A little copy/paste message to start: BRR109 has pretty much quit the fan fic site. IDK if temporary or permanently. She didn't say. I've known her for years and know she's been going through some really tough IRL shit. After she told me she took down several stories, it pissed me off. So now I'm reposting the ones I remember she talked a lot about. Sorry to anyone who had this story on favorites or followers and it got removed. Idk I'm still learning this whole fanfic thing. I'm just going by what I saw BRR109 do the few times I watched her post something...


Epilogue - Blood Star

I remember it as though yesterday. It happened all so fast, on the night of my parents' twelfth year anniversary. They were downstairs celebrating late into the night. I could hear them occasionally laughing over a movie in the living room...a wine bottle cork being popped open and the clanking of their glasses against the other in a toast... Hearing them happy made me smile. For the first time in a long time, I wasn't afraid to go to sleep. My father always told me that as long as I went to bed happy, the boogy man wouldn't come get me in my sleep. Being the highly impressionable and over imaginative eight year old that I was at the time, I believed him. That night I just knew everything was going to be alright. Or so I thought.

Then it happened.

Jade green eyes snapped open. The little eight-year-old girl they belonged to laid motionless in her bed. She had her white kitty blanket drawn under her chin and her eyes staring in the direction of her closed, bedroom door. Pink letters reading Syra adorned the back of it.

What had just woken her up so suddenly? Screaming, and not just any screaming. The sounds of her mother screaming.

At first, I thought my dad had scared my mom, again. But these weren't the screams of being startled from him jumping out at her from around a corner. These were much more horrific. If there was ever a sound to describe sheer horror, what I had heard that night would be it.

The little girl's breathing was becoming more rampant. Sounds of glass shattering silenced the screams, but only for a moment. The glass...it had to be from one of the living room's big storm windows over looking the bay. Or perhaps the coffee table.

Crying. She could hear her mother crying, now. Begging for her life. Who was she begging? What was going on?

Syra couldn't move beneath her covers. She was terrified. Terrified but curious. She could feel warmth encompass her bed sheets beneath her. She was so afraid that she had inadvertently wet her bed. Her tears painted her cheeks, down her neck and into her hair. She could hear her mother continue to beg in sobs.

"Please, don't kill me! Please! What do you want?"

Over and over she repeated herself. Begging. Crying. I couldn't take it any longer.

The little girl knew she was going to regret looking to see what was happening but couldn't lay there any more. Her little feet with pink painted nails ignored the kitty house slippers by her bed. Step by step took her closer to her bedroom door; took her closer to the unseen and unknown down stairs.

Her trembling hand hovered above the door handle. More breaking glass downstairs caused the little girl to yelp and leap backwards. Whatever caused it caused her mother to scream out, again. Screaming and begging to be spared.

Syra yanked the door open and ran down the stairs. "Mommy!" She landed onto the floor level and into the living room.

Suppressed gunfire silenced the living room of the terrified cries. Jade green eyes locked onto a man's tall form.

Of everything happening that night, he was what I remember the most. He was like a nightmare made real.

Steel blue eyes encircled in black face paint met wide, petrified green ones. He scowled over the top of his black mask covering his lower face. Strands of long, brown hair curtaining his face gave him a more unnerving appearance.

Those eyes. So cold. So empty.

Behind him on the couch was the lifeless form of her father dressed down in his blue house robe. In one hand was his wine glass, its red contents spilt onto the couch. In his other was his cigar and between his eyes a single bullet hole.

Syra's attention shifted to her mother's motionless form, sprawled at the feet of the masked man. She was laying face down, dead eyes staring openly into the distance. Crimson started to spread from beneath her body and outwards through the carpet. Shards of glass belonging to the broken coffee table were strewn about her.

That's when I realized this son of bitch killed my parents. Why? Why did he kill them?

"Mommy!" The girl took a hasty step forward to her mother's body, but a shot fired at her feet kept her where she stood.

Syra looked upwards to her parents' murderer. Her eyes fell on the metal arm reflecting the living room light. Standing out in contrast to the silver was a red star on the shoulder. A star as red as her mother's blood.

Syra ignored the man and charged to her mother on the floor. She managed to briefly take hold of her mother's hand before being ripped away. Pain shot throughout her arm tightly held by her assailant's right hand.

One forceful back hand of cold metal knocked her out and sent her to the floor.

That's all I remember of that night. When I woke, I was laying in the front yard with a medical team hovering over me. I could see a fire blazing off to the side. Where I had called home was in flames. Judging by the structure of the house starting to weaken and crumble in on itself, the fire had been burning for quite some time.

I don't know why he spared me. Why he didn't just shoot me like he did my parents. Was I not worth the bullet? A thorough investigation was done by men in black suits. Men I would have no idea who they were until older. I would then come to find out these suits belonged to a secret government agency called SHIELD. Apparently they were tracking my parents' every move. Listening in on every phone conversation. Everything they did was monitored. Of course I was too young to know this, at the time.

It was all explained to me after I encountered this man, again, when fourteen.

Spring break '06. By now, I had been taken in by my grandparents. Everything seemed fine and dandy. My Pappi and Grami explained my parents' murder as the work of a disgruntled employee from my father's electrical engineering business. The fire was used as a cover up. Something told me there was more to what was being told. And there was. I learned this the hard way.

I was coming home from a Friday night football game to find the nightmare had returned.

A sliding glass door leading to a back porch creaked along its track. Entering through it was a fourteen-year-old girl, her long brunette hair braided over her right shoulder. First glance at the joined dining and living areas revealed something was wrong. Book shelves were knocked over with books and trinkets from shelves littering the floor. Chairs from the dining table were knocked over with one being in splinters. A hole was in the far wall next to where the TV normally was. Beneath it was the out of place coffee table. Who ever had thrown it across the room was obviously strong.

The teen's attention shifted to the kitchen at her left. An artificial bouquet of colorful flowers was now on the floor and the vase shattered around it. Cautiously the teen stepped into kitchen. Crumbled on the floor and gasping for air was an elderly woman. The front of her light blue dress was stained with her own blood. She had been shot in the shoulder and again in the gut.

She held out a trembling hand, soaked in her blood. The teen was quick to take it and knelt down beside the failing woman. "Syra," the elderly woman wheezed, "run. Before he finds you."

"Who? Who's he, Grami?"

Her last words forever burned in to me.

"The Winter Soldier."

Before I could ask her who that was, gunfire from behind me tore in to my ears. I can still feel the breeze of the bullet fly past my face on its way to its target. Just like that, a single bullet to the head took my Grami away.

The shadow of a man crept across the kitchen tile floor and over the kneeling teen. He could see her body trembling in either anger or fear.

Green eyes traced the shadow's outline and to its source. There, standing feet behind the teen was a horribly familiar man, clad in black clothing. He looked just as he had six years ago with black painted eyes glaring over a lower face mask. Blood splotched the otherwise polished metal of his left arm as blood ran from the shoulder's star. Some of it had dried, some of it fresh.

Seeing the red star as it was, then, brought me to know it as the blood star. I tried to fight him, but what good that did. He was a wall of a muscle and I a kid. I stood no chance.

Steel blue eyes stared in hatred to the green ones looking up at him in anger. The metal hand around her throat tightened, causing her to gasp and choke for air. She tried to claw at the hand in hopes of fighting it off of her. Tears of desperation streamed down her cheeks and onto the cold metal wrapped around her neck. She could feel the heat of his breath against her face as it escaped through the slits in his mask. There was something unnerving in those blood chilling blue eyes.

He tossed her to the floor and aimed his pistol at her. Without hesitation, he shot her in the left side. He sadistically watched her writhe in pain and clutch at her blood oozing wound before stepping over her and walking away.

I kept expecting him to come back. To finish what he started, but he didn't. He left me there to die. I could hear him drive off on a motorcycle minutes later.

By the time help arrived, the killer was long gone. The secret organization known as SHIELD was back. I wanted to know why. It took a lot of pressuring and arguing with a black man wearing a trench coat and an eye patch before I got answers. What I wasn't ready to know was that my Pappi and father were once scientists for a terrorist organization called HYDRA. I'd heard of them before in school during world history.

My father and Pappi couldn't take doing anymore dirty work for them. So they left. SHIELD took them in and gave them a fresh start in exchange for what information they knew regarding HYDRA. Not even new identities through a special type of witness protection SHEILD offered could stop this Winter Soldier from finding them.

After all I had ever known as a family was killed, SHIELD stepped in yet again. I was provided a foster family through the agency, a middle-aged man by the name of Daniel Strickland and a woman slightly younger than him named Rebeca Holloway. While Rebeca more tolerated the agency assignment, Daniel seemed more of the guardian. I felt safe with them, nonetheless. No matter the occasion, though, they had more gadgets and fancy gizmos as well as an entire armory's worth of guns stashed around their house. I guess it's one of the perks of being agents in a technologically advanced espionage agency. Two years after the assignment, Rebeca was transferred overseas for a top-secret mission. That was the last I saw of her.

I can only hope to be a part of SHIELD one day. To find the bastard that took my family from me and get my revenge. One day... one day...