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He has no name. He has no past. He has no self. He has only obedience to his masters.
The words whispered through his headset are his whole world. He has killed what seems to be a thousand men in a hundred countries, and he is sure he will kill more.
Sometimes he has compunctions. His handlers shortly remind him of his conditioning. Then all hesitation goes away.
He is not a man. Not anymore. His heart is ice.
He is a soldier -- the Winter Soldier.
The arms race has begun again. Augmented humans have emerged en masse, and his goals are to eliminate those who step too far outside their bounds. Those who do not serve HYDRA's interests must be eliminated. All will obey in the end.
Something writhes inside his skull, the feeble cry of a feeble man, and he grits his teeth against it. Distractions are not to be tolerated. As he runs, he mutters under his breath the mantra his handlers have taught him, the one that beats against his skull when he descends into and wakes from cryosleep:
"Hail HYDRA."
Something bothers him about his latest adversary. This itching feeling is one he's experienced once before --
(Howard's white face, Maria screaming beside him -- a white that soon turned to red, screams that turned to silence, a mission executed well -- and all along, the untermensch screaming inside his skull, No, no, I can't, oh God, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry --)
-- but that experience grants him the cold calm of knowing it will soon be over. Still, it irritates his instincts as an operative. It's a weakness and a liability to not be able to place where he's seen a foe before...
Something in his conditioning is blocking him from understanding what the man is shouting at him. He surges forth, all Aryan strength and imminent victory, and finds himself unexpectedly in a clinch; his adversary can keep up with his own strength? Alarming. Another super-soldier? He sets his jaw and heaves, feeling the man give ground. The honed instincts of an assassin tell him that this man doesn't want to fight; he is weak, polluted by some degenerate ideology of mercy, and that is why the Winter Soldier will be victorious. A true warrior knows nothing of pity.
For a degenerate, he's very strong. The Winter Soldier grinds his teeth as the man pushes back, driven by a second wind of something he cannot read. Desperation? But not to win, precisely. Some great agony is wrenching at this man, not of the flesh -- regrettably -- but of his weak and inferior soul... A weak and inferior soul that is putting up a good fight against the mechanical, cold-steel mercilessness of HYDRA's mightiest weapon. It is bewildering. Driven by the urge to overcome (not the man screaming beneath his conditioning, never the screaming), his spark of consciousness struggles to override the learned incomprehension of his training, to seek out whatever weakness might be revealed by the words his adversary keeps gasping out between great gulps of air -- what could possibly be worth wasting precious breaths in this clash of Hercules and Antaeus, two half-human demigods vying for victory, in which weakness is synonymous with death? He listens intently as they struggle, taking in every aspect of the situation: the man's reddening blue eyes, the tears that roll down into a brown beard, the brow and mouth and jawline that scrape against the ice that covers his mind, the untermensch inside his head screaming a single name as his adversary cries out a name of his own --
"Steve! Steve, my God, why don't you recognize me?"