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CHAPTER FOUR
The Haunted

... ... ...

The room was cold, and oddly humid. The air heavy with tension so thick that it seemed to clog his airway with every breath, to catch in the lungs like the fluff from a cotton mill. He sat still as ice, waiting, listening, calculating.

The scrape of a metal chair leg dragged across the cement floor struck his ear, resonating with a hum like that of a tuning fork.

The first guard came at a rush, swinging the sun baton down in a broad arc – aiming for his shoulder.

Twisting his body the Soldier evaded, throwing his own abandoned chair across the dull metal table to hit the other guard square in the chest. The plates of his metal arm shifted, the mechanics inside recalibrating to grab the guard's baton at its base and wrench it free.

He pivoted sharply, delivering a savage kick to the man's middle. Ribs splintered, giving way beneath the force of his heel.

The man staggered away with a wet, choking wheeze, undoubtedly bleeding into his chest cavity.

Pivoting again he met the second guard approaching at his back. Blocking the strike to his face with a forearm, the Soldier brought the stolen baton up and swiftly back down, the steel length landing with a sickening crack against the side of the man's head. Skin split open from temple to jaw, blood bursting alongside shards of broken teeth, and the body dropped – heavy as a sack of bricks.

A flicker of movement at the edge of his periphery called the Soldier to turn, angling his head to glance back over his shoulder.

The woman had retreated into the far corner of the examination room, one hand groping for the handle of the door. Forgetting, it seemed, that she was locked in with him.

He started for her, casting the blood-slick baton to the floor with a clatter. She started, her eyes growing round and over-bright with her terror. Abandoning her search for the door she lifted her hands to him instead, palms turned out in meaningless supplication.

"Don't…"

The trembling command crested and fell around him, no more effective than rain over a mountainside. The pretty plea enclosed within it simply failed to register.

Within two meters' distance she tried to bolt, head and shoulders tucked down as she surged to the right.

He caught her around the chest.

Using her own momentum he carried her backward, slamming her down against the surface of the table – so hard that he all but felt her teeth clack together in her skull. Her spine arched, hair spilling across the wood in serpentine strands of liquid gold.

The broken gasp cut off as his hand closed about her throat, titanium thumb digging into the soft, tender place below the jaw. He bore down, vaguely cognizant of her knees lifting, the muted blue skirt of her dress catching at the pockets of his tactical pants when her legs folded about his waist and pushed. She struggled and flailed, working in desperate vain to throw him off.

"Stop," she croaked, forcing the word free as though dragging it across the edge of a serrated knife. "Please, stop—"

His grip tightened infinitesimally. Her pulse was throbbing against his palm, hammering like the heart of a rabbit about to burst from fear and strain. She was grasping feebly at his wrist, fingers sliding, unable to get purchase, the blood vessels amidst the whites of her eyes bursting like tiny ephemeral flowers, the focus and feeling in gray-green irises dulling swiftly. Her lips – a pink far paler than before – moved, yet no sound emerged.

Giving one last weak shove at his arm her limbs went slack around him. Her hand slipped, fell to the table with a dull thud. The tension along her body eased as if relaxing back into death as it reached up to swallow her.

The rhythm beneath his hand fluttered once, twice more…and went still.

Several seconds more he held before letting up. Pulling his hand away, he straightened, gazing down at the woman's body where it lay sprawled.

She was lifeless and waxen, skirt rucked up about her knees, eyes vacant, staring as if into the very heart of death. She had sliced open her palm and fingers upon the edges of metal plating as they had adjusted to her struggle, blood streaking skin, coating fingertips and caked under nails. Imprints of his fingers forming deep purpling marks about the pale line of her neck.

He looked at her, and all he felt was empty.

...

~BUCHAREST, ROMANIA – 2016~

For what might have been the hundredth time, Bucky scanned the perimeter of the market square from his vantage point. Still no unusual movements. Nothing overtly strange that he could see. Just her: still sitting at the spindly little table, stirring the otherwise untouched tea in her cup over and over again with tiny, graceful circles of her wrist.

She always seemed to be there.

Just…there.

In the little under a month that he had been in Bucharest, he had only seen her the twice before – both those instances over the length of a week. Lately he found himself spotting her almost every time he was in the market. Sometimes she would be sitting outside the café, sometimes seated on one of the public benches or perusing the market stalls. But she was always there. And as days passed to become another week, they never again crossed paths. Nor did he ever catch her so much as looking his way.

True, he wasn't exactly projecting in a way as he might expect a pretty girl to cast her eyes at him – the utter and complete opposite, in fact. But it wasn't about that. It was that he couldn't get the way she had looked at him out of his head. That soft, bittersweet sort of fondness, and then the shock, an expression that had managed to convey the sound and sensation of breath ripped away, or perhaps of having been struck in the ribs. After the intensity of that look, as shaken as witnessing it had made him, the total lack of even one random passing glance felt…wrong. As though the lack of contact was painstakingly intentional.

Then there was the fact that she never seemed to be doing anything. Idly sipping a cup of tea, picking at a sweet roll and leaving half for the pigeons, browsing a booksellers cart without really looking at what she picked up. She never met anyone – never really even spoke to another person, outside of the brief, expected pleasantries to the odd vendor. Not all that unlike himself, though perhaps without so much effort to conceal herself. But then, that was what troubled him.

He'd dreamed of her several nights in. Dreamed he had thrown her down on an exam table and crushed her throat nearly in two.

It couldn't have been based in resurfacing memory. Not purely, at least. He had little doubt that he had have committed just such an action, but the victim would have been some other unfortunate woman pleading for the life he stole. He couldn't explain why his mind had transposed the face of the market girl onto the body of the woman he had choked to death. No, not choked. That was far too mild and imprecise of a word. He had strangled her. He had watched the life leave her eyes – had leaned close specifically to do so, because he certainly hadn't needed the leverage.

The dream had disturbed him. Almost more than others far more graphic and brutal. After waking, he had vomited all over the floor, unable to scramble to the bathroom in time, and had spent the better part of twenty minutes hunkered and shivering in the middle of the mess before he finally recovered enough to move again.

It had seemed too real, too vivid. He hadfelt the column of her neck under his damned metal hand for hours after. It might simply have been a manifestation of his fear for the thing inside him. Or potentially of all the horrendous things that his hands had done, and could yet do to anyone that had the misfortune of getting too close. It might simply have been a reminder that he was a mortar shell housed within the flesh of a man. That he was neither human nor whole.

It might have been a thousand things. What it felt like was a warning.

As an entire week passed this way, that warning chime at the back of his mind grew nothing but steadily louder.

More than once he had reminded himself that it could all be coincidence. She could simply be a new resident, still establishing a routine or pattern of her own. Perhaps her circumstances were similar to his, and she was just another person seeking to disappear amidst the anonymity of a new city. Perhaps the reasons he interpreted her behavior as odd were due to his lack of any gauge as to what normal looked like, and he was being paranoid, growling at shadows. And yet…he hadn't survived this long by ignoring his intuition, and intuition told him – quite loudly – that there was something wrong about her.

He had yet to determine exactly what.

The unease had grown too strong to ignore, the questions too loud and prominent in his head to go another day without looking into them. Late last night, he had scoped out a perch midway up the fire escape of the building with both the clearest view of the whole plaza and enough cover provided by other buildings, trees, and the angle and construction of the structure itself to prevent him from being spotted. There he had remained – all morning and on into what was gradually becoming late evening – to wait, and to watch.

He had no real expectations for what he might see. A meeting, perhaps, or a drop of some kind, even if only in the form of a message. Yet for that, she would have had to be an operative, and frankly, no matter from which angle he considered it, this explanation didn't quite fit.

Where covert appearance and conduct were concerned, she was failing miserably. Unless, of course, that was the point. He had considered she might be bait – something to draw and occupy his focus, distract him enough to allow other, more competent operatives to move in. Still, anyone actively trying to locate and apprehend him would know better than to try something so obvious. And even if someone had underestimated him to such a ridiculous extent, if she was some kind of agent or assassin, none of the potential scenarios along this vein he calculated came near to explaining that damn confounding look.

Had she been a witness to one of his innumerable sins? He honestly couldn't imagine having allowed one to survive, though he supposed it was technically a possibility. As was her being a loved one of someone he had hurt or killed. Yet if this was the case – if she had seen him murder or maim or steal – why, then, had her immediate response to seeing him not been the fear he expected would correspond?

She had entered the plaza a little before seven in the morning, just as the vendors were finishing their setup, and headed straight for the café. Ordering a drink of some kind, she had crossed to one of the benches to sit. Barring a trip to dispose of the to-go cup, this was where she remained for over two hours. Her back had been to him. He would have been able to see anything she had seen – had there been anything of note. Which there hadn't been. A few minutes after nine she had exited the market via the same street from which she had arrived.

While he had remained at his post, his observation of the comings and goings throughout the day turned up nothing aside from the odd pickpocket. There was simply nothing to see.

At around four she had turned up again. Procuring a cup of tea from the café, she settled outside to promptly ignore it and nearly everything else.

Every so often he saw her chin lift as if she were glancing about the marketplace. Looking for something. For a contact? For him? He had no real reason to think it aside from paranoia, but he was more than certain it was the latter.

But for what reason? Why sit here in the square for over four hours just to watch?

By the time she was readying herself to leave at about half past six, he had already made up his mind to follow her, making his way down from his perch and around the east side of the plaza when she rounded the corner onto the street proper.

The day had been a cooler one than those of late. She was wearing a long sweater, perhaps to combat it, of a dark plum color which made some of the tones in her hair appear almost white in the right light. Her shoes were…interesting. Heels, but not the kind he most often saw women wear nowadays. The heels themselves were on the shorter, thicker side, not tall and spindly, the shape of the shoe itself like something he might have seen and admired before many, many times – or so said the faint spark somewhere in his mind.

For several blocks he tailed her: not too close, yet close enough to catch any subtle movements, hugging tight to the buildings and the long evening shadows they cast. Initially it was all he'd planned to do. Follow, watch. See where she went. Home? An office? A meeting place?

Then – seemingly out of nowhere, for no reason at all – her steps slowed. Stopped.

He registered the hint of movement in her shoulders and ducked out of sight, eyes trained to her as she turned to face the empty street behind her. Her shoulders angled to the left, then her hips. One foot was poised to take a step, as if she had half decided to go back the way she'd come before immediately thinking better of it. It was an odd thing to do. Yet it was the expression on her face which struck him, an amalgamation of resignation and disappointment and worry – all of it laced with a quiet misery.

She turned back around to continue onward, and he felt something set deep inside him slip.

It was the strangest sensation. He was at once utterly in control of his body and utterly not in control of his will to use it. His feet were moving, carrying him forward at a swifter, unthinkingly smoother pace, his stride lengthening to close the distance separating him from her. His vision spread unconsciously outward as he drew closer, calculating the distance to the space up ahead between two buildings – nearly too narrow to be an alley, with no windows to overlook it and only the one exposed entrance.

It would do.

His right arm snaked firmly around her middle and locked, forcing her sideways into the alley.

A strangled sound met his ears – not fully formed enough to be a true curse. An elbow jerked viciously back, aiming straight for his ribs. He caught it with his left hand, fingers curling just tightly enough to convey the warning not to do it again.

He felt her stiffen, felt her balance waver. Without thinking he found his grip adjusting about her upper arm to gentle the collision of her back against the brick when she wrenched herself around to face him.

Her mouth was slack, lips parted. Her cheeks were bloodless-pale, and her eyes were...he'd thought they would be blue, but they weren't. They were a green-gray color, large, fringed with dark lashes, and could have been ripped straight out of his horror of a nightmare.

Something about them bothered him. Intensely.

"You've been observing me for days—why."

Russian wasn't his mother tongue – he knew that now – but it came to him as if it was. Undoubtedly a symptom of it having been the one he'd primarily used over the span of seventy years.

It hadn't been a question.

She didn't answer.

The thought did briefly occur to him that perhaps she couldn't understand, that he would have to scrounge what he knew of the local dialect and filter it through Ukrainian. Yet something about the way she was staring at him led him to believe that lack of comprehension wasn't the reason for her silence.

He knew he could be physically intimidating. It had been one of his core functions. Nearly every person he had encountered for decades had all but radiated terror in his presence when he was simply there, without even the ability to attempt to be more frightening than he inherently was. Unlike now, or so it seemed. He was all but looming over this woman like the harbinger of death, projecting as much menace as he knew how to summon and (if he were honest with himself) a little uneasy about just how effortlessly it came to him. And she – small, soft thing that she was – was anything but cowering.

She was wary, that he could see, as any creature would be in the sights of a predator. Which she clearly acknowledged him to be. Her face was tense, her eyes wide and full of that same uncanny shock and recognition, but her body language was open, her posture loose, not tight. She wasn't alarmed, but she was confused, like she hadn't expected to see him there, or perhaps at all, and something else didn't know how to read.

She shouldn't have been so collected, relatively speaking. Not when so close to someone like him. Which led him to believe that either he had lost this particular skill, or she believed she had no reason to be afraid.

Who was she?

"Who do you work for?"

Once again, not entirely a question so much as a demand. If it came a little more harshly, it was only because he was trying to elicit a response, not because he was rattled.

She almost seemed to come back to herself, shoulders straightening, chin jerking as if to realign her attention.

Her mouth opened, voice emerging hardly above a whisper.

"No one."

His hand tightened ever so slightly at her arm, metal thumb – shielded by the glove – curling into the vulnerable spot at the inside of her elbow in a way that was disconcertingly similar to how its dream-spun twin had dug into unprotected throat. Shoving the recollected image aside, he leaned closer, into her space, to maximize the implied threat.

"Don't lie to me," he cautioned, letting the hint of a growl underscore the words.

Truth be told, whether she answered or not, he had no idea what he was going to do now. Up until this point in his escape he had been sure in his conviction to do whatever he must in order to maintain his freedom. But in that split second, he doubted his resolve. He had no intention of killing again, nor did he particularly like the idea of hurting her, even if she was out to do him harm. So what was he going to do with her – knock her out long enough to get a running start out of the city? And if she truly had been no threat, certainly she would be now.

She gave the tiniest approximation of a head-shake, causing the fine pieces of hair that had escaped from the intricate braid to feather about her temples, the corners of her jaw.

"It's not a lie," she insisted, "I don't work for anyone."

Her Russian was slow, a little stilted, as if with lack of use – as though it was taking her time to translate and weigh each word in her head before speaking. Her hands were spread open, even as he held her right arm trapped, conveying harmlessness, a lack of weapon, absence of the intent to lash out.

From afar he had thought her familiar….this close, the pangs of it were so much more pronounced. It was almost uncomfortable to look at her. It wasn't even really her face now – though that was plenty – but the way she moved, the way her mouth shaped sound when she spoke, the way she was electing to speak to him, to hold herself while she did. He got the distinct impression that it was based in experience of some kind, and hard-won at that.

Images flashed across his broken brain: faint, there-and-gone slivers of what had to be memory. Gray concrete walls, the metal frame of an IV drip. A clipboard held in a woman's hand. A drab olive uniform jacket, military-grade, embroidered with a black and white insignia on the lapels – one that nothing short of a bullet would ever scour from his brain.

A hot, noxious tangle of anger and aversion and white, burning terror raked vicious barbs through his chest. And he had been so ready to dismiss the possibility. So much more the fool was he.

"You're HYDRA," he snarled, lip curling back from his teeth.

Her eyes went wide. Not, he realized, with the hollow dread of having been discovered, but with stark, vivid rage. For the space of a second Bucky thought she was going to draw back and slap him.

"I am not—"

Abruptly she quieted. He could all but feel the force of her inhale, measured, centering, and filling her lungs. Her eyes fluttered briefly closed. When they opened the anger was tempered, yet he once again found himself caught in the sensation of being pinned to the spot. Somehow he had the utterly surreal certainty that he had deeply offended her.

She switched to English, the words coming more smoothly for her to say: "I'm no more theirs than you are."

His eyes narrowed, boring into her as though he might pierce through her skull and pick apart whatever the hell was going on underneath. Her pulse was steady, if a bit fast, her stare level, unblinking – meeting his straight on. She meant what she said. Whether true or not, she believed it to be.

What had she said, exactly?

For the space of a few seconds he completely misplaced where and when he was.

A dull ache was starting to develop in his temples and behind his eyes. His heart was pounding – when had that started? How long had they been here? He couldn't remember. He couldn't…

"It's ok—"

When his vision cleared it was to find her expression had changed, softened, leaving something pained and tender in the wake of the anger.

"I don't expect you to remember me. I promise, I'm not here to hurt you…"

And the confusion he remembered seeing in her seemed to have transferred to him, because suddenly he realized what it was about her eyes that bothered him. He had sketched a pair of eyes just like them in at least two of his journals. Wide and glossy with tears not yet shed.

Just like hers were now.

Because they were hers.

...

To say Zuzana had been surprised to see her Soldier again after the run-in at the market would have been phrasing it mildly.

What was still been doing there, she wondered. Did he not register her odd reaction to seeing him as a potential threat? Did he think he had imagined her – that she was some manner of ghost summoned by his subconscious the way she had first thought him to be?

Frankly, she had found it more than a little worrying. If he hadn't acted to protect himself from her, would he if a true threat happened upon him? She really had only vague ideas as to his mental function, or the state of his cognitive repair. And those were all based on a theory that had never come close to being truly tested, let alone proven. It was entirely possible that he wasn't quite as stable as she had first thought.

Even as she'd checked in on him from afar every morning and the occasional evening, it was unsatisfactory. But what else could she do? If she had attempted to make contact, she might really have scared him off, and as desperately as she wanted to ensure he was all right she didn't want it at the expense of driving him away.

When she hadn't seen him at all that day, she had done her best not to leap directly to disaster. But as the hours bled by and the evening edged steadily toward night the knot of anxiety in the pit of her stomach tightened persistently.

Distressed in spite of her effort not to be, she had started home after the post-workday rush dispersed.

What if something had happened? There would be nothing she could do. But what if nothing had happened? What if he'd had the day off, or had determined that it really was a better idea to vacate the area?

When the man's arm hooked around her, hauling her roughly into the alley at her left, vindication mixed with the sick flash of her fear. This was the precise reason she had made it a priority to learn how to defend herself – because she would be twice damned before she allowed anyone to take her where she didn't choose to go ever again. At the very least, she would make it extremely unpleasant for them.

Jamming her elbow back into the bastard's side, she steeled herself to slam her head back into his face when he leaned in reflex to the first strike, hoping for a broken nose. He caught her before she managed to land the strike, his hand closing around the bend of her arm.

The pulse spiked in her throat.

Even through the thick leather glove she recognized the grip – the slight, ever-so-controlled squeeze that quite clearly said: try that again at your peril.

Instinct was not the only thing which had her going passively still and quiet in his grasp. She had not forgotten what he was or that she had plenty of reasons to be wary of him, regardless that he was no longer at the end of HYDRA's leash. Still, even as he crowded her into the wall and unleashed a fully passable replica of the deadly stare that had caused men far larger and braver than herself to flee screaming, she couldn't help thinking that he seemed almost…lost. Like he wasn't quite sure what to do now that he had her there.

She wasn't projecting a threat – she had made certain not to – but she wasn't not a threat. Was she? He was trying to figure it out, and so too figure out what he should, could, or perhaps what he had the stomach to do about it.

He looked different, she noticed. Not so pale as he had been, perhaps, but tired. There were shadows in his unshaven face that she didn't remember, and a hollowness to his cheeks that implied he likely wasn't getting enough to eat, and yet in spite of those things he was still the most devastatingly beautiful man she had ever seen.

"Who do you work for?"

He looked as though he would have a much deeper voice – she had always thought so. It had been somewhat, back then, when his mind had been scraped so raw that he was empty even of the bleeding. Instead, it was a low, warm tenor, and, even when being used to growl at her, was intensely pleasant to the ear.

"Don't lie to me," he'd warned in response to her assurance, and sixty years ago she would have been convinced he meant to brutally end her right there unless she confessed her sins down to the stick of chewing gum she had stolen from her mother's purse as a child.

But she knew what murder looked like in this man's face and it wasn't there just now. Not even when he bared his teeth and accused her of being one of them.

"I am not—"

The strength of her own fury caught her off guard. She swallowed the rest of the venom before she could throw it at him, immediately awash with guilt.

It wasn't his fault. He didn't know...and it's not as though he was entirely wrong. He was simply trying to protect himself.

Just as she was.

A furrow had formed in his brow, deeply shadowed by the baseball cap he wore pulled low over his face. His gaze was distant, partly unfocused. Distracted, perhaps. Or else, possibly, torn between realities.

After a delayed moment of processing, something occurred to her. Something important.

HYDRA had not been an assumption, nor a random guess. Something in his brain knew the association was there, even if the context was missing. He remembered more than she had just given him credit for – more, likely, than he even realized, or could access. She would have staked all of her education and unconventional career on that.

"I'm not here to hurt you," she assured him, voice as soft and even as she could make it, not necessarily expecting him to believe her but perhaps hoping that he could somehow sense her sincerity.

She didn't know what caused it, whether it had been some infinitesimal movement on her part, or some other thing alive only in his mind. All she knew was that he recoiled – abruptly and for no reason she could follow.

Eyes huge, he snatched his hand away from her to clutch it close to his middle. The way he looked at her – the tangle of rage and confusion and fear had been so stark and loud that he may as well have been screaming. Yet none of it had managed to drown out the haunted flicker of recognition somewhere deep in the back of his stare. The impact of it landed like a blow to the stomach.

She could swear she had only blinked, and barely that. In that split instant of time he had gone, vanished so suddenly and completely that he might never have been there at all. Just like that she was alone in the narrow space between the two buildings, winded and overflowing with emotion, with a sob trapped in her throat.

Sagging against the rough, grimy brick, Zuzana tipped her head back, squeezing her eyes shut to counteract the hot, liquid sting at the corners.

She had never allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to see him again, speak to him. In her mind such a meeting could only have taken place within a certain, and devastating, set of circumstances that brought more pain than she could tolerate. Because of this, she had never considered what it would feel like to look him in the eyes and see that he didn't know her. Or, alternatively, that he did.

The hardest thing she had ever done was to grieve him while he – to her knowledge – still lived, knowing as she did that death would have been a mercy. Over fifty years she had grieved. She grieved still.

Somehow, for reasons she found utterly beyond sense or explanation, this was worse.

NOTES:

Not exactly the smoothest first meeting (but not really), as far as those go...

I promise this will get more interesting. The present timeline has been primarily quick bursts of activity amidst what would be a lot of everyday monotony that doesn't need spelling out, but also has to be loosely alluded to at the same time. Beginnings are hard for me, and for this story especially, for some reason.

The next present time chapter will have more going on, and then more from thereon. Hang in there a little bit longer, I promise it'll be worth it!

To all of you who have read so far, and those who have left kudos and decided this rough start was worth following at least for the time being - a huge and grateful thank you. I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you for your interest and for humoring my fan-demon-purging.

Until next time!