"Matthew D." (propatria) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-01-05 19:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, bucky barnes |
narrative: winter soldier
Who: The Winter Soldier
What: Following a signal to its source.
Where: The empty Oscorp facility.
When: Today.
Warnings/Rating: None.
It took time to track the signal to its source, which he did know how to do. Tracking targets wirelessly had been deemed a necessary part of a 21st century skillset, just one in a battery of hundreds of blitzkrieg training sessions on learning the latest thing when they thawed him from ice each time. They never showed him enough to use a technology or technique in any other context, but he learned enough to pass undercover and excel with computers and phones for prescribed, pre-approved purposes. Hunting down a well-masked signal, for instance.
This one came from the United States.
He had not returned there since the fall of the architect's grandiose plans to be the loudest of any leader Hydra had seen in the last seventy years. It wasn't safe to go back there after what had happened in DC, but that wasn't why he hadn't gone. He didn't want to. He wasn't afraid of what might be there, but he was cautious. Crossing the Atlantic felt like sticking his hand in a fire.
He needed to know more, though, and the person who knew how to find the house in the depths of the woods, they knew things. Find them, and he could find the source of their information. There was no way to know how many of the Americans were compromised by Hydra, and even a righteous SHIELD would want to get their hands on him, perhaps more than any of the European governments who knew to who look for, or the terrorist organizations who liked the idea of an assassin out of myth on the payroll.
He went to America anyway.
He traveled quietly, and he went by boat, eschewing airports and their heavy surveillance. He would save plane travel for when the risk was worth the speed. His target would be long gone from the location he had tracked it to. He was just going to sift through the ashes for a next step.
Cash at the coastline in Maine bought a small, dirty motorcycle off a dock worker, no questions asked. It cleaned up well, and the man was short of money. It cleaned up too well, in fact, and the soldier dirtied it again, with soot and mud enough to hide the paint and color.
Standing on the dock with the scent of salt thick on his gloves, tipping a canister of fuel into the engine, he felt a warm flicker of sun and salt and sweetness on the tongue, peaches from the can, a rare luxury, and a man on the docks riding a motorcycle up and down to advertise his wealth. Like a shutter to the next slide, he saw dim shoes, wet and black with leather peeling, heard an engine roar, and smelled blistering diesel exhaust in a desert of dark trees and snow. Blurry red and white in the green.
He reached the facility a few days later. It was nothing he hadn't seen before, and there was nothing left to find, no one there to meet him. Sections had been torn open, and you could smell the death ten feet from the door. This was no Hydra outpost. It lacked the clean finesse, and hallmarks of widespread institutionalization, and the purpose. This place had been built for something different, something local. A SHIELD black site, maybe. Private contractors. He'd find no hard facts here.
He was a ghost in the ruins, inconspicuously vague in a dark winter coat, a hood pulled up over his hair and a bandanna tied around his face, yet again. He was gloved, but he still didn't touch anything. He expected the possibility of surveillance, though there was nothing left here to see.
He catalogued the bodies and the stale chemicals, the vermin and the snow blowing in from outside, stood in the hall for a moment as the dead lights swung overhead in the draft. It felt as if the person who had contacted him wanted him standing here. Trying to make a point? Or maybe not. The house in the forest had felt purposeful, intended. Nothing in this place flickered with knowledge out of reach. A dead end. Whatever this was, it wasn't his fight. He picked through the corpses and the charred remnants of illegal experiments with smooth efficiency, and didn't pause when stepping over the dead.
He left as quietly as he came, unburying the motorcycle from a snow drift a mile away, near the road. By the time anyone would see that an apparent carrion eater had come by to pluck at what remained of the facility, he was gone.