The Red Soldier: Origins of the Red Soldier

ISSUE #1

James ('Bucky') Barnes lay motionless atop a cold steel operating table. Strange machines buzzed around him, their noise echoing in his eardrums. He had lost count of the number of days he'd been trapped, bound, and experimented on. All that he knew was that the last time he'd seen sunlight had been the worst day of his life.

Whilst out on a medical supply run with the soldiers in his unit, they'd been ambushed, outnumbered by Nazi soldiers who had ultimately captured them and delivered them to a HYDRA research facility; among them, the medic of their unit and his friend Dr (Y/N) (L/N).

He'd met the young doctor over two years ago, when he'd moved to Brooklyn to finish his training. A fresh faced boy of only twenty. He'd taken Steve into the university hospital during one of his asthma attacks and Dr (L/N) had treated him, as well as prescribing him an epinephrine inhaler.

Taking notice of the boy's strange accent, Bucky queried where he was from, and the two got talking. After hearing of how lonely he was living in a new country, him and Steve decided it best they befriend him, and so from then on, they met twice weekly in a bar on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street.

(Y/N) had been finishing his degree in Brooklyn when America joined the allies. Bucky signed up to join the troops in Europe, and (Y/N) followed him a year later once he'd graduated. Although he could hardly pick up a gun, never mind shoot it, he had his medical training, and so he was assigned to Bucky's unit as their medic.

Now, lying there with tubes plugged into his body, the whirring of electricity driving him insane, he thought of his friend. (Y/N) had been taken from the holding cells first: beaten bloody, cuffed, and then dragged, as though he were refuse. Bucky had tried to stop them, he'd fought to keep his friend by his side, but with no weapons and little strength, his fight was futile.

For days he watched the same thing happen to so many of his men, and when there were only about a dozen left in his cell, they came for him. He didn't put up a fight; he'd seen what happened to those who did, and he wasn't going to give the enemy the satisfaction of beating him to a pulp.

The days stretched into weeks, and the weeks stretched into months. Each day a different doctor would come in, speaking strange words whilst torturing his body and mind. Had it not been for the hope he had of seeing (Y/N) again, he'd have given in; let the suffering kill him. He prayed (Y/N) had gotten off lightly, perhaps they'd just found out that he was a doctor and needed him to care for their soldiers; knowing (Y/N), he'd have done it – he was kind when it came to those who were suffering – no matter what terrible things they might have done.

The room he resided in would have been completely silent had it not been for the equipment monitoring his vitals, a silence which baffled Bucky. Usually he'd have been shouting, screaming in agony with three or four men in black coats crowded around him. But not today.

As he lay, questioning when the misery would arrive, a number of gunshots disrupted the ambience. His ears pricked up at the sound coming from outside the laboratory, but his eyes remained closed, and his body remained bound to the table.

'Bucky?' a familiar voice called softly through the room, 'Bucky? It's me Bucky, Steve.'

He opened his eyes and tilted his head to the side. The man in the doorway had the voice of Steve Rogers, but not his body. 'Steve?' he questioned, his voice hoarse from the months of endless screaming.

'It's me Buck,' assured Steve, approaching the table and unstrapping the restraints across Bucky's legs, chest, and arms before hoisting him up off of the icy surface. 'Here, put this on,' Steve said, offering him the leather jacket which had been lying screwed up in a ball on the floor. It had his name embroidered into the chest pocket. 'I thought you were dead.'