Chapter Text
As long as he can remember, Red has counted the days.
Six-thousand, three hundred and seven days since he was born, eight-hundred forty-three days since his first mission, twenty-three days since his last, one-thousand, one-hundred and thirty-nine since the Winter Soldier left.
One-thousand, one-hundred and thirty-two days ago, seven days after the Winter Soldier disappeared, Red was debriefed. Winter had not come back from his mission — he was defective, unstable, and disloyal. But Red was different, wasn’t he? He was stronger, smarter, faster, he was told. Red was useful. He would be useful, wouldn’t he?
It’s a way to stay sane, he thinks. Counting the days. It’d be quite easy to go insane, when between missions all you know is desolate silence and hunger.
He’s always so hungry. A deep, writhing thing that aches and grows with each etch he digs with his nails into the stone of his room. Not in his stomach, but somewhere deeper. Further. A hunger of the mind, like a tumour.
The days pass.
One-thousand, one-hundred and thirty-one days ago, Red began more training. Dauntless, endless, for something they had been preparing him for six-thousand, three-hundred and seven days ago. Since the day he was born. He knew his way around a gun before he could speak, he knew how to walk on walls before he could crawl, he knew how to kill a man before he was ever given the Red Spider as a name.
He counts the days. To stay sane.
Missions are simple, mindless things. Because he is a simple, mindless creature. Just another cog in their machine, a factor in the equation. Red was a gear, or a lever, or a tool. He was useful.
The missions varied — perhaps they didn’t wish to bore him. He stole artifacts, and weapons. Papers, jewels, and money. He killed men, and women, and children and faceless things who probably didn’t deserve to live anyways, if he had to kill them. They were useless. He would infiltrate parties and galas, drink from tall flutes of champagne and hide in the corners of smoky rooms. And hide lace in his words, and hide the disgust on his face at the wandering touches of strange men.
Red had never failed a mission; he never dared to come back empty handed — whether it be classified files or blood staining his palms. He was better than Winter, he trained to be. He fought to be.
And he was satisfied. He would dare to call himself happy.
Twenty-three days from his last mission, he is taken from his room, and he is debriefed once more.
And it is simple.
Painfully so, even.
He must kill Harley Keener.
A boy, no older than seventeen. An asset of Tony Starks — a friend. Red is given a file, a face to a name, and a pang of disappointment strikes him as he reads. He learns his school, he learns his home, he learns his family. In the grand scheme of things, Harley Kenner is rather unimportant. Useless.
But, he is told, that this is a baby step. A push in the right direction. The first stage in his real mission; his purpose — ripping the Avengers apart from the inside out.
It’s snowing, when he’s escorted out of the base. It cools his bones, seeps into his blood, and he shivers. It had not been snowing, Twenty-three days ago.
Despite himself, his feet root to the ground and he looks to the sky. Long, dreary clouds cover the sun and tall, towering trees cover the mountains. Flakes fall in his face, sinking into his mask. They wet his cheeks like tears, and a part of them knows someone had been there to wipe them away. Someone, sometime. But not any longer.
“Move.” His handler hisses, the hand on the back of his neck squeezing. Trapping. He moves.
They herd him into the truck, sedate him with the pinch of a needle into his arm, and drive away. And it is simple.
Hours pass. He counts them, to stay sane.
***
New York, in the winter, is wet.
Rain, as it were, tends to plague Red on his most important of missions. It happened once in Santa Cruz, when he had been tasked to interrogate a man from a chapel. It only rained sixty-eight days per year, there, and he had been unlucky enough to encounter it then. Same thing with a mission in Maine, and one London.
He was resilient, however. The rain poured down on his skull like pelting bullets, but he paid it no mind. Breathing in once, exhaling, breathing in twice — he gazed down the barrel of his sniper rifle, finger grazing the trigger. In, out.
Squinting through the scope, he looked through the window. The building — the tower, really. Looming over everything like a grand castle — was made nearly entirely of glass. Sleek, shining. What a man could need in a hundred floors, he would not know. But that didn’t matter, it wasn’t Red’s job to know things.
The bedroom seemed so out of place, it was almost tiny. Clothes strewn on the floors, posters pinned to the walls, and a bed unmade. A pair of boots lay by the door, a sweater hung on a chair, and Harley Keener sat at a desk, writing something.
Red inhaled once. Exhaled. In, out. He squared his shoulders, angled the muzzle just so, and crooked his finger.
A knock hit the door, and it swung open without an answer. Harley didn’t look up from his papers, head in his hands, as a man walked in. He just watched, for a moment, a small smile playing on his face. Gentle, almost.
“Hey, kiddo.” He said, leaning against the doorway. “Still doing homework?”
Harley grumbled something unintelligible, spinning around in his chair. “I hate school,” he groaned, rather dramatically. “You’d still love me if I dropped out, right?”
Tony Stark huffed, because it must be Tony Stark. He looked like Tony Stark, but maybe it was a clone. A copy, who did not know that Stark wore suits and sunglasses and not oil-stained shirts and fluffy slippers. “I don’t love you now.” He said, and something told Red he was lying. It was obvious — he wasn’t even trying to hide the way he looked at Harley.
Stark pushed off the door, kicking a stray pair of jeans lain on the ground as he walked in. He leaned over Harleys shoulder, squinting at the papers on the desk, brow furrowed. “You need to learn to show your work, kid.” He laughed when Harley shoved him. “Brat. Dinners waiting, hurry up.”
And he left. Left Harley alone, blissfully ignorant to the target on the boys back.
Red inhaled once, exhaled once.
Harley Keener was useless. An asset, and maybe a friend — but Stark didn’t have those. He went to high school, he had no father, he used to live in nowhere, Tennessee. He was unimportant.
Tony Stark loved him.
It was a strange phenomenon. This boy, in the grand scheme of things, was nothing. He was not a hero, he was no cog in a machine. And Red is furious at him for it — it’s boiling, and he does not know where to put it. Rage coils somewhere in his chest like a worn dog lying to rest, and it hovers over the trigger like his own finger.
Harley Keener stands, and goes to walk out the room. He pauses, just for a moment, hand on the door handle, like knows. Just for a second, he knows.
Red has never come back from a mission empty handed.
Rain seeps into his mask like the snow, and that is tears, too. And yes, he used to have someone to wipe them away. A father, sometime, somewhere. But no longer.
Harley Keener closes the door behind him, and Red is empty handed.
He should have been ashamed to say he didn’t hesitate even a moment when he runs away, leaving the rifle and his mission behind.
***
There’s a baby in his cell.
Soldat stops at the doorway, despite the grip of his handler on his arm. Nails dig into his skin, he does not flinch.
There is a baby in his cell.
“What?” He speaks, and his voice is rough against his own throat, like sandpaper.
His handler glances at it, humming. “Oh, yes.” They said, like a baby was nothing more than a paperweight. “It’s yours, now. Do what you wish.”
And then the door is slammed shut behind him, deafeningly loud.
There is a baby in his cell, and it starts crying.
Soldat looks behind him, but his handler is gone. The wails echo on the cold stones, reverberating in his ears like a gong. Small, pudgy fists try to free themselves from the threadbare blanket it is swaddled in, shaking at the sky in something like defiance.
The Soldat doesn’t quite realize what he is doing before he has done it, and then he is holding a child. His hands are so big compared to its body that is so small, and something in him is afraid to break it. Hours ago, his hands had been covered in blood, and now they cradle a baby. Wrinkly, and young, and alive. Screaming as if the world had already done it wrong.
It’s yours, now.
Strange. He doesn’t remember having a baby.
It seems to scream and cry forever, the noise like nails on chalkboard. The Soldat supports its head up between his fingers, holding it in the palm of his hands. It couldn’t be bigger than his forearm. He watches.
Do what you wish.
What are you supposed to do with babies? He can’t remember that, either. It keeps crying.
“Don’t-“ the Soldat tries, but it seems a bit useless. The baby is quite intent on screaming its little lungs out. “It’s okay.” He says, and it tastes like a lie.
He shifts the thing in his arms, wrapping it up in the blanket and holding it closer. It must be so cold, and the Soldat might not help with that, because he too is freezing. However, he holds it closer anyways. A selfish thing.
The baby hiccups, its eyes scrunched up and watery. He traces a finger through its downy hair, over its cheek, mapping the small slope of its nose and the corner of its jaw, catching the wet tears. A tiny hand grasps at his knuckle, holding him just as close. Its nails are so impossibly small.
Yours, now.
***
It’s still raining when Red ducks into an alley, grasping at his chest as if he could tear away the part of him that’s screaming. Nails dig into his bulletproof vest, nearly shredding it to pieces. He clutches his own throat, feeling his pulse flutter under his hand.
Fingers fumble for the pocket tucked right above his heart, finding the small pill with ease. He rips off his mask, and stares at it, so unassuming in the centre of his palm. It would be so easy.
He cannot go back empty handed.
Emotions were such fickle things. Empathy, rage, guilt. It’s why Red wasn’t supposed to have them. If HYDRA was a machine, emotions were the rust. With them, the inner workings would become useless. Unimportant junk. Emotions, horrible and violent, writhe in him now. He can’t discern them, there’s so much. Too much, over filling him like a flood.
Red could not be useless.
A wail clogs up in his vocal cords, choking him as he curls a fist around the pill. His knuckles crack the brick when he strikes it, and it caves like a crater when he hits it again, and again after that. His skin is sticky with his own blood when he stops, and the cracks are spun like a spiderweb.
He unfurls his fist, and finds the cyanide pill crushed to dust. The rain washes it away, running through his fingers like fine sand.
Empty handed.
Red inhaled once. “Okay,” he breathed, his voice rough against his own tongue. How long had it been since he’d last spoke? He hadn’t thought to count the days for that. He wasn’t supposed to talk, anyways. “Okay.”
The alley is dark, but desolate. He searches the empty corners like they will tell him a plan, give him an order, but there is no handler, and there is nothing on the back of his neck driving him forward. There is no mission, now, but he still feels it. Something watching him, though the sense of danger is quiet in his skull. They will find him, because they don’t know.
He is defective, he is disloyal, but they think he is better. As he was supposed to be. They will search for him, they will find him, and then when he cannot complete his work, they will kill him.
The alley is littered with discarded trash, and garbage is overflowing from a large dumpster at the dead end. His boots crunch against broken glass, and the metal of the bin is slippery when he climbs onto it, lifting the lid. It’s not the first time he’s needed a disguise, that he’s needed to hide, and he finds something that will do with ease. Old clothes stuffed into a black garbage bag — the sweater he throws over his shoulders smells of rotting things and unwashed sweat, but it will do for now.
New York is a city that never sleeps, its streets full even in the dead of night. Red keeps his head low, pulling the hood over his face, eyes downcast to the concrete ground. He weaves against the crowd of night-goers and straggling drunks, shoulders hunched. He is an atom among them, flowing and following.
He stops at a crosswalk when the light is green, eyes scanning the faces around. No one is looking at him, but if they did, surely they would know. They would see him and know.
The light turns red, and people start walking. He follows, but a buzzing at the base of his skull makes him pause. Stop.
Breath stuttering in his lungs, he turns and finds not his handler, not the hallow barrel of a gun, but an old woman. Face wrinkled with age, smile lines etched into her cheeks — she struggles to step down from the sidewalk, leaning against a cane shaking in her grasp. A horn honks, a man in a car behind the red light drumming his fingers impatiently against his steering wheel, jaw set firm.
Unbidden, Red speaks. “Would you-“ but he struggles to finish, to find the words.
The woman looks up at him, and smiles. “Oh, thank you, dear.” Her wiry, gnarled hand takes his arm, and he guides her out of the way.
And further, then, beyond the crosswalk. She anchors him to the ground, and he helps her stay walking through the thick, suffocating crowds. They say nothing, because really he has nothing to say, and she seems content with the silent companionship.
Eventually, they come to a stop. “Ah, this is me.” She lets him go, and her smile is kind when she looks at him. She looks at him, and clearly she does not know, because who would be kind to mindless creatures. “Thank you, son.”
Red’s mouth moves, but no words come. He is gasping for them, like a fish out of water. He doesn’t know the proper ones, for thank you. He hasn’t been a son in so long.
Her hand pats his arm once, then reaches up to pat his cheek. Kind, still. “Such a sweet boy,” she says, and leaves, walking into the building.
“Thank you,” he echoes. Untethered, now, he goes back to the crowd.