entrancelogs | standing on the cliff face, highest fall you'll ever grace [OPEN]

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standing on the cliff face, highest fall you'll ever grace [OPEN]

Who: Steve Rogers and YOU
Where: All over Wonderland
When: 08/28 - 09/02
Rating: R for lots of violence
Summary: Steve is not Steve anymore. Now he's only the Soldier. But he has a mission to complete and he doesn't fail.
The Story:
I. there's a knock at your door [08/28]

After a rude awakening, the Soldier is back in his element. A minor setback, to lose the target, but there are plenty of others out there who are in need of conversion and his mission parameters are clear. This is the kind of assignment he prefers. There are no mysteries to it, everything is set out plainly before him. Anyone who is not HYDRA must be made HYDRA by any means necessary. That isn't difficult.

Not when there is equipment set up, scattered around the mansion for their ease. The first thing the Soldier does is map out each floor, making careful mental notes of where each station is set up so that he can always corner a potential target in the most convenient place.

After that's done, he observes. He is nothing more than an embodiment of the task he's been given, and so it's not difficult for him to remain on the outskirts of any situation as he catalogues the myriad of people who are still offering resistance to HYDRA's ideals. There are still a great many of them, which means that there's plenty of work to do.

That's for the best. He doesn't do well when he's idle.

[ OOC: This option is for interaction before he's actively trying to recruit or convert, if you want your character to be baffled by Steve not remembering them! ]

II. you don't even recognize the stranger [08/29 - 08/31]

The Soldier is on the hunt.

He is made to fight. War is in his bones, combat is in his blood, and his desire -- no, he isn't meant to desire. What he wants doesn't matter, and should not exist. All that matters is the end goal.

So if a particular target requires a subtler approach, then he can do that. He can greet them with a few well-placed words, but deceit is not a part of his skillset. He would rather be direct: convert or die. Not that murder is truly a part of his mission right now. These people won't do HYDRA any good if they're dead. Better to drag them over to their side by force, if that's what's required.

Which he's entirely willing to do. The shield he carries is not his, it can't be, but it's been provided to him for this mission, along with the uniform. (He will not admit that there's something about them that he's fond of. He cannot be fond of anything.) He bears the shield and wears the outfit as he slinks through the mansion and identifies targets, then approaches them to insist on compliance.

[ OOC: This option will involve him aggressively trying to convert people to HYDRA. Only threads that were pre-discussed as ending in brainwashing will do so. If we haven't talked about Steve brainwashing your character but you would like that to happen, just let me know in your comment. ]

III. there's a hole in your head [09/01]

He rushes down the hallway, somewhere between a jog and a run, doing whatever he can to get away from the buzzing in his head. Something is unraveling. Flashes of images cycle through his mind: a group of laughing men sitting around a wooden table; a woman, smiling, with red red lipstick (she's here, isn't she?); the man he left in the room, but younger, smiling down at him --

The Soldier slumps against the wall, hardly aware of where he is anymore, or who might see. His knees fit the floor and then he pitches forward and catches himself with both hands, breaths coming ragged. Like he can't quite get the air into his lungs. He's felt this before...

No. Whoever those images belong to, he is not him. Whatever ghost of a memory is tugging at him is not meant for him to know or understand.

His lips are still warm, but his eyes are panicked, flicking from side to side as he struggles for breath even though he has a pair of perfectly good lungs.

Steve -- no, no, the Soldier begins to push himself to his feet.

[ OOC: This is for the last day of the event when Steve's programming is beginning to break down! ]

IV. it's you from before [09/02 and onward]

Steve Rogers is someone who submerges himself in guilt as a general way of life, to say nothing of the past five days. Now that guilt isn't simply an extra weight that he carries around on his broad shoulders. No, it's morphed into something much more vicious, a parasite that's eating away at him, making it impossible to think straight or focus on much beyond how incredibly awful he feels.

Now he knows what Bucky has to go through on a daily basis and it gives him even more respect for him. That Bucky has learned how to live with this kind of crippling guilt is a testament to how incredibly strong he is.

Steve has been spending the past nine months telling Bucky that what he did while brainwashed hadn't been his fault, yet now that it's time to apply that logic to himself it feels impossible, unattainable.

Still, languishing in the guilt won't do anyone any favors, and so all Steve can do is pick himself back up again and seek out those he hurt to apologize. He dragged some of them down with him, turned them into mindless HYDRA agents too, and that may be the thing he's the most guilty for having done.

[ OOC: This is for post-event fallout and aftermath when Steve is himself again! ]

[ OOC (2): Both prose and action brackets are fine by me, I'll match you! ]

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The Soldier does not believe that he's ruining people. The Soldier believes that he's helping them. As things are now, they're lost. Showing them the benefits of HYDRA will only make their lives easier, and make all of them safer in the long run. With compliance comes order, and with order comes peace. That's all he's ever wanted: an end to war.

If he has to make difficult choices to get there, then so be it. Granted, none of this is -- in his mind -- a choice. There are only his orders, which he knows better than to not follow.

The woman may believe that she's hiding, and if he were a normal person, it may have even worked. But he can hear her breathing, can hear the way that her finger brushes off of the trigger of her gun. That's a mistake she may come to regret.

There's no reason to act as if he doesn't know she's there, and so he starts down the hall toward her hiding place instead, fists clenched at his sides and shield at his back. He doesn't think he'll need it, but maybe she'll surprise him. It's so rare that he's given a challenge, there's even a part of him that misses it. The thrill of a good fight.

After a moment, she risks a peek. Despite the number of times she's been glad to see Steve's confident stride, this is not one of those times.

She wrenches her head back out of sight and takes a deep breath.

She can't outrun Steve. She's read his files. She's read the history books. She's got a season pass to the Smithsonian Exhibit that she had to pay for in cash so Nick wouldn't find out, but he'd still heard her bitching about getting so much information wrong.

She knows she can't outrun Steve.

And apparently, she can't hide from him, either.

Okay. That means she's going to have to fight him. Fight and probably lose.

But she'll still fucking fight him. She just has to injure him. Injure him badly enough that he can't hurt anyone else, maybe.

She should shoot him.

She tries to dismiss the idea as quickly as it occurs, though it continues to gnaw at her.

No shooting Steve Rogers.

No fatally shooting Steve Rogers.

Okay. Be smart. SHIELD training, Aunt Peggy's training. CIA training. She can be smart.

She slides down the hall, testing doorknobs until she finds one that opens behind her. She pushes her way through. She checks the closet, makes sure no one is hiding there. Empty. Good. No one to get caught in the crossfire. She leaves the door cracked open and hurries to the bathroom. She doesn't know how good Steve's senses are, but she knows they're enhanced. She needs an edge. Something to distract him.

She turns on the shower, turns on the sink, flushes the toilet for whatever time it buys her.

She rushes out of the bathroom and twists, sliding under the bed and holding her gun at the ready.

No kill shots, she tells herself. No kill shots. She can still shoot him plenty of other places, just... no kill shots.

For all of the mental hand-wringing that Sharon's going through, the Soldier feels none of that. He has no reservations about hunting down this woman and forcing her into compliance if that's what's necessary. She means nothing to him beyond the parameters of the mission. Once he's dealt with her, he'll move onto the next person, simple as that.

So it's with a collected confidence that he follows after her and watches her steal into one of the rooms. She's not the first of his prey who's gone for that strategy. It didn't end well for the last one, at least from her perspective. As far as HYDRA's concerned, the encounter went smoothly.

Her attempt to confuse his senses works to some degree. The sound of the rushing water covers up whatever else she's doing, but it doesn't prevent him from approaching the room where she's hidden herself.

The Soldier stops in the doorway and listens. Maybe she's holding her breath, maybe he can't hear her over the water, but somehow she's managed to mask her presence. She's in here somewhere, though, and he'll find her.

He makes his way to the closet first.

She lifts the gun, aiming at the back of his legs. In the back of her mind, she hears Fury telling her about the assignment to protect him. She remembers giving him updates, reporting directly to him. She'd been so proud that he'd trusted her and her abilities so much...

Maybe she should have gone out the window while he was distracted.

But she hadn't, and now she's alone with a brainwashed Steve who can beat her with ease.

She lifts the gun again, wiggling under the bed for a better angle, and exhales slowly.

She can do this. It's to save people. Steve will forgive her. Fury would forgive her.

She can do this.

Maybe Steve would have forgiven her, had she been able to get the shot off. The Soldier, on the other hand, would have been impressed by her boldness.

Instead he views her hesitance as sloppy. He finds the closet empty (a distraction), but then picks up on that small exhale. Whatever advantage she'd created for herself, it's gone now. He whips around and then falls into a crouch, drawing his shield off his back to hold in front of his body to deflect any bullets she might squeeze off.

He peers at her from over the top of the shield, his eyes sharp and challenging. She won't shoot him in the head, he's decided. If she couldn't fire a bullet at him while his back was turned, then there's no way she can do it when he's staring right at her.

Something flickers in his mind, some old file he'd been handed at a time he can't quite remember.

"You're SHIELD," he realizes. That makes her a top priority.

Oh, shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. She should have shot him.

She should shoot him now. She would shoot him now. Except the only shot left available is his head and she can't do that, she can't.

Her eyes widen when he recognizes her as SHIELD. Given his current state, that can not be good. This is going to come down to a fight. And she can't fight from underneath a bed.

She twists, her hip scraping against the bottom of the bed, and kicks his shield away. She doesn't care that the kick is weak; she slides out from under the bed and keeps kicking. She doesn't have an advantage in this fight other than the gun, but she isn't going down without a fight.

With his grip on the shield as tight as it is, her kick doesn't do much except jar his fingers against the unforgiving metal. Painful, but not the sort of painful that would lead him to drop the shield entirely. What is her goal here? To get away? To incapacitate him? Not to kill him, he can tell that much. Maybe she isn't certain herself, and that's why it's difficult to read her.

Coming out from under the bed only makes her more vulnerable, though, and the Soldier springs forward from his crouch to tackle her, shield and all. The bulk of his body combined with the vibranium of the shield might be enough to knock the wind out of her.

Even as he fights to put her down, the Soldier's sifting through his (admittedly small) memory back to recall where the closest equipped room is where he can take her. Bringing one of SHIELD's agents to their side would be a huge boon. He can't fail in this.

To say her plan hadn't worked would be a gross understatement. She slams against the wall, air exploding from her lungs, her body straining to take air in again. Her grip on her gun weakens, and she forces herself to hold on tighter, her fingers fumbling. A shot goes off, but she's barely aware of it as she fights to regain control of herself.

Her vision is faintly blurred by tears, but she can see him well enough to aim. She forces herself to ignore her burning lungs and to hold up the gun.

"Keep back," she grates. Her voice is low, scratchy. Weak.

"Last chance, Steve."

Chance, nothing. She's given him too many chances, and she can't let this continue.

She quickly lowers the gun to underneath the shield, aiming for one of his legs, and fires.

Steve, please forgive her.

Bullet, please hit him.

The Soldier doesn't necessarily function by efficiency. He throws himself into attacks, views himself as expendable so long as he gets the job done. He may be an asset, but that value only reaches so far, and he'll do whatever it takes to complete his mission, even if that means putting himself in harm's way.

So while cornering the woman had been effective, it also put him in a position where she could get a shot off. It's as he's leaning back to try and stand (she's weak enough now that he could pick her up and haul her off regardless of her protests) that the second bullet fires. The first one had stuck uselessly in the wall, but this one hits him just a few inches above his left kneecap.

The Soldier doesn't make a sound, but he does fall backward from where he'd been crouched, forced to catch himself with one hand. Blood starts to dye the blue of his uniform pants red, and there are a few signs that he's in pain: sweat beads at his forehead, the cords in his neck stand out from strain...

But he doesn't stop. Instead he forces himself forward again, pulling his shield up so that he can hold its edge against the woman's neck and exert pressure, enough to cut off her breathing if need be.

"You're coming with me," he grates out.

There is no such thing as a last chance.

She blanches when she sees the blood on Steve's leg. She'd tried to long to protect him from getting hurt that the reality stuns her. Her hand trembles, but then it rises up again, steady on him. She isn't going to become Hydra, she won't.

He hasn't taken away her gun yet. She doesn't know why. Maybe he's too mechanical to think about it. Maybe he just doesn't care.

It's too much to hope that part of him is trying to give her a fighting chance.

She can't see through the shield. She has to guess where his other leg is.

She grins at him over the shield. There's no kindness in it, no mirth. Only the determination that there is no way Hydra is getting a SHIELD agent today. She can't kill Steve. Even if she were capable of it, she isn't sure she'd ever be able to forgive herself. But if she has to shoot herself to keep Hydra from getting her, she will. If she has to die... Well. She hadn't joined SHIELD for the retirement plan.

She squeezes the trigger, counting the shots and hoping the count is correct.

With the way that he has her pinned, the angle at which she has to try and aim her gun is awkward to say the least. It's for that reason that he isn't worried about it at first, but when yet another shot goes off (barely missing his right hamstring) he lets out an animalistic growl and then uses his free hand to swat the gun out of her grip. It goes scattering across the floor and ends up under the desk.

At that point he presses in further with the shield, the edge of it cutting into her throat and compressing her windpipe. His gunshot wound in his leg is bleeding profusely; his super soldier body produces plenty of blood, replenishes it like it's nothing, but that also means that he bleeds like a stuck pig. His pants are getting soaked and sticky with it.

"Enough," he orders, easing the shield off of her throat just enough that he can lift it a few inches and slam it into her forehead instead. If it doesn't knock her out, it will definitely leave her disoriented enough that he should be able to grab hold of her and pick her up once and for all.

Walking on a bum leg is going to be difficult, to say the least, but he'll manage somehow.

She gasps as he knocks her gun away, her fingers reaching for it. She knows what her odds are without that gun.

His shield goes to her throat, pressing harder than before and making it difficult to breath. Her eyes water, stars dance in her vision. She grabs at the shield, her fingers scrabbling over the rim. She tries to push it away, but he's stronger than she is, taller, has a weapon in the shield. He's pressing his advantages - literally.

She tries to say his name, to tell him not to do this, but all that comes out is a choked sound.

The shield moves, and for a second - one brief moment - she thinks he might have relented after all, that the legendary Steve Rogers has actually overcome Hydra's brainwashing. Her throat and lungs burn as air rushes in; she's only dimly aware that he's moving the shield.

She doesn't realize that he's hit her with it, not right away. She feels the back of her head hit the wall. She barely has time to register the pain in her forehead when the colors of his shield start to swim in front of her eyes, quickly overcome by darkness.

Some might question how a shield can be a weapon, but when it's made of a material this strong it has all kinds of uses. The crack against her forehead is effective, causing her to pass out as her body slumps against the wall.

The Soldier nods to himself and slowly tries to stand. His leg buckles under the weight and he sucks in a breath as he braces one hand against the wall. He attaches the shield to his back with his free hand, then staggers over to the closet to ask for something he can use as a tourniquet, which he ties tight around his thigh above the wound.

With that done, he limps back to the woman and loops his arms around her back. Hauling her up isn't difficult, and he straightens (gritting his teeth through the pain) to arrange her weight across his shoulders lengthwise.

She'll probably wake up soon. People don't stay knocked out for long. But he's secured her now and that's what matters.

He's sweating from the exertion at this point, but he pushes his way out of the room and starts down the hall, all too aware of his destination.

She wakes up feeling like she's going to hurl. Her head pounds. It feels like her heart is trying to escape through her ears. She groans, the sound turning to a breathless whimper as pressure scrapes her throat. There's a faint stench of sweat, and her stomach twists at a coppery smell that she recognizes all too well. When she manages to open her eyes, all she sees are a wall with her arms reaching toward it like sticks. No, wait. Not her arms. Legs. Someone else's legs. Not a wall, a floor. But she isn't the one walking. Something is wrong.

She shifts, but a vise holds her in place. She squirms harder, struggling to wake up, trying to register what's happening, to remember how she got in this position. Twisting, she moves as much as she can, testing her limits.

Steve. Steve and his shield. No, not Steve. Not the Steve she knows. Hydra. And if she doesn't escape, he'll take her to be brainwashed.

She bucks, fighting as much as she can. She's hurt him before. Maybe she can pull it off again.

This walk is taking than it should because of his injured leg, which is forcing him to limp. The Soldier is all too aware of how to push through pain. If he can remember correctly (and who knows if he can), that had been one of his first lessons with Hydra. How to handle pain is an important, no, necessary skill.

But the slower pace means that the target wakes up before he gets her to where she needs to be. When the Soldier feels and hears her stirring, he experiences a moment of frustration. This one is more difficult than most of the others had been.

True to that, she fights to escape his hold, but even that much is going to be impossible for her now that she's in such a vulnerable position. All the Soldier has to do is add pressure to keep her pinned down against his shoulders.

"It's not much further," he tells her, as if it's some kind of comfort.

That is not a comfort. She thrashes more. She ignores the way her head spins, the bile that rises in her throat. None of it matters. She has to get away. She has to. She has to throw him off balance. His leg had gotten hurt earlier in the fight, she remembers. She can use that. If she can just get him to loosen his grip... "Steve! Steve, don't do this." The words come out slurred, but she repeats them over and over as she fights him. She can't lose. She can't.

"Gonna beat your ass, Steve," she snaps, her head spinning. "Beat your fucking ass. Big damn hero. Shoulda fucking killed you. Fucking will if you put me down. Goddamn you, Rogers. Fucking coward. Weak-ass fuck." She inhales, then surges behind him with everything she has to try and force him off-balance. Please work, she thinks. Please, please work.

The name again. Even hearing it is enough to make a sharp pain shoot through his head, but her words mean nothing. All of those expletives and threats, they may as well go through one ear and out the other. Except that he does take into account what she says about planning to kill him. In that case, it seems that he won't be letting her down any time soon, at least not until he straps her into the chair.

He is not a coward, but she's trying to goad him and he won't fall for it.

When she jerks her body backward, the Soldier is thrown off-balance, and his injured leg doesn't make maters any better. He won't let go, though, not even as he staggers to the side and slams against the wall to catch himself before he falls.

"There's no point in fighting it," he grates out as he regains his bearings and pushes himself forward. "You'll see."

It hadn't worked. She felt her panic rise, her heartbeat reverberating in her ears. He had beaten her. He was going to turn him into something like him. A cold-blooded machine that sought to destroy people, make them agree with Hydra or eliminate them.

No. No. She had to keep fighting.

She opened her mouth to scream for help, then closed it. She'd had years of SHIELD training and couldn't take Steve on. If someone came to help her, there was no guarantee he wouldn't use his shield on them. His injury meant little to him while carrying her; she doubted it would mean anything in light of getting another recruit. And what if the person who came to Sharon's aid was Peggy? No. She couldn't do that. She couldn't let someone else go down with her. She'd vowed to protect people from Hydra. Luring them into the Soldier's path isn't the way to do that.

Instead, she writhes in his grasp, straining as hard as she can. She can't quit. Not even against Steve. Not against Hydra.

The lack of screaming is a good thing, in the end. If she'd attracted that kind of attention to them, the Soldier would have had to do something distract.

It seems like it's been an eternity, but he finally makes it to the conversion room and practically falls into the door in order to open it. It falls forward and he stumbles, but then leans his weight back to close it behind them.

They're alone with the chair.

Breathing hard and sweating from the extra exertion the bullet wound has put on him, the Soldier presses forward with all the determination of a machine that's built for this purpose -- because that's what he is, or should be.

Soon enough, the struggle will be over, and then everything will be so much simpler.

She nearly passes out again when she sees the chair. There's a low moan deep in her throat that tapers off into a whimper. She keeps trying to fight him, but he's as unrelenting as before. She has to hope there's an opening when he tries to tie her down. As much as she wants to drown in what a failure she is, what a failure she's been, she knows she can't. She has to keep fighting, even when there's no fight left in her.

But no matter what, she doesn't think for a moment that she will ever forgive him for this.

The Soldier realizes that he hasn't won yet, but it's close enough that he's bolstered, and it makes the stiff pain in his leg somewhat easier to bear. He'll need to actually tend to the wound once this is done, maybe track down Wiccan and see if he can heal it at least somewhat. But one step at a time.

Which is how he approaches the chair, step by step. Even if one of his legs is dragging, the room isn't that big, and finally he reaches it.

He shifts the target's body around in his arms so that he can place her in it, but he suspects a fight, which is why he holds her in place with all of his strength, face contorted in concentration.

(That's fine. Steve will never forgive himself for it, either.)

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standing on the cliff face, highest fall you'll ever grace [OPEN]

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