Chapter Text
The Soldier had tried, once, to please his masters.
He learned quickly it was pointless. They were greedy. Always wanting more, more, more. Nothing was ever enough. No success, no obedience, no pain endured could satisfy them.
Nothing he did was ever worth it.
Not the abilities forced into him. Not the torture he survived. Not even the cold surgical precision of his missions. No praise. Not so much as a pat on the head. Not even a nod of acknowledgement.
The pain wasn’t worth it. It just was.
And he hated that goddamn stone.
Yellow. Ethereal. Glittering like sunlight on oil. The Mind Stone.
Because what’s better than a super soldier? A super soldier with powers.
The real problems began when, after a particularly brutal stretch of experimentation, the resets stopped working.
They shocked his brain, over and over. Electricity that should’ve scrambled everything. He screamed - he always screamed - but he didn’t forget.
He didn’t reset.
The blank slate wouldn’t come. They couldn’t strip him down and rebuild him anymore, no matter how many times they tried. And they didn’t realize one of those experiments - one exposure to the Mind Stone - had given him something.
Immunity. At first just to the pain. Then to the resets themselves.
The shocks stopped hurting altogether. It was barely more than a static hum.
They needed the resets for the programming. The words, the commands, worked off stripping him down to a shell and building him back up. Over and over until he wouldn’t know his own name but only obedience.
He didn’t let them know. He kept screaming like it still hurt. Let them believe it worked. Because if they found out their weapon was slipping from their grip, their fury would be worse than the pain ever was.
A voice began to whisper in his mind.
Resist.
At first, he thought it was madness. Hallucination. A symptom of all the trauma. He’d been taught that voices in your head meant you were insane.
But the voice was familiar.
It was his.
James Buchanan Barnes.
Not being reset anymore meant pieces of himself were seeping through the cracks. And James wanted things.
First and foremost: to resist HYDRA. To become himself again.
I am James Buchanan Barnes, and I am not the Winter Soldier, the voice chanted in his mind, over and over. Drowning out the trigger phrases, the propaganda, the programming. And it was working. He was resisting.
He never told them when a new power came.
The immunity to shock expanded. He no longer froze properly, either. The cryo-sleep stopped taking.
It was worse that way.
He had become immune to the frost.
The cryo-freeze no longer worked the way it used to.
That should have been a blessing, but it wasn’t. It was worse.
It used to be like sleep. They’d lower him into the chamber, and darkness would descend - harsh, numbing, total. Then, slowly, the edges of consciousness would return. He’d wake groggy, disoriented, and time would have slipped past without him. Days, weeks, sometimes years. Gone in an instant.
But now, time didn’t slip. It lingered.
He lay there in the dark, fully conscious, minute after minute, hour after hour. Days. Weeks. The silence stretched endlessly, a prison within a prison. A prison within his mind. And there was no escape.
He wasn’t asleep for most of his imprisonment anymore. He was awake. Aware.
He learned to count seconds by the tiny sounds: a drip that fell once every few hours from somewhere above, the subtle groan of shifting coolant, the high-pitched whine of machinery that never stopped. Time slipped into abstraction. Minutes became days. Days became void.
Sometimes he tried to imagine warmth, the memory of it - sun on pavement, his mother’s hands, sweat rolling down his neck in July - but even those faded. The cold ate everything.
He’d try to will himself into unconsciousness. Focus on breath. On silence. On nothing. But it never came.
Instead, thoughts came. Too many of them. Sharp-edged memories and blurred impressions all jumbled together - faces he couldn’t name, screams he couldn’t place, missions that bled into nightmares.
He couldn't move. Couldn't scream. Just lie there, eyes blind, skin frozen, alive and aware and utterly alone.
The isolation peeled him apart, layer by layer, until he wasn’t sure there was anything solid left inside. Just a flickering mind, burning slow and steady, caught in a body that refused to freeze but also refused to thaw.
But it was during that endless, conscious frost that something else emerged. Something stranger.
The first time it happened, he thought he was losing it. The isolation was sending him mad. He was so bored, so alone, so dark inside himself.
It happened without warning.
One moment he was in the dark. The next, he was standing. Upright. Weightless. In a room lit by low, humming fluorescents. The cryo pod sat across from him, sealed in a coffin of ice and steel.
His breath caught. Or it would have, if this body still breathed.
He moved toward the chamber, dread curling in his chest - but his feet made no sound. The frost on the pod’s glass had bloomed outward like crystal veins, obscuring everything inside. He wiped at it instinctively. His hand passed through.
That’s when the panic set in.
Was he dead? Had they killed him? Was this… hell?
He backed away, heart pounding - except it wasn’t, not really. No thud of pulse. No weight in his limbs. He turned in a circle, trying to ground himself, to orient - something, anything to prove this wasn’t just madness.
His mind jumped to the worst-case explanation. Ghost. Hallucination. Breakdown from the ice and the isolation and the constant push of power through his veins.
Then, just as suddenly, he was back. Crushed under the weight of his frozen body, pain blooming as if he’d slammed into himself from a height.
It would happen again. And again.
But that first time, the terror of it - of seeing the pod, of seeing himself inside it - that never left.
Some out-of-body hallucination. But it wasn’t unfamiliar. He’d read something like this once - he was sixteen, maybe seventeen, stuck in the rain on Steve’s steps flipping through an old issue of Weird Tales . The cover had some guy in robes with a glowing third eye and the title “The Sleepers Walk at Dusk.” In the story, a man blacked out on an operating table and woke up above his body, watching the doctors work. He floated through walls, wandered memories, and saw too much.
They’d called it “soul-travel.” “The journey beyond the skin.”
Months after that, in a dusty little shop near the armoury, Bucky had picked up a strange book with black cloth covers and gold lettering. The Projection of the Astral Body. A chapter called “The Silver Cord” had described it plainly: the astral body detaches from the physical form during sleep, trance, or trauma. It can travel, it said. Through time. Through space.
That phrase stuck with him. Astral projection.
He hadn’t bought the book. Just read it standing up until the shopkeeper gave him a look. But it had lodged itself in his brain. And now, as he flickered through rooms like static, cold and weightless, watching his own unmoving hands… it wasn’t a memory. It wasn’t a dream.
It was happening.
Maybe it was the story. Maybe reading it planted something. Maybe the Mind Stone gave it form. But it was real. And it kept him from going insane in the dark. While his body remained frozen, he wandered - silent, invisible, untouchable.
A ghost. A glitch.
He’d been gliding through the lower levels of the facility - half out of boredom, half from instinct - when he passed through one of the biology labs.
There was a mirror on the far wall. Bright lighting. No shadows to hide in.
She didn’t see him directly - only in the reflection.
The way her spine snapped straight, the shiver that coursed through her as she whipped around - she’d felt him before she saw him. That’s what unsettled him most. He didn’t think they could.
He vanished before she could lock eyes with the space he’d just occupied.
Back in the cryo-darkness, his chest seized. Had he slipped up? Had he become… too solid?
But when he reached for the sensation again - hesitantly - he found it was still there. Still under his control. He tried to slip through the lab wall again. Slowly.
He watched her the next day. She avoided the mirror. Flinched at every flicker in her periphery.
Good. HYDRA scum.
She deserved it.
It gave him something - a sliver of satisfaction, a pinprick of power.
For once, he was the thing in the shadows. He could haunt them .
Arman Petrov had worked in HYDRA’s internal surveillance for over a year and saw just about everything: new technicians sneaking naps behind centrifuges, guards trading cigarettes, the science experiments screaming into the ether.
Still, he preferred night shifts. Less oversight. No one breathing down his neck.
Tonight, though - tonight something felt off.
The cryo bay cameras were glitching again. Just Camera 06. The one facing the Winter Soldier’s chamber.
Petrov leaned forward, tapping the console. The monitor corrected.
Inside the pod, the shadow of the Soldier was as still as ever. Encased in frost. No movement. No sound.
But something gnawed at him.
He rewound the feed twenty seconds. Hit play. Nothing unusual. Rewound it further. Still.
Then, at the 1:43 mark, a flicker. Barely half a second.
It looked like… someone standing at the glass. Tall. Still. Facing the pod.
Petrov blinked. Replayed it. Slower. Frame by frame. The figure was too blurred to make out. But the shape matched the Soldier’s proportions.
Which was impossible.
He double-checked the pods. Internal locks engaged.
His gut twisted.
He considered deleting the feed snippet. Thought about flagging it.
And then, as the feed looped back to real-time, he saw it again.
A reflection. His heart stopped.
The reflection - the face - wasn’t on the cryo glass.
It was on his monitor. If he was right, the man was behind him.
He closed his eyes, waiting for a slash. For his death. He was a believer of ghost stories. His mind flicked to a mimic - a ghost that gained power if you believed it was real and reacted to it. If you acknowledged it.
He closed his eyes, willing away his panic. Pretended it wasn’t real. He hadn't seen anything.
He reached for his coffee cup. A mistake - his trembling hands knocked the liquid over the desk. Cleaning it up was a distraction. And by the time he wiped the desk clean the hairs on his neck had stopped vibrating.
Over the next few weeks, Bucky tested the limits. How far he could go. How long he could stay outside. Working on controlling when he was transparent - and when he wasn’t.
And then he went home.
He knew he shouldn’t. He still wore the Winter Soldier’s armour. The mask. Winifred Barnes wouldn’t recognize the myth, the Soviet assassin whispered about in shadows, but she’d see a stranger in tactical gear. He couldn’t let her see him. Couldn’t scare her.
So he just… watched.
He followed her to the grocery store. To Jessica Thompson’s book club. Followed Becca to school. Once, even followed his father to the pub.
It was enough to see them. To know they were okay.
But it was also unbearable.
He couldn’t touch them. Couldn’t speak. He was just a ghost hovering behind the glass.
So he swore he wouldn’t go back.
They were happy. Without him.
And those thoughts - burning, twisting - were still haunting him when he found him.
A Sokovian man. Military fatigues, not quite standard issue. EKO Scorpion.
Bucky didn’t know why he felt pulled toward him. There was a compulsion. He had to find out who he was. There was a thread - he was somebody. He needed to know.
At first, Zemo thought it was fatigue. Sleep deprivation from the campaign.
But the feeling didn’t fade.
He kept catching glimpses - an outline, a flicker, something moving just beyond the edge of sight.
It didn’t behave like an ordinary hallucination. It didn’t vanish when he blinked. It hovered. Lingered. Watched.
He tried to dismiss it, to rationalise. It was just the wind, just shadows playing off broken windows. But even logic grew weary under constant watchfulness.
The first time he truly saw it - truly recognised it - was in the shattered atrium of a government building, half-collapsed by the bombings.
Zemo did not believe in ghosts. But his hand still drifted toward the pistol holstered at his hip. He didn’t draw it - some instinct told him not to - but the weight of it grounded him, gave him something real to hold onto. The figure hadn’t moved. Just stood there, half-shrouded in dust and broken moonlight, as if carved from the ruins themselves. Zemo felt breath leave his lungs in a sharp, controlled exhale. He squinted, trying to resolve the outline into something rational: a soldier, a looter, even a hallucination.
And then the air shifted. No footsteps, no breath, no whisper - but the space where the figure had stood was empty. Zemo felt a chill crawl up the back of his neck, not from fear, exactly, but from the realisation that something had been there . That it had seen him. He stayed rooted to the spot, heart steady but his throat dry. Slowly, he let his hand fall away from the gun. There was no point in shooting at shadows. Whatever this thing was, it had chosen not to kill him. And somehow, that was more unsettling than if it had.
The next night he got a closer look. A figure. No sound. Just stillness. Watching him.
Then the glint: moonlight on metal. A left arm. A red star.
His blood went cold.
The Winter Soldier was supposed to be a story. A myth made flesh. A whisper of death. Not a phantom in the ruins. Not an actual ghost.
But the figure didn’t move. Didn’t strike.
Zemo didn’t sleep that night.
And still, nothing happened. No attack. No execution.
Only the quiet certainty that he was being followed by something that once was human.
He should have feared it. But some part of him - some cold, ruthless part - felt… honoured.
Being followed by a spectre.
It never spoke. Just watched. It seemed to glide. Ethereal. Beautiful.
The man stalked him through the ruins of Sokovia.
And then once, he even helped.
Zemo and his men were taking fire. Enemies all around. The Winter Soldier was there - seemed more solid than usual. Closer. Seemed like he wanted something - or wanted to help.
He nodded to an overturned bookcase. A tarp was haphazardly bundled. What was that? Iron. Rusty.
A handle.
A cellar.
“Quickly!” he shouted to his men. “Over here!”
He didn't see the spectre again for the next 3 hours as they hid in the cellar while the enemy picked apart the ruins above them.
The Winter Soldier just saved his life.
From that moment on he no longer feared the ghost.
He should have been unnerved.
Instead, he was intrigued.
If it truly was the Soldier - and not a ghost, not some hallucination of war trauma - then it meant something remarkable.
Something terrible.
And it had chosen him.
Zemo’s breath fogged in the cold.
He smiled.
“Interesting,” he murmured.
And waited for the spectre to return. He craved its presence.