Who Am I? » [Stucky]

160. Engaging with The Enemy

Baghdad, Iraq

"My god... This place is a ruin..." Bucky whispered to Steve.

Over the horizon peeped blooming peaked spires, caps atop of archaic spiralling towers. Staggering temples of great fortitude that had survived the annihilation of the warring rebels stood defiant in the face of violence - walls only rattled by destruction. But the landscape was still desolated: piles of rubble dotted the dusty craggy landscape and the roads were scorched where fire had consumed buildings. There were empty plots where homes had once existed, but only dust and dregs of foundations remained.

Though some of the city was untainted and unchanged by the political volatility of the region, much of it was upturned and wrecked by the ongoing violence. Refugee camps that were nothing more than houses scraped together from the sediment and detritus existed in the city: small clusters of poverty ridden civilisation. They gathered in their hovels and clutched to one another, cowering in fear of the crime rained down on them and huddling to survive collectively.

The fat cats and the disenfranchised lived among each other in horrendous contradiction, both repelled by the other and the city was laid to waste by the divided population.

It was overcrowded, people lurked on every corner: the women wrapped up in a cocoon of fine fabrics to conceal their identities and the man sauntering in all their misogynistic freedom, kingly in their social hierarchy. Children played - just like anywhere, but their natterings in a tongue far from their own and far from understandable. They played mock war, with make believe guns and disgustingly merry cries in the ruins the adults had left behind, but their shouts of innocent naive joy would end as adults with guns marched by.

The sun in the sky was masked by a thin veil of clouds; dusky and beige just like the surrounding desert. It's scorching rays were enough to melt the team in their tactical attire.

"This place has been like this for a while. It's a shame. Really it is..." Steve agreed, eyes casting over the mutilated and injured fighters, the oppressed women and the restricted children with limited and hopeless futures. "And you can see Hydra's influence... That's the worst thing. So close to tipping the country into complete anarchy and chaos, only so they can rise from the ashes and take over: seize the country as their own."

They made their way through a crowded market place, inhaling the many foreign smells and drinking in the many unusual sights; sticking to the shadows like spectres and ducking under low hanging awnings and tents, dipping under crumbling arches and squeezing past people.

They walked the path that took them beneath a bridge, leading the rest of the team and then came to a quiet bazaar from which tiny strands of tobacco smoke were spiralling from the open doors.

"This is the place..."

Heimland Province, Afghanistan

Steve dragged Bucky with him, snatching him by the arm and taking cover in a cruddy building. He tackled Bucky to the floor as shelling blasted the doorway.

Bucky shot out their attacker from where he was barricaded between Steve's shield and the floor.

The two delved further into the building and took brief refuge in the shady interior.

"This heat is going to do me in..." Steve gasped, back trickling with sweat and pressed up against a withering brick wall.

He was gasping for breath, sitting flat on his arse with his head tipped back against the coldness-kissed wall, elusively cool from the encompassing shadows. Beads of sweat were trickling from his sideburns and nape and pouring like Niagara falls. His blue eyes were squeezed shut in pain, his whole body ringing out with exhaustion and strain.