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

II: Болезненное возрождение (Painful Rebirth)

July 2008. HYDRA base. Siberia, Russia. 

Third Person POV

The Soldier heard the girl's screams. It had been the third time they'd brought her into the experimentation room this week. That was right, he thought to himself. They were enhancing her wings. He hardly even knew her, yet he felt a strange pain in his chest when they were working on her, cutting open her back while she was wide awake to rearrange the bones in her spine to allow for wings. Then when the wings had started growing, they cut open her back again. No painkillers to soothe the pain, no anaesthetic to numb the pain. He'd seen her wings. Beautiful, white things. Pure bird feathers, his handler had said, and the Colonel, his handler, had overseen the operations and experimentations himself. She screamed, this time louder, and he wanted to scream too, almost as if they were bonded somehow. But they couldn't be, not in this place. Love and attraction were the sort of feelings that he was unaccustomed to, that he didn't have the luxury of feeling. 

Moments later, the screaming stopped, and wheels echoed and squeaked down the dirty, grimy hallway. He looked and saw the gurney squeaking by with blood dripping from it, and on it, the near lifeless body of the female that he'd extracted less than three months prior. They'd wiped him afterwards, but how could he forget such a peaceful-looking face? 

They brought him in to have a look at her shortly after as they were cleaning up the blood. He saw a huge droplet splash on the ground. adding to the pools of blood that were already forming around her. This place was dirty. Much too dirty. Better to have sent her to the Red Room, he thought. Their places smelled too much of hospitals, though. Rooms that were pristine white and smelled of chemicals, beds where girls laid in, dying slowly from the pain that had been inflicted upon them by their opponents, surgery rooms where girls were sterilised and reborn into Black Widows, the pride and joy of the Red Room. They should have just woken her up and experimented on her there. He wouldn't have to hear her scream then. But HYDRA did all the experiments. He wondered if they were going to sterilise the girl too. 

But HYDRA hardly ever did stuff like that. They always left that to the Red Room. With women, if the Winter Soldier wasn't going to have them as his regular toys, the men would. Other than that, they would shrink away from 'lady problems.' The Winter Soldier didn't understand such stuff. He didn't exactly want the women they brought him. He didn't understand the need for it. When he was frustrated, he'd punch a hole in the wall. Frustration and anger were perhaps the only emotions that he knew and frequently ahem! acted upon. He looked at her. Her chocolate-brown hair was matted with the blood that flowed from her back, and she was perfectly still. Her face was pale, horribly pale. He felt a sensation of something roil in his gut as he watched her. He couldn't be sick, not at something like this. 

His connection with her was strange. When they'd mopped up a good deal of the blood and left, she was still. After five minutes, she stirred and opened her eyes, fixing them upon the Soldier. He was confused as she studied him, her brows furrowing. 

'Who - who are you?' she asked weakly, but he'd heard it all. The weakness, the pain behind her eyes, he'd studied all of it. Never before had he seen her eyes. They were a wonderful sky blue, something like he'd never seen. Except on missions of course. But his eyes were always on the game then, always on the target. He never had the time to study the sky. He remembered the color, though. Several times he'd seen it, he just didn't really pay attention. But how could he forget that color?