Title: Alone with Death
Author: Lemur
Rating: T
Warnings: Violence
Disclaimer: Marvel owns all. I'm just borrowing.
Feedback: That'd be great. Especially constructive criticism.
Summary: A Winter Soldier mission, circa 2000, from the point of view of the target.
Harper jumped to hear the discharged weapons in the distance, through the empty echo of the building. 'One man,' she thought desperately, 'it's only one man,' but watched as the black-clothed figured moved, gleam of silver, and it was the guards who fell.
Alone with Death
By Lemur
They'd called her handler Olum. The man himself said not much at all as he inspected the room with dead eyes shadowed by thick, unruly eyebrows. His hairy, muscle-corded arms bore the marks of a thousand altercations; the skin of his knuckles a different color after so many layers lost to the abrasion of fist meets jaw.
"You'll be safe, artiste," he'd said when they'd first met, his accent unplaceable, the flat coldness in his voice oddly comforting. "I'm the one they would have hired to kill you." His thin lips curled in a smile, revealing teeth blackened by hand-rolled cigars.
Scars made by his own hand lined his forearms, pale slivers of ridged tissue—one for each kill, rumor said—and of those Harper counted 14. Four lines crossed out by a fifth twice over and four more waiting, as though tallying the winning hands in a game of Crazy 8s. He looked like a killer. If she'd had to picture a killer, she would have drawn a man just as dark, thick, broad and cruel.
Olum meant "death" in Turkish, they said, and that's what he was and what he delivered. And in this case, what he promised to prevent.
Heavy footsteps paced the floor as Olum left the bank of black-and-white security monitors. He strolled, eyeing the pages she'd stuck to the walls with her reserve of chewing gum. He paused, examined, and she tensed. Her gruesome protector blew out a lungful of smoke; she hadn't grown any fonder of the wretched, sweet smell; and he tugged one of her drawings from the wall. "Why you still draw, artiste?" he asked, and she still didn't know if the pronunciation was incidental or mocking. "You not have enough trouble yet?"
Harper sat crouched by the window, using the last rays of the sun before it left them in darkness again. She glanced around the one dingy room; at the bucket for a toilet in the corner; at the stained and filthy walls; at the threadbare mat that served as her bed; at him, her putrid roommate. She knew outside this room were more guards, and beyond that, still more, hidden and covert in the forest. "There's more trouble than this?" she asked.
Olum chuckled like a grinding car engine and stubbed his cigar out on the paper, burning a hole clean through. "It's a shame," he said. "All this, and you're not very good."
A few more days and Harper supposed she'd finally feel unhinged enough to shove the pad of paper at him, demand he draw something himself if he thought her work was such shit, but the idea of relinquishing even one tiny scrap made her heart seize. She ignored him, looked back to her careful lines and finished the bottom curve of Captain America's shield, drawing herself a better hero than the one she'd been given.
One comic, that's all it had taken. She'd published one controversial comic and found herself a hinge point in a revolution—the opposing sides swung to trap her in the middle. She still believed in it, even here with a fly buzzing her ear and the scent of cigars and urine clinging to her dirty clothes. She believed the workers deserved fair wages, that their treatment was wrong and inhuman. But she would take it all back, if she could. In her worst moments, she dreamt of saying the magic words herself, of condemning an entire generation to poverty and starvation if she could just hug her children again.
"Just for a few days," the ambassador had told her.
"Just until the elections are over," her mother had begged.
Hide, everyone said. Hide, stay safe, and let the storm blow over, because too many people wanted to hang her body from a rooftop as a warning, a symbol, as a martyr for a cause she barely understood.
It'd been 10 days now and she'd been keeping her own tally on her sketchpad's cardboard cover. The elections had been held three days past. Any day now, any moment, she was supposed to receive the word. Any day and she was supposed to be safe. She didn't have many blank pages left.
Captain America saluted her from the paper on her lap, the shadow of night already rendering her softer lines invisible. She'd drawn him with thick gloves and wings on his helmet, just like the old war bonds poster Lily had fallen in love with at the thrift store, the one she'd insisted they hang on her wall between Big Bird and Dora the Explorer.
'Little Lily,' she thought, 'my little Lily.' Ten days in the safehouse, and before that, it'd been three months in protective custody. She'll have grown, Harper realized. Her daughter was growing up without her. Her son might be talking now, forming "Mama" with his toothless little smile, and have no mother there to hear him say it.
She closed her eyes; the sun had stolen away her last light anyway; and pressed her forehead to her hands, to the wholesome, all-American hero hidden by darkness. 'Good night, little ones,' she thought, willing the words to find their sleeping minds. 'I love you. Good night.'
She jolted, head lifting at the scuffle of sturdy boots against the dusty floor, and she saw Olum rush to peer at the security monitors. His thick form leaned close, dark eyes reflecting the illuminated screen, darting back and forth.
"What is it?" Harper asked, and Olum hissed at her for silence.
Clutching her sketchpad to her chest, pencil gripped between her fingers, she stood and walked to the display of monitors. She searched the same screen Olum did, looking for what he saw without asking.
The first two monitors showed the front and the rear of the warehouse, panning constantly from side to side. Olum watched, unblinking, as the second monitor slowly scanned back to where it started.
Then, she saw it: In the darkness, a sudden sweeping flash of silver, and Olum breathed a word in a language she didn't understand.
He smoothed his thick fingers over his mangy facial hair, his tongue flicking out to wet chapped lips, and Harper saw fear in his eyes.
"What is it?" she asked again, desperate. Her heartbeat thundered; she could feel the fabric of her shirt tremor against her skin.
Olum muttered long sentences in a foreign tongue; its rhythm sounded like poetry. "Triumph," he said at last, and then turned to her, his face split in a deranged grin. "Or the end."
His limbs thrumming with energy, he pulled a knife from the holster on his thigh and spun it around in his fingers as he looked to the third monitor.
"Triumph?" Harper asked, her voice sounding panicked to her own ears. "What's going on? What's happening? Who's out there?"
Olum peered at the third monitor. "It's him," he said, seeming mad in his eagerness. Gone was her gruesome protector. In his place, Harper beheld a Spartan, a warrior, every delusional soldier who craved a good day to die and an enemy worthy of giving it.
"Look," he said, his battered index finger pointing at the center monitor. "He comes."
She could only stare, her body tense. On the center monitor, guards flooded the grounds, coming out of hiding with the threat of assault. And then there, step by step, first a glint of metal and then a figure emerging from the darkness.
"One man," Harper breathed, and dared to feel hope. "It's just one man."
Olum shook his head, clucking his tongue as though she were a foolish child. "He is not a man," he said. "He is Death."
Muzzle flashes on the screen, and Harper jumped to hear the discharged weapons in the distance, through the empty echo of the building. 'One man,' she thought desperately, 'it's only one man,' but watched as the black-clothed figured moved, gleam of silver, and it was the guards who fell.
Olum laughed gleefully, stabbed his knife into the table and clapped his hands four times quickly. "You see? You see?" He turned to Harper, grinning, as though she should share his delight. "Moscow, Tokyo, Barcelona, New York, 50 years it is always him."
He strode away from her and away from the monitors. "They say he cannot be killed, that he is machine." In the corner by his own threadbare mat, Olum fastened his weapons holster across his chest, slid his knives into their sheaths along his legs. He marched back to her. "That he is machine built only for this," he said, snatching up the knife lodged in the desk, raising it to her.
Its metal shined in front of her eyes, too close to focus, and she looked past it to the feral thrill in his. "Please," she said softly, "you're supposed to protect me. I have—I haven't done anything. It was just a drawing."
His gaze shifted then and he nodded. "I will protect you," he said. He flipped the knife in his grasp and smiled. "I will kill Death." Then he grabbed her roughly by the arm, dragging her to the rusted metal shelf in the corner. "Climb," he instructed. "Climb." And he returned to the monitors.
Hands trembling, she did as she was told, clinging to her notebook as though it could stop a bullet, pencil in a vice grip. At the top of the shelf, she found that the large ceiling tile beside the air vent could be moved. She glanced back at Olum, his face a picture of wicked delight in the pale glow of the television screens. Then, his eyes flickered to her, and he waved her on. "Hide," he said. "You hide."
He looked back to the screens and Harper couldn't stop the small cry that escaped her as more gunshots blasted. They were close, so close.
Death was inside.
She pushed aside the tile and hauled herself into the rafters. Dust and asbestos choked her panting breaths and she thought, 'Please, God, let me live long enough to die of lung cancer,' as she balanced herself on the beams and pushed the tile back into place.
A single sharp scream echoed off the warehouse's tall metal walls, chasing the rattle of bullets, until it sounded like 10 men in agony. Then, silence fell heavy and cottony.
Her blood pumped in a thumping rhythm beneath her skin, filling her ears with her own erratic pulse. She felt individual particles of dust as they settled on her eyelashes and stuck to the fearful sweat across her face.
And then, in the silence, she heard footsteps; steady, unhurried footfalls like the maddening plink of water from a dripping faucet.
She halted her breath in her chest, though her lungs strained and all she wanted was to take in a gulping gasp, clear the dust from her nose, sneeze and sniffle. Her fingers ached from gripping her notebook and pencil tightly to her. Olum moved in the room below and Harper shifted her body an inch or two on the unforgiving metal beam pressing against her breast. Through a slatted air vent, she could see Olum, a knife in one hand and a gun in the other, waiting by the door, an ambush.
'Olum means death,' she told herself. 'He's killed 14 men.' And then the door was torn off its hinges.
Harper gripped the metal beam and clung to her sketchpad as the wall shuddered from the force. Gunfire, and she clamped her hands over her ears. Wetness dripped from her eyes and she peered through the vent, through the dust in the air.
A blur of silver in the dim light of the monitors, and she could see it now—'Oh, God, it's his arm,' she thought, and felt something cold slick through her. Olum panted and grunted in his efforts, thrusting, kicking, and the gun skittered away across the floor. The metal arm gripped Olum's throat with a clean, mechanical thrum, and then her gruesome protector groaned as a knife slid into his chest.
The man, the machine, Death, the soldier, dropped Olum's body in a heap and sheathed his knife in one smooth motion. A strange hiss whispered in the room, and it took Harper a moment to realize it was the air seeping from Olum's sliced-open lungs. No triumph, and her maniacal Spartan had barely lasted 20 seconds; she hoped it was the death he wanted.
Her own lungs seized as she stared at the dark figure, and she'd never heard such silence. She strained her ears, but she knew she'd hear no distant step on gravel, no curious call. Everyone was dead, and no one would be coming for her.
She was alone with Death.
'My grandmother grew daffodils in her garden,' she thought abruptly, 'my grandfather always put blue cheese crumbles on his salad,' and the only footsteps she heard were those of the machine as he stalked further into the room. 'My mother wears a Hello Kitty necklace.'
A head of long, unkempt brown hair swiveled on rigid shoulders, inspecting, and Harper imagined she heard the hum of electronic sensors, wondered if he could detect heat, if he could smell her fear.
'My father sings showtunes after two beers,' she thought, 'my husband always wanted a pet rabbit,' and the machine turned, heel of one foot lifted, his coiled movements graceful and precise as a dancer's as his narrowed gaze fell on the security monitors. 'My daughter—my son—'
Harper stared at Death, and saw only a young man.
Olum had said five decades the machine had been killing, but she looked down now at the dimly lit features of someone who couldn't be older than 30, someone younger than she was. Smeared messily with black, the man's eyes—human eyes and not scanners—shifted to the walls, to the drawings and wads of gum still clinging to plaster abused by gunshots. She'd been stupid to leave such obvious evidence of her presence and felt baffled now that Olum had allowed her to do it.
The TV screens illuminated a jaw dusted with stubble and a face she would have called handsome anywhere else, in any other circumstances, anywhere but here with a knife at his leg that had stabbed through a man's chest and over a dozen guards dead on the concrete outside.
'My daughter—my daughter,' Harper thought, 'my daughter loves Captain America and will only eat peanut butter off a spoon.' Death turned her way and she squeezed her eyes shut, trembling against her metal rafter. 'My son laughs whenever I sneeze and I just want to hear him laugh again.'
A tear dropped from the end of her nose, hitting the vent with a muffled tap, and a metal hand burst through the ceiling to grasp her wrist in a vice. Death pulled and she felt the bone snap as her body broke through the ceiling tiles. She landed on the floor in a dusty, battered heap, her notebook resting atop her hand, bent now at an unnatural angle. White bone poked through red-wet flesh, her pencil resting useless across her bloodied palm.
"Please," she coughed through the cloud of debris and pulverized ceiling tile. "Please, I'm not dangerous. I'm not—I'm no one. I won't tell anyone. You don't have to do this." She retched, hacked at the dryness in her throat, and lifted watering eyes to the man.
But his black-smeared gaze was locked on her sketchpad, on Captain America's jaunty salute in graphite. His dark brow furrowed and he bent down, picked up the notebook with a gloved, human hand.
Harper slumped against the wall, cradling her broken, bleeding wrist, and watched him. In the room's dim light, he looked strangely lost, impossibly young—something fragile breaking over his impassive features—and she suddenly wondered about his mother. 'Does she know where he is? Does he have a wife, a husband?' She saw now that his eyes were a soft gray beneath the heavy black and would not, could not have believed this man was a killer if she'd not just seen it herself.
"Please," she said again, thinking of magic words, daffodils, spoonfuls of peanut butter and a baby's untamed belly laugh.
And then she saw the shift. He dropped the sketchpad and his expression hardened; malice looked all wrong on the lovely angles of his face, like it was a mask, forced on from the outside rather than born from within like Olum's; and a sick churn coiled in her stomach.
Her broken wrist throbbed against her chest, blood soaking sticky through her shirt, and she kept looking at his eyes, at those soft, gray, human eyes, as he lifted his gun and pressed its cold metal to her forehead.
"Does someone love you?" she heard herself ask, and didn't know from where the question had come.
His gaze flickered again, to the sketchpad, then to somewhere, some thought a million miles from here, and then back to her. His jaw tensed, his mouth a hard line.
Harper closed her eyes. 'Good night, little ones,' she thought, and felt the jerk of the muzzle against her skull.
Vadim heard the outer security doors clank open and flipped shut the cover on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
"He's here," Anton said, and Vadim nodded, yawning.
He slid the book to the side of rickety table and grabbed up the file and his pen, listening idly to the asset's footsteps striding near. The door to the lab opened with a squeal of hinges. "Mission report?" Vadim asked, eyes on the page as he printed the date and time neatly in the allotted spaces.
"Target eliminated," the asset responded.
Vadim smelled smoke and petrol and heard heavy boots meet the exam chair's metal footplates behind him. Anton's fingers clicked over the computer keys. "And the safehouse?" Vadim asked.
"Destroyed."
Vadim nodded, yawning again, and made his brief notations on the form.
"Local rescue is already responding to the fire," Anton said, glancing up from the computer.
"That's good," Vadim said. The woman's body would be found by morning and the revolution could finally get the spark it needed to burn everything down.
"Does someone love me?"
Vadim turned before he could stop himself, looking over his shoulder. "What?"
From the dark vinyl and metal of the examination chair, the asset stared at seemingly nothing, eyes unfocused. The question had been asked calmly, in the same tone used to inquire after a target's security detail or the level of carnage requested.
Vadim glanced at the technician standing beside the controls. The frail man shook his head, no explanation. Vadim turned back to Anton, who shrugged. "I didn't hear it if you didn't," he said.
Vadim let out a sigh; it was tempting—debriefings took twice as long when there was an irregularity to disclose; but he didn't know the technician and certainly didn't trust him to keep his mouth shut. He grabbed up the separate Anomaly Report form. "Fill it out," he said, sliding the sheet to Anton, then turning to the technician. "Let's go ahead and wipe him."
The technician's hands rose to the control panel, powering up and calibrating the levels. Vadim stood and walked to the asset, pushing back on its metal shoulder until it rested fully back against the chair. Gray eyes met his, ghostly pale amid the smear of black grease. "Does someone love me?" it asked again, in English colored by an American accent.
"Sure, they do," Vadim replied in the same tongue, adding a slant to the words like the guys in The Godfather. He activated the clamps, restraining the asset to the chair, and held out the biteguard until its mouth opened and its teeth clamped down. Already its breathing turned ragged, screams ready before the mind-wipe vices touched skin.
"We all love you, pal," he said, and nodded to the technician to begin.