Chapter Text
Winter is tightening its grasp on the mountains, and each day begins with a subtle frost on the ground. Novi Grad shimmers in gray and silver and oxidized green, visible in windows on the southeast facing side.
The castle is a living thing. People are endlessly moving through its halls, cleaning dust, prepping meals, making orders on corded landlines tethered to antique desks. The cook is from Vietnam and speaks French and English. The house manager (because a single maid won't suffice, nor even a little army of them, they need a squad leader and an administrative head) is a refugee from Chad with a family in the city, all of them naturalized years ago. Looking at the staff feels like looking at a curated collection.
It doesn’t take long for the Asset to realize it has been stolen. People around it are altogether too considerate; they make the rookie mistake of treating it like a real person. The Asset finds this extremely unprofessional, but peacetime people are rarely put into contact with it - it's... oddly refreshing. Even the militia men, who are appropriately wary even if they know nothing about it, are ready with smiles and laughs and threats to offer it liquor.
And Helmut Zemo is the worst of them, throwing it smiles over an evening drink, inviting it to share meals in a common room, furnishing its storage room with a bed.
No one has mentioned cryo-stasis at all.
The door is not even locked. While a lock wouldn’t stop the Asset's metal fist, it would leave a tacit order to stay inside, which the Asset would have obeyed. They are practically begging for a disaster. What will happen when its operations become unstable?
The Maximoffs live at the opposite end of the castle from where it is stored, even though it walks the halls freely and shadows some of the prominent members of the household. It is not surprised that its skulking brings Wanda Maximoff's voice within its augmented hearing range. She is saying,
"I cannot do it."
and she is saying,
"He's one of us, you know. He was not born here, but he was made, like we were."
And soon, there will be her brother's voice, Pietro's voice, but instead, the Asset hears the voice of crisping parchment, curling up with wooly clouds of smoke, and it says,
"I suspected you would say no."
and it is saying,
"I had to ask you. Forgive me."
And she is crying.
"Don't you ever take a break from spying?" Says Pietro, at its left elbow.
It reflexively swats at him, but lethal intents have no effect when the young man can just flicker out of the way.
"You're not even being paid." The man quips after reappearing.
As ever, the Asset doesn't dignify Pietro with a response.
Wanda exits the library, looking flustered and wiping her sleeve across her eyes. "Don't bother him, Pietro."
"He needs bothering. He's like a sleepwalker." Pietro complains.
Wanda offers it a watery, apologetic smile. She is very strange. Always, she is tracking it as it moves, but never looking on in fear. If anything, she seems ashamed.
"You can go in. If you were waiting."
"I wasn't." It feels compelled to say.
It looks at the open door, heavy wood made a long time ago. Warm airs flow from the library, and it follows the gravitational pull of the room, the familiarity of it, walking. Before it came to the castle, it had been in this library - it's sure of it.
"Come in, dear one."
The Asset freezes up like a deer, mid-stride into the threshold. Its eyes flick toward a large desk central to the space. Helmut Zemo is seated there, but there's disturbed throw blankets on a little couch and a stuffed chair near the fireplace. The Sokovians had some of their talk there, if not all of it. Now the Baron is pouring - no, refreshing - a drink from a bottle of brown liquor he keeps tucked in a drawer in his desk.
"Would you like some?"
As always, it does not answer, but the baron has energy almost identical to a handler, so its face simulates something of an apologetic discomfort.
"Not to worry." Baron Zemo says, nursing the glass like a treasured thing. "Please come in and sit down. It's a wonder how you never rest."
"I am mission-ready." It answers stiffly.
The Baron quietly regards the Asset, letting the silence widen, like a slowly opening mouth. A crocodile, buried in the brown river of its motherland. The Asset can't make itself look away from Zemo's eyes. They remind it of earth, liquor, dried blood on clean white things.
"I know." The man says finally. "I just wanted to see if you could." Perhaps he is having a conversation with himself; it would not be the first time someone did so with the Asset as a sounding board.
Like a judgement, the man says, "You don't know how to rest, do you?"
The Asset hates him. Why must people engage with it like it is a person? Like it's a doll for them to play house with? It was made to kill. To infil. To destabilize. Let it do that. Give it orders to obey. Follow the rules.
There is no self-delusion here. Either the Baron's household, and the Baron, will learn how to use the Asset, or they won't take it seriously until one of them is dead. HYDRA will simply steal it back. If they don't learn their place in this arrangement, it is a matter of time.
"You are thinking about killing someone." Helmut Zemo says, with something odd and fond in his voice.
The Asset finds itself unafraid of the repercussions. Let Helmut Zemo think it mutinous. Then what?
"Are you expecting me to punish you for thinking?"
"Do you have a mission for me?" It says instead, and feels the tone in its voice turn contemptuous.
"... Beautiful." The Baron says, like he's watching something sumptuous and expensive at the theater. The tone throws warm waves rolling up and down its body, and it hates it, how the body is filling with useless trash that bloats the mind and slows the brain.
It glares, which is a failure in and of itself, but it manages not to say what it thinks, which is that this slight-figured gentleman is probably going to be dead within a month because of his own hubris.
The Baron stands up suddenly. "Attend." He says, walking to the fire. He sets down his glass at the little lacquer table with a clink, and the Asset is right behind him at attention, unable to resist its own response to an order. "Good." The man says, clipped. "Sit here, at one end of the loveseat. Now put up your legs. Leave off your boots."
The Asset follows each instruction, even though its discomfort increases with each decrease in formality. Something niggles. This, it thinks, will take the evening to a bad place, a place that sends it out of its head to somewhere else.
But the Baron only looks on expectantly, and then takes up a limp throw blanket and puts it over the Asset's legs, following suit with another thicker one for the chest and the shoulders. He shows less than nothing when his fingertips brush the metal arm. There's no fear. There might even be something like hunger.
The Asset frowns at him and waits for... whatever is supposed to happen now.
Zemo settles himself into the adjacent chair with his glass. Sips and looks on in ponderous thought. "You've been here several days."
"Six." It says. "Sir."
"Six. I believe someone told you to lay down in your room. Do you recall what you did?"
"I laid down."
The Baron smiles, amused. "Indeed. On the floor."
"I was not told to lie down in bed." It says, measuring its tone and still finding itself short-tempered.
"That is either an observation of your own boundaries for comfort, or an intentional misunderstanding of an order, and both are quite pleasing to me." The Baron lifts a hand. "But that is not the point. Do you know what the point is?"
"No, sir." It braces slightly. Not-knowing is punishable.
"The point is that you have yet to sleep. You rest, I suppose, if one feels generous enough to call it that. But you have not slept."
"There is no need to sleep..." It knows this is a lie, but the bigger issue is that there is no cryo container in the castle, and it does not want to be the one to bring up cryostasis. It cannot fathom how so many days have passed without mention of it... It thought by now, the Baron could surely have sourced one, but then, perhaps this is the culmination of his efforts? He could not obtain proper storage and wants to use rudimentary biology to 'rest' the Asset?
"Even you do not believe that, dear one. You need time with your eyes closed. You need to learn how to use a bed."
"I can use a bed." It says, a sliver of indignation finding its way into the voice.
The Baron crinkles his face warmly in a smirk.
"Oh?"
"Sure." It mumbles, feeling a slow sleepy warm grow all over under the blankets. Then, suddenly self-conscious, it looks away. The deviations are starting, and it does not like the loss of control.
"You don't have to sleep in a bed, but I do require that you sleep. Do you need me to teach you? I understand they may have rendered you unconscious often enough, but that's not sleep, is it?"
"I don't know." It answers warily.
"In the end it matters very little. The point is, you need to learn how to maintain yourself. In their own way, your slavers took great care of you, saw to every need they deemed... useful." Zemo thins his eyes. "But I have oft been accused of having standards, so I'm afraid you will have to work on a new skillset."
"Maintaining myself." The Asset supplies obediently, trying to ignore the itchy feeling of heat all over and the way its eyes feel dry and its skin dull and a little prickly, as if the nerves are confused.
"Precisely. Which is why we are going to stay just like this until you go to sleep."
What.
"What?"
"Mm?"
"This is-" The Asset pauses, unsure how to go about criticizing a handler, even a thieving one.
"Yes?" The Baron leans in a little, hungry. The Asset sees a flash of crocodile in him again.
"Stupid." It blurts.
The Baron looks stunned, then he starts giggling.
"We'll see." He says through a little teared up laughter, softened by manners. "The body has a way of taking executive action when it needs to. Now... Lay your head back on the arm of the loveseat. Focus on comfort. If something hurts, shift your body until it's corrected... Good.
"I see that look. No need to be juvenile. Now close your eyes and gently roll them up into your lids. Rest them in that upward position if you can, but don't worry terribly about it. Pay attention to how it feels."
The Baron continues to fill the air with his strange nonsense commands. The Asset tries hard to obey them, but they are so pointless and dull, and it finds so much empty space between the words, not enough to hold on to its attention. It wonders vaguely if this is some kind of trick. The Baron must love his own voice. He is always finding ways to talk. Who does that? The Asset notes its eyes have fallen from the desired position and shuts them a little more tightly and rolls them up, flustered at its lack of concentration. Zemo is making amicable chatter to fill the room, telling it that it's natural to need to readjust if it notices unintentional deviance from instructions, but there are no punishments, no notes of annoyance, only the lukewarm praise-admonishment of the little reminders, sneaking into its awareness as things feel a little soggy in the mind, harder to hold in one piece.
-
The Asset snaps into existence feeling stiff all over, feeling stuck and in need of stretching and cramped onto the loveseat before the warm red coals in the fireplace. The light is shifted, but it isn't morning. It's at least mid-day. Bright and cold and blue outside.
It tries to get up, and a groan escapes from its chest. The library is empty. It feels a kind of thick-headedness as it tries to take command of its wits. It feels oddly wrong for having left its boots unlaced beside the loveseat. It puts them on quickly and laces them tight.
Its movements stiff, but still precise, it makes its way out of the library, looking for some hint as to what happened and why. It runs into the gardener, who is an obvious Shield plant (a ha ha, it catches itself thinking). The agent has allowed himself indoors, not doing anything remotely garden-y.
It gives him a little growl and sends him scurrying away, which goes a long way toward comforting it, since apparently it can be talked to sleep by a nice voice, which is the opposite of menacing and the further opposite of HYDRA.
Oeznik must have a handle on security here, because he is approaching from the kitchens with the exact pace of someone who knows who they will find and where they will find them.
"Good morning, sir." Oeznik says, with the air of someone who can make it morning just by saying so.
"What time is it?" The Asset says, possessed of an urge to be difficult.
"It's half-4, sir. Would you like something to break fast? Perhaps tea or coffee?"
The Asset hopes it doesn't look nearly so unsettled as it feels. It has been eating, yes, but only from a supply of specially designed military rations, which the Baron and EKO Scorpion thoughtfully purloined when they took it. They even leave the rations in the room with it, as if managing its caloric intake is beneath them.
"Where is-..." It stops itself. It cannot decide if it wants to hurt Zemo or... or what.
"Come along." The butler gains an air of authority, one attained through years of experience in household service, and probably years in military or covert ops, observing a chain of command, besides.
The Asset follows like a pup, and lets the cook shove a pastry at it on a tiny plate from a designer called Royal Sokovian. It stares down at the profferred treat, unsure what the woman wishes to communicate about their relationship in the pecking order. They have not so much as been introduced before now, but the woman looks on the young side of twenty, and a bit scrappy.
"Eat your chocolatine or I'll take it personally." The chef says, accent coming through a bit.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" It replies in Vietnamese, which elicits the most satisfying noise.
"You eat it! Eat! I didn't go to pastry school so some army boy could stare at my food like there's bugs in it."
The Asset glares at the little rolled pastry, as though it might make excuses for them both.
"I can't eat this."
"Well." The cook says, puzzling without offense, as though it were not capable of turning her inside out with less than the kitchen knives and its bare hands. "What can you eat?"
"Nothing." Civilians can be terribly clueless. "Quit bothering me." It means it as a kindness. It thinks of the future, where it will be taken back, and hopes instilling distance will preserve some of the people here.
There's a pregnant pause, a face like a mother or a sister - the kind of anger that comes out like the wrath of a minor diety. The chef whips a kitchen towel across the back of its head, causing it to straighten up in absolute affront. Something in the back of its head, some ancient edict, says 'Don't hit a girl' ... and it obeys it on purest instinct, settling for a chilly look.
"You better learn some manners real fast." Says the woman, unphased. "I don't care how fucked up you are. Everyone is fucked up. Understand?"
"Yes, ma'am."
The chef's feathers settle instantly, leaving her looking placated.
"May I go?"
"You really don't want anything? Do you have a... Is it hard to eat?" The woman's demeanor shifts, growing soft. It is reminded of pigeons, improving each other's plumage in the crook of a window.
"I don't eat."
"...Okay."
That's where they leave it, for a while. The Asset thinks it must have communicated something incorrectly, if the chef suddenly looks intimidated (though that word doesn't quite suit the look on her face, but this cannot possibly be anything like pity, can it?). It makes a note to figure out how to reassert its reputation in the house. The way others look at it, a mix of fear and something else, it is beginning to chafe.
-
The library feels wrong without the Baron in it, but the Baron sometimes disappears. So, it hides in its storage room. It glares at the bed like an adversary, and it eats its thinning rations thinking about Helmut Zemo. Who made it fall asleep by talking to it. Something about that is unsettlingly familiar. But it can't deny that, groggy as it might be, some of its brain feels more... slotted into place.
The Asset has a fear growing in its belly; what if it gets used to this before it all falls to ruin?
The fear is informative. Combined with its slept and rested brain, the fear tells it what it must do now.
It waits until sundown, then it goes looking for Helmut Zemo.
-
"HYDRA will kill you." The Asset says without preamble, entering the library.
"They have tried, darling. Your hands around my throat are a cherished memory. It is a pity you don't share it."
The library burns in its brain; a memory that isn't strong enough to overwrite the present: where Baron Zemo sits comfortably like a perched finch at his desk, dressed down the for the indoors, in only a button-up shirt and trousers and alligator-embossed Italian leather shoes.
"You got lucky." Guesses the Asset, looking on dispassionately.
"I did, when Strucker brought you to my doorstep. You were mine the moment I saw you." The Baron says, leveling his unflinching gaze at the Winter Soldier.
"If they cannot deal with you in person, they'll shoot you in the head from a distance. They'll drop bombs on the residence until I am all that's left. HYDRA does not give up. Cut off one head-"
"Do not."
The Asset freezes up like prey. Something rides its body like lightning, up and down, makes it quail in place, even though it outwardly shows nothing. The voice is wrong. It sounds like a resonating thing in something too big for Zemo's relatively average human shape.
"Do not quote your pet cult to me. Do not utter that phrase beneath this roof."
The Baron's eyes hold a wrong sort of light, like the flicker of a candle across a mess of currency. Shining and dull, silver and gold, age-brown, clad long in the dark. His face is a leer of disgust.
"It insults me." He finishes.
The Asset wonders. The plates and servos of its titanium arm make soft noises as it flexes fingers.
"What was that?" It says finally.
Maybe he has a metal neck. It wouldn't be the most ridiculous thing.
The Baron straightens. "A slip-up. Apologies. I find myself quite comfortable at home and am loathe to see it otherwise."
"You stole the Winter Soldier." It points out, as if it needed pointing out.
Helmut laughs.
"Hardly. I've made worse plays for less gain. Strucker is a coward and a fool. I'm impressed his own fears won out, in the end. Were they less potent, he would have likely come trotting out to me with the artifact, even before you did."
"...I don't trot." is what comes out of its mouth, stiffly.
"Of course not. I'm mistaken." Zemo grins. "Do you mind much, being stolen, Winter Soldier?"
It folds arms across its chest and doesn't answer.
"Would you like to sleep here tonight? By the fire?" 'By me', the Baron doesn't say, but the offer is clear.
"Sleep is unnecessary." 'No', it doesn't say, and the lack of refusal is marked, Zemo crooking a brow and the corner of his small, soft lips, like a smug little kitten.
"I think I understand where all this is coming from." The man says slowly. "You think I haven't the power to keep you, so you don't want to get too comfortable."
It shifts on its feet, nervous energy swimming in the veins of its body.
"Do you think it a fluke that I stole you from Strucker?"
The Asset winces a little.
"I thought as much." Zemo says, calm. "It is understandable that you need time to adjust, more time if you think it's a mistake to acclimate to your life here."
It hates Zemo. It hates how simple the world must be for him, a binary division between want and not-want, and seemingly no mental faculties for what he can or cannot have.
But it also recognizes that it is being left to hate him in peace. Encouraged to partake in distracting indulgences. Emotional pollution in its mind.
There is a misguided intention there, for kindness.
"Have you anything you would like to say?"
"No." It says, because it does not know what there is to say.
"What do you think would help you adjust, dear one?"
It feels itself shaking its head without meaning to, its gaze downcast.
"Then we will make it a point to find something. In the meantime, I invite you to try and escape, if it makes you feel better."
The Baron stands and circles the desk, approaches it within easy killing distance and looks up at it with a kind of daring glint in his eyes. The Asset's head hurts.
"Come and sit down, if you like."
A test.
...Isn't it?
It allows itself to be led, not like a soldier or a toy for playing house, but like a distrustful child. It sits in the same place as before, but does not stretch out or remove its boots. It does not want to. Losing time was disconcerting enough, even for the improvement in mental faculties.
"Would you like a drink?"
"No." It ventures. The Baron makes a noise. A pleased little noise.
The Asset feels warmth rise to its face.
"Beautiful." Zemo praises.
The Asset frowns in confusion.
"All is well. Don't fret... Only know it gives me pleasure to see signs of your personality... Though I sometimes find I'm waiting for a seed to sprout. Sadly I was never very good at cultivating green things."
The Asset thinks of the Shield agent.
"I'm possessed of an urge to touch your hair. May I?"
The Baron lifts a hand, and the Asset wants, before it can stop itself.
"No." It says urgently.
The hand freezes, then lowers.
"Of course." Zemo says, nonchalant. "Will you be staying the evening? I'm of a mind to read. Perhaps you might enjoy something of the library."
-
The Asset cannot flee from Zemo. His gravity is too great, the shadow he casts too much a balm from the world outside of it. It falls asleep, bunched up into the corner of the loveseat, while the Baron reads and gives commentary on Machiavelli, Pushkin, others. The Baron has a carefully formed sense of propriety, choosing from short, light subjects and delving only into the shallows of each, as if priming the Asset to be undisturbed and unstimulated. It's a masterful bit of seduction and the Asset almost doesn't begrudge him for it.
He is laying a blanket around the Asset's body when it bolts awake, and grabs at the Baron's shirt with the metal hand. The Asset hears buttons rip and pop in the fist of the hand, half-hauling Zemo up and away from itself. But the realization hits like lightning, and it is shoving back, cowering, trying to shrink into the seat with eyes flashing fear.
"Calm." The Baron soothes. "Calm yourself. Calm." He looks mussed from the sudden motion, from having his shirt ripped off half the way, split down the front in a permanent stretch of expensive, now ruined fabric. The Asset's eyes meet his, dart away, and come back again.
The man continues a soft litany of 'calm' and begins to tell it where it is, in such detail as to border on annoying, but it soothes. It should not soothe and the Asset's brow furrows with a deepening confusion over its circumstances. The fear is breaking up and melting like a brittle icing on the paving stones, for even confusion can unsettle its hold if given in the right dosage.
"Very well. Very good, soldier." The Baron expresses a little distaste at the word, seems to hold back on something he much wants to say.
"Did you dream?" He says instead.
"No." Is that true? It is out of its mouth before it can consider. It's the correct answer. It remembers that.
"A pity. Perhaps a blessing... Are you back with me now?"
The mouth crooks in a wry way and says "I'm here - you said it about nine different ways, didn't you?" and it feels achy and woolly in its brain, all used up, and like its healing from internal injuries.
"I didn't mean to wake you. I'm sorry." The Baron says, as if nothing were amiss. As if his apologies could be given freely, a sweet thing to soften every ill. He does not look 'sorry'. Or at least not ashamed.
"Tired." The Asset agrees, giving its head a shake to try to clear it.
"As I said, I didn't mean to wake you. It is only a little past midnight."
The Asset looks at Zemo, sees little bruises start to green on his ribs.
"I hurt you."
"I frightened you." Counters the other, in a simmer. Zemo smiles, and starts to take his shirt off the rest of the way, and seems to take an even greater pleasure at the Asset's wide eyes when he tosses it into the fire.
"Sir."
The Asset's confusion stays open on its face, enough that the Baron takes note.
"It's a shirt. It was a delight to use it that way. And it was mine to use as I pleased. Now, is there something else you think worth punishing?"
"...You have no shirt." It says, trying not to stare.
"Mm-hm." Zemo agrees with a slight tilt to his head.
"...You..."
"Yes?"
"You should..."
"...Yes?" The Baron's tone shifts with curiosity.
The Asset's heart is traitorously panicked for no discernible reason.
"Should get a shirt." It mumbles finally.
Zemo stares openly at it, considering. "Then," he says thoughtfully, "that is what I shall do. Would you kindly wait here?"
In the end, he brings two.
"Just in case." The Baron teases over a kittenish smirk.
The Asset feels itself blushing.
There's no doubt about it. It hates Baron Zemo.