{3}
"…Capture…"
The echoes of the HYDRA operative's brutal compromise triggered a defensive instinct in his veins, a lucid sense that he recalled harboring in a distant life. Flashes of distorted imagery created a studious illusion of a young blond haired boy, gaunt and ailing no density of muscle growth. He remembered sitting near the sloping edge of a twin spring mattress, holding the boy's frail hand with an urgent grip as the blast coldness of the winter night embraced them.
'Everythin' gonna be fine, you're a tough little guy, nothin' is gonna drag you down...' Those words he couldn't voice back, something was barricading his sentiments. He only felt each retention suppressing an erratic pulse of rage margining within his depths.
...Homecoming...
For an inexplicit moment of voracious impulse, the Winter Soldier felt paralysis receding as his senses awakened to the metallic and charred stench wafting over the fresh snow capped terrain; a potent reminder of the deaths that ensued. A dark figure reflected in the intent glacial pools of his eyes. Regaining a level of clarity, he trained his focus on the brutish American operative standing above him. A sheen of black metal revealed the automatic poised in Rumlow's narrowed clutch. It was a display of false restraint. Bullets hadn't been discharged out of the weapon's nozzle and new transmissions were being received, which gave him a definite recognition that the orphan was still alive.
Red. He was staring down at her blood smearing the white ground, his chrome fist clenched reactively against the rage enveloping him, it was unnatural to feel attachment towards an innocent life, his hard muscles kinked under his uniform when the rawness of an abyssal growl arose from his depths. He fought against the corruptive force of the trigger words encoded into his mind, trying to halt the control through volumes of static. Everything haze into the monochromes of red...He watched as the girl stirred underneath his jacket, her temperature was decreasing, he recognized the signs of her entering the first stage of hypothermia.
As his limbs regained stability, all the Winter Soldier stared at was the gun. One click of the recoiling hammer would end the mission. A brazen sense overtook him, a source of light that steered him away from HYDRA's control as he awakened. Every thought merged back to the girl, and the reason of her prime importance to his masters. The pressure in his skull diminished as his chrome hand lifted, thoughts were traversing as snow dusted over his roguish chestnut tresses before he realized that he was the child's only wall of defense against the bullets aimed to pierce into her vulnerable heart.
...Freight Car...
A warm caress graced his real hand, a phantom touch of his conscience, that steered him back to the little girl depending on him. A flash assaulted his mind as deformities of shattered memories collected into a dominant image of a muscular soldier with blond hair His body emboldened with the colors of America, carrying a gleaming shield through the darkness weaving around him.
'I've never known you to quit a fight, Buck...'
Frosted breath solidified in his throat, he emerged back to reality, leveling a feral glare of steel-blue at the faint glow of firelight. His collective emotions harbored no conviction as he blinked vacantly and with a slow motion of his head; he exuded a murderous glint at Rumlow's finger tracing over the trigger of his assault rifle, long disheveled strands hung over his lips, as he increasingly watched Rumlow's sadistic resolve back to the girl.
The clarification to execute the transmitted order that buzzed in Rumlow's ear. A miasma of blood stroked over his nose as his taut lips pulled into a deleterious grin, exposing his warped amusement to exact voluntary harm on an innocent life. His thoughts savored in the macabre imagery of fresh crimson painted over the white frozen ground, seeping from his target's leaden body.
As Rumlow's dark eyes glowed with flares of black, the Winter Soldier trained his own penetration onto the gun, challenging the logic that had been implanted to evolve his destructive single thought divided the drones of static as he chose to attain humanity over compliance and flexed his metallic fingers into a solid fist. Such delivery of raw strength was effectively utilized to protect weakness. He was prepared to oppose the authority that grounded his body to submit, he had to become the girl's resistance. How could he restrict his merciless tactics and save her life? He needed an outlet to give him a vital reason to defect from his prearranged directive.
"Sir," Rumlow grumbled with a fuse of fretfulness ebbing through his veins. He narrowed a ravenous stare at the unconscious child while pressing his finger over his comlink. He waited to receive the command from his superior. A slight curl of his lips revealed the confirmation of his new orders. His gaze sliced through obscurity and his shoulders rolled back to size his posture into an intimating stance. "Understood."
Feeling a relentless pull of dread against his tensed heart, instincts ripped through him, summoning all reservations of defiance, the Winter Soldier locked his icy azure eyes intensely on the exposed neck of the mercenary, holding no regard to inflict the right measure of harm, as the girl's life hung on a verge of termination. It took a subtle moment of precise calculation to devise his engaging attack.
Brandishing his knife into coils of his metal fingers his stare went depthless retracting no light as his stoic demeanor morphed soulless to the obstructor before him. A vicious siege repossessed his mind, as he blocked out the bone-impaling screams of his retired victims and granted the blemish of red to assail the aggressive hold as the clear azure of his eyes blackened to the core. Through a division of transmuting emotions, he used that one fragment of memory to anchor against the intense storm. With slow, measured ease, his abdomen crunched under Kevlar, freeing a sculpt of muscles from as he stabled his height; giving Rumlow a false sense that he was stalling.
With slow measured ease, his abdomen crunched under Kevlar, freeing a sculpt of muscles from as he stabled his height; giving Rumlow a false sense that he was stalling.
Once he felt unsettled by the provoking threat, his chrome knuckles involuntarily scraped over mounds of the accumulated snow; displaying the cold fury that couldn't be reckoned with. He was trained to remain impassive, a pulse vibrating through his bones, like a droning volumes of a reactivated machine. That's all he was existed to be: a machine programmed to execute commands and destroy obstructions -targets-deviants. He walked through shadows as a ghost, nameless and barren from spirit. His eyes never blinked when he pulled the trigger, stance never faltered. He was modified to feel the emptiness that deleted phantomous echoes of humanity.
After reclaiming a sense of identity to match his heartbeat , the Winter Soldier craned his neck and settled a deadened glance at the shorter operative advancing towards him. The HYDRA agent was a sleeper, recruited by his handlers to shadow him during extraction missions. Brock Rumlow, a brash Italian mercenary who had a blood thirst; he enjoyed torturing victims through methods of interrogation and relished at their submissive pleas; but he wasn't a true monster, he didn't embody the mantle of dread that the Soldier wore or the icy grasp of death that wielded in the assassin's hand; he was merely an observer who could never pierce through the hearts of weakness like a knife.
The Winter Soldier had been surgically remade to serve HYDRA a lethal sentinel and controlled instrument: a frozen gun tangled in strings.
As rage brimmed in his eyes, the Winter Soldier made his effort retake his limited dominance over Rumlow. His hawkish gaze was intent with a shadowed and possessive glint, preparing to deliver a killing strike on his standing violator. In a slight balance of disciplined movement, the grinding of alloy plates of the arm made the presence of his menace known to Rumlow's ears, an unwavering response of instinct became imitate in his glacial eyes in the seconds the audacious operative aligned the pistol at him, evoking a challenging onslaught.
He exchanged a fleeting glance back at the girl, color was decreasing in her face, almost frosted as blood was draining at an unsteady pace. He needed to remove her from the coldness, bring her to a safe house he recalled being situated during a recon mission. Her survival was necessary to preserve.
Rumlow seemed enthralled by the concept of gaining succession, and so it became dual of skill that both of them posed as equal forces of brutality, never faltering to surrender their mission. "Ona moya (She is mine...)" The Winter Soldier declared in a raw snarl and the boyish fullness of his lips sealed into a hardened scowl as avid sweat polished his heated skin. Protectively, he shielded the girl with his flesh arm, shadowing her pale skin, never taking his eyes off Rumlow's gun.
He isolated the bestial impulse to crack Rumlow's skull open. His heartbeat stilled as he tested the mercenary's humanity. "YA budu derzhat' yeye v zhivykh ... Udalit' sebya ili ya ub'yu tebya."
"You think a little threat is gonna to scare me, Winter," Rumlow derided with a cockiness teeming in his gruff voice, barely noticing the shift of unhinged emotion rippling in the Winter Soldier's rebellious gaze. He didn't need to decipher that something was obstructing the assassin's mind, his whole demeanor changed into a fractured semblance of reserved calamity.
He needed to drag the subservient asset back into submission, he taunted at the Winter Soldier, exhibiting livid contempt without annexing his desire to snare the child into his own clutches. She was unprepared for the horrors that awaited to greet her inside the asylums of HYDRA. "Don't tell me that you're becoming defective because of the little brat?" he vexed.
Rage possessed him to the brim, cooling in his blood. "I was given orders to finish the directive," the Winter Soldier dismissed with a slight rasp of nonchalance edging in his masked baritone, almost conveying it naturally. With a hard clenched etching in his chiseled jaw, he leveled his a pulsating, feral gaze effectively at his unreasoning handler. All resistance ebbed away, one of his chrome fingers pointed on the child, while the intensity of his blue irises never reflected empathy. He felt remorse scraping over his heart, evoking a manifestation of pained rage. What he was doing was defying orders, proving to himself that he still had light in his soul. "The girl needs medical attention." His words carried rebellion. "She's gonna lose more blood."
Sensing the defiance against the cognitive programming, Rumlow stomped his boots into with an imposing approach with the limited control of precision, his stoic demeanor shifted with a look of menace, dark eyes burning like smoky embers as he clenched his teeth and grabbed a fistful of messy hair, yanking the Winter Soldier's head with a bone crackling jolt. Listening to the yelping grasps, he wielded his knife into a reserved stab, and just grazed the pulsing vein of his captive's throat. "The brat's gonna lose a hell of a lot more when the scalpel digs deep."
A slow burn of acid rose up his throat, and the Winter Soldier's frosted glare trained at the operative, dismissing all restraint as instincts steered him to accept a returning pulse of warranted tolerance. With an alarming thrust of his metal hand, he seized Rumlow's unguarded arm; tearing stitched material with a flash of his brutal strength. He wouldn't relent, his steeled blue eyes reflected a lurid blaze as his chrome fingers gripped harder onto the scuff of leather.
"What is your mission?" he dismissed, evidently concern for the girl's life. An enraged snarl ripped from his throat, he was losing his restraint and a gush of clotting blood that leaked from his opened wound confirmed that his body was on the brink of collapsing. Rumlow acted indifferent to reveal the information, he easily brushed off the Soldier's raging the demands."Tell me!"
"You're not getting a word out of me, Winter," Rumlow smirked tersely, amused by the baneful and venting assassin's display of unobstructed sentiment. Abruptly, he glared up with a daring glint, never losing his grip on the pistol, nor did he reveal a falter in his impassive stare as the iced clutch of the Winter Soldier's bionic hand, feeling it move on encompassing accord as the metallic fingers threatened to squeeze the bones of his captive wrist out of joint.
It felt like a clasp of inspired dread, clotting up his veins. Precision couldn't be outmatched. In one the wake of the Winter Soldier's unleashed fury, his bones were dislocated. "Son-of-a-bitch," he swore irritably. Strength ceased to exist in his arm, as pressure grew unbearable. His vision became infected with feverish haze. It was enough to make his stomach churn. In a slow recoil of ungrounded footing, his arm was freed.
There was no chance of succession tonight-not without his fleet of operatives that were on the verge of intercepting his position. He needed a distraction. Sweat dampened his spiked hairline, and his fingers betrayed their steadiness. He purposely dropped the pistol into a mound of snow collecting at his boots. It was a false illusion to deem a sense of negotiation.
"Whoa..." Rumlow issued with a calm breath, bracing his hands up in a defensive stance under the Soldier's imposing shadow. His dark eyes hardened into a scornful glare, exposing his fiery rage. The Winter Soldier's deadened gaze bore into his skull like sharpened ice, unwavering and slicing into his layers. "My orders are not to harm the injured brat. It's extraction..." He conveyed valid assurance that the child wouldn't become a victim of his nefarious methods. "Not termination."
Those words seemed to elicit an involuntary reaction, without displaying evidence of a warning, the assissasn's alloy hand dove into the snow to retrieve the discarded weapon, his right arm hung uselessly limp at his side, as the Winter Soldier skillfully aligned the nozzle of the gun clutched in his bionic fist at Rumlow's vested chest.
The next few moments were a blur, three rounds were discharged as the Glock's hammer recoiled with a thunderous blast lighting up the shadowed area, but Rumlow maintained balance against the warning shots arriving at his feet. Empathy was used to shackle down his murderous intent, the Soldier drawled, his voice awash with a detectable Brooklyn accent. Rumlow registered the compromising shift, and he sneered in return."You're not gonna take her."
Cursing, Rumlow nauseated, removed a flare stick from his pouch, and swiped over a steel casing of bullets, igniting a red spark. "On my signal," he jabbed a finger into his earpiece and relayed an order back to his team. "Light up the sky.
Hearing the command being asserted, the Winter Soldier emitted a defiant growl, viciously throwing the emptied Glock against the tree, dismantling the pieces. He needed to remove the operative and resort to using his bare hands as weapons and clear away from the opened ridge before the armored fleet of HYDRA soldiers arrived. He glanced back at the girl, keenly exacting all focus on the smear of blood pouring from covered wound in her stomach. He attempted to reach down to her.
Within seconds of his ceaseless effort to grasp the child's limp hand, crimson spires pierced through the haze of falling sleet, reflecting in his blurring eyes. A storm of operatives moved in sync to their commander's orders, preparing to engage with a dosage of tranquilizers at the Winter Soldier. "Stand down, Soldier," the chorus of an intent threat invoked the usage of his mind to regress back to his menacing tactics. He was HYDRA's creation of resurrection, a merciless enforcer of death and fear: he could trounce and wash the frozen ground with their blood without a flash of conviction in his penetrating eyes.
Rumlow noticed a ripple of opposing defiance in the depthless blue glaring him down. It was a turbulent storm within a balance of waging emotions. HYDRA assimilated that behavior and stripped him down to contain only a voice of obedience. The mercenary's lips curled into a disgusted sneer, as he measured a step towards the unconscious girl, shadowing over her pale skin, barely demonstrating restraint in his stance. As he breathed in the frigid air, he mimicked a reckless kick near to the child's head. His boots crunched with disturbing weight; threating to stomp on her fanned out hair before recoiling away."You want this dying brat to live, then you will remain grounded, Soldier."
Shifting an unhurried glance at the dark shapes forming at a hilltop, the Winter Soldier acutely listened to Rumlow's erroneous words and growing in contempt that he sensed in the mercenary's lewd tone; if he surrendered to the resistance of his programming, the girl would suffer. Her innocence was the only anchor that recalled a piece of his soul that hadn't been gauged out by HYDRA's corruption. The sight of death had met them in the crossfire. Parting his full lips, he drew out a chilling rasp and delivered one submissive answer with a gravelly timbre edging against his Russian voice, "ya podchinyayus'"
In that mere second of accepting his rectified choice, a faint whimper beckoned his luminous blue eyes stray back to the child awakening before them. Rumlow smirked darkly, preparing to snatch her, but the Winter Soldier countered fast, jabbing his metallic elbow full force into his aggressor's kneecap; a yelp confirmed a fracture of bone, as he seized the limb with clasping pressure, striving against the unquenchable thirst to rip the leg off, as the impulse was growing rancid to dismiss. "On a moya missiya," he snarled, fiercely, gnashing his teeth, embracing the sense of bleak determination raking through his body.
Rumlow remained stagnant, obvious to the pain that seeded in his bruising calf, he could feel traction gaining in his snared leg, muscle and bone tensed under coils of metal:there was no pulsation of relief. He gave into the pressure and stumbled off balance, landing into snow with a thud but the Winter Soldier never ceased to deliver more pain with his capable skill; in a blur of red haze, the weight of his body was being crushed as the long-haired assassin saddled over his waist before he could jerk movement, and through darkened splotches of his diminished vision, all he saw was the metal hand reaching down to claim his throat.
"I'm gonna make sure you're mind goes into a blender for this..." Rumlow taunted in a slurring gurgle, and then, he spat out watery drops of red, watching specks of his blood land over the Winter Soldier's lips. The thumping of heavy boots vibrated underneath them."We're gonna make sure you ride the lightning tonight," he chuckled toothy, as he peered at the girl. "And just because you pissed me off, I'll make her watch."
"I don't think so," the assassin rasped with a vicious seethe, thrusting his metal hand up to ram his knuckles into Rumlow's skull. His rampant senses were diverted by the feverish haze obstructing his intent resolve; he couldn't see a dart slicing into the air until the needle pierced the exposed skin of his neck. With the release of an enraged snarl and rash attempt, he quickly yanked the dart out of his throbbing vein and felt a rush of the serum.
"No!" he screeched, clawing at the snow as Rumlow shoved him off; gobs of blood drained out from his wound, heavily. He couldn't focus against the numbness overtaking his muscles, the merging of sedative was effective. Tactical boots of the encroaching operatives dragged over whiteness. A breath later his subdued body was being hoisted up.
When he cast a dismal stare onto the girl reeling back to slow consciousness, before offering them no success of their capture; he thrashed violently under the weight of gloved hands bracing over his chest, with the last vestiges of fleeting strength that he still possessed. With insidious and lethal calculation, he twisted hard flesh arms out of shoulder sockets and forced a leg back, listening to bones snapping out of joint against the jarring force of his ramming boot.
The retreating operative collapsed breathless, nursing the broken leg as he gave the others no glimpse of mercy reflected in his searing blue orbs. Instincts drove him to a destructive course of unparalleled action as he listened to piercing howls erupting from their depths, he was immobilizing all of them within seconds of reclaiming his strength that enforced him to unleash his retaliation and he didn't relent back. These bastards deserve nothing less than pain...
Taking a moment to dwell on his defying choice, the Winter Soldier tasted blood coating over his lips, a line ran down his neck and soaked into the leather of his jacket's collar. It only amplified his will to remove the target from HYDRA's sight. In slow and automatic effort, he crouched low, instilling a sense of humanity as his chrome hand caressed over the child's limp arm.
The connection of his urgent touch ignited a spark of electricity, and his fingers clasped in unison, threading soft and tentative strokes through her dark strands, it satisfied him long enough to accept the existence of a brotherly command that breached the surface of his conditioned programming.
"What are you gonna do now?" Rumlow teased harshly, poising his weight off the damaged knee. A fleet of stealth agents besieged the area, red flicks of scope lights dotted over them as the resounding clicks of automatics broke the silence. He smirked wickedly, licking his bruised lips and cocked his head up, expectingly looking at his firing squad. "Now, we make this hard or easy, but since you're gonna drop, it's kinda pointless to run, given that you've been dosed up good, Winter."
The Winter Soldier conveyed no reluctance in his unwavering gaze, he lifted the girl's weightless body, and curved his arm just enough for her head to rest against his chest, muscles went solid underneath torn kevlar as his sluggish paces tottered forward; allowing the relentless slashing of cold air to etch into his bristled cheeks, numbing though the clenched muscle of his heavy jaw. The ceaseless and insatiable desire to shield her was all he felt. It was only an interlude of their connection. Blood from his uncovered wound outlined over plated rivets of his metallic arm and became a glaze on his knuckles with a slick trek. He was reaching exhaustion, darkness edged his mind as his body resisted to drop as he strained to carry momentum onward until his grayish azure eyes trained vividly on flashes of red aimed to shoot him down.
"Immobilize..."
"You're my mission," he avowed to her in a crooning voice, breath was choking out of him. A concussion of pain induced his body to deny strength, his dimming eyes narrowly stared at her as the components of the sedative flooded through him. Refusing to abandoned her against the masses of distortion, grounded him with a semblance of hope. Believing that salvation was possible to grasp, he embraced her close with an unquenchable need to restore humanity and sacrificed his thermic warmth to give her a chance to live. Unbeknownst to his captors, he glanced blearily down at her angelic and serene face one last time, knowing that when she awoke he would be just a tangible memory for them to erase away.
After a few more barbs succeeded prick into his skin, he surrendered to gravity, sinking to his knees. Blood roared in his ear as the clashing forces of red tentacles funneled violently into his butchered soul, dragging him further into the emptiness of shadowy abyss, but he never let her go.
