Winter Phoenix: HYDRA Is Your Place (A 2008-2012 Marvel Fanfiction)

I: Suisse (Switzerland)

Third Person POV

January 1945. Austrian Alps.

Blood. So much blood. His left arm was missing up to the elbow. Blood flowed from the open wound, seeping the white snow with a deep red. He could barely breathe from the impact of landing on the snow. How was he still alive? he thought, reaching to feel around him. There was no other damage done, he hoped. He felt numb, and weak, pains shooting through the stub of his arm. He opened his mouth to scream for help, but then the world went black.

His eyes opened again, and soldiers were all around him. Take me back, he thought. Take me back to Brooklyn, to the 107th, anyone. Back to Steve. Howard. Peggy. But they didn't look like American soldiers. These were Soviet soldiers. He felt himself being dragged through the snow, most of the blood still fading into the white of the snow. His vision was fading in and out, and he could barely hear a thing. Then doors shut, and blackness overtook him again.

He laid on a table, screaming as the sound of a drill and saw piercing flesh and bone penetrated his senses. There was more blood now.

'The procedure has already started...' a thin, dark voice sounded. A smiling man, short, with glasses, leaned above him. The smile held no kindness in it. Then more drilling sounded, and with one last scream, the world above him went dark.

The next he knew, he'd woken up. There was a sudden heaviness on his left side, and he looked, raising the stubborn appendage. Metal flashed before his eyes, a work of cruel art.

'You are to be the new fist of HYDRA...' the same man said. His metal hand, as if it had a mind of its own, shot out and grabbed the nearest doctor around the throat, strangling him. Then a needle stabbed into him. 'Put him on ice...' the short, bald man said.

They were sealing him in a metal cage, with a glass window in front of him. He'd reached up to touch the glass, but ice froze over his metal hand, and the world went dark once again.

March 2008. George Washington University Hospital.

The Winter Soldier was nearly on his target.

The girl.

Get in.

Get out.

Leave no witnesses.

He shot a nurse as he walked past, not caring when her blood spilled out on the perfectly scrubbed tile floor as if it was water. Then, he kicked open the door to the woman's room, giving the four HYDRA soldiers with him, dressed up as doctors, access to the woman's bed. She laid comatose, her hair splayed out on a pillow. She'd aged a tiny bit, but her hair was still as vibrant as ever. Dark brown, almost chocolate. He didn't know what her eyes looked like. The soldiers loaded her onto a gurney and wheeled her out. When they'd taken the life support out of her, it had beeped and protested, but one of the soldiers had said that her heart rate was stable. It had not been ten minutes before hospital security tried to take their patient back, but the Winter Soldier took them all with hardly a fight. Uninterrupted, they loaded her into the back of an ambulance and took her away. To Switzerland for tests, then to Siberia for training.

They'd already written the letter. All it would take was for Charles Xavier to believe the lie that his wife was dead.

March 2008. HYDRA base; Swiss Alps.

'Elle est belle (She is beautiful),' the head doctor, Martin Raspulovia, said in Swiss French, running his hand through the woman's hair. The Soldier was standing with his handler, Colonel Karpov, and didn't quite understand why HYDRA needed the girl. Only that it was his mission to retrieve her.

'Молодец, солдат (Well done, soldier),' his handler said in Russian. The Soldier only answered with a simple nod of his head. Satisfied with the Soldier's work, the colonel turned to the doctor. 'Девушка будет прекрасным партнером нашему Зимнему Солдату (The girl will be a wonderful partner to our Winter Soldier).'

'Какие у тебя планы на нее (What are your plans for her)?' Raspulovia asked.

'Делайте то, что считаете необходимым (Do whatever you think is necessary).' The colonel reached out and touched the woman's hair. 'Должно быть, она наш идеальный солдат. Наш Зимний Феникс (She must be our perfect soldier. Our Winter Phoenix).'