Unravel

Just the word vigilante made her shudder.

Another masked man had just murdered what he believed to be one of the bad guys. These ‘heroes’ were mostly male but far and inbetween they would get reports of female vigilantes. There was that word again. Ugh.

The biggest problem was that they made her job just so much harder because instead of following up on clues and evidence, she had to find and figure out all affairs and relations of another mangled corpse. She disliked vigilantes - not because they took away her job but because they just had to make it so much more complicated than it had to be.

It was also hard to distinguish between vigilantes and criminals. Where to draw the line? For her, no murder was excusable, bad guy or not. So she had developed an immense dislike for vigilantes.

Agent Elizabeth Moore had been with the FBI for only a short amount of time when it had been revealed that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been infiltrated by Hydra. Up until then she had never seen so much evil and so much death. Her whole department had had to help in the aftermath. It didn’t particularly help her dislike of vigilantes that she was the one that had to update the FBI’s Most-Wanted list.

But she could get over that if only people would stop interfering with her work.

She had encountered several of them, even knew their names by now. Besides the obvious ones like Captain America and Iron Man, there were Daredevil and Hawkeye. She was also pretty sure she had once had to clean up a mess left by Spider-Man. The thing was, there were too many “superheroes” to keep up with. She knew the real names of most of them, too, thanks to the data dump but she wasn’t ever going to remember them.

But sometime during the last few months there had been an addition to the known local vigilantes.

A man in his late twenties or early thirties, leaving behind a trail of bodies so unbelievably mangled, her whole department was in an uproar. Body here, body there. Seeming suicide, beaten into a coma.

She already knew who he was, a man called the Winter Soldier. It didn’t help really help his case that - after the fiasco in DC - he was America’s most wanted fugitive.

But it was usual that Agent Moore just had to run into him whenever she was called to a murder site. And god, did he get on her nerves.

The way he left his victims behind would let everyone think he was a psychopath. But she had read his file, or what was left of it. A lot of them had been taken down before the FBI could get their hands on all of it.

He was actually a poor guy. Being brainwashed and frozen again and again. But apparently he had broken free of Hydra’s grip on him and was now killing one after the other remaining member. Or at least that was what it looked like after her investigation.

/////////////

“How many?” Elizabeth asked Agent Donovan as he joined her on her way towards the FBI van.

“Three. One was still alive when a civilian called the authorities, but not for long.”

She mulled over these facts and prepared her stomach for the scene they were about to enter.

“Do we have any possible suspects?” She asked but she already knew the answer. The past few weeks she had heard one name more than ever before.

Agent Donovan rolled his eyes and looked at her as if to say take a wild fucking guess as he climbed into the car.

Elizabeth heaved a sigh and climbed in after him. Of course her week would start like that.

“Was he overly violent?” She asked him. Death was nothing she hadn’t seen before but even she would rather see something else than blood and gore on a monday morning.

“Nah,” Agent Donovan replied, driving out of the garage, “apparently this time Captain Hook pretty much held himself back.”

“Oh god, Ewan, please, you have to stop giving him these ridiculous nicknames,” she groaned and threw her head back with a slight laugh. Even though she had to admit that she was impressed with his ability to find fictional characters with only one hand or arm, she could only take so much of his puns.

“Never.”

“You’re a child,” she told him, watching as he weaved through the morning traffic of New York.

It took them a few minutes to get to the murder site, thankfully the traffic hadn’t been as bad as usual but once they arrived every joke, no matter how small, seemed impossible.

The whole area had been closed off, police cars and ambulances littered the narrow street and the horde of onlookers grew steadily. As soon as they stepped out of the car it meant business for both of them.

After being cleared by the already present police, they headed straight towards the bodies. She had taken Ewan's word for it but one look at the bodies and she had to force her breakfast to stay down.

The victims’ faces were disfigured beyond recognition and Elizabeth shot her partner a disgusted look. “So much to he held himself back,” she told him. “Do we have a witness?”

“Yeah,” he answered and motioned towards the police car where a young girl and a police woman were talking, “That’s her. Saw him as he fled. She was the one that called the police.”

She nodded and told him she would go talk to the girl before making her way towards her. The closer she got the more she could see that the girl was not only young but more or less a kid. Her teeth were chattering and she was huddled beneath a blanket even though it was close to 80° F outside.

“Hi,” Liz said as she approached them. She showed her badge to the policewoman, who in turn nodded at her and left her alone with the girl.

Trying not to scare the poor girl any more she tried to ask a more general question first before she asked what she came here for.

“My Name’s Agent Elizabeth Moore but you can call me Liz,” she told the girl, crouching down beside her, “What’s your name?”

“Kate,” the girl answered with a sniff and wiped at her eyes, “Kate Cho.”

“Can I call you Kate?” Elizabeth asked and waited until the girl nodded to continue, “I know you probably already told the policewoman but could you tell me what you saw, Kate?”

“I- I think I disturbed him. I w-was walking home a-and went past this alley… There was so much blood.” The girl was whimpering by now and even though Elizabeth had already felt bad for her in the beginning her sympathy for the girl was steadily growing. “I didn’t see th-that much of him. Just-... he had long brown hair and his arm. I- It was weird.”

“Did it look like it may have been made out of metal?” Elizabeth inquired and the girl’s eyes shot up to look at her. “I know this is scary but this is something we need to know.”

After reassuring her the girl nodded her head slightly. Deciding not to torture her anymore, Elizabeth thanked her for talking to her and waved the policewoman over again, so Kate wouldn’t be alone.

She made her way over to Ewan who was trying to fill in parts of the report. The bodies were already zipped up in their respective body bags.

“Anything?” she asked, coming up behind him.

“Yeah,” he answered, seemingly deep in thought. “One false front tooth. All three of them. Probably cyanide.” He looked at her before grinning slightly. “That’s so old school.”

“Hydra,” Elizabeth sighed. “We can’t even be mad, can we?”

“Oh yes, we can. I’d rather they spend their time in prison than dead in an alley. But that would apparently ruin Aquaman’s favourite recreative activity.”

“Aquaman’s an amputee?” she asked in wonder, taking Ewan’s report from him.

“Sure is.”

“I learn something new from you everyday, you weirdo.”