Author's Note: Big big thanks to vrb18, who left my very first review! I really appreciate you taking the time to read and review. This chapter is short, but I'm also posting the next chapter at the same time, and it's a good long one. I do plan to update more often than this. I was away at a conference this week. For some reason they wanted me to work and not write fanfiction. Sheesh.


2014

Americans, I muse as I rest on my bench. They are everywhere around, of course, scurrying like ants in every direction. They are so busy, busier, it seems, than citizens of any other country I have known. And anything goes in America; a businessman in a suit and tie strides past a middle-aged mother in a pink tracksuit and her pierced and sloppy teen offspring (gender, impossible to tell). All three are absorbed in conversations using the same high-end model cell phone.

I would have despised them once. I was so young, so angry. Why so angry, I wonder now. Who had ever wronged me? The world, I suppose, for failing so badly to live up to all my ideals, and Americans appeared then to personify that failure the most. Greedy, self-indulgent, corrupt, and sentimental, they seemed to exist for the very purpose of providing an object lesson to the rest of the world- watch what happens when you defy the ends of HYDRA.

It has been a long time since I felt that passionate anger. It feels like it belonged to another man. When did it change? Or, rather, when did I change? Was it my first trip to the US? No, that was in 1973, it had to be earlier…

Was it a story? A mission? Perhaps a friend… who was the first American I ever knew? I puzzle over it for a moment, and once I have the answer, the bright morning seems to darken just a bit.

For a moment, I no longer see the bus stop in front of me. I flash on my own hand ushering an obedient figure toward a chair hung with restraints; my voice, another time, curtly instructing someone to stay until summoned. A blurred shadow, a flurry of violence, blood flying through the air. Screaming, always the screaming.

Of course.