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The screaming never leaves his head, echoing off the walls of his skull, driving vicious fingers like ice picks deep into the still-sane parts of his mind and clawing them out, one by one. He prickles into consciousness, pain rocketing down his arm as though someone is feeding live electricity through it, a burning, stinging, crackling pain that makes his whole body seize and jolt in the chair, arms bound by the links, head being encompassed by the brackets and electrodes that will wipe him again, ready for his next mission. This is what he is reduced to: pain, fear, and anger - boiling through him in a toxic mix that only makes him more deadly. The only outlet he has for it is his work.
The Winter Soldier has worked for well over fifty years, in and out of cryofreeze. He wakes slowly, the pain coming first - sharp, loud, sizzling through his entire body and making his irregular, too-slow heartbeat judder and skip confusedly in his chest. His blood is ice, and every movement snaps the crystals of frost from between the fibres of his muscles, the joints of his bones, in a way that the only way his brain (or what's left of it, after so many wipings and surgeries and the conscious and determined effort Hydra has put into subduing everything the Soldier was before becoming the Soldier) can interpret it is as more pain. Waking up from cryo is like being set alight from the inside; room temperature feels too hot on his frozen skin, his blood cracks and grates inside his veins, and his mind is dark and foggy but for the screaming red alarm of pain and terror blaring inside his skull.
Waking means wiping. Wiping means a mission. A mission means he is reminded, yet again, of what he is. A weapon, breathing and moving, but not living. He is a dead thing, an unconscious thing, with a vicious, violent history trailing behind him in streaks of blood like Marley's chains. It drips from his hands, crusts under his nails and between the plates of his arm; staining him the colour of the star on his deltoid, the colour who cannot and will not be human again. He is a thing, they remind him constantly; a weapon they use to make the world a better place. He doesn't question it. He doesn't have thoughts of his own - another thing they have wiped from him, with torture and humiliation - other than those of his mission, objectives and locations and the golden rule of Hydra: Complete all missions, at all costs.
Civilian deaths are the norm. Innocent blood spilt is not their concern. He is not supposed to care, either, so he doesn't. He just performs, sits still and screams whilst they pulverise his brain with more electricity, and inhales the frost of cryo before they turn him off like flicking a light switch.
Noticing his acclimatisation, they give him his orders. Nicholas J. Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Never why. Never any other details than the name, the location and a surveillance photograph. His memory is impeccable, near eidetic. His mental crosshairs zero in on that face, painting it with a glowing red bulls' eye, and he will not forget. Cannot forget.
He remembers nothing of Before. The earliest memory he has is of waking up in agony, too stiff with ice to move, to open his mouth to scream. It comes out as a tortured, muffled sound from behind his lips, and his eyelids are heavy and lazy as he tries to drag them open, tries to find out who it is that's burning him alive from the inside out like this. Eventually, he can move, can open his eyes and his mouth and register his surroundings in his cloudy, muddled brain - no clarity, never - and they immediately fixate on a small, bespectacled man with a thick accent and a smug smile, congratulating himself on his success. He tries to grab for him, but only succeeds in wrenching his shoulder; the metal shrieks and scrapes against the fragments of bone still left in his left arm. The agony is burning, too bright, too hot, searing like a trapped sun -
He cuts the memory away there, wrestling it efficiently back into the recesses of his mind. He doesn't remember, ever, for fear - always fear, his permanent state of being, fear and anger that swallows him into darkness and fills him from head to toe with black emptiness, pushing out everything else until he has shedded his humanity, sweated out mercy and pity and empathy like poisons, and he is left with what they want. A shell, an automaton to be commanded. He doesn't remember, he just follows orders and submits for wiping and is turned off like a good boy. Hydra has never tolerated weakness in any form; it is burned away from him by the injections they give him, which blaze through his veins, chasing away the ice and replacing it with fire. He screams, thrashes, but he is always bound by the arm and leg vices. He has no choice but to sit and endure; he has no choices in anything anymore.
Fury is a middle-aged black man with an eye patch and a vicious temper, from what Bucky learns watching his encounter with the NYPD. The Soldier cocks his head curiously, calculating, trying to fight away the blurs and smudges of recollection pushing at the boundaries of their constraints, the fog and mist cluttering and clouding his mind, and walks towards Fury's car, firing his attachment grenade and stepping aside, feeling the blast waves blow his ragged hair around his face, as the van flips and rolls, landing roof-down thirty feet down the road. His goggles - protection against the sun for his ice-blind eyes, gas mask huffing slightly with his breathing - detect nothing. In the floor (or rather, roof) of the van, there is a messy, squarish laser cut, burrowing down through the tarmac and earth into the sewers below.
He debates following, fires at a cop who has broken the cordon and approached, too close for comfort; a tiny red bloom appears in the front of his shirt, like a carnation buttonhole, and the Soldier puts his gun back in the holster at his hip. Fury is, for the moment, out of his reach. There will be a next time. The next time, he will tear the man apart with his hands if he has to. At all costs echoes in his head, and he barks in Russian to the Hydra agents to pick him up, surveying the road as the helicopter whirrs away, him hanging off the ladder as it is quickly retracted into the cab. Fifty feet, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred above even the tallest skyscrapers; he could fall even now and survive. Pick himself up, rotate his shoulders to reactivate his arm, and continue on his mission.
Fury would not. Fury is human, and so, Fury can die.
The bullets rip through the walls, piercing the S.H.I.E.L.D. director's body in quick succession. Shoulder, left lung, right kidney.
He sets off running, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, seconds before he hears a crash from inside, the sound of pursuit. His feet thud off of concrete floors, almost crashing through skylights as his full weight - armoured, bulky with muscle and hidden weaponry, and the pounds of metal attached to his left shoulder, plates whirring - lands on them with one stride of his powerful legs. The man pursuing him crashes through the window of the building behind him as he is about to make the leap off the roof; he hears the ring of the shield and barely has to expend any energy at all in spinning to catch it, ringing and trembling against the metal of his palm. He stares at the man who threw it, a blond of similar build to himself, an inconvenience, inconsequential collateral damage. Or he's about to be. At all costs.
The shield is circular bands of red, white and blue, emblazoned with a white star in the centre. The shield of Captain America, according to Hydra's records. Very untidy of the Captain to be leaving his toys where unsuspecting civilians could pick them up - pick them up, and find themselves faced with a Russian assassin who is more metal than flesh and bone, more demon than human. He smiles behind his mask. The Russians liked him to keep collateral damage to a minimum; Hydra don't care. He is a pitbull without a leash, able to attack anything he comes across standing in the way of his mission, or his escape. He calculates the height of the building, the drop, and smiles again.
The Soldier whips his arm back, hurling the shield at him. He skids back over the surface of the roof, almost to the edge. Next time he will throw harder. Faster. Next time he will test how well humans fall off the tops of New York buildings and get back on his feet, as he does. He makes the drop, curling himself up, cannonballing towards the sidewalk; straightens his legs slightly at the last minute, landing on his feet and setting straight off running. Throwing himself into the Hydra van, not having broken a sweat, breathing normal. He survived the fall. The shield-catching man would not.
The Soldier is not human, and is much harder to break.
S.H.I.E.L.D. really are incredibly sloppy with their agent training, he thinks as the van approaches the car in which Sitwell is being transported. New mission, he was told; eliminate Sitwell, now that Fury is dead. Protect Hydra. He lands on the roof of their car with the barest of efforts, and nobody inside seems to hear the thud of his heavy boots against its weak metal shell. His left hand gripping the car, his right holding a pistol - already cocked and loaded, in anticipation of attempts to fight back - he waits. He's tempted to shoot them anyway, three bullets through the roof of the car and into their soft, unprotected bodies, but his mission needs to be completed first. It's laughably easy. Punching his left arm through the rear window - shattering glass and grasping Sitwell by the collar, he flings him into the path of an oncoming lorry with the man's terrified shriek ringing in his ears. Always the screaming, constant and numbing -
Inside the car is pandemonium. He shoots through the roof, neutralising the witnesses to prevent S.H.I.E.L.D. from calling for backup; the woman throws herself into the front seat as a bullet rips through the headrest millimetres from where she had been sitting a split second ago. The car jerks to a halt and he is thrown into the air by his own momentum, rolling to his feet and slowing himself to a stop in a shower of sparks with his left hand. It gouges five perfect channels in the road surface, not even a scratch on the metal, and he stares up at them through their windscreen, infrared goggles firmly in place to protect his weakened eyes from the blaze of the sun.
Climbing slowly to his feet, he see sthe Hydra van shrieking and squealing on its tyres behind them, approaching fast. He is the rock, the van the hard place; they are trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. The Hydra van rear-ends their Chevrolet and the Soldier flips himself up onto the roof, windscreen shattered beneath the heel of his boot, and punches his hand through to rip the wheel out of the black guy's hands. He tosses it into the path of traffic; every other driver on the road is confused, car horns blaring as the woman fires at him and he jumps onto the hood of the van behind, riding it easily. Moments later, the S.H.I.E.L.D. car is crashed, flipped in a mess of sparks and mangled metal. The agents are all curled up together on the broken door, cushioned by Captain America's shield on the arm of the same blond man who'd caught him earlier.
He takes his little toy everywhere with him, clearly.
The van pulls to a halt, blocking the last lane of traffic. He collects his grenade launcher from the crew in the back, firing at the white man and the woman. The black guy had been lost further down the road, rolling over and over and no doubt sustaining gravel burns and at least a few cuts and scrapes; no concern of the Soldier's. He fires, watching the woman dive to one side and the blond brace himself against the shield; a poor choice, as the grenade sends him flying off the edge of the bridge and through the window of a bus, shield dropping somewhere along the way. Hydra agents fire behind him, endless streams of spit-out bullets, as he advances towards the edge, firing at the woman with one of their machine guns. The black man - the chauffeur - is of no importance, but the woman is clearly a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, and therefore a target.
She fires at him from the ground, grazing his vest, and he drops behind the wall, temper flaring. Fear and anger, always his most potent motivators, course through him, blood rushing in his ears at a roar and his fists clench. He drags off his goggles and pauses for a split second to deliberate. Woman first. Then the blond man. She can run; the guy is trapped like a rat in a cage in the overturned bus, a sitting duck.
He springs up and opens fire; spits commands at the others in Russian, and leaps over the bridge, crashing to his feet on the buckled roof of a car. His sights are locked on her, retreating between lines of parked cars. He barely notices the sparks and patter of rapid-fire bullets through metal behind him as he pursues the woman, blowing police cars away with fired grenades. Hearing her voice from behind a large 4x4, he crouches to roll another explosive beneath the carriage, waiting for the explosion and her inevitable flight - or death. Out of nowhere, she flies at him into his back, garrotte wire stretched between her hands; when he casts her off in irritation, she lands heavily against on a car before flinging a tiny disc at him which attaches itself to his arm and partially disables it in a searing crackle of electricity.
His temper ramps up from mildly annoyed to pissed now, and he rips it off. She remains his main target, and although she is certainly skilled, she's just as human as Fury was. And about to be just as dead.
He catches her in the shoulder with a bullet and she flails to the ground, clutching her wound. Panic is lighting her eyes now, and he's got her all but cornered in her neat little hiding place. Cocks his rifle, narrows his eyes through the sight - and turns to block Captain America's shield, coming at him with all the force of the blond guy behind it. He kicks him away, fires - the bullets rattle harmlessly off the shield - he rolls off the car and yanks his machine gun off his back, fires - it's smacked out of his hands by the man coming at him again - he pulls out two pistols and fires again.
He wrestles the shield off the blond easily, hurls it at him hard enough that it buries itself halfway into the reinforced back doors of a van inches away from his head. Pulls out a knife instead; blocks parry after parry, slashing at him, tossing the knife to his other hand when the blond has him blocked again. The guy panics; spurred by manic energy, he manages to kick the Soldier into the side of the van, and they struggle again until the Soldier grabs him by the neck and throws him over the hood of a car, arm whirring. He jumps down off its roof hard enough to leave a fist-deep crater in the road where the other man's head had been; punches him with the arm, another knife in his hand, pressing the human against the van as he slams it towards his face with another burst of power from the Weapon. It carves a line in the metal as he chases the blond's head across the stretch of gunmetal grey, until he's caught - arm smashed with the shield, then his jaw - caught again by the mask, thrown over the blond's shoulder as the mask is wrenched aside -
He turns. The man's face pales, jaw dropping. "Bucky?"
The Soldier's fraying temper snaps. "Who the hell is Bucky?" he growls, and tries to fire.
The chauffeur from the S.H.I.E.L.D. Chevy, now with an enormous pair of mechanical wings sprouting from a pack on his back, swoops over his shoulder and full-body-slams the blond out of the way. The Soldier climbs to his feet, reaches for his gun again, and fires, ducking the grenade whistling towards his head from his own launcher in the hands of the woman target. Smoke, thick and black, billows around him as he vanishes.
They're furious with him. Sitwell neutralised, thanks to a passing thirty-eight-tonner; but the two men and the woman are all still running free. He's sat in the dingy lab, the artificial light harsh on his tired eyes, lost in the visualisations of the man on the bridge and his "Bucky?" Who the hell is Bucky, he repeats in his head, twitching at the occasional sharp burn of the laser mending the jagged, torn inner wires of his arm where they had been damaged by the woman's circular pulse bomb.
Out of thin air, a memory - blurred and fuzzy, fogged by time and the struggling of his mind to suppress it - flashes into play mode: the doctor, the little fat one with the glasses and the thick Swiss accent, saying, "Sergeant Barnes..." He flinches, tossing his head to the side, trying to shake it off. Memories are caustic, roil in his stomach, make his chest tight and his heart pound and his head - Christ, his head aches like it's about to burst. He doesn't have the mental capacity for memories any more; this has never happened before, but it can only mean one thing is coming - being strapped to the chair for another course of wiping. Fear cords his muscles, tensing his entire body; the orderlies, intent on their repairs of his arm, don't notice. He glances frantically around the lab, eyes pleading. Please, he whispers in his head to anyone who will listen, please, shut it off -
A train. Rocketing through the Alps - flashes of the blond man from the bridge in a strange uniform, hand outstretched - yelling Bucky, no! as his own scream echoes in his ears, louder and louder and louder until it's deafening, and he wants to press his hands to his ears to shut it out, claw at his brain with his metal hand to gouge out that endless hideous sound reverberating around his skull - the sky and the mountains falling away from him as the ground, cold and rocky and snow-covered, stained red with his blood, comes up to meet him - men in uniform standing over him, his mangled left arm, trails of blood in the snow - so much blood, always all over him, coating him, dripping from him, bathed in it, drowned in it - the doctor's voice, needles, the white-hot, searing torture of the saw biting through the bones, no anaesthetic, nothing but his own screams in his head, endless, ear-splitting, agonising, too loud, please, please, please God, shut it off - please -
He chokes, panic rising. His body is vibrating, the orderlies beginning to grow wary - he can't hear anything but that scream, can't see anything but the replay of his own memories, memories he has suppressed and locked away in the deepest dungeon cellars of his muddied mind; but they swirl to the top, jagged and sharp, digging their way into his brain, forcing him to watch one after the other, snatches of visuals with so much pain and so much screaming and so, so much blood, he's choking on it, he's dying - the metal fist grasping one of the doctors by the neck, snapping his spine like a toothpick, his first kill as the Soldier, the bespectacled doctor smiling at him - smiling at him for being a murderer, a demon - his first time in cryo -
He fractures apart. Swinging wildly with his metal arm at the man trying to operate on him, sending him flying into the far corner against the grubby tiled walls, every other man in the room stepping away from him where he's breathing hard, shaking, a cornered animal - fight or flight - at all costs - his mind is darkening again, numbing, he tries to fight away the black clouds but all it reveals is blinding panic, alarms blaring louder and louder, so much noise, so many piercing, screaming noises deafening him, is this what dying again feels like, please, shut it off, help me - he has never pleaded for them to help him before, his poisoners, his torturers, the people who have made him into this soulless machine, this murder weapon -
Gun sights fix on him. He hears the click of rifles being loaded under the wailing in his head, his skull too small to contain his brain, about to burst like an overripe fruit - please, anything, shut it off -
The director comes in. The gunmen stand down. He is not even aware. His head is splitting open, he's sure of it, he's screaming, he's lost on that bridge, staring at nothing, deaf to every word coming out of the director's mouth - thinking about the man, the - the train man, the bridge man, the Bucky man reaching out his hand, distraught as the rib of metal gives way and he - not yet the Soldier, but who(who before that, who, what)ever - plunges with that scream, that scream, to the ground hundreds of feet below -
A fist connecting with his cheek makes his brain rattle, the memory cutting out as though the hand had hit stop. He's so honestly grateful for that, the end of his intense, disorienting pain and remembrance, he looks up at the director's face - and it starts playing again, just the blond man's face, crystal clear, his confused, desperate voice repeating for the millionth time, Bucky?
"The man on the bridge..."
Bucky?
"Who was he?"
"You met him earlier this week, on another assignment," the director informs him, crouched to stare him in the face. His pale, watery eyes are assessing, cold in his cruel, crinkled face. The Soldier feels fear again. Not of another punch - pain is no longer a punishment, he will never fear physical hurt again - but of the memories coming back. Seeing him again, hearing everything echo in his mind, feeling the gut-deep tearing of those memories filling his stomach with razor blades, boiling with nausea. His body gives sympathetic twitches and he flinches, the searing agony of surgery crackling in the phantom nerves of his left arm.
"I knew him..."
Bucky? the man murmurs again, the Soldier remembers his face, the expression in his eyes - like seeing a ghost.
"Your work," the director says, gaze fixed on his face, "has been a gift to mankind. You shaped the century. And I need you to do it one more time." The Soldier stares at him, silent. "Society's at a tipping point between order and chaos. And tomorrow morning, we're gonna give it a push."
Screaming - bodies of children, maimed, on the floor, mothers arched over them, trying to protect them from his bullets, his knives - fires, explosions, showers of sparks - screaming - screaming - his fault. All of it - on the orders of Hydra. Are they the order or the chaos, he wonders, doubt beginning to seep into the swirling eddies of his consciousness, staring into the director's eyes like maelstroms. His eyes are chaos. The Soldier is Hydra's instrument of chaos. Does that make him a murderer or a saviour?
"But, if you don't do your part, I can't do mine. And Hydra can't give the world the freedom it deserves."
He is afraid. Is there freedom in living life in fear - in having everything stripped away from him, leaving the bones and the wires behind - is there freedom in his existence now, because he is so controlled?
"But I knew him," the Soldier repeats, unsure. He thinks - he thinks he remembers from Before - a blond man, the blond man, the man from the bridge - a fire at Hydra's alpine facility - the train from Before - falling, screaming - and the blond man, holding out his hand and calling him Bucky.
Who the hell is Bucky?
He's never been so at war with himself. He - for the first time - wishes they would wipe him; allow him to forget this, all this doubt and uncertainty and the unfamiliar, nagging desire to know, to get answers instead of orders, to forget the need to remember more and more until his mind clears and he can piece everything, all the fractured shards of the lives Hydra chiselled out of his body with lasers and needle points and electricity, together. He needs those answers. He needs to know, for the first time, why he is doing this. Why the man from the bridge is such a threat to them, when - when all he had been doing when the Soldier found him was defending himself against a calculated attack from a recognisable enemy. Hydra's designated, ordered attack hound. The Soldier had almost killed him. Didn't Hydra say that deaths in self-defence or to facilitate an escape were permitted? Encouraged, even? Complete all missions, at all costs. Then why is this man different - why has the Soldier's focus got to shift solely onto him, to eradicate an enemy he knew, he remembers, as something other than an enemy? As - almost as a friend?
The director sighs, stands up. Disappointment in his eyes. "Prep him."
"He's been out of cryofreeze too long -" one of the orderlies argues, concern etched in his voice. Not for the Soldier, his expendable body. Concern for Hydra's investment, concerned that something will go wrong and they will lose control of him entirely, the way they have taken control of himself away from him. He will drift, he will kill, and he will be truly empty, a black hole of destruction and burning fury and utter self-loathing. Sergeant Barnes, the scientist says in his memory; flashes of a boy with a proud jaw and a cocky smile and a neat American army uniform and a scared, fragile little heart in a chalk-stick ribcage - a Sergeant James 'Bucky' Barnes - the Soldier remembers. Who the hell is Bucky?
He is. He is Bucky Barnes; or, he was, until something terrible happened to him -
"Then wipe him and start over."
The Soldier is forced into the back seat, for a split second. Bucky's jaw clenches, his eyes burn with defiance, he pushes against their hands as they shove him backwards on the chair. But then his legs hit the plastic and metal, the arm locks are snapping around his wrists, and the full knowledge washes back over him of what is about to happen. His heart jackrabbits in his chest; he will be wiped - Bucky will be forced back into his tiny, frozen cell in the back of the Soldier's mind, bound and gagged and furious - the Soldier will take over, will go out and murder countless people, will murder Captain America - Steve Rogers - the man on the bridge. Fear constricts his fluttering heart, squeezing its iron fist around the erratic muscle, ribs cutting into his lungs, shrinking around them, binding him breathless and frantic inside the hard shell of the Soldier's body - already retreating, already being forced, hollering, back into his prison cell - the Soldier wrestles control back, and he grits his teeth, mouth opening wide in a snarl as they force the bite plate between his jaws. His eyes still burn, glittering with hatred, as the orderlies beat a hasty retreat and the chair begins to activate.
His demeanour changes the moment the bicep locks close over his limbs. His eyes blaze, and then open wide in terror as the chair tilts back and the arms of the wiping gear lower around his temples and clamp to the sides of his head. He is immobilised, awake and horrifically, painfully aware as the torture of the electrical pulses begins, and so do the screams.
"You're my mission - you're - my - mission -!"
Captain America lies beneath him, face bloody and swollen, lip split, eyes barely able to stay open. They're bright, gleaming blue as they look up at the Soldier, gentle and accepting. He manages to force words out of his bruised mouth - words the Soldier is not expecting - would never have dreamed he would say, to be able to expect them - "Then finish it."
He's gazing at the Soldier gently, not the way any dying man the Soldier has ever seen before has looked at him, and he murmurs, "Because I'm with you to the end of the line."
Those words spark something. A spark that quickly grows, from a flame to a fire to a blaze, razing everything in the Soldier's head to ash, shattering the ice around everything Hydra has kept carefully frozen away, things that pour into his consciousness and make his head spin and his body freeze, paralysed in his moment of realisation. A rush of split-second images like a flood, drowning him in implications and guilt, such enormous fucking guilt, so many people dead because of him, so long he's been a murderer, a killer -
The boys in the church, himself and Steve Rogers, in white shirts and red ties. The murdered little boy - James Buchanan Barnes - whispering to the ghost that "S'you an' me. 'Til the end of the line" in his treble voice, eight years old and acting brave at church. God was watching him then; has He been watching him since? Has He been a witness, ireful and disgusted, as the blood drips from James Barnes' hands, and he rubs his hands over his face and daubs himself in red smears like the mark of Cain? He has killed so many people, he will never be able to scrub the blood away from beneath his fingernails, from the creases in his palms, from the insides of his body where every murder makes its mark - his devil's mark, his demon's scars, his empty, soulless shell rattling with human bones and metal nerves, with the broken pieces of a scared, desperate little boy.
He will never be forgiven. It's almost a relief to consider; that he knows where he is going, when his bones finally grind down to dust inside his body and his eyes close at last. His gaze refocuses on Steve's face, the gentle, fragile eyes, and he realises like a bolt from the blue that he has broken James Barnes' promise from years ago: that it will be Bucky and Steve, Barnes and Rogers, 'til the end of the line. Who the hell is Bucky?
Steve is staring back at him, and he can see the Captain's angel's wings in dust and shattered glass spreading out beneath him. The halo of his golden-blond hair, matted in places with blood and dirt; Steve Rogers will never have to go where he will. He is too good for this, too pure and innocent to deserve the eternal torment to which James Buchanan Barnes has condemned himself. Never in a million lifetimes and more. Lucifer is already crawling out of his pit, laughing, always laughing, repeating James' name - First Holy Communion, panicking, the devil coming for him out of the aisle with his demon's face and wicked, dancing black eyes, Bucky's name echoing around every wall and stained glass window in the building until it deafens - he is weak, and he is damned, and he is going to leave Steve again when the time comes.
The glass beneath Steve finally gives way, and James Barnes - still paralysed with horror - watches him fall thousands of feet down into the bay of Brooklyn, sinking deep under the water.
He stumbles out of the river, metal hand hooked around Steve's shield strap, and drags the impossibly heavy limp body of Captain America out of the bay. He's killed so many people, in the name of chaos; murdered so many, beginning with the child Bucky Barnes and ending with Steve Rogers. He pulls the body out of the water and lays it down on the bank, pretending not to see the slight rise and fall of Steve's chest.
His penance can maybe, finally, begin.