courtings | open post (steve rogers)

A little black box, a wire, and an earpiece. "And it could be anywhere?" Steve asked as he started to look around the room. That was going to be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Imagine how long it would have taken Lawrence to find on his own.

Black box, wire, earpiece. He made his way around the room systematically, opening up drawers and searching through shelves for anything that fit the bill. "What is it, some kind of data storage device?"

"Well, hopefully they'll have kept them around here. Not sure I want to check every single lab in the place." He would if it meant that he could get her back though. He would search the world, hunt down Bardle again if he thought it would help.

He found a couple of notebooks in one of the drawers and flipped quickly through them before shoving them into his backpack. Research notes. Good to know.

"Hm, something like that, yeah." It was the lie that had kept Emma and Walker going to Edinburgh. He was still amazed they'd fallen for it and kept falling for it.

"Something like that meaning not exactly," Steve said as he kept searching. He glanced over his shoulder when he heard a shuffling noise and watched as Lawrence shoved some notebooks into his bag.

He moved on, and the next drawer that he opened up had something that fit the description he'd been given. Steve picked out the items, looping the wire around his wrist before he called out to Lawrence across the room.

"Is this it?"

"Well, yeah," Lawrence admitted, giving a soft laugh. "But I'm not sure how much the technical explanation would mean to you. Or to anyone who hasn't spent eighteen months on the research project." Besides, it wasn't entirely a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth.

He froze when Steve called out, and then whipped around, a fierce light entering his eyes when he saw what Steve was holding. "That would be the thing, yeah," he said. He started to head over to Steve. "Pass it here. I should be able to get it linked up."

Steve wasn't all that eager to hand it over, not until he got some more answers. He kept a tight grip on both of the items and watched the kid carefully.

"I'm sure you can explain it in a way that I could understand. What exactly do you hope to find on here?" If this was anything like the drive that Natasha had gotten a hold of, if it had anything resembling Zola's algorithm on it, then Steve would never forgive himself if he placed it into the wrong hands.

"Sorry, but I've been having to deal with a lot of lies lately." And Steve was nothing if not a fast learner.

Lawrence went very still when he was refused, annoyance flickering for a moment. Well, this was frustrating. "You're not the only one, Steve who just showed up hoping to charge his phone," Lawrence said sarcastically.

"If there's any way to get at the data that Soleil left behind, then it's gonna be through that device. It's nothing dangerous. Basically, if she's not around, it'll do nothing, if she is then... she can find me."

So that was it? A way to try and get into contact with an AI that might not actually exist anymore, whose existence was questionable to begin with. Could a computer system be a person? Lawrence certainly seemed to think so, and Steve was relying on him to further his search. He could only hold out for so long.

He was going to watch his every move, even so. Steve slowly handed over the items, keeping a close eye on Lawrence as he did so.

He loved it when people trusted him. This was easier than the Professor had been, obviously since he'd had to kill the Professor to get the device. He took it as carefully as he could, holding it like a precious thing. "Great, thanks. Now, let's get this show on the road."

As he walked back to the computer, he activated the bio-link. A little extra layer of security. Technology like this, no-one was going to want to destroy it by killing him or stealing it.

Steve's trust only went as far as what he needed from Lawrence, but considering how desperate he was to find Bucky, that went a long way. He followed Lawrence over to the computer, shoving his hands in his pockets as he looked over the console.

He'd learned a lot about computers, but this was definitely above his pay grade and so for the moment all he could was watch. Which was frustrating, but he planned to pay close attention to what he could.

He accessed the computer, starting to pull up files and lines and lines of scrolling code. Some of it he recognised, some of it he'd built in himself when Soleil had needed him to open the door for her, and some of it was completely new and so far above his capabilities it was a little frightening. For all that Soleil had taught him, this had been built by experts. And Soleil had added and changed it herself.

Some of the pieces were definitely not as they had been. Was that due to the kill switch or something else? He didn't even know if he was looking at the right part.

"If you want to do something useful, there should be paper records too. They started using those instead of the computers when they realised She could get into everything that was on the computers.

Steve's eyes scanned over the code, but it may as well have been another language to him, and he wasn't going to be able to make any sense of it. He could tell that Lawrence could read everything there, though, which put Steve at the disadvantage.

Paper records he could work with, though, and so he nodded and started going through some of the nearby file cabinets.

"Is there anything in particular you're looking for? Any terms I should keep an eye out for?" he asked.

Lawrence sat back in his chair, chewing his lip as he thought for a moment. "Project Sevendays. That's what it was called. Also... Robert Emmanuel, Aisling Foster, Ivan, he was one of the head researchers. And... Charlie and Marianne. That's what they were called. I don't know if that'll come up in the files but it's worth looking. Can't hurt. I mean, they're all dead now but... hopefully they've left something behind."

Steve made a mental note of each name. Some of them he'd run across already, but a few were new to him. The fact that Lawrence could so easily talk about their deaths set off another alarm bell in Steve's mind, though.

"... Do you really think all of them were killed by that eco group?" he asked as he started sorting through the files. "Sounds a little farfetched to me." There was more to all of this, Steve knew it. It was just a matter of getting to the bottom of it, though his guess was that this base wouldn't have that kind of information. Not if Lawrence had let him in here.

Lawrence swivelled around on his chair to look at him and then gave a helpless shrug. He wasn't exactly going to admit that he'd killed them all, or had them killed and The EMP had done for Ivan. "I dunno. They were willing to set of EMPs across Europe though. Think how many people that killed just from the plane crashes alone, before you even get to the longer term stuff. I think bumping off a few researchers probably isn't beyond them.

Shame he hadn't managed to wipe out all of them really. Oriya was out there, knew his face, what he'd done. Maybe he could find a way to take care of that if Soleil had left him access to he weapons systems.

Lawrence made a good point, although they were different kinds of murder. Causing a plane to crash was so far removed, while killing someone at point blank took a certain amount of wherewithal. But they could have always hired other people to kill the researchers for them. People like the Winter Soldier.

Steve let out a sigh and kept sorting through the files, eyes scanning quickly over anything that looked interesting. A lot of it was jargon that meant nothing to him, but at the very back of the cabinet he finally found something about Project Sevendays.

"Here we go," he said, pulling it out and leaning back on his heels to open up the file on the floor in front of him.

He waited a moment until Steve was looking through the files again before he checked out the device. It looked the same as the one that he'd had previously. He took a breath and pressed it to the back of his skull, that point where he'd dug the last implant out of his head when Soleil had wanted him dead.

He made a soft noise of pain when it activated, firing the implant into his head, but it wasn't that bad. He could deal. His fingers came away bloody.

Still nothing that was active.

He jumped when Steve spoke again, and slid off his chair to take a look at the file. "Yeah, yeah this is it. We're looking for backup systems. Or I am."

Hearing that small noise from Lawrence (enhanced senses was one of the many perks that came with being a super soldier), Steve glanced up, but he wasn't able to determine what had caused it until he walked closer.

That was when he saw the blood, and the fact that Lawrence was remaining casual about the whole thing only made it stranger. Steve tensed and reared up, taking the file into his hands again.

"What did you do?" he asked, and while he was worried because that was his first instinct when someone was bleeding, he was also waiting for something to go sideways here.

He smiled at Steve, a beatific expression. It felt like it could just be a matter of time. She had to be out there, watching and waiting for him. She was too clever to be taken down by smoke and mirrors and flashing lights. He knew she was. "Nothing that I haven't done before," he said with a shrug. "Don't worry. It's just a small wound. Head wounds always bleed like crazy. At least I didn't have to stick a knife into my head this time."

"Are you insane?" Steve asked with a frown, a kneejerk reaction as he moved closer and then circled around to get a better look at the wound.

That device that Steve had found had been inserted there, and while Lawrence had said that brain implants were used to interface with the system, Steve hadn't expected it to be quite that barbaric.

"Seems like you could have figured out a cleaner way to do that," he said after a pause, tone uncertain. "So what are you able to see?"

"Debatable," Lawrence said cheerfully. He felt sane enough, albeit not quite on the same level as most people. He'd got very very good at fooling people. "I had to cut the last one out myself."

He reached back, pulling the majority of the device away. "It's just a chip. The rest of the device is bio-linked to me. It'll heal eventually." It didn't seem that important, not in comparison to finding Soleil. He pointed out a few lines of code. "Well, there looks to be the main structure of the programming still in tact. They had wipe codes but they didn't destroy the hard copies and Soleil is so smart. Clever girl, I think she backed herself up."

It was still unsettling the way that Lawrence spoke about this Soleil, but Steve was doing his best to ignore that at least until he found out what he needed to know. Desperation had driven him pretty far to bring him here, though while Lawrence did seem to be pretty far off the deep end, he hadn't yet found any proof that he'd hurt or killed people.

Steve hoped he hadn't, he didn't really want this to end up even more complicated than it was already, though he was also prepared to do what was necessary when push came to shove.

"Guess that's a good sign," he said with a nod. "Does that mean you can run some searches?"

Sanity, in his opinion, was purely subjective. Just because they didn't understand what he did in Soleil's service, just because they'd never understood the things that went on in his head. He reached back to rub the wounded spot again, as if he could somehow make it work faster, instead of slowly encouraging cell growth.

"The best sign. She might still be alive." Somewhere. Maybe hibernating. Was that the right term? He wasn't sure. It didn't matter.

"Yeah, I'll do what I can. What do you want me to look for?"

Steve didn't know if it would be good or bad for an AI that powerful to still be alive. He didn't know enough about the situation, but Lawrence definitely seemed happy about it. If all he planned was for them to live out their days together in some odd kind of romance, then Steve couldn't say he minded.

Especially if it got him the information he needed. He hesitated on saying the words, as if speaking them out loud would somehow do harm. But if Steve had been struggling to find Bucky, it wouldn't be very easy for Lawrence to track him down either. Chances were he wouldn't even care enough to look beyond this.

"Search for Winter Soldier," he said eventually. "Let me know if you come up with anything." Steve stood, very still, and waited for the results.

Winter Soldier. That sounded ominous. He wasn't familiar with the term but it was certainly interesting. "Alright, I can do that. Give me a few minutes. There's a lot of files to check." He was fairly certain that the Burn hadn't had anything to do with something called Winter Soldier. He'd known pretty much everything that was going on.

Still, it didn't hurt to look.

The files from the bunker yielded nothing, except the knowledge that they were pretty much intact. Research files, videos, all of it.

Searching wider though, through the pathways that Soleil had created and had left open for him to follow... He hummed softly. "Does 'Hydra' mean anything to you?" he asked. It was just a name, a logo, something dredged up from the deepest encrypted files Soleil had skimmed from various agencies for fun.

Steve did his best to remain patient as Lawrence performed the search. He realized that these things took time, but he had never been very good at sitting around and waiting for a computer to do work for him.

The other methods he'd used hadn't turned up anything, though, and so this was what he had to rely on for now. He wasn't happy about it, but he had to put up with it. For the sake of his friend.

The moment that HYDRA was mentioned, Steve's shoulders tensed and he moved toward Lawrence, nodding firmly.

"Yes, yes it does. What do you have on them?" He tried to keep his tone from being too demanding, but he needed this information, he needed some kind of lead. Anything.

open post (steve rogers)

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