This is not the Endgame

I walk a lonely street

She kept silent as he'd asked, allowing him to deal with those painful memories, getting up to bring a roll of toilet paper and a small trashcan over. She sat, waiting patiently, until his eyes were dry and he was ready to continue.

"If I thought that Zola was bad, what happened after was worse. I was taken to the Hydra installation in Siberia; it was the largest independent Hydra facility in the world, although it worked with the Soviets, agents sleeping in the KGB too. And while Hydra was one organization that crept all over the world, there were branch rivalries; they shared the overarching ideals but not much below that canopy. Everybody wanted power or to drive the power in their part of the world, be the main head of Hydra when they took over the world power structure eventually. The Soviets gave me to Hydra; they gave me a titanium cybernetic arm and extensive brainwashing. More drug therapies. I was told that while this was going on, Steve was crashing around Europe, taking out more Hydra facilities with the Howlers. Then he got onto the Valkyrie somehow just before it started its bombing run. The general perception was that the bombs--they were called Parasits-- were atomic bombs, but the Nazis (and Hydra) didn't have the technology. They were made using the this thing called the Tesseract for their power, an alien energy source, and given that, I don't think that they would have worked like conventional or even atomic bombs. Steve  said that after he was recovered, he found that SHIELD had been researching the weapons, said that opening the Tesseract sort of dissolved Schmidt; it sent him into a different reality, I think, because a gatekeeper on another planet. Or so Barton said. So these bombs were really weird, he didn't know anything about them, other than they were loaded onto small, individual planes that carried a single payload destined for a specific city. Spoke to a high degree of certainty in their power. He fought Schmidt in the cockpit area of the bomber during which the autopilot was damaged, Schmidt died--it was thought--and Steve put the Valkyrie into the ice to avoid the destruction of American cities.

"Meanwhile, I was trained. I learned Russian, German, Romanian, Persian, Arabic, Spanish, and French, Systema and other hand to hand combat systems, knife fighting, additional proficiency with firearms, acrobatics. How to fly virtually any aircraft on the planet. Pursuit tactics and how to handle a variety of vehicles. The drug therapies gave me an eidetic memory, enhanced strength, durability, speed, stamina, reflexes, agility, longevity, and a healing factor. But the serum I was given and the supplemental therapies weren't the same ones that Steve had. He was given the perfected version, no boosters or anything. I learned that the reason they were initially interested in me was because I was Cap's friend; they planned to use me as a propaganda tool--here's this American soldier, but the antithesis of Captain America, he works for us against the US. The public impact would have been considerable, they believed, but Cap disappeared before this plan could be put into action and Hydra publicly went tits up after the war. Then with both of the  scientists who came up with successful versions of the serum beyond their grasp, Hydra thriftily decided to use me anonymously and I became an assassin for them, put on the most difficult and highest priority targets. To preserve my longevity and skills, they kept me in cryostasis until they had another use for me.  Well, mostly. I was tasked for a time to train the girls in the Black Widow program. I met Natasha Romanov there." He frowned. "We were lovers, until they found out. They put me back in cryo when they did.

"I was hard to control; I kept trying to break out, and initially they came up with a bunch of words in Russian, a specific sequence of ten terms that put me into a receptive state where I would receive orders and carry them off. They were words that they'd found out under torture meant something to me. As long as the conditioning held, I was under their control completely, I couldn't resist or refuse at all. And they never activated me until the plans were in place and ready to be executed so that I couldn't break that conditioning before I did the job. The longer the mission, the more opportunity I had to break the conditioning. I worked on American soil only a few times. One of those was to kill Howard Stark and his wife and procure what was believed to be the first successful version of the supersoldier serum in decades. That wasn't a difficult mission, anyone could have done it, but because Howard and I had met during the war, they specifically wanted it to be me to kill him. A show of their power and reach, for me, for him, for anybody who might find out. And they had me crash their car at a specific point, right by some cameras, so they wanted to send a message for people to know that it wasn't an accident. I recovered five doses, and they gave the serum to five volunteers. It was, like Steve's version, better than mine. Still incredibly painful, but at least they were willing volunteers. I had to train them; there was an incident at the end where they were out of control, there was some psychosis risk. They were subdued and put on ice until they could be stabilized; they were all better than me, and I was the best assassin in the world at that time. They had additional useful skills and knowledge that made them the biggest threat to freedom in the world, and do not believe that I am exaggerating. My time as a useful asset was ending,  and they were thinking of getting rid of me, when the new weapons were ready.  The Siberia facility was abandoned when the Soviet Union fell. My handler was a man named Karpov; after the fall of the Soviet Union, he escaped to the West somewhere with my trigger words and they had to control me another way. They came up with a machine that wiped my memories. It was... exceptionally painful to endure, and I think that's what gave me the gaps in my memory that I haven't been able to recover.