All was silent in the tower.
The flickering lights and their yellow buzz had died out sometime around three o'clock in the morning when the party had ended and soon after, everyone had gone to bed.
And if Evgenia listened close enough, she could hear the deep breathes of the two women sleeping next door.
She didn't go to that party.
Instead she had secluded herself in her room with her laptop into the early morning with her eyes beginning to burn and water from the bright screen. She was stubborn. Like Bucky, Uncle Steve had said.
Zhenya saw parts of him in her. When she looked in the mirror, she saw the eyes of her missing father staring back at her. There was the slope of the nose and the width of his face. And when she fought, she mimicked the way that he held his gun and the angle of his arm when he threw a knife. Although, she supposed that that was not genetic but a result of decades of operating alongside him.
Evgenia Yakovlevna was the legacy of a missing man.
And the man himself, was nowhere to be found.
The girl glances at the clock besides her, the time reading five am. Mama and Maria would surely be angry if they learnt that she had stayed up all night to look for him. She brushes the papers and maps to the side of the desk and reaches forward to turn the laptop off.
She would show Sam and Steve what she had found tomorrow.
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Bucky Barnes was beginning to lose count of the number of countries he'd been in.
America, Portugal, Spain, France and now Austria.
He stands behind a tall, brunette woman, and in front of a middle aged South Asian man, sandwiched between all the Austrian locals and the hurrying tourists of the train station.
The brunette steps forward and hands the person in the booth her money for a train ticket. It's a quick transaction and Bucky hopes that his will be too.
The crowd around him heightens his paranoia and sets him on edge. The crowd meant that anyone could be HYDRA, that they could be watching him and waiting for the right moment to take him.
He steps in front of the yellow line and shoves a handful of coin into the booth and almost snatches the ticket out of the booking clerk's hands. Ducking his way around the people, he makes his way down to the platform, hesitating for just a moment on the escalators and boards the train just as it's about to pull out of the station.
Bucky arrives on the outskirts of Bucharest sometime past six pm – according to the rusty, old clock that hangs from the ceiling, and hails a taxi to take him into the city centre. The apartment building is dingy and reminds him of the cell that he shared with Zhenya in their old Russian base, but beggars cannot be choosers, so the former assassin pays the lady at the front desk in coins and climbs up to the even dingier little apartment.
Bucky saves little time to rest. He pries out a floorboard with his bionic arm and shoves the valuable under the floors before shouldering his backpack again to leave the shelter of the building.
He passed a sign just a few streets away that called for workers to help construct a housing unit. The sign was dirty and the text was sloppy, Bucky doubts that it is legitimate, but work is work and he needs as much money as possible so he stops poking the base of the advertisement with suspicion and eyes the glass door that an arrow on the plaque points too.
Shoving his metal arm into the pockets on his raggedy jeans, he heaves a sigh and pushes open the door.
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'Eastern Europe.'
Uncle Sam looks at her in amazement as Evgenia slides the map across the marbled countertop.
'How'd you find it?'
She shrugs nonchalantly. 'You both keep looking in America and Mexico and every North and South American country that he could've easily travelled to by train or car. You didn't consider the option of travelling by ship.'
Uncle Steve looks up from the map. 'There's no way he could've gotten on a ship. The ports are too guarded. A wanted man, much less a wanted man with a metal arm would not have been able to board a cargo ship.'
'He's done it before. When a target escapes, sometimes overseas, we had to find a way to eliminate him without alerting HYDRA of our failures.' Zhenya snatches the map back. 'So. Eastern Europe. I figured he would go back to where it all started.'
The Captain begins backing away from the counter. 'Let's start with Russia.'
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yeahhhh im back. exams went alright but i most definitely failed maths. gay.
oh and make sure to vote and comment fellas, thanks