Disclaimer: I don't own Marvel, you know the drill.
A/N: I've been away for a bit, sorry to admit I've been a little unmotivated lately, but I powered through this chapter. I'm hoping I'll get my groove back and crank out the following chapter in the next week or so.
After the violent encounter with her former lover in The Vault, Christina avoids The Vault. Her neck bares a red, angry bruise that she's forced to hide with high collars and scarves, just like when they'd first met. She takes the next day off at home with her son, her voice quiet and small thanks to the damage Winter's metal hand left behind.
She spends the day bumming out in ripped jeans and comfy, over sized turtleneck sweater, tending to a lot of tummy time on the floor with her little boy. It's a lazy day, but when she lays Jamie down for his midday nap, Christina finds standing before the bathroom mirror, looking over her badly bruised throat, and she can't stop the tears from coming. Feeling incredibly foolish, she curls up in the empty tub and cries quietly, where her sleeping child can't hear.
Wishing desperately that Winter will remember, she hates the part of her that folds in fear. She knows now that she has other problems to concern herself with, as much as she loves Winter, he's still dangerous, which was well and fine when it was only her. But, now she has a son, their son, and she can't continue putting herself in harm's way when she has Jamie to be responsible for.
Christina loves Winter, loves James Buchanan Barnes, but can't be sure that said man even exists beneath the assassin anymore. She loves Winter more than herself, more than her safety, more than her own well being, but not her son's. Who would care for him should she ever be hurt, or killed? She could never leave him to her father, Alexander Pierce would eventually learn of his parentage and then what would become of him?
She loves Winter, but she can't risk her boy. So Christina doesn't go to The Vault again, she spends next couple days playing with her son and watching kid's cartoons. She doesn't learn of the attack in broad daylight, the car chase through the middle of Washington D.C., or the death of S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Fury. Doesn't see the breaking news erupting over every news channel of a second attack on the interstate. Christina doesn't watch the security video and live news footage of Avengers, Captain America and Black Widow, and a third man fighting off an assault team lead masked soldier in leather and fatigues.
~Pomegranate Kin~
Christina spends the fourth day after incident in The Vault day with her best friend. Everyone is, of course, abuzz about the attack in the middle of city. Deja is not exempt from this, over breakfast she informs the busy single mother of Captain America's alienation from S.H.I.E.L.D. and the attacks in the city. But by now the government has swooped in and classified a great deal of yesterday's goings on, so know one knows the true story. Christina swallows the sinking feelings that it may be connected to Hydra or to Winter's return, little does she know that the father of her child was the one spearheading the attack.
Part of her is screaming to run, the other half is demanding she tell somebody, but the part of her that says Jamie is her priority, to keep her head down, to turn the other cheek wins over. So she plasters on another false smile and spends the day picking out nursery items with Deja in Georgetown. After breakfast they take the transit down the street to Wisconsin Avenue and raid baby stores until clear past noon. Dawn Price, Gap, Tugoo Toys, Little Birdies Boutique. Her best friend spends too much on toys her little embryo can't yet play with, clothes they can't yet wear.
They walk Wisconsin Ave in their clanking heels, Christina pushing little Jamie's stroller as she walks side by side with her fashionably dressed friend. Sporting her own turtleneck, a pencil skirt, and mirrored heels, the blonde looks proud and stylish despite the purple hand print hidden beneath the material covering her throat. With all their shopping sufficiently completed, she, Jamie, and Deja settle in at Patisserie Poupon for coffee and french pastries (chocolate milk and a macaron for the little guy).
It's mid afternoon when they hear the first resounding boom. Everyone is the cafe freezes, looking out the window where a cloud of dust and smoke rises into the sky in the distance. Ambling to the window, Christina can see the debris of the blast returning back down to earth from whence it came. She can tell, just by the position of the debris cloud that the explosion had to have occurred along the river. Arlington or Rosslyn or— Theodore Roosevelt Island. Her heart drops down into her gut and has her scrambling for the ordering counter.
"The remote!" Christina demands the startled server, who quickly complies. She switches on the television as Deja scoops up Jamie and marches over to where her best friend is flipping to the new channel. The blonde can't stop the ragged exhale that escapes her as she and everyone in the cafe take in the breaking news, staring at the footage that plays over the screen. S.H.I.E.L.D. Triskelion Under Attack, it says in big bold print.
Said footage shows three massive helicarriers hovering over the headquarters, it shows the debris clouding over the D.C. sky, even closer footage on ground of a group of what appears to be the Hydra sleeper agents mounting an attack on S.H.I.E.L.D., and leading the attack is a familiar—this time, unmasked— face.
Her brain goes into panic mode, her thoughts going straight to Winter and her father, before suddenly something else takes over her mind. Project Insight, she recalls. Suddenly everything makes sense— Hydra's doubled security at The Vault, Rumlow's constant missions in the past month, her father's full lack of availability all week, Winter's sudden return, the attacks, Captain America's uncalled-for criminal alienation. All of this could not be a coincidence.
~Pomegranate Kin~
Christina turns to her best friend with a devastated look, glancing apologetically at her little boy. "Go," Deja tells her despite the resounding fear coursing through her, eyebrows pinched in worry. "I've got Jamie, go find out if your dad's okay." The blonde nods, hugging her friend and kissing her son goodbye. "Mommy's gonna go check on Grampy, okay buddy? Be good for Auntie Dey." Gathering her up her purse and scraping up her courage, Christina bids them farewell and marches out of the cafe. "Just be careful!" Deja calls after her.
Stepping off the curb without hesitation and waving for a cab, she gathers her determination. The first yellow vehicle passes her, already occupied, but this area of Georgetown is a busy district and a major shopping attraction, so the second stops for her and Christina jumps into the cab without pause. Giving her father's address, the cabbie warns her off the attack going on nearby, but she assures him it's a residence. The middle aged man looks hesitant but sees the wild look in her blazing cerulean eyes and quietly complies.
She is going to her father's home, but it isn't to make sure of his well being like Deja had assumed. Not to say she isn't worried, Neo-Nazi leader or not, he's still her father and the only other immediate member of her family left. But, he's a bad man and she knows there's no denying that. Worse, the father of her child is the one mounting a violent attack on a government facility, he's likely to be caught, or worse killed, without ever learning about his son and that is what terrifies her most.
Before the cab properly pulls up outside her father's home, she's already halfway out the door, overtipping via the twenty dollar bill she tosses the driver. Christina runs up the entry steps and hurries to punch in the security home. Alexander Pierce's home is empty, unsurprisingly. All hands are likely at The Vault or the Triskelion. The blonde shudders, pressing on toward her father's study, which she discovers to be locked. Christina jiggles the handle, shoving her shoulder against the door. "Damn it," she curses, before turning around and marching downstairs to the attached garage.
Finding herself the drill, Christina stomps her way back up the steps and faces the office door with a determined look. Finding the bolt holes, she resolves to remove the entire door handle. When the entire handle, lock, and base plate are removed Christina shoves open the door. Her father's study is clean and organized, like the rest of his home. On his desk is a pile of innocent looking World Security Council and S.H.I.E.L.D. paperwork, nothing suspicious or telling of his darker secrets. His computer is surprisingly not password protected, but she finds nothing there either. All of his files mirror the documents on his desk, government related items, nothing that would lead anyone to conclude he was the leader of a Neo-Nazi terrorist group.
~Pomegranate Kin~
His safe, of course, is protected by a code unlike his computer. Christina thinks it over what the four digit password could possibly be. Surely he wouldn't use his own birth year, probably not even hers because those would be the obvious ones. With her hand hovering over the buttons, the woman heaves a stressed sigh before punching in the birth year of her late mother. The safe makes a series of beeps and a the little light beside the keypad lights up red at the failed entry. Christina curses, thinking over it again before typing in Jamie's birth year and receiving the same reply from the high power safe.
Groaning and holding her face in her hands, she can feel the pressure baring down on her. In movies they always get only three chances before some kind of alarm would be triggered and the last thing she needs is for anyone to know she'd been there. Christina bites down on her thumbnail, raking her brain for something— anything— useful. She thinks over her father, how life had been before she'd met Winter and discovered Hydra, before he'd been the WSC Secretary. She recalls how close they'd been, when her mother was still alive and she'd grown up a complete daddy's girl, how everything changed after the incident in Bogotá so many years before. Suddenly it hits her. Crossing her fingers, Christina punches the year, 1989, into the keypad and anxiously awaited the safe's reaction.
This time it responds with a different series of beeps and the little indicator lights up green. She's surprised she was able to recall the year her father had become Undersecretary and ultimately gone on to lead Hydra. Elated, she tears open the door only to find more paperwork, money, and a handgun inside. Pulling out the files, Christina speed reads through each document only to discover more S.H.I.E.L.D. paperwork. The blonde heaves a sigh, sitting down in the office chair in front of her father's desk. She's unsurprised that he'd covered his tracks, after all he'd fooled everyone, even his family, up until this point.
But, Christina knows she has to find anything he may be hiding though. For all Winter's evils, she knows they'd alternated his memory, that everything he's done he was made to do, and that no one would be able to understand that. Humans are fickle that way. For all his sins, Winter is Jamie's father, and she'd do everything she could to keep them from discovering his identity. It could just give him the advantage he'd need to dodge any agencies after him, should he survive the attack at the Triskelion. Even if he's brainwashed now, with time away from the Chair, he would remember everything and surely he'd come looking for her.
Clicking absently through more of her father's files, she stumbles over a file, tucked away in numerous world titled simply Ragnarök. Christina pauses, recalling Norse tales of the extinction-level event; a great battle foretold to ultimately result in the death of the Gods and the subsequent submersion of the entire world in water. She clicks the folder and is greeted by a black page with white coding, followed by a security main frame. Ten blanks slots and a blinking cursor stares back at her.
What the hell are ten letters that would make a sufficient password for a super secret Neo-Nazi main frame? Christina makes a few attempts. Project In— no. Heil Hitle— nope. All of a sudden, Christina feels so stupid. She knows the password, has heard it over and over again down in The Vault. With the eureka effect making her feel considerably more excited than she should, Aha! moment aside, she types in the ten letters— Hail Hydra— and watches the security screen unlock to reveal a mainframe fully complied of cryptically labelled folders. Lumerian, Triskelion, Insight, Leviathan, Rochambeau.
~Pomegranate Kin~
Christina's hand hovers over the mouse, her mind assaulted by a decade's old ache. No. He couldn't. The woman freezes, longs to click the folder, but also spare herself from the truth. Alexander Pierce is a bad, terrible man— a Neo-Nazi, a terrorist— but he couldn't have possibly been responsible for this. She's sure of it, her father isn't that kind of man. So she double clicks.
Immediately her eyes are assaulted by graphic imagery. Report scans labelled Gail Marie Pierce, photos of Interstate 395, the Rochambeau bridge over the Potomac river, of an eight car pile up, a deadly motor vehicle accident, and morgue photos of her mother. Christina throws herself out of her seat, landing on the floor beside her father's safe, and scrambling for the nearby waste basket. Emptying the entire contents of her stomach into the bin, she finds herself crying, gagging at the memory of the post-mortem photos fresh in her mind's eye.
Flopping back against the open safe, Christina tries to catch her breath and calm her hiccuping sobs. Betrayal burns rampant, swallows her whole and then spits her back a whole new woman. Raw with pain, cheeks wet with tears, she closes her eyes, buries the old ache of loss down along with the furious, burning new, and thinks of good things. Of Winter and the old domestic-esque nights, of Jamie and his little laugh, the mirrored image of his father— whom she loves so much.
Christina opens her bloodshot eyes, inhales through her nose and resolves to move passed this new, most horrifying update. Gathering her sense of serene, the blonde clings to the safe's interior shelf for assistance steadying herself. Without notice, said shelf suddenly gives way and she finds herself tumbling back to the carpet. Baffled from her sudden fall, Christina blinks, looking down at the faux half-shelf she holds in her hand.
She turns her attention to the safe and sees that upon the removal of the faux-shelf a dip in the existing top shelf becomes visible, revealing the hidden cubby, all but hidden from any curious on lookers if they didn't already happen to known of it's existence. And, stashed away in the secure little space are numerous manila folders. Physical copies of files and reports, containing all manner of topics. Agent Profiles, Mission reports, and other more important mediums. Christina stumbles upon one a bit different from the others.
~Pomegranate Kin~
Printed on the front are a number of lines in Russian with a title anchored in large font in the center дело No.17, or simply Case Number 17. It doesn't take much for who to guess who this file may be about and, with some hesitation after the first file she'd looked at, she opens it. Her eyes rake over medical reports, scans, debriefing records, photos, and mission summaries.( post/88873041910/be-careful-steve-you-might-not-want-to-pull-on) Some in Russian others in English, all of them horrifying.
Christina looks at a frayed, dog-earred picture— 2x2 in size, printed in black and white— it's an old photograph. James Buchanan Barnes stares back at her, dressed in his military uniform, sergeant's cap proud upon on his neatly cropped hair. His face is youthful, eyes soulful, yet unmarred by the horrors of war and the even worse terrors that would come for him after. Fingers with their neatly painted nails trace longingly over the photo, his jaw, his cheek, the curve of his ear. Christina plucks the picture free of the paperclip and tucks it away in her pocket; a token for safe keeping— should she never see her lover again.
Flitting through the other physical files for anything else of importance, she tucks дело No.17 into her purse, deciding to stow away anything she might find that could incriminate the Winter Soldier. Christina hopes that he'll survive the battle going down at the Triskelion, that her tampering will give him the running start he'll need to stay ahead of the numerous government agencies that will no doubt be after him in the wake of this most recent atrocity, that in it's wake he'll remember her and come looking for her.
It's in these instances that she regrets having moved into the new house. How would Winter find them? The blonde contemplates this as she returns the faux-shelf to it's place of origin, restoring the safe to the condition she'd found it in. Fishing a flash drive out of her purse, Christina pushes up from the floor and scrounges up her courage. Without looking she exits out of of the grisly folder containing the incident of her mother's death and navigates the mainframe for important documents pertaining to her lover, stealing away any information she can find before erasing all evidence she'd been there.
Camped out of the patio of a cafe directly across the street from her former apartment in Foggy Bottom, Christina spends the remainder of the evening waiting. The cafe is a direct line of sight to both the entry of apartment complex and the balcony of her old place, as well the fire escape that Winter would use to gain entry. She orders a turkey wrap and three cups of coffee before the chill of the late night chases her indoors. The blonde choose a table near the entrance, spends the next several hours eating and drinking, watching news reports of the attack and the reveal of Hydra within waiting for Winter to appear— hoping that by some miracle he would remember her and come searching in the old places.
Sadly, waiting for him is a fruitless affair. Hours pass. Christina eats two pastries, downs two large cups of cappuccino, and a 20 ounce green tea with honey— waiting anxiously for even a glimpse of the Winter Soldier coming to find her. Before long daylight begins to shine through the cover of clouds, welcoming a new day to Washington D.C., and leaving the single mother feeling empty and hopeless. With a heavy heart Christina gets in her car and makes her way through morning traffic to Deja and Aarav's.
A/N: To be honest I'm rather unsatisfied with this, but I got across what needed to be conveyed, so ehh. In all it just seems underwhelming in comparison to the other chapters and I'm not so pleased with it. Either way the next chapter or so will summarize the next year with Christina and Jamie, as well as what Bucky will be up to, before we meet up with our canon divergence. What are our thoughts? Where do you think this is going to go and are you excited to see it unfold? Either way thank you kindly for reading, leave me some feedback and let me know!