Quicklog, West Virginia: Winter Soldier, Iron Man, & Captain America
[If this was war, it was almost unrecognizable to the soldier in the idolized blue suit, starry shield at his side. If this was war, it was nothing like treebursts loud as the Fourth of July at home, it wasn't 88s telegraphing death in battered staccato, it wasn't men, young and scared, each sided only once. It was obscured, beneath feet of sun-shattered cement with a light feathering of snow. It was a rank and file of computers, data banks spitting sparks in another pantomime of parroted patriotism.—But no. Some of it was the same, wasn't it? The chaos was there, black and starless against the back of your teeth and tongue. Men yelling, feet beating retreat or onslaught to two very different tunes. He'd seen places like this before—most of them carved into the solid guts of the Alps, prisons, labs, bastions of Nazism or the Skull's own brand of fear.
Only these men, the ones dropped like so many flies all around, bones smashed and fraying—like a popsicle stick you chew on after the ice is gone—all of it ugly,—but these men, they weren't young. They weren't draftees or volunteers. They were older, agents, too many guns, not enough taut battle-borne panic.
The man, just after the second turn in the hallway, armored and yelling into his radio, turning now to point his rifle at Captain America and Iron Man—he had the faceless look of HYDRA, like he was nothing but fodder for a cannon bent on destruction, a bullet in the barrel of a gun, not a man, and that was what got to Steve. That was what drew that frown across youthful features, blond and blue turned dark.
But he was ready for it. Out of the ice now for a few months, and hadn't he been bred for war? Created for it? He was a weapon too. Not the bullet. But the gun itself. And he angled his shield without thinking, sending whatever was shot at him, back. His muscles moved in a choreography of memory, like this hallway was just a better-lit version of everything that had come before.
Only his mind wasn't in it right. He didn't have his Commandos. He had Stark—and the work he saw before him, blood, bones, it was Bucky's. No sign of the man himself, just his handiwork. Steve bashed the slumping attacker in the face with his shield as he moved past him.] BUCKY? [He was a soldier. He knew he was giving away his position. But that was the point, wasn't it? He wanted to be found.