"Why'd we leave the car?" The mini-handler asks, confused, when waking up 19 minutes after they left it in the road and started walking. As usual, he tenses after asking the question.
"The family has most likely reported that it was stolen." Which means the police have most likely been notified and have perhaps even barricaded the road by now.
POLICE DETECTION IS MISSION-NONCOMPLIANT. The usual voice in his head says.
It is a rule for every mission- do not alert the authorities to his presence. It would have been almost impossible to continue driving and avoid them on an empty rural road.
They'd take him away. The newer voice adds and points out, unnecessarily, that if taken into police custody, the Asset would be charged with eight first-degree murders, two instances of vehicular theft, kidnapping a child, and his burglary of the Tesco store.
And that is just in the past 25.2 hours.
"We stealed it?" Harry the Handler asks, horrified.
"Affirmative, Harry." The Asset is still not used to addressing his superior as just "Harry" and cannot fathom his new handler's request. But he must do as his handler wishes and refer to him as requested, as illogical as the wish seems. The name makes Harry the Handler smile, anyways. "We stole it."
"But stealing's bad!" Harry the Handler protests, seeming more bold when the Asset had not gotten annoyed at him for talking. "Dudley told Aunt Tuna I stealed his cookie. I didn't, really, but I still got in big twouble!" He shudders and sniffles.
"Is stealing disallowed for the mission?"
Despite his protests, Harry the Handler does not actually forbid the Soldier from stealing in the future. Which is good, because the Soldier has no money, so theft is the only way to obtain anything at the moment.
"Assassinating the family after they passed us on the road would have stopped them from reporting the theft." The Asset informs him. Then, they could have kept the car, without worrying about police.
"Asassassanat...?" Harry the Handler asks. "Is dat your other name? Like how Aunt Tuna calls Dudley 'Diddikins'?" The boy snickers slightly.
"Negative. Assassinate means to kill." He is not sure Harry the Handler really understands what that means, but the boy does not reply.
The mini-handler had been scared of the agents' corpses in the lodge. It is odd that Harry the Handler would take control of a very highly skilled assassin and then not make use of that branch of the Asset's skills.
Harry the Handler switches topics and starts debating dog names aloud again. The Soldier offers no input. He should not have opinions, after all, and the dog's name does not affect him. At one point, Harry the Handler asks the Soldier for his opinion, but the Soldier just tells the boy that it is entirely his choice.
Eventually, Harry the Handler decides to call the black dog 'Nighty' rather than 'Blackie', adding that Batman is the Dark Knight. The Asset wonders if the Dark Knight will replace his Winter Soldier designation, but so far, his handler has not changed any previous codenames, merely assigned him a new one. Or two, possibly, if Dark Knight is to be a codename.
The boy's green eyes seem more lively when he talks about Batman to his Batman. The Asset/Batman suspects that Batman is somebody else, in addition to his new codename, but the boy has said that the Asset is Batman. It is confusing.
Nighty continues to follow them, most likely because Harry the Handler had fed the dog peanut butter in the shed.
After 33.4 minutes of walking, the Asset finds train tracks that he had not explicitly been searching for, despite thinking about taking trains or trucks instead of cars.
"Where is it?" Harry the Handler asks, looking around in confusion, clearly disappointed that there is not a train on the tracks. "Wanna take the twain."
"The location of the train is unknown. If we follow the tracks, we will most likely find a train eventually." That is, if these tracks are still in use. The Asset does not know if they are.
FIND A TRAIN.
He walks along the tracks for another 1.3 hours, while Harry eventually dozes in his arms and Nighty pads along beside them, occasionally stopping to eat grass for some reason.
The Asset uses his lock-picking kit to unlock the handcuff ring from around his flesh wrist. He had removed the cuff from his prosthesis to check under the wrist plates in the shed, but hadn't bothered with the one around his flesh wrist at the time.
At 2018, the sound of a train can be heard. It grows louder and the distant form speeds towards them, Harry the Handler blearily wakes up, nuzzling the Asset's neck. When he notices the train approaching, his eyes go wide with excitement.
Harry the Handler bounces slightly in the Asset's arms, chanting excitedly. "Twain! Twain!"
"Are we taking a twain?" It is clear that Harry the Handler still wants to. "'cos you don't have the Batmobile?"
"Affirmative, Harry."
The child smiles and talks about the 'Thomas stories on da telly' that he could hear from his cupboard when Dudley was watching it and how he could hear the whole story, not just people talking.
The Asset has no idea what his handler is talking about while he walks along the train tracks, but he listens to every word and stores the information for later. Are Thomas, Annie and Clarabel potential future targets? From the sound of it, they'd more likely become allies or possibly other handlers since Harry the Handler speaks of them fondly.
Except, from the boy's words, it seems that Thomas is a train.
As the real train nears, the Asset sees it is a freight train instead of a passenger train, which is fortunate in that there will not be other people riding it.
"Hold tight, Harry." The Asset says quietly, trying not to make it sound like he is commanding his superior.
"Yessir." The boy nods and wraps his too-thin arms around the Asset's neck while his legs tighten around his waist.
The Soldier keeps Harry the Handler tucked tightly to his side and holds onto the scruff of Nighty's neck with his flesh hand.
Harry the Handler goes back to bouncing slightly in the Asset's arms, chanting "Twain!" The movement makes the boy more cumbersome, especially in the Soldier's wounded flesh arm, but the Soldier cannot tell his superior to stop. He grits his teeth. Nighty is squirming even more from the Soldier's fist.
Jumping onto a moving train would kill any ordinary human, but the Asset has jumped on and off moving vehicles before. The Asset would easily be able to do it alone, but it will be trickier since he is functioning at 65% right now. In the past 24 hours, he has slept only 2.4 hours and sustained a gunshot wound. It is made even more difficult by the fact he is carrying a boy and dog with his injured arm, as well as several bags.
Still, the Soldier will not fail. Failure is unacceptable.
You miss that window, we're bugs on a windshield. A new voice in his mind says. It is partially incorrect. The Soldier would most likely survive, but Harry the Handler and Nighty would be splattered as the voice said.
He will not miss, but this is going to hurt when he makes it, though pain is hardly a novel experience to the Soldier.
As the freight train barrels past, the Asset takes a running leap and Harry screams. The scream sounds more excited than scared.
Some sort of energy shield briefly forms in front of the Asset, cushioning their impact with the side of the train. It is extremely similar to the shields the enemy asset conjured with the weaponized stick, but the Asset left the stick back at the lodge.
Is the shield coming from Harry the Handler? But he does not have the weaponized stick. Perhaps he has those unidentified abilities the enemy asset had, but can do them without the weaponized stick. That could explain why HYDRA wants the boy in the first place.
The Soldier assumes that Harry the Handler had not been allowed to make shields in the presence of the Dursley family, and would not have been allowed to shield himself from Vernon Dursley's beating.
The Soldier grabs onto one of the bars on the side of the freight car with his metal hand and hangs on tightly, gripping Potter with his flesh arm and the scruff of Nighty's neck with his flesh hand. His bullet wound is in agony as that arm supports the weight of the boy and dog, but he ignores the pain with gritted teeth.
Harry the Handler's exhilarated scream is replaced by the sound of the boy retching. It seems as if he will regurgitate again from the sudden lurching speed.
Before the Soldier can do anything about that, another vision flashes through his mind, of snowy mountains, and he's hanging from a different train in a similar manner.
No, wait, it is not him in the vision, because the man's body he is inhabiting has a real left arm, not a prosthetic one. The Asset does not remember a time when he did not have the prosthesis.
The blonde man who was sometimes a child in other recent visions is also clinging to the vision-train. In this vision, he is very muscular and wearing an odd blue suit. He reaches out, shouting "Bucky! Hang on!"
Who the hell is Bucky?
The Asset yells as he falls from the vision-train in the snowy alps, but snaps out it at the sound of a child screaming.
Harry the Handler's scream is now scared instead of excited.
He's falling in reality, having let go of the real train, and he only just snags a lower rail on the side of the freight car.
The Asset's boots almost skim the ground that's passing at a rate of 65 km/hour under them.
MOVE.
The Asset digs his metal fingers in and hauls himself, Harry the Handler, and Nighty higher up the side of the speeding freight car. He kicks the car door open, but not hard enough for it to fly off its hinges.
He manages to fling himself and the others into the freight car and immediately grabs a gun with his prosthetic hand, scanning the interior and ensuring that there is nobody in it with them. He notes once again that it is fortunate that this is a freight train instead of a passenger train.
All that is in here is metal in the form of beams and rods, most likely to be used for construction.
The Asset shuts the freight car door, plunging the interior into almost total darkness. Fortunately, the Asset still has his night-vision goggles in his backpack. Harry the Handler is clearly used to the dark, and had probably been locked in the cupboard under the stairs frequently.
The Asset's tactical vest smells of vomit, undoubtedly from Harry the Handler, considering the retching sounds he'd made before the Asset was lost in the vision.
Nighty appears to have an easily-upset stomach that was upset by jumping against the train, like Harry the Handler. There are flecks of vomit around the dog's mouth, but the dog's vomit seems to have been left on the ground behind them. Which is just as well, because he probably would have tried to eat it like he had with the poop. The dog is disgusting,
Harry the Handler continues to cling to the Asset as if they are still dangling from the train and his tiny body quivers. The boy's clinging, as well as the fact that his heartbeat is quick from adrenaline, mean the boy is not asleep, yet his head droops against the Asset's shoulder in exhaustion, resting in his own vomit.
Nighty huffs out a whine and walks in circles before laying down on the train floor.
The Asset quickly checks Harry the Handler for injuries as the boy's body goes limp with sleep. The handler is unharmed, but he had lost his glasses sometime during the excursion of boarding the moving freight train.
He lays the now-sleeping boy next to the dog. Harry the Handler sighs contentedly and snuggles up to Nighty.
The Soldier then starts to re-bandage his own gunshot wound, mind racing.
The visions are a hinderance to the mission and had put the handler in danger. The Soldier will be punished for almost letting himself and the handler hit the ground. He is still awaiting punishment for gripping Harry the Handler too tightly when it seemed like the boy would fly out of his arms.
Why does he keep having visions of the blonde guy who changes ages and levels of physical strength between visions? Who is the blond guy?
грузовой вагон, freight car, is the last in the string of trigger words that reset him. Is that at all connected to the vision about falling from a freight car in the snowy alps?
It is not important, aside from the fact the visions are distracting to the mission and should be eradicated. If the Soldier ever had visions before, they were almost certainly wiped in the chair.
He is malfunctioning, but this handler does not have a chair or cryo tank. He cannot be fixed without a chair, the reset had done nothing to his mind, merely his allegiance.
Despite the fact he should not be having visions, the Soldier cannot help wondering about them as he lays down, guarding the freight car door.