Chapter Text
There was pain, horrible, horrible pain, twisting, exploding flesh, lungs filling with blood, burning and heat. And then there was nothing.
And then there was flickers of something, white, cold, hands, metal, hurt, screaming, dragging, then quiet again.
-
Steve punched the last Hydra soldier in the room square in the face, the man crumpling to the floor instantly from the force. He checked his breathing, and it was weak, but Steve couldn’t bring himself to care. Images of the torture devices he’d found in previous facilities caused boiling anger to roll in his stomach. The fact these people could do that to a person, much less his Bucky, made him even more disgusted with Hydra than before.
“I found something. Come across the hall.” Natasha’s voice came over the comm in his ear, and Steve left the current room, which seemed to be barren of information anyways, and headed over to her. He found her standing in front of a large tank, the bodies of Hydra soldiers scattered over the ground around her. He stepped over them and made his way to stand next to her. She seemed passive but there was a line of tension in her shoulders, and looking closer at the tank full of a red liquid she was staring at made him understand immediately.
There was a man suspended in the tank, or maybe not a man anymore, based on the horrible jaw stretching unnaturally over his left cheek full of needle-like teeth, and the spiny dark fins protruding from his elbows and backside, or the piscine tail curled against the floor of the enclosure. He was nude and Steve could see every inch of distorted and scarred skin, seeming to branch out from the stump of a left arm that looked to have metal and something that looked like roots twisted into reddened flesh covered in boils. Steve couldn’t help but think of Bucky’s metal arm, and if they were attempting to perform the same thing but failed, or it was unfinished.
He let out a strangled noise and Nat glanced at him empathetically. “It looks a bit like him.”
“No, that’s not Bucky. Trust me.” Steve replied and studied the stringy black hair floating over the man’s chiseled face, wild and long just as the Winter Soldier’s had been. And he could tell, under warped flesh, that this was a man, but a different man from the one he was searching for.
“I know. I just didn’t know if a reminder of him was upsetting you.”
“I’m less upset and more ready to break this guy out of there and leave.” The super soldier began to scan the outside of the tank, looking for a way to drain it or open it without flooding the room. The glass seemed to be a few inches thick, and Steve didn’t know if punching through it might injure the man.
“Steve, wait. How do we know the guy in there isn’t Hydra? What if he’s another brainwashed soldier?” She was wandering closer to a side table covered in documents.
Steve’s eyes flicked over the fresher scars on the man’s body. “I don’t think they’d keep someone who’s willingly Hydra like this. And if he’s brainwashed, then I’ll find a way to break his programming. I did it once already…”
“Steve, I’m not convinced that James even fully broke his programming, even if he really did pull you out of the Potomac. And you’ve known him your whole life and he still almost killed you, so how are you going to help a stranger with it? Be rational about this.”
“I can’t just leave somebody like that! It’s-“
“Then help me look through these. We need more information.” A few files were tossed at him and he easily caught them. He looked up to see Nat smiling softly at his, and he grinned in return.
-
“I’ll admit it, you were right that he isn’t Hydra. From what I can tell he wasn’t ever brainwashed either. Or, more that they didn’t get to it yet.”
“Good thing we showed up then. At least I got to someone in time…” Steve sighed and ate another cracker. Natasha had pulled some out of thin air, ever so resourceful, and Steve was more hungry than he’d like to admit. She was munching on them too while she flipped through the papers, and he noted this was one of the few times they’d actually gotten to rest since DC.
The redhead plucked a few papers out of a file and walked over to him, sitting down. “I don’t think even Hydra knew what they were dealing with. From what I can tell, they found him in a submarine filled with blood at the bottom of the ocean in Canadian waters, probably while looking for the Tesseract.” She showed him an image of the submarine, a dilapidated hunk of machinery that had strange, fleshy growths tangled around it.
“Blood inside it…? So is…” Steve glanced at the tank next to them in disbelief. Of course with Hydra it was always the worst possible option. He’d been hoping it was some other fluid made to keep someone in stasis.
“Yup. But luckily it’s all original. They wanted to keep it pure so they could keep studying it here, so at least they weren’t draining fresh blood to fill it.”
Steve’s throat dried up as he tried to ask his next question. “Is it… human blood?”
“The reports said that’s what it’s most similar to, so most likely.”
Steve blanched and had to take a deep breath, rubbing at his head. “What the hell was a submarine full of human blood with someone inside doing at the bottom of the ocean?”
Natasha shrugged and looked for another paper. “The sub is being kept at a separate facility, so we might want to check that out later if we want more answers.” She paused and found the one she was searching for. “I also found details about the tank. Apparently there’s a tube inside that pumps that guy full of a sedative but-“ She glances to where a dead Hydra goon was splayed over a broken container, liquid that Steve assumed was the sedative pooled on the ground. “I don’t think it’s working right now.”
He scanned the man suspended in blood, but there were no signs of movement. He turned back to the files he’d examined. “They…” He looked back at the tank with deep sadness. “They put him through a lot. A lot of it is blacked out but I could get the gist of it. I’m not sure if Hydra was the cause of those… mutations or not though. But it’s nearly as bad as Bucky’s files. He didn’t seem very lucid during it. Would either be catatonic or screaming about something unrelated to what was happening.”
“That lines up with what I read. It seems they were getting close to giving up on attempts to ‘reprogram’ him because he already had no sense of reality. They couldn’t ’remold a mind that was already broken.’” Steve felt a familiar seep of anger, and could tell Natasha was feeling it too with the way her voice slightly wavered. They both wanted to burn Hydra to the ground as quickly as they could. Who knows how many more people had suffered through their experimentations.
“If he wakes up soon, I want to be ready.”
Nat inclined her head. “You stay. I’ll get supplies. We don’t really know what he’ll need or what he’ll be like when he wakes up.”
“Why me?” Steve’s eyebrows raised, a bit surprised. He thought that interrogations were the Black Widow’s thing.
“You’re a friendlier face. Besides, I think you’re a bit more invested than me. I’ll be back in a few hours.” She ruffled his hair playfully and made her way towards the door, giving him a grin before vanishing into the winding halls of the facility.
“Huh.” He swallowed and looked at the tank again, a sudden chill of apprehension spreading through him.
-
It was about a half hour later, and Steve was pacing around the room, debating calling Nat to ease his anxiety but not wanting to seem overbearing. He trusted her, but being alone with no one but corpses and an unconscious man… alien? Steve had begun to think if the submarine had even come from Earth. He knew aliens were real, so maybe this was a new species? Parts of his face looked so very human, though…
His foot slammed into a box and he frowned down at it. It was already on its side, but the force caused some recording devices to skid out. Old-fashioned in modern terms, but it seems like this Hydra base only kept physical records. He picked up a few of them and read the labels, but there was nothing on the sides but dates. He chose a somewhat recent one and hit play on it. A male voice emanated from it.
“Another exhausting test. We attempted to gauge its healing factor while awake, making lacerations to the intact arm which were filled back in by biological mass within seconds, but the whole time it kept screaming about how it shouldn’t be punished anymore and how ‘Filament Station’ wasn’t its fault. Staff put a metal gag on it, but it was able to tear through it with its incredible bite force within minutes. The subject started to lash out and could not be controlled or properly sedated, and had to be dragged back to its tank. It continued to yell, something about not to ‘weld me in’ as the blood was refilling, before it succumbed to the sedative. My superiors are beginning to lose faith in this endeavor, and I have to agree.”
Steve sighed. He shouldn’t be bothered by Hydra being dehumanizing towards their test subjects, it was the same in how they referred to the Soldier, but it still irked him. He tossed the recorder aside and ran his hands through his short hair. He once again debated calling Nat when movement in his peripheral caught his attention.
The man’s muscles were beginning to twitch, slight tremors racking his body before his eyes weakly opened. Steve could only now see the man had two sets of eyes, one set normal besides the irises being bright red, and the other below it fully milky white and bulging out slightly.
The man began to panic, and Steve now also spotted gills flaring along his neck. He was opening his mouth to shout, but blood was pouring in, and he started to writhe, tail thrashing haphazardly. His eyes darted around wildly and found Steve’s, and he tried his best to scream what Steve clearly understood as ‘HELP!’ The man banged against the glass as hard as he could from the inside, but it didn’t budge.
The super soldier sprung into action and grabbed a metal chair, slamming it into the tank and causing a few splintering cracks. The other man continued to pound at it from his side, but it took another swing of the chair for it to crack with a massive bang, throwing Steve back as blood exploded into the room, the whole floor flooded now in a few inches of red. The man slid out and collapsed on his stomach, retching and coughing out blood. His whole body was quivering with adrenaline and fear, and once he could breathe properly again he began to hyperventilate.
Steve knelt down and put a large hand on his back, intending to rub soothing circles like his mom always did when he was having an asthma attack, but the man flinched at the touch and twisted around, tackling the blonde. Steve’s head hit the ground and he fought to see through the congealing blood that had splashed over his face. Every movement made the blood around them ripple.
Claws scratched across Steve’s face and he grunted, struggling to push the man away. He was strong, decently able to compensate for only having one arm. “Don’t touch me! Don’t pretend to care! You’re all liars!” His words seemed distant somehow, like they were intended for someone else.
“Cut it out! I’m here to help you, I promise!” Steve managed to shove him away and quickly sprang to his feet, backing up.
Fins flared out in rage as he shouted, “You don’t keep promises! You sent me down there to die! I was never meant to earn my freedom!”
“Please, just calm down. We can talk this out like men. What’s your name?” Steve held his hands up and watched the man’s face drop into an expression of shock and disbelief.
“What…? What did you say?” His eyes seemed to clear, focusing on Steve’s face. Now that they were both standing, the super soldier was actually a bit shorter than him.
“I said, what’s your name?” Steve repeated, his voice clear and consoling.
“S-Simon… my name is Simon, but why… why would you care? What… What’s happening, where am I??”
“Okay Simon.” Steve smiled at him and lowered his hands, relaxing his posture. He grabbed a roll of crackers from his pocket, a bit smushed but not contaminated by the blood. “My name is Steve. Want some crackers?”