Project 43: Healing

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They were dead. Elias looked around the room from the doorway as he started to gather himself back into shape. All the monitors were flatlining. They were supposed to have a steady but slow heartbeat. The technology was smart enough to keep the soldiers alive for another hundred years if necessary, so something had happened.

Elias stepped into the room behind everyone else as he tried to figure out what had happened. Had the Hydra officers killed the soldiers before they abandoned the base? Maybe they realized just how unpredictable the subjects were and decided to eliminate them all. Before Elias could figure it out a voice boomed over a speaker of some sort:

"If it's any comfort, they died in their sleep."

Elias didn't see anyone but they continued to walk deeper into the room, looking for a source of the sound even if it most probably came from the speakers in the ceiling, which meant the target was in the security room.

"Did you really think I wanted more of you?" the voice asked. Elias furrowed his brows trying to figure it all out.

His heart stopped for a second as he caught a glimpse of one of the men in his tank. He had been one of the people who killed Elias. He had been the one choking him but now he was dead, lifeless in his tank with a clean bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

Elias reached his hand out to inspect the hole in the glass. Cold air was still flowing through it so the man couldn't have gotten far. He was armed with a handgun and he knew how to use it.

For whatever reason, Elias didn't feel uncomfortable looking at the man through the glass even tho he had been petrified of just the thought of him a couple of moments earlier.

"What the hell?" Bucky asked lowly as he kept on scanning the room. Each soldier had the same condition, one bullet through the head, clean shot, no mess. Something Elias had gotten used to.

"I'm grateful to them, though. They brought you here," the voice continued.

A small thud echoed across the room and in a split second, Steve's shield and Elias' bullet were flying towards the source only to bounce off the glass.

"Please, Captains," the voice said emphasizing the 's' a bit too much, like making a point about how he knew who Elias was.

"The Soviets built this chamber to withstand the launch blast of UR-100 rockets," the voice continued from behind the small glass window. He had locked himself into some sort of a bunker Elias didn't remember from his last visit.

"I'm betting I could beat that," Tony said a bit too proud of his firepower.

"Oh, I'm sure you could, Mr. Stark. Given time. But then you'd never know why you came," the man continued peaking Elias' interest. Both Steve and Tony continued to get closer to the man but Elias saw no use in it. The man posed no threat from behind the glass so whatever he was planning to do, was in the room with them.

Elias started carefully scanning the room, looking for bombs or anything out of the ordinary. Since the soldiers were dead, he wasn't sure what he was even looking for.

"You killed innocent people in Vienna just to bring us here?" Steve asked trying to get the answers from the man himself. Elias wasn't too interested in what the maniac had to say so he continued his search.

"I've thought about nothing else for over a year," the man said quietly. Elias had to turn to look at him and really try in order to even hear what he was saying.

"I studied you. I followed you. But now that you're standing here I just realized," the man said pausing for dramatic effect. "There's a bit of green in the blue of your eyes."