Out of the freezer

[disassembling]

What: AU where The Winter Soldier is found by SHIELD before CA: TWS and settled in with an agent.
Warnings: Just tl;dr. It is my specialty.


Trains weren't generally a source of overland transport anymore, not with planes so conveniently available, but there were points where subtly was required more than quickness. There were less questions about trains, fewer looks with the amount of goods moved into a country so more was able to get through. It was easier to pay people off in shipping yards to look the other way while important items were shifted in and out.

If it had been known early in the process that his superiors had known that an agent had defected and tipped off that there were weapons being moved in from Russia, he would have been removed from the train. Too little, too late though, and the train was hit with SHIELD looking for both intelligence and weapons from the Soviets. It wasn't until a STRIKE team had made it towards the back of the train that some members suddenly realized that their mission had just gotten a lot more complicated.

Cryostasis was a process developed out of the 1940s, though perfected over the years by the Soviets first and then the Americans. Of course, it only worked on him, others never coming up from the surface again because their bodies were advanced enough to cope with the strain on the body and the healing powers required to make it back out of deep freeze. He was special because he was a weapon, made that way to survive the worst conditions. So he bubbled up as he was thawed from the inside out in a process that took hours generally but could be sped up.

Speeding up the process left him disoriented and intractable, irritated and violent. It was fine when enemies of the organization were kicking in the door and shooting the scientists in charge of thawing him. The damage was done though, the anti-freeze drug fast acting in his body as his muscles became suffused with warm blood and his lungs filling with a deep gasping breath as he arched, his blue eyes unfocused as men yelled orders, called in findings. It was all a blur to him.

Someone touched his cold flesh shoulder, but they were gone in the next minute as his metal arm swung around and slammed into the man's gut, blasting him away. He rolled from the chair, acting only on instinct as he grabbed the nearest object - metal table and threw it into a group of men raising their guns. He fought them; worse, he killed them until another team moved in and manhandled him to the ground. Someone did something; a familiar voice called a set of words that made him relax and stand down, so he did.

He was blind-folded, cuffed from wrist to elbow so his shoulders were forced to bow in awkwardly, but his legs were left free so that they could walk him into the SHIELD medical facility where many interested parties had gathered in the time it took to transport him. News had circulated and damage control had not been fast enough where the fact a man was found half-frozen on a train. If he had had his memories of his other life, he might have found it ironically he was found on a train.

The only words spoken above whispered tones was that there had been another similarly unfrozen a few years before. "Call them in. Maybe give us a clue on stabilizing this guy." He was pulled off, seated and chained to a bed in a padded room. With the blindfold off, he knew he could break down the door if he was ordered to. He was deemed too 'unstable' to be in a more populated area, so he was caged and observed.

Damage control indeed. Where were his orders and mission debriefings?

Comments

[eleutheria]

There was a small part of her that still resented being woken up in this new century, it wasn’t only the cultural shock of all the things that had changed, everything was moving so fast now and there were so many things going on, so much noise that it had dizzied her a bit when she had been first exposed to it, but it was also the fact that all the things and people she had knew were gone now. What they didn’t understand was that the things that for everyone else had happened more than seventy years ago had only happened a couple of days for her and it was still a bit of a struggle to try to accept that.

Finding out that most of the people she knew, the people that had fought alongside here and that had been her friends were all gone was a hit she hadn’t been ready for, the only one that remained was Peggy and she wasn’t the same as she remembered, she had all the information to go and see her, but she hadn’t dared to do so. The only thing she had been able to do was go and visit the graves of the howling commandos and Bucky, trying to ignore the fact that she had one at his side and one that she was told was going to be removed since she wasn’t dead, before returning to New York and try to see if the place she had known growing up were still there and most were gone.

Also in a way doing all of this things was keeping SHIELD away from her at the moment, she still got calls from Fury or from a Maria Hill that wanted to contact her in Fury’s behalf and she wasn’t naïve or stupid to not know what they wanted from her, they wanted her to accept working for them and right now, well, right now she wasn’t ready nor willing to do so, and they respected that keeping their distance.

Which was probably the reason she was a bit surprised when Fury had decided to show himself and ask her to return to SHIELD with him, she had refused at first since the last time she had been there it hadn’t been that good, but then Fury had a strange way to put things and that whatever they needed her help with was something that she was going to be interested in and wasn’t that the newest understatement of this century.

The last thing she expected was to immediately be told right off the bat that SHIELD had in custody another person that had been in more or less similar circumstances as her, from what Fury told him the man had been found on a train, being brought from cryo and apparently had taken down several agents before they managed to subdue him. Her purpose here was to apparently help in stabilizing him and she wondered just how the heck they expected her to do that, just because she had woken up on this century didn’t meant she know how to exactly deal with this, more so with a person that had apparently been a weapon or something.

From the surveillance they had of the room, the man in question didn’t looked to be much active, he had apparently not moved since they had chained him to the bed and really seeing that man there made her feel strangely bad, and she just knew that was the reason Fury had showed her this, to compel her to heart and kindness for this man that had probably been used in the worst ways and she finally just sighed before agreeing to go inside, after being assured she was going to be safe and could be extracted quickly, and see if she could bring forth a response from him.

Steph didn’t expected to be the one getting a reaction the moment she stepped into the room and the door closed behind her, taking in sight a face, a person she never thought she was going to see ever again. “…Bucky.”