Chapter Text
Sam
—Washington D.C. | Monday, 28 May 2012 | 10:30 p.m.—
It happens fast.
The thump on the roof of his car, the shining fist crashing through his windshield, the tug against his grip as the steering wheel—the steering wheel!—is yanked up and out of his fucking car, leaving him grasping at both the air and his thoughts.
Sam slams on his brakes, hears the squeal of the tires and Holly’s shriek from the passenger seat, the blaring horns of two, three, at least five drivers behind and around him. But he’s got two viable options, and those options are to get rear-ended and throw the enemy combatant into traffic, or to allow their violent and unwanted rooftop passenger free rein to possibly rip the whole dashboard out, or even—
Whoever or whatever is perched on his car does not go flying onto the highway when Sam hits the brakes, or when Sam’s rear-ended by the minivan behind him with a metallic crunch, or when Sam’s knocked into the lane to his left and then sideswiped by an SUV back across his lane and into the safety rail of the overpass in a screech of collapsing metal-on-metal.
Whoever or whatever is perched on his car just kicks out the other half of his windshield, stabs the passenger airbag and slithers inside with them, a blur in black leather that grabs Holly’s seat belt with one arm for stability while the other arm flashes forward again and again and again, sinking a vicious little knife into his terrified date’s chest and face while car after car joins the collision.
It happens fast, and it’s over faster.
The shadow slips back out through the windshield like it’s a bad nightmare, a twisted flashback of other grim reapers that felled other companions, a figment that was never real at all, disappearing over the railing of the overpass and into the night.
“Oh god,” he breathes, feeling the sharpness where his seat belt has dug into his ribs—maybe bruised, maybe cracked, doesn’t matter, problem for later—and already grabbing for his own knife, the one he keeps in the center console for exactly this— Well, for emergencies, even if not this exact reason. His seat belt is quick work for the serrated bit near the hilt, and Sam’s free to see what he can do for Holly, though he’s betting it’s not a lot.
She’s alive, but barely, and not for very long. He can see that much in the murky yellow coming in from the street lights lining the overpass. He can hear it in her jagged gasping for water—for hydration, specifically, or it would be hydration if she could get the whole word out.
And maybe that quirk, hydration instead of water, would have been something they could laugh at if they’d had more than one date. An inside joke about staying hydrated. But they’re never having more than just the one date. Because there’s no way someone can be stabbed and slashed like this and then wait for rescue services and still be alive in the end.
But he’s got to at least try.
“Hold on, Holly.” Sam casts around in the back seat for something, anything, to stanch the bleeding, despite knowing full well what a hopeless cause it is. That many stab wounds, that many slashes, that much blood—
His fingers finally find the red and black octopus sweater she had tossed in the back seat, and he adds it to the wad of take-out napkins he’d apparently already fetched out of the glove box and pressed against her torn chest.
“Just hold on,” he says, voice low, as comforting as he can make it with the adrenaline pounding through him. “We’re gonna get you outta this.”
Sam doesn’t have enough hands to apply pressure to all the places it needs to go. They’re not going to get her out of this. They, plural, won’t be getting out of this at all.
It would actually have been kinder if that lunatic had slit her throat or stabbed her face deeply enough to hit her brain. But no. Whether by malicious intent or careless oversight, her killer has made sure she’ll linger. At least there’s shock. She’s a guaranteed fatality, but shock will at least keep the worst of her pain and fear at bay.
“You’re doing great,” he lies, because when the only comfort is a lie, you just gotta tell it like it ain’t. “Help is on the way. You’re going to be fine. We’ll get you through this.”
This evening has launched itself past the “dinner and a movie and food poisoning” date, the “candlelit champagne turned bonfire at the table” date, the blind date with his sister that his asshole coworkers sent him on, the “our server is my husband, since when does he work here” date, and even the previous champion of bad dates, the “oh, right, I dumped you when you went off to war and forgot about you or I’d never have swiped right, of course I had no intentions of rekindling that flame” date.
Yeah, this evening has sped right past those and settled in at the top of his list of worst first dates ever. Not top ten, not top five. The top.
This will be the “my date was brutally stabbed to death by a steering-wheel-stealing maniac in leather after dark on the highway, and there was nothing I could do about it but watch, just like Riley” date.
He’s going to have nightmares for a month because of this date. Maybe longer.
Maybe he just shouldn’t be dating, yet. Maybe it’s still too soon to date and this is the universe telling him so very, very clearly.
Or maybe he should move back home, leave D.C. behind, catch a gig with the VA center in Harlem. Be near his ma. Be near Riley’s ma. God, he misses Riley.
There’s a soft, wet rattle beneath his hands, and Sam heaves a bitter sigh. She’s gone. At least she’s not suffering any more.
He pulls his hands back and avoids looking at them while he waits for the flashing lights in the distance to arrive. They’ll have to tear up what’s left of his car to extract him and his recently departed date.
“One less thing to move home, I guess,” he says to no one in particular before closing his eyes and thinking of Riley, playing back the good times, trying to escape the bad.
Alexander
—Washington D.C. | Tuesday, 29 May 2012 | 12:30 a.m.—
Alex pulls on his robe and looks at the clock on the nightstand. It’s late. Far later than he likes to get to bed, and he still has a call to make. That’s unfortunate, but not surprising, given what sort of mess he’s trying to sort out.
A day filled with committee hearings and board meetings, an evening filled with discussions of an entirely different sort. And tomorrow, the same again. Every day, the same again, until the asset comes home like it’s been trained to do. Or until their best trackers turn up its trail, preferably before that trail runs ankle-deep with blood and entrails.
Three weeks. Three and a half weeks, to be precise, since the Chitauri attack on New York, the successful unveiling of the Avengers Initiative, and Livingsworth’s unsanctioned activation attempt. Their asset has been running free for three and a half weeks now.
Livingsworth is lucky he sat out the thaw cycle, and doubly lucky he’s still politically useful enough to keep around, or he’d find himself on Alex’s hit list, and never mind the asset’s. There’d have been time enough to thaw the asset out after Nick’s Avengers failed in New York. If they failed, and only if.
And they hadn’t. They’d made a mess, but they’d won. There was nothing the asset would have been needed for. It should have been left on ice. Not thawed out in a panicked rush and therefore allowed to slip its leash and obliterate the vault and everyone inside it. Livingsworth really should have been there to join the rest and get what he deserved for his foolishness.
Three and a half weeks.
It’s not the longest stretch the thing has been loose and making its blood-spattered way around the countryside, tracking down any grunt technician and medical staffer it can remember. Not the longest, not the first. Not even the first significant escape.
Before being transferred to the States in the ‘90s, the thing had gone rogue after a successful hit in Brazil unfortunately left its handler incapacitated. It had found a pocket of Nazis from the old country hiding from the trials, and it had snapped. Had gone hunting for nearly a week before being hunted in turn and brought back in line.
But Alex’s immediate predecessor had the record for the worst escape. He’d lost the asset in Manhattan in the ‘70s for a full two months. Three entire teams of field operatives had been required to bring it down, and only half a team’s worth of agents had survived to bring it in. The longer the asset was on the loose, the harder it became to retrieve.
Three weeks, going on four? That was tricky. Not the worst case scenario, but there’d need to be a full conditioning session on retrieval, at least two STRIKE teams, maybe a third. A simple, five-or-six-man, two-day refresher course in compliance and the futility of resistance would not do the trick. It’ll take maybe as long as a solid week to fully beat compliance back into it, teach it once more to fear its betters, no matter how low their rank.
Still, it is only the lower ranks being hunted at this point. The ones they had always planned to throw away eventually, even without sacrificing them to the asset. The organization can carry those casualties for the greater good, and the weaker of their members should be pleased to make room for the strong.
Order comes from pain and from power. That is the full phrase. Only those who climb high enough have any reason to know the full refrain. Pain for the few, wielded by the powerful, to establish order for the many. That is the only way to rule properly, the only way to ensure peace for all. Order comes from pain and from power.
And if the asset is roaming free striking terror into the hearts of the weaker cogs in this machine, that is fine. The weak are food for the strong. The asset is a threshing scythe harvesting those so weak as to be unable to hide themselves. Let it grind them up in the process of running itself down, wearing itself out.
There’s no cause for him to be concerned. It would actually be convenient if the asset came for him. If the asset is their feral angel of death, Alex has blood on his door posts. The asset will pass right over at worst, as it has for weeks now. But ideally, it will come in as it’s been trained to, will be drawn in by instinct and desire to please, desire to do well for them, well enough to be fed. It has to be hungry out there, without a handler, without the drugs. Hallucinating, perhaps. Starving and hallucinating.
And when it comes in for food and maintenance, as it is trained to do, it will get caught up in its cage of conditioning and programmed responses, trapped again to be re-tamed.
Johnson and Livingsworth are afraid for no good reason. They are operators like he is, and only a single level beneath him in the organization’s hierarchy. Of all the men in this country, they have no reason to fear their asset. They hold its leash, just as he does, just as any of the other operators do in the other geographies. The asset can and does bite the hand that feeds it, but it cannot bite the hand that holds its leash tightly.
If their grip on that leash is loose, that’s their mistake. They should have kept themselves sharp, should have been present for the thaw cycles, should have carved their own names and tallies in its flesh until they left deep, indelible marks. Should have taken lead in the conditioning sessions, given the asset a reason to remember them and fear them, to recognize their ownership as absolute.
His own grip is white-knuckle tight, and everyone in the organization who has the clearance level to know anything, knows how firm his grip is on that leash, how strong his control over the asset, how deeply he has gouged himself into the canvas of the asset’s being, flesh and mind alike.
He will strangle the asset with its own leash if it tries to bite, if it flashes even a single tooth in his direction. And then he’ll drag it back to its proper place by the neck to learn again who it belongs to and who commands its every action, whether that action is violence or submission.
He only needs one word.
As luck would have it, the asset is waiting in the kitchen when he’s finished discussing the future of the Avengers Initiative with Nick. The house alarm hasn’t been triggered, and the sliding door to the pool is open, not broken. The lights are all still off. The gun is on the table for its operator to use or not as he sees fit. The knives are all politely sheathed.
Good. It’s following protocol. It’s ready to come quietly. As he’d suspected, all they needed was time and the thing’s conditioning would kick back in. And so here it is, behaving exactly as he knew it would.
He reaches into the fridge, holds out a carton of milk and gives it a jiggle. “Do you want some milk?”
The light of the refrigerator illuminates the asset more clearly, picking up the blood on its leather, old and new. The asset just looks at him, face blank, eyes dead, compliant. Its muzzle is hanging loosely, hooked by one corner onto the collar strap of its uniform instead of fastened securely across its face, but that’s a minor infraction, easily attributed to the length of time it’s been off cavorting in the remains of the lower ranks.
Ultimately, all is as Alex expected. It’s returned, it’s following protocol, it’s tired. The entire spectrum of its hopes and dreams, if it had any at all, consists of being brought home and put away again. Of doing well enough that they will feed it before putting it away. Of pleasing them so much with its compliance that they will only beat it a little before locking it up in ice.
The asset is not a person to truly want things, though it is alive enough to experience hunger, thirst. If he poured milk out onto the tiles and bid the asset clean the mess, the thing would gratefully fall to the floor lapping it up. But ask it if it is hungry, or thirsty, and it knows better than to respond, even with a nod or a blink.
They will put down food and water when it has done well, and not until then. And it has returned here, meek and compliant, knowing that it has not done well at all. Just look at it, sitting there, a pathetic lump staring with those vacant eyes, waiting for whatever will come. Knowing that it has no say in the matter.
Literally.
It’s enough to laugh about, and maybe he will laugh in a few minutes. It’s late, but maybe he’ll begin the retraining right here in this kitchen, bending the asset over the table with his fingers wound through its hair and pulling hard enough to rip a few clumps out.
The asset came to him, after all. It recognizes its master. But after nearly a month, he might as well reinforce his hold on the leash, show the asset what compliance looks like, since it’s obviously started to forget. Should only take an hour, between stripping it and washing up afterward. He’ll need another shower to scrub the asset’s filth off of himself.
Maybe Johnson will finally shut up about hiding their trail through the governments of the world when he brings the asset in like a murderous lamb, ready to be wiped clean and popped in the freezer for next time. After a few—or a few dozen—rounds of punishment to demonstrate for it the error of its ways.
Maybe Livingsworth will let his ridiculous decommissioning proposal drop off the agenda once the asset is shown to return to its pen all on its own, without needing to be hunted down by specially trained STRIKE units hoping to survive the hunt long enough to get their turn playing with the prey.
The fool could even come to see the hypocrisy in trying to activate the asset for defense right before lobbying to have the asset decommissioned entirely. A frozen asset buried in concrete twenty feet thick and left to thaw its way into the afterlife can’t exactly provide much defense against those aliens.
Alex turns to get a glass, since he came in here for a reason and the asset will keep until he’s seen to that reason. No sense rushing when he has hours to work with. The asset will sit there until directed to do otherwise, whether he drinks a single swallow of milk or a full gallon.
But it doesn’t sit there.
It’s as silent as always—the asset only ever makes a sound partway into a wipe when the voltage gets to be too much to suffer silently, and even then it’s only capable of desperate, pained gasping. There’s not so much as a whisper of fabric giving its movement away, but the light from the other side of the room reflects just so off the refrigerator door, and Alex can see a shadow where there should be none.
He turns, and the asset is in front of him, close enough to trip over.
Unpleasant. But it’s nothing to be concerned about. It just means that he will spend two hours, not one, teaching the asset obedience, reminding it where the power is always located, and where the pain is always going to go. Carving a few hashes in its flesh. Going over his name another time to guarantee the signature takes in that too-quickly healing flesh.
The asset is programmed not to strike a handler while on an op or while being taught new lessons and retaught old ones. Not to so much as struggle no matter who is doing what to it, or for how long or with what tools. Not to depend on shackles to hold it down for them but to be still and receptive without prompting.
And it complies.
The asset is programmed not to shy away from technicians when they approach torch-first to take it apart and put it back together, when they join in the handlers’ fun, when they drag it to the limits of its endurance, of its ability to consciously withstand pain and damage, all in the name of science, research, progress. Not to resist the muzzle that clamps its jaw shut or the brace that holds its jaw open for them.
And it complies.
The asset is programmed not to object to the mouth guard for its teeth and the restraints for its limbs and the chair for wiping out the inside of its skull when a support team prepares it for the field and for storage. Not to object when its food is forced on it, or taken away from it, or presented to it as something it has not earned and will not receive. Not to beg or plead when it is left empty and hungry in its cryo tube.
And it complies.
The asset is programmed not to so much as consider harming an operator, regardless of which organizational branch that operator is associated with, which command that operator has given, which STRIKE team that operator has handed it over to for correction and for personal—and personnel—entertainment, whether that takes place in proper, designated areas or those operators’ homes.
And…
And if the silent, liquid fury in the asset’s eyes is any indicator, the asset does not comply.
“Sputnik,” Alex mutters, irritated by the malfunction and the need to call someone in to haul the dead weight out of his kitchen before Renata returns in the morning. So much for conducting private lessons in his home. It will have to be the sublevels of the Triskelion, the arena, the whole crowd of them, unzipped and eager for a turn.
But the asset does not drop on hearing the word. Its eyes do not glaze over and revert to a deadened stare. Its muscles do not go slack and send it tumbling, stringless, to the tiles. Its body does not fall to the floor like an insensate leatherbound ragdoll to be collected and carried off back to its concrete toy chest.
“Sputnik,” he says, louder. So inconvenient if the asset has damaged its hearing again… He’d rather not have to yell.
The asset does not drop. He has said the deactivation code. It ought to be on the floor, eyes rolled back and face slack, limbs loose and pliable, for as many hours as they need, until they rouse it with sufficient pain or use the activation code that is Sputnik’s mirror image.
The asset does not drop; it smiles. Just a cold imitation that does not reach its eyes. It is not a person, who could smile and know what that means, who could smile and feel joy or amusement, who could truly smile.
“Sputnik!” he snaps. He is going to have to yell after all. “Sputnik, you piece of shit. Sputnik!”
The asset hears him and does not drop. The asset smiles wider, colder.
And an answering chill starts to crawl up from the base of Alex’s spine. He is an operator. One of the highest in the organization. The highest operator in the Americas. This geography’s HYDRA Supreme. Untouchable as far as the asset is concerned. A man to be pleased at any cost to itself.
But the asset does not drop. It does not drop, but smiles, wide and cold and feral. The asset twirls a blade as black as tar, light flashing along the length of it as the metal tumbles and turns between flesh fingers, a coin in an entertainer’s routine.
“S-sputnik,” Alex whispers, backing into the counter. This is wrong. This isn’t happening. This isn’t possible. He is an operator. He is untouchable.
The asset does not drop. It wraps a metal hand around the front of his robe and smiles like a glacier, sharp, jagged, perilous to cross.
The asset grins, then snarls, bearing its teeth like a wild thing out of the forest. The asset is a rabid dog, a maddened wolf, a monster from the yellowed pages of legend.
And Alex has somehow lost his hold on its leash.
The asset is still.
And then—
—it—
—moves.
Jenna
—Washington D.C. | Tuesday, 29 May 2012 | 2:45 a.m.—
Jenna pulls up to the car wash, card at the ready, and thanks her lucky stars that these things are open 24x7. Last time she lets Liam borrow her truck. Absolutely the last time, and that boy can whine all he likes about it. She’s got client meetings tomorrow for crying out loud. No one drives up to a client meeting in a truck that’s seen the underbelly of a mudslide.
Huh, she thinks, staring at the panel where she’d ideally swipe her card and order up the super-deluxe. That’s odd, really. The panel is just hanging open like someone came by to do some maintenance and forgot to close up shop afterward.
It’s probably one of those cyber people, gangsters with the card readers and malverware viruses, maybe the ones named after condoms. She should just put it in reverse and go find another car wash—city’s full of them—but she sticks around because something seems not-right in an interesting sort of way.
The car wash is going strong.
The panel’s open like it should be out of order, but it’s running. There’s so many suds and so much mist that she can’t make out the car itself, and her headlights actually make it worse. Must be one of those small imports. Probably gets great gas mileage. But how’d they get the car wash to run with the panel busted?
The wash cycle runs down, and as the mist clears and the green lights flash to tell that zippy little import to pull forward and inch past the blowers, she sees that it is not a car at all in there.
It’s a man.
There’s a man in the car wash.
There’s still enough mist from the sprayers to obscure fine detail, but that is definitely human, definitely big enough to be a man—she pities the woman with shoulders that broad or thighs that thick—wearing some sort of bondage gear, and probably not a werewolf. It’s not anywhere near a full moon, and werewolves don’t exist anyway. Not really.
She’s still staring when the man stoops down to pick up a bag—homeless man? backpacker? hitchhiker? student adventurer? member of a very odd underground kink ring?—slings it over a shoulder, puts something on his face, and stalks back through the car wash toward her.
Oh shit. She’s in park. What the fuck is she still even doing here? Does she have no sense of self-preservation? Only idiots linger at an abandoned, hijacked car wash at practically three in the morning in the city. This is how slasher films start. She’s the opening scene, the hors d’oeuvre for Freddy fucking Krueger. They will find parts of her tomorrow.
But he acts like she’s not there. He does something with the fuses or the wires or the whatever is inside the panel, shuts it with what she’s sure would be an audible clank if she was also stupid enough to have her windows rolled down, and then runs a finger down all the buttons for selecting what kind of wash you want.
He has a really reflective gray glove, but only on the one hand. Shiny like metal is shiny. Wow.
Then he looks at her, and his eyes are so blue above the muzzle that she almost forgets everything else. He pushes the bottom button, the most expensive option with twice the bells and whistles, and almost none of it actually worth the money.
The green light flashes on again, and the speaker cheerfully tells her to make sure her windows are up and her doors closed, and to slowly pull her vehicle forward.
Jenna glances forward to see if she should believe her eyes and ears, and when she looks back at the man—car wash fairy? weirdest maintenance man ever? off-season bondage werewolf?—he is gone.
The smart thing to do is to put it in reverse, back out, go somewhere safe, and call the cops. But mystery hobo car wash fairy bought her a really nice car wash—stole it for her?—and her truck is muddy AF.
She shrugs and slowly pulls forward.