Chapter Text
Under ancient trees that stretched to the star-studded sky a bare chested warrior knelt in the snow. A red-eyed cleric pressed a hand to the warrior's chest. In his other hand the cleric held a glass vial. The full moon cast strange, rippling shadows on the snow, shadows that seemed obedient to something other than the moon's light as they twisted their long fingers towards the distant farming village.
"Hail HYDRA," the warrior whispered, eyes wide with awe.
"Hail HYDRA." The priest crushed the vial against the warrior's chest, pressing the Blood of their god through his skin. Quickly he backed away, fading into the shadows, veiled by a spell.
For several minutes the warrior's harsh guttural gasps filled the night, then he stilled. His breathing calmed. He rose to his feet and ran smoothly towards the village.
The screams started soon after. They didn't take long to end.
* * *
HYDRA's god wanted order. Life was the embodiment of chaos and so He desired it through death. His Blood was given to HYDRA's chosen. It made them strong, fast, hard to kill, healed their wounds. In the Blood they found peace, would kill until they were cut down.
Inevitably they came, hundreds of men on horseback, warring peoples following warring gods, uniting to wipe HYDRA and their god of order and death from the face of the earth.
The battle was long and bloody. Almost, they succeeded. They believed they succeeded.
Cut off one head and two more shall take its place.
HYDRA survived. In the dark, secret places of the world, HYDRA survived, with the Blood of their god and their clerics and their faith. No longer able to indulge their god's demand for slaughter, they had to find a new way to seek order.
But they survived. Even when other cults died out, fell victim to the modern age in which gods were disdained and magic was just another tool, HYDRA adapted. They resurfaced, failed, were driven under once more.
But HYDRA adapted.
HYDRA survived.
The pain was distant. There was only the cold. The ice. His blood was escaping, trickling out beautiful and bright across the snow. Bucky turned his head and years passed. Bone greeted him. It had escaped from his skin, venturing out to keep him company while they waited for death.
That was nice. It was good not to wait alone and death should be here soon.
Boots filled his vision. Confusion tangled with the cold and the shocks of pain that reached him through the ice. Death didn't wear boots.
Rough hands were grabbing at him. Someone jostled the bone sticking out of his shoulder and he screamed. The mountains echoed it back, mocking him. He was being dragged through the snow. He tried to struggle, but his body wasn't listening to him. It was only listening to the Boots hauling him away. Hauling him away from his spot in the snow.
They couldn't take him away. How was death going to find him?
The Boots heaved him onto a table. His blood dripped onto the floor. Bright lights blinded him. A woman with red eyes leaned over his body and Bucky thought she might be death, finally come to take him.
Until she stripped his shirt off and pressed her hand against his chest and it burned. Until she broke a glass vial of red over his heart and pushed it through his skin and he screamed. Screamed until his throat was broken and no noise came out, screamed until the red liquid she'd pushed through his skin rose up and answered him, offering him peace. All he had to do was kill. He was too weak to fight it.
Strength flooded the path carved by the Blood. He was calm, a perfect singing void of silence as he ascended into the Blood, answering its call. There were beating hearts all around him. He lunged from the table towards the closest. The peace of the kill flooded him as people fell and their hearts stopped. His eyes were cold, his face empty, and blood no longer flowed from his tattered jagged shoulder.
"I guess it still works," a shaky, elated, terrified voice spoke from behind the observation window.
"Bind him. Bind him now before he kills us all."
He stepped over the bodies, eyes fixed on the woman who'd pushed the Blood into his skin, who'd given him this perfect peace. She raised her hands, fingers twisted to paint an elaborate sigil in the air, and pain wracked his body.
It didn't stop him.
A burst of electricity drove him, stunned, to his knees. There were hands on him, a needle slid into his skin to send cold shivering through his veins. His muscles went slack. A hand latched onto the back of his neck and seconds later something punched into his soul. A harsh voice ground out, "You will obey. You will serve the goals of HYDRA. You will not interfere with those goals. You belong to us. You will kill for us. Do you understand?"
The man who had been James Buchanan Barnes, who had fallen from a mountain to be infected with the Blood of HYDRA's god and Bound, his soul chained and forced into HYDRA's service, said, "Yes."
HYDRA had rediscovered the cache of the Blood deep in the mountains. Everyone knew the legends of their history. No one had known if the Blood was real. Or, if it was real, if it would still work. Finding the man in the snow was like a literal gift from their god.
The Blood was real. The Blood worked. He became the first of their perfect killers, their perfect Soldiers. Bound to obedience with a soul-chain, his missing arm replaced with an elegant construct of gleaming metal, he was sent out in the world to serve HYDRA's will.
There were four more vials of Blood, so there were four more Soldiers. Each one Bound as the first was Bound.
With each Soldier there was a danger. Even Bound, the call of the Blood could overwhelm them. To be HYDRA's perfect Soldiers they had to use the Blood, but in the moment of the kill it was easy for them to ascend completely, to give in to the Blood's call. When that happened, all the Soldiers craved was the kill. No one was safe but the one who'd Bound them.
Even put into magically induced stasis when they weren't needed, gradually they all became unstable, all succumbed to the Blood. All had to be put down.
All but one. All but the first. Eventually, he was the only one left.
The Blood and the soul-chain between them burned everything away. They didn't leave a person behind. Or they weren't supposed to, but the first Soldier remembered something. He remembered that the person he once was had been called James Buchanan Barnes. He remembered that the person he once was had been called Bucky.
They were just words. He didn't know what they meant. They weren't a name. Names meant something. But he hung onto them as an act of defiance when everything else was taken from him. He kept hanging onto them even when he forgot why he'd been fighting so hard to keep them. And when he wasn't the Soldier and he wasn't the singing silence of the Blood he was those words. He didn't know why, he didn't know who they were, except that they weren't the Soldier and they weren't the Blood; they were the one tiny part of himself that didn't belong to HYDRA.
Gradually, he lost the words. Lost Barnes. Lost Buchanan. Lost James.
He held onto Bucky. Clung to it with a fierce, wild desperation, even in its meaninglessness.
When the rest of the Soldiers went wild, when they all surrendered to the peace of the Blood and he was sent to kill them, one after the other until he was the only one left, he wondered. He wondered if he survived because he had that single word. Wondered if he survived because, even though he didn't know what it meant, even though it was a word as hollow and empty as he'd become, he could think of himself as Bucky.
"Wake up." He didn't recognise the voice but he woke up. "HYDRA needs you. Open your eyes." Bucky opened his eyes. There was a man looking down at him. The amulet was in his bloody hand. He must be Bucky's new handler, must have used the soul-chain to Bind him while he slept. Bucky wondered if the last one had died or if this man had killed him.
"Get up." Bucky got up. "I have work for you to do. HYDRA is going to shape this century and I need you to do your job." Bucky looked at him blankly. "Do whatever you need to do to get yourself ready. I need you in fighting shape." He paused. "Do you have any questions?"
Bucky had to swallow several times before he could speak. It was always hard when he was first woken. "What should I call you?"
"Pierce. Call me Pierce."
The work Pierce had for him took him all over the world. Targeted assassinations of specific people. Seemingly random kills, made to look like mob violence. Accidents that, as ordered, no one could ever believe were accidents. Accidents that no one would believe were anything but accidents.
So many dead. He was very good at his job. But it was getting harder to come back.
Ascending through the Blood to the Soldier, where the killing was clean and precise, was easy. Too easy. It was hard to stop himself from ascending higher, from reaching the place of peace where the Blood was all, where the kill was all, where everything was quiet and calm.
He fought. He kept fighting. He didn't want to kill anyone. He didn't want to kill HYDRA's targets. He didn't want to succumb to the Blood and slaughter whoever got in his way.
Each kill it got harder. Sometimes he lost the fight and then the teams they sent out with him would tranq him, net him, shock him.
Electricity was one of the few things that could keep him down. They'd keep shocking him until he snapped out of it. Sometimes he'd bite through his tongue, break his cheekbones, his jaw, from the convulsions, but eventually he'd come back.
He knew he was starting to become unstable, just like the others. It was becoming harder and harder to find his way back to Bucky when Bucky was just five random letters that meant nothing.