1964-07-31 - Interrogation Games
Summary: It's not much of an interrogation when your interrogator can read your thoughts.
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bucky wanda 


.~{:--------------:}~.


He still doesn't know how to get here. Contacts through Steve and his previous encounters with SHIELD….but he's still blindfolded en route. That's fine. It's familiar, in its way….and he's in an interrogation room and not a cell, though he is bound to the chair via heaver cuffs than one might expect. But then, he's proved to them so many times why that's needed.

BEyond that, he's calm and collected - hair bound back, white t-shirt and jeans. They know about the arm, no reason to try and hide it here. Waiting to see who'll come to sweep and verify that he's the one in control of his own mind.


Truly it's not fair to put one of their more satellite agents up against this man. She is no Maria or Sharon or Peggy, one of those indomitable women capable of shooting high calibre weapons at a distance. Or rather, they don't know what she quite is for she never really takes to the firing range. Being someone who can warp probabilities to her own needs makes Wanda breathtakingly interesting as a gun fighter. But she is not there for that. Probably just as many cameras point to record her, much to her irritation, and the demands they be shut off at a moment of truth likely will come to naught. They will cross that bridge when they get to it. One more sip of black coffee and she sets the mug aside. "Do not move it. I need it where it is."

A lie. But the scientists and mulls don't need to know that. She pulls her coat tighter around her and then waits for someone to open the door, admitting her into the lion's den. Maybe it's a fair fight; she is much more of an ambush hunter, naturally, a fighter who likes shadows, claws, and unexpected turns. He can sweep the rug with her physically, and very nearly did. Maybe this is revenge.

Let them question her moral deterioration by settling into a seat across from him with nothing. No paper or pen; too dangerous. Death by a thousand cuts, right? Her coat licks the seat. "Why are you here?" Right down to questions. Great.


She's not one of the ones who makes her sympathy to him obvious. He may not break hearts with those baby blues anymore - that near permanent thousand-yard stare might have something to do with it- but despite the trail of dead and wounded SHIELD behind him, there are those who are willing to grant pity, anyway. He doesn't seem bothered by her business-like attitude. "I'm hoping to work for SHIELD in earnest. But I need someone to make sure that I'm operating entirely under my own will, and not just following Russian programming," he says, simply.


Wanda Maximoff is the vessel for the darkest demon, an elder god shrouded in such malignant aims Dormammu looks friendly next to him. Any pity that survived her conception was thoroughly beat out of her: by Agatha Harkness, her adoptive father, the Nazis, Pietro, cultists, every last ounce of life she drew breath.

"That you are stable inside that head. Not going to shoot one day at an agent," she offers, her English the victim of the German cartels and mafia in the back streets of Little Odessa. A few kicks and bruises, it came out the other side. "This is not me looking in there and breaking your bad code. He is in there. I look and change, you are not you."


"Yes," he says, haltingly. Then that last sentence makes that little frown of puzzlement appear. "I don't think I understand. I'm not asking you to bulldoze the programming. Just….be sure I'm not acting under its direction. Though I guess that's within your abilities? Rewriting or destroying it?" Hope's there, a tentative little thread. Winter could be killed…but what would his absence leave?


She gives one of those noncommittal shrugs and will irritate their handlers to no end by shifting out of English, necessitating a grab for someone who knows German. "«Depending on the methods and structure of your psychological trauma, the methods and timelines change. It's always a delicate business. Try the psychologists first.»" It's probably more sentences than she has properly spoken in a week. Wanda leans back in her seat, her position speaking to a certain dominance of space and confidence drawn in the most intriguing of fashions. "They want to see you are turned on. Like light. Do you think this is so?"

They cannot see what she does: the shift of her gaze into different spectra, aligning to the soulfire of the aura and the mind. Theirs is a careful symmetry shaded in details meaning nothing except for a witch, just as a necromancer's approach means so little to her in turn.


It's like a man standing in front of an empty prison. The structure is still there: doors, fences, walls, watchtowers, cells. But none of it activated - the celldoors unlocked, the hallways unpatrolled, the fence mere dead wire and not an electric cage. The presence he is is not within, though. A little flickering flame, unbound by anything save its own weakness.

He purses his lips at that. "I think so," he replies, simply. "I….it's like a weight's off me. It's not gone, I can feel it, but….it's not driving, either."


Her gaze remains wholly huge, and staring into her pupils would be a mistake unless he enjoys watching rivulets of fine magenta energy creep and crawl in ways that no flower or firework can approximate. Wanda keeps circling in a way, looking for fissures, for evidence of carefully placed magic or worse that would hearken to some instance of tampering in active movement. It's not anything she can be entirely certain of from the mundane side; they could have trained him. He can lie. But some things are hard to disguise from the witch; lies and other treachery inflicted secretively are among them.

"You feel it. What is it a feeling like? When you are under it, do you sit and see out window or are you in this thing, your mind, and fighting?"


No magic, thank God, save for remaining traces of Strange's occasional interventions, like the wisps of perfume that linger in a room after someone's passed. AS far as honesty - he's telling the truth, so far as he knows it. No intetional deception. "More like….like that. It's like being in the back seat of a car when someone else is driving. I see what's happening. I remember. It's not a blackout, mostly," he says, slowly. "Though sometimes I'm confused when I come out of it. I try to fight but….I don't have any ways of bearing down on it, mostly. I mean, I didn't. It's better than it was - Sofia helped. I know it's still there, but….I'm in control. It's my mind again."


Magic of the Sorcerer Supreme's ilk resonates to the carmine sorceress', and she has very little trouble whatsoever recognizing his signature where it may exist. Wanda lowers her lashes to blunt some of the widened range her awareness allows for, fine-tuning her response, blunting the impressions left behind. Those uninterrupted impressions can seep around her guarded mental barriers, and that drives her to contemplate carefully.

"You had this before, ever? To be in control and know you have your own mind?" she asks, brittle English.


"I don't know," he says, softly. "I think so. But….some of the stuff they wiped is still gone. I have my own memories back, from before they got me. My life as Bucky. But….in terms of the time I spent as their slave, not all of it. I think I must've. They wiped me every time…..and they didn't do anything uncessarily."


Wanda says flatly, "Clean. Not very clean. But it is good enough." She shoves the seat back and her feet lie flat on the ground, balancing, her heels rolling slightly to feel out the nature of the ground. It suits her to cover on the edge of departure, the vanishing act toyed with.


By the look in his eyes, he's not sure how to take that. There's an interrogative tilt to his head. "So….that's okay?" he asks, voice with a hopeful lilt. Something about it makes him look painfully young.


"Not enough to be good or best. It will be enough to now." Wanda pushes her hair behind her ears, the storm of espresso and charcoal washed in faint curls that tend to draw loops at their ends rather than rotini spirals. "You do not make a high risk for broken thoughts. My report will not satisfy the big people." She shrugs a little. "My experience, there is nothing good they like. I say. They choose. This is how it goes."


"Close enough for government work?" he asks, with a rueful note to his voice. But he's not impatient, merely accepting. "Well, thanks," he adds, after a beat, hesitant.


"Anyone that is here has a broken mind. We do not work at SHIELD to be normal," Wanda says without so much compassion or concern. It's a neverending truth. Spies have everything and nothing to do with sane attitude, or any kind of sense. The brunette casts a grim smirk in his direction. "The government wants you to obey. They look past anything more."


Bucky returns the smirk with that feral little grin, eyes suspiciously bright. Whatever shards of Winter are in there find the gallows humor in that situation. "Fair enough. I'll fit right in, is that what ou're saying?"


The shards of Winter probably have far more in common than Wanda wants to admit to. She rises from her seat and cocks her head slightly, the midnight spill of her hair clouding half her face. "Yes, that. Now you deal with them." Her smirk lasts a few seconds before she turns, heading for the door. A display of power to show her back, or bravura.


Well, he's more or less bolted to the chair. "Thanks," he says, mildly. There's a faint hint of being almost forlorn. Back here again….and only their word of honor that they'll let him go.


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