#i practically go mute any time a recording device is near me

[james-p-sullivan]

i managed to write about 1.4 k words yesterday and i am over the moon about this

[dragons-socks]

Baby Bumblebee chaptr 5

Bumblebee awoke in a strange house, on a strange bed. He scrambled up, trying to ignore his pounding head. It wasn’t until he noticed Sam passed out in his desk chair that he realized that this was Sam’s room.

“Oh good, you’re awake.” Mikaela said, placing a hand on Bee’s shoulder and pushing him back down. “You’ve got a lot of people worried for you, Bee.”

Bee brought up his hands to sign his apologies, but stopped. They were wrapped up in white gauze. He studied them, trying to remember when he’d hurt them. The energy-blasts from last night hadn’t hurt. His hands should be fine, right?

“When Sam called Captain Lennox, he was still asleep, and hadn't even realized you had left. Do you know how bad he would have felt if Sam and I hadn’t woken up and you were just taken by the Cons?” She asked, voice hard and unmoving. Bee flinched away. “You know Ironhide will most likely just drive you to us even if Lennox isn’t there. He did it last week. So why isn’t Ironhide with you?”

‘Didn’t want to come here.’ Bee signed in stiff, aching movements.

“What do you mean?” Sam’s asked, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Instead of easing the tense atmosphere, he just added to it.

‘Wanted to go home.’ Bee said.

“You were already home, I don’t-” Mikaela put a hand up to stop her boyfriend.

“You wanted to go to Optimus? Lennox told you about their base-switching.” She asked. Bee nodded, looking up at the ceiling so he didn’t have to look at either of them.

“Stop it, Bee.” Sam sounded as tired as Bee felt. He sounded as if an age old ache finally settled completely into his bones, locking into place. “Optimus has already made his decision. He doesn’t want you near him or the other Autobots in this form. At least when you’re this small.”

“Sam!” Mikaela yelled, smacking her boyfriend over the head.

“What? He needs to hear it. He won’t stop chasing the Autobots until its said.” Sam defended.

“You could have said it with a lighter touch.”

“We’ve been trying to do that for a month, and look at where that got us? Bee ran away from the captain and almost got kidnapped by Decepticons.” Bee wanted the bed to collapse in half and eat him whole as the teen couple started to yell over him as if he weren’t in the room. He felt his eyes well up with tears as frustrations lodged in the middle of his throat, too thick to swallow.

Bee tried to get their attention after a while, but they were in their own world at this point. It wasn’t until Lennox slammed the door open that the teens stopped arguing. Lennox didn’t stop walking until Bee was in his arms.

“We’re getting you a phone, and a tracker. And you are so grounded.” Lennox didn’t sound angry, though. He sounded like he was about to cry, which for some reason had the floodgates on Bee burst.

“You know, for a being who didn’t have actual tear ducts for most of their life, Bee sure does cry a lot.” Sam laughed, only to punch in the stomach by Mikaela. “Ow.”

“Shut up, Sam.”

“I’m not comfortable with overly emotional situations.” Sam bemoaned.

“What happened to his hands?” Lennox asked, holding Bee’s hands in his own to inspect the bandages. Bee sat there looking disgruntled, but didn’t pull away.

Sam and Mikaela stumbled over each other as they tried to explain what happened from when they arrived. About the energon beam that shot from Bee’s hands. Lennox turned to Bee, who shrugged, just as new to this situation as the rest of them.

“An energon blast?” Lennox whistled, still not letting Bee from his side. He looked down at the soft blonde locks and piercing blue eyes that peered up at him. “How is that even possible?”

“Your guess is as good as ours.” Sam sunk back down in his desk chair. Bumblebee shuffled his hands out of Lennox’s grasp. He had a theory.

‘Breakdown said something about an energon signal emitting from me.’ Bee winced as his wounds pulled on some of the signs.

“If Bee is still emitting a signal like a Cybertronian, then that means he’s in trouble. Like real big trouble.” Sam realizes.

“And with Prime and his team having just cut ties its going to be a while before we reform contact with them.” Lennox rubbed at his temple.

“So what do we do?”

___________

“Hey, Bumblebee!” Raven ran up to Bee. “Why didn’t you go to school yesterday? And what happened to your hands? Can you sign now? Does it hurt?”

‘Hey, Raven.’ Bee signed.

“That was my name again, right?” Bee nodded. Raven smile grew wider. He lifted his hand in the sign for ‘F’ tapped his cheek and quickly pushed away. Bee was startled at the sign. It was the sign for ‘bee’, And also how Lennox, Sarah, Sam, and Mikaela have been signing his own name. If they remembered to sign as they talk. Not that they had to, because he wasn’t deaf, but it was good practice for them to understand him better. “My neighbor’s grandson is deaf so my mom said I could ask him to teach me how to sign so we can talk! He said that was how to say bee.”

Bumblebee nodded. He finger-spelt his name and then did the sign for ‘bee’, then he finger-spelt Raven’s name and did the sign for ‘Crow’, which was basically just signing ‘black bird’.

“That’s so cool! That’s all I know, but I super promise I’m going to learn all of it so we can actually talk!” Raven pumped his fist in the air.

‘You do that.’ Bee signed, nodding his head. He couldn’t get the smile off face. Raven was just so nice to him.

“So, why were you not at school?” Raven settled down.

Bee pulled out the small cellphone Lennox had bought for him yesterday. Raven gasped, going on another excited babble about the device and how cool it was that he had one even though he wasn’t in even in middle school. Bee mostly ignored his friend as he carefully typed out his explanation. He didn’t have to pass the phone over to Raven, who just read it over his shoulders as Bee typed.

“Oh, is Lennox your dad?” Raven asked. Bee gave a shrug, but then nodded. “You should just call him ‘dad’ then. It had less letters so it’d be easier to sign too.”

Bee shrugged. He didn’t see why he couldn’t do it.

“So you ran away two nights ago and some bad people tried to kidnap you and your dad wouldn’t let you go back to school before you got an actual way to contact him in case of emergencies and also signed you up for self defense classes and like martial arts and stuff?”

Bee shook his phone in Raven’s face. That’s what he just wrote out, so yeah, it’s what happened.

“Why did you run away?” Raven asked.

‘Complicated.’ Bee typed.

“I ran away once. My mom wouldn’t let me watch cartoons. I had to go home when it got dark though and when I did she grounded me and wouldn’t let me watch cartoons for even longer.” Raven shook his head. Bee decided to keep his thoughts to himself. For some reason there were times when it was harder to remember that he was actually ten thousand years older than everyone on this planet. And then there were times like these. “So what happened to your hands?”

Bee mimicked falling and scraping his hands on the ground. Raven went on another word dump of how he fell and scraped his knee so bad he had to get stitches. Back and forth they went. Raven asking a question, Bee answering in a few short words and then Raven going on for five minutes before the cycle commences. It was nice to be honest.

The school day continued. And like all the other days, Bee was bored. He knew how to speak English and he knew that the internet could answer all of these questions for him if he needed to look up what region the rocky mountains were located in America. He’s had to do it before. Math class was cool. He’s seen Ratchet and Wheeljack make cool things out of just strings of numbers.

His favorite class was after lunch. Technically, everyday they cycled through a few different subjects. Spanish was extra boring, because he couldn’t really participate because most of the class was talking and that was kind of hard when a giant mech rips out your vocal chords. Gym was fun, but no one wanted to be partners or on teams with the weird mute kid. Art was - it wasn’t his thing.

His favorite class was music. He didn’t care for the recorder he had to learn to use, but he did like when the teacher brought out his guitar. It looked so cool. He wanted to learn how to play that.

Bee found himself climbing into Ironhide after the last bell. Lennox waved at one of the teachers that were standing watch and pulled away, but not to the direction of their house. Bee sunk further into his seat, letting out a series of sighs and whines. He had thought Lennox was joking about signing him up for some human self defense/fighting classes.

“It’s for your own good. Ironhide is trying to get in contact with Optimus now to see what we should do, but its not going well. I don’t think you want to be shackled with a bodyguard for the rest of your life, and I don’t want to have to worry every time you leave the house.” If Epps or any of his men found out how much he’s been outright mothering Bee, Lennox would be teased for the rest of his days. That didn’t stop the jack hammering of his heart when he thinks about Bumblebee, his kid, getting captured by the decepticons.

“Chin up, kid. I’ll be sure to mention to Lennox’s crew that he’s a mother hen.” Ironhide promised.

“Saws the one who did the search for ‘the perfect gym’.” Lennox flicked the steering wheel. Ironhide slammed the driver’s seat back in retaliation. Bee couldn’t help but laugh as the human tried to fight the autobot. Which got the attention of both and they formed an alliance against the kid.

Bumblebee scrambled into the back seats of Ironhide, kicking Lennox away as the man came for him. He tucked himself in the corner right behind the driver seat, thinking himself safe. Only for the seat to slam back again.

They pulled into the gym not too long after.

[m-i-s-t-istheonlyoneforme]

the main cast of MIST:

If anyone has any idea who these models are let me know, I think I have a few names which I’ll add as soon as I find them, but some of them are completely lost to me and google isn’t helping.

Character descriptions under the cut

Miren Cathbad - a firebrand, Miren is first and foremost Irish as all hell. Her family comes from a long line of druids, and is rumored to have descended from Cathbad of legend. She’s very proud of her heritage and is quick to defend Ireland and condemn the British. She’s not exceptionally smart when it comes to most things but she’s very determined, and is fueled almost exclusively through spite and rage. She’s understands the theory of magic but doesn’t quite grasp most of the latin spells they’re taught. However, when she starts writing her spells in Old Irish, she’s suddenly a prodigy. She got kicked out of her school for starting fistfights, and was just going to get a job when she was approached by MIST representatives to get her “apprenticeship” there.

Jack Batterbee - an all around himbo, you gotta love him. He comes from an old wizard family that was once super powerful but gradually ended up losing most of their magical affinity about 5 generations ago. Jack had only heard legends of his wizard family, and was starting to think they weren’t real. He applied at MIST as a last-ditch effort to learn the trade, and even though he isn’t very good at it, he is learning magic. He excels more at practical arts than magical, and his best class ended up being swordplay. He plays rugby in his free time.

Lucille Waters - A sweet and shy person, Lucille has the silent kind of strength, the kind that sneaks up on you and lulls you to sleep before it kills. She’s trans (mtf) and had to drop out of school due to the bullying there. After she blew up a urinal while being attacked in the boys bathroom and getting expelled, MIST representatives approached her and invited her to finish her education there, instead. She’s a first generation witch, and has found the people at MIST are much more accepting, although that might be because she passes well. She strives to do her best and to keep her chin up despite the numerous mental-health problems she’s struggled with along the way.

Winona Holliday - The fourth of five siblings, Winona was adopted by a sweet and caring couple that attended MIST back in the day. It wasn’t a real surprise to her when she was enrolled, but what was surprising is that her birth parents apparently had quite the reputation. Getting information out of the people who knew them is like pulling an alligator’s teeth, but she swears she’ll get to the bottom of it, any means necessary. She’s super intelligent, the brains of the four friends, and can often come off as calloused and cold. She spends most of her time studying new and sometimes forbidden techniques, and exploring the MIST campus to try and learn any new secrets. She’s sometimes referred to as “Winona Holmes” because her detective skills are so sharp.

Daniel Burke - The poor boy is characterized by his very sharp stutter, rendering him almost completely mute. He quit school due to mounting frustrations and inaccessibility, and was enrolled in MIST to try and do something with his strong magical talents that often act up when his frustrations come to a boil. He gets very frustrated and struggles with self-doubt, and many of the teachers only teach their lessons with vocal spells, struggling to adapt to his disability. He starts off as a clumsy swordfighter, but as the years progress he gets so good, using swordfighting to vent his anger, that he actually becomes known as the ‘Silent Knight’ around campus.

Gabriel Woodward - My favorite tragic hero, I’m such a sucker for a sad edgy boy. He’s a victim of lifelong child abuse from a washed-up, drunk of a father. The Woodward house was famous, or infamous, as a cruel and proud wizard house for a long time until it gradually began to collapse due to infighting. They all attended prodigious schools and had a glowing academic record. Gabriel’s father, Darius, further plunged the family name into the mud when he, the heir of Woodward Manor, slept with two women at the same time and managed to get them both pregnant near the same time. His wife left him nearly immediately after the birth of their son, Gabriel, and he holds it against his half-brother for his ruined childhood. When Grayson eventually emancipated himself, Gabriel felt betrayed-- sure, he had used Grayson as a punching bag his whole life, but how dare he leave Gabriel to his own devices? He arrived at MIST after crushing depression got the best of him and he dropped out of high school, and it carries a huge weight of guilt that he couldn’t live up to his father’s expectations and resurrect the Woodward name

Grayson Woodward - The half-brother i mentioned above. He ended up in Darius’ care after his mother was deemed mentally unfit to care for children (due to a series of horrible mistakes that Grayson was too young to remember). He became a punching bag for both Darius and Gabriel for ‘ruining the family’ and he got so sick of it that he got himself legally emancipated. He needed an apprenticeship to count as ‘continued education’ and so he applied at MIST. The horror when he realized that Gabriel also ended up at MIST was tangible.

[isa-ghost]

Corruption AU

*Galaxy brains*

Catch me tempted to start a whole AU based off my theory that Chase got corrupted at the end of Dark Silence and is living through slowly changing and growing sick and discovering freaky powers he didn’t have before and realizing this is what his comatose best friend went through before the August 3rd/March 5th operation was hijacked by Anti.

Oh god this might be a temporary muse but god am I about to blow it up real quick anyway. There’s details on it below the cut.

Henrik is the one who put Jack in the coma and regrets it deeply. Half-possessed by Anti in the moment he did it, he knew Jack would die unless he induced a coma to stabilize him easier than blindly trying to figure out how Anti his possessed self was killing him.

He wasn’t gone for 9 months but rather 2. In-game the time Jack flatlined was March 5th, 2018 and Henrik reappeared May 3rd, 2018. He has barely revealed any info about what happened in that time, but any time he’s opened up about it to the other egos, Jack’s comatose body, or in vlogs on the channel, he gets extremely anxious and can’t elaborate. He’s trying to coach himself into healing enough to tell the story so it won’t happen to others.

It wasn’t one big operation from August 3rd, 2017 to March 5th, 2018. Jack was in the hospital on and off suffering severe affects from Anti’s constant assaults on him. Anti hijacked the August 3rd operation and March 5th operations. He might’ve hijacked a few in-between but nowhere near the level of chaos and damage on those two days. (I haven’t decided yet lol).

Henrik saved Chase’s life after a suicide attempt soon after his divorce was filed (Bro Average) and is very protective of him, but stretches himself incredibly thin between caring for Jack, watching over Chase, and dealing with his own trauma.

Obviously Chase took over the channel for Jack in his place. The community is suspecting he’s him and not Jack slowly, which he’s somewhat worried about, but hasn’t seen any anger about it yet so he feels like it won’t be a big horrific reveal if he ever gives up the facade and comes clean. It was hard enough watching Henrik’s vlog announcing Jack’s coma.

Being that he’s running the channel in Jack’s place when that’s (one of many things?) what Anti wants to do in order to gain more power, Anti attacked him (Dark Silence) and this is how/why Chase is slowly suffering the slow corruption Jack did from October 2016 to now.

Chase blacked out for a very long time after Dark Silence but beelined for Henrik when he came to his senses. When he found Henrik, he started to grow unstable again and broke down about being cornered by Anti and not knowing what was happening to him now before completely snapping again. Henrik had to fend him off, restrain him, and then had a minor trauma-related meltdown because his best friend is going through what he did on August 3rd and March 5th. Little does he know, this is going to progress far beyond just two one-off traumatic possessions and a two month kidnapping.

Anti lurks around constantly in between times harassing the community or toying with Jack’s comatose body on occasion. He’s watching and very much savoring the downward spiral Chase is in. A majority of what’s happened since May 2018 has been Chase glitching and acting strange rather than Anti, hence the camera/screen glitching more often than his physical body. The remaining fractions of cryptic/glitchy videos has been Anti hacking into the channel and reminding the community he’s lurking. After each time he’s done this, Henrik and Chase have had to reset all passwords to Jack’s social media that they’ve been using to make sure he’s kept out.

Sometimes Chase doesn’t feel/realize/see the recording getting meddled with by himself until well after its uploaded and he sees the community panicking about it, other times he’s well aware it’s going on and is acting that way on camera on purpose because he’s experiencing corruption affects or having blackouts. He‘s ashamed of himself for letting the community see what’s happening to him. Little did he know Anti had cameras record what he did to Chase and uploaded it to the channel so they all already know something is deeply wrong with Chase. He doesn’t have the will to go into detail about everything and clarify, so even though he’s upset about all the different speculations and theories about what’s going on because most of them are incorrect, he’d rather leave them to their own devices because the truth is complicated and messy and would be way too much to explain in a video or post.

Not only Chase, but Henrik keeps in close communication with the community. He keeps them up to date on Jack’s condition, how he personally is doing, how anniversaries and birthdays go, if Anti makes any appearances off-screen around them, his progress with finding Marvin and small updates from Jackie.

Jackie and Marvin are Henrik’s best friends since before Henrik met Chase. They all met through Jack. The coma struck all three of them with different kinds of grief. Jackie stopped heroing for a while and has kept a pretty low profile. He’s too distraught to fight as hard as he usually does and he’s also terrified he’s next on Anti’s list. He Probably Is. Marvin has completely vanished and nobody has heard from him. The truth is, he’s wiped himself off the radar to practice every type of magic he can find a way to learn about. He’s relentlessly training himself to avenge Jack and keep Anti away from the others.

Jameson is a sort of wild card buzzing around wherever needed. He typically hangs around Henrik, who saved him between operations on Jack. Anti attacked him the moment he was created to get him either on his side or out of the picture so he had less loose ends to tie up. He mutilated Jameson’s throat and left him for dead (though Jameson was created mute, the subtle throat scar he has is a common misconception people have when they first meet him). Jackie and Marvin found him, brought him to Henrik, and he was saved. Now recovered, he’s slowly taught Jackie, Marvin, and Chase BSL (Henrik already knew it in case of disabled patients), and floats between places doing whatever he can to help. He knows minor medical assistance from Henrik and helps him with Jack sometimes, he guards Jack’s hospital room (he’s got rapidly developing time powers and he’s not afraid to use them), practices said developing powers on his down time, and just generally does whatever small things he can to make life easier on the other four.

Jackie and Marvin had no idea Dark Silence happened until they both (at separate times on their own) found Anti’s footage on the channel. They’ve sunken even deeper into the grieving/coping methods they developed after Jack went into a coma.

Quit the Game to Win, most (if not all) of the X Scary Games, 1 Video series, any other videos we’ve had random, strange, fiery panic-worthy behavior and glitches from since May 2018 are all Chase. If someone were to watch the videos consecutively, Chase’s deterioration would be a lot more clear, a lot more scary, and a lot more heartbreaking.

So far Chase’s side affects are small glitches, mood swings, nose bleeds, ears ringing, nightmares, random blackouts (usually in which he does cryptic shit or uncharacteristic and unnerving behavior during), headaches, paranoia, and several other (mostly mental) symptoms.

For now, Henrik and Chase are waiting things out. Both of them are very stressed, scared, and tired.

Might edit this (will reblog if I do) or just straight up reblog it with more info if I think up more,,,, if I ever touch this AU again?? Idk it was spontaneous and usually my muses like that don’t last long. XD But I’d be happy to keep this an occasional writing prompt thing or something... Hmmmmm...

Also if you wanna send me asks/write/draw about this AU ever, feel free! Just tell me and tag me! :0

[winterwolvesandstarbucks]

Every counter-play of defense that was encrypted within the breached algorithm had surgically imploded when Natasha unleashed the parasitic files-records of HYDRA operatives viper nests to global security networks; she was a rogue SHIELD operative that needed to go off-grid-to become an undetected apparition within the shadow-zones. She needed to claim a new charade of utilized identity-relevance away from the exposed crosshairs of Interpol, purchasing a synthetic relevance was a practiced device of survival.

Standing under the amber glow of a dock light, rigidly Natasha gripped onto the strap of a backpack, fixing her grayish-teal irises unwaveringly on a cargo ship."Well, that's convenient," she quipped, huskily, crouching low on her denim-clad haunches as dockyard patrol sentry neared her obscured proximity. Doing a gypsy-run was the only way to reach a harbor point in Prague-stock up on arsenals of passports and food rations while traveling back to the Ukraine city of Chernihiv.

Keeping herself poised with balletic-hone agility behind a rusted oil barrel, attentively, on instinctive reaction, Natasha keenly registered whimpering yelps in unison that puppishly resonating within an intact whiskey crate- definitely rejected stray pups. Throw-away orphans that starvingly calling out for their mother. Easing her leather gloved hand over the ratty blanket-sheathed crate with a tentative flex, she delivered a pacifying caress over the distressed bundle. " Easy little furballs, I'm just going to peak..."

She felt a brush of air blow up her neck. It was all the warning sign she needed to know to react in the face of a hostile encounter. But as she swerved to draw her Glock, something rock-hard slammed against her and sent her spiraling backwards on the balls of her feet. The crushing pain she felt in her right side was ignored as she surrendered her body to its natural instincts. Years of training as a ballerina gave her the grace and skill to use her own momentum to roll and back-flip onto her feet. Her teal eyes were hard and alert but they soon widened in muted shock once she realized who her assailant was.

"Derzhis' ot nikh podal'she (Stay away from them)." A harsh familiar baritone threatened with a look of pure unadulterated rage that beckoned to be unleashed. Steel-blue eyes glistened in the midday sun beneath a grungy black-hoodie, framed by wolfish locks. The whirring of a mechanical limb pierced through the tension as her attacker stood his ground and drew his knife. "YA znayu kto ty (I know who you are)." The Winter Soldier said. The woman he fought on the bridge, who escaped his gun. Perhaps more than any other he'd come across. He glanced at the whining pups in the box, feeling apprehensive.

Damnit...It was a blood-rushing mantra that was careening through her adrenalized veins, intimidatingly aware of the menacing prowess of his sashayed advances, a mechanized precision that hypnotically induced an electrified tenor of unwarranted dread in his marked prey. Brandishing deceptive readiness, Natasha dragged her boots to blindingly mirror the arcing-murderous precision of his combat knife that slashed a breadth over her shoulder, lithely Natasha angled her curvaceous form against oil drum at the breathless second his bionic arm explosively delivered a haymaker sweep with bestial-propelling momentum; his metallic fist cannoned sledgehammering force through dented steel with unhinged rabidness, grungily drenching her copper-auburn tresses with sludgy oil. "James..." she urged out, in terse pitch, chiding herself for not being armed with EMP taser disk."It's Natalia...I know you pulled Steve Rogers out of the river, you saved him, didn't you?

"Shut up!" He yelled. Her words registered but he willed himself to ignore them, telling himself this was some sort of trap and that soon she would be leading her comrades to him. They would imprison or kill him...and take away his precious litter. That thought burned him and he was consumed by the overwhelming need to protect what was more important to him than anything. He continued his relentless assault. Like a bull seeking to ram his prey, he charged and attempted to ram her against a box of shipping containers. She was graceful like a swan and leaped over him. Her legs wrapped around his head. A maneuver he was familiar with. He threw his weight back, causing both of them to topple over boxes and land hard on their sides. He didn't miss a beat over the fall and swung his fist towards her. She narrowly evaded him, causing his hand to puncture a crate. "You will not take me. You won't take them!"

Gripping onto a hinged variance of restraint, blurringly in a feverish rush, Natasha yanked the material of his threadbare hoodie chestnut wolfish tresses disheveledly curtained his stubbled jaw, her feverish cheeks as he gnashed his teeth against a throated snarl, ferally revealing a mutative length of canine incisors that alarmingly jutted undercurve his bloodied shapely-wide lips—a morphic possession that he couldn't stave down. A concussive strobe of white-heat bleared her vision, straining against a choke of breath, haphazardly, Natasha gazed back at the precious crate-he was viscerally attached to the distressed baby pups inside."Okay, that's interesting," she murmured, raspily, cobra-striking her lithe hand up to effectively seize his cybertronic arm-the rigged gravity of mercy was on a knife-edge. "What did Pierce do to you...?"

"What he did?!" He spat, feeling the aching pierce in his jaws that told him his canines were near to puncturing his gums and lips. He flicked his knife between his digits and made a charging upward swipe, managing to cut into her jacket, causing her to yell and attack with her own series of judo kicks. "Everything!" He cried. He had been unmade so many times over. His humanity and memories stripped from him. So much he didn't know, but that much to him was clear. He had no name. No family. No friends. All he had were the three pups crying out to him to come protect them. "Hydra took my identity, my freedom...my humanity!" He landed a punch across her stomach, causing her to gasp. She responded by swiping his legs out from under him, causing him to crash on his back, losing his knife. "Now you want to stop my mission...to protect my mission." Those pups were his only mission now, and he would not lose them.

Attuned to driving thrust of his robotic momentum arced to immobilize her into a destabilizing choke-hold in aggressive fruition as he remained locked into submission, with viperish speed, Natasha drove a hammer-strike precision of side kidney punch into tauten flesh his V-braced pelvis; a guttural roar achingly deafened out him as Natasha bodily staddled the athletic sleekness of her denim-clad thighs fluidly over bulkier-ridges of graven muscle chubbily bracketing a stockier heaviness of his garbed abdomen-a definite flex of protrusive strain bloatedly conveyed rampant-contractive urgency.

Against sweltry dampness of his unkempt tresses, his razored steel-aquamarine irises nakedly floored knifing heat that melded with stuporous desperation as he rackingly glanced down at the crate. "I'm guessing what's snug in here belongs to you?" she deduced in huskier pitch, ruefully, hearing the distressed volumes of hunger beckoningly amplify-the underground extensions of HYDRA's butcherous industry was fueled by an unslaked-infectious tantamount of spawning new breeds of compliance.

The vitality of resistance was amputated by sadistic methods of -psychological mania: electronic-convulsive tortures of being strapped into a mortified dentist chair while agonized-limbic- pulses forced memories into a catatonic drift. The Winter Soldier was a reactivated-brutish instrument of termination-a muzzled beast machine condemningly leashed under the merciless grip of his handlers. The scars of the Odessa bullet etched in her alabaster flesh was branded reckoning that she needed to evict, he pulled Steve out of the Platonic River with a measure of soldiery valiance. Maybe he was worth a chance of redemption. With an errant visage of trust, Natasha gestured her hand lithely towards his litter-babies. "Answer me this, are they your...sem'ya(Family)?"

Winter Soldier had not often been at the mercy of those he fought in the field. The brutal harsh training in the dregs of Russia had instilled in him an endurance that could only be beaten into a wild dog. His comrades that were on ice had been just as equally efficient as him, but they all lacked the experience and metal appendage that made him such a dangerous assassin. But now if they could see him, at the mercy of a Widow straddling his waist with his mission in jeopardy of undoing him. He was compromised-tampered with ever since Pierce had decided to turn him into an experiment for breeding hybrid super-soldiers.

"Yes. They are mine…" He finally admitted to the Widow's cool facade. Her teal eyes were hypnotic and spell-binding that he knew then just how dangerous it was for her to weave webs of seduction with them. He shifted his gaze uncomfortably, feeling a solemn absence from within as his thoughts carried him back to a night in Bavaria he had not forgotten. To an elusive feline that had stolen the other half of his heart and fled into obscurity. "They are all that's left of the man I was. They're apart of me...They need me." He grimaced and groaned at the twisting of his abdomen, feeling and dreading the sensation of his belly swelling. He needed them just as bad.

Keeping the delicate contours of her vixenishly sirenic features nonplussed, Natasha felt a neasous rush of heat mounting in his veins; a sloshing pulse of his swelled abdomen grew bloatedly tenser. Luckily they were in a backlit dead zone-the dockyard wasn't located in the grid of surveillance; General Thunderbolt Ross wouldn't be mobilizing a dispatched strike team without a breach from the video feeds. Dragging out a terse breath, Natasha shifted her collective gaze at the darkened warehouse-a disused stockpile of shipping parts-that would serve has their inventive advantage. "Okay..." she coolly murmured, easing herself off lycan Siberian assassin's bulkier form, as their shadowed gazes heatedly clashed with the stark rawness of clamorous urgency."Ready to play hide-seek, mal'chik-volk (wolf boy)?"

His confusion lasted a mere moment before he watched Widow turn and walk towards the darkened warehouse. Was this a ruse of some kind? He wondered if he should take his pups and flee while there was time. But that wasn't an option. The shipping vessel was their only way out of the country and he couldn't afford to miss that departure. Hesitantly he climbs to his feet and follows her into the warehouse, but not before bringing the box with him. He cradled it gently against his waist, murmuring sweet-nothings in Russian to soothe the fussy little furballs inside who were squirming with thirst. The warehouse was dim but the lights shining through the high-rise windows was enough to see their surroundings.

The Widow, Natalia stood facing him, watching him closely as he set his box aside and used his flesh covered digits to rub comforting circles into his baby pups. "Why are you here? How did you find me?" He asked her, unwilling to beat around the bush.

There was no ingenuous answer-the algorithmic program Insight had cripplingly demolished her practical safeguards-profitable information of SHEILD's hardware was being trafficked to the highest bidder with fixed interest. The coolness of her sterling arrow pendant was a token-a promise to keep her best friend-Clint-out of the inevitable crossfire with rogue SHIELD agents."Circumstances have shifted..." she murmured against gritted breath, watching his bionic hand splay a chaste graze of virile- tactile heat affectionately over the infant furry pudge-balls in soothing accord -a gracing touch of protective reverence. "...and now I'm looking over my shoulder just like you..."

"Like me?" The Soldier nearly scoffed at that. What little he knew about the Widow did not exclude the fact she was a renown hero with powerful friends backing her even with the collapse of SHIELD. He was an infamous myth made real and every government around the world would be after him once the details of his crimes were made clearer. He had no friends, no one to rely upon to see him through this. "You know too little about me. But I know you...Natalia." The name-that name. It resurfaced some memories he didn't know he still had, and made him realize where he had seen her before. "You were trained to kill your enemies. If there is anyone who you had cause to take revenge, it would be me. ...Why haven't you?"

He was one of the men who trained her in the Red Room until his handler Karpov put him back on ice. Severing the bond they were forging as mentor and student. He taught her to never hesitate when her target was in sights. How much had she changed? He put two bullets into her over their many encounters. Anyone else would have taken retribution.

Every pulse of traitorous resistance was contrasted against the crimson silhouettes of the Widow operative ranks; every orphaned ballerina-little swan- was surgically weaponized to tragically mature into combative-lethal sirens of incarnate bloodlines. The mansion estate fringed with black pines of Novgorod, Russia was a gladiatorial arena conducted by a power-mongering Lubyanka general- Vasily Karpov- who brutishly exposed verminous -defective weaknesses in his elite ranks, deadening echoes of mercy with paralytic shunts of nitrogen-solidifying bones into unbreakable granite. 'My nikogda ne lomayemsya (We never break)'...'

Little Natalia Romanova was discarded like an ineffective stray-betrayed by her adoptive father Ivan Petrovich when he traded her virginal innocence to demonic watchdogs of the Red Room; they butchered her to dance to the symphonic-dynamical cadence of a venomous seduction-a- morbid concerto of Tchaikovsky's swan lake-programmed sterilization. Those balletic-harmonic rigors of elegant graces weren't for staged performances at the Bolshoi. She was trying to purge out the demons that marked her 'red' ledger; all evidence of her blood-soaked -unforgivable past was digitalized to public viewing because of that shyster Alexander Pierce -she was now a rogue deviant, cut off the deceitful threads.

With her Glock holstered against the tone-suppleness of her back, Natasha understood the grounds of phantom trust always wavered, the grip of tension was rigged on high-voltage, she wouldn't disarm her resolve; on the snowy mountain ridges of Odessa. She betrayed her on instinctive-mechanical vigilance when she received the 'greenlight' protocol to escort a high-priority target for SHEILD's interest-a HYDRA convoy obstructed that mission-hailstorm staccatos of lethal-surgical precision delivered a gut-shot throb of white-heat in her lower abdomen-a paralyzing apparition of point-blank mercy for her to bleed out. 'Ty poshchadil, malen'kiy pauk ...(You're spared, little spider)'

"I know when the pull back the trigger," Natasha murmured in a thready pitch, a subtle quirk played over her voluminous lips as she fixedly gazed at the fussy baby pups. "Now I'm trying to keep a very effective promise that I can do the right thing..."

He didn't question for details. Not when the swelling in his stomach had become a gut-piercing discomfort that made him noticeably grimace. He couldn't put off the irrepressible need that came with his new form. "I have to…I have to…" He arched forward and held his stomach, stifling the groan of pain but unable to mask the rumbling bellow of his stomach to his curious observer. "I have to get out of America. Take them far from here…" The last bit of his resistance towards the Widow had evaporated and now he was looking at her with beseeching eyes, begging for aid he could not expect her to give. "I thought I could do this alone, but-" And then he tumbled forward, dropping onto all fours as he felt his skin crawl with something feral underneath ready to break free.

Bracing his atrophied weight into a planking stance over cement against penetrative-deadened traction possessing his virile-enhanced resilience, vertiginously underneath his tactical fatigues, the tautened-corded sleekness of his muscled-heavier thighs bulkily flexed with athletic torque as he became paralyzingly grappled into drags of a morphic fringe. Angling his head down shaggily his wolfish tresses hung grungily askew over his temples as his sensuous-bow lips widened agape; jutted extension of his incisor fangs curved with a predatory edge. In that breathless-alarmed wake of rampant confusion, as she painstakingly reeled back in conscious footing near a garage door, Natasha owlishly gazed at the pointed curves of his ears furrily sharpening into outstretched-bestial length as his throaty pants became gutturally coupled with quivery-ragged breaths."Vernis' (Get back)..." he choked out in Russian timbre, slurringly, tucked his cybernetic arm over the ballooning rotundity of his pudgier mid-drift-he was gruelingly plumping up as the whimpering cries of the baby pups grew heart-breakingly distressed. "Please you gotta...Arghh..."

His words had transitioned into a guttural growl that was animalistic-inhuman. The walls seemed to echo and shake in the midst of the intense spectacle that had Natasha watching with incredulity. She wasn't scared, not after witnessing such things as the Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk. But she was stunned by this unexpected variable that introduced itself with the Winter Soldier. His body began to shift and change before her very eyes. Bulking muscles of human athleticism were now covered with patches of growing fur that spread across his body like wildfire. His appendages bent and twisted, causing a sickening snap to be heard and a howl to escape his lips.

No longer bipedal but quadrupedal in his posture that resembled a wild animal. His steel blue eyes opened, and shimmered like a silvery moon in the darkness. His bared canines extended likes blades being unsheathed from their scabbards, glistening with drool. Moments passed and James Bucky Barnes-The Winter Soldier-was gone before her eyes. All that remained as an overgrown Siberian wolf laying exhausted on his side-spent of energy.

As her tactical instincts hastily steered her towards a garage door in urgent succession, Natasha haphazardly reached for a power control box, hammering her fist with bruising momentum into a button that automatically lowered the metal door. The nauseous of the rank of milk fluid wafted smellily off the taut swollenness chestnut-furred alpha's bloated girth. Rearing his canine off exhaustingly off a heap of his torn sweater, readily James shifted a massive hind paw, exposing his underbelly as one of the sightless baby pups raised her tinier head against the crate's edge, adorably whimpering for her-Daddy in squeaky pitch. "Do you trust me enough to bring them to you..." she urged, convincingly, feverous tension between them was skyrocketing to overdrive-propelling her into a chimeric throe."We both know how this plays out, right?"

"N-Need help…" Was all he managed to whine out. He didn't know if she could understand him in this form. His exhaustion prevented him from being more expressive in his speech and he was reduced to a weakened mess while his baby-pups cried out for him. His sight was blurry, but he could make out the distinguishable shape of Natalia standing close to him-close to his babies. His fight with her had taken what remained of his strength to endure the transformation, and now he had no choice but to trust her help that she now offered.

"B-Bring them…" He whined. His tongue hung loosely from his opened jaw, and the rise and fall of his belly felt like a crushing weight being pressed against him with each breath he took. He needed to release and nourish his off-spring.

The unwarranted barrage of detonative urgency was fused like a powder-keg, scrunching her nose against the vomitous reek glozing out of him, tactilely with evident swiftness of her cautious delicacy, Natasha vigilantly crouched a breadth near the crate with tentative ease, the smokiness of her grayish-teal irises roved over the dozy bundle of pudgy infant wolf pups fussily nestled over tactical kevlar of the Winter Soldier's jacket. The infant pups were heart-arrestingly precious within the cushioned snugness of their box; enchantingly adorned with cindery-chestnut downy fur as their clawed-paws furrily twitched on the blinded accord. "Well, that's kinda cute-" she quipped, jauntily under breath; driven by viscerous tenor of gentleness, she reached down to cradle a pup while kneading a featherlight caress of her gloved fingers over a shivering girl pup as her tinier snubbed muzzle nudged her palm. "It's okay malen'kaya milaya (little sweetheart), your safe with me..."

As the transformed soldier listened to Romanova's voice soothe his infant, he felt whatever lingering apprehension he still felt over this situation begin to fade. His weary eyes watched as she brought the youngest of his litter, Madison, over to him, with a gentleness he never would have expected from hands so used to wielding the cold grip of a pistol. Then again, he was not one to judge, given his own bloody history. "Spasibo (Thank you)." He rumbled to her as she set Madison down next to his swollen belly. Almost instantly he felt the gentle nipping and tugging that was uncomfortable at first but almost immediately, it paved the way for relief.

"The others, bring them too," he urged. His infant was feeding herself and Natalia didn't miss a beat as she wandered over to the box to retrieve his the eldest of his off-spring-the twins who entered the world at the same time.

Racking distress clashed tremored against her leather-clad arms, the pudgier male thrashed feistily against the voluptuous swell of her breasts, Natasha unerringly angled lithe contours of her forearm, as she cradled the daintier-tremulous female pup as she lowered to the canine alpha's grounded level. The luminous-voltaic sapphire of his irises glacially flashed banking menace as she consciously breached the heavier proximity of his exposed girth, shifting his twin pups against the milk-drench fur where the littlest of his litter suckled down hungrily."So I'm figuring that you've been hiding these furballs since Pierce cut you loose..." she coolly breathed, arching up an eyebrow, as she half-smirked, cannily. "He exchanged their lives for you to stop Rogers from deactivating Project Insight, he tugged on the right thread..."

"He wanted an army. He wanted a better leash to control me at the same time." The mention of Pierce triggered an onrush of anger inside of him. He let it fade away just as soon as it passed through him, knowing his litter could sense were so attuned to him, they could sense any negative energy he would be feeling. He murmured with a groggy tone as she set down both Aurora and Brennen beside Madison. The twins wasted no time and joined their youngest sibling in nourishing themselves. A pinch of pain shot through him by the roughness of his only boy who he reckoned would be a handful as he grew up. Paternal intuition, he believed.

Giving birth to a litter of pups was something he believed next to impossible, but now he began to understand much about it over the past few months since they escaped Hydra surveillance. After pulling the Captain...Steve...from the Potomac River, the Soldier knew Pierce was finished. His only thought was getting back to the safe-house and collecting his pups from the men Pierce had guarding them. They'd been on the run ever since.

"He's gone now. But Hydra is still out there...I went to the museum for answers...That man, Steve...He called me "Bucky"." It felt like a question and not a comment. He looked to Natalia for any hint of recognition. She wore her mask well enough to disguise any answer.

The murmurous croakiness of his gravelly timbre left her warringly reluctant to answer as soul-gripping tension electrified her into an unwarranted deadlock; without breaking her impassive poise, flintily Natasha downcasted a steeled glance her backpack -a reachable vessel of collected secrets that she had attained with decryption-hacking skills of HYDRA's encoded-corrupted database. "Names and faces are pretty much what to expect when you break out of amnesic fringe...They're what you can't push away when you finally wake up..." she whispered, regretfully. "The poster boy-Steve Rogers- who you fought on the Helicarrier wasn't pulling a stunt, he gave up everything to pull you off Pierce's control switch..."

"And I almost killed him…" He felt remorse. It was a surprising feeling that hadn't come to him quite often when he walked on two feet. Remnants of his programming still lingered-the cold indifference to human life. Sentiment. Detachment. He was a machine whose only instinct was to execute and obey. That all began changing when that man-Steve-entered his crosshairs and called him that name that felt so familiar. But Steve had never tried to retaliate except out of self-defense, he never tried to kill him. He wanted to help him.

The Soldier never realized that. But the Wolf was affected-the Wolf felt something humane. Perhaps it had to do with the trio of furballs that touched his stagnant heart in a way he had never experienced before. "Is he looking for me?" He asked Natalia, wincing as he felt Brennen tug harshly after finishing.

"It's complicated," Natasha answered in brusque pitch, back at the Maryland cemetery, she had delivered Steve the classified 'eyes only' Soviet personnel dossier file labeled: NO 17 -James Buchanan Barnes from SHIELD vault records, grainy black-white photos of boyishly handsome GI soldier was clipped over Cyrillic notes handwritten by Armin Zola that contained lab results of a cryogenic experiment—relevant information would come with an infinite-grievous price. That ignited choice of direction would damnably usher a cavalcade reckoning of HYDRA demons-a new threat was always composed in the shadows.

Nonchalantly bracing the curvaceous svelteness of her crouched form, with disarmed precision, Natasha splayed her leather-sheathed palm deftly over velvet-like mahogany fur of the dwarfed female pup who clingily nuzzled her delicate muzzle into the sniper wolf's undercoat, as he tautly scrunched up his long muzzle, raggedly emitting throaty groans another onrush of uncurbed hunger as the chubbiest of the litter-the male- greedily nipped with pinching force over his damp fur."Now with your furry makeover, I'm not sure if you want Rogers to find you...?" she deadpanned, snarkily.

"Its too dangerous to be around me." He visibly deflates as his wolfish ears fall low. It was difficult to mask his emotions in this form that was more visceral than his human body. It was like being attuned to nature itself and nature never holds back. "I'll have the biggest target on my back. Unless I can disappear, I'll always be looking over my shoulder." It wasn't the life he wanted for himself-for his children who were born into this world to be used as tools-as weapons. Even if Hydra were on the run, it didn't mean others wouldn't be interested in the fruits of their labor. The thought made him both frightened and angry.

"Vse budet khorosho (Its going to be all right)." He murmured into the downy-scented fur of his off-spring as they curled and snuggled deeper into his warm side to hide themselves. He would kill anyone and anything that tried to take them from him. He could feel the Widow's eyes on him and met her stare evenly. "I know I have wronged you, Natalia. ...But I need your help."

For a tactive moment of unstinted attachment-sentiment- Natasha riskily graced her palm over his silvered frontal paw, accepting the call of her unexpected mission. The arcane networks of surveillance grids had marked the Black Widow down as a relevant target of interest—the dockyards would be compromised by sanctioned orders of dispatched STRIKE team. Harnessing up steeled poise, guardedly Natasha recognized his teeming urgency-the starkness of visceral need felt calibrated; rampantly she gazed into his grayish-aquamarine irises that mesmerically slivered alight with lucent intensity-whitish sapphire melding into bestial heat. She was undeviatingly aware of the resurgence of invincible -soldiery valiance-Brooklyn spirit- that clamorously rode through his bulkier canine form.

"I'm not someone to trust on the sidelines,mal'chik-volk (wolf boy), but your little furballs are hard to pass off...she murmured in throatier pitch, raspily, the smokiness of her teal depths fixed a trenchant cast over the enchantingly adorable baby pups cozily wedged against the jutted length of his girth-they weren't disposable-trade-off- leverage in the mordacious HYDRA crosshairs, they deserved a chance to embrace daybreak. Conveying a semblance of vestigial trust, she half-quirked the plushier swell of her voluminous lips into a coquettish smirk, blithely."So I guess this means you're bunking with me...?"

An hour later, the container freight bound for a key-port in France began to ferry its way out from the harbor with all 300 passengers and crew docked. If any of the passengers or crew were suspicious about how a radiant young woman, traveling alone, managed to get approval to bring on a caged Siberian wolf, none of them showed it. The few that did notice the peculiar scene were immediately apprehensive with the thought of traveling with a wild predator onboard. Together Natasha and Bucky stood near the guard-rail on the stern side of the ship as the departure horn rang out. They watched as the Washington harbor shrank further and further away from them. They had left behind one battle-field and were on their way to the next.

Cascading tonnage of goliathan waves deafeningly barraged against the cargo ship's hull, within the isolated ambiance of a bunking cabin, braced against a rickey-framed mattress, vertiginously in a blearing reaction, Natasha gripped onto a blanket half-draped over the lithe contours of her denim-clad thighs. After boarding the outbound freighter, with a practicable charade of sire-like persuasion-didn't require a combative shuffle of acrobatic-honed graces that she balletically performed in the engine room ofthe HYDRA-compromised Lemurian Star, Natasha was voluntarily given the moderate excess to utilize a storage cabin as her voyaging refuge.

Quashing down a flintier chagrin of existing like a stowaway fugitive without harboring a lank slate contingency, Natasha vexedly evicted the hinged impulse to contact Agent Clint Barton by the ship's radio transmission-to station a rendezvous point of location in Prague; knowing that after she condemningly breached the uplinked encrypted files-his retired identity was jeopardized; how many conditioned-genetically enhanced Sleeper Agents under Vasily Karpov's cold-blooded ranks were now activated on civilian ground. She had no more cards to deck out.

After squeezing her damp-tousled copper tresses knottily with a towel, Natasha had stealthily gathered vending-machine packets of Doritos, bottles of water and peanut butter-infused Nature Valley bars—enough to sustain a bulked-out nursing wolf's unquenchable-vexatious appetite.

Inadvertently sitting on the floor of the cabin, through her mechanisms of distrust, Natasha listened to whimpery -babyish squeaks emitting crankily from the sightless pups, Natasha fixed all her attentive focus on the babies cushily nestled against the slumbering PSTD chestnut-furred sniper wolf's bushy tail while he was slackly laden on his side- groggily captive in deep-seat thralls of unstaunched exhaustion. James Barnes was no longer anesthetized to the deadened frequency of infectious static that devastatingly pulsed from the soul-razing tentacles of HYDRA.

Removing a package of Doritos out of her backpack stash, Natasha effectively popped the bag open as the powder-cheesy aroma potently sailed through the dense air, evoking her furred bunkmate-HYDRA's mechanized ghost operative- to noncommittally release a throaty gnarl as he muzzily shifted his deadweight over a makeshift nest of cloth tarps, viscerally aware of his baby pups dozily nestled against his swelled girth."Well, you must be hungry, given how much the little pudge-balls pack in, huh?" she coaxed out, huskily in a snarkier undertone, holding up a chip with tantalizing ease."Nothing fancy, since we don't have that luxury on this free-pass cruise..."

The wafting aroma of the tasty snack almost had the wolf drooling with an unabashed hunger that had been steadily growing for hours since their voyage had begun. To ignore the tell-tale pinching of discomfort, Bucky...He now thought of himself as Bucky-it felt right to for some reason. To ignore his hunger, he had gotten some much-needed rest to regenerate his strength. He had been on the run for weeks with his infant furballs, rarely sleeping, rarely eating. There was also the fight he had endured with Natalia at the docks which only served to heighten his already ravenous state of need. He sniffed and growled lowly as he took in the sight of the triangle-shaped chip that dangled in front of him.

"I've gotten by with far-less." He raises his snout and plucks the cheesy chip into his mouth, savoring the vivid taste that left only hungry for more. He didn't ask. He was far too set in wish to not be an inconvenience to his unlikely companion who helped him board this freighter. But it appeared Natalia had other ideas as she promptly dumped the rest of the bag of chips onto surface in front of him. "You're being too generous with me, Natalia. ...Thank you." He spent the next few minutes finishing off the cheesy chips that softened the hunger in his gut. She said nothing the entire time as she lounged back in deep thought, her only movements being the periodic bites she took from her nutrition bar.

The only sounds he could hear where the distant roars of the tides and the chattering of crew members and passengers moving outside their cabin. Their cabin for the most part was spacious enough for only one person with a single cot, chair and night-stand. But it was also big enough for someone to allow their pet to stay in as well. How convenient for him, despite having to sleep on the thin carpet on the floor. He wasn't about to complain, he really did have to survive with far-less in the past.

"How long do you think this trip will be?" He finally asked her once the silence began to become awkward-at least for him.

With an inscrutable flit of her grayish-teal irises, Natasha was underlyingly aware of the predatory heat radiating off the ensorcelled assassin-the Winter Soldier's beastlier hard-edged muscles—a revamped ferocity that wouldn't be contained in the morphic dregs of bestial fusion. Ghostlily echoes of their unforgiving past throbbingly raked over the bullet-scarred flesh of her leather garbed abdomen, like the surgical-driven precision of a Red Room scalpel, irrevocably cutting her deep. 'Ty ne mozhesh' bezhat' vechno, malen'kaya Natal'ya (You can't run forever, little Natalia)...'

Against feigned rapt of tenser vigilance, as she felt the carbon steel of her Glock against her booted calf, Natasha unmovingly became electrified in compromised tenfold, as her palm reactively splayed over her curvaceous side-another grievous callback of her underscored vendettas. She to foster onto a 'no-strings' attached reality-a pave a new road of salvation before 'teammates' close to vest became dead reckonings on her ledger. "If everything holds out we'll be docking at Port de Grenelle in three days...Tops, " she murmured in gritted pitch, offishly, as the baby pups squeaked demandingly in hungered unison.

Coolly she quirked up an eyebrow, registering the hefty sniper wolf's disgruntled moan, his canine muzzle stretched grimacingly wide against feverish panting of shuddery breaths, as heavier-intensified barrages of milk- sloshing contractions; nothing availed to his effusive resistance. "Hold on," she urged, placidly, watching his furred brow aggressively pinch while she clutched a frayed edge of a blanket to drape over his jutted underbelly-he needed a grounded semblance of privacy. The frosted aquamarine of his depths stormily lanced knife-point intensity, contrasting against his slitted pupils-he was in protective-mode, defensively aware of the vulnerability of his pups-also the convenient security of Natasha's untampered proximity. "Don't get used to my charitable tactics," she retorted, pointedly. "I'm only playing nice because of your cute furballs..."

The mention of his pups brought about a warm feeling within the Siberian wolf whose life had changed drastically over the past several months. Life as a Hydra instrument of death was no life at all. It was empty and cold, giving him no cause to think and feel anything beyond the orders he was given and the pain of injuries he would endure. But then Pierce decided to play god. To try and create something fierce and undeniably vicious to give Hydra an advantage over the super-powered heroes that were emerging in the world. Through his blood and genetics, three wolfish off-springs were born.

The moment they entered the world, something inside of the Soldier had shifted-the the manacles that bound him to Hydra's will had shattered irrevocably as his eyes first set sight on the three impossibly small life-forms that were birthed from his wolfish body. He had become not a 'soldat', but 'otets'-a father.

"I think they like you." He said after a moment of deep thought. It would have seen like a polite compliment just for the sake of levity, but it didn't occur to him until now just how much at ease his pups were around the redhead Avenger. Over the past few weeks, they trembled in their boxed-bed he kept them while around strangers. It was only his presence that soothed them. But around Natasha, they were calm-relaxed. It made him develop a new appreciation for his old-time student and former rival.

The feathering drift of her lithe fingers over satiny-velvet fur hushedly captured that instinctive awareness in that addictive breach of connective heat with the smallest of his restless litter; a wonderous fusion that she couldn't ride out. The ephemeral—chaste pressure irrevocably fused a soul-branding revelation—the murderously deceptive siren-the Black Widow conceived out of the Red Room stowed a heartbeat underneath hardcore layers granite.

Drags of unredeemable memories screechingly crescendoed a hellish volume of a damning pandemonium—innocent ghosts of orphans that morphed into banshees-a ghoulish requiem of symphonic-macabre vengeance. Blood always had a price. "I'm not good with kids..." she admitted, harshly in a condemning breath, wrenching her hand back from the squeaking pup as if her caress was poisonous. "If you peek at my file, you'll see a video link that SHIELD buried..." A straining tightness flexed evidently over her delicate jaw. "I guess it wasn't deep enough..."

"We both have a dark past. I am not one to judge." He uttered. There was much about his former life as James Bucky Barnes that he didn't remember. But the screams of death he invoked haunted his dreams like wailing ghosts. He remembered every life he took, innocent and guilty. It took insurmountable strength for him to not succumb to his guilt that begged him to sink into self-destruction. He held on. The three pups, two who were now curled beneath him, gave him newfound life and purpose. The third of his litter, the youngest had drifted and rolled closer towards the redhead who still looked torn.

"Go on. ...I trust you, Natasha." He urged her to give into her greater inclination to pick up young Madison, and not allow the cold darkness of her past to rob her of a newfound connection.

"You sure about this...?" A tenous raze of warred hesitance electrifyingly deadened her in those rigged seconds of genuine, full-measured trust, the young-exhausted- alpha painstakingly nudged his baby girl with an affectionate variance of cherishing reverence, urging the determined pup to stumblingly wobble closer to her opened reach. A euphonious fringe of hope quenched out the infective blood of her slaughterous-unforgiving past of being a penetration Widow operative-a battle-tested marionette of seductive charades who had her strings broken when Clint Barton's hawk-precision arrow tore into her sterilized reality. He violated his 'green-light' orders -staking down a compromised price with the dynamical exception of friendship-humanity. She had Fury-Steve Rogers, but Clint was always a callback of a heartbeat if she fell too deep.

A feverous rush cravingly answered that beckoning cadence of whisper-soft acceptance he tellingly conveyed with a broader-fanged smirk, readily, Natasha shaped her palm over Madison's daintier-angelic form, adoringly cradling the infant pup against her leather-garb chest with a contrasted tracery of pacifying heat as she angled her forearm, just enough to breathlessly watch tiny canine eyes flit open to squinty reveal decadent brandy irises that heart-stealingly gleamed with rebellious vibrancy -thievish fire. "krasotka( beautiful girl)..." she murmured whisperingly, in Russian timbre, accelerated-joyous- euphoria pulsed infectiously within the cabin, as the baby pup squeaked in melodious pitch, snuggling comfily as she glanced up at the blank-faced amazement tearily alight in her Daddy's cool -unblinking-aqueous depths."Vy lyubimy, malyshka(You are loved, little sweetheart)..."

Bucky's surprise at little Madison finally opening her eyes was matched by the shock he felt as Aurora and Brennen had begun to do just the same. It was subtle at first-a wrinkling of their snouts as their eyelids squinted in their shut-state. "Eto normal'no (Its okay)..." he rumbled while nuzzling their tiny paws and kissing them. A moment passed and then their beady eyes finally opened beneath his tender gaze. A vivid shade of blue, full of youthful innocence and confusion, it was a precious thing he vowed to love and protect. "Hello, little guys. Daddy's been waitin' for you."

Their paws flayed and tapped against his shoulder as if they were being begged to be picked up. It was a tender moment that was unlike any he'd experienced before, and Bucky could not help but grin with delight. His chestnut furred tail wagged and his eyes softened to a dim but lively shade of blue. "Good to see you too."

The boyish drawl of his roughen-timbre croakily breached her passive demeanor, as she delicately cradled little Madison against her leather jacket, Natasha felt neutralized by the dosage of hope-redemption this unabandoned connection-nexus had injected her; nothing flatlined between them. With a cautious flit of her grayish-teal irises, she gazed sidelong at the emotionally-compromised alpha-a Soviet beast machine who agonizingly outlasted HYDRA's traumatic-electrified raids of mind-butchering amnesia. A white-noise of concessive static of Zola's nightmarish-surgical hardware that deadened out his tenacious resistance, mutating cavalcades of his dispatched targets' faces into bloodied apparitions under his sniper-vision-mechanicalized wraith of the Sleeper ranks wasn't damaged goods...He broke out of the kill-switch programming because he was granted a new mission-relevance of daybreak.

"Get some rest..." Natasha urged, instructively, easing down the dozy mahogany-furred pup tentatively against his massive silvered forepaw. "I have a raincheck with a peanut butter sandwich..." A devious smirk naughtily quirked up her plushier crimson lips. "Can't let those fellas' out there be disappointed..."

Bucharest, Romania...

As the nectarous scents wafted off displays of crated fruit that were invitingly stacked in tented vendors; the market-bazaar plaza contrasted functionally against Brâncovenesc environs of 17-century Baroque-Romanesque style that became monolithic landmarks of post-revolution architecture; castellated Saxon cathedrals were gothically ornamented with iron spires-the Byzantine valance of conquered imperialism became a historic entity of brickwork terracotta and marble. It had been a caliginous province of survival, but now maddeningly congested with throngs of stink-faced vacationists that barricaded Romanian merchant stations.

Harnessing the instinctive usage of her tactical caliber, readily Natasha evaded sideswiping bicyclists as she purchased a traditional bakeshop dessert-Gogoși- spongy dough balls that were sugarily infused with cinnamon and vanilla; the only digestible pastry that slaked the nursing sniper-wolf's onerous-uncurbed- appetite. She wouldn't become grappled into the domesticity of cyclic errand-runs; against warred vulnerability, everything felt artificial as if compromised reality would betray her again. She needed to complete the mission of securing an undetectable-off-grid- safe house for the baby pups.

Gripping onto the hefty paper bag of her gathered rations, as her iPhone chimed a reminder text of the next 'feeding time' hour, Natasha shifted the observant periphery of her grayish-teal irises unwaveringly at a newspaper vendor with unfeigned awareness before she vexatiously reached the crosswalk-underground installations of traffickers had tantamount of auctioning trade-off breeds-wolf pups were stacked as highly valuable in the Eastern European industry in the shadow zones. The seedier governmental dynamos of the World Council had the Avengers fixed on their chessboards-every counter- move was rigged. Warranted measures of trust felt compromised-she had to remain unbreakable against the play of adaptable contingency.

Riskily, Natasha paced towards a high-point apartment building where the beastlier Siberian wolf used for a makeshift nursing den."He better not be complaining this time..." she quipped under terse breath, raspily, glancing down at her mobile screen at the blank message box that she labeled-Rogers. The First Avenger—the paragon Adions of liberty was more than an expandable-relevant dance partner that Fury had selected after the galactic invasion of the planet-ravaging Chitauri, Steve became a visceral heartbeat of chaste friendship—someone who had her back when the precision of betrayal shadow-crossed her—she couldn't; go all decent on him. "Everything needs to stay close to vest..."

Within the warm sanctity of the immaculate though quite dull safe-house, a different turmoil was constantly increasing in the face of an agitated predator glaring at a target marked for termination. Four paws ground into the rug of the living room, muscles tensed with burning ire as the fur on his body rose on end with anticipation. His target marked for termination, the high-definition tv that was left on when Natasha had left the apartment. His redheaded companion, in her infinite wisdom, had left the channel on a late-night BBC talk-show, where he had to listen to some irreverent idiot ramble on celebrity gossip and the state of the Avengers who were viewed as both heroes and sensationalized idols.

The one called Steve-the Captain-was a source of admiration and bizarre fawning over countless worldwide who romanticized him and members of his team. The wolf smacked his paw repeatedly on the remote control but lacked the precision to hit those tiny human-sized buttons. "I hate television," he growled as he picked up the remote between his teeth and chucked it at the screen, hoping that would offer some bit of satisfaction.

Controlling the hesitation flex of her lithe fingers that ghosted over the doorknob, edgily Natasha stepped into the darkened ambiance of the slummy apartment, faded sheets of newspapers were grimily taped over windows as a ratty cushioned sofa tactically obstructed a cornered kitchen-every measure of the dank space was enforced to become utilized if unwelcomed company-dispatched HYDRA operatives coordinately breached their undetected proximity.

Catching a potent whiff of milky fluid and drenched blankets stuffily enwreathing the air, reactively Natasha scrunched up her nose against the vomitous stench that went fabric-deep. Knowingly, she fixed her grayish-teal irises on the dismantled remote as batteries rolled on the carpeting-an obvious sign of the beasty wolf's powder-keg vexations. "Nothing good on...?" she teased in brisk pitch, easing down the 'doggie' treat bag on a dresser, gazing at the bulkier-canine shadow imposingly braced against the couch."I'm starting to think you need a better playlist..." She feigned back a telltale grimace as the reeking muskiness of his shaggier fur raunchily penetrated her nose. "Maybe a shower to cool down..."

Natasha's entrance had calmed Bucky's ire if only enough for him to merely snarl at her sassy quips to his clearly annoyed state rather than bark up a storm. "Took you long enough." He grumbled under his breath, grimacing at the lancing shot of discomfort surging throughout his body that made him softly whine. The hunger cramps were growing more constant ever since they had arrived here weeks ago. Natasha had explained to him that as a nursing alpha, he had a bigger appetite that needed to be sated to sustain not only him but his three pups who depended on him. The thought of his litter caused him to shoot a glance at the small box they were kept in at the corner of the room surrounded by blankets. They were sleeping soundly since the afternoon but Bucky knew any minute now they would awaken and be in a fussy-and hungry mood.

The thought made him realize what Natasha had mentioned and he gazed down at the dried milky stains on his fur and could only imagine how badly he reeked right now. "Later." He grumbled as he watched her set her keys down on the nightstand. "Did you get anything?" He asked, feeling his stomach twist again with hunger.

Opening up the paper bag, Natasha brusquely smirked as the cinnamony scent of doughed pastries temptingly elicited the moody Siberian wolf to droolingly jutted out his canine muzzle a breadth from her nonchalant position-he was driven by the accelerated onrush of stuporous hunger. Shifting his chubbier mass on his massive paws, clunkily against feverish grogginess, James paced his intimidating-predatory momentum closer as Natasha coaxingly leveled an open-handed gesture from him to swipe off a Gogoși at the palatable second his whiskered muzzle raptly grazed over her palm. The razored length of his barred incisor fangs consciously poised with knifepoint tension over her exposed wrist; it became a play of blinded trust-any betraying movement of distrust would retrigger unhinged impulses of his bestial viciousness. "Don't get used to these daily snack-runs, next time you're going out..." she addressed against huskier drags of breath, snarkily. "Unless you can't fit through that door, which might likely happen in a few days..."

"Very funny," Bucky grumbled as he wolfishly devoured the succulent treat with ravenous hunger. His tongue lapped up the scattered crumbs, uneager to let a single one go to waste in his increased state of craving. He was ignorant to the fact his tail was wagging in his excited state of bliss until he noticed the amused smirk on his companion's face which prompted him to forcibly calm his exhilaration. "Don't start," he shrugged as he turned and padded his way across the floor towards the make-shift bed he set up for his litter near the couch. The wafting smell of cinnamon and milk was intense as he watched his sleeping litter cuddled close to one another, absorbed in the warmth of each other's proximity and the safety his shadow offered them. An intense of feeling of protectiveness and worry gripped the Siberian wolf as he watched them-feared for them.

"Did anything go wrong out there?" he growled softly in Natasha's direction as she reclined on the couch. The worry of her being followed always weighed on him each time she left the apartment.

"I wasn't multitasking if you want to know, wolf boy..." Natasha quipped trenchantly, as the graveled-timbre of his roughened drawl exhaustingly conveyed tempered -defensive urgency; Natasha was aware of the jacked-up tension suffusing through him as ragged gusts of panty breaths amplified with contractive onslaughts of milk-sloshing throbs. Aggressively, the chestnut-furred alpha gnashed his incisor fangs in distressed accord-hinging down his floored panic-an instinctive extent of visceral protectiveness that he couldn't ride out. In feral tenor as the puppyish squeaks of his dozing baby pups hungrily beckoned for him, growlingly, James steered his whitish-sapphire orbs unwaveringly at the closed door-this was his den-site. "Besides I think you'll be busy tonight to even care..."

"Can't sleep. Something about this city…" His features became pensive in the face of an unexplainable feeling of dread that entered his body the moment they entered this city. Whether it was paranoia gripping his discipline or some precognitive sense that came with the nature of being a wolf, he couldn't say. But one thing Bucky felt certain was that he didn't want to stay here for too long. Hydra might be on the run after the fall of SHIELD that shone a light on the shadow organization and all its puppets that were controlled by it. He and his pups might be safe from the world at large, but there were still those out there who knew the truth about what he had become. "It feels familiar," he finally admitted to the assassin who had waited patiently for him to finish his thought. Padding over towards the couch, he gazed up at her with deep glowing eyes that didn't phase her in the least; something he appreciated.

"Have I been here before?" He wondered aloud. There was so much he couldn't remember. The faded images he saw in his dreams were of a different man-a different life. They didn't reveal the darker aspects of the Soldier and those unfortunate to have crossed his path. The Widow-Natalia-she knew more about him than he did himself.

The enmeshed-conventional weaves of SHIELD's paranoid deception were intricate by the evasive designs that Alexander Pierce two-facedly constructed in the operative STRIKE ranks of penetration espionage: Agent Clay Quartermaine was a jackbooted deviation-a showcasing protege of stern-faced Maria Hill who had been stationed in Romania after decoded encryptions of HYDRA viper nests were marked on governmental surveillance installations. Nothing was protocol.

The infiltration mission-an extension of Project Paperclip was compromised as the dossier file that Clint Barton had stealthily obtained for Fury revealed gruesome-concrete details- an underground division of genetic extremist butchers-A.I.M- had surgically mutated Agent Quartermaine into a monstrous crossbreed of lycan visage-a disposable-tragic asset to gain HYDRA attention of experimental network. An infusion of Gemma radioactivity was detected in the salvaged blood samples-it was a chimerical harbinger of weaponized -sadistic deviance of conceiving meta-humans.

"There was a file with recorded evidence that one of SHIELD's top agents was retired by an untraceable Soviet slug, a clean headshot...No mess for SHIELD's janitors to swipe down ." Natasha murmured in hitching cadence, grimly, flitting her steeled gaze at the amnesic sniper-wolf as he impassively hankered in a low- crouch, evident sway of his bushy tail conveyed stoking aggression-she was definitely wading through uncharted waters. Registering his breathy pants, coolly Natasha tossed another dough ball at his silvered fore-paw with distractive precision as he scowlingly gnashed his incisor fangs with a derisive snarl . "What I know is that Pierce had sanctioned that kill-order behind Fury's back..."

He should've known better than to ask, but every image, every memory fragment that came to his thoughts over the past 70 years was tied to death and destruction. Whatever memories that resurfaced were of a cold, emotionless weapon executing Hydra's will. The realization made the wolf feel despondent that there was perhaps nothing good to have come from his life-time other than the three little napping furballs that came from him. And her… The memory of an elusive kitten stealing away into the night was becoming dimmer like a candle flickering out. "So many are dead because of me-so many lives ruined." He whined as he rested his chin onto the floor, tucked over his paws.

The deceased agent she described wasn't someone he could remember, but the feelings this place evoked was one rooted in horror and tragedy. "Do you believe redemption is possible for those like us?" He was surprised at himself by asking. The Soldier didn't care for sentiment and self-righteousness, but the man who used to be James Barnes yearned for it. "Those trained to kill and execute orders? Or are we to be forever haunted by our crimes-our sins..."

The inevitable question wasn't avoidable-every grip of reality was corrupted as she became a defective-traitorous fugitive of her blood-smeared past; after deactivating the algorithmic safeguards of the Project Insight in front of the megalomanic World Council; Natasha released all decoded ciphers-locations of 'spider holes' that parasitic inheritors of SHIELD tried to clear the board with blank-slate protocols: fallback contingents.

Every untenable-faux- identity conceived in her inventive caliber was exposed to global media networks -the murderous firestorm that she covertly ignited at the Ukraine orphanage-ashes of her unjustifiable errors had marked the Black Widow down like a unrectifiable-vermined insurgent surgically bred out the Red Room. It was a trivial modicum of betrayal against the high-stakes gambit of survival-she was pegged in the red-zone. Maybe this nomadic mission of preservation would resurrect unbridle hope again-she wouldn't punishingly cheat herself out, not where infant-defenseless furballs had infinitely compromised her granite-sheathed heart. 'My postroyeny s boleye strogimi veshchami (We're built with sterner stuff)'

"Well, I think you have a good answer right there, James..." Pointedly, she gestured to the blanket-heaped crate as tinier canine snouts feistily jutted up in whimpering unison; the ensorcelled sniper-wolf against the chagrin of his warred sanity, tentatively clamped a frayed blanket with the jutted length of his incisor fangs, towing the fabric closer towards his restlessly adorable litter as he was inexorably grappled back into nursing-mode. The visceral routine kept Natasha distracted from evading rigged crosshairs of surveillance-cockroach operatives of HYDRA sleeper ranks would soon filter out their off-grid location. She needed to use tactical incarnations of her Widow spycraft -purchase new hardware of her arsenal and healthier rations to sate down Jame's insatiable barrages of appetite. For now, she was grounded near the rumbustious baby pups."Maybe you can be someone else for those milyy (cute) furballs since they can't really tell the difference..."

It was a humbling thought to the wolf as he took a moment to ponder its depth, its meaning. He believed Hydra had taken everything from him-his humanity, his memories. But they had also unintendedly given him the means to nurture something precious. The furry pups that had come from his body, conceived by the passion and genetics of both himself and another that he had loved but was now lost. Fatherhood... A strange term for an assassin who had spent so many years taking life after life, he had never stopped to think what it would be like to nurture one. To raise one. Could he do it? His mission was to protect the pups. But protecting and raising were different. For a brief moment, he contemplated what kind of father he had had, and what he could learn from him.

But he couldn't remember. Not his father, nor mother.

It meant that whatever ounce of goodness he derived from the memories, the soul of James Barnes, he would have to rely upon to see him through this life-changing situation. And for once, he felt welcoming towards it. The wolf glances to his redheaded companion and blows his nostrils, sending her a grateful glance that he hoped was readable to her. "I should feed them now. Thank you...Natasha." He rumbled.

Without a clashing deterrence of unwarranted tension, swiftly, Natasha lowered on her denim-clad hunches in balletic sync as the young alpha wolf readily eased down the chunkier bloatedness of his outstretched girth over a heap of blankets. A neasous strain of bone-deep exhaustion-akin to a deadening paralytic-had nakedly gleamed in his mesmeric grayish-sapphire depths; for an ephemeral moment, James was breathlessly immobilized, fostering onto rapturous cadence of addictive hope-deliverance that ratcheted in tenfold.

Angling his canine muzzle towards the wooden crate, sweatily James prepared for another continuous barrage of insatiable nursing. A subtle grimace rapted over his fanged muzzle became evident to milky treks of glozing fluid soakingly dampening over the jutted rotundity of his furred underbelly as he instinctively measured every ragged breath that coupled into beckoning whimpers-a visceral tenor of coaxing urgency that his snugged baby pups were harmonized to; he was disarmingly surrendering himself to the imperative needs of his precious babies.

"I'll admit this is slightly cuter than last night..." Natasha rasped out, banteringly, reaching inside the crate with a drive of tentative variance as she hefted up the angelic-daintiest of the stirring litter-little Mattie, splaying a feathery trace of her lithe palm over the downy sleekness of mahogany fur in embracing accord; while the pudgier male hellraiser rascally bolstered up his chubby mass against the crate on his hind-paws. Quirkily, Natasha arched up a reddish tinge eyebrow as the passive sniper-wolf unabashedly emitted a throaty groan against the errant surge of their hunger rush. "Slightly..."

"It takes getting used to," Bucky rumbled with a deep gravelly voice. In truth, the day he had learned he sired a trio of pups under the watchful eye of Hydra, he faced the reality with disbelief and denial. It was an unnatural act that men-that soldiers-faced having been transformed and conceiving pups. It took nearly a week before he worked the courage to face his off-spring and give them the loving attention they needed. Ever since then, the act of nursing had become as integral to him as the act of sleeping and eating. He found it somewhat astonishing how quickly he'd grown to trust Natasha as he watched her gently pull his litter out, one-by-one, and gently set them down in front of his round girth.

"The day they can learn to find their own food will be a relief," he joked with feigned resignation as the chubbiest of his litter instinctively rolled over to him and bumped against his belly, causing him to snort before wincing once Brennen found his mark and began to nourish himself. His girls followed and the Siberian wolf sighed as he laid his head down, gazing absently at the window, staring at the pale moon gleaming through the blinds. "It seems so far away, but I'm in no hurry to see them grow up so fast."

Soundlessly he fell asleep under Natasha's watchful caring eyes. That night he dreamed of dewy rainforests and running across rooftops.

As the whitish sconces of morning breached through plastic blinds of the slummy apartment, guardedly Natasha braced her denim-clad thighs against the granite countertop, her copper-auburn tresses gorgeously weaved into of a fishtail braided ponytail that fringed over toned curvatures of her garbed shoulder while she glanced down at her salvaged arsenal of ID cards-passports that she had Agent Maria Hill trustingly conceive while being a stray fugitive. The tourism sectors of Bucharest served as their harbor-point before a smuggling run that she was covertly planning with a Romanian cargo informant of rail -line freight.

It was imperative that she reached Chernihiv within the coming days before Thunderbolt Ross decrypted safeguard contingencies that hypercautious Nick Fury had invented for her, in case she needed to beat the rigged dodge. Nothing could be shut-down on the media networks- the macabre errors of her traitorous-weaponized past had bled out video links of unforgivable imagery-CSI reports- and ledgers of terminated marks-the murderous requiem of the Black Widow.

Keeping herself collectively poised near the stove, Natasha, clutched an iron-handle of a stew pot, that she filled with a carton of milk, as she keenly registered a long-drawn snarl emitting from the exhausted sniper-wolf bloatedly resting on his furred side with his dozy baby pups snuggled fussily against the protrusive swell of his jutted underbelly. He needed to break. "Well, you must've had a rough night..." she addressed quirkily, turning the stove's eroded knob with lowered heat. "Figured you needed backup..."

He was roused from his deep-slumber by the scent of warm milk covering his bed like a blanket. His jaw instinctively opened as he yawned, revealing rows of sharpened white incisors that gleamed in the light of day. His eyes peeled open and blue eyes glazed with fatigue as the world slowly sharpened into focus. When he saw Natasha standing over him with a pot of milk that she proceeded to pour into a bowl, the Siberian wolf released a rumbling noise that caused his furry body to vibrate. The little furballs nestled against him swatted his stomach but were immediately drawn by the alluring scent of milk so close to them. "S'thanks...its gonna take a lot to feed these hungry little destroyers," he joked as he began to nuzzle their heads and gently licked them, soothing their restless hunger. As he pulled himself up onto his paws, he spied the bowl and wondered if his pups were capable of feeding themselves now like this. "Can you give me a hand," he beckoned Natasha.

Feeling that her mechanized reaction needed to be tentative, coolly Natasha eased the bowl down with controlled steadiness as the chubbiest of the wolven litter groggily reared up his tinier muzzle in riotous cadence, detecting the wafting scent of heated milk as he thrashed wobbily to advance over the nest of blankets in an hungered—stubborn rush with no visage of strained effort. With lightning-quick swiftness of his canine muzzle, arrestingly Bucky nudged his rebellious-tubbier pup who ornerily emitted a high-pitch squeak, as he murmured in a growlier Russian timbre. "Ne tak bystro...(Not so fast)'..."

"O, paren' (oh boy)..." Natasha teased out breathlessly, flitting her grayish-teal irises at young Siberian alpha kneading his long muzzle featherily over his baby girls that dwarfed against the pudgier bulkiness of his wolven form, the addictive tracery of his contrasting heat shiveringly delivered a pacifying fervency on a reverent accord, as little Mattie kittenishly nuzzled his shaggier underbelly with ticklish nips. The cool radiance of his silvery aquamarine orbs smokingly melded with predatory heat against the hinged wake of unwarranted trust.

Inadvertently, Natasha warded off the stark urge to evade the wonderous -heart-compromising moment as James became consciously attentive to her unfeigned resistance. She didn't want to become emotionally attached to the squeaky furballs—this wasn't her charitable mission. Glancing on the jars of gooey peanut butter on the countertop with a knowing quirk of her eyebrow, Natasha rasped, jauntily. "I'm guessing you want some breakfast now...?"

A sharp refusal was at the edge of his tongue but Bucky couldn't suppress the churning hunger in his stomach that had been building for several hours now. When was the last time he'd eaten? His focus had been completely turned to his litter of pups who needed constant attention and nourishment since they'd left America and arrived abroad. Sparing a glance at his sated pups, the Siberian wolf released a grumbling noise of approval. "That...would be appreciated." He said, gazing at the tubs of peanut butter longingly and feeling his chops drool with anticipation. He followed Natasha towards the edge of the kitchen island where she opened the jars and began to dig out large clumps of that gooey sweet source of protein and chucked them onto a plate for him. She cleaned the spoon off by putting it in her mouth and placed the plate down in front of him. Bucky wasted no time and dived nose-first, dragging his tongue across the plate greedily as his senses were swarmed with delectable sensations.

Gazing at the young alpha moaningly polishing off the glops of peanut butter, coolly, Natasha gripped onto the spoon with a defensive flexion, her grayish-teal irises unwaveringly fixed on the protrusive bloatedness of his furred girth- a untampered sense of phantom detachment-heartache viscerally coupled with the puppy-like squeaks distressingly emitting from the recalcitrant litter nestled in the cushioned heap of threadbare blankets. Wobbling in straying paces, the chunkier pup-Brennnen-squeakily thrust his tinier muzzle over the empty fold, nipping at the material with his aggressive tugs. "Okay...You don't have to answer this..." Natasha hitched out, whisperingly, as Bucky snarlingly jutted out his incisor fangs, dragging the plate with his canine muzzle-those words had razed out a contractive grip of latent anguish that he stowed.."...but those adorable furballs can feel what you lost..."

Bucky wasn't sure how to respond to that thought. It was a deep harrowing reminder that despite having escaped the dreaded confines of Hydra enslavement with his litter, that some things had been left behind. His pups could sense it perhaps. An absence. A feeling of incompleteness. It had festered since after he had escaped the old Hydra facility they kept disguised as a bank with his litter in hand before the remnants of his oppressors could galvanize a form of control in the chaos. He had charged through and gunned down all the scientists, all the guards responsible for his shock-therapy and caging his children in a cold cell without him to nurture them. When he had entered that cell, expecting to find 4 baby pups cuddled together close, he found only 3. Heartbreak didn't begin to describe what he felt, but somehow it registered with his litter who had been crying out in distress ever since.

"I think they can feel what we've all lost," Bucky responded after a lengthy pause. "It wasn't enough for Hydra to use me, but they used my children to keep me in line. It started with four of them, now there's only three. They miss their brother."

Registering the anguished throatiness of his growlier drawl, with a tentative variance of caution, bracingly Natasha eased down on her denim-clad haunches, gracing her lithe palm tacitly over the distressed little guy's cindery-burnette fur, as he raptly whimpered in a cadence of heart- racking squeaks, burying his tubbier form into the snuggled warmth of blankets. A feverish dampiness tellingly steeped into the material as Bucky downcastedly gazed at his baby pup, doing his utmost to evict the heart-crippling onslaught of enduring a grievous failure. "Well, clearly you need to find the little furball..." Natasha rasped, huskily, gesturing for him to pacify the alarmed pup. "It seems HYDRA always has something to trade when playing..."

[droneseco]

Nooie Smart Doorbell Cam Review: Stylish Home Security

Nooie Wi-Fi Video Doorbell Camera

8.00 / 10

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The Nooie doorbell cam offers a diverse variety of security features while allowing for many layers of customization. With the completely opt-in cloud subscription, it's a welcome alternative for those looking into a lower-cost entry into home security. It doesn't have every bell and whistle, but its user-friendly design and features offer plenty of value.

Key Features

Weatherproof (rated IP65)

Night vision up to 49 ft

PIR Motion Detection with human detection

10,000 mAh battery

Specifications

Brand: Nooie

Resolution: 2K

Connectivity: Wi-Fi

App Compatibility: Yes

Night Vision: Yes

Internal or External: External

Power Source: 10,000mAh battery

Axis Control: N/A

Pros

2K video quality

Two-way audio and quick responses

Local and cloud storage options

Mounting options (flat and 15° wall mount)

Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support

Anti-theft siren and safety lock

Cons

158° field of view is narrower than some competitors

No wireless power option

Occasional app glitches

Base station requires an outlet

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Nooie Wi-Fi Video Doorbell Camera amazon

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The Nooie Doorbell Cam offers both essential security and everyday features to simplify your life. This stylish wireless doorbell by Nooie also forgoes a mandatory subscription to keep its usage flexible. For those looking for protection without a huge investment cost, Nooie's doorbell cam may work for you.

Nooie Doorbell Cam Design

From a design angle, Nooie has broken from the standard whites, black, and metallic hue focus of other doorbell cams. The speckled beige coloration provides a warm neutral option for those looking for an alternate color option from the norm.

The Nooie wireless doorbell measures 6.7 x 2.4 x 1.6 inches but weighs only 1.94 pounds, so it feels extremely light in your hand. When either installing or removing the doorbell cam on its mount, the body's dimensions also allow for an easy grip.

With an above-average size, it serves as a great visual deterrent since it's easy to spot at a distance. In practice, the doorbell button is also a good size, so there's no issue giving it a press regardless of how big your hands are. The speaker at the bottom of the doorbell cam isn't the loudest, but it's clear enough to communicate from.

Nooie Doorbell Cam Technical Specifications

To serve as a proper technological 24/7 security guard, Nooie offers some impressive specs to keep everything in sight. This wireless doorbell cam uses a 2K resolution to provide crisp video coverage. The 158-degree field of view is smaller than other similarly priced doorbell cams, but it seemed a smaller trade-off for the camera depth and quality.

There was a small blind spot as a result, but the proper placement of the doorbell circumvented this issue almost entirely. By extension, the night vision coverage of up to 49 feet and passive infrared motion detection ensured even more control over my detection zone.

This doorbell cam comes rated at IP65, so it's considered weatherproof. While you won't want to submerge the unit in water, it was able to stand up to turbulent thunderstorms and rain blowback during its testing window.

For those concerned about device theft, Nooie also features an anti-theft siren if the device is removed from its backing. To prevent accidental triggers, you can also disable this protection at any point from settings.

Nooie Wireless Doorbell Battery, Set-Up, and User Experience

Nooie opted for a wireless design for its doorbell cam, so it needed a battery that could provide power for prolonged everyday use. Its doorbell cam utilizes a battery with a 10,000 mAh capacity. In terms of charging, it took a few hours of outlet charging to fill it to the max via the included USB-C cable.

The battery life will fluctuate depending on what settings you opt into. These hinge around the detection radius, so they can be tweaked towards your home or particular concern. Even when opting into the higher drain settings, the battery drain was never severe enough that it made me feel like I needed to opt into a lower-tier.

When integrating a new smart device into your home, it can be tempting to stick with the most common market device. Set-ups for these tend to be the most streamlined, and they do a good job at making the process painless. Even if you haven't heard of Nooie, it's worth noting that they put a lot of effort into the graphical guidance and intuitive functionality.

When you open the box, everything is clearly labeled. The included instructions cover the major bits, but visual add-ons such as a card explaining the angled mount and mounting foam sticker make for useful visual aids.

The Nooie app itself also tries to keep you from getting stuck during the set-up process. If you run into an issue and something isn't working as intended, Nooie made sure to include in-app tips on what to do next. Not having to immediately dip into a manual to troubleshoot was a time-saving user-friendly touch.

Similarly, learning the LED color patterns for both the doorbell and base station makes it easy to discern specific issues.

Placing and Utilizing the Base Station

The Nooie base station serves a variety of useful functions at the cost of an outlet plug. It provides dual-band Wi-Fi amplification, local storage, an ethernet jack, and plays your in-home chimes.

Placement near your router is more optimal if you have any issues connecting wirelessly. If this doesn't help, the included ethernet cable can circumvent connectivity issues by directly connecting to your router. You may also need to make some router setting tweaks if issues continue to occur.

At the side of the base station is its microSD slot. For those interested in local storage, the option to utilize up to 128 GB of space on a microSD provides some immediate benefits.

First off, there's instant freedom from cloud-based subscription models. Plus, if someone were to steal your doorbell cam, this in-home measure keeps your data safely stored. Furthermore, the short recordings don't take up much space, so you don't have to worry about your card filling up rapidly.

In terms of chime ringtones, there's a small handful of options. Nooie offers a total of four default chimes with one downloadable holiday addition. They're mostly forgettable, but they play well from the base station.

Mounting the Nooie Doorbell Cam

To help get your doorbell cam up and positioned perfectly, Nooie included two wall mounts (one flat and one angled fifteen-degree mount), screws (two concrete and two wood screws), and four anchors. The included mount foam sticker also makes it incredibly easy to visualize your placement prior to installation.

After installing your choice mount, attaching the doorbell is a simple matter. With the flat wall mount, I had no issue placing the doorbell cam. However, the fifteen-degree wall mount had a top locking mechanism that would stick.

While this was relatively minor and solved by feel, the added jostling of the device to properly lock and also remove the doorbell proved irksome.

To remove the doorbell, there's a small hole at the bottom of each mount that requires you to insert a small included pin. This releases the lock and allows you to safely remove the doorbell cam.

Nooie Doorbell Cam Monitoring

When you're ready to check in on your doorbell, the Nooie app makes it easy to manage the experience. Once you've selected your doorbell from the camera list and checked its current connection strength, you can either go live or view recordings from the timeline.

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From the live view, you can toggle between 2K and HD video depending on your connection. While also in live view, you can record video, take a photo, set off the alarm, speak via your device's mic, and mute the live feed. If you tap the view playback option beneath the icons, you can view prior recordings by date either in a timeline or list view.

If you do run into issues here, these typically are a result of your network strength. These present in the form of a laggy live feed, recordings not playing always, and the rare loss of connection with the doorbell itself. With a faster connection speed, the app works fluidly.

Responding With the Nooie App

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When someone presses your doorbell, the Nooie app will cut to a live call screen with a preview of what the doorbell cam sees. From here, you can answer for two-way talk, end the alert, or respond with a pre-programmed quick response or use a custom one that you've recorded for yourself. If you want to change your current custom quick responses, it's as simple as tapping the respective slot and recording over them.

In practice, the quick response can be immensely helpful if you don't have time to chat. The only unfortunate element is the name character limit for the custom responses is fairly short, so you can't go as detailed as the default messages.

Nooie Detection Options and Notifications

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Besides the basic doorbell press, the detection elements on Nooie's doorbell cam allow you to both adjust your battery life as well as any related notifications. The PIR (passive infrared) motion detection works at a default sensitivity of ten feet, but you can adjust it to either three feet or up to twenty feet to tweak your notification frequency. Human-shape detection is activated by default, so you won't have to worry about any simple motion triggering an alert.

During testing, I didn't run into false alerts, but the option to set your detection zone makes it even easier to save battery if you really want to narrow your view. To maximize your battery life, there's also the option to disable the use of PIR motion detection.

As for the actual detections, these get sorted into human detection and doorbell presses within the Nooie inbox.

Nooie Cloud Versus Local Storage

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One of the high points of the Nooie experience is paying for its cloud service remains completely optional. If you're after continuous recording and want to replay events from your video history, you can choose between Nooie's assorted plans. You either pay monthly or yearly while opting to either save videos for up to seven or thirty days before they're deleted automatically.

The service is backed by Amazon Web Service, and you can cancel at any time. If you pay for one month with seven days of video playback, it will cost you one dollar as their cheapest option.

If you need Nooie to capture every single possible moment, or you're especially worried about porch theft, then it doesn't cost much to try. In testing, local storage sufficed for my rural area with its set recording at intervals and overall sensitivity to any human detection. However, in a more populated or busy space, it's easy to see where 24/7 recording can appeal more.

 Third-Party Control With Nooie

The Nooie Doorbell Cam supports both third-party control with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. For testing, I had an Amazon Echo Show 8 on hand. To see a live feed, simply ask Alexa to show you the doorbell cam's name.

When pressing the doorbell, Alexa can play its own chimes and note that someone is at the front door. While the overall integration is relatively minor, it does offer more ringtone options and allow for an alert from another room away from the base station. So if you're in a larger home and you already have a supported assistant device, it's worth integrating your doorbell cam.

Should You Buy the Nooie Doorbell Cam?

Whether you buy the Nooie Doorbell Cam boils down to what features you value the most. For most, the excellent picture quality and superb detection make it an appealing option. However, possible deterrents include its wireless-only option, limited subscription benefits, and app glitches.

If you're after a more budget-friendly doorbell cam and can work with its limitations, the Nooie Doorbell Cam offers great value.

Nooie Smart Doorbell Cam Review: Stylish Home Security published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

[storiesof2018]

Every counter-play of defense that was encrypted within the breached algorithm had surgically imploded when Natasha unleashed the parasitic files-records of HYDRA operatives viper nests to global security networks; she was a rogue SHIELD operative that needed to go off-grid-to become an undetected apparition within the shadow-zones. She needed to claim a new charade of utilized identity-relevance away from the exposed crosshairs of Interpol, purchasing a synthetic relevance was a practiced device of survival.

Standing under the amber glow of a dock light, rigidly Natasha gripped onto the strap of a backpack, fixing her grayish-teal irises unwaveringly on a cargo ship."Well, that's convenient," she quipped, huskily, crouching low on her denim-clad haunches as dockyard patrol sentry neared her obscured proximity. Doing a gypsy-run was the only way to reach a harbor point in Prague-stock up on arsenals of passports and food rations while traveling back to the Ukraine city of Chernihiv.

Keeping herself poised with balletic-hone agility behind a rusted oil barrel, attentively, on instinctive reaction, Natasha keenly registered whimpering yelps in unison that puppishly resonating within an intact whiskey crate- definitely rejected stray pups. Throw-away orphans that starvingly calling out for their mother. Easing her leather gloved hand over the ratty blanket-sheathed crate with a tentative flex, she delivered a pacifying caress over the distressed bundle. " Easy little furballs, I'm just going to peak..."

She felt a brush of air blow up her neck. It was all the warning sign she needed to know to react in the face of a hostile encounter. But as she swerved to draw her Glock, something rock-hard slammed against her and sent her spiraling backwards on the balls of her feet. The crushing pain she felt in her right side was ignored as she surrendered her body to its natural instincts. Years of training as a ballerina gave her the grace and skill to use her own momentum to roll and back-flip onto her feet. Her teal eyes were hard and alert but they soon widened in muted shock once she realized who her assailant was.

"Derzhis' ot nikh podal'she (Stay away from them)." A harsh familiar baritone threatened with a look of pure unadulterated rage that beckoned to be unleashed. Steel-blue eyes glistened in the midday sun beneath a grungy black-hoodie, framed by wolfish locks. The whirring of a mechanical limb pierced through the tension as her attacker stood his ground and drew his knife. "YA znayu kto ty (I know who you are)." The Winter Soldier said. The woman he fought on the bridge, who escaped his gun. Perhaps more than any other he'd come across. He glanced at the whining pups in the box, feeling apprehensive.

Damnit...It was a blood-rushing mantra that was careening through her adrenalized veins, intimidatingly aware of the menacing prowess of his sashayed advances, a mechanized precision that hypnotically induced an electrified tenor of unwarranted dread in his marked prey. Brandishing deceptive readiness, Natasha dragged her boots to blindingly mirror the arcing-murderous precision of his combat knife that slashed a breadth over her shoulder, lithely Natasha angled her curvaceous form against oil drum at the breathless second his bionic arm explosively delivered a haymaker sweep with bestial-propelling momentum; his metallic fist cannoned sledgehammering force through dented steel with unhinged rabidness, grungily drenching her copper-auburn tresses with sludgy oil. "James..." she urged out, in terse pitch, chiding herself for not being armed with EMP taser disk."It's Natalia...I know you pulled Steve Rogers out of the river, you saved him, didn't you?

"Shut up!" He yelled. Her words registered but he willed himself to ignore them, telling himself this was some sort of trap and that soon she would be leading her comrades to him. They would imprison or kill him...and take away his precious litter. That thought burned him and he was consumed by the overwhelming need to protect what was more important to him than anything. He continued his relentless assault. Like a bull seeking to ram his prey, he charged and attempted to ram her against a box of shipping containers. She was graceful like a swan and leaped over him. Her legs wrapped around his head. A maneuver he was familiar with. He threw his weight back, causing both of them to topple over boxes and land hard on their sides. He didn't miss a beat over the fall and swung his fist towards her. She narrowly evaded him, causing his hand to puncture a crate. "You will not take me. You won't take them!"

Gripping onto a hinged variance of restraint, blurringly in a feverish rush, Natasha yanked the material of his threadbare hoodie chestnut wolfish tresses disheveledly curtained his stubbled jaw, her feverish cheeks as he gnashed his teeth against a throated snarl, ferally revealing a mutative length of canine incisors that alarmingly jutted undercurve his bloodied shapely-wide lips—a morphic possession that he couldn't stave down. A concussive strobe of white-heat bleared her vision, straining against a choke of breath, haphazardly, Natasha gazed back at the precious crate-he was viscerally attached to the distressed baby pups inside."Okay, that's interesting," she murmured, raspily, cobra-striking her lithe hand up to effectively seize his cybertronic arm-the rigged gravity of mercy was on a knife-edge. "What did Pierce do to you...?"

"What he did?!" He spat, feeling the aching pierce in his jaws that told him his canines were near to puncturing his gums and lips. He flicked his knife between his digits and made a charging upward swipe, managing to cut into her jacket, causing her to yell and attack with her own series of judo kicks. "Everything!" He cried. He had been unmade so many times over. His humanity and memories stripped from him. So much he didn't know, but that much to him was clear. He had no name. No family. No friends. All he had were the three pups crying out to him to come protect them. "Hydra took my identity, my freedom...my humanity!" He landed a punch across her stomach, causing her to gasp. She responded by swiping his legs out from under him, causing him to crash on his back, losing his knife. "Now you want to stop my mission...to protect my mission." Those pups were his only mission now, and he would not lose them.

Attuned to driving thrust of his robotic momentum arced to immobilize her into a destabilizing choke-hold in aggressive fruition as he remained locked into submission, with viperish speed, Natasha drove a hammer-strike precision of side kidney punch into tauten flesh his V-braced pelvis; a guttural roar achingly deafened out him as Natasha bodily staddled the athletic sleekness of her denim-clad thighs fluidly over bulkier-ridges of graven muscle chubbily bracketing a stockier heaviness of his garbed abdomen-a definite flex of protrusive strain bloatedly conveyed rampant-contractive urgency.

Against sweltry dampness of his unkempt tresses, his razored steel-aquamarine irises nakedly floored knifing heat that melded with stuporous desperation as he rackingly glanced down at the crate. "I'm guessing what's snug in here belongs to you?" she deduced in huskier pitch, ruefully, hearing the distressed volumes of hunger beckoningly amplify-the underground extensions of HYDRA's butcherous industry was fueled by an unslaked-infectious tantamount of spawning new breeds of compliance.

The vitality of resistance was amputated by sadistic methods of -psychological mania: electronic-convulsive tortures of being strapped into a mortified dentist chair while agonized-limbic- pulses forced memories into a catatonic drift. The Winter Soldier was a reactivated-brutish instrument of termination-a muzzled beast machine condemningly leashed under the merciless grip of his handlers. The scars of the Odessa bullet etched in her alabaster flesh was branded reckoning that she needed to evict, he pulled Steve out of the Platonic River with a measure of soldiery valiance. Maybe he was worth a chance of redemption. With an errant visage of trust, Natasha gestured her hand lithely towards his litter-babies. "Answer me this, are they your...sem'ya(Family)?"

Winter Soldier had not often been at the mercy of those he fought in the field. The brutal harsh training in the dregs of Russia had instilled in him an endurance that could only be beaten into a wild dog. His comrades that were on ice had been just as equally efficient as him, but they all lacked the experience and metal appendage that made him such a dangerous assassin. But now if they could see him, at the mercy of a Widow straddling his waist with his mission in jeopardy of undoing him. He was compromised-tampered with ever since Pierce had decided to turn him into an experiment for breeding hybrid super-soldiers.

"Yes. They are mine…" He finally admitted to the Widow's cool facade. Her teal eyes were hypnotic and spell-binding that he knew then just how dangerous it was for her to weave webs of seduction with them. He shifted his gaze uncomfortably, feeling a solemn absence from within as his thoughts carried him back to a night in Bavaria he had not forgotten. To an elusive feline that had stolen the other half of his heart and fled into obscurity. "They are all that's left of the man I was. They're apart of me...They need me." He grimaced and groaned at the twisting of his abdomen, feeling and dreading the sensation of his belly swelling. He needed them just as bad.

Keeping the delicate contours of her vixenishly sirenic features nonplussed, Natasha felt a neasous rush of heat mounting in his veins; a sloshing pulse of his swelled abdomen grew bloatedly tenser. Luckily they were in a backlit dead zone-the dockyard wasn't located in the grid of surveillance; General Thunderbolt Ross wouldn't be mobilizing a dispatched strike team without a breach from the video feeds. Dragging out a terse breath, Natasha shifted her collective gaze at the darkened warehouse-a disused stockpile of shipping parts-that would serve has their inventive advantage. "Okay..." she coolly murmured, easing herself off lycan Siberian assassin's bulkier form, as their shadowed gazes heatedly clashed with the stark rawness of clamorous urgency."Ready to play hide-seek, mal'chik-volk (wolf boy)?"

His confusion lasted a mere moment before he watched Widow turn and walk towards the darkened warehouse. Was this a ruse of some kind? He wondered if he should take his pups and flee while there was time. But that wasn't an option. The shipping vessel was their only way out of the country and he couldn't afford to miss that departure. Hesitantly he climbs to his feet and follows her into the warehouse, but not before bringing the box with him. He cradled it gently against his waist, murmuring sweet-nothings in Russian to soothe the fussy little furballs inside who were squirming with thirst. The warehouse was dim but the lights shining through the high-rise windows was enough to see their surroundings.

The Widow, Natalia stood facing him, watching him closely as he set his box aside and used his flesh covered digits to rub comforting circles into his baby pups. "Why are you here? How did you find me?" He asked her, unwilling to beat around the bush.

There was no ingenuous answer-the algorithmic program Insight had cripplingly demolished her practical safeguards-profitable information of SHEILD's hardware was being trafficked to the highest bidder with fixed interest. The coolness of her sterling arrow pendant was a token-a promise to keep her best friend-Clint-out of the inevitable crossfire with rogue SHIELD agents."Circumstances have shifted..." she murmured against gritted breath, watching his bionic hand splay a chaste graze of virile- tactile heat affectionately over the infant furry pudge-balls in soothing accord -a gracing touch of protective reverence. "...and now I'm looking over my shoulder just like you..."

"Like me?" The Soldier nearly scoffed at that. What little he knew about the Widow did not exclude the fact she was a renown hero with powerful friends backing her even with the collapse of SHIELD. He was an infamous myth made real and every government around the world would be after him once the details of his crimes were made clearer. He had no friends, no one to rely upon to see him through this. "You know too little about me. But I know you...Natalia." The name-that name. It resurfaced some memories he didn't know he still had, and made him realize where he had seen her before. "You were trained to kill your enemies. If there is anyone who you had cause to take revenge, it would be me. ...Why haven't you?"

He was one of the men who trained her in the Red Room until his handler Karpov put him back on ice. Severing the bond they were forging as mentor and student. He taught her to never hesitate when her target was in sights. How much had she changed? He put two bullets into her over their many encounters. Anyone else would have taken retribution.

Every pulse of traitorous resistance was contrasted against the crimson silhouettes of the Widow operative ranks; every orphaned ballerina-little swan- was surgically weaponized to tragically mature into combative-lethal sirens of incarnate bloodlines. The mansion estate fringed with black pines of Novgorod, Russia was a gladiatorial arena conducted by a power-mongering Lubyanka general- Vasily Karpov- who brutishly exposed verminous -defective weaknesses in his elite ranks, deadening echoes of mercy with paralytic shunts of nitrogen-solidifying bones into unbreakable granite. 'My nikogda ne lomayemsya (We never break)'...'

Little Natalia Romanova was discarded like an ineffective stray-betrayed by her adoptive father Ivan Petrovich when he traded her virginal innocence to demonic watchdogs of the Red Room; they butchered her to dance to the symphonic-dynamical cadence of a venomous seduction-a- morbid concerto of Tchaikovsky's swan lake-programmed sterilization. Those balletic-harmonic rigors of elegant graces weren't for staged performances at the Bolshoi. She was trying to purge out the demons that marked her 'red' ledger; all evidence of her blood-soaked -unforgivable past was digitalized to public viewing because of that shyster Alexander Pierce -she was now a rogue deviant, cut off the deceitful threads.

With her Glock holstered against the tone-suppleness of her back, Natasha understood the grounds of phantom trust always wavered, the grip of tension was rigged on high-voltage, she wouldn't disarm her resolve; on the snowy mountain ridges of Odessa. She betrayed her on instinctive-mechanical vigilance when she received the 'greenlight' protocol to escort a high-priority target for SHEILD's interest-a HYDRA convoy obstructed that mission-hailstorm staccatos of lethal-surgical precision delivered a gut-shot throb of white-heat in her lower abdomen-a paralyzing apparition of point-blank mercy for her to bleed out. 'Ty poshchadil, malen'kiy pauk ...(You're spared, little spider)'

"I know when the pull back the trigger," Natasha murmured in a thready pitch, a subtle quirk played over her voluminous lips as she fixedly gazed at the fussy baby pups. "Now I'm trying to keep a very effective promise that I can do the right thing..."

He didn't question for details. Not when the swelling in his stomach had become a gut-piercing discomfort that made him noticeably grimace. He couldn't put off the irrepressible need that came with his new form. "I have to…I have to…" He arched forward and held his stomach, stifling the groan of pain but unable to mask the rumbling bellow of his stomach to his curious observer. "I have to get out of America. Take them far from here…" The last bit of his resistance towards the Widow had evaporated and now he was looking at her with beseeching eyes, begging for aid he could not expect her to give. "I thought I could do this alone, but-" And then he tumbled forward, dropping onto all fours as he felt his skin crawl with something feral underneath ready to break free.

Bracing his atrophied weight into a planking stance over cement against penetrative-deadened traction possessing his virile-enhanced resilience, vertiginously underneath his tactical fatigues, the tautened-corded sleekness of his muscled-heavier thighs bulkily flexed with athletic torque as he became paralyzingly grappled into drags of a morphic fringe. Angling his head down shaggily his wolfish tresses hung grungily askew over his temples as his sensuous-bow lips widened agape; jutted extension of his incisor fangs curved with a predatory edge. In that breathless-alarmed wake of rampant confusion, as she painstakingly reeled back in conscious footing near a garage door, Natasha owlishly gazed at the pointed curves of his ears furrily sharpening into outstretched-bestial length as his throaty pants became gutturally coupled with quivery-ragged breaths."Vernis' (Get back)..." he choked out in Russian timbre, slurringly, tucked his cybernetic arm over the ballooning rotundity of his pudgier mid-drift-he was gruelingly plumping up as the whimpering cries of the baby pups grew heart-breakingly distressed. "Please you gotta...Arghh..."

His words had transitioned into a guttural growl that was animalistic-inhuman. The walls seemed to echo and shake in the midst of the intense spectacle that had Natasha watching with incredulity. She wasn't scared, not after witnessing such things as the Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk. But she was stunned by this unexpected variable that introduced itself with the Winter Soldier. His body began to shift and change before her very eyes. Bulking muscles of human athleticism were now covered with patches of growing fur that spread across his body like wildfire. His appendages bent and twisted, causing a sickening snap to be heard and a howl to escape his lips.

No longer bipedal but quadrupedal in his posture that resembled a wild animal. His steel blue eyes opened, and shimmered like a silvery moon in the darkness. His bared canines extended likes blades being unsheathed from their scabbards, glistening with drool. Moments passed and James Bucky Barnes-The Winter Soldier-was gone before her eyes. All that remained as an overgrown Siberian wolf laying exhausted on his side-spent of energy.

As her tactical instincts hastily steered her towards a garage door in urgent succession, Natasha haphazardly reached for a power control box, hammering her fist with bruising momentum into a button that automatically lowered the metal door. The nauseous of the rank of milk fluid wafted smellily off the taut swollenness chestnut-furred alpha's bloated girth. Rearing his canine off exhaustingly off a heap of his torn sweater, readily James shifted a massive hind paw, exposing his underbelly as one of the sightless baby pups raised her tinier head against the crate's edge, adorably whimpering for her-Daddy in squeaky pitch. "Do you trust me enough to bring them to you..." she urged, convincingly, feverous tension between them was skyrocketing to overdrive-propelling her into a chimeric throe."We both know how this plays out, right?"

"N-Need help…" Was all he managed to whine out. He didn't know if she could understand him in this form. His exhaustion prevented him from being more expressive in his speech and he was reduced to a weakened mess while his baby-pups cried out for him. His sight was blurry, but he could make out the distinguishable shape of Natalia standing close to him-close to his babies. His fight with her had taken what remained of his strength to endure the transformation, and now he had no choice but to trust her help that she now offered.

"B-Bring them…" He whined. His tongue hung loosely from his opened jaw, and the rise and fall of his belly felt like a crushing weight being pressed against him with each breath he took. He needed to release and nourish his off-spring.

The unwarranted barrage of detonative urgency was fused like a powder-keg, scrunching her nose against the vomitous reek glozing out of him, tactilely with evident swiftness of her cautious delicacy, Natasha vigilantly crouched a breadth near the crate with tentative ease, the smokiness of her grayish-teal irises roved over the dozy bundle of pudgy infant wolf pups fussily nestled over tactical kevlar of the Winter Soldier's jacket. The infant pups were heart-arrestingly precious within the cushioned snugness of their box; enchantingly adorned with cindery-chestnut downy fur as their clawed-paws furrily twitched on the blinded accord. "Well, that's kinda cute-" she quipped, jauntily under breath; driven by viscerous tenor of gentleness, she reached down to cradle a pup while kneading a featherlight caress of her gloved fingers over a shivering girl pup as her tinier snubbed muzzle nudged her palm. "It's okay malen'kaya milaya (little sweetheart), your safe with me..."

As the transformed soldier listened to Romanova's voice soothe his infant, he felt whatever lingering apprehension he still felt over this situation begin to fade. His weary eyes watched as she brought the youngest of his litter, Madison, over to him, with a gentleness he never would have expected from hands so used to wielding the cold grip of a pistol. Then again, he was not one to judge, given his own bloody history. "Spasibo (Thank you)." He rumbled to her as she set Madison down next to his swollen belly. Almost instantly he felt the gentle nipping and tugging that was uncomfortable at first but almost immediately, it paved the way for relief.

"The others, bring them too," he urged. His infant was feeding herself and Natalia didn't miss a beat as she wandered over to the box to retrieve his the eldest of his off-spring-the twins who entered the world at the same time.

Racking distress clashed tremored against her leather-clad arms, the pudgier male thrashed feistily against the voluptuous swell of her breasts, Natasha unerringly angled lithe contours of her forearm, as she cradled the daintier-tremulous female pup as she lowered to the canine alpha's grounded level. The luminous-voltaic sapphire of his irises glacially flashed banking menace as she consciously breached the heavier proximity of his exposed girth, shifting his twin pups against the milk-drench fur where the littlest of his litter suckled down hungrily."So I'm figuring that you've been hiding these furballs since Pierce cut you loose..." she coolly breathed, arching up an eyebrow, as she half-smirked, cannily. "He exchanged their lives for you to stop Rogers from deactivating Project Insight, he tugged on the right thread..."

"He wanted an army. He wanted a better leash to control me at the same time." The mention of Pierce triggered an onrush of anger inside of him. He let it fade away just as soon as it passed through him, knowing his litter could sense were so attuned to him, they could sense any negative energy he would be feeling. He murmured with a groggy tone as she set down both Aurora and Brennen beside Madison. The twins wasted no time and joined their youngest sibling in nourishing themselves. A pinch of pain shot through him by the roughness of his only boy who he reckoned would be a handful as he grew up. Paternal intuition, he believed. Giving birth to a litter of pups was something he believed next to impossible, but now he began to understand much about it over the past few months since they escaped Hydra surveillance. After pulling the Captain...Steve...from the Potomac River, the Soldier knew Pierce was finished. His only thought was getting back to the safe-house and collecting his pups from the men Pierce had guarding them. They'd been on the run ever since.

"He's gone now. But Hydra is still out there...I went to the museum for answers...That man, Steve...He called me "Bucky"." It felt like a question and not a comment. He looked to Natalia for any hint of recognition. She wore her mask well enough to disguise any answer.

The murmurous croakiness of his gravelly timbre left her warringly reluctant to answer as soul-gripping tension electrified her into an unwarranted deadlock; without breaking her impassive poise, flintily Natasha downcasted a steeled glance her backpack -a reachable vessel of collected secrets that she had attained with decryption-hacking skills of HYDRA's encoded-corrupted database. "Names and faces are pretty much what to expect when you break out of amnesic fringe...They're what you can't push away when you finally wake up..." she whispered, regretfully. "The poster boy-Steve Rogers- who you fought on the Helicarrier wasn't pulling a stunt, he gave up everything to pull you off Pierce's control switch..."

"And I almost killed him…" He felt remorse. It was a surprising feeling that hadn't come to him quite often when he walked on two feet. Remnants of his programming still lingered-the cold indifference to human life. Sentiment. Detachment. He was a machine whose only instinct was to execute and obey. That all began changing when that man-Steve-entered his crosshairs and called him that name that felt so familiar. But Steve had never tried to retaliate except out of self-defense, he never tried to kill him. He wanted to help him.

The Soldier never realized that. But the Wolf was affected-the Wolf felt something humane. Perhaps it had to do with the trio of furballs that touched his stagnant heart in a way he had never experienced before. "Is he looking for me?" He asked Natalia, wincing as he felt Brennen tug harshly after finishing.

"It's complicated," Natasha answered in brusque pitch, back at the Maryland cemetery, she had delivered Steve the classified 'eyes only' Soviet personnel dossier file labeled: NO 17 -James Buchanan Barnes from SHIELD vault records, grainy black-white photos of boyishly handsome GI soldier was clipped over Cyrillic notes handwritten by Armin Zola that contained lab results of a cryogenic experiment—relevant information would come with an infinite-grievous price. That ignited choice of direction would damnably usher a cavalcade reckoning of HYDRA demons-a new threat was always composed in the shadows.

Nonchalantly bracing the curvaceous svelteness of her crouched form, with disarmed precision, Natasha splayed her leather-sheathed palm deftly over velvet-like mahogany fur of the dwarfed female pup who clingily nuzzled her delicate muzzle into the sniper wolf's undercoat, as he tautly scrunched up his long muzzle, raggedly emitting throaty groans another onrush of uncurbed hunger as the chubbiest of the litter-the male- greedily nipped with pinching force over his damp fur."Now with your furry makeover, I'm not sure if you want Rogers to find you...?" she deadpanned, snarkily.

"Its too dangerous to be around me." He visibly deflates as his wolfish ears fall low. It was difficult to mask his emotions in this form that was more visceral than his human body. It was like being attuned to nature itself and nature never holds back. "I'll have the biggest target on my back. Unless I can disappear, I'll always be looking over my shoulder." It wasn't the life he wanted for himself-for his children who were born into this world to be used as tools-as weapons. Even if Hydra were on the run, it didn't mean others wouldn't be interested in the fruits of their labor. The thought made him both frightened and angry.

"Vse budet khorosho (Its going to be all right)." He murmured into the downy-scented fur of his off-spring as they curled and snuggled deeper into his warm side to hide themselves. He would kill anyone and anything that tried to take them from him. He could feel the Widow's eyes on him and met her stare evenly. "I know I have wronged you, Natalia. ...But I need your help."

For a tactive moment of unstinted attachment-sentiment- Natasha riskily graced her palm over his silvered frontal paw, accepting the call of her unexpected mission. The arcane networks of surveillance grids had marked the Black Widow down as a relevant target of interest—the dockyards would be compromised by sanctioned orders of dispatched STRIKE team. Harnessing up steeled poise, guardedly Natasha recognized his teeming urgency-the starkness of visceral need felt calibrated; rampantly she gazed into his grayish-aquamarine irises that mesmerically slivered alight with lucent intensity-whitish sapphire melding into bestial heat. She was undeviatingly aware of the resurgence of invincible -soldiery valiance-Brooklyn spirit- that clamorously rode through his bulkier canine form.

"I'm not someone to trust on the sidelines,mal'chik-volk (wolf boy), but your little furballs are hard to pass off...she murmured in throatier pitch, raspily, the smokiness of her teal depths fixed a trenchant cast over the enchantingly adorable baby pups cozily wedged against the jutted length of his girth-they weren't disposable-trade-off- leverage in the mordacious HYDRA crosshairs, they deserved a chance to embrace daybreak. Conveying a semblance of vestigial trust, she half-quirked the plushier swell of her voluminous lips into a coquettish smirk, blithely."So I guess this means you're bunking with me...?"

An hour later, the container freight bound for a key-port in France began to ferry its way out from the harbor with all 300 passengers and crew docked. If any of the passengers or crew were suspicious about how a radiant young woman, traveling alone, managed to get approval to bring on a caged Siberian wolf, none of them showed it. The few that did notice the peculiar scene were immediately apprehensive with the thought of traveling with a wild predator onboard. Together Natasha and Bucky stood near the guard-rail on the stern side of the ship as the departure horn rang out. They watched as the Washington harbor shrank further and further away from them. They had left behind one battle-field and were on their way to the next.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Cascading tonnage of goliathan waves deafeningly barraged against the cargo ship's hull, within the isolated ambiance of a bunking cabin, braced against a rickey-framed mattress, vertiginously in a blearing reaction, Natasha gripped onto a blanket half-draped over the lithe contours of her denim-clad thighs. After boarding the outbound freighter, with a practicable charade of sire-like persuasion-didn't require a combative shuffle of acrobatic-honed graces that she balletically performed in the engine room of the HYDRA-compromised Lemurian Star, Natasha was voluntarily given the moderate excess to utilize a storage cabin as her voyaging refuge.

Quashing down a flintier chagrin of existing like a stowaway fugitive without harboring a lank slate contingency, Natasha vexedly evicted the hinged impulse to contact Agent Clint Barton by the ship's radio transmission-to station a rendezvous point of location in Prague; knowing that after she condemningly breached the uplinked encrypted files-his retired identity was jeopardized; how many conditioned-genetically enhanced Sleeper Agents under Vasily Karpov's cold-blooded ranks were now activated on civilian ground. She had no more cards to deck out.

After squeezing her damp-tousled copper tresses knottily with a towel, Natasha had stealthily gathered vending-machine packets of Doritos, bottles of water and peanut butter-infused Nature Valley bars—enough to sustain a bulked-out nursing wolf's unquenchable-vexatious appetite.

Inadvertently sitting on the floor of the cabin, through her mechanisms of distrust, Natasha listened to whimpery -babyish squeaks emitting crankily from the sightless pups, Natasha fixed all her attentive focus on the babies cushily nestled against the slumbering PSTD chestnut-furred sniper wolf's bushy tail while he was slackly laden on his side- groggily captive in deep-seat thralls of unstaunched exhaustion. James Barnes was no longer anesthetized to the deadened frequency of infectious static that devastatingly pulsed from the soul-razing tentacles of HYDRA.

Removing a package of Doritos out of her backpack stash, Natasha effectively popped the bag open as the powder-cheesy aroma potently sailed through the dense air, evoking her furred bunk mate-HYDRA's mechanized ghost operative- to noncommittally release a throaty gnarl as he muzzily shifted his deadweight over a makeshift nest of cloth tarps, viscerally aware of his baby pups dozily nestled against his swelled girth."Well, you must be hungry, given how much the little pudge-balls pack in, huh?" she coaxed out, huskily in a snarkier undertone, holding up a chip with tantalizing ease."Nothing fancy, since we don't have that luxury on this free-pass cruise..."

The wafting aroma of the tasty snack almost had the wolf drooling with an unabashed hunger that had been steadily growing for hours since their voyage had begun. To ignore the tell-tale pinching of discomfort, Bucky...He now thought of himself as Bucky-it felt right to for some reason. To ignore his hunger, he had gotten some much needed rest to regenerate his strength. He had been on the run for weeks with his infant furrballs, rarely sleeping, rarely eating. There was also the fight he had endured with Natalia at the docks which only served to heighten his already ravenous state of need. He sniffed and growled lowly as he took in the sight of the triangle shaped chip that dangled in front of him.

"I've gotten by with far-less." He raises his snout and plucks the cheesy chip into his mouth, savoring the vivid taste that left only hungry for more. He didn't ask. He was far too set in wish to not be an inconvenience to his unlikely companion who helped him board this freighter. But it appeared Natalia had other ideas as she promptly dumped the rest of the bag of chips onto surface in front of him. "You're being too generous with me, Natalia. ...Thank you." He spent the next few minutes finishing off the cheesy chips that softened the hunger in his gut. She said nothing the entire time as she lounged back in deep thought, her only movements being the periodic bites she took from her nutrition bar.

The only sounds he could hear where the distant roars of the tides and the chattering of crew members and passengers moving outside their cabin. Their cabin for the most part was spacious enough for only one person with a single cot, chair and night-stand. But it was also big enough for someone to allow their pet to stay in as well. How convenient for him, despite having to sleep on the thin carpet on the floor. He wasn't about to complain, he really did have to survive with far-less in the past.

"How long do you think this trip will be?" He finally asked her once the silence began to become awkward-at least for him.

With an inscrutable flit of her grayish-teal irises, Natasha was underlyingly aware of the predatory heat radiating off the ensorcelled assassin-the Winter Soldier's beastlier hard-edged muscles—a revamped ferocity that wouldn't be contained in the morphic dregs of bestial fusion. Ghostlily echoes of their unforgiving past throbbingly raked over the bullet-scarred flesh of her leather garbed abdomen, like the surgical-driven precision of a Red Room scalpel, irrevocably cutting her deep. 'Ty ne mozhesh' bezhat' vechno, malen'kaya Natal'ya (You can't run forever, little Natalia)...'

Against feigned rapt of tenser vigilance, as she felt the carbon steel of her Glock against her booted calf, Natasha unmovingly became electrified in compromised tenfold, as her palm reactively splayed over her curvaceous side-another grievous callback of her underscored vendettas. She to foster onto a 'no-strings' attached reality-a pave a new road of salvation before 'teammates' close to vest became dead reckonings on her ledger. "If everything holds out we'll be docking at Port de Grenelle in three days...Tops, " she murmured in gritted pitch, offishly, as the baby pups squeaked demandingly in hungered unison.

Coolly she quirked up an eyebrow, registering the hefty sniper wolf's disgruntled moan, his canine muzzle stretched grimacingly wide against feverish panting of shuddery breaths, as heavier-intensified barrages of milk- sloshing contractions; nothing availed to his effusive resistance. "Hold on," she urged, placidly, watching his furred brow aggressively pinch while she clutched a frayed edge of a blanket to drape over his jutted underbelly-he needed a grounded semblance of privacy. The frosted aquamarine of his depths stormily lanced knife-point intensity, contrasting against his slitted pupils-he was in protective-mode, defensively aware of the vulnerability of his pups-also the convenient security of Natasha's untampered proximity. "Don't get used to my charitable tactics," she retorted, pointedly. "I'm only playing nice because of your cute fireballs..."

The mention of his pups brought about a warm feeling within the Siberian wolf whose life had changed drastically over the past several months. Life as a Hydra instrument of death was no life at all. It was empty and cold, giving him no cause to think and feel anything beyond the orders he was given and the pain of injuries he would endure. But then Pierce decided to play god. To try and create something fierce and undeniably vicious to give Hydra an advantage over the super-powered heroes that were emerging in the world. Through his blood and genetics, three wolfish off-springs were born.

The moment they entered the world, something inside of the Soldier had shifted-the the manacles that bound him to Hydra's will had shattered irrevocably as his eyes first set sight on the three impossibly small life-forms that were birthed from his wolfish body. He had become not a 'soldat', but 'otets'-a father.

"I think they like you." He said after a moment of deep thought. It would have seen like a polite compliment just for the sake of levity, but it didn't occur to him until now just how much at ease his pups were around the redhead Avenger. Over the past few weeks, they trembled in their boxed-bed he kept them while around strangers. It was only his presence that soothed them. But around Natasha, they were calm-relaxed. It made him develop a new appreciation for his old-time student and former rival.

The feathering drift of her lithe fingers over satiny-velvet fur hushedly captured that instinctive awareness in that addictive breach of connective heat with the smallest of his restless litter; a wondrous fusion that she couldn't ride out. The ephemeral—chaste pressure irrevocably fused a soul-branding revelation—the murderously deceptive siren-the Black Widow conceived out of the Red Room stowed a heartbeat underneath hardcore layers granite.

Drags of unredeemable memories screechingly crescendoed a hellish volume of a damning pandemonium—innocent ghosts of orphans that morphed into banshees-a ghoulish requiem of symphonic-macabre vengeance. Blood always had a price. "I'm not good with kids..." she admitted, harshly in a condemning breath, wrenching her hand back from the squeaking pup as if her caress was poisonous. "If you peek at my file, you'll see a video link that SHIELD buried..." A straining tightness flexed evidently over her delicate jaw. "I guess it wasn't deep enough..."

"We both have a dark past. I am not one to judge." He uttered. There was much about his former life as James Bucky Barnes that he didn't remember. But the screams of death he invoked haunted his dreams like wailing ghosts. He remembered every life he took, innocent and guilty. It took insurmountable strength for him to not succumb to his guilt that begged him to sink into self-destruction. He held on. The three pups, two who were now curled beneath him, gave him newfound life and purpose. The third of his litter, the youngest had drifted and rolled closer towards the redhead who still looked torn.

"Go on. ...I trust you, Natasha." He urged her to give into her greater inclination to pick up young Madison, and not allow the cold darkness of her past to rob her of a newfound connection.

"You sure about this...?" A tenuous raze of warred hesitance electrifyingly deadened her in those rigged seconds of genuine, full-measured trust, the young-exhausted- alpha painstakingly nudged his baby girl with an affectionate variance of cherishing reverence, urging the determined pup to stumblingly wobble closer to her opened reach. A euphonious fringe of hope quenched out the infective blood of her slaughterous-unforgiving past of being a penetration Widow operative-a battle-tested marionette of seductive charades who had her strings broken when Clint Barton's hawk-precision arrow tore into her sterilized reality. He violated his 'green-light' orders -staking down a compromised price with the dynamical exception of friendship-humanity. She had Fury-Steve Rogers, but Clint was always a callback of a heartbeat if she fell too deep.

A feverous rush cravingly answered that beckoning cadence of whisper-soft acceptance he tellingly conveyed with a broader-fanged smirk, readily, Natasha shaped her palm over Madison's daintier-angelic form, adoringly cradling the infant pup against her leather-garb chest with a contrasted tracery of pacifying heat as she angled her forearm, just enough to breathlessly watch tiny canine eyes flit open to squinty reveal decadent brandy irises that heart-stealingly gleamed with rebellious vibrancy -thievish fire. "krasotka( beautiful girl)..." she murmured whisperingly, in Russian timbre, accelerated-joyous- euphoria pulsed infectiously within the cabin, as the baby pup squeaked in melodious pitch, snuggling comfily as she glanced up at the blank-faced amazement tearily alight in her Daddy's cool -unblinking-aqueous depths."Vy lyubimy, malyshka(You are loved, little sweetheart)..."

Bucky's surprise at little Madison finally opening her eyes was matched by the shock he felt as Aurora and Brennen had begun to do just the same. It was subtle at first-a wrinkling of their snouts as their eyelids squinted in their shut-state. "Eto normal'no (Its okay)..." he rumbled while nuzzling their tiny paws and kissing them. A moment passed and then their beady eyes finally opened beneath his tender gaze. A vivid shade of blue, full of youthful innocence and confusion, it was a precious thing he vowed to love and protect. "Hello, little guys. Daddy's been waitin' for you."

Their paws flayed and tapped against his shoulder as if they were being begged to be picked up. It was a tender moment that was unlike any he'd experienced before, and Bucky could not help but grin with delight. His chestnut furred tail wagged and his eyes softened to a dim but lively shade of blue. "Good to see you too."

The boyish drawl of his roughen-timbre croakily breached her passive demeanor, as she delicately cradled little Madison against her leather jacket, Natasha felt neutralized by the dosage of hope-redemption this unabandoned connection-nexus had injected her; nothing flatlined between them. With a cautious flit of her grayish-teal irises, she gazed sidelong at the emotionally-compromised alpha-a Soviet beast machine who agonizingly outlasted HYDRA's traumatic-electrified raids of mind-butchering amnesia. A white-noise of concessive static of Zola's nightmarish-surgical hardware that deadened out his tenacious resistance, mutating cavalcades of his dispatched targets' faces into bloodied apparitions under his sniper-vision-mechanicalized wraith of the Sleeper ranks wasn't damaged goods...He broke out of the kill-switch programming because he was granted a new mission-relevance of daybreak.

"Get some rest..." Natasha urged, instructively, easing down the dozy mahogany-furred pup tentatively against his massive silvered forepaw. "I have a rain check with a peanut butter sandwich..." A devious smirk naughtily quirked up her plushier crimson lips. "Can't let those fellas' out there be disappointed..."

[nitemice]

Hey, here's my latest post over on my main blog:

In 2017, I only had one New Year’s resolution: to document a highlight for each and every day that year. Not only did I managed to keep the resolution, I’m still doing it to this day, and I can’t see myself ever stopping!

Tracking my daily highlights for over a year has been a really interesting experience and I’m pretty proud I’ve been able to “not break the chain”. It’s also an idea I think more people could benefit from, so in this post I’m going to try to give you a bit of a rundown of the what, why and how of daily highlights.

What is a ‘daily highlight’?

Basically, at the end of each day, I take stock of everything that happened that day, and I chose a specific moment or occurrence that was the highlight. That is, the best part of the day.

What does that look like exactly? Well, it could be anything! Something simple like “biting into a mushroom burger”, or silly like “noticing a woman whistling to herself as she walked down the street”, or specific like “capturing the flag twice in a single game in ‘Overwatch'”, or vague like “having a weird conversation with colleagues”, although I generally try to make it as specific as possible. To help with this, I will often write some extra notes to give a bit more context to the situation, so it’s easier to remember and understand when I come back to it.

Sometimes, if I’m struggling to think of something, I use the prompt “What moment from today do I wish could have lasted longer?” That’s not exactly what I’m looking for, but it makes for a good starting point if I’m stuck.

Conversely, some days I know my highlight immediately after it happens, and will write it down straight away. Even on those days, I will review the day at the end, to make sure nothing else came later to trump what I already wrote. If there was something, the original highlight usually just becomes a note of the usurping highlight.

When multiple highlight-worthy events happen in a day, I nominate one as the primary highlight of the day and make a note of the rest. This allows me to keep each highlight fairly specific, rather than writing something broad or vague to try and cover everything.

Why do this?

Documenting a daily highlight for the whole of 2017 was an idea that I had somewhat in the heat of the moment, late on the last day of 2016. But it was a culmination of a number of thoughts that had been bubbling in my mind throughout the year.

Earlier in 2016, I had been reading a number of articles about the benefits of journaling, and it intrigued me. But I didn’t want to commit to such a high level of detail and it seemed pretty time-consuming, so I put that thought on the back burner. Also around this time, a friend of mine began meaninglessly documenting the event of her day on her digital calendar. She wasn’t writing down highlights, so much as just blocking out how she’d spent her time that day in a very broad sense. When I asked her why, she didn’t really have any sort of explanation except that she’d started and didn’t want to stop. These two ideas together served as the inspiration for my daily highlights resolution. I decided to draw a line somewhere down the middle: not full-on daily journalling, but not just recording events without meaning.

One of the aspects of journaling that most interested me was its use as a memory tool for later reference and reflection. Recording a highlight each day gives me a date-stamped list of memories that should be easier to recall, and make it easier to remember when things happened. My memory is not the best, and I hoped writing things down like this might help me to improve, or at the very least give me a tool to lean on when someone asks me what I did last week. Writing down a daily highlight also forces me to take a moment each evening to reflect on the day. It’s a step towards a more mindful way of living, appreciating the good part of each day, rather than just focusing on the things that didn’t turn out.

The most enticing aspect of my friend’s time-blocks calendar was the potential for statistics. With all that data on how she was spending her time, she could work out what she was doing often or rarely. The only problem with this is because everything she did was recorded, it’s hard to derive any meaning from it. By recording a highlight each day, the value of the event is intrinsic: they are all the best part of the day. Therefore it’s easy to know what you want to do more (or less), given the statistics.

Another side-effect of daily highlight tracking that I didn’t really foresee was the way it encourages me to get out and do stuff every day. If it’s nearing the end of the day, and I haven’t done anything highlight-worthy, I feel a push to try and do something exciting. That said, the reverse can also happen when a clear highlight occurs earlier in the day, muting my motivation to do anything to compete.

How do you do it?

Being date-based, I decided that a digital calendar would be the perfect way to document my daily highlights and keep them organised. So I created a new calendar in my Google Calendar setup, just for this purpose. With this, I also set up a daily task on my phone with a reminder notification at the end of the day. This is to make sure that when I go to bed, I remember to jot down a daily highlight, if I haven’t already.

For each highlight, I create an all-day event, with a headline summary of the highlight as the event name, as well as an optional location and any further notes I may need for context in the body of the event.

Using this system gives me a lot of functionality and flexibility for little to no effect. For example, I get cross-platform access and cloud synchronisation, meaning I can add and view daily highlights from any of my devices, although I mostly use my phone. That said, it does have some shortcomings. For example, being in a Google Calendar, it’s hard to get at the raw data, making things that I’d hoped to do, like statistics, much more difficult. For now though, it’s the simplest and best way I’ve been able to come up with, and is what I would recommend to anyone interested in adopting the practice.

Some interesting statistics

After (over) a year of highlights, I have plenty enough data for deriving some interesting statistics, so below are some stats that sum up my 2017:

45% of highlights were at home

25% were at work

4.5% were travelling between work and home

16% were at one-off locations (i.e. places that only appeared once)

20% of highlights involved watching TV

14% involved video games (mostly playing, but also watching)

13% involved doing my job

12% involved having conversations with friends/others

10% involved eating

9% involved music/dancing

4% involved shopping

Less than 1% involved alcohol

79 days (22%) had multiple highlights

Hopefully this post has made clear what I’ve been doing, and why. And maybe it’s even convinced you to take up the challenge of documenting your own daily highlights. If anything is unclear, or if you have any questions or thoughts about any of this, leave a comment below, or drop me a note via the contact page.

TTFN,

Nitemice