LEGACY ─ marvel

VII. The Animal Within

Chapter Seven
Bucky

Shuri and Okoye arrived at our location some time later, and enveloped Lena in as much love and relief as we did. By the time we arrived at Wakanda it was late into the night, but T'Challa and Nakia stayed up anyways. After a couple more reunion hugs, Zy'aire had to endure a scolding for leaving so suddenly in the night. This reminded me that I grounded Livy and Stevie for doing the same, and with a stern look their way they seemed to remember too. All three went up to bed without another word, and with a final goodbye, Jo, Alex, Khari did too, taking the ship to fly to their own house.

Everyone is going up to bed, finally able to relax and get some rest now that this whole ordeal is over. I usher Lena towards the stairs, but she resists, shaking her head up at me.

"I'm not that tired," she admits. "I think I want to walk around for a while, try to get the rest of the serum out of my system."

Usually when she has Analiese's serum it makes her incredibly tired, she always wants to sleep it off, not walk it off. But she hasn't had the serum in a while, maybe this is what her body is telling her it needs. I lean down and kiss her gently on the lips, feeling her hands cup just under my jaw. After a second she pulls away, brushing my mouth with her thumb before walking away from me, towards the hallway opposite of me.

As I watch her walk away I touch my lips, feeling a little confused. I've been married to Lena for twenty three years, and been in a relationship with her for even longer than that, and her kiss has never felt like that. Her kisses her soft, tender, and filled with so much love. This kiss was aggressive and rigid, like she was forcing herself to do it.

I place one foot on the steps going up the stairs, and as I turn my body to face the steps, I notice that a few steps up is Livy, giving me a very firm look.

"Stevie didn't listen to me when I told him this," She begins, dropping her voice lower. "I think somethings wrong with Mom."

"What do you mean?"

"I sense something off about her, she just doesn't seem like herself. I sense a lot of aggression coming from her, her movements and happy demeanor seem forced. Like just now when you kissed her, I didn't sense any oxytocin and cortisol, the hormones you release when you feel romantic love. My whole life she's emitted those hormones whenever she's around you, but not now."

I absentmindedly touch my lips again, looking back down the hallway Lena just went down, finding her nowhere in sight. I keep my eyes plastered on this vacant hallway as I tell my daughter: "I'm going to go check on your mother, you go up to your room...maybe bring Stevie and Zy with you. I'll call you if somethings up."

"Be careful, Dad." Livy pleads softly, obeying my request and making her way up the stairs, telling me as she does: "Her scent is outside, it's heading northeast."

The only thing northeast is Shuri's lab. What could she possibly want there?

I run down the hallway towards the exit of the palace, picking up speed once I get outside. I look around as I head northeast to see if Lena is around, but I don't see her anywhere, which makes no sense. The only sign I see of her is when I reach the lab, finding the doors to be wide open...but how could she have gotten here so fast? She could have shifted and flown here of course, but how could she if she has Analiese's serum in her like she said?

I think Livy is right, somethings off.

I enter into the lab and start to make my way down the stairs leading towards Shuri's main lab. The closer I get there, the more I hear noise coming from within the lab. I don't know what though, there's some clanging, some footsteps, but nothing that tells me what's going on down there. I try to make my footsteps as quiet as possible as I make my way down the final steps into the lab, and once I reach the bottom, I keep low to the ground, hiding behind one of the work tables to get a look at what's going on.

I see Lena working a few feet away, her facial expression focused as she takes a syringe needle and places the needle into a green liquid in a test tube, sucking it up inside. I stare at the green liquid and wonder to myself why it seems so familiar, and after a few seconds it hits me, it's Emma Becker's serum, the shape shifting serum.

"I can smell you, Bucky, there's no use in hiding." Lena says without looking up from her current task.

I stand up from behind the counter and walk over towards her, feeling more confused with each second that passes. "That's Becker's serum, isn't it?"

Lena chuckles to herself. "How observant of you."

"Sweetheart what's wrong? How did you get here so fast? What are you doing with that serum?"

Lena flicks the needle and smiles at the syringe before placing it down, picking up another empty syringe, and grabbing another vile of the serum from her jacket pocket, repeating the process over again. "All will be revealed soon, I just need to finish this up."

I take a step closer to her, but just one step. "Livy said she sensed something off about you, said she sensed a lot of anger in you, that you've been putting up a mask since we rescued you."

"She's a smart girl," Lena says, more to herself than to me. "I taught her well. Steve didn't sense anything, but that's to be expected, his ideals blind him, make him weak, just like Soroya."

I take another step towards her, my confusion fading into caution. "Are you not Soroya?"

She shrugs. "That's a complicated question."

"Well uncomplicate it."

"I'm not Soroya, but I am apart of her, have been since she was twelve," She explains, flicking the syringe needle again, her eyes finally falling onto me. "It's been a very long time since I've seen you, or at least properly seen you. The last time we saw each other I was in another form, my real form, and you were teaching Soroya how to lock me away and take control of my body. I didn't appreciate that, by the way, not one bit."

No, no it can't be. How is this possible? It shouldn't be possible. She can see the confusion and panic in my eyes, and it appears to make her happy. She's enjoying every second of this, and her voice is almost giddy as she spells it out for me: "When Bruce Banner told you that gamma radiation allowed Soroya and Alex to shift, did it not occur to you that maybe the animal side of her isn't just a mindless creature? That maybe that side of her is just as real as she is? That maybe, just maybe, that side of her is pissed that she has been made a prisoner in her own mind for nearly five decades?"

I swallow hard, my throat feeling so tight I can hardly breathe, my heart beating so quickly I'm afraid it will give out any second. I want to believe that what I'm seeing isn't real, that this is just some nightmare, but as I watch this woman stalk towards me, like she's a predator and I'm her prey, I have to accept that what I'm seeing is real, that the woman in front of me isn't my wife.

"You're not Soroya." I whisper.

She smiles, a smile filled with falsehood and malice. She stops two feet away from me, allowing me to really get a good look at her. Her fake smile, poisonous words, and sly movements are nothing compared to her eyes. Lena once told me that when I was the Winter Soldier, my eyes looked like black holes, devoid of all feeling and warmth, like I was a machine. These are not her eyes. In her eyes I see rage, unhinged rage, like the kind you see when you let an animal out of captivity after being in a cage for so long, the kind of rage no human can feel, the kind only an animal can.

"No, you can call me the Savage. After all, Soroya has been calling herself that for years, though she didn't earn it, I did."

And then she attacks.