Love and the White Wolf - Book 2

10. They Hurt You. (Emotional trauma)

Content warning: Descriptions of physical and sexual assault resulting in emotional trauma.

As Sarah and I watched this unfold over the two days I received updates from Nick Fury regarding the investigation.  What had supposedly been damning evidence pointing the finger at James was slowly being revealed to have originated from inside the facility in a location he couldn't have been.  The changes were subtle at first in the days before New Years Day, a missed shift here, an unregistered log entry there, nothing that was suspicious by itself but looked at in retrospect indicated a pattern.  At 7:01 am on New Years Day the major attack was launched by the insertion of a flash drive in a computer station in the motor pool far away from where James was being awakened by the medic with our dogs.  It loaded a virus that scrambled security duty shifts, locked the doors to most quarters, and turned off equipment then kept them off.  It was all designed to cause chaos.  Once the flash drive was removed the antivirus systems slowly removed the offending software.  Systems returned mostly to normal by the time James was arrested just before 1 pm.  None of it made sense. 

Dr. Strange finally decided to do some time travelling and watched unseen in the motor pool as a black vehicle pulled up, a man in a black suit exited the passenger side, inserted the flash drive in an unattended computer, reentered the car and the car backed out and left.  He noted the car's license plate number, and the driver.  He noted the time of insertion and then forwarded himself to the time he arrived in the facility advising himself of the flash drive.  One of the other sorcerers analyzed it while it was still in and determined it was supposed to be left in all day to inflict maximum damage but if removed now the damage could be reversed.  So Strange ordered its removal and watched as the damage reversed itself over the morning.  He returned back in time to the vehicle that held the man with the flash drive.  He sat in the back seat between John Burns and Henry Larson and listened to them discuss how they would take out James from the Avengers and teach him a lesson about poking his nose into his past.  Strange went further back and listened as Henry Larson told Burns about his grandfather deciding not to tell Steve Rogers about his friend Bucky still being alive after a fall.  He wanted to see how successful HYDRA's program was in creating a super soldier that could be controlled unlike Steve Rogers who refused to be anyone's puppet.  Later when they saw the evidence that HYDRA was onto something they made a deal.  In exchange for two vials of the Winter Soldier's blood they would provide access to a sitting president of HYDRA's choice at a time of their choice.  The deal was struck and the vials of the Winter Soldier's blood made its way to a secret lab in a CIA facility where several men were injected with a serum made of the blood.  With varying degrees of success the men were sent out to be tested against their sire, as it were.  Only one returned, Isaiah Bradley, who had successfully ripped the metal arm off the Winter Soldier during the Korean War.  Shortly after that, Henry Larson's grandfather ordered that the life insurance paid to Bucky's parents be recouped as he was still alive. 

This wasn't all revealed at once, it actually took Dr. Strange almost two days to piece together this part of the story, going forwards and backwards with Henry Larson, John Burns and finally Senator Herb Larson.  But Nick Fury told me the bare bones of it and asked me when James came to Sarah Wilson's home on Thursday morning to take him away for a week in a motor home he would have delivered on Wednesday.  He asked me to keep James away so he could leverage the knowledge Dr. Strange had gleaned and force Henry Larson and his father into giving up all their files on James Buchanan Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier.

I didn't want to withhold a secret from James but I also wanted him to get that information so I agreed.  The motorhome would also serve as a more private space for our reunion as I was currently sleeping in AJ's room, Sarah's oldest son.  It was delivered just before the evening news came out announcing James release.  Nick already knew and had alerted me.  I was signing for the motorhome already loaded with food, water, and solar panels when Sarah ran out of the house to say it was on the news.  Shortly after Donald Lambert phoned my cell phone and put James on.