

Russian soldiers.

Had she not suspected already, this would have been enough to confirm that she had been transported to Siberia.

Russia might have been part of the Allied Forces during the war, but as any self-respecting Czechoslovakian knew (as had much of Eastern Europe), the atrocities in Germany had been on par with those going on elsewhere at the behest of the Soviet government. And as any self-respecting Czechoslovakian did, she had little love for the Allies that had attempted offering up her country as an appeasement gesture to the Germans. Though Russia had technically been an ally, and though Stalin had been against the Munich Agreement, they hadn't exactly done much to defend their smaller and far less militaristic cousin.

She might not have had as much of grudge against them as she did America, Britain, or France, but it wasn't by a substantial amount. So to say she was less than thrilled about being penned in by the Soviet Armed Forces was phrasing it mildly.

Behind her, the door opened with a metallic click, admitting Doctor Zola and another man who wore the decoration and bearing of a higher ranking military officer.

"Doctor Volin," Zola greeted warmly, smiling widely, "I'm so glad you've elected join us."

As if she hadn't been faced with the choice between this, and this but bloodied and hurting.

"This is Commander Andreyev," he said then in his light, Swiss-accented English, indicating the man next to him with a gesture, "the prevailing officer here. You will be reporting to him when I'm away."

Her eyes darted to the commander, who inclined his chin slightly, taking in the austere posture and immaculately trimmed beard frosted white, the severe lines around his eyes and mouth. A hard man, and not one to be crossed.

The two men moved into the tiny room and joined in her at the viewing window, and Zuzana swallowed down the reflex to rise from her chair and move away from them. Instead she smoothed her hands over her skirt, tucking it around her knees in a nervous gesture that she must have repeated at least a dozen times since being shown into the room.

"What exactly is it that I'm here to do?" she asked, hoping that her attempt to disguise her dislike with the question was successful.

She had been briefed, somewhat. Though the extent of that briefing was that she was being brought in to assess an agent of HYDRA's in regard to his memory-retention. She had been told no more, and even that had been given begrudgingly.

In answer, Zola proffered a pale tan file folder thick with documents – thicker than any case file she had ever seen.

"We have been experiencing difficulties with a very important asset. There is more information in the records there," the doctor indicated the folder. "In short, we are hoping you might be able to discover the causes of these difficulties so that we might eradicate them."

Her stomach twisted unpleasantly, not liking the cold distance with which he spoke of the agent in question.

Propping open the file folder, she skimmed the first few pages – all copies of medical and field reports from other doctors and officials – and then turned back to the most recently dated.

Project: WINTER SOLDIER

Scientific Analysis, 7 June 1957

A comprehensive mental evaluation of Codename: WINTER SOLDIER was conducted over the course of the past week.

In the three years since he was last awakened from stasis, it appears the subject's mind is seeking to fill the holes in his memory or possibly rebelling against the implanted programming he originally received. Diagnoses are varied, but most in the Dept. X Science Team believe that his mental state is becoming increasingly unstable. The subject has recently begun to exhibit more than usual curiosity, even to the point of questioning orders from superiors, and once in the past month, he attacked a fellow operative, nearly killing him. Upon interrogation, he could not explain his actions.

Our theory is that that just as he had reflex-memories which allow him to be such an effective operative, he may also have a retained sense of who he was before. As such, this deeply buried idea may be causing him mental stress and triggering turmoil in his thoughts. Another theory, which is more disturbing, is that he may actually be remembering his previous life, though in small pieces only. If he is to continue to be of use to Dept. X, immediate intervention must be taken.

It is out recommendation that a specialist in cognitive activity be located and brought to study and assist in the eradication of whatever may be causing these aberrations.

Well…she would be the requested specialist, then. Or so she presumed. Not that she fully understood why an expert in Cognitive Behaviorism would be required.

As to why she specifically had been selected was a little more straightforward, if what Zola claimed was true and her father had been a founding member of the team involved. It had been his studies which had originally sparked her fascination, and his encouragement which had served as the foundation of her going to school and becoming a doctor in her own right. Yet it would have been a significant oversimplification to say they shared a focus, or an intent.

Jan Volin had been much more interested in the physical form and function of the mind. His study and use of behaviorism more a means with which to control and alter said function. She had been drawn to the more abstract; things with which surgical means could only tell so much. It had been in studying the effects of shellshock which had led her into trying to revive and advance the long stagnant field of psychoanalytics. She – along with a few specialists before and contemporary to her – believed that there was something going on with the soldiers being sent back from the two World Wars; so many of them discharged as well and functional, yet clearly not quite right.

Was this the expertise Zola had spoken of? Even if it was, she was a researcher, not a clinician. She talked to people, analyzed and conferred with others in her field, wrote reports. That was all. She didn't know how to counsel a covert operative marked as mentally unstable, let alone decipher how to fix the causes of the instability. That wasn't how the mind worked, anyway, or so she believed.

Adjusting the file so that it lay propped open along her forearm, she reread the report.

"It says here he attacked someone. What exactly did he do?"

Zola and Commander Andreyev exchanged a look she couldn't read. Finally the Commander answered, his words clipped and succinct.

"He put a knife in the neck of one of his handlers. Down to the hilt. Missed the artery by a hair and not for lack of trying."

She swallowed against a throat gone suddenly dry as the paper in her hand. "I see. And—is there any idea as to what might have set off this…episode?"

"None that the team could tell. They were too busy deactivating him to dig too deeply into the matter."

Spoken as though this man was some kind of bomb, not a person.

"As you will find in the records," Zola added, "the subject has been given treatments which have increased his natural abilities. He is…enhanced, if you will. And near to invulnerable, conditioned not only to match our best operatives in everything from extraction and espionage to—more delicate matters, but to exceed them. With the use of revolutionary mind-altering techniques and memory suppression we have shaped him to be absent any sense of self or personhood, making him highly suggestible and obedient without thought or question. All in all, creating a powerful weapon. In theory."

The fine hairs at the nape of her neck stood on end.

Absent any sense of self of personhood.

"You mean this man is—"

Zola shook his head. "No, Fraulein. You mustn't think of the Asset as a person, you must think of him as a weapon. That is what he is now. It is all that he is. You understand? This is what you are here to ensure."

She did not understand. She very much did not understand. What did Zola mean: that is what he is now?

What was this?

At a signal the doctor beside her, the Commander leaned forward in his chair and extended a hand, pressing a small red button on a panel set into the frame of the viewing window.

"Begin when ready."

At these words the people that had been milling about the examination room beyond – conferring with one another, checking equipment, and the like – snapped into full activity. A number of them were doctors she realized, noting the long white lab coats. But many of them, outnumbering the doctors by a significant measure, were soldiers. Heavily armed with rifles all held in their arms, not prepared to shoot, but very definitely at the ready.

A doctor crossed decisively to one of six immense cylindrical tanks situated along the perimeter of the room. They were glass secured by a heavy steel frame, too near to opaque to make out what might be inside, and there were so many wires and cables hooked to the thing that it almost resembled the insides of some slaughtered metal creature. Several of these connected to a wide control panel so packed with knobs and dials and flashing lights that she almost missed the monitor streaked with the steady, repeated spike of a heartbeat.

Keying a sequence into the panel, the doctor pressed a final button and the cylinder began to move – rising from its base, white steam emerging in thick, rolling clouds.

No, not steam. Vapor. From intense cold suddenly introduced to the heat in the surrounding room.

As the cylinder continued to rise on its intricate system of pulleys and levers, a yellow light within began to increase in brightness, illuminating the interior of the chamber…and the form of the man inside.

For all her best effort, Zuzana couldn't quite stifle her gasp.

Two of the other doctors approached the subject where he was hooked up to the monitors and sensors within the chamber, one unhooking the wires from where they attached to the man's fitted gray suit while the other stood by with a clipboard, watching closely and taking down copious notes. As she watched, disturbed and repelled, the man began to stir – slowly flexing his hands, turning his head, all with the unsteady difficulty of the intensely groggy.

The suit was sleeveless, leaving his arms entirely bare from the shoulders. The right one was normal – human flesh and skin, if a bit too pale. The left, however, appeared to be entirely encased in gleaming metal.

"He is kept in cryogenic stasis between missions," Zola informed her with a detached cool that raked at her nerves. "When his skills are required, he is woken."

At a doctor's beckoning hand, two of the soldiers present handed their weapons aside and went to the open chamber. She could see the caution with which they approached, the stilted hint of hesitancy before they moved into the circle of machinery, as if nervous. As if they feared the man inside would lash out at them, even in his unmistakably shaky state.

In unison they reached for him, folding his arms over their shoulders and dragging him out of the chamber. He sagged between them, still too weak to walk.

Of course he was – they had just yanked him out of what was, in essence, a medically induced coma. Only, a version that was much harder on the body. From what little she understood about cryo-sleep, in theory, he wouldn't be anywhere near recovered enough to do much of anything for days. Yet the way the soldiers hauled him to a strange, blocky metal chair situated in the center of the room was so cavalier it bordered on rough.

"When the Asset was originally obtained, we had not yet formulated a technique with which to ensure the conditioning we intended to give him took. The usual methods simply weren't enough. We required something stronger."

Her eyes darted to him, to the impassive expression he wore.

The usual methods. Brainwashing. Torture. He didn't have to say it, she could hear it in the spaces between his words.

Noticing that her fingers had tightened upon the folder she held, she forced them to ease where they had curled to create shallow creases in the heavy paper.

She turned back to the glass and the scene behind it. The soldiers had secured heavy clamps about the man's forearms and ankles, binding him to the chair. He looked more alert than he had a moment ago, sitting straighter in the chair and holding his head up, though he still appeared dazed as the doctors moved around him, fiddling with the controls attached to the chair and attaching an IV to his right arm.

"I was fortunate enough—purely by chance, mind—to meet a fellow scientist who was a pioneer in the study of mentalism and hypnosis," Zola went on. "And together, with the help of your father's experience in the working of the physical mind, we were able to create a highly effective method for the erasure of memory and personality."

One of the doctors was arranging a pair of folding metal arms which reached around from the back of the chair, lowering the curved paddles at the ends to frame the man's face between them.

She had the split-second thought that something about the positioning called to mind the use of a defibrillator, right before a bright green light on one of the monitors switched on and the man went rigid in the chair.

The glass thick, the observation room soundproofed. But she didn't need to hear to know that he was screaming. She could tell from the way he convulsed, chest heaving, hands clenching and unclenching beneath the bonds that held him down, though, strangely, he didn't strain against them. She could tell from the way his throat and jaw worked, the way every muscle and tendon corded under his skin against the pain he was subjected to.

"It's truly a working of genius on Jan's part," Zola remarked.

The note of admiration in his otherwise casually amiable tone at utter odds with the awful scene taking place on the other side of the glass. As if they were talking about a new method of suturing, not the invention of a machine to aid in the torture and brainwashing of a human subject. The idiosyncrasy made her stomach pitch with something near to nausea.

This was human experimentation. It was inhumane and unethical and horrifying, and the idea that her father – the man that had raised her to be kind, to respect other people, had nurtured her desire to help and to heal – could have had a hand in it was nothing short of devastating.

"It utilizes electroconvulsive shockwaves, you see. To disrupt and realign the neural pathways, which is what leaves the subject blank and malleable." The little man gave a regretful sigh. "A pity he was unable to further his work with it. We're hoping your efforts will be able to help us do some further perfecting. Indirectly, of course."

Revulsion pooled in her belly, in her mouth. It crawled along her skin, slid slick down her spine like a cold sweat. She couldn't look away from the man, couldn't stop watching him shudder and writhe as the shocks swept through him, concentrated on his head.

How on earth was he still alive? The damage this had to be doing to his brain…

Zuzana bit the inside of her cheek against the reflex to insist, yet again, that she was in no way qualified for a task of this kind, or this magnitude. It hadn't mattered before, it was unlikely to matter now. They wouldn't have gone out of their way to seek her out and bring her all the way here if they didn't think her capable of doing what they wanted. It didn't matter that she wanted nothing to do with this…this barbarism.

She didn't have a choice.

Desperate for something to distract her from the horror of the situation, she grasped for purpose, leaning into the function she was supposed to perform for stability.

"How—" she cleared her throat against the rasp there. "How often is this procedure done?"

For a moment Zola considered this, stroking his chin as he contemplated.

"Primarily it was only until the conditioning took, with subsequent treatments as necessary—whenever the subject showed signs of resistance to his orders," he clarified. "In the past few years these episodes have increased in frequency and in severity. We have had to wipe him more and more often in order to keep him in the proper state."

"And it doesn't impede on his…work, at all?" she asked, incredulous. "The mental stress, I mean."

Zola shot her a small, patient smile – the kind he might have bestowed upon a child who wasn't quite keeping up.

"No," he said simply, "it does not."

Risking another glance back to the glass, she was relieved to see find the doctors had cut the power and had begun folding the arms of the machine back and away from the man now twitching and gasping in the chair. Another soldier marked as an officer stood before him now, reading aloud from a small red-bound book.

As she watched, the man's breathing regulated and his posture changed, spine and shoulders straightening, chin angling slightly down. When the officer closed the book with a snap she couldn't hear, the last remnant shudders from the currents still darting through his body had ceased, and the man – the Asset – sat calm and still, as though he hadn't just endured solid minutes of agony. His face, what she could see of it, utterly empty.

Inexplicably unsettled, hoping to conceal the tremor in her hands and in her breathing, she busied herself by turning through the pages in the folder, pausing when she came to a personnel file. Or, what had once been a personnel file before someone had blacked out a good seventy percent of the contents.

The project designation was clearly visible, as was a serial number, and a label reading Restricted Access with a clearance level of eight, none of which meant anything to her. CLASSIFIED had been stamped in bold red across the top of the paper. The actual contents of the document, however, were nothing but a scattered collection of words surrounded by thick, liberal strokes of black. Words which, without the surrounding context, were as useful as a sulfur match under water. Flipping to the next page, it was to find even more black and even fewer words.

These were her resources?

"Excuse me, Dr. Zola," she began, "but these files are—"

"Hardly helpful, I know," he agreed with an almost pained sympathy, seeing what she'd discovered. Tilting his head toward her in a way that read almost conspiratorial, he added: "One of the true downsides of being on the leading edge of something so great, unfortunately. We must work with what we have, hm?"

She hesitated, eyes flicking to the armed soldiers stationed at the rear of the room and to the Commander who was speaking again into the intercom to the people in examination room.

"It's just…there's nothing in here I can use. If I know nothing about who this man is, or—"

"The Asset," Zola interrupted. "Remember, Doctor."

How the man managed to sound at once warmly patient and sternly commanding was beyond her comprehension. All she knew was that she was intensely uncomfortable with the way he spoke to her, in some approximation of a fatherly manner, all the while reminding her that her task was to assist in the systematic separation of a person from everything that made him one.

She had known coming in that morality was of no worth here, and that her sense of ethics would only serve to endanger her. But as indecent as this all was – as horrific – if she was expected to do this without any kind of foundation to work from, she had no hope of success.

Were they setting her up for failure? Was it a test? Some kind of punishment for not having joined of her own volition long ago?

"I understand." Her voice wavered, yet she pressed on as if it hadn't. "But without anything beyond what's here, I won't be able to identify red flags or triggers or anything else without doing…I don't know, weeks—months, even, of data collection first. You have to remember that my work is still based mostly in theory—"

He shook his head. "It cannot be helped. You will have to do without." Reaching, the little man gave her arm a sympathetic pat. "I understand this will affect your work, and you are to take what time you need."

If only the reassurance was one she could bring herself to believe.

Whatever Zola might say, she understood that the patience of HYDRA only ran so deep. Likely they wouldn't kill her, not if they thought her their best chance at achieving the results they wanted, but there were plenty of tings they could and would do to ensure her cooperation should she prove difficult, or unproductive. Things that she had no desire to entertain the thought of.

Unbidden her gaze slid back to the window to find the room beyond empty but for a few of the doctors tidying up. The soldiers had dispersed, and the man – the Asset – was nowhere to be seen.

There was movement beside her, Zola rising from his seat. He had been speaking, Zuzana realized, and she dragged her focus back to the present, lifting her chin to watch the Doctor do up the buttons of his jacket.

"—see the procedure for yourself at least once, so that you would have the best grasp of what you are working with. Now, I must travel back to America. In my absence you will report to the Commander, or to Doctor Belsky, who is the head of the medical team. They will see that you have everything you might require."

Pausing, he reached for her, laying a slightly clammy hand against her cheek, and it took everything she had not to jerk away from his touch.

"I'm sure your father would be proud, Liebling," Zola told her, his smile fond and, she suspected, as close to genuine as a serpent like him could be. "I very much look forward to seeing the results of your work."

After Doctor Zola's departure, she was given a brief, lightning fast tour of the compound which consisted only of the few places she would need to access while she was there: the mess hall, showers and lavatory, the medical wing where she was to have her own desk and adjoining workspace, and private quarters stationed near where the other doctors stayed. The endless stretch of cement walls and stairs all looked the same to her, a maze of somber gray, and she resigned herself to being hopelessly lost for the weeks it would take to get her bearings.

"The Asset will likely not return from his current mission until late the day after next," Commander Andreyev informed her in his purposeful baritone.

From his post just inside the door of what was to be the room where she slept (and undoubtedly hid from what had become her world overnight), he appeared larger than he had up until now, an imposing, solid wall of a man whose very presence made an already small room appear that much smaller.

"You would be best served," he said, "to take the time to get settled, look over the documents provided, and prepare."

"I'll need pieces from my research—" she began, mind beginning to spin from overwhelm.

"You'll have it by tomorrow," the Commander said, and she couldn't even bring herself to be surprised by the level of forethought on their part.

Casting a chagrined glance about the sparse interior of the room, consisting of little more than a bed barely elevated from a camp cot on which her bag sat waiting for her, a dresser, a desk and chair, and a brass lamp, she added: "And if I'm going to be here for—" she swallowed tightly around the knot in her throat, "—for a time, I'm going to need more than the bag I was able to pack."

"It'll be seen to," he stated. "Is there anything else?"

"Not…for the moment."

"Very well."

With a nod, and a final decree that should she require anything else she was to find one of the guards or the doctors in residence and they would be sure to get a message to him, he removed himself from the tiny room, closing the door securely behind him.

The first thing she did was to lock it, turning the bolt until it slid into place and backing away to sink wearily onto the bed that was far too thin and far too firm.

She contemplated crying, if only for a moment. In the end, what would it do for her? She would have to leave shortly to try and find the mess hall again – she hadn't eaten in hours and would need to do so sooner than later – and she flatly refused to be seen with red-rimmed eyes and swollen cheeks.

There would be more than enough time for tears later.

Encouraging the tell-tale waver beneath her breastbone to settle, she lowered the carpet bag hastily stuffed with clothing and a few toiletries to the cold cement floor, gathering up the project file. At some point she would have to produce some kind of result, and as she had no idea how to go about achieving those results she was left with little choice but to scour the scant resources she'd been granted and attempt to come up with some plan as to how she might proceed.

Spreading the pages out across the scratchy, drab olive coverlet she began to comb through them for anything she could use.

The oldest report included was dated 1945 and featured a thorough, detailed description of the procedures undertaken and the subsequent results, which proved to be a disturbing, if objectively interesting, read.

According to the notes, the unnamed subject had been discovered by a squadron of the Red Army while traversing east through the Alps in Austria, injured, bleeding from the remnants of his left arm where it had been all but torn from his body. They had secured him and brought him back to Russia, where he was released into HYDRA's custody and transported to Siberia and – or so she presumed – this very base. What remained of his arm was amputated to the shoulder and replaced with a metal prosthesis, and he was treated with a series of injections of a serum (the contents of which were described as classified and not listed) intended to amplify…well, all of him.

The affects we have so far been able to quantify are as follows:

Strength, speed, agility, coordination, etc. significantly increased (percentage not yet available).

Enhanced sight, smell, and hearing.

Enhanced metabolic function and rapid cellular regeneration.

Increased tolerance to pain and discomfort. Reduced fatigue and significantly improved recovery-time from strain and injury (exact durability levels currently incalculable).

Advanced recall and learning capacity.

Increased resistance to toxins and other chemical agents (potential negative affects regarding affectability of future doses, stimulants, tranquilizers, etc.).

Simultaneous to administering the injections, the science team had also begun in earnest the attempts to strip away his consciousness.

At first it had been, as Zola had alluded, straight torture techniques meant to break down the mind, leave it raw and susceptible to manipulation. Some of it had served the dual purpose of testing the serum's affects: administering pain and injury to measure how quickly he healed, utilizing sensory deprivation and overload and purposeful exhaustion to measure how long before fatigue set in, and then how quickly he recovered. Even having no experience in such matters, she didn't require it to be spelled out to understand that lines had been crossed. Much of what had been done was simply for the sake of scientists experimenting because they could, not caring that what they did reached beyond the point of cruelty for its own sake.

As the records admitted, on an unenhanced subject, this alone might have been enough. But whether due to the serum's influence or the subject himself being astoundingly strong of will, more had been required to ensure the mental recalibration, as they called it, took hold.

The details were left purposefully vague, not that she had expected otherwise, but there was enough for her to gather that a regimen of brainwashing and hypnosis-based reprogramming in combination with the specially designed and developed Memory Suppressing Machine (the mention brought bile to her mouth) had finally done the job.

The Winter Soldier, as he was referred to most often, was a combat and weapons expert. He had been trained in reconnaissance, military strategy, espionage, and spy-craft, was fluent in over seven languages and passable in five more. He was deadly, efficient, and had over twenty successful missions under his belt – six of which had been assassinations. Best (or worst) of all, he was completely and utterly obedient. Not a man, but a possession. A tool for the using.

A firearm in human skin.

Sickened by the unbidden thought, Zuzana sternly turned her attention to the notes regarding behavior.

Any time the Soldier questioned orders, or didn't obey to the letter, any time he displayed so much as a hint of hesitation or doubt, he was put back into the Machine – scoured and reprogrammed, forcibly returned to a state of mindless compliance. During the periods where they had no use for him, they returned him to cryo-sleep. Setting him back on the shelf, as it were.

Frowning, she skimmed back over the piecemeal description of the Suppression Machine's functionality, wishing she had clearer details.

From what she could determine, the man that had become the Winter Soldier was selected specifically for qualities and skills gained in his former life. Those things, along with the additional training and education they had poured into him, were things they wanted him to retain, while the rest – personality, autonomy, history, emotion, the altogether human elements – were scraped away like so much mold from the surface of a loaf of bread. But how were they distinguishing between the two, let alone isolating the one in order to be rid of it without accidentally removing some of the other?

No matter how hard she raked through the documents and schematics, she couldn't find an answer. Likely this was another aspect of the method they sought to keep folded in secrecy – preventing anyone from stealing and using it. She was not flattered to be considered among the ranks regarded as such a specific threat. Nor was she thrilled by the extra layer of difficulty this gap in her knowledge was going to add to her assignment.

According to progressively more recent accounts, the incidents of disobedience had been occurring at a steady increase for the past two years. The level of violence was increasing as well, resulting in the deaths of two of the Asset's handlers six months prior and numerous injuries of varying severity to others.

Recalibration, while still effective, wasn't holding. The causes? None of the medical staff could determine, even the few with limited experience in behaviorism. No one could figure out what was going wrong. Yet she – unqualified, under-experienced, and out of her depth – was supposed to come in and somehow fix this unstable, unpredictable force housed inside a human body, almost certainly winding up with injuries of her own for her trouble. And if she didn't…but she must. Failure was unacceptable.

What, in the name of all that was holy, was she going to do?

Rubbing at her tired eyes, Zuzana tidied the mess of papers, gathering them back into two neat piles – the helpful and the useless.

She had a headache, her throat was dry, and her stomach pinched with hunger pangs. Before anything else she needed to eat, and she needed water. Then, maybe, she would be able to wrap her head around formulating a strategy. Or maybe it would be time for a bit of that crying.

If she was an adequate multitasker, she might even be able to accomplish both.

NOTES:

I hate all of this and hate that I had to write it.

Ugh.

It's also probably a bit boring. Apologies for that.

A few notes on my OFC: I always struggle with the desire to pursue as much realism as I can into my stories regarding things that are all too easy to allow to be ridiculous. Considering that this story is based on larger-than-life (and respectably ridiculous) comic movies as its source material, I don't fee quite so silly about the familial-ties dragging a protagonist into evil cliché. And as much as it may seem a ridiculous thing to have her a doctor and a leading expert in a burgeoning field; there had actually been several celebrated Czech women scientists by this period, including Marie Zdeňka Baborová-Čiháková who was a doctor of philosophy in 1901, and Adéla Kochanovská who was a nuclear physicist in the 40s and 50s and was a pioneer in radiography and X-ray structural analysis. It's probably the most realistic thing about her.

I'd like to say her expectations for the situation are exaggerated and that everything will be fine, but...well, you've read the tags and, honestly, straight up easy and happy isn't why we're here, is it?

In any case, this is what I have finished and suitable for reading. Hopefully more soon.

Until next time!