A/N: HI EVERYONE,
playlist for this particular chapter is as follows:
1. Sila - A Tribe Called Red
2. Battle Royale - Apashe
3. Destroyer - Saint Motel
4. The Place By the Sea - Ninja Tracks
5. EMI'S THEME SONG: Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
6. Sunshine - John Murphy
7. Sympathy For the Devil - The Rolling Stones
THANKS SO MUCH FOR ALL YOUR LOVE AND PATIENCE FOR THIS NEXT CHAPTER.
- Fel :)
JANUARY 2011
The woman leaned over the table, her wrists handcuffed to a steel table, while Ambassador Dubois watched her with an exhausted gaze. They had been at this for 12 hours, and 16 had refused to say a word. Her hair hung in front of her face and she looked physically exhausted. The ambassador felt a pang of sympathy for the girl. While they had tried everything, it was still a terribly long process…
"There has to be a reason you broke in here." He said gently. He brought a hand up over his mouth to reveal his wedding ring that was glinting in the dim, overhead light.
When she didn't say anything, Dubois sighed heavily. "We can cut you a deal, mademoiselle, but you have to be willing to give me something." He was looking at her like she was a lost creature, a decrepit animal he could save, with just the right amount of honeyed-up words.
He had a name today sometimes he didn't have a name
sometimes
sometimes
sometimes
he just was
James, she had told him.
She always told him his name. if he had one, that day
and today, he had one
Emi and Barnes walked through the backdoors of the facility. They were, of course, instantly greeted by the shouts of startled agents – "hey! You can't be back here" "get out of here!" "who are you?!" – as they sprung into action, grabbing firearms, reaching for emergency buttons, and calling over their coms for backup.
A red light began blinking furiously throughout the facility, while a loud, blaring alarm began to sound. "STOP RIGHT THERE." There was screaming and authoritarian voices, but no result, as James and Emi kept walking side-by-side, stride in-sync, with their eyes straight ahead.
There was an agent, who was running towards James, he began to unhook a pistol from his thigh holster. "Stand down, sir, or I'll be authorized to shoot on sight." He came to a stop less than five feet away from the metal-armed assassin.
He was aiming at James, but it was obvious, that he was very aware of Emi's presence. The girl didn't carry a firearm. That was alarming in its own right. But James apparently hadn't heard the man because he kept walking towards him in slow and deliberate footfalls, mechanical and purposeful. He had a mission. He had a mission, and nothing was going to stop him.
"I said stand down!" The agent screamed and fired the gun right into Barnes' outstretched hand. Emilie could hear the crusch sound of the bullet's shell impacting with the bulletproof metal of James' palm. He squeezed his fingers shut around it and his eyes, not even seeing the scene before him, drifted to the agent's face.
The agent swallowed as his eyes widened in horror at what he was seeing. How could a man stop a bullet with the mere reach of his hand? James reached out, with a volitional and mechanical-like grace, and grabbed the agent's gun in his real fingers. His powerful fingers, tangling themselves around the bridge of the pistol, squashed the firearm like it was silly-putty, breaking it in front of the man's very eyes. In response, the agent tried to turn and run the other direction, but James kicked the man in the abdomen, knocking him to the ground.
He towered above him, his eyes unblinking, unflinching, unknowing, gazed into his. The man was screaming beneath the Winter Soldier's oppressive, heavy gaze—"please, I have children," "I have a wife," "I have—" but whatever else the man may have had, didn't concern Barnes as he grabbed the man's face.
Sometimes he had a name.
Sometimes
Sometimes he could remember
Blue eyes and blonde hair and a sickly little child
Sometimes
Sometimes
SOMETIMES HE COULD REMEMBER HIS NAME
but other times, he couldn't
And, in one, singular motion, he shoved the crushed bullet he had been holding up through the man's jaw, his metal hand drilling up through the base of his skull, before he yanked it out, and the man dropped to a bloody mess upon the floor.
Emi looked over at James with a slightly irritated expression, "Was all that necessary?"
And it was then, the two of them came to be surrounded, in the middle of the opaque, dimly-lit intersection, forced to go back-to-back. Emilie cocked her head and fixed her gaze upon the group of agents surrounding them in a fish-like hoard. Her gaze, scattered and dancing with colors, all at once, bounced together into a bright and dangerous red, with her pupils glaring like specks of an eclipsed sun.
There's no air here.
The agents began to cough on a sudden lack of air flow. Some dropped to their knees, clutching their necks as if they could open their esophagus with the right amount of pressure.
You can't breathe.
A man flopped over, heaving and shaking, gasping and convulsing for air as others began to join him. They were turning blue, asphyxiating, twisting, writhing—dying, from the lack of oxygen.
Now, die.
And suddenly, there was silence as the group of agents that had once surrounded them, coating them, now lay at the assassins' feet… Dead.
James stepped over the bodies, ignoring the crunch of bone as his combat boots pressed into the fingers of a corpse.
She suddenly moved her eyes up to meet his with a chilling expression crossing her features. Her face was half-covered by her messy, greasy locks, but it was enough to catch sight of the unearthly, dangerous features hidden there. She cocked her head to the side as a smile, one that slithered up from the depths of Hell, came to rest upon her lips. Suddenly, there was a loud BOOM in the distance and screams began to ensue.
What the hell? He looked around the woman's snake-like smile and to the door, where he caught sight of agents and other faculty members, running past the facility door. He saw one was sprinting towards the door, he quickly got up to let the agent in, but then, there was a sound, frighteningly close to that of a gunshot, and the man's brains were suddenly pouring down his face as he dropped over. Oh, my God… Dubois' eyes widened as he felt his heart rate begin to quicken in adrenaline-induced, icy terror. They were under attack.
Not a word was said between them. No, the only communication the two of them ever exchanged was a look. They knew the routine of this massacre and that assassination. Emi could control the perception of the mind, and James would simply rip them apart. Barnes, a rolling stone of slow, yet terrifying deliverance, Emi, an obstinate mountain. One distracted, while the other destroyed. They worked well together.
And when they came to the last corridor of the underground facility, rounding the corner, James found a woman running towards them with an assault rifle hoisted across her body. She brought it down and began madly shooting towards the two of them. But she never got a chance to make a hit, as James was suddenly there, in front of her, before she could take another shot.
He easily grabbed the gun out of her hands and threw it behind him. Bucky spoke madly in French to the woman, yanking her chin up so hard, you could hear a painful snap of muscle as he pulled. The French agent spat at him, cursing him, James' fingers tightened around her neck until she began to choke on her obscenities, unable to continue. In fact, with a gentle, little twist of his fingers, after a certain point, the woman's head popped right off her body.
Emi was about to continue, but she realized, as soon as she was about to exit the corridor, Barnes' wasn't following her. "James, come." She snapped in retaliation.
But James was frozen over the body of the woman. His face showed he was washed of everything; his mind, his name, and even the present. Emi went over to him and grabbed his arm, before he sharply turned, his eyes unseeing, his face blank, and he didn't meet her eyes…even as the eyes looked on to meet hers. "James, calm down." She tried desperately to make him to meet her eyes. That's the only way she can get it to work—the only way she can defend herself, is if they truly, intentionally meet her eyes.
James' fingers quickly swallowed Emi's throat and her eyes locked onto his. "James, you need to stop this. You can stop this."
sometimes he had a name
but other times, he didn't
stevebucky buckysteve stevebucky
Emi was gasping, choking for air, as James lifted her off the ground by her neck. She felt something flash on either side of her vision, something dark and eminent, manifesting on the sides of her…
All she had to do was look, all she had to do was turn her head, and she knew what she would see.
But she didn't want to.
Instead, in a slow, agonizing moment of clarity, the world stopped turning for a moment, the blood stopped pounding in her ears, and she found herself looking at Barnes. His face was blank and unseeing. It wasn't murderous, it wasn't violent, it wasn't angry. There was nothing there. To say he had known what he was doing, would be naive—he would repeat it obediently when they told him to, but that was repetition, not action. That's all he was doing. Parroting commands. Regurgitating everything, she had poured into him.
You know nothing of this life, Barnes, and you won't remember them… Not when I'm finished with you. She had told him this when they first brought him in, a sad and terrified man, with a heart shimmering brighter than a dying star, in his eyes.
But that was the thing. No matter what she did, no matter what she tried to undo, no matter how hard she fought…
James Barnes would always know. Maybe, he wouldn't remember, but he would know that there was something, he wasn't remembering. And that's what she saw on his face, then, that's what she saw on the darkened cusps of her peripheral vision—a man standing above her severed body, screaming over his severed mind, screaming for something he knew was missing, but couldn't be found. Screaming for the stolen parts of this life. And further beyond that, in the darkest corners, she saw her, standing before a giant, with green and golden fire in her hands, and the severed universe screaming itself back to life.
Emilie breathed sharply in and closed her eyes as she felt his grip around her throat tighten to the point of humanly impossibility. He was going to tear her in half. She almost let him. Almost.
But he made the mistake of meeting her eyes. That little part of him that recognized her, that little part of him that knew her, not the parts of themselves still frozen in the ice and time of the past.
You will release me.
Dubois turned sharply to the woman, her gaze glittering with a hellish mystique. "What is this?" He managed to ask her.
He thought of his wife, Louise. She would have been tucking their daughter into bed, right about now… And then she would call him. She would want to know how his day was. She would want to know what he ate for lunch. How the ranch dressing was on his salad. She would want to know all the microscopic things that had defined his life, until this very moment.
Because he knew he wouldn't get to tell Louise about the ranch dressing on his salad. In fact, he knew, by looking into the gaze of this woman, the bringer of this chaos outside the door, that he was going to die… And this was the end of everything.
"Dubois, right?" She ripped her handcuffed wrists from the table, causing a cacophony of screeching protest as the chains detached from their proper places. She rolled her neck as if it had been stiff, before she returned her gaze back to him with a mildly interested look on her grand, expansive face. "There's going to be an election in three days, is there not?" She asked him.
There was a particularly loud scream outside, one that sounded directly outside the door. It was getting closer. He swallowed and watched her as a small tear descended down his cheek. "Y-Yes." He breathed sharply.
The woman watched him with an expression that managed to somehow say nothing… Nothing at all. "And the man who wins will be a terrible choice, won't he?" She sat down on the table she had just ripped her hands from, crossing her legs, and looking down at him with the contempt of a bloodthirsty Renaissance Queen.
"How do you know this?" He croaked, the voice of a terrified child, stuck in the body of a forty-something-year-old man.
"Because I was sent to kill the man who is going to be the emergency call-in—the spe ultima, as they say." She got up off the table and walked behind the man, covering his ears up. "Now, you may want to close your eyes."
And suddenly, as if it had been on a countdown, the wall before them exploded in glorious and violent tumult. The force of the wall should have killed him, but the woman struck a hand out to protect?—no, no, she was—what was doing?—the debris suddenly hung in suspended animation, twirling peacefully past them like shooting stars from afar. Dubois felt his chest explode as he released an unhealthy, condensed gag.
She was one of them. The enhanced people he had only ever heard about… The stuff of Tony Stark and SHIELD. And the thing was, he didn't think she was one of the good ones.
His ears, despite being half-covered by the woman's hand, were still ringing. But he didn't have time to feel sorry for himself, as two figures began to emerge side-by-side from the smoky, crackling pile of rubbish, which had once been the wall.
Another woman—short and pixie-like, soft and tender-featured—as well as a massive man, a man with a—could it be?—a metal arm…with a red Soviet-star on the shoulder. He didn't have much time to study the two figures, as the woman he had been interrogating, swung around to the front of him, obstructing his view as she met his eyes. She was towering, he realized, and not in the sense that she was tall, but in the sense that, if you asked her to reach up and knock the sun from the sky, she wouldn't waste time doing it. Her arms were corded with muscle, her chest looked like it could have taken a battering ram, and her eyes looked hungry, like all she wanted was the opportunity to slaughter every last soul alive.
"Now, Ambassador Dubois, I don't want to hurt you." She tenderly wiped a smear of blood off of his forehead, as if to prove her point. "But the thing is," she kneeled down so she was a bit beneath him, looking up at him with an apathetic expression, "I need to do my job, and you need to tell me where the ambassador is."
Dubois swallowed his fear and moved his eyes to meet hers. And all he was met by was steely, cold, and flat brown eyes that refused to move. "It's going to be a narrow victory." He explained, sniffing as a steady stream of tears began to trail from his eyes. "But Trumpkin will be impeached within months."
The woman didn't respond, she just watched him with that masked and terribly cold look upon her face.
"Parliament wanted me…to-to… I'm going to be the replacement."
The woman's eyes closed, and she sighed with understanding. She set her shoulders and turned to the two people standing behind her, the other woman—the short and soft-faced pixie—threw a large assault rifle at her. He could only catch a glimpse, but he recognized the familiar cut and glide of a newly-patented M16. The woman caught it in one hand. "Then I apologize, Mr. Dubois, for being the one who has to kill you."
It was night, by the time the three of them escaped from the HQ the of GDSE, otherwise known as the central intelligence agency of France. The news would report the next day that Ambassador Dubois died from the gunshot wound of an untraceable gun, curious in its nature, as there were no fragments of the bullet lodged anywhere within him. He died by way of a 'clean shot,' as they say, straight through, with no obstacle in its way.
Exactly the kind M16 had spent a lifetime perfecting.
That night, when Barnes had been taken away to be prepped for cryo—as they froze him in between the intervals of missions—Emi and 16, for the first time in years, were allowed a moment out in Paris. As HYDRA's aircraft had—believe it or not—suffered technical difficulties and wouldn't be able to reach them, until morning. And while they were technically 'free' to wander, there were minute-trackers surgically knotted into their cardiovascular artery that, at the very sign of disturbance on the perimeter assigned to them, would immediately detonate a toxin that would instantly stop their hearts.
Not that Emi or Carter cared about any of that, but it was the only life they had.
At that point, everything was mostly closed, except for a few restaurants and cabarets, and so the two of them had decided to spend the last few hours of the night, walking the darkened streets of the ancient city. Until they finally found themselves walking alongside the dark and murky waters of the Seine. Behind them, rising up in beckoning, glittering, elaborate aberrance, was the Eiffel Tower, reaching for the cloudy sky with daring possibility. Before them, a little on their left, were the iron-gated Tuileries Gardens, quiet and black in the silent hour of the night, while further on still, the massive square edifices of the Louvre's towers rose up into the skyline, as if trying to piss on the Eiffel's attempt of a Tower.
And even though there was plenty of towering architecture around them to admire, both of them had seen it before, many times over, and nothing was ever just new. It had been old to them, while it was new to others, it had been old to them before it had even been built. To Emi and Carter, all the glory and constant newness of the world, at this point, was as old as the things that demanded to be looked at, as if it was their first time being gazed upon. And yet, no one looked at them… No one saw them as relics and artifacts of a lost age. That was probably for the best.
There was a silence that had settled over the two of them. Not that there was usually a lot of talking as it were, but this was a different kind of silence. A tired one. A weary one. A silence that demanded a price but couldn't find compensation.
Emi was watching the space ahead of them with a distant expression on her face. "You know, I don't remember who I was before all of this."
Carter turned to look at her friend, her eyes narrowing, as an eyebrow flew up suspiciously. "What do you mean, love?" She allowed, for a moment, a tiny flicker of her accent to appear in her tone. Only when she spoke to Emilie or James.
The other woman stopped and turned to look at her, with a strange sort of look on her face. It was a look 16 had never seen on her face, a look that seemed to be bordering on something. As if it was being pulled into a 'feeling,' she couldn't place, a type of sinkhole of thought that she couldn't help but get dragged into. "The people I killed—" she seemed to, for once find trouble in articulation, as if she had never had a need to articulate anything before, "they thought I was cruel… And perhaps, in some respects, they're right, Carter," she frowned, while a notch in-between her brow appeared, "but the truth is, I don't remember what it was like to be anything other than this." She spread her hands as if referring to herself.
M16 frowned dangerously, sharp lines fixed across her features as she narrowed her eyes. "Well, what do you remember, Emilie?"
"I remember, laying on a straw bed, rain dripping through a thatch roof, dropping onto my face… That's the earliest memory, I believe. I remember my name used to be Sinthea Schmidt—but I don't recall ever being called that. I don't remember my mother, I know who my father was, but I don't remember him… That must be why I was initiated into HYDRA, in the first place…" She frowned, but Carter could tell there was a part of her still attempting to reach the memories that had once known these things, versus the facts that her now. She never knew Schmidt had a child, but then again, Schmidt was a man who injected himself with experimental serum to be 'stronger than a god.' There was a lot she didn't know (or even understand)—or want to understand—about him.
"I remember the girl I loved, but not her name…" She cocked her head and looked up at M16 with a little smile pulling at her lips, a smile that looked like it had once belonged on her face, but had been missing for a long, long time, and had come back worn and stretched at the seams. "I remember that I am old—older than is reasonable for the human life span, that I can't die, and that I am, for all intents and purposes, immortal." She was silent, then, and Carter thought that might be the end of it.
She had stepped closer to Emi. The night air was cold, the winter winds whipping past them, but neither of them had felt the temperature of the air in decades. "But I don't remember what it was like to feel."
"Why are you telling me this?" She asked her partner, hiding her sweet, posh Kensington accent back into her vocal cords.
The confession had made 16 suspiciously narrow in on Emilie's eyes. It made her uneasy to see her despondent partner so nostalgic. Nostalgia was a gift reserved for those who lived above them, in the land outside of theirs, in the land of the light. They were holes and gaps in the tissue and muscle of the universe, and empty spaces did not exist outside of the dark.
"Because Barnes is going to kill me." She shrugged her shoulders in an unsympathetic matter. The old, unresponsive Emi slipping back into her face. "It makes sense, I'm the one who stuffed everything within me—into him… In order to survive, he needs to cut me out."
Carter frowned at Emi's theory, a skeptical and harsh face took hold of her expression. "Lovely theory, Freud, but the problem is, you can't die."
Emi smiled a bit at that. A mystical, misty smile that said, with all the right in the world, that she had already seen the event of her death and knew it, intimately, like a friend. "Not in any rational way, no."
"Well, that's interesting." 16 acknowledged with an incredulous laugh.
"Peggy, promise me, you'll burn my body." She suddenly asked with an intensity that abolished anything else in her mind. "Peggy, please." Emilie reached and grabbed her shoulders, her eyes glistening—not with tears, but with emotion, with feeling, with a beginning…
"Burn your—? My darling, you're not making any sense." 16 was reeling at the use of that name, the use of her name—the name that had defined who she had been. Emi meant to reach into the empty space of her heart and pull something from it that was not rotten, that still shined and glittered in the fading sunlight of the past. M16 knew that reaching for Peggy Carter was a naïve mistake, and to appeal to the emotion of her past, well… Others had tried, but none of them had ever been Emi.
"When it's done—when you think it's done. Burn whatever is left. It's the only assured way for me to truly die. Now," she grabbed her wrists, looking deep into her eyes, "promise me, Carter, promise me."
16 had no choice here. "Yes, Emilie, of course… Of course, I'll do it… But how-how are you to know any of this?"
Emi looked up to the heavens, her eyes trailing the constellations, she smiled up at something above, a radiant and celestial smile that matched the twinkling heart of the sky. "Because I felt something," she tipped her gaze back down to earth, back down to 16, "I remembered what it was like to feel." She reached out and took her face in her hands. "And now, now that I remember being alive, being in love," her words soft, encapsulatingly beautiful as the eyelashes that came to rest on her cheeks, "I get to die. I get to die." Her breath hitched over the word and a single, vital, and irreversible tear rolled down her cheek. "I die, saving the person I love." She pressed her forehead against M16's.
"Foolish." 16 rejected her romantic ramblings.
"A calculated risk."
Peggy Carter felt something deep within her move and something tangible and golden came into the distance, somewhere behind Emi, somewhere 70 years behind her, somewhere nestled between the two people she—no—she threw her gaze out of Emi's line of vision, stopping herself from doing the unthinkable. "What are you bloody talking about?"
When she looked up at her again, Emilie's eyes were shining like twin supernovas—exploding, collapsing, dancing, and imploding within the universes of her irises. Every color you could ever imagine, and even the ones you couldn't, were there, nestled between masterpiece of her eyes. "Love." She said softly as she met 16's eyes and laughed madly, hysterically, heartbreakingly, as she stated to cry, and through her runny, snotty tears, she curved her lips against hers, and they kissed.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – PRESENT DAY
Steve came to the doorway of the senator's office, knocking on the side of the threshold's paneling. An older woman, most likely Senator Carter's secretary, sat inside, with her head dipped over some papers she was scanning.
The secretary looked up at the sudden sound and found herself eyeing a freakishly familiar man—had she seen him somewhere before?—was he a celebrity? Perhaps a news anchor? God forbid he was off of Fox News. Senator Carter did have a way with the gentlemen of the world… Even if she was smart about it, the men she often sought for company of the night, were not entirely… Well, 'appropriate.' Last year, she had even been caught up in a controversy over messing around with that fella off of that TV show.
"Good afternoon, ma'am, I was just wondering, if there was any way for me to arrange a meeting with Miss. Carter?" He offered a smile to her, and—oh my good gracious—that young man had a beautiful smile, even with all that facial hair.
She unhooked her glasses from her face and tried not to hide the blush she was showing. "You know, honey, she went out to lunch with some advisors. If you hurry, she's probably just finishing up her meeting. You can find her at Tony's Café, right around the corner from here."
"Tony's?" The young man frowned.
"Yes, dear—is there a problem?"
"No, I just…" There was a hesitant moment, where the boy decided to smile, instead of frown. "It's ironic, is all." Before he thanked her warmly, wished her a "very nice day," and walked out to go find Sharon.
"Now, that's a boy you don't meet every day." She made a little humph sound, before she looked back down at her paper work.