A Birdie Lost in Time | Bucky Barnes

|8|

Somewhere behind her, she registered the sound of the door opening, but she was too tired to really understand. Not even the footsteps roused her from her half-sleep, once again not feeling completely in control of her body.

The hands that pulled her off the ground were slightly more alarming, but she still could only muster a look of slight annoyance as she turned to face the Russian.

"How are you feeling this morning, ptichka?"

She tried to open her mouth to speak, to send him a snippy retort, but for some reason her mouth refused to form words.

A firm slap to the cheek sent a little life into her, and as her head lulled to rest on the shoulder of whoever held her, she was able to muster a glare.

"Teechkah better not mean bitch," she mumbled, earning a hearty laugh from the Russian.

"No, but that would be another fitting name for you, uh? Now, are you going to cooperate today?"

"Probably not," she huffed, barely above the whisper.

"I guess we will have to see. The Soldat will not be joining us for a while, so if you want to avoid dealing with him you will answer me today."

With that, who ever held her sent a hard punch to the base of her spine, forcing her legs to give out before she could even blink. As her knees hit the ground, a hand was wrapped around her neck, the pressure not enough to cut off her air flow, but enough to keep her still.

"Where did you learn that the Soldat assassinated Kennedy?"

She swallowed, the hand around her neck constricting the longer she didn't answer.

They can't know.

So, she didn't respond. To any of the questions.

She kept her mouth shut, even when their hits got harder. Even as she felt her arm snap beneath the weight of a heavy boot. Even as they decided to bring out a pocket knife, seeing how much red they could add to her cell floor. Even as she was forced into unconsciousness then ripped back to reality, seeing the sneering face of the Russian, she said nothing.

That became their routine. He would come in, question her, get nothing, then leave in a blaze of anger. She wasn't sure how long passed, but she knew days and sometimes even weeks had gone by between visits, because her bruises would all but disappear before he returned.

Why he bothered to keep her alive, she wasn't sure. It's not like she was helpful; she had given him no more than what he believed to be facetious answers, and he was obviously close to snapping.

There had been more than once that she'd wished he'd squeezed a little longer, or cut a little deeper, that he would snap, but it didn't come.

Long past the point of her arm healing, and then her finger—which she agonizingly had to adjust so it didn't bend at an awkward angle—and even after the deepest cuts had healed—no thanks to the vodka they'd so graciously poured onto the wounds 'to avoid infection'—she was still alive.

Because they couldn't know.

She wouldn't be the reason Hydra started jumping through time and fucking up the sacred timeline as the Ancient One had told her it was called. At least, Marlow thought she had told her that. Maybe it was Bruce. Or maybe she was imagining it ever happened.

It was hard to tell between the dream-like states she sat in in-between visits from the Russian and her actual dreams.

She read once—or she thought she read—that if someone sat in darkness and silence for long enough, they would start hallucinating. She hoped she'd read that because that's what had been happening to her.