Chapter 64

The next witness wasn't anyone that Maggie recognized – he was a man, maybe mid fifties, though it was hard to guess because his body and face were sunken with the markers of disease and possibly drug abuse. His lined face was pocked with old scars, and his skin was gaunt. His nose was swollen and bumpy. And yet he looked around the courtroom with resolve in his eyes, his shoulders straight. His tailored suit was clean.

Once he was sworn in Maggie forgot about the dull pain in her shoulder and the residue of her panic from the morning, and leaned in to hear what he had to say.

"When I was twenty two I lived in East Berlin," he said, the facts backed up by his German accent. "This was 1987 – two years before the wall came down, and my family and I lived in a heavily Soviet-controlled area. It wasn't unusual for people to go missing."

"Is that what happened to you, Mr Weber?" Asked Diego. "You went missing?"

The man – Mr Weber – nodded once and scratched his neck. "I remember someone coming up behind me when I walked home from work one night, jabbing a needle in my neck. I wasn't involved with any anti-Soviet groups, so before I passed out I remember thinking: but I didn't do anything wrong." Mr Weber shrugged. "Not that they ever really needed a reason. But I wasn't being kidnapped by the government."

"What happened when you woke up?"

"I woke up in some kind of base. I remember… everything was grey. The walls, the floor, the ceiling. Even the people were grey – that was the color of their uniform, and when they looked at me there wasn't any light or compassion in their eyes." Mr Weber's eyes unfocused, his voice heavy with memories. "They called me subject five. They didn't waste any time – they started experimenting right away, hooking me up to that… that machine."

Diego cleared his throat and brought up a picture of the Memory Suppression Machine. "This is the machine you're referring to, Mr Weber – or rather, a version of this machine?"

Mr Weber's eyes darkened. "That's it."

Maggie's hand drifted up to her mouth and she noticed Andrea shoot her a sideways look, as if worried she was about to start puking again. She shook her head at Andrea and turned back to the man in the witness box. She wondered if he could still hear the buzzing arms of the machine, if he still sat in that chair in his nightmares.

Diego turned to the jury. "Mr Weber's captors were an offshoot of HYDRA, who built a version of the Memory Suppression Chair based on Arnim Zola's original designs." He turned back to Mr Weber. "How many times did they put you in the device?"

"I didn't remember, because after I got out my memory was… fragmented. But then I read the files-"

"You're referring to the files about your captors released with the HYDRA information dump," Diego clarified, already bringing up the relevant documents.

"Yes. I read them, and it says they put me in the machine six times." He visibly shivered. "That doesn't seem like a lot, but whenever I think back to that place I just remember feeling like that pain, that agony, was never-ending."

Diego let Mr Weber have a moment before he asked his next question. "Could you describe what it was like to experience the Memory Suppression Machine? Please take your time, I appreciate that this is difficult to relive."

Weber nodded his thanks, then took a deep breath. "The first time," he said in a shaky voice, "I thought they were going to read my brain waves – like an EEG, you know? They didn't tell me anything about what was going to happen, just told me Du wirst gehorchen – 'you will comply'. They… they strapped me to a metal table, vertical off the ground like this-" Weber cocked his arm at forty five degrees, fingers pointing upwards- "and the machine had these… these arms, I guess you could call them."

Diego brought up a blueprint of the exact device Weber had gone under – slightly different from the machine that Maggie was familiar with, but undoubtedly with a similar purpose.

Weber swallowed. "The sound is what I remember most vividly. When they turned the machine on there was a low hum. Reminded me of my uncle's generator, back home. Then the arms started sparking and made this terrible crackling sound, and I remember thinking 'it's broken,' but the scientist said… he said 'ready to proceed'." Weber choked on a sob, and pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket with shaky fingers. After pressing the handkerchief to his lips, he continued. "The arms came down here and here-" he gestured to points on his forehead, and the same areas on Maggie's forehead prickled with memory. "And then it was just…" he shook his head. "That kind of pain, it is indescribable. I couldn't form a thought, there was nothing but the sensation that my mind was being… torn apart. Obliterated. I remember hearing myself scream. And there was this sense… like I was waiting to die." Weber clutched the side of the witness box. "That was what it was like every time – it went on for minutes at a time, once for half an hour, with electricity surging through my brain. The first time I bit down so hard that I broke my teeth – after that they gave me a mouth guard."

Diego bowed his head for a moment, letting the words sink in. "And can you describe your state of mind after the machine was turned off?"

Weber cocked his head and turned his eyes upward to the ceiling. "It was so strange," he said, his voice almost wondering. "It was like opening your eyes and being in pain, but not remembering why. And more than that – I didn't have any identity, any thoughts. I was just… empty. And they weren't just using the machine – they kept constantly hammering away with their ideology and telling me my new identity. The first few times were a mess, I just kept screaming.

"But then the time came where they put me through the machine, I opened my eyes, and they asked if I was ready for duty. And I just knew. I knew that I was their vessel and I knew I was ready to serve them. It's hard to describe it. I didn't remember my family, my home, the things I liked or the things that made me me. I'd forgotten my name. My whole being and identity was just… obedience. It only lasted about a minute before I remembered some things and realized that something wasn't right, but then they just wiped me again."

"I'm very sorry Mr Weber. Could you please read this line from Arnim Zola's initial designs of the machine?"

Weber took the document with shaking fingers. He read it, sighed, and then began. "The process will eliminate irrelevant memories and data from the subject. When applied correctly the subject will be wiped clean, a blank slate on which HYDRA may write a new destiny."

Maggie shuddered – the words, spoken in Weber's accent, reminded her of two days she'd spent in a New Jersey bunker with an insidious voice in her ears.

"How did you escape such a fate, Mr Weber?" asked Diego.

"Well I didn't remember any of this until a while later, but I've always been able to remember my rescue. I woke up, and I was that other person for just a moment. I gave my loyalty to them and I was ready for my next order. Then I remembered, and they put me back in the machine, but before I could be wiped I was rescued. I never saw who saved me, I only heard their voice leading me to safety."

Weber swallowed. "I was free, but that was… a terrifying time. I couldn't remember my name, who I was, where I was from. They kept me in hospital for three weeks before they tracked down my family. My family took me home, but I didn't remember them. The story was that I'd been kidnapped and tortured by an extremist group and lost my mind in the process." He huffed. "They weren't wrong."

"How did you regain your memories?"

Weber leaned back in his seat and sighed heavily. "It took years. I had flashes of memories but I couldn't hold on to them. The memories came with a headache, which after a while didn't go away at all. It took me two years to piece enough together for me to have some sense of identity but by that point I'd lost everything." He slumped. "And the whole time I was trying to remember, lost and confused, my most solid memory was of opening my eyes after the machine that last time. Because that had never been wiped away. I could remember my mind not being my own, I could remember that drive to comply. It was terrifying, and it drove me half mad."

"Tell us about your recovery."

Weber straightened. "It's been a thirty year process. I came close to death multiple times. I needed to rebuild my life after being kidnapped, but I failed – I was haunted by the returning memories, suffering, and I lost everything. My family, my job, my home. My sanity, for a while. I have chronic migraines to this day, and issues with short term memory – the doctors say I have irreversible brain damage. I drowned myself in drink. I ended up in prison for robbing a liquor store." He sighed. "Remembering the pain is hard. But what haunts me the most?" His face crumpled and Maggie's heart wrenched at the sight of a tear rolling down his pocked cheek. "Remembering what came after the pain," he continued. "The way they twisted my mind. I still struggle with that – if I can be wiped away like that, my very identity, what does that do to my soul? Do I truly have a soul or am I just… a compilation of my memories?" More tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, and his voice shook. "Because once I lost those memories I was nothing. I was an empty vessel for them to fill with what they wanted."

"Do you believe HYDRA destroyed you Mr Weber?" Diego murmured. "Is there no hope for rehabilitation?" Maggie leaned forward.

"If you'd asked me three years ago, I'd have said yes. But then that HYDRA information dump happened, and I realized that I wasn't crazy – everything I'd experienced, everything I'd felt, was real. There was a file about my kidnapping and the experiments they did on me. I realized that I'd gone through that… that horror, but I was here today. I realized that made me strong." His shoulders straightened, and he wiped his tears away with his handkerchief. "So I got clean in prison, did another degree in social work. I got out six months ago and I'm in the process of opening a rehabilitation home for victims of crimes who become homeless. I want to help them before they end up in prison, like I did."

The way the mood in the courtroom lightened was palpable, and Maggie let out a breath.

"That's very admirable, Mr Weber," Diego said with a small smile. "I have just a few more questions for you. Take yourself back, if you are able, to that state of being you inhabited after experiencing the Memory Suppression Machine. That utter emptiness of everything but obedience. Is there anything you wouldn't have done, if they'd asked?"

There was a pause, and Maggie felt darkness creep back into the courtroom. "No. I… I'd have done anything."

"Robbed someone?"

"Yes."

"Committed a terrorist act?"

"Without question."

"Killed someone?"

"Yes, I would have." His brow lowered. "I don't think you get it – the severity of the crime wouldn't have mattered. My only drive was to do what they said – I'd have done it, and I would have felt nothing because I had no feelings. I'd have killed my own mother." A tear slipped down his face. "It never happened, but the knowledge haunts me – I could have gone my whole life not knowing that there was a time where, if someone had asked, I would have killed my mother without a thought."

"I see. And how did you break out of that state?"

"I… one time I had a flash of a memory of my house, of all things, and a sense of this feeling of… happiness. It was jarring to have that image and that feeling disturb what I thought I knew to be true: that I was nothing, had nothing, felt nothing. It wasn't that I'd remembered who I was, it was more the confusion of those two opposites that distressed me and made them put me under again."

Maggie's heart pounded. He understands.

"And like I said, it took me two years to remember enough about myself to feel like I had an identity, even with my family around me giving me information and begging me to remember."

Diego folded his hands in front of him. "You've said you found your strength in facing what happened to you, Mr Weber, and acknowledging it was real. How strong would a person need to be to break away from HYDRA's conditioning – which, admittedly, you were only in the very early stages of – while having no memories of themselves or their loved ones?"

Weber shook his head and for the first time looked over at Maggie. He hadn't really looked at anyone until now, focused inward on his memories, but when his eyes met Maggie's she saw nothing but compassion in them. Her breath caught in her chest.

"If I hadn't been rescued," he said, his voice thick with emotion, "I would be everything they wanted to make me. I can't imagine the strength one would need to pull themselves back from that emptiness, that loss of identity, that utter control. I certainly don't possess such strength."

Maggie's eyes blurred over with tears. Under the desk, Andrea's hand rested on her knee.

When Mallory cross-examined Mr Weber he attacked the man about the reliability of his memory, and said that since the conditioning only worked on him for about a minute at most, the Memory Suppression Machine clearly wasn't effective. Maggie didn't have the energy to feel angry.

But Diego certainly did. His voice was terse as he redirected: "For clarification, Mr Weber, you went under the machine six times did you not?"

"That's correct."

"And you've stated that each time the length of your dissociative state increased?"

"That's correct."

"And would you say that six times is less than the at least one hundred times that Ms Stark was subjected to the Memory Suppression Machine in the early part of her capture?"

"I would, yes."

"Thank you."

It wasn't a great look for Maggie to spend a lot of time with witnesses in the case, so her lawyers wouldn't let her invite Mr Weber back to the mansion. But in the courthouse corridor, she and the German immigrant were drawn together like magnets.

"Thank you," Maggie breathed once they were face to face.

Mr Weber took her free hand in both of his and clasped it tight. "Don't thank me," he said, eyes on hers. "You are not the guilty one in that court room. It was my duty to help them see that."

Maggie, overwrought and overwhelmed, squeezed his hand. "What you said up there…" she cleared her throat. "You're right. You made it through that pain, and you are strong. Don't ever doubt that. I know how painful it must have been to relive it again today."

He smiled. "Do you know the saying 'aller anfang ist schwer'?"

She cocked her head. "'Every beginning is hard.'"

"Yes. Once I got out of prison I got my new beginning. It was hard, but I have a chance at a life now." He sighed. "I came here to offer you your own beginning."

They clutched each other's hands for a few more moments, the ghost of HYDRA between them and behind them, before Maggie's lawyers called out that it was time to leave.

"Best of luck, Ms Stark."

"You too, Mr Weber."

Buzzfeed: "A blank slate on which HYDRA may write a new destiny": Arnim Zola, HYDRA, and People as Weapons.

CNN: Interview – Otto Weber and his Rehabilitation Home for Survivors

On her way out of court that afternoon someone stepped into Maggie's path. Tony and Rhodey both bristled and moved to halt the potential attacker, but Maggie reached out to stop them.

"It's okay," she said, eyes fixed on the person in her way – the woman from the bathroom, whose brother she had killed. "Give us a minute."

Tony frowned. "You know her?"

"Not really," Maggie murmured. "It's okay, though." She peeled away from her entourage and gestured to a nearby room. The woman followed her in, and when the door shut behind them Maggie turned around. The woman's eyes weren't filled with rage this time – they were wary, assessing.

Maggie sighed. The woman had been in court every day since their encounter in the bathroom, and they'd made fleeting eye contact every now and then. Maggie couldn't look at her now without seeing her brother, Ben Mitchell – the last and only time she'd seen him he'd been sitting on a coffee shop stool, unknowingly drinking the cup of coffee that would end his life.

After the day she'd just had, Maggie couldn't find the strength to speak. So she waited as the other woman stared, then chewed her lip, then took a breath.

"Who told you to kill my brother?" she asked, arms wrapped around herself. "Why did they want him dead?"

Maggie closed her eyes. She ignored the phantom echo of the Memory Suppression Chair and focused on her memories, on the mission reports and target profiles she'd read. When she opened her eyes again the woman still watched her warily.

"You trust me to tell you the truth?" she asked.

The woman shifted. "Yeah," she said, eyes flickering. "I do."

Maggie nodded. "Okay." Then she gestured for the woman to sit down, and gave her all the answers she had.

Tony, Pepper and Rhodey all straightened as the strange woman emerged from the room with exhausted lines on her face and reddened eyes. A moment later Maggie followed the woman out and made her way down the corridor to Kemp and Martinez.

"What do you think that was about?" Rhodey asked, eyes tracking the stranger as she left.

"I don't know," Pepper said. "But that woman's been in court almost as much as we have."

"Nosy parker, journalist, or victim's family member then," Tony surmised, "and I think we can all probably guess which one she is if Maggie agreed to speak to her."

Silence fell between the three. Rhodey crossed his arms and sighed, watching Maggie talk quietly with her lawyers. She looked tired, he noticed. He'd almost gotten used to her presence at the facility, enthusiastic and quick with a joke, but since the press conference he'd been seeing less and less of that side of her. And yet he could tell she was trying to hide how much the trial effected her.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. "She's stretching herself too thin," he murmured. "With whatever that was, and she's still working on HERACLES as if her life depends on it."

"Do you think there's anything we can do?" Pepper asked, eyes also on Maggie. Rhodey knew the two had gotten close. Hell, Maggie had gotten close to all of them.

"It's the trial," he replied. "She's not going to be okay until it's over, but until then..." he shrugged.

Tony cleared his throat. "And if the trial doesn't go the way it should then Maggie might not ever be okay," he said darkly.

Rhodey sighed again. Maggie brought out a side to Tony that Rhodey had never seen before (or at least not in a long time), that of a brother. Rhodey loved it usually, but now with the trial hanging over Maggie's head like a guillotine on a thread, he noticed that it was becoming more and more difficult to dredge Tony out of this dark, foreboding mood. Tony got this way when the things he cared about were threatened - before now that had been a short list including Tony, Pepper, and his armor (and when aliens came knocking, the whole damn world). Then Maggie had arrived back in their life in a pretty dramatic way, and the list had grown.

But this was a threat that not even Tony could defend Maggie from. And Rhodey had no idea what that meant for his friend.

January 6th, 2017

Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, New York City

Maggie woke up early to get her shoulder checked – the doctors had agreed that she didn't need the sling any more – so she didn't have time to ask her lawyers about the next witness. She thought she knew who it was going to be, so when she looked up to see a young woman walk into the courtroom, she blinked and then glanced at Andrea and Diego.

"Who's that?" she whispered.

"Last-minute find," Diego muttered, then turned back to his notes.

The young woman gave her name – Katya Lebedev – and other information to Judge Moore, and Maggie eyed her face as she was sworn in. She was in her early twenties and her sky-blue eyes were alert, taking in every detail of the courtroom around her. Maggie noted the poised way she held herself, and realized that Ms Lebedev had been trained in martial arts at some point in her life.

Diego got to his feet. "Thank you for coming today Ms Lebedev. Could you please tell the court where you lived from the age of six to eleven?"

Lebedev met Diego's eyes. "I lived in a building in Russia. It was owned by an organisation called the Red Room."

Maggie went cold. Marble. Blood. Snow. Her eyes widened and she stared at the young woman – she couldn't be older than twenty five, which meant she probably hadn't been at the Red Room with Maggie. All the same…

"Could you please explain what the Red Room is?"

Lebedev's mouth twisted. "Was. It was a program that kidnapped young girls from their families, or from orphanages, and trained them to become assassins. They were allied with the KGB and HYDRA. They took me when I was six – I don't remember much from before then – and trained me for five years. I was… well, they called it training. It was indoctrination." Lebedev spoke frankly, but she couldn't quite hide the tremor in her voice.

"And how did you escape such a controlling organisation?" Diego asked.

"I was… rescued. By the Black Widow."

Whispers broke out across the courtroom and Maggie's eyebrows shot up her forehead. She'd heard that the Red Room fell in the mid 2000s, but she didn't know it had been Romanoff.

"Objection, relevance?" called Mallory.

Diego nodded. "I was just about to get to that, your honor." Moore nodded for him to proceed and called for silence. "Ms Lebedev, these exhibits on the screen beside you show that the Wyvern was at the Red Room from January 1994 to October 1995 – from the age of seven to the age of nine. I know this was before you were at the Red Room, but will you please tell us what you were taught about the Wyvern while you were there?"

"She was a ghost story," Lebedev said, her voice hushed. "Madame B – the woman who ran the Red Room – she would gather new recruits and tell us the legend of this monster – not a human, but a monster – who came to the Red Room and took down every girl who faced her."

Diego circled back to the desk and picked up a folder. "I would like to enter into evidence Exhibit 330, a series of documents recovered from Red Room files. They have been translated from Russian by a third party interpreting company approved of by the prosecution."

The back of Maggie's neck prickled and she sat up straighter. How on earth…? Her brow furrowed, and the furrow only grew deeper as Diego directed Lebedev to read excerpts from the documents: files about the Wyvern Program's visit and notes on the Wyvern's performance, including an entry about how she struggled with infiltration because she was 'barely human'. Lebedev's voice was mostly even, but every now and then as she read Madame B's words her lip curled.

"Thank you for reading those for us, Ms Lebedev. How would you describe your own experience at the Red Room?"

The woman's eyes dropped to her lap. "I wholeheartedly believed that I was theirs to shape," she said. "I was scared, sometimes, and I wanted to leave, but… as time went on, with every day of training and 'education', I believed more and more that I was a soldier in their cause. They weren't really teaching us, they were… creating us." She swallowed. "Madame B would push us to breaking point, over and over. And out of the broken pieces she would make something new. Failure didn't mean you got a second chance." Her eyes flicked up, meeting Diego's. "Failure meant death."

Maggie swallowed. Her eyes were on Lebedev but for a moment her vision shifted, swirled with snow, and she saw a black-haired girl clutching her throat, her eyes drowning with the knowledge that she had failed.

Maggie shivered.

"Did you ever have the option to say no?" Diego continued. "Were your feelings ever considered about what you were tasked with doing?"

"Of course not," Lebedev said, waving a hand. "I've tried to explain this to my family – my adoptive family – many times, and I think they are starting to understand. There was no… no choice, when it came to the Red Room. You bent to their will or you died."

"Once you were free from your captors, did their hold over you break?"

Lebedev's face hardened. "No. Their… their teachings, lived on. I still believed I was a Widow in Training. I was distrustful of the Black Widow even though she'd saved us, and then I was distrustful of S.H.I.E.L.D., and the police, and my adoptive family. They had to put me in a special 'de-programming' initiative because I kept trying to run away and find my handlers." Lebedev's determined façade flickered. "Breaking out of that conditioning was… the hardest thing I've ever had to do."

Diego cocked his head, considering her words for a moment. They hadn't mentioned Maggie in a while but the comparisons were fairly obvious to everyone in the room.

Eventually Diego took a breath. "I'm going to provide an assessment of Madame B, the woman who controlled the Red Room and oversaw the Wyvern's training for nearly two years, and I want you to tell me, as someone who knew her, if my assessment is accurate or not." He paused. "Madame B was a cruel, highly intelligent woman whose greatest skill lay in systematically destroying the minds, souls, and bodies of young girls and turning them into cold blooded killers. She took pride in her achievements, and saw every young murderer as a masterpiece."

Lebedev's eyes flashed. "Sounds spot on to me."

"With that in mind, would you please read the highlighted line from this document – for the record, this is a page from Madame B's personal notes, specifically regarding her assessment of the Wyvern Program. Go ahead, Ms Lebedev."

The young woman cleared her throat. "The Program's aims are fundamentally incompatible with ours – here we create masterpieces, widows made of marble. But they have created an abomination fueled by the darkest imaginations of science and programmed like a machine. She is a monster."

Silence fell.

In the silence, Maggie met Ms Lebedev's eyes. They shared a knowing look: the look of two women who had met a true monster and were glad she was in the ground.

After Ms Lebedev was cross examined and excused, Maggie cornered her lawyers.

"Where did you find her?" she hissed, voice low.

Diego and Andrea gave her blank looks. "I don't know what you–"

"No, don't lie to me, where did you find her? And the Red Room data? I know for a fact that's not publicly available."

Diego and Andrea shared a look. Diego sighed, then turned back to Maggie. "It was an anonymous submission. Guess you've got someone out there watching your back." He cocked an eyebrow. "But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we?"

Diego and Andrea turned away to get started on preparing their next move, but Maggie didn't go with them. She waded through the busy courthouse corridors, protecting her injured shoulder, until she spotted Ms Lebedev's blonde head. As if sensing she was being watched Lebedev glanced around, and the two women made eye contact. Silently, they slipped towards the nearest empty room.

Once the door was shut behind them Maggie turned to the other woman. Lebedev ran her eyes over Maggie, half-assessing and half-sympathetic.

"Thank you for coming today," Maggie murmured, taking a few steps into the room so she wasn't blocking the exit. The action eased some of the ever-present tension in Lebedev's body. "I know how hard that must have been."

"You're welcome," the other woman replied and reached up to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. "Anything I can do to help. I was in the Red Room for five years, you were in HYDRA for twenty two." Her eyes softened. "I think you're very brave."

Maggie smiled and cocked her head. "Well, if you see any other ex-Russians around, be sure to thank them for me?"

Lebedev's face broke open in a grin. "Why Ms Stark, I don't know what you're talking about." With that she opened the door, shot another grin at Maggie, then slipped out into the corridor.

Maggie watched her go with a considering look. There went someone who had escaped from the Red Room and went on to live a life with family, and a job, and presumably friends.

Maybe there's hope for me yet.

That afternoon Diego and Andrea called a character witness: a former HYDRA agent who had worked with the Wyvern on a few missions. He was surprisingly frank, explaining that the Wyvern wasn't a person but a weapon. Cold, unfeeling, obedient.

"Did you ever hear her tell a joke?" asked Andrea.

The agent gave her a funny look. "No."

"Would you say she was an intelligent person?"

"Oh, definitely."

"What did she use her intelligence for?"

"For whatever we needed."

"Would you say she was a kind person?"

The agent shrugged. "She wasn't kind, or cruel. She was just… I don't know how to say this any clearer, she was a weapon."

Andrea, eyes narrowed, gestured to Maggie. "The person sitting in the docks today, is she anything like the weapon you knew?"

The agent glanced over at Maggie. She met his eyes evenly, hiding her fists under the table. "She's got the same face," he said with another shrug. "But other than that… no."

(images)