December // A Winter Soldier Story

24

ｄｅｃｅｍｂｅｒ ２９ｔｈ， ２０１３

２０°

ℒℯ𝒶

Lea must be underwater. That's the only way she can explain the way the world sounds to her when she wakes up.

Everything is muffled and foggy. Even her thoughts are sluggish, as if a murky haze has settled in her brain. She tries to process what's happening by going through the last thoughts she remembers, but the process is slow, and she only sees pieces: the streets of D.C., a gloved black hand, the cool silver metal of a weapon designed to kill. It doesn't clear very much up for her.

Her eyelids are fighting to stay closed, but she wants to open them. She thinks she may finally understand what's going on if she can look around. She pulls as hard as she can, but they don't budge. Maybe they're guarding her from something she really doesn't want to see.

Her breathing is shallow and short. The longer she is conscious, the more her body begins to tell her. A dull aching can now be felt across the side of her skull, which grows more painful each minute. There is a hardness and a coolness to the ground beneath her, suggesting she may be laying on concrete. The air is stale. It smells like mold, but has a sharpness to it - the sort of sharpness that the smell of blood has.

That makes her heart start beating rapidly. She hopes she is wrong about that deduction, because if she isn't, then this can only mean that she has reached the end of her life. If she has been kidnapped, like she is picturing, then she knows she won't last long. She's a petite girl from New Hampshire, with no muscle mass or knowledge of how to fight back. She won't survive a kidnapping if the kidnapper wants her dead.

The fear is enough to force her eyes open, but the sight she is met with only increases her feelings of dread. She is in a dark room, with walls and a floor of solid rock. When she looks to her left and sees giant bars across an open part of the wall, her heart leaps into her throat. A cell. She's sitting in a cell.

She tries to calm her racing heart, but the room she's in only makes her panic more. This is unlike anything she's ever experienced. This scene before her now belongs in movies or in nightmares. Perhaps she is asleep, she thinks desperately - but deep down, she knows she is wide awake. This isn't a nightmare - this is reality, and it's cold, hard, and staring her right in the face.

A slamming noise echoes suddenly down the hall, the noise causing hairs to raise on her arms and her whole body to jump. Her fight or flight response kicks in and she hauls herself up despite her physical pain, curls herself into a tight ball, and gets as close to the wall opposite of the bars of her cell as she can. She hides herself in the dark shadows of the corner of the cell. She's not foolish enough to think that this will fully conceal her, but a tiny shred of her prays that this might make her less of a target.

Lea is shaking badly. She wishes she was more of a hero, that she wasn't be so weak in the face of danger, but she's never known fear like this before.

Her ears pick up on the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway. Her terror only increases. A million scenarios of what is about to take place run through her mind: none of them are good, nearly all of them resulting in torture or her death. She has no idea where she is, but she can only guess that this is Hydra, retaliating for her affiliation with Bucky. And as little as she knows about Hydra, she knows enough to be sure of the fact that if she is correct about her captors, she is currently in serious danger of never going home again.

The footsteps are getting louder. Lea pushes herself into the corner as tightly as she can, wrapping her arms around her body in a futile attempt at protection. There is more than one person walking down the hallway, and the footsteps seem to be heading straight towards her.

It is not long before she sees a shadow on the ground just outside of the cell, and her heart stops completely: a moment later, a man walks into her view. 

He peers around the cell for a moment, then spots her and gives her an unsettling, sly smile. But this is not what surprises her the most.

No. What surprises her the most - what makes her gasp and choke on her own tears all in the same moment - is when Bucky, the Winter Soldier himself, the object of all of her woes and hopes of late and the very person she's been searching for for weeks now, steps into her view as well, with a gun bigger than the span of her arms and the most vacant, lifeless eyes she's ever seen. 

It is enough to make her break.

"So this is her," the man beside Bucky says, his voice deep and menacing with a trace of an accent she doesn't recognize - all the traits of a villain in a movie, except this isn't a movie. Lea stares straight past him and at Bucky, who is not even looking in her direction with that cavernous gaze of his. Two thoughts enter her mind at once: one, she can now confirm her suspicion that it is Hydra who has captured her; and two, she would give anything for Bucky to lock eyes with her right now.

"She doesn't look like much. I wonder what it is about her that Captain America and Iron Man decided she was worth their time."

This causes Lea to temporarily shift her gaze from Bucky to the man. Does Hydra not know that she helped Bucky? And if they don't, how long can she keep it from them?

As she is thinking, the man makes direct eye contact with her, and leans down condescendingly to speak.

"Are you going to be a good girl and tell us what we need to know? Or are you going to be a difficult one?" he asks, as if speaking to a child.

Lea stays perfectly still, or at least as still as she can be while continuing to shake a bit with fear. She glues her mouth shut. As terrified as she is, she decides to use this opportunity to memorize his appearance, should she ever escape and want to track him down. She commits his uneven hairline, his grey hair, his protruding stomach, his tan but wrinkled skin, his straight teeth, and his aged face to her memory, sprinkling in details of how he speaks and stands.

The man lets out a breath and knots his eyebrows, straightening up again. 

"Ah. A difficult one. No matter, we will get the information we want out of you one way or another."

In the middle of his speaking, Lea's eyes drift to Bucky's again: he is still staring off into the distance, appearing as though he isn't entirely in tune with the world around him. Perhaps it is the dim light of the hallway or the grimy uniform he is adorned in, but he looks dreadful. His eyes are unfocused and hazy like she's never seen before, and in the entire time he has been standing before her cell, he hasn't moved a single inch. Lea doesn't know what's wrong, but then she remembers something he told her weeks ago: I am their weapon. They warp my mind. They've done this for decades, and they keep getting away with it, unless I can escape from them for long enough that my mind recovers. 

Is she now witnessing the very horrors he had tried to describe to her?

"Oh, darling, the fun doesn't begin for you until tomorrow, sadly," the man continues, again pulling her attention reluctantly away from Bucky. He flashes another grin that makes her stomach turn. "Make sure you rest up. You need to be on your A game tomorrow!"

He must finally be done speaking, because after what feels like decades, he moves to leave. His turning finally triggers something in Bucky, who moves the second he moves. 

Bucky turns as the man walks away down the hall: for just a second, a single moment in time, his eyes lift to hers in her cell. Then they are gone again, and the man she's been craving for so long slips through her fingers for the hundredth time, vanishing down the hallway.

But in that single moment of locked eyes, she caught a message that was buried so deeply within him that she isn't even sure if she'd actually seen it. In that faint moment, she caught in his expression one word: help.