Land of Confusion

There's too many men, too many peopleMaking too many problemsAnd there's not much love to go aroundCan't you see this is the land of confusion?

This is the world we live inAnd these are the hands we're givenUse them and let's start tryingTo make it a place worth living in

-Genesis

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Tessa sat in her room, a blanket pulled around her slender frame. She was sitting with her back against the headboard and was staring at the bare wall directly across from her. Now fifteen, she had no idea what the life of someone her age should have. She had lived in Siberia and learned to harness what had mutated within her. Unlike others, she was treated better. She wasn't locked away in a frozen hell. Her brain wasn't scrambled up like the others. She was Alexander Pierce's only child; he wasn't going to let her be treated like anyone else in this place.

Over the last two years, she had been training, both in her mutant abilities as well as combat. When it came to hand-to-hand fighting, she was getting better, but she had a good trainer. When he wasn't out on a mission, in stasis or training the girls of the Red Room, The Winter Soldier was her teacher. As a bonus, he had longer time between his sessions in the chair, and that was preferable for Tessa. He was always on task, but he was softer toward her after the fact when he had some of his own personality peeking through.

Drawing her knees to her chest and letting her head rest upon them, Tess looked around her small room and offered a sigh into the silence of the place. She was bored and ready for the Soldier to return from Belarus and the Red Room. He'd been gone almost a month this time. Considering he was really her only friend, Tessa missed him a great deal.

There was a soft rap at the door followed by someone turning the knob and opening the door a crack. Tessa immediately looked up and swiveled that icy blue gaze toward who was visiting. A smile briskly spread over her lips.

"Dad," she said with an edge of excitement. It wasn't often that he got to visit these days, but they wrote to each other often. The blanket was abandoned as she got up, socked feet hurrying her into the embrace of her father's arms.

"Button," Pierce smiled and enveloped her in his grasp, one set of fingers curling softly into her fine, blonde hair. "I have missed you."

"I missed you too," she responded and pulled back enough to look up at the kind face of her father. "I wasn't expecting you until next week."

"There was a hiccup I needed to handle in Belarus."

Immediately, her face went somber. Her gaze searched her father's eyes. "Is the Asset alright?" She hated that name, truly, but there was too much emotion there for her to think it would go unnoticed by her father had she called her friend anything but that name.

Something ticked in Alexander's jaw before he gave his daughter a small smile. "He will be soon." And he left it at that.

Her brows knotted together in the center, and her head canted to the right a small bit. "What happened?"

Pierce sighed softly and knew that Tessa wasn't going to leave well enough alone. "He stepped out of line with one of the women."

Right about there was where Tess stopped listening and wished she hadn't asked. That kind of intimacy with anyone hadn't even been a thought in her head yet. A hand was raised to let her father know he didn't have to go on.

"Does he really have to get wiped?" There was only one punishment, really, that would be bestowed on the Soldier. It was always either being wiped to a clean slate by the chair or being put into cryostasis, sometimes in combination. If she could only pick one of the two, it would be just the chair, though.

"I'm sorry, but absolutely," Pierce couldn't take the chance that the memory would linger long, but it would linger long enough to make an impact on The Winter Soldier. "Just... not immediately."

She gave her dad a sad little smile but nodded her head regardless. In this side of life, things just happened this way, and it was something she'd learned to accept as part of the facts of life.

"If it has to," she trailed off briefly before continuing with her words. "Can I see him before he has to go through it?"

"Mm," he began. "I don't know about this time, Button. He's being punished and needs to reflect on that. Do you know why it's that way?" He shifted his chin downward and let the blue of his eyes find those of his daughter, soft but intent behind the look.

"Because he can't fall down on the job when he's out there," she responded after only a moment. She didn't have to like the fact of it to realize the importance of it. "Our cause has to be protected."

"Exactly," Pierce smiled softly and moved his hand from his daughter's hair to lightly cradle against her cheek. "Would you like to grab dinner with me tonight?"

She did, of course, and that was exactly what happened. It was a treat to get to spend the time with her father. While he was cool and calculating in everything he did, his warmth toward Tessa was nothing less than genuine. She was his everything, and as soon as she was done training, he looked forward to being able to take her home again.

It didn't happen that night, but everyone knew the moment The Winter Soldier was subjected to his painful relief of being able to forget the torment of watching Natalia, one of the Widows of the Red Room, be brainwashed out of knowing who he was and what had built between them during the month he had been in Belarus. Blessedly, he would forget the images of seeing her scream and buckle under the weight of her own conditioning.

When next Tessa saw The Winter Soldier, it was two weeks after her father had come to visit her. The hour was early, but she was up and dressed and entirely ready to go when she heard a metal hand rap twice upon her door.

Getting to her feet, she headed to the door without hesitation and pulled it open. A smile fell across her features as she saw his face again.

"Training," he said in a harsh tone with no pretense of hello or catching up. Tess didn't take it personally.

With a simple nod, she gave him a smile and brushed past him to step out into the wide hallway of the facility. She turned to watch him shut her door then fell in at his side in silence as they headed toward the training area that had been set up for Project: Tesla, the program that had formed her into what she had become over the last two years.

"What are we working on today?" She lifted her eyes up toward the Soldier's profile and examined him while they walked.

He didn't look toward her but he responded all the same. "Today we combine hand-to-hand combat with your abilities."

The thought of possibly hurting him made her gnaw at the corner of her mouth for a moment. Perhaps part of it stemmed from the idea that her electricity was too similar to that which coursed through the chair that reduced him to muscle memory and compliance.

"What if I hurt you?" Her inquiry was given while she still watched him and walked at his side. She watched just long enough to see him smirk then pause at the door to the dampening room.

Steel blue eyes turned toward her as he paused, something akin to gruff humor slipping from his lips without thought. "You think you can?"

With that, he pushed the door open and slipped inside, pausing just out of the way to hold the door ajar so she could pass through. Even in such a basic state, he was ever the gentleman toward her.

"Well," she started. "I can, you know, maybe try?"

Her return humor caused a rare, clipped laugh to escape his lips before he could stop it. The vast, dark room was illuminated soon after as the lights came on with their movement. There were various dummies, barricades and hiding nooks situated around the room. There was even a conex there. How it managed to end up passing through the corridors and doorways was anyone's guess. It was likely put there when the facility was in its early years, the years when it was being built more than likely. The corridor just wasn't that wide.

Currently, Tessa was the only one to be trained in here, as far as she knew. The walls were made of a material that would keep the rest of the base safe from the lightning she could create from ambient electrical sources, including her own mind and the firing synapses of others.

"I won't take it easy on you, Tessa," The Winter Soldier spoke with that smirk still in place on his mouth.

"I wouldn't expect you to, Soldat," she murmured with an exaggerated, dark tone to it. It was an overly emphasized tone that came across as comically mechanical.

The Winter Soldier's smirk grew slightly before, without any warning, he threw a kick right into her side to fully focus her on the task ahead. Tessa grunted out a huff of pain and her feet stumbled over each other to send her colliding headlong into a stack of crates. She ended up a heap on the floor, her eyes widening and blinking as the sudden manner of attack finally really registered in her head.

Fucking cheater!

Blue eyes immediately lifted to the last place he'd been, but he was no longer in the same spot. Licking her lips, Tessa rose from the floor then took flight into the high ceiling to get a better view of where he could be hiding. She had hardly stopped to get a good scan of the place when a crate was hurled into her chest to send her head over feet into the back wall.

"Alright now..." She sounded frustrated already, but she got no response at all from her sparring partner.

Tucking herself up into a dark corner of the ceiling, she sent out the mental scan of her brain in search of the pulses that were produced from his in response to her calling. Immediately, she honed in on where he was hiding behind a protruding wall. Raising her hand, she pulled in a sudden burst of electricity from the lights above him and sent it right into the edge of the wall he stood behind.

The Soldier rolled out and raised his gun to aim toward her, but she wasn't done with raining bolts down toward him. One hit his metal arm and jolted him to the right, the gun skittering across the floor as he lost his grip on it momentarily. While he lunged for the weapon with his right hand, she bombed down from her hiding place and crashed into him with an audible thud of body-on-body.

He grunted and rolled with the hit, throwing her one-armed into the solidity of the wall. Tess hit hard and expelled every unit of breath from her lungs. As she scrambled to her hands and knees, she gulped in frantically for breath that burned her throat and made her chest ache with the effort.

"Fuck me..." she gasped out toward the floor, but she stayed down for the time being, leaning to the side to support herself further with the wall that had stopped her in the first place.

Tessa heard his boots and raised one hand to blast a cone of sparks out of her palm, knocking him back several paces and making him see starbursts. He growled through the pain and proceeded to take hold of her and launch her against the side of the shipping container, denting in the side of the conex and making her body blaze with pain. God, she missed the softer side of him when he wasn't newly ready to comply with orders.

Over the next twenty minutes, The Winter Soldier beat the absolute shit out of her while she shocked the hell right back out of him with the same ruthlessness that he was showing her.

Tessa was drenched in sweat, but she was still fighting. It might have been on her last leg, but she was still fighting. When he nearly caved in the wall with her body, she finally felt the last of her reserves gather in one big build of frustration and anger.

The Winter Soldier looked down at his right arm as he felt the static build and set his hair on end then vanished like a shadow in the night. Line of sight didn't matter at this point. Instinct and power coalesced within her, causing her eyes to flicker with the same blue as the power she wielded.

Suddenly, his mind erupted into agony and he screamed out. His body collapsed to the floor, his flesh and blood hand coming up to grasp into his hair as his brain was scrambled on the molecular level.

Memories flashed through his consciousness along with the pain and power overtaking the moment.A life long ago. A weak man with sandy blond hair, blue eyes and a body that didn't fit his inner fight. Steve. An alleyway where he fought a much-larger man and wielded a shield made of a garbage can lid. The breeze catching a discarded military service card for the Army emblazoned with its failing stamp.

The images were gone just as quickly as they appeared in his memories, but the shock of it floored him, quite literally.

When Tess heard him hit the ground, she let her reserves die out entirely. As frugally as she could, the fifteen year old got back to her feet then staggered and stumbled toward where she'd downed her opponent. She didn't get too close, though; he'd tricked her before by falling prone. The fact that he was still holding the side of his hand as he recovered made her lean a little to the side, worry painting itself across her delicate features.

"Soldier?," she began, her voice carrying the same as her expression right then -- worry. "Are you alright?"

Stormy blue eyes looked up at her from the floor, a shadow cast over half of his face by the arm lifted to his head. To look back on it, it mirrored his inner self -- one area of light known as Bucky and another in dark that took up the mantel of The Winter Soldier. His chest was heavy in its rise and fall, eyes slightly wide as he stared up at the girl he'd protected for so long. He looked almost afraid of her.

"Soldier?" Her brows knit harshly in the center of her forehead and she moved to kneel beside him. Thankfully, he didn't pull away from her which would have made her feel worse about what had happened.

"My name is James," he replied in equal parts awe and concern, eyes plastered on the face of his student that had caused those scant memories to return.

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Posted: 29 July, 2021