Insanity

Chapter 31

Song: Human by Rag N Bone Man

☆☆☆

"I'm only human, I make 
mistakes, I'm only human 
that's all it takes."

☆☆☆

A woman screamed as the assassin shot into her car's window, sending the car reeling bumper first into a tree.

It was pitch black, so dark not even a single star could be seen in the sky. The only thing illuminating the path was the car's now cracked headlights, lighting the space just a few feet in front of it with a silvery luminescence.

The assassin strode up to the driver's side door, pulling out the man from the ground. His face was already bloody and starting to bruise just around his nose. The limp driver squinted up at the assassin, as if with a look of recognition. "Sergeant Barnes?" he asked, and the assassin chose to shove away the buzz in his brain. The man mumbled pleas of help but the assassin ignored him, striking him in the face several times until he was as limp as a cooked noodle. The assassin threw him back into the car, going around the other side to find the woman.

His orders repeated in his head: sanction and extract. Leave no witnesses.

The woman cried out to her dead husband uselessly, seeming to have given up. Her face too was already bloodied, and she had a dizzied haze over her eyes. The assassin figured terminating her would be as easy as snapping a toothpick, and she put up no fight.

A weird sense of deja-vu came over him; he'd been here before, on this night, killing these innocent people.

A wave of guilt washed over him as he realized the horrifying thing he was doing. He let go of the woman, willing her to suck in a breath, though no such thing happened. She too slumped forward, her dead body sprawled across the car's dashboard.

What had he done?

He stepped back, looking at his shiny left hand tainted with blood, horrified at the evil it had just done. Why had he killed these people? He suddenly couldn't remember. But they were dead, and it was because of him.

What if they had children, grandchildren? Their family would never know the truth, but he supposed they never could. They'd never know how their loved ones actually died and would probably live their entire lives believing it was just some freak car accident, never knowing the man who killed them was still very much alive.

He tried to wipe away the blood on his hand by rubbing it against his pants, but it was no use. The stain just got bigger and more permanent, as if combining every ounce of blood from every one of his victims in the last fifty years and smearing it across his hand, dripping into his joints, paralyzing his hand. It was as if from beyond the grave, his victims were silently getting their revenge.

But suddenly, the scene changed. He was no longer in a woodsy area at night and when he looked back at his hand, the corruptible metal had been replaced with flesh. A real, true hand took the place of his cybernetic one: skin, tendons, muscles, bones, blood. Even fingernails and lines on his palm.

He glanced up to see he was standing in what looked to be a military base, the walls and floors doused with warm yellow lights dangling from the ceiling in stark contrast to Hydra's usual frigid room temperatures and bright florescent lights.

He felt a pat on his back, jumping slightly at the weight of it. Steve Rogers stood beside him, smiling like a boy who'd gotten his first car. "What do you think, Buck?" he asked, stepping back and spinning in a little circle. Gripped in his left hand was a stunning circular shield, all red, white, and blue with a star in the very center of it.