-12-

++++++++++

January 10th, 2014

Ideal Federal Savings Bank, Washington D.C.

On arriving back at the bank the assets gave their mission report, then were ordered to sit in the vault and wait.

One of the handlers, a balding man with a beard and glasses, had tried to speak up: "We could get them to-"

But he was cut off by the younger handler, wearing a bow tie: "The Director's the only one authorised to give the assets missions right now. He's busy with S.H.I.E.L.D., so they're just going to have to wait."

At that, the Wyvern and the Winter Soldier had been left alone in the vault, save for the occasional rotation of guards and technicians. They were ignored.

They sat on hard metal chairs against the walls of lockboxes, still wearing their uniforms. The Wyvern didn't know what the Winter Soldier thought about – if he thought about anything – while he waited.

She simply existed in the snowstorm of her mind, recalling flashes of sound from the mission, and considering the silent weapon to her left. His breathing was slow, deep, and… in time with hers. She wondered when that had happened. They sat and breathed together, and the Wyvern wondered why he seemed so familiar. He wasn't familiar like the Director was, and certainly not like the metal chair that loomed on the other side of the vault. She'd trusted him on the mission, though she knew trust wasn't a part of her programming. His voice was familiar in her commpiece. The low clicks and whirs of his metal arm were like a song she'd heard before.

At some point in the night, their handlers sent in nutrition bars and water bottles. The Soldier and the Wyvern equally divided the supplies, pulled off their masks, and ate in silence. When they were done, they put their masks back on: no one had called an end to their mission, so they had to be ready.

The Wyvern noticed when the Soldier fell asleep. He didn't move, and his mask and goggles concealed his features. His breathing didn't even change, but she knew. When he woke up two hours later, the Wyvern allowed her eyes to shut behind her goggles. She dreamed of nothing.

When she woke up, neither she nor the Soldier had moved. But he held his next breath for a second longer when she woke, before resuming their shared pattern.

A few hours later, they heard a group of guards gossiping as they walked past.

"… took out two strike teams on his way out-"

"And a Quinjet-"

"… Director must be sending out the assets soon…" The voices drifted away.

No orders came. The Wyvern and the Winter Soldier had been told to sit and wait. They complied.

George Washington University Hospital, Washington D.C.

Steve held Natasha against the wall of the staffroom, teeth gritted as they hissed at each other. He'd been attacked by his own team, shot at, lied to, and hunted by the organisation Peggy had built. He needed something, and Natasha's verbal gymnastics were only making him angrier.

Natasha seemed to see it in his eyes. After another second of thought, she finally threw him a bone.

"I know who killed Fury."

His shoulders loosened and he let her go, but he didn't step back. There was a moment of silence before she continued.

"Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe he exists. The ones that do call him the Winter Soldier." She looked into his eyes. "He's credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years."

"So he's a ghost story." Steve's brow was furrowed and his glare intense, but Natasha didn't flinch.

"Five years ago I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran; somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff. I pulled us out. But the Winter Soldier was there. With his partner." She paused, watching Steve absorb the story. "I was covering my engineer so he shot him, straight through me." She lifted her shirt, revealing the puckered scar on her left hip. "Soviet slug, no rifling." She cocked an eyebrow and smirked. "Bye-bye bikinis."

Steve levelled his gaze at her a second longer, then lifted his head. "Yeah, I bet you look terrible in 'em now. And his partner?"

"Just as murky. I didn't get a good look, just saw a shadow of wings." Recognition flashed in Steve's eyes. "She's called the Wyvern-"

"She?"

Natasha smirked, almost a grimace, and looked away for an instant. "Another ghost story, one I first heard where… where I was trained. The older girls had faced her, and each of them failed. My teacher spoke about her once: said she was a monster. This coming from a woman who trained girls to become murderers and called them masterpieces."

Natasha and Steve looked at each other for another long moment, now on even footing.

She eventually continued: "Going after them – either of them – is a dead end. I know, I've tried." She lifted her hand, revealing the hard drive. "Like you said, they're a ghost story."

He took the USB. "Then let's find out what the ghosts want."

Ideal Federal Savings Bank, Washington D.C.

Later in the day, the handler with the bowtie walked into the vault.

"Wyvern, the Director just put you on tracking a pair of targets. They've got a hard drive with sensitive information, it just pinged at a shopping mall but the targets got away. File's on the computer there."

The Wyvern got to her feet, ignoring the strain of her muscles after sitting still so long. She walked past the deactivated Memory Suppression Machine to the computer screen on the other side of the room, and got to work.

S.H.I.E.L.D. already had teams of technicians tracking the hard drive and the targets, so the Wyvern monitored police bulletins, scanned shipping manifests and chased down all the unconventional methods she could think of. The targets were good, staying well off the radar. The Wyvern gave hourly reports to her handlers, pinging a few car thefts and police reports of suspicious activity.

As she worked, the Soldier remained in his chair on the other side of the vault. She could feel him watching her, though he didn't move. Once, when a handler came in with nutrition bars again and the assets took their masks off, the Wyvern caught a flicker of something crossing the Soldier's grey-blue eyes.

Mission, thought the Wyvern. And then: secrets.

She furrowed her brow, and returned to her screen.

Two hundred miles away, Arnim Zola's computer consciousness taunted Steve and Natasha. The hard drive was plugged into the sleek black port that the Wyvern had installed two years ago.

"For seventy years HYDRA has been secretly feeding crisis, reaping war." In amongst the flashes of marching troops, anguished faces and explosions, there was a shot of the Wyvern's shadow silhouetted across the rocky ground of a desert battlefield.

When the missile came and the compound was obliterated, Steve's mind reeled with everything he had learned.

Rumlow spotted the Captain's footprint in the rubble, and put a finger to his earpiece. "Call in the assets."

Director Pierce's Home, Washington D.C.

The Wyvern sat beside the Winter Soldier in the dark kitchen, waiting for the Director. The kitchen table was red in the glow from her goggles, and moonlight glinted off the red star on the Soldier's arm. They had been ordered to report to this address for more orders. They had complied.

When the Director padded into the kitchen and opened his fridge, he was more casually dressed than the Wyvern had ever seen him – at least, that she could remember. The image of a man with white blonde hair, wearing flannel pyjamas in the ocean spray shimmered across her mind. She blinked the image away.

The Director did a double take when he saw them – had he expected them to knock? – and closed the fridge door.

"I'm going to go, Mr Pierce," called a woman's voice from the corridor. "You need anything before I leave?"

The Soldier had noted the housekeeper before they'd infiltrated the building. She had already been through the kitchen and turned off the lights.

The Soldier and the Wyvern watched the Director as he called back: "No. Uh, it's fine, Renata, you can go home."

"Okay, night-night!"

The Wyvern felt a flicker of emotion at the casual endearment, but brushed it aside.

The Director took in the sight of his assets sitting together at his kitchen table for a moment longer.

"Want some milk?"

He wasn't surprised when they didn't respond. He began briefing them, circling the countertop and joining them at the table. Their eyes were blank as he gave them their targets and their timeframe.

Both assets tensed imperceptibly when the housekeeper walked back in.

"Sir, I-I forgot my… phone…" Renata's eyes flicked from the metal arm, to the glowing red eyes, to her employer's wincing face. The assets stared back.

"Oh, Renata. I wish you would have knocked."

Neither asset flinched when the Director shot Renata. When the briefing was complete, the assets stood and left the house, not looking back at the woman's sprawled, bleeding body.

January 11th, 2014

Baltimore Washington Parkway, Maryland

On the way back from liberating Sam's wings from Fort Meade, Natasha and Steve were briefing their recruit on the situation. He took it pretty well, accepting the whole HYDRA conspiracy with minimal swearing.

"Hey Wilson," Natasha asked, tapping her foot to the beat of the song on the radio. "You ever hear of anyone else with wings kind of like yours? A woman?"

Steve tensed at the wheel.

"Uh, no, should I have?" Sam was running diagnostics on his wing pack in the back seat.

"It's not likely, I was just checking. So," she said, in the tone of someone about to spill some juicy gossip, "HYDRA's working with these two assassins…"

HYDRA Strike Van, Washington D.C.

"Anything?"

The Wyvern was not programmed to feel irritation, but she was certainly feeling something as her handler asked her the same question for the seventh time. She knew he'd been briefed that when the Wyvern had something, she would inform her handlers.

The Wyvern did not show this on her face. She chose to ignore the malfunction, and shook her head in response to her handler's question.

The Wyvern and the Winter Soldier had been tracking the targets since the early hours of the morning. The were working with a newly formed combat team, scoping out locations the targets might use to go to ground, and following up on acquaintances.

The question was especially irritating because the Wyvern almost had something. Or she thought she did. She'd flagged a theft at Ford Meade from two hours ago, impressed by the skill and stealth of the break in. She'd been researching the stolen item and linked it to a Samuel Thomas Wilson, ex Air Force, currently working at the Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C. She couldn't find any known links between Wilson and the targets, though, so it could be a dead end.

Until: "I've got something."

The handler was at her shoulder in seconds. "Explain."

She complied, explaining the break-in and the veteran, and how she'd pinged the plates of Wilson's car outside a building where S.H.I.E.L.D. Officer Jasper Sitwell was having a meeting.

"So?"

"Sitwell failed to report back to the Triskelion," the Wyvern explained, and then pulled up a CCTV shot of Wilson getting into a car with Sitwell. She followed it up with a photo from a different location, showing the two getting into a new car, this time with two shadowy figures already inside. "They were smart with avoiding the cameras, but I managed to pull this from a tourist's location-tagged Instagram."

"God bless America," said her handler. "Where's that car now?"

The Wyvern pulled up the tracking program she'd set up to monitor the plates of the targets' new car, and showed her handler their three last pinged locations.

He nodded, and turned to the rest of the team. "We'll cut them off at the freeway. Let's move out!"

Causeway, Washington D.C.

The plan was simple: no more playing around with police disguises or hiding the assets. The mission was elimination and they would go anywhere, do anything, to achieve it.

The Wyvern was in the air, her arms looped under the Winter Soldier's as they soared over rooftops and telephone wires to the freeway. His right arm was warm in hers.

"We've got eyes on target," said their handler over comms. The Wyvern peered over the Soldier's shoulder at the strike team's heavy combat vehicle just as it pulled onto the freeway. Her eyes tracked forward from the vehicle, finally catching on the targets' black Chevrolet.

"Confirm," the Wyvern replied. "Commencing contact." She had barely formulated the thought before her wings responded, folding and shifting their angle, sending the assets into an accelerating dive. She realised, moments before they were over the car, that she hadn't told the Soldier what she planned to do, but judging by his bunched muscles and intense focus, he already knew.

She swooped over the targets' car, dropped the Soldier on the roof and rocketed ahead, drawing the targets' attention to her screaming engines and black wings. She heard glass shattering, and a scream.

"Auxiliary target eliminated," the Soldier stated.

She flipped in the air just as the targets braked, throwing the Soldier from the roof and onto the causeway. He gouged his metal fingers into the road, halting his momentum. Slowly, precisely, he stood to face the targets. Civilian cars continued to drive on either side, leaving the Soldier a lone, metal-armed figure facing the stationary car.

The targets stared at the inscrutable Winter Soldier, then recoiled at the sight of the Wyvern, wings outstretched, plunging through the air toward them with an automatic gun in each hand. She blew over the Soldier's head, gusting his lank hair, and fired into the vehicle, landing six shots on – a red, white and blue shield.

But she'd distracted the targets from the strike van. It slammed into the rear of the car and propelled them toward the Soldier, who somersaulted onto the roof. The Wyvern corkscrewed in the air, increasing input to her wings so she could catch up with the vehicles again.

"Wyvern," the Soldier grunted, before he ripped the targets' steering wheel out through the windshield, and dove off the side of the car. She caught him, gripping the back of his combat suit and lifting him away from the bullets erupting from the car's roof.

"Eliminate the vehicle," the Soldier told their handlers. The assets soared in tandem with the screeching vehicles as the strike vehicle bumped the targets' car, sending it careening to the side of the causeway and flipping into a tumble of metal and glass.

The Wyvern flared her wings, catching the air in her carbon fiber webbing and dropping down to land by the braking strike vehicle.

The causeway was a mess of strewn car parts, but she could see that the targets had survived. There were three of them: the male and female targets, and a man who must have been the veteran, Wilson. The Wyvern released the back of the Soldier's combat suit, and he accepted a grenade launcher from the strike team. As he lifted it to fire she jetted back into the sky, pulling out another automatic weapon. The wind screamed in her ears and her heart was pumping, but she was cold and focused on the mission.

The Soldier landed a shot on the male target, catapulting him off the causeway. The Wyvern observed the resulting bus collision and resolved to confirm target elimination momentarily. For now, she had two more targets to eliminate.

As the strike team sprayed a hail of bullets at the cars strewn on the causeway, the Wyvern soared over the targets, raining fire from above. The targets were fast, clearly accustomed to avoiding aerial fire. They ducked and weaved from cover to cover, using the parked cars to absorb the bullets.

The veteran, seeing the Wyvern bearing down on him, actually leaped into a crashed minivan to avoid her shots, then rolled out the other side. She couldn't land, else she risk being caught in the fire from the strike team, so she soared back and forth over the causeway, trying to get a clean shot.

She caught a flash of red hair out of the corner of her eye and rolled to avoid the female target's pistol fire. When she banked out of the roll the female target was leaping off the causeway, followed by a flaming car.

"Wyvern, find the third guy!" called her handler, and she pulled into a sharp turn, gliding over the debris on the causeway. The veteran had hidden himself somewhere, using the female target's explosive exit from the causeway as a distraction. The Wyvern circled the causeway, narrowing her eyes. The veteran was in a tactically impossible position, and soon he'd run out of cover. The Wyvern would be ready.

Over the comms she heard the whining sound of a bullet impacting, and on instinct looked over her shoulder. The Soldier was sitting behind the shelter of the concrete bollard, touching his goggles. As she watched, he tore off the cracked goggles and leapt up, spraying shots at the street below. The Wyvern was startled by the anger she saw in his form, but forced herself to look away. She rained shots into the parked cars, hoping to drive the secondary target out of hiding.

"U menya yest' ona," ["I have her,"]said the Soldier. "Nayti yego." ["Find him."]

So the male target was still alive, then. The Soldier leaped off the bridge, tracking down the female target, and the strike team followed, encouraging an agent named Douglass to "light up the bus".

The Wyvern had been ordered to find the veteran, though. So she complied.

She finally spotted him as Douglass's heavy machine gun roared to life, when he stabbed a strike team agent on the causeway and relieved him of his gun. He moved fast.

The Wyvern cut her engines and dove towards the veteran, hoping he wouldn't notice her until too late, but he'd already spun around and fired a round of bullets into the sky. She veered to the side, feeling bullets scream past her goggles.

"Wyvern, help us!" It was Douglass, shouting over the roar of his weapon and the screams of the strike team.

The male target. She recalled the many warnings crowding his file, and flared her wings. She soared up, away from the veteran, and flipped backwards so she careened over the edge of the causeway.

She righted herself under the shadow of the bridge just as the male target charged Douglass, deflecting the bullets from the machine gun with that red, white and blue shield. The target flipped over Douglass's head and smashed him into the roof of the car. Should have gone for the legs, the Wyvern thought, and then she attacked.

The target had just jumped behind what he thought was the shelter of the car when the Wyvern swooped on him, heel spurs snapping out and aimed straight for his head.

No normal man would have had time to avoid being speared in the eye, but the target jerked to the side, crying out, and threw his shield at her. It missed, but bounced right off the underside of the bridge and back into his hands.

The Wyvern flipped in the air, gunned her engines to stay aloft, and fired at him with her revolver. The target blocked the shots with the shield and then leaped. The Wyvern hardly had time to marvel at the height he reached before she felt the target's warm grip on the edge of her wing, and crashed to the ground. The tarmac crunched under her enhanced body, and the breath rushed out of her lungs.

It was the first time she'd ever been plucked out of the air, but the Wyvern didn't hesitate. She rolled with the fall and flicked her heel spurs at the target's chest, but he flipped backwards and tossed the shield at her. Teeth gritted, the Wyvern threw up her wing to block the metal disc, and her eyes widened at the resulting clang. The force of the throw knocked her backwards, out from under the shadow of the bridge.

She looked at her left wing, and saw that the shield had dented the Adamantium skeleton. She looked back up at the target, eyes wide behind her red goggles. She tried to recall the details of the man's shield from his file, but she'd been looking for potential safehouses and allies, not what his weapon was made of. The target caught his shield again.

She was pulled out of her surprise by a burst of gunfire from above – she'd been thrown out of the cover of the bridge, and now the veteran had her in his sights again. She threw herself to the side, wrapping her wings around her body and rolling.

"Go, I got this!" called the veteran, and she heard the male target sprint up the road and away from her.

Jaw clenched, the Wyvern straightened from her roll and whipped two more guns from her back, firing them up at the bridge. But the veteran had already ducked for cover.

She was starting to understand the Soldier's anger, but hers was tempered with something that she thought might be respect.

She bunched her muscles and sprang from the roadway, firing up her engines to get her the last few feet to the bridge. The comms were silent, save for the sounds of the Soldier engaged in a fight somewhere down the road. The bodies of the strike team littered the roadway.

The veteran had vanished again. She stood alone on the causeway, hot tarmac under her feet and adrenaline coursing through her veins. She gritted her teeth and reached up to turn the thermal vision of her goggles on, when engines roared behind her. Turning, she saw the veteran soaring into the sky, a pair of sleek grey wings strapped to his back.

If the Wyvern wasn't a weapon, she might have exclaimed at the sight of the man flying above her, wings outstretched. His wings were narrower than hers, made of metal plates instead of the larger skeleton-and-webbing structure of her own, but he was a blur as he flew into the sun, blinding her.

The Wyvern was a weapon, however, and she instantly reacted to the change of play. She flipped backwards off the causeway again, snapping out her wings. She looped under the bridge and hurtled back into the sky, spinning to get the Falcon – because that was what he was – in her sights. They fired at each other, soaring in parallel arcs, and simultaneously rolled away from the other's shots.

The Falcon knew how to use his wings. They swerved and rolled around each other in the sky, exchanging shots and using the bridge and surrounding buildings for cover. The Wyvern knew she had more weapons than he did, that she could outfly him if given enough time, but she was conscious of the mission – she could hear the Soldier in combat with the male target now, and there'd been no confirmation on the female target's elimination. They were the mission, not this – admittedly skilled – soldier.

She veered downward, feinting a dive at the Falcon. When he accelerated away to avoid it, she pulled out of the dive and instead raced down the street, casting her gaze about for the targets.

She'd just cleared the corner of a pillared sandstone building when she spotted a flash of metal out of the corner of her eye – the Soldier had just tossed the male target over the bonnet of a car. She twisted her wings, trying to turn onto their street, but the Falcon had caught up with her. He slammed his boots into the small of her back, throwing her off-course and through the windows of a nearby office building.

The Wyvern smashed through glass, wooden beams, office equipment and finally through a plaster wall, the objects breaking against her Adamantium spine. Slumping against the floor, she groaned and pulled a shard of wood out of the back of her thigh.

The mission.

She heaved herself to her feet.

Gunfire spurted into the office, fired by the Falcon, who hovered outside the hole she'd put in the wall of the building. She dove into the next room then ran to the nearest window, rotating her wings to ensure they hadn't been damaged in the impact.

At the window she sighted the female target on the road, propped up against the rear end of a car with blood seeping from her shoulder. The Wyvern was about to hurl herself out of the window to land on the target when the sounds of fighting over the comm stilled.

"… Bucky?"

The Wyvern froze. That was the male target's voice, and he'd been fighting with the Soldier just a second ago. She peered out the window, finally spotting the male target and the Soldier facing each other in the centre of the intersection. The Soldier had lost his mask. There wasn't anyone named Bucky in the files. Who was he-

"Who the hell is Bucky?"

The Soldier lifted his weapon, and the Wyvern thought no– but then he was knocked to the ground by the Falcon. In the same moment, the comms crackled to life:

"Wyvern, Soldier, bug out. We've got them surrounded."

The order was almost a relief. The Wyvern launched herself through the window, just as the female target hoisted a grenade launcher and fired at the Soldier. The Wyvern rolled in mid-air, hitting the grenade aside with a wingtip, seized the wild-eyed Soldier by the back of his suit and rocketed away. The targets flinched at the grenade's explosion and lost sight of the assets in the smoke. Moments later they were surrounded by Rumlow and the STRIKE team, with fresh vehicles and weapons.

Soaring toward the nearest available vehicle, the Winter Soldier and the Wyvern were silent. She could sense his turmoil and confusion, as if it were radiating from his body and into hers.

When they landed and appropriated a parked van, the assets were both thinking the same thing: Who the hell is Bucky?

++++++++++