#Ridge the elemental reaper

[ottos-doodle-page]

Did a little doodle doo of my reaper Ridge🥀❤️

Ignore the bad hand, and the OC ask thing(that’s for a story I’m working on), and ignore the bad scenery lol. It’s supposed to be the sea but you know.

I was semi proud of this little pen doodle lol. It was part of a sketch dump that I don’t want to share, sorry:/

But hey! You can read some short stories involving him on my ao3 here if you want:)

#otto's art #my art #otto's work #art #otto drew this #otto draws #otto did this #artists on tumblr #ridge #ridge the elemental reaper #reaper ridge #Ridge O’Harron #otto’s oc #oc #oc art #my oc art #my ocs <3 #please do not steal my art or oc #please do not steal my art #please do not repost #not ai generated #not ai art #sketchbook art #traditional art #sketch #pen sketch #sketch dump #oc artwork #otto's writing #ao3

[otto-c-graves]

So this cool story has sat for years and I just got around to editing it. Remember this good little sketch of a guy? Love him. That's Ridge:) He's in this fic. Give it a read if you like. Or are a board. Whichever:) Thank YOU in advance if you do! Much love and Best regards.

#oc #ao3 fanfic #otto’s stuff #king ridge #Ridge #Ridge the Reaper #Vertigo #my original characters #my oc story #dnd #dnd character #Ridge the elemental reaper #ao3 #read on ao3 #please do not steal #otto's writing #otto's OCs #otto babbles on and on #tw death #tw depressing stuff #ptsd mention #flashback #dnd campaign #original writing #original story #otto's story #gay mlm #mlm #angst? #poly relationship

[c-c-2]

“The Mountain” by William Ellery Channing (1818–1901) (1), published in Ralph Waldo Emerson, comp. (1803–1882) (2). “Parnassus: An Anthology of Poetry”. 1880.

Once we built our fortress where you see

Yon group of spruce-trees sidewise on the line

Where the horizon to the eastward bounds,—

A point selected by sagacious art,

Where all at once we viewed the Vermont hills,

And the long outlines of the mountain-ridge,

Ever-renewing, changeful every hour.

Strange, a few cubits raised above the plain,

And a few tables of resistless stone

Spread round us, with that rich delightful air,

Draping high altars in cerulean space,

Could thus enchant the being that we are!

Those altars, where the airy element

Flows o’er in new perfection, and reveals

Its constant lapsing (never stillness all),

As a mother’s kiss, touching the bright spruce-foliage;

And in her wise distilment the soft rain,

Trickling below the sphagnum that o’erlays

The plateau’s slope, is led to the ravine,

And so electrified by her pure breath,

As if in truth the living water famed

Recorded in John’s mythus, who first dashed

Ideal baptism on Jordan’s shore.

In this sweet solitude, the Mountain’s life,

At morn and eve, at rise and hush of day,

I heard the wood-thrush sing in the white spruce.

The living water, the enchanted air

So mingling in its crystal clearness there

A sweet, peculiar grace from both,—this song,

Voice of the lonely mountain’s favorite bird!

These steeps inviolate by human art,

Centre of awe, raised over all that man

Would fain enjoy, and consecrate to one,

Lord of the desert and of all beside,

Consorting with the cloud, the echoing storm,

When like a myriad bowls the mountain wakes

In all its alleys one responsive roar;

And sheeted down the precipice, all light

Tumble the momentary cataracts,—

The sudden laughter of the mountain-child.

On the mountain-peak

I marked the sage at sunset, where he mused,

Forth looking on the continent of hills;

While from his feet the five long granite spurs

That bind the centre to the valley’s side,

(The spokes from this strange middle to the wheel)

Stretched in the fitful torrent of the gale

Bleached on the terraces of leaden cloud

And passages of light,—Sierras long

In archipelagoes of mountain sky,

Where it went wandering all the livelong year.

He spoke not, yet methought I heard him say,

“All day and night the same; in sun or shade,

In summer flames, and the jagged, biting knife

That hardy winter splits upon the cliff,—

From earliest time the same.

One mother and one father brought us forth

Thus gazing on the summits of the days,

Nor wearied yet when generations fade.

The crystal air, the hurrying light, the night,

Always the day that never seems to end,

Always the night whose day does never set;

One harvest and one reaper, ne’er too ripe,

Sown by the self-preserver, free from mould,

And builded in these granaries of heaven,

This ever-living purity of air,

In these perpetual centres of repose

Still softly rocked.”

Illustration: Postcard of Old Bennington, Vermont

Notes:

(1) William Ellery Channing (April 7, 1780 – October 2, 1842) was the foremost Unitarian preacher in the United States in the early nineteenth century and, along with Andrews Norton (1786–1853), one of Unitarianism's leading theologians. Channing was known for his articulate and impassioned sermons and public speeches, and as a prominent thinker in the liberal theology of the day. His religion and thought were among the chief influences on the New England Transcendentalists although he never countenanced their views, which he saw as extreme. His espousal of the developing philosophy and theology of Unitarianism was displayed especially in his "Baltimore Sermon" of May 5, 1819, given at the ordination of the theologian and educator Jared Sparks (1789–1866) as the first minister of the newly organized First Independent Church of Baltimore. Channing died in Old Bennington, VT. There is a cenotaph to him in the graveyard of the Old First Church seen in the postcard above. Robert Frost (1874-1963) (1a) is also buried there.

(1a) Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. Frequently honored during his lifetime, Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution". He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet laureate of Vermont.

(2) Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo,[8] was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (2a) considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence." Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, “Essays: First Series” (1841) and “Essays: Second Series” (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", and "Experience." Together with "Nature", these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."

He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

(2a) Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (August 29, 1809 – October 7, 1894) was an American physician, poet, and polymath based in Boston. Grouped among the fireside poets, he was acclaimed by his peers as one of the best writers of the day. His most famous prose works are the "Breakfast-Table" series, which began with “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” (1858). He was also an important medical reformer. In addition to his work as an author and poet, Holmes also served as a physician, professor, lecturer, inventor, and, although he never practiced it, he received formal training in law.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Holmes was educated at Phillips Academy and Harvard College. After graduating from Harvard in 1829, he briefly studied law before turning to the medical profession. He began writing poetry at an early age; one of his most famous works, "Old Ironsides", was published in 1830 and was influential in the eventual preservation of the USS Constitution. Following training at the prestigious medical schools of Paris, Holmes was granted his Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard Medical School in 1836. He taught at Dartmouth Medical School before returning to teach at Harvard and, for a time, served as dean there. During his long professorship, he became an advocate for various medical reforms and notably posited the controversial idea that doctors were capable of carrying puerperal fever from patient to patient. Holmes retired from Harvard in 1882 and continued writing poetry, novels and essays until his death in 1894.

Surrounded by Boston's literary elite—which included friends such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell—Holmes made an indelible imprint on the literary world of the 19th century. Many of his works were published in The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that he named. For his literary achievements and other accomplishments, he was awarded numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world. Holmes's writing often commemorated his native Boston area, and much of it was meant to be humorous or conversational. Some of his medical writings, notably his 1843 essay regarding the contagiousness of puerperal fever, were considered innovative for their time. He was often called upon to issue occasional poetry, or poems written specifically for an event, including many occasions at Harvard. Holmes also popularized several terms, including Boston Brahmin and anesthesia. He was the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who would become a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.

[thewatchau]

The Feadhainn Valley

Most of the lore in the upcoming series will be edited compilations of dozens of posts from the last two years. While there are some minor new details sprinkled throughout, I’ve attempted to post significant new information in a “Watch AU Fun Fact” post so you don’t have to read all of these HUGE posts to find them.

Other Posts in this Series:

Geographic Regions of Duilintinn: The Feadhainn Valley • The Northern Mountains • The Southern Mountains (and Foothills) • The Western Forest •  The Draoidh Valley • The Monaidh Plains • The Beinnfaire Ridge • The Cuartalan Wetlands • The Costageal Plains • The Domhainn Peninsula • The Iolla Cliffs

Other Related Series: Major Bodies of Water in Duilintinn

In This Post

Summary

Name Origin

Geography

Magic

Trivia

Additional Art

Summary

The “Feadhainn Valley” refers to the geographic region between the Northern and Southern Mountains (hence the “Valley” part of the name), with the Edge Mountains and Eastern Sea on its western and eastern flank. In the Modern Era, the majority of this region is known politically as the Kingdom of Duilintinn, with the exception of the deeper recesses of the Western Forest. 

The term is primarily used when speaking of Duilintinn in a context prior to the kingdom’s founding. However, despite the inaccuracy of the term “Duilintinn'' in those contexts, many still casually use the name of the modern kingdom when discussing the Feadhainn Valley. Thus, for most purposes, the two are synonymous. 

Name Origin

“Feadhainn” comes from the name of the first large-scale civilization on historical record that occupied the majority of the Feadhainn Valley. Evidence of Feadhainn’s  architecture and culture appear as far west as Monacoil near the fringes of the Western Forest and as far east as Iolla Beacon on the cliffs of the eastern coast. 

Geography

Major Geographic Regions:

The Northern Mountains

The Southern Mountains (and Foothills)

The Western Forest

The Draoidh Valley

The Monaidh Plains

The Beinnfaire Ridge

The Cuartalan Wetlands

The Costageal Plains

The Iolla Cliffs

Major Bodies of Water*:

Agrona River 

Airceann River 

Gáire River 

Guardian River 

Pa’Gille River 

Rúnach River 

Loch Glas 

Loch Domhainn 

Reaper Cove

The Eastern Sea

*Duilintinn’s major bodies of water has its own dedicated post series, which you can read here. 

Magic

While the continent of Tirónar as a whole is remarkably high in magical ecosystems and influences in the natural world, the Feadhainn Valley is arguably the epicenter of that magical environment. To date, no other region has been discovered with such a significant influx of magic as is seen in the Feadhainn Valley. In particular, Fae Gardens are observed so often in the Feadhainn Valley that they could easily be considered a geographic feature of the region. For more information on these phenomena and their effects on the natural world of the Feadhainn Valley, see this post on Magic in Nature and this one on Fae Folk and the Fae Realm. 

Trivia

Early in the AU’s creation, the Feadhainn Valley was primarily described as a region with mountains to the north and south, an ocean to the east, and a forest to the west. When asked about the region’s climate, the author used Northern Italy as a reference due to these similar geographic features (minus the forest). As a result, many elements of the Feadhainn Valley are based upon the real-world region of Northern Italy, including climate, geography, latitude, and size (120,000 kilometers squared).

Additional Art

A slightly newer version of the map at the top of the post. While the better colors allow for this version to be legible without being overly saturated, the other image is still in use for the sake of consistency with maps used in other posts. 

A simplified version of the map that focuses on the roads and travel times for travelers of the Feadhainn Valley. 

The Feadhainn Valley in comparison to the rest of Tirónar. For reference, the valley is the one on the eastern coast with the large lake. 

The Feadhainn Valley in comparison to the entire Mortal Realm. For context, Tirónar is the westernmost continent in the northern hemisphere, with the Feadhainn Valley filled in with dark green in the center right of the landmass. 

#Feadhainn Valley #The Lands of The Watch #History of Duilintinn #Flora and Fauna of The Watch #Geographic Regions of Duilintinn

[blessedwifey]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Under Armour Ridge Reaper GORE-TEX Shell Jacket.

[storiesof2018]

-A ghoulish eeriness sailed over the darkened environs of the Bavarian forest, as discarded hulls of shelled-out HYDRA Uber tanks became obstructive sentinels over the ridgelines as whiteish sconces of moonlight haloed over the SSR division encampment, pitched up tents adorned with the Red Cross insignia flappingly beckoned medic evac ranks to haul the wounded, bloodied faced GI's that were screamingly pulled out of razed fox-holes.

Everything was rehearsed on urgent cue, transport gurneys blindingly moved in traumatic procession as cotton gauzes were sheathed over marred, bullet-riddled flesh, young men that resonated heartbeats of full-measured valor gurglingly choked out in throat-draining cadences as they became on the stuporous fringe of cacophonic panic-an immobilizing dread that grappled them into catatonic lucidity. The second wave of HYDRA ranks mobilized on the front-lines as deafened volleys of anti-tank artillery mistily rained a blood-storms over westward ridge.

Around the stationed point, Ford GP convoy jeeps road out with mud-rutted traction, advancing into the murkiness of the forested grounds that were rigged as the sniper domain, combative-honed Iron Cross Wehrmacht marksmen lethally decked with Mauser Karabiner 98k rifles for long-range precision-shadow reapers.

As the radio wavelength of Agent Peggy Carter's dulcet British-timbre commandingly broadcasted the fixed location of dugout extraction, impassively braced in a sniper- crouch on parked Jeep's hood, with his Springfield 1903 rifle strapped over the bulkier cords of his blue tactical-padded shoulder. Feigning his nonchalant poise, as rakish chestnut tresses unkemptly strayed over his temples, with a distractive play of charming tack, Sergent Bucky Barnes sucked out a drag of vaporous breath as the bendable length of a freshly lit cigarette saggily drooped over the pouty swell of his jutted underlip, his grayish-aquamarine irises unwaveringly razored in the direction of the SSR operations tent, where Captain Steven Rogers was coordinating their next recon mission with Gabe Jones.

'Hell, M' not gonna enjoy this...' he snorted against a murmurous gravelly pitch, snarkily, knowing he was next 'up-to-bat' for a nightly Commando scouting report. "Beats watchin' Duggan snore..." He couldn't ward off being a defiance-starved hostage in the butcherous POW barracks of the Azzano stronghold where the Red Skull's diabolical-sadistic toady -Armin Zola- had surgically anesthetized him before wiring him to needle-point machinery, torturously jabbing mutative infusions of serum cocktails into his veins. After the vomitous, sweaty onslaughts of night-chills that feverishly raided through him, Bucky had staunched out bone-plaguing implosions-the contractive tautness of deadened-heavier muscle, he knew something was-different.

Against his steeled passiveness, jacked-up tension became exceedingly detonative through his veins, every implosive second on the forested battlefront was rigged, as white-bluish salvos of incendiary blasts that surged out of HYDRA weaponry horrifyingly scythed a calamitous wake as young GI's were vaporized into heaped remnants ash-obliterated in a trajectory of energized firebolts. Despite all push-forward efforts of the SSR, HYDRA's butcherous reign of infestive carnage had escalated-armored war machines divisions harvested out Allied units into vapours of white-noise. They needed to destroy Armin Zola's energy cube before echoes of salvaged valour flatlined.

Dabbing out his cigarette, scathingly against roils of feigned tension that rapted over his fisting hand, sniffily Bucky downcasted a crestfallen glance of teary aquamarine at wooden cross markers being stored in convoy truck- an elemental reverence to honor the fallen soldiers of his 107th infantry. "Damnit..." he breathed out, chokingly, as feverish bleariness dampened his lashes. They were young courageous men who devotedly followed tenacious-hellbent- Sergent James Barnes had geared up unerring measures of soldiery faith in him-when the Uber tanks blasted cannonades of voltaic energy over trigger-mine warrens of Azzano, he was pulled into a dugout trench by Dugan- a sitting duck who had devastatingly watched his unit-brotherhood dissolve in sifts of ash. "I gotta be there for em'..." he gritted under a sourish breath, ruefully, grazing his teeth over his pouty underlip. "They deserve that..."

His mournful thoughts were interrupted by the brush of approaching footsteps. Months of experience had made him familiar with discerning friends from foes. Though he kept his guard up, he knew that he was about to receive some friendly company. "Don't be too hard on yourself, Bucky. You're a good soldier. You do what you can for the men. They know that." Despite the encouraging words that came from the baritone voice, they weren't the softly spoken words that belonged to Steve Rogers, but from Captain America. True to form, Bucky watched as the American symbol of Liberty and Freedom approached him, still decked out in his uniform consisting of a carbon polymer flame-resistant jacket, blue paratrooper trousers, leather boots, and combat gloves.

If it weren't for the cool blues of his soft eyes, it would've been hard to recognize the kid from Brooklyn whose greatest strength was his compassion as well as his courage. Steve having long been accustomed to having Bucky uplift him from his sorrow in his darkest moments felt the need to do the same as he watched his friend unravel into the depths of remorse. It was encouraging of course. A soldier without compassion was no better than a machine following orders. But a soldier fully consumed by his guilt in the field was a time-bomb ready to go off. "Losses in war...are inevitable." Steve felt the pang of that reality hit him hard. "You gotta stow it, Bucky." He said to his friend as he stood beside him.

A derisive clench heavily rapted over the knife-edged planes of Bucky's jaw, as he glaringly fixed his sniper-vision of glacial aquamarine on the darkened vistas of the Bavarian forest, boomingly a thunderous cacophony of nightly RAF bomber raids became symphonic in destructive volume-firebombs blindingly careened with salvos of defensive artillery over the German ridgeline; another insomnious-damnable rush had barraged their encampment. With tactful ease of his impassive stance, involuntarily Bucky dragged his tactical boot over the mulchy ground; he was on the vacuous fringe of heart-wrenching collapse, livid spectres of his 107th unit being sifted into ash ravaged him soul-deep.

A chagrined gleam betrayed his battle-lagged wariness as Bucky flashed a knifing glance heatedly onto the white star insignia that heroically contrasted over the patriotic mantle of the Allied Force's new valorous poster boy- Captain America. The runtish gaunt-faced asthmatic that determinedly traded blows with Flatbush hoggish bullies was now a hunkish-enhanced Adonis-a soldiery paragon that vivaciously gorgeous USO dames swooned over. Hell, Steve even had a radio theme that inspiringly broadcasted over Europe. He wasn't the 'big brother' anymore, his best friend had daringly trudged into the tenebrous labyrinth of HYDRA stronghold-liberating Zola's torture-starved POW's, with just a theatrical prop shield on his back. "Yeah..." Bucky drawled throatily, his suave-boyish features nakedly rapt with phantom anguish as he bluntly gave Steve an offish smirk. "M' guessin' you pals gave you orders to push me out there again, huh?"

At that Steve gave him a lopsided smirk. "Well, I know how much you like to sight-see. And I think we both know that Duggan wouldn't go five minutes out there without his flask to keep him company." In truth, Steve didn't envy the duty of patrolling the perimeter at night when there were so many unknowns to be found in this part of the world. In this instance, the Commandos were more than likely to run into wildlife in these forests than a Hydra patrol moving through the area. They were about 5 clicks out from the nearest settlement and for all they knew, these parts of the forest could be frequented by the local civilians, some innocent and some just as eager to report their location to a Hydra spy in exchange for some money. They could only trust a sharp mind with sharp eyes to navigate this area at night before they carried on with their march in the morning. Bucky was the only logical choice while the others healed and rested.

"What do you say? You up to it?" Steve asked as Bucky took a moment to ponder things. The sun was getting lower while activity surged in the background as the troops scrambled to erect their tents for the evening.

"Ready as I'll ever be, punk..." Bucky quipped in grating pitch starchily, against bone-racking tension flexing over his knuckles, readily he buttoned up the collar of his navy blue jacket as frigidness of the October evening gustily whooshed over the encampment, firelight beacons hauntingly deflected off the Red Cross station-point as the odorous reek of morphine and diesel fumes grippingly breached his scrunching nose. "Grah...Don't wait up for me..." he urged with smug cockiness in his gravel-roughen-timbre, while unerringly adjusting the buckled strap of his Springfield rifle over his padded shoulder; having stealthily executed HYDRA penetration soldiers with dead-eye precision in desolated farmhouses of bomb-out Normandy, Bucky became predatorily attuned with the mechanical cadence of a kill-zone.

Quirkily, Bucky felt a half-smirk tug at his shapely-wide lips as he unwaveringly steered his grayish-aqueous gaze at the blackened towering pines that spookily enwreathed over the drive-out clearing, with adamant reserve Steve tellingly recognized his steeled-hellbent bravado, giving him a subtle nod, warringly evident to the hawkish gleam of his azure irises-the brotherly cadence felt weightily heart-driven; Bucky needed to break distance from the SRR ranks, the nightmarish apparitions of his grievous failure. "I guess it's gonna a rough night .." he murmured in snarkier pitch, easing down in mid-crouch to knot the laces of his paratrooper boots. "Don't worry, punk, this Brooklyn kid knows how to put em' on the ropes..."

At that Steve gave his old friend an encouraging pat on the shoulder. "They won't see you comin'. We're lucky to have ya, j***. I'll make sure Falsworth saves you some soup." Steve could hear a commotion inside the camp as the troops continued to unload their supplies. This far from the nearest SSR base meant they had to conserve their munitions and supplies accordingly or they'd be at risk of being unequipped in a dangerous territory where they couldn't afford to compromise their presence.

As he turned to leave his friend to his duty, Steve hesitated for the briefest moment. Ever since they were boys, he had developed a sense of caution-an intuition-that warned him of potential danger. He hated to leave Bucky alone out here. If it were up to him, he'd be out here with him into the long hours of the morning as they scouted the perimeter. But as the Captain of their company, he had to formalize their strategies based on the new intelligence they were receiving about alleged Hydra experiments being conducted in a fortress hidden in the mountains. Steve let his feet continue to dutifully carry him into the camp just as the sun continued to descend further into the horizon, blanketing the region in twilight and darkness.

Somewhere in the distance, a foreboding howl sang up into the moon.

--------------------

The ghoulish ambiance that malignantly veined against the bordering pines of the forest, singed remnants of metallic shrapnel were discarded over the frigid ground; miles outward, the symphonic infernos of rampant mayhem of the night raids deafeningly caromed over the shadowed environs in a tumultuous succession.

Unbeknownst to his laser-edged vision, with his Springfield rifle poised in the clutch of his roughened fingers, Bucky swaggeringly advanced with the measured precision of his tactical prowess, gnarled branches whip-lashed over the garbed padding of his shoulder as implosive pulses of the carious miasma of decaying flesh odiously wafted off gutted-out skeletal maggoty deformities that were once HYDRA scouts, black material of their Iron-Cross uniforms tatteredly sheathed over jutted-out torso bones.

Quashing down a gut-lurching reaction against a nauseous onrush, defensively the young baby-faced sergeant bolstered up his sniper-honed readiness, as errant brunette tresses disheveledly whisked over the graven edge of his razored cheekbones, tensely Bucky crouched on his muscled hunches with athletic grace, he knew with a grip of doubt that he wasn't alone.

"Shoulda figured Barnes..." he quipped under breath, croakily, feeling a bone-shunting-ghostlier chill rake numbingly through his veins in paralytic fruition at the stunted moment Bucky shudderingly registered full-throated fierceness of wolfish snarl menacingly resonating in amplified volume. Piercingly the mesmeric smokiness of his grayish-aquamarine irises became unwaveringly fixed on unmistakable-murderous visages of bestial claw-marks stamped on mudded clumps of dirt. "W-What the hell...?"

The highlands were blanketed by darkness stretching for miles. The luminous rays of moonlight could not breach the canopy of trees extending the vast landscape. But deep in the recesses of the mountains could be heard a faint crackle. Too soft and distant to anyone from afar. But if anyone were in closer range, they'd recognize the alarming dissonance of gunfire going off and the accompanying screams of ravaged men. Feral eyes glared at the pulping bodies of two men choking on their last breaths while clutching their throats. Their blood-their lifeforce spilled uncontrollably through the bites that ripped open their flesh, and tasted their fear. Hunger festered in the creature's stomach-hunger and an insatiable desire to exact pain upon his former captors who tortured him for so many moons.

Humans. They were like a plague upon the Earth causing only pain and suffering. The creature vowed to return them the favor. As he watched two of his captors die, his body was filled with a burning fire. A strength to escape and chase his mistress the pale moon. The creature leapt through the open window of the fortress and into the night. As more humans became aware of his escape, they chased him into the forests, unaware they were hunting their own doom. Hours into the night, he fed and listened to them cry out in misery as he drained their life-blood.

His senses were heightened and the world look so different. Even in darkness, everything was crisp and red like the blood he spilled. The pounding in his ears told him how many human heartbeats were near. So many dim-racing with fear. The hunger continued to burn inside of him despite how many he had slain. He needed to get away-far away. Into the night his feet carried him, across the field of trees as the world blurred past him. He couldn't escape the grip-the anger, the pain. What did the humans do to him? Not far away, he could hear the beating of another heart. This one was calm-soothing. It angered him. He wanted it silenced.

Luminous eyes glared at the offending human through bushes, watching as he looked over other dead humans. He had a weapon. But his back was turned-he was vulnerable. The creature growled, and before the human could react, he charged towards him and pounced with his wolfish maw opened, prepared to bite.

A brackish stench of frothing drool assailed over the underbrush, grappling him into an entrancing thrall of prevalent menace, a homicidal entity breached his isolated position, blurringly against feverish sweat that grungily drenched his chestnut tresses. With mechanized traction, in peripheral vigilance, Bucky levelled his long-barrel rifle against a point-blank deadlock, as the monstrous-beastlier phantom growlingly emitted volumes of rabid aggression.

Catching heaves of breath that racked in his chest, scowlingly, Bucky poised his finger over the trigger-lock as the cadence of unpalpable ferocity gutturally deafened in vicious tenor. Lucent orbs of whitish lazurite blazingly flashed with a soul-knifing intensity as canine muzzle berserkly thrust out with lightning-quick precision of a cobra-strike; the mania of blood lust exceedingly increased in rabid cadence as the hulking-monstrous wolf hungrily detected a thermic pulse of Bucky's rampant heartbeat. Barring the jutted length of his incisor fangs against an unhinged torrent of murderous ecstasy, jarringly the mutative denizen panted out a ferocious snarl over Bucky's muscled shoulder.

The wolf missed his target. An act which served to only infuriate its temper even further as he gracefully landed on his paws stared down the human, snarling with malicious saliva dripping from his maw. The stains of blood on his muzzle attracted the Bucky's attention and made him realize just how lethal his attacker was as he prepared to aim his rifle at him. The wolf barked and roared, once again charging at him, determined to attack and sink his incisors into his flesh. The wolf lunged just at the same time Bucky rolled out of the way. The predator's reflexes however were sharper than the average wolf and reacted-almost as if sniffing out Bucky's move before he even acted. The wolf jumped ontop of Bucky, tackling him to the ground.

Bucky yelled and raised his rifle as the attack dog barked and roared like a possessed animal. The young man held his rifle up at the creature's throat, trying to keep that vicious maw away from him as it chomped and fought desperately to reach him. The stench of death and gore was heavy and repugnant, causing Bucky's eyes to water and for him to gag.

The bone-crushing massiveness of the demonic canine enforcer suffocatingly thrashed with explosive-bludgeoning- momentum of concussive aggression. Before the cocky sergeant could mouth-off a snarky quip about a classic Sherlock Holmes novel that he borrowed from Falseworth's hidden stash of English fiction -the Hound of the Baskervilles; Bucky gnashed his teeth against floored shunts of adrenalized panic, wrenching his arm back in a defensive reaction, in that blinded instant he breathlessly drove a kidney-strike of his bruised fist into the hellbound wolf's furred girth with immobilizing precision. The draconic strength bodily pinning him was unrelenting as he bridged the athletic bulkiness of his thighs in rampant succession, only to grimacingly swallow as viscid bloodied drool gloppily hiked over his shapely-wide lips.

"G-Get off!" He yelled shoving back against the oppressive beast. He could feel his arms straining under the pressure of the immense force and for a moment was tempted to call out for help. Before he could, that was when the wolf finally managed to wrap its maw around the rifle and yanked it from his hands-an act which shocked the young sergeant. Having no other option, he raised his forearm just as the wolf latched onto it, sinking its razor-sharp teeth deep into his flesh.

"AAAAACCCHH!" Bucky's wail pierced the night skies as pain and burning fire flooding his nerves. His blue eyes were wide with fear and anger as the wolf applied bruising pressure on his right arm. Filled with conviction, Bucky used his left hand to reach for his side-arm pistol. He pressed the barrel into the wolf's throat and fired. Not once, not twice, but three times, watching as the bullets exploded out the top of its head. The creature yelped and immediately went limp, its maw releasing Bucky's blooded limb as it crashes lifelessly to the ground beside him. "Aaaugghh..." Bucky whimpered, clutching his arm and rolling over onto his side, face pressed into the dirt as tears escape him.

Choking out vomitous breaths, rackingly against a throated rasp of hitching agony, Bucky dragged his knuckles with blinded urgency over the ground, jackknifing his bulkier abdomen into a planking stance as ribbons of blood gruellingly drenched his Commando tactical jacket, corded thews of his mangled forearm were evidently gouged by a knifepoint assault of wolven fangs that had bleedingly gored through his flesh bone-deep.

The agonized slash heralded a mutative-freakish convergence of incarnate unity-deviance, as the genetic manifestation-fusion luridly bred out a HYDRA laboratory pulsed with infective contractions of morphic-insurmountable strain. "C'mon Barnes..." he murmurously drawled in a hitching breath, doing his utmost to staunch out the injurious puncture as blood wetly hemorrhaged against his palm's tremorous grip over the shredded material that revealed a bloodied gouge over his bicep."Y'gotta fight..."

Uncontrollably, losing the conscious grasp of his exhausted pistol, Bucky thrashed against bone-cleaving inducements of untamped havoc that he couldn't ride out, tauter resiliency of hunkier muscles cuttingly threaded with protrusive veins as he railed out a cadence of his throat-shredding anguish. "S-Steve..." The roughened gravelliness of his timbered drawl sobbingly forced him to become voiceless as he retched up intestinal acid that had soul-crippingly deadened his vertiginous mobility against stoking dregs of warred resilence, as his feverish vision bleared against onrushes of paralytic-blackout- numbness. "B-Bitten..."

There were thundering vibrations shaking the Earth beneath Bucky's prone form. The static in his ears made it difficult to discern anything other than the high-pitched ringing in the dead of night. But the sporadic noises of choking agony had traveled far-numerous kilometers-towards the edge of the Howling Commandos camp where the solitary figure of Steve Rogers stood in deep thought. Steve had finished debriefing his men and dismissed them back to their tents. Before he could retire to his own, he had taken a moment to silently reflect on the war-effort, only for his sharp hearing to pick-up the bloodchilling howls of a wolfish predator locked in combat with a human-with Bucky.

"Bucky!" Steve had bolted without a moment's thought and stormed into the forests in the direction of the struggling sounds. It was a dark night where the only source of light came from the pale moonlight streaking from above, but he was able to navigate his way through the maze of trees and bushes until he reached a clearing. "Bucky! Oh god." Steve slid across the ground on his knees like a batter running for home-base, and came to Bucky's side. "Oh no…" The blonde felt his blood run cold when he saw the sight of Bucky's weeping wound. Beside him was the dead carcass of the largest wolf Steve had ever seen before. "I got you, man. Lay still," Steve urged his best friend who shivered and convulsed against his lap.

As the bone-racking crescendo ratcheted through his blood-gutted flesh, against fevered exhaustion, tremblingly, emitting out whispery-pukish rasps Bucky pillowed his cheek into corded solidity of Steve's tauter shoulder, as he felt a kneading grace of Steve's brotherly caress splayed a desperate rapt under the boyish chubbiness of his slackened-dimpled jaw. Implosive--damnable contractions were sickeningly forcing him to choke on surges of vomitous bile as his lashes flitted against the knifing heat that burningly encompassed his mauled arm had excruciatingly intensified like a clamping vise.

"P-Punk..." The blurred depth of his owlish pupils chillingly razored with voltaic intensity predatorily melding with silvery-aquamarine while his unkempt chestnut tresses damply askew over his temples. "Hr...grah..." Gurgling out quivery breaths, mumblingly, Bucky was careening on the stuporous fringe of being half-awake, the brackish rancidity of drenched canine fur odiously wafted off the lifeless wolf, he felt deadened against the gravitic pulse-a deadlier-ferine aura that viscerally channelled through him. "M-My arm... I can't feel it..."

"Keep it together, Buck." Steve grunted as he helped Bucky up to a squatting position. "Can you walk?" He asked worriedly as he saw his friend's inability to remain balanced and focused. His sweat drenched skin and the temperature of his skin sent alarm coursing through Steve. What was happening to him? The wound on Bucky's shoulder was dark, nearly black in the moonlight and unless Steve was imagining things, the clavicle bone was nearly visible. The trapezius muscles twitched and made a sickening crackle which caused the blood in Steve's body to go cold. "Damn it." Steve cursed, realizing the risk of his friend getting infected by the animal that bit him. "All right, hold on tight, Buck. I'm gonna get you to the medic back at camp." Left with no other option, Steve used his immense strength to easily lift his friend up onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Bucky didn't struggle. Steve was both glad and worried by that as he set a quick jog through the forests, following the path he had came from.

The camp was still wide away by the time he came racing through the tree-line. His arrival was announced by Morita was immediately called for the medical tent to be cleared.

"What the hell happened?" Duggan yelled once he saw a bleeding Bucky on Captain America's shoulders, barely conscious. The other Commandos picked up their weapons at the ready in case of an attack.

"He was attacked by some wild animal." Steve said as he carried Bucky into the tent. The medic of the group, Gabe Jones was already inside and clearing off a make-shift cot for Bucky to lay on. "Bucky, hey!" Steve cried out in fear as he watched Bucky's eyes drift and daze in and out of focus. "You with me? Look at me, pal."

The cushioned mattress against his sweat-dampened back anchored him to immovable reality, against the slumberous grogginess, tearily Bucky pinched his eyelids with tensing strain as he registered the bracing pressure of Steve's leather-sheathed hand urgingly against the bracketed muscle planes of his thickened chest; the invincible vitality of Brooklyn brotherhood grew into a pacifying contrast of beckoned hope.

Thrusting his lacerated arm, in a lightning-quick rush of bestial-enhanced momentum, screechingly, he was reaching for Steve as a uniformed combat medic with a Red Cross insignia stitched on his fatigue parka irrevocably jabbed the shunting dosage of morphine into his forearm, numbing out the convulsive upheavals of rampant drags of heaving breath that quakingly ignited a cimmerian-wolvish unity. Against backlit contrasts of the forested encampment, Steve's angular-graven features hawkishly edged tauter, conveying infinite urgency. "P-Punk..." he slurred in froggish timbre, croakily, drifting into sedative-induced throes, while a smirky quirk breathlessly tugged over his shapely-wide lips. "D-Don't do anythin' stupid..."

That was all Bucky could manage before his exhaustion won out and he fell into shock. "Bucky!" Steve cried as he held his head with his hands. In the entryway of the tent the other Commandos stood somberly gazing inside. "Is he gonna be all right?" Steve asked the medic who held Bucky's wrist to check his pulse. A perpetual fear took hold of him that he hadn't felt in such a long time. Not since the day he lost his mother. Guilt festered within him, telling him that he should've never let Bucky patrol the perimeter by himself. If he had backup-if he had been with him-he wouldn't be in this position right now.

"If I can clean the wound and stop the bloodloss, time will tell," the medic responded as he stripped away the remains of Bucky's shirt. "Captain, sir. I need you to stay outside so I can work on him," the medic insisted as he began to sort through the numerous bottles of alcohol and iodine.

"C'mon, Cap. He's in good hands," Duggan urged Steve as he placed a sympathetic hand on the blonde's shoulder. Steve stared at Bucky's bloodied and bruised body with a torn look that emphasized the innate struggle within him. He wouldn't lose his best friend. He had to hope and pray he survived this. Steve let himself be guided out of the tent to allow the medic to treat Bucky. Steve could only linger outside, haunted by the memory of finding Bucky in his wounded state, and by the luminous sapphire of his eyes that were like frosted diamonds before he had passed out.

----------------------------

'M' with ya until the end of the line...'

The unbreakable mantra of a prevalent Brooklyn cadence warringly echoed against Bucky's tremorous heartbeat; onrushes of infused morphine had overpoweringly arrowed through his veins —unbidden feverish chills draggingly racked him bone-raw into a phantom succession as the muskiness of blood-drenched layers medical gauze that sheathed over his forearm smellily entrenched his rivalrous senses. The draping cascades of the Red Cross tent flappingly chased hurricanic gusts of the frigid October headwinds, as the vaporous fumes of diesel entrenched the medic stations, jeep convoys immediately hauled out with M5 anti-tank guns, answering the distress-call for the grounded infantry units on the ridgelines.

Harnessing up dormant visages of his amplified resilence, against catatonic grogginess, aggressively, Bucky clutched onto the mattress with a viscerous flex of a bestial grip as he consciously listened to a short-range frequency of paranoic artillery-fire that distressingly broadcasted on Gabe Jone's SCR-300 pack radio as cacophonic POW trauma incessantly resonated within the station tent. 'We're getting massacred out there...'

The tension felt as dire as being in a warzone helplessly waiting for the enemy to come into your tent and litter you with bullets as you laid on your cot. Apprehension took hold of him and there was nothing more he wanted than to have a weapon in his hand aimed at the tent-flaps. As his listless gaze searched the tent area, he nearly recoiled off his cot when the flaps opened and someone entered. Bucky felt his heart leap up into his throat, gripping him with fearful anticipation until he realized who it was that came in.

"Bucky, you're awake." Steve said both relieved but mildly focused in a way that said he was still in captain-mode. In fact, the blonde stood fully garbed in his uniform with his shield slung onto his back. Outside could be heard the commotion of increasing chaos as the Howling Commandos scrambled to form a line of defence against some unseen attackers. "How do you feel?" Steve asked worriedly, drawing Bucky back to the present.

An unnameable maelstrom of bone-gripping pain had anesthetized him, feverish clamminess profusely glazed over his youthful skin, chestnut tresses rakishly clung to his furrowing brow against the strenuous wake, despite that his collapsible dregs of strength felt dissected in tenfold. With a painstaking variance of his telltale stubbornness, Bucky arched his back off the mattress, gnashing his teeth against the infectious scourge. A pinching drag starkly grazed over the pouty swell of his underlip, as he became shockingly aware that his canine incisors were gnawingly jutting out in lengthened-mutative traction.

Groaningly, as Steve's deep-sonorous timbre placidly reached him, Bucky eased his bandaged hand up to his jaw as his grayish-aquamarine irises flashed at the medical instruments and remnants bloodied gauze lividly placed on a wooden table. A panic-razed breath caught up his scoured throat as a mounting revelation of the hellish attack arrestingly deadened him into a soporific vigil of concussive traumatic onslaughts. Unfalteringly, Steve downcasted the stormier intensity of his oceanic azureous irises at the medical clipboard report authorized by General Chester Philps: 'Sergrent James Barnes: Not Fit For Duty'.

"W-What's happenin' out there..." Bucky rasped under gravelly breaths, against throaty scratchiness, quashing down another inexorable bout of irrepressible, gut-sloshing nausea, while Steve immediately reacted to evident choked-off gurgling and propelled a metal bucket with driven momentum of his booted foot at the headlong second, Bucky had retched up breathless-pukey- heaves. "S'thank's punk..."

"Its nothing we can't handle, and nothing you should be concerned about," Steve only replied to his friend's initial question. A group of ragtag militia who belonged to neither Hydra nor the Allies had stumbled onto their camp and thought they could raid the supplies.

Their numbers were too few to mount an effective attack despite their daringness. Steve fixed his friend with an assessing look, half-tempted to push him back into bed where he should be. Instead the Captain sighed, running a hand back through his hair. "You gave us a big scare last night, Buck. You lost a lot of blood. You know if it was me in your shoes, you wouldn't let me go out there. You're ordered at least a full day of bed-rest before we can talk about you going back out there." Just as he finished it looked like Bucky was prepared to argue with him. That was until his best friend's eyes widened and he rushed for the bucket. Steve grimaced as he listened to the chilling sounds of Bucky emptying his stomach in loud heaves. "Easy," Steve gently placed a cool rag against Bucky's temple and eased him to sit back down onto his cot. "You shouldn't be out of bed."

"Yeah, like that's gonna happen..." Bucky grumbled back, dismissively against a snorty pitch, vexatiously shrugging off the dampness of the rag that chilled against his tensing brow as Steve deftly applied the spongy cloth over his feverish temples with a tentative flex, onrushes of contractive throbs bloatedly intensified within in his stomach-nothing ebbed. Scathingly, he braced his muscled forearm over the bracketed ridges of his mid-drift as sludginess of bile chased indrawn breaths. Convincing himself to refuel his battle-tested defiance readily Bucky gripped onto the wooden edge of a table with a steeled flex, pressing his lips into a harsh grimace. "You're not leavin' without me..."

"I didn't come here for a debate, Buck. I came to see how you were doin'," Steve sighed as he leaned back against a medical table. His arms cross and a look of remorse comes over him as he takes the time to look over his friend's appearance. Bucky looked like he had just climbed out of a wood-chipper with his body barely intact. The numerous scratches, bruises and the heavily bandaged part of his shoulder were clear indicators of what he'd been through, and Steve felt remorse hit him once again that he had sent Bucky out there by himself.

"What happened out there?" Steve asked, recalling the dead anima-wolf he'd found with Bucky. Marita and Jones had gone back out there in the morning to search for the carcass only to instead find it gone. What they had found instead was the raiding militia that were nipping at their heels.

Feigning his indifferent toughness against an imploding surge of predatory fierceness, the chemical potency of antiseptic sailed nauseatingly within the medical station, a rapt scrunch of his nose conveyed instinctive sniffing as he unmistakably caught a saltish wafting of panicked dread-human sweat that penetrated through sheets-the cindery mortar of a HYDRA-ravaged town. Furrowing his brow confusingly into an incredulous pinch, reddish skeins of thermic heat pulsingly veined towards Steve in arrowing sync, as he became clashingly attuned to a blood-thumping resonance of his best friend's steadier heartbeat.

Fostering on a conscious measure of phantom restraint against blood rushes of white-heat, Bucky panted out heavily in ragged breaths as throbbing in his swelled gums bleedingly coupled in bone-splintering fruition. "T-There was something big that jumped me..." he drawled under tight hitches, scratchily, as feverish wetness grungily dampened his unkempt brunette tresses. A dumbstruck blankness stamped over the hard-edged planes the ruggedly delineated with the boyishness of his graven features "S'it's gotta be still out there, Steve..."

Crestfallenly, Bucky winced against pained breaths, as he shakily caught his underlip between his sharpened teeth-fangs. Making a tactful advance to the cot, determinedly Steve's turquoise-azure irises gleamed niveous light-a fiercer rawness that echoed soldier-driven intensity, preparing to gear up for another battle-run into the slaughterous pandemonium of HYDRA's damnable-ironhanded warpath. "I guess it was kinda stupid not lookin' over my shoulder, huh...?" he quipped, snarkily.

"I don't think anyone else could've been prepared for something like that," Steve reassured his friend. He himself wasn't so sure what it was that had attacked Bucky. It looked like a wolf, but its size was too huge and its face too twisted to be considered an ordinary specimen. There was also the fact Bucky had blown so many shots into the creature's abdomen and skull in the effort to save his life. It was deader than roadkill. But it didn't change the very strange fact that its dead carcass was no longer where it should be. Realizing that Bucky must've noticed his disquiet, Steve exhaled roughly and tightened his jaw. "The thing that attacked you, we couldn't find its body. Duggan and Jones went out there this mornin' to look for it. Jones said something about your bite wasn't ordinary. You got bit, Buck, by a jaw with too many teeth to be considered and ordinary wolf." Steve explained, hoping to make him understand the gravity of his injury. "Jones wanted to study it, make sure we knew what we were dealing with in case there are more of those things out there. Instead, all we found was a ditch with blood-stains on it."

An unhampered succession of gut-wrenching momentum of a contractive heartbeat forced Bucky to revealingly stiffened against the pillowed cushion, demonically ghoulish visages zombiesque skeletal remnants of deformed canine apparitions screechingly amplified into a macabre rhapsody of banshee-like frequency against his feverish headrush. Every pulse veined a possessive divergence as he felt knifing traction under the cotton gauze sheathing over his left bicep."You're tellin' me that I was bitten..." he rasped in breathless cadence, dizzily jerking his head back, as he pinched his eyelids against grimacing tension."I-It's gotta be from HYDRA...There's no other way to explain it, Steve..."

"We're not discounting anything at the moment, but it would explain a lot of the rumors we've been hearing about them up in these mountains," Steve said feeling increased worry. He knew what kind of monsters Hydra scientists could be, having seen the grisly aftermath of their experiments in the several labs they'd raided over the past several months. Man, woman or child, even animals. Zola was determined to give the Skull a fighting edge against the Allies and to do that, he needed specimens to experiment on. The things they'd found even gave Howard nightmares about setting foot in a lab. "People have gone missing, and there's a lot of unrest about wildlife in the area running into town. It's probably connected to whatever attacked you last night." Steve watched as Bucky stubbornly tried to throw on his jacket with one arm still in his sling. "Whoa, what are you doing?!" Steve yelled, alarmed as he stood in front of Bucky who tried to make his way out of the tent.

"M' going out there..." A snarlier pitch emitted up his throat, growly attempting to half-spun on his combat boots in mechanized variance, Bucky gnashed his teeth against seething breaths, the hard-edged virility of his features rapted with bestial tension as he jutted out his stubbled jaw with aggressive traction, intimidatingly giving Steve a menacing flash of his canine fangs as he became attuned to penetrative fierceness that outrode his warred restraint. Blazingly his slitted irises gleamed whitish heat of voltaic sapphire; abandoning his combative reserve, against headlong-wolven- rabidness Bucky delivered a banking stoke of his full-measured viciousness, telltale fisting of his bruised hand warningly surged up, propelling explosive momentum of a straight-arm uppercut a hairbreadth from Steve's broaden jaw."T-This is my damn hunt...!"

"You're not going anywhere today, Sergeant Barnes," Steve spoke with a firm tone. The intensity of his blue eyes and the tightness of his jaw made it clear that it wasn't Bucky's friend talking, but his commanding officer, Captain America. "You're not fit for duty, and you're not putting yourself at risk out there." The duo maintain a tense eye contact that threatened to boil over into something dangerous.

Until now, he had never had to pull rank on Bucky since they had begun serving in the same unit. Bucky was his best friend and they trusted each other more than a lot of blood-brothers did. But it was inevitable it seemed that they would arrive to a moment such as this. Having seen the wild and ferocious look in Bucky's eyes, Steve began to worry about his frame of mind. But as the seconds passed and Bucky made no move to get passed him, Steve believed his message had been made clear. He'd wrestle Bucky onto the mattress if he had to.

"Now stand down, and get some rest." He ordered. "We'll handle this."

Dragging out throaty heaves, scowlingly against the crescendoing tempo of a heart-racking stupor, Bucky reeled back in stilted—mortified alarm as if he was blindingly dodging concussive blowback from a flash grenade. The visceral echoes of his Brooklyn spirit ragingly deafened against the floored revelation that he bullishly attacked little Stevie, his scrawny-asthmatic best friend was a punching-bag of mortal courage, never breaking into a gutless run like a chicken-hearted sap when his back was pushed against the wall of Flatbush alleyway. Those cornered backdrops were Steve's battleground-of fighting the jock-faced bullies. He always used a trash lid as his shield against thuggish ambushes of knuckled bruises on his bonier-gaunt features-never backing down, he was helluva of scrapper. 'I had em' on the ropes...'

Quashing down rampageous siege of untamed aggression that unwarrantably fueled revamping stokes of his beastlier ferocity, Bucky gazed down at the flexing tension of his hand, stark panic blankly melded in the aqueous depth of his owlish-wide irises as convulsive dregs of breakneck awareness throbbingly whipsawed through him in paralytic succession. "Steve...Wait...Damnit, I didn't mean to..." he choked up a raspier gasp, stammeringly as his lips poutily stretched gapingly against breathless -stupefied distress."Punk...M' sorry."

"Its all right." Steve said. Hearing his friend's apology, he let his temper cool and was both parts thankful and remorseful over their heated exchange. Despite his greater inclination towards keeping his friend safe after sustaining a life-threatening injury, Steve was also concerned over his how that encounter might have changed Bucky. He was short-tempered and aggressive which was a far cry from his normally cool demeanor. He couldn't have him in the field like this. Not till he was back to his normal-self. "Look, um, why don't you just get some rest, and I'll have Jones bring you some food and-" He was interrupted when the tent-flap opened and in came Duggan immediately seemed to immediately notice the tense atmosphere between the two friends.

"Sorry, Cap. We need you on the edge of the perimeter, we think got eyes on a Hydra scouting party." The bowler cap soldier said which not only served to distill the tension but also break the ice. Steve fell back into solider mode immediately as he patted Duggan on the shoulder.

"I'll be right out." Duggan exited the tent, leaving Bucky and Steve to make one last exchange. "Will you be all right?" Steve asked worriedly.

A derisive nose scrunch tautly became evident, as Bucky grimacingly feigned a half-smirk; he couldn't remain fastened own a medical cot, straining against mutative tension, he stuntedly eased onto the mattress as foggier haziness bleared out his vision with no avail; he couldn't redouble his tactless efforts. What he agonizingly endured in the Azzano hellhole-being injected with blood-crippling serums that Doctor Armin Zola serpentinely conceived to slake his pestiferous tantamount of surgically razing out soldiery echoes of defiance into babbling—vermined POW captives of disposable flesh. He was HYDRA's inventive-depraved maestro of amputating out heartbeats of Brooklyn resistance with torturous-maniacal devices of psychological deprivation—chasmic thralls of starvation that felt grippingly deathless.

Allowing his tactical jacket to slip out of his tremorous clutch, dizzily Bucky roved a steely glare of feverish aquamarine down at blood-smeared gauze discarded in a bucket. "Yeah-That might not be so bad..." he drawled in threadier pitch, scathingly, as he felt Steve's leather-gloved palm brace over his shoulder, keeping him steadily bolstered against a wedged pillow.

Measuringly with passive vigilance alight in his cool azure depths, Steve evicted bone-deep tension as he dishearteningly gazed at chestnut tresses slickly clung over the dark fringe of Bucky's lashes, while an unquenchable onrush of repressive hunger insatiably floored the 'pretty-boy' Commando on grudging accord —salvaged C-rations of canned soups and salty biscuits—crackers wouldn't curb down his untrammelled barrages of steepened appetite. He needed meat. "Kinda cravin' a steak right now..." A growlier timbre emitted out of him, demandingly. "Gotta be somethin' good around here..."

It was perhaps the most random thing Bucky might've said, but to Steve it was oddly reassuring and he couldn't help but release a dry chuckle. "I'll send Jones in with some chow we made this morning. Don't worry, I made sure Duggan didn't eat your serving." Steve smirked good-naturedly as he heard Duggan groan outside, 'Its not like there ain't enough for seconds, Cap.' Steve gives Bucky a nod and hesitantly leaves the tent. He couldn't help but feel a sense of foreboding as though he hadn't heard the last of this predicament. He just hoped Bucky took it easy, and that there weren't anymore of those animals out there.

--------

As the spookish waxiness of the moonlight gothically haloed over iron spires of a Bravian castle of Baron Von Strucker; the castellated massiveness of Romanesque travertine stone reddishly contrasted against torchlight sconces, as cranking gears of the drawbridge whirred to allow HYDRA convoys to drove into the archway courtyard. Every mobilized advance of ground reapers installations was dynastically orchestrated for the Iron Cross's sanguineous-fanatical legacy to reign with galactic-innovative devices of infective conquest. The Nordic energy cube that was unearthed in a Tønsberg chapel had become the Red Skull's humanity-scything weapon to consumingly harvest out Allied defences of the frontlines-to evolve into victorious Titians over the genocidal remnants of the hope-suffocated world.

Black leather-grabbed troopers were impassively poised on the bastion edifices, their faces mechanically concealed by futuristic owl-like goggles as leather vizards fringed their unexpressive lips. Each HYDRA sentry was outfitted with Arnimhilation 99L Assault rifles that were infused with voltaic energy-a white-noise frequency of disintegrating Allied divisions into cindery ash heaps. With a gestural signal of a HYDRA carrier truck, white Kraken sigil was demonically emblazoned on the doors."Lass sie durch(Let them through)..." A commanding Germanic resonance of a battlement sentry blared out, immediately signalling at the drawbridge patrol below him in urgent tenor. "Letzter, der durchkommt (Last one to come through)..."

The thought allowed Arnim Zola sag with relief. Days on end there had been nothing but a constant flow of misfortunes that would have seen him meet the chopping block if the Skull did not value his expertise. It began with several missing shipments from their munitions facility several kilometers away, rumored to have been captured by the Allies who were mercilessly carving a path their way. A few missing caravans, however withstanding, did not compare to the calamity of having one of his specimens escape. An unruly wolf that proved far more resilient to his serum-based infusions than the other animals he experimented on. While the scientist prided himself on his keen intellect and cunning, he was not brawn. As he told Schmidt time and again, he designed the weapons, it was not up to him to manage them.

The guards in charge of the creature's transport back to his cell failed spectacularly and allowed it to escape the castle. Since then, Zola went into planning mode to attempt to rectify this mess before word reached the Skull's ears. But fortune seemed to once again favor him when his men had brought in the remains of the creature early this morning after their scouting mission. The carcass of said creature now laid strawn upon the table he wandered over to where a few of his assistants were examining its body. "Miserable creature. For all its grace and cunning, it lacks the will that only humans could demonstrate. Wouldn't you agree, Fraulein Selina?" He called over towards a shape in a dark corner.

Against the despotic shadows of the HYDRA infested Bavarian castle, armoured installations of convoy trucks drove into sub-levels in a militaristic unison-a reactive extension of the Iron Cross legion maliciously helmed by the barbarous warmonger- Baron Von Strucker; possessive snideness that callously fringed in the portly doctor'stoadyish command, his jowled features stubbily rapted with agitated impatience as he glared beckoningly at his lethal- kitten-operative."Sei nicht schüchtern, mein Haustier (Do not be shy my pet)..." he taunted, churlishly.

Hinging down her brazen fieriness with impassive vehemence, naughtily Selina brandished collective poise in her indifference stance, as the black sleekness of her leather bomber jacket—a token of her executed loyalty- stylishly contrasted against flickering sconces of the marble hearth of the spacious throne room. Her practical grab of seductive infiltration was honed with imperial—untouchable elegance, a tailored collar overlappingly arrowed length over the svelter contours of her graceful neck as lustrous mahogany tresses were knotted in an exquisite chignon. Scones of firelight burnished over the cool fineness of her elfish visage as she infuriatingly braced her lithe back against a stone column.

The carious reek of dissected flesh stinkily wafted off the bullet-gored canine as surgical implements of diabolical gadgetry hellishly adorned a medical trolley. Clutching her unholstered Walther P38 pistol with deceptive readiness flexing her lithe-gloved fingers, in a sauntering advance of her phantom-mechanized -coolness, involuntarily Selina neared the autopsy table, and gave her swine-faced handler a rueful smirk that foxily played over the crimson lushness of her voluminous full-bow lips, she answered, in a raspier undertone, snarkily." Well, I guess you're in a disappointing mood that no spoils came back..."

"Quite," Was Zola's terse response as he took in the state of the creature. A preliminary exam was enough to indicate that someone had killed it with an estimated eight shots. While an ordinary wolf could be killed a single well placed shot, it apparently took nearly a full chamber to bring down his augmented creation. He would be beaming with pride now were it not for the failure to record combat data other than the mauled corpses the creature had left in its wake last night. What were its endurance limits? How far could its senses stretch? Could it be contagious? Questions that were left unanswered and that the scientist was frustrated over. "What more can you tell us?" He asked one of his skilled hands that opened the canine's bloodied maw.

"The creature has fresh blood on his teeth, but too soon to tell if it is human or his own. But...look here!" Reaching into the wolf's mouth with latex gloves, the assistant pulls out what at first looked to be nothing more than a patch of fur. Zola cleans his spectacles and leans forward as they place the bloodied patch beneath an examination light.

"It appears my little patient introduced himself to an Allied soldier," Zola smirked sadistically at that as he came to identify the patch as a piece of torn clothing with the hauberk eagle symbol. "Not just any soldier apparently-a Commando. Curious..."

Narrowing a thievish flit of her tigerish-coffee irises, evident to a deviant smirk, unblinkingly Selina gazed at the unmistakable dark blue scrap of clothing that grisly clung to the mutative -disposable canine's bloodied incisors-an infective divergence of the rogue-lycan- instincts had inexorably conceived morphic infancy within one of the Howling Commandos; using expandable Allied soldiers for merciless sterilization of humanity, Zola was dementedly ushering a freakish reality of cimmerian genetics.

Scrunching up her pert nose, with an incredulous breathy whiff, Selina nakedly caught arrestive traces of a virile scent-a woodsy smokiness of aftershave and diesel that was addictively intoxicating."Well, I guess I'll be having fun playing with the army boys tonight," Selina deadpanned under breath, challengingly, and with an underhand swipe, fluidly, holstered her pistol, as she teasingly smirked at the pudgy bespectacled doctor. "After a girl does get bored around HYDRA stiffs..."

Zola had the patience to silently ponder her course of action. Wolfgang Von Strucker's daughter was as much an asset as she was an unpredictable element. That her father chose to surrender his estate and offer his services to Hydra meant his daughter was at their beck and call to command. Despite his displeasure towards seeing a woman on the field of battle, Zola knew they were lethal as poison, and had talents that ordinary men could not equip such as the ability to charm and finesse their way into power. Selina was both a charmer and a feline who would not hesitate to extend her claws against anyone in her way.

Including himself…

Better to utilize her talents than to allow her to linger over his shoulder. "Very well. But be discreet. Observe and follow. If things are as I suspect, the poor fool who was bitten will be in for quite the aftershock of his experience. Bring him to me-alive, if that proves true."

Every surgical deviation of Armin Zola's obsessive tantamount of amputating pathetic excuses of humanity into vermined throes fueled his egotistical -crazed- desire of relishing in the industrious ranks of HYDRA supremacy; for the last month, he was relentlessly searching for a dynamical strain that prevailingly veined within the incarnate matrix of the alpha serum of traitorous Doctor Abraham Erskine infused within a puny Brooklyn runt, all his synthetic POW failures were inadequate furred deformities; nothing was effective against the genetic transcendence of demonically birthing new legion of monstrous-wolven- chimeras.

With the trade-off alliance of Baron Wolfgang Strucker, he conditioned tractable-sirenic perfection in a kittenish Füchsin (vixen)--a highbred-feisty daughter who virtuosically harnessed a furtive-thieving- calibre against the parasitical throes of her leashed existence. "Do not fail me, little Fraulein..." he warned, sneeringly, as he lifted his pudgier hand with malicious ease to inspect the blue material, watching her slink vanishingly into the shadows -into the phantom drift. "Indeed you won't..."

----------

Against the earshot reckoning of soldier's dawn, within the darkened ambiance of the medical tent, feverous sweat wetly drenched cotton-wool sheets, as contractive pressure of morphic tenor shifted athletic, well-defined bulkiness of heavier muscles thrashingly flexed with spasmatic onrushes-crescendoing in an infective abandon of bestial ferocity. Everything was sensory heightened within the mutative drift like kinetic -elemental frequency-assonance that he galvanically registered miles outward as the mechanical traction of Panzer tanks launching diesel-fueled momentum over the Bavarian ridgeline.

Silvery paleness of morning light spookily contrasted over murkier environs, deafening staccatos of anti-tank guns cuttingly ratcheted as bloodied sprays from bullet-gouged flesh mistily sailed in the brisk air; Bucky felt every straining thump of penetrated heartbeats anguishedly contracted into a flatline pulse as heated saltiness of grievous tears wetly drenched mud rutted trenches before depth charges of pitched grenades cacophonously exploded in volleys of firestorms as gruesome remnants of Allied soldiers hailed over the battlezone.

Clutching into the drenched sheet, the hunkier tautness of his athletic-honed mass rushingly burgeoned in a tempoed-mutative- succession underneath his wool military garb as pukey grogginess raggedly threaded his whispery drawl, scratchily. "What's happenin'..." Against that neasous rush, Bucky propped his forearms bracingly over the mattress steel frame, arching his back with a desperate thrust of his warring resilience against careening momentum, only to crashingly nosedive onto the ground; his muscled forearms strenuously bolstered him into planking stance, as he growly heaved out throated pants against chest-vicing spasms. "Argh..."

Sick. Fever. Chills. Sweat. Blood. Hunger. Hunger…

A rampant flow of sensations poured through him with the unrelenting force of a raging river. Bucky couldn't discern the source of his calamity, only that the world suddenly appeared to be phasing in and out of coherence like a flickering lightbulb. His hearing was smothered by the pounding of his pulse-so loud, so all-consuming he wondered if his ears might burst. He wasn't aware he was screaming until he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror propped up on the food-tray. Blue eyes impossibly wide, he thought he caught a glimpse of something monstrous sneering back at him with gleaming teeth and predatory eyes.

Unconsciously he smashed the mirror with his fist with such reckless abandon he could only stare with dim horror at the shards of glass stuck to his knuckles. Blood streamed down his hand in such a brilliant spectacle, he could neither feel nor stop its flow. Before he could panic he watched as slowly but surely, the cuts began to heal themselves and the shards plopped out from his hand. Feeling sick, Bucky reached for the slop-bucket and emptied the contents of his stomach. Sweat dripped down into his eyes, obscuring his vision which served to only agitate him further. "Weak…" He growled, falling back onto the mattress, eyes swimmingly caught between a blurred reality and obscure images shifting through his psyche.

"Sergent Barnes..." With surgical tack, stubbier fingers manically clutched a syringe a viscous liquid spurted out, as haloing blurriness of greenish sconces reflected off chrome implements tellingly smeared with bloodied remnants-it was a pernicious revelation that captured POWs of the 107th infantry were torturously butchered into a horror-shop. Whirring drones of an electrical pulse of the examination gurney stuporously deadened his straining mobility as the ominous glare of oval eyeglasses maliciously became evident to a vulturous sneer. "You owe my pleasure of not making me disappointed in this ceremonious audience, not like your ineffective unit, such pathetic issues of American soldiers..." He snickered, churlishly, wobbling towards a medical trolley, as Zola lifted up a nightmarish helmet -an invention of cerebral gadgety to erratically induce zapage of psychological agony as dangling wires spidered over the pudginess of his white-sleeved wrists. "They did not last the night when I played with their defeated minds..."

"Monster…" The word spewed from Bucky's lips like toxic venom. There was no better fitted word to describe the Hydra scientist that had strapped him to a table and proceeded to inject him with his poison. The neverending chorus of screams had told him the scientist had done the exact same to the men of his infantry-his brothers. "Kill you…I'll..." He suddenly lurched off of his cot and collapsed onto the ground, laying on his side. He tried to banish the image of Zola, but being far from his captor didn't help him to escape the feeling of being confined-being caged. The walls of his tent were now suffocating him with their oppressive confinement, he longed for the feeling of fresh air embracing him.

"Grraauggh!" He cried through clenched teeth and squinted eyes while hugging his stomach. He needed to ease the ache of hunger that screamed at him to feed. He wanted to deafen the pounding of his pulse in his ears, howl at it to the top of his lungs until he could hear nothing but dead silence. Sweating profusely, he crawls forward, smacking the palm of his free hand against the ground, ignorant to the veins bulging on his skin, and the hair follicles rising off his body. His teeth gnashed with the strain of effort, pulling him onto all fours until he was crawling towards the tent flaps with deep growling breaths.

"On your feet, Sergent..." Commandingly a lyrical steeliness of a British-accented undertone silkily resonated behind the flapping drape as laced combat boots fringed an unwelcome breach of undeterred approach; impassively with elegant fierceness cemented in her unfaltering composure, exquisitely garbed in her SSR bronze service uniform, Agent Peggy Carter entered the medical tent with an observant gleam in her chocolate irises. Nothing detracted her genuine concern, as she eased on her curvaceous haunches with a measure of immovable resolve, nauseous dampness sweatily trekked down the corded thickness of Bucky's arching back as he breathlessly convulsed against the possessive rush as infective heat. "This not you, James Barnes..." she murmured in urgent pitch, fractionally kneaded her the lithe pressure of her gloved fingers over the protrusive veins bulging over Bucky's tauten forearm that was sickly ashen as he snarly panted out a breathless warning. "I will be damned if you give up this fight, not when Captain Rogers needs you..."

"Steve...Cap…" Bucky rasped out with a deep voice. His droopy eyes were glazed as if he were half-awake while allowing Peggy to help him to feet. Her presence contracted a swarm of sensations that hit him with the force of a truck. Ambergris cream, floral jasmine scented locks-a blood-rushing combination of scents that caused him to unconsciously growl, his grip on Peggy's arms growing tighter. He could feel her struggle against him, Bucky unable to comprehend anything but the emotions storming inside of him as the grip of hunger increased in ferocity as he stared at her exposed neck. "No…NO!" He roared, releasing Peggy with a not so gentle push. His heavy breaths were pronounced by his bared teeth, his bent posture was predatory, ready to pounce on the nearest prey he could find.

Bruisingly against the rampageous momentum of his defensive reaction that bull-rushed into her bodily with unstoppable-breakneck- aggression, trepidatiously Peggy breathed out a choked-off gasp as she was alarmingly tackled into a dresser with bone-slamming force-a denotative surge of monstrous ferocity that wouldn't be roped down against warred motions of restraint. He was uncaged. In blinding succession, with floored awareness, effectively Peggy braced her palm on the ground as bloodied glops of drool trekked slickly over the delectable-vibrant suppleness of her curvier alabaster features. Gazing unflinchingly at the intimating length of his poised fingers that flexed in clawing sync, Peggy urged out, staidly in beseeching pitch, fluidly dodging a slashing arc of his fisted hand. "S-Sergent Barnes don't be stubborn..." she implored, easing her bruised palm with deft traction-reaching for him. "Wait..."

So he ran. He could hear Peggy calling out to him, but Bucky ignored her as he rushed through the tent-flaps and into the dead of nightfall.

------

Against the vaporous smokiness that enwreathed the backlit tavern, aromatically scents of brewed whiskey funkily sailed from congested booths as Dum Dum Duggan's hearty chuckle jovially deafened as mug pints of German stout clanged in unison, impassively keeping himself distant near the bar as amber sconces from glass-adorned lamps burnished his unkempt chestnut tresses, Bucky dragged a fork with hungered precision over a plate of gravy-drenched beef Rouladen that was cravingly layered with juicy pork belly-his fissionable-rapine appetite for meat had calamitously escalated in tenfold.

Refusing to join the boozy shing-dig of the Howling Commando's achieved mission against HYDRA installations of the battlemented ridgeline, noncommittally without suave reserve, Bucky emitted a huffish breath, as he vexatiously strapped the glazed beef with aggressive flexion of his clutched fingers and sloppily chewed a mouthful in wolfish bites.

"S'good..." he murmured in a growlier pitch, belchingly, as his jutted canine incisors devouringly shredded the beef in one aggressive gulp, drizzles of gravy trekked over his dimpled chin- succulent flavours meatily quashed his gluttonous barrage. For the umpteenth time, Bucky couldn't stave down the onrushing mania of wolfish-induced hunger- a stuporous ecstasy that made him bloatedly unhinged like a debauched slob-not a hunkish Brooklyn kid. "Gotta have more..."

"How ya doin', Buck...?" A heavier-timbered Brooklyn drawl sonorously breached his ears, fringed with infinite concern as Steve with tactful ease dragged out a bar stool, in a placid variance that didn't belie his adamant resolve while behind them Dugan hoisted up another overflowed pint of a foamy beer to drunkenly clink with Flasworth as their boisterous-intoxicated revelry amplified slurringly in clamorous unison. The Howling Commando's had cleared the field, but the names of valiant-hearted men were still branded on nameless markers, hell-storms conducted by HYDRA's engines of butchered-unslakeable mayhem devastatingly razed out nearby townships as weaponized Uber tanks were idle in sentry mode.

There was no homefront of victory, embracing the valorous mantle of Captain America-the avenger of unswerving liberty-made Steve a straight-arrow that bravely directed grief-exhausted GI's out of the interminable crossfires, despite the high stakes of mortal freedom were collapsing each time the battle-tested Allied units became tragically sledgehammered by an inexorable blow that HYDRA counter-played.

Gesturing the bar-keep with the determined smirk tugging at his plushier sculpted lips, Steve hailed a shot glass of whiskey. "Y'know, I can't really feel the effects..." he admitted, sheepishly, as Bucky played off his smirky cockiness, arching up an eyebrow. "Remember when you sweet-talked me to empty out a bottle of jack-daniels..." His azure irises unabashedly downcasted on the amber liquid in the glass. "Couldn't even stand on my feet..."

"And I had to carry you the whole way home, you puked on my shoes," Bucky burst into a fit of laughter at the memory. It was a peaceful time in their lives despite the unending struggles, they mostly remembered the good that came of it. Back then they were just two punk kids looking out for each other against a whole borough of uncaring and sadistic bullies who loved to pick on the little guy. Most of their mischievous nights out consisted of mornin' lunchins at Jack's Diner, pranking the cruel jerks so they'd think twice about preying on others, and tap-dancing with the gorgeous dames at the club later that night. Seeing Steve's dimpled cheeks redden with embarrassment was also too much fun to see. "Suppose I had that comin' for daring you to drink that much. Don't tell me you miss that?" Bucky said with a bemused look as he wiped the gravy from his chin with his thumb then proceeded to lick it. His stomach groaned almost as if it wanted more.

But that was impossible. He had just finished a full plate of beef enough for two people. Why was he feeling so hungry? His mind rationalized that he needed to catch up on his strength after being bedridden for nearly two nights. Memories of his flight from the tent this morning came back to prickle his mood and how Steve found him collapsed from exhaustion hours later beside a mauled animal-a stag.

An eruptive resonance of unbridled hunger portentously thrummed-a bestial thirst ushering Bucky into gluttonous-possessive dregs of an insurmountable thrall; hawkishly shifting attentive intensity of his stormier azureous irises at the gravy-smeared plate, Steve despondently watched his best friend consume the gravy-smeared plate as Bucky's canine incisors predatorily jutted into razor-edged fangs. Hunching over the bar-top, the young sergeant growlingly emitted panty breaths; every graven-ridge of heavier muscles became athletically honed against a breakneck rush of -wolfish- agility as Bucky propelled off the stool at the reactive moment, Steve urgently gripped onto corded flesh of his tauter bicep, forcibly jarring him out of the hoggish stupor. "Buck, what's gotten into you...?"

He would have replied if he were in his normal frame of mind, but Bucky felt as if he had entered a maze of overwhelming hunger. Every direction revealed a new temptation, it was so consuming he had difficulty amassing his thoughts and forming a coherent sentence. His blue eyes were glazed and unblinking as the room span on its axis and his senses were being bombarded by a myriad of intoxicating allures. Roasted duck, seasoned potatoes, freshly cut carrots, juicy ham. His mouth watered and his stomach howled for nourishment. "Gotta eat...gotta..." His breathing had become heavy and deep, his dishevelled appearance prompted many curious eyes to gaze in his direction, some were amused others were alarmed by the wolfish gleam in his blue iris'.

"Cap, everything all right with Bucket-Head? I ain't seen eyes that crazy since we ran into that scruffy drifter doubling for Carter. What was his name? Howler? Howlett?" Duggan said, whistling with mild incredulity as Bucky picked up an unfinished plate of food on another table before the waiter could get to it. Bucky proceeded to shovel the remaining pieces of ham into his mouth, licking the plate clean with his tongue. "Okay, that's just disgusting," Duggan said dryly before he proceeded to belch very loudly, earning him numerous groans from the nearby patrons.

Bucky wasn't paying attention to any of this as his eyes locked on another waiter who exited the back with a tray full of barbequed wings. Something in Bucky's eyes must've alarmed the waiter who suddenly turned pale as death the moment he made eye contact with him. "Mine!" Bucky roared as he moved forward. The waiter yelped and dropped the plate on the floor as he tripped. Not missing a beat, Bucky fell onto all fours, prowling towards the pieces of food like a predator ready to consume its prey.

"Bucky! Stop!" Steve yelled and used his immense strength to haul Bucky up off the floor by his arms. He felt his friend struggle against him, instinctively trying to throw him off and resist. The amount of strength it took not release his hold surprised Steve who hadn't expected Bucky to be this strong. The super-soldier serum in his veins made him stronger than an ordinary man, but even he was having trouble getting a handle on his best friend who seemed hell-bent on consuming those chicken-wings like a man-an animal-possessed. Bucky growled and was near to breaking free, prompting Steve to bring them both towards an unoccupied booth where they fall into the seats. "Enough!" Steve yelled again. He could see a few of his men coming forward as if to assist him but Steve promptly shook his head at them. "No. We're fine here!" Falsworth and Jones appeared hesitant until they see Bucky slowly begin to simmer down in Steve's grip. Steve reaffirms his order with a nod and his men return to their seats.

"This isn't you, Buck. Get it together," Steve urges his friend as he slowly releases him. Steve wanted to haul him out of the tavern and send him on the convoy back to base. Despite what he wanted to believe, this wasn't just a random incident, it was a third in the past few days since Bucky was attacked. Physically it appeared his friend had recovered, but what did it to him mentally? Steve wasn't a doctor, nor was he a scientist, but he knew something was happening to his best friend that meant he needed to be checked out by more than a field medic. "Come on, man," Steve says in a comforting tone as he sees rational and understanding return to Bucky's focused eyes. His friend suddenly appeared mildly confused and worried. "Bucky... Are you all right?"

"Captain Rogers..." Lavishly garbed in scarlet velvetiness of her exquisite crepe dress, Agent Peggy Carter distractingly with curvaceous graces, sauntered passed the occupied booths, knowing her ignited a powder-keg of intractable-drunken rowdiness of gung-ho soldiers, nakedly she brandished her steel-maiden poise, as her lustrous chocolatey-brunette whorls sleekly reminded half-pinned that queenly emphasized the delectable suppleness of her reserved features. Involuntarily Peggy stood in front of a wooden door adorned with rose-etched glass, as the plunging- sweetheart décolletage of her ample breasts voluptuously beckoned a jazzier-vibrant allure that made her forbiddenly desirable.

"Captain," she addressed in blunter pitch, sultrily, fixing her dark irises on the repulsive heap of discarded plates. Grounding heeled resistance away from Steve's proximity; he braced his muscled forearm over Bucky's heaving chest, readily against the defensive rush on the combative accord, he feigned stark alarm, stoppingly clutching onto Bucky's fisted, greasy hand in warred succession that was viciously arced to deliver a throat-strike. His tawny-blonde tresses wetly clung over his tensing brow, every angular plane of his boyish features rapt waging desperation to immobilize his best friend; sneerily, Bucky gnashed his canine fangs against vicious seethes, jutting his broader jaw with aggressive strain as he forcibly sunk into the cushioned booth with Steve reining him down. "If you're not busy, Captain, Howard requires you back at the camp..." Peggy urged out, promptly."Something urgent has steered his curiosity that greatly concerns what might be happening to Sergent Barnes..."

"What are you talking about? What does that mean?!" Bucky felt a surge of unbridled anger coursing through him as Peggy spoke to Steve as if he weren't even here. Glancing between the troubled SSR agent and his friend who looked equally concerned. Did they know something was happening to him this whole time, and none of them said anything? A sting of betrayal hit Bucky and something dark and primal inside of him wanted to lash out. His eye twitched and his fists clenched against the edge of the table, the wood began to groan beneath his strength. "What are you guys keeping secrets from me now?!" Bucky made a telling attempt to stand up before Steve steps in front of him.

"We didn't want to worry you, Bucky. Trust us, if we knew anything definite, we'd tell you," Steve assures his friend with a genuine look that soothes his ire if only slightly. Steve places a hand on his shoulder, giving it a squeeze. "Just sit tight. I'll be back in a few minutes." With one last look at his friend, Steve hesitantly turned and followed Peggy out of the tavern.

"Not in the mood for a dance, handsome..." A melodious undertone rasped, smokily near the booth, warding off his riotous aggression, Bucky dazedly caught a fleeting glimpse of a lithe hand naughtily tilting a whiskey glass with devious variance-imploding a stilted moment as lamp sconces burnished alluringly over sleekier cascades of dishevelled mahogany whorls that breathtakingly constated with pillowy full-bow lips that were vixenishly lacquered cherry-red-a sirenic-thievish decadence that stealingly held any wanton glower in a point-black deadlock. Playing off an indifferent charade, she purred, breathily, allowing a slow burn of whiskey to scour down her throat. "Let me guess you need something more than a cheap drink, Army boy...?"

At first, Bucky wasn't sure where that voice was coming from and if the dame in question was talking to him. He wasn't the only army boy in the tavern, after all. But no one else seemed to respond and it wasn't long until he pin-pointed its source at the booth in the corner across from his. He could make out the unmistakable shape of a young lady putting out a cigarette. She was sitting in shadows, the only sight visible was her pale hands and her smooth neck. For a moment he felt as if his mind had come to a screeching halt.

As a young man who'd been around many dames, he'd grown used to them being at the center of the public eye-bathed in light where many eyes followed their movements. He couldn't remember the last one who seemed more comfortable in the dark. It made him curious, but he still felt mostly peeved over his tussle with Steve and Carter. Right now he wanted to just be left alone. "You could say that, Miss. But if you're looking for me to share mine, you're timing is all wrong." To demonstrate this, Bucky lifted the glass of whiskey that had been left on the table and took a swig of it. He might as well have been drinking water for how little it affected him.

Through it all, he kept a focused look on the dame across from him, wondering how she might reply to his rebuff.

"Not really a smooth player, huh?" Selina purred in snarkier pitch, brusquely, as the virile smokiness of his naked scent headily contrasted sensuous—addictive tracery of a fevered beckon of his leashed arousal; she registered an incarnate tenor of wolven heat bankingly teeming with his pulse as beer-drenched GI uniforms frowsily sailed over the crowded booths as poker decks were chintzily shuffled on tables, braggingly Duggan sliced the cards with a fast-hand, while the high-player royal flush was on the rigged fringe of sealing a full-house gambit.

Tersely, evading the drunken pandemonium of the Howling Commandos, with brazen-practical graces, felinely, Selina eased down onto the booth's cushioned seat aware of his subtle invitation-cool pearlescence of her ivory-white flesh ethereally gleamed against the black chiffon Italianesque dress underneath her long coat, the vixenish flare of a ribboned bodice slinkily fringed over her voluptuous decolletage, while svelter tautness of her lithesome form braced nonchalantly against the booth's polished wood.

Against the shadowy-roisterous ambiance of the bar-house; the sanity fineness of her elfish features entrancingly contrasted with the doe-eyed intensity of her coffee-brandy irises, despite the kittenish exquisiteness of her ravishing visage, the luscious fullness of her pillowy burgundy lips were voluminously bowed, with a devious play of an impish quirk.

"Usually you soldier boys like to chase my heels on the dancefloor," Selina purred, breathily, tracing a daintier finger around the rim of his emptied glass with unfeigned-seductive deviousness. "You're making this night..." she paused, sliding her glass across that was bewitchingly smeared with a vivid imprint of her crimson lips—a challenging beckon—dare. As she mirrored the whitish heat that fused menacingly within his sweltry grayish-aquamarine irises, Selina wickedly flashed an incredulous gaze at his shapely-wide lips, the curved incisors roguishly edged with knife-point sharpness that grazed over his poutier underlip-this hunky 'soldier-boy' was morphically spliced with the predatory—genetic fusion of the HYDRA sleaze-Zola's lycan serum—the weaponized hell-hound attacked him. "Interesting..."

Every deceptive measure of her furtive stint became inexplicably compromised against the wolven-tameless- dynamic. A chimerical unity of monstrous possession was irrevocably converging through him—he being verminously chastened into a soul-consuming regeneration of amputated humanity-no switchbacks of redemption against the warranted penance that tragically spawned out nefarious apparitions-wolven reapers conducted out of the ranks HYDRA.

After Selina was -remade- with blood shunts of mutative injections, Armin Zola desired her to usher his maniacal-berko-legacy of elite operatives on the conquered battlefront. Her power-mongering father 'Baron Wolfgang Strucker' had traded her off to become a 'shifter' executioner, lethally dispatching traitorous scum that betrayed the Iron Cross legion as a furred-canine- vixen. "So, I'm guessing you like to pack in all the spoils, handsome..." she inferred, pointedly, gesturing a lithe hand at the evident landside heap of meat- greased plates that sloppily adorned on the bartop. "Obviously, your taste for the good stuff runs deep..."

If Bucky were being honest with himself, his favorite past-time back home was to go out for a night of fun on the town with a lively cute girl on his arm. But he wasn't in the mood to be chasing a pretty dame to share a dance with. Not tonight. In fact, he had only seconds ago thought about taking the bottle of whiskey with him back to the camp and drinking himself to sleep to escape the misery he was now feeling. But out of nowhere, this mysterious woman seemed to have come and tickled his curiosity until she had finally stepped out of her dark corner. Bucky was grateful his expression was hidden behind the glass in his hand because he was sure he would've looked like a fish out of the water, gasping for oxygen the minute he caught a glimpse of her face.

"Oh wow…" He thought inwardly, his eyes wide as they took in what could only be described as the face of an angelic beauty bathed in long mahogany tresses that shimmered in the dim light of the tavern. Pale alabaster skin doused with a modest amount of make-up to give her a flawless complexion, eyelashes lined with dark mascara and sinfully red painted lips. 'A dark angel,' he mentally corrected himself. Her radiance was unquestionable but something about her gave off a dark aura that stirred something inside of Bucky. Something wild and ravenous that begged to be unleashed. Swallowing slightly, Bucky felt his misery evaporate and he was on full-alert mode in the face of a breathtaking curiosity that he now wanted to indulge.

'Okay Bucky, time to turn on that Barnes Charm.' He straightened in his seat and flashed her a dimpled smile with glowing blue eyes. "Well, I do work out a lot in the field. Sometimes you gotta take in as much as you give." He reasoned. Despite the awe he felt, he regained a bit of his focus and took in the woman's appearance from the dark trenchcoat she wore an exquisite dress with high-heeled boots. She looked like she came from money and he wondered briefly what she was doing in a place like this. "How about you? I mean no disrespect, but you like you're used to being in nicer places than this. You local?" He wondered.

The gravelly huskiness of his suave-timbered drawl arced in her veins bone-deep like heated molasses, Selina guardedly stiffened against the cushioned seat as his shapely-wide lips quirked flirty, evident to the alighted gleam of boyish naughtiness melding in his grayish-aquamarine irises, the underlying -virile- scent of aphrodisiacal sandalwood and earthen pine headily wafted out his pores.

Tamping down a rivalrous implosion of unhinged abandon, Selina offishly played against his unevaded question with a dismissive pop of her voluminous lips-she couldn't become attached to a heart-starved reality, not against the carnal deviation of wolven bloodlust. "Let's just say I don't stray too far to get what I want if the offer sticks, handsome..." she gritted under breath, trenchantly, as the contractive pulse in her gums throbbingly heralded a morphic strain. "Obviously none of your Army friends over there claimed my interest..."

"I suppose I should count myself lucky then if you found me interesting enough," Bucky replied easily to her banter. Something about her cryptic approach made him curious to discern what she was looking for here tonight. A friendly conversation? A shared drink? Or something else entirely that involved a warm bed. He steered his thoughts away from the distracting thought. He didn't move that fast with strange women, even if they were interested. But something told him that dark beauty in front of him wasn't here looking for pleasure. But he was a gentleman like his father had raised him to be, and he wouldn't discard his manners as he gestured for the brunette to join him as he poured them both a glass. "Would you like a drink, miss…" He hadn't gotten her name yet, he realized. And for some reason, he wasn't so sure if she'd be inclined to give it to him.

"Playing off the nice card are we?" Selina purred, banteringly, tracing deft pressure of her lithe finger over the intricate whiskey glass, with a convincing pout, she quirked up her brow as she caught a naked glimpse of his deforming ears, curved flesh widely sharpening into a mutative point under his askew chestnut tresses." How about we swipe a bottle for keeps..." she coaxed in a foxier undertone, collectively shifting her dark gaze at the whitish opalescence of the waxen moonlight haloing ghostily against the glass planes of begrimed windows; an evocative impulse branded her with a subtle thrill of anticipation. Kittenishly her glossier cherry-red lips pursed into a jaunty smirk, as Bucky gripped the whiskey bottle in tenser flex, broodily leashing down a tenor of bestial predatoriness as he smugly conveyed Brooklyn-boy charm. "Unless you already had your fill?" she quipped, coyly.

Bucky downed the last few shots left in the whiskey bottle to demonstrate his reply. He felt a mild tingling that was gone almost instantly which served to only resume his bitter state. Through it all his blue eyes never wavered from eye-contact with the mysterious dame seated across from him, almost as if they had entered a staring contest to see who would shy away first. It might've been a childish thing to some, but Bucky unintendedly took it as a test of will to see who might reveal something first that their lips wouldn't speak. His dour mood caused a burst of heat to flush through him, sparking the return of an insatiable appetite that was little to do with food. He was dimly aware of a prickling pain in his jaws and found he could no longer hold his mouth closed as he had.

As his lips parted he revealed a set of sharp canines that gleamed in the light, catching the mysterious woman's eyes. Unaware of the change to his mouth, Bucky only realized she was staring at his lips and it caused the heat in his body to increase ten-fold. It suddenly began to feel very hot inside this bar. Releasing the empty glass, Bucky licked the alcohol from his lip and exhaled roughly. "Sounds good to me, darlin'. Lead the way," he coaxed her with a dangerous smirk.

--------

Evicting the mechanical-vexatious tenor of her bestial conditioning that exceedingly outrode her unwarrantable resilience; nothing became a deterrent against the vampirish malice that demonically reaped over Bravainian ground-her tyrannical-militaristic grandfather had stamped his iron-fisted reign in blood as the machine of war irrevocably fueled a symphonious reckoning of that hailed butcherous tempests of mayhem. The HYDRA king-pins-vipers conceived their smokescreen alliances-irrelevant extensions that would be terminally disposed of when their industrial usefulness was expired. 'Hail HYDRA...'

Against the October chilliness that penetratively sailed over the forested labyrinth of evergreens, with the tigerish heat melding in her coffee irises Selina darkly gazed at the desolated-grievous vistas of the battleground, brickwork remnants of shell-out foundations-no stone was left unturned. Her kittenish nose scrunched raptly against miasmatic potency of corpse-laden decay wafted from stacked-up trenches, as uniformed silhouettes of young men became lifeless-phantom denizens within the chasmal graves as the amberish luminance of moonlight spookily graced them with reverence.

"Like the view?" she questioned in a huskier pitch, ruefully, glancing down at the blood-smeared GI dog tags underneath her booted heel, while Bucky tensely clutched a bottle of German whiskey against the taut solidity of his garbed thigh; echoes of the razor-edge menace nakedly set over the graven planes of his boyish features as he steeled tight-lipped response. "Do you think freedom is just a damn luxury now...After all, nothing ever sticks out here..."

Bucky didn't immediately respond. His young optimistic mind would have once leapt at the irrefutable notion that life and liberty were the right of every living person on the planet-that it should be fought for no matter the cost. But after witnessing such unimaginable horrors over the past few years, from bloodied trenches to abominable camps, he couldn't help but wonder how things would ever be the same again if the Allies won, and Hydra and the Axis were beaten. How long until the next conflict came and innocents were dying all over again? He didn't know. The depressing thought caused him to take another swig of the whiskey. He enjoyed the burning flavor that tingled his nerves for a few seconds before it was gone.

"I wouldn't still be here if I still didn't believe in what we're fighting for," he responded after what felt like a while. "Those Hydra monsters need to be stopped. But I can't say I believe the fighting is done once they're gone. Freedom comes at a cost. People are free to be saviors or destroyers." He mused, kicking a clump of dirt that he thought was a rock. He and the mysterious brunette were walking at a leisurely pace across the parking lot of the tavern, their direction aimless as they took the time to enjoy the cool night air. In the distance, they can hear the chirping of crickets in the woods and the faint hooting of an owl.

The skies were cloudy but the brilliant ethereal moonlight shone done upon them. The sight somehow made Bucky feel a twinge of discomfort within his body. His jaw ached, and so did his fingers and ears.

An infinite converge of morphic tension unrestrainedly fringed between them as the whitish sconces of moonlight cosmically pulsed gravitic auras of celestial energy, a hypnotic command that kept Bucky in a stuporous deadlock. Reddish veins of thermal heat electrifyingly striated over the forested darkness like forked lightning, every heartbeat of craven prey became fierily entwined within a predatory matrix as he aggressively scrunched his nose against a blood rush, catching a full-bodied scent of a nocturnal varmint-a rabbit.

As his barred incisor-fangs menacingly jutted over his swelled underlip, knowingly Selina watched banded-cords of bulkier muscle flex heavily underneath his jacket, as she registered the wolven cadence venting out of him in guttural rabidness. "Something wrong, handsome," she played in breathy pitch, deviously, her coffee irises tigerishly roved over virile contours of his fingers bruisingly arced in monstrous protrusion as he vertiginously bolstered his fever-racking mass against a parked jeep. "I might enjoy this..."

"No...Not again…" Bucky groaned as he fell against the side of a parked vehicle, his body suddenly drenched with a cold sweat. The pouring rivulets trickled down his neck, soaking the front of his shirt while his muscles groaned against the clothing. He vaguely realized that the woman had someone not only understood what was happening to him, but was also encouraging him to embrace it. The hunger. The pain. The call of the wind beckoning him to howl with release. The pressure in his body continued to build as he struggled desperately to control his breathing and not fall into a ravenous decline. His blue eyes glared fiercely as his vision swam, everything felt detached and beyond his comprehension. The world was red like an inferno, but in the darkness he could see flickers of light in the shape of all living things; men, women-humans and animals.

His stare landed on the woman next to him and he felt a flicker of disquiet as her eyes glowed like burning candles into the dark. A predator lurked beneath, calmly watching his struggle with fascination. Bucky's blood burned, his muscles throbbed with pain, and yet he still found himself rife with hunger and desire. "Who are you…" He growled, his voice no longer the smooth soft baritone of a Brooklyn kid but something deeper and scary. "What are you…" He finally collapsed onto his knees, crying out as he the buildup of pressure increased on his lower back as if his bones were threatening to extrude from his pelvis. It tore through his clothes and a furry appendage suddenly expanded from his back. A wolf's tail.

Against the horrifying-unriddled onslaught that paralyzingly atrophied him in contractive fruition, raggedly keeping his forearms braced on the ground in strenuous traction, erratically, gnashing his fangs, Bucky choked-off throaty gnarls in voiceless-mortified tenor as the furred skeins of chestnut bushily lengthened into a canine tail; dragging his fingers into the dirt with clawing sync, gapingly his lips stretched in whimpery heaves against bone-splitting pressure as his tactical pants tatteredly ripped apart on divesting accord, the corded-heaviness of his muscular thighs uncontrollably bridged up with the anguished momentum of a jackknifing thrust. "Argh..."

Straying wetness errantly glided over his feverish cheek as white-heat pulsing throbbed in his veins, as tauten contours of his exposed backside arched in morphic realignment as his wolfish tail lashingly swayed over his thighs with defensive flex-crouching down a breadth at his tremulous side, intriguingly, Selina caught the metallic glint of his G1 service dog tags fastened over the broad width of his neck-trade-off validation of his condemned identity that she could thievishly swipe off his neck:

James B Barnes

32557038 T4 3092

3092 STOCKTON RD

SHELBYVILLE, Indiana

Investing whisper-soft pressure of her lithe palm over the drenched material of his shirt, brushingly Selina kneaded a sensuous caress of her feminine ministrations over the corded-flesh of his bicep, against the disarming-headlong need, ephemerally she gloried at the virile contrast of heavier-athletic resilience of his muscles. Answering the echoes of naked-forbidden demand that starvedly made her no longer untouchable in the sirenic thralls.

On her own volition, breathtakingly mirrored his tactile heat, Selina angled her delicate jaw against the headier cadence their faces shadowily touched - surging-ardent drift as the glacial steeliness of his heavy-lidded gaze mesmerically beckoned the lush cushiness of full-bow lips beautifully edge their wet heat deeper into kiss-bruised abandon with him-just staged play. "From the looks of things you'll be howling at the moon soon..." she deadpanned in a raspier breath, snarkily, delivering a feathery glide of her lithe fingers distractingly over the heated slickness of his thickened nape."I guess you'll have to trust me now, huh, Wolf boy..."

"W-What are you doing…" Bucky groaned out with a weak voice. Exhaustion was creeping upon him and he couldn't prevent the unknown woman from swiping his dogtags out from his neck. He struggled to reach out and reclaim them from her, but the aching pressure on his back made standing vertically feel almost impossible. His shins and calves felt like glass that would shatter at any moment beneath the pressure of his mass. His gritted teeth pierce into his inner lips, causing trickles of blood to drip from his mouth. His blue eyes were unblinking and glazed over. His sense of smell was intense and he found himself drawn to the alluring floral fragrance wafting from the brunette. He couldn't help but growl with desire as her dainty fingers caress his jaw and brush through his sweat-drenched locks.

It felt good, he wanted more. Through his hazy distraction, he doesn't see her begin to pull a tranquillizer needle from her pocket. Zola's order to capture him still stood, but before she could contemplate her next move, a voice cuts through the area with a commanding tone.

"Bucky?! Where are you?!" Steve called out as he exited the tavern searching for his friend.

With reactive poise of her acrobatic graces, in a fervent rush, keeping herself in a mid-crouch, balletically Selina clutched his dog tags as she detected unstoppable encroach of propelling momentum that fringed maddeningly closer; a telltale gleam of the alloy-fused vibranium that belonged to chivalrous 'Perseus' that votively carried mantled liberty; Captain America the handsomely boyish Adonis that she identified from Zola's dossier files, a runtish Brooklyn kid whom the Jewish doctor-Erksine had genetically enhanced with vita-ray infusions with the alpha serum.

Now the prophetic reckoning to usher the infectious-plaguing tentacles of the HYDRA legion, to conceive a new Olympus by stationing Titian installations over the Axis battlegrounds was irrevocably on the fringe of being unleashed. "Hang on, Buck..." Adamantly, Steve braced his patriotic shield over his right forearm as he imposingly paced closer—his cool azureous rises stormily flashed over Bucky who convulsively slumped against the Army Jeep's rear wheel. "M'comin'..."

Against whipcrack readiness, her palm lithely ghosted over a holstered Walther P38 pistol-a fatal accessory- for practical convincing if her masquerading theatrics were compromised-she couldn't get a fix of point-blank satisfaction. Hissingly, Selina gritted her teeth, with lightning-fast agility, unerringly she utilized the backlit shadows, and sashayed vanishingly behind the tavern with a variance of feline swiftness -never looking over her shoulder. "Next time, I won't play so nice, handsome..."

She was gone as quickly as she had stepped into his life, and Bucky could do nothing but watch it happen. His furry dishevelled form collapsed into a seated position back against the wheel of a car, unable to move nor do anything but stare at his hands. His hands had horrifically changed into something gaunt and predatory with sharpened nails and throbbing veins. Patches of hair had sprouted from his chest despite the fact he always kept himself shaved. 'What is happening to me? ...Who was that woman?' The questions would plague him long into the night, even as Steve arrived at his side and took in the changes his body had undergone.

"Oh, no…" Steve whispered, convinced now more than ever that Howard's theory wasn't ridiculous but a horrifying reality. His best friend was turning into a wolf.

-------

"Scout reports will put us here, Cap..." The soft- timbered voice of Private Gabe Jones confirmed as he eased on his SCR-300 two-way radio transceiver pack over the jeep's metallic hood, keeping his wired headset strapped firmly over his ears-he was 'backpack Commando of their ragtag unit. Despite his instinctive -vigilant calibre of being a proficient marksman of the 107th infantry, Gabe had decoded white-noise encryption HYDRA frequencies that steered them to underground locations of HYDRA viper nests. Narrowing his dark-umber irises fixedly at Steve's brass navigating compass, that cherishingly adorned wth a grainy newspaper clipping of vivacious Agent Peggy Carter.

As Gabe hastily jotted down the coordinates on a fanned out Central Europe map as the battle-tested Howling Commandos assembled for their recon mission, Steve gripped onto his bullet-resistant helmet by the chin-strap as he braced at the driver side door, tawny-blonde tresses clung unkemptly over the angular planes of his chiselled-hawkish features that virilely belied his stern-face demeanour. Navy-blue, grayish padded material of his 'field' uniform delineated grittily over the bulkier sculpt of his muscled chest as white-star insignia contrasted with red buckled straps fastened over his armoured mid-drift: he was tactically geared up for battle."Dead zones are under a railroad bridge, where freight of HYDRA artillery is being dispatched at 08:00..."

They'll have the convoy guarded top to bottom." Steve mused as his acute eyes gazed over the map laid sprawled out over the hood. There was a stretch of forests for several miles out which meant there was only one road for the convoy to travel through; the railroad bridge. "But they have only one out to take."

"So will we," Duggan added with a constipated look that was a rarity for the normally bold soldier. "They'll cut us down to ribbons if they see us coming."

Steve nodded in agreement. Inwardly the young captain filtered through a number of possible plans of attack that would not only increase the odds of success but also keep his men safe. The safety of his men was always a top priority for him whenever the odds were weighed. Especially now that one of them was...compromised. Steve's blue eyes flick upwards and sees Bucky crouched on his haunches with his M1903A1 Springfield resting in his hands. An idea took shape in his mind that could work out in favor of everyone.

"We'll setup a blockade on the road about 2 miles out of the choke-point. It should slow them down long enough for us to needle them out. Bucky will provide overwatch and take out any surprises they have lurking back. Duggan, you and Gabe setup the blockade and rig it to blow in case they try to push through it. ...I'll storm the convoy and keep them busy long enough for us to secure the artillery. We can't take the chance of leaving anything behind for them to salvage. Any questions?" No one responded and a satisfied Steve dismissed them as he made his way over to Bucky.

"How you feelin', Buck?" He asked worriedly. He had his concerns about letting Bucky back into the field after he spent the last two nights in Howard's lab. His friend behaved like a caged animal trying desperately to escape, even it meant attacking those where trying to help him. Howard was still nursing a black eye after injecting Bucky with a compound to distill his aggression and animalistic appetite. Bucky seemed under his own control, but it didn't change the more physical changes that he'd undergone, suck as his growing thick stubble and sharpened fingernails.

The vestigial tension galvanically mounted in tenfold against the predatory onslaught, despite his Brooklyn spirit rebelled, thirstily Bucky couldn't slake down the insatiable tumults of undeterred-wolfish- bloodlust; Steve had anchored him back out of the bestial thralls as the wolven-canine- divergence-promise of humanity was still graspable.

After being isolated in a Red Cross tent after the syringe infusions, Bucky felt like was cinematically propelled in an unfathomable reality where silver--screened players scarily morphed into repulsive chimeras of tragical monstrosities. 'You're gonna be howlin' soon, Barnes...'

Tamping down a guttural resonance, Bucky felt pulse was jackhammering in riotous tenor, scowlingly Bucky remained crouched his fatigue-garbed haunches into sniper-hone poise, under lengthy unkempt brunette tresses, his ears were furrily deformed canine-like as he gripped onto the hammer-lock of his rifle. Against the spookish paleness of twilight hours, graven-edged contours of his stubbled features steelily razored as the heaviness of his jaw clenched. "M' fine, Steve..." he answered in a growlier drawl, throatily. "I dunno how long I can keep this on the ropes..."

"If anyone can, its you Bucky." Steve said hoping to keep his friend level-headed. "Even Lon Cheney Jr couldn't walk this off." He quipped which caused Bucky to softly chuckle. In truth he believed that anyone else would've succumbed to the symptoms his friend was experiencing. It took immense effort on his own part of convincing Peggy and Howard of that. They were prepared to hand Bucky over to General Phillips so he could be shipped off to some lab where he might never see the light of day again. Howard had stressed the implication that was was done to Bucky was irreversible. The creature that bit him left a permanent mark on him that had both incredible but also horrifying effects. Steve believed in Bucky, but he also knew how dangerous he could become.

Keeping an eye on him was a priority but Steve had to believe his friend could "rein in the beast" if things got ugly. "I can't pretend to know what you're going through, but if there's anything life has taught us, it's knowing how to adapt when the going gets tough." Steve reminded him. Life had been hard on them growing up, changing them, but they learned to push through and get stronger from it. "I'm looking out for ya, don't forget it." Steve held his hand down to his friend. It was a symbolic gesture than just offering to help him to his feet, but also through these trials.

Easing up tremorous shakiness of his clawed-hand, quakingly, Bucky accepted the visage of brotherly reverence that his 'little Stevie' conveyed, aware of the knife-edge sharpness of his fingernails as his palm mirrored against the underside of Steve's leather-gloved hand. An expressive quirk on his shapely-bow lips toothily exposed his canine incisors, as his grayish-aquamarine irises piercingly silvered with latent menace. "I gotta have that look of the Wolfman now, huh, punk?" he snorted with derisive snarkiness, humorlessly. "S'just waitin' for Duggan to chuck a can of dog chow at me..."

"Let's not give him any ideas." Steve chuckled as he released Bucky's hand. Inwardly he was stunned by how strong his friend's grip was. The supersoldier serum gave him peak speed and endurance, but even Steve wasn't so sure if he was at the top of the pecking order in their group. Bucky was getting stronger and more deadly, and Steve could only hope that the animal inside of him didn't take full control.

---

It was mid-afternoon as the Commandos laid in just beyond a railroad bridge crossing. The cluster of trees kept them sheltered and obscured from any wandering eyes as they camouflaged themselves to better blend into their surroundings. Even Steve had decided to forgo his helmet and instead wore his brown bomber jacket over his uniform. The spangled red, white and blue weren't exactly the best features when it came to stealth. Further, up ahead over a hillside, he could see the sunlight reflect off the stainless glass of a sniper-scope. Bucky laid in waiting, watching the bridge through his lens.

Keeping himself rigidly planked on his braced forearms, with impassive variance, Bucky levelled his Springfield rifle over his gloved palm, flashingly the periphery of his steel-aquamarine depths caught the encroaching glimpse of black-tarped military trucks embellished with demonic Kracken-skull insignia of HYDRA-mobilizing a 'pick-up' convoy near the railroad bridge as dissonance of a carillon horn eerily blared with chugging succession of train wheels screeched over eroded tracks-the expected artillery freight was three miles outward. "Damnit.." he seethed out, bitingly, and unholstered a two-way radio transmitter from his pouched-belt. "Cap..." he drawled in huskier pitch, murmuringly, pressing the device's button. "Delivery...Inbound...Three clicks...Comin' in hot..."

"Copy that. Hang tight," Steve responded through his radio. Duggan, Jones and Falsworth were crouched along the bushes beside him as they watched the bridge. "You ready?" Steve asked his men who looked equal parts determined and eager. A brush of wind swept through the tree-line causing the leaves to billow out around them. Autumn was near and Halloween was a couple of weeks away. If he were back home around this time, Steve would have found himself being dragged by Bucky to a Halloween dance-party surrounded by Dorothy's, Scarecrows and Tinmen. The night would end with him and Bucky stealing away into the night laughing after pranking Jake Cooper and his band of bullies.

If anything, he'd at least miss the candy and treats. He shrugged from his thoughts as his sharp hearing listened to the sound of approaching vehicles. Raised voices followed cursing out in German. The Hydra convoy came to an abrupt pause several feet shy of colliding with a barricade of toppled trees standing seven feet high. "Was zur Hölle ist das?! (What the hell is this?!)" The passenger side-door of the lead convoy opened and out stepped a well-dressed officer with a Hydra crest emblazoned onto his coat-pocket. "Mach diese Straße jetzt frei! Wir können nicht verzögert werden! (Clear this road now! We cannot be delayed!)"

Ensuing yells followed and they watched as several armed men jumped out of their vehicles to approach the blockade. "Bucky, how many are there?" Steve whispered into his radio.

With tactical readiness stemming in his veins, stealthily undetected by the HYDRA parade cavalcade, as black Mercedes 770K Grosser low-top convertible was at the helm-a high-ranking SS lieutenant of Third Reich was polishedly garbed in his Kriegsmarine leather trench-coat while BMW R75 motorcycles revved up in flanked position; within measured seconds, HYDRA stormtroopers 'death-walkers' fleetingly assembled in mechanized-wraithlike sync around the forested barricade. Enraged by the obstructive deterrent, ballistically the HYDRA official stood up from the back seat, gesturing his tight-fisted wrath.

'Yeah someone's not happy..." Bucky quipped under breath, throatily, as his paratrooper boots dragged over the clumpy-mossier dirt in planking traction as the rifle's barrel frontally levelled with sharpshooter poise. Angling the heaviness of his knife-jaw, chestnut tresses unkempt fringed over the bestial deformity of his pointer ears, as he unblinkingly gazed through the scope of his grounded rifle, marking down the proximal 'dead-eye' range. "M' countin' five..." he drawled in a growlier cadence, unerringly as he locked the rifle's ammo chamber, keeping his index finger readily ghosted over the trigger-lock. Underneath his navy-blue parka, the heavier bulkiness of his tauter muscles flexed on a contractive-morphic accord, as his nose raptly scrunched when sulphuric rancidity of carious decay-blood- that noxiously wafted off the HYDRA official's tailored garments."Grah...I've got a clear shot."

"Hold your fire until I give the signal," Steve alerted Bucky as he began jogging towards the bridge. "Duggan, Jones, go green." Steve watched as not a few seconds later shots were being rained down on the stunned Hydra troops who were pelted with bullets. A spike of adrenaline rushed through Steve who leapt over the rail and raised his shield high. It wasn't long before the Hydra officer saw him coming and a deathly pale look formed on his face once he realized who was coming for them.

"Es ist er! Der Kapitän! Das amerikanische Schwein. Töte ihn! (It's him! The Captain! The America pig! Kill him!") The officer cried as he jumped back into his black Mercedes 770k Grosser. A luxury vehicle meant for high-ranking officials. Immediately the troopers aimed their rifles and began unloading in Captain America's direction. The First Avenger held his shield firm, its indestructible properties repelling the lead bullets as if they were paper-balls. Seeing an opening for an offensive, Steve ducked low and twirled, propelling his shield with pin-point accuracy towards a support beam on the bridge. His geometric mind knew exactly how to make use of his armament as it reflects off the beam towards a trio of troopers hidden behind cover.

Triple clanks are heard and the troopers collapse dead or unconscious. "Now, Duggan!" Steve yelled. Duggan tossed a grenade clear of the artillery convoy causing one of the trucks to burst into flames, scouring debris across the luxury car. Troopers began to climb to the hoods of their vehicles to get a higher ground advantage. "Bucky take your shots!" Steve alerted. Not a second later all the troopers were shot dead with surgically hit rounds to the skulls. "Bring uns hier raus! (Get us out of here!") The officer yelled at his driver who immediately slammed on the accelerator, determined to break through the barricade.

"Bucky, take out their tires!" Steve yelled as he narrowly leap to the side to avoid being run-over. The officer wouldn't escape through the barricade but he would be worth more to them alive.

With downshift jerk, screechingly the Mercedes gunned up full-throttle, the red HYDRA pennants whippingly tore off the hood, the twined motorcycles explosively flipped into a waterline ditch as Bucky's dead-shot precision blurringly aimed for the wheel-spokes. With a half-smirk tugged at his shapely lips, he emptied up the calibre-barrel in rapid succession of a blinding earshot, as the hailstorm of bullets flurringly shredded the rubber of the frontal tire-a deafening pop ensued as the swerving vehicle destructively careened a nosedive into a station-house." All yours, Cap..." he rasped out gravelly, feigning a tight-jaw grimace as feverish torrents of nauseous heat blearily stole his vision. "N-Not again..."

"Good shot," Steve commended his friend. He watched as the Mercedes swerved and crashed into the rail of the bridge, nearly close toppling over the edge. He had to get the officer out of there before he either fell over, or jumped just to prevent himself from being captured. As he barreled through a couple of troopers who thought they'd fare better fighting him hand-to-hand, Steve looked on as he saw the rest of his men make their way to the bridge to block off the rear in case the convoy tried to retreat. "Seal them off. Don't let any of em' off the bridge." Steve kicked the bumper to one of the trucks, an act which stunned Jones as the truck crashed into one of the convoys attempting to pull out.

Duggan guns down one of the troopers attempting to pull a pin on a grenade. Jones nearly takes a shot to the stomach before Steve intercepts with his shield. Just when it seemed the commandos were close to taking control of the convey, the unexpected happened and Steve was shot in the back of his shoulder.

"CAP!" Duggan yelled in horror. "He's***. Damn it, Barnes! There's a sniper. Cover us!"

"Steve...!" Blood misted into the frigid vapours, against throated gasp, Steve achingly crashed onto his knees in deadened traction, splaying his leather palm over the bullet-gored flesh of his shoulder, against heart-gripping distress, Bucky reared his head up, as his lips went throbbingly agape, revealing the jutted points of his barred incisor fangs as he emitted out a deep-throated scream. "Punk..." A railing pitch growlingly coupled with choked-off heaves as he blankly gazed at his 'little punk' being frantically encompassed by the Commandos while his vision strobed into reddish--murderous haze. “No...”

In an urgent tempo of unbidden alarm, his depths predatorily razored into aqueous crescents of livid sapphire, as thermic-connective pulses of heartbeats fierily veined into reddish skeins as he piercingly shifted a murderous glower of vengeful bloodthirst in direction of the HYDRA sniper's nest, thrusting his stubbled jaw in a fiercer clench. He knew the damning extent of his breakneck choice to vengefully engage the infinite hunt: there was no going back. "T-This is for you, punk..."

He had never given in to the darker impulse of vengeance in veins, not even since the war began and he'd witnessed the atrocities committed by Hydra and the Nazi parties. But seeing his best friend, his courageous and genuine little Steve, get shot by a target he should have kept his eyes opened for, caused Bucky to fall into that dark allure. Unintendedly, the wolf within growled and had fallen in sync with his instincts, sensing the injury of one he cared for. Bucky gritted his teeth and threw his rifle aside. Before he knew what was happening, the wind was whipping at his face, his hair billowing behind him as he raced through the forests at an intense speed. His only thought, his only instinct was to find the sniper that injured his friend and hurt him back.

The world had turned into a blood-red portrait with tiny specs of light humming in the distance. There was one crouched in a nest of shrubs and vines, scrambling to retreat as if sensing his approach. With agility he didn't realize he possessed, Bucky lunged high up into the trees and caught the bark twenty feet off the ground. His heightened sense of smell detected the wafting odor of cheap aftershave and gunpowder. A Hydra soldier wearing a full-face mask is now racing wildly through the trees with his rifle held tight. "Stoller na bazu. Konvoy atakoval Kapitan Amerika. Nikto ne vyzhil. YA ranil yego, no mne nuzhna pomoshch'! (Stoller to base. The convoy was attacked by Captain America. None survived. I wounded him but I need assistance!)

If he were in his own state of mind, Bucky would have paused to consider his options; the alternative such as taking the trooper captive to be interrogated for answers. But logic and strategic planning had escaped him. There was only the irrepressible desire to take his pound of flesh. And so he lunged from the trees, descended upon the stricken trooper who only had time to scream out in horror before he was trampled and lashingly stabbed by sharpened claws.

Bucky's conscience had vanished and there was only the ravenous hunger of the beast eager to sate its bloodlust. Blood splattered across his stubbled face as the trooper choked on his last breath. Gleaming silver eyes gazed unblinkingly at the life-form as its light flickered away before raising his head upward and releasing a railing howl towards the skies.

-----

'Hell, what have you done, Barnes...' An unwarranted mantra condemningly resonated with onrushes starved-out adrenaline; blindingly into forested environs, Bucky propelled a thrust of his beastlier momentum at rampageous paces, a grimace stretched over this lips as the whipsawed sting of pine branches gouging over the padded material that sheathed over his muscled flesh. The brackish reek of viscid fluid of his gruesome-horrific assault smudgily trekked over his dimpled chin; nothing was leashed down when he monstrously arced his clawed-fingers with throat-slashing viciousness into the HYDRA sniper's exposed thorax, without no availing mercy just carnal-deadlier octane of predatory rabidness.

Guttuarlly heaving out breathless pants, against a vomitous raid of feverish exhaustion, Bucky collapsed onto his bracing knees, cottony bleariness dizzily swarmed his vision as he sobbingly hammered a fisted hand with bone-splitting force grimily into the muckier ground; contractive apparitions of the soul-wrenching onslaught. Each pulsating throb of misaligned spinal bones exorcised warring visages of his Brooklyn resistance; tearingly the bushier length of his canine tail shaggily protruded over his backside—pressing his forehead bruisingly into the ground, a throated puppyish whimper noncommittally hitched out him as the mutative-wolven- unity of infectious divergence had stuporously careened him into a catatonic fringe, irrevocably grappling him into morphic-deadened throes. "I can't...Fight it..."

The quaking sensation made him feel as if he was ready to implode on himself. But in reality, it was the burning hunger of a primordial beast clawing to escape. Bucky searched his pockets for the inhibitor serum Howard had created for him only to realize he had left his extra doses back at camp. There was nothing to stop the barrage of consuming agony spreading throughout his body as he let loose another vicious roar. His canines had extended beyond their subtle capacity and the veins on his flesh bulged with his expanding muscles. He felt power, he felt rage in an all-encompassing fire that couldn't be quelled.

He was dimly aware of the sensation of his skin prickling with heat. His intense eyes watched as animal-like fur sprouted from his bolstering flesh, spreading like wildfire across his body. His calloused digits had extended to gargantuan size with knife-edge claws protruding from his nails. "NO!" He roared, quivering with both fear and anguish at how foreign his own voice sounded. There was no trace of himself. Not in his voice, and not in body. His mind clung to the memories of his humanity as if they were being swept away by a howling wind.

Slowly his clothes began groan and shred from his expanding mass. His body fell forward and his boot collided with the earth before it tore open. A wolfish paw implanted into the soil, and then a second followed. Razor-sharp claws grasp the bark of a tree and snap it as if it were made of plastic. Teeth clenched into an unbreakable sneer, they dug into his gums as a strangled groan escaped him, feeling his jaw expand beyond human proportions into a grisly maw. His blue eyes that were once soft as cool waters, sharpened into vampire slits that glowed like the moon.

Bucky Barnes was gone. The wolf had emerged to prowl the night, hunting anything and anyone one in his way.

------

A vaporous putridness of stagnant blood miasmically breached her senses, as skeletal remnants of a gutted-out Black Forest stag were odiously discarded over the rocky smoothness that fused into an isolated den. Thunderous cascades of onrushing water dampishly became an elemental valance; after observing the grislier bloodbath of the HYDRA sniper with recon vigilance, Selina had advanced within the sanctuary-domain with tempered-practicable cautiousness, impassively brandishing her vehement poise on sashaying accord; the reeky stink of bloodied decay pungently sailed over the fang-gored deer husk. 'A fella's gotta eat...'

Crouching on her sleekier haunches, scones of moonlight ethereally arced over the wolfish fur-sheathed tautness of bulkier mass-graven-edged ridges that heavily bracketed protrusive flesh as frayed traces of navy blue tellingly clung over the hulkish massiveness of his slacken canine form-the genetical fusion of Doctor Zola's wolven strain had devastatingly manifested through the hunky 'pretty boy' sergeant; he was irrevocably captive into dregs of morphic oblivion.

Being the damned heiress of the monarchic Strucker bloodline had shackled her into knifepoint reality; she had deceptively masqueraded a Robin Hood gambit, infiltrating the estates of the Bavarian aristocracy, thievingly collecting spoils to profit necessary hardware for the underground stations of 'black-out' resistance-networks of desolated orphans-strays. After her warmongering father discovered her treasonous escapades-hijinks, she was punishingly leashed down with vein-shunting infusions of mutative- wolven serum- an occultic-unforgiving divergence that warranted her expandable heartbeat if grips of sentiment compromised her leashed resolve.

"Sleeping it off, Wolf Boy...?" she breathily scoffed, gazing down at the furred length of his canine muzzle, the ivory gleam of his curved incisor-fangs sickeningly daubed with viscid crimson. Narrowing an incredulous flit of her brandy-coffee irises deviously at his torn jacket, with attentive-thievish swiftness, cunningly, Selina ripped a threadbare sleeve off and swiped it over the beasty- soldier's jutted fangs; silvery incandescence of the moon limned over his wolfish bulk-a gravitic pulse headily beckoned with sensuous-virile- heat. Fully aware of her consequent impulse, Selina didn't reel back, as her lithe fingers disarmingly caressed whisper-soft pressure of abandoned reverence over his canine muzzle. "I'm guessing it was a fun night for you...?" she razzed, sassily, as the glossiness of her mahogany whorls half-draped sleekly over her leather-garbed shoulder. "If you even remember..."

He felt as if he were submerged in a dark ocean of oblivion with nothing and no one to guide him out. His dreams were listless and empty-a void that couldn't be sensed. Was he dead? Was he asleep? He couldn't say, but he imagined both to be a very cold experience that racked his entire being from head to toe. He felt restless and desperate to breach the surface. Light trickled into his world and with it, a cacophony of sounds and smells that bombarded his senses, causing him to release a whine of discomfort. His entire body rumbled and the smell of wet dog assaulted him. He wrinkled his nose through shut eyelids. He was groggy, but alive.

But where was he? What happened? He thought he heard someone talking to him.

"Who's there?" The voice that spoke was that of an unearthly monster breaching through the fog of his disillusion and pushing him towards total equilibrium. The voice had come from him! His eyes snapped open and he let loose a startled yell that sent waves of distress throughout his body. The sound of rushing waterfall deafened the ringing in his ears, but his focus was solely on the hideous face gazing back at him from the water beneath his rock.

"GRAAH!" The beast, the monster screamed at the exact moment he did himself. It was a spell-binding sight of such horror, it couldn't be unseen he believed it to be a nightmare. But inside he knew the truth as his memories began to resurface. But the tiniest part of his mind that begged for confirmation made him raise his hand to his nose, only to see beast-the wolf-also reach up to touch his snout. "No...NOOOO!" He let loose an agonizing howl.

The deep throatiness of his clamorous agony excruciatingly deafened into a panic-razed tenor; not wavering her cool gaze from the anthro-beasty-wolf; tactilely Selina reached out her gloved hand, kneading his damp chestnut fur with ghosting-arrestive pressure invested with her splaying caresses. With every lithe glide of her fingers, naked awareness of fevered decadence was starvedly edging in the coaxing flexion of her phantom-soft touch."Yeah, this won't be an easy slide for you, handsome," she deadpanned out tersely. "Lucky for you, I know how to play this game well..."

The barrage of emotions roaring through him had made him oblivious to the alarming fact that he wasn't alone out here. Everything felt alarming to him, from the faintest brush of wind whipping through the canopy of trees, to the cold water splashing onto his furry body draped over the rock. But what he hadn't anticipated was seeing the woman he had met at the tavern only a few nights ago standing on the neighbouring rock. Her long legs were hugged tight by brown leather boots and black trousers. A utility belt encompassed her waist where she carried numerous pockets along with a sheathe hunting knife, and a holstered pistol. Alarm set in and Bucky released an instinctive growl at her presence. "You...I remember you. What are you doing here?!" He growled as he stood in a hunched posture, clawed hands resting against the rock with his paws digging into the wet earth. Something about this woman unsettled him, but also felt oddly familiar.

She didn't look the least bit intimidated by his appearance. If anything, it probably intrigued her. It raised many questions, such as how she knew where to find him, and why she to understand what he was going through.

As the whitish scones of moonlight pierced through watery cascades, as her brandy irises gleamed deviously alight, with an amused quirk of her eyebrow, unflinchingly Selina watched the wolfy-soldier clunkily brace his arched hind-paws on the rocky surface, reining up controlled traction in his monstrous poise. Frustratedly emitted a growlier seethe, Bucky fostered onto a visage of restraint as his bushy tail reactively swayed against his muscled thighs on defensive accord, evident to the razored slash of his claws. "Let's just say I have experience with this..." she murmured in cryptic pitch, brusquely. "Things will get more complicated once you fully commit...No switchbacks."

"NO!" Bucky growled with a mounting impatience borne out of confusion. Who did this woman think she was? How could she possibly understand what he was going through? "This-This isn't who I am! I don't want this!" He growled with a biting taste of copper at the back of his throat. Blood, he realized. Horror tinged with disgust crept up on him once he realized he'd killed something or someone amidst the wolfish transformation. What if he had hurt one of his men? What if… What if he hurt Steve? "Steve...Cap. I gotta find him." Steve had been shot, he remembered. Its what set him off and made him mercilessly hunt down the sniper and rip his throat out.

He began to stalk forward with a single-minded purpose of finding his friend until he felt a hand latch onto his massive forearm. Shockingly enough, the strength behind the grip was enough to stop him in his tracks. He turned and stared incredulously at the mysterious woman's gloved hand that looked ridiculously small on his expanded limb, and yet was strong enough to hold him in place.

"If you want to ride this out, stay close..." Selina gritted, urgingly, as the feral variances of combative intimidation defensively mirrored the adrenalized fusion of their reactive poise, with a blinding swipe of her lithe hand, unerringly, Selina clutched his fur-sheathed forearm-their dynamic tenor became electrifyingly symphonic against the dragging knifepoint graze of her fingers."Listen, this new make-over will keep you from doing the things you want...Go back to your friend, and you'll be choking on a bullet..."

"Who the hell are you...What are you?" Maybe it was a trick of the sunlight, but Bucky thought he saw her eyes glow with flecks of gold. Brilliant and entrancing. The answer appeared to gleam right back at him as he continuously gazed into her eyes, understanding the scope of what she was telling him. He couldn't go back. Not like this. His friends would shoot first and ask questions later, even if Steve tried to stop them and explain. He couldn't go back..

So where did that leave him? Heartbreak and woe encompassed him and the seven-foot tall lycanthrope released a dismal sound. "Guess I have no choice," He uttered with a deep throaty voice. His snout bristled with emotions and he wanted nothing more than to retreat into a dark corner and expel them. Shrugging out of her grip, Bucky stomped across the path and began to march across the small river. He could see a small cave hidden near the edge of the waterfall, hidden by the cascading water rain down from high up.

He didn't turn to look if the woman was following him, but inwardly he hoped he wouldn't be left alone tonight.

--------------------------------

"Where are ya, Buck...?" Against the vacuous gloominess of the Bavarian forest, trudging his desperate momentum over the boggy ground; steeling himself against the heart-arresting reality that his best friend had been recaptured by another dispatched HYDRA convoy; after getting patched up back at the SSR encampment, Steve had relentlessly pushed himself to locate Bucky-nothing derailed him. Vigilantly, he paced through the forested warren, the potent aroma of evergreen burningly clashed against his temperate senses as he lowered into a mid-crouch, bracing his muscled haunches with tactical-honed agility.

Doing his utmost to brandish his unshakable reserve, Steve his hand to urgently signal Duggan not to approach his exposed position, Steve traced his leathered palm flatly over a massive canine pawprint evidently gouged in clumpier muddy heaps. Steering the glacial coolness of his azureous irises hawkishly in the infinite direction of the mountain pass, only to find tattered scraps of a distinct navy blue jacket had been wrenchingly discarded over shredded paratrooper boots. "No..." he murmured against despairing breath, as wetted bleariness mistily dampened his lashes, blonde tresses errantly clung over his tensing brow as he downcastly gazed at the blood-smeared remnants of Bucky's uniform. "Buck..."

"This doesn't look good, Cap…" Duggan remarked with a touch of remorse in his tone. He knew a wild animal attack when he'd seen one and whatever it was that attacked could still be lurking in the area. "Maybe Barnes has just been wounded? There's no way to know for sure." He knew how deep the friendship ran between Steve and Bucky and he wanted to offer his captain some measure of reassurance that his friend wasn't lost, captured or worse: dead. But he knew that in war, denial wasn't a luxury they could afford. MIA meant good as dead. The other Commandos somberly agreed but said nothing as they allowed Steve a moment to gather his thoughts.

Steve knew what Duggan was trying to tell him but steadily ignored his commentary. Unlike the rest of his men, he understood just what had happened to Bucky and it could only spell bad news for everyone. Against his own better judgment, he hadn't told the others about the changed Bucky was experiencing since he'd been bitten by that wild animal. Peggy and Howard had insisted but the last thing Steve wanted was for Jones, Falsworth and Duggan to see Bucky as a mad dog they would have to put down if he got too wild in their opinion. He had believed and hoped the inhibitor serum Howard developed would be enough to stave off Bucky's symptoms at least until they were finished here in Bavaria, but apparently it wasn't.

Now Bucky had run off, was probably unrecognizable and incredibly dangerous right now to anyone near him. He knew his friend wasn't dead. He could feel it. Steve's only hope was that he would somehow find his way back to them. "He's not dead...We'll give it a day." Steve finally said to his men who had been waiting patiently for him to give a directive. Steve pocketed the emblem from Bucky's jacket and rose up to face the others. "If we don't find him...we'll move on." It was a hard thing for him to say, but he knew what his friend would want.

"I don't think we should be searching this late. Whatever it was that attacked Barnes will be even more difficult to track out here." Falsworth said. Steve shrugged in agreement.

"We'll head back to camp. There's something I knew to tell all of you...about Bucky. Something you probably won't believe." He said as they begin to make their way back. The others exchange unsure glances before Duggan chuckles.

"Trust me, Cap. At this point, nothing can surprise us."

--------

It was still nightfall when Bucky had awoken that night. The sight of a crackling fire at the entrance to the cave caused alarm to set in before he sensed that familiar female scent he'd come to identify. The warm lighting allowed him to see his furry body that cast an ominous shadow upon the cave-wall. He let loose a tired growl as he settled on a rock close to the burning pit.

He had slept easier that night, dreaming of times past where he and Steve used to come home dressed in pirate costumes after a long night of trick-or-treating through Brooklyn's commercial district. Times were happier then. Simple. The only horrors to be experienced were the bullies they'd angered with a barrage of eggs, and the ghoulish costumes worn by other trick-or-treaters on the streets. How did his life change so drastically that he was now a walking terror that parents told their children scary stories about at night?

Was he going to spend the rest of his life this way? He wondered as he gazed at the gargantuan fingers held out in front of him, and the razor-sharp nails that could slice open human skin with ease. "I'm a monster…" He growled mournfully.

Quirking up her pointer ears, grudgingly she registered the anguished gravelliness of his despondent timbre, nonchalantly the wolfish vixen kept herself sveltely crouched on her lissom haunches; bracing her fore-paws over the rocky peak. Against the firelight sconces that enchantingly contrasted over the vibrant silkiness of her dishevelled mahogany fur, with a rueful thrust of her delicate muzzle, inadvertently she narrowed the delicate length of her canine muzzle down with chagrined ease, readily she caught the saltiness of heated wetness-a banking scent of unwarranted heartache that wouldn't be staved down- the wolfy sergeant was a verminous captive within the forsaken thralls of a chastened reality. "Don't get comfortable there, Wolf Boy," she rasped, grittily, in sardonic pitch, her luminous bronze orbs fixedly glaring at the bulkier he-wolf. "This is just a one-time exception, nothing else..."

Bucky didn't think he could be startled anymore after the surprises he'd experienced over the past couple of nights. But the deep feminine voice caused hot anticipation to run through him, causing him to nearly jump to his feet. Remember what he had witnessed early today, his suspicions were all but confirmed as he observed a pair of bronze eyes gazing at him from the shadows on the opposite side of the fire-pit. "You're like me, aren't you?" Bucky rumbled. It all made sense-her strength, her confidence and this familiarity he felt towards her. He squared his shoulders and sniffed, capturing that floral heady scent that caused his blood to burn hotly. It was intoxicating just as it was alluring. His inner beast recognized the female as a shared member of his race and howled inwardly with delight. "Show me..." He rumbled once more, trying to control his heightened state of awareness.

The feverous implosion of wanton-addictive heat grippingly purged out deep-seated tension, coquettishly with a foxier glint melding within her autumn- bronze depths-the innate need of sensuous release effusively commanded him with abandoned urgency as he unstintingly encroached on his arched hind-paws with strained clunkiness, leashing down unslaked aggression. Predatory menace roguishly surged through the graven-cords of his furred bulk-intimate tension rode on high voltage as he breathlessly angled his canine muzzle up, against conscious sanity and growingly inhaled the cherry-infused decadence of her feminine-naked scent- a headier aphrodisiac rapture of beckoning ecstasy. "Not what you were expecting, Wolf Boy..." she purred in a breathy undertone, vaulting balletically off her perch in a distractive succession of her effortless graces.

With a deceptive play of kittenish mischief, Selina had friskily sashayed a hairbreadth from the hunkish anthro-canine, and blindly felt the shadowy pulse of ardent heat, as the jutted length of his fanged-muzzle hungrily delivered intensifying pressure over the lithe-contours of her furred shoulder. Fascinatingly, the phantom flexion of his clawed fingers, brushingly shifted each virile- driven caress over tauten-supple curves of her mid-drift, tactilely revving up her arousal. "A little close don't you think, handsome?"

A she-wolf was the last thing Bucky would've expected to be meeting in the dim hours of the night. And yet, it was a surprisingly spell-binding sight that caused his piercing eyes to slowly drink in the furry anthro-form to the last detail. She was as nearly as tall as him, possessing a keen muscular shape with layers of dark fur encompassing her lithe frame. Her claws were longer-sleeker that made them appear almost as knives upon her hands. She was an imposing sight that would have no doubt inspired terror in the hearts of ordinary men who would see her-see them both-as a werewolf monster.

But to Bucky, the sight was as ardent to him as seeing a naked woman in front of him. He should've felt abashed by the thought, but it was as unshakable as the burning intense hunger that surged throughout his body. The beast within howled with vigor and craved to have the she-wolf enveloped into his embrace. Her scent of was as intoxicating to him as a hot whiskey and he felt drunk with allure which caused him to take long quick strides in her direction, backing her up against the wall to which he pounced forward trapping her between his arms as his hands planted into the rock wall.

"Not close enough," he growled with a deep throaty voice that conveyed nothing but deep desire as his luminous blue eyes gazed into her glimmering golden orbs. Her warm breath wafted onto his snout, causing him to lap at his incisors and growl.

The definite promise of untamed intimacy was damn alarming, uncompromisingly headier rushes of his panty breath echoed with bestial fervency over the sleek contours of her delicate muzzle; cravingly against the unfeigned pulse of evocative lucidity, Selina braced herself as his clawed-fingers edged virile-sensuous reverence over the unkempt tresses silkily fusing over the litheness of her shoulders. Gutturally jutting his muzzle with an hungered thrust of rampant demand-unanswered longing, Bucky was aware of the crushing strength of his massive paw, he shakily bracketed a possessive grip over her furred nape, capturing the implosive need of breathtaking release, as he grazed a chaste drag of his incisor-fangs a breadth from her muzzle, reaching for a heady kiss-only to heart-crushingly realize they weren't human. Gripping onto the muscled heaviness of his forearm, Selina gazed into his sweltry grayish-aquamarine depths, urging him to hold back. "It's just not the same, huh?"

A timber growl emanated from the back of the wolf's throat. Heady and desirous as he became immersed in the spell-binding scent wafting off of the she-wolf in front of him who had awakened something deep unshakable from within. A dangerous craving that was equal parts frightening as well as euphoric. Her question rattled his thoughts, allowing the man from within to regain some semblance of awareness as he blinked repeatedly, his pupils normalizing despite their unbreakable proximity. "Maybe…" He rumbled as if lost in thought. Unconsciously the lengthy digits on his gargantuan hands trailed up and down her forearm, almost teasingly as he felt her resound against him. His hands closed around her arms as he brought her closer. "...I can get used to this." The tips of their muzzles brushed against one another, an act so leisurely it was instinctual-it was perfect.

Answering the surging need as their canine muzzles sultrily edged with beckoned grace to mirror a rush of wet heat, starvingly against the unhinged-addictive thrill of bone-deep abandon. Blindingly, Selina felt his paw-hand deftly trace the underside length of her furred jaw with a phantom caress as the unslaked upheaval for headier-novel supremacy burningly rode through her. Dragging pants of their breath rampantly echoed in an outpaced-wonderous cadence as Bucky naughtily flashed her a toothy smirk, urging her wolfish form to become his flesh and blood reality as she arched the bustier cushiness of her furred swells against the steel-honed rigidity of his bulked torso, gazing in the voltaic blaze of lucent sapphire that smolderingly melded in his irises. Groaningly, Bucky thrust his muzzle with a headlong promise of their sensuous havoc-an irresistible vitality. "It's funny in the morning you won't remember this dance..." she murmured, hushedly, as the heated dampness of his tongue feverishly glided kiss-soft pressure of her delicate features. "Do you want to risk it?"

It was a tempting offer that he wouldn't have thought to question. Not in his present state of mind. To the animal-the wolf-within, he inwardly howled with eagerness to dive deep into the abyss of pleasure and lay claim to the willing she-wolf and have her become his mate. The solidifying pact would ensure their safety, their shelter from the storms raging throughout the world where humans hunted them for sport. But there was something amiss about all of this. That much he was able to discern by the she-wolf's sudden appearance and willingness to pull him head-first into this new world he'd become a part of. He was mystified by her just the same as he was drawn to her. She was a beautiful and cunning creature that he would relish the thought of chasing into the moonlight.

Even if it was for one night they would be together, there could be risks. The same risks humans took each time they had i***. His mind conjured the thought of children, but remarkably they were a trio of furry pups swarming him and the she-wolf in front of him with loving affection. It was a strange thought at the same time it was a dangerous one. "I don't even know your name," he growled, allowing himself a moment to bask in the warmth of her heated proximity before slowly slinking back. "We should get some rest," he growled, forcing himself to the ground to lay on his side.

As the beasty-wolf rested sulkily near the makeshift firepit, huffishly, pursing her sleekier muzzle, Selina became painstakingly attuned with the pained resonance gravelly emitting out of him. Quashing down instinctive urgency against grounded relevance, she was inexorably grappled into an unwarranted deadlock of rigged consequence - she was on the knife-edge of being a disposable fugitive against the parasitic ranks of HYDRA. As her bronze irises unblinkingly flitted over the silvery light of the moon ethereally haloing over furred bulkiness delineated under his dishevelled chestnut fur Selina gazed at his tremulous paw-hand that glided quiveringly over his slacken muzzle on dejected accord, as hitching choke-off sobs gurgled raspily up his throat. "Look, I usually don't give something back unless it's worth a trade, but..." she paused, tersely, watching defensive tension rapt over the furrier thickness of his shoulders. "You did kiss me, James Barnes, so I guess that makes an exception for you to call me...Selina."

It was an unexpected revelation to him that left him momentarily stricken with surprise. If he was a betting man, she didn't reveal her name to many people. Briefly, he wondered if it was a fake name to deflect his curiosity. He quickly shut away the thought knowing she had no reason to lie. As flirtatious as she carried herself around him, she was still very secretive and private with the details of her life just as any person would be. But it nevertheless made him feel appreciative that she chose to trust him with such a personal thing about herself. And...she wasn't wrong, he did decide to leave a lasting impression that was still setting his blood on fire. He felt suddenly connected to her in a way that he didn't realize until now, he'd been yearning for. Before he could reconsider himself, he turned onto his side to face her and stared into her glimmering orbs of gold-smiling with his smouldering gaze. "Selina...I like it. Somethin' tells me I'm one of the lucky few to know it. Fair is fair, darlin'. You can call me "Bucky"." He rumbled as he flexed his jaws as if yawning. "What do you say we get some shut-eye?"

He watched her carefully as she silently laid beside him. A short distance apart but they could feel each other as if they were pressed closely against one another. The events of the night played in their thoughts repeatedly before sleep would claim them. Neither of them stirred as they slowly drifted closer into a warm embrace, their cinnamon-coloured fur bathed by the crackling of flaming embers to the firepit with the stars shining above.

------

Feverish grogginess blearily grounded her into content; dozily, Selina temped down a breathy groan, as she eased her cheek off the rocky surface tactilely aware of the virile nakedness of hard-corded flesh-a thermic heat bodily contrasting against as the frigid morning ambiance ushed October chilliness starkly ghosted over the freckled pearlescence of her shoulders. The pillow-soft lushness of her voluminous lips grazed over the palm as she threaded her lithe fingers consciously through sleep-tousled whorls of mahogany, feeling the spooning heaviness of a muscled arm embracingly bracket over supple curves of her mid-drift with blinded reverence. "M-Must be morning..." she rasped against a throated moan, sleepily "Too early..."

A deep comfortable groan emanated from behind her brought about by the shift of her awakening. The arm that was wrapped around her waist suddenly tugged her closer as if alarmed by the thought of her escaping the warm security she was blanketed in. She followed the arm to its bearer and saw an enchanting sight she had not been expected. A very human, very n***, Bucky Barnes laid on his side with his head resting against scattered remains of his clothing that made a make-shift pillow. His brunette bangs hung over his face, his stubbled jaw twitched as he muttered something soft and intelligible in his dream. Interestingly enough, he appeared more relaxed than he'd been for the past week. As if the days of unending pain brought about by the transformation were gone with no hint that they had been there before.

His eyelids fluttered and his brow pinched. Slowly but surely, they opened and crystal blue eyes reflected the light of the morning sun. They immediately snapped closed and Bucky groaned as he covered his eyes. "Someone get the blinds," he sleepily murmured as he pressed his face into a sea of dark mahogany and inhaled the soothing lavender scent.

Quirking her eyebrow as she registered the murmurous gravelliness in his suave-timbered drawl, amusingly, Selina gazed at the hunkier radiance of his graven-edge features that held traces of boyish chubbiness as the wolfish shagginess of his tresses disheveledly clung over his pointed-tip ears—under the fringe of his lashes, the glacial steeliness of his heavy-lidded aqueous irises bleary mirrored her stare, achingly capturing a riotous heartbeat—an untamed wolf incarnate. Groaningly Bucky dragged out a fevered breath, as his incisor fangs unabashedly grazed over his pouty underlip. "Well this is the first morning I actually like waking up too, soldier boy," she quipped in snarkier pitch, her full-bow lips curvily played off a jaunty smirk, as she roved her dark gaze vexatiously at the cave's entry point, as encroaching silhouettes of black uniform HYDRA enforcers were readily poised in sentry-mode. "A girl can get used to this..."

An oblivious Bucky was only aware of two things; his body was no longer a fur walking terror, and he was laid sprawled out on the ground with a beautiful dame pressed snugly against him. Not just any beautiful dame. "Selina? ...Selina." He would never get tired of saying that name, it rolled right off the tongue causing a rush of heat to burst through him. His eyelids peeled open and he gazed wondrously into those warm brown eyes gazing back at him. "So...it wasn't just a dream," he said with a boyish smirk curled at his shapely lips. He had slept so peacefully last night, dreaming of mahogany curls and glowing amber eyes above him-beneath him.

It took seconds for him to realize that they were both in fact naked beneath a tattered sheet that was used for tents. He would've wondered where it came from were he not so enamoured by the state of the woman beside him who made him feel so many things; life, excitement...desire. His blue eyes flicked to her lips, watching as she bit on her bottom lip with a sharp incisor still noticeable. Were he not so distracted he would've noticed her eyes had flicked towards the outside of the cave as if seeing something he didn't.

"Good morning to you too, darlin'." Bucky couldn't help himself as he leaned towards and pressed his lips against hers. It was meant to be a chaste but clear show of affection, but the noise she made, a soft and heady m*** that transitioned into a sigh caused hot desire to flood through Bucky's veins as he threaded his fingers through her curly locks. The kiss deepened and he felt her applying firm moist pressure, her nails trailing up his biceps towards his neck. Bucky felt himself becoming lost in a sea of passion, drifting aimlessly as he surrendered to the instincts of his heart and body.

That was until his hearing detected a cluttering of footsteps and something fast and sharp whizzed through the air. "GAAAH!" Pain exploded through him as if he'd been lanced with a hundred needles up his arm. The kiss was broken and a gasp of shock escaped him. In his n*** arm was a tranquillizer dart with a sickly green fluid pouring into him.

Glancing over his shoulder with an impassive reaction, evicting a throb of betrayal that thrummed a chord bone-deep cunningly Selina watched HYDRA operatives-the gatecrashers- mechanically advancing with sniper rifles poised, their synced precision cobra-like as she caressed a splayed palm lithely over his bicep with nail-dragging ministrations with a vicious flex. "You should be more careful who you play in the dark with, handsome..." she purred, wickedly, grazing her kiss-swollen lips over his stubbled jaw, as heated breath ghosted out."Hail HYDRA..."

"N-N-No…" The sting of betrayal hit Bucky harder than any bullet wound once he realized what was happening. He'd been lied to-deceived by a Hydra agent who led him into a trap. His immediate inclination was to fight back, to recoil from her touch despite how much it pained him to part from her. But his muscles failed him. Whatever they had shot him with had paralyzed his limbs to the point he could do nothing but swim through a sea of fatigue. He was drowning, feeling the world bearing down upon him and pulling him under. Through hazy eyes he watched as Selina rose up to her feet with the sheet draped around her, leaving him exposed to the operatives that entered the cave and locked his hands into reinforced cuffs. He thought he saw a look of remorse in Selina's eyes before they carried him away out of view.

"Steve…" Bucky called out somberly as he was carried out into the daylight. The sun lingered high in the skies, blinding him to the point he could do nothing but give in to the tranquilizing agent permeating his senses. He fell in and out of consciousness; feeling detached from his own body-his own world. He could hear voices surrounding him. The warm touch of the daylight evaporated as he was dragged indoors. He felt himself being laid out on a table. The cold sterile surface brought back an onslaught of horrific memories, as did the face he saw hovering over him. "No...Not you..."

"Good morning, Sergeant Barnes..." A toadish cadence sneeringly resonated from the jowled-faced HYDRA doctor as his stubbier fingers maliciously grazed over Bucky's pointed ear with assessing ministrations of surgical-unmerciful- precision, like a prophetic divergence, heralded a new bestial evolution, as furrier skeins of chestnut melded with flesh, while his other hand clutched Bucky's GI dog tags, hypnotically dangling the metallic chain in a taunting sway of a pendulum a breadth from the young Commando's sweat-damp brow with possessive ease, creepily, stoking up dormant aggression, as Bucky half-paralyzed, jutted his stubbled jaw with fevered strain into a defensive clench, refusing to cater Zola's unsated-reaping indulgence. "Time to finish what we've started..."

-----

A full night and day had passed in the Howling Commandos camp, and Bucky hadn't returned. A tension lingered over the band of brothers that was growing uncomfortable as time passed, and none knew how to broach the subject of Bucky's disappearance to the vigilant captain. Steve stood at the ridge of the camp, staring out into the vast forests like a statue for hours on end. He didn't move a muscle, not even so much as a twitch, and it had begun to weigh in on the several members of the unit who knew that one of them would have to help Captain America see the grim truth of things. Duggan wished it didn't have to be him, but he wasn't going to wait for Falsworth, Swayer or Jones to get off their a*** and do it first. As he made his way across the camp from his tent, he was surprised to see several of the men huddling close towards one of their parked jeeps where the Captain himself seemed to be deeply engrossed in a map laid out. Were they moving out? Duggan jogged over towards the group just as Steve looked up and waved him over.

"What do we got, Cap?" Duggan asked readily.

"Marita came in this mornin' after scouting the valley ahead. We thought the news of a Hydra facility were just rumors being spread to deflect Allied resources into investigating dead-ends. But sure enough, he found tire-tracks headed to the ridge of the mountains. High up here," Steve pointed his pencil towards a narrow gap between two towering teeths of rocks. "There's an old castle that belonged to a wealthy Bavarian family called the Struckers. We think they're connected to Hydra and have been letting them use their castle as a research base. If Bucky has been captured, this is where they would've taken him."

"Seems like a Hail Mary, Cap." Jones expressed with a frown. "How can we be sure is a prisoner after what you told us yesterday?" It was a valid point, Steve knew. The men's reaction to Bucky being a werewolf had been various from shock to disbelief. Slowly they all seemed to be coming around to the idea based on the evidence found, but now none were sure how to approach the situation with their missing and possibly dangerous commando.

"Bucky might be dangerous, but he's still vulnerable. My gut tells me that Hydra will want him alive, and they'll throw as many bodies as they can at him until he gets overwhelmed." Steve explained. A look of concern flashed over his features at the thought of what kind of torture his best friend could be going through if he was indeed being held captive again. "Regardless if they have Bucky or not, this is Hydra facility is a priority target that we can't ignore."

The commandos shared silent exchanges, all understanding the importance of what lay ahead. "So when do we leave?" Duggan asked with an enthusiastic grin, prompting nods of approval from the others. A relieved Steve could only smile at his men with gratitude.

'Hang on, Buck. We're coming for you.'

-------

Against the caliginous ambiance of the HYDRA-infested dungeon, Baroque-Romanesque columns gothically fused with the stairway, as gossamer webbing adorned the mustiness of the stone-brick walls, slinkily with her brazen prowess, Selina advanced her soft-footed paces closer to the laboratory station, her coffee irises fleetingly caught glimpses of liquid bluish vials and surgical instruments placed on medical trolleys as traumatic-razed cadences agonizingly echoed from stacked cages. She had breached the forbidden underground of Zola's hellish domain of mutative butchery where soldiery denizens became forsaken.

The odorous- macabre stench reekingly enwreathed over gutted-out skeletal canine forms-defective captives that had no tactical usefulness to serve in the HYDRA ranks. Evicting a traitorous impulse that strummed against her heartbeat of unwarranted-knifepoint betrayal, without staunching up her cautious deterrence, Selina roved a sidelong glance at the reinforced chains bolted on the grimy wall against from a vacant cage, shackling Bucky's slumped form into anesthetic-hypodermic- thrall, as his unkempt tresses of chestnut grungily webbed over the graven-edged planes of his bruised cheekbones. The young sniper-wolf appeared exhaustingly grappled into chasmal submission. He was cruelly denuded from shreds of his tattered Commando uniform, athletic- corded definition- that etched cuttingly into bracketed washboard ridges of his tauten abdomen was damply glazed with feverish sweat.

A contractive numbness dredged in her veins, as Bucky emitted a growly pant. "Look, I don't care if you play the silent game, just know it wasn't personal...I did what they wanted me to do, handsome," she gritted, ruefully, her dark irises trepidatiously staring that demonic Kracken-skull of HYDRA insignia on her leather jacket's sleeve-a brand of her morphic servitude-her dynastic bloodline of point-blank relevance. Gnawing kittenishly on her lush underlip, she tried her damnedest to hold back a shaky breath. "D-Doesn't mean that I wanted this..."

He said nothing to her in response. His sweaty bare-chested form was shackled back against the wall, arms held in place by manacles designed to restrain a wild animal in a zoo enclosure. But even in his secured state, he exuded strength and a festing buildup of emotions that threatened to overwhelm him. Hurt. Betrayal. Anger. They were only three of the emotions he was feeling in this moment, but they were perhaps the most devastating to him as he helplessly glared at the brunette in front of him. A woman he had only this morning shared something deep and intimate with in his moment of vulnerability only to discover he'd been deceived.

"What did you want?" He asked with a bitter taste in his mouth. The narrowed squint of his eyes conveyed nothing but displeasure as he tugged at his restraints, trying and failing to disguise the hurt in his watery gaze. "Was it all an act? Everything?" He seethed with a quivered lip. "You were just sweet talking me into letting my guard down so you could bring me back to your viper's nest?!" He yelled ruefully allowing a single tear to shed but nothing more. He'd give her nothing else to show how much her betrayal hurt him-how Hydra was so close to breaking him.

Feigning the steeliness of her ebbed tension, unwaveringly Selina glared at the evident treks of bloodied drool that smeared over his dimpled chin, as his sweltry grayish-ultramarine irises piercingly scythed with luminous-bestial heat, evident to a throaty snarl that she registered. "I'm not someone that you can trust..." she rebuffed in a velvety rasp, tartily, with balletic grace, she fluidly pivoted a breadth near the medical trolley, as her coffee irises flitted over the metal—calibrated instruments—the murderous arsenal of torture at her impulsive disposable. With a thievish precision of her swiping her leather-clad fingers, unerringly, Selina clutched onto a bone scalpel, viscerally captured his arrested pulse at knifepoint, as she flashed her makeshift weapon; brandishing cool rapt of indifference over her elvish features. "I was taught the knife always cut deep when the angles shift..."

He wasn't sure what to say to her as he listened to her cut-throat words he would've construed as taunting. But the moment she picked up the scalpel he immediately became apprehensive. His toned muscled coiled in preparation for what he perceived to be an imminent lethal threat against him. His jaw tightened and his fingers hardened into fists, watching as she moved with an elegance that was swan-like and enchanting. It drew his eyes to her alluring gaze and the coyness he saw on her face confused him. Especially once he saw her pocket the scalpel in the b***-pocket of her jacket and her form straightened to one of at-readiness. What was she doing? The answer eluded him until he heard a new step of footsteps entering the abysmal lab.

"Good afternoon, Sergeant Barnes. I hope you enjoyed your rest. Tell me, are the manacles uncomfortable for you?" The short and stocky man that entered sent a jolt of unease through Bucky's body but it was quashed by the overwhelming hatred that threatened to consume him. He couldn't help but to lurch forward only to cry out in pain as his limbs twisted against the restrains hold him in place.

"I will take that as a "yes"." Arnim Zola removed his glasses and proceeded to clean them with a handkerchief while casually listening to Bucky's painful whimpers. "Now, mein junge (my boy). You mustn't overextend yourself. I would have thought it was a lesson you would have learned by now."

"Go to hell, you sadistic b***!" Bucky growled behind sweaty dark tresses. His clenched jaw revealed rows of sharpened incisors that gleamed with malice. A sight that would've provoked fear in ordinary men. Zola, however, merely smirked with the adoration of a parent seeing its child take their first steps.

"Hydra put considerable time and effort into their investment in you, Barnes. An investment stolen by that shield-wearing buffoon months ago. Were it not for the skills of my esteemed operative here, I feared you would have been lost to us forever." Zola said, glancing at Selina with a calculating eye. "Quite the silver-tongue she has, does she not? To lure my lost cub back to his new home. I think proper introductions should be made by now, shouldn't they, fraulein? Go on, tell him who you really are, and who your family is."

Cringingly at the virulent tempo of maniacal-crazed insanity that resonated out the bloated-faced toad, unperturbed Selina levelled her coffee irises at the baronial crest of the Strucker legacy etched above the hearth-an imperious, warmongering bloodline of Roman-like conquers that deceptively reigned with tragic vendettas of mortal betrayal. She was condemningly bred into the Iron-Cross legion, helmed by her father: Wolfgang Strucker; only to become remade into a virtuosic -lethal marionette harnessing the calibre of stealth infiltration-a weaponized siren of covert espionage in the HYDRA ranks.

Glaring at the porcine doctor with a flintier intensity of her brandy depths, with revamped disgust, Selina dragged out a breath, scathingly, as he wobbled to his cluttered desk, lowering a fleshy hand with demented ease over a syringe filled with a greenish liquid-the genetic infusion of that would usher a carnage-reaping reality of lycan supremacy, as his piggish sneer tellingly conveyed his sadistic indulgence. "Well it's a bit complicated..." she gritted in huskier pitch, sardonically. "Besides I'm not sure if Charm boy can handle it..."

"You are too modest, my dear. Better to discard all illusions. After all, you and Sergeant Barnes will be spending much more time together." Zola's sinister implication left both Bucky and Selina confounded as they discreetly shared a look with each other. "Beautiful is it not," the scientist said as he holds the vial of purple fluid up for them to see. "Something so unassuming-yet capable of turning even the most pitiful man into a beast of unstoppable destruction. The Red Skull believes magical relics of the past are the way to secure total victory for Hydra. He has his weapons. I have mine. Science is the future, the weapon I have cultivated to ensuring not only victory, but a new beginning...for all beings." His spellbound eyes meet Bucky's cold blue, lost in a dream as if gazing upon a work of art he had carved by his own hands. Bucky for his part wasn't willing to remain silent as he scoffed at the evil scientist's ambition.

"I've already heard this noise before, k***. Why don't you just kill me and be done with it already? Better than listening to you monologue about turning me into your mindless puppet. Its not gonna happen." Bucky wasn't putting on a show for anyone's benefit. Something inside told him that Steve and the Commandos wouldn't ignore this place for too long. When they came, they would raze it and everything to the ground. Bucky didn't care if he was caught in the middle, he just wanted to see Zola's world crumble around him and wallow into total defeat.

"Yankees," Zola spat. "So ill mannered and arrogant. No matter. Once I inject you with this, I won't have to hear your prideful bluster anymore. You see the creature that bit you was a pure wolf, injected with a modicum of human DNA and the super-soldier serum laced to it. An imperfect trial with disastrous results, but one that we learned much from. Time and patience is key, and you have seen the fruits of my labor..." Zola motioned towards Selina, beaming with pride as her iris glimmered golden in the pale light of the room. "Perfected."

A shivery flexion of unwarranted dread knifed through her veins on heart-paralyzingly accord when she caught Zola's froggish eyes slimily narrowing at tautened curves of her svelte midriff; a phantom throb of generated white-hot pulses of contractive tension as Selina deftly splayed her lithe palm over her abdomen, kneading a reactive caress over the feminine suppleness that would bloatedly swell with morphic heaviness-straddling her into inescapable-grievous thrall of unremitting anguish. The naked revelation of her damnable existence was to fatteningly deliver a wolven litter. Reeling back in tremorous reaction, breathlessly Selina gnashed her incisor fangs, curbing down the lethal tumults of ferocity as she watched Zola gesture his stubbier hand in direction of the 'breeding' cage. She couldn't run. "You don't own me.." she hissed against a snarl, gazing unwaveringly at the syringe. "Put the damn stuff in him and I'll do something unpleasant..."

"My dear. You have belonged to Hydra ever since the moment Herr Strucker pledged all in his name to its cause. That includes his fortress, his massive wealth...and his only daughter. Do not misplace your anger towards me, Fraulein. You flirt with the darkness when you go out at night, seeking spoils to satiate your thrilling need for adventure. But now it is time for you to stop running, and accept the duty your name demands of you." With quick striding steps, Zola made his way towards Bucky with the needle held towards him. Bucky stiffened and recoiled backwards, knowing it was futile to make himself small as possible while he was restrained to the wall. "Together with Sergeant Barnes." With a quick jab of the needle into Bucky's exposed arm, the scientist pumps the putrid purple fluid into Bucky's arm while he groans out in discomfort. "You will sire a new species of soldiers. Fast as the wind, deadly as the night-they will know nothing but total obedience to Hydra."

The chemical infusion surged as the bruising flesh of his muscled forearm sweatily oozed as unbidden vulnerability crescendoed against their echoed heartbeats; vertiginously as choked against belching heave, Bucky angled the heaviness of his jaw in exhausted fruition as the fevered intensity of his grayish-aqueous depths blankly glared at her with stark heartache while as his pointed ears had furrily outstretched against his temples. "Alright..." she rasped in disarming tenor vehemently as Zola prepared another syringe of a mutative cocktail. "I'll do it..."

Zola turned and spared Selina a curious look. "Is that so?" He asked, surprised by her malleable acceptance. "That is refreshing to hear, fraulein. Perhaps there is hope for you yet." Shifting his focus once more to Bucky, Zola watched as the serum began to do its work and begin forcing Bucky's transformation in a manner that could not be surprised-could not be reversed. "As for you, Sergeant Barnes, I believe this will be the last time we will truly speak. Once the serum is done, you will be nothing but a blank canvas for me to sketch whatever I wish. You will become the Fist of Hydra-lurking the shadows, always prepared to eviscerate our enemies with one stroke. You, and your off-spring."

Bucky said nothing, unable to fight against the rampant flow of discomfort shooting through his body. His words were lodged at the back of his throat that closed in on him, making him feel as if he were suffocating. His dismal eyes make contact with Selina's who promptly shifted her gaze from him, unable to stare at the hurt and betrayal in his eyes. But the screams that followed couldn't be ignored. Bucky's flesh rippled and fur slowly sprouted from every pore on his skin. His face was contorted in agony as he trembled, fighting against the poisonous serum seeking to undo his humanity.

It was at that exact moment, the building rumbled as if the very Earth had shifted. Zola and Selina stagger while a number of his instruments clattered off his desk. It was so sudden, so unexpected that Zola did not have time to voice his confusion before he heard an alarm blare and numerous Hydra security guards were rushing through the corridors outside his laboratory. Were they under attack? "See to it he makes no trouble." Zola said to Selina as he makes to leave the room. He sees an exasperated look upon the young woman's face which sparks the old man's ire. "And stay here! I would hate having to reduce such a capable operative as yourself to living as a mindless brood in the kennels."

With that, the scientist rushed out of the laboratory in search of his head of security, leaving Selina alone with Bucky.

---

True to Zola's held suspicion, Castle Strucker hadn't been hit by a sizeable earthquake or even a mountain avalanche. It was a very heavy, very lethal assemblage of frag grenades being thrown into the shipping courtyard by a conspicuously heavy trooper wearing a Hydra blazer. "I'm gonna need a long bath after this," Duggan groaned at his disguise as he picked up a discarded Hydra weapon. Rushing to a platform, he began raining fire on a unit of Hydra guards taking cover behind flaming barrels.

The soldier grinned devilishly as the barrels exploded, sending debris and gory limbs across the yard. Duggan ducked behind cover just in time to avoid an energy projectile being shot at him, only to respond in kind. The gatekeeper was incinerated into ashes, filling the commando with a grim sense of satisfaction after seeing so many of his Allied brothers perish by these weapons. He marched towards the security boot hand then pulls the lever on the control panel. "Open-sesame."

The gates to the castle open, allowing a caravan of SSR reinforcements to drive in, led by Peggy Carter and Colonel Phillips at the helm. "Cavalry is here, Cap." Duggan says into his radio.

"Copy. Secure the perimeter, make sure no one gets away. They'll be looking for the backdoor." Captain America replied through his transmission.

"Guess I'll go knock on the backdoor." Duggan brushed his mustache and nodded, making his way out of the booth. That was until another voice came in on the transmission and stopped him.

"I'm on it, sergeant. Rejoin the captain. He'll be needing you in there."

Uneager to argue, Duggan did exactly that.

----

Against a splinter fraction of vestigial awareness, errantly Selina gazed at the graven-roughen contours of Bucky's lengthening jaw mortifyingly furrier as the boyish chubbiness of hunkier beauty heart-wrenchingly fused with chestnut skeins in morphic succession, as corded thews of athletic-honed muscles tautly stretched against the bulging-mutative rotundity of his bulkier mass. Grimacingly, against erratic convulsions, as Bucky choked back sobbing breaths, his shapely lips hung voicelessly agape, evident to his curved incisors grazingly jutting into a twined length of canine fangs-bestial havoc that echoed with implosive urgency.

Driven by the addictive heat beckoning with the undeniable-sensuous rush of escalating hunger, readily Selina answered that headier cadence of their duelling ferocity became symphonically rapturous for her to evade. In a poised variance of her controlled grace, hushedly the lithe delicateness of her gloved palm ardently feathered over the bonier curves his furred muzzle with chaste—feminine reverence. Everything became unstoppable as tension forbiddingly amplified into headlong -denotative abandon.

The decadent fusion of wolfish heat blood-poundingly surged in their bones as Selina curvaceously arched the bustier swells of her voluptuous breasts against the heavier solidity of his chest; catching the viscerous tenor of his resistance, as the flexing of her sleekier thighs heavily intensified at the moment she dragged into the wolven thrall, achingly feeling a bushier-canine- tail furrily emerge through the ripped visages of her garbed backside. "Y-You're not alone in this, handsome..." she murmured in a breathy rasp, as her fingernails inexorably sharpened in bestial sync. Riding on the morphic fringe, shimmeringly the vibrance of her bronze irises gazed into cool whitish sapphire as Bucky raggedly grazed his fangs with virile-driven precision over her graceful nape, stealing her pulse against fevered- breaths. "I don't belong to HYDRA..."

Bucky couldn't bring himself to say anything. Not at first. The pain of her betrayal was too fresh for him to discard. But the longer he gazed into her deep brown eyes, he felt as if he were falling back under her warm spell. Could he trust her? He couldn't be sure. What he did know was what he was feeling at that moment. Longing, desire, tenderness. There was an innate kinship-a bond that couldn't be broken. If anything, the beast within begged for it to be solidified with a rush of c*** heat. But he forced the beast to heel, to think beyond the physical aspects of desire and focus in on the burning emotion that needed a proper outlet.

They were connected, they were both cursed into becoming beasts of war for an evil regime. But they were still human, and they understood what they wanted: each other.

"Neither of us do, darlin'." He responded finally with a deep growl, gazing at her from behind sweat drenched locks. He grimaced as his balled fists began to ache with the pressure of expanding digits and sharpening claws. "Now's our chance to do somethin' about it. What do you say? Are we gonna spend our lives in cages, or are we gonna chase the moon...together?"

The whiskey-roughen huskiness of his gravelly timbre resonated with contralto smoothness; his clawed hand fiercely strained against in warring traction of the chains, edging to reach the delicate fineness of her jaw, Selina braced against the sensuous maelstrom-a definite surrender against forbidden heat between them. A subtle glide of his veined knuckles became caressingly invested with a shivery whisper of virile need, their novel reality of infinite passion was ushered against boneless-electrified gravity shockingly drag them into bestial throes of a feverous-indescribable rapture. With gracing steadiness, Bucky cupped her jaw as his sensuous-pouty lips breathlessly angled to deliver a feathery tracery of melding wet heat over the crimson flush of her sheening, readied pillowy lips. "Uh...M'not sure how we're gonna do this..." The murmurous suaveness of his Brooklyn drawl hitched in panty breaths. "I-I just wanna try..."

An hungered cadence fierily stoked a possessive contrast, propelling them deeper into a soul-racking communion, milky-white suppleness of her flesh became sheathed with mahogany as she felt the arrowing drift of his nose hotly scrunched into her furrier cheek as the reined grip of his clawed fingers tactilely kneaded amorous reverence through her dishevelled tresses, keeping her gloriously captive against heated rushes of untamed fervency that coupled with a bruising thrust of his open-mouthed kiss throatily crushed the plusher lushness of her swelled lips voluminously wide—a raging promise of tempestuous intimacy-a floored awakening that breathtakingly surged into an incendiary nova of white-heat that searingly arced between them. The jutted curve of his fangs grazingly tugged fiercer pressure on her recaptured underlip as bone-liquifying ecstasy careened them into sensuous oblivion-Bucky had claimed her as his she-wolf.

Slowly but tenderly their bodies began to transform in their heady exchange. Unlike the past several times before, Bucky didn't feel pain. He didn't fight the change. He didn't know if it had anything to do with the serum Zola had injected him with, or if it was just his body-his soul-accepting the change and the mate that inspired him. But as he felt his manacles come free with a simple pick of a scalpel, Bucky felt freedom on a level he hadn't anticipated as he gazed into the golden flecks of amber gazing back at him. Wordlessly he touched his snout against hers, conveying a sum of affection and gratitude. "Now let's get out of here."

-----

It was reaching dusk by the time they had happened upon the old fortress built at the ridge of the mountains. It was just where Marita said it would be. Captain America's trojan horse plan had worked. As an avid learner of Greek Mythology, Steve employed this war tactic he remembered from his high school days and was able infiltrate a caravan of supplies headed into the heavily guarded castle. Once the truck had entered the courtyard, he'd given the all-clear and the Commandos had unleashed hell upon the bewildered contingent of Hydra troopers stationed outside. Over three dozen of them were taken by surprise by a mere dozen SSR soldiers led by their courageous Captain.

Explosions were ripping the old courtyard apart as a number of munitions trucks were set ablaze causing their cargo to violently combust in a shower of sparks and flames. Captain America held his shield at the ready as he charged through a score of troopers firing at him, using his shield and unrelenting force as a battering ram knocking out anyone in his way. Steve threw his shield at one of the soldiers attempting to activate the sluice gate leading into the castle, hoping to shut away the storming enemy. The shield zipped through the air and found its mark, breaking the lever to the gate and preventing anyone from closing it.

"Push forward!" Steve commanded.

The Howling Commandos formed a line behind their captain and began firing as they chased the fleeing troopers into Castle Strucker. Steve could only hope they weren't too late to save Bucky from whatever they were planning on doing to him.

Castle Strucker wasn't the first old castle that Steve had launched an incursion into since the war began. These parts of Europe still had very old historical structures and ancestral homes that were well-fortified and made easy ideal testing-grounds for Hydra experiments. But Castle Strucker was by far the biggest one yet that he and his Commandos had nearly gotten lost as they exited the grand-foyer where they left a scorching devastation and a dozen dead enemy soldiers.

The Neo-Gothic architecture reminded him of Rome and the decor of old Anglo-Saxon Britain. If circumstances were different, the artist inside of him would've stopped to appreciate the old fortress with awe and curiosity. It nevertheless still filled him with remorse knowing that they couldn't afford to leave this structure standing after they were done here. Colonel Phillips ordered it brought down to a scorching ruin to make sure Hydra couldn't salvage anything to use against them later.

It was why Steve made no objection as he watched Falsworth and Marita plant explosives around the foundations and interior load-bearing walls of the fortress. Steve, Jones and Sawyer gave them cover-fire as they moved across the vast corridors, searching every room-for Bucky and key Hydra officials to take them captive. "I feel like we're walking in circles here, Cap," Jones grumbled uneasily as they circled another corridor that looked almost exactly the same as the one they'd left. "And this place gives me the creeps. How are we gonna find Barnes?"

Steve inwardly sighed as his eyes scanned the area. The interior corridors were lit only by a few sconces on the walls. Due to the age of the fortress, it was unlikely it had any electricity installed except for what would undoubtedly be Zola's laboratory. As his eyes continued to scan the area, he saw a faint impression beneath the Persian rug beneath their feet. A cable? Steve lifts the rug and sure enough, finds a conduit taped to the ground. "We follow the electrical conduits. They'll lead us to wherever Zola is."

"Done here, Cap." Duggan chimed in. "Whoa!" The sergeant's sharp reflexes availed him as one of the doors opened and he was met with the barrel of a gun to his face. A young Hydra Trooper exiting the lavatory with his pants hanging loose. "Don't mind us, son. Just go on about your business-"

"Stirb, amerikanisches Schwein! (Die, you American pig!)" And then the young soldier vanished in a burst of ashes and residual blue energy while a stunned Duggan could only blink in bewilderment.

"That's another you owe me," Marita said as he held a Hydra pistol in hand.

"Didn't realize we were keeping score." Duggan huffed as they jogged to catch up to Steve and the others as they made their way up a grand-stair case.

----

he infectious valance of HYDRA calamitously enwreathed over ghostlier shadows of the chamber, predatorily with her rampageous-adrenalized momentum, Selina propelled her wolfish agility as white-noise frequency screechingly caromed against the banshee assonance of demonic mania. Inadvertently, Selina felt her pointer ears swivel in a reactive flex against deafening concussive pulses of klaxon alarms as HYDRA enforcers robotically mobilized by intercom broadcasts. 'Destory them...Destroy them...Now!'

Growling under a stifled breath, the snarky vixen knew was in a deviant fugitive in the parasitic crosshairs, bracingly, she hesitated in her paces, as electric salvos tectonically delivered a lightning-strike, the vitreous-bluish energy mournfully incinerated Allied soldiers into smouldering ash-heaps. The cosmic voltage was being discharged by the HYDRA-Reapers, as the smokiness of cindered flesh reekily breached her attuned senses.

Arcing her bushy tail, involuntarily Selina gestured to the bulkier sniper-wolf, conveying her apparent warning as her curvier muzzle eased up, rampantly sniffing a viscid potency of ashy remnants-Allied soldiers that blindingly overstepped into the rigged kill-zone. "These party-crashes didn't stay long..." she deadpanned, tersely, as Bucky narrowed his canine head downcastly, holding onto a moment of heart-shunted grief, his shaggier thatch of chestnut fur bristlingly rapted with a predatory edge, trying his damndest to curb anguished wetness that feverishly bleared his vision. With a coaxing nudge on his muzzle, Selina urged him to follow her stealthier lead. "We need to keep moving, handsome..."

The grim reality surrounding them was a great incentive for them to just take the opportunity to cut and run. The fortress was under siege, losses were being taken on both sides. No one would miss them in the chaos that they could use to mask their escape. But Bucky couldn't discard the bonds of duty and brotherhood inside of him that were every bit as strong as they were when he was still human. The doubtful part of his mind that begged for him to follow Selina and escape told him that there was nothing he could do. As a wolf, he couldn't fire a weapon. But the beast within growled chidingly as it reminded him that he himself was now a living weapon. Bred with untamed ferocity with the supersoldier serum still humming inside of his veins, aching for the chance to extract his pound of flesh from those who had captured and tortured him. But beyond vengeance, his sense of smell alerted him to the striking fact that this wasn't just about the two of them.

"Steve's here," Bucky whined with concern. He knew the punk would punch his way through hell to find and rescue him all over again. Bucky couldn't just leave him behind. Not without at least...saying goodbye. "I gotta find him." Bucky grunted, shifting his luminous blue eyes to gaze at Selina's who gazed back at him, torn by his decision.

Quirking up her furred brow, inscrutably, Selina tamped down the revamping of her murderous ferocity that rapted the sleekness of her mahogany fur as wolfish vixen became pressingly aware of his brotherly-hellbent devotion that he underlyingly stowed back; a visceral callback of deterrence that would they grudgingly prevent them from reaching Zola's lockdown office. Against her collective periphery, riskily Selina caught a thermal pulse veining from a HYDRA sentry, mordacious fumes of carrion rancidity wafted off stinkily discarded tatters of leather. "How do we even know your powerful friend has breached my father's castle..." she huffed, pointedly, as Bucky tensely shifted on his massive paws, noncommittally growling in throatier pitch, his glacial-aqueous orbs stormily razored over the ash-dusted uniform. "Let me guess you got his scent.."

"Not just his…" Bucky growled. Malice and hatred entered his tone while at the same time his luminous eyes had narrowed into deadly slits. Before Selina could question him he had taken off at break-neck speed, leaping over the gunned down ashen remains of dead Hydra and SSR soldiers littering the hallway. She followed him at a brisk pace, easily matching his speed as she was left to wonder just what it was he was after. And then she detected the scent as well. It was poignant and detestable as every other thing that reeked of Hydra in this fortress that belonged to her family. Maybe, just maybe there was one last thing they could do before escaping into the night. As they turned a corner they pounced right through a line of cross fire between SSR agents and Hydra troops. The sheer size and speed of the two wolves caused the fire to stop if only for a moment as the slawjacked soldiers were stunned by the enormous beasts that just entered their midst.

There was an enormous set of double doors ahead of them that led into what looked like an old study. Voices reached their sharp hearing, setting them on edge.

"I don't care what Wolfgang will think. The fortress is lost-the Allies are closing in. The best we can do is salvage the research and escape. Under no circumstances can I be captured. ...Release the beasts from their cages. They will give us time. I must retrieve Barnes and Strucker's brat."

What followed was a radio transmission on the other end, "Yes, sir. It will be done… Hail Hydra."

Brandishing up warred restraint against bestial savageness in the fissionable moment as the patrolling HYDRA sentry ghosted his tremorous hand jerkily over his taser-gun hostler, in explosive tempo, Selina angled her curvaceous-lissome girth with acrobatic swiftness as her fore-paws bodily hammered viciousness of her aggressive-deadlier momentum blindingly over his armoured chest with bone-jarring pressure. Slashingly her muzzle poised into a menacing stretch, holding the guard into an immobilizing stance as the undercurve knifepoint drag of her fangs arrestingly grazed over the pulsing vein of his exposed throat with feral delicately. It would be so damn easy to malignity deliver a throat-strike; Zola had deceptively calibrated a safeguard-unforgivable contingency 'free ticket' if the Strucker ancestral domain became a warzone. "It would nice if someone opened this door for me," she coaxed in huskier pitch, silkily, brushing her muzzle with devious-seductive ease over his ear, as bearish dire-wolf flashed his lucent sapphire orbs glacially at the metallic door. "Hail HYDRA..."

Zola snapped with alarm the instant the double doors to the study were thrown open by a frightening force. The Hydra scientist recoiled with fear, immediately anticipating being rained down by Allied gunfire. But what he hadn't been expecting was the beastial set of growls that followed. The fear he had been experiencing multiplied exponentially once he saw the two beasts that stalked into his study. Tall magnificent creatures they were, standing over five feet tall and nearly six feet in length. Their cinder-brunette fur seemed to glow like fire in the light of the fireplace bathing the interior dim light, making it difficult to see. But the glowing orbs of amber and blue glaring at him from the darkness paralyzed the Hydra scientist with unshakable fear...and awe. "Such perfected magnificence to become conceived into a reckoning of nightmares...Come, my pets, we must leave the past into the ashes..." he commanded, fiendishly, his tailored fedora shadily tilted over his jowelly features as he gazed at the ravishingly exquisite she-wolf anthro's shapelier mid-drift, covetously imaging a bulbous protrusion of HYDRA-born whelps. "To herald new promise..."

"Stay away from her..!" Clunkily on his arched hind-paws, as Bucky gutturally vented out a full-throat snarl, he daringly sidestepped in front of his wolven beauty with intimidating traction; the hard-edged virility of his canine features cuttingly rapted, evident to razor-thin slits that gleamed with murderous heat, bankingly fusing in his cool aquamarine irises as he glared at the pudgy-faced doctor cowardly staggered behind his obstructive desk.

With predatory-honed advances, bearishly he sashayed heftier momentum, the knifing length of his massive claws deathily arced a hairbreadth from Zola's graspable briefcase, papers—schematic notes were loosely stuffed. He wanted the maniacal HYDRA composer that damningly morphed him into a lycan-highbred, the apparitional mantras of heart-razed agony, deafeningly teamed with slingshotted images of his 107th infantry being harrowingly reaped into sifting vapours of mulchy ash on the Azzano ridgeline as Uber tanks wheeled over trenches; HYDRA had surgically amputated out humanity into a monstrous fringe, purging soldiery valour-resistance as young-traumatized POW's were freakishly mutated into draconic war-dogs."Y-You're not gonna win..." he gnashed his fangs, his paw massively shadowed over Zola's flabbier cheeks, poised to make the doctor suffocatingly choke on his own blood, without a breath of mercy. "M' gonna enjoy this..."

"Freshly turned and anxious for a kill?" Zola huffed. Though his question may have been perceived as a taunt, his eyes were glimmering with genuine curiosity. "How splendid. Tell me, Barnes, would you have been so eager if you were still the useless soldier you once were?" The scientist smirked ever slightly as he watched the enormous direwolf pause in his steps and bristle. "Would you not have been compelled to take me captive so that I may be interrogated by your superiors? I am valuable to them, am I not? Instead you easily succumb to the lure of malice. Like a perfect predator-a perfect killer."

"Shut up!" Bucky growled, fighting to reign in his bloodthirsty impulse to pounce on the doctor and rip his throat out with his jaws.

"You are exactly what I intended to create." Zola beamed. "And with the abilities you doubt possess-enhanced sense of scent, speed and strength, you would have spawned an army the likes of which would help Hydra conquer the world." And just as soon, the Germanic scientist had become slackened with disappointment crossing his features as Selina flanked his right side to prevent him from escaping. A threatening growl from her caused Zola to sigh as he continued to gather his things, appearing unconcerned of the threat teetering so close to him. "But now I realize, perhaps I chose my test subjects poorly. You and this impudent girl clearly cannot appreciate the vision of a better future."

"Your future isn't the one we want. Hydra will never rule this world." Bucky sneered.

"You could have had a prominent role, and yet you pretend as if you can return to your old one." Zola chuckled tauntingly. "Do you think the Allies will accept you as you are now? All they will see is a monster to be caged or executed." Outside the noise of gunfire and screams increased, setting the scientist further on edge as he realized time was running out for him to make his escape. "I offer you one final chance to come with me."

Bucky and Selina's responses were twin ferocious growls. Zola sighed with disappointment, reaching into his coat pocket and producing a glass vial with a clear blue substance. "Pity. Once your service to Hydra was finished and you delivered to us the army we envisioned, I would have reversed the transformation. You could have both lived the rest of your mundane existence together as you would have pleased."

"No! Wait!-" Couldn't help but bark out with mounting panic. But it was too late. Both he and Selina watched as Zola grimly chucked the vial into the fireplace where it shattered and evaporated into nothing. Their hopes of returning to humanity, painstakingly, vanished before their eyes in a crackling hearth. Bucky and Selina closed their eyes, both of them sensing the other's despair.

"Too late." Zola scoffed as he took a moment to savor the anguish he could see radiating off of the pack of wolves." Two sets of eyes opened, and burning fury scorched the atmosphere while the oblivious scientist picked up his umbrella. "Now you will know nothing but the lives of mindless beasts, your only instinct to kill and concei-AAAHHH"

"B***! DIE!" Every muscle on the Bucky's body visible tensed with anticipation before he lunged towards the scientist, eyes wild with savage instincts. Zola didn't have time to react before the wolf's frontal paws shoved into his chest-the augmented strength of the beast easily propelling the short stocky man off the ground and sailing towards the panoramic windows of the study. Selina watched listlessly as Zola screamed in terror as he fell multiple stories into what she could only assume to be a hard-hitting death.

Crystalline shards of glass piercingly hailed over the marble-stone flooring, as the screeching resonance of Zola's terror-razed scream clashingly deafened against concussive volleys of SSR division artillery, obstructive traction of Sherman convoy tanks mightily barricaded near the castle's drawbridge. The mordacious-vampiric reek of HYDRA's tyrannous denizens sailed within her father's ancestral domain as blowback depth-charges explosively rattled the monolith foundations. Harnessing a variance of feline-swiftness, balletically, Selina crouched over the stone ledge of the arched window, her bronze irises unblinkingly chased the porcine doctor's freefall, as her fanged muzzle curved into a deviant smirk. "Guess his future came real quick, huh..." she quipped, snarkily, as her paw deftly ghosted an instinctive caress over the curvaceous litheness her furred mid-drift. "So what happens now, Wolf boy?"

Bucky had been so absorbed in the dark disturbing satisfaction of having exacted retribution on his tormentor that he nearly forgot that he wasn't alone. Teetering at the edge of the window, he stared into the abyss below where a cluster of trees enveloped the castle with the mountains looming ahead. A pale full moon lingered in the skies, casting a luminous glow upon the countryside. Were it night for the booming thunder of rain clouds and the unrelenting noises of war and death, he would've thought this was a peaceful moment with a breathtaking view. Wordlessly, he turned his head and felt his muzzle brush up against the she-wolf's.

They held each other close in an intimate embrace, feeling the weight of oppression having lifted with the apparent death of their captor. They could escape now together, into the night and no one would know their fates. But he couldn't do that. Not yet. The soldier, the man inside wouldn't walk away from his duty.

"Now we finish this."

----

Chaos was ramping up a large body count by the time Captain America and his Howling Commandos burst through a set of double doors on what had to be the third floor of the castle. The grand staircase they'd used had seemed unending, the steps spiraling up a tower sized keep that were no doubt used to transport heavy objects between levels. Despite the few floors they'd climbed, they may as well have been trying to climb up a step-ladder one at a time due to the number of Hydra troopers they clashed with on the way up. They'd followed the conduits up two stories until finally they pushed through a set of immaculate wooden doors.

"I hate stairs," Duggan wheezed as he struggled to catch his breath. The other Commandos were equally exhausted, their worn expressions matted with sweat and drops of blood belonging to the enemy troopers they determinedly fought through.

"I second," Jones agreed as he took a swig of his canteen. Duggan swiped it before he could take another drink. "Its just water," Jones chided.

"Good enough," Duggan grumbled as he drank the cool nourishing liquid in one go.

"Form up, stay close," Steve instructed as they began racing down the corridor. Far head they see a group of guards forming a barricade made up of furniture and supply crates. "Take cover!" Raising his shield, deflects a number of plasma energy projectiles while his men hurdle behind stone columns and tentatively return fire.

"Captain, they're guarding something up ahead!" Marita yelled over the chaos while continuing to shoot from behind a wall corner. Sure enough, Steve could see two guards standing in front of a massive set of iron doors. It was heavily reinforced with multiple bars and a sluice gate. They appeared to be opening it while the troopers in front of them provided cover fire. Whatever was inside either had to be very important or…very dangerous.

Warning alarms sounded in Steve's mind as he realized what. "Damn it. Cover me now! We can't let them open that door!" The urgency of his voice brought no room for question as the commandos began raining fire against the man-made barricade of troopers, careful not to hit their captain, as he charged their ranks. Steve held his shield up, deflecting as many plasma bolts as possible without exposing himself. The floor suddenly shook as if an earthquake hit the castle. Steve wasn't sure if it was the battle raging outside, or something much more ominous.

"Mach die Tür auf! (Get the door open!)" One of the guards cried out as the troopers began to get picked off by the ceaseless onslaught of the Howling Commandos. There was also the frightening fact that Captain America was charging at them like a madman prepared to spear them through the wall. "Jetzt! Jetzt! (Now! Now!" Steve watched as the bolt on the iron door was released and the sluice gate began to rise. Forgoing thoughts of safety, he propels himself over the barricade and barrels into the nest of troopers like a torpedo. At that exact moment, the walls shook and chilling roars emanated from inside the room.

Steve and the Hydra soldiers he had trampled all looked on from their spilled position upon the ground, forgetting the battle entirely as the 500lbs iron doors began to shake with violent force as something inside fought to break free.

"What the hell did you do?" Steve murmured with mounting anticipation. The guards who opened the door didn't have time to react nor lament their fates when the doors were thrown off their hinges, smashing them into mangled puddles of crimson gore upon the wall. The other troopers that formed the barricade only now appeared to realize what fate they had consigned themselves to as demonic eyes gazed back at them from the dark abyss inside. It was at that exact moment, lightning flickered and illuminated the towering mass of monstrosities that lurched forward.

There were three of them. Apparitions of grisly horror that should've only existed in stories and feature films. One stood an impressive six feet tall wearing a disheveled black suit that was once finely tailored. Pale deathly skin encompassed a scrawny posture that was sickly. The eyes were sunken hollow with blood-red eyes glaring hungrily upon the pack of troopers. The sharpened incisors confirmed what many woefully guessed but were unwilling to believe; a vampire.

The second reeked of animal fur and dead vermin. Like the vampire, he wore tattered rags that were ripped by and matted with brown stains. The beast was hunched over as if used to walking on all-fours despite standing vertically on two feet. Pelts of dark fur encompassed the entire body but its face revealed leathery skin with an elongated mouth-a wolfish snout with gleaming incisors that dripped with malice. A beastial grow let loose as the best tugged on the broken chains that clung to the manacles on its joints. A deformed wolfman.

The third of the lot stood front and center, alarmingly tall-over eight feet. A walking tower or terror and putrid muscles. Like the others it wore tattered remains of clothing, ripped in many places only to reveal mounds of stitches used to attached broken dead flesh. It was a walking ghoul of horror with a stony face and ashen green lips. A monster that showed no life, only an unshakable will to destroy all in its path.

"Offenes Feuer! (Open fire!)" The Hydra troopers cried out. A few even tried to run while their comrades hopelessly rained fire upon the trio of abominations that Zola created in his experiments. The monsters moved freely and swept through the troopers like mindless beasts, driven only be sheer instincts which were to kill. Steve for his part wisely retreated several paces as his men rushed to join him. Jones and Duggan help him to his feet as they watch the horror unfolding before them. The vampire treated the troopers like open buffet that ensnared into his clawed embrace, sinking his teeth into their necks and draining them of their life-blood as their cries carried into the corridor. The vampire didn't react, even as they poured their bullets into his body, he continued to feed.

The wolfman treated his prey much the same, savoring both their blood and the terror they exuded as he climbed the walls and pounced on them. The monster was a wrecking house of destruction, picking up two troopers by their necks, holding them several feet off the ground. The duo snaps sent chills across the area and the bodies lifeless fell.

"My God. What is this…" Sawyer whispered.

"What Zola's been doing here," Steve finally said. He couldn't see Bucky among them and he couldn't help but to feel relieved by it. Gazing upon the trio of monsters, the Captain briefly hesitated, not knowing who these men once were-whether they were volunteers who submitted to Zola's sick experiments, or whether they were once like Bucky-victims caught in the crossfire.

The question of whether or not they were friendlies was answered when the bloodsucker of the group rushed towards him and tried to tackle him to the ground. Steve's quick dexterity availed him as he bashed the vampire with his shield, sending tumbling back to the ground where he landed with a roll-up. The creature proceeded to hiss at him with blood-stained teeth. That was enough to answer his question. This was Zola's response to their presence here-his way of buying himself time. But what did that mean for Bucky?

"What do we do, Cap?" Jones asked, a hint of unease in his voice as the monsters turned their sights towards them and began their slow approach.

"We fight on," Captain America urged them. The strength and determination in his eyes inspired them to push past the fear of this situation, and work together.

"Well then. Happy Halloween," Duggan raised his Hydra weapon and they all began to fire.

----'This better be damn well worth it...' Advancing past the mechanical war-machines as SSR units rapidly dismantled the long-gun cannons, garbed stylishly in her leather bomber jacket, Agent Peggy Carter grounded her steel-maiden poise, readily levelling the nozzle of her Walther pistol with a point-blank flex a hairbreadth from Zola's bulbous throat, as he vomitously groaned out a pitiful. "Doctor Armin Zola," she murmured composedly in adamant pitch, and bruisingly dragged generous pressure of her tactical boot over his pudgier wrist, forcing a pained grimace to rapt saggily over his jowelly features. "It's over... Do not even think about getting up, we have you surrounded."

Zola couldn't stand up even if he tried. The knife-digging pain that traveled up his body and the feeling of nausea in his stomach told him what he knew-his leg was broken in so many places after his harsh landing. He would have surely plummeted to his death had dumb luck not been on his side, causing him to hit the bark of tree that softened the speed to his collision upon the ground behind the castle. But his luck had just as quickly evaporated as he found himself facing the barrel of Margaret Carter's pistol. 

The scientist released a weary sigh, knowing he was hopelessly incapable of escaping now. The Red Skull would never forgive this failure.But perhaps...Perhaps he still had one card left to play."Perhaps." He groaned as he propped himself up against a rock. "But if there is one thing I have learned in the theater or war, Fraulein, is to always have a contingency plan." It was only then that Peggy noticed something small and metal held in his hand. "And here is mine." His thumb pressed the button to the detonator in his hand, which triggered a red light to blink alarmingly from the device. "I may have lost this battle-but if my instinct is correct, and Captain America is inside searching for his beloved friend, then I have just won this war. In five minutes, it will all be over. For the Red Skull. Hail Hydr-"

Against heart-plummeting desperation, breathlessly, with a hinged grip of her warring composure, Peggy drove jaw-breaking ferocity of her delicate fist crushingly into Zola's flabby jaw, as the radio detonator evidently slipped out of his possessive clutch. Pivoting on her boots, mistily her chocolate-umber irises gazed at the direction where the Howling Commandos infiltrated. Removing a radio transmitter from her jacket, quakingly she hitched out a thread breath. "Captain Rogers..." she whispered in fevered rawness, hearing flatlined static echo back. "Steve...Come in...Steve...”

----

"Captain America and the Howling Commandos knew they had their work cut out for them as they watch the wolf and vampire evade their gunfire with unnatural speed. It was like trying to shoot lightning before it struck. The monsters were that quick, and openly allowed their prey to take their best shots. It was a game to them-to play with their food and allow it to marinate in concentrated fear. As for the big hulking zombie, while he lacked the speed and dexterity of the other two monsters, he more than made up for it due to his constant regeneration. 

No amount of plasma projectiles they fired into his scorching dead flesh was enough to disintegrate him entirely unless they focused their collective shots on him, which was impossible without leaving themselves open for attack by the other two creatures.They had to rely on close-quarters combat and unity to get them through these odds. Steve raised his shield in time to block and thunderous right hook coming from the big green undead monster. 

The kickpain of the vibration nearly made him lose his footing. Jones and Duggan stood back to back, shooting at the walls and ceiling where the vampire was practically teleporting due to his enhanced speed. Marita and Sawyer were covering each other by firing at the wolfman and preparing explosives.

"Look out!" Duggan yelled. Marita yelled in fright as he was tackled to the ground from behind. A chilling snarl blew against his ear and hot breath grazed his neck. The vampire was prepared to feast until a boot collided with its face, sending it scampering back. Duggan held a hand out and helped Marita to his feet. "That's two you owe me."

"I'd say we're even," Marita grumbled.

"Naw, he counts as two!" Duggan snarked.

"Focus!" Steve yelled, leaping off a vanity and power-thrusting his shield against the head of the eight-footer, sending him staggering backwards

."Eat this, you freak!" Jones fired into a dark corner where he perceived the vampire to be, showering the corridor with debris. Though he missed his target, the dust particles blew wildly in their left direction, alerting them to a moving target. 

"Got him!" Duggan fired at the chandelier on the ceiling, causing it to fall and crush the dark specter, pining it to the ground as it howled with pain. Holding the barrel of the Hydra rifle against the monster's head, Duggan fired multiple concentrated shots and watched as its head and entire body disintegrated. 

"Whoo-ya! One down!"Just as it seemed the Commandos could collectively take a breath to appreciate this closer step towards victory, Peggy Carter's voice came through on the radio.

"Steve...Come in...Steve..."

"A little busy right now, Peggy!" Steve yelled as he tossed his shield across the corridor, sending it bouncing across numerous columns until it struck the head of the monster, dazing him for but a moment before he began stomping towards him with renewed determination.

Staunching down a paralyzing numbness that infinitely crescendoed into knife-stabbing ache in her bustier, leather garbed chest, stiltedly Peggy flitted the heat bleariness of unshed wetness off her lashes as she clutched onto transmitter becoming motionless-stuck in gravitic thrall of apocalyptic elysian as incendiary blasts of cosmic-voltaic energy blindingly arced over the castle's iron spires, Peggy became viscerally aware that Steve was beyond her reach.

Measuringly she brandished her stoic demeanour as the starkness of naked dread betrayed her spycraft resilence—it was suffocating tumult as she was irrevocably careened on the bleeding-edge, gripping onto the radio device as tense-jawed General Philips sat in the backseat of a convoy Jeep, grumpily voicing the order of Zola's arrest. Easing the radio to the voluminous swell of her rose-petal lips, Peggy whispered in huskier pitch, beckoningly. "Captain listen to me...Zola has rigged everything to blow in four minutes..." She dragged out a choked-off breath, shakily. "I-I know how much James Barnes means to you, but you need to get your men out of there..."

"Negative! We can't leave without Bucky!" Steve yelled, desperation gnawing at him as he tried to come up with another plan in this hopeless scenario. He was prepared to give his men the order to evacuate without him even if his search doomed him to perpetual death. He couldn't leave his best friend behind. He-

"Cap, look out!" Steve had been so caught up in his moment of disquiet he didn't see the tall putrid monster come up behind him with a broken piece of column held over his head. Steve raised his shield just in time to avoid getting his head smashed in, but the excessive weight of the object caused him to crash to the ground with blocks of stone pouring over him.

"Gaauughh," Steve groaned. Blackness threatened to consume his blurred vision as static rang in his ears. 'Concussion'. The word rang in his mind and he fought desperately to keep his eyes open and focused. He could hear shouts and screams all around him. Plasma bolts nearly blinded him by their intensity. He stared listlessly up at the monster standing over him, preparing to raise its enormous boot to smash his head in. Duggan and Jones threw their body weight against the monster, uncaring of the danger their proximity to the creature posed to them, they wouldn't allow it to kill their captain.The monster ignored them entirely, its unnatural strength keeping it vertical like a statue with a machine-like will to see its task done. 

That was when he saw it. An enormous wolf. Mistakenly he thought it was the other beast that climbed onto the monster's back and wrapped its maw around the neck. Then he saw that same creature get trampled down by another wolf-this one more slender in its shape and too quick to spot. Steve closed his eyes, blinking repeatedly as he tried to comprehend what he was seeing.And what he was hearing. "Get up, punk...run!" The wolf seemed to growl at him as it continued to bite on the monster's neck.

"Bucky…" Steve realized.

Snarling against heaves of panty breaths, with beastlier momentum of his predator-hone graces, slashingly Bucky knifed the jutting length of his incisors fangs into protrusive greenish veins of the hulkish-zombiefied behemoth as the massive deformed hand unremittingly grappled Steve into a back-breaking chokehold. The bilious-lurid stench of intestine fluid wafted off the bulging orcish flesh as Bucky aggressively thrust his canine muzzle into the monster's collared neck in a feral stupor, driving a penetrative throb into an exposed vein as vaporous reddish mist oozily hazed in that vicious wake. "S-Steve you gotta leave..." he growled, croakily, flashing his sapphire orbs at blackened shark-like depths manically gleamed alight with uncontained rabidness-a soulless hunger as tarry-mucus drool gloopily dampened over his unkempt chestnut fur. "Argh...GET OUT OF HERE...NOW!"

Mustering all his strength, Steve gritted his teeth and bashed his shield against the monster's face. It was like hitting a concrete with steel, but the force of his attack caused a deafening gong to emanate throughout the corridor, causing the wolfman to howl with discomfort. The monster crashed down onto its back, knocked out if only temporarily. With the wolfman disoriented it allowed the she-wolf the opportunity to pounce on him and wrap her maw around his neck. 

A chilling snap followed and the wolfman creature laid deathly still. Steve fell onto his knees, gazing with hooded eyes at the blue glimmering orbs of the beast that had saved him.There was humanity to be found in those depths-and a familiar face smiling back. "Bucky...You gotta...come back with us…" Steve urged, struggling to keep his eyes open. Duggan and Jones were quick to catch him as the fighting in the corridor had come to an abrupt pause. "Buck…" Steve held out his hand, trying to touch his friend and feeling as if this might be the last time.

The invincible echoes of their everlasting brotherhood heartily mirrored in effusive tenor, edging closer on his massive paws, heart-crushingly Bucky sniffily eased his canine muzzle towards Steve's leather-gloved hand; they were inseparable-hellbent kids of Brooklyn; always daringly getting in smart mouthin' alley-scrappers with jock-face brutes, never backing down to protect the little guys-it was a brotherly dynamic-a covenant that cherishingly ran soul-deep.

 As the monstrous cadency of the ghoulish-hybrids chillingly amplified into a hellish tumult, keeping himself poised on his furrier haunches, as his glacial aqueous irises gleamed unwarranted heartache, Bucky smirkily quirked his muzzle into a breathless smirk. "You gotta promise me somethin' punk...' he rasped out his Brooklyn drawl, murmuringly, staring into teary heat of Steve's azure depths, as he nuzzled a cherishing flexion of unbreakable--brotherly reverence against Steve's palm. "Don't this put ya on ropes...M' always gonna be your Bucky, nothin's gonna change that, Stevie."

"I know… I know…" It was a heartfelt exchange that allowed a tear of remorse to escape Steve's cloudy eyes. There was too much he wanted to say to his friend. But the ticking at the back of his mind reminded him that they were running out of time. "We gotta go. We gotta-" An ominous groan disturbed the moment. All eyes diverted to the monster that had been subdued, and they all expressed varying degrees of exhaustion and frustration. Was it unkillable? The wolf and vampire had been easier to pick off, but they all surmised this zombie-like giant wasn't going to be as easy. With time quickly dwindling towards an explosive decimation, they couldn't afford to dawdle any longer.

"Howling Commandos, come in! Get your a*** out of there! I don't care what you have to do! Pull Rogers out kicking and screaming if you have to! That's an order!" General Phillips' voice barked through the radio transmission. 

The monster slowly began to rise up off the floor as Bucky looked apprehensively at his brother's in arms."Get out of here. We'll hold him off." He growled. The men didn't question it. They helped the injured Steve back to his feet and began making a beeline for the exit, leaving Bucky and Selina to stare down the monster rising to its feet. There was no going back now. The castle was going to blow any minute, and they couldn't let the monster escape before it did. "Wish it didn't have to turn out like this darlin'," Bucky said with remorse.

Catching a drag of breath as she registered the murmurous despondence fringing against his gravelly-throatier drawl, Selina brushingly whipped her tail over his muzzle in a frisky coaxing. "Don't worry, handsome, I know where they keep the back door..." she purred, briskly. "Ready to play a game of chase with Frankstein over there..."

Bucky grimly watched as the monster full made it to its feet, seemingly no longer concerned by the fact the soldiers he was attacking were now gone as he instead focused his mindless course of destruction on the two direwolves that had attacked him. He began lumbering towards them with outstretched hands. With Zola taken care of and Steve now being taken to safety, Bucky couldn't think of any other reason to stick around this hellhole. "After you, darlin'. Ladies first. Lead the way." Bucky quipped with a flirtatious grin of his incisors. Together the two wolves took off at a brisk pace through the corridor. The telltale stomping vibrations telling them that the monster was following a short distance behind.

Outside the castle, Captain America and his men stagger across a draw-bridge headed for the main courtyard when the first explosion detonates. The store-rooms and grandhall of the castle combust in roaring flames. The charges were detonating by each level to bring it to collapse in on itself. Peggy ushers for a jeep to meet them half-way. Duggan and Jones help Captain America climb into the back before they join him. "Go! Go! Move!" The jeep takes off just before the draw-bridge collapses.

Bucky felt the explosions rattling the fortress and knew they were losing time. "How much further?!" He barked as he followed Selina, and trying hard to ignore the monstrous groans following them every step of the way. He thinks he hears Selina yell "up ahead". A set of double doors with the Strucker family crest emblazoned on the wood. The two direwolves don't stop as they barrel inside, their combined physical strength causing the wood to splinter and explode inwardly. Another explosion shakes the castle causing a stone column to collapse onto the monster before it can follow them inside."Where are we?" Bucky barked worriedly. He couldn't see any windows or stair-cases leading to this "backdoor" Selina mentioned. The room they were in and dozens of weird looking objects on high-shelves along with tomes and dimly lit candles. Was this a library?

A veristical contrast of infectious desolation heart-arrestingly pulsed over the barcode ambiance of the darkened library-occultic santorum of HYDRA's treasure stash, gothically adorned on black-ochre bookcases were Eldritch relics of forbidden magery etched with runic glyphs of the celestial tree- Yggdrasil-the dimensional branches of time deciphered from Noric mythos. As the candlelight sconces became captured in lucent heat of her autumn-brandy irises, with practiced ease Selina reared her sleekier muzzle up near a shelf, reaching for granite-quartz horse figurine, Bucky zeroed his sniper-vison on the wooden door, his pointer ears tensely speared at the moment, he detected proximal earth-shaking thumps of the hulking- dreadnought. "That's not good..." he gnarled out, throatily, whiplashing his bushier-wolfy- tail against the shelf. "Grah...Can't even control this stupid thing yet..."

" Lucky for you I know all my father's tricks when he beats the dodge," she gritted, edgily, applying enough pressure as they became aware whirring resonance of mechanisms unlocking behind the case. They had one chance to evade the soul-crushing grip HYDRA's tentacles, despite the irreversible purge of their humanity. "Shall we, Wolf boy..."

Bucky didn't question her. Knowing there was no time left for second-guessing he helped her to push against the bookcase. "If this works out, I owe you dinner, darlin'." He quipped. It was a motivating thought that lightened the apprehension they carried on their shoulders as they listened and felt the explosions continue to shake the castle. This was it going forward for him. The life of Sergeant James Barnes was a thing of the past. The she-wolf with him was the way forward for him. What it might lead to, he didn't know. But as his focused gaze landed on her midriff, the thought of it swelling with his off-spring no longer seemed like such an outlandish idea to him. If anything, it was something he would look forward to.

Together the two wolves pushed, their amplified strength turning the 500lbs bookshelf clock-wise until the figurine she had been reaching for teetered off. Seeing this, he watched as she pressed herself towards him almost as if to hold on for whatever came next. The relic struck the ground between them and took on an otherworldly blue glow that enveloped the entire room. Bucky and Selina's world's were filled with a blinding light that consumed them-detaching them from their surroundings. It was at that exact moment, the final bomb detonated and Castle Strucker collapsed into a smouldering ruin.

Outside the castle, the SSR and Howling Commandos look on with varying degrees of pride and remorse. Steve stood front and center, anguish consuming him as a tear slipped down his cheek. "Good bye, Bucky."

---

"Yeah...It's just...I had a date..."

The vestigial shunts of bone-numbing iciness ghosted through his veins, as cacophonic volume blared incessantly from jumbo-screens of digitized imagery of whiskey bottles and apparel stores frenetically broadcasted around him —the enigmatic director of SHIELD garbed in a black long-coat vanishingly blurred with a stealthy variance o phantom coolness from obstructive roadblock of armoured SUV vehicles.

 'What happened, Rogers...'

As his twangy- blonde tresses errantly askew over his tensing brow against the November gusty chillness, Steve clumsily pivoted on his boots, feeling like a drifter being detachedly ushered on a groundless fringe of paradox reality; spectral latent echoes of grievous heartache tearily gleamed in his oceanic azure irises as he felt straying trek of heated wetness errantly glide down his angular cheek; he ultimately made the votive -interminable -sacrifice to end the genocidal reign of HYDRA's carnage-reaping scourge-the unbidden cost was too high—when he tragically nose-dived the Red Skull's futuristic winged bomber—the Valkyrie into the glacial fathoms of the Atlantic. ‘I hate to step on our toes...’

Everything faded out as onrushing gallons of frigid water heart-stoppingly entombed him into the cockpit. Now, he was standing in the congested hub of a modernized Times Square, in a listless vigil, trying his damndest to adamantly harbour onto a grip of threadbare-heartsick restraint.

 Staving off the paralytic tremors racking within his unthawed veins, Steve clenching the broad heaviness of jaw, steadily daring himself to move forward, as he sprinted his near a traffic gridlock, uncharted environs that made him feel awkwardly vulnerable. He didn't know if Peggy or the Howling Commandos were still-alive. If this was a simulated reality that Armin Zola torturously induced with a mind-trap experimenting.

"I-I gotta find em'..." he murmured rawly, against breathless timbre, knowing his option was to find a library-museum. Everything contractedly imploded around like avalanche-force, the industrial grandiosity of downtown  Manhatten deafened, as he footedly staggered to cement his warring balance, nabbing a subway tunnel guardrail with an unshakeable flex of his fingers that damagingly crimped the iron, tasting watery saltiness dampened on his plush-chiselled lips, and feverishly quashed down a gut-retching surge of unwarranted vomit, while he exhaustedly collapsed on his knees.

"You gotta shake it off..."

Steve didn't know what he was doing. He must've looked delirious to many of the passing civilians on the streets going about their daily life. Several curious eyes had wandered towards him and the small platoon of agents that surrounded him in the middle of Times Square. Everything looked so different. Everyone looked so different. There was a loudness to the city that was familiar, but everything else Steve had difficulty connecting to the world he knew. He was home, but it wasn't the home he remembered. If he wasn't so shaken by the changes surrounding him, he would've marveled at how much the world had advanced in 65 years.

"Just...try to take it in slowly, soldier." The man, Fury told him after nearly a minute passed of silence. The directive gave Steve a little bit of comfort due to its familiarity

."So we won?" Steve asked. They had to have if Americans were going about their daily life in such a carefree and leisurely fashion. And they weren't speaking German.

"In large part thanks to you." Fury affirmed. "Lot of good men made the ultimate sacrifice. But in the end, it all counted."Steve lowered his eyes in sorrow. Fury's word's weren't far from the truth as even in what he perceived to be a short murky dream, he was still haunted by the loss of his best friend. His fate sealed in a collapsing fortress on Halloween night. How many more of his Commandos lost their lives after Steve had plunged the Valkyrie into the water? Were any of them even still alive to this day? Was Peggy…He was lost in his thoughts while his wandering gaze took in the small crowd of on-lookers watching him from across the street. He felt he must've been so disconnected from reality, locked in a perpetual fantasy that he thought one of the men on the street looked familiar to him...

Broadway street vendors were maddeningly stationed near a crosswalk, the wintry gusts whirlingly flitted discarded hot-dog wrappers as three adorable baby wolf pups adorned with cindery-chestnut fur were squeakily pouncing on a loose wrapper, the daintiest of rambunctious litter, angelically shivered against the stranger's motorcycle boot as he stood intimidatingly a breadth at Daily Bugle newspaper kiosk, his nonchalant stance invested with sniper tack as he gripped protectively onto a leash.

For an unimpeded moment, against heart-starved wariness, everything felt unreachable Steve confusedly gazed at the resurrected phantom of his past-James 'Bucky' Barnes garbed in slim-fit denim jeans hunkily curved against the athletic litheness of his bulkier calves, roguish length of dark brunette tresses disheveledly curtained under a Brooklyn Dodgers cap akin to a wolfish mane; the razor-edged virility of his stubbled-heavier features boyishly held telltale chubbiness as his shapely-wide lips breathlessly kicked up into a quirky smirk. "S-Steve..." he choked out against murmurous pitch, shakily as gossamer drifts of snowflakes powdered over his leather-clad shoulders, his grayish-aquamarine irises nakedly held alighted radiance of skyrocketing- joy. "Punk...S'it's me.."

Standing collectively at his side, garbed in a black long-coat was gorgeously exquisite beauty-a voluptuous siren incarnate- the sleek glossiness of her tousled mahogany whorls cascaded off her wool-clad shoulders as voguish sunglasses classily bordered against the delicate-coolness of her elfish features. Tensely she clutched a Starbucks cup of brewed coffee as the chubbiest of the litter feistily swatted a tiny paw over Bucky's motorcycle-boot. Her luscious-pillowy lips curved dazzlingly, evident to a jaunty laugh. "This little chubb-ball knows how to steal the moment..."

Adjusting the sunglasses off her kittenish nose, covertly Selina glanced at the barricade of SHIELD vehicles, giving a curvaceous uniformed operative, the vibrance coppery-scarlet tresses fierily contrasted tactical neoprene as she remained lethally remained impassive behind Director Fury, on the svelter curves of her lithe midriff the blood-red hourglass insignia of the Black Widow was visible-she was a convenient friend in the shadow-zones. It was denotative powder-keg of exposed risk, they needed to remain off-grid from SHEILD's vexatious proximity while deceptively playing a blank-slate gambit of relevance in spades. 

"Looks things might get crammed around here, Wolf boy," she purred, breathily, her amberish-bronze irises knowingly gazed Fury who signalled his mobilized agents to position a defensive ground around the revitalized-thawed-out First Avengers. "We need to keep walking, handsome...No looking back."

It should've been an open and shut argument in any other instance. Bucky knew how crucial it was for he and Selina to keep a low profile in this modern day and age where they were still struggling to adapt. Civilization had evolved to depend so much on technology that news and answers were available to them in just a few clicks away. Anyone could easily match their faces to historical archives if they knew where to look. Making a few friends in high places kept them under a small umbrella, but if they stepped out from under it even an inch it ran the risk of exposing not just them…"They found him, Lina…" Bucky whispered trying hard to repress the emotion in his eyes but his voice betrayed him. He ached more than anything to rush across the square and envelope his friend in a warm hug, laughing with joy. "I can't believe they actually did it." Bucky sniffed, smiling a watery as Steve held his gaze, the recognition in them noticeable enough for him to know that Steve knew it was really him.

"Bucky?" Steve whispered in mute shock.

Thinking quickly, Bucky held a finger to his lips in a "shushing" manner, making it clear to Steve that they couldn't do this in public. "How do you feel about a walk in the park, darlin'?" Bucky said as he leaned forward to plant a coaxing kiss against her cheek.The velvety heat of his sensuous lips featherily ghosted whisper-soft pressure over her supple cheek as his stubbled jaw pricked her chilled flesh against the gusty frostiness, knowingly Selina flitted her dark gaze in the unobstructed direction of Central Park, they needed to get out of SHEILD's crosshairs, as she registered the onerous whimpering of her dozy baby-pups who shiveringly tucked underneath the kiosk station. "You think the kiddos will sleep this off later on..." she rebuffed in a huskier undertone, snarkily, as Bucky crouched on his denim-clad haunches, and brushingly kneaded the one of the little girl's downy fur with fatherly-driven tentativeness invested with each pacifying caress, as crow-lines deeply bracketed his temples. "So which one do you want to carry to the park, handsome..."

Gazing down at the trio of adorable furriness, Bucky grinned with fatherly enthusiasm as he watched two of the litter yip up at Selina with an eagerness that only both she and him could understand. The third of the lot, also by far the most chubby and feisty of the group, seemed to be fixated on trying desperately to climb up Bucky's hamstring as he rested his frontal paws against him. "I think they decided for us. Besides, I wouldn't want to deny this fussy little guy." Leaning down Bucky patted the head of the male pup, watching as he wrinkled his nose and yipped. "Up and at em, Bren." Bucky laughed as the two tiny females practically bounced into Selina's arms, their tails wagging happily to be held so close to the warm security of a motherly embrace. The chubby male did the same as he snuggled into the crook of Bucky's arm, poking his head out to gaze curiously at their surroundings. 

"You ready?" Bucky asked Selina.

With thievish precision of her stiletto-heeled boots, embracingly Selina cradled her lithe arms over her precious heart-stealing baby girls who nestled cozily in mirrored unison as NYPD cruisers speedily whooshed through a clamorous procession of Midtown traffic, news choppers intrusively haloed over Times Square to obviously film the awakened Sentinel of Liberty as Steve Rogers vertiginously braced his shoulder against a curbside telephone pole, evading swarms of bustling -near-to-two media reporters, aggressively blaring out their rampant questions to Nick Fury: a smokescreen distraction. "Looks like Sleeping Beauty over there isn't going anywhere..." she quipped, jauntily, while giving a subtle nod tacitly at the 'Black Widow' operative-the luxury of personal space wasn't compromised. "She'll have fun keeping soldier boy level on his feet..."

"I just hope it's not too soon for him," Bucky uttered to himself as he and Selina navigated their way through the rapidly expanding masses of civilians who had now caught wind of the spectacle occurring in the street. 

If anyone had any illusions about it, the news broadcast being run on every screen in the vicinity was a clear picture as it ran the live feed of a living legend returning to life. "CAPTAIN AMERICA LIVES!"It was a couple hours later that Steve Rogers had finally managed to extricate himself from the SHIELD Base that he had been sequestered too in the height of the public frenzy over his return. He liked to think of himself as a patient man who could tackle any issue with a clear mind. But the weight of this shocking revelation that he had not only been on ice for over sixty years, but that Bucky was somehow still alive and in the same point and time as himself had Steve feeling anxious for answers. 

When he had saw his friend gesture for him to keep quiet, Steve knew that his answers would need to wait and that Bucky was probably keeping a low profile that he himself and failed to mere minutes after waking up.Now Steve found himself walking through familiar streets that were not quite as he remembered them to be. But the destination was thankfully still the same.

---

 It was rapidly closing in on midday and the sun was starting to vanish behind the enormous skyscrapers in the distance. Steve wore a navy blue jacket and beige cargo pants with a blue cap. Not an elaborate disguise but it made him feel comfortable. He wasn't so sure he could completely say the same about his "babysitter". Or "handler" as Director Fury called her. "Thanks for convincing Fury to let me do this...Natalie was it?" He asked.Steve would've lied if he said something about her alluring teal eyes didn't make him feel like the skinny shy kid he used to be.

"I usually shuffle names to keep things complicated ..." Natasha snarked in raspier pitch, jokily, bracing against matte-black Camaro's hood, she deftly eased a leather-sheathed hand up to the level of the bulkier tautness of wartime Adonis's t-shirt garbed chest, giving him a high-priority envelope. "For your eyes only..." Her voluminous lips quirked into a half-smirk. "Everything you need is packed inside..." A chaste tracery of virile heat ardently breached her pulse as Steve hesitantly accepted the package. "Since I like you slightly...I guess you can call me, Natasha..."

Something about the Russian woman made Steve feel as if there was more to her than met the eye. The wistful part of himself that saw what reminded him of Peggy shuttered away those thoughts as he focused instead on what made her different. And in a weird sense, Steve felt Natasha was someone he could grow to trust if he considered taking Fury's offer to join SHIELD's ranks. And that made the soldier feel mildly assured as he accepted the envelope she gave him and responded with a grateful nod. 

"Something tells me you don't let too many people in on that." He said after a short pause. She arched an eyebrow at him perhaps confirming his suspicions and in turn causing him to smile at her with gratitude. "You can call me Steve. I can find my way the rest of the way from here. But I guess we'll be seeing each other around?" He asked, hoping he didn't sound too hopeful.

The apparitional incarnations of SHILED's behind-the-curtain espionage protocols were rigged to set an imploding firestorm against the World Council, warrants of freedom-liberty had become a deadlock relevance as Fury set his underhanded cards on the table, everything was classified as new-extraordinary -players were being selected against calibrated mechanisms of governmental oversight; dynamics of cadenced trust were artificial, she wouldn't allow a valorous-hearted Brooklyn soldier compromisingly breach her anesthetized heart-she was unforgivingly conditioned in the Red Room Academy to become cold as granite-to feel no pulse of sentiment. Splaying her lithe palm with a distractive glide over the Camaro's door, flirty Natasha flitted her lashes with a teasing wink, and replied in a smokier undertone, brusquely as she gave him a sidelong glance. "Don't get too comfortable...Or I might have to check up on you."

Steve watched her drive off in a stylish fashion that left him lingering a few seconds longer than he intended. Once she had turned a corner out of view, he let loose a small sigh and shifted his attention back towards the street ahead. Central Park. The last time he remembered being here was on his 20th birthday. He and Bucky had just come from seeing the Dodgers playing a double-hitter and walked through the park while mimicking some of the incredible plays they had seen. That almost felt like another life-time.Crossing the street, Steve watched as an elderly woman dropped her back in the middle of the crosswalk. He instinctively picked up the bag for her and watched how alarmed she looked by the action until he held the bag out to here.

 "Here you go, ma'am." He smiled tenderly, confused for a moment by how stunned she was."Thank you, young man. I thought you were a mugger. Rare to see such gentleman these days," she said as they crossed the street. Steve felt a smidgen of despondence at her claim, realizing that the city he called home probably hadn't improved entirely for the better.

"Have a good evening, ma'am." Steve said his farewells as she continued pushing her food-cart towards the bus-stop. The blonde released another sigh, this one heavier than the last as he gazed around his surroundings, searching aimlessly for that familiar face...

The picturesque vistas of autumn-laden Central Park were scenically ominous against the shadowy oak trees adorning near the iron gates; shadowily bolstering the corded-planes of his garbed back underneath gnarled branches, the Brooklyn sniper wolf -Bucky Barnes grimacingly feigned a nose scrunch against the aching traction of his incisors fangs, that curved under the shapely-bow of his lip; unkemptly his roguish chestnut tresses shaggily askew under his gray UnderArmor baseball cap as his gloved hand unconsciously traced over his GI dog tags-looping on the wartime chain a platinum-silver ring was revealingly tucked against the leather collar of his leather jacket.

After being careened into a time paradox of a transdimensional gateway from the cindery ruins of Strucker's castle, his wolven form was detected by the monkish sentinel of the Eldritch Arts named the Ancient One-Sanctum guardian of the Multiverse. She had mystically fused their wedding rings with telestic energy-anchoring a soul-bond that chastened them onto the cimmerian fringe of embracing their humanity again.For two-years, Bucky adapted to a new-morphic- existence, only to become a young alpha when his exquisitely-snarky- beautiful she-wolf delivered their baby pups. Now, he waited for his best friend-little Stevie- to return to his side.

 For a stalled moment that blood-poundingly electrified his overhauled resistance, unwaveringly with impassive tack, Bucky roved the grayish smokiness of his aquamarine irises as he drawled out, cockily in murmurous timbre, watching Steve pace crunchily over heaps of reddish maple leaves on his determined tread. "Hey don't keep me waitin' all day, punk..." he snorted out a throaty chuckle. "I've done enough of that..."

Following the voice to its source, Steve smiled warmly in kind. "Yeah well, at least you didn't have to do your waiting on ice. I'm still feeling the chills in this weather." Their banter reminded him of simpler times that he wasn't sure he'd ever relive again. After Bucky's presumed death at Castle Strucker, Steve had been a depressed shell, consumed with grief. He had no source of comfort, not even the temptation of alcohol could numb the pain he felt in his heart. Peggy had been a rock to him, keeping him anchored from the waves of sorrow. It was thanks to her that he had managed to keep his head on straight continue fighting. Losing Bucky made Steve feel as if he lost a part of himself--a crucial part of the man he was born as and not the soldier he'd become. Taking a few steps forward, the emotion must've been clear in Steve's eyes as Bucky came forward to greet him. They didn't say anything, only engulfing each other in a crushing hug. "It's good to see you, man," Steve said, finding his voice as they simply held each other close, pouring years of longing into it.

Uncontrollably against chest-racking sobs, Bucky heaved out fever-pitched breaths, as he viscerally held onto Steve with unabandoned -grounded-resiliency of his brotherly grace, every second was undeniable release as the bristled heaviness of his dimpled chin pudgily rested on Steve's tauten shoulder-flesh and blood, not a grievous chimera of heartache that hauntingly resonated against the spectral lucidity of jacked-off hope. An inseparable-timeless brotherhood that was forged on the downtrodden avenues of Flatbush borough was reignited. Pinching his eyelids shut, Bucky felt a heated trek of straying wetness over the knife-edged curve of his jaw-they needed this. "Didn't I tell you not to do anythin' stupid..." he snarked against throaty croakiness, grazing his canine fangs over the jutted swell of his underlip, whisperingly.

"Couldn't have. You took all the stupid with you," Steve chuckled as they slowly parted but still stood close enough to observe one another. Steve for a moment was astonished by how much Bucky looked the same but also noticeably different in some parts. The stubble was new. In all the years they'd known each other, Steve had never seen Bucky grow a beard. Despite his youth, his friend could get as bushy as his father was if he didn't go to Stanley's barbershop every couple of weeks for a shave. His hair had grown out too-wolfish and neatly combed into a mop tucked behind his ears. His teeth were sharper and cleaner than he remembered. But his eyes remained largely familiar and unchanged. It made Steve wonder if Bucky had somehow managed to cure himself of the wolf curse or if he found some way of controlling it. Natasha and Fury had been vague when they mentioned Bucky and the woman he had apparently married-the woman who was with him in the 40s. Selina Kyle Strucker.

"How long has it been for you?" Steve finally asked. "How did you end up here like me?"

"S'it's kinda hard to explain..." Bucky dragged out a timorous breath, stammeringly, as he mirrored the hawkish intensity of Steve's turquoise-azure irises as shaggier tresses, unabashedly his gloved splayed over the chubbier bulkiness that evidently thickened his leather garbed abdomen; a telltale visage from the long-haul pregnancy that he beautifully endured with Selina. "After Lina ad I were...Uh..." A straining wince raptly tugged over his shapely-wide lips, crestfalleningly. "Transported here in 2010 after the castle got blow-up... We met these incredible people who helped us get everythin' back..." He nipped his poutier underlip, as his fangs morphically lengthened. "M' still always gonna be a wolf...Zola's genetic cocktail made damn sure that I would never be a soldier again..."

Steve stood pondering this revelation with mute shock. A year. For Bucky it had been only a year since he lived in the 1940s before he was thrust into the future to continue living as a wolf. Ironically enough, the amount of time passed for them both was nearly the same. It had been only a few months, close to a year after Castle Strucker had fallen that Steve defeated Red Skull and plunged the Valkyrie into the ocean. A year he lived believing his best friend was gone forever.And now here they were, two men out of time, embracing each other like the past 65 years had never happened and it had been only yesterday that they'd seen each other. It wasn't too far from the truth. But much had changed it was clear as Steve glimpsed the shimmering ring on his friend’s neck.

"But you're not alone, Buck. A good soldier knows when its time to just be just a man...or a wolf." Steve said with an amused smirk as he watched Bucky shake his head mirthlessly. "And now you got a wife…A family?" Steve couldn't help but ask, remembering the trio of cute puppies he had seen being carried away by Bucky and Selina this afternoon when he'd seen them.

"Yeah, Lina is back at our place feedin' the pups..." Bucky drawled in whisper-soft pitch, throatily as Steve involuntarily glanced back at the park's entrance gates-a vacuous, inevitable road that seemed agonizingly directionless for him to trudge alone. This wasn't a victorious homefront-the vivacious, tough-as-nails-Peggy Carter had tragically aged into a fragile eighty-five-year-old woman; a transmissible brain disease -dementia- had emptily purged out her memories. He couldn't let Steve regrettably discover that heart-wrenching truth of what his 'best girl' had become. 

Quirking his lips into a fanged-smirk, toothily, Bucky registered the saltiness of errant tears as Steve mistily downcasted his azure depths, guardedly stowing up his anguish. Bracing his arm over the First Avenger's tensing shoulders in a tenor of brother-drive protectiveness, Bucky snorted out a dorky laugh, underlying every measure of his indent to help Steve cross the road. "C'mon on punk, I think it's time for my little guys to meet their uncle Stevie...I definitely think it's gonna be one helluva of night..."

It was an invitation that Steve was grateful to receive after what originally had been a shockingly distressful day. The shaking fact that his entire world and all he knew was gone-lost to time-still weighed heavily on him. But he found comfort in the fact that even when having nothing, he still had Bucky like he always did. And now apparently he had new nieces and nephews eagerly waiting to meet him. This wasn't the life he envisioned for either him or Bucky after the war, but he wouldn't trade it for anything else. "I think I'm excited to meet em' too." Steve replied as he began following his friend out of the park. "Halloween party you said? ...Just tell me you're not showing em' anything with monsters, werewolves and vampires?" Steve asked with a fake grimace causing Bucky to snigger.

"No that's a little too soon, even for me." Bucky replied. "Something called Hocus Pocus. The girls love witches. Can't say the same about my boy, he hates it.""Witches I can do," Steve chuckled. Bucky however appeared mildly hesitant as he glanced towards the skies, seeing the full moon hidden by wisps of clouds.

"I don't know. I still howl at the moon, Steve…" He nearly laughed as he saw Steve become jittery.

"Terrific," Steve chuckled. Halloween had come, and for once the two Brooklyn brothers were eager to celebrate together with their growing new family.

THE END.

{October 31, 2020}

[claudeng80]

PERSIA, DRAGON SURGEON SHIRAYUKI - YURIS ISLAND - MISSING BOOTS :D :D :D :D

Prequel to The Surgeon’s Lover

Not many trees could withstand the weight of a fully-grown dragon without breaking, and the mighty oaks of Yuris were no exception. Persia clung to the upper branches with all four claws, her wings thrashing for balance and lift as acorns rained to the ground below and squirrels ran for their lives.

Out of sight below the cliff, Obi cursed his borrowed islander sandals, the wrong size for his feet and no good for climbing. He’d catch up, but it would take him time.

The maelstrom that was the Grey Reaper stilled as Persia found a stable position, and Shirayuki called up to her over the groaning of the wood. “Do you want to talk about it?” Generally she was no more willing to volunteer feelings or weakness than Obi was, but they both had a soft spot for Shirayuki. Even when they wouldn’t talk to each other, they’d talk to her.

“He’s stubborn and impossible.” A shiver of scales preceded another rain of acorns.

The pot calling the kettle black, Shirayuki thought. “This is nothing new, Persia. How does that lead to you stealing his boots and perching in a tree?” The silence from the top of the tree was pointed, as Persia watched a ship on the horizon. The tree’s lower branches, as thick around as Persia herself, might be safe enough to climb. “I’m going to come up there so we can talk in a civilized fashion, no more yelling.” Behind her, on the beach, half a dozen Yuris Islanders with their little blue native dragons watched raptly. They were making a spectacle of themselves.

For as much time as she spent clambering up dragon rigging, it had been far too long since she’d climbed a tree. Deeply ridged bark scraped her fingers as she ascended, each branch the girth of the trees she climbed as a child. She wondered if the trees of the oak walk were still there, or whether Lord Raj had cut them down by now.

About a yard below Persia’s feet, she reached the point where she could go no further. The ground swayed dizzyingly below her, so she locked her eyes on Persia’s claws driven into the wood, bark and splinters everywhere. “Can you tell me now?” She asked, soothing, hoping a more private interview might induce her to open up.

Persia ruffled her scales again, and Shirayuki squeaked as she clung to her branch. The great tail lashed, but Persia still wouldn’t make eye contact. She seemed calmer now, but a new element had entered her demeanor. Shyness? Surely not. Possibly embarrassment. “I don’t think I should discuss it with you,” she answered, and that was certainly embarrassment in her voice.

Shirayuki leaned in, ready with more questions, but she was interrupted from below. “What the hell are you two doing up there?” Obi had arrived, and he was angry. She lifted a hand to placate, to explain, and she was sliding, losing her grip and there was nothing to grab.

Persia launched in a flurry of tail and wings, shattering branches as she reached out, one front claw catching Shirayuki around am arm. Wind buffeted her and twigs lashed her skin, up and up until at last they were free of the tree, hovering fifteen yards above Obi. Her shoulder shrieked at the position, but she grabbed at Persia’s feet anyway.

“Put her down, you overgrown bat,” Obi ordered, and Persia cackled.

“Just what I had in mind,” she crowed, tucking into a tight swirling circle of a dive that had Shirayuki clutching at her scales. She backed air with a massive flap, nearly halting in midair, then loosed her grip.

There was no time to scream as Shirayuki dropped, caught by Obi almost immediately. She might have been a dispatch envelope for the effort he showed, gathering her in against his chest, but no dispatch would have his face so white. All anger was gone, replaced with terror. “Are you all right, are you hurt?” His voice was barely a breath, his heartbeat pounding against her arm.

“Just a few scratches, I think.” One on her wrist was already weeping blood, and a another on her face stung.  Obi just stared, holding her even tighter as though reassuring himself she was all right. “I could check the rest if you put me down?”

She could almost watch the blood rush back into his face, pallor shading into blush with no state in between. He lowered the arm under her knees, carefully helping her stand then retreating to a decorous distance. “Everything seems to be in working order. No harm done. What are you two even arguing about?”

The blush didn’t fade, possibly even deepening, or it might have been the sun. “Just a difference of opinion.” The flock of little blue dragons, no larger than birds, rustled over their heads and up to where Persia was circling. Obi watched them go. “She’s not happy I’m not talking her advice, and I was perhaps not very polite about it.” His face was guilt.

“Perhaps?” She knew him better than that.

“Hm. Definitely.” She didn’t have to say a word. He knew what he needed to do. “I’m sorry I told you to mind your own business,” he shouted up to Persia. “I do care what you think!”

A boot landed in front of Shirayuki, spraying sand. She blinked to clear her eyes, opening them to find Persia was circling low now. Obi looked down at the single boot and gritted his teeth. “And I’m sorry I called you a bat!” The second boot joined its mate a couple of yards away, followed by Persia herself. Shirayuki stepped back to avoid the clouds thrown up by Persia’s wings, and Obi steadied her with a hand on her shoulder.

Persia’s mouth hung open now and her tail curled, pleased as Shirayuki had ever seen her. “Now are you going to do what I say?”

“No,” Obi answered curtly, dropping his hand to stride forward and eye Persia’s foot. “Come on, let’s get you out of the sand, you’ve got splinters all over. It’s going to take all afternoon to get those out.” They turned together for the covert, in harmony again, and Shirayuki felt as though she’d missed a good half of the conversation.

“I’ll be there to help,” she called, and ran for her tools. At least pulling splinters was something she understood.

#century prompts #temeraire au #in which obi has a dragon #fanfic #thelionshoarde

[nicksstoryvault]

A ghoulish eeriness sailed over the darkened environs of the Bavarian forest, as discarded hulls of shelled-out HYDRA Uber tanks became obstructive sentinels over the ridgelines as whiteish sconces of moonlight haloed over the SSR division encampment, pitched up tents adorned with the Red Cross insignia flappingly beckoned medic evac ranks to haul the wounded, bloodied faced GI's that were screamingly pulled out of razed fox-holes.

Everything was rehearsed on urgent cue, transport gurneys blindingly moved in traumatic procession as cotton gauzes were sheathed over marred, bullet-riddled flesh, young men that resonated heartbeats of full-measured valor gurglingly choked out in throat-draining cadences as they became on the stuporous fringe of cacophonic panic-an immobilizing dread that grappled them into catatonic lucidity. The second wave of HYDRA ranks mobilized on the front-lines as deafened volleys of anti-tank artillery mistily rained a blood-storms over westward ridge.

Around the stationed point, Ford GP convoy jeeps road out with mud-rutted traction, advancing into the murkiness of the forested grounds that were rigged as the sniper domain, combative-honed Iron Cross Wehrmacht marksmen lethally decked with Mauser Karabiner 98k rifles for long-range precision-shadow reapers.

As the radio wavelength of Agent Peggy Carter's dulcet British-timbre commandingly broadcasted the fixed location of dugout extraction, impassively braced in a sniper- crouch on parked Jeep's hood, with his Springfield 1903 rifle strapped over the bulkier cords of his blue tactical-padded shoulder. Feigning his nonchalant poise, as rakish chestnut tresses unkemptly strayed over his temples, with a distractive play of charming tack, Sergent Bucky Barnes sucked out a drag of vaporous breath as the bendable length of a freshly lit cigarette saggily drooped over the pouty swell of his jutted underlip, his grayish-aquamarine irises unwaveringly razored in the direction of the SSR operations tent, where Captain Steven Rogers was coordinating their next recon mission with Gabe Jones.

'Hell, M' not gonna enjoy this...' he snorted against a murmurous gravelly pitch, snarkily, knowing he was next 'up-to-bat' for a nightly Commando scouting report. "Beats watchin' Duggan snore..." He couldn't ward off being a defiance-starved hostage in the butcherous POW barracks of the Azzano stronghold where the Red Skull's diabolical-sadistic toady -Armin Zola- had surgically anesthetized him before wiring him to needle-point machinery, torturously jabbing mutative infusions of serum cocktails into his veins. After the vomitous, sweaty onslaughts of night-chills that feverishly raided through him, Bucky had staunched out bone-plaguing implosions-the contractive tautness of deadened-heavier muscle, he knew something was-different.

Against his steeled passiveness, jacked-up tension became exceedingly detonative through his veins, every implosive second on the forested battlefront was rigged, as white-bluish salvos of incendiary blasts that surged out of HYDRA weaponry horrifyingly scythed a calamitous wake as young GI's were vaporized into heaped remnants ash-obliterated in a trajectory of energized firebolts. Despite all push-forward efforts of the SSR, HYDRA's butcherous reign of infestive carnage had escalated-armored war machines divisions harvested out Allied units into vapours of white-noise. They needed to destroy Armin Zola's energy cube before echoes of salvaged valour flatlined.

Dabbing out his cigarette, scathingly against roils of feigned tension that rapted over his fisting hand, sniffily Bucky downcasted a crestfallen glance of teary aquamarine at wooden cross markers being stored in convoy truck- an elemental reverence to honor the fallen soldiers of his 107th infantry. "Damnit..." he breathed out, chokingly, as feverish bleariness dampened his lashes. They were young courageous men who devotedly followed tenacious-hellbent- Sergent James Barnes had geared up unerring measures of soldiery faith in him-when the Uber tanks blasted cannonades of voltaic energy over trigger-mine warrens of Azzano, he was pulled into a dugout trench by Dugan- a sitting duck who had devastatingly watched his unit-brotherhood dissolve in sifts of ash. "I gotta be there for em'..." he gritted under a sourish breath, ruefully, grazing his teeth over his pouty underlip. "They deserve that..."

His mournful thoughts were interrupted by the brush of approaching footsteps. Months of experience had made him familiar with discerning friends from foes. Though he kept his guard up, he knew that he was about to receive some friendly company. "Don't be too hard on yourself, Bucky. You're a good soldier. You do what you can for the men. They know that." Despite the encouraging words that came from the baritone voice, they weren't the softly spoken words that belonged to Steve Rogers, but from Captain America. True to form, Bucky watched as the American symbol of Liberty and Freedom approached him, still decked out in his uniform consisting of a carbon polymer flame-resistant jacket, blue paratrooper trousers, leather boots, and combat gloves.

If it weren't for the cool blues of his soft eyes, it would've been hard to recognize the kid from Brooklyn whose greatest strength was his compassion as well as his courage. Steve having long been accustomed to having Bucky uplift him from his sorrow in his darkest moments felt the need to do the same as he watched his friend unravel into the depths of remorse. It was encouraging of course. A soldier without compassion was no better than a machine following orders. But a soldier fully consumed by his guilt in the field was a time-bomb ready to go off. "Losses in war...are inevitable." Steve felt the pang of that reality hit him hard. "You gotta stow it, Bucky." He said to his friend as he stood beside him.

A derisive clench heavily rapted over the knife-edged planes of Bucky's jaw, as he glaringly fixed his sniper-vision of glacial aquamarine on the darkened vistas of the Bavarian forest, boomingly a thunderous cacophony of nightly RAF bomber raids became symphonic in destructive volume-firebombs blindingly careened with salvos of defensive artillery over the German ridgeline; another insomnious-damnable rush had barraged their encampment. With tactful ease of his impassive stance, involuntarily Bucky dragged his tactical boot over the mulchy ground; he was on the vacuous fringe of heart-wrenching collapse, livid spectres of his 107th unit being sifted into ash ravaged him soul-deep.

A chagrined gleam betrayed his battle-lagged wariness as Bucky flashed a knifing glance heatedly onto the white star insignia that heroically contrasted over the patriotic mantle of the Allied Force's new valorous poster boy- Captain America. The runtish gaunt-faced asthmatic that determinedly traded blows with Flatbush jock-faced bullies was now a hunkish-enhanced Adonis-a soldiery paragon that vivaciously gorgeous USO dames swooned over. Hell, Steve even had a radio theme that inspiringly broadcasted over Europe. He wasn't the 'big brother' anymore, his best friend had daringly trudged into the tenebrous labyrinth of HYDRA stronghold-liberating Zola's torture-starved POW's, with just a theatrical prop shield on his back. "Yeah..." Bucky drawled throatily, his suave-boyish features nakedly rapt with phantom anguish as he bluntly gave Steve an offish smirk. "M' guessin' you pals gave you orders to push me out there again, huh?"

At that Steve gave him a lopsided smirk. "Well, I know how much you like to sight-see. And I think we both know that Duggan wouldn't go five minutes out there without his flask to keep him company." In truth, Steve didn't envy the duty of patrolling the perimeter at night when there were so many unknowns to be found in this part of the world. In this instance, the Commandos were more than likely to run into wildlife in these forests than a Hydra patrol moving through the area. They were about 5 clicks out from the nearest settlement and for all they knew, these parts of the forest could be frequented by the local civilians, some innocent and some just as eager to report their location to a Hydra spy in exchange for some money. They could only trust a sharp mind with sharp eyes to navigate this area at night before they carried on with their march in the morning. Bucky was the only logical choice while the others healed and rested.

"What do you say? You up to it?" Steve asked as Bucky took a moment to ponder things. The sun was getting lower while activity surged in the background as the troops scrambled to erect their tents for the evening.

"Ready as I'll ever be, punk..." Bucky quipped in grating pitch starchily, against bone-racking tension flexing over his knuckles, readily he buttoned up the collar of his navy blue jacket as frigidness of the October evening gustily whooshed over the encampment, firelight beacons hauntingly deflected off the Red Cross station-point as the odorous reek of morphine and diesel fumes grippingly breached his scrunching nose. "Grah...Don't wait up for me..." he urged with smug cockiness in his gravel-roughen-timbre, while unerringly adjusting the buckled strap of his Springfield rifle over his padded shoulder; having stealthily executed HYDRA penetration soldiers with dead-eye precision in desolated farmhouses of bomb-out Normandy, Bucky became predatorily attuned with the mechanical cadence of a kill-zone.

Quirkily, Bucky felt a half-smirk tug at his shapely-wide lips as he unwaveringly steered his grayish-aqueous gaze at the blackened towering pines that spookily enwreathed over the drive-out clearing, with adamant reserve Steve tellingly recognized his steeled-hellbent bravado, giving him a subtle nod, warringly evident to the hawkish gleam of his azure irises-the brotherly cadence felt weightily heart-driven; Bucky needed to break distance from the SRR ranks, the nightmarish apparitions of his grievous failure. "I guess it's gonna a rough night .." he murmured in snarkier pitch, easing down in mid-crouch to knot the laces of his tactical boots. "Don't worry, punk, this Brooklyn kid knows how to put em' on the ropes..."

At that Steve gave his old friend an encouraging pat on the shoulder. "They won't see you comin'. We're lucky to have ya, j***. I'll make sure Falsworth saves you some soup." Steve could hear a commotion inside the camp as the troops continued to unload their supplies. This far from the nearest SSR base meant they had to conserve their munitions and supplies accordingly or they'd be at risk of being unequipped in a dangerous territory where they couldn't afford to compromise their presence.

As he turned to leave his friend to his duty, Steve hesitated for the briefest moment. Ever since they were boys, he had developed a sense of caution-an intuition-that warned him of potential danger. He hated to leave Bucky alone out here. If it were up to him, he'd be out here with him into the long hours of the morning as they scouted the perimeter. But as the Captain of their company, he had to formalize their strategies based on the new intelligence they were receiving about alleged Hydra experiments being conducted in a fortress hidden in the mountains. Steve let his feet continue to dutifully carry him into the camp just as the sun continued to descend further into the horizon, blanketing the region in twilight and darkness.

Somewhere in the distance, a foreboding howl sang up into the moon.

The ghoulish ambiance that malignantly veined against the bordering pines of the forest, singed remnants of metallic shrapnel were discarded over the frigid ground; miles outward, the symphonic infernos of rampant mayhem of the night raids deafeningly caromed over the shadowed environs in a tumultuous succession. Unbeknownst to his laser-edged vision, with his Springfield rifle poised in the clutch of his roughened fingers, Bucky swaggeringly advanced with the measured precision of his tactical prowess, gnarled branches whip-lashed over the garbed padding of his shoulder as implosive pulses of the carious miasma of decaying flesh odiously wafted off gutted-out skeletal maggoty deformities that were once HYDRA scouts, black material of their Iron-Cross uniforms tatteredly sheathed over jutted torso bones.

Quashing down a gut-lurching reaction against a nauseous onrush, defensively the young baby-faced sergeant bolstered up his sniper-honed readiness, as errant brunette tresses disheveledly whisked over the graven edge of his razored cheekbones, tensely Bucky crouched on his muscled hunches with athletic grace, he knew with a grip of doubt that he wasn't alone.

"Shoulda figured Barnes..." he quipped under breath, croakily, feeling a bone-shunting-ghostlier chill rake numbingly through his veins in paralytic fruition at the stunted moment Bucky shudderingly registered full-throated fierceness of wolfish snarl menacingly resonating in amplified volume. Piercingly the mesmeric smokiness of his grayish-aquamarine irises became fixed on unmistakable-murderous visages of bestial claw-marks stamped on mudded clumps of dirt. "W-What the hell...?"

The highlands were blanketed by darkness stretching for miles. The luminous rays of moonlight could not breach the canopy of trees extending the vast landscape. But deep in the recesses of the mountains could be heard a faint crackle. Too soft and distant to anyone from afar. But if anyone were in closer range, they'd recognize the alarming dissonance of gunfire going off and the accompanying screams of ravaged men. Feral eyes glared at the pulping bodies of two men choking on their last breaths while clutching their throats. Their blood-their lifeforce spilled uncontrollably through the bites that ripped open their flesh, and tasted their fear. Hunger festered in the creature's stomach-hunger and an insatiable desire to exact pain upon his former captors who tortured him for so many moons.

Humans. They were like a plague upon the Earth causing only pain and suffering. The creature vowed to return them the favor. As he watched two of his captors die, his body was filled with a burning fire. A strength to escape and chase his mistress the pale moon. The creature leapt through the open window of the fortress and into the night. As more humans became aware of his escape, they chased him into the forests, unaware they were hunting their own doom. Hours into the night, he fed and listened to them cry out in misery as he drained their life-blood.

His senses were heightened and the world look so different. Even in darkness, everything was crisp and red like the blood he spilled. The pounding in his ears told him how many human heartbeats were near. So many dim-racing with fear. The hunger continued to burn inside of him despite how many he had slain. He needed to get away-far away. Into the night his feet carried him, across the field of trees as the world blurred past him. He couldn't escape the grip-the anger, the pain. What did the humans do to him? Not far away, he could hear the beating of another heart. This one was calm-soothing. It angered him. He wanted it silenced.

Luminous eyes glared at the offending human through bushes, watching as he looked over other dead humans. He had a weapon. But his back was turned-he was vulnerable. The creature growled, and before the human could react, he charged towards him and pounced with his wolfish maw opened, prepared to bite.

A brackish stench of frothing drool assailed over the underbrush, grappling him into a entrancing thrall of prevalent menace, a homicidal entity breached his isolated position, blurringly against feverish sweat that grungily drenched his chestnut tresses. With mechanized traction, in peripheral vigilance, Bucky leveled his long-barrel rifle against a point-blank deadlock, as the monstrous-beastlier phantom growlingly emitted volumes of rabid aggression.

Catching heaves of breath that racked in his chest, scowlingly, Bucky poised his finger over the trigger-lock as the cadence of unpalpable ferocity gutturally deafened in vicious tenor. Lucent orbs of whitish lazurite blazingly flashed with a soul-knifing intensity as canine muzzle berserkly thrust out with lightning-quick precision of a cobra-strike; the mania of blood lust exceedingly increased in rabid cadence as the hulking-monstrous wolf hungrily detected a thermic pulse of Bucky's rampant heartbeat. Barring the jutted length of his incisor fangs against an unhinged torrent of murderous ecstasy, jarringly the mutative denizen panted out a ferocious snarl over Bucky's muscled shoulder.

The wolf missed his target. An act which served to only infuriate its temper even further as he gracefully landed on his paws stared down the human, snarling with malicious saliva dripping from his maw. The stains of blood on his muzzle attracted the Bucky's attention and made him realize just how lethal his attacker was as he prepared to aim his rifle at him. The wolf barked and roared, once again charging at him, determined to attack and sink his incisors into his flesh. The wolf lunged just at the same time Bucky rolled out of the way. The predator's reflexes however were sharper than the average wolf and reacted-almost as if sniffing out Bucky's move before he even acted. The wolf jumped ontop of Bucky, tackling him to the ground.

Bucky yelled and raised his rifle as the attack dog barked and roared like a possessed animal. The young man held his rifle up at the creature's throat, trying to keep that vicious maw away from him as it chomped and fought desperately to reach him. The stench of death and gore was heavy and repugnant, causing Bucky's eyes to water and for him to gag.

The bone-crushing massiveness of the demonic canine enforcer suffocatingly thrashed with explosive-bludgeoning- momentum of concussive aggression. Before the cocky sergeant could mouth-off a snarky quip about a classic Sherlock Holmes novel that he borrowed from Falseworth's hidden stash of English fiction -the Hound of the Baskervilles; Bucky gnashed his teeth against floored shunts of adrenalized panic, wrenching his arm back in a defensive reaction, in that blinded instant he breathlessly drove a kidney-strike of his bruised fist into the hellbound wolf's furred girth with immobilizing precision. The draconic strength bodily pinning him was unrelenting as he bridged the athletic bulkiness of his thighs in rampant succession, only to grimacingly swallow as viscid bloodied drool gloppily hiked over his shapely-wide lips.

"G-Get off!" He yelled shoving back against the oppressive beast. He could feel his arms straining under the pressure of the immense force and for a moment was tempted to call out for help. Before he could, that was when the wolf finally managed to wrap its maw around the rifle and yanked it from his hands-an act which shocked the young sergeant. Having no other option, he raised his forearm just as the wolf latched onto it, sinking its razor-sharp teeth deep into his flesh.

"AAAAACCCHH!" Bucky's wail pierced the night skies as pain and burning fire flooding his nerves. His blue eyes were wide with fear and anger as the wolf applied bruising pressure on his right arm. Filled with conviction, Bucky used his left hand to reach for his side-arm pistol. He pressed the barrel into the wolf's throat and fired. Not once, not twice, but three times, watching as the bullets exploded out the top of its head. The creature yelped and immediately went limp, its maw releasing Bucky's blooded limb as it crashes lifelessly to the ground beside him. "Aaaugghh..." Bucky whimpered, clutching his arm and rolling over onto his side, face pressed into the dirt as tears escape him.

Choking out vomitous breaths, rackingly against a throated rasp of hitching agony, Bucky dragged his knuckles with blinded urgency over the ground, jackknifing his bulkier abdomen into a planking stance as ribbons of blood gruelingly drenched his Commando tactical jacket, corded thews of his mangled forearm were evidently gouged by a knifepoint assault of wolven fangs that had bleedingly gored through his flesh bone-deep.

The agonized slash heralded a mutative-freakish convergence of incarnate unity-deviance, as the genetic manifestation-fusion luridly bred out a HYDRA laboratory pulsed with infective contractions of morphic-insurmountable strain. "C'mon Barnes..." he murmurously drawled in a hitching breath, doing his utmost to staunch out the injurious puncture as blood wetly hemorrhaged against his palm's tremorous grip over the shredded material that revealed a bloodied gouge over his bicep."Y'gotta fight..."

Uncontrollably, losing the conscious grasp of his exhausted pistol, Bucky thrashed against bone-cleaving inducements of untamped havoc that he couldn't ride out, tauter resiliency of hunkier muscles cuttingly threaded with protrusive veins as he railed out a cadence of his throat-shredding anguish. "S-Steve..." The roughened gravelliness of his timbered drawl sobbingly forced him to become voiceless as he retched up intestinal acid that had soul-crippingly deadened his vertiginous mobility against stoking dregs of warred resilence, as his feverish vision bleared against onrushes of paralytic-blackout- numbness. "B-Bitten..."

There were thundering vibrations shaking the Earth beneath Bucky's prone form. The static in his ears made it difficult to discern anything other than the high-pitched ringing in the dead of night. But the sporadic noises of choking agony had traveled far-numerous kilometers-towards the edge of the Howling Commandos camp where the solitary figure of Steve Rogers stood in deep thought. Steve had finished debriefing his men and dismissed them back to their tents. Before he could retire to his own, he had taken a moment to silently reflect on the war-effort, only for his sharp hearing to pick-up the bloodchilling howls of a wolfish predator locked in combat with a human-with Bucky.

"Bucky!" Steve had bolted without a moment's thought and stormed into the forests in the direction of the struggling sounds. It was a dark night where the only source of light came from the pale moonlight streaking from above, but he was able to navigate his way through the maze of trees and bushes until he reached a clearing. "Bucky! Oh god." Steve slid across the ground on his knees like a batter running for home-base, and came to Bucky's side. "Oh no…" The blonde felt his blood run cold when he saw the sight of Bucky's weeping wound. Beside him was the dead carcass of the largest wolf Steve had ever seen before. "I got you, man. Lay still," Steve urged his best friend who shivered and convulsed against his lap.

As the bone-racking crescendo ratcheted through his blood-gutted flesh, against fevered exhaustion, tremblingly, emitting out whispery-pukish rasps Bucky pillowed his cheek into corded solidity of Steve's tauter shoulder, as he felt a kneading grace of Steve's brotherly caress splayed a desperate rapt under the boyish chubbiness of his slackened-dimpled jaw. Implosive--damnable contractions were sickeningly forcing him to choke on surges of vomitous bile as his lashes flitted against the knifing heat that burningly encompassed his mauled arm had excruciatingly intensified like a clamping vise.

"P-Punk..." The blurred depth of his owlish pupils chillingly razored with voltaic intensity predatorily melding with silvery-aquamarine while his unkempt chestnut tresses damply askew over his temples. "Hr...grah..." Gurgling out quivery breaths, mumblingly, Bucky was careening on the stuporous fringe of being half-awake, the brackish rancidity of drenched canine fur odiously wafted off the lifeless wolf, he felt deadened against the gravitic pulse-a deadlier-ferine aura that viscerally channelled through him. "M-My arm... I can't feel it..."

"Keep it together, Buck." Steve grunted as he helped Bucky up to a squatting position. "Can you walk?" He asked worriedly as he saw his friend's inability to remain balanced and focused. His sweat drenched skin and the temperature of his skin sent alarm coursing through Steve. What was happening to him? The wound on Bucky's shoulder was dark, nearly black in the moonlight and unless Steve was imagining things, the clavicle bone was nearly visible. The trapezius muscles twitched and made a sickening crackle which caused the blood in Steve's body to go cold. "Damn it." Steve cursed, realizing the risk of his friend getting infected by the animal that bit him. "All right, hold on tight, Buck. I'm gonna get you to the medic back at camp." Left with no other option, Steve used his immense strength to easily lift his friend up onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Bucky didn't struggle. Steve was both glad and worried by that as he set a quick jog through the forests, following the path he had came from.

The camp was still wide away by the time he came racing through the tree-line. His arrival was announced by Morita was immediately called for the medical tent to be cleared.

"What the hell happened?" Duggan yelled once he saw a bleeding Bucky on Captain America's shoulders, barely conscious. The other Commandos picked up their weapons at the ready in case of an attack.

"He was attacked by some wild animal." Steve said as he carried Bucky into the tent. The medic of the group, Gabe Jones was already inside and clearing off a make-shift cot for Bucky to lay on. "Bucky, hey!" Steve cried out in fear as he watched Bucky's eyes drift and daze in and out of focus. "You with me? Look at me, pal."

The cushioned mattress against his sweat-dampened back anchored him to immovable reality, against the slumberous grogginess, tearily Bucky pinched his eyelids with tensing strain as he registered the bracing pressure of Steve's leather-sheathed hand urgingly against the bracketed muscle planes of his thickened chest; the invincible vitality of Brooklyn brotherhood grew into a pacifying contrast of beckoned hope.

Thrusting his lacerated arm, in a lightning-quick rush of bestial-enhanced momentum, screechingly, he was reaching for Steve as a uniformed combat medic with a Red Cross insignia stitched on his fatigue parka irrevocably jabbed the shunting dosage of morphine into his forearm, numbing out the convulsive upheavals of rampant drags of heaving breath that quakingly ignited a cimmerian-wolvish unity. Against backlit contrasts of the forested encampment, Steve's angular-graven features hawkishly edged tauter, conveying infinite urgency. "P-Punk..." he slurred in froggish timbre, croakily, drifting into sedative-induced throes, while a smirky quirk breathlessly tugged over his shapely-wide lips. "D-Don't do anythin' stupid..."

That was all Bucky could manage before his exhaustion won out and he fell into shock. "Bucky!" Steve cried as he held his head with his hands. In the entryway of the tent the other Commandos stood somberly gazing inside. "Is he gonna be all right?" Steve asked the medic who held Bucky's wrist to check his pulse. A perpetual fear took hold of him that he hadn't felt in such a long time. Not since the day he lost his mother. Guilt festered within him, telling him that he should've never let Bucky patrol the perimeter by himself. If he had backup-if he had been with him-he wouldn't be in this position right now.

"If I can clean the wound and stop the bloodloss, time will tell," the medic responded as he stripped away the remains of Bucky's shirt. "Captain, sir. I need you to stay outside so I can work on him," the medic insisted as he began to sort through the numerous bottles of alcohol and iodine.

"C'mon, Cap. He's in good hands," Duggan urged Steve as he placed a sympathetic hand on the blonde's shoulder. Steve stared at Bucky's bloodied and bruised body with a torn look that emphasized the innate struggle within him. He wouldn't lose his best friend. He had to hope and pray he survived this. Steve let himself be guided out of the tent to allow the medic to treat Bucky. Steve could only linger outside, haunted by the memory of finding Bucky in his wounded state, and by the luminous sapphire of his eyes that were like frosted diamonds before he had passed out.

'M' with ya until the end of the line...'

The unbreakable mantra of a prevalent Brooklyn cadence warringly echoed against Bucky's tremorous heartbeat; onrushes of infused morphine had overpoweringly arrowed through his veins —unbidden feverish chills draggingly racked him bone-raw into a phantom succession as the muskiness of blood-drenched layers medical gauze that sheathed over his forearm smellily entrenched his rivalrous senses. The draping cascades of the Red Cross tent flappingly chased hurricanic gusts of the frigid October headwinds, as the vaporous fumes of diesel entrenched the medic stations, jeep convoys immediately hauled out with M5 anti-tank guns, answering the distress-call for the grounded infantry units on the ridgelines.

Harnessing up dormant visages of his amplified resilence, against catatonic grogginess, aggressively, Bucky clutched onto the mattress with a viscerous flex of a bestial grip as he consciously listened to a short-range frequency of paranoic artillery-fire that distressingly broadcasted on Gabe Jone's SCR-300 pack radio as cacophonic POW trauma incessantly resonated within the station tent. 'We're getting massacred out there...'

The tension felt as dire as being in a warzone helplessly waiting for the enemy to come into your tent and litter you with bullets as you laid on your cot. Apprehension took hold of him and there was nothing more he wanted than to have a weapon in his hand aimed at the tent-flaps. As his listless gaze searched the tent area, he nearly recoiled off his cot when the flaps opened and someone entered. Bucky felt his heart leap up into his throat, gripping him with fearful anticipation until he realized who it was that came in.

"Bucky, you're awake." Steve said both relieved but mildly focused in a way that said he was still in captain-mode. In fact, the blonde stood fully garbed in his uniform with his shield slung onto his back. Outside could be heard the commotion of increasing chaos as the Howling Commandos scrambled to form a line of defence against some unseen attackers. "How do you feel?" Steve asked worriedly, drawing Bucky back to the present.

An unnameable maelstrom of bone-gripping pain had anesthetized him, feverish clamminess profusely glazed over his youthful skin, chestnut tresses rakishly clung to his furrowing brow against the strenuous wake, despite that his collapsible dregs of strength felt dissected in tenfold. With a painstaking variance of his telltale stubbornness, Bucky arched his back off the mattress, gnashing his teeth against the infectious scourge. A pinching drag starkly grazed over the pouty swell of his underlip, as he became shockingly aware that his canine incisors were gnawingly jutting out in lengthened-mutative traction.

Groaningly, as Steve's deep-sonorous timbre placidly reached him, Bucky eased his bandaged hand up to his jaw as his grayish-aquamarine irises flashed at the medical instruments and remnants bloodied gauze lividly placed on a wooden table. A panic-razed breath caught up his scoured throat as a mounting revelation of the hellish attack arrestingly deadened him into a soporific vigil of concussive traumatic onslaughts. Unfalteringly, Steve downcasted the stormier intensity of his oceanic azureous irises at the medical clipboard report authorized by General Chester Philps: 'Sergrent James Barnes: Not Fit For Duty'.

"W-What's happenin' out there..." Bucky rasped under gravelly breaths, against throaty scratchiness, quashing down another inexorable bout of irrepressible, gut-sloshing nausea, while Steve immediately reacted to evident choked-off gurgling and propelled a metal bucket with driven momentum of his booted foot at the headlong second, Bucky had retched up breathless-pukey- heaves. "S'thank's punk..."

Its nothing we can't handle, and nothing you should be concerned about," Steve only replied to his friend's initial question. A group of ragtag militia who belonged to neither Hydra nor the Allies had stumbled onto their camp and thought they could raid the supplies.

Their numbers were too few to mount an effective attack despite their daringness. Steve fixed his friend with an assessing look, half-tempted to push him back into bed where he should be. Instead the Captain sighed, running a hand back through his hair. "You gave us a big scare last night, Buck. You lost a lot of blood. You know if it was me in your shoes, you wouldn't let me go out there. You're ordered at least a full day of bed-rest before we can talk about you going back out there." Just as he finished it looked like Bucky was prepared to argue with him. That was until his best friend's eyes widened and he rushed for the bucket. Steve grimaced as he listened to the chilling sounds of Bucky emptying his stomach in loud heaves. "Easy," Steve gently placed a cool rag against Bucky's temple and eased him to sit back down onto his cot. "You shouldn't be out of bed."

"Yeah, like that's gonna happen..." Bucky grumbled back, dismissively against a snorty pitch, vexatiously shrugging off the dampness of the rag that chilled against his tensing brow as Steve deftly applied the spongy cloth over his feverish temples with a tentative flex, onrushes of contractive throbs bloatedly intensified within in his stomach-nothing ebbed. Scathingly, he braced his muscled forearm over the bracketed ridges of his mid-drift as sludginess of bile chased indrawn breaths. Convincing himself to refuel his battle-tested defiance readily Bucky gripped onto the wooden edge of a table with a steeled flex, pressing his lips into a harsh grimace. "You're not leavin' without me..."

"I didn't come here for a debate, Buck. I came to see how you were doin'," Steve sighed as he leaned back against a medical table. His arms cross and a look of remorse comes over him as he takes the time to look over his friend's appearance. Bucky looked like he had just climbed out of a wood-chipper with his body barely intact. The numerous scratches, bruises and the heavily bandaged part of his shoulder were clear indicators of what he'd been through, and Steve felt remorse hit him once again that he had sent Bucky out there by himself.

"What happened out there?" Steve asked, recalling the dead anima-wolf he'd found with Bucky. Marita and Jones had gone back out there in the morning to search for the carcass only to instead find it gone. What they had found instead was the raiding militia that were nipping at their heels.

Feigning his indifferent toughness against an imploding surge of predatory fierceness, the chemical potency of antiseptic sailed nauseatingly within the medical station, a rapt scrunch of his nose conveyed instinctive sniffing as he unmistakably caught a saltish wafting of panicked dread-human sweat that penetrated through sheets-the cindery mortar of a HYDRA-ravaged town. Furrowing his brow confusingly into an incredulous pinch, reddish skeins of thermic heat pulsingly veined towards Steve in arrowing sync, as he became clashingly attuned to a blood-thumping resonance of his best friend's steadier heartbeat.

Fostering on a conscious measure of phantom restraint against blood rushes of white-heat, Bucky panted out heavily in ragged breaths as throbbing in his swelled gums bleedingly coupled in bone-splintering fruition. "T-There was something big that jumped me..." he drawled under tight hitches, scratchily, as feverish wetness grungily dampened his unkempt brunette tresses. A dumbstruck blankness stamped over the hard-edged planes the ruggedly delineated with the boyishness of his graven features "S'it's gotta be still out there, Steve..."

Crestfallenly, Bucky winced against pained breaths, as he shakily caught his underlip between his sharpened teeth-fangs. Making a tactful advance to the cot, determinedly Steve's turquoise-azure irises gleamed niveous light-a fiercer rawness that echoed soldier-driven intensity, preparing to gear up for another battle-run into the slaughterous pandemonium of HYDRA's damnable-ironhanded warpath. "I guess it was kinda stupid not lookin' over my shoulder, huh...?" he quipped, snarkily.

"I don't think anyone else could've been prepared for something like that," Steve reassured his friend. He himself wasn't so sure what it was that had attacked Bucky. It looked like a wolf, but its size was too huge and its face too twisted to be considered an ordinary specimen. There was also the fact Bucky had blown so many shots into the creature's abdomen and skull in the effort to save his life. It was deader than roadkill. But it didn't change the very strange fact that its dead carcass was no longer where it should be. Realizing that Bucky must've noticed his disquiet, Steve exhaled roughly and tightened his jaw. "The thing that attacked you, we couldn't find its body. Duggan and Jones went out there this mornin' to look for it. Jones said something about your bite wasn't ordinary. You got bit, Buck, by a jaw with too many teeth to be considered and ordinary wolf." Steve explained, hoping to make him understand the gravity of his injury. "Jones wanted to study it, make sure we knew what we were dealing with in case there are more of those things out there. Instead, all we found was a ditch with blood-stains on it."

An unhampered succession of gut-wrenching momentum of a contractive heartbeat forced Bucky to revealingly stiffened against the pillowed cushion, demonically ghoulish visages zombiesque skeletal remnants of deformed canine apparitions screechingly amplified into a macabre rhapsody of banshee-like frequency against his feverish headrush. Every pulse veined a possessive divergence as he felt knifing traction under the cotton gauze sheathing over his left bicep."You're tellin' me that I was bitten..." he rasped in breathless cadence, dizzily jerking his head back, as he pinched his eyelids against grimacing tension."I-It's gotta be from HYDRA...There's no other way to explain it, Steve..."

"We're not discounting anything at the moment, but it would explain a lot of the rumors we've been hearing about them up in these mountains," Steve said feeling increased worry. He knew what kind of monsters Hydra scientists could be, having seen the grisly aftermath of their experiments in the several labs they'd raided over the past several months. Man, woman or child, even animals. Zola was determined to give the Skull a fighting edge against the Allies and to do that, he needed specimens to experiment on. The things they'd found even gave Howard nightmares about setting foot in a lab. "People have gone missing, and there's a lot of unrest about wildlife in the area running into town. It's probably connected to whatever attacked you last night." Steve watched as Bucky stubbornly tried to throw on his jacket with one arm still in his sling. "Whoa, what are you doing?!" Steve yelled, alarmed as he stood in front of Bucky who tried to make his way out of the tent.

"M' going out there..." A snarlier pitch emitted up his throat, growly attempting to half-spun on his combat boots in mechanized variance, Bucky gnashed his teeth against seething breaths, the hard-edged virility of his features rapted with bestial tension as he jutted out his stubbled jaw with aggressive traction, intimidatingly giving Steve a menacing flash of his canine fangs as he became attuned to penetrative fierceness that outrode his warred restraint. Blazingly his slitted irises gleamed whitish heat of voltaic sapphire; abandoning his combative reserve, against headlong-wolven- rabidness Bucky delivered a banking stoke of his full-measured viciousness, telltale fisting of his bruised hand warningly surged up, propelling explosive momentum of a straight-arm uppercut a hairbreadth from Steve's broaden jaw."T-This is my damn hunt...!"

"You're not going anywhere today, Sergeant Barnes," Steve spoke with a firm tone. The intensity of his blue eyes and the tightness of his jaw made it clear that it wasn't Bucky's friend talking, but his commanding officer, Captain America. "You're not fit for duty, and you're not putting yourself at risk out there." The duo maintain a tense eye contact that threatened to boil over into something dangerous.

Until now, he had never had to pull rank on Bucky since they had begun serving in the same unit. Bucky was his best friend and they trusted each other more than a lot of blood-brothers did. But it was inevitable it seemed that they would arrive to a moment such as this. Having seen the wild and ferocious look in Bucky's eyes, Steve began to worry about his frame of mind. But as the seconds passed and Bucky made no move to get passed him, Steve believed his message had been made clear. He'd wrestle Bucky onto the mattress if he had to.

"Now stand down, and get some rest." He ordered. "We'll handle this."

Dragging out throaty heaves, scowlingly against the crescendoing tempo of a heart-racking stupor, Bucky reeled back in stilted—mortified alarm as if he was blindingly dodging concussive blowback from a flash grenade. The visceral echoes of his Brooklyn spirit ragingly deafened against the floored revelation that he bullishly attacked little Stevie, his scrawny-asthmatic best friend was a punching-bag of mortal courage, never breaking into a gutless run like a chicken-hearted sap when his back was pushed against the wall of Flatbush alleyway. Those cornered backdrops were Steve's battleground-of fighting the jock-faced bullies. He always used a trash lid as his shield against thuggish ambushes of knuckled bruises on his bonier-gaunt features-never backing down, he was helluva of scrapper. 'I had em' on the ropes...'

Quashing down rampageous siege of untamed aggression that unwarrantably fueled revamping stokes of his beastlier ferocity, Bucky gazed down at the flexing tension of his hand, stark panic blankly melded in the aqueous depth of his owlish-wide irises as convulsive dregs of breakneck awareness throbbingly whipsawed through him in paralytic succession. "Steve...Wait...Damnit, I didn't mean to..." he choked up a raspier gasp, stammeringly as his lips poutily stretched gapingly against breathless -stupefied distress."Punk...M' sorry."

"Its all right." Steve said. Hearing his friend's apology, he let his temper cool and was both parts thankful and remorseful over their heated exchange. Despite his greater inclination towards keeping his friend safe after sustaining a life-threatening injury, Steve was also concerned over his how that encounter might have changed Bucky. He was short-tempered and aggressive which was a far cry from his normally cool demeanor. He couldn't have him in the field like this. Not till he was back to his normal-self. "Look, um, why don't you just get some rest, and I'll have Jones bring you some food and-" He was interrupted when the tent-flap opened and in came Duggan immediately seemed to immediately notice the tense atmosphere between the two friends.

"Sorry, Cap. We need you on the edge of the perimeter, we think got eyes on a Hydra scouting party." The bowler cap soldier said which not only served to distill the tension but also break the ice. Steve fell back into solider mode immediately as he patted Duggan on the shoulder.

"I'll be right out." Duggan exited the tent, leaving Bucky and Steve to make one last exchange. "Will you be all right?" Steve asked worriedly.

A derisive nose scrunch tautly became evident, as Bucky grimacingly feigned a half-smirk; he couldn't remain fastened own a medical cot, straining against mutative tension, he stuntedly eased onto the mattress as foggier haziness bleared out his vision with no avail; he couldn't redouble his tactless efforts. What he agonizingly endured in the Azzano hellhole-being injected with blood-crippling serums that Doctor Armin Zola serpentinely conceived to slake his pestiferous tantamount of surgically razing out soldiery echoes of defiance into babbling—vermined POW captives of disposable flesh. He was HYDRA's inventive-depraved maestro of amputating out heartbeats of Brooklyn resistance with torturous-maniacal devices of psychological deprivation—chasmic thralls of starvation that felt grippingly deathless.

Allowing his tactical jacket to slip out of his tremorous clutch, dizzily Bucky roved a steely glare of feverish aquamarine down at blood-smeared gauze discarded in a bucket. "Yeah-That might not be so bad..." he drawled in threadier pitch, scathingly, as he felt Steve's leather-gloved palm brace over his shoulder, keeping him steadily bolstered against a wedged pillow.

Measuringly with passive vigilance alight in his cool azure depths, Steve evicted bone-deep tension as he dishearteningly gazed at chestnut tresses slickly clung over the dark fringe of Bucky's lashes, while an unquenchable onrush of repressive hunger insatiably floored the 'pretty-boy' Commando on grudging accord —salvaged C-rations of canned soups and salty biscuits—crackers wouldn't curb down his untrammelled barrages of steepened appetite. He needed meat. "Kinda cravin' a steak right now..." A growlier timbre emitted out of him, demandingly. "Gotta be somethin' good around here..."

It was perhaps the most random thing Bucky might've said, but to Steve it was oddly reassuring and he couldn't help but release a dry chuckle. "I'll send Jones in with some chow we made this morning. Don't worry, I made sure Duggan didn't eat your serving." Steve smirked good-naturedly as he heard Duggan groan outside, 'Its not like there ain't enough for seconds, Cap.' Steve gives Bucky a nod and hesitantly leaves the tent. He couldn't help but feel a sense of foreboding as though he hadn't heard the last of this predicament. He just hoped Bucky took it easy, and that there weren't anymore of those animals out there.

As the spookish waxiness of the moonlight gothically haloed over iron spires of a Bravian castle of Baron Von Strucker; the castellated massiveness of Romanesque travertine stone reddishly contrasted against torchlight sconces, as cranking gears of the drawbridge whirred to allow HYDRA convoys to drove into the archway courtyard. Every mobilized advance of ground reapers installations was dynastically orchestrated for the Iron Cross's sanguineous-fanatical legacy to reign with galactic-innovative devices of infective conquest. The Nordic energy cube that was unearthed in a Tønsberg chapel had become the Red Skull's humanity-scything weapon to consumingly harvest out Allied defences of the frontlines-to evolve into victorious Titians over the genocidal remnants of the hope-suffocated world.

Black leather-grabbed troopers were impassively poised on the bastion edifices, their faces mechanically concealed by futuristic owl-like goggles as leather vizards fringed their unexpressive lips. Each HYDRA sentry was outfitted with Arnimhilation 99L Assault rifles that were infused with voltaic energy-a white-noise frequency of disintegrating Allied divisions into cindery ash heaps. With a gestural signal of a HYDRA carrier truck, white Kraken sigil was demonically emblazoned on the doors."Lass sie durch(Let them through)..." A commanding Germanic resonance of a battlement sentry blared out, immediately signalling at the drawbridge patrol below him in urgent tenor. "Letzter, der durchkommt (Last one to come through)..."

The thought allowed Arnim Zola sag with relief. Days on end there had been nothing but a constant flow of misfortunes that would have seen him meet the chopping block if the Skull did not value his expertise. It began with several missing shipments from their munitions facility several kilometers away, rumored to have been captured by the Allies who were mercilessly carving a path their way. A few missing caravans, however withstanding, did not compare to the calamity of having one of his specimens escape. An unruly wolf that proved far more resilient to his serum-based infusions than the other animals he experimented on. While the scientist prided himself on his keen intellect and cunning, he was not brawn. As he told Schmidt time and again, he designed the weapons, it was not up to him to manage them.

The guards in charge of the creature's transport back to his cell failed spectacularly and allowed it to escape the castle. Since then, Zola went into planning mode to attempt to rectify this mess before word reached the Skull's ears. But fortune seemed to once again favor him when his men had brought in the remains of the creature early this morning after their scouting mission. The carcass of said creature now laid strawn upon the table he wandered over to where a few of his assistants were examining its body. "Miserable creature. For all its grace and cunning, it lacks the will that only humans could demonstrate. Wouldn't you agree, Fraulein Selina?" He called over towards a shape in a dark corner.

Against the despotic shadows of the HYDRA infested Bavarian castle, armoured installations of convoy trucks drove into sub-levels in a militaristic unison-a reactive extension of the Iron Cross legion maliciously helmed by the barbarous warmonger- Baron Von Strucker; possessive snideness that callously fringed in the portly doctor'stoadyish command, his jowled features stubbily rapted with agitated impatience as he glared beckoningly at his lethal- kitten-operative."Sei nicht schüchtern, mein Haustier (Do not be shy my pet)..." he taunted, churlishly.

Hinging down her brazen fieriness with impassive vehemence, naughtily Selina brandished collective poise in her indifference stance, as the black sleekness of her leather bomber jacket—a token of her executed loyalty- stylishly contrasted against flickering sconces of the marble hearth of the spacious throne room. Her practical grab of seductive infiltration was honed with imperial—untouchable elegance, a tailored collar overlappingly arrowed length over the svelter contours of her graceful neck as lustrous mahogany tresses were knotted in an exquisite chignon. Scones of firelight burnished over the cool fineness of her elfish visage as she infuriatingly braced her lithe back against a stone column.

The carious reek of dissected flesh stinkily wafted off the bullet-gored canine as surgical implements of diabolical gadgetry hellishly adorned a medical trolley. Clutching her unholstered Walther P38 pistol with deceptive readiness flexing her lithe-gloved fingers, in a sauntering advance of her phantom-mechanized -coolness, involuntarily Selina neared the autopsy table, and gave her swine-faced handler a rueful smirk that foxily played over the crimson lushness of her voluminous full-bow lips, she answered, in a raspier undertone, snarkily." Well, I guess you're in a disappointing mood that no spoils came back..."

"Quite," Was Zola's terse response as he took in the state of the creature. A preliminary exam was enough to indicate that someone had killed it with an estimated eight shots. While an ordinary wolf could be killed a single well placed shot, it apparently took nearly a full chamber to bring down his augmented creation. He would be beaming with pride now were it not for the failure to record combat data other than the mauled corpses the creature had left in its wake last night. What were its endurance limits? How far could its senses stretch? Could it be contagious? Questions that were left unanswered and that the scientist was frustrated over. "What more can you tell us?" He asked one of his skilled hands that opened the canine's bloodied maw.

"The creature has fresh blood on his teeth, but too soon to tell if it is human or his own. But...look here!" Reaching into the wolf's mouth with latex gloves, the assistant pulls out what at first looked to be nothing more than a patch of fur. Zola cleans his spectacles and leans forward as they place the bloodied patch beneath an examination light.

"It appears my little patient introduced himself to an Allied soldier," Zola smirked sadistically at that as he came to identify the patch as a piece of torn clothing with the hauberk eagle symbol. "Not just any soldier apparently-a Commando. Curious..."

Narrowing a thievish flit of her tigerish-coffee irises, evident to a deviant smirk, unblinkingly Selina gazed at the unmistakable dark blue scrap of clothing that grisly clung to the mutative -disposable canine's bloodied incisors-an infective divergence of the rogue-lycan- instincts had inexorably conceived morphic infancy within one of the Howling Commandos; using expandable Allied soldiers for merciless sterilization of humanity, Zola was dementedly ushering a freakish reality of cimmerian genetics.

Scrunching up her pert nose, with an incredulous breathy whiff, Selina nakedly caught arrestive traces of a virile scent-a woodsy smokiness of aftershave and diesel that was addictively intoxicating."Well, I guess I'll be having fun playing with the army boys tonight," Selina deadpanned under breath, challengingly, and with an underhand swipe, fluidly, holstered her pistol, as she teasingly smirked at the pudgy bespectacled doctor. "After a girl does get bored around HYDRA stiffs..."

Zola had the patience to silently ponder her course of action. Wolfgang Von Strucker's daughter was as much an asset as she was an unpredictable element. That her father chose to surrender his estate and offer his services to Hydra meant his daughter was at their beck and call to command. Despite his displeasure towards seeing a woman on the field of battle, Zola knew they were lethal as poison, and had talents that ordinary men could not equip such as the ability to charm and finesse their way into power. Selina was both a charmer and a feline who would not hesitate to extend her claws against anyone in her way.

Including himself…

Better to utilize her talents than to allow her to linger over his shoulder. "Very well. But be discreet. Observe and follow. If things are as I suspect, the poor fool who was bitten will be in for quite the aftershock of his experience. Bring him to me-alive, if that proves true."

Every surgical deviation of Armin Zola's obsessive tantamount of amputating pathetic excuses of humanity into vermined throes fueled his egotistical -crazed- desire of relishing in the industrious ranks of HYDRA supremacy; for the last month, he was relentlessly searching for a dynamical strain that prevailingly veined within the incarnate matrix of the alpha serum of traitorous Doctor Abraham Erskine infused within a puny Brooklyn runt, all his synthetic POW failures were inadequate furred deformities; nothing was effective against the genetic transcendence of demonically birthing new legion of monstrous-wolven- chimeras.

With the trade-off alliance of Baron Wolfgang Strucker, he conditioned tractable-sirenic perfection in a kittenish Füchsin (vixen)--a highbred-feisty daughter who virtuosically harnessed a furtive-thieving- caliber against the parasitical throes of her leashed existence. "Do not fail me, little Fraulein..." he warned, sneeringly, as he lifted his pudgier hand with malicious ease to inspect the blue material, watching her slink vanishingly into the shadows -into the phantom drift. "Indeed you won't..."

Against the earshot reckoning of soldier's dawn, within the darkened ambiance of the medical tent, feverous sweat wetly drenched cotton-wool sheets, as contractive pressure of morphic tenor shifted athletic, well-defined bulkiness of heavier muscles thrashingly flexed with spasmatic onrushes-crescendoing in an infective abandon of bestial ferocity. Everything was sensory heightened within the mutative drift like kinetic -elemental frequency-assonance that he galvanically registered miles outward as the mechanical traction of Panzer tanks launching diesel-fueled momentum over the Bavarian ridgeline.

Silvery paleness of morning light spookily contrasted over murkier environs, deafening staccatos of anti-tank guns cuttingly ratcheted as bloodied sprays from bullet-gouged flesh mistily sailed in the brisk air; Bucky felt every straining thump of penetrated heartbeats anguishedly contracted into a flatline pulse as heated saltiness of grievous tears wetly drenched mud rutted trenches before depth charges of pitched grenades cacophonously exploded in volleys of firestorms as gruesome remnants of Allied soldiers hailed over the battlezone.

Clutching into the drenched sheet, the hunkier tautness of his athletic-honed mass rushingly burgeoned in a tempoed-mutative- succession underneath his wool military garb as pukey grogginess raggedly threaded his whispery drawl, scratchily. "What's happenin'..." Against that neasous rush, Bucky propped his forearms bracingly over the mattress steel frame, arching his back with a desperate thrust of his warring resilience against careening momentum, only to crashingly nosedive onto the ground; his muscled forearms strenuously bolstered him into planking stance, as he growly heaved out throated pants against chest-vicing spasms. "Argh..."

Sick. Fever. Chills. Sweat. Blood. Hunger. Hunger…

A rampant flow of sensations poured through him with the unrelenting force of a raging river. Bucky couldn't discern the source of his calamity, only that the world suddenly appeared to be phasing in and out of coherence like a flickering lightbulb. His hearing was smothered by the pounding of his pulse-so loud, so all-consuming he wondered if his ears might burst. He wasn't aware he was screaming until he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror propped up on the food-tray. Blue eyes impossibly wide, he thought he caught a glimpse of something monstrous sneering back at him with gleaming teeth and predatory eyes.

Unconsciously he smashed the mirror with his fist with such reckless abandon he could only stare with dim horror at the shards of glass stuck to his knuckles. Blood streamed down his hand in such a brilliant spectacle, he could neither feel nor stop its flow. Before he could panic he watched as slowly but surely, the cuts began to heal themselves and the shards plopped out from his hand. Feeling sick, Bucky reached for the slop-bucket and emptied the contents of his stomach. Sweat dripped down into his eyes, obscuring his vision which served to only agitate him further. "Weak…" He growled, falling back onto the mattress, eyes swimmingly caught between a blurred reality and obscure images shifting through his psyche.

"Sergent Barnes..." With surgical tack, stubbier fingers manically clutched a syringe a viscous liquid spurted out, as haloing blurriness of greenish sconces reflected off chrome implements tellingly smeared with bloodied remnants-it was a pernicious revelation that captured POWs of the 107th infantry were torturously butchered into a horror-shop. Whirring drones of an electrical pulse of the examination gurney stuporously deadened his straining mobility as the ominous glare of oval eyeglasses maliciously became evident to a vulturous sneer. "You owe my pleasure of not making me disappointed in this ceremonious audience, not like your ineffective unit, such pathetic issues of American soldiers..." He snickered, churlishly, wobbling towards a medical trolley, as Zola lifted up a nightmarish helmet -an invention of cerebral gadgety to erratically induce zapage of psychological agony as dangling wires spidered over the pudginess of his white-sleeved wrists. "They did not last the night when I played with their defeated minds..."

"Monster…" The word spewed from Bucky's lips like toxic venom. There was no better fitted word to describe the Hydra scientist that had strapped him to a table and proceeded to inject him with his poison. The neverending chorus of screams had told him the scientist had done the exact same to the men of his infantry-his brothers. "Kill you…I'll..." He suddenly lurched off of his cot and collapsed onto the ground, laying on his side. He tried to banish the image of Zola, but being far from his captor didn't help him to escape the feeling of being confined-being caged. The walls of his tent were now suffocating him with their oppressive confinement, he longed for the feeling of fresh air embracing him.

"Grraauggh!" He cried through clenched teeth and squinted eyes while hugging his stomach. He needed to ease the ache of hunger that screamed at him to feed. He wanted to deafen the pounding of his pulse in his ears, howl at it to the top of his lungs until he could hear nothing but dead silence. Sweating profusely, he crawls forward, smacking the palm of his free hand against the ground, ignorant to the veins bulging on his skin, and the hair follicles rising off his body. His teeth gnashed with the strain of effort, pulling him onto all fours until he was crawling towards the tent flaps with deep growling breaths.

"On your feet, Sergent..." Commandingly a lyrical steeliness of a British-accented undertone silkily resonated behind the flapping drape as laced combat boots fringed an unwelcome breach of undeterred approach; impassively with elegant fierceness cemented in her unfaltering composure, exquisitely garbed in her SSR bronze service uniform, Agent Peggy Carter entered the medical tent with an observant gleam in her chocolate irises. Nothing detracted her genuine concern, as she eased on her curvaceous haunches with a measure of immovable resolve, nauseous dampness sweatily trekked down the corded thickness of Bucky's arching back as he breathlessly convulsed against the possessive rush as infective heat. "This not you, James Barnes..." she murmured in urgent pitch, fractionally kneaded her the lithe pressure of her gloved fingers over the protrusive veins bulging over Bucky's tauten forearm that was sickly ashen as he snarly panted out a breathless warning. "I will be damned if you give up this fight, not when Captain Rogers needs you..."

"Steve...Cap…" Bucky rasped out with a deep voice. His droopy eyes were glazed as if he were half-awake while allowing Peggy to help him to feet. Her presence contracted a swarm of sensations that hit him with the force of a truck. Ambergris cream, floral jasmine scented locks-a blood-rushing combination of scents that caused him to unconsciously growl, his grip on Peggy's arms growing tighter. He could feel her struggle against him, Bucky unable to comprehend anything but the emotions storming inside of him as the grip of hunger increased in ferocity as he stared at her exposed neck. "No…NO!" He roared, releasing Peggy with a not so gentle push. His heavy breaths were pronounced by his bared teeth, his bent posture was predatory, ready to pounce on the nearest prey he could find.

Bruisingly against the rampageous momentum of his defensive reaction that bull-rushed into her bodily with unstoppable-breakneck- aggression, trepidatiously Peggy breathed out a choked-off gasp as she was alarmingly tackled into a dresser with bone-slamming force-a denotative surge of monstrous ferocity that wouldn't be roped down against warred motions of restraint. He was uncaged. In blinding succession, with floored awareness, effectively Peggy braced her palm on the ground as bloodied glops of drool trekked slickly over the delectable-vibrant suppleness of her curvier alabaster features. Gazing unflinchingly at the intimating length of his poised fingers that flexed in clawing sync, Peggy urged out, staidly in beseeching pitch, fluidly dodging a slashing arc of his fisted hand. "S-Sergent Barnes don't be stubborn..." she implored, easing her bruised palm with deft traction-reaching for him. "Wait..."

So he ran. He could hear Peggy calling out to him, but Bucky ignored her as he rushed through the tent-flaps and into the dead of nightfall.

Against the vaporous smokiness that enwreathed the backlit tavern, aromatically scents of brewed whiskey funkily sailed from congested booths as Dum Dum Duggan's hearty chuckle jovially deafened as mug pints of German stout clanged in unison, impassively keeping himself distant near the bar as amber sconces from glass-adorned lamps burnished his unkempt chestnut tresses, Bucky dragged a fork with hungered precision over a plate of gravy-drenched beef Rouladen that was cravingly layered with juicy pork belly-his fissionable-rapine appetite for meat had calamitously escalated in tenfold.

Refusing to join the victorious shing-dig of the Howling Commando's achieved mission against HYDRA installations of the battlemented ridgeline, noncommittally without suave reserve, Bucky emitted a huffish breath, as he vexatiously strapped the glazed beef with aggressive flexion of his clutched fingers and sloppily chewed a mouthful in wolfish bites. "S'good..." he murmured in a growlier pitch, belchingly, as his jutted canine incisors devouringly shredded the beef in one aggressive gulp, drizzles of gravy trekked over his dimpled chin- succulent flavors meatily quashed his gluttonous barrage. For the umpteenth time, Bucky couldn't stave down the onrushing mania of wolfish-induced hunger- a stuporous ecstasy that made him bloatedly like a debauched slob-not a hunkish Brooklyn kid. "Gotta have more..."

"How ya doin', Buck...?" A heavier-timbered Brooklyn drawl sonorously breached his ears, fringed with infinite concern as Steve with tactful ease dragged out a bar stool, in a placid variance that didn't belie his adamant resolve while behind them Dugan hoisted up another overflowed pint of a foamy beer to drunkenly clink with Flasworth as their boisterous-intoxicated revelry amplified slurringly in clamorous unison. The Howling Commando's had cleared the field, but the names of valiant-hearted men were still branded on nameless markers, hell-storms conducted by HYDRA's engines of butchered-unslakeable mayhem devastatingly razed out nearby townships as weaponized Uber tanks were idle in sentry mode.

There was no homefront of victory, embracing the valorous mantle of Captain America-the avenger of unswerving liberty-made Steve a straight-arrow that bravely directed grief-exhausted GI's out of the interminable crossfires, despite the high stakes of mortal freedom were collapsing each time the battle-tested Allied units became tragically sledgehammered by an inexorable blow that HYDRA counter-played. Gesturing the bar-keep with the determined smirk tugging at his plushier sculpted lips, Steve hailed a shot glass of whiskey. "Y'know, I can't really feel the effects..." he admitted, sheepishly, as Bucky played off his smirky cockiness, arching up an eyebrow. "Remember when you sweet-talked me to empty out a bottle of jack-daniels..." His azure irises unabashedly downcasted on the amber liquid in the glass. "Couldn't even stand on my feet..."

"And I had to carry you the whole way home, you puked on my shoes," Bucky burst into a fit of laughter at the memory. It was a peaceful time in their lives despite the unending struggles, they mostly remembered the good that came of it. Back then they were just two punk kids looking out for each other against a whole borough of uncaring and sadistic bullies who loved to pick on the little guy. Most of their mischievous nights out consisted of mornin' lunchins at Jack's Diner, pranking the cruel jerks so they'd think twice about preying on others, and tap-dancing with the gorgeous dames at the club later that night. Seeing Steve's dimpled cheeks redden with embarrassment was also too much fun to see. "Suppose I had that comin' for daring you to drink that much. Don't tell me you miss that?" Bucky said with a bemused look as he wiped the gravy from his chin with his thumb then proceeded to lick it. His stomach groaned almost as if it wanted more.

But that was impossible. He had just finished a full plate of beef enough for two people. Why was he feeling so hungry? His mind rationalized that he needed to catch up on his strength after being bedridden for nearly two nights. Memories of his flight from the tent this morning came back to prickle his mood and how Steve found him collapsed from exhaustion hours later beside a mauled animal-a stag.

An eruptive resonance of unbridled hunger portentously thrummed-a bestial thirst ushering Bucky into gluttonous-possessive dregs of an insurmountable thrall; hawkishly shifting attentive intensity of his stormier azureous irises at the gravy-smeared plate, Steve despondently watched his best friend consume the gravy-smeared plate as Bucky's canine incisors predatorily jutted into razor-edged fangs. Hunching over the bar-top, the young sergeant growlingly emitted panty breaths; every graven-ridge of heavier muscles became athletically honed against a breakneck rush of -wolfish- agility as Bucky propelled off the stool at the reactive moment, Steve urgently gripped onto corded flesh of his tauter bicep, forcibly jarring him out of the hoggish stupor. "Buck, what's gotten into you...?"

He would have replied if he were in his normal frame of mind, but Bucky felt as if he had entered a maze of overwhelming hunger. Every direction revealed a new temptation, it was so consuming he had difficulty amassing his thoughts and forming a coherent sentence. His blue eyes were glazed and unblinking as the room span on its axis and his senses were being bombarded by a myriad of intoxicating allures. Roasted duck, seasoned potatoes, freshly cut carrots, juicy ham. His mouth watered and his stomach howled for nourishment. "Gotta eat...gotta..." His breathing had become heavy and deep, his dishevelled appearance prompted many curious eyes to gaze in his direction, some were amused others were alarmed by the wolfish gleam in his blue iris'.

"Cap, everything all right with Bucket-Head? I ain't seen eyes that crazy since we ran into that scruffy drifter doubling for Carter. What was his name? Howler? Howlett?" Duggan said, whistling with mild incredulity as Bucky picked up an unfinished plate of food on another table before the waiter could get to it. Bucky proceeded to shovel the remaining pieces of ham into his mouth, licking the plate clean with his tongue. "Okay, that's just disgusting," Duggan said dryly before he proceeded to belch very loudly, earning him numerous groans from the nearby patrons.

Bucky wasn't paying attention to any of this as his eyes locked on another waiter who exited the back with a tray full of barbequed wings. Something in Bucky's eyes must've alarmed the waiter who suddenly turned pale as death the moment he made eye contact with him. "Mine!" Bucky roared as he moved forward. The waiter yelped and dropped the plate on the floor as he tripped. Not missing a beat, Bucky fell onto all fours, prowling towards the pieces of food like a predator ready to consume its prey.

"Bucky! Stop!" Steve yelled and used his immense strength to haul Bucky up off the floor by his arms. He felt his friend struggle against him, instinctively trying to throw him off and resist. The amount of strength it took not release his hold surprised Steve who hadn't expected Bucky to be this strong. The super-soldier serum in his veins made him stronger than an ordinary man, but even he was having trouble getting a handle on his best friend who seemed hell-bent on consuming those chicken-wings like a man-an animal-possessed. Bucky growled and was near to breaking free, prompting Steve to bring them both towards an unoccupied booth where they fall into the seats. "Enough!" Steve yelled again. He could see a few of his men coming forward as if to assist him but Steve promptly shook his head at them. "No. We're fine here!" Falsworth and Jones appeared hesitant until they see Bucky slowly begin to simmer down in Steve's grip. Steve reaffirms his order with a nod and his men return to their seats.

"This isn't you, Buck. Get it together," Steve urges his friend as he slowly releases him. Steve wanted to haul him out of the tavern and send him on the convoy back to base. Despite what he wanted to believe, this wasn't just a random incident, it was a third in the past few days since Bucky was attacked. Physically it appeared his friend had recovered, but what did it to him mentally? Steve wasn't a doctor, nor was he a scientist, but he knew something was happening to his best friend that meant he needed to be checked out by more than a field medic. "Come on, man," Steve says in a comforting tone as he sees rational and understanding return to Bucky's focused eyes. His friend suddenly appeared mildly confused and worried. "Bucky... Are you all right?"

"Captain Rogers..." Lavishly garbed in scarlet velvetiness of her exquisite crepe dress, Agent Peggy Carter distractingly with curvaceous graces, sauntered passed the occupied booths, knowing her ignited a powder-keg of intractable-drunken rowdiness of gung-ho soldiers, nakedly she brandished her steel-maiden poise, as her lustrous chocolatey-brunette whorls sleekly reminded half-pinned that queenly emphasized the delectable suppleness of her reserved features. Involuntarily Peggy stood in front of a wooden door adorned with rose-etched glass, as the plunging- sweetheart décolletage of her ample breasts voluptuously beckoned a jazzier-vibrant allure that made her forbiddenly desirable.

"Captain," she addressed in blunter pitch, sultrily, fixing her dark irises on the repulsive heap of discarded plates. Grounding heeled resistance away from Steve's proximity; he braced his muscled forearm over Bucky's heaving chest, readily against the defensive rush on the combative accord, he feigned stark alarm, stoppingly clutching onto Bucky's fisted, greasy hand in warred succession that was viciously arced to deliver a throat-strike. His tawny-blonde tresses wetly clung over his tensing brow, every angular plane of his boyish features rapt waging desperation to immobilize his best friend; sneerily, Bucky gnashed his canine fangs against vicious seethes, jutting his broader jaw with aggressive strain as he forcibly sunk into the cushioned booth with Steve reining him down. "If you're not busy, Captain, Howard requires you back at the camp..." Peggy urged out, promptly."Something urgent has steered his curiosity that greatly concerns what might be happening to Sergent Barnes..."

"What are you talking about? What does that mean?!" Bucky felt a surge of unbridled anger coursing through him as Peggy spoke to Steve as if he weren't even here. Glancing between the troubled SSR agent and his friend who looked equally concerned. Did they know something was happening to him this whole time, and none of them said anything? A sting of betrayal hit Bucky and something dark and primal inside of him wanted to lash out. His eye twitched and his fists clenched against the edge of the table, the wood began to groan beneath his strength. "What are you guys keeping secrets from me now?!" Bucky made a telling attempt to stand up before Steve steps in front of him.

"We didn't want to worry you, Bucky. Trust us, if we knew anything definite, we'd tell you," Steve assures his friend with a genuine look that soothes his ire if only slightly. Steve places a hand on his shoulder, giving it a squeeze. "Just sit tight. I'll be back in a few minutes." With one last look at his friend, Steve hesitantly turned and followed Peggy out of the tavern.

"Not in the mood for a dance, handsome..." A melodious undertone rasped, smokily near the booth, warding off his riotous aggression, Bucky dazedly caught a fleeting glimpse of a lithe hand naughtily tilting a whiskey glass with devious variance-imploding a stilted moment as lamp sconces burnished alluringly over sleekier cascades of dishevelled mahogany whorls that breathtakingly constated with pillowy full-bow lips that were vixenishly lacquered cherry-red-a sirenic-thievish decadence that stealingly held any wanton glower in a point-black deadlock. Playing off an indifferent charade, she purred, breathily, allowing a slow burn of whiskey to scour down her throat. "Let me guess you need something more than a cheap drink, Army boy...?"

At first, Bucky wasn't sure where that voice was coming from and if the dame in question was talking to him. He wasn't the only army boy in the tavern, after all. But no one else seemed to respond and it wasn't long until he pin-pointed its source at the booth in the corner across from his. He could make out the unmistakable shape of a young lady putting out a cigarette. She was sitting in shadows, the only sight visible was her pale hands and her smooth neck. For a moment he felt as if his mind had come to a screeching halt.

As a young man who'd been around many dames, he'd grown used to them being at the center of the public eye-bathed in light where many eyes followed their movements. He couldn't remember the last one who seemed more comfortable in the dark. It made him curious, but he still felt mostly peeved over his tussle with Steve and Carter. Right now he wanted to just be left alone. "You could say that, Miss. But if you're looking for me to share mine, you're timing is all wrong." To demonstrate this, Bucky lifted the glass of whiskey that had been left on the table and took a swig of it. He might as well have been drinking water for how little it affected him.

Through it all, he kept a focused look on the dame across from him, wondering how she might reply to his rebuff.

"Not really a smooth player night?" Selina purred in snarkier pitch, brusquely, as the virile smokiness of his naked scent headily contrasted sensuous—addictive tracery of a fevered beckon of his leashed arousal; she registered an incarnate tenor of wolven heat bankingly teeming with his pulse as beer-drenched GI uniforms frowsily sailed over the crowded booths as poker decks were chintzily shuffled on tables, braggingly Duggan sliced the cards with a fast-hand, while the high-player royal flush was on the rigged fringe of sealing a full-house gambit.

Tersely, evading the drunken pandemonium of the Howling Commandos, with brazen-practical graces, felinely, Selina eased down onto the booth's cushioned seat aware of his subtle invitation-cool pearlescence of her ivory-white flesh ethereally gleamed against the black chiffon Italianesque dress, the vixenish flare of a ribboned bodice slinkily fringed over her voluptuous decolletage, while svelter tautness of her lithesome form braced nonchalantly against the booth's polished wood.

Against the shadowy-roisterous ambiance of the bar-house; the sanity fineness of her elfish features entrancingly contrasted with the doe-eyed intensity of her coffee-brandy irises, despite the kittenish exquisiteness of her ravishing visage, the luscious fullness of her pillowy burgundy lips were voluminously bowed, with a devious play of an impish quirk.

"Usually you soldier boys like to chase my heels on the dancefloor," Selina purred, breathily, tracing a daintier finger around the rim of his emptied glass with unfeigned-seductive deviousness. "You're making this night..." she paused, sliding her glass across that was bewitchingly smeared with a vivid imprint of her crimson lips—a challenging beckon—dare. As she mirrored the whitish heat that fused menacingly within his sweltry grayish-aquamarine irises, Selina wickedly flashed an incredulous gaze at his shapely-wide lips, the curved incisors roguishly edged with knife-point sharpness that grazed over his poutier underlip-this hunky 'soldier-boy' was morphically spliced with the predatory—genetic fusion of the HYDRA sleaze-Zola's lycan serum—the weaponized hell-hound attacked him. "Interesting..."

Every deceptive measure of her furtive stint became inexplicably compromised against the wolven-tameless- dynamic. A chimerical unity of monstrous possession was irrevocably converging through him—he being verminously chastened into a soul-consuming regeneration of amputated humanity-no switchbacks of redemption against the warranted penance that tragically spawned out nefarious apparitions-wolven reapers conducted out of the ranks HYDRA.

After Selina was -remade- with blood shunts of mutative injections, Armin Zola desired her to usher his maniacal-berko-legacy of elite operatives on the conquered battlefront. Her power-mongering father 'Baron Von Strucker' had traded her off to become a 'shifter' executioner, lethally dispatching traitorous scum that betrayed the Iron Cross legion as a furred-canine- vixen. "So, I'm guessing you like to pack in all the spoils, handsome..." she inferred, pointedly, gesturing a lithe hand at the evident landside heap of meat- greased plates that sloppily adorned on the bartop. "Obviously, your taste for the good stuff runs deep..."

If Bucky were being honest with himself, his favorite past-time back home was to go out for a night of fun on the town with a lively cute girl on his arm. But he wasn't in the mood to be chasing a pretty dame to share a dance with. Not tonight. In fact, he had only seconds ago thought about taking the bottle of whiskey with him back to the camp and drinking himself to sleep to escape the misery he was now feeling. But out of nowhere this mysterious woman seemed to have come and tickled his curiosity until she had finally stepped out of her dark corner. Bucky was grateful his expression was hidden behind the glass in his hand because he was sure he would've looked like a fish out of the water, gasping for oxygen the minute he caught a glimpse of her face.

"Oh wow…" He thought inwardly, his eyes wide as they took in what could only be described as the face of an angelic beauty bathed in long mahogany tresses that shimmered in the dim light of the tavern. Pale alabaster skin doused with a modest amount of make-up to give her a flawless complexion, eyelashes lined with dark mascara and sinfully red painted lips. 'A dark angel,' he mentally corrected himself. Her radiance was unquestionable but something about her gave off a dark aura that stirred something inside of Bucky. Something wild and ravenous that begged to be unleashed. Swallowing slightly, Bucky felt his misery evaporate and he was on full-alert mode in the face of a breathtaking curiosity that he now wanted to indulge.

'Okay Bucky, time to turn on that Barnes Charm.' He straightened in his seat and flashed her a dimpled smile with glowing blue eyes. "Well I do work out a lot in the field. Sometimes you gotta take in as much as you give." He reasoned. Despite the awe he felt, he regained a bit of his focus and took in the woman's appearance from the dark trenchcoat she wore of a blouse and tight pants with high-heeled boots. She looked like she came from money and he wondered briefly what she was doing in a place like this. "How about you? I mean no disrespect, but you like you're used to being in nicer places than this. You local?" He wondered.

The gravelly huskiness of his suave-timbered drawl arced in her veins bone-deep like heated molasses, Selina guardedly stiffened against the cushioned seat as his shapely-wide lips quirked flirty, evident to the alighted gleam of boyish naughtiness melding in his grayish-aquamarine irises, the underlying -virile- scent of aphrodisiacal sandalwood and earthen pine headily wafted out his pores.

Tamping down a rivalrous implosion of unhinged abandon, Selina offishly played against his unevaded question with a dismissive pop of her voluminous lips-she couldn't become attached to a heart-starved reality, not against the carnal deviation of wolven bloodlust. "Let's just say I don't stray too far to get what I want if the offer sticks, handsome..." she gritted under breath, trenchantly, as the contractive pulse in her gums throbbingly heralded a morphic strain. "Obviously none of your Army friends over there claimed my interest..."

"I suppose I should count myself lucky then if you found me interesting enough," Bucky replied easily to her banter. Something about her cryptic approach made him curious to discern what she was looking for here tonight. A friendly conversation? A shared drink? Or something else entirely that involved a warm bed. He steered his thoughts away from the distracting thought. He didn't move that fast with strange women, even if they were interested. But something told him that dark beauty in front of him wasn't here looking for pleasure. But he was a gentleman like his father had raised him to be, and he wouldn't discard his manners as he gestured for the brunette to join him as he poured them both a glass. "Would you like a drink, miss…" He hadn't gotten her name yet, he realized. And for some reason, he wasn't so sure if she'd be inclined to give it to him.

"Playing off the nice card are we?" Selina purred, banteringly, tracing deft pressure of her lithe finger over the intricate whiskey glass, with a convincing pout, she quirked up her brow as she caught a naked glimpse of his deforming ears, curved flesh widely sharpening into a mutative point under his askew chestnut tresses." How about we swipe a bottle for keeps..." she coaxed in a foxier undertone, collectively shifting her dark gaze at the whitish opalescence of the waxen moonlight haloing ghostily against the glass planes of begrimed windows; an evocative impulse branded her with a subtle thrill of anticipation. Kittenishly her glossier cherry-red lips pursed into a jaunty smirk, as Bucky gripped the whiskey bottle in tenser flex, broodily leashing down a tenor of bestial predatoriness as he smugly conveyed Brooklyn-boy charm. "Unless you already had your fill?" she quipped, coyly.

Bucky downed the last few shots left in the whiskey bottle to demonstrate his reply. He felt a mild tingling that was gone almost instantly which served to only resume his bitter state. Through it all his blue eyes never wavered from eye-contact with the mysterious dame seated across from him, almost as if they had entered a staring contest to see who would shy away first. It might've been a childish thing to some, but Bucky unintendedly took it as a test of will to see who might reveal something first that their lips wouldn't speak. His dour mood caused a burst of heat to flush through him, sparking the return of an insatiable appetite that was little to do with food. He was dimly aware of a prickling pain in his jaws and found he could no longer hold his mouth closed as he had.

As his lips parted he revealed a set of sharp canines that gleamed in the light, catching the mysterious woman's eyes. Unaware of the change to his mouth, Bucky only realized she was staring at his lips and it caused the heat in his body to increase ten-fold. It suddenly began to feel very hot inside this bar. Releasing the empty glass, Bucky licked the alcohol from his lip and exhaled roughly. "Sounds good to me, darlin'. Lead the way," he coaxed her with a dangerous smirk.

Evicting the mechanical-vexatious tenor of her bestial conditioning that exceedingly outrode her unwarrantable resilience; nothing became a deterrent against the vampirish malice that demonically reaped over Bravainian ground-her tyrannical-militaristic grandfather had stamped his iron-fisted reign in blood as the machine of war irrevocably fueled a symphonious reckoning of that hailed butcherous tempests of mayhem. The HYDRA king-pins-vipers conceived their smokescreen alliances-irrelevant extensions that would be terminally disposed of when their industrial usefulness was expired. 'Hail HYDRA...'

Against the October chilliness that penetratively sailed over the forested labyrinth of evergreens, with the flintier intensity of her coffee irises Selina darkly gazed at the desolated-grievous vistas of the battleground, brickwork remnants of shell-out foundations-no stone was left unturned. Her kittenish nose scrunched raptly against miasmatic potency of corpse-laden decay wafted from stacked-up trenches, as uniformed silhouettes of young men became lifeless-phantom denizens within the chasmal graves as the amberish luminance of moonlight spookily graced them with reverence.

"Like the view?" she questioned in a huskier pitch, ruefully, glancing down at the blood-smeared GI dog tags underneath her booted heel, while Bucky tensely clutched a bottle of German whiskey against the taut solidity of his garbed thigh; echoes of the razor-edge menace nakedly set over the graven planes of his boyish features as he steeled tight-lipped response. "Do you think freedom is just a damn luxury now...After all, nothing ever sticks out here..."

Bucky didn't immediately respond. His young optimistic mind would have once leapt at the irrefutable notion that life and liberty were the right of every living person on the planet-that it should be fought for no matter the cost. But after witnessing such unimaginable horrors over the past few years, from bloodied trenches to abominable camps, he couldn't help but wonder how things would ever be the same again if the Allies won, and Hydra and the Axis were beaten. How long until the next conflict came and innocents were dying all over again? He didn't know. The depressing thought caused him to take another swig of the whiskey. He enjoyed the burning flavor that tingled his nerves for a few seconds before it was gone.

"I wouldn't still be here if I still didn't believe in what we're fighting for," he responded after what felt like a while. "Those Hydra monsters need to be stopped. But I can't say I believe the fighting is done once they're gone. Freedom comes at a cost. People are free to be saviors or destroyers." He mused, kicking a clump of dirt that he thought was a rock. He and the mysterious brunette were walking at a leisurely pace across the parking lot of the tavern, their direction aimless as they took the time to enjoy the cool night air. In the distance, they can hear the chirping of crickets in the woods and the faint hooting of an owl.

The skies were cloudy but the brilliant ethereal moonlight shone done upon them. The sight somehow made Bucky feel a twinge of discomfort within his body. His jaw ached, and so did his fingers and ears.

An infinite converge of morphic tension unrestrainedly fringed between them as the whitish sconces of moonlight cosmically pulsed gravitic auras of celestial energy, a hypnotic command that kept Bucky in a stuporous deadlock. Reddish veins of thermal heat electrifyingly striated over the forested darkness like forked lightning, every heartbeat of craven prey became fierily entwined within a predatory matrix as he aggressively scrunched his nose against a blood rush, catching a full-bodied scent of a nocturnal varmint-a rabbit.

As his barred incisor-fangs menacingly jutted over his swelled underlip, knowingly Selina watched banded-cords of bulkier muscle flex heavily underneath his jacket, as she registered the wolven cadence venting out of him in guttural rabidness. "Something wrong, handsome," she played in breathy pitch, deviously, her coffee irises tigerishly roved over virile contours of his fingers bruisingly arced in monstrous protrusion as he vertiginously bolstered his fever-racking mass against a parked jeep. "I might enjoy this..."

"No...Not again…" Bucky groaned as he fell against the side of a parked vehicle, his body suddenly drenched with a cold sweat. The pouring rivulets trickled down his neck, soaking the front of his shirt while his muscles groaned against the clothing. He vaguely realized that the woman had someone not only understood what was happening to him, but was also encouraging him to embrace it. The hunger. The pain. The call of the wind beckoning him to howl with release. The pressure in his body continued to build as he struggled desperately to control his breathing and not fall into a ravenous decline. His blue eyes glared fiercely as his vision swam, everything felt detached and beyond his comprehension. The world was red like an inferno, but in the darkness he could see flickers of light in the shape of all living things; men, women-humans and animals.

His stare landed on the woman next to him and he felt a flicker of disquiet as her eyes glowed like burning candles into the dark. A predator lurked beneath, calmly watching his struggle with fascination. Bucky's blood burned, his muscles throbbed with pain, and yet he still found himself rife with hunger and desire. "Who are you…" He growled, his voice no longer the smooth soft baritone of a Brooklyn kid but something deeper and scary. "What are you…" He finally collapsed onto his knees, crying out as he the buildup of pressure increased on his lower back as if his bones were threatening to extrude from his pelvis. It tore through his clothes and a furry appendage suddenly expanded from his back. A wolf's tail.

Against the horrifying-unriddled onslaught that paralyzingly atrophied him in contractive fruition, raggedly keeping his forearms braced on the ground in strenuous traction, erratically, gnashing his fangs, Bucky choked-off throaty gnarls in voiceless-mortified tenor as the furred skeins of chestnut bushily lengthened into a canine tail; dragging his fingers into the dirt with clawing sync, gapingly his lips stretched in whimpery heaves against bone-splitting pressure as his tactical pants tatteredly ripped apart on divesting accord, the corded-heaviness of his muscular thighs uncontrollably bridged up with the anguished momentum of a jackknifing thrust. "Argh..."

Straying wetness errantly glided over his feverish cheek as white-heat pulsing throbbed in his veins, as tauten contours of his exposed backside arched in morphic realignment as his wolfish tail lashingly swayed over his thighs with defensive flex-crouching down a breadth at his tremulous side, intriguingly, Selina caught the metallic glint of his G1 service dog tags fastened over the broad width of his neck-trade-off validation of his condemned identity that she could thievishly swipe off his neck:

James B Barnes

32557038 T4 3092

3092 STOCKTON RD

SHELBYVILLE, Indiana

Investing whisper-soft pressure of her lithe palm over the drenched material of his shirt, brushingly Selina kneaded a sensuous caress of her feminine ministrations over the corded-flesh of his bicep, against the disarming-headlong need, ephemerally she gloried at the virile contrast of heavier-athletic resilience of his muscles. Answering the echoes of naked-forbidden demand that starvedly made her no longer untouchable in the sirenic thralls.

On her own volition, breathtakingly mirrored his tactile heat, Selina angled her delicate jaw against the headier cadence their faces shadowily touched - surging-ardent drift as the glacial steeliness of his heavy-lidded gaze mesmerically beckoned the lush cushiness of full-bow lips beautifully edge their wet heat deeper into kiss-bruised abandon with him-just staged play. "From the looks of things you'll be howling at the moon soon..." she deadpanned in a raspier breath, snarkily, delivering a feathery glide of her lithe fingers distractingly over the heated slickness of his thickened nape."I guess you'll have to trust me now, huh, Wolf boy..."

"W-What are you doing…" Bucky groaned out with a weak voice. Exhaustion was creeping upon him and he couldn't prevent the unknown woman from swiping his dogtags out from his neck. He struggled to reach out and reclaim them from her, but the aching pressure on his back made standing vertically feel almost impossible. His shins and calves felt like glass that would shatter at any moment beneath the pressure of his mass. His gritted teeth pierce into his inner lips, causing trickles of blood to drip from his mouth. His blue eyes were unblinking and glazed over. His sense of smell was intense and he found himself drawn to the alluring floral fragrance wafting from the brunette. He couldn't help but growl with desire as her dainty fingers caress his jaw and brush through his sweat-drenched locks.

It felt good, he wanted more. Through his hazy distraction, he doesn't see her begin to pull a tranquillizer needle from her pocket. Zola's order to capture him still stood, but before she could contemplate her next move, a voice cuts through the area with a commanding tone.

"Bucky?! Where are you?!" Steve called out as he exited the tavern searching for his friend.

With reactive poise of her acrobatic graces, in a fervent rush, keeping herself in a mid-crouch, balletically Selina clutched his dog tags as she detected unstoppable encroach of propelling momentum that fringed maddeningly closer; a telltale gleam of the alloy-fused vibranium that belonged to chivalrous 'Perseus' that votively carried mantled liberty; Captain America the handsomely boyish Adonis that she identified from Zola's dossier files, a runtish Brooklyn kid whom the Jewish doctor-Erksine had genetically enhanced with vita-ray infusions with the alpha serum.

Now the prophetic reckoning to usher the infectious-plaguing tentacles of the HYDRA legion, to conceive a new Olympus by stationing Titian installations over the Axis battlegrounds was irrevocably on the fringe of being unleashed. "Hang on, Buck..." Adamantly, Steve braced his patriotic shield over his right forearm as he imposingly paced closer—his cool azureous rises stormily flashed over Bucky who convulsively slumped against the Army Jeep's rear wheel. "M'comin'..."

Against whipcrack readiness, her palm lithely ghosted over a holstered Walther P38 pistol-a fatal accessory- for practical convincing if her masquerading theatrics were compromised-she couldn't get a fix of point-blank satisfaction. Hissingly, Selina gritted her teeth, with lightning-fast agility, unerringly she utilized the backlit shadows, and sashayed vanishingly behind the tavern with a variance of feline swiftness -never looking over her shoulder. "Next time, I won't play so nice, handsome..."

She was gone as quickly as she had stepped into his life, and Bucky could do nothing but watch it happen. His furry dishevelled form collapsed into a seated position back against the wheel of a car, unable to move nor do anything but stare at his hands. His hands had horrifically changed into something gaunt and predatory with sharpened nails and throbbing veins. Patches of hair had sprouted from his chest despite the fact he always kept himself shaved. 'What is happening to me? ...Who was that woman?' The questions would plague him long into the night, even as Steve arrived at his side and took in the changes his body had undergone.

"Oh, no…" Steve whispered, convinced now more than ever that Howard's theory wasn't ridiculous but a horrifying reality. His best friend was turning into a wolf.

"Scout reports will put us here, Cap..." The soft- timbered voice of Private Gabe Jones confirmed as he eased on his SCR-300 two-way radio transceiver pack over the jeep's metallic hood, keeping his wired headset strapped firmly over his ears-he was 'backpack Commando of their ragtag unit. Despite his instinctive -vigilant calibre of being a proficient marksman of the 107th infantry, Gabe had decoded white-noise encryption HYDRA frequencies that steered them to underground locations of HYDRA viper nests. Narrowing his dark-umber irises fixedly at Steve's brass navigating compass, that cherishingly adorned wth a grainy newspaper clipping of vivacious Agent Peggy Carter.

As Gabe hastily jotted down the coordinates on a fanned out Central Europe map as the battle-tested Howling Commandos assembled for their recon mission, Steve gripped onto his bullet-resistant helmet by the chin-strap as he braced at the driver side door, tawny-blonde tresses clung unkemptly over the angular planes of his chiselled-hawkish features that virilely belied his stern-face demeanour. Navy-blue, grayish padded material of his 'field' uniform delineated grittily over the bulkier sculpt of his muscled chest as white-star insignia contrasted with red buckled straps fastened over his armoured mid-drift: he was tactically geared up for battle."Dead zones are under a railroad bridge, where freight of HYDRA artillery is being dispatched at 08:00..."

They'll have the convoy guarded top to bottom." Steve mused as his acute eyes gazed over the map laid sprawled out over the hood. There was a stretch of forests for several miles out which meant there was only one road for the convoy to travel through; the railroad bridge. "But they have only one out to take."

"So will we," Duggan added with a constipated look that was a rarity for the normally bold soldier. "They'll cut us down to ribbons if they see us coming."

Steve nodded in agreement. Inwardly the young captain filtered through a number of possible plans of attack that would not only increase the odds of success but also keep his men safe. The safety of his men was always a top priority for him whenever the odds were weighed. Especially now that one of them was...compromised. Steve's blue eyes flick upwards and sees Bucky crouched on his haunches with his M1903A1 Springfield resting in his hands. An idea took shape in his mind that could work out in favor of everyone.

"We'll setup a blockade on the road about 2 miles out of the choke-point. It should slow them down long enough for us to needle them out. Bucky will provide overwatch and take out any surprises they have lurking back. Duggan, you and Gabe setup the blockade and rig it to blow in case they try to push through it. ...I'll storm the convoy and keep them busy long enough for us to secure the artillery. We can't take the chance of leaving anything behind for them to salvage. Any questions?" No one responded and a satisfied Steve dismissed them as he made his way over to Bucky.

"How you feelin', Buck?" He asked worriedly. He had his concerns about letting Bucky back into the field after he spent the last two nights in Howard's lab. His friend behaved like a caged animal trying desperately to escape, even it meant attacking those where trying to help him. Howard was still nursing a black eye after injecting Bucky with a compound to distill his aggression and animalistic appetite. Bucky seemed under his own control, but it didn't change the more physical changes that he'd undergone, suck as his growing thick stubble and sharpened fingernails.

The vestigial tension galvanically mounted in tenfold against the predatory onslaught, despite his Brooklyn spirit rebelled, thirstily Bucky couldn't slake down the insatiable tumults of undeterred bloodlust; Steve had anchored him back out of the bestial thralls as the wolven-canine- divergence-promise of humanity was still graspable. After being isolated in a Red Cross tent after the infusions, Bucky felt like was cinematically propelled in an unfathomable reality where silver--screened players scarily morphed into repulsive chimeras of tragical monstrosities. 'You're gonna be howlin' soon, Barnes...'

Tamping down a guttural resonance, Bucky felt pulse was jackhammering in riotous tenor, scowlingly Bucky remained crouched his fatigue-garbed haunches into sniper-hone poise, under lengthy unkempt brunette tresses, his ears were furrily deformed canine-like as he gripped onto the hammer-lock of his rifle. Against the spookish paleness of twilight hours, graven-edged contours of his stubbled features steelily razored as the heaviness of his jaw clenched. "M' fine, Steve..." he answered in a growlier drawl, throatily. "I dunno how long I can keep this on the ropes..."

"If anyone can, its you Bucky." Steve said hoping to keep his friend level-headed. "Even Lon Cheney Jr couldn't walk this off." He quipped which caused Bucky to softly chuckle. In truth he believed that anyone else would've succumbed to the symptoms his friend was experiencing. It took immense effort on his own part of convincing Peggy and Howard of that. They were prepared to hand Bucky over to General Phillips so he could be shipped off to some lab where he might never see the light of day again. Howard had stressed the implication that was was done to Bucky was irreversible. The creature that bit him left a permanent mark on him that had both incredible but also horrifying effects. Steve believed in Bucky, but he also knew how dangerous he could become.

Keeping an eye on him was a priority but Steve had to believe his friend could "rein in the beast" if things got ugly. "I can't pretend to know what you're going through, but if there's anything life has taught us, it's knowing how to adapt when the going gets tough." Steve reminded him. Life had been hard on them growing up, changing them, but they learned to push through and get stronger from it. "I'm looking out for ya, don't forget it." Steve held his hand down to his friend. It was a symbolic gesture than just offering to help him to his feet, but also through these trials.

Easing up tremorous shakiness of his clawed-hand, quakingly , Bucky accepted the visage of brotherly reverence that his 'little Stevie' conveyed, aware of the knife-edge sharpness of his fingernails as his palm mirrored against the underside of Steve's leather-gloved hand. An expressive quirk on his shapely-bow lips toothily exposed his canine incisors, as his grayish-aquamarine irises piercingly silvered with latent menace. "I gotta have that look of the Wolfman now, huh, punk?" he snorted with derisive snarkiness, humorlessly. "S'just waitin' for Duggan to chuck a can of dog chow at me..."

"Let's not give him any ideas." Steve chuckled as he released Bucky's hand. Inwardly he was stunned by how strong his friend's grip was. The supersoldier serum gave him peak speed and endurance, but even Steve wasn't so sure if he was at the top of the pecking order in their group. Bucky was getting stronger and more deadly, and Steve could only hope that the animal inside of him didn't take full control.

It was mid-afternoon as the Commandos laid in just beyond a railroad bridge crossing. The cluster of trees kept them sheltered and obscured from any wandering eyes as they camouflaged themselves to better blend into their surroundings. Even Steve had decided to forgo his helmet and instead wore his brown bomber jacket over his uniform. The spangled red, white and blue weren't exactly the best features when it came to stealth. Further, up ahead over a hillside, he could see the sunlight reflect off the stainless glass of a sniper-scope. Bucky laid in waiting, watching the bridge through his lens.

Keeping himself rigidly planked on his braced forearms, with impassive variance, Bucky levelled his Springfield rifle over his gloved palm, flashingly the periphery of his steel-aquamarine depths caught the encroaching glimpse of black-tarped military trucks embellished with demonic Kracken-skull insignia of HYDRA-mobilizing a 'pick-up' convoy near the railroad bridge as dissonance of a carillon horn eerily blared with chugging succession of train wheels screeched over eroded tracks-the expected artillery freight was three miles outward. "Damnit.." he seethed out, bitingly, and unholstered a two-way radio transmitter from his pouched-belt. "Cap..." he drawled in huskier pitch, murmuringly, pressing the device's button. "Delivery...Inbound...Three clicks...Comin' in hot..."

"Copy that. Hang tight," Steve responded through his radio. Duggan, Jones and Falsworth were crouched along the bushes beside him as they watched the bridge. "You ready?" Steve asked his men who looked equal parts determined and eager. A brush of wind swept through the tree-line causing the leaves to billow out around them. Autumn was near and Halloween was a couple of weeks away. If he were back home around this time, Steve would have found himself being dragged by Bucky to a Halloween dance-party surrounded by Dorothy's, Scarecrows and Tinmen. The night would end with him and Bucky stealing away into the night laughing after pranking Jake Cooper and his band of bullies.

If anything, he'd at least miss the candy and treats. He shrugged from his thoughts as his sharp hearing listened to the sound of approaching vehicles. Raised voices followed cursing out in German. The Hydra convoy came to an abrupt pause several feet shy of colliding with a barricade of toppled trees standing seven feet high. "Was zur Hölle ist das?! (What the hell is this?!)" The passenger side-door of the lead convoy opened and out stepped a well-dressed officer with a Hydra crest emblazoned onto his coat-pocket. "Mach diese Straße jetzt frei! Wir können nicht verzögert werden! (Clear this road now! We cannot be delayed!)"

Ensuing yells followed and they watched as several armed men jumped out of their vehicles to approach the blockade. "Bucky, how many are there?" Steve whispered into his radio.

With tactical readiness stemming in his veins, stealthily undetected by the HYDRA parade cavalcade, as black Mercedes 770K Grosser low-top convertible was at the helm-a high-ranking SS lieutenant of Third Reich was polishedly garbed in his Kriegsmarine leather trench-coat while BMW R75 motorcycles revved up in flanked position; within measured seconds, HYDRA stormtroopers 'death-walkers' fleetingly assembled in mechanized-wraithlike sync around the forested barricade. Enraged by the obstructive deterrent, ballistically the HYDRA official stood up from the back seat, gesturing his tight-fisted wrath.

'Yeah someone's not happy..." Bucky quipped under breath, throatily, as his paratrooper boots dragged over the clumpy-mossier dirt in planking traction as the rifle's barrel frontally levelled with sharpshooter poise. Angling the heaviness of his knife-jaw, chestnut tresses unkempt fringed over the bestial deformity of his pointer ears, as he unblinkingly gazed through the scope of his grounded rifle, marking down the proximal 'dead-eye' range. "M' countin' five..." he drawled in a growlier cadence, unerringly as he locked the rifle's ammo chamber, keeping his index finger readily ghosted over the trigger-lock. Underneath his navy-blue parka, the heavier bulkiness of his tauter muscles flexed on a contractive-morphic accord, as his nose raptly scrunched when sulphuric rancidity of carious decay-blood- that noxiously wafted off the HYDRA official's tailored garments."Grah...I've got a clear shot."

"Hold your fire until I give the signal," Steve alerted Bucky as he began jogging towards the bridge. "Duggan, Jones, go green." Steve watched as not a few seconds later shots were being rained down on the stunned Hydra troops who were pelted with bullets. A spike of adrenaline rushed through Steve who leapt over the rail and raised his shield high. It wasn't long before the Hydra officer saw him coming and a deathly pale look formed on his face once he realized who was coming for them.

"Es ist er! Der Kapitän! Das amerikanische Schwein. Töte ihn! (It's him! The Captain! The America pig! Kill him!") The officer cried as he jumped back into his black Mercedes 770k Grosser. A luxury vehicle meant for high-ranking officials. Immediately the troopers aimed their rifles and began unloading in Captain America's direction. The First Avenger held his shield firm, its indestructible properties repelling the lead bullets as if they were paper-balls. Seeing an opening for an offensive, Steve ducked low and twirled, propelling his shield with pin-point accuracy towards a support beam on the bridge. His geometric mind knew exactly how to make use of his armament as it reflects off the beam towards a trio of troopers hidden behind cover.

Triple clanks are heard and the troopers collapse dead or unconscious. "Now, Duggan!" Steve yelled. Duggan tossed a grenade clear of the artillery convoy causing one of the trucks to burst into flames, scouring debris across the luxury car. Troopers began to climb to the hoods of their vehicles to get a higher ground advantage. "Bucky take your shots!" Steve alerted. Not a second later all the troopers were shot dead with surgically hit rounds to the skulls. "Bring uns hier raus! (Get us out of here!") The officer yelled at his driver who immediately slammed on the accelerator, determined to break through the barricade.

"Bucky, take out their tires!" Steve yelled as he narrowly leap to the side to avoid being run-over. The officer wouldn't escape through the barricade but he would be worth more to them alive.

With downshift jerk, screechingly the Mercedes gunned up full-throttle, the red HYDRA pennants whippingly tore off the hood, the twined motorcycles explosively flipped into a waterline ditch as Bucky's dead-shot precision blurringly aimed for the wheel-spokes. With a half-smirk tugged at his shapely lips, he emptied up the calibre-barrel in rapid succession of an earshot, as the hailstorm of bullets flurringly shredded the rubber of the frontal tire-a deafening pop ensued as the swerving vehicle destructively careened a nosedive into a station-house." All yours, Cap..." he rasped out gravelly, feigning a tight-jaw grimace as feverish torrents of nauseous heat blearily stole his vision. "N-Not again..."

"Good shot," Steve commended his friend. He watched as the Mercedes swerved and crashed into the rail of the bridge, nearly close toppling over the edge. He had to get the officer out of there before he either fell over, or jumped just to prevent himself from being captured. As he barreled through a couple of troopers who thought they'd fare better fighting him hand-to-hand, Steve looked on as he saw the rest of his men make their way to the bridge to block off the rear in case the convoy tried to retreat. "Seal them off. Don't let any of em' off the bridge." Steve kicked the bumper to one of the trucks, an act which stunned Jones as the truck crashed into one of the convoys attempting to pull out.

Duggan guns down one of the troopers attempting to pull a pin on a grenade. Jones nearly takes a shot to the stomach before Steve intercepts with his shield. Just when it seemed the commandos were close to taking control of the convey, the unexpected happened and Steve was shot in the back of his shoulder.

"CAP!" Duggan yelled in horror. "He's***. Damn it, Barnes! There's a sniper. Cover us!"

"Steve...!" Blood misted into the frigid vapours, against throated gasp, Steve achingly crashed onto his knees in deadened traction, splaying his leather palm over the bullet-gored flesh of his shoulder, against heart-gripping distress, Bucky reared his head up, as his lips went throbbingly agape, revealing the jutted points of his barred incisor fangs as he emitted out a deep-throated scream. "Punk..." A railing pitch growlingly coupled with choked-off heaves as he blankly gazed at his 'little punk' being frantically encompassed by the Commandos.

In an urgent tempo of unbidden alarm, his depths predatorily razored into aqueous crescents of livid sapphire, as thermic-connective pulses of heartbeats fierily veined into reddish skeins as he piercingly shifted a murderous glower of vengeful bloodthirst in direction of the HYDRA sniper's nest, thrusting his stubbled jaw in a fiercer clench. He knew the damning extent of his breakneck choice to vengefully engage the infinite hunt: there was no going back. "T-This is for you, punk..."

He had never given in to the darker impulse of vengeance in veins, not even since the war began and he'd witnessed the atrocities committed by Hydra and the Nazi parties. But seeing his best friend, his courageous and genuine little Steve, get shot by a target he should have kept his eyes opened for, caused Bucky to fall into that dark allure. Unintendedly, the wolf within growled and had fallen in sync with his instincts, sensing the injury of one he cared for. Bucky gritted his teeth and threw his rifle aside. Before he knew what was happening, the wind was whipping at his face, his hair billowing behind him as he raced through the forests at an intense speed. His only thought, his only instinct was to find the sniper that injured his friend and hurt him back.

The world had turned into a blood-red portrait with tiny specs of light humming in the distance. There was one crouched in a nest of shrubs and vines, scrambling to retreat as if sensing his approach. With agility he didn't realize he possessed, Bucky lunged high up into the trees and caught the bark twenty feet off the ground. His heightened sense of smell detected the wafting odor of cheap aftershave and gunpowder. A Hydra soldier wearing a full-face mask is now racing wildly through the trees with his rifle held tight. "Stoller na bazu. Konvoy atakoval Kapitan Amerika. Nikto ne vyzhil. YA ranil yego, no mne nuzhna pomoshch'! (Stoller to base. The convoy was attacked by Captain America. None survived. I wounded him but I need assistance!)

If he were in his own state of mind, Bucky would have paused to consider his options; the alternative such as taking the trooper captive to be interrogated for answers. But logic and strategic planning had escaped him. There was only the irrepressible desire to take his pound of flesh. And so he lunged from the trees, descended upon the stricken trooper who only had time to scream out in horror before he was trampled and lashingly stabbed by sharpened claws.

Bucky's conscience had vanished and there was only the ravenous hunger of the beast eager to sate its bloodlust. Blood splattered across his stubbled face as the trooper choked on his last breath. Gleaming silver eyes gazed unblinkingly at the life-form as its light flickered away before raising his head upward and releasing a railing howl towards the skies.

'Hell, what have you done, Barnes...' An unwarranted mantra condemningly resonated with onrushes starved-out adrenaline; blindingly into forested environs, Bucky propelled a thrust of his beastlier momentum at rampageous paces, a grimace stretched over this lips as the whipsawed sting of pine branches gouging over the padded material that sheathed over his muscled flesh. The brackish reek of viscid fluid of his gruesome-horrific assault smudgily trekked over his dimpled chin; nothing was leashed down when he monstrously arced his clawed-fingers with throat-slashing viciousness into the HYDRA sniper's exposed thorax, without no availing mercy just carnal-deadlier octane of predatory rabidness.

Guttuarlly heaving out breathless pants, against a vomitous raid of feverish exhaustion, Bucky collapsed onto his bracing knees, cottony bleariness dizzily swarmed his vision as he sobbingly hammered a fisted hand with bone-splitting force grimily into the muckier ground; contractive apparitions of the soul-wrenching onslaught. Each pulsating throb of misaligned spinal bones exorcised warring visages of his Brooklyn resistance; tearingly the bushier length of his canine tail shaggily protruded over his backside—pressing his forehead bruisingly into the ground, a throated puppyish whimper noncommittally hitched out him as the mutative-wolven- unity of infectious divergence had stuporously careened him into a catatonic fringe, irrevocably grappling him into morphic-deadened throes. "I can't...Fight it..."

The quaking sensation made him feel as if he was ready to implode on himself. But in reality, it was the burning hunger of a primordial beast clawing to escape. Bucky searched his pockets for the inhibitor serum Howard had created for him only to realize he had left his extra doses back at camp. There was nothing to stop the barrage of consuming agony spreading throughout his body as he let loose another vicious roar. His canines had extended beyond their subtle capacity and the veins on his flesh bulged with his expanding muscles. He felt power, he felt rage in an all-encompassing fire that couldn't be quelled.

He was dimly aware of the sensation of his skin prickling with heat. His intense eyes watched as animal-like fur sprouted from his bolstering flesh, spreading like wildfire across his body. His calloused digits had extended to gargantuan size with knife-edge claws protruding from his nails. "NO!" He roared, quivering with both fear and anguish at how foreign his own voice sounded. There was no trace of himself. Not in his voice, and not in body. His mind clung to the memories of his humanity as if they were being swept away by a howling wind.

Slowly his clothes began groan and shred from his expanding mass. His body fell forward and his boot collided with the earth before it tore open. A wolfish paw implanted into the soil, and then a second followed. Razor-sharp claws grasp the bark of a tree and snap it as if it were made of plastic. Teeth clenched into an unbreakable sneer, they dug into his gums as a strangled groan escaped him, feeling his jaw expand beyond human proportions into a grisly maw. His blue eyes that were once soft as cool waters, sharpened into vampire slits that glowed like the moon.

Bucky Barnes was gone. The wolf had emerged to prowl the night, hunting anything and anyone one in his way.

------------------------------------------

A vaporous putridness of stagnant blood miasmically breached her senses, as skeletal remnants of a gutted-out Black Forest stag were odiously discarded over the rocky smoothness that fused into an isolated den. Thunderous cascades of onrushing water dampishly became an elemental valance; after observing the grislier bloodbath of the HYDRA sniper with recon vigilance, Selina had advanced within the sanctuary-domain with tempered cautiousness, impassively brandishing her vehement poise on sashaying accord-the reeky stink of bloodied decay pungently sailed over the fang-gored deer husk.

Crouching on her sleekier haunches, scones of moonlight ethereally arced over the wolfish fur-sheathed tautness of bulkier mass-graven-edged ridges that heavily bracketed protrusive flesh as frayed traces of navy blue tellingly clung over the hulkish massiveness of his slacken canine form. "Sleeping it off, Wolf Boy...?" she breathily scoffed, gazing down at the furred length of his canine muzzle, the ivory gleam of his curved incisor-fangs disturbingly smeared with viscid crimson.

valorous resiliency

[arcticficialbanana]

Wild World, P2

Part 1

Pairing: Sam x Reader

Word Count: 3,770

Warnings: Mental health issues, fairly angst heavy.

A/N: This one goes out to @amor67figment-love and @notetoselfedits thank you for the support Fam ;)

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 “I’m not sure, but she seemed like she didn’t know what was going on. I mean, she was lucid, she just seemed to think the institution was operational.” Sam covered his face with his hands, pressing his fingertips into his forehead trying to make sense of the situation.

 “So this lunatic,” Dean waves his finger in the air but Sam cuts in abruptly, “Y/N,” he asserts as he puts his hands through his hair, “Her name is Y/N, and she is not a lunatic.”

 Dean’s mouth hangs open for a moment before he puts his hands on his hips, “Okay, so this Y/N-”

 “Just Y/N, Dean.” Sam says through gritted teeth.

 Dean sighs and walks over to Sam, crouching down by the armchair, “What’s going on Sam? You’re real touchy today.”

 Sam looks down at his brother and drops his hands to his thighs. He takes in a deep breath and shrugs, “It was so surreal. She seemed so scared of me, and she ran back into that hell house like it was a daycare.” Sam shakes his head and laughs a humorless chuckle, “But she was real. I touched her and for a moment she trusted me. She wasn’t scared of me until I tried to lead her away.”

 Dean looks over his brother’s face and bites his bottom lip. Seeing Sam twisted up like this seems so uncharacteristic. They’d been through much stranger situations, so Dean doesn’t understand how one girl takes so much out of Sam. Dean pats a hand on Sam’s knee, “Why is this getting to you man?”

 “Dean...” Sam drops his head and his gaze goes through the floor, “How far are we from losing touch with reality? What has our reality turned into over the last ten years? I mean, it started as us protecting people from the daily Wendigo, Scarecrow, or Shapeshifter. Look at us now, Dean. When was the last time we’ve spent more of our day with humans rather than Demons, Angels, and Reapers?”

 Dean clenches his brow and thinks deeply, “Come on man, what are you talking about? Everyone we care about is human,” he plants his hands on his knees and stands up.

 Sam looks up at Dean desperately, “But how many of them are still here? When was the last time we were with Bobby? Jo and Ellen? Charlie? Dad? Eileen?” his eyes are red and he blinks at Dean.

 Dean looks around the room as he inhales a labored breath before throwing his hands up in the air, “What about Jody? Donna? Alex? Garth? Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t play the list game. Just keep looking forward.”

 “Are we even helping people anymore? When did fighting switch from saving others just to protecting ourselves?” Sam waits for Dean to think about it all.

 Dean’s face drops and he swallows hard before turning back to Sam, “We are protecting people. Everything we do is to save the world.”

 “How many times have we given something up to save each other? Save Cas? How many selfish decisions have we made?” Sam’s voice rasps.

 Dean can’t handle any more and he rushes to the table and grabs 2 coats before coming back to Sam, “That’s it, we’re going. Put your coat on.”

 Dean shoves a jacket into Sam’s chest and Sam looks at it in his hands like a foreign object, “What?” he breaths in confusion, “Where are we going?”

 “To find Y/N.” Dean says as he pulls his arm through the jacket sleeve.

 Rain drops pitter patter on the window in the common room. The night is dark, so you can’t see the droplets, but you assume they are there since you can hear the drumming on the roof. You stare into the darkness, studying what detail the moonlight can illuminate for you.

 Faintly you see thick, aged ridges in bark on the side of a tree. You put your finger on the cold glass of the window, tracing the lines you can make out. You huff hot breath over your fingers, leaving a foggy shape of your hand behind on the window when you pull away.

 A chill on the back of your neck gives you the uncontrollable urge to turn around. You look over your shoulder and see a patient staring at you.

 You blink your eyes several times to adjust to the room and realize it’s your roommate. You nod a sort of introduction and she keeps her eyes very still on you. Starting to feel uncomfortable you turn back toward the window, but the chill is coming in from outside.

 “You don’t have to feel bad.” A voice responds to an unasked question.

 Your chair scrapes the linoleum as you turn around once more, “Excuse me?”

 “About frightening me. It wasn’t your fault. I get night terrors. Sometimes I start screaming and flailing, you just happen to be standing there.” Your roommate initiates a conversation.

 You aren’t sure what to say, but she is right, you did feel like you might have triggered some fear.

 “That sounds terrifying.” You turn your chair around so that you are fully facing one another. Her arms are resting lazily on the worn fabric of the chair. She starts to pick at a loose fiber, twirling her finger around the tear.

 “There is nothing you can do to help me. It’s an old recording on replay now more than anything.” She bores into you without blinking, making you cross your legs in discomfort.

 “Don’t they give you medication for that?” you ask, curious about how someone lives with a condition like that. You suppose it’s not like they can have a normal relationship if they’re constantly terrifying people who live with them.

 Tilting her head at you she responds, “They’ve tried the good old fashioned ways.”

 “I don’t…really know what kind of treatments are…implemented.” You blush, embarrassed as she studies you carefully, “I suppose I was living in a world that I didn’t need to learn about any of that.”

 “Electric shock therapy.” She says coldly, “Leeching.” You wince at the image in your mind.

 “That’s inhumane…” you whisper and look around with concern, “Was that here?” you ask nervously, feeling selfish for asking such a question after she confided in you.

 “I’ve been to many institutions. This is just the one where they sent me to die.” Her lip quivers barely noticeably. 

 You feel a tightness in your chest, feeling her pain and fear at what is to come, “You can call me privileged, but when something isn’t your problem you just don’t care to spend the time to find out.” You are abashed, but it’s not like there was anything you could do about medical decisions made way over your head. The light of passing headlights refracts through one of the windows.

 “Did you know lobotomy was a normal practice for anything doctors couldn’t explain? If you’re a paralyzed vegetable you don’t have night terrors or voices in your head anymore.”

 Your body tenses up and sympathy seizes you, making you both devastated and furious with mankind. Humans are so quick to shove anything under the rug that makes them uncomfortable or that they can’t explain. Out of sight and out of mind, don’t let other people’s pain taint our good time. Equality for all- as long as you are a theistic, wealthy, white, educated, heterosexual.

 “Everyone is so ashamed of mental illness and things they can’t understand that they’d rather close their eyes and have someone else deal with it than know what goes on to their loved ones.” You shake your head in disappointment, “People care even less if it isn’t affecting a loved one. Just hang them out to dry, as long as it’s not my problem…” you are humiliated that you are one of the latter people.

 “But now that it is my problem, I can’t help but wonder what they are going to do to me.”

 Your roommate cocks an eyebrow and watches the emotions run across your face, “Well, they’re not going to give you medication.” She declares.

 You raise your head in alert and wonder just how sure she is of this, and also what is she implying? Are they going to give you electro-shock therapy? Or worse?  

 Your roommate leans toward you, some hair falling in front of her face, “Listen,” she says softly for the first time, “You don’t belong here.”

 You raise your eyebrows, surprised that you’ve heard this more than once since you’ve gotten here. She smiles gently and continues, “You’re not like us.”

 You look at her bleak, thin arms as they reach out for you, “You should leave while you can still go.” Her expression turns from kind to dreary and a chill runs down your spine.

 You are sitting too far from her, so her arms drop to her sides when she can’t reach you. She pauses and watches your throat as you gulp hard. She is definitely a patient, not a doctor, so you don’t think her warning message was a test this time.

 She works her jaw, clearly attempting to decide if she should say anything else.

 “I’ll be in the room. I hope I won’t see you there.” She says, not in an obnoxious way. She stands awkwardly, moving her limbs one at a time and with stiff gestures. You watch her walk into the dark hallway, feeling uneasy about your conversation.

 The headlights illuminate the overgrown driveway, occasionally lined with stone pillars. Dean drives slowly over the rocky terrain, keeping aware of his surroundings. He pulls up next to a sedan in the abandoned front lot.

 Dean kills the engine and the brothers get out of the car, quietly shutting the doors. Dean shines a flashlight on the face of the building; stone covered in moss and water stains. Dean whistles and tosses Sam a flashlight.

 They walk over a cement path, ivy crawling through the cracks in the way and along the walls of the building.

 “This place?” Dean squints at a window on the second floor with shattered glass in the pane, “You sure she’s in there?”

“I saw her run inside.” Sam says certainly.

 “Well, here goes nothing.” Dean sighs as they approach the large wooden door, grabbing the iron knob and pushing the door open. A loud creak echoes in the room and Dean aligns his gun underneath the wrist holding the flashlight.

 “Dean,” Sam places a hand on his arm, lowering the aim of the gun, “We don’t want to scare her if she is in here.”

 Dean looks at his brother skeptically for a moment, but nods and puts the gun in his belt. He looks around the room, dusty and lined with spider webs. Dean makes a face and gags, making Sam shake his head in amusement. The guy hunts evil for a living, but spiders and snakes skeeve him out. 

 Sam walks over to the reception area and reaches for the knob to the office, “Locked.” He sighs.

 “Hey, check this out.” Dean says over a clipboard, “Y/N filled out a form.” He waves the paperwork in front of Sam and hands it over.

 “Where did you find that?” Sam looks over the basic information, verifying that it was indeed Y/N. The date was recent, and her address is local. How was it possible that she hasn’t heard the haunted legends of this place?

 Dean slaps his palm on a counter jutting out from a reception window, “Right here.” He peeks inside the room, “Not much in there anyway.”

 Sam briefly looks up at Dean and nods, “Gotcha.” He tosses the clipboard down on a leather couch with deep wrinkles and sagging cushions. 

 “So...” Dean looks at footprints on dirty floors leading out of the room, “She comes in here, doesn’t notice it’s a mess, fills out a patient entry form and…” He shines his flashlight down the hallway outside of the room, “Thinks she hands it to someone?”

 Sam follows up behind Dean, “I guess so.” They walk past dark windows with faded curtains, “We’ll have to ask her about that.”

 Sam puts a finger through a moth-hole in one of the curtains, “I guess we see what we want to see.” He wipes his hands on his jeans.

 “It’s pitch black; did she imagine light too?” Dean wiggles his flashlight on a wall and peeks through a door, revealing an out of commission bathroom, “Doesn’t she shower? I don’t know if these pipes are working.”

 Sam rolls his eyes but replies, “I guess, if she came in the day time then there are enough windows that she wouldn’t need light.” He checks out the bathroom after Dean walks away and mutters, “I don’t know about the water.”

 “Well, did you smell her?” Dean adds with a chuckle.

 They walk in silence as Sam tries to remember anything particularly unusual about Y/N when he met her outside.

 Before Sam can give a recount he hears a faint sound and puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder, signaling a finger to his mouth.

 Dean reaches for his gun but Sam shakes his head, mouthing ‘I think it’s her’ and turning his head in the direction he thinks he hears the sound.

  “…ashamed of mental illness” he can just barely make out in the empty, echoing halls of the asylum.

  “What do you hear?” Dean asks, his days of blasting hair metal in the Impala catching up to his hearing.

 “Um,” Sam closes his eyes in concentration, “they can’t understand…close their eyes…someone else deal with … Here, I think it’s this way,” Sam opens his eyes and points through a door that leads to a room with a circle of chairs. 

 Sam walks carefully on the balls of his feet to avoid making noise, paying attention to the voice. Dean walks around a push cart stacked with meal trays and nearly walks into a cracked foot stool.

 “…what they are going to do to me.”

 Dean tugs on Sam’s jacket and exclaims, “I hear it!” in an excited whisper. Sam scowls at Dean, realizing he probably thought this was some sort of mental breakdown on Sam’s part.

 Dean shrugs and wipes the smile off his face when he notices Sam’s aggravated look. They both approach the doorway to the next room with caution, moving the beams from the flashlights out of the way.

 Sam signals for Dean to stay in the dining area while he tries to approach Y/N, “Watch out for spirits.” He says softly. Dean nods.

 Sam takes his steps with a light foot, noticing that Y/N is facing a hallway perpendicular to him, so he didn’t want to make her jump.

 He bites his bottom lip, unsure how to approach the situation. Sam was used to sneaking up on enemies, but that ended with one of them dead. How was he supposed to talk to you without surprising you and having you run away again?

 He cleared his throat lightly.

 You looked up and turned around, pausing for a moment.

 Then your eyes widened and you gasped, “You again!”

 “I see things and hear things that aren’t really here.” Sam says abruptly.

 “You…” a muscle in your eye twitches and you are taken aback by his sudden confession.

 “It’s past curfew, if they see you in here-” your heart races as you panic.

 “I used to hear the voice of Lucifer, constantly torturing me, and I could never tell if he was really there or not.” Sam was tense, but when he saw your face relax he let out a breath of relief.

 “Lucifer… the devil?” you screw up your face in disbelief.

 “Satan himself.” Sam chuckled, “I kept telling myself he wasn’t there…but he was so real. So in my head. Nobody else could see him, so I felt like my mind was slipping.”

 You start fiddling your fingers, unsure if you should believe Sam. It’s not much stranger than your roommate’s night terrors and almost-lobotomy, is it?

 “So why were you telling me I don’t belong here?” you chew on your lip, hoping for a reasonable explanation.

 Sam looks uncomfortably to his left, “Um,” he takes a tentative step toward the center of the room, “Why don’t you tell me what brought you here, and I’ll answer all of your questions in return?”

 You watch as he approaches the chair recently occupied by your roommate. He looks at it with a frown and decides to sit on the floor instead.

 “I was…” you start to recall, “Someone I knew…” you fumble over your words, unsure how to begin.

 “It’s okay.” Sam reassures, “Why don’t you start with when you got here.” He barely looks up at you, as even from the floor he reaches your shoulders in height.

 “I came here on Sunday. I told them…that I…hallucinated.” You stuttered. Sam didn’t interrupt, but his eyes urged you on so you continued, “They listened to me and took me to a room, so I’ve been here since.”

 “Took you to a room? Did they say anything?” Sam presses and you try to recall exactly how it went down.

 “I don’t think so, they just listened to me and smiled and went down the hallway so I followed them. When the nurse walked into the room she looked at me then after I sat on the bed she left.”

 Sam nodded and looked at the floor for a second, then he asked, “What happened after that?”

 You look to the hallway to your room, “Well, I just did what my roommate did… so when she went to group therapy or the community garden I did that too.”

 Sam contemplated your story and looked into your eyes with great care, “So what do you eat?”

 You realized that you hadn’t eaten since you’ve arrived, but neither did your roommate, so you hadn’t thought of that.

 “I haven’t been hungry, actually.” You give Sam a slanted smile.

 Sam’s face drops and his worried expression makes your smile fade away, “Is everything okay?” you wonder.

 “You haven’t had anything to drink either?” Sam questions.

 “There’s a water fountain there,” you point to the wall behind Sam, “But I haven’t been really thirsty either.” You shrug.

 “You don’t find that strange?” Sam suggests, but you hadn’t felt thirsty so you didn’t think it was that strange.

 “Okay. Could you tell me about your hallucination? Then you can ask anything you want.” Sam smiles weakly.

 “I saw an apparition. After I came home from work, it was just there in my house.” You rub the sides of your feet together nervously.

 “You’re sure it was an apparition? No chance someone was there? Or it was a shadow from the window?” Sam furrows his brow, determined to defeat your idea.

 “It had a face.” You shake your head, “I know it wasn’t real.” You take a deep breath in and look to an empty corner of the room, recollecting the image in your head, “It was the face of someone I knew.” You blinked your burning eyes, “They are dead.”

 Sam chews on his cheek, unsure of how to respond, but you clap your hands together, “Okay. So, Sam.” You shake your finger at him playfully, “So doesn’t that sound like I belong here?”

 You make a very awkward laugh and continue, “So why do you say I shouldn’t be here?” you cock your head and cross your arms, awaiting his response.

 A clang in the other room makes you hop up in your seat and grab the arms of the chair. A moment later a voice comes through the doorway.

 “Because you’re not crazy,”

 You grip the chair tightly as you peer over to the doorway, watching as a large muscular man you don’t recognize comes into the room with a crowbar.

 “What the hell?” You gasp.

 “It’s alright, that’s my brother.” Sam says, slapping a hand to his forehead.

 “Who are you?” Your eyes widen at Sam, questioning if you should have told him everything, exposing yourself when you don’t even know who he is really.

 “I’m Dean Winchester, that’s my little brother Sam. And I just encountered a very angry ghost in the cafeteria, so we should probably get out of here.”

 “I’m not going anywhere with you.” Your eyesight snaps to the crowbar gripped in his hand.

 “He won’t hurt you-“ Sam puts a hand out toward Dean and reaches for you before you interrupt, “How do I know YOU won’t hurt me?”

 Sam looks hurt, and you aren’t sure if it is a ploy but you instantly regret saying that.

 “Listen, Sweetheart, we can answer all of the questions you have, but we’ve really got to change our scenery.” Dean looks around the room, gripping the crowbar with both hands like a bat.

 “I feel much safer here than-“ you slowly stand up and move to the edge of the wall.

 “They’re right.”

 You turn your head to the voice, where your roommate stood in the entrance to the hallway.

 “You’re not as safe here as you think.” She says and waves her hand in front of her body.

 Your eyes flicker with light and you hold your arm in front of your face. When you pull your arm away you blink rapidly, seeing the room filled with rusted, broken chairs and dried leaves all over the floor. You shake your head and look around again, seeing cracks in the wall and a wheelchair with a bent wheel frame. 

 You turn around to the wall and try to catch your breath. Instead you see several layers of peeling paint and papers barely clinging to the wall and fallen along the floorboards.

 “What…” you cover your face, “What is this?” you walk backwards until you run directly into Sam’s chest and spin around to face him, “I’m hallucinating again.” You say with a rasp in your voice.

 “No.” Your roommate croaked, “You saw what you needed to see.” She takes a step into the room. Dean tightens up on his weapon.

 You turn to her, trembling, your throat itchy, “You said…”

 “That I was sent here to die.” She says through rotted teeth, “I did. We all did.” She takes a few more steps, and without realizing it you started walking toward her as well.

 Just a few feet from one another she groans, “That’s why you don’t belong here.”

 As her lips curl back over her decaying teeth she lurches for you and you squeeze your eyes shut as an iron bar comes swinging in front of you.

#Sam Winchester #Sam Imagine #Sam Winchester Fiction #Sam Fiction #Sam SPN #supernatural #SUPERNATURAL AU #Supernatural Fiction #supernatural imagine #Wild World

[ilovearticlesoffaith-blog]

Being Slow about Ministry

Many pastors are slow about advancing in their ministry.  Sometimes they are slow in obeying the call of God.  Perhaps, this is because many pastors have a phlegmatic temperament.  Slowness is a very dangerous thing in the ministry.  One of the determinants of our lives is the speed at which we move.      

What is the time according to God’s clock?  There are three times that are running simultaneously.  These are “my time”, “your time” and “the time”.

Then Jesus said unto them, My time is not yet come: but your time is alway ready.

John 7:6

Take a look at your watch right now.  In the natural that is your time. Take a look at some one else’s watch. That is his time.  But what is the time?

In real life, every watch has a slightly different time. My watch is usually set a few minutes fast to help me overcome the spirit of lateness.  Other people have more accurate watches. This phenomenon gives rise to a multitude of different times for everyone.   

In the spirit realm, we all have different times.  My time is different from your time. That is why Jesus said, “My time is not yet come but your time is always ready.”

A few years ago, Princess Diana shocked the world by making a sudden and tragic exit.  No one expected her to die when she did. No one expected her to die on the Sunday morning that she died.  

A week before she died, if you had asked me, “What is the time?” I would have said,  “It is Sunday morning, and time for church”. If you had asked her the same question she would probably have answered, “It is another Sunday morning; and a few days before I go to be with my boyfriend in France”.    But the time was actually seven days to her death.  Unfortunately she didn’t know it.

On the Saturday before she died, she was having dinner with her Egyptian boyfriend in Paris.  If someone had asked you, “What time is it?” you might have said, “It is eight o’clock.”  If someone had asked her she may have said, “It is Saturday night, and a time of lovemaking and dreaming of a better future.”  But she was wrong; the real time for her was a couple of hours before the end.   She was also one week  closer to her funeral.  

“My time” speaks of where I am in the timetable of my life.  “Your time”, speaks of where you are in the timetable of “your life”, and “the time”, speaks of where we are in God’s overall timetable.  

Unknown to many people, this earthly life is very time-related.  Every instruction or opportunity is time-related.  Hear this and hear it very well:  every instruction that God has given to you has an invisible timer.  A countdown begins the moment God speaks to you.  The available time to perform that duty reduces with every passing hour. Many think they are just biding time and will take God seriously later.  Do not be deceived!  The expiry date of your grace period is fast approaching.

Like I said, Princess Diana might have been planning for her wedding. What she didn’t know was that she was not far from the night of her exitus.  She was oblivious to the fact that she was to be the subject of the largest funeral of all time. She didn’t know the time.   

Do you know the time?  Do we know the time?                                                   

If God has told you to do some work, the clock has begun to tick.  A time will come when you will no longer be able to fulfil that instruction.  

Sometimes God speaks to you:  “Finance my Kingdom.”   Perhaps that comes along with a five-year period wherein you can obey Him.  Perhaps He tells you:  “Go out as a missionary.”  Maybe that instruction has a ten-year lease.  Some people spend eight years of that period doing other things and then in the last two years, attempt to obey God. But their time is almost up. Nothing effective can be done in the remaining two years.

One day, God is going to remove the element of time from our lives.  This has been prophesied in the book of Revelation where He swore that there would no longer be time. But until then, everything we have to do is very much related to a ticking clock.  

Dear Christian, if you think you have forever to please Him you are living in the highest kind of deception.   

And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer:

Revelation 10:6

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

Ecclesiastes 3:1

I read a book in which the author said, “Write the books you intend to write and write them now.”  He continued, “At another stage of your life, you will not write the same things you would have written then.”   How true that is. Perhaps if I were to write the books I wrote some years ago now, I would not write them in the same way today.  

Five More Lives

Once, my children were playing on their play station.  There was this creature that was making its way through a jungle with all sorts of amazing traps and ambushes. Gigantic wheels would appear and roll over their player.   Deep ridges would appear into which the player would fall. Eagles flew over trying to kill the player.  As I watched, my son’s player was suddenly destroyed by a huge animal, which came from nowhere.   

Then I said, “Oh, sorry, that is the end of the game.  You’ve lost your player.”    

But he answered “Oh, don’t worry I have five more lives.  The game is not over at all.”

The computer games of our world have deceived us into thinking that we have multiple lives.  We have nothing but one life and one death.  The clock is ticking and opportunities are passing by.

There will even be a time when you will hear the Word of God but will not be able to repent. In the book of John, Jesus said, “Do not say that there are yet four months.”   In other words do not give yourself extra time. This is the time of the harvest. It is time to respond now.

Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.

John 4:35

Gordon Lindsay, a man of God, who built Bible schools and churches in the sixties, wrote this powerful poem. It depicts the life of a young man who was offered the opportunity to get involved in the harvest. He procrastinated until he was too old to obey God.  He never intended to disregard the call of God. But before he realized, his life was over.  Read this poem by Gordon Lindsay.  I believe it will bless your heart.   

Sunrise and skies are fair.  A day begins without a care!  A day for joy!  A day for leisure! A day for thrills! A day for pleasure!  Youth is merry and young.  Youth is gay.  The great reaper is far away.

But there is a call, ‘tis the master’s voice!  I need you today, may I be your choice.  A harvest is waiting and the fields are white.  Will you join the reapers in the morning bright?  Awake, oh youth, to the heavenly vision.  Because multitudes, multitudes are in the valley of decision.  The morning sun high above the earth!   

A cry of distress in the midst of mirth!  Heathen are born and heathen are dying. 

Is there none to hear them crying?  “Oh yes,” said the youth.  Count me as one to help in this harvest till the day is done.  Yet he lingered on for a little more fun.   

High sun, high noon; you’ll be hearing from me soon.  I’ve married a wife, I’ve property to see; five yoke of oxen acquired by me.  I’ll soon heed the call. I’ll join the band. Ready to give the reapers a hand, but he carried on. He had a bargain in hand.   

Afternoon sun and afternoon light, the golden ore hastened its flight.  Conscience still hard memories daunted.  Wealth, he had acquired, yet more was wanted.  Many were the possessions he proudly flaunted; houses and barns, lands and farms, streams and ponds, stocks and bonds. Chickens and hogs, forest and logs, crops and flack, meadows and haystacks, orchards and berries, vineyards and cherries.   

Day was waxing, day was waning, still the rich man was entertaining for a sinister voice had spoken and said, ‘On with the fun, on with the dance. Go ahead and make merry while you have the chance.  You’re a man of the times, you’re ten feet tall.  He saw time yet for the call.  So a little more jolly and a little more fun.’  And the hours slipped away until there were none.

Sunrise to sun fall.  The day was wasting on the western wall.  Hands still busy with a thousand thing.  As evening descends and curfew brings.  The day had faded into twilight red.  As multitudes hasten to join the dead.  

 “I am ready”, “I am ready” said the man at last.  But shaking hands could not hold fast.  His hair unnoticed had turned to gray.  Still he thought it was yesterday.  Alas, harvest past, it was too late.  To save those who had gone to a Christless grave.

Where is the silver and where is the gold?  Where are the possessions to another soul? Where are the sheep that grazed the hill?  And where are the cattle that drank from the river? Where are the barns that were filled with plenty?  And where are the thoroughbreds one hundred and twenty?  Where are the heirlooms? Where are the treasures?  Where is the laughter? Where are the pleasures?  Where are the porters? Where is the wine?  Where are the delicacies? And the dinners that are so fine?

Sun sunk low.  And night descended. The summer is gone, the harvest is ended.  O for a chance for time extended!!  A wasted life was never intended!!  Sun fall and noon rise. What is left of the rich man’s prize?  Go out to the valley to yonder hill, and see the marble standing still.  Treasures were offered in heaven.  But he took instead the cold reward of the unsaved dead!

And what of us who live today?  This is our home let us not stay!!  A call to the harvest till it shall end.  Work now, work fast, and reap my friend.  New dawn and sunrise!  Till the faithful the master will give the prize.

by Dag Heward-Mills

[fishingrodsreelsandgear-blog]

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[ottos-doodle-page]

My reaper man Ridge!

This was just a quick sketch I did last night. Maybe one day I’ll make it into a bigger piece but I just really liked how he turned out.:)

#otto's art #my art #art #otto drew this #otto's work #doodle #otto draws #sketch #Ridge #Ridge the elemental reaper #shoulder angel #shoulder devil #traditional art #sketckbook #pencil sketch #look at him #i love him #beautiful #just exquisite #otto’s oc #don’t steal #don’t repost

[otto-c-graves]

Hello! I would like to just. Put this here.

#otto's work #oc #own character #dnd #d&d #d&d 5e #d&d character #d&d oc #home brewed campaign #Ridge #Vertigo #King Ridge #Vertigo the fortune teller #Ridge the elemental reaper #otto wrote this #fanfic #m/m #m/m romance #fluff #comfort #empathy empathy put yourself in place of me #ptsd #flashbacks #death by fire #fire death #nightmares #im happy with how it turned out #Vertigo and Ridge are my babies and nothing you can say will change my mind #ao3fic #archive of our own

[blessedwifey]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Under Armour Ridge Reaper GORE-TEX Shell Jacket.