We Were Agents
I focus on the steady bleep bleep bleep of the ECG machine as it sings out the heartbeat of the man on the hospital bed before me.
In the days it has taken for me to be processed, for it to be decided that I'm not guilty by association, the doctors have done their best. One of them had talked to me, before letting me in here. Tried to comfort me, to prepare me for what I was about to see. I don't think he understood that I didn't need comforting. Shock. Denial. Grief. Anger. I've been through it all, lived every moment in bitter, agonising pain, since they first told me that the man I've loved with all my heart, the man I've spent the past seven years of my life falling asleep and waking up next to, has been secretly working for HYDRA.
The doctor spoke in a soft voice, using words like compound fractures, third degree burns, compression on the brain and medically induced coma. I recognised that tone of voice. It was the same one I'd used on the occasions when I'd had to deliver bad news to good people. When I'd had to tell families that their brothers and sisters, their sons and daughters, their fathers and mothers, weren't coming home. That they'd given their lives in service – like that was some sort of comfort. Like it made the pain of their loss less raw, more bearable.
"Most of his nerve endings were burned away," the doctor told me. "When he wakes up, he'll feel nothing."
And I knew what that felt like, too. For I'd come through shock, denial, grief and anger, and now I'd settled on numb. A cold, empty, manageable numbness, because see-sawing between those other things—one moment in denial, the next burning with furious anger, before grief kicked in—was too exhausting. Feeling hurt too much, so I switched to feeling nothing.
Now, looking down at the body, trying to see past the burns dressings and the mass of wires hooked up to machines I can't even name, there is only one question on my lips.
Was any of it real?
The moments we'd shared, both special and ordinary. The candle-lit dinners we'd gotten lost in each other's eyes over. The holidays we'd taken at my family's cabin in Piedmont, on the shores of Lake Crescent. The Thanksgivings and Christmases we'd spent together. The missions we'd talked about, and the silences we'd shared because some missions were too classified to speak of, even between ourselves.
Had all of that been a lie? An illusion? Some sort of play, staged to make Agent Brock Rumlow seem nothing more than the ordinary S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent he was pretending to be? Had he truly loved me, or had it all been a con? Had he played me, used our relationship to gain access to S.H.I.E.L.D. information he himself couldn't reach? Was I truly the love of his life, or just a means to an end?
Tears leak from my eyes, and I brush them away. Briefly, I try for denial. They got it wrong. He wouldn't work for HYDRA. Not him. Not Brock. He's a good man. I know him. If he did this, he was coerced. It was against his will.
The denial lasts only as long as it takes for my tears to dry. A realist, I can't cling to the lie, no matter how comforting it feels. Besides, Romanoff herself delivered the news to me. She used the voice. The expression on her face was of pity, and I could hear the words she didn't say. Poor woman. The man she loved turned out to be a monster. I saw, too, a silent accusation in her eyes. If only she'd seen the monster inside the man. We might've been forewarned.
Then had come guilt. Maybe this was my fault. I'd lived with a HYDRA spy for years, and seen nothing. Hand-waved away his occasional late-night disappearances as just part of the job. Swallowed his lies about wanting to change the world hook, line and sinker.
I can now look back on that line with hindsight, and when I do, it chills me to the bone, peppering my skin with goosebumps. He wanted to change the world, alright; just not in the same ways I did. I wanted to make the world a freer, safer place for the children we'd occasionally talked of having. I wanted to make a less broken world to raise our family in. Little did I know he was slowly undoing all of my work. All of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s work. I could never have imagined that every time we managed to mend a broken wall, he was the one who helped tear another down.
Bleep bleep bleep.
The ECG pulls my thoughts away from broken walls, cementing my mind in the present. I want to leave. To walk away. To grieve the death of the man I had loved; if he had even existed in the first place. But a part of me needs to know if any part of Brock—my Brock—is still in there. And more than that, I need to understand why he did it. Why he sold out his friends and colleagues. Why he betrayed me, and the future we'd wanted to build for our family. Why he worked with and for men who valued death and order over freedom and life.
"You'd hate me seeing you like this," I say, my voice a stranger in the clinical, bleeping room. Three years ago, he'd broken his leg on a mission in South Africa. Been laid up in bed for over a week, doctor's orders. Most men would have loved that. Bought themselves a little bell and used it to summon their doting girlfriends for a cup of coffee, or a slice of toast, or a new book to read. But not Brock. He lasted 24 hours, then disobeyed his doctor's orders and started walking around on his crutches. I woke up to find him in the kitchen, making breakfast, a look in his eyes that said, I'm not lying around like some cripple for the next week.
The memory of that day brings a smile to my lips; the memory of the Triskelion in flames quickly wipes it away. My world, so solid and secure just days earlier, has been shaken to its core. I used to think that I could get through anything, any trial or test or catastrophe, as long as I had Brock by my side. I saw him as something strong, dependable; the anchor which tethers the ship when the raging storm tries to blow it away.
But he isn't the anchor. He's the storm. He's spent God knows how many years trying to blow the ship away. And I was on that ship, in the eye of the hurricane, looking up and seeing blue skies and believing everything was fine. Never sensing the peril I was in. Fooled by his smiles. Reassured by his strength and confidence. Now, the ship is gone, and I'm drowning at sea. I have no anchor. I don't even have a life jacket.
I look down at the man who destroyed my world, and I want to hate him. I gave him my heart, and he stuck a knife through it. I gave him the truth, and he sold me lies. I wanted us to start a family, and he took the family we had and tore it apart. I've lost friends. Even now, not all of their bodies have been recovered. The people I've worked with and cared about for almost all my adult life, are gone.
For that, and for everything else he's done, I want to hate him. And maybe one day, I will. But first, I need an answer to my question.
Was any of it real?
How much of this nightmare will linger when I wake? I'll wait for the answer for as long as it takes. It's not like I have anywhere else to be. My ship's adrift without a helmsman, a navigator or a captain. There's nothing left for me to do except sit and wait.
Bleep bleep bleep.