Two
“Captain, I’ve got the best people I can spare working on it, but I have more pressing issues like global security to take care of. I can’t just reassign all of SHIELD’s top resources to—”
“THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH,” the frazzled blond bellowed at the stoic director as his fist came down on the metal desk with a reverberating thump with enough force to leave a sizable dent in the surface.
It had been eight days since he had had to take a rain check on the plans he had made with Dr. Harvey to help her train, due to his covert mission in Lithuania taking a few hours longer than predicted to complete.
Eight days since he had ridden into her apartment’s dim garage on his thundering motor cycle with a bag of Chinese takeout as an apology for being late when he found the pools of dried blood and the shoes he had bought her for Christmas on that pavement. At first, he had hoped he was wrong. That she had dropped them somehow and gone inside her apartment where he would find her curled up on the sofa watching some episode of Star Trek. However, as every one of the calls to her cellphone went straight to voicemail as he ran up the stairs, the growing sense of dread settled in.
But she was gone.
It had been eight days since his frantic fingers called Agent Romanoff on the high-tech phone that nearly cracked in his trembling hands as he barked over to her in a panic, “Natasha. Natasha she’s gone. Doc—Ruby. She’s gone. There’s blood everywhere, and she’s not answering her phone.”
The distinct sirens of SHIELD vehicles sounded nearby minutes later as Steve sat helplessly on the front step into the apartment building.
“None of the blood was hers! Each pool of blood was from someone else; your lab confirmed that. That means she was targeted, and kidnapped by god-knows-who, and she’s probably out there right now being—.” But Steve’s voice faltered and fell, unable to say that single word that brought unimaginable thoughts of her to his mind. She was too sweet for that. To kind for that. Too good for that kind of fate…
“Being tortured,” Fury interrupted without hesitation. “That is if at this point she is even still alive. The fact that we haven’t had any uptick in chatter, or action means that whatever information they needed out of her, she hasn’t given to them, and at this point, she’s probably been dead a while. The bad guys in the real world aren’t patient, Captain. She’s not coming back. And I’m sorry.”
Steve’s jaw visibly clenched as his hands tightened into fists that turned his knuckles white. His lips trembled with rage has he held back another outburst.
Fury was wrong. He had to be. She couldn’t be dead. She was alive. She had to be.
“I promised her she’d be safe when she joined SHIELD. I promised her that no matter what, she’d be protected here, and you turned your back on her. You put a target on her back and then sentenced her to die.”
“Captain, it’s not that—.” But whatever Fury had left to say wasn’t heard as the super soldier turned his back on the other man and stormed out of the secure office, ensuring that the door slammed hard enough to crack the cement wall it was secured to.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
“I need you to do something for me. An order, if you will.”
He was running out of ways to lie, and that frightened him. He could feel Sasha’s growing unrest about Ruby’s insistent silence, even if his master seemed to oddly respect her strength and resolve to protect those she clearly cared deeply. They both had seen people give in far sooner and under far less duress than they had put her through. She was like a rose that endured through a harsh winter, still blooming and surviving despite the killer frost. It was awe inspiring to the Asset, almost beautiful in its own way, and he was grateful he was under orders to ensure that she lived through it all. It would be such a waste to destroy something with such a unique beauty to it.
A part of him wondered if anyone had ever sought to protect him and defend him as fiercely as she did for her Steve, her friend. Had anyone ever called him their friend before? But those were thoughts and questions he didn’t dare truly pry into, out of fear where they would lead. It was better to not think about it at all.
“Our contacts inside SHIELD have informed us that our guest has been declared dead. SHIELD fabricated a car crash and a terribly burnt corpse for her loved ones to bury. No, we will not be threatening her with her loved ones. I want her eventual loyalty, not for her to cooperate with the full intent to devise a means of escape once she seems to have earned enough trust. However, our dear Captain needs… Well, lets call it a reality check to her status.”
Sasha handed the Asset a plain, white envelope with the known address for Avenger’s Tower printed on it… And Steve Rogers name. “You know the drill. Just enough to get their attention.”
A stiff nod was the only response Winter made, before vanishing back out the door of the office and heading down the hall. A part of him looked at the envelope in disgust, jaw set tensely, as his mind begged his metal fingers to crumple it… But they wouldn’t obey. He had orders, and orders needed to get obeyed.
His footsteps carried him loudly down the hallway that lead to the door with the iron room that he spent most of his time in. The agent standing guard outside eyed Winter coldly before standing to unlock the door and let the Asset in.
She was asleep, her head canted slightly to the side as her chin found a resting place on the cuff around her neck. She looked peaceful again, and for a moment, he stood in the darkness provided in the room and simply stared again. She stood out amongst the gloom and depravity of the room… Like a white rose in a blood-spattered room… An image from his own memory.
And then the lock clicked loudly shut, jarring her harshly awake with the frightened gasp that he had grown far too familiar to. She feared him during the day. During the day, he hurt her, and today would prove to be no different. They both knew that. It was what he was here to do, and what he would continue to do until she provided the answers that his masters needed.
Silently, he wandered over to the stained, metal table with similar restraints to the ones on her chair and set down the addressed envelope before unsheathing the knife at his hip with an audible shing.
Her flinch and the way she tensed told almost as vivid a story as her frantic heartbeat that he could see from the way her stained shirt shuddered rhythmically over her chest. She was calculating and was not prepared for what answers she was coming up with. She had known change would come eventually, the stakes would be raised in order to get her to talk, and she terrified.
He gave her a moment to think in silence as he slowly walked back over to her side and crouched down to be on her level, knowing she would not look up at him. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing the terror in her eyes, or risk seeing the ice in his, as she had made the mistake of doing before. She was learning the steps to this dance, even when the music was changed.
“You can’t stay silent forever.” His flesh hand lifted to brush the sweat-coated locks of blonde hair that fell around her face behind her ear, letting his flesh fingertips brush against the soft skin of her cheekbone for just a moment before she flinched, causing him to withdraw for just a moment.
“But I am sorry.”
The blade shifted from his metal hand to his flesh one and in one fluid motion, his stood, metal fingers gripping her by the jaw tightly to hold her head harshly still against the back of the chair. His flesh hand came up knife in hand, faltering not even once as the blade dug into the flesh of her scalp.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
All she knew was that he was gone. Winter, as he asked her to call him. He had left in the morning as he always did, and no one had returned until that night when an agent she had never seen before brought in a bottle of water and bowl of cold, but cooked rice. He only stayed long enough to watch her eat, then left.
“Steve… He’s in an apartment in DC. The Jefferson Building. Eighth floor. The door at the end of the hall on the right. He’s… He’s got an undercover bodyguard living as his next-door neighbor. Agent 13 of SHIELD’s Special Service.”
Winter had been right. She couldn’t stay silent forever. She talked.
Out of all the things she could have given them, that was the least harmful. She knew Steve could take care of himself. SHIELD would fix it. He would be safe even if she gave that up. However, she still felt sick to her stomach as though she had betrayed her friend… But one can only be expected to withstand having a blade carve your scarred skin so deep until you can’t take much more. Eventually, you talk just to get it to stop.
And she had.
Winter had taken his prize from her head and sealed it away in the envelope as her blood audibly gurgled down the drain between her feet. Her head fell to the side, dizzy from the blood loss and the fatigue of it all in that brief moment of peace before he returned to her side with the med kit he carried and only ever used the seemingly magic burn ointment before. Only this time, he was armed with a needle and thread.
Those wounds had mostly healed by the time she heard the panic coming from down the hall, and she barely had time to sit up from her place in the far corner of the cell where she shackles attached to the wall before her door burst open and Sasha came in with an austere look on his face.
The feeble blanket that had fallen she tugged up to her shoulders as if she could hide behind it and they would leave her be, but the man only snapped his fingers and said “Release her. She comes with us.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
What. A. Headache.
Leave it to Alexander Peirce to be too ambitious and too hasty, rather than bide his time and make opportune moves when possible and inconspicuous. Leave it to Alexander Peirce to under years of work. He deserved the death he got, at least in Sasha’s opinion. Good riddance.
The Asset had been temporarily loaned to the American to oversee Captain America being brought down. Dr. Harvey had given little, but enough information to ensure that that could be done without any foreseeable hiccup, but Pierce had aimed for a bigger target and had opted to take down Nicholas Fury instead, resulting an absolute mess in the Potomac, and decades of Hydra operatives that had been hidden in various power spots of society being exposed and arrested after Natalia Romanov dumped all of SHIELD’s and Hydra’s files onto the internet.
Well, all the files that had been kept with SHIELD.
That didn’t include himself and the good Dr. Harvey’s knowledge of the inner mental workings of those so-called Avengers. She had had the good sense to not keep a digital file on the SHIELD mainframe of her assessment of each of her clients. She kept notebooks, all of which had been burned at her faked death.
At least for the time being, she was still worth more to him alive. She knew things that he needed and had no other easy way to get.
He knew that the Asset would return to him eventually. It was in his base programming to return to his core handler: Sasha Anosov. So even with Pierce’s ridiculous solution to the Winter Soldier’s original memories breaking through, due to his unnecessary access to Steve Rogers—why in God’s name, that man allowed the Fist of Hydra to even speak to Captain America given the circumstances was absolutely unfathomable—which was to wipe him and start over, Sasha knew his prized possession would come back to him eventually.
In the meantime, they would have to move. The current location of where Sasha’s operation had been leaked, and it was only a matter of time before law enforcement or the damned Avengers came bursting down his door and he wasn’t quite ready for that.
Oh well, just a minor setback. One they would recover from in time.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
It had been Pepper who had brought up the box of mail and left it on Tony’s desk to go through, much to his chagrin, with a threat of what wouldn’t happen later that night if he didn’t clear through it all by the time she returned.
Most of the mail had been advertisements, credit card applications for various people, thank-you letters… All of which were tossed into the fire place one by one while Jarvis warned him about smoke alarms. But one letter in particular caught his eye and made him pause. It wasn’t post-marked and had a stain on the front that couldn’t be from a coffee mug. But the most jarring factor was that it was addressed to Steve.
Most people would have taken several moments to deliberate about opening someone else’s mail, but Stark was not one of them. What was the worst that Cap was going to do to him? Give him a stern “Now Tony, you know I don’t appreciate you going through my mail?” Like that would ever work.
Easily, he slipped his letter-opener through the end, ripping the paper before dumping the contents into his hand… That he then dropped on the ground with a grunt of disgust.
“Jarvis!”
“Yes, Mr. Stark?”
“Where the hell did this letter come from?”
“Unknown. Based on the fact that it was near the bottom of the mail bin, I would assume it arrived two days ago. I’ll go through the video logs and see if I can determine who and when.”
The clump of blood-covered blonde hair still sat on the floor before Tony grabbed it with a napkin with a gag.
“Shall I inform Captain Rogers of this letter?”
“No… Not yet. I want you to run the DNA off of this thing, date it, whatever. Then once we know what we’re dealing with, I’ll tell him.”
“Ah. Afraid it’s another episode of Ms. Callahan?”
At that name, Tony visibly shuddered… And gagged again at the though of the woman who used to mail parts of her body that she severed to him, as tokens of her affection. Toe nails, hair, blood, and eventually her own ear.
“Capsicle isn’t as aware of the crazy fangirls of this world, and I’d like to be able to give him the ability to sleep well at night without feeling like one of them is trying to crawl into his window. If it’s a Crazy Callahan all over again, then I’ll handle it myself.”
“And if it’s not?”
That made Tony pause as he stood in the elevator, his empty hand reaching for the bio-lab button. His face faltered and he looked at the clump of blonde hair once more, his lips pursing into a tight line as he mulled over his options. He almost hoped it was a crazy stalker for Steve. The alternative to that was… Whoever she was, this woman didn’t part with this willingly.
“We’ll handle it appropriately. Until then, you don’t tell anyone else about this. Not even Pepper.”
……………………………………………………………………………………….
After a week, Tony had much forgotten about the clump of blood-covered hair that had been mailed to Steve. He had left Jarvis to check every DNA database known to man and moved on with his life. Without anybody else to bring up the subject, other things took precedence when it came to Tony’s attention... And after a week, the fact that Nat had successfully dumped all of SHIELD and HYDRA’s secrets onto the internet filled his conniving heart with glee.
Within moments, he was starring in front of his holographic screens downloading as much of the intel as he could get his hands on. He had been trying for months to hack back into SHIELD’s servers after the helicarrier and been blocked at every turn, much to his annoyance. Now, it was all out there for him and he didn’t even have to—.
“Mr. Stark?”
An annoyed groan sounded from the billionaire as he forced himself to mute the various video feeds and pause the scrolling screens of intel coming in. “What on earth could be more important than what I’m doing right now, Jarvis?”
“Well sir, you asked me to alert you when we got a hit on the DNA off the hair that had been mailed to Captain Rogers.”
Now that had Tony’s full attention. With a quick wave of his hand, the various feeds vanished leaving only one, showing the DNA from the lab and the DNA it matched to.
“We only NOW are getting a match? What took so long?”
“Her DNA was only ever filed with SHIELD, no where else. I was only able to find a match once—.”
“—Once Nat dumped all of their files into the public domain,” Tony interrupted swiftly. But that fact sobered him. There were too many pieces of a puzzle falling into place and he was beginning to think they were about to paint a picture he didn’t want to see. “Jarvis, who am I looking at?”
All at once, a familiar face and name popped up on the screen with the DNA, along with various files… And Jarvis hesitated.
“Dr. Ruby Harvey. And by the level of decay on the blood in her hair… It was only a week and a half old. That means—.”
“—She’s alive.” It was the only explanation. Steve had told him the truth behind the lie that SHIELD had publicized, and Tony knew that the Captain blamed himself for her disappearance, despite his and everyone else’s efforts to convince him otherwise.
“Find Steve. Now.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
He didn’t understand.
It had taken him two weeks to find his master, but he had done it.
He had expected to be punished, or to go back on ice. The man named Sasha was clearly upset with the failure of the mission, but the anger and disappointment was at someone named Pierce that, the Asset was certain he had never heard of before. Instead, he was given orders.
“I have a valuable asset here. She’s not like you. She has information, and I need her safe from others here and safe from herself. You are to ensure that she doesn’t get hurt by anyone for the time being.”
Those were simple orders but… they felt odd.
She was not restrained when he was taken to her secure holding cell. She was left free to wander about the room that reeked of torture and death. However, that was not what stunned him. The moment the door closed and locked, rousing her from her seemingly peaceful sleep, she stared at him as if she had seen a ghost before a smile erupted on her face.
Within a moment, the tattered blanket she had had was tossed aside and she rushed across the room to gather him into what he figured was as tight of an embrace as she could manage. Flashes of the image of a white rose in a blood-splattered room crossed his mind seeing her look so bright and cheery in a place such as this.
“You’re alright. Oh, I thought you were dead, that I’d never see you again. They wouldn’t tell me anything. You left and never came back and I was so worried…”
Her voice faltered with doubt and her arms fell slack around him until she quietly, and cautiously took a step back from him, looking almost hurt at how he had failed to respond to how she had anticipated at their interaction.
But how was he supposed to respond? How did she know him? He had never met her before. She had no name, no place in his memory.
“Winter… It’s me. Ruby…”
Her voice cracked and she took another step back closer to the single light in the room, illuminating what he had missed in the moment before.
She was clad in a pair of surprisingly clean shorts and loose shirt, that seemed too large for her, but left her arms and legs exposed, and his brows furrowed as his pointed gaze traveled over her. Her legs had four, distinct scars from stab wounds that were in the end process of healing, but most notably were the two, healed burns in the shape of handprints that adorned her upper arms and her calves, and several similar burns down her forearms. In his mind, he could hear the echoes of screams, and the smell of burning flesh…
Focused, he took an unconscious step forward, reaching out his flesh hand in confusion to trace along the scarred skin. She had been tortured. Repeatedly. That much he could tell. Though why anyone would torture someone so innocent looking as she did confused him. No wonder he had been ordered to protect her. She needed it.
“Roza…” The name was just above a whisper as it fell from his lips. His hand wandered of it’s own accord, and he felt her stiffen beneath his touch, but it did not dissuade him, but eventually, his fingers brushed across the puckered line buried in her scalp at the side of her head that they had been looking for. Another scar.
“No… My name is Ruby. Don’t you remember me?”
But her question fell on deaf ears as he continued to study her, seemingly lost in the though as the stab wounds on her legs were examined next… Until he noted her shivering.
“I don’t understand… Winter, please. What did they do to you?”
“Moya Roza…” His brows furrowed as he slowly returned to his full height, staring intently at her face. He didn’t understand. Why did she call him Winter? He had no name. Or was he Bucky? James? Winter? The Asset? Too many questions that he did not have answers to, but only one mattered to him in this moment. “Who hurt you like this?”
Her face went blank and he watched as she swallowed heavily as unshed tears brimmed in her eyes. His jaw set, ready for her answer so he knew who to protect her from the most
“You did. Don’t you remember me?”