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He spends his nights in cold shadows.
They – he does not know what they are called, but in his mind, he calls them “they” because that seems ominous enough for them, what with all their secrecy – do things to him that make his head heart and his jaw clench. And then they help him walk, his legs like softened rubber, to a low cot. They tell him to lay down, and he does, because he knows that their words must be obeyed, unless he wants to endure the machine that tears apart his brain again, again, again.
He lays on the cot, and he knows that there is a man sitting outside his metal door, just in case he decides to leave the room. He has never made that choice – he doesn’t make choices, they make choices for him – so he doesn’t know what the consequence for leaving the room is, but he imagines that he would not enjoy it, not that he enjoys anything. He just goes where he is pointed, and he shoots who he is told to kill. He has a purpose, even if he does not always know what that purpose is.
Above the cot, there is a small window, just large enough to let the moonlight stream in and cover the room in cool shadows. The moonlight is the only thing in the room that he feels like belongs to him – it is his and his alone. They cannot touch it.
He runs his fingers, flesh and metal, over the part of the wall that the moonlight touches, and he doesn’t know much about science beyond what is necessary to fire and reload a weapon and the basic anatomy of a killing strike, but he wonders how the moon can give off such a coolness when the sun can give off such a warmth. Sometimes he remembers a voice, soft and asthmatic, explaining this to him, but he brushes it to the side. The voice doesn’t have a target pinned to its chest.
He lays on the cot and watches his moonlight skate across the walls. He rarely closes his eyes – he does not dream often. Usually when he tries to sleep, all he sees is grey and black and red blood, and he doesn’t know why, but that leads to him waking up with a scream perched in his throat and sweat at his temples.
On the rare occasions that he does dream, he doesn’t see anything of note – no people, no places, no things. All he sees is his colors, deep in the darkness where he doesn’t even remember if he has a name, but there is a sky-blue voice calling out to him with a name on his lips that rings gold. He dreams in sounds and colors, and he finds the absence of concrete images comforting. His life is full of weeping children and bloody corpses, and the swirling colors and soft voices in his dreams are beautiful in contrast with the horrors he sees every day. Of course, he doesn’t process them as horrors when he’s standing there with the assault rifle in his hands, but late at night, with the moonlight streaming in through the window, he realizes that he is an instrument of terror. There is nothing he can – or will – do about that, because any attempt would lead to more hours in the chair with the harness around his head and a mouth guard on his teeth.
He wonders if the children hear the colors of his voice when he shouts to their parents. He tries not to listen too hard to the sharp yellow streaks of their screams when he fires the – black, black as night – bullet into their parents’ bodies.
He likes colors more than he likes people; for one thing, he has never been told to kill a color.
He still can’t hear the colors of his voice, and he doesn’t know if that means he’s broken more than he already is or if his voice never had a color, and it’s just grey, grey, grey, like the dust that he kicks up when he runs after a target.
Earlier today, he had been told to take out a target, just he always has been. They gave him weapons, and he covered his body – for he is a weapon, too – in pistols and knives. They gave him a description, a time, and a place, and he showed up.
And he was going to achieve his mission, too, because he had taken the target’s weapon from his arms, and the target was injured by his knives and bullets. He ripped his mask from his face, because it was becoming difficult to breathe in the hot sun, and he didn’t expect his face to make any impression on the target. Besides, he was going to kill the target before the day ended.
And then the target called to him in a voice that seemed to promise him oceans, and he said that golden name from his dreams, and all he can do is throw the name back at the target, because how could a name as shining as that be his?
They call him “the Winter Soldier,” and that name is silver and dripping red with blood, and it is not beautiful.
That golden name, on the other hand…
So he leaves, and the target lives, and they tell him that it doesn’t matter that the target seemed to know him, and that he seemed to know the target, because how else could the target know that beautiful, shining name from his dreams?
They wipe his brain again, and they tell him to lay on the cot in the room touched by his moonlight, and he wonders if he’ll dream of that blue voice and that golden name again, or if he will see only grey dust and blood on his hands, staining both flesh and metal.
When he wakes up the next morning, there is a name on his lips, and it is the brightest blue that he has ever seen, and he never wants to stop saying it.