"No! God! No!!!"
A few minutes later, heart-wrenching screams erupted from the screening room, like some small wild animal caught in a bear trap. The only difference was that these near-death cries lasted rather longer.
When he first pushed open the door, everything in the screening room had made Steve feel warm and comforted.
It was a small home theater, with beautiful red lounge chairs arranged around a round table. Beside it stood a small refrigerator with transparent glass doors, stocked with all kinds of beverages—almost all products Steve had endorsed himself, with quite a few having been in production since 1940.
But once they had taken their seats and the tabletop projector began running, its light illuminating the screen as the film of the past began to play, Captain America felt as though he were slowly being swallowed by a dark sea, his hands and feet turning icy cold.
He had no idea how Deathstroke had picked out that particular tape so precisely from a pile of videotapes, but its contents were not the happy memories Steve wanted to see. It was neither a record of him and Bucky going out with their Godfather as children, nor memories of everyone spending Christmas together. It was the final day of that old man's life.
The recording was fairly normal at first, but when Steve saw his Godfather and Gin saying they were heading out to bring him food, he could no longer smile.
Sure enough, events unfolded exactly as he had feared. The man in the footage left the company, drove to a fast-food restaurant, bought his godson's favorite beef burger, and happily headed for the latter's home.
Then the accident happened on the road. Mr. Wilson's sedan collided with a truck that had run a red light and burst