Alessandra Cavallaro (slaypire) wrote in salemscenes, @ 2016-04-23 14:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | bucky barnes (reprogramed), jondy (x5210) |
Who: Jondy and Bucky
What: They try to break up the riot before the tornado hits
When: This afternoon
Where: Downtown
Warnings: Violence
The noise of the crowd was what had piqued Jondy’s interest. She had the day off from the animal hospital and had planned to spend the morning wandering around downtown Salem. She wanted to check out the book store though books held little interest for Jondy because she read them so fast and the pleasure was over too quickly. Movies and television shows were actually better for her because she couldn’t rush those. There was a variety of shops and she envisioned herself getting a latte and walking around, not stumbling onto a protest.
When she arrived she noticed people with signs. She used her super vision to get a quick close up and read them. One of them had a big red circle and a line drawn through the words “Hawthorne Coven”. People were chanting and yelling. Jondy wasn’t one to get in the middle of something that didn’t directly concern her. She tended to stick to the fringes of society because she couldn’t afford to draw attention to herself. It appeared that she wasn’t the only one. She drew up next to James standing at the top of a nearby building with a perfect view of the growing mob.
“This isn’t good,” Jondy said quietly. She didn’t want to startle him so she made sure to make her presence known in case he hadn’t noticed it yet. She wasn’t purposefully trying to sneak up on anyone but her feline DNA guaranteed that there was always a degree of sneak in all of Jondy’s movements.
She walked up alongside him and looked over at him. She recognized him from being around the hotel and had thought she had seen him with Steve but wasn’t completely sure. If he was a friend of Steve’s, Jondy trusted him a little bit more than she might other strangers. The fact that he had also chosen a perch on high to observe without being directly involved keyed her into the possibility that she might have found a kindred spirit.
“How long has this been going on?” She asked.
She folded her arms over her chest and stared out over the crowd below. If necessary, she could drop to the ground in an instant, completely unscathed even though the building was several stories high.
No, Jondy wasn’t the only one trying to keep a low profile in Salem. Bucky didn’t feel the need or the urge to reach out to the people in town or on the network. He knew he probably should try regardless of his feelings on the matter since Natasha had advised that he needed to do “normal” things to help completely break down his conditioning, but making new friends wasn’t something he was up to yet. He was starting to spend more time in the hotel, albeit in his bedroom, but it was progress and a step up from continually wandering around town to avoid sharing space with another person.
However, it was his ventures outside that had brought the sudden unrest of Salem to his attention. There was already a post on the network about the native residents feeling uneasy with the new arrivals but Bucky had been aware of it before then. Unlike the people flying around town or swinging from webs in flashy suits, Bucky knew how to travel without drawing all kinds of attention to himself even with a shiny metal arm. It gave him the advantage of hearing in on the worried whispers that had turned into angry ranting over the past couple of weeks. So really, he was hardly surprised by the the crowd of people protesting outside of the hotel.
It wasn’t his problem, not yet, but Bucky couldn’t find it in him to keep completely away. For one thing, people in crowds tended to act like idiots especially when they were already riled up and more importantly, they were picketing people that would be able to hurt them without breaking a sweat. It was a powder keg waiting to go off and so long as he was forced to stay in Salem, the resulting fallout would affect him in one way or another.
That meant that he needed to keep his eyes on the situation but with distance away from the protesters. Not long after they showed up, Bucky found himself on a roof nearby the hotel, his sniper instincts strong as ever. He kept watch for a good while when Jondy suddenly appeared at his side. He didn’t say anything and his gaze stayed on the crowd below but he didn’t make a move to show he was uncomfortable with her presence.
“Couple hours,” he answered simply. “And more keep showing up.” As the words left his mouth, another small group showed up and joined the protesters with their own signs. “This isn’t going to end well.” The crowd was loud and the shouts were angry. It hadn’t started out that way. They had obviously been unhappy from the start but as the crowd grew bigger, the infamous mob mentality settled in and it only took a few people shouting to hype the rest of them up. “They keep whipping themselves up into a frenzy.”
Couple hours? Jondy was surprised by that. She didn’t usually sleep very much. It was one of the quirks that made her different from the other transgenics. Neither she nor Max ever needed to sleep which meant they would stay up all night talking and keeping each other company. Jondy must have been very involved in her reading because she hadn’t heard the commotion. They were close enough to the hotel where Jondy’s super hearing would have certainly picked it up.
She frowned as she watched the crowd get progressively more loud and then quiet down again. Jondy hated crowds, tended to avoid them or anywhere she might accidentally draw attention to herself. But Manticore wasn’t here. It was one of the first things she did, search high and low for her creators because if they couldn’t have her, nobody could. They had proven that when they killed Tinga and when they allowed Zack to die to save Max. Manticore was a place of evil and though it was supposedly gone now, destroyed by Max, Jondy knew the government still operated to some extent which meant Manticore was never truly gone.
She used her feline vision to get an extreme close up on the crowd again. She folded her arms over her sizable chest and frowned as she watched the crowd. For now, she was content to stay apart from them, up here on the rooftop with… what was his name again? Had she seen him on the network? She had surely seen him around the hotel but it wasn’t as if either one of them was particularly friendly.
“If the crowd gets out of hand, I’ll jump down and try to separate them,” she said. The last thing they needed was for these idiots to get them all killed or worse. There was worse things than death, Jondy knew because she had experienced most of them when she had been growing up at Manticore.
“I’m Jondy.” She turned her head, her bright blue eyes watching him. If they were going to be stuck up here together for a little while, she figured they might as well know each other’s names. Though Jondy had no true name, that was just the name that the other kids at Manticore had chosen for her. Jondy’s name was X5210.
Bucky spared Jondy a small glance and there was a spark of recognition. He’d seen her post on the network before but she wasn’t one to post often like the others. He could respect that, all his interaction on the network so far had been under filters. Half of it was because he tended towards being a loner since Hydra had gotten their hands on him and the other half was paranoia. Public posts meant that everyone had access to them and anyone could read them. He wasn’t ready to be the open with so many people just yet.
He didn’t physically react but Bucky had caught the fact that she nonchalantly said she could jump down from where they were. She didn’t have to mean it literally but something about her made him think she did. It wasn’t like that would be impossible, not when he and Steve existed. “I’ll give you a hand.” Normally, he wouldn’t have offered or walked away as soon as she walked up to him but she was quiet and that was something he appreciated.
“Bucky.” He shot her another look and nodded. He was still getting used to thinking of himself as Bucky but it resonated more with him than James. In most of the memories he’d managed to recover, everyone had called him Bucky with the exception of Sergeant or Barnes. Nevermind Winter Soldier. That was a name he wouldn’t mind losing.
They stood in silence together as they watched over the crowd below. It almost felt like a recon mission from his war days and that was a welcomed feeling. The group of protesters continued to grow and the angry buzz surrounding them rose along with it. At some point someone pulled out a megaphone and Bucky rolled his eyes as the moron helped work up the crowd. It was only a short amount of time after that that the protesters finally broke out into a frenzy with people shoving and screaming.
Bucky didn’t even have to look at Jondy and he jumped off the roof along with her. His landing was lighter than it usually was and he took off into the crowd. He pulled some jerk off another guy’s back with ease and gave him a small shake before shoving him away. He was used to fighting but this was a whole different beast since these were just stupid people that got out of hand rather than trained soldiers with guns. He had to remind himself that he needed to hold back.
He made to move to get closer to the hotel doors so the fight didn’t spill into the lobby but before he could, he spotted Jondy. She was moving a lot faster than he thought she could, obviously able to handle herself. Still, when she was dealing with a couple people he didn’t hesitate to head her way when he saw someone else nearby with a bat, swinging it indiscriminately. Before it could make contact with her, Bucky reached out and grabbed it mid-swing with his metal hand. He crushed the aluminum under his fingers and yanked it out of the guy’s grip before knocking him out with a punch.
There were two girls standing near the statue outside of Gulu Gulu Cafe that Jondy didn’t recognize. They were trying to talk sense to the crowd but were met with more jeers and more angry yelling and even someone throwing things at them. Jondy had enough. This was getting out of hand and it was well past time to stop it before they all got hurt.
Jondy landed neatly on the ground like a cat and just as she did, a group of idiots decided to turn a car over. It landed with a crash, the windshield smashing into a million pieces. Jondy straightened up quickly and dove towards the crowd, literally using her body to separate the people and the cars.
“Stop and listen!” she yelled at them. But nobody wanted to stop and listen and they rushed at Jondy. She tried to stay calm even though she was in the heat of battle. She knew that many of these people were human and she could easily hurt them if she let herself take it too far. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. They said that transgenics were soulless monsters created in a lab but Jondy had a soul, she knew she had a soul.
The Blue Lady was watching out for her because out of nowhere Bucky’s hand reached up and grabbed the fat part of the bat that was aimed at Jondy’s head. It wouldn’t kill her but if it had been swung hard enough it was possible to knock her unconscious. That was the problem with this crowd, she was trying to treat them all as humans but they weren’t. Some were supernatural creatures with powers that might have been comparable or greater than Jondy’s.
“Thanks,” she said to Bucky. “Duck.” Someone literally came flying through the crowd right at Bucky but Jondy was prepared. The person slid over Bucky’s back and Jondy grabbed their jacket and used their momentum against them, sending them sailing out into the crowd with the same velocity they had come at Bucky and Jondy.
“This is out of control,” she said, looking around, wishing she didn’t look as hopeless as she felt.
Bucky gave her a nod of thanks in return when Jondy pulled someone off his back. They were in the thick of the melee and things were only getting worse with every passing second. His lips thinned in annoyance as he kept himself in check. Bucky was trained in violence and as much satisfaction as he’d get out of swatting everyone aside, that wouldn’t really accomplish anything but adding to the sweeping frenzy. He was caught up in his indecisiveness until he saw the look the look on Jondy’s face and that was it. Bucky was done trying to play nice.
Shoving or throwing people aside didn’t do anything but buy them a couple seconds before the rioters got back up and joined in again. “Follow my lead,” Bucky called out to Jondy and motioned ahead. He carelessly shouldered people out of his way, forcing a path to a couple of men that were hitting anyone in their line of sight without thinking twice. “We’re taking out the ones having too much fun.” Bucky was suddenly in one guy’s face and leveled him with a well placed punch to the head. He caught the protester’s unconscious body and tossed it over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and deftly maneuvered through the crowd, trusting that Jondy wasn’t far behind. He sprinted across the street and placed the man down on the empty sidewalk.
“Ready to go back?” He shot Jondy a questioning look and right back into the crowd. He started in on his plan to systematically knock out the people that weren’t fighting back in defense and laying them down across the street from the hotel. It would hardly put a dent into the group but at least the main agitators weren’t going to be involved in the mix.
It was a tricky to decide who was simply on defense when everyone was fighting but Bucky decided that anyone that was using more than their fists was fair game. He received more than his share of hits while he stalked through the crowd but it hardly registered, used to worse, and used his metal arm to block everything aimed at his face, his lips twitching whenever he heard a surprised yelp as a result.
The plan seemed to be working well. Jondy followed Bucky’s lead. She didn’t know what he was, he moved like a transgenic so she assumed that he was one for the moment. It wasn’t like she could stop in the middle of a fight and ask him how he moved and fought the way that he did. She knew there were transgenics that she was unfamiliar with here in Salem. Like Jewel, Tinga’s clone that felt like a real ghost haunting Jondy. She hadn’t met or seen Alec yet but she was certain that when she did, she would throw an absolute fit. It wasn’t right that anyone else should have Ben’s face.
Jondy tended to target the aggressors, which was sadly, almost everyone. There were some rubberneckers that had gotten caught up in the melee and Jondy didn’t know those ones unconscious, just simply whisked them off their feet and set them down away from the crowd with the clear instruction to run and hide until it was over. She was glad to see that not everyone was thinking like a rioter. There were others in the crowd that were helping, she thought she spotted Steve but couldn’t exactly stop and say hello.
More unconscious bodies began to pile up in her and Bucky’s spot. They were both about to head back into the crowd when Jondy spotted something unusual. She put her hand out and tapped Bucky on the elbow. Some people were not comfortable being touched and she respected that but she had to get his attention somehow.
When he looked at her she pointed at the three people that she didn’t recognize but were Allison Argent, Alex Udinov and Stefan Salvatore ranting and raving lunacy.
“Something’s happening.” Jondy could feel the dangerous shift in the air. She did not know the three of them but even so, she could recognize erratic behavior. Then they were chanting and Jondy knew they were in trouble.
“Stop! Stop destroying everything!” she tried to yell over the sound of breaking glass as someone heaved a trash can through a shop window. It was too late for anyone to stop what would happen. Because Jondy heard the horrible roar of something dark and terrible approaching.
Bucky’s focus had been on another target but the tap on his elbow made him pause and glance over at Jondy. He looked over at what she was pointing at and his eyebrows furrowed. He recognized the three from the network but they didn’t seem to be in their right mind just then. If anything, they looked like they were having some kind of psychotic break.
He didn’t know what they were in for but he knew Jondy was right. Bucky’s hair stood on end and there was a sudden ominous feeling that ran down his spine. “We need to go.” Whatever was going to happen, he had the feeling that no amount of fighting would put an end to it. He turned to get Jondy to go with him but the people in the crowd caught on that something more than the riot was going on and they started to panic and began to run every which way. It parted him from Jondy even as Bucky tried to make his way over to her.
“Jondy!” Bucky shouted her name but it was washed out by the roar of the protesters as they swarmed around him. He lost sight of her just as the panic grew worse. One glance away from the crowd and he spotted what had made them all lose their shit. A tornado was headed their way.