To Those Who Wait

by hiyabucky

Isabel Barnes spends her days in Brooklyn nursing patients and following the mischievous likes of Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers. Their life turns upside down when Bucky is drafted for war and Steve joins the Project Rebirth experiment, leaving Isabel with the decision to either stay behind or follow "Captain America" into war. [Steve/OC]. Timeline - CA:TFA to A:IW

90. Chapter 89

89.

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When Isabel wakes up in the infirmary bed, she feels different. Gone is the pain and the hunger and all the blood. Everything is louder, brighter, odorous and clearer. She feels stronger, fitter, reenergized, reborn.

She doesn't have time to consider it, because as soon as her eyes open, Madame Hydra appears over her and pulls her up from the bed, across the room. She's too weak to fight back, she realises, and struggles to get her legs to move as she's dragged across the floor. She's stuffed into the glass casing of one of Hydra's cryostasis tubes. Madame Hydra shuts the door on Isabel before she can really register what is going on through the fog in her mind.

There's the beeping of the machine, and then a locking sound as the door secures itself shut.

Isabel looks down, at her blood-soaked skirt to her feet where a frost is crawling up the sides of the tubing. It's freezing, making her feet numb almost instantly. It crawls up her legs, up the tube, toward her knees, and then to her hips.

Isabel begins to panic. She bangs on the door, screams to be let out, but no one comes to save her.

The air in the tube grows colder and the oxygen seems to be sucked out, replaced only by the stale, crisp cold and ice.

Isabel looks out of the small window by her face and her eyes immediately land on the chair in the middle of the room where Bucky is strapped down, being wiped repeatedly in succession. His eyes are open, staring blankly at the room in front of him and not registering any of it, and his mouth hangs open, limp with pain and… nothing. Nothing. There's nothing on his face, no emotion at all, that suggests he's anything other than a robot.

It breaks Isabel's heart.

She bangs one last time on the glass in a desperate hope to get his attention, but then her hand sticks to the wall, frozen there by the climbing ice. The white gas reaches her chest and then climbs up her chin and her hair. With one last strangled breath, the ice fills her face and her mind and her eyes close.

For a moment, all she knows is the intense, heart-stopping cold, and then she knows nothing else.