1216/An Assassin's Anguish

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An Assassin's Anguish
Date of Scene: 30 June 2017
Location: Astral Plane
Synopsis: Winter Soldier is stuck in a nightmare from his own mind. Claire and Mercy-Coyote try to save him.
Cast of Characters: Mercy Thompson, Winter Soldier, Claire Temple




Mercy Thompson has posed:
A woman and a coyote walk together.

The rolling fields around them are awash with every red imaginable; crimson, blood, scarlet with undercurrents of a darkness that borders upon black.

It's the coyote that leads; as she navigates the volatile shades around them. She's keeping them upon a track of mostly the light colored reds.

Ahead of them is a lone figure, a familiar figure, one trapped within a tempest of shadows. Before the two step into the eye the storm, the coyote will pause and give Claire a look. There's a quiet whine of warning, then the long-limbed coyote plunges ahead -

Winter Soldier has posed:
The ruins of the church are still smoking. The liberation force arrived too late.

French Resistance fighters, British troops, and American soldiers mingle in the desolated streets, walking among the ruins of what was once a small town in Nazi-occupied France. To a one they are tired-eyed and ragged, and all with that same air of not knowing what to do with themselves. They arrived prepared to fight, and found only corpses.

No one has yet even begun to try to take account of the dead, to clean up, to do anything except try to absorb the magnitude of the atrocity that has happened here.

There is a young man, barely out of boyhood, seated on the twisted wreckage of what used to be a cart, staring across the square at the collapsed church. He looks very much as he did in the picture Claire saw of him, perched pensively with his rifle across his knees, but with the addition of miles of hard marching and months of harsh fighting to harden his features and embitter his face.

War has taken its toll. He is covered with the dirt of travel, and with the soot and ash still drifting through the air. His rifle is cleaner than he is. But his blue eyes are still clear enough, if weary.

He can't seem to take them off one particular window of the church. It's still intact enough to support the weight of the charred corpse folded over its sill, dead midway through an attempt to make it through.

A woman. Below her dangling arms, on the ground beneath, lays the burned small body of the child she tried to get clear.

James Barnes just can't seem to stop looking. Not up until he lowers his head and scrubs the back of his hand across his eyes, once, twice-- then winds up just pressing the heel of his hand to his eyes to try to stem the sudden tears.

They got here way too late.

Claire Temple has posed:
Claire Temple walks a world steeped in red.

She lives a life where all she sees, day and night, is the same, unchanged flow of blood -- thick and red and always on her, always all over her -- and yet not even the bloodiest nights in emergency compare to this.

With still the phantom ache of her death running the bones of her neck, she steps after the guide of the coyote, taking path where the little animal leads her. Whenever she strays too far or looks too long, barely able to comprehend the surreality of this place, those familiar, golden eyes beacon her back.

She has nothing left but to trust to follow. Her mind still knots, reason and sensibility pulled like too many turns of the rack, trying to comprehend what just happened -- what is still happening -- and why she can remember it all. Between steps, she passes a glance down on that marking on her hand, brushing fingers over its sigil.

The coyote's whine pulls her eyes back up. And Claire sees. The figure, swathed in dark -- dark so different from this world of unending red. The animal runs ahead, and she murmurs a sound of surprise, not wanting to be left behind. The woman quickens her step, air rattling along her upper palate as she runs. The closing figure cuts in familiar shapes and angles, and her eyes widen --

-- and the world changes again.

She smells smoke and the rendered fat of overcooked flesh. She knows these smells before even seeing, nauseous memories of countless burn victims -- and yet even that cannot fully prepare Claire Temple for what she sees.

War, simply put, begetting devastation and death. The collapsed church, folded over with a woman's corpse, and the soldier who cries himself over his failure to stop it.

It's her soldier. James Barnes wiping his tears with no metal hand. Before that. Before it all. Like in the photograph --

Her voice calls through the dispelling smoke, faint and heartbroken. "James."

Mercy Thompson has posed:
When Claire touches the sigil upon her hand the green light within will pulse gently. A current of power zings from her her hand to her fingertips, as the Eye of the Medicine Man answers that particular touch of the Nurse's.
The coyote's step pause as the two appear within the memory of James Barnes. The coyote's lupine-yellow eyes cast all about; looking at church, the body, the child, the soldiers and then finally one specific soldier.

While everything seems solid and real, Claire and the coyote will find themselves more witness than actual participant. Everything feels solid, yes, but when soldiers walk past they do so without any recognition or single utterance of word to the woman and coyote.

For the coyote once the measure of this particular memory is taken, the coyote turns back to Claire. Again, there's the faintest sound from the animal, before she trots away. It's a slow sort of trot and it'll eventually bring the coyote down next to where James Barnes. Looking all the world like a stray dog sitting near a man who needs comforted.

Though no comfort can be found.

However, that doesn't stop the coyote from trying to do just that as a quiet bit insistent bark is now offered.

YIP!

WAKE UP!

With that sound the smallest strands of powers reach outward to try and push the memory - though it'll do more harm than good, as the shadows around the trio suddenly rear upward. Affronted that the coyote would try such a thing. Not when the broken mind of James Barnes holds such pain.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Shadows rise up.

So do the corpses.

Dropping pieces of their charred, fragile bodies as they rise shakily to their feet, bleeding still from the many gunshots that murdered them, they rush inward with a terrible and unexpected speed, as if marionetted by some malignant hand. They do not pay Mercy or Claire much mind, though they brush sickeningly past woman and coyote in their singleminded march.

Their target is James, who does not resist them, nor seem to recognize them beyond the way they must represent the guilt in his own mind. They lay eager hands on him, hands that shuck down to the bare bone as cooked flesh falls away, and to a one they try to drag him down into the pooling shadows.

Further into whatever history waits in the wings of his mind.

Claire Temple has posed:
She calls --

-- and even if he hears, there's no time.

No time for Claire either, as she goes deathly still, quiet with widening eyes, as those still-smoking bodies pull themselves up under their own power. Settling blood gouts free from their execution holes.

She can't speak. She can't make a sound. She can't breathe, seeing something and refusing to believe it's real, because she's still trying to force her reality into this nightmare -- trying to make sense of it all.

She tenses, but they move by, intent purely on James. Something switches in her head. She panics.

Rushing forward with a snapped, "Get OFF him!" she reaches to shove violently away one of those charred, undead bodies. That sigil burns on the back of her hand. The corpse in her hands melts away like unwinding shadow, a knot loosened and left to disperse.

She's not sure what she just did -- but it helps. So she does it again, and again, pulling and tearing at that congestion of bodies, trying to tear some back. Those she touches dispel under her hands, but there's still so many, pulling the man away. Pulling him /down/ into the dark.

"James!" she calls again, pushing into the tangle of it all, trying to reach, trying to grab for him. If he disappears down, so will she. She promised to protect him --

Mercy Thompson has posed:
The dead rising.

Something completely unexpected by the coyote, which causes the animal to back-pedal away.

And while she stands there shocked, her system will feel another jolt, as the dead rush for the young man.

It's only as Claire calls 'James' that the coyote manages to pull herself together. Several more YIPS are offered, but they make little difference to the horde of dead grasping at Bucky. Mercy's power is just too small against the Coyote and the blood that currently courses through his veins.

Again, the coyote's movements are arrested as power flares bright against the death that surrounds the trio. It's like a shoot of new grass breaking through dead cracked earth; a singular piece of goodness upon a drought ravaged land.

Those bodies of the dead begin to disappear, but with so many and so much, it'll take more than Claire to clear the area out.

As such, James and Claire find themselves being pulled down into the pool of blackness that's beneath the soldier.

Her hand reaches for the Soldier and while it's a near thing, she still misses, by a hairsbreadth. So close, but not close enough. A familiar story for the Nurse and perhaps the Assassin as well.

The two fall and soon the coyote joins, because what else can Mercy to do? She won't leave them to whatever lays ahead, or in this case, down below.

Winter Soldier has posed:
New smells assail Claire and Mercy, as they drifts through the blackness. Familiar smells, to Claire. Sharp antiseptic. Sterile steel. Blood. The smells of an operating room.

The scene slowly resolves before their eyes. It is winter, somewhere in Eastern Europe, a winter so frigid that flesh sticks against metal. Especially in in a room like this. A cold, dimly lit room centerpieced by an operating table, with some sort of device arched over it like the tail of a scorpion.

James is here. He has been here, on the table, for the better part of the day now. But that is the way it goes, with the experimental injections. Sometimes they work instantly, leave him trembling and sweating and puking his guts out all over the floor, while a bunch of labcoats stand over him and scribble notes. Sometimes it's hours before he really feels anything, the effects a slow fire that builds and builds and builds in his blood.

Today it's the latter, and instead of fire he feels like ice is forming in his veins. He can almost picture it, the crystals spidering through his blood, chilling him until he shakes uncontrollably on the table.

"Ah," a voice sighs. There is another man present, sitting beside the table. "Please, as we have discussed: relate whatever you experience." Dr. Arnim Zola is a soft-spoken man, deceptively gentle and precise in his diction-- among other things.

"I'm experiencing-- a conviction-- that you can go straight to HELL--" Bucky hisses, straining against the heavy straps binding him down.

"We also discussed the consequences of recalcitrance," is Zola's patient reply. "Have you forgotten? There are many who share your cell, who are not as valuable as you have turned out to be. If you are content to be the cause of their suffering, so be it, but I think you would prefer to spare them. That much is within your power to do."

Bucky's features twitch, twisting with a furious rage. Then the resistance leaves him, his body slumping in his bonds. From the way the line of his jaw stands out, the way his body continues to convulse, it is clear he is in profound pain, but not a sound escapes.

He has known how to suffer in silence since he was a child. It is a small thing to ask of him for the safety of others.

Claire Temple has posed:
Her hand misses him.

Claire falls. She falls through darkness. She cannot see James Barnes. She cannot see the coyote. The only light glows off the sigil marking her hand.

She grasps down over it and closes her eyes. If she must trust in anything, let it be that.

There comes no end to her plummet. No bottom she hits. No impact, no force, no pain.

Claire simply is, strewn over the icy ground, shivering through her thin clothes as she pulls herself in close. Her breath clouds visibly past her parted lips, low and shallow and thin.

These smells she knows all too well, like a second home to her -- but almost immediately she knows something about them is wrong. Something tainted. Something long gone corrupt.

Pulling herself up to her feet, she witnesses.

All at once, it's too much, like a fist across her face, and it Claire falters, staggering to stay upright. She winds under the pain of it, the hurt of her natural empathy, barely strong enough to survive it in the tortured agonies of Metro-Gen's emergency ward, much less this, a memory, a figment of his mind --

Yasha's -- James's -- too-familiar, sharp words blink tears from her eyes. Is this what happened to him? No, it's what /is/ happening to him. That smartass mouth works even now.

Claire's eyes pull up from James Barnes strapped to the table, drawn to the papery tones of that second voice. A researcher, it looks like. A scientist. A /physician/. A man who has taken the vows to heal and never harm, and here he is, testing, torturing, twisting a human being beyond the rights of an animal. Holding loyalty like a weapon, turned on the man he has bound -- making him suffer without the right to scream.

She hears someone snarl, and it's her own voice, her own words: "You /mother/fu--"

It does not finish. It cuts into a windy scream, her voice cracking as she lunges at the figure of Armin Zola to lock her hands around his throat and SQUEEZE the life away. How fucking DARE he. How DARE he. How --

Her sigil flares. The figment breaks apart under her hands, and unravels into a sigh of dispersing shadow. Her hands shake with denied rage. She freezes. Then she moves, instant, immediate, looming over James Barnes's bed to violently rip open his straps.

"It's OK, it's OK," Claire keeps promising, taking his face into her hands.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
When awareness returns the coyote immediately turns upon her four feet; surveying the area around them and also making sure Claire is here and okay.

At the sight of the Nurse, the coyote offers a gusty chuff of a breath.

Thank god. That's what she'd likely say if she could talk.

As it is, all the coyote can do is focus her attention upon what's happening. The coyote's hackles rise upward, ruffled by what she sees, what she hears, what she smells. While Mercy has seen much in her life this particular setting is that rarely has crossed her path. In this her upbringing would label her as quite 'sheltered'.

Give her the Fae, magic, magical artifacts, those she can handle. This. This is a struggle.

Those thoughts careen through the coyote's mind, as she considers what next to do. Thankfully, that choice is taken from her, as Claire rises up violence promised in that tone of hers; that movement, as well. All the coyote can do is watch, the whites of the animal's eyes beginning to peak around that golden gaze.

And like before Zola disappears when the hand with the sigil touches him, it. Then it's to James and like before, where Claire became the witness, now Mercy does.

As soon as Claire touches James' face the world, for him, momentarily reassembles itself. The veneer of James Buchanan Barnes disappears and it is instead replaced by a familiar visage and known image of the Winter Soldier. He's dressed as he was when he arrived within the clearing; black upon black, with his customary weaponry likewise represented within this realm.

His awareness is also replaced by who he really, or currently is. The assassin. Here to save Claire Temple and to some degree Mercy Thompson.

And for as long as Claire touches him the knowledge of WHO he is and WHAT is happening will stay.

Only the shadows react, as they once more rear upward, The Coyote's psyche moving to lash out at the trio within this portion of the astral plane.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Claire takes his face into her hands, and for the scant few moments she is able to touch him, he looks up at her not as James Barnes-- young and ravaged on a table-- but as the man she first came to know. Hard-edged, honed, ruinous-eyed with age and too many years of death. His eyes search the dark-- and find hers.

Recognition flickers in them. Then their coldness flees before pleading question. Where is this? What is happening? Why is this happening? He was going to...

He starts to speak. And then the shadows tear them apart, consuming them both into darkness. It is a blackness that lingers, far longer than the others, an absolute night that smothers the senses. But soon enough it, like the rest, starts to lift, to part... and it lets through the sound of men shouting, women screaming... the high, uncomprehending shrieks of children.

It starts to get hot. Swelteringly hot.

The work of the Winter Soldier is not typically flashy. Over the decades he has been the master of orchestrating the accident, the misadventure, the death of natural causes. But sometimes, to start a war, you have to do something correspondingly grand. Something that will inflame nations. Something that is completely unambiguous.

The scene resolves to a craggy, mountainous landscape of scrub desert, spread from horizon to horizon under a cloudless night sky. Veiled and faceless, the Winter Soldier is moving swiftly through what looks like a relief camp, armed with weaponry unambiguously unidentifiable as that typically used by the insurgents battling Soviet occupation in the area.

He is killing everyone is sight. And not a single person looks like a combatant.

His path takes him unerringly towards the largest building in the camp. Hastily erected, it looks like the centralized hub of the camp: health center, gathering area, distribution site all in one. Many of the men shunted their families to go hide there once the killing began.

It is fortunate they are not alive to see their mistake, when the Winter Soldier methodically seals the building and puts it to the torch.

He stands dispassionate, incurious vigil by the front doors, because they are the only easy way in or out. But his initial securing of the building was well-executed. Though many try to escape, the locked doors hold firm until the last screams stop.

Claire Temple has posed:
He changes under her hands.

No longer that boy too young to be sent off to war; the look in his eyes goes heavy under the weight of decades.

This is familiar. Claire brushes James Barnes's overlong hair free from his eyes. Her hands tremble, but refuse to let him go. She learns down, her face half-lit by the glow off her burning sigil. It shines light down the wet streaks cutting her face.

"I've got you," she tells him. "I've got --"

Shadow cuts between them. Her hands come free. The last thing he will hear is her cry of dismay --

Claire falls into darkness once more.

That hypothermic dunk abruptly scalds her, the air too-hot against her thawing skin. She shudders, her sensitizing nerves resurrected in a thousand shallow stings, running her like the dragging swipes of razorblades.

A field of stars she's never seen before, not in Harlem, not in Hell's Kitchen, ceiling her in an endless expanse of clear desert sky. But Claire does not look long, and barely sees even less, kicking up sand as she pulls to her feet. The first thing she looks for is her guide, unshakeable through this entire journey -- that little coyote that has never left her. With tears still on her face, it hits her she knows all along what it is -- who it is.

Her friend that her mind, for a time, believed was dead. She reaches to touch that fur.

Then the night lights with a distant, yellowy glow. Over the mountains carry distant screams.

"No," Claire bleats into the dry air. Then, to the little coyote, to Mercy, she begs, "--It's not him."

Because she knows now, as she pushes off into a run, stumbling, tripping on her own ankles in her mad desperation, feeling her own breath burn like smoke in her lungs. Like the smoke off those old corpses. Like the smoke burning off the new, the bodies and screams locked into a crucible of the Winter Soldier's making.

Her stomach turns, and her eyes cry to both the sear of smoke and the memory of those screams. She'll never forget them, never for all her life, but still she looks for him, but still must find --

And come from the darkness stands Claire Temple, lit by firelight, hair moved by the heat of the pyre, and no longer afraid.

In several short strides, she moves recklessly on the assassin, aware he can shoot her, aware he can take her throat again into his hands, aware he can kill her in a hundred simple ways. Most hesitate if just to see him, but Claire does not, reaching to rip his mask free and take his face back into her hands.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Claire and Bucky are ripped apart.

Her hands pulled from his face and the two thrown into the next vision. it's a trip to Wonderland, if Wonderland was filled with abhorrent destruction, terribleness and horror. So. Much. Horror.

As before, the coyote follows, her steps less scattered, though no less hesitant. The desert before them would normally act like a balm upon the coyote's soul, but tonight it's not. Not with what the wind brings her. Not with what her eyes can see, her ears can hear.

The touch upon fur will bring the coyote's gaze back to Claire. With other circumstances she'd offer a coyote grin, but tonight all the coyote can offer is a grave touch of her nose to Claire's hand.

When Claire rises to her feet and offers those words, the coyote likewise stands. Then the two are running pellmell across the sand -

What meets their gaze is shocking. The whites of the coyote's eyes can be seen, as her yellow-eyed gaze rolls. A howl leaves the coyote now, a sound rising in pitch for several seconds before the eery wail dies back. It's the only way Mercy can currently express her feelings and almost a second call breaks free. It builds in the back of her throat and pushes hard against her teeth and tongue.

And while the trio watches the memory play out and Claire reaches for Bucky's face, somewhere within the shadows a new figure emerges. A man, old, young, middle-aged, his form flickers and just as the shadows reach outward, to once again attack Bucky, the man clucks his tongue. With that single click of noise power reaches outward from Old Coyote and arrests the shadows from touching the Winter Soldier.

Winter Soldier has posed:
The Winter Soldier looks over his shoulder at the sudden baying of a coyote behind him. His frost-blue eyes, empty and dead, find Mercy's four-footed form, a shadow in the dark... and then, inexorably, they are drawn to Claire. To Claire, as she crosses the distance between them, finally unafraid.

He could shoot her. Could break her neck again. Could open her throat with a knife. Could end her in so many ways. But he doesn't. He only looks at her, frozen in place, confused by this woman who shows not only no fear, but no /pause/ at the sight of him...

...and she dismisses his mask to take his face back in her hands.

The silence stretches on. Two ostensible men war with shadow in the background. But James Barnes is not watching. He is only looking down, into the face of a familiar woman, his mind struggling loose of its prison: a hell forged from his own overlong history.

"Claire?" he asks, recognition in his eyes.

Claire Temple has posed:
New voices come, men shaped by the interplay of that deadly shadow --

And Claire feels like she is in the eye of the storm. No, she feels like she is the eye, a single point of grounding and calm beyond which a violent storm plays: one she knows now will rip James Barnes away the instant her hands let go.

So she does not. She comes in so close he can trap her again at another front door, kill her inside a simple flex of his hands... and she tears away that mask that makes him the Winter Soldier and takes into her hands the man trapped within.

A coyote bays through the darkness. The sound reminds Claire she is not alone. And that she can do this.

He speaks her name. A rough, relieved breath rasps free from her lips. Thank god, Claire thinks. Thank you god.

"Yeah," she whispers back. "I found you. I promise I won't let you go."

Mercy Thompson has posed:
The shadows rage against the invisible hand that holds them at bay. They struggle, twist, turn, but this particular battle is already lost.

The coyote turns, her pivot quick and fast, as she feels a familiar swell of power. Only the area where she heard that click of tongue is empty. Whomever was there is now gone. Again her hackles rise slightly, but when nothing more happens, Mercy turns back around.

Her lupine gaze will search out Bucky and Claire, and when she sees the two standing so close and Claire's sigil-touched hand upon him, the coyote relaxes.

Moving forward the russet-cream colored coyote yips to grab their attention, then she turns. It's like before, she'll trot ahead a few steps, then stop, then trot again, before she stops and looks over a shoulder. To make sure both are following her. Once they are the trio begins their trek. The area around them, with burning building, screaming people, quiets and fades away from harsh yellows and oranges to a familiar red for Claire and the coyote. There the coyote leads them through the web of color, staying away from the harsh dark slashes that can be found within it.