Chapter 5

Cassandra Darnell was not entirely sure what she would find in the seedy hotel room that faced the parking lot and main road, but as she gazed down at the decomposing body sprawled beneath the lintel of the bathroom, the coagulated blood fleshy against the carpet, she was pretty sure this wasn't it. Setting her woefully small rucksack on the floor, she closed the door of the room, flicking the lock into place.

Trying not to breathe in the cloying scent of putrid blood and fetor, she stepped over the body, glancing about the bathroom. It was very small, the corners at which you did not want to glance too closely, but there was no sign that anyone had been staying here, except for the dead man at her feet. She stared at the mirror, ambivalent and trapped. She expected to find him here, just as she had envisioned him, seated in his chair, watching the people walking along the road, alcohol in his hand. Yet here she was, standing in a dank little motel room with a dead man. Not that it was a surprise it would become more complicated. It wasn't as if life had been easy thus far, after all.

She frowned at the mirror, catching sight of a hand print on the sheer, cold surface of the mirror. Hesitating, she tentatively placed her hand flush against it.

There was a crack of what sounded like thunder, and her surroundings faded around her, and it was as if she had walked through a portal.

She was running, her breath rasping against her throat, her chest rising as falling with each rise and fall of her feet. Boots crackled through decaying leaves, and she could feel her blood pumping, thunderous and gorged within her extremities. But as she leapt over dead fall and ducked beneath branches, she realized suddenly, it wasn't she at all. It was Him. It was always Him.

She could feel him, as if she was trapped within his body. She could feel his desperation, hopelessness, and panic. She could feel his wretchedness as if it leaked out of every pore.

Cas jerked her hand away from the mirror, wiping it convulsively on her shirt, turning and stumbling over the body and out of the bathroom. Bucky remembered. Cassandra jerked her rucksack off the floor, and she was out the door in two heartbeats. She had to find him, because the way he was feeling, they were going to lose him. She was going to lose him.

It was stupid, she thought as she boarded a bus. She did not even know what she was doing. From everything she felt and saw through him, she thought she knew where he was. But as she sat down in her swaying, stained chair, her inner voice mocked her. Who did things like this? It was unbelievable! Following an assassin like a lost puppy after a potential owner, it was madness. And yet...

She remembered everything. She remembered the accident. The heavy darkness that veiled her from the outside world, it had been like floating in a warm cocoon. She could hear things around her, muffled, as if from a great distance, but she saw nothing, could neither move nor feel. Until the visions began.

Initially, it was small things. She could feel pain in her legs, or arms, and little did she know, but unusual bruising would blossom across her pale skin, causing the nurses and doctors much confusing as to cause. And then the dreams began.

She would dream about waking up, gasping and retching against the smoke that billowed around her. Voices around her would order her to stay still has her heart raced and she clung to the sides of her metal coffin in panic as they examined her, letting her sit up.

She would see faces, faces of those she killed, assassinated. She would feel the agony shoot up her amputated arm as they fitted her with a bionic invention as they had so many times before. After a long time, years, she began to realize that this person was not her, and she struggled against the dreams, with no avail. She became trapped, trapped within a broken man's body, forced to live what he had lived, with the pain, and the desperation, a weapon, controlled and muzzled.

Until the day he broke. Really broke. She remembered it still, and her skin crawled with the memory. It had been a routine attack, fully planned by his handlers and his muscles ached for a chance to do the job. He had been unstable throughout the day, knocking out a scientist accidentally in response to getting touched. Too long out of Cryo, he overheard several times.

He was dropped on the deck of a ship, his target a fifty-four year old diplomat who was sleeping in his bunk, aft.

Bucky crept forward down the shiny, lacquered corridor, his heavy, booted feet making hardly a noise over the sound of the waves and the soft spray of the sea. The knife he held glinted in his hand as he let himself into the diplomat's room, and he paused, listening to the man's even breathing.

The diplomat was in bed with his wife, her hand gently resting on his bare chest as they slept, It was short work as Bucky exchanged the knife for a long needled syringe which he plunged into the targets throat. It was over silently as the target struggled for air, dying with his wife sleeping unawares.

Bucky slipped from the room, a dark ghost, but was halted just outside the door. In his way stood a child, his chubby hands clutching a Captain America comic strip, his pajamas modeled after the comic's ostentatious hero. He stared upwards at the shadow darkened Winter Soldier, dropping his book.

But Bucky gaped at him. It was as if he stared at the scrawny build of someone he used to know.

'I had him on the ropes,' a voice informed him, and Bucky started, looking around.

'Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone," he whispered to the terrified child in front of him.

An almost embodied voice answered him, 'How can I? You're taking all the stupid with you?"

Bucky clutched his head, dropping the knife with a loud clank. "Stop it," he begged the child, who had begun to cry. "Steve, where are we? Steve?'

It was like his whole world had crashed in on him. Cas, after what seemed like a nightmare of black waves and raised voices, sat straight upwards in a white bed in the hospital screaming his name. That had been two years ago.

And now, as she sat, swaying and staring blankly out of the dirty bus window, she hoped against all hope her projections would have worked, and she did not face death at Bucky's hands. Not now. Not after all this time.