Rebecca Barnes: Another Winter Soldier

Chapter 18: Always Too Late

Rebecca sat alone, doing nothing but listening to the howling wind pass her by. She had enough of reliving her memories for now, so she attempted to block them out temporarily. She was trying to shift her focus to the wind, but it wasn't working as well as she had hoped. She didn't know how long she had been sitting there, but she assumed that it was a while. Strangely, she had a strange feeling that she should get out of the area. She thought that she was just being paranoid for the first bit, but that feeling started becoming stronger. She stood up, her wings growing behind her once again. She was about to take off, when a strange jet-looking thing started to appear out of nowhere, slowly fading back into sight. It was hovering in front of the ledge that Rebecca was standing on, a ramp starting to lower only a few feet from where she was.

A man started to walk down the ramp, making Becky tense up.

"Who are you, and what do you want." Becky said plainly, more of a demand than a question.

"Who I am, does not matter. I just need to borrow you for a bit, that's all." Zemo stated.

"No."

"You must feel bad about killing Rogers, am I correct?"

"If you're trying to manipulate me, it ain't gonna work."

"Very well then. I do not wish to harm you. The less you resist, the quicker this will be."

Rebecca hated how calm and unbothered this man seemed to be. It reminded her heavily of the HYDRA scientists. Wait a minute... was this HYDRA? Their jets didn't look like this from what she could remember.

"Are you HYDRA?" Rebecca asked, not expecting anything else.

"No, I would never involve myself in activities such as theirs. Their goals will never be accomplished, they would have to get off their asses in order for that to happen. It does not seem like they are planning on doing that, so they are about as pointless as any other organization I've come across."

"What do you want with me, then?"

"I cannot tell you now, but I will stop wasting our time. Time is quite precious, yes?"

Rebecca let out a menacing growl, picking up the same katana that she used earlier.

"Storm." Zemo spoke, in clear Russian.

Rebecca froze in place. That was a word that she recognized much too well. Her handlers used this word on her when she acted out, so she was unable to harm them. Her heartbeat increased steadily. "If he knows that word... then he would know my activation code.... please no... I just got freed..." Rebecca wearily thought to herself.

"Now, I will begin." Zemo said.

Rebecca couldn't even twitch. She did give Zemo a terrifying glare, however, and if looks could kill then Zemo would've been a rotting corpse on the ground forever ago.

"Sniper."

Rebecca had completed many sniper missions over the decades. She was even a better sniper than her brother.

"Crimson."

Crimson... the colour of blood. And Rebecca knew that she would spill a lot of it, once the brainwashing process was complete.

"Thirty-One."

1931 was the year that Rebecca lost her father, her humanity, her everything. The year that HYDRA began experimenting on her. The year that she would be changed, forever.

"Nightfall."

Nightfall is the opposite of Daybreak. Bucky was supposed to represent dawn, Rebecca was supposed to represent dusk. Rebecca didn't understand HYDRA's logic of why they did this, there probably was an explanation. She wasn't going to risk asking, however; she would always get punished if she questioned anything.