let me tell you about Sokovia — not one of the glossy dots on a diplomat’s map, but a running wound scabbed over with centuries of disappointment. he grew up between crumbling blocks and blackened factory bones, beneath concrete skies forever swollen with snowclouds and the taste of iron. forward was nothing but gray, behind was only loss — war memories sucking all the color away, leaving each day colder until hope was just a word old men spat out between their teeth.

HYDRA came when nothing was left. their smiles were as empty as the coal-scattered fields behind the city, promising order while their shadows crept behind every locked door. Sokovians were already a people gnawed to the bone by treachery, fed on it until it burned in their bellies; they watched as friends went missing, as strangers’ faces melted into violence, until all that was left was a stony-eyed resistance. they hated HYDRA the way animals hate cages — pure, instinctive, desperate. boys with scuffed boots and broken vodka bottles tagged the streets, old women hissed curses, men wrapped fists around hidden blades. they banded together, cornered and savage, teeth bared — not so much soldiers as starving packmates who’d chew their own limbs off before kneeling.

EKO Scorpion formed in the ruins — a myth ground out of the city’s bruises, soldered together by hunger, fever, hatred. more rumor than reality, they were brothers to one another: bruised and starving under sputtering bulbs, warmth snatched like contraband, laughter like shrapnel. mercy starved in the dark beside them. honor came battered and hard, like leftover bread — barely enough, scorned if shared. HYDRA uniforms passed untouched; the look Zemo’s men gave them was old, flat, and dead as the ghosts in the streets.

there were no subordinates — Zemo’s circle were wolves held together by remembered scars, by the cold code of brotherhood Helmut gave them: to never leave your own behind, to bite out the heart of betrayal, to stare back unblinking from the jaws of every threat. in this family, trust was lifeblood; lose it, and you were gone, drowned with all the other drowned hopes.

that night, wires hummed with terror. rumors stuttered through Novi Grad’s choking alleys, the city’s heart beating fast as HYDRA’s hounds stalked for rebels who still believed they could matter. everyone knew what it meant to be ‘taken’. still, in the concrete gut below the city, they waited, every movement premeditated murder or desperate hope.

and then — he came. the winter soldier hunted by night, shadow licked to bone, the rain sheeting off his body until he looked half-drowned, half-phantom. bleak eyes. blood hunger. he fought not like a man, but like some captive, terrified animal — trapped behind the wire, every movement a snarl, all muscle and ferocious instinct, every blow screaming his agony. he broke wrists, smashed teeth, fighting to the last gasp, clawing for air and freedom, trusting nothing, not even his own hands. he flailed at the pack encircling him, desperate — tooth and nail, spit and blood, more wounded wolf than human, the howl of something ruined reverberating in every crack of knuckle on bone. they moved as one body, no breaks, no mercy for anyone who couldn’t keep up. in the chaos, Zemo barked the only order that ever mattered: «bring him in. alive.»

each man forced down the soldier’s wrath with bruised hands and broken faith, boxing him in, pushing him deeper into the tomb of the city. unity forged by old suffering, their strength bound by what had been taken — that was what finally broke him. when the handcuffs locked cold around his wrists, his breathing was ragged, fight spent but hate undimmed. rain battered the stone above. they only stared, wordless, masks washed new with water and streetlight.

«you’re ours, now,» Helmut said, holding the winter soldier down, voice dull, soft-edged, final.

another night survived. another hope clawed back from the dark. Sokovia — just barely — still endured.