[Log] Catch-All for February

[worthallthis]

Who: Winter and YOU
When: The month of February
Where: Locations in the prompts
Summary: Winter deals with the aftermath of his latest explore and the TDM prompts
Warnings: Various attempts at destruction, memory loss, mold


I. How Many Ways Can I Smash This - Outskirts of town, ADI headquarters

Two days after making a very satisfying crater out of a clearly Web-aligned artifact in Dogtown, Winter finds that same artifact in his pocket. A little silver triangle covered in etched cob-webs that fits easily in his palm.

Annoyed, he goes to the outskirts of the city-- not Dogtown side, the other side-- and hurls another grenade at it. It's back in his pocket the next morning.

He talks somebody into snitching him some highly corrosive acid from one of ADI's labs, and watching over him for safety purposes as he pours it all over the damn thing.

He has Steve smash it with Thor's hammer.

He finally returns from a meeting with ADI, disgruntled, and tells whoever's waiting for him outside, "They can't keep it, either. You're just supposed to watch me and make sure it doesn't make me do anything stupid." He sounds extremely displeased with this situation.


II. No More Dance Steps - Closed to CR, at a local swing club

Once a month, there's a swing dance club in the rec center in town. Winter always goes with whichever of his friends happen to be free that night (or more likely, those friends who make an effort to be free that night). Today is no exception.

Except today he's standing outside staring at the sign with a confused frown. "Why am I here?" he asks hesitantly. "I don't know how to dance."


III. One Fear - Around Glaucester and ADI

After that horrifying realization that he's truly forgotten something, Winter keeps stopping in the middle of whatever he's doing and pulling out small hand-sized journal from his pocket, flipping back through it to find something and double-check it, or hastily scribbling something new.

And he seems to have multiple journals in multiple pockets, when he's wearing his outdoor coat that has pockets big enough for them. "Wait," he says in the middle of a conversation, and fishes through pockets until he finds the right one and can double-check something.


IV. Safe Place Gone - outside the ADI apartments

One chilly morning, Winter is outside the ADI apartments, sitting on a bench in the snow, wearing his sole secondary pair of shoes, scrubbing vigorously at his combat boots and looking distressed.

There's a stack of other belongings on the bench beside him, blankets and clothes and a handful of books, all in various states of... grossness. Some of it is moldy. Some of it is damp. Some of it is crusted in something that looks like blood. Winter is trying to clean it off, to the best of his limited cleaning ability.

Come help him out? Or just be grossed out by what happened to his stuff.


V. Wildcard

Winter still does all his usual stuff: he patrols regularly around the ADI compound and the Dogtown fence. He eats lunch in the ADI cafeteria when he's on the campus. He reads out loud there, or in the park, or on a rooftop if he gets bored of (or paranoid about) the sidewalk. He practices with people or gives lessons in self-defense in the evenings at the ADI gym.

He's around, like always.

Comments

IV

[musicdied]

There's no rest for the wicked - or for those who've been foolish enough to sign on as security personnel. Yelena's coming back in from an overnight shift when she spies Winter outside the apartments, amidst an array of belongings.

Damp, mildewed, somewhat bloody belongings, she realizes as she gets closer.

"Winter?" she says quietly. "What the fuck?"

[worthallthis]

"I woke up," Winter says, "and my room was. It was all like this." He holds up one of his books with a hopeless sort of expression. The boots, at least, appear to be salvageable: they're just kind of crusty, and his boots are meant to get a little bloody.

The book probably won't be. It's got mold.

[musicdied]

Yelena mutters a low string of curses under her breath, but is already pulling out her phone to capture the state of his things. She can multitask - attempt to help him salvage what he can, and pester anyone in for the early shift in Investigations about any other reports of rampant decay.

"Just overnight? There was no sign anything was wrong before?" She doesn't think it likely - but if there was, even if it might have seemed inconsequential at the time, she's fairly certain Winter would have noticed.

[worthallthis]

"No. Nothing. It smelled fine, my things were fine." He stares morosely at the book, then sets it down and continues working on his boots. "Some things are still okay. I put them in the living room. Some things went in the trash. The more further from the door it was. The worse it was."

His bed, in fact, was the worst. That was unpleasant to wake up to, and he may have actually dealt with a shower to scrub off rather than his usual bath.

[musicdied]

"Were you in Dogtown in the last couple of days?" Yelena asks, the faint twist to her tone on Dogtown making it sound more like a curse than the name of a place.

She crouches down to inspect his rot-infected possessions more closely, with particular attention to the items that seem to have been bloodied.

Wildcard

[failedpromise]

Without her memories of what happened at home (or at least, anything past spending several years stranded in space) or her memories of everything that has happened since coming to ADI Cortana has nothing to keep her from running off into the sunset. Well, almost nothing. Because she absolutely did try running off into the sunset. She even chucked the tracker she was carrying when she found it on her person, being unable to remember where it had come from.

Fortunately for everyone, Cortana had no idea how to properly maintain the robot body and also didn't have her charger with her, so it didn't take long for her to collapse somewhere she could be easily found and brought back where she could be recharged and restored to functionality. Now, well, it had become clear to her that this ADI place had the best resources to help her get back to the Chief, even if their explanations for what was going on were obviously bullshit.

(She'd never admit it, but she hadn't been able to come up with an alternate explanation that made any more sense. Especially since she had a growing feeling that this place should be familiar to her.)

Now she's just trying to find out more about her supposed stay here. She's got an account, and while she could hack it for now she's just browsing the forums and looking at her supposed online prescence. It-none of this makes sense! She huffs in enraged frustration and springs out of the chair she's been sitting in, turning around to --

...Who's that?

"Hello?" Her face scrunches, or at least does the best approximation it can of doing so, in confusion, something which is mirrored in her voice. There's no fear or anything, just a total lack of recognition.

[worthallthis]

Winter had found her tracker, without her, and made distressed noises over it. Then he'd gone hunting. He heard from one of his coworkers that they'd found her run-down and set her to charge again, and he waited impatiently for her to come back online.

So here he is, jumping back when she leaps up, startled. "Cortana," he says, baffled and a little hurt by her lack of recognition, but with a sinking feeling at the same time. Who the hell is Bucky, he remembers saying, with no context to go with it.

[failedpromise]

Poor Winter. If Cortana were in her right mind, she'd feel bad about tossing the tracker ...though she also wouldn't have tossed it in the first place.

As it is, she stares at Winter for nearly five whole seconds, pale blue eyes taking in his hurt and concern with no small amount of surprise.

She's (how?) functioning on Human timescales. It occurs to her, somewhat belatedly, that she doesn't have time to just think and think and think.

"You have me at a disadvantage." She tries to smile at him, tries to hide her growing disquiet. This person not only knows her, he cares.

Only the Chief has ever been close enough to care.

"I've been told I lost some memories." Lost? Or were they taken from her? She's been violated in a similar manner before, but to take so much... could it be another symptom of rampancy?

What is going on?

[worthallthis]

Oh fuck. Lost memories. Winter has to pause for a long moment, because that does happen to be his worst fear ever, worse than medical, worse than trains. He never anticipated it applied to another person.

"Winter," he says. "My name is Winter. You're on my team." He pauses, a more normal amount this time, realizing she might not understand his unusual lexicon if she doesn't remember him, and corrects, "We're. Friends. I helped you train with the new robot body. We pet each other's hair sometimes."

II

[bossyboiler]

She has made the effort to be available tonight. It is important that Winter does things that he likes because if he does, Kate believes that he'll feel more like a person. It is important to her that he feel like a person because he is one. She will take no arguments about it.

Kate is under the belief that people's memories are back to normal. "What do you mean? Of course you know how to dance." She looks at the entrance doors and can see people inside. Then she looks back and up at Winter. "Right?" Maybe he's trying out humor, she hopes.

[worthallthis]

He looks confused and a little unhappy. "HYDRA wasn't going to teach a weapon how to dance," he says uncertainly. Kate isn't the type to be mean like that.

And yet his feet knew how to take him here. And he knew he was doing this thing tonight. Just... not that it was dancing. Apparently.

[bossyboiler]

Kate is equally as confused. They are here. Where had Winter thought they were headed to when they had left the apartment? It doesn't make sense to her. However, there is one thing that she is certain of. "You're not a weapon anymore, Winter. You're a person who, up until this evening, liked to dance."

Maybe his memory has been permanently damaged but it seems very weird to Kate that it is only effecting the one area of his life. Well, weird until she remembers where they are. "Do you remember why we left the apartment?"

[worthallthis]

He jerks his head in a dismissal of the weapon thing, because he knows, he knows, that's not the problem. Not really.

"To come here," he says, answering her actual question. "Because I always come here this night of the month. But." There's something like horror slowly dawning on his face, roiling in his stomach. "I forgot," he says, voice thin. "I used to know and I forgot."

IV mild gore??

[lobster_bib]

Jesus is no stranger to cleaning nasty things off boots--guts, coagulated blood, rotting cerebral fluid. He still has no idea what got to this man here, but the curiosity draws him over.

"If you can get your hands on it, white wine vinegar's a miracle worker." A tentative smile. "I could give you a hand."

[worthallthis]

Winter glances over Jesus briefly, placing who he is, then nudges one of the bloodied blankets his direction. "I don't even know if this is real blood. It might be magic blood. Or magic mold. It might never come off." He sounds dour. Definitely unhappy.

He's also being overly pessimistic, because his boots are clearly getting cleaner.

[lobster_bib]

"Magic mold," he echoes with a grimace. "Well, don't give them up for dead yet. I've cleaned worse. May I?"

He motions at one of the boots.

[worthallthis]

The boots, thankfully, do not have mold. They have crusty blood. But he does offer the second one to Jesus. "The books might be beyond saving. I hope the boots aren't. They're from before." They're perfectly fitted to his feet. Comfortable. Durable. He loves his boots dammit.

I

[punched_hitler]

Steve is pretty sure that doing this anywhere enclosed is a bad idea, so he gets Winter to bring him back to the spot where he'd tried the second attempt with a grenade. He's thinking if acid didn't work, lightning probably won't (though he's not ruling that out), but smashing it with Mjolnir? That's gotta do something, right?

He sets the little pyramid in the center of the blast crater and glances over his shoulder for Winter. "You ready?"

Ideally, this will be anticlimactic, but when is anything in his life anticlimactic?

[worthallthis]

Winter takes a couple judicious steps back, just in case the silvered metal explodes and goes flying. "Don't burn your hands again," he warns, as if Steve has any actual control over that beyond not using lightning this time. "And you should protect your face."

[punched_hitler]

Steve sighs, as if very put upon; it's unclear which statement he feels that way about (maybe both), but he does pull out a pair of safety goggles he'd swiped from the lab. "You're no fun," he points out, even as his tone has an undercurrent of unease, because he doesn't like the way this thing keeps following Winter, and he wants to take care of it. He wants to stop it.

So he puts on the goggles, then hefts the hammer, swings it high over his head, and brings it down -

And staggers a little, though he stays on his feet.

[worthallthis]

The pyramid shatters into a dozen, maybe a hundred shards of silvered metal under the hammer blow. It always does. It's not hard to destroy, it just keeps coming back.

Winter approaches again, eyeing the remains, then eyeing Steve. "Did any of it hit you?"

Wildcard

[easilyamused]

By all rights, Adam Pierson should be an easy enough man to follow. And, for the first two days, he is. The first day, he goes to work at ADI, stops for coffee on the way, and ensconces himself with the rest of the research grunts, then heads back in the evening, an hour after quitting time, having spent that time in the gym. The second day starts much the same, though after lunch he heads up to Dogtown to serve a shift at the mobile medical clinic.

Day three, however, is his day off. He heads downtown, catching the bus out front of the ADI housing, and stopping a block early - not particularly odd, given the relative mildness of the weather and the refreshing lack of potentially-lethal precipitation.

When he hits downtown - not exactly packed, but populated with a mix of locals and winter tourists - he vanishes, blending into a small knot of the latter, then peeling off at some point when there's a momentary break in sightlines. It takes almost an hour to pick him up again, coming out of a little secondhand shop.

And then he does it again. This time, he's a little easier to pick up, finishing a cup of coffee while paging through a book on local history.

The third time, he seems to slip a little while shaking his stubborn tail - it's possible to catch a flash of his black wool coat as he disappears into a narrow alley, a few doors down from the theatre.

[worthallthis]

Winter is not stupid. Winter can tell when he's being intentionally led somewhere for violence. (Okay, maybe he is a little biased, though.) But he is also so frustrated now by how easily the bastard keeps losing him that he's willing to risk it.

He swings down from the roof, to the fire escape, to the ground behind where this Adam entered the alleyway.

He doesn't have a weapon out, but he has his metal arm ready in case Adam does.

[easilyamused]

Methos is halfway down the alley when he hears the dull reverberation of someone hitting the metal fire escape, and then the cracked and slushy pavement behind him. He turns, hands buried deep in his pockets, his slightly-hunched posture and the turned-up collar of his coat suggesting this has more to do with the February chill than any hidden weaponry he might have.

(Does have. It's been a very, very long time since he'd last willingly gone anywhere unarmed.)

His eyebrows lift as he notes the ever-so-slightly defensive nature of Winter's stance, skepticism writ clear in the lines of his expression. "And here I was wondering if you'd ever come out," he says.

[worthallthis]

"Who are you," Winter demands, stance not changing, but also a little surprised that there's no violence yet. Not complaining about that, though. "Nobody loses me as easily as you did." Not without magic. Or a whole hell of a lot of experience. Tracking people (in order to kill them) was his job.

Or it used to be. And while he might be a little less than he used to be physically, he still has the skills of a lifetime of assassinating people.