Captain America: The Winter Soldier
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The tunnel loomed in front of me like the gullet of a fabled creature, devoid of light and color, with no distinguishable end in sight. The barred doors looked like the ones you would see on a prison cell and as I stepped closer to peer in, another face appeared on the other side. A taller woman with dark hair pinned back, athletically built with the same careful gaze of Natasha. A customary among S.H.I.E.L.D. agents from what I saw. That and a penchant for sending mysterious coordinates.
"We have to move fast." She opened the door wide for me. "There's not much time."
I felt better about going in after hearing her voice, knowing it was the same person, Maria Hill, who I spoke with hours ago. It'd been a long trek to find her location and despite the ache in the soles of my feet, walking ensured that nobody was following us. I had to be extra careful, especially after what happened at the mall.
"Will you tell me what's happening now?" I asked her as she led the way down the yellow lit underpass. "Where Natasha and Steve Rogers are?"
"It's better if I show you," Maria answered, the winding tunnel bringing us past several doors until we reached the center of the passageway, lights wired to the ceiling like someone had been occupying this place for years.
A soft mechanical clicking made Rex's ears perk up and it grew louder as Maria pulled back a curtain separating us from the unconscious man lying on the hospital bed. Several criss cross scars littered over his scalp and forearms, a black patch slung over his right eye and the secrecy leading up to that point made me believe that man wasn't just another S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.
His vitals beeped steadily on the machine but his eyes didn't open, even when Maria went up to him and smoothed a hand across his forehead.
"Is that-"
"Nick Fury." Maria nodded. "He's the reason S.H.I.E.L.D. pulled you out of Siberia."
I breathed in deep, studying the man's figure on the cot and wondered what happened to put him in that condition. And who did it. "You said he knows about my family?"
Maria hesitated at that, still watching the rise and fall of Nick's chest and it occurred to me that maybe she didn't know herself; maybe it was really only Nick and that was why she needed my help. To wake him up again.
"Your father had been working for S.H.I.E.L.D. before he... disappeared," Maria said. "But before his attack, Nick discovered he'd also been working with Hydra."
"Hydra?"
"A network of neo-nazi terrorism that first started in World War II. All of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s intel had pointed to their elimination after the war." She paused again and frowned. "Fury said that there were holes in your file. Pages that were intentionally blacked out and details left out about that night in 1999. Cell phone records indicated that your father had been keeping contact with Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives up until his presumed death."
"And... my Uncle?"
Maria shook her head. "The only thing we could recover about him was his body. Nick had been digging into everything, had an entire team retracing your family's movements up until that night when Hydra attacked him."
"Because he knew too much."
"Technically, Nick Fury has been dead since yesterday afternoon. Tetradoxine B in his system kept him under long enough for me to get him out and with Hydra thinking he's out the picture, it'll be a hell of a lot easier to make our next move."
I understood why I was there now, in the United States again, in front of the man who could possibly put the pieces of my life together again. Maybe not to have it back, but to accept that this was how it was going to be for me. "When S.H.I.E.L.D. first brought me here, they said that my family might have actually survived that night. There was blood all over the scene, but... no bodies. As much as I wanna believe they're alive, a part of me just can't. I'll never get that man's face out of my head, the way he stole my whole life from me." Rex's damp nose nudged the palm of my hand then, whining softly as if he too were reliving that memory. "It's hard to think anything would survive him. Sometimes I wish he killed me too."
"But he didn't," Maria said. "Whether it was luck or fate, you're here now and you can help us stop the same people who took your family."
"What can I do?"
"There's a doctor Fury knows downtown. I'll send you the address. Escort him back here and in the meantime I'll contact Romanoff."
I nodded, glancing down at Rex who sat patiently beside me, ears perched on high alert and ready for whatever course we were about to be thrown on next. He seemed to know what was at stake as he bounded ahead of me and kept a short distance between us when we hit the inner city again, my phone gripped tight in my hand so we wouldn't veer too much off track.
The address was a two story clinic and I managed to find the man, Dr. Fine he introduced himself as, while he exited the first floor elevator and despite the confusion on his features he didn't put up a struggle or ask many questions when I told him who sent me. He understood completely what he needed to do, like a part of his brain was always set to be on standby.
It took an hour to get to him and another hour getting back, Rex's nose and my memory of the path carving us back to the security of that iron barred door where Maria waited at the threshold. Her features were tight despite the doctor's safe arrival but she hurriedly walked him to Nick Fury's body where he assessed his vital signs and worked on getting him conscious again.
Maria stood next to me while we watched the doctor work, her hands on her hips. "S.T.R.I.K.E. has Natasha and Steve's location pinned."
I gulped when she mentioned those men and I wondered if they knew I was inadvertently the cause of their agent's death in the mall. They knew who I was... they saw my face.
"Where are they?" I asked.
Maria's laptop screen was opened and she pulled up a real time map of D.C. and farther downtown was a single red dot. It wasn't moving and from the weaving of the lines it looked like they were in the middle of a highway.
"Dozens, maybe hundreds of agents will be on them unless we can extract them in the next twenty minutes."
"The mark isn't moving so maybe they're on foot," I surmised. "That's what I would do."
"And the problem is we're running out of time," Maria added, glancing between Nick Fury and the computer.
There wasn't much of anything it seemed and whether we had one hour or one minute, my mind couldn't find a way to connect the dots between us and them. But that was half the issue. The greatest was finding them blind in a city with several thousand bodies. An almost impossible thing for any normal person.
My brain instantly shot to Rex then, who was resting with his head between his paws, eyes halfway shut and I recalled the stories S.H.I.E.L.D. told me about his service history: his many missions sent along side Captain America and S.T.R.I.K.E., speed and aggressiveness not like any other war dog they had before, and his remarkable talent for sniffing out enemy placed bombs. He remembered my scent after fifteen years.
He'd remember S.T.R.I.K.E.'s too.
I took off my torn, blood stained jacket then and rolled it into a ball under Rex's nose. His head jerked up from the smell of the dead S.T.R.I.K.E. member's blood, running his muzzle along the length of the crimson tinted sleeve and he slowly stood on his feet. There had to be something else on it beside the man's blood. If there was... Rex would smell it. He'd find it.
"What is it?" I whispered to Rex when he grumbled low in his throat. "Did you catch something?" I glanced back at Maria when he turned tail then and headed fast for the tunnel entrance, stopping and looking expectantly back at me when I didn't follow. "He can take us to them."
She was watching Rex with something akin to astonishment but nodded, closing the laptop screen. "Stay on them," she told me. "Update me if there's any changes."
"You're not coming?"
"I'll find a way into their envoy. If they get their hands on Natasha and Steve, they won't be kept alive for long. Be careful, they'll do the same to you."
I believed that. If Rex hadn't tore that man's throat out in the mall, it would've been me lying dead in that corridor instead, and it made me sick to think that they might have done the same to my dog. They'd go to any lengths to keep Hydra's infiltration unknown. They made quick work to dispose of my family and now Nick Fury. Was I gonna be next?
I followed Rex out into the crisp afternoon air and he sniffed the ground once before banking to the right into the swarmed city intersection, and I tried keeping close at his tail while weaving through people passing on the sidewalks, waiting at traffic lights to cross to the other side. Once every five minutes he'd halt in his tracks and lift his nose to the air, at the cracks in the sidewalk then bark at me as though to say we were getting closer.
My phone grew hot in my hand as I sent Maria a series of coordinates at each turn, every new street Rex brought us down and the longer they grew, the faster Rex's legs pumped to his destination. I was already out of breath. My feet stung with every step but I pushed and pushed forward, telling myself to just keep my eyes trained on Rex and that he'd lead us to Natasha and Steve.
I didn't know it was going to be a war zone.
Citizens were fleeing all around us, vehicles long abandoned and their alarms blasting behind the echo of gunfire. I knelt beside a dented white van, slinging an arm around Rex as he sniffed the air and growled.
But where-
My heart drained of blood when I saw him... the man from that night, the one who took away my family. He was ripped perfectly from my nightmares and my breaths grew faint when I saw a flash metal. His metal arm.
It was him.
Then just as quickly he was gone, masked in the embers of an explosion and when the smoke dissipated it was like he didn't ever exist to begin with.
Tears slid down my cheeks when black cars came lining in, surrounding Natasha and Steve as well as another man I didn't know with their crosshairs pointed at their heads. Some of them wore patches stitched to their sleeve. S.T.R.I.K.E.
I hurried to contact Maria but through blurred vision the phone slipped from my hand and clattered to the concrete, and I fell back against the van, sliding to the ground. Rex's wet nose nuzzled my cheek, whining as my breaths came out fast but shallow. I couldn't control it. Not when my brain brought me back to that night in 1999, my body following and thinking I was ten years old again hiding under that office desk.
Helpless. Paralyzed with fear.
Rex started barking, pawing at my arm and circulating back and forth between me and the edge of the sidewalk, and the urgency of his calls made me scrub the tears from my cheeks and push myself back up.
The agents from S.T.R.I.K.E. cuffed and loaded Steve, Natasha and the third man into their van, convoys of other police and S.H.I.E.L.D. officials following all around their transport.
If what Maria said really was true... then there was only minutes left before they were going to be killed.
"Are you ready, Rex?" I murmured down at his head and retrieved the burner phone from the curb. "It's not over yet."
It was seven miles in when Maria sent me her last set of coordinates. Shorter than the last but located in a more vague area of D.C., a grey family sized van was parked in the lot of a neighboring apartment complex and I couldn't help wondering if it was another one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secured hideouts, like the one they housed me into. It made sense to me, if that was how their agents seemed to be in two places at once all the time.
I hadn't drove since my time in Nevada when I was eighteen and granted, it was all illegally until I decided to make deliveries on foot, I relied on muscle memory as I started the car and eased out carefully to Maria's designated safe zone.
With Rex sitting in the passenger seat, I did as her last message instructed and drove back to where they kept Nick Fury, wondering how the three of them meant to make it out and back again, especially since they were so outnumbered. And those men brought many guns.
I was at a residential stop sign when the van door suddenly crashed open and in stumbled Natasha, her red hair mussed and jacket bloody with Steve holding her steady by the waist. Maria followed in shortly with the same man I saw them with in the street earlier and he appeared like he'd been roughed up too. Rex raised his nose in the air and sniffed, smelling the blood and barked at them once.
"How did-" My mind was reeling at how they managed to find the car in the middle of city traffic so quickly but these were people who could do things I could barely imagine and I realized this must have been what Maria had been setting up earlier in the tunnel. Of course she would have the car's location tracked whenever it moved.
"Double time, O'Brien," Maria told me, sliding the van door shut, dressed in head to toe like those S.T.R.I.K.E. men. "Romanoff took a bullet."
"I said I was fine," came Natasha's hoarse reply.
"You already lost a pint of blood."
"And counting."
Steve and Maria's voices were calm, but all four of their presence in the car coupled with Natasha's pale face, and Maria keeping watch by the door did nothing to ease my drumming pulse while I pushed harder on the gas pedal. Too many voices at once, so many stop lights and cross traffic that I begun to feel queasy.
"This is why I don't have a license," I mumbled, almost to myself, my hands tight on the steering wheel.
"You serious?" The man named Sam peered at me through the rearview mirror then. "And you're our getaway driver?"
"I haven't gotten into an accident yet."
"Oh, that's perfect," Sam said under his breath, letting his head fall back against the wall.
Maria had just removed her disguise when I brought the van to the tunnel entrance, cutting the engine fast so they could help Natasha out; her eyes were still open but if they didn't get her to Dr. Fine, that was going to change real soon. I opened the driver's door and Rex jumped down first, running in front of Steve and Maria when she led the way into the tunnel.
Rex barked into the darkness, signaling our return and within seconds footsteps came hurrying toward us. Dr. Fine moved with urgency, his eyes taking in Natasha's form leaning against Steve's side.
"GSW. She's lost at least a pint," Maria told him.
"Maybe two," Sam added.
"Let me take her."
"She'll want to see him first."
Natasha's lips parted at that, eyes locking briefly with Steve and she even glanced toward me as if I'd been keeping something from her, but I remained quiet. They might not had known that Nick Fury still lived but that was all that I knew since coming to D.C... the rest was just fragments that didn't fully fit together yet.
Rex bounded ahead of us, slipping past the curtain before Maria pushed it back.
"About damn time."
I stopped and stared at the sound of Nick Fury's voice, robust and not at all matching to the man who was once on the brink of death, still lying weakly on the cot. The man who changed my life. All in less than a week.
Natasha's expression paled for a different reason now. "How did you do this? We watched you die."
"Lacerated spinal column, cracked sternum, shattered collarbone, perforated liver, and one hell of a headache." Nick Fury's list was long but given the kind of things I heard about him, it seemed like those injuries had spurned on his will to live instead of breaking it... how else could he had survived such an attack?
"Don't forget your collapsed lung."
"Let's not forget that. Otherwise, I'm good."
"They cut you open," Natasha argued. "Your heart stopped."
"Tetrodotoxin B. Slows the pulse to one beat a minute. Banner developed it for stress. Didn't work so great for him, but we found a use for it."
"Why all the secrecy? Why not just tell us?" Steve asked.
"Any attempt on the Director's life had to look successful," Maria explained.
"Can't kill you if you're already dead," Fury added, his heavy drug-induced gaze studying our faces. "Besides, I wasn't sure who to trust."
Hearing that made me feel lucky enough to be in his presence then because if Nick Fury had remained conscious the entire time he might had considered me unsavory given my background and Dad's apparent double cross. In his eyes, I might've turned out just like him. But the most confusing part of it all was... I wasn't even sure who'd that person would be. I didn't really know my Dad at all.
Nick Fury felt well enough to stand but the doctor still helped him sit at a nearby table where Maria had the USB's contents screened on her laptop. The natural pink hue returned to Natasha's cheeks and whatever the doctor had given her to ease her pain from the dislodged bullet was working fast.
"This man declined the Nobel Peace Prize." Nick Fury studied down at a photograph of a man named Alexander Pierce, the head and hands behind Hydra forming ranks inside S.H.I.E.L.D. and it was difficult to imagine someone with a warm smile as his having malice in his heart. "He said peace wasn't an achievement, it was a responsibility. See, it's stuff like this that gives me trust issues."
"We have to stop the launch."
"I don't think the Council's accepting my calls anymore." Fury clicked open a brief case then, three identical keycards lying inside.
"What's that?" Sam said.
Maria also turned her computer around toward us and the blinking green simulation of three giant aircraft models synchronizing with each other. "Once the helicarriers reach three thousand feet, they'll triangulate with Insight's satellites, becoming fully weaponized."
"We need to breach those carriers and replace those targeting blades with our own."
"One or two won't cut it, we need to link all three carriers for this to work because even if one of those ships remain operational..." A grim look passed over Maria's face then. "A whole lot of people are gonna die."
"We have to assume everyone aboard those carriers is Hydra. We have to get past them and insert these server blades and maybe, just maybe we can salvage what's left-"
"We're not salvaging anything," Steve cut in and his tone startled me. It was angry, frustrated, and non-negotiating; nothing at all like what I remembered meeting the calm and even tempered man in the shopping mall. "We're not just taking down the carriers, Nick, we're taking down S.H.I.E.L.D."
"S.H.I.E.L.D. had nothing to do with this-"
"You gave me this mission. This is how it ends. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s been compromised, you said so yourself. Hydra grew right under your nose and nobody noticed."
"Why do you think we're meeting in this cave?" Fury demanded. "I noticed."
"How many paid the price before you did?"
"Look, I didn't know about Barnes," Fury answered quietly. It wasn't just his expression that fell at the mentioning of this person, but each pair of eyes glanced at Steve with a mixture of sympathy and shock.
"Even if you had, would you have told me? Or would you have compartmentalized that too? S.H.I.E.L.D., Hydra... it all goes."
Destroying anything that once had connections to your goals, to people and places that you considered to be friends or home wasn't a decision anyone could make lightly. But the side these people had been fighting for held their own weapons to their heads. I understood Steve's distrust, his need to wipe it all clean. It was the only way to be sure.
"He's right," Maria's voice echoed my thoughts then and out of the corner of my eye I saw Natasha nod solemnly.
"Don't look at me," Sam chimed in under Fury's pinning stare. "I do what he does, just slower."
A ghost of a smile pulled at Fury's mouth and he wasn't at all angry that he'd just been outvoted. "Well," he slumped back in his chair. "Looks like you're giving the orders now, Captain. "
Despite the relinquishing of command, the air was still slightly strained with tension and it mostly stemmed from Steve but I didn't think it was because he feared they wouldn't be able to stop Hydra's impending attack. He seemed more on edge since Fury brought up the person called Barnes. Maybe it was another agent like Natasha or Maria... or someone Hydra had tried to kill and succeeded like what was supposed to happen to Fury. What could have happened to me.
They decided to split up. I was only a courier, not easily remembered or twice looked over and in certain situations that became pretty helpful, but a heaviness in my heart - a finality that I felt at all my previous transfers - told me that my time there in D.C. was coming to a close end . I had to figure out what I was going to do next. Where I was going to go.
Almost like a restart to that night in Chicago, but instead of being forced to run, I had a choice now. It wasn't the one I expected to have nor the one I ever imagined myself choosing again, but it was all I knew. A self exile. I had Rex back and even though it was all due to S.H.I.E.L.D., their world wasn't mine. Somewhere only people built like Captain America and Natasha could expertly navigate through and they'd trusted me enough to aid them this far. My job was finished. As for what would come after...
Only the future knew.
I stood from my seat then and Rex ran ahead the mouth of the tunnel then and barked at us, as if to signal that it was time to depart.
"O'Brien."
Fury's voice stopped me before I got far and when I looked back, he gestured me over with two fingers.
"Before we throw ourselves to the wolves," he started to say when I rejoined him and Maria at the table. "There's something we need to discuss."
"Do you..." I swallowed the growing lump in my throat. "Do you mean my parents?"
"Yes. Long awaited, isn't it?"
"Maybe," I answered. "Or maybe it isn't. They could be dead."
Fury and Maria exchanged a glance toward each other and it was neither comforting or filled with confirmation that they weren't alive, and somehow that scared me even more. What did Hydra exactly do to them? Fury continued on by saying, "Before we get to that, what need to talk about who attacked you that night."
That was exactly the reason why I didn't want to speak of it. That man would never leave my memory, would always be the source of why I couldn't get restful sleep anymore... I knew him. I knew him well. My fingers clamped down on the armrests of my chair when his face - his ghastly face - flooded my vision and my stomach began to hurt like he was in the room with me.
"I remember him. I always will. You know, I used to see him everywhere after that night. In street corners, subway trains, outside my window... he became my own shadow for the longest time. Fifteen years... too long to have somebody haunt you, someone you don't even know."
"He isn't just any man, O'Brien. His name was James Buchanan Barnes and he was barely alive when Hydra captured him back in 1943 and turned him into the walking killing machine he is today."
"He's brain-washed," Maria clarified. "He wouldn't remember his own name, his past or what he's doing under Hydra's control."
James Barnes, the name repeated in my head. The man... he was a regular person. Like me. Like my family and my Uncle who traded his life so I could keep mine. And he didn't know, he didn't what he'd done - what he'd continue to do as Hydra continued to move the invisible strings controlling his body.
Did that comfort me? I didn't have an answer for that. Because regardless, he was still there that night, still pulled the trigger that killed someone I loved, and what ended up happening still happened, but I realized what Nick Fury was trying to say: he wasn't just a man. He was also a slave.
James Barnes, whoever he was before this, had his life stolen too.
"We know your father and Uncle's loyalties were initially with Hydra."
"With Hydra?" I repeated Fury's words, perplexed. "But when I got here, they told me he was working undercover for S.H.I.E.L.D."
"He was, but that's not where he started. Your father and Uncle were born Hydra, O'Brien, and eight months before the attack your father made contact with S.H.I.E.L.D. We believe they meant to turn themselves in, but instead of sending your father to the brig, they came to an agreement: your father would work undercover for S.H.I.E.L.D. if he remained within Hydra and siphon as much intel as he could."
Dad must've thought he'd be washing away his sins, that by taking my family out of the equation Hydra had been building themselves into but keeping himself in it by going to S.H.I.E.L.D. would redeem him somehow. I didn't know if it did. Hydra had always been there first it seemed and it made my gut sick to think that whatever Dad was trying to do to right his wrongs, to put a wrench in Hydra's plan, would've made no difference in the end.
It was like one big empty circle. My family giving their lives for mine... only for me to go without love. With really living a life.
My gaze drifted over to Steve who was checking up on Natasha and I remembered the look that passed over his face when they spoke of the man who I thought been responsible for everything. "He knew James Barnes, didn't he?"
Fury nodded. "Better than anyone."
"I've been by myself for fifteen years. If my parents did survive that night, why would they wait so long to find me?" Why would they leave me all alone? And with my Uncle long dead, what honest chance did Mom and Dad have? Hydra could have gotten to them already. The man named James Barnes could've gotten to them already and I didn't want to imagine the outcome under that man's reticle again.
"I can't promise they're alive, O'Brien, but I can and I will help you find them. Wherever they are."
Or whatever happened to them.
S.H.I.E.L.D. never found Mom and Dad's body or so they'd claimed, but they could've been left somewhere unmarked. Disposed of along with the other lives Hydra had taken and at that point, I didn't know if the agents who brought me back from Yakutia were loyal to Nick Fury or been led astray. But they'd given me back Rex...
I wished I could've told them I made peace with the possibility of not ever knowing what happened to Mom and Dad, but that wasn't entirely true. I carried bits of them everywhere I went; my Mom's voice in the back of my head, Dad's touch in my heart, their blood on my skin possessing me to go on. Why else was I still there? To live a lone existence?
No... not alone. Not forever. I'd been reunited with Rex again and if it took me the rest of my life, if I had to walk through the farthest corners of the world, I'd see my parents again. One way or the other. Living or dead.
I didn't expect it to be alive, though.
I assumed to be out of D.C. by dawn.
Despite all they had done for me, for bringing me that much closer to closure regarding my parents, I didn't know what use I could have been to them and so I found myself and Rex back in the apartment. The curtains were pushed wide open, white rays of sunlight casting strips over the bed as I took a quick sweep of the entire place and pocketed only what was small, useful and could be taken on a plane. Food for Rex was priority. Everything else could've waited until we started anew... wherever that was. I hadn't yet decided.
It was going to be a lengthy commute on foot to the nearest terminal. It was just past midday when Rex and I stepped out from the apartment complex lobby and I checked the map on the burner phone to make sure we were headed in the right direction but when my eyes turned to the sky, I froze.
I could see them hovering. The helicarriers.
They appeared so otherwordly, three great gray masses hanging clear on the horizon and the longer I stared at it, the more of that ashy color bled against the blue. Smoke.
I peered down at Rex then and he was already looking up at me, ears on alert and head tilted as if he were reading my thoughts, and confirming what I'd been feeling all through his keen sense of hearing. Maybe he already knew what was happening... those were his former partners over there and there was only so many of them against hundreds of Hydra agents that must have been on those aircrafts.
I couldn't leave.
Not now. Not yet.
I was actually being given a choice, like what I couldn't do that night in Chicago. I didn't want to run then and I wouldn't do it now, not when there was still something I could've done to save lives. Even if it was just one. It wouldn't be that easy and I couldn't even do what Maria did... but I had to try.
I spun on my heel then and headed for the opposite direction of the airport with Rex charging ahead, pausing at intersections to smell the air and he changed course a couple times, barking at me like he was telling me we were getting closer. Powerful eruptions like cannons being fired into the sky made me stop and glance up at the treeline, pillows of sulfur wafting high up over the branches but the echo of gunfire went on.
Rex kept the lead our entire run there, his dark bushy tail acting like a beacon in the middle of D.C.'s bustling streets, keeping us from getting separated but when I looked away just for a second, he strayed too far and I raced to catch up with his stride.
"Rex, no!" I called after him when his shape disappeared completely behind striding legs. "Rex, wait!"
Panting, I crossed over to the adjacent sidewalk, searching frantically for any trace of Rex but then his telltale howls came from the thick shrubbery. He stood right at the dirt path leading up into the riverbed, barking endlessly and aggressively at something I couldn't see deep inside the trees where the shoreline ended and when his coal black eyes jumped to me I knew he'd found something.
My shoes crunched over damp leaves and broken twigs as I pushed through the thicket, stubby branches scratching the skin on my palms and when the riverbank came into view, my whole body grew cold.
There lied Steve.
A/N: Thank you for reading!
Chapter title reference: "Mind Machine" by Scar Symmetry (from the 2006 album Pitch Black Progress)