Red Thorn

Chapter 14

Early 2016

Red had left three days prior on a top secret mission that Fury had asked be done. He was rarely involved in the Avengers Initiative nowadays, but when he asked for help with a mission, it was done. But little did the Avengers know, Red had asked her father figure to do just that. It had taken some convincing, but eventually she got her way.

For two years, Red had watched Steve meet dead end after dead end in the search for his best friend, exhausting every last bit of information he had on whereabouts he might have gone. She could tell that it was taking everything the Captain had not to give up on his search.

Red had exhausted all of her contacts trying to find James Barnes, checking every single off-the-records HYDRA safe house but it was no use. Wracking her brain about where the supersoldier could possibly have gone, Red remembered something that was once said during her time in the Chambre Noire. The legend of the Winter Soldier breached even those walls and there were once rumours that he'd had to flea a scene and hide in a flat, one of the very few times he'd ever failed a mission.

That was how Red had ended up in a deselect apartment in the middle of Bucharest, Romania. She had been surveilling the place without much hope of any results, but much to her surprise a familiar mop of shaggy brown hair had entered the building, and moments later the lights were on in the suspected apartment, though the windows were covered with newspapers.

The following morning when he left, Red breached the flat. There wasn't much to it, a mattress on the floor used as a bed, a single lamp and a barren kitchen. On the counter there were news articles spread out, those about the Avengers. Beside it was a notebook and though she felt it could hold the answers to her questions, Red couldn't bring herself to flip through it. It felt like too much of an invasion of her privacy because she too had once kept one when she'd escaped her own hellish prison.

Red knew he was there, she'd heard him long before he'd entered the room. Turning around, she came face to face with the man from the fall of SHIELD. He looked healthier, bulkier, which led her to conclude that HYDRA had only been feeding him the bare minimum to stay alive, his hair was silkier too which confirmed that he had an overall healthier lifestyle, not that it was hard to have a healthier lifestyle than whatever HYDRA was doing to him. She noted that he also had the beginning of a short beard.

The two master assassins stared at each other in silence, neither one moving a muscle. She noticed as his eyes flickered to her mask, one not too dissimilar than the one he had been forced to wear for decades.

"Cолдат," she eventually said, calling him soldier in Russian. Noticing him stiffen slightly at the word, she added, "I'm not HYDRA."

He relaxed ever so slightly and glanced towards the papers behind her. "I know."

She nodded and slowly reached behind herself, making sure not to do anything that might trigger the former Winter Soldier's fight or flight reflexes, to grab a piece of paper. It was a brochure for the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian with Steve on the cover. "Do you know this man?"

"He's Steve Rogers, I read about him in the museum," the wary super soldier replied.

"Чушь собачья," Red cursed, calling him out on his bullshit. "You pulled him from the river, why?"

"You stood down, twice," he countered, "Why?"

They both cocked their heads to the side ever so slightly, silently staring at each other.

"Do you know who I am?"

"You're the Red Thorn," Bucky told her. "Another ghost story until you became an Avenger... and the second-best assassin in the world." Red quirked an eyebrow at him and he smirked ever so slightly. "Natasha Romanoff was an expected variable of my last mission, you were not. Your presence was unexpected by HYDRA."