Lacuna [1] {Completed}

Chapter Eight

          She flipped over the folder and went over its contents more througouly. Each picture of the metal ligaments seemed to be results of different experiments. Each time she saw a new picture, the formula changed slightly. After she went thought all of them once, she reached for a pen and paper in the drawer of the desk she was sitting at and wrote them down one by one.

It took her an hour to organize the formulas into anything that made sense. She spent the next two looking for a pattern, stuck in a constant loop of getting somewhere and then backtracking. As soon as something started to make sense, the end result didn't.

She knew these were formulas of electric energy. From atoms to neurons she knew all the formulas of the mechanical prosthetics made sense, but there was one element in each that didn't and she couldn't figure it out.

           After three and a half hours after Erin had sent Steve to bed, she finally shoved the file aside. She rubbed her temples in frustration and reached for her cup of coffee. Wanda had been kind enough to deliver her third one of the night.

There was another file Erin had been eyeing, but she wasn't quite sure she was ready to know its contents. She took a deep breath and grabbed the file Steve had given her about what happened to Winter Soldier in Siberia. She flipped open the folder and her eyes scanned the first page. There was a picture of Bucky in an unforgiving metal box that HYDRA kept him in during his cryo sleeps. She flipped to the next page. The names of all the scientists who experimented on The Winter Soldier were written and what they had each contributed to him were scrawled onto various sheets of paper. Every compound they had used to wipe his brain was listed along with the tools to do it. The results were listed as well. The experiments they did had given him enhanced strength similar to Captain America, only used for more a more deadly purpose.

           She turned the page over and stopped in her tracks. She was looking at another list of name and dates. She was confused for a moment until until her eyes stopped on two names: Howard and Maria Stark. Date of kill: December 16th 1991, the year of her own birth. This was a list of The Winter Soldier's kills.

          Something in Erin's stomach turned to ice. She had interned at STARK industries every summer since she was 15 until the last summer before she dropped out of college. She only met Tony Stark a handful of times, but her grandfather had been close with Howard when they first began S.H.I.E.L.D. It was enough to make Erin hurt for their loss. She couldn't imagine what Tony had been through, finding out that your friend's ghost turned assassin friend killed your parents.

But she also couldn't imagine being manipulated so much that you were unknowingly being forced to kill someone who had once been a comrade and the parents of a person who could have so easily been your friend.

           She shut the folder quickly and looked up at the Winter Soldier again. It felt impossible... impossible that he had been turned into something like that.

           A memory surfaced in Erin's mind.

*****

"Grandpa you didn't tell me you knew Captain America!" Five-year-old Erin said to her grandfather. She was sitting in his office one afternoon going through pictures he kept. She found one dated from 1944.

           The picture she held in her hand had three men in it. One of them was of her grandfather, much younger than the white haired man who stood in front of her now. In the picture he stood on the left side of Captain America and there was a dark haired man on his right side.

Erin knew all about Captain America. Her father had taken her to the Smithsonian for her fifth birthday just a few months ago. Ever since she watched the documentary shown there, she became obsessed. She asked her father everything he knew about him. She wanted books, documentaries, comics, anything that had Captain America on it, she wanted. She was even more estatic when she found out that she had been named after Peggy Carter, one of the founders of S.H.I.E.L.D. and friend of her grandfather. She was still a little young to really understand what exactly S.H.I.E.L.D. was and what both her grandfather and father did there for their jobs.