A Birdie Lost in Time | Bucky Barnes

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Marlow woke up the next morning with a strange sense of limbo where she wasn't sure if she should feel relieved or not. The night before she'd basically went straight from the balcony to her bed, needing little more than the blanket around her shoulders to fall asleep.

Why she was so tired, she wasn't sure, but she'd woken up just before nine in the morning, finding a text on her phone from Bucky saying they'd landed and were on their way to the prison. She also had a message from an unknown number—

Torres, she realized.

Leaving her phone on her bed, she went to the kitchen to start coffee before going to change and get ready for the day. Each time she glanced at her phone, she felt her stomach becoming tighter and tighter. Eventually, she returned to the kitchen and filled her mug before wandering back into her room, hesitantly bringing herself to her bookshelf.

Her tablet was on the top shelf, purposefully tucked out of sight on one of her first nights here. After she listed her victims, the piece of technology felt ominous and unsafe. Like it was the thing that made what she'd done real, not her.

But that was foolishness; her tablet was just an object.

She reached her hand up and felt along the edge until her fingers touched the casing, then she pulled it down, using her sleeve to wipe away the dust that covered it. As she powered it up, she crawled onto her bed, propping her back against the wall between her windows as she went through each security point.

Her first task was tracking Bucky and Sam's phone, which she did with ease considering they made sure to enable tracking to her phone. Once that link was established, she moved onto the next task; searching Hydra servers.

She tapped into the programs she'd not looked at in months, eyes scanning and filtering through the last five years of newly mined data. She wasn't positive that the information would have come about in the last half decade, but she figured it was the best place to start and see if there was any talk.

It was a slow process—always was—but longer this time because every so often her mind would wander to Bucky and Sam, trying to guess what was happening on the other side of the world. No new messages were coming through, and their trackers hadn't moved from their location at the West entrance, so they likely had to leave their phones at check in.

She just had to wait.

She hated waiting.

Her fingers swiped back to the servers, finding her place on the page where she'd left off.

It was something about experimentation, but there was information missing. Most of the files people decrypted were redacted and missing words if not paragraphs, but she did her best to piece together the trials.

Testing for some sort of drug, or enhancement, with temporary success before patients succumbed to side effects. She followed the trail of information, linking one doctor to another, one facility to the next, until she was sure that what she was reading was unrelated.

If only she didn't spend two hours sniffing at a dead end.

Just to be thorough, she searched for connections with the doctors and anyone else involved in that project, but nothing led to anything significant or super soldier related, so she finally called it off.

Her next lead was a call for scientists in the late nineties with knowledge in chemistry and biology. There were no other details, and really, that could be for anything, but she couldn't not look into it.

Again, each link she followed seemed to connect to nothing important, although there were mentions of a doctor—or maybe multiple—over a number of years. It seemed like it could possibly be a supervisor, or overseer, or team that was involved in a bunch of important projects before Hydra fell, but she couldn't be sure.