Day 4, 7:09

James shook his head.

"No. You need to go to New York." Dolores looked up. She could see the resolution building inside of him. She wondered if the serum had also enhanced her ability to sense emotions, even without touch.

"Please, James. You can't just leave me here." Dolores could feel more tears building up inside of her and she rubbed them away from her eyes with her healthy hand. "I mean, of course, you can, but please don't. I need your help!"

Bucky looked at the woman in front of him, begging him to stay. The absurdity of that thought struck him. People only ever begged him to leave. To spare them. Flashes of crying faces twisted in terror and anguish flashed before his mind and he closed his eyes to force them away. He looked at the woman. Her theory made sense, which meant she now also had powers. He might not have her skills, but he could easily understand what she was feeling. He knew that feeling all too well. He remembered it from the first few times he woke up. The sudden loss of control, the sudden fear of oneself. The feeling of every safety being ripped from you, even your own body, your own mind foreign and hostile.

He wanted to run, flee from the tentacles of Hydra inching ever closer. He wanted to disappear like the ghost the stories told he was, vanish from the radar of humanity and try to understand his fractured soul and body in peace, away from the face of the world, where nobody would find him, where nobody could touch him. Everything in him wanted to flee the constant stirrings of humanity, run to a place where the air never moved, where not a single human breath but his ruptured the air.

His gaze fell on the crying woman in front of him again. He was amazed at how much she could cry. They didn't have enough water to replace all those tears. Her face was swollen and her eyes were red. He pulled out the half empty water bottle of the doctor, Dot, from the backpack and gave it to her.

"You cry a lot," he noted. She stared at the bottle.

"I usually don't. I haven't cried in four years." A sad smile brushed her lips with wings of distant memory.

"Nessy was the last one to see me cry. Actually, the only one. She was the only one to ever see me cry." Bucky watched her face, tried to read it like she could read him, but he couldn't grasp anything but a painfully beautiful smile.

"I will take you to New York. When you are safe, I will go." Her eyes shot up to meet his and immediately he turned his gaze away. He wanted to tell himself he did that to avoid her reading him better than she already could. But he knew why. He feared already that he would not be able to keep his promise.

A smile exploded on her lips.

"Thank you! But you can also stay. I want to go to the place were Steve stays. All the Avengers stay there, or at least most of them do. Some of them have pretty amazing abilities, they can keep us safe." Bucky just shook his head. The smile faded from her face, but she didn't cry again.

"How will we get there?" Dot reached out to the backpack with her right hand, leaving the metal case in her lap, and started rummaging in one of the compartments until she pulled out her cellphone. She stared at it for a while before she spoke.

"I guess I'll just call Steve. He can have Stark locate us."

"So can Hydra." Dolores nodded as if she had already thought of that.

"Yeah, I know. But you can hide us, can't you? We'll just climb up a tree, call them, and only come down when Steve comes to get us." Bucky wanted to smile at her naivety, how she thought that trick might work twice, but he didn't. He realized it was the only idea they had right now. He would have to change tactics slightly, but the concept would still work. He nodded.

"Can you walk?" Dolores nodded. She stuffed both her phone and the case into the pockets of her jacket, pulled it back on while hissing in pain and scrambled to a stand. Bucky watched her eagerness in amusement, then he packed up the backpack and swung it onto his shoulder. He left the trash they had produced where it was, knowing it would be like breadcrumbs for the soldiers looking for them. Now they just had to find a good place to hide, as close by as possible.

They started walking slowly, Bucky in the lead, Dot trailing behind him. He took in their surroundings, carefully listening for any sound that was out of place. But since finding, climbing onto and helping Dot up a seemingly impossible to climb, high tree wasn't too hard, his thoughts went spiraling out of control.

Most of all, he wondered why he had agreed to help her. Whenever he asked himself that question, his mind drifted back to the first time she had come into the cell. She hadn't been afraid. No, she had been furious, but not with him. She almost had seemed to take no notice of him. As if he was just another patient she could ignore until she wanted to talk to him. In her own strange way, she had treated him normally. She had brought things she treasured into the cell. She had painted in the cell. Bucky tried to remember whether anybody had ever done something so normal in his vicinity. He couldn't. Maybe that was the reason he felt so strangely attached to her. Because she had trusted him. She had trusted him the way a human instinctively trust another. With her, he had never been a weapon, a tool, a broken pile of shards or just another psycho. The way she treated him made him feel just a little more human.

Bucky could feel a small smile plucking at his lips as he watched her settle against a branch fork. It confused him. He wasn't sure anymore what he wanted, and that confused him more than her behavior towards him.

Her question interrupted his thoughts.

"Shouldn't we get further away?" She pointed at the trash about fifty meters away from them. "They'll no we were here." James nodded. He was startled at how easily the words slipped from his lips. The same in the cell. He hadn't wanted to talk to anybody at all, but the words just escaped the prison of his lips, slipped past the guard of his teeth.

"They will see that whoever of us is wounded, is not wounded badly. There is not enough blood for that. They will only we are still mobile and will try to guess where we went. Getting as far from here makes the most sense since we were apparently in such a hurry that we couldn't even cover our tracks. They will look for tracks, but not for us."

An odd sensation tugged at his stomach and he watched a strange fire light up in her eyes. It seemed happy, but not only. It was amazement.

"That's awesome. I get now why it took forever to find you." She smiled. She was talking about Romania. Bucky felt the urge to imitate her smile, but all he could muster was a sad upwards tug of his lips. Dot took her phone out of her pocket and looked at him, the obvious question in her eyes. She nodded.

She thumbed around on the phone for a while before she seemed to find the right button and held it to her ear. Her whole face followed her words. It lit up at "Hey Steve!" and turned into a patient smile as the person on the other line seemed to rant away. She rolled her eyes sarcastically whenever she said "yes", "I know", and "sure". Only once did her smile falter when she was able to talk. "Sure, please do. But the Hydra swats are also still following us, so James said, so hurry up. We'll come out when we see you. Codeword is the first sentence I ever said to you." Childlike excitement mixed into her gleam at the last sentence and she hung up. As soon as she looked up at him, her emotions were reserved again, controlled. A pang of envy struck his guts. He wondered if her emotions would ever run as freely when he was around. He forced the thought out of his head. He would be long enough for that. As soon as she was safe with Steve, he would be gone.