Joana

"What did you do to him?" Joana repeated, only louder. She took rapid steps towards Bucky, hoping that she could do something to help him. Pierce put his arms around her waist and pulled her away from him. "What did you do?"
Pierce shoved her away from Bucky and into the arms of the soldier who seemed to have control over Bucky. He caught her a stopped her from falling over, but held on to her arms to keep her from going back to Bucky.
"So," Pierce said, patting Bucky on the cheek. Joana pulled against the soldier. "Our first experiment is a success. Let's move on to our second."
Joana scowled. She looked over at Bucky.
"You're going to make him kill me," she said, her voice dry. Her eyes were narrowed into slits. Pierce laughed.
"Oh no. Joana, you're more important to us than that. We need you alive," he told her. "What we do need, is to see whether or not you can do what we need you to do."
The door opened again and a few soldiers walked in. They had scowls on their faces as if they were all sucking on lemons all at once.
"We don't want him to kill you, Joana," Pierce said, a coy smile on his face. "We want you to kill them."
Joana's stomach dropped. She looked between Bucky, Pierce, and the soldiers. There were four of them, all large. She could take them down, easy, but kill them?
"No," she said quickly, shaking her head. "No!"
Pierce gave her a smile of pity.
"You say that like you have a choice. Karpov, please." The soldier holding Joana let her go.
"Soldat," Bucky turned to Karpov without blinking. "Ne dvigaytes'."
Bucky (could she even call him Bucky? She had to, Joana assumed. If she stopped calling him Bucky, it would mean she'd given up hope.) nodded his head once. Pierce put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him to the ground. He pulled out a gun and held it to Bucky's head.
"No!" Joana yelled and stepped forwards. Pierce pressed the tip of the gun to Bucky's head.
"Joana," he cooed in a sing-songy voice. "If you don't kill these men, I'll shoot him in the head."
Joana glared at Pierce, her jaw clenching.
"You're bluffing. You need him. If he's your Winter Soldier, then you wouldn't kill him."
Pierce hit Bucky's head with the gun. Bucky jerked to the side, teeth bared. Joana couldn't stop the gasp that came from her mouth.
"Ne dvigaytes!" Karpov yelled as the Winter Soldier started to stand. He straightened himself and let the blood drip down his forehead.
"Kill them, Joana," Pierce instructed. Joana scowled at him. She had to stand her ground, she couldn't let Pierce control her. Pierce hit Bucky again and again and again, until Joana was pleading, begging, screaming for him to stop.
"You want this to stop, Joana?" Pierce yelled at her. "Kill them!"
Joana looked towards the me. One of them cracked their knuckles. She glanced back at Bucky. Blood dripped down his face and he didn't seem to care. Her vision altered and kneeling there on the ground was Bucky in a tuxedo, just like in her dreams, and he was soaked in blood. Looking away, she shook her head.
"I can't let you hurt him," she said, unsure of who she needed to direct the words to. The soldiers took that as an invitation to begin the fight. The four soldiers stepped forward. Even if Joana wasn't about to fight for Bucky's life, their movement triggered something in her mind that told her she needed to fight. She took her stance immediately, hands raised and feet apart.
The first guy swung at her and she ducked to the side, striking him in the side twice with her fists. Walking around him as he groaned, she hooked her foot around his ankle and pulled, dropping him to the floor. She glanced over at Bucky, who sat there, staring blankly forward at nothing. The second man danced around her for a second, standing on the other side of the soldier who was trying to push himself off the ground. Joana stepped on his back, pushing him back to the ground, and threw a punch at the second soldier. He blocked her punch and went for a strike at her stomach. Joana jumped backwards, stepping painfully on the first soldier's fingers.
"This is boring. If you don't pick it up, I'm shooting him," Pierce said, pressing his gun into Bucky's head for effect. She glared at him, her heart filling with rage. She dropped to the ground, grabbing the first soldier's arm. She twisted it behind his back and pushed with all of her might. As he screamed, she could hardly hear the 'crack' of his bone. The other three soldiers ran forward and pulled her off of him.
"Where is the Joana I heard about?" Pierce asked, his voice almost in whine. "Where's the Joana who was a feral dog? I want to see her toady."
That seemed to be code for the soldiers because they suddenly started beating Joana with such ferocity that she was surprised they had withheld themselves before. She didn't take it for long before she started fighting back. Her vision turned red. All thoughts of calm and keeping herself from turning into the demons she tried so hard to fight were gone from her mind. All she could see was blood. All she wanted was to rip their heads off and bathe in their blood.
Once she started fighting back, there was no stopping her. She bit them, drawing blood, and she hit them harder than any man had hit them before. She kicked them and broke their bones and tore their muscles and dug her claws into her skin. All the while, she heard Pierce cackling. He was laughing at her, at her weakness. He was laughing because she wasn't strong enough to control herself.
She sat on the ground, breathing heavily. Her hands were stained red, but she didn't even dare look down. She stared straight ahead at Bucky, who didn't seem to careless that she had just murdered the four men, who were laying on the ground in different positions, in different variations of death. The iron taste of blood was still in her mouth from all the times she bit the soldiers. She hated it. It dripped down her chin and in to the pool of blood she was sitting in.
She looked up at Pierce, her eyes filled with tears and hate. He had a gleeful smile on his face.
"Are you satisfied?" She asked him, her teeth grinding, her throat tight, her words dripping with utter hatred. Pierce looked at her.
"Very."
He smacked Bucky in the head again. Bucky fell to the ground.
"Stay there," Pierce said to Bucky. Bucky's eyes rolled in his head. A tear rolled down Joana's face.
"Why are you doing this?" She asked. Her throat swelled, tears continuing to roll down her face.
Pierce gave the gun back to Karpov.
"Because, my dear." He stood above Joana, looking down at her like dirt on his feet. "It's fun."
With those chilling words ringing in her ears, Pierce and Karpov left her along. As soon as the door slammed shut behind them, she crawled through the blood over to Bucky, who was groaning on the ground. She put his head in her lap, brushing the hair from his sweaty face. Diluted drops of blood fell from her chin and landed on his face. She wiped them off and scrubbed her lips and teeth and chin with her shirt. She started petting Bucky's hair as his eyes opened again.
"Shhh," she whispered to him, her lips trembling. "Shhh, you're okay."
His eyes fully opened and she knew it was Bucky again, not the Winter Soldier.
"Joana?"
A smile grew on her face.
"Bucky."
He looked around the room, his eyes filling with horror. He looked at Joana's face and her hands.
"Joana, what did you do?"
The words hit Joana in the heart so deeply, she didn't know what to say. She lowered her head, tears spilling from her eyes.
"I'm so sorry," she said through the tears, though it only came out as a whisper. Her throat was tight. "I'm so so sorry."

****

That wasn't the last time they wiped his memory. But there were weeks in between each time Joana got to see him. She wasn't told where he went or what they did to him exactly, but he always had these strange bruises on his face and every time he seemed to recognize her, Karpov would say 'Soldat!' and Bucky would become the Winter Soldier again.
As time dragged on, Joana tried to control her anger and her hatred towards the soldiers and Pierce. She didn't want to ever see the horror in Bucky's face that she saw on that first day every again, she didn't want to hear the fear and disappointment in his voice. She was not the girl he had fallen in love with all those years ago. She didn't even think he still loved her at all. The thought broke her heart beyond all belief, but she didn't really care what he felt for her anymore. All she cared about was keeping him safe.
When the soldiers came into her room, most often Joana just let them beat her. It was the only way she could think of that would help control her anger. She thought that if she stopped fighting as much, maybe the blood lust would go away. Hatred for HYDRA slowly left her system, while hatred for herself started settling in.
After they realized what she was doing, they started threatening her with Bucky more than before. She tried to resist, but he was still her weak spot. She would still do anything to keep him safe. So she came up with a compromise.
When the soldiers came in the next day, she demanded she see Pierce. She sat on the floor and would not move until he came in to talk to her.
"You realize that you're in no position to ask anything of me," he told her, eyes narrowed.
"And yet, you're here."
"What do you want?"
Joana stood.
"I want to make a compromise," she said, crossing her arms. "I will do everything you ask of me without fighting, as long as you don't make me do what I did on that first day. I will kill people as long as Bucky doesn't see it."
Pierce stroked his chin.
"It's a good deal. Can I add something to it?"
Joana inclined her head.
"We realized that if you start calling him Bucky or James, he starts remembering things. Neither of those names are no longer in your vocabulary. You will call him Barnes or Soldier. Is that clear?"
Joana set her jaw.
"Clear as day."
Pierce smiled and she wanted to punch him in the face.
"We have a deal then. You do everything I say, just no murder around Barnes. I think I got more than you did with that one, Sweetheart," Pierce said with a wink. She glared at him.
"I got everything I wanted," she said to him, jaw clenched.
"Don't glare, Joana, it doesn't look good on you," he told her. Ever so slowly, Joana widened her eyes so they were no longer squinted. Pierce beamed again.
"Why don't you come with me?" He asked her. "I've got something I want you to do."

***

Joana regretted the compromise immediately. The things he made her do...
She was amazed how easy it was for her to stop calling the Winter Soldier by his true name. 'Barnes' came so easily to her. Every time she saw him, he looked less and less like the man she fell in love with. Still, she would not give up hope. The more the Winter Soldier was around her, the more he got used to her presence. Pierce revealed to Joana that he wanted her and Bucky to work together.
"My two best, working side by side, following my every command. How perfect?"
They started training together. No longer was Joana subject to daily beatings. Instead, she went to a trainer, like she had before, and learned alongside the man who used to love her. She didn't know which was worse; if she had stopped calling him Bucky in her head and giving up on him, or continuing to refer to him the way she knew him before and live in the constant pain it reminded her of.
Eventually, they found a way to fight in sync, just like they had done before the war. In her mind, Joana was in a back ally protecting Steve from the bullies who dared make fun of his asthma. In reality, she was a murderer training to kill beside the world's soon to be most deadly assassin. Pierce would continually tell her how pleased he was with her improvement.
"You and Barnes are practically twins! We can use that."
Once Joana and the Winter Soldier learned to fight beside each other again, Pierce started filling the room with people who they had to take down. They were impossible to beat. Joana could take on 4-5 men on her own, without any Super Soldier Serum, and Bucky could take out infinitely more than that. After the first time they tried this, Pierce walked in to the room fuming.
"Joana, you will never be away from him. Every second he is out of cryostasis, you will be there too," he said, eyes made of fire. Joana, who was still breathing heavily from the fight, scowled.
"I don't understand."
"Barnes spent half of the time protecting you instead of hurting them. He still remembers you in his subconscious. We need to be rid of that," Pierce said. Joana looked over at the Soldier, who was sitting on a bench, drinking water, eyes staring into nothingness.
"You want to desensitize me from him," she sighed, casting her eyes down. Pierce glared at her.
"Will you resist me?" He asked her, jaw clenched. Her nose burned and her lip trembled.
"No. I won't."
"Good. You've got work to do."
To his promise, Joana was always around Bucky. She went back to being strapped to a chair whenever she wasn't training with him. She had to sit and watch as they tortured him. At the beginning, Joana would scream at them, begging for them to stop. Pierce told her she wasn't allowed to. Once, Bucky asked why there was a pretty girl strapped to a chair. After that, Joana was forced to stand like a soldier.
"How is Barnes? Is he warming up to you?" Pierce asked Joana. She slipped a sweater on over her head.
"Since you wiped his brain last?" She snapped. "Yes. He calls me Partner, like he did last time. Never by either of my names, first or last. He doesn't know who I am."
"And in training?"
"He only helps me when I'm hurt and it won't jeopardize the mission. There's one thing you should know about Barnes, Pierce. You can wipe his brain, you can torture him, you can do whatever you want, but caring for other people is part of who he is. It's in his soul, and you can't ever take that away."
Pierce smirked. He leaned in close to her ear.
"I love it when you get all angry."
Joana's body trembled as the urge to snap Pierce's neck consumed every inch of her body. She glared at him, but didn't move. She had already tried that once and he forbade her from moving away from him ever again.
"You'll be happy to hear," he told her, stepping away and turning to put his tie on. "You and Barnes are going on a mission."

Joana blinked twice, her mouth hanging open.
"Where to?"
Pierce turned to her with a wide grin.
"You ever heard of the Red Room?"

***

Heck yes. Are y'all ready for tiny Black Widows? This part is where things get a lot worse, so just hold on to your seats. Let me know if I'm not making any sense in my writing, because sometimes things make more sense in my head than they do when I actually write them down. Also, if you wouldn't mind helping me edit or giving some feedback on what I could do differently, that would be nice. Anything is appreciated. But, if I spelled something like 'the' wrong, I do really only need one person to point it out, just so you know. Anyway, I love you all so very much you don't even know. Thank you for the reads, comments, and votes! I will be updating again as soon as possible. With great affection, authorsbane