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CHAPTER TWO
Free
... ... ...
~BERN, SWITZERLAND – 2014~
By then the whole world had been familiar with the group of enhanced and gifted individuals known as the Avengers. The incident in New York – defined by a portal opening up over the city and proving, once and for all, that they were not alone in the vastness of the universe – had shifted the planetary zeitgeist so decisively that the mention of Captain America on the television suspended behind the counter of her favorite tea and coffee shop had not been enough to startle her.
It drew her attention, certainly, as it did every other person within, her eyes lifting to the screen on which newscasters had diverted an afternoon weather update to new and breaking reports from Washington DC.
The reporters were speaking in that intense and rapid-fire way they used with something dire, not unlike the way they had done with the New York incident two years prior. The footage illuminated was shaky, obviously taken from someone's cellphone camera as they moved at a run – but what it depicted was clear regardless.
The wreckage of three massive helicarriers falling from the sky and into the Potomac River. Noxious clouds of thick black smoke, mechanical fires bursting from metal and glass, water spraying, flooding into the streets in great plumes as people ran, screaming and crying and terrified.
"—it has been reported that Steve Rogers – Captain America – was aboard one of the aircraft when it went down. His whereabouts are still unknown, as if whether the Captain Rogers is alive or dead."
"Oh my God," one of the baristas murmured, hands pressed to her mouth as the interior of the shop went still, all eyes riveted to the television.
The footage was replaced with that from what was likely a police helicopter: the camera airborne and sweeping slowly around one of the great falling machines, focus narrowing in on what appeared to be two blurred figures locked in a struggle atop a length of metal scaffolding inside. There was a flash of silver, mirror-bright amidst the dull industrial shine of glass and steel.
"While officials have yet to confirm, the man seen here fighting with Captain Rogers has been identified as none other than James Buchanan Barnes, Rogers' former childhood friend, thought to have died in service during World War Two—"
An old photograph was put up in one corner of the screen, black and white shades gone sepia brown with time; the portrait of a young man in uniform, handsome, eyes alight and teeth gleaming as he grinned into the camera, and…unsettlingly familiar.
"—it has also been revealed that Barnes has spent the time since his supposed death serving as the Soviet spy and assassin known as the Winter Soldier—"
The crash of something shattering on hardwood broke the spell over the interior of the shop. People jumped and glanced around to stare at her, and only then did she realize that the sound had come from her; that the cup had slipped from her hands, sending bits of ceramic and hot coffee spilling across the floor.
She couldn't breathe…her entire body was awash with ice, her hands shaking uncontrollably.
"Here, love…"
The older of the two baristas was suddenly there, armed with a towel and tray, cupping her elbow in a gentle hand and ushering her into a seat before setting to clean up the mess.
Numbly she sat, her mind reeling with shock.
"I'm sure he'll be ok," the woman assured her sweetly, "he is Captain America, after all."
Part of her wanted to laugh. Not that she could have. The barista was just trying to soothe the distressed customer that was in so often she had become something of a friend as much as a regular. This woman didn't know that her reaction had little to nothing to do with Steve Rogers.
He's alive, she thought, the faint lit of relief almost immediately consumed by an oppressive cloud of awful, soul-crushing dread.
She left the tea shop without any coffee that morning, and almost the instant she'd walked through her door she had thrown up, violently, until there was nothing but bile to drip from her mouth onto the kitchen floor. For hours after she had lay there, curled up upon the tile, her mind racing and half sure her chest was splitting open down the middle.
He's alive.
...
~BUCHAREST, ROMANIA – 2016~
Swinging from the shoulder, Zuzana threw a fist into the punching bag, aiming for the peeling white logo centered on the navy vinyl. The bag swung wildly from its chain suspended from the ceiling. Unlike most other times, however, the successful hit failed to satisfy her.
As had everything else she'd attempted today.
After a few more attempts to force her focus in line, she gave it up as a lost cause and retreated to the wall-length mirror where her things sat waiting. Flopping cross-legged to the floor, she snatched up her water bottle and drank simply to have something to do as she stared vaguely in the direction of the boxing ring centered in the main room of the gym.
Coverage of DC had been everywhere for weeks. It was on the news, the radio, on the front page of every newspaper and magazine, on the lips of seemingly everyone she passed. She hadn't been able to get away from it.
With time, more and more information was released. Security footage from one of the destroyed helicarriers offered a closer view of the fight between Captain America and the Winter Soldier, the collapse of the craft around them as they brawled, and both of them falling from the wreckage into the river below.
Captain Rogers, the news outlets were quick to report, had been located and was recovering in a hospital room under guard. As for Barnes nothing was known. He had effectively vanished, a wanted fugitive. After a few days the speculation came that he was dead, killed in the fall, or the following crash. Zuzana had known better. It would have taken far more than either thing to kill the Winter Soldier. Yet it was almost easier to believe it had, for if he was dead, then at least…
At least he wouldn't potentially be alone and stressed, hunted in hostile territory, and – if the revelation of his identity was true – likely overflowing with involuntary memory and sensory bleed-over. Probability was high that he was reeling and traumatized and without a safe place to process any of it. Knowing it was like having a razorblade lodged sideways in her windpipe.
When it was confirmed that HYDRA, concealed within the hidden bowels of SHIELD, its mortal enemy, had been exposed and collapsed from within, she had experienced a moment of vicious satisfaction. Any relief, however, had been short-lived.
All she had wanted was to find him. She'd been unable to stay in Bern – the latest in her string of her continually changing and reforming lives – yet by the time she might have been able to figure out a way to get to the US without being caught, he would have been long gone. Training and instinct would have told him to lay low and get as far away as he could, and she had neither the knowledge nor skills to track him. He was lost to her. And even if he hadn't been, she had only ever been a moment in decades' worth of time – a fragment from a point in that moment he wouldn't remember. She had never really known him at all, she'd reminded herself, as if it could prove any sort of consolation.
At the time she hadn't known what she wanted more: to drown herself in vodka or walk into the sea and wash away.
Two years later and she still didn't really know.
"Hey."
Blinking, Zuzana looked up to track the bulky form of her trainer and the gym's owner as he made his way to her from the ring, offering a tiny wave.
"Good work with the bag today," he noted, watching her unwind the protective tape from around her hands. "But you seem a little off. What's up?"
If Cristian hadn't been a friend, she likely would have brushed him off with some airy, noncommittal answer. As it was, he might have been the one living soul closest to her rat this point in her life, and part of her needed to say it.
"I saw a ghost this morning," she admitted quietly, concealing her voice from all but him with the ambient noise of people sparring and working out. "A dead man's face on a stranger."
"Maybe it was him?" Cristian mused, hearing the echo of old pain in the dramatic statement and taking it straight. It was one of the things she liked about him: as eccentric and strange as she was, he never seemed thrown, nor put off, by any of it. "Stranger things have happened."
"Maybe."
She had seen him so many times, in so many faces that never turned out to be his – her soul serving as a vessel for the phantom of her memory in payment for the life she hadn't asked for and didn't deserve. And every time she saw him, but didn't, it tore her bloody all over again.
It had become such a familiar pattern that when she had seen him in the early-morning Saturday crowd she had believed him to be just another specter overlaid upon the form of a stranger. She had marveled at the uncanny resemblance, heart tender with the promise of an oncoming ache. Yet the illusion had lingered, not wavering as the seconds passed and the details came up wrong; the similarities only sharpening as he stood motionless amidst the steady stream of bodies, his eyes locked on her – a blue so brilliant that it never quite seemed real.
It dawned on her slowly at first, a creeping hope stitched through with doubt. Because it couldn't have been. The random, cosmic twist of fate of chance it would have taken to bring him here was beyond calculating. And yet...
When she knew, she did so immediately, as she knew the texture of the scars at her wrist and shoulder beneath her fingertips, and with the stark, extraordinarily specific pang of love and of loss.
She knew the subtle, self-soothing movements of his fingers, not quite fidgeting, on the strap of the bag over one shoulder. She knew the stature, even as he held himself hunched inward, to appear smaller, less. She knew the way he set his jaw, so sharp and graceful it might have been fresh-carved by an artist shaping bone in the way of fine glass, and the way his eyes took in details, made them lie down and submit for his absorption with almost no conscious thought to doing so. And when he had slipped back to vanish into a crowd sparse enough that it should have been difficult, master at his craft that he was…well. She knew that, too.
There was a soft nudge as Cristian leant to touch her shoulder with his own.
"You want to stay back and talk about it?" Waggling his dark eyebrows, he added with relish: "Mihal is making his grandmother's famous Sarmale."
She laughed, which pleased him. "Do you make a habit of inviting people over for lunch with no notice? I pity your poor husband."
Cristian scoffed. "Of course not. You, my most favorite student, are special."
"I'm honored," she replied somberly, and sighed. "Thank you, but I'm not fit company right now, and there are things I need to get done before tonight. Maybe another time."
"Well, you know where we are."
Patting her once on the shoulder, he stood and went to check on his other paying students – although technically he only still accepted payment from her due to sheer stubbornness on her part, and the occasional unserious threat upon his life.
Even though she hadn't taken him up on the offer of a sympathetic ear and fantastic food from his local-famous chef of a husband, she was grateful for it, and for him. Friends were a challenge when one was required to be guarded and selective about how much of oneself to share with others, and relocate with more frequency than was widely considered normal. Good friends – the kind for whom it seemed easy to roll with her eccentricities and tendency to vanish off the face of the planet for days at a time with no explanation – were even more so. She would have given a great deal to be able to sit with the two kind young men with a bottle of wine and share everything currently roiling inside her. Mihal would no longer be able to call her – always with affection – a secretive little cat. And she might find some ease to help her through the days to come.
Unfortunately, she didn't have the luxury of such comfort, or such honesty.
She wouldn't see her Soldier again – of that she was certain. He had seen there was something wrong with the way she had looked at him; too long and with far too much intensity. He would assume he was compromised, and would be out of the city faster than she could have traced him if she tried. He might very well already be gone.
But he was stable, capable of functioning enough to have made it all the way here, to cross oceans. Stable enough to traverse busy Saturday markets.
He was stable, and he was free.
NOTES:
Since I forgot to mention it earlier - chapter size is probably going to vary pretty widely. It all depends on scene-size and where the flashbacks appear. My Beta-reader suggested breaking up things to help with keeping the multiple narratives, flashbacks, dream sequences, and current events straight, so I'm gonna try it. It might make this thing a million chapters long.
Alas. There are worse things.
It is also very on-brand for me.
Cheers.