Chapter Text
JAMESSOLDATJAMESSOLDATJAMES
As their promise is stolen away by a thin breeze, echoing both threat and conviction, their lips stretch into a gruesome grimace. The body is all hard-wired nerves and twisted tendons that pull and knot under skin, the spiralling drain of everything pulling their whole body taught, flesh and metal alike.
(Hot blood leaks from an ice-cold side.)
(Blood, all thick and heavy with iron tang, spreads slow through the thick layers of clothing until it dribbles through and stains the floor.)
Beneath them, shaking with fear and pain, or maybe the horror of approaching death, the man who forced them to become this loathsome thing of nightmares and forgotten dreams stares up at them with glittering eyes. Tears swell in them, glinting like jewels in the faint light, marred by the thin streaks of exploding blood vessels along the whites. The bomber’s mouth gapes, flashing gums stained with blood and a tongue growing too thick for the confines of teeth to restrain it.
(It’s so loud inside their head, too full of one another to have room to think correctly, each so violently awake in a way that has never happened before that they run into each other over and over and over and maybe soon this brain will begin to leak from their ears and wouldn’t that be a relief, an escape from the pressure. From being conscious. From this horror of life.)
Colour has leached from skin, a grey cast creeping up the man’s neck like greedy tendrils of ivy. Little fingers reaching upward to grab a hold and pull the last bits of life away.
(There’s so many smells, dirt and wind and snow, blood and metal and death, leather and paper and ink, and they all collide in one miasmic slap.)
The human hand flexes against the ragged red leather of the orders, still fighting the onset of tremors that began when the words started. Its weight is the only earthly thing all pieces of whatever they are, whatever they have become, can focus on and partially settle. A lighthouse in a storm, each pass of the light trying to guide them further.
(The mission is complete. No mission report to be issued. No commands left. Not if the order keeper loses the ability to speak permanently.)
With the way senses are jumbled, any dividing line between James and Soldat overrun with agony, they don’t pick up the sound of oncoming threat until it is too late.
They go from hunched over their prey, feral and a mere moment away from using teeth to finish their job, to struck bodily. There’s an accompanying whine of technology that comes along with the impact, one that either James or Soldat would have been able to pick up long before any blow could have landed, but the way they have been pulled irrevocably together into a tangled mess stunts every one of their senses unless they focus intently.
(It’s as if their head has been plunged into an echo chamber, everything is amplified tenfold, until sound and smell and taste and touch all boil over one another. White water rapids crashing over and over and over.)
The impact expels air from their lungs as they go sailing, minds scrabbling to pull pieces of cohesion back together. Instead, instincts settle in, and the metal hand begins to scrabble at the attacker who dared interfere with this, this final stop. They cannot allow this. Even as metal arms band around their sides, they can feel the book escape their grasp. They don’t register the pain that accompanies the strike, because pain doesn’t matter. What matters is the book. And that it has been taken from their grasp.
It ignites fury.
They bare their teeth and snarl.
(Fury slip slides in and out of the forefront of their focus. Wavering focus wobbles something dangerous.)
(Black rage and grey smoke sea water.)
(Swirling and swirling and swirling together into a cosmic mess.)
Reaching blindly, even as their vision spins, the metal arm collides with something, and they attempt to dig their fingers in for purchase. Instead, a vicious sound of metal-on-metal screech sounds, sending ripples of unease through the plates of the metal arm. The unease is mirrored in the shift of sliding metal over metal.
Even as they continue to sail through the air, they attempt to turn in the grip to get a better purchase and put a stop to this. For a half second more, even with ribs protesting the pressure of metal arms, they tried to turn in the grip, before suddenly, they are released.
Cold air is the only grip they can find, and it offers no mercy.
Against a body that remains disjointed still, just out of full control as there remains too much of both consciousnesses, they try to orient themselves in the air through twisting limbs, but lose the battle against gravity. Landing heavy on a shoulder, there’s a sound of something ripping, along with a bright burst of heat against skin.
(Unimportant.)
With ground beneath them, they twist their hips and leverage the metal arm against the smooth concrete, digging thick furrows into the stone as momentum carries them a bit further. Digging toes beneath them, there’s a thin squeak as the leather tries to grasp a foothold. Getting both legs planted firmly, they lever their weight onto their haunches and crouch, metal fingers still imbedded in the ground, flickering their gaze around the open space in search of the attacker.
(There’s rot still trickling out of that cracked shell deep within them, the Asset still oozing outward but with nowhere to go without the finished sequence, black tar sickness trying to wind its way through blood and bone.)
(It begets violence, though differently than whatever monster they have blended into becoming.)
(It begets rivers of blood.)
(And mountains of bone.)
They find the Iron Man, hovering between them and the almost dead order keeper, face of metal impassive and glowing. No amount of time studying those planes of gold and red would tell a soul the pilot inside’s thought. Unconsciously, they pat about their chest, mind stuttering to remember that the book is missing, and it burns.
The Iron Man continues to hover and watch.
(There’s a new sensation oozing into the mire, something born from what was James, but the source is lost under the weight of all. It does nothing to quench the fire and sea, but settles, a thin stream of mist, all rotten citrus guilt.)
(They remember, they remember, they remember death at their hands, over and over and over.)
“Go away,” they manage to spit out, but it’s a hard thing, sound coming out disjointed as if jumping between what James and Soldat were once, a strange dialect of near forgotten Brooklyn and never forgotten Russian. As they speak, they look away from the metal guardian, trying desperately to track their goal.
(It’s a battle to be able to form a coherent thought, let alone pull the words out from the depths of the rising sea smoke.)
(Black fire clears the path, but it’s a close thing.)
“Stop murdering people,” the Iron Man says, electronic and distorted.
Fighting to parse through the sentence to a point they understand it, they finally spot the red leather book where it lays, spread face down against the ground, pages bent beneath the weight of itself. The back cover picks up slightly, just a dribble of movement in the wind, before settling again, crumpled still.
“Not dead,” they grumble, because the Iron Man is wrong this time, they can tell because the Order Keeper is wheezing away on the ground by the doorway, wet lungs loud even across the distance of the walkway. Sounds of life, so this one doesn’t fit the mold of murder. Yet. A quick glance confirms, because the bomber’s chest continues to rise and fall and the snow smells like fresh blood.
(Whose blood it is exactly is not so easily pinpointed.)
“Semantics. He was going to be.”
They shrug, not bothering to even try at wrangling together both of their thoughts long enough to pull out any inflection from the tone.
It doesn’t matter what the metal man is saying, the metal man is not attacking them, is not trying to take the book, therefore the metal man is neutral. So, they shrug.
(Some piece of Soldat slides heavy over a broken fragment of James and their vision goes grey, so much wrongness tangled up that it’s starting to break more than just the inside parts of them, before coming back once again watching the book.)
The metal man keeps talking.
(They both listen and don’t, because they both are and aren’t.)
“So much for following my lead. You’ve earned yourself a concussion and violent bondage Barnes,” Iron Man mutters, but it doesn’t feel like they are the ones being spoken to.
(Who is Barnes?)
(The mission.)
Breathing sharply, they press their fingertips lightly to the ground and balance their weight gently across all limbs, beginning to move towards the red. Staying low to the ground and ears that flicker between static and all the sounds in their stuttering body, they ignore the two other men in the room. They don’t matter. The muscles that jump and protest in their thighs matter, only in the sense that they must force their legs to cooperate. It takes keeping weight on their hands to keep moving.
They probably can’t walk right now.
“I’ll tackle you again if you start murdering,” the metal man adds, but drifts to the floor with a thin clang.
They really don’t care to pay attention to him at all now.
(There’s a breadcrumb trail of blood behind them, a twisted version of a story something in their head once used to know, but it’s poisoned and dark, and isn’t that more fitting than anything else?)
With a metal hand that was built with anything but gentleness in mind, they flit fingers between the spine of the book and the floor, collecting the dusty thing as if it is a small broken animal.
(Just like them.)
The pages come away from the concrete with a soft wush of noise, some remaining bent and crumpled from the rough landing. With the human hand, they press the book closed, uncaring of the folded paper, until the black star stares up at them.
Their face is doing something, muscles jumping about, as if it hurts, or there are bees under skin. That black thing deep in their skull has stopped oozing, the remaining start of the trigger beginning to fade away through time, but they swear for a second, another thing in their head looks out from their eyes.
(Too much too much too much too much too much too much.)
It feels like their cheeks catch on fire. The tears are hot, too hot to have come from a cold creature such as them.
Tears get smeared into the blood and dirt as they try to wipe them away, but they won’t stop falling.
Breathing becomes a sideways affair.
(Emotion or blood loss?)
(Does it matter?)
(No.)
(Lungs of crooked stairs and blood bags.)
Pulling the orders close to their chest doesn’t ease anything that’s happening to the body.
“Friday,” the metal man speaks again, intruding on this fragile second in time. They glare at where the red and gold sentinel stands, keeping both hand pressed flat to protect the pages.
“Call Everett Ross,” Iron Man continues. “Let him know I have the bomber. And the Winter Soldier. And maybe send medical.” As he speaks, they watch him lean heavily against one of the support pillars. A small panel in the shoulder of the suit pops up and swings a weapon in the direction of the wheezing bomber, but they can’t bring themselves to look in that direction. It’s not a piece that matters now.
They study the metal sentinel, eyes narrowing.
(Soldat believing threat, James imagining promises kept, both so loud and in discord, out of tune and grating.)
(They can picture the man behind the faceplate.)
(The inventor, the mechanic, the man who looked at them with sadness and rage and pity and sorrow and perhaps even the faintest thing of understanding. Who gave them food and clothes and weapons and a chance at being something more than just a rogue asset.)
(The man who’s parents they took away.)
“They’ll take me,” they speak, flickering between pronouns and perhaps there still is a paramount need for self-preservation, to not have to explain how the body is home to more than just one, that somehow all of the doors have been ripped open by whatever the bomber had done, that even the faintest hint of Asset continues to drip poison into blood just for it to drip back out onto cold stone floors in rivulets of crimson.
(They can be taken, they don’t matter, they are tired.)
(Time to put the rabid animal to sleep.)
“Yes.”
Thinking is difficult.
Like chasing cats.
Or fish.
Too fast and flowing.
They need to catch just one.
The one they do, illuminates the ember of hope.
“Burn,” they plea.
Unfolds the protective grip on the pages, because under the warbling of a heart stretching too far, here might be the path to peace they had forgotten. They set the red leather down on the cement, reverent, gentle, far gentler than the pages that drip blood deserves, running just one human finger over the grooves indented into the leather where the black star, and stare at the Iron Man as if trying to look through the armour and into the eyes behind them.
(Trying to find those eyes of kindness and understanding just one more time.)
Begging to gods that turned their back eons ago and pray.
“Burn.”
There’s a moment in time where nothing happens.
The broken bomber doesn’t breathe. The wind doesn’t howl. Blood doesn’t drip. They don’t exist.
The faceplate of burnished gold flips up and those eyes they sought find them.
(A cataclysmic thunder rumbles low on the horizon of their mind. The pain mounts, building just at the point behind their nose, talons spreading outward to take away the muscles in their jaw. The mouth tastes like blood and bile and maybe they can’t speak any more, but they need the man to understand just this one word anyway so would speech be the worst thing to lose?)
The man is crying.
They don’t remember his name.
(All they can remember is his kindness.)
(Why is the man crying?)
A palm glowing white hot is lifted and the book becomes flames.
They stop looking at the man after that.
The fire calls, it sings.
As pages curl, edges eaten greedily by the fire that turns them to blackened ash, as the leather first bubbles then cracks then starts to disintegrate, each passing second of the books destruction quiets different pieces of all of them. Quiets them enough that the pain is held at bay for just a few more moments.
They are crying.
(It still hurts.)
(Mission complete.)
Even when the fire fades to nothing but glowing embers of fragile thin burnt paper, they can’t look away.
(But they are still so deafeningly loud. Too much between one set of ears.)
More blood drips to the cold ground, and they can feel it dribble down their chin, that thunder in their head triggering something to break. Dark red blood founts from their nose, the valve on the pressure in their skull finally snapping.
Their vision goes grey again.
It comes back to them on their back, a pile of smouldering ash near their head, and the metal man with a human face staring down at them. Water is dripping from the human eyes. They are looking beyond him to the matte ceiling above.
(Who is he? The man in with the metal skin and all too human eyes?)
(Why is he looking at them with pain?)
“Jesus Christ Barnes, are you shot anywhere else?” the man asks, half frantic under the bubble of reverberating sound that starts to hum around their ears.
They frown.
(Bees, so many bees, all of them so angry, they sting inside their skin, fighting their way out, bullying through layers and layers of muscle.)
Blood continues to slide from their nose, staining new tracks across their cheeks to catch into their hair.
The human seems to consider the state of them and then asks something else.
“Who are you right now?”
It’s a whispered question. As if it’s a secret. Something that shouldn’t be overheard.
They understand this.
The frown turns to a faint grin.
(Memories are no longer accessible. Maybe they’ve even been erased.)
Spreading shaking fingers, they can utter one word, finding the control over jaw muscles just as the fire in their belly begins to ravage their spine. “All.”
The human face twists in a way that they may have comprehended once.
They don’t now.
But it does make their heart itch. Something in their sternum cracks.
(Maybe metaphorically.)
There are metal fingers holding their flesh hand. They aren’t their metal fingers. Tilting their head, they catch sight of a shiny red hand entwined with theirs. Follows the shiny red back up to that strange human expression. The red metal is cold. Or maybe it’s just their hand.
Sensations are jittery.
Touch feels strange.
They had forgotten it could be anything other than cruel.
(Quiet as a mouse, fear creeps in. Steals in, soft fur and trembling whiskers, finding that little hole left in their heart, the perfect place for a fragile creature to curl up.)
(Distantly, they know a piece of finality is happening to them.)
“You can sleep now,” the human whispers.
They don’t know him.
But they trust him.
Sleep sounds nice.
They close their eyes.
(Mission complete.)
(There’s a split-second picture. Dusty around the edges, a bit worn. A kind and worried face of a woman leaning over him, soft cheeks and softer clothes, smelling of salt and fresh bread and the linen beneath a boys back. Their back. She feels safe. Then it’s gone.)
(At ease Soldier.)
FIN.