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So since the Winter Soldier was assigned to training the Black Widowlings in the Red Room, we know he taught these twenty-eight twelve-year-old aspiring murderesses. But he also basically baby-sat twenty-eight twelve-year-old girls and the possibilities for what happened are beautiful.
Because young girls want to know everything. About everything. So they’ll be asking him all sorts of questions. They’ll want to know what his name is (“No, Mister Asset; your real name.”), and they want the story behind the metal arm and also can they paint his nails even though he doesn’t really have nails on the left arm and why is his hair so long and they all think it makes him look handsome and does he ever put it in a ponytail or a bun and can they maybe braid it later (“Please Mister Asset, please?”) and has he ever worn makeup and he would look so pretty with it he should probably try; and has he ever killed someone with just one finger on the metal hand and how did he do it and can he teach them how and someday could Hydra give me an arm like yours, Mister Asset? And also have you ever had a girlfriend?
He never physically disciplines any of the girls. And he doesn’t know why not, except there’s some small part of him that won’t take someone who will never see him coming and can’t hit back and then hurt them, unless he’s under orders to do it. And nobody ever said anything about hurting these girls, so he doesn’t.
He’s their hero within a few days because he’s the nicest instructor they’ve ever had. He’s never hurt any of them on purpose, he isn’t insulting, and he’s incredibly tactically smart. He doesn’t tell them to shut up, and he doesn’t yell at them or hit them for mistakes, and he’ll sit still for them and let him braid his hair, and he doesn’t have these “I’m too manly to do that” notions that make him reject their nail polish or their mid-grade attempts at makeup. They know something’s up with him being sort of controlled; but also they can see past the control into what was James Buchanan Barnes; and they personally like him. His handler is generally rude and also ignores them; the other instructors have been mean or cruel. But the Asset just goes with what’s happening and doesn’t hurt them; and in the mess of their lives, that makes him one of the best people they’ve known in years.
He starts getting attached to them (because twelve-year-old girls, man, they grow on you). He doesn’t really take care of them because they don’t need that; they’re tough. But he’s oddly protective and orders them to eat well and personally corrects all the weaknesses in their fighting. He /wants/ to see them succeed. Except he doesn’t know how to identify that. The Asset does not “want” anything. He lives with a confusion in the back of his shattered brain, trying to sort out why he smiles behind his muzzle when one of them does something well and trying to find out why he gets the weird nervous feeling in his chest when one isn’t doing things so well. Plus, he likes them, and he can’t figure out why that is either. He tries to make a list: they smile at him, the metal arm doesn’t bother them, they do hair and makeup on him—and he realizes it’s all pleasing to him. And that’s new. The Asset has no pleasure, has never had any pleasure. Except now he does. And he’s not sure if he should let himself like it or not.
One of the girls’ favorite pastimes is to try on his armor and holsters. They look forward to growing enough to get full-sized gear of their own, even though they know it won’t be quite as big as his because he’s larger than they’ll ever get. All of them have firmly decided that they want to get a left hand glove like his.
One of the girls tries on the glove he has, because all of them try it and compare how big his hands are to theirs; but while the glove is off she starts absentmindedly tracing the palm of his metal hand. It’s the first touch he’s had in years that doesn’t hurt and doesn’t have a direct purpose. So he sits there confusedly letting her fingers wander over the metal. She’s not even being particularly nice; it’s just a distracted touch that isn’t pain, and he has no idea whatsoever how to deal with that. He doesn’t know if he should let it feel nice or not. Even the touches to get his nails painted or makeup on had cosmetic reasons. This has none, except maybe she’s just curious about a hand that’s different than hers. Yes, that’s it. She must be curious. Like the scientists, touching the parts of him that were different. Except for this little girl doesn’t have the intense scrutiny, or the prodding fingers, or the scientific knowledge and authority to study him. She’s just there, running small, warm fingers over his cold, metal palm and turning his world upside down.
The day after the following day, she’s killed in a training incident. He doesn’t understand why he feels so heavy and slow after that.
He sleeps sitting up on a chair in the girls’ barracks. The Hydra officers think his emotional bond with the girls is hilarious, so they leave him there on a folding chair inside their doorway. What would he do to them? He likes them too much to hurt any of them, and he barely does anything without orders.
Which is why he hears it on the night one of them has a nightmare. It starts out quietly, a disturbance in her breathing, a minuscule hitch in each inhale. But it turns into little whimpers, the kind that are unmistakably human and would give her away to an enemy. He can’t let that happen. All the rest of the dormitory is awake and silently listening. So he gets up to take care of it.
She wakes at the sound of his footsteps—he let them be heard, and where did that come from?—and she looks up fearfully, sliding from sleeping to waking.
He puts a finger to his lips. She nods.
He turns, heading back to the chair where he’s supposed to sit.
But something is still there in him, and as hard as he tries to analyze and logic it, he doesn’t know where the urge to say this is coming from. It’s just there, like he’s heard it in this context or maybe he’s said it before.
He steps back up to her. Brushes the little blonde’s hair off her forehead. Whispers, “It’s okay. Shh. Go back to sleep.”
She smiles up at him and nestles back down in the covers, calls him Papa, closes her eyes.
A redheaded one makes eye contact and grins impishly. “Papa Asset,” she calls him, and the rest of the dormitory stifles giggles and nods. He’s Papa Asset to all of them now.
He nods in acknowledgement and sits back down where he belongs. Papa makes sense as a name. It’s a term for the male in charge of a group. He thinks it might be affectionate, but he guesses that’s okay to accept because they like him.
He doesn’t know why, at the end of it, the name Steve is in his head. It just sits there quietly, unobtrusive, and jostles him in subtle but disturbing ways. There are five Steves he can think of (two Hydra officers, a Hydra agent, one old handler named Steve Ivan, and Steve Sinkevich who he killed on his previous mission); but the name bumping around in his mind doesn’t match up with any of them even though it’s the same name they all have. He wonders if it’s just is mind being weird on him. He figures it must be. He doesn’t let himself consider that he might be starting to remember something from before a previous wipe. Because every time that happens, they wipe him again; and he doesn’t want that to happen. He wonders how long he can keep it a secret this time if he starts remembering again.
All these girls. He doesn’t want to forget them.
One of the girls keeps a list of her family on the wall in chalk: mother, father, siblings, aunt and uncles, cousins, second cousin. She says a prayer for each of them before the lights go out and the girls are handcuffed to their beds for the night. The morning after the nightmare, Papa Asset is added to her list.
The girls make him a flower crown once summer arrives and they have outdoor training. He wears it, and it looks so out of place on him: a crown of white flowers on the head of a muzzled man who’s constrained in black leather from head to toe. Bound and leashed, but wearing a circlet of innocence and love.
His handler’s been getting pretty sick of the connection between him and the girls—sure, it was cute for a while, but it’s getting annoying. He tears the flower crown from the Asset’s head, calls him an idiot, spits on him, backhands him across the face. In under a minute, the handler is killed by a swarm of furious Widowlings whose Papa he just hurt.
The Asset is given a new handler within the week. He heard about what happened to the last handler, and even if he hadn’t had orders not to harm the Asset where the girls would know about it, one look at his pack of tiny avenging angels and he knows not to lay a hand on Papa Asset. So instead, he hauls the Soldier somewhere private to beat him and orders him to be quiet so the girls won’t hear his screams.
This handler is psychologically crueler than the last one. He notices the deep bond between the Asset and his girls, and he finds a way to torture the Asset with it. He orders the Asset to beat one that’s slacking in her training. The Asset doesn’t understand why both he and his victim are crying by the end of it.
The girls know that something’s going on because it’s not in his character to hurt any of them. They pull him aside later on. Firmly, he’s told that what he did is not okay—we don’t hit people to punish them—but they know something’s up with him and the handler and having to follow orders. The girl he covered in bruises comes up to him, kisses his muzzle-covered cheek, and says, “I forgive you.”
The Asset’s handlers are torturing him by not feeding him properly—whatever their reasoning; they’re probably being cruel just because they can. The girls figure it out when they see how his uniform buckles are looser than they were a couple of days ago. They confront him; he insists he’s not hungry and his stomach growls to betray him.
The girls try to sneak food to Papa Asset for the night. They’re caught and beaten for it. All of them scowl darkly and get the looks of small assassins going to war.
The girls go on a hunger strike. They themselves are the only things of Hydra they can damage, so they start starving themselves in protest. In a show of solidarity with Papa Asset, they cut off their left shirtsleeves and wear their black tank tops over their regular shirts. They start doing prison tattoos and marking stars into their left shoulders that match his.
Hydra cracks. They start feeding the Asset properly and the girls start eating again too. All of them are getting better food than before, and their forms fill out into healthiness. Papa Asset smiles behind his muzzle and teaches the girls to repair their own gear by showing them how to sew their left shirtsleeves back on.
The Hydra officials show back up at exactly the wrong time: Papa Asset is getting makeup applied and they want to see him. The girls yank the braids out and he wipes off the lip gloss, but it’s too late and he can’t get the eye shadow off; he just has to wear it out there and see how it goes.
The handler is about ready to slap him for showing up in front of his senior officers looking like that. How could he, after everything he’s been put through to become the perfect Asset, just roll over and be a makeup model for a bunch of girls who are supposed to be training?
But the officers love it.
They think the eyeshadow is a brilliant idea. It works like the sunblock stuff football players wear and that means he can see better in the bright sunlight. It’s also a neat psychological trick: he looks less human, more fearsome, more like a vacant skull, more like a monster. It’s a beautiful idea. They congratulate the handler for thinking of it. He bows and takes the praise. The girls around the corner stay silent.
Dear reader, if none of this has made you sad yet, just think of this:
Natasha, as a small child, tries on his muzzle and asks him confusedly why he has it. “You don’t need this.”
Now imagine Natasha, years later, touching his muzzle as he’s trying to break out of Hydra’s programming and saying once again, “You don’t need this.”
Bucky looks confused. “I’ve heard that before.”
Natasha nods and rolls her left sleeve up over her shoulder, revealing the five-pointed star marked into her skin. “I was the one who said it.”
And that’s when Bucky starts remembering.
The Red Room. The girls. The name "Papa Asset." The eyeshadow, the flower crown, the hair braiding, the hunger strike.
Bucky sits back and stares at the ceiling for a few hours, startled and vaguely feeling happy for the first time in years.
He remembers it.