David awoke while his mother'a unexpected guest was busy coming to terms with the truth in the forest outside. By the time Summer fed him and got him started on his usual post-breakfast habit - watching an hour or two of cartoons - she found herself sitting at the kitchen table, staring blankly at her laptop screen, starting to wonder what exactly would happen next.
Would he not come back? Would he continue on through the forest, seeking revenge perhaps, or finding some underpass to sit and rot under? Maybe find a cliff to pitch himself off of? Judging by what she'd heard of his breakdown out there, nothing was out of the realm of possibility.
Trying to put it all out of her mind for at least a few minutes, she scrolled through some news articles and half-paid attention to them as she glanced down at the date on the bottom-right of the screen and realized she had a paper due in less than two days. Suppressing a groan, she wondered if harboring a traumatized HYDRA fugitive was worthy enough of a leave of absence from online college.
Ignoring school for the time being, she gave into the urge to research her guest further than she had the night prior. This time, she focused on articles and accounts of his time pre-HYDRA, which meant she mostly read old newspaper and magazine articles extolling the adventures of the famous Howling Commandos.
Reading more in-depth about who he had been before HYDRA came along only saddened her further. It also was slightly mind-boggling that two men from that era, himself and Steve Rogers, both looked just as young as they did in the photos she was perusing. But the difference was, Rogers looked exactly the same now, judging by his image on her son's bed sheets and what she saw of him on the news. Her guest, however, seemed to be an empty shell compared to what he had been, noticeable by even the quickest glance. There was just nothing left of what had been.
Eventually, she closed the laptop and drummed her fingers on top of it. David was sitting happily in the living room, content with his cartoons, and it had grown quiet outside. One side of her brain told her to pray he didn't come back and be happy that he was finally out of her house. The other told her to march into the forest and make sure he hadn't hung himself or maybe used his weird arm to rip his own head off.
She sighed and closed her eyes, shaking her head at herself. This entire situation was idiotic. She was in over her head with this one, she was sure of it.
Glancing into the living room, she called softly, "Hey, kiddo - want to come outside for a little bit?"
He hadn't moved an inch for nearly two hours. He was still slumped against the base of a tree, staring ahead at other trees, silent and red-eyed as he sat quite literally lost in thought. Memories were trying to form from the fragments and his mind was trying desperately hard to make sense of it all, but mostly all he was managing to do was confuse himself further.
Whatever the full story was, he didn't want to know it. He didn't want the memories to resurface any more than they already had. He didn't want to be awake or aware of anything. He wanted to go back to when everything made sense, when all that he knew was a mission, an objective, and a result.
He didn't bother to look when he heard the distinct sound of footsteps and leaves crushing underneath him. He kept staring straight forward, even when a few moments passed and a woman's familiar face suddenly filled his line of vision.
She had knelt down in front of him, at a somewhat safe distance, and was speaking softly. "Hey. Just wanted to make sure you were still alive."
A single blink of his eyes was his only acknowledgment of her words. She looked him over, eyes immediately drawn to his exposed metal arm that she was seeing for the first time, now that his hoodie and gloves were laying somewhere in the dirt, leaving him in a too-big black t shirt that didn't hide much. She stared at the arm for a moment and then glanced at the tree that had met an early fate thanks to it, and after clearing her throat a little, she turned back to him. "I shouldn't be doing this, but I'm asking you to come back inside the house. I'm an idiot for it but it's not the first time I've been an idiot, so whatever. I think that you deserve some help. Actually, you deserve a lot more help than I can give you, but I think I'm all you got at the moment."
"You can't help me," he muttered.
She shrugged. "I can feed you more bland food and let you use my shower. That's something, right?"
She smiled just barely, and he narrowed his eyes at the gesture. The tiny smile then instantly faded and she sighed. "Just come on. Please. Before you decide to demolish the forest."
She then stood up and extended a hand to him. He stared at it as if it was the single most bizarre thing he'd ever seen. She huffed impatiently and shook it a little.
"We need to work on the staring. You should talk more and stare less."
His eyes shot up to hers and he glared at her. Then he grabbed her hand with his right one, grimacing a little bit and retracting his hand quickly once he was standing.
"Your arm okay?" she asked, noticing the way it hung oddly at his side, probably for the first time.
"It's broken," he muttered, recalling how his supposed former best friend had broken it during their fight on the helicarrier. It already wasn't hurting as bad as it had at first, so he'd been ignoring it.
"But - you've been using that arm," she said in slight disbelief, still looking at the arm in question. Then she added, "Although I did watch bullets literally fall out of you last night. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you have freaky healing... powers, or something."
He looked away from her and then noticed her son standing near the tree line, watching them curiously. The boy looked him in the eyes but showed no fear, no apprehension, just curiosity.
"Come on," the woman said, stepping in front of him and then stopping and turning back to face him. "Oh - now that you know your name, can I call you by it? Do you mind? Is there anything you'd prefer I call you?"
His supposed name didn't feel real, so he didn't know how to answer. Whoever he was now, he was sure that he wasn't that man anymore. It was more fitting for him to have no name than that name.
"Can I just call you James, maybe?"
He shrugged. She seemed to be happy with that response.
"Okay. Good."
She then turned and continued walking, taking her son's hand when she reached him. His eyes fell on their joined hands and then there was the smallest flicker of a memory behind his eyes, one that was gone almost as soon as it had come, of a similar scene, of a smaller hand clasped inside a bigger one and a woman's warm, smiling face and the sun shining bright behind her.
He furrowed his brows and blinked against the dull ache that the picture had brought, then started walking when he realized the woman and boy were already halfway down the hill.
He had a reason for relenting and following her back into the house.
Still hoping that she wasn't making the dumbest mistake of her life, Summer stood at the front door and let David in first, then her guest of honor - who she was going to have to get used to calling "James" - and then closed the door. David did not hesitate to head back into the living room to finish watching the cartoons that had gotten interrupted, leaving Summer to stand awkwardly for a moment, trying not to stare at the metal arm that was maybe a foot away from her.
It was an impressive arm. Terrifying and completely bizarre, but impressive. And the red star symbolic of communism on it that she could see through the tattered short sleeve was just a lovely touch.
Brainwashed or not, she was pretty sure that this was the dumbest decision of her life.
Eventually she realized that he was staring at her staring at him.
"Uh..." her eyes flickered back and forth from his own to the floor and eventually settled on the hallway. "Sorry. Just. Uh. Shower. I was going to let you take a shower."
"What?"
She looked up at him to find utter confusion on his face.
"A shower," she repeated.
"I don't..." he began and then trailed off.
"Don't.. what? Take showers?" she asked slowly, raising an eyebrow.
"I don't want to."
The look on his face as he pointedly did not look at her made it clear that he was adamant about not wanting to. "Well... I mean... you're kind of bloody and... there's like... tree bark in your hair. Wait - is the arm not supposed to get wet?"
"It's not the arm."
"Then..."
"I don't like the cold."
Her eyes widened. She suddenly got it. "Oh! Oh my gosh - did they not ever let you... you know what, never mind. Come with me, I'll show you something."
As usual, she began walking, and he didn't follow. She stopped and turned back. "Seriously. It's not what you think it'll be. Come on."
This time, he followed, though not without a grimace that let her know that he found her annoying. Oh well. She got to her bathroom and opened the door, turned on the light, and turned around and waved her hand towards the shower as he stood off in the hallway, looking highly wary. "I guess you don't remember these. I'm afraid to ask what you do remember, but..."
She slid her shower curtain aside, stepped one foot in and grabbed the shower head off the wall, then flipped on the hot water and stepped out. "Come here," she said, looking over her shoulder and gesturing with her head. He still looked extremely unsure, but he slowly came forward.
"Now put your hand out," she said when he was close enough to reach the stream of water. After a moment's hesitation he complied, and as the warm water ran over his right hand, she said, "See? You can make it as hot as you want by turning that knob on the wall. I don't know what you're used to doing or what they made you do, but whatever it was, you don't have to do any of that anymore."
He kept watching the water, nodding slightly at her words, and then she reached forward and turned it off. After mounting it back on the wall, she turned and then glanced at her little rack of shampoos on the other side of the tile wall and muttered "... Right. So, I guess you can use my son's soap. It's shampoo and conditioner and soap all in one. It's either that or you can smell like a rose garden."
She glanced up to find him simply watching her ramble on. She cleared her throat and looked towards the door. "Right. So uh... I'll leave you to... that, and... oh wait. Clothes. Crap. Wait, I have an idea."
She sprinted off to her bedroom, which was very close by, just across the hall, and started digging towards the back of her closet. When her search surprisingly bore fruit, she sprinted back to the bathroom to find him standing exactly as he had when she'd left him. She set down a pile of clothes on the closed toilet and explained, "My brother left some of his clothes here by accident last time he visited. He's not quite as tall as you but he works out and... anyway. These should fit good enough." She then smiled at him and asked, "Any questions or anything?"
"Why are you doing this?"
He asked in such a small voice that she almost didn't hear him at first. His expression seemed half suspicious and half curious as he waited for her to answer, and it took her a moment to gather her words. "It's not a big deal. It's just a shower and some food and a couch to sleep on."
"But you know who I am."
His face contorted slightly as he spoke, as if the words caused him pain and made him wince just a little bit. "Yeah. And you do scare me, I can't lie about that. I just... given what I've read about you, I think you could use a break for once. That's all."
She ended with a shrug, and with that, she turned and walked out of the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Then she quickly opened it again and stuck her head inside. "Oh, and watch the robot arm. I can't afford any big expensive repairs to this bathroom if you accidentally smash a hole through it." Then she closed the door again and headed back to the front of the house.
For the next 20 minutes, she passed the time by fixing David a snack and making her third cup of coffee that day. Then she sat down at the dining room table with the drink, spending the rest of the time staring at her cell phone and controlling her urges to do something stupid like tell her brother what she was doing. He was on the other side of the country in California with his family and had been regularly texting her since all hell broke loose in D.C., but she hadn't answered his last text yet for fear she'd accidentally panic and text-yell in all caps that there was a brainwashed HYDRA assassin currently in her shower and to send help because she had a bad case of major sympathy for him.
No. She pointedly looked away from the phone and took a giant drink of coffee. As she was chugging, her gaze traveled from outside the front door to the living room, where David was still perfectly happy, and then on to the hallway, which was the point when she almost - almost - choked and descended into the land of cliches that she'd done so well avoiding so far. Instead, she just swallowed awkwardly loudly and immediately looked away from the wet, shirtless, aforementioned brainwashed assassin making his way down the hall with what looked like a scrap of fabric in his hands. At least he was wearing the pants she'd given him and not just a towel, which would have been the mother of all ridiculous cliches and just unfair.
"Um..."
She looked up then as he lingered at the edge of the hallway, pretending to have just noticed him for the first time. Instantly, her eyes tried to glue themselves to the ugly and brutal-looking scarring that marked where flesh met metal on his right shoulder. It was impossible not to look - whatever operations that had attached the thing to his body must have been absolutely horrifying.
He held up what had once been a shirt and muttered, "I didn't mean to tear it..."
"Oh," she said, forcing herself to stop being rude and staring like a gawky idiot. "That's okay. Um... let me see what else I have."
She then got up and squeezed past him in the hallway - trying a little too hard to avoid touching him but finding success - and then headed back to her closet to see what other relics she could unearth.
Once back inside the small, rather messy, closet, she began looking for something that she did not want to touch, see, or otherwise deal with at all, but it would probably fit him better than anything else she had and her options were limited. Five minutes into her search, she frowned and held a large black pullover hoodie in her hands, eyeing the thing with disdain before getting up and walking out of the closet.
Immediately, she gasped and clutched at her chest at the sight of "James" lurking right outside the closet door, which she was not expecting. She'd left him waiting outside of her bedroom, and now she'd narrowly avoided another potential cliche - colliding accidentally with a half-naked, still slightly wet, man.
"Sweet mother of... I was not expecting that," she sighed and rolled her eyes, taking a step back and trying to catch her breath. He didn't offer any apologies, but just kept standing there with that unnerving stare of his. She held out the hoodie and thrust it at him, and he took it wordlessly.
As he fit his arms through the sleeves and started to pull it over his head, she told herself to stop watching and kick him out of her room, but she didn't. It had taken her this long to start noticing that he wasn't horrible looking. The fact that he was now clean had helped with that revelation. Not that it mattered. It was just now officially not something she could wholly ignore.
The hoodie fit him decently well. He pulled his damp hair out from the back and then shoved his hands in the pockets, and she was reminded of something. "Oh! Do you want a sling or something for the arm? I could drive you to a clinic somewhere if you wanted."
"No," he answered quickly.
"But -"
"It'll heal fine."
For his sake, she hoped he would.
"Okay. Well... come with me and I'll make you something to eat."
She almost told him that he wore the hoodie far better than the man who had given it to her had, but she kept her mouth shut and headed out to the kitchen as he followed behind.
When the girl had mentioned the word "shower" the first time, he'd had an immediate visceral reaction to the word and a memory more physical than mental of cold, hard, unmerciful water that he wanted to avoid at all costs. She seemed to understand though, somehow, and to his surprise, her words had been true and the shower had been nothing like what he was expecting. It wasn't easy, though, because not two minutes into it, the reason why he'd refused it at first replayed fully in his mind.
He remembered his post-mission ritual in its entirety, the same one he'd doubtless endured countless times over the last five decades. It was methodical, routine, and utterly devoid of dignity, but he didn't have much of a concept of what dignity was to know the difference. HYDRA treated him as what he was to them, a weapon, not a human being, and they maintained him as one maintains a weapon, not as one cares for a person. Or even an animal.
He remembered ice-cold water sprayed at him from all angles and being sprayed harder and colder if he complained or tried to fight the handlers off, and being restrained at least once because of it. Now he had to wonder why it had to be so cold when this random woman was perfectly capable of offering him hot water. Couldn't the people he had served so well do the same?
After the shower, he had spent a good five minutes staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, mostly glaring at his shoulder and trying not to remember anything related to acquiring the arm. But it had been in his dreams the night before, and the mental images were much clearer now, and those were far worse than frigidly cold showers.
He was now positive that he'd been fully conscious when they'd attached the metal limb. Too many flashes of screaming, of indescribable pain, the smell of flesh and metal burning and melding, and uncaring faces above attested to the truth of that.
But why?
Why any of it?
It was a short time later that he was again seated at the woman's dining room table, wearing borrowed clothes and staring down a new offering of food that, if he caught a break, he might be able to avoid throwing back up this time. More rice, and something that the woman had called an "applesauce cup".
He ate it all in silence, feeling slightly sick the more he ate but too hungry to stop. Meanwhile, the woman sat across from him, doing something on her phone, and every few moments, he'd get a whiff of something that smelled amazing. Familiar, too, but only in the slightest sense.
"What's that smell?"
She jumped a little bit and looked up from her phone to him. "Huh? What smell?"
He shrugged.
She looked around the room, as if to search out the culprit, and then glanced down at her cup. "Is it coffee?"
The word seemed as vaguely familiar as the smell. She held out the cup for him to smell, and that confirmed it as the source of the scent.
"Oh... well, I'd offer you some, but... did you keep down the rice from this morning?"
He shook his head. She frowned and tapped at her cup. "Well... once you're eating normal and keeping everything down, I'll make you some. You probably haven't had coffee in, what, seventy years. That's rough."
She seemed to talk a lot. He wasn't sure why, or how to answer half the time. And she never maintained eye contact for long. He assumed it was because he terrified her. Surely she was lying, and she was only helping and feeding him out of fear.
"So... are you remembering more things?"
He didn't answer, as was becoming the custom.
"You know, it helps to talk things out. It doesn't really matter who you're talking to, either. Talking, just getting the words out of your head can go a long way."
He stared at his now-empty bowl, still feeling hungry. "I don't want to."
"All right. I won't bug you about it."
Silence fell once more, and he retreated back inside his thoughts. Physically, he was feeling far better. His arm was indeed healing quickly and the shower had helped ease other aches and pains, but he was still every bit as distraught and confused as he had been earlier in the forest.
The more he thought, the more he remembered, and he didn't want to remember anymore. But what else was there to do but think?
Something in his peripheral vision ended up garnering his attention. Slowly, he turned his head and saw the little boy, David, standing right next to where he was sitting and holding something out for him to take. His eyes fell to the object, which appeared to be a toy, and then he glanced back up at the boy, entirely confused.
Then he heard footsteps rushing close, and then Summer was behind the boy, looking panicked for half a second before mouthing "take it". He frowned at her, and she mouthed it again and again until he relented and took the toy from the boy's hand.
He looked down at the toy, a small figure of a man with gold horns on his head and dressed mostly in green. It had a slightly gruesome face, and he looked back to Summer questioningly as David jumped into the chair next to his own.
"He's asking you to play with him," she explained, taking a seat as well. "Which is kind of huge. He'll usually only play with me. Oh, and that's his Loki action figure. Do you know who that is?"
He shook his head. She continued, "He's this alien guy who tried to invade the earth last year. The Avengers stopped him. He doesn't actually look like that, though. Toy companies decided to make him look extremely creepy instead of..." she shrugged, trailing off. "Anyway."
"Avengers?"
She nodded. "Superheroes and aliens are suddenly supposed to be normal now. And David's favorite Avenger is the one he's holding right now."
He looked at the boy's hand and his eyes widened a little bit. He hadn't expected to see a tiny likeness of the man who had made him remember so much, the man he'd almost killed on the helicarrier.
"He's obsessed," Summer said, slightly apologetically. "I hope it won't bother you or freak you out."
Still staring at the tiny Captain America, his memory stirred. A poster somewhere, of the same costumed man, of Steve, of Captain America. Fanfare and comic books and... a song, maybe?
"You're remembering something, aren't you?" Summer asked.
He looked up but didn't answer. Then her eyes widened and she scrambled out of her chair. "I just had a brilliant idea. Hang on."
A moment later, she was back, holding a pad of paper and a pen out to him. "Write down what you remember. Everything you've remembered. This way you don't have to talk about it to anyone, but you'll get it all out and be able to keep track of it all."
A little baffled by her enthusiasm, he took the offered items and then handed her the little alien toy in turn. She took it and he set the paper down, seeing the sense in her idea. He opened it to the first empty page, and while he did not want to review anything that he'd remembered, if doing this eased the ache in his head, he'd try it.
And so, he began to write. He kept writing long after Summer and her son had gone on to a different part of the house. He wrote in Russian, because it was what he automatically began writing when he had penned the first word. It didn't feel right, but since it seemed to be instinctual at the same time somehow, he kept on.
The rest of the day was a blur of scribbling, another bland meal, and more thinking and more scribbling. He was left alone for most of it, and by the time it was dark outside and all was quiet, the storm raging within his mind was his first clue that perhaps writing everything down had not been the best idea.
His thoughts grew steadily darker, and he recalled his original reason for agreeing to come back to this house - the woman's gun.
Summer put David to bed that night feeling considerably better about the situation than she had the night before. She still took up watch at the end of the bed, on the floor facing the door, with her gun, because anything else would have been foolish. But, all things considered, everything seemed... tentatively not-horrible. Possibly. Maybe.
James had been writing all night, and from the few times she'd managed to sneak a peek, drawing too. She left him alone for the most part, making sure that he ate and drank again before she and David turned in for the night. All in all, life with an assassin in the house seemed to be far more boring than she would have imagined.
Due to her lack of sleep the night before, she fell asleep very quickly at her post, head lolling to the side and her grip slackening on the gun in her lap as slumber overtook her.
So deeply out she was, she did not hear the door opening slowly and almost completely silently, nor the footsteps that crept towards her almost ghost-like in their lightness and quietness. She didn't so much as twitch when fingers gently plucked the gun from her hands, and she continued to sleep when the footsteps faded and the door closed behind them.
On a stranger's couch, alone in the dark with his thoughts, fragmented memories, and more pain than one lifetime could hold, a soldier sat clutching a gun that he'd just stolen.
He'd been right about Summer, and the terror he inspired in her. Why else would she fall asleep on the floor, sitting up towards the door, with a gun in her hands? And why shouldn't she? She was smart to be afraid. Smarter would have been to leave him to rot in solitude, not offer him shelter.
Writing down all that he'd remembered and learned so far had painted a picture that he didn't want to see. Even how he had written it was wrong, so wrong, because he wasn't Russian. He was from New York, from Brooklyn, a soldier who had died for his country. That was the story, anyway. But there was no way to reconcile that with the other side of the coin, the master assassin who had changed the world's landscape all for what he had been told was peace and order. Nothing added up to anything even slightly sensible. A loyal solider couldn't serve two masters, and an agent of order couldn't also cultivate chaos and destruction. He couldn't be Sergeant Barnes and the Winter Soldier both. Each was in direct contrast to the other; he could only be one.
Was this his fate, to be torn between two histories and two identities and thus have neither?
His single desire was to forget. But, as he had already come to grips with earlier, there could be no forgetting, no HYDRA to fix him up and restore his ignorance.
The next best thing was staring back him from the barrel of the gun in his hands. If he couldn't forget, then he could sleep.
Sleep would stop the storm, the ache, the rage in his mind. It would erase the pain and the abuse and the blood drenching his hands. If he ceased to exist, then it would all be over. It would be like sleeping in the ice, except this time, he wouldn't be awakened for the sole purpose of shedding more blood.
There would only be sleep.
He closed his eyes, lowering his head slightly, gun pointed at his forehead as his metal fingers crept closer to the trigger. But before he could touch it, a tired and gravelly but still feminine voice interrupted his tentative plan.
"If you're gonna do that, please don't do it in my house."
A/N: a big thank you to those of you who have read/reviewed/faved/followed this story! You're all the best! And to the reviewer Starlight, I explained the situation with Ruin in the first chapter, but in case you missed it, Ruin is still in the hands of midnightwings96, and the next installment is being worked on right now. This story isn't a sign of Ruin being abandoned. It's still very much alive. And this story here was a relatively brief one to write, already finished and currently in the posting/revising stage. Thank you for reading and for the feedback! And to everybody else, see you all in a few days :D
