Morden Man

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

Yes, I double posted. And no, I'm not sorry that I did it.

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

Washington D.C.
March 26th, 2005
17:27pm

It was wrong. He was wrong. That thing was not Steve Rogers. Bucky knew that and yet he felt compelled to sit down. Without a word of protest he followed after Steve and sat down when he gestured to him to do so. On the table was a slab of meat that resembled a half-eaten heart and given the chunks of flesh between Steve’s teeth it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out who’d been eating it. The elderly man picked up his utensils with surgical care and began to cut a small piece of the heart free. Once he had managed to do so he offered the piece to Bucky and smiled at him weakly. Barnes shook his head and Steve shrugged his shoulders and slid his teeth along his fork until the meat was in his mouth. He chewed on it greedily for a few moments, moaning euphorically every other second, and then looked up at Bucky as if he’d forgotten he was there.

"That uniform does not belong to you," Steve smiled mischievously at Bucky from across the table. "Did your mother never teach you that it was unkind to take things that don't belong to you?"

It was Steve's voice but the speaking pattern was nothing like Bucky had remembered. With each second in his presence it became clearer to him that the thing opposite him was not his friend. Those eyes though, the way they shone in the light and looked as if they saw straight into your soul, Bucky found it damn near impossible to believe it wasn't him. He steeled himself and tried to force some inquisitorial statement from his lips but something about the way the man looked at him forced him to confess his deepest, darkest thoughts.

When Bucky spoke it was more blubber than the bluster he had in mind. "My mother died when I was a child."

“Of course she did. That would explain why your manners are so lacking,” Steve mumbled from behind the napkin he wiped his mouth with. His eyes darted towards Bucky’s arms that were resting atop the edge of the table. “Elbows.”

Barnes pulled his elbows away from it and placed them in his lab obediently. “Sorry about that.”

“You are forgiven,” Steve said with a polite smie. “It’s not often that I have dinner guests. Not willing ones at least. I am afraid it’s been some time since I last entertained so I do hope you’ll be as forthcoming with your forgiveness if the locale leaves something to be desired. I did not have much time to prepare. Much the opposite in fact. You see, I could feel it, I could feel the madness. It had been too long since I last fed and it had begun to fetter my brain until I could think of nothing other than doing harm to my fellow man. That simply wouldn't do, would it?”

Bucky's hands twitched a little as the man spoke. He tried his best to calm them but his body seemed to be fighting against whatever hold the thing posing as Steve had over him. Every time he opened his mouth to speak it seemed to erode his control over Bucky and now Bucky's body seemed to have taken up the battle where his mind had faltered. Barnes spotted those piercing blue eyes lock on his hands and he held them against one another tightly to quell the twitching so as not to arouse his suspicion any further.

"Yes," Bucky smiled politely as the old man looked back at him, visibly unconvinced. "I understand."

Steve shook his head gently. "You are a resilient one, Captain, it is not often that I encounter men like you. Even now you try to suppress it but you must not. You see, were I not to feed, were I to suppress my urges, I would succumb to the madness and become something truly monstrous. What would you become if you failed to suppress your most base impulses, I wonder? Should we investigate what it is you fear?"

In the blink of an eye "Steve Rogers" became something else. Something Bucky at once recognised intuitively and felt completely detached from. It was him. There was something different about him though, a dullness to his eyes that made him deeply uncomfortable. His hair was long and shaggy and a black domino mask rested atop his face. His doppelgänger reached for a glass of wine in front of him and drank from it with a contented sigh before looking up at Bucky.

To his surprise a thick Russian accent left his mouth. "You are full of surprises."

Bucky searched his memory in an attempt to recall some clue as to why the doppelgänger might have taken that form but found it blank. He had nothing. Whatever this thing was, whatever it was trying to do, it had seemingly fired a blank. Seeing Steve sat before him had unsettled him so much he had succumbed to the hold of the being in front of him. This bizarro impression of him had broken it. The shaggy hair and domino mask slithered away and the man's true face was finally revealed.

He was horrific. Impossibly skinny with blemished, jaundiced skin and a half dozen ginger rags atop his greasy scalp. His teeth were jagged, yellowed points that looked as if they were barely cling to his rotten gums. Bucky noticed a flash of recognition across the man's eyes as if he noticed that Bucky had broken from his hold. He lunged towards Barnes with his fork and attempted to stick him in the neck. Bucky parried it away and twisted one of the man's arms until it snapped in two like a twig. He howled in pain and suddenly the man's hostages burst into life, as if freed of his hold too, and began to flee to the exits.

There was a crackle of energy as Bucky's arc shield burst into life. He took a glance towards the diners that sat dead, their skin flayed and their rib cages burst open, as he approached the hideous man with a grimace. Bucky rained punch after punch down on the man until the yellow pins in his mouth were cracked and broken. The man hacked up blood in Bucky's face and used his last free arm to scratch at the exposed mouth of his cowl. Bucky broke that arm as easily as the first before beating the man in the face with his shield until he slipped out of consciousness.

He stood, breathing heavily, and glanced down at the beaten mess that had taken once take his and Steve's forms. He lifted him from the ground and threw him through the window of the restaurant onto the street outside. Bucky stepped out of the broken window after him and glanced towards the end of the block towards the police cordon. The crowd had swelled, there were more patrol cars than there'd been when he'd gone in, and everywhere Bucky looked a phone was brandished in his direction.

Bucky Barnes might have been dead as far as the world was concerned but they would all know that Captain America was alive after tonight.

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

What's going on with those applications? Are they going to have to wait until Friday too?

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

Washington D.C.
March 26th, 2005
17:12pm

Horns blared as Bucky’s bike came to a halt. Downtown Washington was gridlocked with traffic. On the horizon Bucky could see a row of patrol cars and a cordon around which a crowd of people were assembled. He took a glance at the brown leather-strapped watch around his wrist and sighed before pulling parking up and dismounting. He made his way towards the crowd and listened in for a while as they peppered the officers with questions. Each one was either batted away or ignored outright. Eventually Bucky turned to the elderly black man in the flat cap beside him and gestured towards the police cordon.

“What’s going on here?”

“One of those costumed freaks is holed up in a restaurant with a bunch of folks down there,” the man muttered with a shake of his head. “The police have cordoned off the entire block from the looks of things. What can you do, eh? As if traffic in this town isn’t bad enough already.”

Barnes grimaced. He’d promised Hill before he left that he wouldn’t do anything to bring attention to himself but the police looked far from capable of handling this situation. His thoughts drifted back to the woman at the museum and the “sadness” she had seen in his eyes. This was Bucky’s life now, the duty and the shield, and there was nothing else. What good was he if he walked away from situations like these? What would Steve have thought of him if he had done? He gritted his teeth as he thought about the torrent of abuse Maria Hill would hurl in his direction afterwards and headed back to his bike to get his uniform.

It was bitter cold as he slipped down an alleyway to pull on his uniform but once it was on Bucky could barely feel the cold at all. He took a couple of breaths to calm himself as he prepared to walk out in public in his uniform for the first time and then strode out. At first there was nothing. People walked past him with bemused looks until he drew close to the crowd near the police cordon. The old man Bucky had spoken to looked round first and took a brief glance at him before turning back to the cordon. He froze in place as what he’d seen began to sink in and he slowly looked back. His eyes widened as if he’d seen a ghost and he reached for those nearest him. One by one they turned and the crowd began murmuring.

Bucky stepped towards them and the crowd parted to let him walk through. The bemused Bucky had been met with at first had turned into stunned silence. He lifted up the police tape and slid underneath and began to approach the restaurant when a voice called out from behind him.

“Hey!” A police officer stood with his hand pressed against his radio as he readied to call for backup. “You can’t go in there.”

Suddenly his eyes widened as Bucky turned to face him and the sun deflected off of the red, white, and blue of Bucky’s uniform. The police officer’s hand slid from his radio and he gulped loudly and nodded in Bucky’s direction. With a small smile, Barnes turned back towards the restaurant and walked towards it without breaking stride. A bell clanged behind him as he stepped inside and he spotted a young beaten woman in the corner tied up with rope. She squealed with fear as Bucky locked eyes with her and he gestured to her to calm down.

Barnes took a glance around the corner into the restaurant and mumbled an expletive under his breath at the bodies dotted around the room. Many sat at tables with their ribcages torn open, a gaping hole where their hearts had once been, with lifeless eyes rolled back into their heads. Others lay on the ground with large portions of their skin missing. The floor was caked in blood and utensils were scattered across the floor atop broken glass. At some of the tables the living sat acting out some bloodless pantomime. They pretended to drink from empty glasses, scraped their knives and forks against empty plates, and mopped at their mouths with napkins.

Bucky glanced around the room for the “costumed freak” the man had spoken about earlier and found nothing of note. Finally in the corner of his eye he sensed movement as an elderly man stood up from one of the tables. His hair was a blonde faded by age and his face was wrinkled and aged. He wore a long-sleeved baby blue shirt and dark blue trousers. With a walking stick in hand he hobbled towards Bucky and shot him a fragile smile that wavered as if maintaining it took all of the man’s effort.

Finally the man moved to speak. “What do we have here? Please take a seat. I do so love having company for dinner.”

Between the man’s teeth was human flesh but that was by no means the most shocking part. He’d been slow to notice it at first but now the man stood directly in front of him he realised he’d seen those eyes somewhere before. That voice too. Both had aged some, the voice more raspy and the eyes heavier, but there was no mistaking it. Stood before him was a man that was supposed to be dead. A man that Bucky Barnes had once considered a brother, a mentor, and a friend.

It was Steve Rogers.

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

Washington D.C.
March 26th, 2005
13:59pm

Barnes, Stevenson, and Fontaine had left for Washington the morning after their inquisition at Smiley's hands. Bucky had spent most of the flight reassuring them they wouldn’t spend the rest of their careers in an even deeper hole than Jakarta. Try though he might to assure them that SHIELD wouldn’t punish them for not rooting out Jackson they seemed unconvinced. He couldn’t blame them. In their position he would have been too. All Bucky could stress was the importance of keeping Jackson’s betrayal secret. If they wanted a future within SHIELD that was absolutely imperative. If they wanted a future anywhere that was absolutely imperative. That part of the message seemed to sink in. He hoped for their sakes it had done lest he be called into Smiley’s office one day and handed a folder with their names in it. It certainly wasn’t Smiley’s style but Bucky wouldn’t put it past Nick Fury.

Barnes exchanged an awkward goodbye with them though tried as earnestly as he could to express his desire to work with both of them again. After Smiley had finished debriefing Fury, Barnes had stopped by Fury's office for a time. They spoke briefly and Fury made his disappointment at having lost Tiger Shark clear but otherwise congratulated him on a job well done. His first proper outing as Captain America had been a success as far as SHIELD were concerned. So why was Bucky still so downbeat? Was it the boy on the ship? He couldn’t quite work it out but felt some personal time was in order. He felt like he’d been living in the uniform for the past week.

It had taken some convincing but Maria Hill agreed to allow Barnes out of the Triskelion for the afternoon. Bucky had wanted to go to a bar somewhere to get a drink but Maria “suggested” he visit the Captain America Exhibit at the National Museum of American History instead. It was better than prowling the hauls of the Triskelion or sitting alone in his quarters. He had exactly six hours to himself in which he could do that. Hill had offered to send some SHIELD “escorts” with him but Bucky refused her on the spot and told her SHIELD would have to find another Captain America unless they let him go on his own. After several expletives Agent Hill finally agreed.

Feeling the wind on his face on the bike ride there had been freeing. The actual exhibition had been anything but. Bucky stared into a cabinet in which the "actual" shield of Captain America sat. He knew from first experience that it was anything but the real deal and wondered how anyone believed it. There beside the shield was a mannequin dressed in Bucky's old uniform. He tried his best not to make eye contact with it and instead focused on the shield behind the pane of glass. From beside him the sound of a voice made him jump slightly.

It was a grey-haired lady that looked as old as time. She smiled at him and gestured towards the cabinet. “I met him once.”

Her words listed past Bucky's ears without registering as he stared at her wrinkled skin. She was so frail that she looked like she could barely support her own weight. Yet there she stood on her own, a lilac cardigan draped over her shoulders, staring into the cabinet beside Bucky all the same. Bucky looked at her face, her thinning hair, and wondered whether he'd look that old now were it not for the icy waters of Atlantic.

Suddenly he remembered the old woman had spoken but not what she had said. “I beg your pardon?”

“Captain America’s sidekick,” the old woman grinned. “I met him.”

Bucky strained to find some face amidst the wrinkles that he recognised. After several seconds of trying he found himself disappointment. More likely than not the woman was misremembering things or it was a family story that the details of had been embellished with time. Barnes thought back to the young SHIELD agent on the flight to Germany that claimed his grandfather had fought with Steve. It wasn't uncommon for men to fabricate stories like that. The people waiting at home expected glory or gore when more often than not war was soul-destroying tedium. Perhaps this was another instance of that.

“I was a child at the time and far too young to understand what was going on. My father was a civil servant in the Vichy regime working as a double agent for the French resistance. One night some men came to our home speaking a language I could not then understand. Tallest amongst them was a man in a blue uniform carrying a shield that I had heard the other children talk about. Captain America. They say he was five times as strong as a normal man and ten times as fast. It wasn’t him that fascinated me but his young friend, Bucky.”

“Through the eyes of a child I thought he was huge,” the old woman muttered as she pressed her hand against the cabinet. “Now I understand that he was no more than a boy then. I remember thinking how brave he must have been. There amongst all the bullets, all the explosions, all the… killing. He must have been forced to do things that no boy should ever have to do. When I grew older and my family moved to America I read about him. I saw the footage they showed American children of him fighting alongside Captain America. He was always smiling. It was wrong. The young man I met was sad.”

The woman's words cut Bucky deeper than any knife might have. Perhaps she had seen him. Perhaps not. It made no difference. In a few seconds the woman had shown she'd understood him and the pain he'd felt all those years ago better than anyone since Bucky had woken up. He had bore the responsibility that came with being Captain America's sidekick willingly, he'd done things Steve couldn't bring himself to do, and somewhere along the line he'd lost a part of himself in doing it. If he could go back and change a thing he wouldn't have but there were times he dreamt of having had a normal childhood. If only all the boys back in America that envied him knew how badly he used to envy them at times.

"I never forgot his eyes," the old woman said as she glanced towards Bucky. "There was so much sadness in them.”

Suddenly eyes that had been bleary and lifeless came alive as if she recognised something in those eyes that she had recognised once before. She reached a thin, wrinkly hand towards Barnes and placed it against his cheek. Unsure of himself he stood still and allowed the woman's hand to rest against his cheek for a moment before staggering backwards a few paces. The old woman's hand remained in the air and stretched out towards Bucky as he shook his head slightly and began to walk backwards away from the woman.

Tears began to well in the woman's eyes and Bucky wanted to step towards her and tell her she was right, he wanted to hold her and tell her that he was alright, but he knew he'd never be able to do that. Instead he tried to swallow away the large knot in his throat, turned his back on the old woman, and made his way towards the exit. As he reached the parking lot and bestrode his bike he stopped for a moment and dipped his head in mourning. Not for Steve or the boy he'd killed in Jakarta but for himself.

Bucky Barnes was dead.

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

...

Yeah, dodged a real bullet there.

@Byrd Man

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

Because I love Arrow, and have this reflex to automatically forgive it for any wrong move the producers make, I was just about to defend the show's dignity with logical reasons for designing the helmet the way it was designed.

But then I realised that I have none.

@GreenGrenade

Every time I look at that picture I think it's a poorly done fan-made photoshop posted in the Arrow subreddit. Then I remember it's not.

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

Ollie and Slade haven't really kept in contact, so whether or not he's all...Deathstroke-y is anyone's guess, I don't think using Arrow as a stepping point is enough of a reason to lay claim to Slade as a member of GA's rogues' gallery.

Also yes. He's been Green Arrow since around the time that pesky nine eleven thing happened. Never even had that weird period where he just called himself "The Arrow" either. Also what the hell is this "Starling City" you speak of? Poppycock.

@Sloth

As long as this monstrosity doesn't appear anywhere I'll be a happy man.

Maximum Comics: Dawn of Justice | REBRANDING - PLEASE STAY TUNED

Ohh.... I can feel the love.... I think.

No but really outside of backstory stuff of Slade training Ollie on the island, he's pretty wide open.

@Sloth

Is Slade already Deathstroke then? As in will you be writing Ollie as Green Arrow when you pick him up?