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Brock Rumlow is recruited fresh from a tour in Iraq because even an intelligence outfit like SHIELD needs fresh young bodies and Rumlow fits the description to a T.
Maybe he’s just sick of his too soft bed and the pillow that makes him feel like he’s face-deep in mud. Nobody told him how hard it would be to duck every time a car backfires or when water guzzles down the pipes in his shitty apartment. He feels exposed in his shirt and jeans and his knuckles itch so bad for guns and knives that he sometimes cuts them open just to watch them bleed.
Rumlow wakes up in a green room with a dozen or so other guys. A chill sweeps through him when he realize that they’re all ex-soldiers, ex-marines, ex-cons, ex-something like him.
They are expendable. No one’s going to miss their sorry asses if they conveniently slip through the cracks. Maybe one or two neighbors might wonder about the basket case on the third floor but that’s it. They fuck up here and their family won’t get so much as a card in the mail.
One by one they turn to the eagle emblem emblazoned across the far wall.
A suit greets them with a patronizing smile.
Rumlow dislikes him immediately.
“You are here gentlemen.” The suit tells them, cleaning his glasses with a cloth that’s worth more than his monthly paycheck. “Because you have been chosen. At SHIELD, our mission is to prevent acts of terrorism before they can happen. But we can’t do that unless everyone pitches in. It's time to serve your country.”
It feels an awful like the judge told him to choose either the army or the juvie for beating up two boys. An officer comes to stand in front of them, young, brunet with a straight nose that’s never seen the wrong side of a fist. The uniform stretches awkwardly across his shoulder and his hair is in desperate need of a trim. But it’s his mouth everyone sees first, framed by lips that belong on a porn star. A couple of guys snicker and elbow each other when they get a look at his face. The first time he bats his baby blues, one of them even reaches out like he’s some hajji or a native girl who wants to bum a cig for a quick fuck.
But Rumlow sees the squareness of his jaws, the way his body flexes and moves like it’s made of liquid steel.
The man’s fast, strong and he’s got a metal arm. They’re on the ground before they can blink and even then, that’s a moment too long.
Glasses says, “You can call him Winter.”
Winter pushes them hard.
Boot camp was nothing. His tour in Iraq is barely a bleep on the radar.
It doesn’t matter who they were before. Those who can’t make the cut are weeded out like the moron who tried to play grab-ass on the first day. He tries not to examine it too closely. All he knows is that SHIELD wants the best and Winter demands nothing less.
Now and then he sees more suits come in to watch their progress. There’s even an impressive black guy who gives Winter a hairy eyeball like he can’t put a finger on what he is and it makes him and a couple of guys bristle, protective in a way an officer has no right to inspire.
Winter doesn’t take to well to the attempts at hiding him.
He takes them apart, renders bone from flesh like they are nothing. What they knew of the battlefield is nothing, he tells them. His eyes are soft as he grinds a heel into his back.
“You are weak.” The man says matter of fact, voice laced with a nondescript accent. “I will make you strong.”
Rumlow believes him.
When they’re not getting the shit beaten out of them, Glasses fills them in on what’s happening in the real world, somewhere far from them, a place SHIELD is supposed to protect. The suit becomes animated as he points out the civil unrest, riots and genocide. SHIELD can’t be everywhere at once but a single strike force may be enough to tip the balance.
Kill the martyrs in the cradle, destroy the technology if they can’t steal it, control information and intelligence. Make people see how much they need SHIELD. Beside him, Cooper kicks his heel and rolls his eyes as though to convey—can you believe this shit?
Rumlow may be a jarhead but he’s no idiot. He recognizes propaganda when it’s being shoveled down his throat. SHIELD is not the paragon of righteous good it likes to pretend to be. Given enough time, Glasses could have won him over. He’s a soldier, he takes orders. It’s his job.
But he’s a soldier and he knows the status quo. The only thing you can depend on is your team. It doesn’t matter who holds their leash in the end because they’re too damaged for anything else. But Winter, in his socially dysfunctional ball-busting ways, cares.
Winter sits with them and eats with them like a grunt instead of an officer. He has a metal arm that he never uses—the normal one hits hard enough—and he has a remarkable accuracy with anything he can get his hands on. He’s heavy for a small guy for all that you never see him coming unless he wants you to. Deep underground with no windows and filtered air, he becomes a lodestar for their troubled nights.
“So LT, where’d you serve?” Rollins wheedles, slurping cream of mushroom like it’s going out of style.
Winter grimaces visibly though he isn’t sure it’s because of Rollin’s atrocious eating habit or something else.
“Don’t call me that.” He orders and Hansen raises an eyebrow.
“’s what you are innit?”
“Look around you.” Winter says quietly. “The only thing you should be concerned about is getting out.”
Kirkland yields with the slap of his hand on the training mat.
Cooper fairs slightly better because he fights dirty.
They all have nightmares. It’s never anything good. Rumlow sometimes wakes with a scream on the tip of his tongue and his knife buried in the mattress. He knows Hansen stays up nights playing checkers with himself while Winter never sleeps at all.
There are days that are worse than usual, an anniversary or a promise never kept. Sometimes Winter holds vigil over the troubled sleeper. Their sleep is easier on those nights.
Runlow himself woke once embarrassingly, never to be told even under duress, with his head in Winter’s lap, the flesh and blood fingers resting against his throat as though checking for his pulse. Groggy with sleep, he lashed out and Winter grabbed him easily, talked him down in a weird mongrel of a language his variegated Farsi, French and Portuguese can’t touch.
“Rest while you can.”
He earns their loyalty one by one even as he breaks their bones and remolds them into whatever SHIELD, no the suits, need them to be.
Their first job is a milk run in Namibia where insurgents have strung up one SHIELD agent by his ears and is demanding ransom for the second. Rollins chews obnoxiously during transit. Winter kicks him and he’s so surprised the gum falls out of his mouth. The rest of the flight is peaceful.
It’s a quick grab and bag but first success is sweet.
They celebrate. It’s the first time they’ve tasted fresh air in months. They sit on the roof of their safe house, passing around a bottle Cooper smuggled in. Rumlow doesn't ask.
Some of them complain about the suits. Others talk of their families like they’re already gone. Rollins mutters he misses his ex—“she was a great fuck”—and they even get Winter tipsy enough to admit “I can’t swim”.
They look at him in disbelief.
“You” Rollins says, “the super soldier.”
Winter taps his arm.
“Metal.”
After the first mission, they have the run of the building. The next time Cooper leaves the green room, Rumlow passes him a grocery list. The asshole brings back about five different kinds of water wings and instead of making them run laps around the entire perimeter, Winter gets a dangerous look on his face and tries them on.
He looks ridiculous with yellow ducks wrapped around his biceps but he and the boys lie through their teeth like pros he’s so proud of them. There’s a pool they sometimes use for drills and he jumps right into it. The water wings help him float somewhat and Hansen whistles when Winter comes up dripping and wet.
The techies aren’t pleased.
The suits are watching them.
Rumlow frowns.
The next day, Winter is gone. He simply straight up disappears like he never existed.
Though they don’t show it, they’re a little lost without Winter. They don’t chance asking. If Winter is being punished for something, they don’t want to make it worse.
Shortly, they’re integrated into SHIELD’s personal army as the STRIKE division. But there’s something intrinsically different about them that puts handlers and other teams off. Rumlow has to man up and fill Winter’s boots. In three years, they don’t lose a single man. Rollins comes close to losing a hand and Hansen tried as a witch and nearly burnt at the stake but they’re all on the right side of the hospital bed by the time the next orders come in.
It’s a suicide run cleverly disguised.
Cooper mutters that his medical training ended just short of resurrection. Threatening Glasses doesn’t seem to work so Rumlow aims a little higher.
Alexander Pierce barely bats an eye when Glasses stumbles through his door. In fact, he seems a little impressed and it raises Rumlow’s estimation of him. After dismissing ‘Glasses’, Sitwell as it turned out, he pours them both a glass of scotch. He swirls it around in the glass for a moment wondering why was it always scotch before sipping it. The amber liquid burns as it goes down.
“Winter is one of our best recruiters.” Pierce starts with a non sequitur which catches him off guard. “I’m not sure how he does it to be honest. Did you know for example,” the man addresses him with a depreciating look, “he got the Black Widow to defect by putting a bullet through her?”
He hadn’t known that.
If hadn’t seen the shark lurking beneath the watery blue, he would have been hard pressed to believe that Alexander Pierce was the brains behind SHIELD and whatever parasite it was incubating.
“Good help is hard to find. I’ll admit, I was a little worried when we set him to build a strike team of all things but I think I can see why he picked you.”
Pressing a button under his desk he said, “Activate the Winter Soldier.”
Despite Hansen’s complaints of his desperate lack of anything resembling a social life, Rumlow’s heard of the Winter Soldier before. He knows that most of the intelligence community thinks him a ghost or at least a series of agents operating under the same name. But the STRIKE team knows better, Rumlow knows better. They owe a lot to Winter, they owe the Winter Soldier their lives.
“For God’s sake, try not to act like you’re fucking girls.” Cooper hisses through the corner of his mouth.
Winter is cold, methodical in his movement as always like a finely-tuned machine. But his eyes are blank when he sees him. A curious stare that gives Rumlow a sense of feeling that Winter is seeing through him. It unnerves him. Something is wrong.
“Sir,” Hansen says brittle, sounding terribly young. “It’s good to have you back.”
After the mission, the Winter Soldier is led away into his berth on ice. Winter had been here all along right under their feet and they hadn’t known. His men are understandably upset. Some manage to handle it better than others. Rollins plans on getting rip-roaring drunk.
“Beautiful isn’t he?”
“Sir?” Rumlow hates how uncertain he sounds but he cannot help but recoil in disgust at the darkness edging Pierce’s voice. Apparently, he doesn’t do a good job of it because Pierce sides up to him like a coiling python and knocks on the frosted glass, eyes proprietary as he gazes down at the man sleeping on the other side.
“You’re a smart man Agent Rumlow.” Pierce says shrewdly. “It takes a lot of guts to question orders. I can always use a man of your talents.”
He can’t swallow past the lump in his throat.
“Thank you sir.”
Pierce nods.
“I’ll be keeping my eyes on you.”
They see the Winter Soldier several times after that. Pierce keeps him busy. Every day brings new headlines splashed across the front page. As Hansen sinks despairingly into the depths of his protein shake, Coop perused the article and shakes his head.
“It’s like he doesn’t remember us.” Rollins complains.
“He doesn’t, remember us.”
Idiot was given. Cooper doesn’t actually bother to tack it on. He's classy like that.
“How’s that possible?” Hansen snaps.
Kirkland shakes his bald head, his hand going up to pat it twice for luck
“I’m telling you, there’s some serious shit goin’ on ‘round here.”
“Enough.” Rumlow quiets them. Banging his spoon on the side of the bowl, he tells Kirkland “Finish your oatmeal.”
In 2012, Loki the godling hits Manhattan with an alien army. They spend months after doing clean up. Not all bodies are accounted for, the Avengers didn’t exactly keep track as they took them down. Some of the alien technology is missing too but it’s the Tesseract that angers Pierce the most.
Privately, Rumlow smiles. Even Pierce couldn’t order the assassination of an alien dignitary. But it doesn’t keep him from sending them on wild goose chases from time to time, especially when it involves the rumors of Loki’s staff.
Winter drops in one night, a joint op that goes fubar as soon as they hit the ground. It’s obvious now there’s a mole inside SHIELD. AIM knew they were coming. Rumlow gets his men out of the way as Strike Team 2 is incinerated on the spot.
The lab is going up in flames. They can’t do anything but fall back. As the super-heated air crackles on the side of his face, he can’t help but think—Pierce planned this. Pierce didn’t take failures lightly. Maybe he was trying to clean house. Six years of loyal service and he ends up using his grappling line to haul ass and land in a free fall outside the building.
Winter has to carry him half way when his legs fail, holding him with his real arm while the other burns uselessly at his side. He sizzles like a fucking sausage when he wades knee deep in snow and Rumlow who’s seen just about everything from the Hulk to men torn to pieces, vomits before passing out. By the time Cooper slaps him awake, Winter is missing one arm and both Kirkland and Rollins are holding him back from jumping back in the wreckage.
His ears are ringing.
“What’s happening?” He rasps and Winter spares him a concerned look.
Something about the explosion jarred him loose or maybe it’s that he’s been out so long he’s forgotten to put his mask on. Winter mulishly explains, “I’m going back in.”
“That’s suicide.” Cooper snaps even as he helps Rumlow sit up.
“Sss...” Winter makes a noise at the back of his throat. “Hansen is still in there.”
“The kid’s dead.” Cooper tells him, voice raw with smoke and grief. “Saw him go down.”
Rumlow closes his eyes for a moment. Hansen had been twenty-one, a fucking kid compared to the rest of them.
“We don’t leave anyone behind.” Winter says when the comms fizzle to life.
They’re being recalled.
Winter argues passionately about their orders. The STRIKE team would be touched if they didn’t know Winter was basically asking for to be taken off the mission. The man’s blue eyes are unfocused, burn marks lashing his hips and side. But the only medical attention he’s allowed is a mechanic poking at the melted socket in his left shoulder.
“Let me bring back his body at least. He has a family. They’ll wonder.”
Pierce considers him for a moment before nodding to one of the real doctors behind him.
Both he and Cooper tense.
“Wipe him.” Winter’s eyes widen but the fight goes out of him. He doesn’t like where this is going. But before he can stop whatever is happening, Winter shoots him a look that flays him to the bone. His men shift uneasily behind him as Winter opens his mouth for a plastic bit. The way his teeth clamp down hard even before he’s strapped in tells them he’s done this before.
The thing they put over his head looks like something they might see at a salon. Winter hitches his breath when someone flips the switch on and he screams.
It’s an ugly sound to hear. Even Rollins, Cooper, and Kirkland who’ve been with him since the beginning flinches at the cries. Winter is not a vocal person. The Winter Soldier has even less words to spare. To see him like this, screaming, twisting, it’s—terrifying.
Pierce turns to him with a genial smile.
“Unfortunately, this means that you will have to carry on your mission without the Winter Soldier. His skills are required but not necessary. When he’s done, please send him to me.”
Rumlow hears the warning.
Do not rock the boat.
Bits and pieces of the man will emerge the longer he spends time out of cryosis.
Of course, that means another wipe.
He doesn’t always come willingly.
Rumlow learns that the only person who can control Winter during his brief episodes is Alexander Pierce. The man only has to raise his voice and Winter falls in line, his eyes shuttered like sheets of ice but utterly acquiescent to Pierce’s needs. But Pierce can’t be bothered all the time and there are tactics the doctors—if they could be called that—and the scientists employ, a string of words that bears repeating inside his head even as Winter writhes in his seat.
Every time they wipe him, they upgrade the damned machines. Rumlow cannot believe they can’t do it without the pain. Maybe the doctors enjoy it. Hell, maybe Pierce enjoys it the way the Winter Soldier goes smooth and pliant under his hands, never to argue or to strike back at his commands. Maybe the screams are the sign that the machine is working and someday, they might have the perfect tool at their disposal instead of a hollowed man named Winter.
It’s bad for morale. He gives the boys a freebie on this one but he owes Winter to see him through his lobotomy. But even the security detail, five men to the left, five to the right, seems discomfited by the screams. The sound sets his teeth on the edge. Winter nearly pulled himself free once before being darted by a tranq gun. It’s the ones they use for the Hulk.
The numbers 3-2-5 gets him nothing but a pizza place in Louisiana. Rollins finds out he’s allergic to seafood.
“Where’s Howard?” Winter asks before the bit is placed inside his mouth. “He promised to tell me.” his eyes go distant “...something.”
There is no Howard. He doesn’t know a Howard.
Rumlow swallows as the doctor makes a note.
“He’s not here right now.”
Glasses is cheerful—never a good sign.
“Gentlemen, you have been reassigned.”
Their job is to babysit Captain Rogers as he goes around shaking hands and kissing babies. There’s a new exhibition at the Smithsonian they’re supposed to attend and Rumlow is so bored out of his mind that he considers paperwork and the green room.
“Rumlow.” Cooper appears out of nowhere, his expression grim. “You need to see this.”
History was never his strong suit. He looks at the plaques of the Howling Commandos, the team Captain Rogers led before his impromptu nap in ice.
“What am I looking at?”
He doesn’t have time for this, he can’t see Kirkland or Rollins. Who knows what the hell they’re doing. Sometimes he feels like he’s the only sane adult in the group.
Cooper turns him around.
His stomach drops.
“James Barnes.” Coop says quickly even as he puts two and two together. “He and the Cap grew up together in the forties, died—presumed KIA. Rumlow” the other man shakes him. “Cap’s best friend is Winter.”
“How the fuck did they...”
Cooper shoots him a pitying look.
“You even have to ask?”
Sometime after the Second World War, SHIELD was founded. SHIELD found Bucky Barnes.
“What do we do?”
“Nothing”
Cooper looks at him incredulously.
“For now.” Rumlow amends. “We do nothing. We can’t do anything. Once Project Insight goes live, they won’t need Winter. Fuck they won’t even need us anymore. I need to think.” He says hastily, moving fast towards the entrance.
“Don’t take too long.” Cooper says grimly. “Guys like Cap, he won’t last in this organization.”
He’s assigned to cap’s detail. Pierce doesn’t trust him. Says Cap is too ideal for his tastes. Rumlow doesn’t disagree. But he keeps an eye on cap because he knows Winter would have wanted him to and he owes Winter.
It isn’t long before he’s given the kill order.
“We’ve served together for seven years.” Rumlow begins and like all good plans, it doesn’t survive first contact.
“You want a divorce now Rumlow?” Kirkland cracks a grin. “Won’t you think of the kids?”
“This where you tell us you won’t stop us if we decide to go?” Cooper asks wryly.
“Shotgun.” Rollins calls, carrying bags of ordinances in both hands.
Rumlow scowls.
He turns the two agents away when they try to get in the van.
“I’ll take over from here.”
Cap glowers when he makes himself comfortable while the Black Widow barely gives him a glance. That might have had more to do with the bullet in her shoulder. Winter was usually a better shot than that. He wonders—
Now is not the time.
He breaks out the first aid kit strapped to his thigh and a knife.
“Let’s make a deal.”
Cap rubs his wrists.
“Why?”
“Because like it or not, the Winter Soldier needs you.”
This gives the blond a pause.
“Who is he?”
Rumlow shakes his head as the van screeches to a stop.
“That dumb forties guy look has to go.”
Winter is wiped for the last time.
It doesn’t make him feel any better but it’s a start.
When he hears Cap’s voice on the intercom, he goes directly to the control room and points a gun at the back of a kid’s head. Out the corner of his eyes, he sees Agent Thirteen preparing to pounce. She’s not the only one but he’s got his team on his side and a couple of shmucks too.
He tells the kid “Make sure those things never get off the ground.”
The kid happily complies.
A hydra is a mythical monster who grows two heads each time one is cut off. The only way to kill it is to cauterize the bleeding stumps, to make sure nothing can grow from its ashes. In the light of that, it seems strangely poetic to hear explosions rock their heels. The walls grow warm, the light flickers before the backup generators kick in and dies. They are plunged into darkness highlighted only by phones and the lonely exit sign on the far end of the room.
In the following shoot out, the kid’s brains are splattered over the console, he loses his favorite knife and Coop only takes out three Hydra agents before going down.
Rumlow chokes on a lung as he crawls over the broken glass, Thirteen covers for him.
“Coop! You alive?!”
“Fuck! I need a gun!” Comes an enraged cry. “Give me yours!”
“What happened to yours?!”
Rumlow slides his gun across the floor.
The answering gunshots are the only reply.
With a soft groan, a woman topples into a puddle of piss. She’s the last one. There are a couple of whimpers but no one actively shooting at them so he calls it a win. He feels dizzy. Cooper looks grave. He always looks grave come to think of it. Always looked constipated ever since they found out about Winter and Pierce and Cap...
He feels cold.
“Agent Rumlow” Agent Thirteen says breathlessly. “Don’t move.”
He blacks out.
Rumlow wakes up in a hospital to Rollin’s ugly mug. His grin looks more lopsided than usual and that might be because he only has half as many teeth. The side of his face is bruised to hell and back and he wants to ask if he tried to stop a quintjet his forehead.
“Status report!” He barks, tries to bark. It mostly comes out as a wheeze.
Kirkland cackles in the background sitting up in a wheelchair.
“Can’t do that anymore” the bald man says, pulling at the curtains as though examining them for bugs.
“Turns out you don’t have rank when you blow up the organization that hired you.”
“Coop” Rumlow says slowly. “The hell are you wearing?”
Cooper shrugs, shameless as he readjusts the pink cap on his head.
“Lost a bet.” He says, flaunting his shaved legs. It also gives him a convenient look up his skirt which is not what a recovering man needs. "How do I look?"
“Jesus” and at the risk of knocking himself out again, he jerks his head sideways to escape the view.
"Huh, not what I was going for."
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Figured Winter might need cheering up.”
“We want him to remember shit, dipshit.”
“Don’t deny our love hoss.” Cooper says in his usual burr of a voice, helping him into a second wheelchair.
Rumlow grumbles at the state of his entire team.
“Where is Winter anyway?”
Winter’s room is empty save for the guard posted outside. Amateurs, even without his metal arm, Winter can scale walls like he’s the goddamned Batman. Cuffs won’t keep him in bed for long, fractured wrist might need work and the dislocated shoulder and arm, intracranial hemorrhaging, brain damage—he tears the clipboard out of Cooper’s hands.
He thought it'd be easy once Winter got out. Winter was supposed to be untouchable, not stuck to a hospital bed. He reads through the doctor's report and it feels like his stomach lands on top of his liver.
The door opens.
“Aw shit.” Coop swears, as he jumps behind Rollins. But the damage has already been done. Captain Rogers stares incredulously at Cooper’s candy striper outfit. He blushes to the roots of his hair. Score one for the STRIKE team. The scene in the elevator could have gone much better if they’d known to throw in Cooper first.
“What...”
Someone bumps into him from behind and throws the door wide open. Kirkland and Rollins both look like they’ve won the jackpot and Rumlow knows he’s not far behind.
“Oh wow.” Sam Wilson whistles. “You guys clean up nice—“
“Hey we have dibs alright?” Cooper says petulantly. “We get half custody.”
There’s a martial spark behind the Captain’s blue eyes.
“He doesn’t even know his own name.” Cap growls and his team cringes back, all except him.
“But we went back for him.” Rumlow says, holding his gaze steady. “Leave no man behind, that’s what he taught us.”
At once, the blond looks stricken.
Winter—Barnes stirs before subsiding. They hold their collective breaths.
“He knows us.” Rumlow continues. “He wasn’t alone.”
He hates how his knees grow weak in relief at the understanding in the Captain’s face.
He holds his hand out. Rogers shakes it.
“Truce?”
“Truce.”