Unchained
The Soldier dropped the bloodied, blue and red-suited man on the bank of the Potomac and stared at him. He knew him; flashes of a scrawny kid with the same gentle eyes flitted through his mind. Steve. Friend. His head pounded as memories from another life teased him, just out of reach. Laughter at an amusement park. A funeral. Steve pulling him to his feet in a dark place, taller this time. Bigger.
He clutched his head and groaned as he stumbled into the woods, wandering for several hours before eventually stumbling to his knees in the shade of a fallen tree. Remnants of Hydra still remained but he wouldn’t report back, he couldn’t. He didn’t want to be put back in the chair again; he didn’t want to be stuck in the cryofreeze again. He wanted to remember the man laying prostrate on the ground near the river. He wanted to remember the woman with the green eyes too.
He had recognized her suit immediately…After all, he had fought her multiple times throughout the years. But until this mission, he'd never seen her face or even heard her voice. The man with the shield had called him "Bucky"...and the woman had stopped dead in her tracks. “Who the hell is Bucky?” he’d heard himself utter at the same time he heard her quiet, anguished voice whisper “Bucky!?”
She’d torn off the mask that covered the upper part of her face and eyes and stared at him in disbelief. His mind had started screaming the moment he saw her face. He knew her too, somehow. His heart clenched and he couldn’t breathe when he thought about those green eyes, soft and anguished as she’d stepped toward him. She'd never shown any fear of him, nor any other emotion for that matter. Her eyes filled with confusion and tears had been like a punch to the gut.
He may as well have been frozen in the pod again at that moment, staring at the hand that she’d extended towards him. She had spoken words in a language he didn’t recognize, but sounded familiar. His head had throbbed as he was fixated on her outstretched hand. Memories of soft hands in his hair and lilting laughter in the dark had assaulted his mind. “ALLY. FRIEND. TRUST.” Something deep inside him had screamed when his eyes met hers. Confusion had drowned all of his senses; he had fought this woman before; they had tried to kill each other more times than he could count... but instinct said to trust her?
Mission momentarily forgotten; his mind was whirling, hand itching to reach for hers. Hesitantly he'd taken a step towards her and started to lift his hand. He’d pulled a gun when he saw the man with the shield behind her shift and almost instantaneously, the redhead he’d shot earlier had launched a grenade. The woman he’d been so fixated on had thrown herself backwards, growling out an impressive string of accented expletives at the other woman. He'd heard her land heavily on her side, still spewing profanities, before he’d escaped with mind still swirling in confusion.
She'd been at the Triskelion, too. Single-handedly, she had torn through dozens of men and done millions of dollars in damage to the building. Flitting from shadow to shadow, burning anything and everything in her path. The Soldier grudgingly admitted that it was impressive, in all of his years hunting her...he'd never seen her abilities on full display. He had been too busy with Steve to fight her;
The woman had kept her distance and taken the fight to the grunts; she never got close to him. Ostensibly to keep her from losing what little control she had. "No wonder Pierce had been afraid of her." The Soldier had thought to himself when he had seen melted asphalt and scores of wounded men in her wake. She'd been an emotionally-charged, one-woman army.
He still didn’t quite understand why she had even been involved. Openly involved. That suit and her powers marked her as Nightingale, a member of the highly secretive Sentinels. His superiors had assumed a Sentinel would appear if their plans for Project Insight had been leaked. But never before had any Sentinel risked such blatant exposure. She was a shadow, and throwing herself into the public eye was sure to paint her as a liability to her organization.
Neither SHIELD nor Hydra had much in-depth information on them; rumors, conjecture and a few facts that had come at a high, bloody price. She was one of only two Sentinels that anyone had knowingly encountered. After WWII, unknown entities had funded the Sentinel Project. The project had been an attempt to create more super soldiers, and they had been wildly successful.
That success had been brutal, bloody and expensive. Out of nearly fifty carefully chosen volunteers, only six had survived the ordeal. Serums, forced genetic mutations and torturous experiments had given the survivors incredible abilities. Faster reflexes, increased healing time…and mutations that allowed some of them to manipulate dark matter, heat, electricity and more.
Those survivors took the mantle of Sentinel and served in an attempt to better the world from the shadows. They infiltrated places that should have been impenetrable and eliminated threats with an unmatched efficiency. Dictators, war-lords, Hydra operatives, drug king-pins, dirty politicians…none seemed beyond their reach. But never innocent civilians. As far as the Soldier knew, no civilian casualties could be traced to any Sentinel operation. There had been only six of them however. And as the world had grown, their reach had shrunk.
The Soldier knew that Hydra had attempted and failed many times to run them to ground. When they had gotten close to finding any sort of base, one single Sentinel had appeared. She’d put down the two teams while they were en route to the suspected base, and left only a single man alive. A messenger. The terrified man had returned babbling about a woman in in black with glowing eyes. He’d been clutching a box and inside was a finger from each corpse as a warning.
A short note had been included, written in beautiful, flowing script: “Keep playing with fire and you will end up burned. ~Nightingale” A promise that had been kept, as it were. That had been the first time his handlers had turned him out after her. Months of hunting had lead him to a small underground apartment in London. She was the only one within, suited up and armed to the teeth…obviously expecting him.
And he’d returned in failure; missing his left arm. She had melted it off of him when he had her in a choke hold. He suspected she had known all along that she was being tailed…and willingly played the bait. Any leads on the other five Sentinels had gone cold and remained that way for decades. Hydra hunted her more times than he could count. Each time someone important to them had ended up dead after each attempt to flush her out. Cooked to death, from the inside out.
Several more times throughout the years, he’d gone head to head with her with varying outcomes. He had never succeeded in capturing or killing her. She simply vanished, literally, into the shadows if the fight went on too long. Sending a clear message “You can’t kill me and you can’t find me unless I want you to.” It had frustrated him, enraged him to no end. Failure meant the chair, and going on ice. It had never been his business nor had he ever cared who she was or why she did any of the things she did: she was his mission. But this? This was different now. He KNEW her…and he had been trying to kill her.
The Soldier got to his feet slowly, understanding that he needed to find some place to stay, new clothes something to eat…some place to hide. Hours had passed quickly, with him sitting there on the ground in woods until it was nearly dark. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed as he trudged through the fallen leaves, but a row of houses appeared through the trees. The windows of each cozy house glowed with light, except for one.
He slunk through the brush and looked at it again. White with brown trim, two car garage, slightly over grown landscaping, toys in the backyard meant kids. But no lights, no cars in the drive, no evidence of dogs, several newspapers on the porch…nobody home. As quiet as a ghost, he made his way towards a basement window, and kicked it in silently as he could. Pushing himself through the broken glass hadn’t been pleasant but he breathed easier being out of sight.
The basement was dark and cool, but enough light filtered in for him to make out a basement den. Sofa, television, coffee table. No people. To the left was another room that looked like an office and to the right he could see a storage area, full of boxes. He stepped cautiously towards the door, knife in hand and peered inside. His eyes adjusted quickly and he saw shelves full of knick-knacks, boxes, and an empty backpack at the bottom. He grabbed the backpack and slung it over his shoulder, turning his attention to the boxes. He tore one after another open.
Toys, children’s winter clothing, women’s shoes, holiday decorations, and finally a box of men’s clothes. He rifled through the box of men’s clothes, holding shirts and pants up to himself. A little large, but close enough. He stuffed what he could fit into the backpack and turned to leave, but a jacket and cap hanging on a peg near the door caught his eye. The jacket looked a little worn, but clean, and near his size. The Solider threw it over his shoulder, stuffed the ball cap in the backpack and headed towards the stairs.
Upstairs, the tidy house was just as quiet as the basement had been. It felt strange to him to be in someplace so domestic, welcoming and clean. The rooms were dark as he sifted through drawers and closets. He’d changed into the clothes he had found in the basement, stuffing his gear into the backpack. Mail had piled up near the front door, where the postal carrier had pushed it through the mail slot. In the kitchen, he shoved a few cans of food into the backpack and noticed a brightly colored flier tossed on the counter. “The Smithsonian Museum is proud to present the Captain America Exhibit”.
A closer look had his heart thudding in his chest again; the man on the flier was the same man from the bridge. The same man he pulled from the river. The flier was hurriedly stuffed into a pocket, next to some cash he had pinched from a dresser drawer. Maybe the museum would help him remember. Steve. Steve and the green eyed woman were the only links to his old life, to whoever he used to be. And looking to the past might be his only way to have a future.