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CHAPTER FIVE
Soldier

... ... ...

~SIBERIA, RUSSIA – 1957~

It had only been a few days – the majority of which had been spent either in her room or at her desk in the medical science wing – but already there were a number of things she disliked to the point of intensity.

The first of these was the smell, the oppressive reek of cold concrete and ice. How ice could have such a strong scent, she didn't understand. But it did. Like…dead, stagnant water. Though perhaps her dislike of it was more a reflection of her mood than anything real of the part of the ice itself.

The second…was the soldiers.

Above all other things the compound was, first and foremost, a military base. Soldiers were everywhere – stationed at doors, traversing the halls and milling about the public rooms. And everywhere they were, everywhere she went, they watched her. More than was necessary for guards ordered to keep an eye on the outsider, and in ways that were not strictly appropriate.

Other than the girl she had spied briefly working in the kitchen, and another that supposedly came to help with laundry every week, there were no other women in residence. If there had been more at one point, they hadn't spent much time in the places where men worked, and certainly not in a capacity like hers.

For the most part the other doctors treated her with a sort of civil disinterest. At worst they outright ignored her – which was more than all right by her. She would rather be ignored than scrutinized, rather have disinterest than unsavory attention. From the soldiers she received both.

While she had been assured of her safety, she was old enough (and perhaps jaded enough) to be mistrustful of such a promise. It wasn't simply that she was a woman trapped in an enclosed space with men kept in long isolation, nor that she was untrained, unarmed, and an easy target, but that she had been granted a measure of authority over them. Being among the doctors' ranks automatically made her superior to anyone there aside from the higher officers. A large number of Russian men that had been raised to view women as inferior in every way – upbringings which their training would only have reinforced – were not about to look at her with anything less than automatic hostility.

So far there had been nothing but the odd nasty barb flung in passing or insult disguised as a joke. Always just within earshot, of course. Nothing that, technically, she hadn't heard before and plenty of times at that. This didn't bother her. Words didn't bother her. It was what words might become when given the time to sour that frightened her.

There was nowhere to run. She was utterly at the mercy of soldiers who were held in check by a lead scientist that was – if the information she had managed to wrangle from one of the kitchen staff was true – rarely in residence and a commander with more important things to see to than the comfort or safety of one lowly (and female) doctor.

Since it was very likely she would be there for the rest of her life, she supposed she had better find a way to get used to the reek of ice. To the constant chill and the close, monotonous cage of the concrete prison.

As to the soldiers…all she could do was keep her head down as best she could and try not to draw any more attention than she already had.

The click of her own heels upon the floor of the empty corridor sounded unreasonably loud to her own ears. Clutching the notepad and folder tightly in the crook of her arm she rounded another corner, hoping she hadn't taken yet another wrong turn, and experiencing a cool burst of relief when the set of doors came into view – guards stationed outside each.

As instructed, she made for the door on the right. At her approach, the guard stationed outside turned to slide a key into the lock, twisting the knob and pushing the heavy metal door open to allow her inside.

The room was one of two adjoined by a central wall into which a one-way window was set. On this side, all that could be seen was dark, opaque glass. But anyone in the other room would have a clear, unhindered view of everything that occurred within its neighbor. It was small, furnished with nothing beyond a plain aluminum table, two chairs, and the lights overhead.

Three men were waiting inside when she entered. Two guards were stationed in the rear corners of the room. They were more heavily armed than any of the soldiers she had yet seen about the compound, rifles strapped to their backs, handguns at their belts, and each holding a slim metallic baton with slender prongs at one end which, she suspected, would dispense a powerful, painful electrical charge. And, seated in the chair across the table from her, was the Asset.

Upon her entry into the room his head lifted to look at her, and something about the slow, perfectly measured movement caused a soft, unexpected ripple of unease to chase along her spine.

Shoving it out of mind, she summoned the approximation of a smile and crossed to the other chair.

"Good afternoon," she greeted automatically, realizing only after she'd spoken that maybe it was silly to introduce herself to someone that had been stripped of all sense of social norms.

But then, she supposed that was part of what she was there to measure, whether or not he responded to such things, when, in what circumstances, and (if she was lucky) why.

Setting her things down on the surface of the table, she separated notepad from folder. Folding her skirt and lab coat neatly around her knees, she sat down, and turned her attention to her – for lack of more appropriate term – subject.

She hadn't been able to get that good of a look at him before; the observation room had been situated too far away for anything but the generalities, details hadn't been visible. Now that she was within a few yards of him, she was better able to see all the things she hadn't then, the first of which being that he was larger than she had expected.

It wasn't that he was a giant. It was simply that, from the different vantage point, he had seemed smaller, not quite so wide in the shoulder perhaps. Or maybe it was that she was seeing him now fully recovered from being woken from cryo-sleep and what had immediately followed. His posture was different: almost unnaturally neutral, as though he held no tension or strain anywhere in his body. Something most human forms didn't, or perhaps couldn't, do. And the way his eyes followed her when she moved was…eerie. She felt like she was being sighted by a wolf.

His hair was a rich dark brown and overgrown, falling about his face in long, unkempt pieces. His eyes were the kind of pure, brilliant blue that would have been truly stunning had the color not been dulled some by the impassive cold in his stare. They appeared more deeply set than they truly were by virtue of the harsh lighting and the way he held his head, with his chin angled slightly downward. Stubble heightened the shadows beneath high, arcing cheekbones and razor sharp jaw.

A very handsome face, she thought. The kind of face that would have made him popular with women, and certainly a number of gentlemen, at one time. Why this in particular disturbed her the way it did, she had no answer.

"I am Doctor Zuzana Volin," she introduced herself. "I'm here to give you an examination."

She still wasn't entirely sure how to talk to him, and probably wouldn't be until a few sessions in, but had elected to use the tone and style she would have with any of her patients. Most of them had been former soldiers, and she hoped he would respond well to the straightforward cadence and clear direction.

"Do you understand?"

At her question, the Asset spoke.

"Yes."

His voice was low, unyielding, but not as deep as she had expected. He had a soft mouth, she noticed. Sensitive. Or, it would have been had he been capable of using it that way.

Nodding, her eyes darting briefly to the darkened glass at her left, she opened the file folder and took a breath.

Strictly speaking, she hadn't been informed there would be anyone observing her sessions. But considering for whom she was now in service, and why, it seemed a more than reasonable assumption to make. Zola would want regular and frequent reports, and would no doubt have assigned people to monitor her efforts, and to ensure she was performing her duty as described to her rather than goodness only knew what else. She wouldn't deny that she was nervous, to herself at least. But like hell was she going to show it to them or the guards or anyone else.

"You returned from a mission yesterday," she noted after skimming her notes. The Asset did not respond. Because she hadn't asked a question, she supposed. "Are you well?"

Earlier that morning she had been issued a liberally redacted copy of the report of the mission in question. It had been to extract a prisoner from one of the gulags to the southeast. There was no mention of injury on his part, but she felt it prudent to inquire.

"Operational," he provided. Neither his expression nor his tone so much as shifted.

Zuzana felt her brow begin to rise and quickly checked the reflex.

The answer had been coldly detached, so…separated from his own sense of wellbeing. Even if he had been injured, even if he'd been bleeding out in front of her, she had the feeling that so long as he could still function enough to do as ordered, he would have reported the same. It shouldn't have startled her. But she supposed a part of her hadn't truly believed he was what Zola had said he was.

Again, she nodded, partly in the hopes of covering her pause under the illusion of having been studying something in his answer.

"I'm told you have a room you stay in when not on a mission."

Technically, she had been informed that he was kept in a modified cell in the disciplinary barracks between being dispatched, and that was if he wasn't scheduled to go back into stasis, which was the more common of late. They were keeping him thawed (which was a term she loathed on principle, but it was the vernacular) primarily for use, but it correlated nicely with her needs both for access and the ability to analyze him when not constantly in recovery.

"Do you sleep?" she asked, and when he gave his toneless answer in the assent, added: "Did you sleep last night?"

"Yes."

She made a note. At some point later she would ask him for amounts and frequency, but for now this was enough.

"Did you have any dreams?"

"No."

He answered this as promptly and definitively as he had every other question. No pause, no hint of uncertainty of lack of comprehension. Interesting.

So he knew what dreaming was, at least on a theoretical level. It wasn't something he'd had to be taught. A leftover scrap of knowledge from before, then? If so, on what level? Did he actually remember it, or was it deep-buried knowledge, so imbedded that the Memory Suppression treatment had not yet managed to shake it loose?

For a moment Zuzana simply studied him from across the table.

He wore no outward expression of anything resembling emotion, but it would have been wrong to call him expressionless. There was definite presence behind his eyes, enough to confirm that he was a living, thinking creature. He looked steadily back at her in a way she might have considered bold, even challenging, if it wasn't so unabashedly neutral. Calculating, though not quite clinical. She had never seen anything like it before and honestly had no idea what to make of it. He wasn't empty…but he wasn't supposed to be. Just void of humanity.

"I'm going to give you a list of three words," she said, turning her attention back to her painstakingly planned itinerary. "Terrain, echo, window. Can you repeat those back to me?"

There was a slight pause then. His face didn't change, even in some slight narrowing of the eyes or crease in the brow, not even a twitch of jaw or mouth. But she thought she saw the gears in his mind working, and didn't need to be told that he was analyzing everything from her speech patterns and questions to the exercise she had just prescribed, turning them over in his head, feeling the edges and contours, and then storing them away.

"Terrain," he repeated obediently, "echo, window."

There was a very faint rasp to his speech, she noticed, one that she might have associated with disuse. A longer-lasting effect of the stasis, perhaps?

"Good," she praised, as she would have with any other patient. Probability was high that praise didn't even register to him, but that didn't matter. It was for her, more than anything. Something to make this endeavor even slightly more palatable.

"In your own words, can you give me a report on your last mission?"

She listened as he recited a meticulous outline of what had occurred, checking it against the written report she had in front of her. Clearly this was something he was called upon to do regularly, for he had no trouble touching on every aspect with the detail to make it a thorough report while also utilizing a practical brevity.

His recall was spot on, down to the minute. He had broken into the high-security prison through one of the service entrances during a shift-change late at night, located the prisoner HYDRA wanted released, and escorted him out and into the custody of a contingent of agents. All had gone smoothly and according to plan apart from the unexpected snag in the form of a single serviceman working on repairs. There could be no witnesses, of course. No one could know what had happened, or how the prisoner had escaped. So, as per his mandate, the Asset had eliminated the threat.

"…termination by strangulation with wire garrote," he described bluntly. "Anonymity was maintained. Prisoner 1428C was delivered to rendezvous point at 23:16 hours."

Quick, clean, brutally efficient.

Choosing to pretend that her face hadn't just drained of color, she ducked her chin and made another note.

The death itself, to say nothing of the method, disturbed her – of course it did – but the emotionless way he described it was somehow even more upsetting. Anger, annoyance, or even enjoyment, as frightening and horrific as that would be, would have been easier to stomach simply because it was something she could recognize. The empty void in place of even the barest trace of emotional undercurrent was ghoulish and...wrong. In every way it could be.

There would be other questions to ask later, other tests and exercises to try. For now, she simply wanted a baseline to work from, and as a part of that baseline, there was other data she required.

Not wanting to inadvertently provoke any defensive responses, she was careful to make her intentions clear before approaching him.

"I need to do some physical examination, which means I'll need to come closer to touch you. All right?"

While true, he was given thorough physical exams after each mission, the results of these were of little use to her beyond general notation of injury. For one thing, there was data she required that wouldn't be documented by the other doctors – if they were considered at all. Heartrate, reflexes, and breathing might not be accurate from the time of most recent exam to the time she was able to see him. She might be able to use them to spot and track irregularity in his mood or mental function, and therefore thought it more practical to become accustomed to taking them herself.

Another brief, calculating pause preceded his flat, clipped acknowledgement. She imagined he wasn't accustomed to being spoken to like this, which might have been setting off some internal warnings. Too much outside of the normal could be upsetting to many of the men she had worked with in the past, which made it that much more important to set a precedent of expectations now rather than later when she was actively trying to decipher what was going on.

The Asset wore tactical pants and boots like a soldier, but the vest they'd given him in place of a shirt or jacket was some manner of synthetic material which fit close to his torso and left his arms bare, not unlike the suit he'd worn in the cryo-chamber. The fact that his skin was warm when she lifted his right wrist to check his pulse was unexpected, for all that she logically knew it would be. He wasn't a machine, for all that the gleaming metal of the left arm might have implied otherwise.

The arm itself was cybernetic – a complex piece of machinery formed into the shape of a prosthetic. According to the specifications she had read, it was strong enough to shatter concrete, dent steel, and tear through almost every structure known to man when wielded by a man with the kind of strength to attempt such a thing. The soviet star had been emblazoned upon the shoulder, bold and red against the polished titanium base. A brand, she thought. Though the symbol itself was only a half-truth. A horror concealing another, far worse horror beneath.

Before she could prevent the thought, she found herself wondering if it had hurt him to receive it. Had they anesthetized him to remove the remnants of the ruined arm, or hadn't they bothered? What did it matter if a weapon felt pain?

But she couldn't afford to think that way, however unnatural it might feel.

Though he sat passive and unmoving under her ministrations, hands resting flat upon his thighs, she wasn't quite capable of preventing her mind from spiraling to places she would rather it didn't.

How much protection did the guards provide, truly? If he was truly enhanced to the degree described, he was faster than they were, and stronger by far. True, he wasn't supposed to be capable of lashing out on his own, but if something set him off the way he had been in the past…how exactly were they supposed to stop him?

How close was she to an accidental death just by being in the room?

...

The Asset spent a great deal of time waiting: for orders, for travel for pre-mission preparations to be completed, for observation, and for many more things besides. He had no opinion about the matter, nor about being taken to this bare little room instead of to his cell or to the training levels – he simply sat as he was bid, and he waited.

When the door opened to admit a doctor, he was unsurprised. Doctors were as common a staple in his day to day as were the handlers, though none of them had ever required a separate room in which to see him. Not that he could recall. By default that made this one different.

"Good afternoon."

The higher register of the female voice was an odd counterpoint to what was almost an exclusively male environment. Not jarring, at least not to him. The guards posted at his back, however, both altered their posture, the rustle of their clothing and the adjustment of hands on stun batons illustrating the subtle shift. Whether in response to the sound, or its source, was unclear.

She wore the same white coat the rest of the doctors did over a simple blue dress, crisp and clean, defining the smallness of her in neat lines. And she was small – both in height and in stature. Small, and altogether fragile in relation to everyone else in the room. The embroidered tag over the left breast pocket of the coat featured the same black and red insignia worn somewhere by every person in the compound, below which was stitched the name Volin.

Not familiar. But then, he never really expected anything to be.

He watched as she lowered herself into the chair across from him. She was studying him with an understated caution which he determined to be due to one of two things: either she had never seen him before, or the last interaction she'd had with him had gone poorly. As there was a hint of curiosity in the look, he was leaning toward the former, which meant that this doctor was a new one.

To his recollection, none of the doctors which had come before her had been female. He was as of yet unable to determine whether there was some significance to this.

"I am Doctor Zuzana Volin," she told him. "I'm here to give you an examination. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he said, compelled by the question to give answer.

He caught the flick of her eyes toward the wide glass panel stretching along the wall to his right, recognizing the reflexive motion as one similar to a glance over the shoulder. So too did he catch the lightning-quick flash of apprehension.

Whatever – whoever – was on the other side of the glass made her nervous.

Opening the file she had placed on the surface before her, she smoothed the flat of one slender hand across the page there. She proceeded to ask a series of questions, making notes as she went, like any other doctor. The nature of the questions, however, was not at all what he was conditioned to expect. Nor was the way she responded to his answer in regard to dreaming – studying his face as though she possessed the power to bore through his very skull and pry out whatever it was she was looking for.

She had done nothing which communicated any overt threat, yet his focus narrowed in on her just a little more intently.

Awareness and vigilance was part of his mandate. Any detail, no matter how small or seemingly meaningless, might be necessary to carrying out an order yet to come. Without his conscious direction his mind existed in a state of constant calculation: weighing, measuring, running sums and probabilities, cataloguing weaknesses like weapons in an ever-growing internal arsenal. He comprehended that he was meant to be here, meant to regard this as just another examination and her as just another doctor. That was understood and accepted. But the deviations would be noted regardless. He was programmed to do so.

"Terrain, echo, window."

The tip of her pen glided across her paper as she circled something written there, the movement of her hand smooth and unthinking.

"Can you repeat those back to me?"

She noticed when he didn't answer immediately. Glancing up at him again, she met his eyes. He saw the knowing spark, the realization that she was being scrutinized, watched as the realization reshaped, became thoughtful.

After a moment the compulsion to answer rose up around him, and he complied, repeating the words as she had requested. What his doing so told her, he didn't know. It was not his place to know.

She then had him recite a report of the mission he had most recently completed, comparing his words to what he assumed was a written copy from his handlers. As he spoke, he could all but feel the length of her body coil with tension from all the way across the little room. Her unease was palpable, as was the distress she was trying to conceal by attempting to be engaged in the printed report – eyes down, face purposefully blank, shoulders tight. And it was here that he was able to fit together just what was different about her, apart from the obvious.

Unlike the rest of the doctors, whatever her purpose, she very much did not want to be there.

For generous moments after he had finished declaiming she simply sat in silence. She made no notes, nor gestures to indicate comprehension, or even the discomfort lacing every bone serving as the foundation for the carefully-crafted poise. Whether the guards behind him or the eyes behind the window saw that it was a mask, he doubted. She was concealing it well. But he could pick out the tells, subtle though they were.

Finally the doctor seemed to steel herself. "I need to do some physical examination," she announced, "which means I'll need to come closer to touch you. All right?"

He recognized the tone of a question but no grasp of its form. Referring back to earlier requests she had made of him, he made the calculation that she must be requesting confirmation that he understood.

"Ready to comply."

That seemed to satisfy her. Rising, she circled around the table to approach him, bringing her chair with her.

The hem of her dress reached just below her knees, the garment held close around her waist by a belt of the same cloth. A potential weapon or restraint, he noted, not that he would have need of it.

He followed her movements, tracing the rhythm of her steps, the way her body carried her. She was graceful, but not in the way of an agent or an assassin. Even the best had difficulty concealing themselves completely, and not even the micro-movements which had betrayed many capable operatives before her were those of a trained fighter. She was a doctor only, it seemed. Albeit different from the rest of the medical team.

He saw her eyes drop as she neared, casting a cursory glance toward his left arm. He was accustomed to the metal appendage receiving a fair amount of attention, either when it was in need of maintenance or repair, and when he was in the field, as the weapon it was. It was her expression that read wrong – the flash of something under the hints of fear and distaste, which he could not identify. Some form of sentiment that required more observation in order to be quantified.

A faint, herbal scent met his nose when she settled at his right. Aromatic, slightly sweet. She reached for his flesh hand, fingers sliding lightly around his wrist to feel for the pulse beneath the thumb joint. Her skin was cool, but not cold, her touch soft, bearing a latent hesitancy which none of the other doctors possessed – which served as yet another grain of evidence that she would rather have been somewhere else.

He observed her in still silence while she measured the rate of his heart against the delicate watch at her wrist. The shade of her hair where it brushed her downturned cheek gleamed too warm to be truly black, though it was very near to it. She had a narrow nose and slender dark brows, a soft, delicate mouth painted a muted shade of red. Something flickered in a distant crevice of his mind…superfluous. Unhelpful. He nudged it away and out of reach, centering his attention on the finger she lifted before his face to check his vision.

These tests were variations on ones he recognized. Simple checks of his sight and hearing in addition to heartrate, less thorough than those used by the other doctors when taking his vitals. Whatever knowledge she gained must have been for different purposes altogether to negate them being repetitious. She didn't take any of the information down. Which was unusual, especially compared with how much notating she had done before.

Some of the tests he didn't recognize. One included tucking both hands under each side of his jaw and tilting his head from side to side, then angling up, the soft pressure of her thumbs framing his face providing a sensation so alien that he neglected to watch her expression during – a potentially lethal mistake which he would not make again. Another test involved cupping the back of his right hand in hers and running the tips of her index and middle fingers down his palm. His fingers curled reflexively inward before he willfully straightened them. Whatever she was looking for there, she seemed satisfied enough.

Releasing his hand, she allowed him to lower it back to his lap, the skin of his palm tingling. The distraction was unacceptable, and so he silenced it.

"All finished," she declared. "Just one last thing—can you repeat those three words again for me?"

"Terrain, echo, window," he obeyed promptly, and she nodded, seeming pleased.

"Very good."

Moving back around the table to where she had left the files, she leant down briefly to write something before gathering up her papers.

"That's all for today, then. We'll be having regular sessions from now on, working around your…assignments." A slight pause. A hitch to the word. Dislike. Perhaps disapproval? "I will see you again in a few days."

She smiled then, the red of her lips curving in a way that didn't quite reach her eyes. Folding her things to her chest, she stepped back to the door, knocked twice, and, when it opened, slipped out into the hall beyond.

The guards escorted him out once she was gone, directing him down the empty hall to the lift which would take them up to the training levels.

"I still say it's crazy," one of them said to the other as he adjusted the grip on his rifle in order to pull the folding gate closed. "Bringing in a woman. For this?"

The guard at his left shrugged. "I heard it was on Zola's order specifically."

The Asset heard them – it would have been impossible not to – but as the discussion contained neither orders nor anything directly to do with him, he allowed the words to roll over him like water, and waited.

The creak of gears clicking into operation preceded the split-second of vertigo and the upward momentum of the floor below their feet.

"When d'you think he last saw a woman? That wasn't through a scope, I mean," the second guard inquired.

The first emitted a hearty laugh.

"Not that he'd care," the man retorted, "I heard they removed his cock along with half of his brains. Still, he gets to spend all this time with a pretty piece of skirt like that? Fucking waste if you ask me."

If at one point a part of him might have understood the nature of the conversation, the Asset no longer had access to it. He was merely able to distinguish the notes of incredulity, frustration, and skepticism exchanged between the two guards, and could put together that they were dubious as to the new doctor's presence. Or perhaps her purpose, and her ability (or lack thereof) to perform it adequately.

But it wasn't his place to know, or to understand.

His place was in the field, and when he was not there, his place was in the training rooms, sharpening his skills on the edges of blade and bullet and bone.

By the time he was escorted back to his cell that night, the guards' conversation had crumbled away to hardly more than scraps of a shadow. He was empty but for three words – random, and absent of any meaning but for their origin on the doctor's steady voice.

NOTES:

With the way I write, it is difficult for me to work with a character that doesn't emote or do much by way of introspection. I'm not entirely sure I succeeded the way I wanted, but I did my best.

(Longer chapters are coming, I swear.)

Thank you for reading, and if you have a moment to spare enough to toss a comment to your writer, I'd be grateful and love you forever.

Until next time!