Isabel gave us all of the information that she dug up online the next morning. Every file on Winter had apparently been dumped onto the internet, along with every secret SHIELD or HYDRA had ever tried to keep, but they had been taken down within half an hour after they had been put up and every site that claimed they had the files wanted your credit card number.
Isabel said that she found the address of where Captain Rogers used to live in Brooklyn, at least, and it was said that Winter had used to live on the same block. They were the same buildings, they hadn't been changed in 75 years, but that part of town was run down and less favorable than it used to be. She gave us the coordinates of where Winter had supposedly died in the Alps. He had been drafted right after America joined WWII and he had gone through the ranks and became a Sergeant. Winter was in the 107th infantry when he was captured by HYDRA for the first time and they used him as labor to build their ships and they likely performed experiments of some sort on him. Captain Rogers had saved him and 400 other men and after Winter fought alongside Captain Rogers, taking out HYDRA bases until he fell from a train on a cliff and 'died' in 1945.
"That was all I could find, I'm afraid," Isabel said, after she had told us this.
"Are-are you sure all of that was about Winter?" I stammered, trying not to stare at him.
Isabel shrugged and looked down at her laptop. "Everything seems to be conclusive with him being James Barnes. All of the archives, all of the facts, what Captain Rogers said." Isabel frowned. "I wish I could have gotten ahold of those HYDRA files before they were taken down."
I regarded Winter with worry. He was glaring at the ground like he was trying to fit these pieces into the puzzle of his past.
"We need to go to Brooklyn," Winter mused.
"It's about five hours by car with no traffic," Isabel said instantly.
"We can get a car," Winter said, crossing his arms. "We should bring the glider."
My eyes darted between Winter and Isabel.
"S-should we go now?" I asked. "Like right now, now?"
Was I ready to go now?
Winter nodded. "The sooner we go, the better."
It only took about ten minutes to get ready and to cram my clothes and the scraps of a project I had been working on into my duffel bag. Winter didn't have anything to pack, but Isabel traded him a bag with some clothes and things in it for a ghost of a smile and a rare 'thank you'.
"I'll call you wherever I can find a phone," I promised her, hugging her tightly.
Isabel squeezed me and my feet left the ground for a second. She set me back down and smiled sadly at me.
"Take care of each other, okay?" Isabel said thickly, pushing up her glasses in an attempt to seem unruffled.
I nodded and smiled, tears pricking my eyes.
It felt weird not getting into a car and driving off, we just walked down the street in the growing darkness and Isabel's apartment fell slowly behind us along with her and Poppy's silhouettes in the window.
"Do you think anyone will come after her because we were there?" I asked slowly, worry suddenly gripping my stomach in a vise.
"…I hope not," Winter replied.
We walked for about ten minutes until we found a poorly-lit parking lot and I tried to seem casual as I leaned against the brick wall of a nearby building while Winter worked on hot-wiring the car. The car rumbled to life and Winter jerked his head for me to get in. I scrambled in and slammed the door and we sped out of the parking lot.
We drove for two or so hours before I fell asleep.
I was startled awake by something that I couldn't figure out. It was pitch black outside and for a split second I saw a face in the darkness, thrown into sharp relief by the edge of the headlights, and I gasped and recoiled away from the window, putting my elbow in a drink that had been in the cup holder.
"What?" Winter instantly barked. "Stella, what is it?"
"I…" I gaped, staring out of the window. It had looked like a gaunt, skeletal face with eyes much bigger than any I had ever seen...
"I – I was just dreaming, I guess," I mumbled, rubbing my eyes.
"What did you see?" Winter persisted.
"It – I mean it looked like a face," I chuckled at myself, shifting around. "But it couldn't have been; it was too… grotesque to be a human face."
I glanced at Winter, frowning and scanning the night with suspicious eyes.
My eyes drifted to the clock. 2:47 am.
"We should be getting there soon," I said quietly, setting my feet up on the dashboard.
Winter watched me for a minute before looking back to the road. We drove in silence until the lights of towns could be seen through the darkness. The trees fell away and were replaced with towering buildings and I knew that we couldn't be far from Brooklyn.
"Where was the address, again?" Winter asked and I jerked out of my half slumber.
"Uh…" I yawned, checking the paper Isabel gave us. "It just says 'Brooklyn Heights' and 'Middagh Street'."
I almost said 'It's awfully late, wouldn't you rather just find a hotel and see it in the morning?' when I noticed the hard look on Winter's face. He was dead set on seeing it right now, so I could just suck it up and yawn for a bit longer.
We found the right street, nothing special, just a few burnt out street lamps and graffitied alleys. Winter seemed to know where he wanted to go now and he parked on the street in front of a looming, dark, dilapidated brick apartment building.
Winter got out of the car the second it was off and I hesitated, gripping a flashlight I had packed, wondering if the floors of this place would crumble under our feet. Winter came around and pulled my door open and waited for me, a shadow obscuring his face. I threw my duffel bag over my shoulder and eased out, hovering next to Winter as he stalked up to the skeleton of a building.
Winter went around the side of it to the right and I trailed close behind him. He ambled up a small porch and stood in front of one of the doors, silent. I peered around him. The door looked like it had once been very sturdy, but time had taken its toll on it. It was closed but it didn't look like it would resist a few good kicks.
Winter moved to stand in front of a brick that was behind us and nudged it with his boot. I almost expected there to be a key underneath of it with the certainty that he had moved it, but there wasn't, just a spider that scurried away once it was disturbed.
Winter turned back and looked at the door. He gently tried the handle, but it was locked.
"It doesn't look like it would take a lot to knock the door down," I said softly.
Winter glanced away to look at the open area to our right.
"Wait here," he said quietly and leapt silently over the railing and disappeared around the side of the building.
Deafening silence settled and I felt nervousness stir my stomach as I glanced behind me. Something darted out of my line of sight when I turned around, but the poorly lit street was empty besides that. I clutched the flashlight a little tighter and backed up to get my back against the door. I bumped into something alive and definitely not the door and I gasped and recoiled, ready to bash something with my flashlight, but it was just Winter, standing in the open doorway and looking down at me strangely.
"I thought I saw something," I hissed, glancing behind me again.
Winter ushered me into the apartment, scanning the street.
"Stay close to me," he murmured.
My flashlight swept across the floor as we went inside and I noticed that this place wasn't quite as dirty as I had imagined it would be. It was a small apartment, it looked like it had one bedroom and one bathroom and it made Isabel's apartment look like a castle. There were wires and pipes sticking out of the floor where I guessed that sinks and appliances had once been at the far end of the room and there was a big x-eyed face spray painted on the living room wall.
"Footprints," Winter said lowly and I looked down at the ground.
"Maybe they're just from some homeless people," I replied in a hushed voice, my flashlight sweeping across the floor and the walls.
Winter's head jerked to the side and he stared out of the window. "Maybe."
Winter lumbered around the tiny apartment and I couldn't help but think about how much he looked like a spirit in the darkness. He wandered around for an hour in complete silence and I was yawning more and more and I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. I sat down against the wall in the living room under the graffiti and rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. I must have dozed off because I jerked my head up to see dusty daylight and Winter sitting in the middle of the room, facing the opposite wall.
"Winter?" I asked, sleep slurring my voice.
He didn't respond and I pushed myself to my feet and padded over to him.
Winter was staring at the brick wall, and the look on his face reminded me of how he looked right after he had fought Captain Rogers for the first time and recognized him; it was like he was in an altogether different place. I gently sank down to kneel next to him and I reached out to put my hand on his arm. He didn't react.
Winter stayed like that for most of the day, unmoving and mute.
I decided to let him be and I dug the bits and pieces of scrap I had been tinkering with out of my bag. Ideally, we needed a thing to watch out for us, something to protect us when we couldn't stay awake. I wanted to create some sort of guardian, but I didn't know how I would be able to with my very limited resources. For now it was just a dream, something to distract me from the way Winter was staring straight through the wall.
My stomach started to growl in the afternoon, but I didn't want to leave Winter. I didn't like this abandoned apartment filled with ghosts and dust. I heard glass break somewhere outside and my hand slipped on the hardware I was working on and I jabbed my hand with a screwdriver.
"Shit!" I hissed and my eyes jumped up to the boarded up window. A shadow passed across the streaks of light leaking through the wooden planks. I gripped Winter's arm, but he might as well have been made of stone.
I froze and barely dared to breathe. As silently as I could, I padded up to the window and squinted out through the gaps in the wood. There wasn't anyone that I could see. I stood watch for a bit, my stomach in a tightening vise of unease. My hand was bleeding where the screwdriver had cut me and I bit at my fingers, tasting coppery blood.
Taking a steadying breath, I took a step back from the window, deciding that it was nothing. I turned around to look at Winter and my stomach dropped when I realized that he wasn't the only one in the room.
I couldn't even gasp before the shadow of a person took off, giggling, and darted into the one bedroom and slammed the door. The scream I let out jarred Winter beside me and I fell backwards, the concrete floor biting into my palms.
"Stella?" Winter barked, leaping to his feet.
"There's-someone-in-the-bedroom!" I hissed out, pointing at the door in terror.
Winter's eyes darted up to the door and he eased a gun out of his belt and pointed it at the door. He moved across the room to the door without making a sound and paused at it. My heart felt like it was going to leap out of my chest and run away. He kicked the door in with an ear splitting crash and whipped his gun around the bedroom, scanning the inside with wild eyes. He relaxed after a minute and turned to look at me, narrowing his eyes.
"Must've gone out the window," he said quietly.
I let out the breath I was holding and I pushed myself to my feet and inched toward him. He was right, there wasn't anyone behind him inside of the room and the dusty window had been pried open.
We left immediately after that, I didn't feel safe there to begin with, and Winter seemed like he was ready to go. We decided to stay at a hotel while we figured out what to do next. Winter waited in the car while I got the hotel room; I was a lot less noticeable than he was.
"Second floor, I think it's number…" I dug the key card out of my pocket. "256."
Winter nodded and parked the car.
I was ecstatic to have a bed to sleep in tonight, dusty as it was, and I dropped my duffel bag onto the bed closest to the window and flopped down onto it.
"There's two beds," Winter said, lingering in the doorway.
I lifted my head up from the bed, raising one eyebrow at him.
"Yeah, I figured you wouldn't want to share a bed," I replied.
Winter's eyes darted to the window, the open curtains letting sunlight in.
"That's noticeable, it would have been better to have just gotten one with one bed," he clipped, marching across the room and throwing the curtains closed. "I won't sleep."
I sat up and looked at him, somewhat stung.
"Where's your laptop?" Winter asked, glancing around the apartment and not at me.
I dug it out of my bag and handed it to him. He snatched it from me and sat down at the little table in the corner of the room and turned it on, fixated on the screen. I watched him for a minute, irritated. When was the last time he had even used a laptop?
"I'm gonna take a shower," I mumbled and I closed the bathroom door.
Winter stayed on my laptop all day, doing research I assumed, and I just decided to mess with the hardware I had been working with the day before. I was trying to create a sensory apparatus, but for now all it did was turn from blue to red if I got within a foot of it.
Winter was right about not going to sleep, I didn't know how much longer he could go without it.
"You must be tired by now?" I asked the next day as he drove us around in our stolen car. "You haven't slept in days…"
"I'm fine," he insisted, despite the growing bruises under his eyes.
"You have to sleep sometime," I went on. "It'd be better to sleep while we're relatively safe than to collapse from exhaustion when something really happens, wouldn't –"
"I said I'm fine," Winter growled and I felt blood rush to my face.
We didn't talk much for a few days, we just drifted from motel to grimy motel. He refused to sleep. Winter said that he had something that he needed to take care of, and that he would need the glider. He said that I would be safer if I wasn't with him and if I was moving around, so he dropped me off at a mall and told me that he would meet me back outside by a specific tree in three hours. I nodded and went into the mall to get out of the cold autumn wind and I felt guilty for being so relieved to get away from Winter's heavy silence for a bit.
I immediately wandered into an electronics store that was on the top floor and looked at what they had. Nothing that I needed, but I still liked looking.
I wandered lazily around, looking at the stores. I sat next to the large fountain in the middle of the mall and worked on sketches for a while. I found a candle in a store that smelled strikingly similar to the way Winter smelled when he wasn't dirty. I smelled a bunch of different candles and I glanced up out of the window and I met eyes with someone and my stomach did a complete back flip.
It was Captain Rogers.
I ducked behind one of the tables instantly, praying that he hadn't recognized me, earning a disapproving look from one of the employees. I ignored her and crept around to the other half of the store that was all beauty products and I saw Captain Rogers and a black man walking with purpose into the candle store. I noted that he looked familiar, but I couldn't think of why in my panic.
I darted out of the store as soon as they went into the other side and I tried to force myself to walk and not sprint, my eyes darting wildly around for somewhere, anywhere to hide.
My eyes found a women's restroom and I scurried towards it and I heard someone shout "Hey!" behind me as I bolted inside of the door.
I tried to not gasp when I slammed the door behind me and I walked to the corner on the other side of the sinks. There weren't any windows in the bathroom. I was trapped. I covered my mouth and tried to stop myself from crying, fear twisting my stomach. What were they going to do when they caught me…?
I shouldn't have to be this scared of him, he was likely friends with Winter once. Winter had changed since then though, and it was more than likely that he had too.
Three pretty girls walked in and I tried to force myself to stop making a scene as they went up to the mirrors.
"What the hell was up with those guys?" one of the girls said, leaning over the sink.
I stopped listening, my blood pounding in my ears. This was it. I was cornered like a rat in a cage. At least Winter wasn't here.
"Babe are you alright?" I realized one of the girls was asking me and all three of them had looked away from the mirrors and they were studying me.
I lowered my hand and wiped my eyes with my sleeve.
"T-those two guys out there are looking for me-" I quaked. "I don't know what to do…"
The three girls looked at each other, anger hardening their faces.
"Okay, listen," one of the girls, the shortest one, said in a soothing voice. "We're gonna go out there and distract those boys and you're gonna run the opposite way and take a long hallway to the left, okay? It'll spit you out right by the food court and you're gonna run up to the Chick-fil-A. Tell them Kourtney sent you, and you gotta hide, and they'll let you stay there until it's safe for you to go, alright?"
I nodded, my knees feeling weak.
"Okay," said one of the other girls, walking up to me, her high heels clicking on the tile floor. "If all of it goes to hell, you jab em and you run, okay?"
She handed me a small knife with a sharp blade and a pink handle.
I nodded, unable to speak, and the girls shared a look of determination and it occurred to me that this probably wasn't the first time they had found a girl scared for her life cowering in a bathroom.
They swept out and I darted over to the door and listened. I heard arguing and I cracked the door open. The girls were lividly quarreling with Captain Rogers and the other man and I took this as my chance to escape.
I tore out of the bathroom and sprinted down the hallway at full speed, not even daring to look back. I ran as hard as I could and threw myself down the left hallway. My lungs burned and my feet hurt with every slap against the polished floor, but I kept running. I ended up right in front of the Chick-fil-A and I ran up to the counter, panting and out of breath, and the older woman behind the counter stared at me in surprise.
"Kourtney – sent me – I need to – hide –" I panted. "Please –!"
The woman nodded and hissed at me to jump over the counter. I did and she immediately swept me out of sight and behind some of the machines.
"Stay here honey," she instructed and I nodded, too out of breath to say anything before she walked casually back to the counter.
I sank down to sit on the floor, praying to whoever that Captain Rogers wouldn't find me here.
"What does the guy look like?" A different girl asked me and I jumped.
"Uh t-tall, blonde, muscular, the other guy's black and he's muscular too," I stammered.
The girl glanced up and peered over one of the machines.
"Is one in a gray t-shirt and the other in a red jacket?" she asked and my heart clenched in terror.
"Yes," I whispered, and the girl nodded. She went back to making waffle fries a few feet away from me.
I stayed in the corner of that Chick-fil-A for what felt like an eternity, closing my eyes and praying that they would pass by.
"They're gone, honey," the original woman said, walking back behind the machines to talk to me. "I sent 'em toward the top level."
I breathed a sigh of immense relief. "Oh, thank you."
"No problem," she said, giving me a sad smile. "You better scoot before they come back though."
I scrambled to my feet and nodded. She led me to the back of the restaurant and out of a back exit.
"T-thank you so much," I blubbered, tears forming in my eyes. "Really, thank you so much."
"No problem, honey," the woman said, giving me a comforting hug. "Do you have some place to go?"
I glanced at the clock on the wall. Winter was probably waiting for me.
"Yeah I have someone waiting for me," I sniffled.
"Go on then," the woman insisted kindly.
I thanked her again, overwhelmed by the kindness of these strangers and she gave me a knowing, sad smile and I ducked out of the back door.
I hauled ass over to the tree I was supposed to meet Winter under and sure enough he was there, leaning against it, his face tilted to the ground. He looked up when I approached him and his expression immediately hardened when he saw how panicked I was.
"Captain Rogers is here we need to leave now," I blurted out before he could say anything.
His eyes widened and he scanned the parking lot behind me and his arm snaked around my back and we jumped into the freshly stolen car and sped off.