2284/Ataraxia

Ataraxia
Date of Scene:	01 September 2017
Location:	Staten Island, New York
Synopsis:	Plot finale. Having developed a plan to save Claire Temple, Steve Rogers, Mercy Thompson, Sam Winchester, and Winifred Burkle follow Bucky Barnes to the Hydra base where the former Winter Soldier knows she is held captive.
Cast of Characters:	Winter Soldier, Captain America, Winifred Burkle, Mercy Thompson, Sam Winchester, Claire Temple
Tinyplot:	Tayaniye

---

Winter Soldier has posed:
Saint Michael's Medical Center-- a modest campus comprising a few buildings encircling a larger main hospital-- isn't hard to get /to/, per se. No harder than it is to get to anywhere else on Staten Island, though it's a bit of a trek from the more habitated centers of the island. The hard part about this is going to be getting /into/ the medical center, though the ragtag group that Bucky Barnes has brought back to Claire's place of incarceration has a plan. Well, at least half a plan. Maybe one-third of a plan.

Bucky was able to pick out a time when workers out on the grounds of the medical center would be at a minimum, and when most construction efforts would be on the upper floors of the main building that is their objective. He hasn't brought them to the front door, however-- or at least, the side door he uses as the Winter Soldier-- because the Hydra presence starts right there, and he wouldn't want to have to execute any of them that Hydra deems rather less interesting in terms of a 'catch.'

Instead he's brought them to a small maintenance shed, about halfway between the sparse woods surrounding the campus and one of the buildings on its very fringe. There's no immediate indication why he would pick this place over any other, up until he breaks the lock off the door with his left hand and reveals within-- instead of the expected generators or gas tanks such a place might contain-- a ring of concrete centerpieced with a heavy steel hatch.

"Back door," the erstwhile Winter Soldier explains tersely. "They only have one official way in and out, but the brass always keep a personal way out in case of emergency. Doesn't open from this side, though. Only opens for a switch in a control room on the first sublevel."

And there he left them, to dubiously trust that he is not LYING and will actually execute their plan: to have him bring Captain America in as a prisoner, and to open this back way for them once within. This required some level of... preparation in making Steve look appropriately roughed up, which Bucky did NOT appreciate, but necessity was necessity.

The plan went surprisingly well at first. Nobody at the 'front desk' is nearly qualified to stand in the way of the returning Winter Soldier, however late he is. Once he and Steve get down to a level with some actual security, and Bucky gets questioned about his unexpected cessation of contact for two days, he is promptly forgiven-- more than forgiven-- once he displays Captain America, wrists chained behind his back, and the iconic shield.

"How long are you going to stand here asking me pointless questions?" Bucky eventually loses his patience, with convincing Winter Soldier frigidity. "Volkov is going to want to see this for himself, and he's not going to thank you for holding me up."

Such it is that Bucky and Steve find themselves occupying the freight elevator leading down to the subterranean levels beneath the hospital, the former wearing Steve's shield. There is silence, for a time.

"As long as this doesn't go like that one time with Namor," Bucky mentions under his breath, "it'll be fine."

Captain America has posed:
Dirtied, bloodied, and bruised Captain America assumes silence through the entire proceedings with his blue eyes trained solidly on the floor. It's odd, in a way, for him to so earnestly avoid eye contact, but being a prisoner meant acting the part. The skin of his wrists complains underneath the shackles, partly because he's drawn them apart from each other. Defiance seemed far more convincing than easy complicity.

His eyes trail around the elevator as the pair enter the elevator. Thanks to SHIELD, cameras in elevators have become something of a norm in Rogers' life, but the murmur warrants a small pull of the Captain's lips on one side. It's not a smile, but it does reflect memory.

"You know how tempted I was to leave him with them?" he mutters in response. "If they hadn't had a doomsday weapon..." the suggestion that he would've left Namor with Hydra is ridiculous, and they both know it, but it's also the most normal things have felt in days, an irony that doesn't escape Steve's notice.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Fred doesn't trust Barnes. That has been made clear not only in her actions dealing with him, but in words that she's expressed to both Mercy and to Sam. She worries that this plan relies too heavily on him, to much on expecting him to be able to pull it off. However, she does realize that putting bombs at the main entrance as a distraction immediately puts everyone in the base on high alert to start. Without any other valid plan, this is their best bet and they don't have the time to hash out something better. That doesn't mean she has to like it.

Hiding nearby the door of the shed, Winifred Burkle gives Sam a worried look - one that she has given him quite a few times since the fight at the junkyard. This is a high stress situation and she knows he's been using his powers more. That's the last thing she wants to have happen tonight, even if she knows the possibility is high due to high stakes of this infiltration. A hand readjusts the bag of firepower that is her haul that they brought with them. A few other items from the Hyperion's weapon closet are also there. She gives a glance to Mercy, checking on the coyote.

Then, her attention turns to the door, willing it to open. Claire is somewhere inside and - according to Sam's vision - being tortured. They need to get in there as soon as possible.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Waiting. It's one of the worst thing about plans that are multi-pronged.

And while Mercy Thompson waits in that maintenance shed, dressed in simple serviceable and dark clothing, she remains mostly silent. As with previous iterations of the group's crazy plans, ambushes and rescues, she likewise has a small messenger bag. The strap of the bag is slung diagonally across her body, with the bag filled with a variety of bombs, grenades and weaponry. She also has several hellfire molotov cocktails strapped to one arm, with the slender tubes carefully concealed under the sleeve of her black jacket. Upon her other arm, overtop the sleeve of her jacket is her trusty smartphone. Ready to detonate things should she need a remote charge.

Her arms across crossed over her chest and while she keeps most of her senses attuned to the world around them, part of her mind is focused elsewhere. In a prayer. It goes something like this -

Please let this work. Please don't let anyone die. Please let us find Claire.

The prayer is repeated like a mantra and finally after the third repetition of that prayer Mercy opens her eyes. Her gaze circles the room around them and the people within, and with that look of hers she catches Fred's own glance her way. While she doesn't necessarily smile at Fred, she does at least acknowledge the other woman's look with a nod.

It's all seriousness right now from the Coyote. Then, much like Fred, Mercy turns a quick look to Sam as well.

Sam Winchester has posed:
Sam Winchester trusts that the Winter Soldier isn't lying. Whether or not he'll actually get to the switch that will let them all in? Well, that's another question and another concern.

The truth is, once the plan was set he spent zero time thinking about it. He swallowed a ton of Advil and took a very long nap after his disasterous attempts to scry the place. Now there's a faint, dull ache behind his hazel eyes, but nobody would know it to look at him. He has come armed to the teeth in full Winchester style, with his favored Beretta 92FS in the shoulder holster under his bulletproof plaid shirt and tactical jacket, a Smith and Wesson 5906 that he's got at a waist holster, poorly concealed but still technically concealed, the pair of tactical knives in either boot, the neck knife tucked down his shirt, and one more tucked into his belt.

Knowing a sorcerer is on site means he couldn't skimp on his normal weaponry either. He's got two flasks of holy water tucked into the inner pocket of his jacket, and two Crown Royale bags full of rock salt. Chalk if he needs sudden sigils, iron dust, twine, and one can of spray paint just in case they find themselves in need of a devil's trap or something similar.

Conspicuously absent from this kit are two items. The ICER pistol, and the bespectacled bunny he's been carrying about. The latter simply cause he doesn't want to lose Feigenbaum in some Hydra Hell-hole, and cause he needed the room for weapons. The former, because after thinking long and hard he decided that anyone willingly working for Hydra under the ground qualified as a monster in his book, and he didn't feel like they had a lot of time to play around. If he leaves a bunch of unconscious bodies there's the chance Hydra knows how to help them recover quickly, and then they might well get swarmed. It's a risk he's not willing to take, for any of them.

It's also probably a safe bet that he did shoot up at some point, because he needs a shot about every four to six hours to keep withdrawals, alone, at bay, let alone to feed any abilities he might want to use. At the very least, perhaps, the arsenal he's brought might indicate he's not keen on relying on those. Not here, not knowing they fit into Hydra's plan somehow.

He catches both women staring at him. He reaches over and squeezes Fred's shoulder. "We're going to bring her home," he murmurs, with the calm assurance of someone who has walked into enough dangerous situations to have lost count of them, and who has had to lead people who were not so assured out of them safely.

Either he's unaware that they're concerned about his tainted blood and the tainted powers that come from it, or he's choosing oblivousness. Either way, he focuses on the mission.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Surprisingly, there are no cameras in the elevator. Bucky obviously knows this already. Hydra is not an organization that benefits from keeping copious recorded footage of its own doings. It's not how they really operate.

He still keeps his voice down, though, when he answers with an audible smirk in his voice, "We coulda left him a little longer than we did."

The time for jokes eventually comes to an end. Not soon, either: the elevator seems to descend a long time before it finally grinds to a stop, opening onto a sterile, plain, and cookie-cutter environment that seems quite part and parcel of what one might expect of an organization like Hydra, with its fetish for redundancy. Bucky gives Steve a bracing glance, and then he puts the Winter Soldier mask back on. His left hand takes his best friend harshly by the upper arm, dragging the battered-looking Captain America down the halls.

The control room they're looking for is actually on the first sublevel, which is convenient, but it's on the other side of the base from the elevator that brought them down here. Still, they don't really encounter that much in the way of resistance. In fact, they don't really encounter many others at all. The people staffed here all seem busy; idleness is not tolerated.

They do stare as the Winter Soldier passes with his singular prisoner, however. One person stares longer than the rest, unnoticed by Bucky from her position at the end of a long hall that he passes by.

There's one person manning the control room when they arrive, someone very easily ordered out by the Winter Soldier. Bucky cuts a look at the door, doesn't let go of Steve's arm ("Sorry," he says, sotto voce), and then flips the switch to open the back entry.

It's audible when that heavy hatch unlocks, a resonating sound of metal. It won't be hard to heft it open. What might be hard is deciding what to do, when a look down reveals a pitch-black tunnel boring straight down into the earth. No ladder. No nothing. And it looks like it goes down a very long way.

Captain America has posed:
Relief colours each corner of Captain America's face at having no eyes in the elevator, but Steve's eyes dance with amusement at the thought of leaving Namor longer. "Probably should've," he mutters to his feet. But moments later the doors open and Cap assumes his silence once again.

Booted feet shuffle along the cement floor. Yet his blue eyes follow the corners and edges of the room. He feels like he's being watched, prompting him to seek any signs of surveillance aside from the eyes that seem to follow them through the base. He even takes notice of the woman who stares at them, blue eyes lingering on her longer than would be considered polite. In fact, from a prisoner, it might be dubbed overtly aggressive, a thought that has his eyes flitting away moments later.

The pressure on his arm produces a dull ache, but it barely registers along the curiosity he bears. He casts a long look at Bucky. "How long you think until we have company?" he murmurs, eyes trailing towards the door.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
All of those outside are a bit on edge. That's understandable, considering what is at stake and how their previous attempts at infiltrating had gone before. The knowledge that their rescue of Sam was only 'mild' interference has Fred on even more of an edge than she was before.

For a brief moment, when Sam puts a hand on her shoulder, she reaches up to hold it. Then, though, she nods, eyes back on the shed in front of them. "We'll find her," she agrees."

When the hatch audibly unlocks, Fred is quick to scurry forward. She gives a quick look about her as she does so, but then she's putting her - not exactly impressive - strength behind opening up the door. With the additional help of Mercy and Sam, the door swings open. If she was expecting the waiting to be the hardest part? Well, she would be wrong. Now they need to find a way down a dark tunnel with no ladder and no means of descent.

Frowning, Fred reaches into her bag to bring out a bundle of rope. "I...I'm not sure this'll be enough," she tells the others. "But, we could see how far down it goes?"

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Mercy watches Fred and Sam and at both of their words the coyote nods. "We will." She says, finally speaking.

And even without her sensitive ears Mercy would have heard that click and clank of the hatch unlocking. That sound is enough to cause the coyote to straighten up and drop her crossed arms down to her side.

Then it's onward to help Fred lift that hatch upward. When it reveals a descent into darkness the mechanic frowns. "Great." Mutters Mercy Thompson, perhaps echoing something of how Fred currently feels. While the more slender woman reaches into her bag for that bundle of rope, Mercy will reaches into her own bag of plenty as well. From it she pulls forth a small compact flashlight. Then the coyote is crouching down near the hatch and leaning forward slightly. With a flick of her thumb the flashlight is turned on and while it lights a good portion of the tunnel it doesn't quite reach the bottom. That's enough to cause the dark-haired woman to mutter even more beneath her breath.

Straightening up from her crouch, Mercy says, "I can't see the bottom. I'd say let's drop the rope down and then one of us can go down and see what it looks like." At this point her gaze turns to Sam versus Fred. "I can probably do it. I'm pretty good with long drops."

Sam Winchester has posed:
Sam frowns thoughtfully as he stares down the shaft. Not an elevator, like he expected, but a lift from the bottom. He doesn't speak right away. "A better look would be wise," he agrees, slowly, "Though I don't know if 50 feet is going to cut it. I think ultimately I'll have to float you two down there, and someone will have to send the lift up for me. But let's get more information. If you think you can go down, then I'll hold this end of the rope. And I'm here to uh. Catch you. If you fall. Two different ways."

He frowns down at the shaft, contemplating how much more 'juice' he might need for this, but decides it's not time to distress them with that yet. He gazes about, wishing there were something more solid to attach that rope /to/, but. There isn't.

"Fred, if you can steady me a bit," he suggests. Small and slight though she is, a bit of extra weight to keep him stable is still nothing to sneeze at, that and a pair of good set stances and his own strength ought to keep Mercy from say, dragging them down the horrific tunnel with them. "This is why I need to buy myself a cool drone camera," he adds, apropos of nothing. "Or sign the paperwork at last so that when I do stuff like this, I can say 'hey SHIELD, can I have a cool drone camera? And they'll say yes."

He sage nods. He's dork babbling because sending Mercy down the shaft is making him nervous. Don't mind him.

Claire Temple has posed:
Meanwhile, inside:

In that instant, the Winter Soldier moves past with his prisoner.

"Is that Captain America?" asks one of the HYDRA personnel in the passing -- and admittedly keen -- earshot of the two passing super-soldiers. His voice lifts with undisguised shock. "I didn't ever hear of anything --"

"Sounds like it happened," another man answers, sharing that same look of disbelief. Because shared amongst all their minds is that same thought: this is a game changer.

Anastasiya Nikolaevna Zhuraleva, among that small group, lifts her head, and in that instant, meets Captain America's blue eyes with her own, pale and steely. He holds her eyes, and she looks right back, her lean, rifle-straight body shouldered against the wall. A cigarette curls smoke from between her lips.

They walk by. Her nostrils flare as she stares after them.

The men continue to chat. "What do you think they'll do with him?" they say. "We should confirm intel from the Vila. She must have heard something from SHIELD."

Stasya isn't listening. The soldiers, jailor and prisoner, pass out of sight. She crunches her cigarette and follows.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Apparently eighty years apart aren't nearly enough to dispel how attuned Steve and Bucky are to one another, when operating together. Steve turns his head to follow someone with his eyes, and at his side Bucky's grip on his upper arm tightens in wordless question.

He doesn't ask immediately. Not until they're in the control room, clear, and they've gotten the hatch open for the others. The actual lift control isn't there, it seems, and Bucky transparently considers whether it'd be safer to stay put and avoid being seen too much, or to keep moving in case people come to the control room and find the Winter Soldier... somewhere he has no reason to be, with a prisoner.

How long do we have? Steve wonders. "Up until somebody notices I didn't go where I was supposed to go with you," he says grimly. "I could start walking you there, but I'll be damned if I'll do anything to help a fake capture turn into a real one."

This is about the time he finally asks, "Who did you see?"

Captain America has posed:
A twist of Steve's body silently asks for the restraints to be removed from his wrists. He'll need his hands in short order, likely. His eyes trail to the shaft and he inhales a long breath while he recalls Stasya. "A woman. Perfect posture. Average height. Cigarette in her lips, and obviously not easily intimidated," Steve's eyebrows lift. "Formidable, I think."

He stares at the door in silent consideration. "We needed to get everyone in to help... Claire," the strange familiarity of using the first name of someone he's never met feels nearly foreign on his tongue, "but we lose any advantage we have if we all get stuck in here."

His jaw tightens, and his fingers ball into fists. "...you should walk me there..." The logic in Steve's voice is unmissable when he notes, "Tactically it makes the most sense. I'm over a hundred years old. I've seen enough for more than a lifetime," but there's something in his expression that speaks greater volumes.

Their compatriots haven't.

And then, with a grim smile he adds, "That... or you could rough me up again if someone inevitably walks through the door." Because there needs to be a reason to be here.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Unaware of what is going on inside, Fred looks between Sam and Mercy as they debate the merits of scaling downward. There's no argument when Mercy volunteers. While Fred has many other skills, rappelling downward in the dark alone is not exactly one of them. Of course, she would do it if that were way was necessary. There's a short nod as she agrees to the plan. "Let us know what you see."

Handing the rope to Sam, she can't help but grin at his divergence into drone cameras. She wraps her arms about his waist first in something that is like a fond hug before she then holds him tighter and plants her feet. "I think a drone camera at your disposal is definitely a good reason to join SHIELD." There is no sarcasm there. She truly thinks that would be a sound point. "But only if they let me use it, too." Clearly, a dealbreaker.

There is a bit of a hesitation at knowing he'll be using his abilities to float them down should the rope not be long enough to do the trick. However, again, they don't seem to have any other choices available to them should that become necessary.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Sam's offer to catch her should she fall, whether with rope, or telekinetic powers, earns a small smile from the coyote. Then there's a nod to Fred's question. "I will."

Then once the two are ready Mercy will pull her bag of tricks off and set it near the two. "Don't let me forget that." Is her quick words, before the mechanic tucks the small flashlight in one hand, while the other grabs the length of rope. Pulling in a quick fortifying breath Mercy tries to center herself as best she can, before easing over the edge.

Even with the woman trying to be careful there's still going to be a sudden pull upon the rope. A hundred and ten pounds of it - Mercy can only mitigate so much of her weight. Her flashlight illuminates the area around her as she eases her way downward and when she comes to the end of the rope she looks downward again. There's an internal battle on whether she can make the rest of the drop and while she thinks she might be /able/ to, there's enough doubt there that the coyote once again mutters. It's only after that mutter that Mercy calls up, her voice echoing oddly thanks to the walls surrounding her, "Sam, I'm going to need your help. I'll give you a count of three then catch me!" And with that, Mercy waits for confirmation from above and when it's received she says, "1-2-3 -" And there she goes - letting go of the rope.

And while she /expects/ Sam to catch her that doesn't seem to stop the woman from shifting slightly so both her hands and feet are near each other to potentially take the brunt of any type of impact that isn't soft.

Thankfully, for Mercy, Sam does catch her in that TK grip of his and downward she goes. Until she hits the bottom. As soon as she's down she immediately plays her flashlight over the area and it's clear what the shaft is used for. A lift. Because there it is. A way to get everyone down. "There's a lift!" Comes her far away voice, "Get ready!" And just like that, Mercy brings the lift up - the only thing?

It's noisy. So. Very. Noisy. Clearly the lift is not often used.

Sam Winchester has posed:
Catching a full-sized woman and floating her gently down to an unknown, unseen spot from 150 feet up is not, as it happens, as easy as it sounds. To date, most of Sam's TK adventures have involved quick actions. A throw of a full-sized Winter Soldier being his biggest and most dramatic. He takes it really slow and really steady when he gets her, and soon he's straining, red faced, sweating, gasping, trying not to let her so much as get jostled.

It takes more energy than he's ever used in his life, and he can feel all that tainted magic burning away in his blood.

"Fred," he gasps, knowing she'll hate having to do this, and knowing there's no choice. Both his hands, all his energy, all his concentration, are on one thing and one thing only. "Lower right hand inner pocket."

The headache that he'd mostly gotten rid of starts to blossom slowly behind his eyes again, and he starts to tremble. This is not an addict stopping off for a top off, this is a real need here.

Fortunately, Fred sees it for herself, and shoves up his sleeve to plunge that thick, bright red serum into a good vein as quickly as possible. This allows Sam Winchester to finish the job.

He puts his hands on his knees and pants for a moment as he listens to the noisy lift come up with a grimace, but he does reach back to take Fred's hand and squeeze it ever so gently, knowing...well. Knowing that sucked. For her.

But he wastes no time, either. However concerned he is about the fact that they may have blown their stealth then and there, he jumps on board and gets ready to descend this tunnel the way it was meant to be traversed.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Steve turns in a wordless request for the restraints to be removed. Bucky, looking apologetic, gets the chain by his left hand and twists, snapping it so the links slither free off his friend's wrists. He unhooks the shield from his back, too, handing it over as he listens to the answer.

He transparently doesn't like what he hears. His expression goes flat, dislike and anger burning in his eyes. "A bitch is what she is," he grouses. "Our time's definitely short now. That's Volkov's right-hand woman. She'll probably alert him right away. We are f--"

The sound of the lift grating to life, down at the other end of the hall, drowns him out. Bucky shuts up and looks, briefly, appalled.

"Yeah, forget walking you there," he says, crossing sharply to the door of the control room and jerking it open. "Let's go--"

Claire Temple has posed:
The motorized lift moves.

Lacking cables or the infrastructure of a normal elevator, it appears to be a monstrously-sized scissor lift -- one whose folded lengths seem rigged to extend beyond this floor and much deeper: possibly into those five subterranean levels Bucky Barnes mentioned in detail.

When Mercy Thompson turns it on, the sound is unmistakable. In the narrow confines of the shaft, where sound layers on itself and amplifies painfully, it is near deafening, telling of a hastily-built construction creaky with disuse -- if use ever at all.

This back entrance was picked for its reason: it's not used unless it has to be.

With all three of them finally to the ground, what awaits in the dark, emergency-light lit tunnel are a pair of heavy steel doors. It leads out to a nondescript, skeletally-built hall, with walls and doors, though unfinished -- the ceilings piped with ventilation and water, and freshly-laid wiring braiding through the foundation. The halls are marked with the floor number. The platform eventually lets them down to the first, topmost floor of those five levels.

Pro: Both Captain America and Bucky Barnes are on this level with them.

Con: The too-noisy lift attracts the attention of every single HYDRA person on Level 1. Within moments, the discrepancy is being called in across their channels. So come the sounds of voices and footsteps, approaching and unfamiliar, down toward the hall on the other side of the lift doors. "I'm not hearing an authorization for this. Is it a false positive?"

And meanwhile --

Pro and con: The control room door opens.

And Stasya stands on the other side, her pale eyes two ice picks that scrape from Bucky Barnes to Captain America beside him. Two men making a very suspicious dug-out inside a room they shouldn't be.

"Pochemu ty zdes?" she demands, lifting her jaw in the way predator animals do, as if to sip fear from the air.

Her eyes narrow. She does not hesitate. The woman takes her sidearm in hand, cold, deliberate, barrel swung to point directly on the chained Steve Rogers. Her finger pushes the trigger.

Captain America has posed:
The freedom from the cuffs has Steve stretching through a series of simple rolls while Bucky identifies Stasya. Cap's wrists roll in tight circles, and in short order, so do his shoulders, allowing everything to work itself to its regular position.

But the sound of the lift earns a sharp roll of Steve's eyes. "So much for the element of surprise." His arm slides through the sleeve while crisp purposed steps drive him behind Bucky to the door.

"Where w--" but the thought never makes it out. The click prompts reaction rather than thought out planning, and the shield lifts to deflect the bullet. The familiar //ping// of weaponry against vibranium echoes through the room.

Good sense goes out the window. The weapon draws closer to Captain America's chest and his fingers curve around the handle inside it. His wrist flicks as the shield twists in his grasp, bringing it to a sharp angle. He groans quietly when the shield releases from his grasp on a collision course with Stasya.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Fred helps Sam steady himself against Mercy's descent. Honestly, it's Sam doing most of the work in ensuring Mercy doesn't plummet down the elevator shaft. When they realize the rope is significantly shorter than is necessary to make it the rest of the way, she frowns. While she still holds on to Sam, she looks up at him when she realizes he'll have to use his abilities in order to ensure the coyote's safety.

As he starts to use his power, a hand remains on him, though now it is less physical steadying than an emotional one. Soon, she starts to realize that something is wrong. The way downward is not as easy as Sam had hoped and he needs help. Quickly, she reaches into his pocket, but it's only when she pulls out a syringe of blood that she freezes. She knows exactly what he wants and what that means and - also - what is at stake. It takes her a few moments, but the fear of an injured Mercy spurs her forward to roll up his sleeve and plunge the needle into his veins.

There's a breath that sounds almost like a gasp as she pulls the needle out and shoves it back into her bag - loathe to leave any evidence behind them. The lift shrieks in its ascent and she winces at that, holding Sam's hand as they wait and then board it. There's a shiver she can't stop for a few moments at the knowledge of what she's done.

As they descend, she has the same thought as Sam: there's no way everyone did not hear the lift. The footsteps and conversation easily confirms it. At least they're inside now. She pushes herself against a wall, hand reaching into her bag for one of the metal grabbing bombs.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
It seems all three of them are having similar thoughts; the noise. The lift, while good in some sense, also wasn't the best idea.

But, it is what it is, and with the lift already rising upward Mercy can only let it continue.

When the trio is finally down within that bare-bones room, Mercy can't stop the look she sends between the two. Does she know something happened above? Possibly. Or rather, something within both of their scents gives her a little clue that something happened. And while she'd like to ask what happened, Mercy doesn't. Not when their element of surprise is potentially blown. "I'm going to bet someone heard that." Says the mechanic quietly, even as she reaches for one of the molotov cocktails beneath the sleeve of her jacket. With that molotov cocktail in hand, Mercy because to move, but within a few short steps something causes the coyote to pause. Her head now cants to the side as her gaze moves to the steel doors that lead outward. "There's people approaching." States the woman quickly and softly again and a second after that warning of hers, Mercy adds, "Two. There's two people coming toward the doors."

Sam Winchester has posed:
Sam Winchester steps in front of Mercy and Fred and draws his Beretta in one smooth motion. "Stay behind me," he says grimly. He draws a bead on those doors that would be about center mass for anyone but a dwarf or a giant, hopes that they don't have body armor on, red emergency light casting strange shadows over his face as his emotions shut down. The moment the doors open he's going to go right ahead and try to shoot them both in the heart, offering one smooth, aimed shot and a second slightly hastier but still practiced one.

The position makes sense to him for a variety of reasons, from their chosen weapons to his bulletproof clothing to his huge size to simply the fact that there is a streak of John Winchester-taught chivalry/chauvinism that will never be fully rooted out of him. If someone's going to take a bullet tonight, it's not going to be one of the two women with him if he has his say.

If this clears the way forward as Mercy's senses seem to suggest, he'll cautiously take it, if not...he'll prepare for the next round. He's not in love with this position, lacking cover as it does...being fast and accurate is about all he's got for keeping them alive here.

Winter Soldier has posed:
The door opens to a very unwelcome sight. Why are you here? Stasya demands.

Bucky transforms instantly back into the Winter Soldier. His head lifts, his eyes frosting, his mouth curving in a sneer. "Ne tvoye delo," he snarls back, but it's way too little and way too late. He can't bluff his way through this. And he certainly can't bluff his way through a gun aimed at his best friend.

The reaction Stasya gets out of him is so ingrained that Bucky couldn't have stopped it even if he wanted to. The truth shines out of his suddenly-desperate eyes as he moves to try to protect Steve. Who, of course, doesn't need protecting anymore.

Seeing Steve's swift deflection and counter-throw, Bucky adjusts his own approach. He pulls his own sidearm, firing a bullet for her center mass. "Lift is down the hall!" he calls back at Steve.

Meanwhile, the two people Mercy heard approaching round a corner and appear in the hallway... but the gunshots at the control room, at the far end of the hall beyond the lift, draw their attention more urgently, and they pull their weapons and start pelting in that direction.

Peeking out the lift doors and watching where they're heading will yield the sight of Steve and Bucky and their conflict with Stasya, some fifty feet distant at the end of the hall, as their intended destination.

But Claire IS, the last any of them knew of her, on level two...

Claire Temple has posed:
Between the control room, the distant cries of the emergency lift, and Captain America, Stasya pieces it together. Realization and rage make her eyes glacial.

She moves quickly, seamlessly to fire that shot; however, Captain America is just as fast.

Vibranium arrests the kinetics of that bullet and crumples the round to a harmless thing, dropped on the floor; the woman has only the time to snarl before the subsequent throw of the shield slams into her, knocking her backward, out of the doorway and into the opposite wall of the hallway.

The collision is thunderous. It would crumple a man on the spot --

-- especially followed up with a single shot from Bucky Barnes's gun that catches her in the stomach. Stasya doubles over, ended for the count.

Then straightens back up, something decidedly unnatural about the double sets of eyelids pulling away from her reopening eyes. English, thickly accented, rises from her throat, as she spits blood. "Amerikanski trash."

No more time wasted, as she lunges back at them, her first strike a too-strong roundhouse at Bucky's gun. Bones crack and mulch as she moves, and a shifting of her, a too-vivid ripping apart of human into animal --

-- Mercy will smell. And recognize. And know. She's a wolf.

It earns the entire attention of Level 1. Personnel run past, backs to the three emerging from the lift entrance, most of the HYDRA workers without guns and standing in shock at the unimagined sight of the fight. And Captain America --

Not everyone is clued into his appearance here. Enough that one man is yelling into his comm, "Something's wrong with the Soldier! How is Captain America here?! We have a breach!"

Captain America has posed:
Captain America doesn't stop on his course. Upon releasing the shield from his grip, he chases after it until Stasya doubles over from the hit, giving Cap just enough time to scoop it from the ground. The change in the woman's appearance causes his eyebrows to lift as he twists to try to strike her with a shield.

He's Amerikanski trash. It's not wholly untrue. "I dunno--" he uses the shield like a kind of discus as the personnel begin to converge towards them "--Brooklyn's nice even with the hipsters--" he breathes out as he tosses the shield to ricochet off one of the base's walls to one of the incoming assailants. "--mostly--"

There's little his shield can't do. Except be a gun. Which he would very much like to have right about now.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
As Sam takes point, Fred readies herself. She did, in fact, bring a gun. However, the physicist is far more used to crossbows, bombs and other devices similar to that. Determined, she arms the magnetic bomb, but does not yet toss it - keeping it ready. Two people is not enough to expend something as valuable as one of their bombs.

Especially as they ignore them and start to run in the opposite direction. There's a look to both Mercy and Sam. They're here now and people are alerted to their presence. "We need to find a way to second level," she tells them. "The drawing he showed us had some sort of way to get down there, right? We have to use this to get to Claire." As far as she is concerned, Barnes can look after himself. Plus, he has Captain America with him. Even if she cared about his well being, having the legendary Avenger on his side would be enough to believe they can handle it...even with the entire floor converging on them. This is, really, their best chance to find her and she is not about to waste it.

That look turns into action as she swiftly - and quietly - starts to move forward to find a way to the second sub-level.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Sam steps up to point. While this causes the coyote to frown she doesn't necessarily voice her thoughts. Instead, Mercy will shift a quick glance to Fred, before it's back to the steel doors.

Then the trio is moving to those doors and peering out. Already chaos is starting to hit this particular floor and in some ways that's good, while in other ways it's bad. Now Hydra knows something is going on. It'll likely get harder here on out. Not that-that will stop the teams from completing their mission.

Automatically Mercy's gaze goes to the three main combatants down the hall. The woman, the Captain and the Soldier. Mercy's expression is grim, but much like Fred she knows they can take care of themselves. They have to at this point. That doesn't stop the mechanic from turning her gaze to finding a way for them to get to the second floor. Fred's reminder of the map Bucky drew for them gives Mercy a momentary ah-ha moment. "Stairs. There should be stairs nearby." Because the only elevator that's near the trio is the one that currently has supersoldiers and Hydra agents near it.

When Fred steps out of the room Mercy can be found close behind. Her eyes are searching for a specific type of door - the kind that leads into a stairwell. It doesn't take long to spot it and when she does Mercy says, "There." Her words are quiet, even though the majority of people have their back turned to them. "Let's go." And then the coyote strives to casually hot-foot it to that door - only something stops her. A familiar scent. A wolf. That scent causes the coyote to nearly stop in her tracks, her attention shifting to down the hall again. It only takes seconds for her to follow that scent trail and identify what it is; or who it is. "There's a wolf down there. The woman. She's a wolf." And while Mercy's words are softly spoken Fred and Sam should be able to hear what she says. Even if not, they'll see Mercy immediately and suddenly change directions. Towards the trio fighting down that hallway. Someone best grab the coyote before she makes a stupid mistake, especially one she can't really help with, even if her brain is telling her otherwise.

Sam Winchester has posed:
Sam grabs the coyote by the arm. He does it with a grip that is surprisingly strong, even given his size.

His voice is low, intense, and urgent. "That's a pair of super soldiers giving us the best distraction we're ever going to have. Remember: our job is to /get Claire Temple out of here/. You run in there now you'll blow this. We need you, Mercy. Let's go." It's the same sort of voice he uses when he has to remind Dean of some hard but important truth, a thing that often happens when Dean's emotions explode all over the place, leaving Sam, as the steady and, in some ways, less emotional of the two to bring him back to baseline. He doesn't know Mercy well enough to know if it will work, but...it is what it is.

And if it doesn't, well, even if she starts trying to change in his hand he's going to try to bring her right along with him to those stairs until she looks like she's going to thunder down there under her own power. Now he takes rear, as Fred was ahead of him and as he had to stop and gather Mercy. It's not an arrangement he loves, but at this point either end of the chain is a danger. He puts Mercy between them, lest she feel the need to dart up again.

Winter Soldier has posed:
A blow from the shield and a bullet to the belly should have done for Stasya, and Bucky is already moving as if expectant he'll be stepping past a corpse. But his attempt to pass her meets with something unexpected: she's not dying. In fact, something else very different is happening to her.

He stares as she twists and contorts, transforming, his shock lasting a moment too long. The kick stings his hand and sends the gun spinning into a corner. "<Jesus fuck,>" Bucky sputters. "<Everyone already knew you were a bitch. Wasn't necessary to hang it out so everyone could see.>" And while Bucky was always good at picking up languages, it's still no doubt disorienting for Steve to hear him spitting words rapidly in his fluent, slangy Russian. That language wasn't one he ever had before his 'death.'

There's some things that still stay the same, though, and one of them is the way Bucky seems able to just read Steve's wants from his body language. Using the time while Steve's attacking Stasya to recover his gun into his right hand, he unholsters another sidearm, passing it seamlessly to Steve as the both of them move the engagement fluidly out into the hall. He can see, beyond the gaggle of Hydra personnel, the others hustling towards the stairs, and he registers clearly what it is they need. A distraction. He starts to move--

Something's wrong with the Soldier, Bucky Barnes hears them saying. The phrase widens his eyes in an expression mingling rage, bitter humor, a thirst to hurt as he has been hurt... and the erstwhile Winter Soldier, he starts to laugh.

"Nothing is wrong with me now," he says, trying to push past the engagement of Steve and Stasya, as intent on the uncertain Hydra personnel-- his longtime tormentors-- as a hawk on mice. His eyes are wild, mad with the memory of decades of ill use. "You lost your leash." He plunges after them even though they are unarmed and have no defense against him, and who he does not try to shoot, he is content to break in half or pull limb from limb with his bare hands.

Claire Temple has posed:
The shield, ricocheted in perfect angles off the enclosed walls, hits its mark -- the vibranium ringing as it slams into a clustering group of HYDRA guards en route to the noise of the lift. It creates an opening to allow Bucky Barnes to do his work --

-- and to begin taking his vengeance out on the people who once held his fetters.

She's a wolf, says Mercy.

Anastasiya Zhuraleva demonstrates how right she is. In a matter of moments, the woman distorts and rearranges, and in the time of a lunge, she is no longer even human -- but a monstrously-sized wolf not unlike the two packmates Thompson brought to the raid --

That died for the raid. Pitch-black pelt and sharing those same, glacial-pale eyes, the wolf circles Steve Rogers. Hers is a fight of control, man's intelligence against the animal rage, and the latter tips too-heavy, and the creature leaps at him in the precious window that he is without that shield, a full-force slam of huge weight to try to bear him down. Clawed paws tear and those wicked jaws, teeth almost as long as a man's fingers, snap wildly down in violent, furious desperation for his face, his throat -- all those soft places the beast begs to rip open. For his augmented strength, the wolf is a close match -- with just enough an advantage of her fury and momentum. She wants Captain America's blood. She will HAVE this kill, the first enemy of HYDRA, and do what the Winter Soldier could never accomplish.

Blood spills, in hat moment, by his very metal hand. A growing bloodbath that calls the attention of more operatives, yelling in comms to each other -- the Soldier is malfunctioning, SHIELD is here, breach of operations, EVERYONE to level one -- that the team of Sam, Mercy, and Fred are momentarily overlooked.

They have a clean run to a door marked as the stairwell down to the next subterranean level. It is boxed cement on all sides, freshly-lain and newly built, four flights that with distance and space screen the fight above into silence.

By the time they reach Level 2, the entire floor feels like a push through a membrane into a new reality, this one quiet, too-calm. It is one long hallway: the far end has one door marked MEDICAL.

And the opposite end, on their other sides, has a group of three, two men and a woman, arrival in tac equipment and guns, no doubt deployed to the fray above -- and coming straight for the same stairwell the group will be leaving. Interception is imminent. The question is who acts first?

Captain America has posed:
Relief tugs at Steve's expression when the gun enters his grasp, and in a matter of seconds flat, he's firing at the wolf that won't fall so easily. "What I wouldn't give for a silver bullet right about now," he mutters.

With a loud grunt and an even louder thud, the wolf's lunge towards him creams him on the floor, and underneath powerful paws, he struggles to keep the wolf away from cutting his face.

He struggles beneath her, writhing to wrestle against the enraged beast that so desperately wants to finish him. Knowing full-well that the weight of the wolf and his disadvantaged position mean he isn't likely to be able to just push her off, he shoves hard against her with his left hand, allowing his left arm to wriggle free until he press his forearm towards her mouth, offering it to her in a strange kind of sacrifice. Or rather, forcing it to her mouth.

His experience with werewolves is few and far between, but he hopes the SHIELD-tech Kevlar of his suit will be enough to keep his skin intact enough.

This gives him enough leverage to send a punch to the wolf's neck, aiming to cut off its breath hard and fast and give him the moment he needs to get out from underneath her.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Fred continues through the hallway as the ample distraction ensures that they will move along - hopefully - unmolested. As she is up in front, she only barely catches the hesitance of Mercy. What she does hear is the fact that the woman attacking Captain America and Barnes is a wolf. That's certainly information to be recorded, but for now she agrees with Sam - there is not much they can do about it. This might be the only opportunity they have to find Claire and they need to take it.

She's not without sympathy, had Sam not stopped to ensure Mercy traveled with them, she would have slowed. Instead, she is the first to reach the stairwell. Pushing open the door, she holds it to ensure both Mercy and Sam make it inside.

Unable to help herself, she watches what she can of the fray as she holds the door open. Turned the right way at the right time, he sees the woman turn into a wolf and lunge for Steve Rogers. There's a momentary pause, but she knows where her action must be right now and it is, unfortunately, not on this floor. As soon as they are across the threshold, she shuts the door behind them with what she hopes is a barely audible noise amongst the other chaos.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Fury. There is so much anger within Mercy Thompson right now. It's a hot knot of emotion within her chest.

That rage only grows as Mercy quickly considers just how they could have /made/ a wolf here. Darryl. Likely from Darryl, or so Mercy Thompson assumes and that assumption is what causes Mercy to momentarily lose some of her typical logicalness. Before she can commit more than a few steps Sam (thankfully) grabs her arm. That stops the coyote's forward momentum, but it also brings her angry gaze around to the tall Winchester. While not typically ruled by the coyote, or its animalistic instincts, that doesn't mean anger can't cause her to react like it does. As such, Mercy's lip curls back showing her teeth in a display of very un-Mercy-like aggression. "You don't understand - Darryl!" Which says it all for Mercy Thompson and while it does matter, it also doesn't - at least not in the here and now. There are more important things at hand and the more measured side of Mercy manages to reassert itself when Sam drops Claire's name.

That doesn't cause the mechanic's anger to abate, but it's enough to get her back on track. She admits, "You're right." Her tone of voice is harsh, even as she continues with, "It's okay." Then finally ends it, "I'm okay." Giving voice to a (rare) lie, as she finally continues down the hallway (under her own power) and to that door that leads to the stairwell. Upon seeing Fred, Mercy will give the other woman a wordless look of thanks, before Mercy is taking those steps two and sometimes three at a time. Four flights for the coyote doesn't take long and as soon as she's at the door to the second level Mercy all but bursts through. As soon as she's within the second level hallway her gaze immediately turns to the noise of that approaching squad. The look on her face simply reads 'oh shit' and then Mercy's gaze is dropping to the hellfire molotov that's still held in her hand. While she hadn't really ever intended to use these against regular humans (only superhuman assassins) that slim-easily-shattered tube is /thrown/ at the approaching squad. As soon as the molotov is out of her hand Mercy shouts a warning, "Got a squad here!"

Sam Winchester has posed:
If there is one thing Sam Winchester is used to dealing with-- and understands really well-- it's anger. In this case, the anger and anguish of knowing that a friend has been used to give Nastya the powers she so coveted. His eyes are sympathetic, but his grip, hard and steely, does not abate until the coyote says she's okay and moves to continue down the hallway. Then he lets her go. Fred takes the rear, and he slips behind Mercy, nodding to her, appreciating her letting him...well. Be a big Winchester meat shield.

But then Mercy is sprinting, and he hustles to keep up, swearing a little under his breath. She throws molotovs, and he lifts his Beretta. He uses his superior height to fire his Beretta over her shoulder, to try to finish off anyone of those men who weren't taken by the blast of the burning flame, his features blank with focus.

One shot. Two. Three.

He wants these people down fast, so that they can get Claire while the distraction upstairs is ongoing.

Winter Soldier has posed:
For a few critical moments, the erstwhile Winter Soldier loses himself in pure fury against his longtime slavers. He plunges into their midst, ripping them apart bodily, a maddened animal finally loose from its cage and free to wreak a very visceral sort of vengeance. With zero compunctions, he kills everyone that comes within reach, tearing loose limbs and opening throats with the edge of a drawn knife. He would find it a poetic sort of justice, if he were capable of forming coherent thoughts. They made him the weapon he is. Let them feel what it is like to have the weapon turned on them.

He snarls to himself as they shout that the Soldier is malfunctioning. The fuckers frame it that way? They don't even frame him as a man capable of volitionally turning traitor, but as a machine that has to break to go turncoat? How fucking dare they--

The only thing that snaps him out of it is the sight of Steve going down beneath the werewolf. The rage breaks beneath the weight of an instinct far older than his abuse by Hydra-- the instinct to protect Steve Rogers. It's still there, even beneath the new man he has become... a man soaked in blood from the people he's already killed. He breaks off and swivels around to run straight back, pelting down the hall to try to hit the monstrous wolf in a ruthless clothesline with his metal left arm, simultaneous with Steve's own effort to punt her off himself.

It tries to follow up by wrapping about the wolf's neck in a literal steel headlock, the arm whirring loudly as Bucky leverages all its inhuman strength in a vicious attempt to throttle the breath out of her.

"Go, Steve," he barks. "They're heading down to the next level, they need one of us with them."

Or they might not, though Bucky certainly isn't privy to that knowledge. Mercy, fueled by rage, starts right in with the hellfire. It doesn't look anything like a conventional explosive, so the squad doesn't seem to know quite what to do with it other than try to dodge.

The hall filling up with furious augmented flame, of course, means dodging is useless.

The flames eat into their gear, and with cries of shock they try to smother out the flames -- to strip off their outer armor when that doesn't work. This leaves them easy targets for Sam's shots, the three Hydra personnel going down as the enhanced fire burns slowly down. A path clears again...

But behind them, they can hear the distinct sound of more reinforcements coming up the stairwell from the lower levels, responding to the crisis on sublevel one.

Claire Temple has posed:
The wolf bears mercilessly down on Captain America, and those killer jaws snap down on him --

-- and stop, arrested by his forearm before they can close onto his throat, canines sinking into and through the kevlar-weave and coming so close he can feel their tips pinching force into his skin. The beast snarls and shakes her head ruthlessly, that back-and-forth rip of predators tearing flesh, trying and trying desperately to tear through his armor and taste the blood her instincts bay her to consume. That blood HYDRA has wanted for decades. Rogers, in their grasp --

The creature tries to bear down, her blunted nails digging into his shoulders to hang on -- but Captain America sneaks a punch in, augmented strength driving force into the she-wolf's neck. Stasya yelps in pain, forced off, but with a lupine quickness reorients herself back to her paws to tense anew, recoiling.

Then that metal arm collars in and chokes her up, and the werewolf howls, until its locking plates brank her silent. The creature twists and struggles, jaws snapping uselessly at the air, panting as she's slowly choked.

Down on Level 2, the cleansing hellfire works as promised -- and Sam's shots hit their mark and make three corpses. And with the concussive hallway echoing the sounds with approaching forces from the levels deep below, there is one route for the group to go.

The one they're here to take, after all.

There is only down the hall in a quick sprint to the door marked as MEDICAL, closed but unlocked. Opening it bears something, however, hitting senses fast for those who can sense it.

Magic. The room is thick with its stain. It is old. Older that this world. Older than sin. Something primordial -- something ancient.

It hangs like a cloying ceiling down on an otherwise empty room. No doctors or medical personnel. Just unfinished walls and draping plastic to provide sterility to something barely-built. The are beds, some empty, others filled with sheet-wrapped corpses, no doubt awaiting cremation. Faces they don't recognize. All marked: TO BE DISPOSED.

Through the stink of magic, Claire Temple's scent is here. Following it is possible, and leads to one of those side-by-side rows of metal beds. She's in the AWAITING DISPOSAL line-up, bedded between two wrapped corpses. Clad in a medical gown, still left strapped to the bed, is the missing nurse: looking unmarked from captivity, physically unhurt, though her dark, vacant eyes gaze sightlessly into somewhere far away.

Captain America has posed:
While Cap's forearm makes a much safer chewtoy than his face, the feeling of sharp canines pressing into it leaves him all too aware of his own vulnerability. His punch gives him short-lived space. The wolf's weight is just too much for him to adequately kick off at this angle.

But that brief reprieve turns to rescue when Bucky headlocks the woman. Steve's shoulders fall back to the ground and he inhales a single long breath with a shake of his head before pressing himself back to his feet.

The space Steve finds with Bucky holding the woman in a headlock has him running back to where the shield ricocheted from one wall to the next. In a cloud of dust, he kicks it, causing it to lift in the air. Steadfast grasp catches the shield and his gaze slides back towards Bucky. Those same blue eyes stare at Bucky a few beats. "Not without you, Buck." There's a short pause and then he adds, "They need both of us with them," if the werewolf is any indication.

But the statement doesn't have him lingering long. "We need to get them a way out of here," he's moving towards the lift and then he adds, "and torch whatever's left on the way out." Slash and burn typically doesn't suit his style, but the fact Hydra continues to exist decades later despite all of their efforts during the War wears on Steve.

The path of least resistance is the one to the elevator, and despite the seriousness of the situation, he fights the smirk on his face. He pushes the button, and the doors respond.

A tick of his head bids Bucky join.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Mercy's argument that they don't understand is met with a look of sympathy, but Sam has already said the most convincing argument as to why the need to keep moving: they need to get Claire out of here. Fred is right behind Mercy and Sam as they tear down the stairs.

Once into the 'it's too quiet' hallway, Fred pauses at the trio of tactical clad guars coming their way. The magnet bomb is prepped, but there is no need. Mercy has a molotov bomb ready to go and Sam's Bereetta will hopefully take care of anything else. Instead of the fight, the physicist's attention is drawn to the door: Medical. That's where Sam said he saw Claire in his vision.

While the others take care of the guards, Fred books it down the hallway. She can hear the other guards coming up the stairwell, they have no time to lose. She reaches the door, hand going for the lock picks in her back pocket, but they prove unnecessary. The door opens when she tests it. As it pushes open, she is careful, unsure of what might be inside and who might be waiting there. However, upon hearing no movement, she enters.

Fred is not exactly trained, but she can feel the prickling of the hairs on her arms an at the back of her neck as she moves inside. Once inside, she pauses, horrified to see all the corpses, covered in sheets and ready to be 'disposed.' It takes her a few moments, but - grim faced - she starts to search for the nurse.

It's by following Mercy that they find her. "Claire!" she gasps, immediately moving to remove the restraints that hold her to the bed. "Claire! It's Mercy and Fred, we're going to get you out of here. It's going to be alright."

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Mercy watches the flames ignite. She watches as the two men and one woman try to valiantly quell the flames upon the gear, but it's all for nought as Sam's gun barks three times. Finishing the job.

It's enough to cause the coyote to stare for a second at the down bodies and then she resolutely turns her eyes away from the tableau of flame and death. This isn't about playing fair, it's about winning. Mercy keeps that thought in mind as she looks toward the door marked 'Medical'. Then just like that they're on the move - to that door - and hopefully to finding their missing friend. Especially as the sounds of reinforcements (and not for them) can be heard.

While there is a brief moment of warning for Mercy, when Fred opens that door, that something isn't all right with that room, the coyote still steps inside. As soon as she's within the room those sure-footed steps of Mercy's turn to a stagger. The heaviness within the room presses down hard upon her senses, and Mercy can only offer a mutter of, "My god.", as she struggles with the pressure of magic. With steps that still falter Mercy tries to focus, to push past the stain of ancient magic that's within the room. This causes Mercy Thompson to focus on her other senses now. Hearing, sight, but most specifically smell. That's what allows the coyote to find a familiar scent - Claire.

While her steps become steadier, the pinched look around Mercy's eyes and mouth continues to stay there. It's a winding path through the bodies (so many of them), but Mercy does get the two of them to Claire's bedside. Seeing their friend staring so sightlessly, Mercy can't quite stop an echoing gasp of, "Claire!" And while Fred works upon the restraints, Mercy checks for a pulse. "Oh thank god." The coyote says, relief seen within her expression, heard within her voice, "She has a pulse." Because for a minute there Mercy really did fear Claire was dead. "Let's get her out of here, I can carry her." And then, "There's so much magic in this room. Old magic."

Sam Winchester has posed:
"I'm right behind you," Winchester the Younger tells the two women grimly, even as the stench of blood, viscera, and burning flesh fills his nostrils.

Why? Because Sam Winchester hears the reinforcements coming from the lower levels. He's a firm believer in 'fight smarter, not harder,' so he bypasses the medical room and continues his charge down the stairs two and three at a time, barreling straight to the door separating level two from level three. He goes trusting Fred and Mercy to handle various Claire wranglings. He does this because he knows he's got to make sure those Hydra soldiers don't get through that door. He's holstering his gun as he sprints, drawing a knife instead, slicing hard into his hand. The blood wells up, thick, dark, red. He may consume it, now, but he sheds it just as freely. It's almost a bookend to his actions upstairs, a bookend that neatly encompasses his new dual nature. Fiend, and friend. Hero, and heretic. Demon child and do-gooder.

But of course, he's not drawing his own blood for the sake of poetry.

The principle behind a basic hedge mage's blood ward is simple: like any spell embraced by the so-called magical have-nots of the mystic community, those who do not have any inherent mana or power akin to that carried by the Harry Dresdens and Zatanna Zataras of the world, it draws upon symbols, words, and concepts that are so well-worn and ingrained into the collective consciousness that essentially every member of certain cultures ends up powering the thing with a little bit of their belief every single day, whether they actively think about the spell or not. This principle is why every hedge spell must be precise in every component, whether those components are rare ingredients, symbols, words, or gestures. It would be a mistake to think of those spells as weak; if one has the education one can do a lot very little power; a tiny bit, a spark, really, to catch into a massive flame of supernatural strength.

Today, Sam chooses the same ward that he's put on a certain storage unit, the one that hides his most precious possession right now-- the vengeance demon he's using as his personal keg.

It starts with blood, the secret of life, sacrificing some of his pain and life force to provide that tiny, necessary spark, to tell the universe that he is willing to bear the pain to enact his will along these well worn universal grooves in reality's landscape. This he uses to paint a sigil upon that door; two interlocking circles, with a square where they meet, two lines straight down from the inner line of the larger topmost circle that bisect the smaller, a pair of lines from the top of the smaller circle that run at angles, a sweep of a half circle between the topmost, with a pair of what look like horns. An ancient sigil, a bar against entry, originating, he thinks, from Eastern European witchcraft traditions-- maybe Romania, maybe Moldova, though he's certainly mongrel enough to take whatever he can from wherever he can. And the source hardly matters now, because this one is old, and familiar.

Then, the incantation. In Latin, as it must be so very often, because the language spread all over the world. Certainly it spread to ancient Dacia, the same region from whence this symbol was born. The association of this so-called dead language is strengthened in spellwork thanks to the influence of the church over the centuries, then, later, books, movies, comic books, and video games, making it, and a handful of others, a powerful component in many, many hedge spells. It's a very necessary component in this one.

Sam's pronuncation is precise and as flawless as if he'd been there, speaking the language to buy bread from street vendors under the watchful eyes of the agents of wrathful emporers.

"Obstant. Facubius nulla consors nisi sanguinem."

Bar the way. Let none pass save those who share my blood.

If Misha is here, and truly a sorcerer, and below, well, that won't hold out long, the man can surely break a ward as easily as Sam can set one. But he hopes the spell jams t

Sam Winchester has posed:
that door long /enough/ to avoid a firefight on two fronts.

Winter Soldier has posed:
The metal arm strains and howls as it suppresses the werewolf with savage force. Bucky's features are locked in unremitting, merciless blankness as he throttles Anastasiya from behind, positioned such that she cannot claw him or twist to gain any purchase TO claw him. She tries to turn, to snap, to twist, and he meets and counters every attempt, shifting deftly to keep himself behind her and his arm locked about her throat.

"You never could match me," he tells her, and it's Winter Soldier talking. "You still can't, even with this. And now I'm going to kill you."

And he might have spent a long, loving time on ensuring just that -- but Steve won't go without him, and Bucky can't honestly blame him. With a frustrated noise he twists his arm, breaking the werewolf's neck in his grip, then drawing a pistol to put a bullet in her head. He has no assurances that this will kill her, given the rather special properties of werewolves -- much less ones tampered with by Hydra -- but it's the best he can do under the circumstances and the limited time.

"Come on," he grunts, joining Steve in the elevator and impatiently jamming the close door button. Blood dries on his face, his left arm, his body. He makes no move to clean himself up. "I know a shortcut."

It's one that gets them from the elevator over to the medical ward in record time. About the same time Fred and Mercy finally find Claire, amidst all the other bodies earmarked for DISPOSAL. On seeing her, he goes pale under the blood streaking his face; turning away in abrupt silence, he tries to head back towards the door to the med ward, apparently intent to defend it against enemy forces.

And this: "Where's Sam?"

Claire Temple has posed:
Fred's initial shouts of her name do not rouse Claire Temple. Her heart beats and she breathes shallowly, obviously alive, obviously conscious --

-- but nonresponsive. Her opened eyes gaze at some spot that is neither her nor the approaching Mercy, neither woman recognized. It appears that she does not even realize they are there. When Fred works on undoing those leather straps around her wrists -- the skin is raw and abraised and bruised beneath it, she was /fighting/ -- her freed limbs hang limply.

Her sightless eyes twitch back-and-forth as if reading some invisible script.

As Sam executes his incantation and lays down that ward --

-- the timing is impeccable, wrought with the closing sounds of approaching men hiking up from the stairwell of Level 3. They push against doors that hold, solid and true, not with any sort of lock but bound with the barrier of live magic. It holds HYDRA reinforcements, unable to ascend this way up. Distantly, a man speaks something sharply: call Volkov.

The active ward moves through Sam. And it hits something else -- something strong, like two spells sharing little space.

Captain America has posed:
The gruffness of Barnes' manner meets odd silence from Captain Rogers in the elevator. For his part, underneath his mask, Steve appears stoic, detached, and crisp, yet his blue eyes speak to something else. The haunted expression behind them doesn't quite go away, even as he nods with confidence at the short cut. There's an implied //good//, but it doesn't even find words.

Instead, his thoughts trail to the would-be werewolf. "What are the chances she's actually dead?" There's a pause and he frowns. "Doesn't seem like anyone stays dead anymore." Observations from a man out of time.

He trails after Bucky and eyes the hallway at the question. //Where is Sam?// "We'll find him--" and Steve is already on the move, pressing passed the space the others occupy, shield in hand, to retrieve Sam.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
The sudden appearance of a bloodied Barnes and Steve startles Fred. They aren't coming from the same direction she expects Sam to enter. With Hydra coming from the stairwell, it's just as likely for them to enter from a different way. Immediately, she halts her unshackling of Claire whens he hears them coming and grabs the crossbow from her bag. She turns about to fire it at the intruders, pulling the trigger as soon as she sees the battle stained pair of super soldiers. She sees the bright red, white and blue shield a bit too late.

"Sorry!" She hisses, horrified that she might have shot Captain America. "I thought you were them!" She would feel far less guilty if Barnes were alone, perhaps blaming him for sneaking up on them. Shoving the crossbow right back into her bag, embarrassed and slightly frantic with the need to get Claire out of here as soon as possible, she turns back to the restraints. It takes a few tries, but she unstraps the nurse, wincing as she sees the reddened bruises. As gently as possible, she attempts to help Mercy lift her so they can make a hasty retreat. Despite the fact that Claire does not answer them, she keeps talking to her in a steadying voice. "We've got you, Claire. It's going to be okay."

For once, Fred does not argue with Barnes or sound petulant and angry as she answers his question. Instead, she gives information, sounding worried. "He said he was right behind us." However, he's not in the room with them just yet.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
All the magic around them it's enough to cause Mercy's attention to keep shifting around. And while her attention is split between Claire, Fred and the magic within the room, that doesn't stop her from hearing the approaching footsteps. Nor the scents that precede them. Familiar scents, even if one is tinged horribly with blood.

It's only when Fred stops with the unshackling that Mercy has a second to look perplexed, opening her mouth to ask why, before suddenly there's a crossbow in the other woman's hands. Mercy can't quite stop the widening of her eyes and then, "Fred, wait it's -!" But too late, the quarrel is already on it's way. "- friendlies."

One can only hope the two super soldiers dodge out of the way. Which they should hopefully do that, right? They are super soldiers.

Then it's back to Claire and when Fred finishes unbuckling the restraints Mercy quickly picks the other woman. Even with Fred's help it doesn't seem like the Nurse's weight is much of a burden, as Mercy immediately takes a step away form the beds and that 'disposable' line. Even with those steps of hers the coyote can't quite stop the look she's turning around the room. "What were they messing with?" She asks, more to herself than anyone, and while she almost begins to walk a circuit of the room her steps pause when Sam is mentioned. That brings Mercy's attention straight back to the group and their current situation. Thankfully, Fred answers that question and Mercy helpfully nods along in agreement, and while normally she'd have likely sensed those blood wards being deployed, tonight she doesn't. There's just too much magic within the room and it's drowning out her senses to anything but it.

Sam Winchester has posed:
Sam Winchester shivers as that second spell reverberates within his very soul. It charges him up with adrenaline, even moreso than the soldiers on the other side.

As a result, he hauls ass. They won't have to conduct much of a search for Sam. He comes charging up the stairs three at a time, those long Moose legs carrying him quickly. He's out of breath when he sticks his head back through the stairwell doors leading to the second level, taking in the whole of the team. "I've trapped the reinforcements downstairs, but they're getting Volkov and the spell won't last. And there's another spell running..."

He trails off.

The moment he gets a real good look at Claire, with her twitching eyes giving off that sense that she's reading an invisible script, he knows.

"Oh no," he murmurs.

His head snaps up. "...and they're using her as the power source. The lynchpin. For all I know she's the whole spell circle. And whatever has been done would take /me/ days to study; I sure don't know what to do about it /now/. We need Liam. Not that this changes the plan much, but seriously, we'd better move." Because if that spell triggers while they're still trapped inside of the Hydra facility, he has a feeling they are all 10 kinds of toast.

He's...not really entirely sure that they won't be ten kinds of toast no matter where they land when that thing goes off. Maybe, /maybe/, a salt circle would stop it. Or it might just contain it, and explode Claire in backlash energies.

Winter Soldier has posed:
The odd silence doesn't go unmissed. Bucky glances askance at Steve, notices the look in his friend's eyes, and pales. His own eyes avert, and he makes a cursory attempt to scrub the blood from his face that emphatically doesn't work. Looking down at the floor of the elevator, he swallows, and says a whole lot of nothing himself.

His shamed silence persists until Steve speaks again. "Don't know," he says, still subdued and avoiding his friend's eyes. "Probably pretty low."

I wish I had stayed dead, he wants to say, but even he can recognize that it's probably not the best thing to say to his current company.

The sight of Claire doesn't do much to dispel or distract from the guilt -- it only adds more guilt of a different form and shape, his shoulders slumping visibly. No, what does serve as a distraction is the sudden way Fred whirls and fires a crossbow at himself and Steve. Startled, Bucky reacts on a hairtrigger, left arm snapping up to catch the bolt midflight with a metallic whir.

Sorry, she says. "...doesn't matter," Bucky answers, tossing the bolt back to her. "Better to be on guard than not."

He turns back towards the door at the news Sam should be 'right behind them,' apparently intent on finding the younger man. He doesn't have far to go, however, before Sam shows up at a run with a lot of information, none of it good. Bucky frowns in silence at the news Claire is the focus of some spell being channeled. "Can we at least move her?" he asks, maintaining his position near the entrance with apparent intent to hold off any sudden arrivals.

Claire Temple has posed:
As Sam's ward holds strong for now, and the group reconvenes together in Medical, the room around them remains innocuously calm. Quiet.

There is little sound save for the distant movement of the stopped HYDRA reinforcements far below, and the exchange of the group's voices.

Claire Temple offers little. Set free of her restraints, she looks away and hangs in her helpless cataonia. Her eyes ring dark and raw with sleepless stress, and her heart pounds in triple-time.

With Fred and Mercy's help, she slings into the latter's arms, a boneless, slack give to her limbs of someone not home. And yet, her lips seem to be trying to move, even if sound cannot form.

Sam Winchester is right.

There comes a crackle of disturbed magic that he will sense and Mercy will smell, an active spell triggered --

Claire is the conduit, but only one half of the trap. The other is the metal bed, and freed of her mass and weight, the furniture scours over with runes. Something deliberately set -- something that activates only upon someone moving her. Something someone expected would happen with this conveniently-laid bait.

The change happens in an instant.

Magic claws into every living person here, too powerful to be denied -- like a magic older than the concepts of matter and energy and with the liberty to help itself freely to both. The world goes to black and their senses snuff out.

Like a rebirth, when everyone awakens again, it is only in one way: alone.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
                                    -FRED-                                    

There's both relief and a twinge of annoyance that Barnes brushes off the crossbow bolt so easily. On the one hand that's good, as she didn't hurt anyone of their raiding party. However, to know how easy it is for him to defend against her attacks just goes to show how unprepared she might have otherwise been against the Winter Soldier.

Fred's face turns toward the door, intent on following the soldiers out to find Sam as soon as Claire is properly in Mercy's arms. Just as she looks in that direction, Sam bursts through and she takes a sigh of relief. He was gone for long enough that it's possible something had happened to him. The relief is incredibly short lived.

Claire is being used as a battery? What does that even mean? Fred tosses a worried look back at the catatonic nurse. The plan hasn't changed. They need to get her out of here before her battery is used up. "Okay," she says softly, resolutely. The easiest way out is almost certainly the way Barnes and Cap came through. Mercy now safely has Claire. It's time to go.

Unfortunately, Fred doesn't even get a step in the right direction before the blast of magic energy hits her. Much like Indiana Jones and the golden idol, with the counter balance out of sync, the trap triggers and the spell crashes into them all. This feels almost like a sensation she's felt before, back in the LA library. Fred barely gets out a cry that sounds something like a sob before the world goes black.

Claire Temple has posed:
Reawakening comes in the form of soft, familiar things: a slant of dawn light over her eyes. The chilly breeze of the early morning. The slow and innocuous drip drip drip of water.

Did Sam possibly not turn the bathroom tap off all the way? Thoughts like this may come to a mind still half-fettered by sleep, for this feels like a lethargic pull away from that drowse, and with that the safety of coming to someplace familiar. It is difficult to think immediately of things like the HYDRA raid, the hospital complex in Staten Island, the memories of the Winter Soldier, or the promise to find Claire Temple.

Transient, meaningless things. Images a whisper in her mind wants to convince her was all a dream.

Only the first breath in tastes cloyingly sweet on the throat: earthy, musty, like basements, like wet dirt. And that sound of dripping is closer than it should be.

Because it's falling not from some bathroom tap, but off the rock of the ceiling, collecting dew pooling down in its lazy meter. Deeply familiar sounds. The most familiar she knows.

More familiar than her nights over at Sam's apartment. More familiar than her safe room at the Hyperion Hotel.

Because the cave that welcomes Fred, dressed back in her itchy rags, surrounded in her handmade, broken things, is the one she's awakened to every morning for years.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Fred's eyes blink open and she shoves herself up, as if waking from a nightmare. "Sam?!" The name slips out of her mouth, unsure of what it actually means. A hand goes to her back pocket, searching for something there. Wait, pocket? No, there's no pockets. There's nothing there. Just the rags. Of course, there's always just the rag. What was she expecting? "Angel?" What's an angel? No, that's not right.

The water drips, comforting, something she knows. "Mercy?" Is she asking for mercy? No, there's no mercy on Pylea. She knows that by now only too well. A hand adjusts the collar about her neck. No, it was just another nightmare, like all those ones where she's a physicist student and lives in a place where humans aren't slaves. There's no place actually like that. Words are just words until they're not actually words, they're just thoughts that don't make sense.

A hand snatches up her glasses on the ledge nearby where she sleeps - taking a pointed rock to scratch onto the wall at the same time. She's gotta write this out, make it go away. Finding an empty space on the entirely covered walls, she starts to scratch. "T minus vx over c squared divided by the square root...."

Claire Temple has posed:
The cave welcomes her the same way it does every day: in silence and cold indifference. It provides shelter but it is no home.

All it does is provide a place, small and dark, for her to hide from Them: the demons who would find her, take her back, shock her, remove her head.

Memory fights inside her mind: it was so vivid. Was it a dream? Was it real? But she /did/ those things, right? Didn't she?

With her decision to sort it the only way she can -- with her math -- the woman takes to a clean spot on the wall for her calculations.

Minutes pass as she fills it, until there is no space --

-- because that section of the wall is filled with other things. Her own writing, easily recognized --

And it comes back. New York. Angel. His friends. Her new life. Sam. The forming circle of people.

She's written 'Sam Winchester' on the wall. Details about him. How he looks. His life as he's told it to her. A footnote: he loves me.

There are other names, spreading in the long manifesto along the walls. Chapters. Stories after another. Stories she wrote. Stories she weighed and calculated and solved.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Fred writes, muttering to herself as she does so, equations that almost sort of make sense. The equations and drawings on this wall are not entirely scientific, they're stories, memories, attempts to get the painful thoughts out of her head.

The nightmares linger longer this time. She can still feel the adrenaline, the fear, the need to find someone. She shakes her head - dirty hair falling in front of her eyes - trying to clear it. Thinking that there's something other than this place only leads to pain. She knows that for a fact.

Then, though, the equation she was starting to write overlaps with another word. Angel. She blinks and pulls back...a vision hits her. A tall brooding man in all black, giving her a worried look. 'I will always try to be there to save you Fred. Always.' Handsome man. Saved her from the monsters. Wait, what monsters was she saved from? They're still out there, waiting. No, that can't be right.

She moves to search out another clean space, to try and write this away, but her eyes move over more of the story and find the story of Sam Winchester. He loves her. A hand tentatively reaches forward to touch the footnote. Her eyes close for a moment and she can feel the warmth found in the circle of a strong pair of protective arms, a voice in her ear: 'There isn't a dimension in existence I wouldn't follow you to. You're not alone anymore.'

Her eyes open. Now, she studies the other chapters, the equations that equal a life away from Pylea. Building bombs in Mercy's garage, the trust she put in the coyote and the friendship she found with her. Wesley and his books, his steadying way of helping. Even Dean, calling her bro and handing her a beer.

"Claire..." she says softly. The rock is set down beside her. She steps back from the wall and looks around her. The rocks, the smell, the dripping water...even the rags, they feel so real. They're familiar. This is what is real, right? No. Yes? No. No.

Fred keeps backing up, a hand reaching up to hold onto the deactivated collar about her neck. She looks toward the mouth of the cave and then back to the wall filled with her writings.

Claire Temple has posed:
Is it real? Yes or no?

Something presses into her mind. It tries to sound like her, like the voice everyone hears of their own self rehearsing their thoughts, but the seams are not yet straight. Like a foreign force, magic, wanting to undo and rewrite her into the reality of its choosing.

One where the potential memory /wants/ to come forward, and wants to imprint into her mind:

The memory of Fred, standing here alone in her cave, rock in hand, writing these stories. Making them up and writing them down. Scripting the hallucinations that are beginning to form. The human mind can only take so much. So much pain. So much despair. So much loneliness, day after day of it in this hell, with nothing for the lost Winifred Burkle but the thoughts in her head. Doesn't the mind need to make up the rest to carry on? Make up a cast? Make up a story? Make up a life for her, where she's happy?

Was it real? Or is she losing her mind?

It's her, whispers something up from the back of her head, trying to coax those errant questions away. Just pick up the rock and keep etching. Keep writing. Write how she helps save Claire Temple. Write how everyone survives and strengthens their bonds together. Write how Sam looks as he tells her he loves her.

Write something and seal it.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
The hand grips the collar even tighter. Fred can feel the metal dig into the back of her neck. It feels real. She can feel the pressure, a bite of pain.

More than that, she can feel the loneliness, the chatter of her own words in the back of her mind. That's all familiar, all readily washed back into her thoughts. It's only too easy to believe these thoughts are all made up. She believed LA and Earth was a lie for four years. How hard is it to believe that a life where she has a family, friends and someone who loves her is also a lie to make herself feel better?

It's her. This is all her.

Moving forward, she picks up the rock again. She thinks about how she would end the story of saving Claire Temple from the Hydra base. She can complete that story. There's an equation there.

Then, she thinks about Sam, sitting on a bed in an abandoned hotel with a stuffed rabbit between them. She weaves the scenery of a dust covered crossroad.

No, the footnote is wrong. Her eyes drift back to it. It's inaccurate, incomplete. While she knows Sam loves her, she loves him, too. That's not just in her head. That's real.

Scrambling backward, she looks around her. This is all wrong. She's not supposed to be here. With a burst of energy, she tosses the rock at the cave's wall and she stumbles toward the entrance of the cave.

Claire Temple has posed:
The whispers in her head beg otherwise. It -- and her, trying so badly to sound like her, to use her voice -- tells her this is /right/.

Give in. Finish the story whatever the way she wishes. It can end in whatever way she chooses. She can fall into it, lose her mind as she's meant to, and spend the rest of her little time adding to her rock-scratch story on the wall.

And when they finally do find her, the slavers she outsmarted once but not forever, perhaps there will be nothing left of her to fight them. Perhaps nothing left of her to even be afraid. She'll be safe in her story, with Sam Winchester whispering his sweet things into her head.

But the woman rejects it and lets the rock go.

The entire caves statics, blurring in a single flinch. It does not like this.

As she turns, it even tries to compel her back, begging her this is wrong -- she is wrong -- and she cannot go out there.

Isn't it wrong to go out there? Isn't she meant to stay here, in the dark, in the tight, safe, confined little space? Isn't this where Winifred Burkle belongs? Isn't this what Winifred Burkle /deserves/?

Out there isn't safe. Out there isn't controlled. Nothing is sure, it pleads with her, not even those memories in her head. They're stories, just stories she made up in her madness, none of it is real, and she doesn't love any--

When Fred crosses the threshold and steps out into the light and open air, reality breaks.

It shreds around her, crashing down. And when she awakens, back in Level 2 of that subterranean base, the weight of the collar around her neck is gone.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
This goes against Fred's instincts. Faced with portals and other worlds and with a danger of this level she would want a small, dark, safe place. The demons are out there, the threat of beheading. She knows that.

That may be the case, but she is not the same woman that lived in this cave before. She clings onto that moment of clarity, the moment she knew she was in love with Sam. That's what she deserves: a life not lived in fear. A life filled with family and friends and the man she loves.

The fear still remains lodged in her chest. This might be the wrong choice. The moment she steps outside the cave, she could be captured and killed. That possibility feels real and visceral. However, the vision fractures. That helps strengthen her resolve.

The pleading in her head becomes almost a scream, something impossible to ignore. It tells her there's no Hyperion, no friends, no Sam. She has no connections, no one she loves. No. As if pushing through a strong wind, she keeps moving and steps out of the cave.

Everything changes. The pressure around her neck is relieved and she drops to the floor almost immediately. She's back on the subterranean base. There's a gasp, a disbelieving look around her. Is this real? Is she dreaming this? Is this another nightmare?

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Mercy

Sam's arrival and what he has to say causes a look of concern to begin to wash over the coyote's expression. That expression turns to something more in a matter of seconds as the runic symbols suddenly flare to life. Seeing that and feeling the bubble of magic expand outward, Mercy's expression goes from concerned to outright fear. There's enough time for the woman to state a hurried, "No!", before the magic slashes outward to their group.

Truly, there are times that Mercy wishes she could do more than just change to a coyote and sense magic. Or the ability to see, sense and to some degree control ghosts. Sure, all of that is good, but in this instance? Not so much. Being able to cast spells would help so much more. So. Much. More.

Either way, nothing more can be said by Mercy, as the world fades away like a candle ruthlessly snuffed out. Darkness takes hold and Mercy Thompson's last stray thought is a simple one - don't drop Claire. Then her consciousness, her senses and all her feelings likewise dim until nothing more is there.

Claire Temple has posed:
Reawakening comes in the form of soft, familiar things: the earth smell of fresh-turned dirt. The familiar, sharp taste of autumn down her top palate. The slow and innocuous drip drip drip of wet onto the loam, in one of those lazy Montana rains.

Aspen Creek comes back to Mercy Thompson, where she awakens deep in the heart of its forest: rolling land peopled by a thousand thousand trees, deep rich green where it grows in the shadow of the Rockies. The coniferous forest spreads thick, the great pines joining hands to form a cool, shady environment of brown, leaf-strewn earth thatched with moss. It is the last light of the day and already dark,  and sunset amber filters through the breeze-lifted leaves of the canopy above, shadows gathering in the alleys of the trees.

There is a clearing here to the coyote's awakening, a small, soft patch of free grass fringing a great pond. Trees hang over it, growing towards the water, as if drawn to see their reflections in its black mirror. The water laps quietly at the banks, cool and clear.

The sounds of birdsong usually fill these manless woods, though now they are quiet with the last threads of night song -- before it all goes quiet.

A mouthful of air gives map to where she is: familiar land, scented with her pack. Their territory.

Light reflects off many pairs of eyes from the thick, treed perimeter. Wolf eyes. Her wolves.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Familiar scents. Familiar sounds.

It lulls the coyote's just awakening senses to something more gentle; less sharp, less spastic. Instead, there's a vague twitch to Mercy Thompson's limbs and an opening of her brown eyes. When her gaze sees the canopy above she can't quite stop the frown that twitches her lips downward. Then she's sitting upward and casting a look around herself -

"Wait." She says to herself, her voice quiet, "This isn't -" Right. This isn't right. There was something else. Something more. A group, her friends, not this familiar forest, but that thought doesn't persist long. Nor those words. Especially when her senses suddenly come alive with the fact of /where/ she is and also what's around.

Or more importantly who. The pack. The wolves. Rolling to her feet now, Mercy looks towards the perimeter, her senses easily telling her she's not alone. Seeing the reflection of light upon the (many) predatory eyes that surround her, Mercy says, "Hey. How's the hunt going?"

Because it has to be a hunt they're on, right? This many wolves, her out here too, it must be a hunt. Perhaps for the fledging wolves.

Claire Temple has posed:
Eyes watch her from all sides, the silvery moonlight catching glints and shines off their mirrored lenses. They wink in and out of the dark, here and gone again, the great predators moving through the brush without the sound of a single disturbed branch.

<Hunt,> answers one of the pack, confirming Mercy's called question. The voice creeps through the pack bond, low, slithery -- not like what she remembers.

A dozen pairs of eyes glitter in the dark. From this comes man's old stories of will o' the wisp. Of fool's fire. Fire in the dark lashing off the shining eyes of what hunts them.

<Yes. Hunt.> Another voice. Twisted.

<We hunt.>

The boughs of a spruce shift and part with a hiss of many needles, and the lean, strong, darkened shape of a wolf emerges from the treeline and stalks into the periphery of the cleaning. Shadow folds along every one of the animal's long legs, the roll of its moving shoulders, the low, watchful bow of its thick neck.

The animal's scent catches Mercy before she can see it, even though it should not be, even though it cannot be possible --

The wolf steps into moonlight, and it is not a wolf -- it is a thing, sutured and seamed together in a dozen butchered pieces, burnt and noosed with looping vivasection scars, his brindled pelt gone, lost to raw, weeping, gnarled flesh. He bares jaws with missing teeth, some replaced gunstock-metal, his skeletal head grafted and built into the plates of shining steel.

His dead eyes reflect nothing but rage.

<Not finished,> answers Darryl.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
The pack-bond is typically a shining thing. Bright with the thoughts and emotions of the wolves. Bright with their calls and their communication, but in this moment that brightness is lost.

Darkness is heard in that first answer of hunt. The darkness continues as the pack answers. Each voice as twisted as that original one. It's at this point that Mercy shifts her balance slightly, knowing something isn't right here. Something is very wrong. So wrong. There was magic, a spell -

There was a - there is a monster.

There's a monster now.

That movement within the peripheral of her vision is seen and immediately turned to. When her eyes land upon the wolf known as Darryl, Mercy literally sways; her shock is so great at the sight of him. There's also a pallor to her features now, as Mercy Thompson whispers in horror, "Darryl. No, you're - this isn't right. This isn't real. No." Comes her denial and while Mercy Thompson knows she's committing an error she can't quite stop herself from taking a step backward. Giving ground when she shouldn't, showing fear when she shouldn't. The wolves can likely scent all of that; fear, shock, horror.

And guilt.

And it's that fear and guilt which causes the coyote to move again, a second step, third and finally fourth. Her steps are taking her away from the crudely stitched and reassembled Darryl. Away from the pack. She's going to run. She has to run at this point, or so her brain screams at her.

Winter Soldier has posed:
It's not real. But it might be real enough to kill her.

Fear comes off her, the smell of it heavy and thick in the air. Fear, horror, shame, //guilt//. She can see their eyes shine to taste it. She can see dozens of eyes turn to follow her as she stumbles, backs away, and turns to run.

Her fleeing shape triggers instincts older than the trees rearing tall around them. <Prey!> the chorus goes up. <Prey! PREY.>

The forest in her wake comes alive with the familiar sounds of pursuit, slavering pants and fleet paws following her in the dark. Less familiar, however, are the tortured sounds of metal behind her, the hiss of pistons and grind of gears mingling with the soft natural sounds of flesh. They hound her mercilessly through the dark, hemming her in from three sides, driving her onward towards the pitiless face of a cliff that rears in the distance to eventually block her path.

They funnel her down like a lamed deer.

<Kill,> their shattered voices echo in her head, the sound of them as tortured and mechanized as if they were shredded through a machine and spit back out as a mangled mess. <Kill. They found her. They found US.>

She can hear every last one of them, their voices mutilated in so many distinct and individual ways. They all clamor with rage, with pain, with betrayed hatred.

But not Darryl. Not Darryl, in the forefront, his metal-and-gears body shrieking as it jigsaws through some semblance of movement.

Darryl, he just screams in her head, screams in blind pain every time his ruined body moves.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
It might be. It just might be enough to kill her. Like the first time she ever visited this type of dream scape, where her soul was nearly torn asunder. Only then she had help, but now she has none.

None whatsoever.

She runs, her feet crashing through the underbrush, low hanging branches scraping against arms, legs, even her face. She can see what they're doing - hear what they're doing - she knows what they're doing, but that doesn't stop her flight. Even as she understands she's being herded. How many times have they done this before? Herded an animal to its death. So many times.

The shriek of the tortured metal, of Darryl, is heard by her keen coyote ears, and his mental screams are likewise felt. It's enough to cause the coyote to stumble a time or two, her own breath coming out in harsh pants. It, however, doesn't stop her from continuing to flee. The dark shapes to her side are seen, the wolves behind her heard, and the ever present hate felt. Her mind goes through what she could do, but none of the ideas are good. None end with her surviving this. Just her death.

It goes onward like that as they run her forward and she runs from them. It continues all the way to the face of that cliff and when she reaches that dead-end, Mercy Thompson finds her momentum stopped. She looks at the craggy rock face, breathes in the scents, hears the wolves approach. Feels the bond of the pack; the bond so corrupted, so tortured. So wrong.

Wrong.

That word hangs within her mind. This is wrong. Somehow it is. The bond, the pack, Darryl. /Darryl/. /Aaron/. Slowly now the coyote turns and when she comes around to face the roiling forms of the wolves something is different. A look in her eyes, the expression upon her face - there's still horror yes, but something else. "No." She says, her voice strained, "This isn't right. This is wrong." And as she says that last word energy from within Mercy's own self flares to life. Across her eyes a line of red ochre paste can now be seen. Bordering above and below the stripe of red are much finer, slimmer, lines of green. Red for strength, for bravery, green for life, endurance, for clarity of sight.

Claire Temple has posed:
Howls join on another, stacking upon themselves and climbing high into the night. Higher than the trees. As high as the jagged mountaintops casting darkness against the horizon of starlight.

The prey runs. The pack takes pursuit.

All behind her and all around, weaving through trees, blurring through the darkening forest, are a dozen shapes -- following her, circling her.

Wolves run too fast at her right and force her flight in one way; another close moving body, too-familiar with the soft, muted gallop of padded feet and the deep, ventilating slither of breath, warns of another wolf directing at her back.

Following. Circling. Herding.

Mercy Thompson knows what the pack is doing. Hunting as they've taught her. Hunting as she knows as well as the blood in her own veins: her upbringing, her life, her home. And now turned on her.

The wolves have scented the false coyote finally hiding among their ranks. A false coyote who stepped too sure and too boldly into their territory. A false coyote who must be torn apart and made a lesson.

<WRONG,> they echo back her words.

<Wrong>

<wRONg> sings through the trees.

<FOUND US. TOOK US.> comes a sudden snarl, one tattered, tortured, butchered wolf leaping from the dark to snap jaws just inches from Mercy.

<TRAITOR>

<LIAR>

The pack comes into sight, her pack, all of them broken, misshapen, reanimate things -- not wolves anymore, not beautiful and proud. Dissected experiments. Rewritten monsters. Not alive, not dead -- but found, FOUND as they scream in wild torment, because of /her/, because of what she did to them, because of what she brought to their land.

There are whispers in her head to ratify this. They want her to believe. They want Mercy Thompson to accept the guilt and reality of her sin: to calcify it into this new world. But as she runs, as she flees them, as she comes surrounded in all sides with those screaming, galloping, nightmare wolves, the forest around her -- skips and statics. Red ochre. Lines of green.

It opens a veil -- a single spot of sunlight against all this night. A place different than this. A place that does not belong. She can reach it -- as the wolves follow, snapping at her, desperate to hook their teeth into her flesh.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Their sing-song chants. Their words. Their faces. Their bodies.

The horror they've faced. The pain. The terrible pain.

Their pain.

Traitor. Liar. This is your fault. Those words echo within Mercy Thompson and go a step further within her own mind, her heart - you don't belong here. Interloper. This isn't your place. You're not family. Not a wolf. Not a human. You're nothing. /Nothing/. You. Don't. Belong. Anywhere.

How many times had she heard that? How many times did she feel that way? It's what made her run in the end. What little happiness she found within the pack ripped away by those who thought she didn't belong. By those who thought they knew what was best for her. And while her expression crumples and her body curves inward slightly against this onslaught, that doesn't stop the coyote from seeing her escape.

It doesn't stop her from running toward it. Even as teeth snap, beasts snarl, and claws gouge deeply into the earth. None of it stops Mercedes Thompson from running to that mote of light, nor moving to step through it.

Away from this nightmare.

"I'm sorry." Are the coyote's last words to the ravening beasts, as she escapes, "I'm so sorry."

Captain America has posed:
Steve

Relief tinges the edges of Steve's expression when Sam returns. They all came in together, and standard operations say they're all getting out together. But Sam's words cause it to dissipate. Bucky's question merits a small tick of his head, "I don't think we have a choice. We all need to out of here," because Sam said he would have to study it. And if they need Liam, then they'll have to have time to find him. "We need an exit, Buck--" his friend knew a shortcut to this space; maybe he also knows a way out of here.

The runes that appear along the metallic bed earn a crisp lift of Cap's eyebrows behind the mask. Thanks to his post during the war, Steve Rogers is no stranger to the weird that Hydra produces, yet magic remains one of the oddest forms of Hydra trouble he has encountered. That said he's not an entire stranger either. The mystery of the runes and their entrancing nature, therefore, act as a warning system. He reaches out to draw everyone to the ground, "Get do--" but the word is eaten.

The dizzying nature of the magic sweeps over him, causing his knees to buckle beneath it and the world disappears before him. Black enters his conscious. And, much like when the ice overcame him, he's enveloped in the magic's power: mind, soul, and body all fall victim to the magic's will.

There's no fight in the frozen.

Claire Temple has posed:
The freeze took him this way before. It feels like a fall, a plummet through endless thin air, and then --

Reawakening comes in the form of soft, familiar things: music playing, thick and tinny, from a wood console radio, the song being Here in my Heart from Al Martino. The flat, over-warm smell of an apartment, mid-day light venting in through heavy drapes. The distant, drifting sounds of a city bleeding in from outside and below -- the noisy, grinding sounds of car motors rattling in ways he has always heard his entire life and not at all this past year thawed from the ice. The smell of cooking stew layers on the air. The slow and innocuous drip drip drip of rain on the windows.

He is himself, sitting back in some well-tailored armchair, taking throne in the sitting room of this apartment and surrounded by darkly-painted, carved walls, ensconced with tasteful decor -- the familiar things of a lived-in home.

The last of which stares up at Steve Rogers at one of his knees.

She looks about seven, small and with her dark hair tightly-braided, with blue eyes the same colour as his. In them is the same conviction as his too, stubborn and fiery, as she declares in prim accusation: "You're not /playing/, papa! I /told/ you to come find me!"

The little girl speaks in perfect King's English.

Captain America has posed:
It's jarring in its own way. The strange wash of peace at being somewhere so foreign yet so familiar. Comfort has been a luxury for many years, and here, in this place, it fits like a glove. He sound of the rain at the window, the waft of the stew--everything about it feels like home. Even the objects grant some sense of belonging.

It's been a long time since Steve Rogers has belonged anywhere.

Or has it?

He can't tell. Nor does he want to fight it. The beauty of it washes away the sounds that continue to echo in his mind. They're drowned by the hearth of home.

The child at his knee earns a faint quirk of a smile--haunted by something he can't quiet put his finger on. But her insistence that he should be playing wins her something far easier. "Oh Susie," his lips hitch up on one side with a brilliant flash of teeth, "I think I fell asleep." His smile turns dimpled with his admission. "Don't tell your mom." He presses his finger to his lips. That will be their little secret. "Should Iount again?" His eyes sparkle with unbridled mischief while he inches off the chair. "I suppose I need to close my eyes and do the whole thing again."

His hands press over his eyes, "I know, I know, no peeking," the laugh in his voice is unmissable. "One... two... three... four..."

Winter Soldier has posed:
There's only a brief rapping on the front door, before it opens to admit a cannonball of a little girl, probably about eight, with flying brown braids and impudent blue eyes. Following behind her is a familiar-yet-unfamiliar man, who shoulders his way in the ease of someone assured of his perfect right to come and go at all times.

"No running in the house, Mary," Bucky scolds, kicking the door shut behind him again. "How many times have I told y-- ow!" This, because the bundle of two year-old settled in the crook of his left arm has just insistently pulled his hair. Short hair, cut neatly-- not straggling, not unkempt. "Fine--"

Disentangling the wriggling toddler's determined grip, he sets her down to crawl, letting her loose from a whole and unharmed left arm. No metal, no slithering steel plates, no gears (why would there be?). He pauses a moment, glancing at his wrist, but there's no watch to be seen there.

The gesture is there and gone, Bucky straightening back up. "Clara would've come, but she's home with Judith," he makes excuse, still paying more attention to his children than Steve. "She's got the flu again. They can't come up with that universal vaccine fast enough..."

He finally notices the current activity. "I guess this is where I distract you so Susie gets a big old head start on hiding," he says, loud enough for little girls to hear.

Captain America has posed:
The sound of the door prompts Steve's hands to fall despite the fact he's not supposed to be peeking. Even the counting ceases when his gaze lingers on Bucky. The smile that draws over him turns bittersweet, eerily painful yet broken with beauty, and he can't figure out why. Every tinge of him struggles to understand what he can't put his finger on, but the girls and their machinations draw him away from the thought and into Dad-Uncle mode.

He rises to his feet and takes several large paces to close the distance between them. He's not wholly sure why, but impulsively, he reaches out to hug his friend, skipping on any of the designed niceties so many resort to in order to preserve semblance of masculinity. The smile remains a few more beats until he processes the words and takes a step back into his own space.

"Judy going to be okay?" because that's all that really matters. The mention of the game has his lips quirking into a mischievous very lopsided grin. "Yeah. Give me a minute to find Susie and I'll get you a drink," he reaches out to clap Bucky on his back before motioning towards the living room where he'd just been seated. "Take a load off. Make yourself at home, Buck." And then, as an afterthought he calls: "Ready or not, here I come!"

He peers down the small hallway of the apartment in search of a small person.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Bucky grins, a little bemusedly, as Steve gives him that strange look and then comes right in for a hug. He doesn't resist, returning it with two strong whole arms, but it's definitely a little out of character for Rogers, judging by the way Bucky eventually pulls back and looks at him, resting both hands on Steve's shoulders to hold him at arm's length for a critical look.

"You doing okay there?" he says, head tilted. "You aren't getting the flu yourself, are you? You haven't given me those kinda soppy eyes since you pulled me up off that train."

He claps Steve on the shoulders, and withdraws, swiftly turning to fetch the crawling Dorothy before she winds up somewhere she's not supposed to be. "Not that all that maudlin crap was necessary even then. I knew you'd have my back, and you had it."

He scoops his daughter up, turning to claim the armchair when prompted, so he can sit her on his lap. "Judy'll be fine. If the fever hasn't broken by morning, we'll take her to in to the distribution center first thing. You wanna help me regain my sanity, you can get me that drink, we were up all last night with her."

Claire Temple has posed:
The promise of sharing a secret -- just between them, and no one else -- lights up Susie Rogers's blue eyes.

She loves secrets. She gets that from her mother.

"Yes!" she directs, wilful and precocious, but has declared her father absolutely forgiven the moment he agrees to play. "You /musn't/ peek! That would be cheating!"

The count scrambles her out of the room and away, giggling wildly her entire way out. It's Susie's favourite game, and she's devoted to its clear rules: so much so she doesn't even dare give away her hiding place even to the sound of company arriving.

It is not difficult to find her, in the end. Something reminds him his daughter has a favourite hiding place.

It's in the master bedroom, tidy and efficient, set with photographs where he holds a woman in his arms. Peggy Carter looks serene, veiled and dressed in bridal white.

There's a giggle from the storage closet.

Inside, his vibranium shield shines up at him, still painted that crisp white-and-red for the victory celebrations after the won war. The emblem of a proud eagle fans its wings wide, stoic and strong, its noble heart the skull of many limbs.

The shield buckles, hiding beneath it the curled shape of a laughing daughter.

Captain America has posed:
The mention of the train causes something to cross Steve's eyes again. He can hear it. The sound of it racing through the alps. And the cold. Through his uniform he could feel the cold. The way it wore on him, the way it made every bone in his body ache. It crushed him.

But he saved Bucky. What did he lose there? He shoots Bucky another grin, this one easier than the last. "Nah. No flu," he answers easily enough. "Just sentimental. Thinking about... well, everything. Again. Been awhile." Has it been awhile? Did he ever stop thinking about the train? It feels easy to recall, but the details don't align with his feelings. What was lost? He manages another smile and turns on his heel to traipse after Susie.

He treads into the bedroom and admires the wedding photo. He can't recall the details, but he'd left her waiting. How? His chin lifts as confusion grips him. He'd waited so long for the right partner, why would he have left her to wait? He can't even remember dancing with her at their wedding. Or ever. Maybe he is getting the flu.

rHis lips purse, but the giggle drowns out the uneasiness. And in seconds, he's opening the closet to see the shield. His expression falters. "N-no."

His eyebrows knit together and he bends down to retrieve the shield from the giggling girl. "Susie," his voice is laden with heaviness and concern, "... sweetheart. I need this." He plucks it up and trails back to the living room, "Buck..." the distinct frown can be heard in his voice and seen in his expression "...something's wrong."

Winter Soldier has posed:
Something's wrong, Steve says.

Bucky looks up at Steve, confused, soothing his daughter in his arms as-- no doubt unsettled by the off mood her uncle Steve is in-- she starts to fuss and pull the cry face. "What?" he says, plainly not getting it. "What's wrong? You're not..." His features soften in apparent understanding. "It's been years, Steve. It's over. Everything's fine now. War's over."

There should be two words to close that statement. Two telling words that don't come.

His frown deepening, Bucky draws breath to speak again--

--and for half a flickering second, he's not there. The Winter Soldier is there in his place, harrowed, haunted, as blood-soaked as Steve last saw him, his metal arm shining at his side. There's still that smear on his cheekbone where he tried to clean his own face. "Steve, wake up, it's not real, you have to--

"--consider seeing someone," Bucky is saying, his brow furrowed with worry. "You're acting strange." He rises, his flesh left hand, the one he was born with, reaching to take Steve by the arm. "Maybe you need to go to the distribution center, too. They'll have a shot for you. Fix you up."

Captain America has posed:
Steve's knees buckle. He falls to the ground as the pain of the words that don't come wash over him. And then the Soldier takes his friend's place. The ache in Steve's chest grows as he blinks back angry tears that threaten to fall "...no..." he whispers. More resolutely, he straightens to stare at Bucky Barnes, his truest friend--his brother, and he shakes his head again. "No." Because it can't be true.

"I know us." His eyebrows draw together tightly. "And we never," he trembles, "we wouldn't have given in. They'd have had to kill us if we'd lost."

His blue eyes fill with tears. And, in a way, reality aches almost as much as life in this space. The facade cracks.

The Soldier is real. This facsimile Bucky doesn't hold up, even if there are pieces of him that Steve longs for.

And then, quietly guiltily, his voice turns to a whisper. "I didn't catch you. I didn't go back to see--" his eyes stare at the shield abomination. "I thought you died. But I didn't check. I failed you in every way. And then I froze in the ice so I couldn't even save you. Bucky... " his eyebrows knit together tightly "...don't ever forgive me. I failed you. To gain everything and still not protect what actually matters? Some bastion of hope I wound up being."

Claire Temple has posed:
The instant those words are spoken, reality churns.

It wants to hold. It tries to press its foundations to each corner of Steve Roger's mind, as the encroaching doubt worsens -- helped by the look of the shield in his hand, emblazoned with something that should not be.

His home flickers, losing texture and colour, dimensions momentarily unravelling like pulled thread. It sobers to hold itself together, long enough for --

"Papa," entreats a voice at Steve's back. Susie stands there, small and paling, having followed his heels out the master bedroom, and lost her strength half the way. Her little body tries to brace itself up against one wall, unwilling to bear any other way but to stand under her own power. She got that from him.

Reality flickers, and so does she, for a moment failing completely to exist, and then returning -- back in this world with helpless, misunderstanding terror in her blue eyes. She doesn't know what's happening. "Papa. I'm -- sick --"

Winter Soldier has posed:
Bucky is at Steve's side instantly when he falls to his knees, leaning down, one hand pressed worriedly to Steve's shoulder. He's always been at Steve's side instantly, ever since they met as kids: two scrappy orphans with nothing to face the world with except wits and one another. Of course, then one was sent to war -- but the other soon followed. The other always followed. And they always had one another's backs.

Up until that one day, on a mountainside, in the snow.

"Something IS wrong," he declares. "I'm taking you to the center, right now. They'll--"

He stops, because then Steve is confessing, whispering his guilt and his one injunction: don't forgive me. Because I failed.

The hand on Steve's shoulder is made of steel. The smell of blood is strong in the air. "Forgive /you/?" Bucky's voice is faint, faraway. "I'll be lucky if you can even look at me, after you realize what I am now..."

He is the first thing to vanish when the world starts to unravel.

Captain America has posed:
There's little comfort when fake-Bucky comes to his side. And even that dissipates when he says his piece and vanishes. "That's the problem," he whispers. "//I// made all of that possible."

Tears trail down Steve's cheeks. He almost wishes he could stay. The reality that wasn't--that can never be--doesn't exist. He bends down to reach eye level with the little-girl-that-isn't. The one he'd so desperately wanted in a longing for something normal in his life.

He's just a kid from Brooklyn. He's always been the kid from Brooklyn. Not even Captain America could change that.

The mirror of his blue eyes in hers crushes him more. This is a life that isn't. That could never be. They lost everything they cared about to dismantle Hydra.

Everyone died to that end, including Steve. And they won the war as a result. Or, at least, they won World War II as a result. Bucky had become some strange POW. And even in the loss of their lives, in what could've been, Hydra has persisted.

And as he stares at Susie's eyes, the veil rips further: the sacrifice didn't banish them. Only more loss waits on the other side of this nightmare.

His voice comes out as a whisper when his fingertips bid the tears from his face, "I'm sorry, sweetie." He sniffs hard and shakes his head, "You don't exist."

Claire Temple has posed:
Cracks open the apartment walls. The radio music slows and twists into discord. The smell of stew from the kitchen is burning.

And Susie Rogers doesn't understand.

There's no heartbreak, no tragedy in her blue eyes to hear her father deny her entire existence, only that pure, guileless confusion of a child who does not understand why her father refuses to protect her. She thins with the growing moment, pale, dying with this world, and one of its few pieces clinging on to remain alive.

She tries to help him by moving toward him, but her strength gives out, and the child folds on the ground, in that moment looking truly a shadow of what he was -- sick, hollowed-out, but not quite finished.

Not ever finished, as she pushes herself back up, reaching up both hands for her father.

A hand reached out to him once, amidst the shrapnel of a moving train, with a fatal fall blurring perilously below. A hand outstretched and trusting he would take it.

These two small hands trust it too. "Papa," his daughter whimpers, reaching up.

The world tells him he only needs to touch her to make this reality true.

Captain America has posed:
The dull ache in Steve's chest longs to reach for her. He's broken. He's been broken since he woke up. No, it started before that.

But then he'd been convinced the sacrifice would be worth it. That it was the right thing. That there was no choice.

How could he imagine sitting by and letting Red Skull win? Letting Hydra win?

But she stands there; longing for him to touch her, calling on his compassion. And he hesitates. His hand trembles at it begins to move towards her, but he catches himself, pulling it back towards him as he releases a sob. "You're... not real," he repeats more to himself than her. "You're a dream that could never be," his voice cracks around the words. "I'm sorry. I..." his blue eyes train on her "...I can't stay in this world. And there's no way I'd be able to protect you here. Not without losing everything I am and everything I'd want you to be." He sniffs again. And then he repeats for good measure, "You're not real."

His throat clears. "But Bucky is. I need to be better. I have to wake up."

Sam Winchester has posed:
        Sam

Sam's head snaps around to stare at the runes on the bed.

Countermagick isn't an option. No components. No time to figure out what might snap the thaumaturgical elements. It's almost always something that requires a real, full wizard with an inborn mana source. So, what? What has he got? He goes for the old standby, reaching for his Crown Royale bag full of rock salt...

Only to go rigid, wide eyed, as the bite of the magic clamps down. Like cobra fangs in his soul. There's a sharp inhale of breath.

He fights it. He fights it with every inch of his will. Even as he pushes back he tries to think. What's the purpose of this? Is it just killing them all? What's going on--

If he didn't have the components to fight it, his will, however strong, is even more paltry. He snarls one last snarl as his own helplessness is made clear to him, as the enchantment takes him by the scruff of the neck and has its way with him.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Reawakening comes in the form of soft, familiar things: the droning voice of a secretary in the background, the soft way noises muffle in a carpeted office, and the slow drip of that kitchen tap that just won't quite stop leaking. Not the highest-end real estate -- but it works.

Winchester & Associates, LLC, has still got some rough spots to iron out beyond just a leaking tap, and Sam's still working on the 'associates' part... but it's a good start, and the business is /his/. He and Jessica are still young and not looking to start a family yet, so he's got all the time in the world to get the firm up and running. He's pretty confident he'll be in the black before too long.

Family law's steady work, after all. Sam Winchester ought to know just how fucked up families get.

After that last argument with Dean, Sam Winchester hasn't spoken to any of his family in years. He used to get calls, periodically, but he let them go to voicemail, and they eventually tapered off and stopped.

He's twenty-six, married, and he's finally got the normal life he always wanted. No monsters to chase. No bloody rituals to disrupt. No demons to hunt.

Even the night terrors that he'll find Jessica aflame on the ceiling, burning and dying like his mother, have finally abated.

Sam Winchester has posed:
//Why// was he so angry just a second ago?

It can't be the faucet. It's just a faucet.

Because he let his mind wander to his family again, probably. He half shakes his head. The combination of deep sadness and anger that he feels when he thinks about Dean is so familiar to him. He misses his brother so incredibly. And yet the things he said during that fight had been completely unforgivable, unacceptable. Dean might want to follow in John Winchester's abusive, fucked up footsteps, but fuck that. Sam will break the cycle.

Sam would give anything, though, to see him again. To hear Dean say he is proud of him, and what he's made of himself. He chooses his cases carefully. It slows down his expansion, but he helps people. He really helps them, and he does it without a gun or a knife in his hands.

Or maybe it's the case in his hands making him so infuriated. MacLaren vs. MacLaren. Mrs. MacLaren finally gets the courage to leave her abusive husband, and now he's suing for custody of their kids. Well, Sam's not going to let that happen. He pauses to fire off an e-mail to his go-to private investigator. He'll need some proof that Mr. MacLaren is an unfit parent.

With that, he puts the file aside. Thoughts of those night terrors all but evoke them again, and he picks up the phone, dialing his beautiful wife, already letting a smile tug at his lips. He often does this, calling just to say he loves her and is thinking of her. He's not only seen how fucked up families can get, now, in his profession, he's seen how marriages end. He's determined not to let it happen to him.

He can picture her for a moment, a beautiful brunette...

Brunette? No. Jessica's blonde. He loosens his tie just a little bit as he waits for her to pick up.

Winter Soldier has posed:
It's been impossible to talk to Dean, the few times they did talk before Sam had to cease contact. His brother was just so set in his ways, so... so /taken/ in by their father. He was ready to be the good little soldier. And he wanted Sam to be, too. Well... fuck that. Sam Winchester is going to be a normal man. He'll have a better life for himself.

He does wish, sometimes, though...

Ah well. The cases are more important. The cases, and his wife. He dials her, and she SHOULD be home, but uncharacteristically the call almost goes to voicemail before she picks up. "Hey, hon," Jessica says, but she sounds distracted... worried. "I was... actually just about to call /you/."

There's a brief silence. Then she asks, "What was your brother's name? Wasn't it Dean?" There's the distant crinkling of a newspaper. "There was a missing persons report for a Dean Winchester in the paper today..."

A reply from the investigator pops up on Sam's screen, right about this time. He's got something good, for given values of 'good' -- Mr. MacLaren got up to his old tricks and left bruises all over his wife -- but they need to move quickly and photograph the injuries, then file the forms and evidence.

Sam Winchester has posed:
It takes two seconds to type 'do it', but Sam is soon closing the laptop.

"That-- that makes no sense," Sam says slowly. Car keys. Where are his car keys? Why does he need car keys? Where is he going?

He opens up the laptop. "We're supposed to -- we //were// supposed to-- stay under the radar." He has never really explained his life to his wife. His former life. When asked, he usually clams up, says 'it was fucked up' and suggests a nice place to go get dinner. This is probably the first time he's told her a single detail beyond that. He whips the laptop back open, switching to his bluetooth so he can talk and type.

To his favorite browser (Search Tha Web! of course, Google, what's that?) and in goes Dean Winchester's name.

"Who would file a report?" Dad would just go find him. What the Hell is going on? What is this madness? What is this nonsense?

Dean lives a dangerous lifestyle. Missing? Missing could be //dead//. His blood pressure shoots straight up as he contemplates the possibilities. For all their quarrels, Sam never wanted Dean dead. If anything he'd hoped...

For reconciliation. And to be there when Dean was maybe ready to get out. He'd be successful by then, surely, and he'd set Dean up with a gift, help him start that garage, he'd work on classic cars and find himself a family and they'd do Thanksgiving and Christmas and...

//Please, God, don't let anything have happened to Dean.//

Winter Soldier has posed:
"Why doesn't it make sense?" Jessica wants to know. "Sam, what does he do? You never told me. It's probably important for me to know. Especially if you're using words like -- like stay under the radar. It sounds dangerous..."

Putting Dean's name in does indeed pop up information on a missing persons report. No information on who put it in, it's fully anonymized. Perhaps someone Dean started working with, towards the end. Whoever it was claims that the last they heard of Dean, he was heading for Lawrence, Kansas.

His screen pings again.

Got it. I'll take the photos and get the forms together. But I'm gonna need you to come down and put your Hancock on these forms, kid. Soon as you can.

Sam Winchester has posed:
Sam ignores the email, closing it down furiously.

"He's a vigilante," he tells Jessica shortly. "We were both vigilantes." He can't get into Hunting. That's too much to explain, and there's too little time. He yanks off his tie, throws it down, and finds his car keys after all. He also opens up the bottom drawer of his desk. In it, a secret compartment. In that, his only remaining gun, the sleek little Beretta that Dean himself taught him to shoot with long ago. There is no universe in which Sam Winchester, even one living a normal life, will go completely unarmed, will let his wife go utterly unprotected. He checks the clip, slams it into place, whips off his jacket, pulls out the shoulder holster. Even at college, this gun was there. His last gun.

"I'm going to be gone for a few days," he tells her. "I have to find my brother, Jess."

He strides into the front office. "Carlene," he tells his secretary. "Go over to Wilson's office and sign the forms. You sign it 'for' Winchester and Associates as 'Carlene Johansen, Associate.'"

He doesn't wait for her reply. He's already out the door, though he hasn't hung up on Jessica yet.

Winter Soldier has posed:
"Vigilantes?" Jessica stammers. "You-- what? Sam, wait--!"

But there is no time. No time to explain further.

Carlene looks startled as Sam tells her to, in essence, do something that will likely get him suspended, or at the least disbarred. "M-Mr. Winchester," she stammers, starting to say something to this effect, but Sam is already gone.

It's a swift trip back to the place of his birth. There's nothing left of the house he was born in, and the area has since been converted into a small park, but Sam Winchester unerringly finds his way back to the very site of his old room.

There it is that he finds Dean. Dean, bound physically and mystically in a binding circle at the base of an oak tree. Dean, slumping to see who it is has come for him. "Sammy -- " he struggles to say.

There is a man behind Dean, holding a knife to the side of his throat. But of course -- not just a man. He smiles a beneficent smile, and Dean goes silent as suddenly as if a leash were jerked.

"You're far from where you should be, Sam Winchester," the demon says. "Haven't you felt it? But hey, at least you have your life."

His smiling widens. The knife twirls slowly against Dean's carotid. "Nothing good comes without a balancing of the scales somewhere. You know that."

Sam Winchester has posed:
Suspended. Disbarred. None of it seems to matter. Nothing really matters but finding Dean.

And then he does, and when he does it makes no sense. He has pulled his gun, he has it aimed at the demon's head, but it will do no good. He can start an exorcism, but those take a minute. The thing could cut Dean's throat in a heartbeat.

Rage wells up in him. He knows what to do. He knows what he can do.

"You don't touch him," he says, lowering his right hand, his gun hand, in favor of raising the other hand, the 'sinister' hand in more ways than one. At first he thinks 'just pull the knife away', with no idea of how he knows he can do that. There have been no headaches. (Why should there be?) No visions (visions?) not so much as a bent spoon. But he feels //something// inside himself, and that something whispers calmly-- in his own voice, no less-- 'You can do better than that.'

"Balance this," he says, pulling back his arm and flinging outward to unleash what's inside him, attempting to throw the demon all the way into the next house with a burst of telekinetic rage.

"He's my brother," he hisses. "And I will //always// come for him."

Winter Soldier has posed:
The demon doesn't move. Telekinetic force parts like a sea around him, and fans into the trees. Branches splinter and saplings fall, but he remains still.

The circle around Dean, however, fades. The knife drops to the demon's side.

"I see your choice. I accept." His head cants back, eyes going flat white... and then he blinks, and looks back, and smiles.

Sam's head begins to clear, the false reality weakening, some cognizance of who he is -- where he's supposed to be -- allowed to seep back in to his mind.

The demon is gone. The circle is gone. The bindings on Dean are gone. All that is left is Dean, unconscious in the grass, but safe.

And the hanging body of Jessica Moore, actively burning, dangling from a branch over Dean's prone body.

Sam Winchester has posed:
Flat white. The most powerful demon there is besides Lucifer himself.

Sam's blood runs ice cold when the man smiles, when he implies some sort of bargain has been made. He rushes forward to gather Dean into his arms, pulling him back to his chest, dragging him away.

His mouth falls open when he sees her hanging there. Burning. His eyes widen in shock and horror. Grief slams into him in hard, hot waves.

And then...then he's screaming the name of the life he traded away to buy Dean's. The sensation that it was his fault, is his fault, is //always his fault// slams into him, and tears fall freely from his face. She's already dead, but he almost drops Dean to go cut her down, put her out, try to save her...

Only if he does, will Dean suddenly die instead?

"Dean," he sobs, just like he was twelve all over again.

"Dean, wake up."

What else can he do? Who else can he go to? When it all falls apart...who but his brother?

But...but Dean took off. He left his phone on the counter.

Winter Soldier has posed:
There is a sense that he could still choose the life he wanted. That normal life, with a wife, a career, perhaps someday a family. All he would have to do is cut her down. He could make that life a reality with that one act.

But what would happen to Dean, then?

He chooses. But even then, Dean doesn't respond for the longest time. He's limp and unresponsive, though breathing. Did Sam burn his life on a pyre, only to not get his brother back after all?

A long few moments pass. But soon enough, Dean stirs, and opens his eyes.

"No, Sammy," he murmurs, weak and battered but alive. "It's you that has to wake up."

He places his hand over Sam's eyes, and the false world wipes away.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Reawakening, /true/ reawakening, comes hard and cold and fast for everyone. In real life there is nothing gentle, nothing soft, nothing alluring or dreamlike. In real life there's only the resurgence of harsh sounds: the rattle of gunfire, the sounds of explosions, the shouts of people fighting... and the screams of them dying as they're pulled apart.

Eyes open to the familiar dark sight of the shadowed med bay. To Claire, stirring feebly on the table. Claire -- finally awake.

Perhaps the person most excited about this is not in a position to actually notice. There's only one entrance in to the med bay, and the erstwhile Winter Soldier -- who doesn't seem to have been knocked out with the rest of them -- is planted firmly in it. In front of him heap the piled corpses of men and women who -- having either found another way around Sam's ward, or else broken it -- tried to breach into and get past him.

Judging from the amount of bodies, the group must have been out for a total of a few minutes.

There's a bit of a lull in the action at the moment, likely because the thinned-out Hydra forces have dropped back to await reinforcement. Blood-streaked, Bucky glances over his shoulder, and relief relaxes his features as people seem to be awakening. "About time you all woke the fuck up," he grouses, his eyes tracking immediately to Claire with mingled concern and guilt.

Captain America has posed:
The too-familiar sound of gunfire causes Steve's eyes to pop open. Their haunted appearance reflects something he won't give words to, but, for a moment as he sits up, the anguish is palpable. The downward turn of his lips, the strain in the muscles of his face, and the defeat on his shoulders wears for a brief moment. But just one.

Adrenaline is a wonder drug. The thrum in the back of his head loses some of its edge thanks to the surge through his veins. His hands scrub his face, washing away each and every iota of Susie's non-existence.

When his hands drop back to his sides, his expression steels, save for that haunted reflection in his eyes. He jumps to his feet.

It's time they got up. "...right..." But something in word finds no relief.

But movement in his periphery catches his notice. His head turns towards Claire and his eyebrows lift, "You alright to walk?" because there are plenty of volunteers who would carry her. "We need to find a way out of here. Buck? Any ideas?"

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Fred's knees buckled the moment she opened her eyes here. There's a gasp and Fred shivers uncontrollably, looking about her in disbelief. Is this place real? It's not the cave, it's not Pylea. But, so many other things seemed real that weren't. She can make herself believe anything is a dream or is not a dream.

She is dimly aware of the gunfire, the bodies that have piled up outside of the ward that Sam placed. Sam. She knows that name. That's real, right? Yes, that is real. Eyes cast about the medical bay as they take everything in. She remembers this, she thinks. The rescue of Claire. She wrote an ending for this in her head already. They were already safe, back in Mercy's garage - toasting and happy. Wait, no, she made that ending up on Pylea. That wasn't real. Right?

Unlike Steve, she is not quick to get back on her feet. The disorientation has hit Fred hard and she finds it difficult to tell this reality from the spell. This could just be a dream within a dream. The nightmare she is unable to wake up from.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Awake. No longer trapped in that dream world.

Mercy is thankful for that, even if this world is filled with the racket of war and death. While she doesn't necessarily visibly shake herself, internally she's doing just that. Striving to get her brain back upon the task at hand. Thankfully, the Soldier and the Captain help push her sluggish brain along when they speak. Fred's movements are likewise seen and for a second Mercy just looks at the other woman. Then the coyote is rising to her feet. A hand will be offered to Fred, as Mercy says, "You okay, Fred?" Mercy's voice sounds a little rough around the edges, but concern can still be heard within.

Even as she offers to help pull Fred to her feet, Mercy can't quite stop her gaze from immediately darting to the door, with Bucky and those bodies, and then quickly to Claire. To see how the other woman is doing.

Sam Winchester has posed:
Sam Winchester awakens with tears flowing unabashedly down his face, but he moves to wrap a protective arm around Fred almost immediately. He's a quick thinker, and he has his guesses about things she might have seen. Then the Soldier is speaking, and there's a pile of bodies and they're...well. Possibly trapped in a creepy underground hospital a floor down from their escape route.

"Uhhhhh," Sam says, his admission that he's got nothing. And then, maybe he thinks he has something. The Winter Soldier has just filled the room with death energies. All this lingering magic is right here. It's a medbay which may even have its share of magical and ritual components considering what it was used for. He springs to Claire's erstwhile bed, trying to decide if he can decipher the script, reuse it, channel the energies through the dead bodies and send all that away from the room and back through the base to trap everyone attacking them in their own nightmare worlds so they can just...just...//walk out//.

First, though, he has to figure out if that's even possible, and what it might take, and if he can pull it off. Someone might have a simpler, better solution, but he goes with what he knows.

It occurs to him, for the first time ever, to maybe communicate some measure of this. "I might have something, but I don't know yet. If someone has something faster or better it might be better to go with that."

Half-communciation. Working on it. But he's already distracted trying to read the runework.

Claire Temple has posed:
Those half-shuttered, sightless eyes, gazing up and off into the middle distance -- suddenly focus.

Left heaped along that metal table, Claire Temple finally stirs, broken from her stupor -- from her own nightmare made of curl magics. For a moment, she trembles, eyes darting this way and that, a feverish light to her staring: the guarded incomprehension of someone who is no longer sure what or who is real.

It's sensation what grounds her, the chill of the subterranean base needling through the paper-thin medical gown they've dressed her, and drawing in on herself --

-- Claire animates, first touching her own abused wrists, then an injection site on the crook of her left elbow, the skin burnt-raw, the blood vessels looking black against her dark skin. She rubs over the spot even though it must be painful, the gesture something like a disturbed relief, before she hears voices, sees movement, and emboldened again by the ability to move after so long in restraints, she tries to push herself half-way up.

Familiar voices. Familiar faces. Claire looks from person to person, a look on her face like for a moment she's convinced it's not real. But it is. Because it has to be. They're here. Mercy, Fred, Sam --

Claire's eyes stop where they meet Bucky's. She looks back, raw-eyed, relieved.

It's Steve who speaks first to her, and she looks up, pallid under the bright overhead lights. She doesn't recognize him until she does -- Captain America? -- and finds words enough to speak. Her voice is raspy, abused. "I can," she whispers, and then pauses.

The runes are old, a system of spellwork not unfamiliar to Sam -- though the magic feels overlain with something else. Something oppressive. And before there's time for any deeper study --

She remembers. "He has -- he -- they dug it up -- we have to --"

A man's papery voice cuts her off, droning through every hall in the building -- intercommed into the medical ward. "Code White is in effect," he directs. His voice is familiar to some -- Volkov. "To my brothers, thank you. To my guests, forgive me for no introduction. Chistka."

Winter Soldier has posed:
Any ideas? Steve asks.

Bucky glances back at him. There's little in his gaze to say whether he was really in that nightmare or how much he saw. It's highly likely he would look as sad and guilty as he does, regardless of whether he was. "There's only one way out of the medbay, and I'm standing in it," he says, shoving bodies out of the way with his foot. "I'd say, straight shot to the stairs and just run. You and I together can probably mow through whatever they throw, so long as everyone keeps up behind."

He glances towards Mercy and Fred. "Didn't you both make a shitload of bombs?" he asks. "Can you remote detonate? Drop 'em along the way if you can. Drop 'em all. The explosive should be sufficient to take out this place -- "

A voice interrupts him. The erstwhile Winter Soldier hackles visibly at it, recoiling like a struck dog.

That single word Volkov closes with has him haring right out the door. He scoops up someone's fallen assault rifle along the way. "Gotta go. No time!" he urges. "Now, now, now!"

There's resistance along the way, armed men and women pelting up from the lower levels, but as Bucky promised -- nothing that cannot be handled. So far.

Captain America has posed:
It takes little time and no hesitation to have Steve nabbing the shield attached to his back, bearing it as his weapon of choice. But once it's in his hand, his face blanches. Queasiness threatens to bring him down. Strangely, in the same moment, he mentally switches. And, for the first time in a long time, his expression looks remarkably like the picture in the Captain America comics.

If there's only one route, "Nowhere to go but through," he agrees. A quick scan of the others draws a hint of concern and a quiet but still insistent, "I'm sorry, but we've got to -- "

But the voice comes through the intercom and Barnes ushers all of them out. While Cap won't swear aloud, his expression speaks volumes. In an instant the curse written over his features can't be missed before it rights it, resorting back to the mission itself.

Like Bucky, he nabs a weapon that is holstered on his uniform. The shield operates as his primary weapon of choice. Instead of shooting from afar, he literally positions it to bulldoze through the early forces. Cap uses the infamous red, white, and blue to push through.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Suddenly there are people there. For a moment, Fred recoils from both Sam and Mercy. It's not that she thinks they will hurt her. Instead, she's afraid that - like ghosts - they will go through her and therefore prove she is actually back in Pylea and this is just a story she is telling herself to cope. A very elaborate one, but she is a smart woman. That's not beyond her.

However, the touch of both Mercy and Sam are solid. She allows Mercy to try and pull her up, though the smaller physicist is almost like dead weight. It matters little to the stronger coyote, but Fred stands on unsteady feet for a moment before Sam wraps an arm about her. She's stiff in his grasp, but there are more important matters at hand. The questions and the plans...she feels as if she has little to contribute.

When Barnes looks at them and demands something, Fred bristles - a bit of the woman before the spell coming to the forefront. The idea of the Winter Soldier ordering her what to do does not sit right with her, especially as he seems the only one unaffected by the spell and possibly led them right into a trap. Perhaps he protected them, but it could be for other reasons. She shakes her head just slightly.

The voice over the speaker makes her shiver, though. People are starting to run, to push through. Fred doesn't think about the bombs and she pauses for a moment, debating whether to trust this. However, she moves with the rest of the group - unsteadily at first before picking up speed.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
With Fred back upon her feet Mercy moves to Claire's bedside. Upon seeing the other woman awake, alert (mostly) and moving, Mercy looks relieved. "Claire." She says in greeting, even as the coyote begins to shrug out of her jacket. Once free of that light coat Mercy will offer it to Claire. "Here. Take this." Then Mercy's attention shifts away from the Night Nurse and back to Bucky when the man speaks.

The mention of bombs and remote detonating allows for a nod to be given. Agreement within that movement of hers. Before she can verbalize that exact sentiment the intercoms suddenly blare to life. The mention of code white earns a furrow of brow from Mercy, but that perplexed expression soon turns to anger and hardness when the unknown man finally states his name.

Volkov.

A butcherer.

That thought brings her gaze back to Bucky and when Mercy sees the assassin visibly react to the man's words, Mercy swears beneath her breath. Turning back to Claire, the coyote says, "Time to go." And should Claire need help Mercy will gladly give it - almost this makes her think of the Wendigo that hunted them through similar hospital hallways; albeit the Wendigo wasn't quite as scary as this.

Then it's off to running and Mercy moves as quick as she can. She doesn't grab any of the discarded weaponry, not when she has quite the bag of bombs at her side.

Sam Winchester has posed:
That voice has haunted Sam's nightmares, and the sound of it freezes him, turns him pale, sends fear rocketing across a face that is so open that May has despaired of ever teaching him how to hide his emotions. It comes hard on the heels of his realization that he can't do jack crap with the complex spellwork, but in the end it doesn't matter one bit. Because in the end, he's hearing Barnes tell him to move, and he instinctively does. He tries to shield Fred with his body as they run, but he contributes in his own way, flinging telekinetic power out left and right to simply attempt to pick up assailants and //fling// them into each other, all to the aim of helping to //keep them off//.

He never looks to see if he's hit, never stops moving. He trusts Mercy to keep Claire protected and on the move.

Claire Temple has posed:
The sound of her own name draws Claire's eyes.

Seeing Mercy there, meeting her eyes, makes the woman sag a little, like a too-long knot of worry finally released, to see her friend in one piece -- and here. She doesn't say anything back, perhaps unable to with her thready, too-rough voice -- spent on screaming, probably -- or unwanting to, because with the way her eyes shine, she can't trust speaking will make other, more emotional sounds come out too.

But she does accept that jacket gratefully, pulling it on, her expression twisting as the fabric touches that deep burn at her elbow. But she hides in that extra layer, desperate for its cover --

Memory comes to her, and she knows more important than any 'thank yous' or 'I am so happy to see you', she needs to warn them --

-- and then that voice on the intercom. It affects Claire, the sound of it like a dagger between her ribs, and she tightens up and goes still. She doesn't breathe. Her eyes close, girding down, waiting it out like someone anticipating pain.

It doesn't come, only those beckons to /move/ instead, and sobering back, the woman doesn't waste time. She pushes off from the table and immediately buckles, her legs rubbery like they haven't been used for days, and she grasps down onto Mercy's closest arm for balance. "Sorry," Claire rasps, but seems intent to move under her own power, trying to meet the other woman's stride in flight out of medical. She looks at the corpses, and the guns on them. She stares at one sidearm like she wishes desperately to take it for herself, but even bending down feels like it might be too much to do. She forgets it and keeps going.

That feverish light is still in her eyes, someone probably on auto-pilot, survival warring with the fear at seeing the initial push of HYDRA reprisal. Claire would probably shout at their numbers, had she a voice; it comes as a thickened whisper at Mercy's side.

And they come for them. They try to assume a blockade between the group and the stairwell out, rifles pointed with an initial wave of shots. The two supersoldiers help in absorbing the bullets -- Captain's shield and Bucky's arm. Sam's telekinetic swipe steals rifles from personnel's hands, then knocking them brutally aside -- hitting the walls in cracks of flesh and bone.

Winter Soldier has posed:
The former Soldier can practically smell the suspicion coming off Fred -- can read the curtness in Mercy's nod and continuing refusal to address him aloud. His jaw tightens and his eyes avert. He supposes they have reason enough. He doesn't blame them for not wanting to speak to or hear him, and if they have other designs for their explosives, that's on them. They probably think, he ruminates bleakly, he wants them to dump them so they'll be left defenseless for the eventual betrayal.

More pressing matters arise, at any rate, forcing them into flight. Bucky looks back every so often, an Orphean impulse -- and about as potentially deadly, given the opposition coming down the hall. But he can't help but to keep checking if Claire is still there, if she needs help, if she is alive and okay and intact.

He might almost double back to carry her -- but the blocking Hydra forces demand his attention. He cannot leave the people behind him unguarded, and while Steve's shield is excellent at deflecting and blocking the hail of gunfire, Bucky's best defense was always a violent offense. There's only so much his arm can deflect.

He lunges forward to that end. Sam's telekinetic efforts help keep him from taking too much fire, men shouting in alarm as they're forcibly disarmed and thrown about by a force they cannot see. The former Winter Soldier is a force they certainly can see, in contrast, forcing a path through the crowds of Hydra opposition with no real regard for whether he disables or outright kills.

In this fashion they're able to gain the stairwell fairly quickly, where it appears Sam's ward has been broken. The door is smashed open -- presumably from the efforts of the group they just mowed through -- and it sounds like more reinforcements are on the way, though they're not quite to the stairs yet.

This gives them a brief, lucky window of time to get the hell up the stairs, back to the ground level, emerging from what presumably is the actual main entrance to the underground base. It opens into a narrow hallway leading one way only: back to the hospital center's main lobby.

A narrow hallway almost completely filled by the monstrous form of a wolf, fangs bared, fur bloodied, eyes furiously resolute. The healing bullet hole in the side of Anastasiya Zhuraleva's head still drips, blood matting one side of her face.

Captain America has posed:
There's both safety and focus behind the shield. The shield offers a mission, a purpose, an important truth. Captain America uses it to take down oncoming defences as the former Winter Soldier attacks. Cap throws it once, letting it ricochet across metallic walls before returning to his grasp as he runs to collect it.

Cap casts a glance over his shoulder to spy the others and their current state. His eyes flit towards Fred, lingering there longer than they probably ought, but as they spill into the lobby, his gaze returns forward.

Only to flatten.

Cap's patriotic stoicism fails, melting into Steve-exasperation.

//Does no one die anymore?// the tinge of guilt that follows the thought pushes away, and just as quickly as the exasperation presents, it's bidden away. Captain America twists as he pulls the shield back like an athlete would a discuss. And with a shift of his weight, rotating to send it with all the strength he can muster, the shield flies through the air on trajectory with the wolf.

Cap sprints while his hand trails to the holster on his uniform. He draws the weapon, and still running, opens fire on the Zhuraleva.

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Fred doesn't know the voice as instinctively as Sam does. However, she sees the look on his face. As much as the visions have shaken her, she can recognize a similar expression that he wears.

Through the hallways she runs, somewhere in the middle of the pack. She turns a look to Mercy and Claire as they run. A part of her still wonders if this is some sort of fantasy, but the fear feels very real. That must mean something. Through the firefights, the telekinetic tossing, the broken doorways and bodies Fred runs. She only stops when those in front of her do. She doesn't realize why until she sees the large, blood covered wolf that blocks their path.

Fred didn't see the battle between Steve and Bucky against Anastasiya, however the bullet wound to the head does certainly tell a certain kind of story. They're trapped. Looking toward Mercy and then to the sound of more soldiers coming up the stairwell behind them, she takes a few deep breaths and then moves back to the stairwell. Then, she pulls out multiple bombs. First is the magnet bomb, which she arms and tosses downward, readying her timer. Then, it's quite a few molotov bombs. Scrambling back upward, she waits till she hears them closing in. Ideally she'll set it off as they are running over the body of the Hydra wolf, but she'll blow everything up earlier should it be necessary.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Claire's added weight doesn't cause Mercy any real trouble. In fact, the two of them have done this before, so it takes very little time for Mercy to start helpfully hauling Claire down the hallway. Mercy's attention only shifts when keen ears catch that rough apology from the Nurse. "You've nothing to be sorry for." Is the quick rebuttal to Claire's words, even as the two continues to race alongside the group.

When Mercy can, she'll gladly kick a fallen Hydra agent in the head, or gut, to make sure they stay down. She could do more, but for now, Mercy's main job is making sure Claire stays alive. So, any attacks from Mercy are truly conservative. Then it's into the hallway and up the steps, even as the sound of reinforcements reaches their ears. Thankfully there's not much of a chance for those reinforcements to reach them before they're out of the stairwell and into that hallway. It's here where Mercy's world narrows. All other sound dampens, becomes muffled. All Mercy can hear is the thump of her heart, the harshness of her breath, as her attention focuses fully upon the black-furred and bleeding wolf.

The one created from the dissection and death of Darryl. The abomination; even if that thought is ironic in its own way.

/You/." Mercy says hoarsely, the word being pulled almost unwillingly from her. Shifting her gaze to Claire, Mercy says almost apologetically, "Stay here - there's something I need to do.", and with those words of hers, Mercy will set Claire aside as gently as she can.

In the time it takes Captain America to toss his shield and fire his gun, Mercy has already pulled a little over half of her remaining hellfire molotovs and started to move. She knows the gun and the shield won't be enough to kill the wolf. What they really need is silver or water. With neither of those things available to them, then it's fire, and fire is what Mercy has. Those bottled bits of magical flame are now ruthlessly tossed - two at the beast's face, to hopefully blind her, then three at her feet to trip her. The last two are held in reserve and here is where Mercy waits. She waits for the wolf to open it's maw, whether from pain, or rage, and when that occurs Mercy savagely hurls the last two cylinders straight for that open mouth.

Sam Winchester has posed:
The two bomb-making women of their crew are ready with hell-fires, and that's good, because Sam Winchester did not bring the right tools. Ruefully he thinks about all the silver bullets he left behind, because //werewolves// were not expected. But really. Shouldn't werewolves always be expected? He resolves to carry silver always now.

Mercy sets Claire gently aside, Fred moves forward and he is there, a hand out and ready to catch and steady Claire if she needs it, but //only// if she needs it, aware that the horrors she has seen and endured might make touch a little fraught for her. All the same, he all but mantles over the nurse they've come to rescue, gun out and up, ready to defend her with his life if that's what becomes necessary. At this time, and at this moment, others are better suited to Hunting than he is, so he Protects. It's an irony that really doesn't escape him, but...neither does it concern him.

He's certainly out of juice for any more TK. He's been burning way too much power tonight. If he burns too much more right now he's going to become their next problem, and that's the last thing he wants.

Claire Temple has posed:
The sight of it makes Claire stop in her tracks, having never in her life seen anything like -- a werewolf. Her pupils shrink to take that in on top of everything else. Her hand tightens on Mercy's arm. Her lips move articulately, soundlessly with the words too hard to say: holy shit.

The werewolf fills the hall -- roots herself firmly between the group and the only way out. Murder reflects against the animal lenses of her eyes.

Mercy asks to be let go, and Claire only half-attentively unwinds free from her arm, still staring at the monster. She only seems to animate once Mercy is no longer in arm's reach, her body unsteady -- and takes Sam's arm silently, gratefully in needed balance to stay upright. After a moment, and wordlessly, her hand tightens, needing something else. Needing to touch someone to tell herself this is all still real.

Blood drips from the wound that has not -- cannot -- kill her. And stepping forward, her blunted claws dragging against the tiled floor, the wolf takes in their scents -- the fear and grief -- and it wet her jaws worse, lips curling away from canine teeth the lengths of their hands.

Stasya, or that monster she has become, does not waste a moment more lunging forward. Like before, her first target is Captain America, any intelligence left in her monstrous head that hatred for him, and she bears toward him, an instant before a lunge --

-- before the shield hits true, the powerful vibranium coupled with his powerful throw catching the animal with violence, sending her back and nearly through a wall. It dents and collapses under her weight, disturbed electrical making the lights stutter, before she screams in animal fury and tears back out.

Animal or not, there's enough human intelligence that she sights -- and smells -- at her periphery --

-- Fred, and her work to arm a series of IEDs.

With a two powerful twist of her body, the werewolf tries to use her size and momentum to break through the vanguard line of supersoldiers to reach the soft underbelly of the group, because if she cannot tear apart Captain America and the traitor dog, she'll rip apart the soft, weak things that accompany them, starting with the smallest soft thing of them all --

Lobbed fire, however, catches the werewolf in the face. The molotov shatters and covers her, alcohol-soaked fur burning nauseously, flesh bubbling and charring, as the monster HOWLS in surprise and agony. She abandons her attack and recoils, tripping on her own legs, shaking her head wildly to snuff the fire. It only carries it along her body, cooking her.

Misha, Stasya thinks, as fire opens in her jaws and engulfs her her throat. It cooks her from the inside-out. The wolf collapses to the ground, and this time does not get back up.

Winter Soldier has posed:
There is an odd sort of look to the way the once-Yasha watches Stasya, as she holds the line against their group's last chance at escape. It is a look of realization, of understanding, and then of pity. Not a pity that will inspire him to speak or act to save her life, of course -- but a pity, nonetheless.

"<He commanded you here to die for him, Anastasiya Nikolaevna,>" he says softly. "<Did he love you enough it was worth it?>" None of the rest can understand Russian; perhaps why he chooses that language to say what he does.

It does not stop him from readying to face her, but in the end Mercy -- spurred by vengeance on behalf of her lost friends -- acts with sudden decisiveness. The magical flames catch easily in her fur, setting her ruthlessly ablaze, the monster a brief flare of horrible burning light before the last two bombs burn her out from within. One of the few effective ways to kill a werewolf.

There is a brief silence from James Barnes.

"You were going to use that shit on me?" he mutters incredulously, mostly to himself, though he seems neither defensive or surprised about it, nor even offended. He'd have used that shit on himself too.

The clatter of men on the stairs behind them -- too close -- rouses him from his reverie. Fred's magnet bomb seems to cause a stir down the stairwell, the clatter of weapons suggesting most of the men lost hold of their rifles, delaying the assault a few precious moments, but it won't delay forever. He shakes his head sharply and urges the group onward. "Exit in two hundred yards," he estimates. "Dump whatever you've got left and detonate when we're clear."

Winifred Burkle has posed:
Fred sets her bombs to do their work and then turns about to join the others. An ear is given to the stairwell - she needs to know when to detonate the other bombs she has planted. However, what she faces when she turns around is a werewolf intent on ending her.

The scientist freezes, eyes wide as she realizes the intent of Anastasiya. There's little she has that will stop this. A normally lethal bullet didn't stop her, what chance does she have? However, her moment of frozen panic is quickly laid to rest as Mercy steps in with the molotovs available to her.

An unimpeded gasp escapes Fred as the wolf - instead of lethally lunging at her - is brought down by magical fire. There is little sympathy there, though there is certainly a bit of fear and awe that the weapons she helped made are capable of such a thing.

The question from Barnes about them wanting to use that on him is met with a bit of a look, but no other response. How else would they combat a murderous assassin that otherwise seems impenetrable? Now, though, she starts to shed more of what is available in her bag - linking them up with the detonation app from Mercy.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Another person might look away when the wolf catches fire, but not Mercy.

For Darryl, Mercy witnesses the burning of the wolf. The death of this one. It's not a pretty sight, or smell, but Mercy watches until Stasya no longer moves.

Then the coyote's gaze moves away from the corpse. Her eyes turn to Bucky first, the notes of his pity picked out from the sharper notes of burnt fur, burned flesh, before she nods to his muttered question. "We were." She says in agreement, then she looks to Claire, Sam, Fred and the Captain. When Fred starts dropping her available bombs to the ground, Mercy does similar. The last of her molotovs will likewise be set (carefully) down upon the ground. They'll explode once the main detonation is triggered.

Once everything is in place Mercy will touch the screen of her smartphone. The screen brightens from that touch of hers, even as the coyote begins to move. Her steps will either take her back to Claire, if need be, or forward down the hallway. "Ready." Calls out the coyote as she now runs, her gaze and attention shifting between the group, her phone, and their way out.

Sam Winchester has posed:
Two hundred yards is two hundred too many in Sam's estimation.

He doesn't care to watch the werewolf burn. He's seen literally hundreds of monsters burn, having been on what amounts to something like an average of 2 hunts per month every month for thirteen years.

The ladies are dropping bombs, and he's moving Claire gently closer to that entrance, not at all put out to have her clinging to his arm. Right now he chalks every one of her reactions up to the shock of her captivity, but later he'll remember that she still has had very little grounding in the supernatural world, and will take steps to give her the knowledge that is, 100% and in every major way, power when it comes to such things. Even Dean couldn't do his job without some of that knowledge. The stuff in one's head helps one survive better than the ability to weild a gun.

He won't break off from the group of course, and certainly doesn't want to get far from Fred, but his protective stance for the woman they've come to save never falters. Forward down the hallway for Mercy might well be a logical choice, but should Claire want to go back to the friend she's closest to he will certainly take a step back, sensitive, as he is, to what one might need to feel even somewhat functional. And she needs to be as functional as possible, cause they're not out of the woods yet.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Ultimately Bucky seems to shrug off his own incredulity for the mild joke it was, especially when it just gets deadpan reactions from Fred and Mercy. He's not surprised about that either. As is typical of most of his humor after eighty-five years of killing -- it's not actually very funny at all.

Running is the imperative now, anyway, and once Fred and Mercy get their linked array of explosives set, he pushes them onwards. Their pursuit in the stairwell has sorted itself out already from Fred's magnet bombing, and they're starting to pour into the hall behind them. There's no longer any way to fight, only to flee, and that in mind Bucky finally doubles back.

Without asking permission or forgiveness of Claire, he relieves Sam of his guarding task with a brief nod and hefts the nurse up, because they're going to need to go fast and she's in no condition. "Let's go," he says, and turns to run, apparently completely unburdened by carrying Claire.

There is no resistance to stop them from pelting out of the center. None to stop them from clearing to the tree line. All the possible resistance is still within the building, already desperately trying to dismantle the set explosives. They've got a few disabled, but not enough yet to stop the chain reaction set to blow.

They could try to flee, but they won't. The gestalt of Hydra was always far more important than any insignificant individual life...

Winifred Burkle has posed:
With her explosives laid and set, Fred is quick behind the others as they run. The fact that Barnes was attempting a joke is completely lost on her and, honestly, not dwelled upon. Instead she focuses on that tree line.

Once Barnes removes Claire from Sam's care, a hand reaches out and grabs onto Sam as they run. Her other hand holds onto the phone that holds her link to the bombs that she set. There's the anticipatory fear that everything has gone wrong, that they will run and hear the unmistakable sound of a sniper or a gunshot or a different kind of explosion. It's coming, she knows it. This is supposed to be the Real World, things do not happen like this. They don't manage to escape.

/Nothing good ever happens here./ The thought comes unbidden to her head. She attempts to suppress it, but there it remains.

Attempting to dislodge the thought, she looks to Mercy for confirmation before setting her own explosives to detonate.

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Perhaps after this is all over Mercy will take a minute to realize what she did. What they all did. Choosing life and death for the people (and wolf) within that cursed building. It's going to leave a mark, definitely, but that price won't be seen just this moment.

When Fred looks to Mercy for confirmation, the coyote nods, before she touches the screen of her own phone.

With several swipes of her fingertip the bombs within the building are armed and then set to detonate in one fell swoop.

Sam Winchester has posed:
Sam nods to Bucky in return. There is no distrust there, in sharp contrast to most of the group, and no guilt or anguish, in sharp contrast to poor Steve. He lets Claire go without complaints, trading her for Fred's hand, which he squeezes with his own broad one as they run. He could all but wish he had strength enough to repeat Bucky's feat with Fred, scooping her up into his arms and running, but for all that he seems weirdly stronger these days he's not about to push his luck when they've got bombs to flee. He watches her detonate those bombs, once the trees are sheltering them, but he doesn't let her go, not even for a second. He needs that hand, suddenly, needs it fiercely.

He has, in the span of minutes through their strange fight and flight, compartmentalized basically everything about everything. There will be time enough to process the dark revelations of his ugly vision, time enough to bow his head in guilt and grief and wonder at the implications of what he has bought and sold. For now, though, there is only a dull ache in the center of his chest, ignored for the most part while they handle the work of getting free of this place, soothed by Fred's fingers entwined with his.

Soothed by that, and by this...it seems they have won, carved an incredible, unlikely victory out of nearly thin air. This time, he doesn't think anyone gave any orders to offer /no significant resistance/. For all that he doesn't yet understand the purpose of the vision spell...perhaps because none of them really fell permanent victim to it, thank God...springing that trap was a serious expenditure in terms of resources, components, energy, focus, and time. No, they were expected, perhaps, but they were resisted. Significantly.

It almost gives him a tiny kernel of hope for the future. Their strange group may be 'rag-tag', as May has so-often named it to be. Scrappy and strange. Hunters, soldiers, healers, shapeshifters, mystics, vigilantes, touched by darkness, reaching for light, and damned if they don't manage to accomplish a little good from time to time.

Here, in this moment, as explosions wipe out a group of zealous, insane human monsters...it is, for one Sam Winchester, enough. Perhaps more than enough.

This is who he is. Bought and paid for.

And the fact that he and Dean don't have to be /who they are/ as islands unto themselves, that they can now have friends, a team, a home base, well. That's a sort of cosmic customer loyalty gift of some kind. He looks into each of their faces.

His smile is there-and-gone again, but it's one of brief, sincere gratitude all the same.

Claire Temple has posed:
Claire Temple is one of those people who looks away as a wolf monster burns.

The too-bright, too-hot burn of hellfire turns her head, and with a quiet desperation she turns her face, eyes shut. Maybe in another day, another life, she would have more courage, more cold patience --

-- but it's too much, and the last month swiftly hits a horrifying limit. She can't look, and a moment later, can no longer move, paralyzed on the spot, a perfect, eery silence as her hand grips tight to Sam's arm and her heart beats painfully in her chest. It's more than she can take, and for the first time in years, the smell of burning flesh makes her insides twist.

Fortunately -- though maybe some in this group would question that -- Bucky Barnes slips in and takes Claire into his arms. The action pulls pulls her hand free from Sam's arm, and animating to the touch, she turns a strange look askance onto the man whom, for the last eight years, was the Winter Soldier.

Even more strange is the way she gentles, closing her eyes and tightening her hands on him as he runs.

The main floor rigged with the last of those homemade explosives, the group takes flight from that complex, blurring through the night and retreating to the overgrown Staten Island brush, its thick, overpopulated treeline hiding them in its shadow --

-- while HYDRA's remaining reinforcements, those who were not pre-selected for immediate evacuation on Volkov's orders, reach the main level. And with pointed rifles, find waiting not the malfunctioning Soldier, or Captain America, or the mysterious rest of the group, but a tithe left in consolation. Bombs upon bombs all around them.

The men and women process what will happen in all of a moment. So it must be. The mission is already complete, and success assured. This will change nothing. They are all only one head, and on a beast with many necks --

The unit commander lowers his gun. And tells his men, "Hail Hydr--"

The complex detonates by the remote command. The main building shatters all its remaining glass, exploding outwards in licking tongues of fire, before it folds in and collapses to the earth.