Re: log: steve rogers, tony stark, winter soldier
He had propped the woman up in the aisle, and as Steve advanced after his little show, the woman didn't move. She was breathing, at least.
The soldier wasn't immediately behind her, not anymore. He had been rifling through one of the last intact cabinets the entire time the good Captain had been making an enthusiastic show of destroying the opposition. He tore through the contents item by item. He was at once careful, intent, and aggressive, slamming one drawer shut before opening the last.
It had to be in here. One of these drawers. It could be filed under any of a dozen code names, but it was here. They had taken the last of the records here when he began destroying the other facilities. There had been a shipping manifest in France, and while it hadn't mentioned the documents to be sent stateside by name, he knew what they would try to bury now. Here. The file he wanted would be here.
When Steve came beyond the edge of the cabinets, he would find a gun pointed at his face. The metal hand held the weapon, while the damaged right picked through the files. Blood had soaked through the porous segments of the tactical armor around the entry wound, but he didn't seem to notice. Then again, he also seemed oblivious to the small pool of blood at his knee.
From this angle, it was now obvious that he had been shot twice, not once. In fact, the evidence of this first injury was on the floor - bloody boot prints that had started just outside the entryway and grown thicker and darker once he was inside. No doubt this bullet had hit him earlier in the facility, before Steve's arrival. He was one against who knew how many, unable to be as deadly as he had been trained to because of a wish. He had taken a bullet to the thigh when the noise of Iron Man and Captain America's arrival outside had sent the agents into a frenzy. All this time, months of work without a single serious injury, and two meddling heroes put all his work to waste.
There was no apparent exist wound for the bullet. Yet he had walked on it and fought on it until now as if it was nothing, speaking either to great determination or a disturbing lack of awareness of his own physical pain. He healed quickly, of course, but not nearly quickly enough to explain that.
The steel hand that held the gun didn't shake, but his arm did waver, slightly, and the pace of his work on the cabinet was starting to slow. He still didn't look up. The file, and then he could go. He couldn't look up at the Captain, or he would be too compromised to push through his injuries. He remembered Cap's bloody face on the Helicarrier, the blind and soothing regularity of mission combating with as yet unfamiliar memory, withyoutiltheendoftheline. The file. He could apply first aid outside the facility, and get the bullet out of his leg once he was at least a few miles away.
Clearly losing blood, he was still plotting his exit strategy, still inside the mission, still set on mission completion, and death before failure.