hydratrashmeme | Trash Party Dumpster #1

Trash Party Dumpster #1

(Will be continued in a Dumpster #2 post if by some unholy hell-miracle this post hits the 5000-comment limit.)

Filthy anon dumpster for sad hobos to fling moldy pizza crusts, raccoon eye makeup tips, and garbage about their sad trash kinks at each other.

AKA the Hydra Trash Party kinkmeme. One hundred percent Hydra Party Favor Bucky Barnes, Is It Sexy Violence Or Violent Sex?, and Bad Guys Do Bad Things To Your Faves: Winter Soldier Edition. BLANKET NON-CON/DUB-CON WARNING, not safe for work, not safe for life, not safe for anyone, read at your own risk ~~of becoming one of us~~.

Rules in brief: don't be a jerk except to fictional characters, warnings for particularly fucked-up garbage are nice but not required, thou shalt not judge the trashiness of thy neighbor's kinks unless thy neighbor is trying to pass off their rotting banana peels and half-eaten pizza crusts as a healthy romantic dinner for two, off-topic comments may be chucked out of the dumpster at management's discretion, management's discretion decrees that omegaverse, soulbond AUs, D/s-verse, non-superpowered AUs, etc. are off-topic.

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GO TO TOWN, TRASHBABIES.

Unholy hell-miracle achieved! Round 1 is closed; comments and fills in existing threads are still welcome, but all new prompts go to Round 2.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Brock takes the Camelbak and a drink mix packet with him into the truck stop, makes a beeline for the bathroom. No sense breaking into their potable water until it’s strictly necessary. Brock takes a quick leak, then heads to the sink to mix the Soldier’s lunch. He dumps the packet into the bottle, fills it with cold water, and screws the lid on to give it a hard shake.

The resultant creamy drink looks almost like a Muscle Milk. Some similar kind of gainer shake, maybe. It smells a little like vanilla, but mostly chalk and powdered vitamins and concentrated gym rat tears. This, this is what they have an entire case of in the back of the van.

That poor son of a bitch. Brock shakes his head and tucks the empty packet into the pocket of his coveralls for secure disposal later.

The Subway is to the right once he comes out of the bathroom, built into the back wall of a grungy convenience store. Mitchell is perusing a nearby rack of ‘VIrginia Wines!!’ as if they’re not goddamn on duty. Brock gives him a look and brushes past to put in his sandwich order. The kid behind the counter looks barely old enough to shave, let alone be shaving meat.

“Hey, man.”

Harper is in line behind him all of a sudden, fidgeting with a bag of Fritos.

“Yeah?”

Brock adopts a similarly casual stance, gives the agent a working-bros nod. To an outside observer, they should look like two Joes at lunch.

“Since we stopped already,” Harper asks. “Who’s driving next?”

“I am,” Brock frowns. “Why do you need to know?”

Harper’s eyes flick briefly to the sandwich artist. The Subway kid isn’t even paying attention, messing with the oven for Rollin’s sandwich.

“Can I call shotgun, at least? Kind of sick of hanging out with Bingo.”

“Bingo,” Brock says flatly because what the hell. That is an absolutely terrible fucking dog name.

Harper must mistake his blankness for rage, because the agent starts back pedaling like a politician.

“It’s cool if I can’t! Just thought we could change up. Or trade.”

“Sorry man, no can do,” Brock says as sweetly as possible, because he’s itching to snarl ‘permission denied’ instead. He suspects Harper’s only springing this now because they’re with civilians, and there’s no way Brock can chew him out properly without blowing their cover. And he’s willing to tolerate a transfer being freaked out (especially given the bizarre kinky dog pound), but at some point, Harper is going to have to deal with the Soldier’s improbable existence. He doesn’t have much of a life expectancy if he can’t.

“Hit up Big Jay, maybe he’ll trade?” Brock adds. ‘Jay Romero’ is Rollins’ fake name for the road; they stick with initials that match their real ones so nobody gets confused.

“Okay, cool.”

Harper’s expression is indiscernible behind his paper mask, but his nod is amicable enough. Rollins will probably tell him to fuck off too, probably in graphic detail, but that will be a good life lesson in not being a little bitch. Brock swings up to the register to pay for his sandwiches. By the time he gets Rollins’ Coke from the fountain, Harper has taken off like his ass is on fire.

Whatever. His funeral. Brock does a quick time check and is pleased to see he’s got more than enough time to grab some canned lightning for the road. The way the rotation goes, he and Rollins get the ass-crack of dawn shift. He picks up a few Monsters and those bottled Frappuccinos no one admits they like, and juggles the whole mess out to the diesel pumps where the van is pulled up and fueling.

Rollins is standing by the van with his baseball cap pulled low, watching the gallons tick slowly up. The mobile strike unit is a beast that takes forever to fill.

“Sandwich,” Brock grunts and waves the bag at him. It’s dangling from his left fist, but his arms are too full of drinks to hand it over.

“Thanks.” Rollins relieves him of the Subway bag and fishes his Coke out from the crook of Brock’s right elbow.

“Get the door, I gotta feed the Soldier.”

Rollins takes point at an angle to the back bumper so his bulk can block the pump security cam. He waits until the Volvo at the next pump pulls away before tugging the left door just far enough for Brock to barrell inside.

Brock dumps his strategic reserve of caffeine into the open case of nasty Soldier shake mixes, but hangs on to the Camelbak. He’s so focused on stashing the drinks that it takes him a second to realize what’s going on.

Harper and Mitchell are frozen by the Soldier’s cage, staring intensely at something just in front of them. A yellow-and-red Subway napkin is sitting just in front of the open cage door, bearing a small pile of potato chips.

The Soldier is stretching metal fingers toward them with the same caution you’d use to defuse a bomb.

“Who the shit,” Brock begins, and stops himself. It doesn’t matter, he realizes with rising alarm, who thought it was a good idea to give unapproved food to the Soldier. What matters is the Soldier hasn’t even looked at him. Normally, it’s impossible to make him stop canvassing his mission commander.

“Sir,” Mitchell and Harper squeak in unison.

“Pick that shit up! He’s not allowed regular food,” Brock orders.

It’s not the agents who answer him, though.

“Treat,” the Soldier says in his accented Russian. And he can’t tell if it’s the Soldier’s creeptastic flat affect or actually intentional, but there’s no rising intonation to make that a question.

A single eye peeks up through the Soldier’s wild matt of hair, piercing and cold.

“Treat,” the Soldier repeats in English, and picks up a single chip, hard enough to crush it.

Oh. OH. OHHHHH. I am equal parts turned on, creeped out, and heart broken by this. You have achieved the trash trifecta, you wonderful garbage creature. Please accept this gift of toe nail clippings, cat hair, and an empty bottle of antidepressants.

This is so awful, and yet somehow endearing.

You make me hate and love these jackasses at the same time. You are wonderful.

wellthatescalatedquickly.gif I can't wait to see what happens now. May I also note that your Rollins is amazing. The names detail was great and of course he'd be Big Jay. Rumlow wouldn't settle for less. Have some old packing and moldy bread

Fuck.

Brock’s palms go slippery on the curve of the Camelbak.

“This is your treat,” he says firmly. He gives the bottle a hard shake. The Soldier’s visible eye rolls, focuses somewhere beyond his shoulder.

Fuck, fuck, triple-fuck.

The Camelbak hits the floor as his shock sticks leap into his hands, charging up to full in the second it takes to blink. A normal human’s in fibrillation at three hundred milliamps across the chest. He’s not sure what the Soldier’s built from, but he prays they don’t have to find out what kills him.

Brock steps forward with both batons ready, but the Soldier doesn’t even cringe at the promise of lightning. He makes a distant noise and glances back and forth between the bottle and the chips. He doesn’t ask again, but the question is clear in his eyes.

“He’s glitching out,” Brock snaps. “You confused him.”

“He was like this when we came in,” Harper hisses.

“Kept asking for a treat,” Mitchell says. “We thought maybe if we gave him something…”

The driver’s side door opens with a loud creak and Brock nearly bites off his own fucking tongue. Harper and Mitchell’s hands fly to their Glocks, unnerved by the interruption. The Soldier ignores all three of them and perks hopefully in that direction.

“Everything okay back there?”

Rollins leans over the center console, eyes narrowed in on Brock’s crackling batons, the comparative stillness inside the cage.

“Yeah,” Brock swallows. “Dealing with a situation. Get us out of here, we’ll switch drivers on the road.”

To his credit, Rollins doesn’t grumble, just shuts the hell up and kicks the engine.

“Two minutes behind,” he announces, which sounds like he’s bitching, but he looks for Brock’s face in the rearview.

Brock signals back with a tiny head shake. All options are bad when it comes to the Soldier malfunctioning, but given his pick he’d rather it happen far the fuck away from cameras. If they have to discipline him, they can pull off at a deserted exit.

The Soldier is staring at the chip pile again like he’s one stop short of pissing himself with excitement. He’s on his hands and knees, making the whole cage sway with anticipation, and there is no way they’re going to get this back on track without addressing the conflict in direction. There’s a reason they tell you the Soldier’s high-maintenance. All it takes is one misstep and he jams - or goes off. And after everything he’s read about this new conditioning...

Brock clicks off the juice and flips his batons back into their holsters.

“Eat your lunch first,” Brock says, bending down to pick up the shake. “Then you can have dessert. I mean, your ‘treat’.” Christ, it’s not even been five hours and he’s already sick of the puppy talk.

The magic word seems to have the desired effect, though. The Soldier crawls dutifully out of the cage, just far enough to reach for his disgusting shake. Brock tries not to fumble as that metal deathtrap hand brushes over his decidedly not-impervious human one. He has seen this fucker rip the hatch clean off a fucking tank; he has zero illusions about his knuckles’ chances.

Harper and Mitchell are still as death, still gripping their pieces like a lifeline. They all watch with bated breath as the Soldier draws the bottle close, clicks the spout up, sniffs it - then folds himself back into his cage, wrapped around the Camelbak like a baby with his binkie.

A cold wash of relief plunges down his back and Brock sways with the motion of the van. He catches himself against the gun rack, uses the momentum to round on the fucking shit-for-brains he has for operatives.

“Next time he does anything remotely off message? You call me,” he growls at Harper and Mitchell. “I don’t give a shit what it is. Because believe me, that is one gun you do not want to see misfire.”

Even Mitchell has the decency to look cowed. They both fall all over each other to apologize, neither looking too hard at Brock, or each other.

“We weren’t sure what’s supposed to be standard,” Mitchell admits. “With the - cage thing and all.”

“I know,” Brock concedes. “I’m working on a cheatsheet.”

Again, that vague uneasy feeling. He’s starting to wonder if there’s a reason Pierce sent them out into the field without a complete operating manual, if there’s a reason they’re driving themselves. He wonders who he’s pissed off lately, and how.

The Soldier, on the other hand, seems to be having a religious experience balled up in his stupid kennel. He bolts his nasty shake in several long pulls, looking for all the world like God just came in his mouth. He even unscrews the top and deep throats the residue off the inside straw.

“Damn,” Mitchell whispers reverently. The Soldier blinks up at him with white froth still on his chin, which even elicits a snicker from Harper.

“Treat,” the Soldier says again, reaching for his pile of chips. He stops just shy of touching, though, and looks to Brock for confirmation. Completely back on target, looking to his mission commander for direction. As bizarre as this protocol is, it seems to be working. He just wishes it weren’t also creepy as shit.

“Yeah, go ahead,” Brock says, and see it’s all perfect, the way it should be, except for the part where he has to light R&D on fire. “Uh, ‘good boy’.”

The Soldier visibly shivers, which is just icing on this entire fucked up cake. The corners of his lips twitch up, and he inserts a chip between his lips where the curve of a smile should be. Brock wonders if this is the Soldier’s approximation of happiness.

“You get sick from those, it’s not my problem,” he tells the Soldier. “You puke, you clean it up.”

The Soldier seems to take his warning seriously. All traces of good humor disappear and he nods once, very solemnly, and pulls the chip out of his mouth to examine it. He proceeds to dissect them one at a time, licking each side of every chip one by one, breaking them apart to inspect for hidden poisons. By the time he gets around to actually eating any, they’ve been reduced to equal-sized soggy pieces arranged neatly on the top of a napkin, nothing like a potato chip ought to be.

Mitchell and Harper both look vaguely uncomfortable. They keep fiddling with their phones, periodically glancing at the ongoing Lays disaster. It almost makes Brock feel like an asshole.

“They’re safe,” he tells the Soldier gruffly. “You can eat them. You know? Swallow?”

He can feel Rollins opening his big yap and punches the back of the driver’s seat hard right before ‘that’s what she said’ happens again.

The Soldier freezes while Rollins is still cussing Brock out for being a humorless dick, then carefully takes the smallest bit of potato possible. He pops it all the way into his mouth and chews, slowly and thoughtfully. Another follows, and then another, and then - fuck. The Soldier is smiling, actually, honest-to-God smiling like a human being.

“Talk about the uncanny valley,” Mitchell mutters.

Brock just nods, momentarily speechless. He’s always thought the Soldier was attractive - in the way tigers are attractive, or a well made semi-automatic. Like a force of nature: you don’t fuck with it, or it will fuck with you.

Now, those hunter’s eyes are locked on him, aware in a way they usually aren’t. They glitter in the low light, closer to grey.

“Thank you,” the Soldier says softly, in lightly accented but understandable English. It might be the most terrifying thing he’s ever said.

The Soldier continues munching his way through his tiny pile of broken chips, making soft noises just this side of intelligible. When he’s done, he gently folds the napkin up and pulls it into the cage with him, tucks it beneath his head like the world’s tiniest, saddest pillow.

Nobody feels like commenting.

**

I never thought that the Winter Soldier eating potato chips could be heartbreaking. Well, that shows what I know. I love how you write him and how everyone responds to the poor thing. It's brilliant.

Goddamn, I love you and this story so fucking much, this part was unbelievably GOOD.

I love how creepy this story is! Even though the kennel is supposed to be degrading, it just makes the Soldier even more unnerving and terrifying.

Thank you! I am glad it was frightening; I wad definitely aiming for horror in this bit.

FUCK.

The soldier smiling 'line a human being' and appearing suddenly pretty and making soft noises and shivering at Rumlow's awkward 'good boy' put my mind in a possibly wrong headset. BUT STILL, THE POSSIBILITIES.

This is one of the best Hydra operatives/WS fics I've seen here, the interactions are all priceless and Rumlow being professional and not necessarily cruel just for the sake of it is my headcanon Rumlow. So I just had to fall in love with this I guess *hands*

Thank you anon - you picked up on exactly what I was trying to convey. The team's relationship with the soldier is most interesting to me when it's in flux - it's human to be conflicted about horror and unable to place one's reaction in a beat bucket.

Oh wow, now I'm probably reading it wrong, but it ALMOST looks like Mitchell and the others feel a bit sad for the WS, which IMO would make this read even more complex and depressing than it already is, and I would be totes on board.

And now this can be considered out of context for this story, because I'm interpretating, but there aren't many fics out there for at least someone in the squad feels sorry for the asset, even in passing (and maybe they get dressed down for it)? I read some with Rumlow being the good guy, but that's mostly it. For some reason, thanks to something about this story, I now CRAVE THIS.

And anyway, I've been following this since day 1 and it's one of my favorite fills here.

Thank you anon - I am glad you picked up on my intention :) One of the most fascinating and heart breaking things about Bucky's existence to me is how many people must have seen him over the years and yet chose to stay complicit. I am more horrified by the possibility that not everyone was a complete monster, just messy and terrifyingly human.

RIP ME, CAUSE OF DEATH THIS FILL.

SHE DIED DOING WHAT SHE LOVED.

I really can't understate the fascinated horror this story invokes in me. The chilling nature of the "Treat" scene alone is something that comes back to me over and over. This whole thing is amazing.

Thank you so much, anon. You have no idea what a horrible day I've had and seeing this comment just now prevented some really ugly tears.

Dear anon author I hope you haven't abandoned this. This might easily be my favorite fill of all time.

Thank you so much. (Strangely, I had just turned up to attempt to update - it is not a super trashy section but at least plot enables intense trash in the future?)

**

They’re actually just shy of Knoxville when the encrypted call comes through, which is shit Brock hopes he doesn’t have to explain later. He’s done his damnedest to make up the time they lost during their unscheduled pit stop to switch between him and Rollins (who is currently zonked out drooling against the passenger side window), but the radar alert keeps pinging so many fucking speed traps. Between that, a jack-knifed semi, and the never-ending Tennessee construction, they’re now running almost eighteen minutes behind.

Brock pulls off at the next exit that has a travel plaza and heads for the back section of the parking lot, far enough from the majority of the families running into the attached restaurant, but close enough to other vehicles that they won’t seem like a solitary pedo van. With luck, no one will notice that they’re just sitting here.

The sat phone is one of the almost-modern models, in that it has an attached screen large enough to show a couple headshots side by side. The damn thing still loads incredibly slow, reliant as it is on ancient as fuck satellites. Rumlow picks up the handset for the audio portion, listens for the Mission Commander updates. By the time the full target profiles have downloaded, he’s already swearing inside his head.

“Mariella Costa,” Harper reads, squinting at the tiny font blurred beneath the primary target. “Level Five clearance, Flight Deck access...shit. She was an Insight engineer?”

“Can it and I’ll tell you,” Brock snaps, still straining to listen to the prerecorded message. It pisses him off when they send these ‘tactical updates’ like five seconds before he has to present. He gets the need for security. But would it kill them to give him time to digest? He waits until the message has started to repeat before he hangs up the handset. The profiles stay lit behind him, the literal visages of dead men walking.

Harper, Mitchell, and Rollins shuffle to gather around the screen. The Soldier is the only one missing, curled up in his cage like a big leathery panther.

Christ, he hates his life.

“Here boy,” Brock says through clenched teeth. “Come see this face you gotta tear off.”

The Soldier crawls out of his cage with an odd stiffness, noticeable only because it immediately disappears as soon as he realizes Rumlow is watching. He’s more like a cat in that regard, Brock thinks. Conceal the small stuff, until it hurts so bad you bite the fuck out of people without provocation.

The newly minted rules are taped above his cage, written on the back of a page of MRI results. It’s not a very long list -- mostly, ‘don’t fuck with the cage, don’t feed unauthorized foods, exercise as needed’, and a cheat sheet of all the formalized commands. Brock can see the Wonder Twins have added a couple extras, including “never expose to sunlight” and “never feed after midnight”. Brock bites the cap off a Sharpie and adds ‘don’t fuck with the list, either’. And, because he’s not a completely joyless asshole, he adds “never splash with water”.

He heads back to take his place at the center of the group. The Soldier comes to sit right at his feet, nearly plants his butt directly on top of them. Brock nudges him to the side with the steel toe of his boot. The Soldier scoots where he’s directed, again with that very subtle creakiness. Brock makes a note to exercise him later.

“Primary target is Mariella Costa,” he tells the group. “Former Insight weapons engineer. Called in sick to ‘work from home’ three days ago; supervisor got suspicious when she failed to respond to email.”

He taps the visuals at top half of the screen. Mariella is a muscular, tan woman with a mole on her right cheek and deceptively sweet features. Her profile photo shows her with shoulder-length, wavy dark brown hair, but the inset ‘most recent appearance’ shot from a grainy convenience store camera seems to show that she’s shaved it off.

“Orders are to take this one alive, if possible,” he says, looking directly at the Soldier. “Confirm what she knows before anyone touches her. If we do have to take her out, they want visual proof of execution. Tissue samples, video, the whole nine yards. Basically bring her head on a plate.”

“Damn,” Harper says. “She run out on her boyfriend or something?”

“Or girlfriend,” Rollins mutters. Like he cares. Brock nudges Harper with the edge of his boot, too.

“According to her coworkers, the second target is her boyfriend. Radim Jelinek. Jelinek failed to report to his job at a local hospice over forty-eight hours ago. Intelligence presumes he’s on the run with her.”

He taps the lower half of the screen, highlighting a hefty, bald white man with broad shoulders.

“This one you can kill on sight,” he tells the Soldier.

The Soldier tilts his head and scrutinizes both pictures, drawing his eyes up, down, and around the lines of their individual faces. Brock leaves him to it. He knows from experience the Soldier will memorize until his creepy eyes fall out.

“Inside source says they’ve crossed over to AIM. Requested asylum in exchange for information. Costa was working on long-range targeting, but her other specialty is aerospace engineering. She may have had access to Stark’s turbine schematics. Apparently, she made noise like she wanted to switch to Propulsion. Idiots in charge let her access their server, trying to convince her to join their team.”

“Seriously?” Mitchell groans. “Anybody ever heard of social engineering? Fucking corporate espionage.”

Brock can’t disagree with that.

“Yeah, their asses are grass. Anyway, official story is, she plans to sell those designs to hostile governments.”

He glances down at his StarkPhone to confirm the details. They’d given him the SHIELD-friendly mission package to review before they left. The real reason they’re out here, though - the part that applies to SHIELD’s tentacled underbelly - that they don’t trust in soft copy anywhere. Once the sat phone is switched off, there will be no trace.

“And unofficially?” Rollins asks.

“Unofficially? She’s one of ours. And she left a coded message. She threatened to expose ‘a significant number’ of senior-level members - publicly on the internet - unless her safety is guaranteed. Says if she and her boyfriend both have a place in the new order, she’ll even burn bridges with AIM - give them bullshit and walk tomorrow.”

He pauses a moment to let that sink in.

“...holy shit,” Harper breathes. He’s saying what they’re all feeling. What this chick is trying -- it’s worse than suicide. Suicide, at least you choose the when and how. This engineer, she’ll be lucky if they let her die.

He understands now why this mission earned the Soldier. Whether it requires this much firepower is irrelevant. HYDRA uses its Fist for two reasons, when something needs to be crushed or when it needs to be personal. Costa needs to be crushed, because she’s forgotten: with HYDRA, it’s always personal.

HYDRA is the most jealous bitch there is, and nobody, fucking nobody, leaves her.

Mitchell laughs, reedy and nervous. “Wow. So that’s double jeopardy for how many billion, Alex?”

“Not enough,” Rollins says. “Cause, here we are.”

“Yeah,” Brock agrees. “Piss off HYDRA, piss off AIM - not a great way to stay breathing.”

The Soldier says nothing, still fixated on the glowing images. His nostrils even flare, like he thinks he can pick up their fucking scent from the pixels. God, Brock hates this conditioning, hates it down to his bones. At this point, R&D might even be sacrificing function in the name of their puppy play.

Brock glances at his phone again.

“The targets are holed up in an AIM bunker south of the border. AIM trades with the cartels in Nuevo Laredo, so they’re underground and armed to the teeth.”

“Bunker busters?” Mitchell asks hopefully.

Brock manages not to pull a completely unprofessional face.

“‘Diplomatically complicated’. Preferred that we infiltrate and excise. Job one is setting up a scramble on transmissions,” he says, looking pointedly at Mitchell. “We have to assume as soon as we engage that Costa’s going to try and retaliate.”

Mitchell nods. He raps the side of his jam-box’s generator, the way other people might knock on wood.

“I got sat and mobile covered. Do they have any hard lines? If they got fibre shielded and buried we’ll probably have to cut it.”

“We have a scan of the bunker schematics,” Brock says. “Looks like there’s at least two? And also some nice choke points and blind corners.”

Read: dinner time for the Soldier. He’s a miracle at a distance, but he’ll take you apart just as brutally up close and personal. Worst comes to worst they can find a solid choke point and funnel hostiles through their cyborg grunt grinder.

Rollins strains to peer at Brock’s phone.

“You got clearance to share that with us?”

Brock scowls. “Yeah, I was getting to that. Hang on.”

He taps the series of codes that allows him to broadcast a secure transmission over infrared. For security reasons, his stupid STRIKE app only communicates sensitive data phone-to-phone. He doesn’t have the clearance to transmit over the mobile network.

“Put ‘em up,” he grunts. The team responds by holding up the business ends of their IR readers.

Rollins’ eyes narrow when he opens the brief on his phone.

“Big place,” is all he vocalizes. Brock hears all too well what he doesn’t say. The compound is four levels, huge for an outpost in this region. He wonders if there’s more like them, maybe up over the Canadian border. Now that Tony Stark’s people are obsessed with shutting AIM down in the United States, it looks like they’ve just started setting up shop across the line.

Like fireworks tents, only meaner. According to their roster, this outpost has nearly eighty security personnel on staff; at least a quarter of those decent mercs. Sixteen to one, if the odds were completely stacked against them. Fucking thankfully, they’re not.

“Yeah, it’s a long list,” he acknowledges. “But they’re not all on shift at the same time, and we have an assist. Some of their people are also our people.”

Which is the other reason Costa’s an idiot. Trying to run to AIM, like AIM hasn’t been in HYDRA’s back pocket since it was founded. Lots of governments and think tanks over the years got that special, secret push.

And if they ever get too loud or out of line, they get a harder shove - and fall over.

Brock turns his phone around to highlight the lower right section of the schematic.

“We ingress from the southeast corner,” he says. “Our guys on the inside are working on a door code and cover.”

“We know where they’re holding her?” Mitchell asks.

“Our guys are working on it. For now, assume it’s the lowest level.”

“And the people who work there?” Harper asks.

“What?”

“The security, okay, I see the patrol stations marked.” Harper squints at his own phone and draws two fingers apart to zoom. “But there’s labs here, they gotta have employees. What about Joe Schmoe who works in Evil Physics, or whatever the fuck AIM does? How are we gonna sneak past with Benji here? He isn’t exactly subtle.”

Fuck. Harper’s back on Belize again, and while Brock doesn’t exactly blame him, the last thing he needs is this bullshit stirring up the group. Mitchell could maybe use some healthy fear, but it bothers him that Rollins is uneasy. It is a big place to take on with just five people. Creepy or not, if something goes sideways, the Soldier might just be the trump card that saves them.

“Belize wasn’t typical performance,” Brock says firmly. “He’s been adjusted.”

“And he glitched out like four hours ago!”

“Because you idiots fed him chips!” Rollins says. Rollins is good at masking fear with pissiness, or indifference, but Brock knows from experience eventually the facade cracks. And they can’t be chipping each other apart now.

They got a job to do, and whatever knots Brock might have in his guts about going in like this -- by ground, with a skeleton team, and the Soldier’s freaky cage rattling every mile along the way -- that pales compared to thought of turning it down. Just look how well quitting turned out for Costa.

“Doesn’t matter who fucked up!” Brock snaps, before Mitchell can open his big mouth too. “The Soldier’s gonna listen this time, okay? He’s gonna be good.”

Brock glances toward the Soldier, hoping that was close enough to the right creepy lingo. He feels his blood turning to ice.

The Soldier is still curled patiently off to the side, exactly where Brock left him, only he’s no longer drooling at the targets. His eerie eyes are fixed directly on Brock’s face with the same intensity. Like he’s also measuring Brock for a coffin.

“How many?” he asks in Russian. His voice sounds like he’s been chewing gravel.

Brock’s whole mouth is running dry.

“How many what?”

The Soldier’s eyes flick to Brock’s StarkPhone, then back to his face.

“How many on each level?”

“Guards? Or...”

“How many total?” The Soldier asks insistently.

Harper and Mitchell are both staring like the Soldier’s grown a second head. Brock’s unsure if it’s because they’ve started Russian lessons, or if it’s because this is the longest discourse they’ve ever heard from the Soldier. Rollins’ hand is shifting ever so slowly toward his Glock.

The Soldier picks up on the hostility and shrinks back slightly, dips his upper body down.

“I’ll be good,” he promises in thickly accented English. “I’ll get them for you. I'll get them.”

Somehow, Brock doesn’t think he means just the targets.

I lllllllooooooovvvvve this!!! The language is SO GOOD. I love how there is so much flavor packed in with the mission lingo. EXCELLENT WORK TRASH FRIEND.

please accept a gift of snotty paper towels, a hair clot, and one cheap sock with a hole in the heel.

Re: Fill: Pedigree (9/?)

(Anonymous) - 2015-01-06 15:51 (UTC) - Expand

AAAAAH OMG.

NOW it's Xmas. :D I was desperately waiting for this, and this part was somehow extra-awesome.

Re: Fill: Pedigree (9/?)

(Anonymous) - 2015-01-06 15:52 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Fill: Pedigree (9/?)

(Anonymous) - 2015-01-09 17:31 (UTC) - Expand

I was JUST thinking about this story yesterday and wondering if it would be continued and then you posted and it was like a beautiful dream come true! This is so awesome I can't wait to see the asset get all murdery (and of course, the trash)!

Re: Fill: Pedigree (9/?)

(Anonymous) - 2015-01-20 01:17 (UTC) - Expand

“I’ll get them for you. I'll get them.”

Oh wow, now I could be reading into this too much, and in case just don't listen to me, but I'm now seriously interested in knowing what kind of reward the Soldier is going to expect at job done. :D:D:D

Re: Fill: Pedigree (9/?)

(Anonymous) - 2015-01-20 01:19 (UTC) - Expand

This is absolutely gorgeous. You have this wonderful mix of pure horror (I'll get them for you) mixed with humor (don't feed after midnight) mixed with intrigue and greatness. I can just feel Brock's exasperation, the team's worry, their horror at being around the Soldier and these conditions and it's great. You are incredible.