Chapter 211: Crossbones: Captain, I Always Thought You Were One of Ours
BOOM!
The grenade launcher fired, and an instant later the round detonated with precise accuracy right at Steve's feet.
In the instant of the blast, the shockwave tore outward in every direction, dragging chunks of stone and shredded asphalt with it.
The force sent Steve's whole body flying, tumbling twice through the air before slamming, back-first, into a car parked along the curb.
The roof caved in instantly under the impact, and the tempered glass of the windows shattered into a spray of fragments.
A sharp crack.
Fortunately, he was still gripping tight to the Vibranium shield he'd just wrenched off the dashboard.
At the moment of the blast, instinct had already brought the shield up in front of him.
The shield absorbed the worst of the shrapnel and the shockwave. Aside from his arms going numb from the force and a ringing in his ears that hadn't stopped, he'd come away without any real injury.
Soldier Boy hadn't been so lucky.
He'd been locked in close-quarters with Steve just a moment before, the two of them grappling almost chest to chest. When the Winter Soldier's grenade came in, there'd been no time to break away, let alone raise a shield to block it.
The fireball from the blast swallowed his upper body whole, and the scorching air pressure sent him staggering backward several steps.
Smoke rolled through the street, thick with the bite of gunpowder, and once the pale haze finally thinned in the wind, Soldier Boy's outline came back into view.
He looked down at his uniform, now shredded and scorched, covered in black soot and burn marks, and his expression darkened instantly to something murderous.
He raised his head slowly, his gaze cutting through the drifting smoke to lock onto the Winter Soldier, still standing off to the side, calmly reloading.
"Fuck! Did that old bastard have your factory settings screwed up before he sent you out here?"
"Didn't he tell you to keep friendlies out of the blast radius when you're using ordnance?!" Soldier Boy roared, ripping the ruined remains of his uniform off his body as he went.
The Winter Soldier, for his part, didn't so much as pause.
At Soldier Boy's outburst, he only glanced up briefly, then moved his eyes back to Steve, as if hitting a teammate a moment ago barely registered as worth mentioning.
His eyes locked on Steve. The next instant, his mechanical arm rose again, the grenade launcher's barrel realigning with Steve, who had just flipped down off the roof of the wrecked car.
The trigger pulled, again and again.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Three grenades launched in quick succession, trailing white smoke that tore through the air, screaming toward Steve.
Steve's pupils contracted the instant he saw them coming.
His arms were still numb from the last one he'd taken head-on. There was no way he was eating another one of these directly.
The thought alone launched him sideways like a coiled spring, his body darting between cover like a hunting cat, a string of explosions chasing behind him, shrapnel from the blasts rattling against his shield in a hail of debris.
Even as he dodged, Steve kept his eyes on the Winter Soldier through the haze, still lining up another shot in the distance.
This time, he didn't keep dodging. The instant the last explosion died away, he spun on his heel and hurled the shield in a wide arc.
Whoosh—
The shield cut through the air with a sharp, whistling sound, tracing a curve overhead.
CLANG!
It slammed straight into the grenade launcher, the impact ringing out across the street.
The launcher was knocked clean out of the Winter Soldier's grip and landed somewhere in the grass, while the shield, carried by the rebound, spun through a half-arc in the air and came flying back toward Steve like a boomerang.
Steve raised his hand and caught it cleanly with a solid smack.
Off to the side, the Winter Soldier, seeing the launcher knocked away, didn't bother going after it. Instead, he simply pulled the semi-automatic rifle hanging from his shoulder strap around to the front.
But before he could raise it—
Bang! A gunshot cracked from behind cover to one side.
It was Natasha.
She'd used the lull in the fighting between the Winter Soldier and Steve to reload, and now, using the burned-out wreck of a car as cover, she lined up a shot on the Winter Soldier's head from the side.
The instant the trigger pulled, the round spiraled out of the barrel, driving straight for his skull.
The shot was fast and precise. Anyone ordinary would already have been dead.
But in the split second before the bullet buried itself between his eyes—
Snap!
The Winter Soldier's left arm shot up, the silver mechanical limb moving with impossible speed to block, the metal hand closing with pinpoint precision around the incoming round.
The bullet crumpled inside the metal grip with a harsh screech of metal on metal, flattened into a scrap of scorched steel, and dropped to the ground.
Following the sound of the shot, the Winter Soldier turned his head toward where Natasha was hiding, his gaze settling through the tactical scope with slow precision.
At the same time, the semi-automatic rifle in his right hand had already come up, the black muzzle leveling on Natasha where she crouched behind the charred car wreck.
The trigger pulled.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat—
Bullets poured out in a torrent, striking the car wreck and throwing off sparks in every direction.
Natasha curled up tight behind the door, her breathing coming fast and shallow.
Even with everything she'd been through in the field, the sound of bullets hammering against metal just behind her still sent her heart into her throat.
A piece of shrapnel from a ricochet clipped her cheek, drawing a thin line of blood across her cheekbone.
Feeling the warmth trickle down her face, Natasha steadied her breathing, forcing her heart rate back down.
The rifle's magazine emptied in a matter of seconds, and the instant the gunfire stopped, Natasha didn't hesitate. She leaned half her body out from behind cover, gripped the gun with both hands, and pulled the trigger three times straight at the Winter Soldier's chest.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
All three rounds connected.
Unfortunately, none of them found his skull. They struck his tactical vest instead.
Given the limited stopping power of a handgun round, the bullets only left three shallow dents in the Kevlar. The Winter Soldier didn't so much as flinch.
He looked up at Natasha, who was already lining up another shot, tossed the empty rifle aside without a second thought, and drew a pistol from the holster strapped to his thigh.
But just then...
A figure dropped from the sky without warning.
Carter, seizing the moment while the Winter Soldier's attention was locked on Natasha, launched herself off a two-story fire escape nearby, dropping through the air like a hawk on a dive, knees bent, aimed straight at the Winter Soldier's shoulders.
The instant her knees connected with his shoulders, her thighs clamped hard around his neck, and her hips snapped sharply to the left.
A sharp whoosh of movement.
Carter used the momentum of the fall to spin a half-turn in the air, wrenching the Winter Soldier completely off balance, and slammed him down sideways onto the pavement with a heavy thud.
Straddling him on the ground, Carter had somehow already gotten a set of steel knuckle-dusters onto her right hand.
She showed him no mercy. Fist raised, she brought the metal studs of the knuckle-duster down hard against his temple.
One punch. Two punches. Three punches.
Every strike carried the full weight of her body behind it, the knuckle-duster meeting his skull with a dull, heavy thud each time.
An ordinary person wouldn't have survived the first hit. The Winter Soldier only had his head knocked slightly to one side.
The sheer resilience of it genuinely startled Carter.
Before the third punch could land, the Winter Soldier's mechanical arm surged with force, five fingers closing like a steel vise around Carter's right wrist.
The instant the metal fingers tightened, Carter felt like her own wristbone was about to be crushed to powder, and the pain twisted her whole face.
At the same moment, the Winter Soldier arched his core and hips and threw Carter clean off him with raw strength, reversing their positions in an instant.
He pinned her to the ground, his mechanical arm rising high, fingers curling into a fist, the silver metal catching the sunlight with a cold, hard gleam.
If that punch landed clean, Carter's face was going to cave in.
CLANG!!!
A loud crash. Steve's shield arrived just in time, spinning through the air to catch the mechanical arm and knock the punch off course.
The metal fist grazed past Carter's ear and slammed into the ground instead, punching a fist-sized crater into the asphalt, cracks spreading outward like a spiderweb.
The shield rebounded. Steve came in hard behind it.
He caught it out of the air without breaking stride, using the momentum of his run to drive the shield out in front of him like a human tank, slamming into the Winter Soldier at full speed.
BOOM!!
The Winter Soldier was thrown backward off his feet, his back crashing through the rolling shutter of a nearby convenience store, tumbling through collapsing shelves and scattered merchandise before finally coming to a stop.
Steve didn't press the attack.
Instead, he hauled Carter up off the ground, pulling both her and Natasha, who'd broken from cover, behind him, his eyes locked on the figure slowly rising inside the wrecked storefront.
But before he could catch his breath...
"You two done with your little show?"
A low voice dropped from above.
Steve's head snapped up. Soldier Boy was standing on top of an overturned delivery truck, looking down at them from above.
He'd stripped off the ruined remains of his jacket by now, wearing only a black tactical vest, the veins standing out along his bulging arms.
The next instant, Soldier Boy leapt down off the truck.
The moment he landed, his feet punched two shallow craters into the asphalt, cracks spreading outward from the edges.
He gave Steve no time to react. The shield swung.
There was no flourish to the strike, nothing but pure force and speed pushed to their absolute limit.
The shield's edge came whistling through the air, and Steve barely had time to bring his own shield up to block.
CLANG!!
The impact of the two shields colliding rang out like a giant bell going off right next to his ear.
Steve felt an indescribable force travel up through the shield into his arm, then into his shoulder, and finally sweep through his entire body.
He was sent flying, shield and all, like a baseball off a bat, crashing straight through the brick wall of a coffee shop along the street!
The collapsing brickwork buried him instantly underneath the rubble.
"Steve!" Carter cried out.
"You should be worrying about yourself right about now!"
Soldier Boy swung the shield again, this time aiming straight for Carter's face.
Carter didn't dare take the hit head-on. She kept dodging and weaving, working her fighting technique to stay a step ahead of him, her eyes flicking repeatedly toward her own shield lying somewhere in the distance.
Bang!
Soldier Boy's fist connected, and Carter went flying backward.
Only this time, there wasn't the faintest trace of pain on her face...
Carter landed lightly, rolled once on the ground, and came up with her own shield, which had been lying in the rubble, now firmly in hand.
At the same time, over on the other side, Steve had already clawed his way out of the wreckage and was closing the distance toward Carter at a dead run.
But just as the two of them were about to go three hundred rounds with Soldier Boy, a sudden gunshot cracked out and shattered the thought entirely.
Steve and Carter turned toward the sound in the distance...
Only to find that, at some point without either of them noticing, Natasha had been seized by the Winter Soldier, his gleaming silver mechanical hand now clamped around her throat. Both of them felt their chests tighten instantly at the sight.
At the same time, a swarm of police cars had already surrounded the street, and a man in a police uniform, Crossbones, was striding out of one of them, reflexively leveling his weapon at Steve and Carter.
But the moment he caught sight of the bystanders lining the sidewalk, phones out and filming the whole thing, he lowered the barrel just as quickly.
"Put your weapons away."
"Hey. At least put your weapons away here!" Crossbones snapped, low and sharp, at the tactical team behind him.
"Those two are Captain America and Captain Carter. Pointing guns at them is going to stir up exactly the kind of public backlash we don't need right now."
He glanced at the crowd still filming from a distance, drew a slow breath, and stepped in close to Steve. "Captain, if you don't want your teammate strangled in the middle of the street, I'd suggest surrendering right now. Get in the vehicle with us."
"What do you say?"
"..."
At that, Steve turned and looked at Crossbones's face.
He was quiet for a moment, then spoke, slow and even. "Brock Rumlow. Never expected you to be HYDRA too."
"Didn't expect it?" Crossbones looked back at him just as evenly. "You knew who I was back during the Battle of New York, didn't you?"
"The Battle of New York?"
"That's right."
"In the elevator that day. You don't actually remember any of it?" Crossbones stared straight at Steve.
Seeing Steve say nothing, he frowned slightly. "You really do have a short memory for a man of your standing."
"You used the confusion at the time to make us believe you were HYDRA, which is exactly why we handed the Chitauri Scepter over to you by mistake."
"It wasn't until recently, when Pierce told us you were never actually one of ours, that we finally understood..."
"Looking back on it now, you played us for fools that day."
Listening to all of this, Steve still said nothing, his mind filling with question marks.
When exactly had he ever told anyone in an elevator that he was HYDRA?
But looking at how utterly certain Brock Rumlow seemed, it didn't feel like he was lying either.
So where exactly had things gone wrong?
Steve sank into thought.
Before long, a memory surfaced: the Battle of New York, and the moment he'd been knocked unconscious by another version of himself.
His eyes went sharp.
It all lined up. Every single piece of it.
The thing that other version of him had been carrying at the time, it had looked exactly like the Chitauri Scepter.
Which meant everything Brock Rumlow had just described hadn't been anything he'd actually done at all. It had been done by whoever had been impersonating him.
But why would anyone do that?
Was it really just to trick them out of the Chitauri Scepter?
A flood of questions surged through his mind, but before a single one of them could find an answer, they were cut off completely.
Facing the combined assault of Soldier Boy, the Winter Soldier, and Crossbones's people, the three of them ultimately couldn't fight their way clear. Crossbones cuffed their hands and had them loaded into the transport vehicle.
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