So the soldier showed him pain.

The room was full of men stretching his mind out of his skull and pinning it open with their questions. They took notes.

"Wipe him."

The man in the chair screamed, clawed, and their cold electric needles pulled through his mind, grafting memory onto memory. And all he knew were the crystalline knives of ice in his flesh and the cloying flavor of decay choking his death-swollen throat.

"Again. Wipe him."

"What do you see?" (Again. Wipe him. Notes on green plastic clipboards.)

He saw a blown-out Brooklyn through the blue Austrian sleet, streets swimming in mud. From behind he wall he followed his target in the scope of his rifle-And then something heavy (he thought of rebar) swung him in the back and he flung forward on crumpling splintering legs into the bottomless snow. The words cracked in his throat as he tried to speak to the men stretching his mind out of his skull and pinning it open with questions.

"Vitals are set. Hibernation ready."

"You'll be good this time, Barnes." The man speaking was dead, fifteen years later, in a closed machinery building. His voice curled under Barnes' and the Soldier's skin with its gentle coercion.

"No," the Soldier was moaning, sliding onto his knees before the man, like an insolent seven year old.

"No."

"No! NO!"

"I can't-I can't breathe in there-No!"

"I CAN'T-"

He suffocated as they thrust him into his coffin and began flooding it, black spotting across his vision as the room spun and flickered. The coffin tasted like death, and it held him around the throat with its bloated hand.

When he regained consciousness, he was suspended in timeless, bodiless cold. There was no light.

The Soldier buried Barnes' consciousness away, and waited.

And now the Soldier was screaming, but it wasn't from the chair. He was on a paper lined table and bleeding. And angry.

"Mission Report."

The Soldier screamed in fearless spite at his master, and rolled to lunge with his arm. They could not punish him now. But as he reached he felt the gaping fissure where flesh and metal met and the pain stopped him.

"Mission Report, Soldier."

Barnes started to hear his own voice trembling through the Soldier's lips. "Rebecca-" The Soldier gasped and spat unintelligibly. "Oh help me-"

"-please-"

"It's useless. Wipe him."

In the chair, he lit up and went numb.

The electricity tore him, sent his mind crawling-

-and dragged the Soldier out.