Work Text:
- East Berlin.
It is a cold December night, and Galina is waiting for the most important train she will ever catch.
She is bundled up in the warmest clothes she had available - a good military-issue wool coat, two pairs of thick wool tights, her straight uniform skirt, and three sweaters layered one over the other. The one closest to her skin was knitted by her sister, long ago. There are roses woven into the wool - “to remind you of me”- and she likes to pretend she can feel the texture of them against her chest, right where Roza used to put her head as a drowsing child.
She clutches a handbag at her side. She has nothing but the contents of that handbag, and those aren’t much. Bringing anything more would have raised too many suspicions. She thinks, briefly, of her notebooks, her records, her laboratory. The medals, the awards. The years of learning, the joys of hard-won discoveries. Not a single souvenir of any of it.
Perhaps that is better. In the end, it had brought her nothing but horror.
She can’t stop herself from shivering, but she doesn’t think it has much to do with the temperature. She will not stop shaking until this is over, one way or another: until she is free or until she is dead, and she is very nearly indifferent as to which ends up the outcome. If she dies, she supposes the newspapers back home will write a few words about her. Figure out a way to hide how she spent the last few hours of her life.
If she lives, she will spend the rest of her life as a fugitive. Always looking over her shoulder, always waiting for the sound of a heavy footfall behind her. She might live to a ripe old age yet, but she will die silently of fear every day.
****
It would be the supreme form of irony if the one they sent to finish her was the boy she had failed to save. Not that he is a boy anymore, though she isn't sure you could call him a man.
She remembers him, the way he looked in the white bed at the military facility where they had transported him after he had been "rescued." His bruises and contusions bloomed vividly against the white of the sheets and his skin. A drawn, fine-boned face, marked by the sharp dark lines of spiky eyelashes and a chapped mouth. He had looked small and vulnerable and terribly young.
He had made her think, almost forcibly, of her brother. Volodya, dead in the first months of this war. Nineteen years old and no older. And how many more like him, left behind on nameless hills. Buried in unmarked graves, if they were lucky enough to be buried.
She passed a hand across the boy’s damp, cool brow. To her surprise, his eyes fluttered open, the color of rain, and frightened.
He muttered something she didn’t understand. He was American, she remembered. She had no English, but his mouth sounded dry, so she took the cup of water by his bed, held it to his lips so he could take a sip.
He gave her a look of profound gratitude as he drank. His gaze flicked over her, just once, up and down her uniform, and the corners of his mouth curved up the tiniest bit. She imagined that, before all this, smiles came to him easily and often.
He cast a long, searching look around the sterile room, over the white sheet covering his body, and finally saw the bandaged stump where his left arm used to be. A grimace of shock and pain convulsed his face, and he shook his head briefly in horrified disbelief. He spoke again, a choked, hoarse whisper, and she didn't need English to understand what he must be saying. Biting his lip, he turned his face away, tears squeezing from his tightly shut eyes.
The room was white and silent but for the whir of electricity, and the soft, awful sounds of the boy trying to stop himself from weeping. Wishing she could say something he would understand, Galina placed a hand on his relatively uninjured right shoulder. After a few moments, he reached up and grasped it with his own. His palm was hot and dry and trembling. She let him hold onto her until he was asleep again. The cup by his bed had been laced with laudanum.
****
Later, when she heard what they had planned for him, she was horrified. Hearing what they wanted her to do. To help them break into his mind, to alter it. To turn him into a murderous machine; a machine, they insisted, that would help them protect the Motherland.
She protested, of course she did. Immoral. Inhumane. Better to have let him die.
But the man whom everyone obeyed had smiled at her - a kindly, twinkling smile, with untold terrors lurking behind his teeth - and reminded her of her mother and her sister. Surely, Galina would not want anything to happen to them. Surely, she would do her patriotic duty to create this super-being, whose work would help to protect hundreds and thousands of mothers and sisters? Or was she simply willing to allow vulnerable people - including those whom she loved - to die?
When she saw him again, weeks after their first meeting, he had looked marginally healthier, and was sporting the first of the bionic prosthetics they would test out on him. His skin had more color but the time inside the walls of the facility had given him a sallow cast; his eyes, once so lucid even half-anesthetized and shocked with loss, seemed duller and guarded. She tried not to look at them too often.
“Do not think of him as a man, comrade,” one of her colleagues at the facility told her. “He is only raw material for the weapon we are forging. For the good of the Motherland.”
She tried not to. No more compassionate touches. No more attempts to grant him comfort. He was cared for by the medical staff; and if the care was not always up to Western capitalist standards, his overall vitals seemed to be improving anyway.
Only once, when they were left momentarily alone, did he try to speak with her. She was detaching electrodes from his chest when he plucked at her sleeve with his fingers. In careful, broken Russian, he whispered, “Want . . . go . . . home.” Indicating the prosthetic with his head, he added, “Not . . . want . . . this.”
And what was she supposed to do? It wasn’t as though she could break him out. It wasn’t as though she could change one iota of his fate. She was simply another part of the machine. She, too, was raw material being forged into power for the Motherland.
They all were.
For her good behavior, her superiors arranged a furlough so she could see her family. They got her passage on a freight train heading to Moscow, stopping in the little town where she grew up. She saw her mother, her sister. Her mother put wood into the stove and used saved-up rations to bake a loaf of bread, almost like the ones they’d had before the war. For three days, she woke up to an orange sunrise over the town where she had spent her childhood.
When she came back, they had already begun the first experiments. She learned to avoid the room where they worked on him, whenever she could. She tried not to think of him as a person. No one else seemed to. They began calling him “The Winter Soldier.” It made him sound cold and indomitable. Unless you heard him screaming.
She had made one more attempt to intervene, knowing it was futile. The man whom everyone obeyed had given her a long, cold look, and explained that, now that they had invested all this effort into rescuing the American and patching him up, they could either build him into a valuable asset, or simply keep him alive as long as possible, to serve as the subject for other experiments. “In fact, comrade, it will be quite up to you whether he continues his life as the Winter Soldier or a . . . a sort of large laboratory rabbit.”
The war ended. The country began to rebuild itself, trying to gather up the shredded ruins of the past and patch them into some semblance of a return to civilization. Much was made of the honored dead. There were songs and ceremonies and movies to commemorate the great sacrifices made. It helped less than you might think.
They kept her working on the puzzle constantly. They expected much of her. She was brilliant, always had been. A mind made for code-breaking. Recruited straight from school into a top-secret cadre of military scientists. Not even her family had ever known what she did. They wanted her to figure out the patterns in the electrical activity of the Winter Soldier’s brain. To read them, to dissect them, to figure out how to alter them.
While the people were expected to bravely cope with post-war austerity, the technology available to the Soviet military boggled the mind. Modern machinery, the kind no one outside their circle had ever even heard of before. Techniques straight out of science fiction. They sent electricity through his body, into his brain, they injected him with chemicals to make him sleep and make him wake and make him calm and make him angry.
He was often angry. There were whispers that he had already killed one of his handlers. They kept him shackled at the wrists, until he broke one of the chains. After, they kept him in solid iron restraints, nearly immobilized. They experimented with cryo-sleep. They were careful not to kill him, but she knew they were not shy about experimenting with avant-garde behavioral modification techniques.
He was stronger than they had imagined. It took them years. And more deaths, more injuries, than were ever recorded. The boy screamed, and fought, and slept, and broke slowly. They knew it was starting to work when he finally stopped trying to claw off his prosthetic arm.
Most of her work did not require her to be in a room with him; whenever she was, they kept him drugged enough to be docile. One day, as she was reading the output of his brain on one of her screens, he turned his face toward her blankly. The softness had melted from his delicate bones. He had a growth of beard that made him look older than his years, and his hair was long and matted. The eyes, still the color of water, were tired and lost.
They routinely erased his memories with precisely targeted electroshocks to the hippocampus, but they needed to figure out a way to keep him holding onto the “right” memories: his mission, his allegiance, his deft ability to murder and to maim. They needed a way to encode those, and to trigger the encoding somehow, immediately after a “wipe.”
Electrohypnosis was what they called it; an esoteric marriage of physical neuroscience with linguistic and behavioral programming. Map the spikes and plateaus in the brain waves; the verses and the chorus; find a way to slip inside them, turn memories to lies, morality to dust. It’s incredible what electricity can do. What agony can obliterate.
It wasn’t a flawless plan, by any means. The human brain is much too complex for anything like this to function perfectly, not long-term. There was no way to erase stored long-term memories, not without removing his ability to even pretend to be human; all they could do was overwrite them. He would need periodic “wiping” and cryo-sleep to keep the programming from degrading; no way to avoid that. Without maintenance, the effects of the programming would almost certainly fade with time; he might even regain some of his long-term memories. Nor was it clear that he was unable to make new ones. But, for now, it seemed to be working, and that’s all that mattered to the people reporting to the people reporting to the people in charge.
He came out of the electrohypnosis sessions feral, confused and disoriented, and they needed a verbal trigger to “remind” him of who he “was.” They asked her to come up with the activation sequence. Something simple but non-obvious. Evocative but meaningless. Enough words to make guessing them impossible, but not so many that the handler might misspeak, and give the Winter Soldier enough time to turn on him.
And she did it; she found the words that would encrypt his memories, dropping an iron curtain between the ruthless, hyper-effective Winter Soldier and the smiling American boy that he had once been. What nobody knew was that she had implanted two codes into the boy’s brain. One, to turn him into an obedient machine. And another, to reverse the hypnosis and turn him back into a man. She has never quite understood why she did this. Perhaps a part of her wondered if she was destined to someday become his prey. Or was it just a way to salve her conscience? To pretend to herself that there existed a possibility - however slim - for his salvation? If it was, it didn’t work.
She was there, at the very edge of the room, as far away from him as possible, the first time they tested the activation. She forced herself to watch while he twisted in his restraints, every muscle in his body resisting fiercely, and then when he finally slumped and pronounced, in that accent he’s never shaken, “Ready to comply.”
They sent him out to hunt down an unruly dissident who was becoming too prominent. The Winter Soldier performed his mission perfectly. The death appeared to be a tragic accident. The following month, they sent him abroad. He returned damaged, but not irreparably so; apart from that, the mission had been a success. Again and again, they sent him out, and each time, he did exactly what was asked of him.
The boy was gone. And there wasn’t even a man left in his place. Only a weapon forged from raw materials gathered on a battlefield long ago.
****
By then, they had no more need of her, and she never saw the Winter Soldier again. In any event, by then, she had troubles of her own. Her sister, Roza, had fallen in love with a man. Galina had worried - the young man was the kind who did too much thinking, too much talking. But Roza was in love, and insisted that there was no danger. One day, authorities came to their mother’s house, bearing the sad news that Roza had died in a car accident, together with her lover. Faulty brakes. A bridge.
Not long after, her mother had died too. Heart trouble.
No more going home after that. No home to go back to. No one to love, and only the intimate terrible knowledge of her own corruption as her sole - and constant - companion. Still, there was work; always work to do, new research, new publications, new awards. Galina was assigned to a better post, to teach at a university in Leningrad, then Moscow. Eventually, she was sent on a lecture circuit to East Berlin. It is a mark of her professional success and the faith her country has in her, that she was given permission to travel abroad. So many people lately try to desert the Motherland, given half a chance. Traitors, cowards. Not like her.
But the man who had died with Roza, he’d had friends. And, over the past several years, she has been talking with them. In secret. She knows how to keep a secret. The network is fragile as a spider’s web, but just like a spider’s web, it’s often farther-reaching than it seems.
And so, when she came to Berlin, a young man came to see her, just two days ago. She had never met him, but he knew her name. And he told her about an incredible, foolhardy plan that would - almost certainly - end in the death of everyone involved.
Or, if everything goes perfectly, it will give her another chance. A new beginning.
So here she is, waiting for a train. If this works - if, if - she will change her name, speak not a word of her past or of her profession. She will try to do something good in this life. Not that it will ever be enough to expunge the dark marks on her record. But perhaps it will offer a distraction from the endless nightmares.
If this works.
Some loose inspiration taken from https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/crashing-through-the-berlin-wall-in-a-train/85812/