Tenderness and Ferocity | Winter Soldier x Reader

The Second Day

"Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. if we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other... Technical perfection strives toward the calculable, human perfection toward the incalculable."
— Ernst Jünger

"Tell me about your last mission. Why did it fail?"

"It didn't."

"Why did it almost fail." Excuse me.

"First shot missed the target."

"Mhmm... Did something get in the way?"

"No."

"Do you think it was a miscalculation on your part?"

"I don't know."

"I... See, I have no idea how shooting works." she laughed. "Did you misjudge the distance, maybe? The wind, the... trajectory?"

"No."

"So why do you think the first shot failed?"

"The shot didn't fail. I failed. And I don't know."

"But you got him the second time. So what went differently?"

"I don't know."

She thought she knew, but she needed to work him through it. A lot depended on it, and it wasn't just her dedication to her career, but to the whole Winter Soldier program. None of the other recruits were remotely as promising, their minds unhinged or too far gone, hours wasted into them and all that brilliant work. If she got it right just this once, they could do so much more, so much...

Hydra's reach tended to exceed their grasp. This led them to be overly ambitious and fail — painfully, and often. She had to remind herself that it led to growth, that perseverance in the face of your own failures was what growth was. But if she could contribute to a move in a new direction, a right direction, she will have accomplished something with her life. Even if she didn't get any credit and was never remembered, as many of the staff often weren't, at least she could have that small knowledge for herself. She certainly didn't have much else: just her job, and distant family, and colleagues that passed for friends.

"I'm going to say three words. Try to remember them: glass, gecko, charity. Say them back."

"Glass. Gecko. Charity."

"Good. And three things you can see in this room. How about... the lightbulb, that metronome over there, and the sink in the corner. Name them."

"The lightbulb. The metronome. The sink."

"Very good. Now I'm going to get you some paper and a pen." She paused mid-way from getting up to ask "Promise you won't stab me with it?"

He stopped to think, and said "I won't. ...Stab you, that is."

With a wry smile, she went to the little table on the other side of the room.

The Director agreed to give the Soldier a cell with a bunk to sleep in, some bare amenities, and now he spent his time there when he wasn't in session with her, or training (which was most of the time) . She couldn't tell if the change in environment or sleeping made any difference. But as the fabric of his speech got looser every time she plucked at it with a barbed question, she was convinced it had to matter.

They had their meetings in a completely different room, with no bars or windows, and no cameras either. It would have been intimidating to anyone else, that sort of consummate interrogation room lifted out of a dystopia, but anything was better than the sterile stench of the lab where they killed him over and over only to start him up again.