"Matthew D." (propatria) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-12-25 22:19:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, bucky barnes |
narrative: winter soldier
Who: Winter Soldier (Narrative)
What: A little visit to a red room for Christmas. No green, not very festive, mostly memories that are bad.
Where: The Red Room Academy in Ukraine.
When: Today.
Warnings/Rating: Warning for intense oblique references and not remembering disturbing things?
As it happened, the soldier didn't need a map to find the coordinates of the small flashing dots. He committed them to memory (novel) and compared them to what he did know. He hadn't lost the ability to identify his location no matter where he found himself, the intense geography of spatial relation and homing back to base no matter what. To find his way home a good dog always needed to know where he was and how far to run.
Ukraine was ground well-tread. On the train, slumped against the window like any other weary passenger, it only took him a few minutes to put the pieces together. He laid the dots over maps in his mind, sunken eyes turned toward the blind window that faced the darkened countryside, almost no details visible aside from the occasional flashing lights of farmhouses and passing cars.
Weeks. It had been weeks since the last wipe, now. Halfway to Stockholm to shake down an ex-banker for information, he had remembered New York, that one escape, a final act of rebellion followed by thirty years of empty nothing.
Even now, it was only pieces. He remembered the target, a young man with long hair, and his father, the French ambassador. He remembered that urge homing pigeon go home and the peculiar desire to see what would happen if he did something else, the blossoming of choice, that something other than what was prescribed could happen. He remembered trains and unfamiliar faces and buildings that felt somehow as if they shouldn't be there, shiny skyscrapers and caterwauling music, food and storefronts advertising sex, a strange dystopia of a New York halfway dreamed. He remembered refuge in a flophouse, remembered when they came, and then nothing for a few years after they put the bit in his mouth again and yanked and never, never, never sent him to America again. This was the start of erratic and wipe him every time he opened his eyes.
The house was one of those dots in the Ukraine. Once he had correlated each dot to nearby towns, this one had burned brighter in his mind in the others. He didn't remember why, but he had long been a creature of instinct. His trust in his own urges had become fragmented (what was his, what belonged, what was pressed inside and out of place) this one felt right. It felt real, as hard as it was for him to say what was and what wasn't.
The map could be an obvious trap. He didn't know who had been on the other end of the line in Prague. If he hadn't felt the memory of this place, sensed that it was somewhere buried, he would have stayed a thousand miles away from such an obvious target. So he made sure to leave a trail in Stockholm, just enough. Not enough to make him seem suddenly sloppy, which no one would believe, but enough to make them think he'd slipped. That would keep them busy and asking questions in Sweden that no one could answer. It might be enough to make them think he had purposefully avoided the dots on the map he was given out of suspicion. Then he headed straight for the one that had felt most important.
It was cold outside the gates of the house. Snow was gently falling on the eves, and all sound was muffled by it. Several windows had been boarded up, and the glass was visibly broken on another.
He vaulted over the iron gate without opening it, keeping the padlock, at least fifty years old now, perfectly intact. The falling snow would cover his footprints. Nothing stirred here, not even wildlife from the quiet fields and forest beyond.
He had been in many places like this lately, isolated and cold. He liked them because there was no pressure to mimic others and blend in, but he felt a quiet ache for cities. He didn't want to look at people, but cities felt more right than this. Maybe he belonged in a city, or he once had. Then again, you couldn't reclaim everything.
The boards over the windows were half-rotten, and they came loose with an easy wrench. He slid his pack in and then went through himself, slipping in feet first.
He let his eyes adjust and coughed. Something moved in the shadows - just a tenacious rat, when he looked a little closer. This place was as good a shelter as any.
Very little snow had managed to drift inside under the door, but the structure was obviously wet through with damp. The ceiling above sagged, and the carpets had rotted to shadows. He coughed sharply into the handkerchief tied across his face at the dust stirred up from his footfalls. There was no telling whether they might have laced this place with bugs in case anyone came back, but that seemed doubtful. The building was untouched; eerily so, far enough from civilization that no one had even bothered to leave graffiti.
He disliked it immediately.
Preferences were new, but it felt wrong. The sensation of knowing something had been scrubbed out of him with particular care was distinct and intense as he stepped into the kitchen, a relic of a time sixty years ago he remembered a little better than anything else in between. He opened a cupboard and another rat scuttled out. There were still boxes in it, though the food had long since been eaten by pests. When they left, it had all stayed behind.
They? He thought he heard a sound of scuffling feet, wheeling something heavy. Memory hit like a hammer to the back of the head, and he tasted metal. Girls. There were girls here. He knew it like their perfume still hung in the air. He walked through the rooms on the first floor and remembered something, remembered fighting, correcting - teaching? When was he a teacher to anyone?
He went upstairs. Here were bedrooms, including a small closet he recognized as his own. But he hadn't always slept there - why?
Top floor. The stairs were weak here, and as he mounted the last one, the banister broke under his hand. He stumbled as his foot punched through the stair that fell away with the banister. His hand slipped forward, and an inch thick splinter punched through his glove to his palm.
Stupid. An idiot's wound. Blood soaked through the soft lining of his glove and out through the leather, pooling and dripping down three stories. He tore the handkerchief off his face and tied it around his hand. He ought to clean up the blood in case anyone did come here on his trail, but it had to wait. There was something on the top floor he needed to see.
Over the past week, he had begun to sometimes dream about a window. It was high in a building in the countryside, looking out on snow and ice, and they were good dreams. That was all there really was for him so far - right and wrong, good and bad, positive and negative. There was rage, and will, and what was good and what wasn't.
The door to the room on the third floor was lying on the floor, the doorway a gaping hole. The window wasn't boarded up because of the height, and he could see the countryside. He remembered this room. Someone good had been here.
There was a flicker of feeling - red hair?
but that was all.
What did she look like? He looked at what remained of the bed, a husk of black planks and a moldering mattress in the iron frame. His hand was warm from the blood. Who was she? Did she have a sweet smile? Was she part of a larger plan to wear him down? Had she been anything more than one good night? The dream said yes, but when he reached for something substantial about someone - important, there was nothing there. There wasn't even a memory to fit a face into, no figure that fit it. Yes. They were important, but that was all, all there was.
Memory was happening too slowly, and then going much too fast. He blinked, hard. His eyes were wet. He knew more than ever, which was good, but made him feel out of control, which was bad. Knowing a little meant he wanted to know so much more, but it felt sometimes like he was being dragged toward a final answer he might not be able to live with.
Then again, he had been battling a kill order for weeks now, and he was still here.
He went out through the window and onto the roof, following a track that felt familiar. He avoided weak spots in the roof until his feet met the ground outside the cellar door.
Down, into the dark. He pulled the doors open and smelled sixty years and must, mold, and silence, all dampened by the cold.
Everything was still here. The empty cases where the practice weapons had been, a shelf of folded girl's clothes, many of them strangely intact aside from moth holes. A glass case containing something like medical equipment, empty syringes and piles of soiled bed linen.
But the tank. It was at the back, and still in fine shape for its age, built to last. The hundred cords still snaked toward a generator that had rusted still long ago, and the tubes that conducted cold through its surface remained coiled around it.
He put his hand on the door, hanging gently ajar, and tipped his head inside. Good and bad. The room upstairs had been good. This was not.
When he touched the door, there was a sharp flicker of memory so harsh and cold that he sat down there, at the edge of the tank and saw nothing for a little while. He remembered, he remembered something about withering ice and the sensation, not of going to sleep, but of dying in a drawn out instant, one screaming cell at a time.
The person who had sent him here knew something about him, he decided, once he could see again. He pulled the handkerchief around his bleeding hand thoughtlessly tighter, and felt the reassurance of his flowing, warm blood. They knew these places meant something to him, or they guessed. They either knew his file, or they knew him. He would know them too.
First, though, he had to clean his blood from this house.