Chapter Text
Fuckfuckfuckfuck. My brain is foggy. All I know is I need to get the hell out of here. I don’t care how, I just need. To get. Out. It’s a swarm of lab coats and military personnel but no one so much as glances my way as I half stagger through them. The flashing red lights don’t help my confused senses as I desperately try to recall the layout of the facility I’ve been in for the better part of my life. Right, I tell myself, heading down a nearly deserted side hall. I lean against the wall for a moment before I see the small door at the end of the hall. Naturally, someone chooses that exact moment to give two shits about what I’m doing.
“Where do you think you’re going?” in German, lovely. That means I likely can’t talk my way out of this one, my Russian is far more fluent than my German. I slowly turn around towards the measly scientist that yelled at me and sigh. Why me? Not the first time I’ve asked myself that question, and it most likely will not be the last. He’s a little shorter than I am, and I simply punch him in the head, and he crumples. Probably just knocked out. Probably. I am certainly not at my full strength right now, but I am also recovering quickly thanks to the super soldier stuff (at least I’m pretty sure that’s what they called it). I take his lab coat along with his id badge. I put the coat on and want to take the dreadful pin on it off and chuck it through the goddamned wall. These fuckers have had me here for who knows how long, doing I don’t even know what. I don’t bother to try and gather any intel on my way out, I already know too much about these assholes. Thanks to the id I borrowed, I’m able to walk out of the door at the end of the hall before anyone else sees me.
As soon as I’m outside, I focus on getting as far away from that hell hole as fast as I can possibly go, given I’m still recovering. Soon, the scattered sounds of gunfire and sirens fades, and I’m in the middle of nowhere. Lovely, just what I need. To try and figure out where the fuck I am after escaping an ice box. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what that was. What I remember is that I was ten years old, on my way to the candy store with my birthday money, and then I wound up in that strange facility and now I’m a super soldier assassin with fire powers (I believe the technical word is pyrokinesis but I’m no scientist). I’ve been training here to be their little slave for I don’t even know how long. I think I’m seventeen. Am I? Fuck. I can’t even remember my own age. After however long I’ve been training, they made promising advancements with another one of their pets and the next thing I know, I’m in some pod thing, and I’m cold. Then I woke up – if you can call it waking up – to alarm sirens and gunshots and now I’m here. Speaking of here, I don’t know where here is. I’ve been walking for a while, and now I’m seeing looming rectangles in the distance. “There’s no way. What the…” It looks so familiar, yet so distant at the same time and the fact that I can’t place it frustrates me.
I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, or how there are so many lights and straight up futuristic things here, but I find some discarded clothes, so I don’t stick out so much, and start to make my way around this place. I see a rolled-up newspaper on the rug of a shop. At least that’s a familiar thing. I grab it and start to read it as I find a bench to sit on. I see a name. A name I know. And suddenly, I realize. Holy shit. I’m in New York.