Chapter Text
Fuck Hydra. Seriously, fuck these snakes.
I cannot wait to suck the marrow from your bones, I thought as hard as I could at the guard holding the trigger to the electric collar around my neck. He stood at the entrance to the lab which had been set up for me to eat in. Singular kakugan activated, I maintained eye contact with the nervously sweating man, my kagune, hands, and teeth working in tandem to dissect my meal.
My meal being, of course, a failed human experiment. I wasn't sure whether it had been terminated or simply expired. A third milky eye had either grown or been implanted in the gash below the right eye and all the teeth had fallen out and been replaced by two bones which resembled walrus tusks, long enough for the points to cross at its chin. And those were only the externally visible mutations. Internally, some organs had fused together while others had replicated poorly, and bone had grown in several places between the ribs.
I carefully cut and peeled the skin back with my kagune. The organs I wasn't going to eat with a mind uncorrupted by ghoulish hunger were removed and tossed onto the floor. Hydra janitors could kiss my ass. There was no way I was eating any part of the digestive tract. So sue me, I was a picky ghoul. It was still shocking how quickly I'd adapted to eating human flesh so as to have preferences for body parts.
Had I not decided to shut away my human sensibilities in favour of the ghoul's as soon as I realized where I was and what I'd become, the youthful face and tender flesh would have had me violently retire everyone complicit in the cruel experimentation on young children, regardless of any punishment inflicted through the collar.
As it was, any compassion and empathy I had was locked away with the part of me that screamed cannibalism was inherently bad and wrong. Was it really cannibalism though if I wasn't technically human? How genetically similar were ghouls and humans anyway? Did they share a common ancestor? Was it a case of parallel or convergent evolution? Pointless questions, perhaps, considering the fictional origin of ghouls. But I had thought the MCU nothing but fictional too, yet here I was.
I did hope I was in the MCU. I'd never read the comics.
All that was left was the bones, teeth, and most of the digestive tract. After my bindings were replaced, I was prodded out out of the lab and into the clinically white hallways towards the shower room. With an actual cattle prod too, the asshole.
Every time someone 'Hail Hydra'd within earshot I held back the urge to yell 'Fuck Hydra!' back at them. Feign obedience, feign subservience; I couldn't rock the boat just yet.
Showertime was a humiliating affair, with no privacy or hot water. I was forced to strip and was then hosed down with an almost bruising jet of freezing water. What were they going to do if I got sick, huh? As a ghoul, I wouldn't get sick so easily, but it was the principle of the matter.
After I was dried off and dressed, I was tossed into my cell. The bulletproof glass partition slid shut after me. In one corner there was a cot; in the other, a toilet. No privacy, as par for the course.
But that would soon change. I had a plan. A certain person was showing the signs that would lead to a certain event, and as soon as I gleaned the information I needed from that event, I'd be outta here, with a plus one.
All I had to do was lie still, and listen.
A few days- a week- a month?- an unknown (to me, these scientist bastards recorded everything) length of time ago, I had been a content nobody, headed off to an anime convention in my low-budget Kaneki Ken cosplay. Black clothing and nails, the mask, and a white wig. For kagune, four scarves of different reds and materials tied onto a belt under my shirt. One of my friends managed to snap a decent picture of them in the air like actual kagune when I ran and jumped down a flight of stairs. I limped for a while after, but it was totally worth it.
The convention ended and I waved goodbye to my friends. I didn’t bother changing out of my costume and just took the mask off, wrapping the scarves around my waist. Up until this point, it had been a great day.
Then some psycho had to start stabbing people on the train.
I was on my phone when someone started screaming. I lifted my head, startled, and stared in shock at the woman sitting beside me clutching her stomach and the masked man standing in front of her clutching a bloody knife.
He raised it again. "Die, bitch!"
I must've been either braver than I thought, or stupider.
"No!"
I jumped and latched onto his arm. Bad move. We fell to the ground. He snarled and started trying to stab me instead.
He was an angry adult man; I was a scared teenage girl.
Guess who won.
…
Me, actually.
Looking back on it, I got really lucky. Somewhere in my flailing, I think I hit him in the temple hard enough to knock him out.
Adrenaline pumping through my veins with the excited staccato of my heart, I staggered to my feet. I pointed triumphantly at his unconscious form.
"Ha! Take that, you bastard!"
I turned to the other passengers, expecting them to celebrate the successful takedown of the attacker with me. Instead, I only got looks of horror.
"Love," an older man approached me, slowly, calmly, hands out as if approaching an injured wild animal, "I need you to not panic, alright, and just listen to me."
I stared at him uncomprehendingly. "Wha- panic? Why would I…"
Something trickled down my neck. Even before I raised my hand to swipe at it and saw the red, I knew what had happened.
I wasn't lucky enough to avoid injury.
"Oh, shit," was all I managed to saw before I fell over and passed out.
I expected to wake up in a hospital, or never wake up at all. Instead, I woke up when my back hit the cold hard ground.
The first thing I noticed was the people pointing guns at me. The second thing I noticed was a ravenous craving.
I don't remember what happened after that, lost to the thrall of ghoulish hunger as I was, but when I woke up I'd been divested of my costume and a collar had been placed around my neck. My neck which was free of injury. Further inspection revealed metal bindings wrapped around my waist under the thin grey shirt and shorts I had on. Titanium, I'd later been told.
I won't recount everything that happened afterwards. All you need to know is that while I still had no clue how I'd ended up here or why I'd taken on most of Kaneki Ken's physical attributes, I'd managed to piece together that I was in a Hydra base focused on the creation of more supersoldiers, and Bucky was here.
Yes, James Buchanen Barnes, the Winter Soldier, brainwashed best friend of Steve Rogers.
Which brings me back to my plan.
Back in my cell, I lay on my cot and concentrated on the noise of the base.
Scientists talking. Guards gossiping. The sniffles of child experiments.
(A pang of sympathy and guilt, quickly suppressed.)
The buzzing of The Chair.
I smiled. It was about time.
желание.
ржавый.
семнадцать.
рассвет.
печь.
девять.
добросердечный.
возвращение на родину.
один.
грузовой вагон.
I mouthed each phrase to myself, imploring my shoddy memory to, even if it could no longer retain anything else ever, remember these ten phrases .
Zhelaniye.
Rzhaviy.
Semnadtsat.
Rasvet.
Pech.
Devyat.
Dobroserdechniy.
Vozvrasheniye na rodinu.
Adin.
Gruzovoi vagon.
Longing.
Rusted.
Seventeen.
Daybreak.
Furnace.
Nine.
Kindhearted.
Homecoming.
One.
Freight car.
Tomorrow was the day.