1455/SHIELD: Achtung Means FAIL

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SHIELD: Achtung Means FAIL
Date of Scene: 30 April 2020
Location: Manhattan Subway
Synopsis: Winter gets his man. Nazi days suck.
Cast of Characters: Jane Foster, James Barnes




Jane Foster has posed:
Somewhere under 42nd Street-Bryant Park/Fifth Avenue Station, a man chases a ghost from another age.

The premier assassin of the Soviet Union almost loses his life doing it as the 12:05 AM train -- the 7 -- comes roaring westbound. Almosts. This is a night full of almosts. Almost taking down the Nazi with an ICER shot point blank, until his quarry dropped backwards down the escalator. Almost catching up with him on the electrified tracks and decades of filth. Almost hitting the subway car chattering along the rails until drawn up to a violent stop.

Doors torn open reveal the usual somewhat dingy interior, not the subject of an awesome hyperloop project. Advertisements blare for the usual suspects - Daily Planet subscriptions online, StarkPhone, LexFlix - and many others. The scattered flock of travelers fling themselves out onto the platform. Another train hisses into the platform from the opposite direction, scattering trash and clouds of smoke. An acrid burn of it slithers up, oily and burning the eyes.

And a man silently grips the far side, fingers punched into the window frame. Metal bends. Spiderweb cracks form. Someone lost in their headphones doesn't even notice. T-60. 59. 58. Ding, ding, ding! Westbound and eastbound trains shudder as the eastbound 7 leaves Bryant Park going 30 mph. If the westbound 7 leaves in 180 seconds and limps along at 15 mph, how soon will the Winter Soldier realize he's been attacked by a nameless swan planter and someone stole his keys, hiding them in a fountain?

James Barnes has posed:
The thing about him, creaky old relic of the Cold War that he is, is that inexorable persistence. The later ones were trained better, geared better - the Widows in their gracile elegance, the Wolf Spiders not created out of a wounded remnant of an enemy - but none could outlast him. Out-endure him.

It still holds true, with that bloodhound instinct to refuse to relinquish the trail while there's still scent hot in his nose. So he's pounding after that turnstile hopper, still, heedless of the trouble he's left in his wake. Even the looming potential of a post-mission lecture from Fury isn't enough to slow him.

Jane Foster has posed:
American-made and Soviet-refined against another Cold War relic, earlier even. Not like most of those cars were engineered any later. Most of the tracks and tunnels went down in the shadows of the Gilded Age or Teddy Roosevelt's fading shadow, creaking away on fragile diesel-punk mechanics that weren't ever meant to last this long.

The westbound train reports an incident, driver hissing about a near slip or pedestrian strike. Robbery. Of course, SHIELD listens, the NYPD shutting down Bryant Park issuing commands not to stop. Too late, too late, for the eastbound train gallops along like the old grey mare she is. The rush simmers to a flicker-beat of squealing wheels on hot iron, punched forward. The Nazi flunkie goes hand-over-hand, pushing his way toward the front. Short of where a driver would notice, listening to the string of commands from his superiors bleated over a radio. Strobes go haywire as the lights pop and spark, the few of them illuminating the path. Front headlines shimmer, wink out. Bucky's running in the dimmer darkness if he's after the train, either chasing it too late to catch up with the damn thing after crossing the tracks, or bound to the rickety old snake that heads straight for Queens. Brooklyn.

Old stomping grounds.

James Barnes has posed:
He knows the map of the subway like he knows the delta of veins on his remaining hand. Not merely the knowledge of an assassin often sent to work in the seething hive of humanity that is New York, but the gut deep knowledge of someone who's known it since ice came in wagons and gangwars were conducted with tommy guns. This Nazi has his ride, but Buck's jinking hastily for the E train. Trying to cut the curve - head him off at the pass, as the old Westerns had it. He's a dark and fleeting shape, pounding over the platforms, moving at speeds beyond an ordinary human sprinter's.

Jane Foster has posed:
The 7 stretches into northern Queens. Not a large amount of rail traffic that way, not like the dense concentration of lines splintering over Manhattan. The web thins out with the apparent need and density, though not like Queens and Brooklyn lack for public transit ridership or need. But first, the toxic slew of the East River, more sludge than water nowadays. The subway plunges steadily eastward, following tunnels bored deep into bedrock, passing the UN headquarters where, not far away, the German Consulate still reels from an abduction.

Choices aren't great when it comes to crossing Manhattan to Long Island, when you get right down to it. Bucky has to be patient, lurching after the 7. Doesn't matter if he's on it or doggedly hastening through the tunnels after it, lighting up a slew of weird alarms. It's a ten minute ride, what's that to a supersoldier's stamina? Stations chug off: Vernon Boulevard, Hunters Point, up to Court Square with its triple arrangement in a nest of platforms. There the 7 and the E converge and split apart. Grabbing the E launches Bucky forward minute by crawling minute, taking a northbound line while the 7 strafes the heart of Queens, cutting through Sunnyside Gardens and bypassing the huge Cavalry Cemetery. Appropriate maybe. The cavalry of one is coming.

Maybe Bucky just rides comfortably in style. Maybe he pounds it -- the train takes 7 minutes, but that's one long slog away from Manhattan.

He can get himself a coffee while he waits!

James Barnes has posed:
He rests for those few moments, calculating, waiting. Motionwise no more than another straphanger - the arm's concealed under nothing more specialized than a compression sleeve in an absurd diamond-plate pattern in dark gray, and a glove. But he's got that aura that makes the wiser and more sensitive of the commuters move away....or in one case, meet the pale eyes in the opening door of the car, and decide that they'll wait for the next train. At least his rifle is cased and in his other hand, and none of the pistols are on display. There's a certain amusement in the cat and mouse game through the old tunnels.

Jane Foster has posed:
Ding. Ding. Ding.

The 7 rolls into the station, disgorging its passengers. Up come the clotted masses of humanity in drips and drabs. Doors swing open. No Nazi in a dark uniform with a specific armband among them, of course, but that would be too easy. He can scan the glass and none of those faces locked up in their own little worlds belong to the era gone by.

But, then, everyone has their hiding places. The chatter reels off as a guy turns, going "Uh... Spider-Man?" in hearing. A shift, as the train starts to peel away. Is there a run through the tunnel or a trip on the 7 ahead?

James Barnes has posed:
The 7 it is. He might outrun a slowly accelerating train at a sprint, but this is proving a longer chase. Over he goes, all the better to search for this guy, car to car. He can always hit the emergency brake if he needs to make a break for the tunnels. "Spiderman's a pisher, kid," he informs him, as he dashes past.

Jane Foster has posed:
"Yeah, but he's not paying! I get fined if I do that!" shouts the passenger, and he shakes his fist ineffectively at Bucky in passing. No idea who he is talking to but that sense of bruised morality applies.

The 7 rattles on. Shortened cars on account of the SHIELD blockade, but here it's less of an issue. People crowd in. Digging in after miles of running, sauntering slowly, must be a blessing in a way. Bucky can see the faces, none of them like his companions. One or two of the phones stuck in passengers' hands flicker--

--black and white, goose-stepping soldiers in row after row--

They frown and shake the devices, pausing videos. Luminous colour bleeds in, some hiphop video for one, another watching a basketball game. Up ahead, the tinny melody out of someone's headphones bleeds barely through to sharpened senses, a tap-tap-tap of an old orchestral piece, a voice shouting, cheers, and the irritated woman scowls. "No reception out here. Cheap ass city."

Streaming banners, glimpses of red and white, flash-in-the-pan, as he slides into the forward cars. It's a breadcrumb trail one by one, except there's no tasty treat waiting for Hansel. Just the night glow as the 7 pops up again to street level for just a few blocks, a billboard flashing--

Nuremberg. Again.

James Barnes has posed:
The revulsion, the fury, is all the more visceral for being vintage to Buck himself. To the boy at the core, who went off to war to make the world safe for people like Steve, sickly and infirm. For himself, the son of a Jew. For all the *untermenschen*.....even before HYDRA folded him into its embrace, remade him.

Glances take it in, these glimpses into the past made chimerical. HYDRA survived, and so did he. The predator within the parasite. He's still going forward, relentless, trying to find his prey.

Jane Foster has posed:
Sparks fly from the wheels. Broken glass spiderwebs a corner where 'Spider-Man' isn't a fare-paying, respectable citizen. He isn't affected by the rocking and squealing of the wheels, the rhythm of the city just as fascinating as Berlin, a long-ago Berlin not shorn of character or Prussian glory days. Outside, all is well.

Eventually Bucky reaches the door to the driver's compartment. The radio is vaguely audible within. Spitting notifications, the ancient clangs of the system. So close. So far.

James Barnes has posed:
He peers in, carefully - shading the door with his metal hand, first. Better to catch any bullets on alloy, rather than bone. Only then is he making his way in. Any driver there is about to get an unpleasant surprise, assuming he hasn't already had one.

Jane Foster has posed:
The driver is busy doing driver things on the train. The door being popped open takes a bit of work, jury-rigging it free. A scattering of pedestrians might note, still too focused on their devices. Ahead lies yawning shadow, lies the greater run of track as far as northeast Queens where the train eventually terminates its route and spins back around to reverse the crosstown purpose.

He's going to be startled, if anyone looks in. Latino, fifties, he's in his uniform and that is nothing at all like the flunky feeling the wind snap against his limbs. The darkness is cloying and the headlights throwing weird shado--

There's a tiny picture of an older Latina woman and two smiling teenagers with the plastered on expressions of a formal photo. A bank of materials. A human shadow leering, looming over the headlights.

Wrong place, Barnes. He's not inside.

James Barnes has posed:
No one there. No one inside. Which leaves.....of course, the outside. He does it the easy way, relatively speaking, opening a door at the end....and then he's climbing up for the roof. Spiderman, indeed. Two can play at that game, even if Barnes does it with a laboring exertion that might make Peter cover his eyes and mutter about how they shouldn't let the old guys out of the nursing homes.

Jane Foster has posed:
The driver is already alarmed as the door goes sort of shut. Mostly because a startled passenger yells about it, approximately two steps before Bucky heads into the second car. Slow-motion reaction of "Hey! Dude, you can't go in there!" becomes a point of probably a faulty alarm, a lack of a lock, a total demotion due to lapses in security. The driver hears, looking back over his shoulder. The train lurches around a corner, leaping through another tunnel. It's planned to pull into another station soon, popping up to street level on a delicate incline, hitting that ever well named community of Corona. Ironies.

Bucky is going to have to explain himself in a few thousand feet, running short of track and cover of dark, the city by night too brightly lit for secrecy.

A door yanked open reveals the squeal and rush of air, the beeping noise warning someone. Indicators feed dials and notices, cops put on alert by a frightened employee. But here, there's the crawl, the roof perilously low. They didn't design tunnels for chases.

The Nazi flunkie sits awfully tight to the front car, away from the platform side, his fingers buried in the warped windowframe. He's looking ahead more than back, pressed flat with his feet spread for balance.

Time is running out.

James Barnes has posed:
But now Buck has him in his sights, figurative if not literal....and he's pursuing again. Slinging down to the side so he can clamber along the cars, trying to get up within hands' reach. He doesn't dare use firearms in the tunnels, not with a whole trainload of civilian targets *right there*. He's got his teeth bared in that rictus grin, utterly belied by the look in the pale eyes.

Jane Foster has posed:
A trainload of civilians, a blur of passing platforms, jutting bits of brick. This is a line that hits mostly minority communities in this string of Queens, a jumble of Filipino, Indonesian, Pakistani. Over from the next station is a mosque, dome jutting up. The street crowds in, waiting to flank the entries to the 7. Life, almost audible, in technicolour detail just a few dozen feet above. If he strains, Bucky might hear the rumble of trucks, the hullaballoo of a city in its wracked slumber at 1 AM.

It doesn't sleep. It doesn't. The wind streaming in the tunnel makes it harder to see without goggles, squinting, tearing at the face. A bump sends the cars rattling and the man shifts, his head turning away from the floodlit lamps of the headlights dimmed so close. German bleats and blares as Bucky creeps, his body causing passengers who notice - few - to cluster, or bang on the windows and shout further. Something's amiss, and the living organism of man knows it. Up ahead, Junction Rd. and its station. The digital sign, and the Nazi squints. He readies to jump, snarling at the frozen smile of a reaper. Run, run, run. The Totenkopf that Bucky dropped with a headshot is back to haunt him.

James Barnes has posed:
He gauges the leap, careful as a cat, and pounces. Determined to take this one down, tear him off, subdue him. For all that it's Winter's cold calculation driving - and he's there, a presence, even if the code words aren't currently active - it's the core of James that's goading him on, still. The kid who knew war in Morocco and Tunisia, in Sicily, before HYDRA had ever heard of him.

Jane Foster has posed:
Leap as the train wiggles and shimmies, as the broken blur of options becomes a blast of light out of the dark. Leather boots hit tile and he's running at a charge, the benefit of no weariness. Muscles ache with fatigue, surely, or perhaps the pain is an old friend for Bucky. His rabbit is fast, already known.

But the strength of snatching at him becomes apparent by seizing the uniform, and the flunkie spins. Cold eyes laugh and his face is set in hard lines as he twists. Something is wrong: dense, the body is so /dense/, not like flinging Thor around but still more than Bucky himself would be. Which makes a knee or a fist flung suddenly that much worse. Impacts carry a battering ram slam to them.

James Barnes has posed:
Pain's Winter's oldest companion. They made him sturdy, durable, tough....but wasted not a second's thought on anything like comfort. Like the neverending sound of the sea to someone who dwells at the beach - those few brief moments when it's gone are a deafening silence of their own.

Not human. Not even originally human....but not unconquerable. "What are you?" Buck asks, even as he's grappling with this fool in the black uniform. Trying to beat him down, subdue him, by quickness and brute force.

Jane Foster has posed:
Throwing down in the middle of a nearly empty platform -- with most of the passengers refusing to get out -- has advantages. That trash can in reach? It's ripped free, spilling over with wrappers, smashed between the pair of them. Down they go, smashing into tiles and chipping them, a fight of clawing hands and knees raised. Pugilism wasn't lost on those boys from the Junker classes. It sure as hell isn't here, though there might be a static shock for strikes.

Bucky doesn't even get a laugh for it. "Honourable. A faithful servant."

James Barnes has posed:
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Buck says, in utter disgust. "You've never been human, have you? Why-" A grunt as he takes a fist in the ribs, "-unh, the uniform. The symbolism?" Metal fingers curve around the back of that "servant"'s skull, and Buck's trying to smash it into the tile. His face is a pale mask, now, blood on his teeth from a blow that took him in the lip.

Jane Foster has posed:
There /aren't/ ribs. Or there are. There are and there aren't, the body under Bucky absolutely real. His fist doesn't sink in, there are no moments of hitting a hard light projection or something weird. But that slight resistance, offset with another upper cut and a nasty elbow going for his face again meaning to get away. The soldier careens over the tiles on his side, not his back, resisting the collision of skull to tile with an attack to the face that would make most flinch. "For freedom. To stop the spread--" Oh, that smack resonates. It vibrates through, stiff, painful. No blood, not telling anyway.

"Amerika poisoned the well. Bad ideas, suffering people. It's not too late. But you, you won't listen. Fighting for old ideas." His words are spat out, the taste of them with the crack-swelter of pain. Oh it must be felt. Surely? He reacts like it does.

James Barnes has posed:
They raised him to take damage like a hawk's trained to go for the lure. To 'suck it up', as the modern phrase goes. It's there, roaring like a tide in the back of his mind. He's going to need time, even with the serum to help. "Give in," he tells him. "Give in. Stop the spread of what? Why would we listen to you, when you show up in the garb of one of our oldest foes." Only belatedly does the question he should've asked come to the fore. "......HYDRA?"

Jane Foster has posed:
Give in, give in, give in.

The chanting in the streets, the riotous procession of neo-Nazis, the abduction. Those who fought in the dark, those who fell to a bolt. What do they know of giving up?

It's going to be raw, brute force. Punches, kicks, strident attacks, they will be tearing at one another until bruises form and pieces of flesh sunder, until the body gives and the weariness strikes. Shooting in here is too hard, but the stamina called on to sustain the brutality might wither before the flunky -- he really does have a name -- finally crashes under the colossal amounts of damage thrown down.

And just one weird point before that happens, as his battered foe won't answer that question except with fists. His visage -blinks- like it's not there, and then it is for that last punch. This isn't right. But then, nothing ever is.

Flesh, but not. Alive - breathing, yes - but not perfectly human. Very clearly smart enough to respond and there's nothing on his body like a wire to be fed by a wireless connection, something weird. The uniform is exact. Perfect. No mere replica. Nazi standard, right down the livid tears or mottled shirt from one too many fists and fights.

He has a source. But an answer? Not yet.

James Barnes has posed:
It leaves him there panting, in a kind of animal triumph. Winter whispers his satisfaction in the back of his mind: now the mission is complete. Soon they can go into the cold and *rest*. Chest heaving, sprawled half-over the fool....and with just enough energy to find his SHIELD ID and croak, "Agent of SHIELD," to the timorously approaching Transit cops. Another few panting breaths and he adds, "Got any zipties? I'm fresh out."

Jane Foster has posed:
"This is what you get for trading shifts, Abdullah," mutters a tired looking cop. He doesn't want to be here. "Maybe take off his coat so no one kills him, eh?" It's a long night ahead.