Captain America: Civil War (Charlotte Stark)

Ch. 6 Fake Psychiatrist

Steve sat in a temporary office with Sam wondering what would come next. I sat down next to him. Sharon entered and handed Sam and I a sheet of paper. "The receipt for your gear."

Sam read it. "Bird costume? Come on."

"Metal woman outfit." I read. Then look up. "What the hell?"

She shrugged. "I didn't write it," she said. Then she did something unexpected. She touched a key on a computer terminal, and the screen in the room lit up with a view of Bucky Barnes.

"I'm not here to judge you," the psychiatrist was saying. "I just want to ask you a few questions."
Steve glanced over at Sharon. He knew he wasn't supposed to be seeing this. She was on our side. "Do you know where you are, James?" the psychiatrist asked. Bucky didn't say anything. "I can't help you if you don't talk to me, James."

After a long pause, Bucky said, "My name is Bucky."

Now that he knew Sharon would listen to him, Steve asked her a question that had been bothering him. On the video screen above them, the interview with Bucky was still going on. "Why would the task force release this photo to begin with?"

Sharon stated the obvious. "Get the word out, involve as many eyes as we can?"

"Right," I said. "It's a good way to flush a guy out of hiding. Set off a bomb, get your picture taken. It got several million people looking for the Winter Soldier."

Sharon could see where I was going. Bucky was one of the best in the world at what he did. Why would he let someone get a picture of him? "You're saying someone framed him to find him."

"Steve, we looked for the guy for two years and found nothing," Sam pointed out.

"We didn't bomb anything. That turns a lot of heads." Sharon still wasn't sure. "So? That doesn't guarantee that whoever framed him would get a guarantee that we would." There was no way anyone could make sure that drawing him out would ensure Bucky wound up in their custody.

She was right. But once we granted the idea that Bucky had been framed, we had to wonder... how else were they all being manipulated? Who wanted to find the Winter Soldier so badly? Steve and I looked up at the screen, where the questions were still coming. "Yeah."

"Tell me, Bucky," the fake psychiatrist said. His Dr. Broussard disguise was holding. No one in the facility knew who he was. "You've seen a great deal, haven't you?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"You feel that if you open your mouth, the horrors might never stop." He looked down at his phone and saw STATUS: PACKAGE DELIVERED. Everything was falling into place for him. He looked back up at Bucky. "Don't worry. We only have to talk about one."

Everett Ross spoke nervously into a walkie-talkie as emergency lights came up in the facility. "All right, come on, guys. Get me eyes on Barnes."

"F.R.I.D.A.Y.," Tony said at the same time. She was the AI who had replaced J.A.R.V.I.S. after the Ultron mess. "Give me the source of that outage."

In the next room, Sharon caught Steve's eye. Both of them had a bad feeling about the timing of this power outage. "Sublevel five, east wing," she said. That was where Bucky was being held.

Steve got moving. In a nearby room, T'Challa looked up and watched him go.

Everett Ross was issuing orders. "Evacuate all civilians. Give me a perimeter around the building and gunships in the air."

"Please tell me you have a suit," Natasha said to Tony and I as we passed Ross.

"Sure do," Tony answered. "It's a lovely three-piece, two-button.... I'm an active-duty noncombatant."

"You guys took mine, remember?" I say and they roll their eyes at me.

What did she think, we had extra armor stashed in our shoes?

Sharon caught their attention then. "Follow me," she said. She knew where the Winter Soldier was.

Tony paused inside a doorway as the Winter Soldier battled through a group of soldiers trying to keep him from escaping. He hadn't told Natasha the whole truth. He did have a little emergency Iron Man tech on him. Tapping the screen of his smartwatch, he transformed it in to an Iron Man gauntlet. He stepped into the room and hit the Winter Soldier with a sonic pulse from it while the repulsor powered up.

The Winter Soldier staggered but didn't go down. Tony fired the repulsor, but that didn't take him down, either.

They exchanged a series of punches, Tony mostly dodging, and then the Winter Soldier brought up a gun he must have taken from one of the soldiers. Tony blocked the shot with the gauntlet, looking in shock at Bucky and the gun that would have put him down. The repulsor wasn't going to work after that. He took one last desperate swing at the Winter Soldier, but an elbow and a kick to the stomach left him gasping on the floor across the room.

Natasha and I tried to tag-team him next, each of us delivering a coordinated flurry of kicks and elbow strikes that connected but didn't slow the Winter Soldier. He slammed me through a table and got his metal hand around Natasha's neck. "You could at least recognize me," she choked out.

T'Challa saved her life then, coming out of nowhere to crash into the Winter Soldier and blitz him with a series of kicks and punches that actually drove him back. He took a solid punch from the metal arm and got up again, wrestling the Winter Soldier into an open stairwell and shoving him over the railing. Then T'Challa jumped down after him, eyes full of cool confidence.

But when he landed in the main lobby with doors in every direction, the Winter Soldier was gone. Outside, Sam had lost the fake doctor, too. He had gone into the crowds.

"Sam, do you have eyes on the fake doctor?" I ask through my comms.

"No, he got away. Do you have eyes on Barnes?"

"No, he got away."

I ran up to the roof and found Steve there. We burst through the door to the helipad, the Winter Soldier was already lifting off in a stolen chopper. Steve sprinted across the helipad and jumped to grab one of its landing skids. The chopper dipped sideways, and Steve caught the railing that ran along the edge of the roof. He held on, straining every muscle in his body to pull the helicopter back. The Winter Soldier saw he wasn't going to be able to pull away. He slammed the control stick to the left, angling the rotors down toward Steve, who barely dodged them. I quickly jumped out of the way so I wasn't sliced in half as well. The rotors chewed into the concrete helipad, and the helicopter crashed back down onto the railing. Steve and I got to our feet.

The Winter Soldier's metal arm smashed through the cockpit window and grabbed me around the throat. I braced myself and pulled back but couldn't get free. As we grappled, the shift in weight tipped the helicopter off the edge of the roof. It fell, trailed by pieces of the roof railing, and splashed into the River Spree.

The next thing I know, I feel Steve pulling Bucky and I out of the water. Bucky is unconscious and I am panting, trying to regain my breath.

"Thanks, Steve." I say to him.

"Anytime." He says and we both look to Barnes.