Dawn arrived before Bucky did, which made me thankful I had taken the time to dress for the weather. While not exactly warm I also hadn't been soaked to the skin and forced to think about dying in the cold again. Telling Wanda and Sam had been difficult enough.
It had also been the first time I had told anyone that.
Not Fury. Not Natasha. Not Tony.
No one knew that I had been conscious after the crash. It seemed to be something too horrible, too personal to burden anyone else with.
Until today.
Yes, they had found it horrible, but had not shown even an ounce of pity.
They had both faced things just as horrible in their own way and it felt… not good per se, but a relief to finally share that with someone I trusted.
And I did. I trusted both of them.
When Bucky stepped up onto the ledge, I watched him for several minutes. Wet and bedraggled, hair hanging in his face and dripping, clothes soaked through as expected, but also torn and dirty. Mud and detritus on his feet and up to his knees. He'd spent the night on the move at a guess and I had to wonder how long it had taken for him to come back to himself.
"Soldat."
He didn't even twitch, just sighed heavily, head down, drops of water falling from the tips of his hair onto the wet rock. "Da."
The tone not right for the Soldier, so I knew Bucky stood there, probably full of guilt and remorse, and debating taking that swan dive if it would protect the rest of us from his alter ego. "Even if you aim for the rocks it might not be enough," I pointed out drolly.
He managed a snort and turned his head slightly to look at me, perched on the steep hillside a several yards away. "How long have you been sitting there?"
I shrugged. "A while." I got to my feet, feeling stiff and in need of a hot shower. My needs would wait though, I wanted to make certain Bucky had found his footing again. "What happened this time?"
He shook his head, water flying from his hair, visible even though the sky only marginally brighter, the heavy cloud cover and ongoing rain making it a mostly useless effort. "Her elbow hit me and… I was gone. I woke up in the woods, running. Took me almost an hour to just figure out which way was north and begin making my way back here."
"She's fine." Knowing he needed that assurance before anything else.
"Course she is. I stabbed you, not her." He growled and spun away, looking as if he wanted to bolt. To run back into the wilderness and lose himself for a while, or perhaps forever. Become some legendary wildman living in the deep woods that the locals would speak of only in hushed tones, telling tales by warm fires of their encounters with the stranger who lived in the highest peaks and eschewed all contact with the outside world.
I realized that it could have be me. That I could have walked away from this brand new world that I knew nothing about and understood even less of to live out my days alone dwelling on my past and all that I had left behind instead of trying, if poorly, to move forward. I remained unsure which would have been a better path for me. For the world, having me here and present clearly the better option, but from a personal standpoint…
I seemed to have acquired far more loss compared to what I had gained.
If I saw it as a viable option I could only image how Bucky felt.
He'd already spent two years alone dealing with his personal demons, spending a few dozen more might just look like a relief to be away from anyone else he might hurt. "Don't go," I pleaded, voice soft, and he froze, practically vibrating in place with warring emotions.
"It'd be safer," he told me, voice shaking on the words.
"For who? You or all those people you won't be able to help." Button pushing at it's best. While he feared the Soldier could appear while on a rescue mission, it had never stopped him. He still rushed in and put forth every effort to save as many as he could, as if each one saved could partially assuage the guilt of all those he had hurt over the decades.
He twisted about looking as if he wanted to scream at me, but instead all but folded in on himself, all the bluff and bluster draining out of him in an instant. "I don't want to hurt anyone," he finally whispered in pure misery.
I moved towards him, slow and steady fearing he would bolt if I came at him too quickly. I set a hand on his shoulder. "Neither do I, but I seem to be very good at it lately."
He shook his head. "But with you it's all about good intentions, me… not so much."
"Buck, did you intend to go after Wanda like that?"
He shook his head not meeting my eyes. "Of course not. Her hit… I didn't even get a chance to try and stop it. I had no control."
"And she knows that. I can promise you both of them have been worried sick about you since you ran out of the garage."
"They shouldn't be," he mumbled, but I could feel the tension release somewhat under my hand.
He'd been more concerned they would hate him. And while upset and not thrilled about what had occurred neither of them had blamed him for one second.
They gave him the benefit of doubt.
And that made a huge difference.
Others would only assume the worst, that he could never be more than the Winter Soldier, the Asset, an assassin, a killer.
Yet, of all of us, he was also the only who comforted children when their lives had been torn apart at the seams. Speaking to them with a gentleness that would never be attributed to the deadly Fist of Hydra, memories of his younger sister most likely influencing his astonishing knack with kids. He might not remember large parts of his life, but what he learned had been deeply imbedded and showed in everything he did.
He needed to forgive himself and, no matter how many times I told him that very thing, it would mean nothing until he was ready to do so. I just had to be there, support him and his decisions and wait for the day he could look in the mirror and not hate what he saw there.
"Well, you coming in or running?"
"You saying you won't stop me?"
I let my head drop down, looking at the worn rock between my feet. "I'd want to, can't deny that, but if what you need is time alone, then take it." I felt more than saw his head snap around, the weight of his eyes on me. "I believe it would be better for you to stay."
"You're sure they're not mad?"
I turned my head, trying not to grin. "Now, I didn't say that. Wanda was not thrilled you ruined one of my shirts, but they understand that you did not do it on purpose. That matters more, I think."
He pushed his hair back out of his eyes and nodded slowly. "I really gotta get handle on this," he complained bitterly.
"Yup," I agreed, "but how about we start with a hot shower and some food."
"And apologise," he added, but with a lightness I hadn't expected. "I could cook breakfast," he suggested as he turned about to begin the climb that would get us to the nearest entrance.
"I don't think that would count as an apology," I pointed out. Thanks to Wanda we had both improved, but neither of us would be able to cook much more than the basics. I could manage a decent chili or shepherd's pie these days, but I still overcooked steaks and undercooked chicken.
Bucky surprised me by laughing. "You could be right about that. Thanks, Steve."
"Anytime, Buck."
.
. . . . .
.
I don't who, if anyone, Maria had shared the data with, but she came up with a target less than a week later. This time we had a two day lead, but we had a large area to cover, the targeting only approximate, it could be off by inches or several hundred yards. She had also discovered there had been other implosions missed by everyone, some in such remote areas, or on the seabed that no one but the local flora and fauna would have noticed. It also expanded the target zone by an order of magnitude, which would make this endeavor even more challenging now.
The aerial shots, taken by a drone, of the one high up in the Himalayas, a shocking sight to behold, the side of a massive mountain just gone, the surrounding area stripped bare and looking like a nothing less than a gaping wound gouged into the planet itself.
With the additional hits added to the mix the damage became even more clear and the earth had reacted accordingly with earthquakes in an attempt to relieve the stress being caused by the implosions pulling at the skin of the planet.
I'd gone back to the message boards to try and match sales of the missing shells with the current target, but they'd gone silent, the user names purged and the threads deleted.
I feared that meant they either had what they needed or had turned elsewhere for product, it could go either way and neither would be likely to end with a happy ending.
This time the target ended up being in the bucolic hillsides of Costa Rica. Hot as hell and line of sight damn near nothing once out in the rainforests. Of course, the potential target area included both a city and the wilderness and even though the vast majority of implosions had happened in or near a city we could not assume it would happen here. So, thanks to some rushed purchases we now had a set of three drones to aid us, flying over the target zone in hopes of finding the bomb before it went off.
Maria had confirmed the presence of tesseract energy and we'd rigged sensors that would pick it up to the drones as well as handheld devices.
We split up, Bucky and Sam in the quinjet taking the jungle, while Wanda and I headed into the city, both teams using a spiral pattern to cover the most territory possible. We knew the chances the bomb had already been planted would be slim, but we would keep looking until we found the damn thing.
That first step all that mattered at this point. Without a complete version of the bomb we would never be able to disable any of them. Assuming, of course, that all of them were the same on the surface.
Christ, this had turned into such a fucking mess.
"What are you brooding over now?" Wanda asked, eyes lifting from her phone that monitored the drones to the street before us. On the outskirts of the city proper the houses were layered atop one another stretching up the side of the mountain, the roads barely wide enough for a single car, the area one of the poorer ones.
The sun hadn't quite made it over the horizon, so it remained quiet and the few people out and about didn't look at us twice. Well, didn't look at Wanda twice, her coloring closer to theirs even with the blue eyes. I stood out with my shock of blond hair not entirely hidden by the baseball cap atop my head. A gift on my birthday last year, copy of a Brooklyn Dodgers cap, the original back at the Tower, in a hermetically sealed shadow box to protect it.
I had no clue where Tony had found it, and refused to say how much it had cost him, but I had more than appreciated the gesture. Of course, just few months later everything fell apart.
I shrugged. "Not sure what you mean." She had no need to know that I worried we could make an even bigger mess of things if we succeeded here. The implosions seemed to designed to create a specific effect, if we stopped one, it would potentially make the situation and the results worse than if we just let it go off. Maria had access to better computers and people with knowledge in the fields these explosions impacted upon. Our best guesses had been just that: guesses.
The experts in tectonics she'd consulted had painted a picture far more worrisome than any I or Bucky had imagined.
"Agent Hill told you something you don't want to share," Wanda finally said and since she wasn't wrong I didn't answer. "Do you think that will stop me, stop us from trying?"
"No. It's not that."
"Then what? Steve, I understand I team needs a leader, and that said leader will need to withhold information on occasion, but this is hurting you. Let us share the burden."
I sighed heavily, stopping the middle of the empty road. A cat wandered further down, watching us warily, strangers in it's territory. "What if it is already too late?" If she needed details I would give them to her, but I felt certain she'd figure it out on her own.
She stared at me for long minutes as her mind chewed on those words and their possible meaning. I saw the realization in her eyes the instant she put it all together. She began swearing in Sokovian, which made my lips twitch slightly in morbid humor.
We'd known since discovering the plan had been on of Ultron's that the ultimate goal to be the destruction of the human race, but the tipping point, the moment when turning back would not be an option hadn't been. Hell, we hadn't even thought about it.
Maria Hill had.
"Can it be reversed?"
I shook my head. "They don't know."
Wanda closed her eyes for a long moment, sucked in a deep breath that came out ragged and torn. "We can't just give up," she argued, but her voice had been rendered hoarse and raw.
"We could. Others are aware now, with better resources. We could let them take over, and maybe succeed." I'd thought about it, a lot, since I'd been informed of the truth, that this fight had quite possibly already been lost and that nothing we did from here on out would make a bit of difference in the end.
Tilting at windmills.
"No," she stated vehemently. "We fight. We do everything in our power to fix this."
I set a hand on her shoulder. "Which is why we are here." I hadn't doubted for an instant how any of them would have reacted to this news; I simply hadn't wanted to burden them with the knowledge. No need for their nights to be any more sleepless than they already had been. So I'd taken the burden on. Much as I seemed to with everything else. I kept secrets, just like anyone else did. Only those I kept seemed to end up hurting people I cared about in the end.
Maybe I wasn't cut out for this superhero gig after all.
"Cap, we got a hit."
I dragged myself out of my mental musing at Sam's words. "Location?"
"Three klicks east of your position. Drone picked it up, I'm sending the others there now to confirm."
"We're on our way." I turned to Wanda whose look hard hardened. "Ready for this?"
She managed a half-hearted smile for my benefit. "Always."
Needing to not draw attention to ourselves, we took our time getting there. Walking briskly at most so it took nearly thirty minutes to find the location, three drones hovering overhead, the sensors in our hands also signalling the presence of the unique energy related to the tesseract.
We ended up in a neighborhood garden. Tiny, yes, but full of life, and the only open area around we'd seen aside from the streets themselves. "It's not here, unless it was buried months ago."
Wanda turned a slow circle in an attempt to narrow the target area. She stopped facing southwest and pointed. "That way."
We skirted the edges of the garden and made our way down a narrow alley, the drones following along overhead. "Bucky, contact Hill and let her know we may need a pick up."
"On it," came the quick response.
We, my team, did not have the necessary tech or skills to figure out the damn thing, so I'd agreed to allow Hill's team to take possession once we'd found it. With us constantly looped in on what they discovered. I didn't ask who would be working on it, but suspected Tony would be involved in some manner. There just weren't many in the world who could deal with this level of tech quickly, and it wasn't as if the Avengers hadn't been trying to discover and stop these weapons all along, we had simply ended up being a couple steps ahead thanks to being there when the first implosion in Prague happened.
The trackers led us to a seemingly empty building, which struck me as odd, but I didn't bother to question Dame Fortuna this time around. The interior dark and the air stagnant, as if no one had been in here in an exceedingly long time, the dust thick on the floor except for a single trail of footprints.
The tracker seemed to follow the line of prints in the dust.
I squatted down, running my fingers through the void of the shoeprint. My fingers came up nearly clean. "These are recent, a day at most."
Wanda nodded. "I don't like this place," she informed me in a soft voice. Not frightened, just worried. The bomb could go off at any moment and we were all but standing atop it.
I wondered if she had become sensitive to tesseract energy given her powers had been created using the Sceptre. It wouldn't surprise me given we had definitely moved into the realm of the unknown.
"You can wait outside if you like. Guard the entrance," I offered, but she quickly shook her head.
"No. I'm fine," she assured me and moved to follow the path already laid out before us.
It led to a solid metal door that had been locked. Wanda made short work of it and I opened it with care, wary of potential booby traps to protect the weapon we suspected to be on the other side.
A steep set of stairs went down, looking to have been carved into the mountain itself. We both flipped on bright LED flashlights and made our way down with care. The steps not new, both them and the walls worn with age and decorated with a combination of artwork and graffiti.
After nearly ten minutes of constant downward motion we came to the end and another door, the lock dispatched just as easily.
We opened it to a slaughterhouse.
Wanda gagged at the sight of so much dried blood cast about so carelessly. At least a dozen bodies, all male and in their mid to late twenties. Tables had been tipped over scattering various bits of apparatus across the floor. A thin layer of white powder lay over everything.
Wanda muttered in Sokovian, covering her mouth and nose with her the sleeve of her shirt. "Cocaine," she informed me and I used the sleeve of my jacket to create a filter as well. The drug probably wouldn't harm me, but no need to find out here and now.
So this had been some drug cartel's cutting room and someone, had removed those in charge with prejudice. If the workers had been killed I would have expected far more bodies, most likely women and young children conscripted to do the actual work.
Instead only armed men had been killed.
Odd. Why let the innocents go if all you were going to do was blow them to hell anyway?
Unless one of said innocents had been encouraged to plant the bomb in exchange for being freed from virtual slavery and given the opportunity to escape what would be coming in the near future.
The long game would mostly likely kill them anyway, but they didn't need to know that, did they?
I stepped with care as I moved through the room, looking for anything that might be the weapon we searched for.
There were several rooms off of the main one, primitive sleeping pallets in each, for the workers most likely, then what could only be the office, much more richly appointed than the rest. One body, slumped over in a chair dead from a headshot, but the rest undisturbed.
Except for the quite obvious bomb sitting on the desk.
A screen reminiscent of that on a cell phone glowed softly, but with no timer or anything similar visible, just the blank screen. The shell identical to the ones we'd recovered in Austria.
It didn't look capable of the massive destruction created by all the others, but we could not see into it. Had no clue what made it tick and we would not being trying to find out. The so-called experts could have a go at it, I'd be far more likely to set the damn thing off by accident.
Wanda held up her phone, the tracker going crazy now that we stood next to the thing.
"Is this where I say Bingo?"
I tapped my comms. "Sam?"
The response came through broken, static laden and completely incomprehensible.
"Wanda can you relay a message through the drones?" I didn't want to leave the thing alone in case that screen came to life.
"I'll try." She tapped the screen of her phone for several seconds, then shook her head. "Signal is too weak. I'll head up and tell them to send the recovery team in."
"Warn them they'll need strong stomachs and masks unless they want a free high."
She snorted, some color returning to her cheeks at the gallows humor. "I'll be back."
I nodded and watched until the light of her flash had been lost up the stairwell.
I looked over the main room, the wasted lives and, for a moment, felt that they might very well be the lucky ones, dead already and not forced to suffer through what would be coming.