"Matthew D." (propatria) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-05-09 17:20:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, bucky barnes |
narrative: 'james'/winter soldier - marvel, new york
Who: 'James'
What: The soldier goes on a walkabout, encounters skinny jeans, sets a false trail for Hydra to follow, and makes some positive memories for a change.
Where: New York.
When: Tonight.
Warnings/Rating: Long.
He was going to leave the facility eventually. It was bound to happen. He paced. He followed his usual on-mission routine to keep his body primed. He kept a small kit of all-purpose tools in a pocket of his armor, and he performed a few minor repairs to bring it back to decent condition. It would need to be replaced soon. He had no sentimental attachment to the uniform. It was, after all, one in a series, improved year by year, updated, parts swapped out as the mission demanded. Much like his arm. Much like him.
In the quiet there was too much time for dreaming. He had the journal, himself, and nothing else. There was a world to learn about, but he had no mechanism to learn about it.
In the end, that was what drove him to leave Tony Stark's safe house. It had been weeks since the facility. Hydra was looking for him, and they would be watching New York carefully, but they would have more eyes on Washington. He had been more active in that area, and no doubt they still expected his nascent programming to wake up, to grab his mind with an iron fist, to drag him home on a leash.
Home.
The facility was bare, but the false house at the front was outfitted with a convincing garage facade. This included nondescript transportation - a pair of sedans in dark blue, a few years old, with full tanks of gas. The keys, when he climbed in, were sitting on the driver's seat. Stark had thought ahead, even if the rest of the building felt only halfway finished.
He put the keys in the ignition, and the garage door opened helpfully on its own. Head down, driving slowly, he pulled out onto the deserted street.
He fixed his mission sub-objectives in his mind. While the overriding goal was still exterminating Hydra, to be manifested in the short term by travelling to Washington when Stark was ready, he needed to find a device that could access the internet. He didn't want to ask Stark for that. Also, if he was ever going to be able to safely leave and return to this building, he needed Hydra fully off the scent. Sub-objective two.
He did not forget the mission when he drove a few blocks and began to see people, more and more of them, when he looked up past the window and saw the skyline of New York and felt a flush of adrenaline and a twinge in his leg where the wound was almost healed.
He remembered what had happened on the mission gone wrong in New York, the mission that had made his masters monitor their asset even more closely. Only fragments - forty years ago, riding the subway, disoriented and alone, his hair growing long and hanging lank, sleeping in a boarding house, fighting six agents of Hydra at once as they beat him and shocked him and drove him to the ground, drove him to submission and dragged him back -but these fragments were more concrete than almost anything else he had remembered. He could still feel that confusion, the feeling of being somewhere he was and wasn't supposed to be, and the panic when they had found him, the rage that had no source he could understand.
That was when it had started, when they had begun to talk about his instability, when wipe him became a watch word. They had worked so hard to flush this glitch from him, but the memory of the bad New York mission had been one of the first things to come back, months ago. Something had connected, that rebellion with the present moment. When he had walked away, and they had pulled him back in, dragging at the ground with his fingernails, not even knowing why he didn't want to go.
He kept his head bowed as he drove. They would have eyes in the sky, looking for him. They would be running facial recognition at every intersection camera, every convenience store.
He parked the car on a quiet side street. His armor was conspicuous, though he was cleaner now than he'd been in the wilderness. He chose a residential area, clean of surveillance, and waited until the sidewalk was clear, before exiting the vehicle. He entered an alley, sat down against the wall, slumped. He waited.
Twenty minutes later, a suitable candidate came by. He wore a backpack and was clean cut. His clothes looked expensive, but, again, it was hard to tell what expensive meant anymore. James, Soldier, whatever it was he called himself now, was waiting for someone who was his own size and build, someone preferably wearing a - sweater with a hood? Half the people he saw on the street were wearing them, but he didn't know what they were called. They hadn't sent him on an undercover mission in a long time. The sixties, maybe. Each decade blurred into the next one. Casual vocabulary and modern fashion weren't important when your mission was to break into a prime minister's home and shoot him while he slept.
He was also looking for someone around the same age, and there was a stumbling block there, because who the hell knew? If he was born when James Buchanan Barnes was born, he was old as the damn hills but that didn't seem quite right. So much time on ice. When he saw his reflection over the sink for the first time in a gas station bathroom, a voice over his shoulder had murmured pretty rough for a guy who hasn't hit thirty, but then the voice had gone away. It was there sometimes, even now. It wasn't apart from him, it was a thought of his own, but one that stood out like a flash of color on black and white. He tried not to think too much about it when it came. Everything was a mess in his head, and no wonder, if what Banner said was right. Best not to think much about that, or he'd follow it to a memory he didn't think he wanted back. His instability was changing every day, from flashes and twitches and memories that took him out of his body to something more, something concrete, something he could almost touch but couldn't reach.
Anyway.
The guy with the backpack was nervous enough of long-haired homeless guys that he didn't even notice the body armor, looking carefully away and making zero eye contact. People could be intensely stupid sometimes. Clueless backpack kid didn't even feel the hard tap to the back of the head when it came, but he definitely would when he woke up.
The street was quiet enough this late into the evening that he stripped the man down and pulled his clothes on without a single person walking by the mouth of the alley. The sweatshirt went over the body armor smoothly, but the pants were trickier. Why was this man wearing such tight jeans? Tactically speaking, they were just impractical for free movement. And even considering that the man was a civilian, they seemed...indecent. Also, uncomfortable.
Fair enough - he left the pants next to his victim. If James was lucky, the legs of the body armor would pass as some kind of modern fashion statement. From what he'd seen, there weren't any hard and fast rules about that kind of thing.
He took the man's backpack and rifled through it, dropping whatever wasn't useful in a small pile beside him. The tablet was just what he'd been looking for, something he did actually know how to use. No cash in the wallet. Mission not yet complete.
It was a simple thing to improvise bonds and a blindfold for his victim. James backed the car into the alley, loaded the man into the trunk, ensured there was good airflow, and closed it. There. One thing taken care of.
He didn't go to Brooklyn.
He knew how to get there. No question of that. Even in this New York, a New York he hadn't been in for forty years, he knew which streets he would need to follow, which bridge, the fastest way.
He didn't go.
He didn't walk the streets of New York. He kept the hoodie over his head to shield his face from any cameras, and he drove.
Here were people. There was a mother with two children, twins, a matched set in blond, one with glasses an one without, shoving each other on a streetcorner. There was a group of young girls in short skirts on a corner, chattering to each other. There were skyscrapers, too many of them, foreign blots on the landscape, somehow wrong to his eyes.
There was a tired looking young man with a bag in his hand. Going to work? James stopped at an intersection. He looked at the boy on the corner, who seemed too young to look so tired, wearing stained clothes and carrying a plastic sack that likely held his lunch. It was flat. Going home, then.
Going home from the factory, empty lunchpail in hand, fingers so stiff they feel bruised, sweat drying on the back of his neck. Honest work, though, even if it is temporary. The job is just this week, but he can stretch it out for a month, the pay, he can string it along. They fed the workers breakfast at the factory, and that was seven less meals to account for, seven more breakfasts he could buy and leave next door, at -
A harsh honk dragged him out of the momentary remembrance with a sickening feeling of drowsiness. He had slowed to a stop halfway across an intersection. He jammed on the accelerator, and he cursed. Out loud.
He went to the train station.
Sub-objective two - board a train headed anywhere. He lifted a wallet from the back pocket of a man walking out of the station, dragging a bag behind him on wheels, and he felt a faint pang that he couldn't place. He wouldn't be able to find the man to return the wallet, but he decided to leave it somewhere that it would be found.
A healthy amount of cash. Good.
He bought a ticket. He ensured that he tilted his head up for just a moment, just long enough to check when the train would arrive on one of the screens set high in the wal, just long enough to give the security camera a full image of his face.
He boarded the train, wearing the backpack he stole from the boy who was, by then, surely panicking in the car parked near the train station.
At the third stop, just after the train left the city, he left the train. All trains eventually come to a stop to wait for another train to pass them on the track. In the last car, when the conductor was busy two cars down checking tickets, he wedged a door open and stepped out onto the tracks.
It took almost an hour before he could find a motorist willing to give him a ride back into the city. The driver talked too much, but James sat in the passenger seat and listened, mostly. The man had strong feelings about the Yankees, which twinged something in him, though he couldn't quite tell if it was negative or positive. The driver's accent and his pattern of speech was distantly familiar, reminding him of someone he had no name for. A friend? A brother? A parent? A cousin?
He spent most of the ride staring at the skyline of the city, in a way he couldn't when he was behind the wheel, and wondering about what it meant to be from somewhere. When he reached for home, he pictured a chair, and a coffin of ice and metal. But looking at New York from a distance gave him the satisfaction he once felt when he successfully returned to base from the field.
(When he returned, he was put on ice again almost immediately. Those small rooms full of machinery that smelled of gasoline and condensation on metal had been hateful and comforting at once, an island of familiarity in a sea of half-remembered things.)
The man with he stole the wallet from in the train station had been finely dressed, and the cash in his pocket reflected that. James tried to pay the driver who let him ride with him, the Yankees fan, but the man refused the money. No no, he said. My pleasure.
James returned the favor by asking the man top drop him ten blocks from the blue sedan. He got out of the car under a broken streetlight. Nobody should torture a guy because he pulled over for a stranger by the side of the road. Even if he was a Yankees fan.
It was dawn by the time James returned to the car. He made a pit stop on the way to an all-night convenience store. He checked on the boy in the trunk, who begged to be let out.
"Where do you live?" James asked. They were the first words he'd spoken, and, understandably, the kid hesitates.
His driver's license said 'Shane Mahoney', and he thought, Irish kid, but what does that mean, what does it matter? "Shane," he said. "I'm taking you home."
Apparently, Shane decided that he had nothing left to lose, and rattled off his address. Within the hour, James was hoisting him effortlessly from the trunk, like a doll. He dropped him against the wall, propping him up.
He tucked the rest of the cash he stole into the boy's pocket, enough to pay for a new tablet computer.
Maybe? Probably.
As he dropped Shane Mahoney to the ground, he loosened his bonds, so he could free himself slowly, and pull his blindfold from his eyes well after the car was out of sight.
James parked the nondescript sedan back in the nondescript garage, and he shed the stolen sweatshirt. He rolled his shoulder. The wound there had heaed so well that he didn't even feel the pull of scar tissue anymore. Soon, there would not even be a mark.
He felt -
He didn't know what he felt. Good? It was a good mission. He achieved his goal. He heard about the Yankees, and he saw New York, felt its difference, felt the throb of people and crowds, and he left a false trail for Hydra to follow way from the city, away from its people, away from the Avengers. And no one died.
He sat down in the spare barracks, alone in the cavernous, empty facility, and he turned the tablet on.