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Chapter Four: Making Money
"Ah, we missed you yesterday. You and the veteran."
I glowered at Claudiu. "If you are trying to imply what I think you are, I will beat you with this." I waved the large chunk of scrap about in a threatening manner.
The old vendor simply laughed at me. "Come now, none of that. Did you give the man some tea? Maybe you can persuade him to accept Andra's offering of clothes where Andra has failed."
My expression was unamused. "He is a veteran, Claudiu, as you have said. One does not force a veteran to do anything unless one is looking for a fight. I have work to do and money to earn."
I continued sorting through the bins, picking out suitable scraps and random machine parts to buy. They were set aside, piled into a heavy canvas bag I often carried to the street market. Claudiu sold the metal debris by weight value, not by size or specific parts.
"Yes, yes, your silly metals and that neverending story writing," the man waved away. "You could have already been a world renowned author or a mechanic if you stopped playing around with it all like you still are."
When I was unable to land a job once I finished college, I had decided to learn a technopath-related skillset that didn't immediately make anyone suspect I had an ability that was Enhanced. With nothing but an Etsy account, an Ebay account, numerous social media venues, and an extra room in the apartment my friend let me live in, I took up metal sculpture. I couldn't ever draw when I was younger, and that still held true. But three-dimensional art that involved manipulating metal? That was a talent I undoubtedly had. So, as I spent my months legally unemployed in Romania, I made good money selling all sorts of things made from metal while attempting to write a good series of short stories. At the same time, I sometimes popped into the 24-hour auto repair shop down a few streets to sell spare parts for cash. Or the electronic repair shop on the other side of the city, fixing circuit boards or making delicate fixes to fragile wiring. Also for cash. Bills were less traceable than credit.
Mother had a metal crow statue as a result, about as tall as a newborn baby was long. She liked birds. My elder sister had a platinum necklace and a very nice refurbished laptop. Father had a ring, made from rose gold and decorated with engraved fractal patterns, as well as a rebuilt iPod for all his oldies music.
But, I was still paranoid of being found out. My mother shared my sentiment. So, the money I earned being a metal sculptor was put in a bank account under my grandfather Jim's name in Switzerland. The extra Romanian cash I made doing minor under-the-table fixes and sales was kept for emergencies. My technopath skills made the fake identity happen. His name had also been given for the internet accounts on social media and the vendor websites. James Morgan. It was generic. There was an estimated 1,165,993 people in America with the last name like Morgan. The world didn't know that the money being transferred from a linked to the Swiss account was for me, the petite English major. My mother, who had encrypted access to the account that I had set up for her, gave me money from it to live off of. No big expense to her, only a moving of funds that looked like nothing but a mother supporting her unemployed daughter.
I guess that's called tax evasion.
Claudiu's stall was where I purchased all the necessary materials for bargain prices as of late, and all the elder man knew was that I goofed around with crafting small metal statuettes and fixed cars for extra cash. The struggling writer bit wasn't very impressive, but I talked about it much more than my sculpting.
"It is called making ends meet, Claudiu. I would rather attempt to make a great deal of profit filling orders made by strangers from the States or interested parties from the internet than trying to sell anything purely artistic for myself. Let me make the tacky one-inch naked woman statues and paperweights, while you sell me all this scrap," I declared, dropping the last wedge of metal into my canvas bag.
The old man sighed exasperatedly. "Fine, yes. Let us see how much you owe me today..."
The bag full of junk was weighed, I paid the exact amount in cash. "Are you sure you can carry all of that? That is more metal than you usually carry."
I made a face. The vendor had a point. How was I going to haul it to my apartment?
I glanced around, wondering if my budding friend and ex-killer was about. I could hear whirring.
James was, as my ears had told me. He stood at the produce stall, buying half a dozen apples, dressed in the outfit he usually wore on Fridays and Saturdays. Dull grey shirt, black undershirt, his jacket, a matching grey snapback with DOPE on the front, the hiking shoes he always wore, generic blue jeans. The hat was kind of ridiculous, because all it made me think of was the phrase, 'white city trash.' He already had a plastic bag in his hand, meaning he was nearly finished with his morning shopping at the street market. I briefly debated what I could do to get his attention.
"Oi, plum-eater!"
My impulsiveness was already rearing its unhelpful head. I startled the poor man terribly. He looked as though he was having a normal day, not counting my shouting. No smiling or Brooklyn accent, then. At least I didn't yell his name; I didn't need any sneaky Hydra grunts to realize my would-be friend was in fact their runaway Winter Soldier.
Catching sight of me, he raised a brow, expression mildly disgruntled. I motioned. Come over here.
James let out a short breath, paying for his fruit and thanking Andra. He turned back, a bag in each hand, striding across the street swiftly. Not speaking, the man gave me a questioning look.
"Can you help me out? I don't think I can haul all the scrap I purchased today all the way to my apartment, and I really need it for stuff."
Slate-grey eyes glanced between the bulging canvas bag sitting on the scale, the scale's readout for how heavy it was, and me. He held out the bags, his black leather gloves in place and gripping the plastic handles. Accepting them, James reached out with his left hand, gripping the fabric handles and pulling it up. Bracing his other hand at the bottom of the bag, my sack of metal was cradled in his super-strong arms.
"Good?" he asked directly.
"Good," I said in return, nodding to Claudiu as I began walking towards my apartment building. James easily kept up with his long legs.
"Thanks for this. And, you know, good morning."
He shrugged. "Anytime."
I glanced at his hat again. "That snapback of yours looks ridiculous on you."
The man had enough dignity to raise an eyebrow in my direction. "What's wrong with it?" He wasn't riled by my comment, but interested in hearing my response.
"Whenever I look at it, I just think of all the people my age who wore snapbacks in Sacramento. Paired with the sad hobo clothes, longish hair, and jaw scruff, all you make me think is white city trash."
He made a face. "I like this hat."
"Do you even know what the word dope means?"
"It has more than one meaning," James pointed out.
The man had the patience of a Buddhist monk. He must have realized I was trying to make small talk and wasn't bothered by the fact I was essentially talking to him without any inhibitions. It was what generally happened when silence between me and others roused my anxiousness, leaving me to spout whatever came to mind. That included being mildly abrasive and unfortunately blunt.
"You got serious skills," I said, proving my lack of brain-mouth filter.
"I know," James said simply. "I'm not much older than you either."
I blinked at him. "Uh, yeah, sure you are. Buddy, my mental math puts you as much, much older than me."
"He doesn't count," he said, "I'm twenty-nine. Take away the years he existed. He lived in ice and blood; that's where he'll stay."
Clearly, James had made a few mental distinctions between who he was now and the Winter Soldier he had been before. Not too many, because I could still see the silent pain emanating from his tall figure that screamed self-hate, guilt, and depression. But, enough. There was James and there was Him, it seemed. I'm not him and I don't do that anymore was what he implied and didn't openly say. The secondhand stress that I had managed to avoid just yesterday morning tried to crawl back into my life.
"I'm twenty-seven," I spoke. "That makes you two years older than me, then." James and my sister were the same age.
The man gave a nod.
"Got a favorite color? Or colors?"
There was a sizable pause before I received my answer. "Baby blue."
It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. "That's specific."
"I see it in most of the memories I can understand," he said. "Baby blue eyes, off-white paper, stubby wooden pencils, sharp lines and frail hands…" James muttered it to himself, as if the very thought of the color caught him in a memory of its own power. His arm whirred louder.
"Red, shades of blue-green, grey, black, and a deep olive green."
The whirring lessened. He looked in my direction.
"I have this dress I love that is this unique shade deep olive green. I love tones of blue-green, because I think of my mom when I think of turquoise and I think of the open ocean when I think of teal," I detailed to the taller man. "I like grey because it doesn't show dirt as easy as white does. I like black because I've grown up wearing that color a lot and my mom always dresses in black when she leaves the house, wearing her good jewelry she inherited from her mother. I like red because it makes me think of the photos my mom keeps in scrapbooks where my dad had a bright ginger red afro. And my grandfather's ruby ring, which I am set to inherit when Mom passes on into the mystic."
James looked at me for a moment, looked ahead for more than a few moments, and looked back. "What about your sister?"
I shrugged. "She's got this cedar hair, somewhere between doe brown, ginger, and blonde. I blame her for why I like dating girls with curly hair, because she has the most magnificent curly hair that I've ever seen. Sis takes after Dad in looks, and I take after Mom." I paused, moving both plastic bags to one hand and fishing out my wallet. He stopped beside me. I flipped open the red pleather, displaying both my California driver's license and a family photo.
"Here, see?" I said, holding it up for him. The man still had to bend down a bit, shift the canvas bag so its contents wouldn't spill out onto the street, as there was a nine inch difference in height between us.
James stared at the informal family photo with an intensity that I couldn't quite identify. He studied my mother's black hair and its single silver grey streak, her dark eyes and clay skin. She was wearing her best clothes. A striking black suit jacket with padded shoulders, her Sinaloa jewelry, black slacks, leather quarter-heel shoes, grey silk blouse, neck dripping with long beaded necklaces made of precious stones and silver. The studious gaze flickered between her image and mine, with my wavy near-black brunette hair, dark eyes and partially lighter skin. I wore black like her, but with a modest necklace and higher heels. Both of us wore identical pairs of glasses. My sister sat beside me, the lightest tan skin, blue eyes, curly cedar hair, pastel clothes. Dad was a mix of black and pastel. Dark jacket, dark pants, pastel collared shirt, pale skin, blue eyes, snow white hair that had lost its curls. They didn't wear glasses. The photo was taken before I left for Romania (like the impulsive younger daughter I was) at a restaurant by a waiter.
"You look like your mother," he said at last.
The man considered me now, bundled in a bulky burgundy coat, black jeans, a puffy aqua cotton scarf, and laced up boots. My hair, normally falling in dark waves all the way down to the small of my back, was twisted up, folded, and clipped in place against my skull. I was using the too-long sleeves of my coat to keep my hands warm, and half of my face was hidden under the scarf. Romania was a bit too cold for my California taste. My glasses, slim and black and squarish, were trying to slip down the bridge of my nose. I looked like a pitiful thirteen year-old with my soft feminine baby face and petite body.
"And you're smaller than her."
I narrowed my eyes, snapping my wallet closed. "You callin' me tiny, buddy?"
James appeared vaguely amused.
My eyes were slits as I put away my wallet. "Fight me, white boy. Fight me."
A smirk was my reply. He was lucky we were mere feet away from my apartment building, or I would have been the first and last small person to ever dare challenge the Winter Soldier in the name of height-related pride.
Damn napoleonic complex.
I took the elevator while James took the stairs. He was shifty about elevators, perhaps because of scary past experiences that related to his former killer-brain-damage-Hydra-Soviet status or because confined spaces were not acceptable by paranoid standards. We reconvened at my front door, I let him in, I closed it behind me, and James looked uncertain on where to put the bag of scrap metal.
I placed his groceries by the door. "Here, follow me. I got a workroom."
The door that lead to said room was across from the door to the kitchen. Inside, it was the same size as my bedroom. A small bathroom exactly like mine was attached. It had hardwood flooring like everywhere else in the entire apartment. I didn't really understand what was going through the head of the architect when he was designing the apartment building. The rooms were arranged very strangely.
James was fascinated. Everything in the room was made of metal, from the furniture to the commissions I had yet to mail. My big steel worktable covered in scattered clumps of copper or nickel, the chair that matched the worktable, the confusing drawer system I had shoved against one wall, bins, a small side table where sword replicas were piled high, a file cabinet. The floor was covered in iron flecks and steel shavings. I switched the overhead light on, making the floor shimmer.
"You can dump the bag out in that bin right next to the drawers."
He walked further into the room, located the aforementioned bin, and emptied it. The clattering-bang noise was loud. I winced as I shuffled through my filing cabinet for this week's commission orders. Because of my father, I believed in some illusion of a paper trail.
"You made these?"
I glanced over, papers in hand, to meet with the sight of James holding one of the sword replicas. Specifically, one of the very sharp ones. His gaze was focused on its perfectly balanced edge, and with a few quick movements, he was spinning it about adeptly. Slashing, controlled yet powerful lunges, a few perfunctory blocks. The air around him had changed at an alarming speed, as if someone had hit a switch. His eyes were cold, grey ice without any hints of blue. The metal arm purred in a menacing fashion, the unspoken intent stifling my breathing.
"Uh," I said smartly, more than nervous but far from hysterical. "Can you put down that 18th century replica of a British naval sword? That's… actually functional."
He paused, glancing between the melee weapon and myself. The sharp edge glinted up at him. It seemed to hit the man that it was in fact dangerous to be throwing out those kinds of moves in a small room like the one we were occupying. The sword was speedily put back, gunmetal eyes looking a little wild and no longer frosted over.
"Thanks, buddy. It's not that I don't trust you to not do something violent with the sword, but it took me awhile to get together enough fourteen karat gold to plate the handle on that thing."
It took James a few minutes to calm down. "How much do people pay you for these?"
"Depends on what it is, how much time it takes me, and if it's within my power. I mostly got cosplayers ordering replica swords or metal armor for costumes, and a rare few wealthy individuals that want authentic without having to buy the real deal for millions of dollars. They email me. I'm like the Fabulous Fakes for metal antiques. The most I've been paid was for a replica of… Well, your souped-up sniper rifle from the War that Howard Stark made you. It was non-functionary, of course, because I hate guns, but I got 40,000 dollars for it. Extremely detailed."
"Bonnie?"
I gave him a look. "What?"
He himself appeared confused, before it bled into sheer awe at his new memory. "It was the name of the gun. I'd named it Bonnie. Steve called his .38 caliber Smith-Wesson Clyde as'a joke."
I had a feeling I'd be learning all sorts of interesting fun facts, both innocent and horrifying, throughout our friendship. This one counted as innocent, if not bad-joke-but-funny-in-context funny.
"Then I made an extremely accurate and detailed model of your girl," I said in jest. "And the money I made from doing so was put toward my parents' retirement fund. I normally make only a max of five hundred dollars on a replica. Passably affordable but quite reasonable for the quality, I think."
He nodded, looking around the workroom and wandering slowly between metal bins and hazardous obstacles. Like, for instance, fallen nickel statues. The change of focus was a polite sign of dismissal. I dumped my order papers on the work table, settling into the chair. Reading through them seemed like a good idea; I couldn't remember what they were even if my life depended on it. A keyblade. Shuffle. A gladiator's pauldrons and arm guards. Shuffle. An elven necklace. Shuffle. Another keyblade. Shuffle. A… very detailed pair of rings that I suspected were going to be a nerdy couple's wedding set. Shuffle. A small Captain America statuette.
"Hello darkness my old friend," I sung brokenly under my breath.
Steve Rogers was going to keep haunting my ass in more ways than one, I was sure of it. The statuette order was made me think of my sister and how she apparently met him at that conference. The cycle of my thoughts were equally bothersome. Was Sis doing okay? Was she back from the conference? Was she overworking herself with teaching undergrads? Was Steve Rogers vague friends with my sister now? Were they text buddies? Did Steve Rogers know his long lost best friend was hiding in Bucharest, Romania?
Annoyedly, I plucked the statuette order and placed it atop the pile. With barely a thought, I allowed myself to sink into a state of hyperawareness. Steel, nickel, iron-chromium-nickel, copper, the heavy electrical current running through the apartment building via a built-in generator and circuit breakers, aluminum, gold, platinum, sixty watts worth of overhead light, two hundred and thirty volts of alternating current per each wall outlet in the room, cobalt-nickel-titanium-iron-aluminum-molybdenum, nickel-cobalt, lead-tin-cadmium-bismuth, copper-zinc, tin, lead, cobalt, gallium, unknown-unknown-unknown-titanium—
I pulled at the elements of stainless steel I detected with barely a flick of my fingers. I could feel its fluid movement through the air as it listened to me, flowing freely like dense water or precious metal syrup. Mercury by appearance, but iron-chromium-nickel by composition.
I heard a noise, a surprised grunt. Louder whirring.
Looking up, I found James stockstill and his eyes wide. Streams of shiny stainless steel curved and twisted through the open space, parting around his body and less than two inches away from touching the worktable. The metal really did look as fluid and watery as mercury, but the quality of its shine was uniquely stainless steel. It was a strange picture, staring at a man with a robotic left arm, dressed in grey colors, wearing his stupid DOPE snapback, visually unkempt, surrounded by floating metal rivers that almost looked like metallic jasmine vines. With his gunmetal eyes, the entire scene seemed to fit that strange brand of tumblr aesthetic that was popular with middle school kids.
I could tell from the expression on his face that James was thinking back to when I was fixing his arm not too long ago. It had been a quick fix, but I had made an impression. A simple stroke, from the top of his plated shoulder down to his wrist, and the plates clicked open for maintenance. Normally it took more than a few tools and circuit commands to make that happen, but all I did was touch it. The maddenly complex interior had been open for anyone to see, a chaotic mesh of circuitry, wiring, and mechanical insanity that I couldn't quite explain. A few very careful touches of the circuit board, wiggling the wires back in place. Recalibrating the plates.
It was hard being a technopath with no prior education in engineering, mechanics, or anything that involved your unique power. You could understand what was wrong if something was broken, you could figure out what each part did for the functionality of the machine, you could make sure it worked proficiently, but you didn't know the names of parts or how to properly describe what you were doing most of the time. I worked with an instinctive reflex to guide me, not a doctorate or a PhD. The only thing I actually learned that was related to my technopathy was programming and the basics for building computers from scratch.
So, I felt embarrassed, maybe shamed, by my show of power before James. He'd seen it before, but how long would it be until he became afraid of what I was capable of?
"I'm sorry," I blustered, gesturing about with flapping hands. "Lemme' just get this all together, sorry about this—" The liquidized metal moved with my own motions, swiftly dumping itself onto the worktable in a sad drippy pile. It reminded me of a mud pie, except shiny. "I don't have people around when I do this," I said awkwardly.
"It's okay." James said, trying to compose himself after his initial shock. "It's just, I've never seen anything like that." His tone was awed. Wondrous.
I smiled weakly. "Not too… freaky? I don't… Uh, I don't like to make great shows of what I can do, and usually it's just me and this empty apartment. I'm prone to multitasking, so I often sit here working while I'm browsing the internet, writing emails, printing orders… computer stuff that I can do in my head while I fiddle around with metal," I babbled.
God, I was a mess of sudden anxiety. Nobody but my family really knew about how I really made a living. Was this wise, letting somebody like James to know? What was I saying? I trusted him, already helped him out, and now I was doubting? Was he regretting? Should I have never offered to help him out, fix his arm?
He somehow managed to smirk, shaking his head carefully from side to side. "You're crazy," he said. "You can do all that, but you help my sorry ass?" The man kept shaking his head, unable to believe whatever he was thinking. "No wonder you're not afraid of me. You fixed my arm like it was nothing, and you could probably destroy it just as easy. God, you're fucking crazy."
Without meaning to, I found myself chuckling. "Birds of a feather flock together, I guess. 'Figures that I'm the one to say that you should be able to trust me because we're so strange, but then I start getting all shaken up."
"I almost didn't follow after you when you left to buy cherries," he confessed.
"So what, we both have anxiety?"
James made some kind of motion with his shoulders, a universal sign of I really have no idea.
I huffed a laugh. "Well, thanks for helping me with the scrap metal anyway, James. Want me to come show you out? Can't have white city trash like you losing your way in Romania, or to the front door."
He frowned in annoyance. "I like this hat."
"Whatever you say, James. Whatever you say."