Work Text:
The first time he sees the Asset, it’s just a glimpse through a thick glass window set into an iron door. The Asset is tied-down-head-thrashing-eyes-wild-foaming-at-the-mouth. An animal that knows too well the habits of its keepers. Pierce does not remark, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t formed an opinion, there and then, about what he sees.
“He is an animal,” someone says.
“All humans are animals,” Pierce tells him.
The second time he sees the Asset the whole base is in lockdown. Rumour is that the Asset shook off his programming on the way to cryo and there are a dozen dead in the chamber, and now the Asset has their clothes and their guns and their ammunition. Pierce is the only living person in the whole damn base who’s been blooded, and he was thoroughly blooded in Vietnam. The AK he took off the dead guard in the corridor fits like a child in his arms.
He goes to the door, peers through, and then goes into the hall. The great, white-pained door to the labs is there. Iron. Riveted. Even the Asset isn’t getting through that. And certainly not when he’s in the grip of the fits that have been a problem for Hydra for the last god knows how many years. Bouts of lucidity, bouts of will.
Pierce was not surprised to hear that the Asset was unstable, difficult, unmanageable at times. He’s made a study of James Buchanan Barnes. Not an official study, more the study of a childhood spent starry-eyed, belly-down on the carpet reading Captain America comics, and five years of quasi-religious devotion to Commandos! on Wednesday nights. Other kids could quote baseball stats but Alexander Pierce learned James Buchanan Barnes like a slaughterman learns the inside of a pig.
He looks through the window in the iron door. It’s a small room. The Asset is looking down, standing bloodied like an monster, looking at the corpses collected by his feet. A broken sink is gushing water, and the Asset is anklebone deep in a soup of water, drugs, bodies, human fluids. AKs lie half-submerged, and Pierce, who waded through Vietnam, knows that its even odds that every one of those fucking guns will jam.
Pierce knows when he opens the door, the Asset will try to escape. He knows the smell will roll over him and stick in his nostrils and stick in his throat and he’ll have it in his hair and on his skin. He’ll bite a nail in two days and he’ll taste it hiding where the skin and nail join. And if he thinks about it, if he really thinks about it, it’s hard to believe it’s been so long since the taste of death was in his mouth.
He readies his AK, dry, clean, functional, and opens the door. The stink rolls over him like a wave. The Asset looks up. The animal snarl that’s on his face suddenly falls away. He stares at Pierce as if Pierce has already shot him.
“Steve?” the Asset whispers.
And Vietnam did not prepare Pierce for much, no, except a distrust of narrow spaces and the disdain of other Americans, no, it did not prepare him for much but it did make him quick on his feet. He puts a finger to his mouth and feigns a glance over his shoulder and he hears the Asset’s shaking, gulping breaths. He steps into the little room. It’s a half-step down, and the warm, stinking liquid on the floor swamps his shoes and soaks his feet.
The Asset grabs for him, hands open, reaching like a child. “Steve? Steve, Steve, Steve!”
He is aware, as the Asset is scrabbling at him like a blind man, that there was a time he would have found this upsetting. Back when he still believed we the people meant anything but chaos and disorder. Back when he swallowed whole the lines Commandos! And Captain America comics were feeding him. He looks at James Buchanan Barnes.
The Asset looks right back. His eyes are pinned out, the waxy skin of his face all splotched with uneven colour. He wonders what Hydra's been feeding the Asset, and he wonders what the Asset thinks he's seeing. “Bucky,” he says, testing it, and the Asset makes breathless, wordless sounds.
Every little boy wants a toy gun for his birthday, and this, well, this is something special. Pierce smiles.
The Asset’s mouth hangs open, he’s panting. He coughs and his voice rattles into gear again. “I knew you were coming, I knew you were coming for me. They said you were dead, they showed me the newspaper. I knew you wouldn’t…” then his voice fails him altogether.
“Shhh,” Pierce says and Barnes subsides so there’s only the gushing of the broken sink.
There was a time Pierce did the right thing, just like Captain America said. And at that time the right thing was agent orange. And the right thing was clearing VC out. And the right thing was bodies pushed out of helicopters and the breathtaking conflagration of jungle foliage, and not beating the piss out of the hippy who spat on him. The right thing has never, ever worked for him. He smiles at the Asset.
“I’m here on a mission,” he whispers. “I need your help.”
A crooked smile. Exactly the smile he saw in countless photographs. The books of his childhood, The Commandos in Colour, with all the stickers pasted so carefully in. He’d like to punch all the teeth out of that mouth.
“My cover name is Alexander Pierce. Pierce. Call me that, not Steve.”
“Pierce,” he repeats.
“Good. Sit tight, and do what you’re told for now.”
The Asset’s eyes widen. “Stay?” he whispers, voiceless.
“There’s a whole regiment out there, and they’re coming for you,” Pierce says. He cribs right from the comics. He read them so much he memorized pages and pages of them. “I busted in to warn you. Don’t want you to get shot up. I’ll come back for you soon.”
“Wait?”
“Not much longer. Just do what they say. I’ll try to get close to you, make sure they treat you alright.”
The Asset blinks. It’s like watching a light go out.
“Pierce,” the Asset whispers.
The Asset doesn’t talk, and doesn’t touch, Pierce had to tell him people were starting to ask questions, that it was compromising the missions. But today, the Asset whispers his name once, as soon as Pierce comes into the room, and then again. Pierce looks down at him and the Asset turns over his flesh arm. Red wounds, nearly healed but probably only an hour or so old. Someone dragged something sharp down the Asset’s arm. A scalpel, probably. Maybe a bet among the techs. See if there was meat inside, or machine. It wouldn't be the first time.
“Who did that?” Pierce asks.
The Asset tells him with his eyes. He looks across the room to the technician, the one who looks after the IVs and the injections.
“Won’t happen again,” Pierce says. He carries a small pistol and it’s a quick, clean, back-of-head affair. The other technicians scream and stare, hands to mouths, their lab coats splattered.
“The Asset is above the pay grade of every one of you,” Pierce says while the technicians cower and the lab guards crowd the doorway, staring. He waits, knowing none of them are going to challenge him because every one of them know who he is, what he is. He is the only one who can control the Asset. No one wants to fuck around with that.
Pierce turns and looks back at the chair and sees the Asset’s faint, twisted, twitching smile.
He’s been handling the Asset for years now, and the Asset is still a young man. It bothers him. Pierce doesn’t really understand why. He just knows he hates the Asset more and more every year.
He has always hated the Asset. He has always found a cruel delight in this game, and came to be exquisitely good at it. I need your help on a mission, and Someone is trying to kill me, and This guy is trying to blow my cover, and once, with perfect, beautiful irony, Your country needs you. Today, though, today there’s no pleasure in any of it. He cannot make headway in Washington, and the work requires diplomacy and time, not murder.
“Get out,” he tells the guards and the technicians and they do and immediately he feels better. Maybe there are roadblocks. Maybe there are problems. But Alexander Pierce has a trump card, even when he can’t deploy it against his enemies, he can still get a sort of revenge. He knows that Barnes was affectionate. In all the pictures he is touching a comrade's shoulder or their arm. Here he's been touch-starved for years, for decades. He cannot hurt the resurrected Captain America directly, not yet. But there is this.
Pierce looks at the Asset, who is standing there, waiting for orders. A relic of the Greatest Generation, the last war that made sense, the last war that mattered, the hero Pierce used to want so desperately to be. A gun. A tool. A toy. Nothing.
Pierce dismantles him precisely.
The Asset never works quite right after that.
Pierce sees the Asset staring at him sometimes, like he’s trying to tie together two ends of a thread that the chair keeps cutting. Maybe it’s because he’s grown old, and the Asset has stayed the same, and the story doesn’t fit any more. Maybe it’s because of the way Pierce took him apart. He considers telling Rumlow to bleach out his hair just to see what would happen, but he doesn’t bother. It’s almost done, and even with a crippled Asset he can take pleasure in the endgame.
“Leave it,” he tells the caretakers, the techs who see to the Asset’s non-essential needs. They barber him every few days when he’s not in cryo. They cut his hair quarterly, check his teeth bi-annually. The barber swallows noisily.
“Sir?” he asks.
“And cancel the others.”
“He's uh, due for a hair cut soon, sir. The front of his hair is going to start to get in the way of the rifle sites.”
As if Pierce doesn’t know the Asset is starting to look like the kind of person who once spat at him.
“Leave it,” Pierce says. "It doesn't matter."
He can feel the Asset watching him.
He has to strike the Asset to get him to function now. Like hitting an old TV to make the picture stop jumping. It always works. Until it doesn’t work any more. Until the Asset starts to take the bite guard with an anticipatory cringe. Until the mission goes wrong, and the Asset starts asking questions. Then it just works most of the time.
But by then it doesn’t matter. The next mission is a suicide mission. He would like to be there. He would like to see it. He would like to know if the expression on Steve Rogers’ face will be the same as the expression Peirce wore when he realized that everything he had come to believe in was a lie. But there will be no time for that.
“Speak when he talks to you,” Pierce tells the Asset when the mission brief is done. “Make noise when you fight. Scream when you feel pain. Do you understand?”
The Asset’s eyes fix on his and Pierce can see the damage he did when he took the Asset apart. Hooded eyes. Something hidden.
"Do you understand?"
“Yes."
“This is it,” Pierce tells him.
“The end of the line,” the Asset says.