Chapter Text
There is a cat on the windowsill.
Abnormal occurrences excluded, the Asset wakes at 0600 hours, local time. One hour of exercise is performed in order to prevent weakening of the body. If possible, essential nutrients are consumed, for the same purpose. Necessary personal hygiene is maintained, to cultivate a non-remarkable appearance and odour. Routine surveillance of the areas surrounding the Asset’s location is undertaken. The Asset will leave the location at irregular intervals to procure supplies.
This location has been selected as one that is very unlikely to attract unwanted attention. It is presumably an architectural accident, an awkward single room sandwiched between two drab office suites, too small to be a studio flat, too big to be a spare cupboard. The water and the electricity have both been disconnected for several years, the front door has rusted shut, and the windows are caked so thickly with grime from the passing trains that seeing into the location from the outside is impossible.
The cat makes eye contact with the Asset from the windowsill, and emits an affronted, drawn-out yowl.
The cat is an Abnormal Occurrence.
The Asset considers.
Continuation of yowling is likely to draw attention, and is therefore not acceptable. The cat must either enter the location or leave the windowsill. Opening the window wide enough to allow the cat in may attract attention if the location is under observation. The cat must then be dealt with once inside the location. Assessment: less than ideal.
If the window is opened enough to allow the Asset to reach through it, the cat can be disabled, and removed from the windowsill, thus preventing the cat’s return and minimising possibility of detection.
This is the most acceptable solution.
The Asset draws himself to his feet, sets down his lunch, and goes to the window. The cat watches him quizzically with one green eye. There’s a pitted, scabby hollow where the other should be. It jumps when the Asset cracks the window open.
The Asset takes a butterfly knife from the scarred table and flicks it open.
The cat stands. Severing its left rear Achilles tendon and pushing it from the windowsill should take no more than fifteen seconds. This will resolve the abnormal occurrence.
The Asset shifts the knife in his hand. The abnormal occurrence blinks at him from the other side of the grimy glass.
After a long moment, the Asset yanks open the window. (Illogical. Recalibration required?) The abnormal occurrence flumps to the floor with a conversational mewl, leaving motes of dust swirling in the air.
The Asset peers at the window dubiously.
The abnormal occurrence stalks across the room, and begins to eat his lunch.
-
When the Asset leaves the flat at 1528, there are only a handful of people milling about the park (his brain provides the information automatically, rapidfire - two office workers lunch break female late forties low threat – garbage collector male smoking overweight back issues low threat-), but he feels them like splinters under his nails. The rustle of the wind through the bare, black tree branches seems to whisper up through the pavement and surround him. He imagines water trickling up from between the icy stones, pooling round his ankles, rising-
Unnecessary. Focus.
He passes squat blocks of flats and cheap offices, all built with a familiar Soviet-esque brutalism. They’re set far apart, the streets built wide, and the sky is a dizzying, open abyss above him. Howlingly empty. The dirty, metallic taste of the steelworks sticks in the back of his throat. The Asset stares hard at the pavement, scarf pulled up around his mouth.
Seems like you’re cracking up, champ.
The Asset’s thoughts are disorganised. The Asset knows that it is long overdue for a reset and a spell in storage.
The cold suddenly seems a little more vicious.
He knows that he should head on past the park to the BelMart on the main drag, that he’s visited the corner shop too many times, that his route is becoming familiar, easy to trace – but the thought of walking down Brestskaya Street, surrounded by people, standing under the scouring glare of those neon supermarket lights with all that fuckin’ noise all round him –
He takes a deep breath, and immediately wishes he hadn’t. The cold aches and scrapes inside him. His throat is tight. The Asset’s thoughts. Are disorganised.
-
“Mr. Sadowski, I didn’t know you had a cat,”
Assessment: the woman who runs the Magazin on the corner is one ugly dame. Her lips and cheeks are oddly puffy, the skin tight and shiny, and half of her front teeth are cracked and brown. She also picked up on the Asset’s Russian accent the second she heard it (even HYDRA cells ain’t sadistic enough to make their cyborg assassins learn Belarusian, okay, even Nazis have limits) and has since taken a bit of a shine to him. Which makes returning to her shop an unforgivable breach of protocol. But then, so is having a panic attack in BelMart, most likely. So.
“I’m looking after it for a friend,” he says, thumping several more tins of cat food down onto the counter.
Damned if he’s gonna let some one-eyed punk of an Abnormal Occurrence steal his lunch two days running.
-
When he gets home, the Abnormal Occurrence has not only eaten his dinner, but also puked it back up again. On his combat boots. You’re an Abnormal Pain in the Ass, he wants to tell it. The urge is unproductive and illogical, so he ignores it.
-
There is a hacksaw gritting through the gristle that holds his shoulder together and he can feel it, feel every fuckin’ jagged tooth of it, there are bright lights, there’s a scream, there’s a scream, there’s a shrieking goddamn howl at the back of his throat but they’ve stopped up his mouth with their foul-tasting rubber bitepiece so he can’t and and and there’s – work – to be done on his insides, on his guts and heart, ribs to be sawn apart and opened up like a fuckin’ oyster shell Jesus fuck Jesus fuck-
There are laughing men with cruel fuckin’ faces, and there’s someone sobbing in a cell that his brain shies away from even in his sleep-
And there’s a face, a face he knows or knew or wants to know, thin and ill, and kind, kind, so fuckin’ kind, big kind blue eyes watching him with that unbearable kindness as he puts his hands around a thin neck and crushes the windpipe flat.
He wakes only when the body has gone completely cold.
-
The streets are quiet. Pretty typical for a winter weeknight in a place where it’s quite possible to have a few too many, pass out somewhere, and freeze to death before your designated driver comes to get you. Groups huddle under the streetlights, cigarettes flaring in cupped, gloved hands. Here and there, couples and lone figures trudge through the snow.
Warmth washes over him as someone leaves a bar. The smell – smokes, cheap beer, sweat – is so achingly familiar that for a minute it’s all he can do to just stand there, thinking of laughter, hazy light, cigarettes. A deep, earthy taste at the back of his throat – whiskey, Bucky thinks, whiskey – an arm that is his, that is really his, slung around a bony ribcage – telling someone you dumb punk, you really got the constitution of a dishrag, dontcha-
The bar door slams shut, and the cold draws close again. He thinks of the rotten sweetsickness of vodka and a table full of plastic shot glasses. HYDRA likes to know their agents can function no matter what. He thinks of sitting in a cold cold chair. Hearing a cold voice.
-
“Семнадцать” the voice says, and he drinks. A cold sickness creeps down his throat, but he does not gag.
“Каково расстояние между Ленинградом и Москвой?” the voice asks.
“Шестьсот тридцать километров” he answers. There’s silence. The scratch of pencil against paper.
“Восемнадцать” the voice says. He drinks.
-
Outside a shitty bar in Belarus, the Asset clenches his metal fist until it creaks. Unproductive. Fucking unproductive. Something hot and horrible crawls under his skin.
-
Here is what is known about Jaraslau Kavalyow. He was 26 years of age. He left education at 16; never entered further training or long-term work. His physical traits are no longer relevant. Absent father. Lived with his mother in a two-bed flat near Baranovich Central Station. Few friends. Two ex-girlfriends who never pressed charges. Had certainly committed a range of muggings and petty thefts in the past, and may well have intended to commit more on the night of his disappearance. His body was found in the meltwater of Lake Zhlobinskaya almost six months after his disappearance. His neck had been crushed to half its normal size.
In a city as small as Baranovich, anonymity is difficult to maintain, which means manhunts rarely last long.
In weather as cold as Belarusian winters, the ice takes a long time to melt.
The Asset knows these things.
-
“You look tired, Mr. Sadowski,” the lady at Shpion Magazin says to the Asset.
-
“I guess that friend of yours isn’t coming back for his cat, huh,” the lady at Shpion Magazin says to the Asset.
-
The Asset dreams of a kind, familiar face often. One part of him opens its mouth, a half-remembered name on its tongue. A different, sharper part bares its teeth, because to abandon a kill order is unacceptable.
He wakes shaking and retching, but forces himself to lie still, to grit his teeth.
Unproductive. Unproductive.
-
The Abnormal Occurrence now comes and goes with such regularity that the window is perpetually open for it, because fuck it. The Abnormal Occurrence is the colour of very dirty dishwater, and was probably once long-haired, although so much of its fur is missing or matted that it can be hard to tell. It uses his top-of-the-range tac vest as a nest and likes the metal arm better than the normal one. It has taken to sleeping by his head on the arm of the battered couch, curled up into a raggedy, one-eyed loaf. If the Asset thrashes too vigorously in his sleep, the Abnormal Occurrence bites his head.
For some reason, this behaviour is acceptable.
-
One day he finds an old, fuck-ugly derelict diner in town. The windows that aren’t boarded up are practically opaque with dirt, the signs are cracked and peeling, the furniture inside is falling apart, but he still thinks he can see what it was meant to look like. Pure Americana, cheerful, maybe a bit tacky – retro stools, milkshakes, posters on the walls, bright lights, big city.
He pauses there, staring through the dusty glass, and a strange feeling laps at his insides. He finds himself thinking of a great, silent lake, of water inching up the insides of a building. Slowly. Slowly.
-
The next time he goes to the Magazin, the woman at the counter fumbles his change, and in scrambling to stop it falling, presses her hands firmly against his. For a moment their eyes meet. He knows better than to jerk his arm away. If she feels the metal under his thick gloves, she says nothing of it.
That night he scans the street outside his window restlessly, chasing every flicker of movement.
-
Two days later, he finds faint indents in the snow beneath one of the trees at the edge of the park, and he knows.
Within the hour, the flat has been stripped of any identifying possessions.
The Asset spends the day curled into the underside of the railway bridge, still as a statue and quiet as the dead.
When he stalks back to the location at dusk, he isn’t disappointed – a figure crouches at the park fence, all but invisible, head angled towards what used to be his building.
The Asset watches impassively. The flat is unremarkable from the outside, a dark and dingy window among other dark and dingy windows. The inside is empty. There is nothing to indicate that he was ever there – that anyone has ever been there at all. Good luck to anyone trying to find any kind of proof that this is where-
A little blip of shadow interrupts his thoughts. It breaks away from the trees, lazily wanders across the snow, scrabbles up a porch, leaps onto his windowsill and yowls like a big fuckin’ one-eyed arrow.
The Asset grinds his teeth in the dark.
-
“The keepers of the Red Room like to make sure those they find disappointing end up leading disappointing lives.” Natasha’s voice is impassive. “There’s a lot of ways they can do that.”
“Plastic surgery?”
“Can go wrong very easily.”
“Geez.” Steve thinks of taught skin and broken teeth. He trails one finger along the scarred, stained tabletop, brushing away the dust. “She was sure it was him?”
“Sofia might have been a bad assassin, but she was always a good spy,” Natasha replies. ”It was him.”
Steve goes to join her at the grimy window and peers out into the icy park.
“It’s called Malady Park,” Natasha says, her fingers resting on the sill. She glances at him, hints of a smile lingering at the corners of her mouth. “You can always trust ex-Soviets to take the cheery path.”
He lets his eyes drift over the rotten floorboards, the shredded curtains, the stained couch.
“Can’t you just.”