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The Dacha. 1045 hours. Vorenezh Oblast.
Five wolves gather. The latest casualty is Evgeniy pulled bleeding from the dark loess soil turned as weapons and barriers against the Winter Soldier. An earthen wall wreathing half the dorm's side crumbles away a little, rocky boulders dislodged, rumbling that mutinies in a cascade that might overwhelm the unsuspecting. Twitchy brothers can easily be overtaken by a wave if the strategy plays out well enough. Nikita and Matvei keep a bit of a watch, while Orel stalks in uneven circles, breath labouring a little after his flight after a child. That child's alive, that says something.
«Death house,» snarls Nikita, throwing a burning look at the innocuous dacha. «Why not destroy it? That would be good.»
Scarlett doesn't try to rally their numbers, organizing her understanding of the layout. "Which way in are we talking about? Somehow I have trouble imagining you want to rapel through a window. I could drop you through a roof."
"Back door, if it has one," Buck says, matter of fact. His voice has gone cadenced, clipped - somewhere between Winter and Sergeant Barnes. Then he looks up at her. "You got a better suggestion?" Not being sarcastic - it's a genuine question. To Niki, he says, «It may come to that. But I want the children out and alive, first. We've got to come at Volga, though. Does he have any vulnerabilities that you all know of?» Sweating, bleeding from little wounds, his hair partially pulled loose from its ponytail.
The backside of the dacha lacks a door; he already checked last time and found only the high windows as the main source of entry. The cleared east wing against the rails has a door, as does the west wing. Nothing obvious constitutes a way in, the low-slung roofline and the dacha hall in the middle a block absent of a route. There could be hidden means, concealed in walls or overcome by the occasional bush. This is a house of lies, after all.
"Windows wherever we want them." The redhead doesn't wait any further on the milling aid. Without Bucky to check her — and a word would do it — she takes to the air, escaping the lashing grasses. Those groundswells of undulating motion further add to the poisonous elixir of carbon dioxide and other subterranean gases belched through the open fissures breaking around the wolves, only intended to unnerve them or render them unconscious. Destructive tendencies aside, she scrambles to the rooftop of the dorm rather than anywhere else. Second story, her expression screws up into a mask of concentration, mouth pinched, moon-pale face all hard lines and unforgiving symmetries. Gloved fingers closed into a fist, she rears back and punches the roof. The second blow rains after the first, awkward, for finding her rhythm won't happen overnight. Neither is it at all quiet: shards of wood and stone fly into the air, her full strength applied after the sixth or seven cross that hits in a rough oval wide enough for two men to fall through. Which is what will happen if they get up there.
The thready cries of disapproval are notice someone has heard this racket.
«Up we go,» Buck says. He's scrambling back up to the roof, to go peer down at the way she's made for them. Peeking tentatively, lest someone takes his head off. "What do you see, darlin'?" he asks, as he skitters along the rooftiles.
Trying to climb the walls is easier with a metal hand than a flesh one, unfortunately, but damn if they do not try one by one to reach those halcyon heights. Nikita has the easiest time of it, practically leaping from cornice to rooftop and up. Matvei and Orel go slower, and Evgeniy takes brute force to reach up there. Bleeding and irritated, Volya finally scruffs the older man and practically hangs off the eaves one-handed, hoisting him up by a rough, rocking lob that will amount to hissing and swearing, snapping between them. Let Bucky worry himself about that.
Or the bullets shot through the shabby roof, for the sniper taking shots at Scarlett and Volya in one of those windows still runs there. She curses and scrambles back. Let them try to take her head off as she flings a broken shingle into the hole.
«Get out of our house!» Angry, Russian, and a voice that hasn't broken yet.
"Beds!" she says. A lot of beds, as it happens.
|ROLL| Bucky +rolls 1d10 for: 4
He knows better - but the NCO's mind is under pressure from the shadow of the wolf's, and the other pack members that keep brushing against him mentally. The children down there may be deadly, but…they're still shooting at his men. AT his girl. So he leaps down without a further thought, tucking into a roll to bring him straight up back to his feet again.
Where be the missing three? Invisible kith and wounded kin, madness gnawing at the bellies and an insatiable desire for more — for blood, flesh, hot under tooth and fist and mouth. Calm that crackles in and out, the burning pressure up and down the cap of the bicep might feel like twitching of a muscle.
Where Bucky goes, though, Matvei follows and that ends up tugging along the rest of them in a deliberately ragged quadrant. Leaping into the brink without knowing what's through the hole is a family trait: first swings Nikita, practically free-running off the broken roof beam. Credit to the mutant scion, her fists hit hard, a telltale hint of that in the completely wrecked light overhead. Volya drops down, and Orel bombs in moments later, no restraint for him to gain his bearings. The first target he sees is the first he closes in on, sweeping one of the rickety metal bedframes and its thin mattress ahead of him with a sweep of his arm.
And that devious strike at speed impales the incredulous sniper through the goddamned throat on a Soviet-made bed leg. Bucky might recognize the man. He stood in the shadows beside Volga himself.
Hopefully that does the trick. It should. Far be it from Buck to try and claim that kill. He's heading for Viktor and wrenching the rifle from his hands, holding it out to be claimed by whatever Buckling feels up to playing sniper. There's no pity in the Soldier's face, nothing but that cold curiosity.
Viktor's choking arrogance ends in a blur of metal and a wiry clatter that fills the cavernous darkness. Mired in shadows, the second floor dorm benefits only from its upper windows being choked in dust and wintry grime. The eyes take a moment to adjust, despite the hole Scarlett punched into the ceiling. Wire beds, five a piece, stretch out on either side. Wooden flimsy chests in a corner act as a proper closet in a building built before such things were common. The squalling protest cut off with a little gasp belongs almost wholly to a child hiding behind one of the beds, barely visible, still in a white gown, barefoot, and messy-headed. Whatever was in progress involved not putting on pants, and clutching a book to a thin chest. Boy or girl, the child's of an age where determining that is tough, especially with the coltish features and loose hair. Two doors crown the room, at either end, past a bathroom on the west.
Viktor's rifle ends up in the hands of Matvei, of all people, rather than freewheeling brothers or the blood-spattered Volya who already has his own. The man on the ground spasms a few times more, but not getting anywhere fast on that front. Into that charnelhouse drops Scarlett herself, face as pale as a pearl in the charcoal murk of stormwater drains.
There's that alpine remotemeness, Winter's gift, if it can truly be termed that. The child's gasp has him turning to look. «Are you hurt?» he asks the little unfortunate. Neither sympathy nor warmth there. A glance at the others - are they fit to go on? With him? Nikita, Matvei, Volya, Orel, Evgeniy. Five. Lazar is….doing what he does best, no doubt. And Adam and Kyr, missing. Only after a moment does his attention return to Viktor, and he steps over to him, looking down at him. «Are you mortal?» he asks him, almost offhanded.
Viktor looks odd without his suit, preferring something much darker in attire. His sightless eyes stare up to the ceiling and the beam of the doorway, the bed lying atop him. Such an incongruous end for a man of such terror. But then, is there ever really a death rattle through the wound in the chest? Off with his head, claims the Red Queen, although she is deliberately not looking at the impalement or the spreading red puddle accruing under his back. He has no answers; on her part, the bohemian darts into the middle of the mix, dusting plaster off her ripped gloves.
Orel hunches lower, clearly fully prepared to strike out at the earliest opportunity at the child. A common bond there, since the book isn't used so much as a shield as a possible weapon, clutched in place. The snarling is becoming a throb in the skull as he dashes after the boy, and Evgeniy doesn't reach out though he streaks past, and Volya triangulates on the door to the east, not the west.
«Let him go,» James's voice is a whipcrack,but he doesn't try to restrain Orel as he pursues. His gaze follows VOlya's. «What do you see?» There's that pressure, still. Minds leaning on his, the wolf resurgent, the beat of blood in his throat, the tidal rush in his ears. Some part of him is still cold enough to survey this with increasing dismay, and he glances at Scarlett. Incongruous, his beloved girl here in the middle of the mess and the blood.
Hair red as blood, dipped in the cuprous flow of life, skin pale as snow, is she not made for this particular environment? Only the surreal flash of her verdant eyes betrays her in the low-light conditions, sunshine of a cloister waiting outside. Worry creases her brows closer, attention turned back upon Bucky. Too dangerous to remain close? Screw complying with rules; she heads to him, rotating to put her back to his, hand brushing gently against his mortal hand. A singular reminder of a bond.
The door tipped shut forces Volya to work the handle and listen to the open hallway beyond, the plain staircase slicing down to the first floor. He nudges the muzzle of the gun through, but the eye meets no resistance.
It's that child apparently more concerning, and his game of playing at fawn to the wolves does not work quite as planned. Orel swings around, glaring at his own elder likeness. «And tell the others? Do you want to die?»
«They know we're here already.» Buck's voice is dry. «But if you can catch him without killing him….do it. More likely he was trying to draw you into a trap.» He squeezes her hand for a bare instant. Then he's padding towards Volya. Viktor's corpse, however, doesn't get neglected. Buck picks it up to break the neck, as if for insurance, and athen drops it again.
That hideous snap of bone makes her jump. No way around that. The redheaded bohemian's smile does not survive the approach nor the jarring snap, vertebrae sliding way in a fashion never anticipated by nature. No tears; she cannot afford that sort of weakness anymore than Bucky can. Life or death situations call for another strategy.
Orel bristles, his shoulders trembling at the strain. Matvei inches after him, the roaring disobedience flooding through the pair of them enough to warrant concern. The child shrieks again, his efforts to get away hopeless when he scrambles for the washroom and the door. Hands might get to the frame, but the pair are just too fast. What then to do with their prey, if not kill it? He kicks and lashes out, delivering jarring blows far outsize for someone so small. Matvei's silent grimace of pain speaks volumes before he casually chops at the back of the kid's head, closer to his neck. One way of dealing with things, but it does not bring down the unfortunate victim in all his squalling protest.
That leaves two more — Evgeniy and Nikita, in tandem — going after Volya. Outside, the shell casings and broken glass sight where an attempt to shoot was made. Viktor apparently didn't mind ruining architecture.
«Tie up the kid, if you've knocked him out.» There's that unpleasant, vertiginous feeling of moral sense slipping away. Winter and the wolf (wolves) don't care for petty human concerns, and James's ethics, rough and ready as they are, waver without Steve there to bolster them.Then he's following Volya - Steve's a concern, too. Where is he? What has been done to him? Down to the dorms, to see what's waiting there.