He can't get the stench of the Winter Soldier off him.
It's that stench that follows him to the hide-out, it's what makes him close his eyes and feel his own body the most accurate he can remember himself feeling, probably ever, or just since the last blank came. It's the way he aches from head to toes and outright hurts in his flesh and blood arm's middle area.
It's how all that and the headache and bruised muscles and cracked ribs can't make him stop smelling the putrid flow of old sweat and blood, dirt and smoke and death, all over himself. His pores seem to swim in it and it tingles under his skin, pulses in his brows, echoes in his emptied mind.
His hair is matted and messy, unclean and unkempt, spreading not any less harsh an aroma, making him cringe in distaste. His one half wants to hack it away and get rid of that mess, the other half, however, needs it to be even longer and to hide him away from the unknown space surrounding him. Hide him from the world, or maybe himself.
It is not any less easy than ever to be re-born into a different world, more and more alien to him every time he emerges from the cold. He feels as angered with himself as he does every time his mission ends and he doesn't understand what is it all for. They tell him it's for a good cause. He doesn't know what good or a cause is anymore. He still carries on with his missions every time 'cause he's good at it. 'Cause he has to. 'Cause they need him to and if he doesn't, there will be punishment.
He's used to his own anger, it feeling like it's fused to his brain, the constant anger. Now, though, he's more frustrated and scattered, he's failed his mission, lost his objectives, ran away and hid as a shadow between all the carnage and smoke and people, who didn't even see him, all wet from the river's waters and dirty and broken. His metal arm was whirring loud and harsh in the empty walls he ended up in, his blood pumping in his ears and leaving a nasty taste in his foul feeling mouth.
He stood and flinched when his flesh arm sent a crack and a jolt of burning pain right up to his shoulder. He had to right the bone and fix it in place, to immobilize it and wait for a quick healing process to kick in, just as he knew it would work. He would have otherwise been taken to a place where people pushed him and prodded him and patched him after his missions found their endings. Now he didn't have anywhere else to go, he knew.
What he didn't know was what to do with himself. He found this place emptied in a hurry and completely trashed, heaps of papers and files having been burnt in one corner. His handlers ran away and left him to be. He failed his mission after all, he failed to win and he lost. Maybe they just assumed he would be gone by now, destroyed, disposed of, just as he himself thought his last target would have done. And why didn't he?
It would have been so easy to just leave him under the fallen construction piece of the helicarrier, just have him left there to be burned or drowned. To be rid of, without any problems. And yet the man saved him and refused to fight him and called him names that made him feel more lost and scared and angry than he ever recalled feeling. Feeling, as it is, was irrelevant and new to him, but right then, after his mission went all the way bad and not the way he would have predicted, he felt terrified and he didn't know why.
It was so new and just wrong that he lost it and unleashed his strength and confusion and all the power he still had at the man, not only to try and make this right and complete his mission, but to silence the man and his words. They made him burn and shake inside and he didn't want that anymore. So he rushed and made impact and took blows to the target's unprotected head, until he suddenly stopped.
He didn't know why he did, he just couldn't continue anymore, 'cause it still felt wrong, just wrong, and he didn't know what was right anymore. And the man looked at him, still looked, with one eye shutting down after the numerous beats and cracks. And he still talked to him, the man gave up and still told him he was with him. 'Til the end of the line. And it cracked him more than any of the blows he'd had ever received, it made him stumble over his one-way thought process of kill and eliminate and just stop with his metal fist still raised in the air, ready to make the final deadly strikes.
These never came, and he felt the moment to go on, and he knew that instant that he didn't hear those words for the first time. It was the same ghost-like certainty, as the time when he thought that he knew the man, flashing through his crazed and mangled thoughts. He didn't remember or know anything, except for the fact that he knew he should have remembered. It was the same feeling that he sensed when he thought about himself and wondered if there was something before the mission, and before that.
He wasn't yet finished grappling with those thoughts before there was a blast and the glass under him crumbled, taking the man away with it in a burst of debris and parts of the burning helicarrier. It was only because he still held the metal hand ready for striking the man, that he managed to grab and hold himself and not fall as well. But it felt wrong, again so wrong, now looking at the man, a little figurine flying away, tumbling down through the air and becoming smaller and smaller, him watching.
It seemed that moment that they were in the wrong places, that he himself should have been the one falling down, always falling, never catching the hand that was extended to him, and always disappearing into the depth of nothingness, into the cold. He felt his veins fill with blood and his muscles flexed, and his mind was splitting into two – one part watching and the other falling. Soon he did just that.
He let go or he jumped, and at the same instant he was in free fall, so familiar it stung his eyes and made him grit his teeth, when he entered the dirty stream of the river and plunged under the surface. He went down like he was a stone whose aim was the very bottom of the river. He almost reached it, his lungs not feeling the strain he thought he should have felt, and he grabbed the man in his ever strong metal grip and didn't let go until they both resurfaced.
He pulled the heavy body from the water and leaned in to make sure that he was still breathing. The man was, albeit heavily, and he suddenly felt the same loss and fear creeping up his disjointed mind. He struggled with himself for a second and then backed away from the bank of the river, dripping water and feeling empty and yet filled with ripples of total confusion, messing up his already muddled brain. As aimless as he felt, he still had the basic regulations drained inside into his very skull, to go and seek a hide-out, so he did just that.
Now, staying in the hidden building floor underneath the ground, he searched for some thought or order or even a sense of feeling the way ahead. But none came. He was angry and scared, and he hated the mix, so foreign to him and so unwelcome. The events and the words that passed him in these last days drilled through his mind painfully when he tried to rest. He couldn't sleep and although no physical pain hindered him so – he was used to it after all – he knew that the ache he felt wasn't of physical nature, it was in his mind.
Fighting the impulse to make a blow to the wall or to his own head to silence the flashes and the words he instead tried to get some sleep, dreading the way he just knew it would not be as dreamless as he would have liked.