Who: Bucky Barnes/Matt Murdock What: Bucky is having a stakeout party. Where: Disused office building across from a major Manhattan hotel. When: After rescuing Tony. Warnings/Rating: TBA.
There was nothing to lead someone to the thirteenth floor of a nondescript office building, positioned across the street from a luxurious Manhattan hotel. There was no surveillance footage to show anything out of the ordinary, no obvious entries and exits, no alarms. No one noticed that someone had been slipping in and out of the building for weeks. No one checked the currently vacant office space on the top floor, a wide open room of short carpet and cubicle sections leaning against the walls. They hadn't called him ghost for no reason.
It would take someone extranormal to find the soldier tucked behind a tower of disused plastic chairs, the muzzle of the rifle pointed at the penthouse across the street. The sniper rifle had come from a cache he raided months ago, but it still hadn't entirely lost the scent of moss and dirt from the forest it was buried in, sealed in a plastic bag to hold out rust. Freshly oiled and assembled, it was poised on a plastic tarp, braced on the soldier's shoulder.
He could lay like this for many, many hours. He knew that, but didn't necessarily remember why - the need to remember it drifted away, directionless. There had been below zero nights and desert heat days, fighting sand and snow in the eyes and the weapons, waiting for the right moment, the perfect shot, easy as releasing a breath, as smooth and simple, neatly geometric.
That shot had not come yet.
Now she called herself Zoya Abdulova, but he knew her name as he knew her fingers, poised close to his eye while she
Did something he didn't quite remember. But he knew her, and he knew she had been living in this country with her false name for forty years. He knew her as part of a matched set, as Dyatlov, something swift and deadly and notorious. Now she was an old woman, but it was only a year or two ago, a year or two as it was to him, she had been blonde and young, lovely, tight-lipped. She had been Hydra, and she had done things, but she had escaped to live well.
She had a distinctive walk, caused by an injury (he can see the knife in her thigh, even if her face as a young woman comes to him only in pieces). He watched her in the scope. Did he train her? Did it matter? All of it was gone. It washed away years ago.
He couldn't say that he missed this singularity of focus, because that would require feeling something about it. His mind was neat and empty, and he watched his target through the scope. She occasionally walked in front of the large window of her penthouse. The scope followed, but the trigger never twitched. He knew from her itinerary that her grandchildren were visiting soon.
He did not feel differently, one way or the other, about the children seeing their grandmother die if he did not take the shot soon. The gun simply followed, back and forth, as she paced and talked and cooked and consulted her security team, hour after hour, through the day and into the night.