April 4, 2014
"Cognitive recalibration" is one of Natasha Romanoff's favorite phrases. In common lingo, it's defined as "hitting someone really hard over the head to wake them the fuck up". This can be achieved in a variety of different ways, including but not limited to a helicarrier crashing into a building and causing part of the roof to collapse onto one's head.
It was like snapping out of sleepwalking to find herself miles away from where she had fallen asleep. One minute Bellona Drager was docilely sitting before a table in an isolated room somewhere in the upper levels of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Triskelion, awaiting unknown orders, guards calmly standing around her, their sharp eyes watching the girl with clouded blue eyes and a bandaged shoulder and arm. The next moment, there was a supersonic boom and explosion as something crashed into the side of the Triskelion, crumbling it to pieces with an overwhelming roar. And then there was chaos; guards screaming and shouting, the ceiling thundering downwards, clouds of dust spewing upwards and outwards. Next thing Bellona knew, she had fallen onto the floor, an egg-sized lump growing on her right temple. She quickly glanced around at the continued pandemonium and tried to remember why she was even there. But she couldn't; the building was collapsing to pieces and her innate survival instincts seized a hold of her faculties.
When running for your life, your consciousness shuts down. Fight or flight, and both demand a constant stream of uninterrupted energy. Thinking, the brain's favorite pastime, expends too much of this energy, therefore, you shut down, controlled only by primal survival instincts.
Bellona Drager found herself running for her life, thick-soled boots crushing brick and metal and wood that was being churned up from the impact. She didn't think, she scarcely even breathed. A pain was shrieking somewhere in her body but she ignored it, her self-preservation instincts allowing her to spur herself through the agony. She was pounding down staircases, streaking through hallways, flying past others fleeing.
The noise was stupendous, a howling, screaming, yelping roar that filled her ears and drilled through her fogged brain. It was spectacular, like the barriers of sound themselves were being broken, all the while churning up memories and recollections of the past few days that would have paralyzed her had she not been so focused on her goal of escaping.
She found herself outside the building in moments, fleeing from an apocalyptic scene. Bellona Drager was rocketing along the riverbank of the Potomac, just seconds later, the helicarriers were crashing into down into the river, sending tsunami surges of water racing all about the vicinity of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Triskelion. Her legs were a blur, her arms pumping despite her accumulated injuries, her heart was beating like lightning, her eyes passed over everything around her, observing everything but reacting to nothing. The only goal was escape. Fight or flight, and this was one of the only times she had ever chosen flight.
The world was falling apart around her. And she had no idea where anyone was. She remembered waking up with a bandaged right arm, and Alexander Pierce shuttling her off to S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters to wait for further orders while Project Insight went into effect. Her injuries had prevented her from joining the Soldier in the battle that had evidently taken place on the helicarriers.
The Soldier.
Where was he? The thought flashed through her mind as she sprinted away from devastation, still in automatic flight mode, she didn't notice her pace drift slightly sideways, heading in another direction.
Without slowing her flight, Bellona Drager sneaked a glance backwards, catching a glimpse of the destructive inferno that was rampaging behind her; therein lay her mistake. Reverting her eyes from the path in front of her resulted in her charging into something hard, metal, and solid. She was flung to a halt and tumbled downwards, landing on top of whatever she had run into.
She gasped, the syllables ripped from her lips like twin gunshots, "Winter?"
The word seemed to have no effect on the Soldier, he stared up at her with tortured blue eyes, eyes like she'd never seen them before. They were more alive than ever, and bursting with emotion, thundering like the mayhem behind them; pain, sorrow, confusion, regret, guilt, and a burning self-consciousness that defied brainwashing, defied torture, defied everything that had ever oppressed him — defied even recognizing her.
He threw her off of him with a violent shove and she went flying away, impacting the nearest tree with a jaw-rattling crash. She hit the rough bark with a scream and crumbled to the ground, landing painfully on her wounded shoulder, though she was more astonished than hurt.
It was the scream that cut through the vortex in his mind, his eyes landed on the girl crumbled on the ground at the base of the tree and they widened to the size of quarters, fresh guilt washed over him and he fell to his knees before her. "Bells!?"
"Oh, finally recognize me?" She spat a mouthful of blood out onto the grass before her and reached her left hand up to cautiously check on the injuries to her right shoulder. The blood had begun seeping through the bandages and her entire upper arm was stinging, centralized around where the gun had shattered her collarbone, but she ignored it and turned her glance towards the Soldier. He looked like he'd been through hell and back, but then again he was no stranger to the devil's lair. He was sopping wet, his hair clinging to his face and neck, he was holding his right shoulder carefully, as though it had been dislocated, and had sustained a formidable amount of other, more minor, flesh wounds. She frowned as she assessed his injuries, wondering who could have the capability to inflict them upon him. "Who did you get in a fight with?"
The question seemed to throw him once more into the deep abyss of questioning his existence. He silently rolled backwards onto his heels as a wave of despair and horror overcame him. Bellona had never seen him as emotionally charged as he was at the moment, and it was stupefying every time his saturated steel blue eyes met hers, because despite the familiar clicking of synergy in the back of her mind, he had never looked at her the way he was looking at her now, like he was looking at her not entirely as the Winter Soldier, but as someone more, someone lost and found, forgotten and rediscovered.
"I don't know…. I do know…. I can't remember….. His name!? But…. Oh God, I know that face!" Bellona flinched as he suddenly jerked his head up and glanced around wildly, as though expecting some opponent to come barrelling out of the trees towards them. "We have to go, we can't stay here-"
"Shut up!" She commanded, and he froze at her words because she had used the same tone he would when giving her orders during a mission. One that was dominant but understanding, knowing that the other would comply with anything requested of them. That was when they both realized they weren't speaking Russian as per usual between them, but English. The nostalgic familiarity of their native language caused a poignant silence as they stared at each other as though they were truly seeing the other for the first time. And it awed both of them.
Until finally, she moved. He watched her raise her uninjured hand and snap her fingers, he heard the slight buzzing of energy as air molecules raced around them, creating a ward that encompassed the two, sealing them off from the outside world. Their surroundings, however, remained the same: a wooded area outside the city on the banks of the Potomac.
With the guarantee of safety for a moment, he jerked back to reality, assessing the situation they were in. "You can't maintain this for long," he eyed her wounded shoulder nervously, knowing it would be sapping most of her energy and eventually cause the air ward to fail.
"We have enough time," she grunted; struggling to her feet, she closed the gap between her and the Soldier with two strides and unceremoniously pushed him down towards the ground. He tumbled backwards, hissing slightly as his shoulder twinged from the impact.
"What are you doing-"
"Your shoulder's dislocated."
"Bells-"
"Your shoulder-"
"Yeah, okay. Heal it."
Her left hand glowed with a curious white light that began to pool within the palm of her hand like mercury. "This might sting a little," she warned him, kneeling down beside his injured shoulder, "but it's just energy in its purest form — completely raw and entirely unstable because it isn't being used for any type of reaction — yet."
He merely watched curiously as she carefully placed her hand on his dislocated shoulder. He sucked in an astonished breath as the white energy began to seep down into his skin, feeling like cool bathwater from the Lake of Avalon as it targeted each of his wounded cells and fueling them with the raw energy to speed up all molecular reactions, accelerating his already enhanced healing process. There was a clicking of bone as his shoulder snapped back into place, along with a whirring of his metal arm as it reacted to the sudden input of energy into his body. It took her several long minutes to heal his wounds entirely, upon finishing she flopped back onto the grassy ground and let out a groan, allowing the remaining wisps of white energy in her palm to float over her own wounds, cooling and healing them.
"Literally who did you fight?"
"I don't wanna talk about it," her companion sighed and let silence descend between them as they each dealt with the cyclones spinning through their minds, the Soldier wringing his metal hand, the war goddess rubbing the pale scar on her neck. Occasionally, they would glance at the other with a sort of grateful reverence, as though comforted by the fact that not only were they together, but that the other knew exactly what each was going through: sheer, unmitigated mystification.
It was a several long minutes before Bellona pushed herself up into a sitting position and gave the Soldier a long, searching look.
"What… do we do... now?"
He stared blankly at the trees around them without answering for a stretch of time. They both knew what should have come after their unplanned rendezvous in the middle of the woods near the Potomac: return to Headquarters. But something was different now, the rules had changed, the game had changed, everything had changed.
"We run," he finally replied in a calm voice, turning and looking directly at her, and she saw something in his eyes that she had never seen before: self-volition.
"Where?"
"Away from here."
"When do we start?"
"Now. But before we go, there's something I have to do first."