Chapter 1
'This is the beginning, of anything you want.'- Boy
Some days are just ordinary days. You get up, go to work, eat, talk to friends, watch TV, go to sleep. Then you get up and do it all over again the next day, and the next. Uneventful, unchanging. The world keeps going in the same way. Every day, millions of people get up and experience days like this and they know that tomorrow will probably be the same. They keep going, living their lives, going through the motions.
Yet some days aren't ordinary. These days are rarer. They don't happen very often, yet when they do everything changes. It doesn't have to be a big thing that makes a day different. You could meet a new friend, fall down the stairs, have an argument with someone. Then there are those days. The days that change everything. Everyone at some point experiences one of those days. A family member could go to hospital, someone could die, you lose your job. Although it doesn't have to be some terrible things thing that makes a day unordinary. There are plenty of happy occasions that can change a day. The birth of a baby, a wedding, moving house, a new job. Whatever the reason that makes a day different, these are the days that we remember forever. These are the days when time seems to stand still. Where you notice every tiny detail. It's strange the things that people remember. A smell, a sound, a feeling. Most days merge into one another, a series of endless repetition where each day is as forgetful as the next. But these days, these special days stick in our minds forever, a vivid image of colour against the blurred grey of normality.
That day was an ordinary day. It started just like every other day and Ally had been sure it would be like every day. She had already mapped out her entire day. She would go to work as a teacher, come home, make dinner for herself, spend the night watching something on Netflix and be in bed and asleep by half past 10, lust like most other nights that week. That was a typical day for Ally and although most people would consider it boring, including Ally, she really didn't care. It had been months since the last school holiday, work was tough and as someone who has just broken up with her boyfriend of 18 months, the last thing she wanted to be doing after work was going out and trying to meet new people. Right now she was enjoying some time on her own and even though it was ordinary, it was exactly what she needed.
However things never turn out in the way we expect. We plan all the happy days and we look forward to them, but it's the other days, the devastating days that tear your life apart and come completely out of the blue, like hurricanes come and destroy everything in its path, striking suddenly and leaving devastation in its wake. Those are the days that change us the most. Those are the days that we can rarely go back from. Those are the days where nothing will ever be the same again. And we never see them coming.
His entire body convulsed in pain as the bullet entered his body, hitting off of his already dislocated shoulder. Gritting his teeth, he raised his metal arm, wincing slightly as the movement pulled at his muscles and fired two shots straight into the head of the shooter. He had been aiming for straight between the eyes, but what could he say, he'd had a fairly eventful day. Beside the bullet did its job. A kill was a kill. The hydra agent wouldn't be firing back and he most certainly wouldn't be followed this time. Not by Hydra, not by SHIELD and not by whoever the hell else might be coming after him.
The adrenaline was still coursing through his veins, keeping his senses alert as he waited, listening and silent for the soft sounds of approaching footsteps. For the tell-tale click of a gun. Or even for the soft and steadying breath of a predator watching him from the shadows, ready to strike. With his heightened senses, he could hear every sound for at least a mile around. Every rustle of leaves, the flapping of a birds wings at it took flight, the distant sounds of sirens. But not what he was listening for. The area was clear. He had killed them all.
Accepting that the battle was over, for now at least, he allowed his body to relax slightly, only to instantly tense up again as the pain from his shoulder shot through him. He had been shot before. He was used to pain. He was trained to handle it. It was just that his injuries weren't usually so severe. Then again, he hadn't faced another enhanced before. Another equal. He was fairly certain he had a few broken ribs, a few cuts and bruises that weren't too serious, the dislocated shoulder and the gunshot wound would need attention. As much as he might like, he couldn't ignore them.
It was in that moment, the moments of silence, those eerie and tense moment at the end of a battle, the moments where your body is still bracing for an attack, only to finally let go and slump in relief when it doesn't happen, when the fear finally took hold of The Winter Soldier.
For the first time in his life, the one that he could remember anyway, he didn't know what to do. He had no orders and no one to give him orders. He could finally make his own decisions. He could finally make decisions about what he was going to do, who he was going to be. But he didn't know who that was. The weight of the power that he had finally been granted weighed down heavy on him, crushing the slight grip of reality that he was struggling to hold onto. He was The Winter Soldier, The Asset. He belonged to Hydra. Or did he? That didn't feel right. That wasn't who he was. It was and it was what he remembered, yet it was wrong. It wasn't all there was. There was something that he was missing. Some thin wisp of a memory, floating around the edges of his subconscious that told him he was something more than this. That he had been more. Flashes whizzed through his brain like a strobe light, causing him to close his eyes at the pain of conflicting realities that struggled to fit together and make sense in his brain. The more that he tried to cling onto them, the more they disappeared into the darkness of the memory that he couldn't grasp. Or maybe it wasn't his memory that was causing the blackness at the edge of his vision. Maybe it was caused by the blood that was pouring out of his body and dripping gently down his arm, pooling into a bright red puddle underneath his right arm.
Whatever decisions he had to make about what he was going to do would have to wait. His basic training and his instinct for survival took over. He was weak, he was injured, he was wet and he needed to find shelter. Hydra, Shield, whoever they were would be coming back for him. He was dangerous, he was a liability and he was a secret that they would never let out. Let them try he thought. Because despite suffering from blood loss, he was finally making his own decisions and even though he may not know who he was or what he was going to do, he knew one thing with absolute certainty. He wasn't going back.
The streets were deserted as Ally walked back from work. The smell of burning smoke still filled the air, the smoke rising from the burning wreckage that was still visible, glowing against the night sky. Normally Ally wouldn't have walked the streets on her own this late at night, but she hadn't really had any other option. The buses weren't running and finding a taxi was virtually impossible. It was times like this when she wished she would just get over her stupid fear and buy a car, but even after nearly a year and a half of living in America and she was still scared to drive on the wrong side of the road. Normally she would have found the empty streets, the smell of burning smoke and the sounds of sirens in the distance unnerving, but at the moment she was honestly too tired to care. All she wanted to do was to get home and sleep and try to forget about all the horrific things she had seen that day.
It was one of those days, the ones that when you think back on them are just so crazy that when later you try and think about what happened, it all just seems like a dream. Those days seemed to be happening more and more often. A few years ago the world had been relatively normal, just full of your average dangerous lunatic or mass murderer. Nowadays the news was filled with alien invasions, real live gods from other planets, monsters destroying cities and people with strange abilities. Ally had watched it all on the news like everyone else, wondering what was happening to the world. It seemed like each and every day was getting crazier and crazier. Nothing really seemed to surprise them anymore.
Yet today was different. Today she wasn't sitting in front of a TV screen watching the world go to hell. Today she got to witness it all first hand and what was worse, she had got to witness the aftermath of it all. Of course she had known that there were casualties of things like this. That some people hadn't been saved. But the Avengers were heroes and had saved entire cities. That was what the news always focused on. You could almost forget about the people who hadn't made it. They were just a number, a statistic, a figure. A picture shown on a screen for a second never to be mentioned again. But today Ally knew that she wouldn't forget about the people who hadn't made it. She had seen the devastation first hand. She had seen the tears and the grief as the children in her class were told that their parents wouldn't be coming home. She didn't think she wold ever forget the looks on their faces.
It was why she was so late home. She didn't feel like she could leave the school until every last child had been picked up by someone. In a city like Washington D.C you would be hard pressed to find someone who wasn't connected to the government in some way. Five different children in her class alone had parents who worked for SHIELD, for two of them, life wouldn't be the same again.
As Ally climbed up what seemed like the never ending stairs to her apartment, she knew the fourth floor hadn't been a good idea but she was a sucker for a view, all she could think about was climbing into bed and try to forget about everything that she had seen. She was exhausted. Trying to pretend to a class of 8 year olds that everything was fine when three large, plane things were literally falling out if the sky less than 2 miles away wasn't easy and she felt emotionally and physically drained from the act of keeping a fake smile in place all day.
When she finally closed the door to her apartment, Ally sagged against the door in relief, locking out the mad, crazy and dangerous world, just wanting to fall asleep and put the whole day behind her. Little did she know that her night was just beginning. The mad, crazy and dangerous world had followed her home.
A/N- So this is my first ever story published on this site and also the first story that hasn't been written in the first person. (It's so much harder). Anyway thanks so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed. This chapter is very much an introduction so please keep on reading to find out what happens. Please feel free to comment and I'll do my best to reply.