Chapter 14
The mission.
The Wyvern rocketed toward IN-03, swooping below the weapons array and peering into the glass dome. It was empty. She made two circuits to be sure, but she didn't think she'd miss the Soldier and the man on the bridge fighting each other. The wide river glittered below her, and the cold winds of the higher altitude nipped at the edges of her goggles.
Over the comms she could hear continuing gunshots, growls and the whir of the Soldier's metal arm. She wondered how the man on the bridge hadn't died yet. They must have been very evenly matched.
As she peeled away from IN-03 she had a realisation: she'd only ever used the comms to report mission status and request backup or vehicles. But she heard a pained groan – the man on the bridge, she thought – and knew she had to act.
"Soldier, stand down!" she called. There was no response. She knew it wasn't likely to work, but she'd had to try.
Seconds later, she heard: "Drop it!" Followed by a crack and a howl.
The Wyvern went cold, and her wings faltered. That had been the Soldier's scream. It brought back echoes of his screams from last night, but he wasn't in the chair now. The man on the bridge had done that.
The Wyvern gritted her teeth and prepared to push her wings to their limits, but at that moment two Quinjets rose into her peripheral vision. She had barely a second to react before they fired at her. With the roar of gunfire overriding the sounds of fighting in her comms, the Wyvern flared her wings to halt her acceleration, and fell behind the Quinjets. They reacted quickly though, spinning in mid-air and turning their guns on her once again.
Either S.H.I.E.L.D. agents on the ground had found some undamaged Quinjets or there had been some non-HYDRA agents on the Helicarriers. Either way, someone had got a hold of two of the deadliest jets in the sky and were gunning for her.
The Wyvern banked seamlessly into evasive manoeuvres, rolling and weaving and using one Quinjet as cover against the other. She'd been trained in this for years, but she didn't have time for it – she couldn't distinguish the Soldier in amongst all the other operatives' commlinks now, and that concerned her far more than the scream.
For a moment the Wyvern considered just flying head-on at the Quinjets and shearing off their wings with her stronger Adamantium wings, but she was still turning over the man on the bridge's mission in her mind: People are going to die. I can't let that happen.
She wasn't sure why she was still thinking about it, but something inside her told her it was something to consider. So she didn't move straight towards annihilation. Instead she made close passes against the Quinjets, avoiding their weapons and trying to shove her heel spurs into one of the functioning engines. That would ground the S.H.I.E.L.D. air forces and allow her to carry out her mission.
She saw pale, hard faces every time she soared over the cockpits. Finally she drove her spurs into the left wing turbine of one of the Quinjets, and pulled away as it dipped and fell into a controlled spiral to the treetops below. She set her sights on the second Quinjet and gunned her engines.
"Wyvern, report!" came a terse voice over the comms. Rumlow. "41st floor, come help me take out the trash." Rumlow continued talking, monologuing about pain and order, and the Wyvern realised that he was talking to someone else – an ally of the man on the bridge, perhaps. Though it made her heart pound, the Wyvern ignored the direct order, and continued trying to ground the Quinjet.
The pilot had realised what she was trying to do, and every time she got close he swerved aside. After a few failed passes, and after almost being blown out of the sky by a missile, she lobbed a grenade into the Quinjet's turbine. After a very loud and bright explosion the Quinjet went down, a bit faster than the other one but still slow enough to ensure the crew survived.
In that moment, the Helicarriers seemed to come to life. The weapons arrays on each carrier clunked into position, guns rotating toward targets the Wyvern couldn't see. They were three thousand feet in the air now, the deep blue river below winding through green parks and the distant sprawl of buildings. The Triskelion hangars stretched below the Wyvern's dangling feet. She hesitated in the air, her engines burning and her chest heaving. She was a few hundred feet beneath the hull of the highest carrier, where she was sure the Soldier was. She suddenly recalled a computerized German voice, and an algorithm written in green code.
You will turn his legacy to dust.
The Wyvern's breath stilled in her chest, and she wondered if Zola's algorithm would choose her, if it could tell that she had ignored her handlers' orders. Perhaps it would be easier that way. The gun turrets settled their aim, clunking into position, and she wondered how many people were about to die.
The man on the bridge's mission had failed. The Wyvern closed her eyes.
But then, instead of the boom of artillery, she heard the gun turrets moving again.
The Wyvern's eyes opened to see the Helicarrier's cannons swiveling once more, locking on to a target below. She blinked, and looked down to see the other Helicarriers aiming up.
For a brief moment the Wyvern wondered if the algorithm had singled her out for elimination, over all other possible targets. But then they began to fire.
The first volley launched past the Wyvern, narrowly missing her wings. Missiles and bullets screamed from one Helicarrier to the other, illuminating a fiery triangle in the sky. Glass and metal shattered, making the Helicarriers shudder in the sky and causing a rain of debris.
The Wyvern found herself caught between three enormous aircraft apparently hell bent on destroying one another. Debris and artillery tore through the air around her, scorching her skin and near-deafening her. Heart pounding, she leapt into evasive manoeuvres.
She had no way of predicting where the next missile would be; she turned one way only to be cut off by a falling hunk of burning metal, and when she swerved aside a volley of missiles screamed past her face. She had no time for thought or planning, no hope of using fancy flying to escape the tonnes of artillery tearing the air apart. She made herself as small a target as possible.
The sky was filled with fire and metal, and the Wyvern had nowhere to turn. She dove, hoping to use one of the lower two Helicarriers as cover.
As she dodged and swerved, she heard a scream over the comms – the same scream as before, one that reminded her of the chair, and lightning coursing through neurons.
"Soldier!" she called, then screamed when a large-caliber bullet ripped through her right wing, lighting up her cybernetic neurons. "Bucky!"
There was no response. She kept trying to get to IN-01 but it was absolute mayhem. Cut off by a volley of cannon fire, the Wyvern tried to gun her engines and soar upwards, out of the deadly triangle the Helicarriers made, but at that moment IN-02's engines failed, and it dropped out of the sky with a groan.
Faced with the groaning, burning hunk of metal above her and the Quinjets slipping from its deck, the Wyvern flipped her body and plunged out of the sky, outstripping the falling debris. Over her head she heard a deafening, metallic screech when the two Helicarriers collided mid-air.
The resulting shock wave pummeled the Wyvern as she dove through the sky, and her back was scorched in the explosion. Burning metal rained around her, pelting her back and filling her cowl with the stench of smoke.
She chanced a glance over her shoulder, and her eyes widened under her goggles at the sight of the Helicarrier snapping in half above her, tilting over. Her heart skipped a beat. Coupled with the horrific groaning sound, the Wyvern felt as if she was being pursued by an enormous metal beast.
She didn't have time to level out and get out of range, as she'd planned. Heart in her mouth, the Wyvern continued in the only direction available to her: down, into the open S.H.I.E.L.D. aircraft hangar.
She cleared the lip of the hangar just as the Helicarrier plunged nose-deep into the retaining wall. It was the loudest thing the Wyvern had ever heard; a titanic roar of imploding metal, fuel exploding, and furious, churning water. The shock wave of it tipped her sideways in the air, and a thrill went down her Adamantium-enforced spine at the sight of the hangar wall collapsing, releasing millions of gallons of white water.
She swerved, rocketing across the open hangar as the river and pieces of Helicarrier flooded the space. An enormous spinning turbine whizzed over her head, nearly catching her shoulder. With the roaring of the river and the burning Helicarrier at her back, the Wyvern caught a glimpse of an open door to her right. She swerved again, engines screaming.
At the last moment she snapped in her wings to fit through the door, sailed into the corridor beyond and put a hole in the adjoining metal wall when she collided with it. But she didn't have time to hang out of the wall and contemplate her near escape – water was already flooding into the enclosed space, churning and filled with debris. The building around her shuddered.
The Wyvern pulled herself out of the crumpled wall, retracted her wings and ran, racing the rising flood through the subterranean corridors.
The Winter Soldier pulled the target out of the river. Pain scorched through his body, from his dislocated shoulder and his crushed chest, but he had the strength to carry the man out of the water and onto the riverbank.
He paused, looking down at the target on the muddy shore. The man was bruised and lacerated, with blood staining his colourful uniform, but his chest was moving. River water spilled from the target's mouth as he fought for breath.
The Soldier backed away. The mission: the mission is…
He looked into the sky, but it was empty save for smoke. He remembered the other asset, the Wyvern, remembered her metal wings and red goggles and her voice over the comm system. She'd told him to stand down. She'd called him by the name: Bucky.
The Soldier's mind was a mess; thoughts and flickers of memories. He knew the Wyvern was important, but he couldn't remember why. The memory of her wings was tainted by blood and lightning.
The Wyvern wasn't on the comms now. The earpiece greeted him with nothing but silence. Clenching his jaw, his mind whirling with the target's voice and bloody face, and the Wyvern's silence, the Soldier turned and limped away from the riverbank.
The Wyvern emerged from the bowels of the Triskelion bloody and soaking wet, with gashes in her wings and missing her cowl. She still had her red goggles, but the cowl and her earpiece had been torn off when part of the building collapsed on her. A long gash beside her ear oozed blood down her neck and into her combat suit.
She'd had to literally tear her way out of the Triskelion, pulling apart debris to get through, and at one point punched her way through the ceiling to escape the floodwater. But now she stumbled out onto the tarmac where the HYDRA vans had parked less than an hour earlier, into the mayhem of screaming civilians. Her body was aching and her skin was vibrating with left-over adrenaline from her fight through the building.
She spun around, looking into the sky, but the Helicarriers were gone. Plumes of smoke billowed from the river and the Triskelion itself, and the Wyvern could see the wreck of IN-03 groaning in the middle of the river.
She pressed a trembling hand to her mouth.
She'd failed. She'd given up one mission to carry out the other, but in the end both had failed. Project Insight was a smoking wreck, and she'd lost the Soldier.
She hadn't heard from him since his scream while she was dodging the Helicarriers' missiles, and she'd lost her commpiece soon after crashing into the hangar.
She wondered if the Soldier had been crushed in the Helicarrier wreck, or if the man on the bridge had killed him. She pressed her eyes shut.
After a few seconds of dripping blood and river water onto the tarmac, the Wyvern trudged into the nearby wooded area, unseen by the chaotic masses. She ripped off her goggles and gauntlets, stuffed them in a pocket, then detached her wings. It was almost a relief to disconnect from the overloaded and damaged sensors.
Tucking the folded Adamantium under her arm, the Wyvern stepped back onto the tarmac and walked away from the Triskelion. In her black combat suit, she could pass as any injured S.H.I.E.L.D. agent escaping her damaged workplace. Her dark hair hung loose and dripping around her bare face, and skin peeked out from around the moorings in her back and the bullet wound in her side. Her wings were cold and heavy under her arm. She'd never been so exposed in public before, except in disguise.
The Wyvern was tired. A failure. She felt empty, far emptier than she'd been after the chair and her trigger words. She felt as if everything inside her had fallen away, leaving a burnt and hollow shell. There was no mission, not any more. And yet she was walking.
She looked up from her boots on the tarmac and considered the direction her feet were taking her.
Of course. The HYDRA facility in the city.
The Wyvern clenched her fists and doubled her pace, heading for the bank.
She didn't know what she planned to do once she got to the bank, but it turned out that whatever she'd considered had already been done. The building was on fire when she arrived, flames billowing out of the dome and the shattered windows. She paused on the street corner, stinking of river water and defeat, and watched another building fall into destruction.
She didn't know what made her turn her head. It could have been that she felt someone's eyes on her, or saw the firelight glinting off of metal. It could have just been the instincts that had helped her to survive for twenty two years. Either way, her head turned, and she found herself looking into the Winter Soldier's eyes.
He'd just climbed out of one of the bank's windows and frozen in his steps at the sight of the Wyvern. He was still soaking wet, clutching his right arm to his chest, with drying blood on his face. He had no weapons left.
The Wyvern and the Winter Soldier stared at each other from across the sidewalk. They both dripped blood and river water onto the concrete. Neither of them moved.
Once she'd processed what she was seeing, the breath whooshed out of the Wyvern's chest.
He was alive. His grey-blue eyes were almost comically wide at the sight of her, dazzlingly bright with pain and turmoil. It reminded her of the chair, and she broke eye contact to glance at the burning bank. That chair, at least, would no longer be a concern.
When she looked back at the Soldier he still hadn't moved, but now his eyes were searching her face. She didn't know what to show him – her mind was still reeling from her memories and realisations on the Helicarrier, and she suspected she was in shock.
Their eyes narrowed as both the Wyvern and the Soldier's enhanced hearing picked up on sirens in the distance. They looked at each other for a second longer, and then the Wyvern turned and walked away. The Soldier fell into step beside her.
District of Columbia Housing Authority, Washington D.C.
The Wyvern and the Winter Soldier found a safe house without exchanging a word. They were both limping, their wounds slowing them down, but no complaint or request to slow down passed their lips.
On the surface, they were behaving as if they were on a normal mission – complete the objective and go to ground. But neither of them had any plans to return to their handlers.
The Wyvern led them to one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Director's safehouses that they had scoped out only three days ago – a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the red brick Housing Authority block, with a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and not much else. The location was obviously compromised, but it was the closest safehouse within walking distance of the bank, and the Wyvern suspected that no one would be looking very closely at defunct safehouses while the city was burning.
They climbed up the wobbling fire escape and broke in through the window. The Wyvern checked the apartment for inhabitants and bugs while the Soldier climbed in after her. Once she was sure it was clear she placed her damaged wings on the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. She let out a slow breath.
The other chair at the table scraped on the linoleum floor. The Wyvern glanced up, eyeing the Soldier as he lowered himself onto the wooden chair on the other side of the table. He was favoring his right arm, and the Wyvern distantly thought: dislocated. His wet uniform squelched on the chair.
They sat in silence for what felt like hours, staring into space. The silence in the safehouse, after the gunfire and crashing Helicarriers, felt odd but not unwelcome. The stillness was odd too, after so much action.
Now that she'd finally stopped moving, the injuries littering the Wyvern's body made themselves known. The bullet hole in her side was stinging, still oozing blood into her uniform. Her back was burned and bruised from the debris of the Helicarriers, she had an open wound beside her ear, and the puncture wound in her thigh from yesterday was aching. Her uniform was wet and sticking to her skin, and her boots were full of water.
The Soldier hissed in pain. The Wyvern glanced up to see him wincing as he tried to put his arm in a more comfortable position.
She got to her feet, but froze when he flinched. Their eyes met.
The silence between them felt thick, as if they should be speaking, but couldn't remember how. Instead of speaking the Wyvern slowly approached him, sidestepping around the rickety wooden table and approaching his right shoulder. The kitchen was narrow, barely fitting a fridge, sink, stove and table, and her hip scraped against the wall as she moved toward the Soldier. She held her palms out, the pale skin bare.
His gaze flicked from her hands to her face. He nodded.
Slowly, the Wyvern put her hands on the Soldier – one on his bicep, gripping his combat suit, and the other on his wrist, over his bare skin. That done, she met his eyes again. They rippled with pain, but he gave no indication of wanting her hands off him. He sat with his shoulders back and his chest out, and the Wyvern realized he'd done this before. The thought made her… sad. She wanted to consider this new feeling, but she had a limb to focus on.
She pulled his arm out so it was in a right angle, facing forward from his body, then steadily pulled the bent limb outwards. She'd learned how to do this – sometime, somewhere. Once she met resistance she pulled the arm up slightly. There was a dull clunk, and the Soldier let out a breath. The Wyvern let go of his arm and backed away until she hit the noisy fridge. The Soldier's face was a little looser now, and he rotated his arm with a grunt.
"Do you remember?"
The words startled the Wyvern, even though she'd said them. They were shockingly loud in the small, mundane space.
The Soldier looked up, also startled, and grimaced. It was more emotion than she was used to seeing from him. "Barely." His voice was low. "I remembered… I knew I didn't want to kill him."
The man. The target. "Did you kill him?" Her aching back was pressed against the fridge, and her hands were loose at her sides.
"No. No, I… I got close. But he's… when I left him, he was alive." The Soldier struggled with the words, and his eyes darted back and forth.
"I can check for you."
His eyes flickered up, meeting hers. She could see the chaos that mention of the man brought to his eyes, but her offer seemed to ease it a little. He nodded.
The Wyvern cocked her head. "He said your name is Bucky."
The Soldier – Bucky – shook his head, exasperated. "I don't… I don't remember."
"You have time."
At this reminder of their ill-begotten freedom, he frowned. He opened his mouth, shut it, then looked down at his hands. His hair dripped onto the linoleum. Eventually he whispered: "Don't… don't go back."
The Wyvern stilled, her eyes focusing on the S- on Bucky's face. He looked as exhausted as she felt; face tense, eyes downcast, wet hair lank around his face.
After a moment, she stepped away from the fridge and retook her seat at the table. "There's nothing to go back to," she replied. "Besides, you're my mission now."
His head snapped up and he scrutinised her face. Slowly, hesitantly, the Wyvern offered him a smile.
He smiled back, easy as breathing, and it made her breath catch in her chest. She remembered seeing him smile only three times before: once a ghost of a smirk, after defeating a particularly defiant target. Once a small, sad thing flashed her way before they were both wiped. Once an encouraging turn of the lips after she'd been shot out of the sky in a desert.
She remembered sensing emotions from him before - when he was concerned about her, or scared of the chair, or angry at a target. But he never displayed those emotions on his face, always a blank slate. Sometimes it seemed that only she could see the man he was, flashing for moments in his eyes. It was entirely possible that she mostly projected her own fear and pride onto him. But this smile, though it was bloody and quirked with a flash of pain, was him, and she felt as if she was meeting him for the first time.
"You're my mission, too," he replied. His steel blue eyes flickered, with recognition and something lighter.
The smile slipped away, into pain and confusion and a hint of his usual blankness, but it seemed that they'd acknowledged the enormity of what they'd done. HYDRA was burning, and they were free to pursue their own missions now.