star-anise:

last-snowfall:

verysharpteeth:

n-a-blue-box:

pierce’s death was too good for him.

How hard he hits him though. He nearly knocks him off the chair he hits him so hard and Bucky’s head bounces on rebound. And Bucky isn’t even being defiant here, just stuck. He’s caught in his own thinking and isn’t really resisting, just not reacting. He’s still Winter Soldier here, but Winter Soldier trying to figure out what just happened with his day and we know he could stop Pierce mid swing if he really wanted. But he doesn’t, just sort of pulls himself back upright still clinging to the fact that SOMEHOW the Soldier knew him and can’t figure out why. The little bit of Bucky that’s left frantically trying to organize fragments of memory.

Pierce died too quick.

Here’s where it gets worse, though: a brief couple minutes later, Pierce tries to give him a speech. It’s a speech full of praise and glory.

And why would you bother? Because it works better, if all your violence comes with another option. It works better, conditioning, if you have a carrot and a stick. It works better if you are the font of all things good and make the frame so that the recipient thinks they deserve all things bad.

Now given where they’re keeping him, and everything else, let’s adjust this in perspective: “good” becomes not actually good. It becomes an absence of pain, of punishment. It becomes a positive word. It becomes the presence of another human being in a life of constant isolation and imprisonment.

And then if you really want to get upset, you can think about what Pierce would have looked like mid-century, when he was younger, and when the Winter Soldier starts making his mark.

You’re welcome.

You’ve heard this story before:  He’s imprisoned and tortured and experimented on, until he hardly remembers his own name.  And in the depths of his despair this blond man comes to him like an angel, like a halo, and says: Come with me.  Come follow me.  Come fight with me.

But this isn’t his true angel, because this time disobedience comes with fire and pain and freezing cold; and he never looks like the man the Winter Soldier keeps expecting to see.  But Alexander Pierce is the closest thing that he remembers, so he’s the one the soldier obeys.