#red solider

It’s alright Scout, you’ll get there!

original \/

(art by @dany-blog1)

Pairing: Winter Soldier x Red Guardian

Warnings: sexual references.

Summary: Four years after meeting the Winter Soldier, Alexi Shostakov finds himself face to face with the man he once knew. SHIELD assigns him the mission to find and liberate him.

Word Count: 2k

notes: i get spicy. im no good at it. i advance the plot i think? i'm genuinely spitballing everything. it's terrifying.

unedited. shoutout to my readers on ao3.

follow the tag, #a mission of liberation if you're following the story along! :)

┌── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──┐

Alexei was never good with mornings, but after the dream he just had, he was having an even worse, more confusing morning. 

Even mentioning “The Winter Soldier” was tough without his face erupting into a deep red blush that covered his entire face. 

“And he is not a good friend…um,” he blubbered, the entire council looking at him with confused and critical looks, one of them even trying to cover her smile with her hand. “I mean, he is my friend, but my friend was brainwashed again.” 

Bill pointed at the file that Alexei had in his hand, his eyebrows furrowed deeply into his face as he made several vague gestures that all amounted to “use the damn file that I spent all night making you dipshit!”, so, Alexei opened the file and noticed the sweat from his hands had soaked it in a perfect hand print. 

“Um,” Alexei paused, wiping away his sweat with the sleeve of his thrifted suit. His palms were very sweaty when he woke up as well, but not from nervousness. No… it was… something else. 

He gulped hard, trying to ignore the pounding in his ears that prevented him from reading the information on the file. The file kept saying “friend”. But now, it was confusing. Echoes of his dream blared through his head like microphone feedback. 

“You know, as much as I like that red suit on you, I think it’d look much better on the floor.”

“My friend is not The Winter Soldier-” I think I want him- “My friend is who was under the flesh of a killer. Someone who remembered Coney Island. Who I like to believe is the coney island hero. I know he is someone.” someone I want in my bed.

“Alexei, are you alright?” one of the very serious people at the meeting table asked, noticing how sweaty and unsure he looked while reading off the file. “You look… flushed. Are you running a fever?” 

“Talk to me, Alexei. How do you think my arm would feel pinning you down on this mattress? Would you like that?” The Winter Soldier was shirtless, the scars from his arm glistening under a warm light. Alexei didn’t know where he was, but he knew that he had shaken his head yes without a second thought. 

Has he always been this way?  

“I’m fine- I just get… stage fright.” 

Alexei let out guttural noises as The Winter Soldier tangled his metal fingers in his hair, pulling his head back and biting into his neck, using his other arm to grip his thigh. He liked it. 

The room was silent as Alexei nearly fell off his balance, accidentally dropping the file as he tried to push the memory of quite possibly the most confusing dream anyone might ever have. What did it mean? Was it an allegory for a brutal fight that would soon befall them? 

If that was the case, which it probably was, then why was it giving Alexei a hard-on during the most important moments of his life? 

“We just need a testimonial, please. Nothing fancy,” a blonde woman said, rubbing her temples with black polished nails, nearly sinking into the table in front of her with exhaustion.

The person sitting next to her spoke up, a man in a suit a million times more expensive than Alexei’s. “Do you care about your friend? If I were you, I would be very focused and driven.” He spoke in a very deep but matter of fact voice. 

When they thought Alexei wasn’t looking, the blonde whispered to him, very loudly, “remember the fucking baby we had to deal with three years back? I’d kill to relive that shitty disaster.” the man clearly tried not to laugh at her joke, but he was terrible at it. 

“This is veryyyy funny. Let me tell you about The Red Room. You all have heard of it. Do you know who was there? Me. I was there. I saw it all. Everything. Do you ever have nightmares? I don’t- I’ve seen them all with my own two eyes. The Winter Soldier has been brainwashed,” he shouted, his strong russian accent grabbing the attention of everyone in the room. He usually tones it down, but this situation called to let it free. “They killed the soul of the man underneath, who had a family. A mother. How would you like it if someone took your child and made them kill innocent people everyday? You Americans must think brainwashing is sedation.. I’ve heard screams of people after they remembered. I didn’t know until after. So yes, this is important. I feel guilty. But most of all, I feel angry.” 

After his bout of rage, one last echo of his dream flew through his head like a dart. “это мой хороший мальчик.” 

“That’s my good boy.” 

The room was deathly quiet as Alexei picked up the last pages of the file off the floor and threw it on the desk, looking around with shame for his outburst. Just like a child would do. Only more proof of his immaturity that had been the very thing he blew up for. 

Finally, the silence broke. “Hi, Sandra Pope, I’d like to formally apologize for their arrogance. This is hard. And yes, we never knew that he was an unwilling killer or a victim of abuse. This case is important, and I’ll be sure we’ll all work very diligently and tenaciously,”said a tall, shiny dark skinned woman in a pencil skirt. “I think we’ll read the file and gather some questions. But I think it’s important to focus on the mission instead of the nitty gritty details until absolutely necessary, alright?”

Alexei took a seat at the table, doing his best to hide his very obvious faux pas. “When I first met him, he was on a mission to kill Howard Stark. I caused him to fail, because I am exceptional fighter, I don’t know why- but I know what he was after. The serum. That will lure him in. Would it be possible to set up a coup?” 

“That is very valuable information, it must be easier to share whenever you aren’t being stared down by our most serious collection of Agents,” she smiled brightly. “Jackie, how about you get started on that?” 

Jackie, the blond who had insulted him earlier, looked up in shock. “I… that’s not my expertise? Sorry, I’m not sure I can do that. I specialize in tactical force selection, not… coups.” 

Sandra scrunched her chin. “Then it looks like you need to branch out to more areas of expertise; it’s always good to learn and grow past what we already know, isn’t that right? You always seem to think so, very publicly too,” she declared, not once making eye contact as she looked over Bill’s file. 

Bill had a virtually unreadable expression after the entire ordeal, but seemed pleased that his file was finally being read. 

“Fine,” Jackie said. “I will plan the coup. We’ll send in the Red Guardian. I also must apologize, Mr. Shostakov, you’ve formed a great basis for a genius plan. I look forward to our partnership going forward and joining you in saving whoever is behind the winter soldier.” Whatever she was saying, it was clearly ingenuine and dry. 

“Okay. Let’s start now,” Alexei smiled. “No time to waste, right?” 

Despite the angered but obnoxiously composed face of his new reluctant colleague, they made the plan to trap the Winter Soldier right there, for 4 hours, only briefly stopping for other meetings. But there was one problem that they all quietly elected to ignore for the time. 

Getting Howard Stark to repeat what almost got him killed. And properly leaking the information. 

Clearly, someone in The Red Guardian’s circle somehow knew exactly where he’d be, but also, in The Winter Soldier’s, someone knew exactly where Howard Stark would be. Howard would need to be dropping hints about the coup and hope that it gets to the ears of whoever leaked it the first time. 

The mole couldn’t have been someone in the lab, because they’d know how to make the serum.

This coup would be their only chance. There’s only so many times Howard… Wait. 

“What if he makes multiple shipments to one place? They’ll figure it out and assume that they can raid the location- then we will ambush,” Alexei blurted, the idea on his train of thought too good to forget, as he often did that more times than he’d like to admit. 

“They’ll line up the dates Howard Stark isn’t seen… and they’ll most likely note his license plate, no doubt it’s being tracked,” Jackie shot back, raising an almost invisible blonde eyebrow as she threw down a file on the desk, biting her fingernails as she thought it over. 

Sandra cleared her throat, catching the attention of the two tired Agent’s. “Yes, but you’re forgetting, we need Howard Stark on board for this or else it won’t work. Someone in his inner circle had to have leaked his whereabouts, and without their knowledge…” 

“Plan goes boom, hope goes down harder,” Alexei finished, leaning back in his black office chair, slightly rocking back and forth, a single strand of his brown hair falling in front of his eyes. “So, who wants to do the recruitment? I don’t want to talk to capitalist pig. I am no longer communist of course, but…” 

“He’s a piece of greedy shit who profits from genocide? Yeah, trust me, I know,” Jackie said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “He makes me want to go full marx, just for personal spite.” 

Someone snored louder than a chainsaw  in the corner of the messy room. 

Everyone turned to look at Bill Foster, who was slightly drooling, a drip of slimy saliva slowly traveling down his chin as Sandra stifled a giggle. “Guess we know who should make the recruitment then, huh? Since we all know how terribly adamant he is on perfection…” She noted. 

“Let me awaken the beast from his peaceful slumbers a payback for… something he probably did to me before but I have forgotten and sworn to get revenge for. I just have a feeling,” Alexei volunteered, a big smile plastered on his face as he walked up to the chair where Bill was sleeping unpeacefully. 

He paced around him, his fingers under his chin as he tried to think of a clever way to wake him up. Frantically, he grabbed his shoulder and yelled, “I think I want to be communist again- would you be okay with that or do I have to move back to Russia?” 

The next day, they all waited by the phone while coming up with alternate plans if Howard Stark didn’t agree. None of them quite amounted to the near perfect one they had devised that would be terribly tragic. Everyone knew the odds were low. 

They’d practically already moved on from the mere mention of it while Bill met with him at his home in New York city to propose the very dangerous and risky plan to him. 

An explosion of turbulent emotions filled the room as the phone rang, making everyone's hearts leap from their chest.

A mission like this, challenging and very rewarding, was one that everyone sought out- to fail so quickly would be a disgrace. But Alexei didn’t care about bragging rights or anything else of the sort, he just cared about getting back his… his friend. 

Sandra looked around the room with a grieved look veiling her sharp features, wiping her hands on her pencil skirt before picking up the phone. “Hello, this is Sandra Pope, who is this?” Pause. Surprise. “Howard Stark?” 

Pairing: Winter Soldier x Red Guardian

Warnings: none, so far.

Summary: Four years after meeting the Winter Soldier, Alexi Shostakov finds himself face to face with the man he once knew. SHIELD assigns him the mission to find and liberate him.

Word Count: 1.9k

notes: i definitely have a more coherent vision for where i want this to go, and also, i think this is some of my more vibrant writing for some reason. it might even be too wordy. As always, this is unedited. and now i know how to spell alexei.

Also, I still am not sure exactly how tumblr works. But i do know I LOVE it here.

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

The sound of red dodge balls bouncing off of the gym floor echoed almost a thousand times over as the children whooped and hollered during the game that Alexei usually loved to play. Under his smile he had to plaster on like paint that day, he wondered if this would be the last time he saw it. 

And how much he was going to miss it if he failed. 

Living a double life wasn’t easy, especially one this dangerous. He didn’t like to think about what would happen if he was tracked down by someone who wanted vengeance and decided to use the kids as a ploy against him. 

Alexei seemed to get along better with kids than adults, and sometimes, many times, he wished that wasn’t so. He was often not taken very seriously. Of course, this always worked in his favor- as no one would expect the childish man to be a very dangerous ex-communist super-soldier on the weekends. 

But he could sense that with this mission, everything could change. 

“Alright kids, gather 'round’, your favorite teacher has something to say!” Alexei said enthusiastically in his faux american dad accent after blowing the whistle to signify the end of their game. It wasn’t done with great joy on his end. 

The sweaty, stinky, disheveled kids wiped their wild hair from their cherry red foreheads and slunk down to the ground, heaving as they tried to keep their eyes on the not-so-favorite teacher. How was a super soldier supposed to know when kids are overworked?

Once they were all settled, Alexei pulled a chair in front of him, straddling it’s blue plastic as he attempted to spin a rouge dodge ball on his fingers, brutally failing and knocking a kid in the face. “Oh, dear- I am so sorry- Um. Anyways. You all will be getting a substitute tomorrow. I know- I know-” he paused, holding up his flat palms, “do not cry. I have to visit my poor sick mother in… Nebraska. She’s ill with fevers and chills and the tummy…” 

The children all gave an array of expressions- from overjoyed to grossed out.  

“Don’t let this discourage you, children, I will be back by Monday, and then, schools are out for the summer! You can still play dodgeball on your own because I know that’s what you’ll all miss most-” he rambled, trying not to meet eyes with the poor girl he’d accidentally hit with the dodgeball, so much so that he didn’t notice a member of school staff appear behind him. 

The woman cleared her throat, causing Alexei to jump violently, knocking over the chair he was sitting on and assuming a fighting pose, making all of the kids roar with laughter when he almost slipped. Even the wicked looking woman cracked a bit of a smile- but Alexei knew it wasn’t a compassionate one. 

Sure, being the fool was great for undercover, but he didn’t know how much more of this he could take. 

“Bob Toledo…?” she inquired, her voice flat, staring at him coldly through her small glasses. “your friend is here, he says it’s urgent. Something about coney island. And that’s not just me paraphrasing, he said “something about coney island”.” She held up two slender fingers and made quotation marks. 

“Tell him I’ll be there in a second, I’m telling my kids goodbye!” he smiled, turning back to the kids, picking up the chair he knocked over. “Now- like I was saying… I know very well the thing you’ll miss the most is these talks of ours, where I share a good life lesson. This is a good teaching moment, kids, because sometimes, people you love… they get sick-” 

“I told you not to come in here!” The staff member scolded, cutting off Alexei once more and clicking her heels past him urgently toward the entrance. 

Alexei turned his head to see his friend, one of the key members in his reckoning only a few years ago, Bill Foster, walking through the door, his face grave with urgency as he ignored the warnings of the staff member. 

“Bob, we need to go, now,” Bill pleaded, his composure stiff with focus as the staff member continued to talk about rules and regulations. “You’re running out of time… it’s only a matter of hours until…” 

Alexei smiled, politely, nodding his head toward the kids, who now all had the same expression, months wide like a fish, true fear in their eyes at the events that were unfolding among their very young eyes. “Alright kids, have a nice weekend!” 

Once they were walking through the early May sun in the shouldering hot parking lot, Bill began to express the matters of his concerns more deeply, although Alexei should’ve spent more time explaining that his mother was going to be fine. This would not look good to the principal if she found out Alexei was giving the children mortality epiphanies. 

“We were working on luring him in, and maybe making some deals with people on the outside, but it turns out, he was spotted in upstate New York not long ago. We’re still investigating, as he disappeared without a trace, typical, but you need to be ready for whenever he’s seen again. Prepare an ambush,” He rambled, brushing off his coat. 

“No, we need to lure him out again! We must think smarter, smarter than we have ever thought before,” Alexei exclaimed. “And before Monday. You have made a scene, Agen- I mean, Mr. Foster, they will be suspicious of me and then I will lose my perfect American dream! That would be an American nightmare.” 

Bill Foster looked at him suspiciously, opening the door to his car after pressing the key fob to unlock it. “We’ve been looking for this man for about twenty years now, Alexei, we can’t just “think harder” about it.” 

After nearly bumping his head on the door frame of Bill’s car, Alexei jumped into the seat, digging a snack from the pocket of his cargo shorts. “Yes, but, you are forgetting something…” He said in a sing-song voice, returning to his russian accent, peeling back the wrapper on his dunkaroos. “You did not have this brain.” 

At that, all of his dunkaroos flung from the packaging during a wave of clumsiness and all over Bill’s car. “Okay. I’m not sure… That would be of much help…” He said, looking at Alexei with some form of… disgust, barely. Alexei noticed and continued to inspect his reaction as he started the car. 

“I am just excited, no need to insult my intelligence… Especially not about something you know absolutely nothing about,” Alexei said, using his arm to sweep some of the cookies from the dash and back into the package. “And, what do you know-” he poked, slipping back into an American accent, “-it’s in the field we’re specializing in.” 

Bill raised an eyebrow at him, stopping the car as he backed out of his parking spot.  “Are you implying you know something about the Red Room that you haven’t shared with us? You shouldn’t harbor important secrets that would benefit the well-being of-” he paused, noticing that Alexei was mocking him. “How can we trust you!?” 

“It never came up- no one asked me!” Alexei defended, stumbling through his words, his shoulders stiffening with deranged fear. “Please don’t take away my life!” 

Bill shook his head, fully backing out of the parking space as he tried to keep his cool. “Okay, Alexei, I won’t report this to anyone, but you better be sure to tell me everything you know about the red room’s plans, that way it would be easier to draw them in. And we can stop him from killing anymore people.”

“And-!” Alexei added, very loudly, “We can free him. We can stop him from what he cannot control himself from doing.” 

The car went silent, Alexei’s everlasting light dispersing in the atmosphere as he silently remembered when The Coney Island Hero resisted his conditioning. He was a person. He was human. And he could choose whether or not to kill someone- and he chose not to kill Alexei. And for that, he was going to free him and make sure he would never be used again. 

“I knew him. For four days, five days… I don’t remember. Felt like years. But I knew him. The Red Room killed The Coney Island Hero. It is hard to even want revenge- I only care about freeing him,” Alexei muttered, relaxing his shoulders and taking a shaky breath. 

Bill took a few moments to respond, making Alexei’s heart beat quickly under his collared gym uniform. Did he say something wrong? Did he sound too… emotional? “I’m sorry- I didn’t realize how close you two became while… going on a mission for communism and nazis.”

Alexei forced a laugh, still feeling the sweat pool on his forehead under his baseball cap. “We all make mistakes… But he didn’t know any better. I did.” 

“Well then, our first step of action, you tell me what The Red Room’s goal is,” Bill said, gripping the steering wheel tightly as they steered onto an interstate. “And our second step is setting up the perfect trap.” 

The next day, after Alexei spilt everything he knew about The Red Room to Bill,  they called a meeting with a group of Agent’s to discuss the upcoming project, coded M21, after the first date of Spring. Alexei came up with it himself, him being the only one to chuckle at the “joke” he made. Bill took it seriously and praised him on coming up with a good codename. 

“Alright, before we go in, just tell them everything they need to know and they will help us, alright? I spent all night on this file for you to read from. We’re running out of time until you have to go back to being a teacher,” Bill ordered just before walking into the room of about seven skilled members of SHIELD specialized in tactical planning. 

They were appointed by Peggy herself. Alexei and Bill were supposed to have the meeting the day before, but Alexei took too much time adding new details and fumbling through practice “speeches” as he insisted on calling them, that the meeting had to be rescheduled to 6 in the morning. 

Alexei didn’t do well in the morning.

“Yes, sure, okay, you got it- now let’s get this party started, okay? Okay,” He said, throwing open the doors, Bill following closely behind with a smile, true fear underlying underneath his grin. First impressions mattered. He didn’t want to be stuck with people who didn’t take him seriously, and didn’t believe the winter soldier had been brainwashed. 

Alexei waved a red gloved hand at the Agents, giving a true smile, nervously fumbling around as he opened his mouth to speak, but then realized he had forgotten to take the file from Bill before they walked in. Thankfully, Bill noticed this and awkwardly stood behind him until he had his attention to give him it. 

“Sorry. It is morning. I did not wish you a good morning because, well, it is not a good morning. It has not been a good morning because my friend is killing people.”

Bill stumbled into his chair, rubbing his forehead as he looked around, only one thought going through his head. “If he’s supposed to be taken seriously, then this mission is doomed.”

-