The Color Of Blood

Part Nine; Red

He didn't have a name. Names were for people and he was a machine.

He's sure he must have had a name at some point, but it had been erased with everything else. It didn't matter anyway, not anymore.

They call him a soldier, and that is enough.

His mind was a sheet of paper; scribbled on and shredded and taped back together in various ways. And his body? It felt enough like his own, but he couldn't recall what being himself felt like. He knew enough to know the arm, shiny and metallic, was not of his own making. But his actions aren't his own either.

For as long as he could remember, they had controlled him. They broke him down to his bare essentials and remodeled him as they saw fit, only to trash him and begin again.

He was a puppet tied to strings and he couldn't see who held the other end.

The faces around him changed often. Each time he awoke, it was a different person giving him orders. Through bits and pieces of eavesdropped conversation, he assumed they must have been freezing him somehow. The science and logic didn't make sense to him, but then again it didn't have to.

He was a soldier and soldiers didn't ask questions; they followed orders.

Cryogenic sleep was not like other sleep, he was sure. He couldn't explain it in words, even in his own head, but it was something he felt. He didn't remember enough of normal sleep to delineate the difference. It just was.

Sometimes when he was asleep, he could feel time passing. Days, months, years, all spinning by outside of his cage. He couldn't watch it, but there was a sense of some sort.

It was during those times that he dreamed.

In these dreams, he saw a shadow made of light. It was a person. An angel. Colors he couldn't recall the names of circled the stranger's head like a halo, clothes woven from stars and blood clung to their lithe frame.

He didn't know who the shadowed person was. Sometimes he awoke with a word on the tip of his tongue only for it to fall away before it reached air. Many times he thought it was just an illusion, a guardian angel sent to make everything feel just a little less bad.

He didn't deserve an angel, he thought. They messed with his head, made him forget the things they had him do, but he remembered a lot, too.

He remembers the screams of people he's been sent to eliminate.

The scent of gunpowder fresh in his nostrils.

He remembers blood. So much blood.

He must have been a bad person before all of this became him.

Maybe this is what he deserved.

Missions were both the bane of his existence and his only purpose. He wished sometimes that they would just kill him, but he knew he was far too useful to them to be disposed of so easily. The idea of botching missions on purpose occurred to him more than once, but he didn't have the courage and he hated that about himself. Not that the thought ever lasted long enough to come to fruition; they always wiped his memory before it came to that point.

His target this time was a man they referred to only as Fury. He was to take him out no matter the casualties. It was supposed to be simple.

Until someone got in the way.

The soldier was no stranger to people fighting back; he was an assassin and his targets usually weren't ones that would go quietly. But never in his many years had he come across someone who matched his strength.