"Matthew D." (propatria) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-01-18 16:48:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, bucky barnes |
narrative: winter soldier
Who: The soldier (Narrative)
What: The soldier struggles with soft drinks, thinks about trigger phrases, and then decides something much more difficult.
Where: A convenience store at the Eastern border of West Virginia.
When: Today.
Warnings/Rating: Some violence.
The soldier was standing in a convenience store in West Virginia. He wore a dark blue baseball cap and a worn gray hoodie, a black pack low on one shoulder. The room was cold, warmed only by a small space heater that the clerk tucked behind the front counter, and it smelled of salt and cigarettes. The rug by the front doors was soaked through from the pass of wet feet over it, and the cream colored tile beyond was covered in grey black streaks and ordered dashes from slushy bootprints.
He was staring into the soda refrigerator.
It was a cavalcade of colors, options, and what had to be flavors (?) labeled on the side. Row by row, stack by stack, priced separately and produced by mystery companies, not a single one was familiar to him. Blue and red, yellow and orange and green.
He needed to eat something. He had been on the move for almost a entire day, but he hadn't eaten in considerably longer than that.
He couldn't remember ever being allowed a meal of more than tasteless, fortified starch and protein, from what few memories he'd retained. For the past two weeks he had stolen from home refrigerators and other travelers as he moved, taking whatever was available. There had been nothing like this parade of options, item after item arranged like a fan of cards.
His mind wandered. Had he ever been given choice in this way? Even now, his destinations were all predetermined by his end goal. The soldier took missions. He did not fail them. It wasn't simply that failure was not an option, or he feared the punishment that followed. Failure was meaningless. The concept did not exist. He pursued his target until mission completion, and that was all. This mission was no more a choice than any other.
In Washington, though, he had very nearly failed entirely, and it had only taken words. Вы помните Раскольникова? They meant nothing at all on their surface, but they had settled on his mind, soft and deadly to nascent ideas of ownership or memory as a clean hard frost. It turned something off, tugged him back, and reminded him of the calm quiet he didn't quite remember, the cold. What was this imagined world outside his safe chamber, outside sweet-voiced handlers and orders? What could it possibly offer?
With one of the heads of Hydra clasped in his hands, he had stared down to the door at the end of the hall. That glinting metal doorknob was what dragged him from the edge. He had seen it many times, years ago, when this facility still operated in its original purpose. Beneath a hospital, where medical waste could be easily disposed of, and doctors could come and go without arousing suspicion, he had been kept. Years, possibly. The thought floated without an anchor to time, but he had seen that doorknob, blurry and flecked with light, strapped to a gurney and still shaking with ice.
For his poisonous words, he crushed the man's jaw, but something remained still missing. His fingernail hold to something was torn sharply away. When he left the hospital he could read the signs on the road, but when a woman asked him for directions he couldn't respond, not even to deflect her attention. Cевер? His tongue stung, and he could not speak, muscle memory of a very old pain. Before the chair (had there been a time before?). Something about mothers and language, and what was required.
He was sure that he had remembered small things since what happened on the banks of the Hudson, but they disappeared when the man in the facility spoke. He knew how clean they must have made him before the mission for the Captain, how poorly he must have behaved for them to strip him this bare. The knowledge of this was dull and real, and connected only to a smothered flutter of panic. Words. Someone had murdered words, taken them, weaponized them.
He was still staring at the soda.
"You gonna buy anything?" The burly woman behind the counter was obviously less than interested in why the dirty guy in the baseball cap had gotten into a staring contest with the pop refrigerator.
A decision. He had to make a decision. But he was lost, here - why would anyone choose any of these things? What did people use to decide? A girl sidled up awkwardly beside him, apologized, and reached in to pull out an iced tea. No lingering, not a thought about what she wanted.
He stared at the brand she'd chosen. Maybe it was the best one. He reached out for it. It was hypnotic. Вы помните Раскольникова?
"The fuck do you think you're doing?"
The solider looked up. How long had he been standing there? He turned to look behind him again.
Two men were standing at the cash register. One was wearing sunglasses indoors and a black balaclava. The girl with the iced tea had been pushed to her knees, and Balaclava was holding his gun to her head sideways for no practical reason the soldier could think of. Even at close range, it would only reduce his accuracy.
The clerk had gone from petulant to hyperventilating, and she was struggling to open the safe. The other man, presiding over the clerk, wore a Guy Fawkes mask. The string parted his blonde hair in the back. The soldier didn't know why he even recognized it. At some point, it must have been important.
Balaclava was shouting now, moving around the girl on the floor with the swagger inexperienced violence, built around stories he'd been told. The soldier had known many such men. He looked uncomfortable with the gun in his hand, like he'd never held it before. "What'd I say?" He gestured with the gun, away from the girl's head - up, then down to the floor. "Get the fuck down!"
He swung the gun back to the girl's head. Too fast, too nervous, too twitchy. His finger slipped on the trigger, and the gun went off.
The soldier moved. He moved faster than any human being ought to with a cold start, closing the ten foot gap to Balaclava before he could move more than a half foot out of the way, before Guy Fawkes could bring his own gun to bear. Balaclava was struck square by a metal arm driven forward by two hundred pounds.
He slammed into Guy Fawkes and they both went through the plate glass window, skidding onto the asphalt outside the store.
The soldier turned - the girl was out cold, but not dead. The bullet had skimmed past her temple. The clerk was still alive, tucked behind the desk and babbling about the money on the counter.
The soldier ignored her. Instead, he stepped over the unconscious girl, and went back to the refrigerator. He chose a bottle that claimed to contain cold coffee and put it in his pack. He also picked up the first box of crackers and peanut butter he saw on the shelf, and a box of colorful, sweet looking cakes. Then he went around the cashier's desk.
The clerk was covering her face, now, and pressed herself as closely against the back of the desk as she could. The soldier did not acknowledge her. Instead, he picked up the small black and white monitor behind the desk and yanked its plug from its socket.
He walked out, stepping over the body of Guy Fawkes. He had taken a chunk of glass to the shoulder as he went through the plate glass window, and was whimpering as he tried to staunch the flow of blood.
Balaclava had fared less well. He lay halfway between the empty gas pumps and the store, his arm bent the wrong way behind his back, wheezing under ribs that had cracked from the blow. His leg was bleeding, and more seriously than his friend's, the blood almost black. The glass had cut close to the femoral artery. If he survived, it would be a very near thing.
The soldier looked at the monitor, still in his hand. He had fully intended to simply crush it when he left the building, but now, looking down at the would-be armed robber, he wondered if its weight had a better use.
The mission. What was most important was the mission. This boy had clearly seen his face, and could describe him to law enforcement. He had nearly killed the girl inside, and he was almost dead anyway. Collateral damage in pursuit of the end goal was always acceptable.
The soldier canted his head, looking down at the bleeding man. More a boy, really, by his build, carrying a gun he hardly knew how to use. The monitor was heavy in his grip.
The soldier dropped it next to the boy's head. The glass shattered and sprayed over the blacktop, taking with it the footage of the robbery. "Yesli vy identifitsirovat' menya, ya ub'yu tebya." The boy wouldn't understand, but he didn't need to, breath hitching in his lungs as he fought broken ribs, staring wide up at the figure standing over him.
Sirens were nearing. The building didn't have central heating, so it didn't have an automated alarm. The soldier turned his head, and he could see the clerk's ashen face in the window, her phone to her ear. Yes, time to go.
He climbed back into his car, stolen in DC at a desolate streetcorner, and started the ignition. He was around the corner before police lights appeared in his rearview mirror. Да, я помню.