Chapter 9

March, 2009 (22 Years Old)

HYDRA Quinjet, North Atlantic Ocean

The cockpit of the Quinjet was silent, save for the engines whirring and the tapping of the Wyvern's keyboard. The Winter Soldier piloted the jet, his eyes focused and his flesh and metal hands sure on the controls.

They were alone together for this mission. The Director had given the Wyvern her briefing: the mission was to locate and eliminate a non-combatant target who had fled Tehran three hours previously under the protection of a level 6 combatant. The Wyvern had been provided with a Quinjet, an arsenal of weapons and tech, and the Winter Soldier. The Director had merely told them to work together before leaving them alone on the jet.

Unbeknownst to the assets, this was their second mission together. The Winter Soldier had been woken for a few other missions since the Congo assassination three years prior, and the Wyvern had been in constant service of HYDRA, but they hadn't crossed paths until now. HYDRA was expanding its interests, working closer to its final goal, and that meant greater use of the assets.

They had location trackers implanted in their cybernetic limbs and were under orders to report back to base every five hours. Other than that, they were alone.

The assets hadn't spoken to each other since the beginning of the mission. The Winter Soldier had merely taken the controls of the Quinjet and set a course for the eastern Mediterranean, while the Wyvern sat at the Quinjet's onboard computer and started tracking their targets. The silence stretched between them.

Both assets experienced an odd sense of déjà vu whenever they looked at their partner. This wasn't unusual – they both knew that all sorts of forgotten memories and past missions haunted the stormy chaos of their minds. Neither asset addressed it, though each sensed the other's quiet turmoil.

The Wyvern finally stood, carrying a laptop with her into the cockpit. She sat in the co-pilot's seat, not looking at the Winter Soldier to her left. She sensed him tense minutely.

"I have located the targets," she murmured. "There was an encoded financial transaction to an ATM on the Ukranian-Russian border. CCTV shows that ATM user was the level 6 combatant, who got into a car with stolen plates and headed east." She turned the laptop and showed the screengrab of the CCTV to the Soldier: it showed a lithe woman expertly disguised in a brown wig and prosthetic makeup standing beside a car. The target's head was visible in the passenger seat.

The Wyvern was used to showing her findings to her handlers, but it felt odd proving her worth to the Soldier.

He eyed the CCTV image, then nodded. "The combatant will head east to her extraction point."

"Extraction point?"

The Soldier glanced away from the cockpit window. His blue-grey eyes were serious, but not quite blank, as he looked at her. "The combatant is extracting the target for S.H.I.E.L.D. They're meeting her in Slovakia."

The Wyvern felt an unexpected, improbable rush of anger. "I was not briefed on that." Her tone was steady, but she knew that the Soldier had sensed her emotions.

Silence fell, almost awkward now. The Wyvern was quickly getting frustrated with the Soldier: with his blank silences, his hidden knowledge, and his uncanny ability to read her. She was used to working with operatives who feared her and used her, acknowledging that she was a weapon and nothing more. The Soldier, whether it was because of his similar programming or his honed insight, seemed to see something more.

Finally, she asked: "How far out from the Ukraine are we?"

"Ten hours," the Soldier replied, his voice sharp as if reporting to a handler. The Wyvern furrowed her brow.

"If the targets continue east, that will put them just outside Romania. I can track their plates through CCTV, and now that I have their general direction I should be able to trace the combatant's communication with her handlers." She left the 'now I know that she has handlers' unspoken. "Preference for contact?"

The Soldier seemed a little taken aback at being asked for a preference – he looked at her out of the corner of his fractionally widened eyes. But the Wyvern didn't know how to treat an operative who was like her. She only knew how to communicate with agents, handlers: people with agendas and egos.

"Depending on terrain, I can disable their car long-distance." His voice was low. "Mission requires minimal contact with the combatant."

The Wyvern found herself nodding. "Long-range rifle. I'll run cover."

The assets glanced at each other once more, partly out of wariness and partly to communicate their agreement, then returned to their tasks. The Wyvern remained in the cockpit for the rest of the flight, using all of her tracking knowledge to keep up with the elusive level six combatant.

The conversation in the cockpit seemed to have lessened some of the tension between HYDRA's weapons, though they were both aware that there was something still hanging between them, dark and painful.

All the same, they continued to speak for the rest of the flight, perhaps a little more than was necessary. Neither of them could give orders to the other, and they each recognized the other's skills and potential as an opponent. They'd reached a strange sort of truce, speaking only about the mission but simultaneously seeing in the other's eyes a respect and mutual understanding that they'd never known before.

Finally, they tracked their targets to a new stolen car travelling down a stretch of road outside Odessa. The Soldier landed the jet ten miles away, and the Wyvern flew him to a vantage point atop a mountain of sandstone cliffs and wiry shrubs. He was heavy, but she had engineered her wings to be able to carry two targets besides herself, so she could handle an enhanced soldier with a metal arm. The Soldier did not seem particularly taken aback by the sight of the Wyvern in full uniform with the wings, either. His grey-blue eyes merely flicked over her, before he nodded his readiness to move.

Now she could hear his long, slow breaths through her ear piece as he waited for the targets' car to arrive on their stretch of lonely road. The Wyvern was gliding above the cloud cover. Her goggles were equipped with heat sensors, so she could see the two orange dots winding up the road below.

"Two targets," she confirmed for the Soldier. She dipped into the clouds, soaking her uniform, and poked her head just below the cloud cover. She could just make out the shapes of the targets' bodies behind the car windshield. "Target in the right-hand passenger seat, combatant in the left-hand driver's seat."

"Targets sighted," the Soldier murmured. The Wyvern flew over the car, her shadow disguised by the clouds, just as the vehicle lurched, skidded, and tumbled over the side of the road and down the nearby cliff.

The Wyvern banked, wings outstretched, looking down as she soared back and over the edge of the road. The car was smoking at the bottom of the sandstone cliff, bonnet crumpled and gasoline leaking from the tank.

The car had tumbled to the left of the road, so it was still in the Soldier's line of sight. The Wyvern could see the glint of his metal arm, up in his sniper's nest.

She circled the wreck until she saw movement: a flash of red hair – the wig must have fallen off – as the combatant pulled the shaking target from the front seat of the car, heaving him out of the twisted metal and supporting his head when they tumbled to the rocky ground. The combatant covered the target with her body, a gun in her hands as she looked wildly about for the shooter.

"Soldier," the Wyvern said, her voice neutral.

"I have him."

The Wyvern noticed the exact moment the combatant spotted her circling shadow. The woman contorted herself even further over the target, flipping over and shooting up at the sky. Her shots got remarkably close to the Wyvern, despite the blood running into her eyes.

But the woman stopped shooting when the loud crack of the Soldier's rifle rang out.

The target's head snapped back in a burst of blood, and the female combatant's hand flew to her abdomen. The Wyvern fired up her engines, heading for the Soldier's nest.

"Confirm target elimination," the Soldier said in an empty voice.

"Target eliminated," she replied, her voice barely picking up over the sound of her engines. When she reached the Soldier he had already stowed his rifle, so she looped her arms under his and lifted him into the sky.

At the bottom of the ravine, Agent Romanoff lay in the pool of her engineer's blood. She'd been shot before, but she'd never get used to the feeling – like red-hot barbed wire being pulled through her flesh. She put pressure on her wound and grimaced, the failure of her mission settling like a stone in her stomach. She watched the winged creature disappear into the horizon, the shooter with the metal arm in its clutches.

I'm going to find them, Natasha decided, already planning to field-dress her wounds and get the engineer's body to the extraction point. She'd have Coulson's team run ballistics, and she'd chase down all her old contacts for information on operatives with metal arms and wings. I'm going to find them. I'll show them that the Widow does not fail.

HYDRA Facility, Greece

The assets relayed the success of the mission to their handlers, and were ordered to report to a nearby HYDRA Facility. Once again the Winter Soldier piloted the jet, while the Wyvern electronically wiped all evidence of the assets' presence in Europe. There wasn't much to get rid of, so she mostly monitored press coverage and encrypted transmissions. The combatant was already trying to track them, despite the bullet hole in her stomach. The Wyvern respected such tenacity, but she would have a hard time tracing a pair of ghosts with no place in the world.

The Wyvern wasn't concerned about that, but while monitoring press coverage, a headline caused her to take a sharp breath through the nose, and freeze mid-typing.

The Soldier, of course, noticed. He looked over, noting her furrowed brow and trembling fingers. His eyes tracked to the screen: "TONY STARK STILL MISSING AFTER AFGHANISTAN WEAPONS DEMONSTRATION; PRESUMED DEAD".

The headline sparked a burst of recognition in the Soldier, though it was faint and confused. He looked back up at the Wyvern. Her dark eyes were brighter than he had ever seen them, darting across the screen, and finally flicking up to him.

"Is it mission relevant?" Her voice was low, as if asking for a secret.

The Soldier clenched his hands on the jet's controls, thinking. "I… I don't…" Their targets hadn't gone near the Afghanistan border, and he hadn't heard anything about a Tony Stark in his briefing. But he thought he understood the Wyvern's pull to that headline. There was… something.

Before the Soldier could dig deeper and make his growing headache worse, he had to concentrate on landing the Quinjet at the facility. HYDRA agents emerged from the base, preparing to conceal the jet and brief the assets.

The Wyvern was still staring at the headline, now accompanied by a picture of a dark-haired man with strangely-featured facial hair, wearing a sharp suit. She was staring so hard at the screen that the Soldier wondered if she'd even noticed they'd landed.

One of the agents knocked on the back of the Quinjet, and the Wyvern flinched.

The Soldier leaned over, closed the laptop's browser and then took the device from her. She stared at him until he finally met her gaze.

He didn't know what to say to her, so he merely held her gaze, seeing the confusion and pain swirling behind her eyes. She kept the emotions well hidden – he doubted the agents about to board the plane would notice – but he could see them. They called to something in his own stormy, tormented soul. The Soldier squeezed his eyes shut. A weapon does not have a soul, he reminded himself. The things he was feeling: the fast-beating heart, the pull towards the Wyvern, the confusion, they were all symptoms of a malfunction.

"Barnes," whispered the Wyvern.

The Soldier's eyes snapped open. She'd spoken the word like a gift and a curse, and his mind raced with it. Barnes. It sounded soft, coming from her mouth, but he heard echoes and fragments of other voices saying the word: sharp, barking invocations, a teasing lilt, a resigned sigh. The Soldier remembered having a name.

The Wyvern watched the Soldier as he staggered after the HYDRA operatives to the memory suppression chair. She'd seen a world of knowledge explode in his eyes when the name left her lips, followed by sharp pricks of pain.

She could barely remember how she knew to say it, let alone why she'd said it. A part of her had meant it as an olive branch: some kind of gesture after he'd witnessed her reaction to the confusing headline. Another part of her wanted to use the name as a weapon, to drive it into his heart and twist.

Listening to his screams as he fought against the chair, the Wyvern didn't know if she was relieved, or if she wanted to rip out her own tongue. She felt drawn to him, to the picture of the man in the online article, to any place free of screams and blood.

When her time with the chair came, the metal arms of the machine sparking with the promise of pain, she recited the name in her mind: Barnes. Barnes. Barnes.

November 25th, 2010 (24 Years Old)

From: New York Facility Leader

To: Director

Wyvern Progress Report

I wish to thank you for posting the Wyvern to our Facility this year. The asset has proved invaluable in furthering HYDRA's interests.

As was reported, the Wyvern assisted our strike force in convincing the CEO of BattleTech Industries to pull his presentation from the Stark Expo and supply to HYDRA. The Wyvern has also been quality testing initial samples.

Recently the Wyvern was tasked with obtaining the plans for the upcoming Stark building project, which previous operatives failed to achieve. As you will see from the attached documents, the Wyvern was successful. It appears that the project is to be called Stark Tower, and will stand in central Manhattan.

One note on the Wyvern's ongoing progress: handlers have intermittently reported "strange behavior" over the past few months, though they described nothing more concrete than the following. The Wyvern has twice asked handlers about the name Stark, questioning its mission relevance. Once the relevance was explained, the Wyvern became visually less unsettled, and proceeded with the mission. We have been maintaining regular wipes and cognitive recalibration to ensure the fitness of the weapon.

Hail Hydra.

After the success of their first two assignments, the Wyvern and the Winter Soldier were periodically posted together on short, difficult missions. Hardly anyone in HYDRA remembered the bloody history between the two assets, and those who did were sure that twenty years of wipes, missions and cognitive recalibration had resigned the events of 1991 to an ugly historical truth that would never see the light of day.

The assets did have some memory recall between wipes, more often when they were together than apart. There was no predicting what might prompt a memory to surface. But their programming ensured that their handlers were never aware of their emotional distress, and the missions were usually too short for them to remember much anyway.

The constant dance of remembering and forgetting came to a head in late 2010.

December, 2010 (24 Years Old)

Tbilisi, Georgia

The mission was complete.

The Winter Soldier had tossed sleeping gas grenades into the manor while the Wyvern tinkered with the natural gas lines. Soon the whole household was fast asleep, breathing in the deadly hydrocarbon gas until they asphyxiated in their beds.

But the assets had to confirm target elimination, so they ensured that their masks were firmly fixed to their faces, and climbed into the manor. It was a beautiful house, with red stone pillars, wide balconies, and lush furnishings. The Wyvern climbed in through a second-storey window after the Winter Soldier disabled the security system from downstairs. She knew he would check on the three guards posted at the ground floor entrances, so she went straight for the primary target's bedroom. The gas mask inbuilt into the Wyvern's cowl filtered her breath as she padded across the cream carpet to the ornate four-poster bed.

The target, a prominent Georgian politician, lay still and silent beside her husband. The Wyvern pressed a gauntleted finger to the target's throat, then the husband's.

"Primary and secondary targets eliminated," she murmured into her earpiece. The Soldier didn't respond, but she could hear his steady breathing as he did his own checks downstairs.

The Wyvern moved through the rest of the upper rooms, careful not to leave any trace of a footprint in the carpet or a scrape against a wall. She was a ghost in a house full of corpses.

The Wyvern was especially careful with her sharp metal wings, conscious that the smallest spark would send the whole house up in a column of fire.

Finally, she came to a closed door painted a bright shade of green. The Wyvern gently twisted the handle, pushed open the door and stepped inside.

Half the walls of the room were green, and the other half were blue. Colorful rugs, pillows and toys were strewn across the floor, and moonlight filtered in through gauzy curtains.

The Wyvern stepped across the cluttered floor. There was a bunk bed set against the far wall, and in the darkness she could just make out two lumps, one on each mattress. A plastic truck crunched under her foot, and her breath caught in her chest.

Focus, scolded a voice in her head, but the voice sounded very far away.

She reached the bunk bed. It was built of sturdy pine, with a ladder running up one side, and the vibrant blue and green comforters were almost painfully bright. The Wyvern stared at the tertiary targets, huddled under their blankets with their eyes closed and their lips parted.

She'd known they'd be there. Their details were in the mission briefing: Twins. Six years old. 12% likelihood of their being outside the bedroom after 8:30pm.

The Wyvern hadn't given them another thought. But now, watching their still forms in the darkness, her thermal vision showing their core temperatures beginning to drop incrementally, she couldn't think of anything else. She'd killed children before, she knew she had. So why…

The target on the top bunk had his face turned toward the window, as if he'd been watching the moon.

The Wyvern stumbled backward, her hands shaking in their barbed gauntlets. Her chest was heaving, her lungs screaming for oxygen. Her… her mask. It must be malfunctioning. She turned on her heel and raced out of the bedroom, sprinting for the window she'd climbed through earlier, slipping out and leaping from the balcony to the garden below.

She landed with a dull thud, and her knees buckled. The Wyvern's vision had narrowed to a pin point.

"Wyvern," she heard the Soldier saying over the comms. She tried to speak, but she could barely get enough air into her lungs to stay conscious. She felt like the skin around her skull was constricting, threatening to suffocate her.

The Wyvern tore her mask off, goggles and all, and fell onto her hands, sucking down air as she trembled. Her mind was racing: had she been poisoned? Had her mask malfunctioned? Was it… she gasped as a stabbing pain made itself known in her chest – was she injured?

It could have been seconds or hours later that she heard the Soldier's soft footsteps behind her.

The Soldier heard the Wyvern's breathing change over the comms, and it immediately put him on alert. The Wyvern wasn't a green operative, she was a weapon – whatever had her hyperventilating and choking could be a very dangerous threat. He rushed to the upper levels, saw the open bedroom door and the crushed plastic truck. From there he followed her out the window and landed in the backyard.

Seeing her now, on her hands and knees in the dirt of the garden bed, struck a chord of familiarity deep within the Soldier. She was gasping for breath, her folded wings trembling with her panic, and her dark hair had tumbled around her face. The Soldier took off his muzzle, knelt beside the Wyvern, and put his hand on her shoulder. She didn't react.

He used the hold to pull her gently backwards, and guided her to sit on the cold ground. He held her upright with his metal hand on her shoulder, and with the other rubbed small, soothing circles against her back. Her exposed face was white in the darkness, eyes wild and darting, mouth open in a grimace. But the contact against her back seemed to bring her back to herself a little, and she started trying to regulate her breathing.

"I… the gas… my mask-" she tried to wheeze, but the Soldier merely shook his head and kept rubbing her Adamantium-reinforced back. He knew how to do this, somehow.

"It will pass," he murmured, watching the jumping pulse in her throat. As he held her in her panic, a series of images flitted across the back of his mind. He saw a small blonde man wheezing and coughing on the filthy ground of an alleyway. He saw a curled-up soldier soaked in grime, screaming at ghosts. He saw a girl with a ripped jacket and a tear-stained face, kicking and shoving him as he set a car alight. He remembered a whisper: You're my mission now.

After a few minutes, the Wyvern stilled. The Soldier removed his hands from her, mind racing. He was still kneeling in the dirt.

They sat together in the dark garden in silence, matching each other's long, slow breaths.

Finally, the Soldier spoke: "Your name is Margaret," he said, his eyes fixed on her face. At the name she flinched, and turned to look at him. "I killed your parents."

There was a long, terrible moment of silence. The Soldier watched the Wyvern's eyes as they transitioned from blank shock, to recognition, and then sparked with anger. He remembered that look – he didn't remember how many times he'd seen it, but he recognized the eruption of fury that seemed to consume her, transforming her face and irradiating her eyes.

He didn't stop her when she knocked him backwards with a flick of her wings, or when she pinned him and held her clawed gauntlet to his throat. He remembered this too, being at her mercy. He wondered what it was about her fury that allowed him to override the programming that screamed at him to survive.

She paused with her barbed fingers pressed into the skin of his throat. He felt blood trickle down the side of his neck and drip into the moist soil below him. The house was silent, the garden was silent, and the only thing the Soldier could see was the Wyvern's twisted, snarling face, blocking out the moon. He didn't look away.

The Soldier didn't know how long they stayed like that, the Wyvern crouched over him with her claws at his jugular. But eventually, something flickered across her eyes, and the snarl faded from her face.

"You didn't have a choice," she murmured, and relaxed her grip on him. He could have freed himself, but he didn't move a muscle.

"I still did it." His voice was rough, cracking with guilt.

There were tears slipping down her cheeks now. She released his throat and slid off his chest to sit beside him. "So did I," she whispered. "Just now."

The Soldier closed his eyes. The Wyvern was breathing hard, not the panicked gasps of earlier but loud exhales, as if she'd just run a marathon. He didn't know what to say to her.

Their comms crackled: "Soldat, Wyvern. Mission report."

They'd missed their five hour check-in. The Soldier sat up, eyes opening, and looked at the Wyvern. Her cheeks were wet with tears, but the blankness was already starting to creep back into her deep brown eyes. The Soldier bowed his head, and grimaced.

"Mission complete," he told their handler, hoping his voice didn't betray the pain radiating from his chest.

"Good," the handler said. "Report to extraction point."

The Wyvern was already getting to her feet, a little shaky. In unison they walked back to their vehicle, leaving the silent house behind them.

The Wyvern drove back to the extraction point, sticking to the speed limit and staring resolutely at the road. Twenty minutes into the journey, she sighed.

"Sleep," she said, her voice hoarse. "It's three hours to the extraction point."

The Soldier eyed her for a moment, taking in her fixed stare and clenched knuckles. He knew she wouldn't tell him twice. He also knew that they were both perfectly aware that the assets were not programmed to sleep on a mission unless absolutely necessary.

The Soldier closed his eyes and slept.