The girl seemed more content after getting food in her. She still walked slowly, more slowly than he liked, but he wasn't going to push her to go faster than she felt comfortable with. He had seen her shoes. They were liable to fall apart at any moment.

He felt tense the whole walk back to the warehouse, the things he had learned turning over in his mind. James Buchanan Barnes, the museum's information screen had called him, just as the man on the air ship had called him. The only Howling Commando to give his life.

But he hadn't given his life. It had been stolen. It had been taken and ripped apart, only to be thrown back together. All jagged edges and no memories.

"Crow Man." He blinked from his thoughts and looked down at the girl next to him. Since calling him a "fanboy," she had left him to his thoughts. Now, however, she broke the silence, and she gave him a scrutinizing look. "You alright, buddy? You got this kinda constipated look on your face - well." She shrugged and gave a teasing grin. "More constipated than usual. Hotdog doing you dirty?"

He wondered if anyone in HYDRA ever spoke to him as freely as she did to him, without fear of consequence. Yes, he had been ordered about and barked at, had been abused by Pierce, but no one had ever inquired of his well being. He's certain no one had ever called him constipated before.

"Fine," he told her, and she narrowed her eyes at him.

"Are you actually fine or are you just saying you're fine?"

Did it matter? he wanted to ask, but looking at her, he knew it did. To her at least. He did not know why, but it did, and he felt a twinge in his chest at the thought.

"Actually fine."

She wasn't convinced. He could see it in the way the corners of her lips pulled down only just. "If you say so." They continued into the alley that led to the warehouse, and he stopped short at the sound of movement around the corner. Shuffling footsteps, two bodies. His hand twitched, and he only just stopped from throwing his arm out to keep the girl back as well. Why keep her back? Why keep her safe? He looked down at his hand, then at the girl as she continued forward with little thought to what might be around the corner. She is small, he decided, and useful to keep around. It will not do to lose this advantage so soon.

"What's up?" she asked, taking a couple steps further before turning back to him. He nodded to the noise, and her mouth formed an O in understanding. "Ah, that's just Helen and Marty, the ones that live by the fire escape. They'll probably just ignore us anyway."

He remembered how the girl had mentioned the couple before. It didn't calm him, and he felt a barely there flare of frustration at the trust the girl placed in them to leave her alone.

She didn't wait for him before continuing on her way, and he was left with no other choice but to follow. Sure enough, the noise had been made by the homeless couple he had nearly ran into the day he found the girl's warehouse. He watched them, not meeting their eyes but keeping aware of their movements. The girl gave a small wave as they walked by, and the man grabbed the woman's arm, tugging it but saying nothing.

It was the woman who called out.

"Nena," she called, and the girl paused in her walk, looking at the couple. He took note of the name, and how the girl reacted to it, and filed it away. The woman glanced at him, and then, thinking he would not understand, spoke in Spanish. "No bad men today?"

"There was a security guard that was a jerk." She paused. "Not as bad as the man that kicked the dog, but still worse, I think, than the guy that beat up Captain America."

Crow Man went still next to the girl. She knew, then, of the attack, but didn't seem to recognize that it was he that was behind it. Of course she knew. The entire city knew. She had never mentioned it, not even at the Museum.

He didn't think she actually cared.

"Who is he?" the woman asked, and she regarded him with a cold, accusing look. The girl looked up at him and smiled.

Had anyone ever smiled at him as freely as this girl did?

"He's my friend, I guess. He's good," she said, and she said it with that final sense of authority she seemed to have.

He looked down at her, barely believing what she had said. But before anyone could challenge her, she was already saying her goodbyes and leaving the couple behind. He followed, and resisted the uncharacteristically petty urge to say his own Spanish farewells. The woman was already suspicious. Best to not push her to action.

The girl, he decided, was a bad influence.


Ximena napped when they got back to the warehouse. She dreamed of nothing, though she swore she heard the voice of one of her foster mothers - her name had been Carrie, and she loved her plants a little too much - telling her she wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Which was fine. If she didn't sleep, maybe she wouldn't dream of the empty city of ash.

When she woke, she found Crow Man hiding under his stairs. She almost couldn't see him at first; the sun was getting low, and the shadows in the warehouse grew darker. There was still enough light to see, but it was dimmed, and it wouldn't last nearly as long as Ximena wished it would. The dark didn't bother her, not really, but she did like being able to see.

"Whatcha lookin' at?" she asked, sitting in front of him, just within the stretch of shadow. She squinted at him through the darkness when he looked up at her. There was something in his hand, and she could only just make out that it was the information pamphlet from the museum. "Can you even read that?"

She only realized that her words may have come across differently than she meant when he shot her a look, and she rather wished her eyes hadn't adjusted to the dark so quickly so she wouldn't have to have seen it.

"I didn't mean like you're stupid or nothing!" she added quickly, holding her hands up in defense. "I meant, like, it's too dark!" The look - and really, it was more of a glower - leveled off to something Ximena could better stomach.

"I can read."

Ximena scowled, scratching at the back of her hand and feeling stupid all of a sudden at the miscommunication. "I really didn't mean it as nothing mean."

"I know."

"You'll know when I wanna be mean."

"I know."

A silence fell between them, and the air between them felt… stifled. Ximena's hand started to go numb from her scratching, and she pulled her hands apart before she broke skin. The scars from the last time she had done so had only just faded away enough to the point where they were no longer noticeable. She huffed and unfolded her legs, kicking them out towards Crow Man. They didn't touch, but they were closer to him than she had ever sat to him. She leaned back, her hands behind her to prop herself up.

"Why did we go to the museum today?" she asked. His gaze flickered away for a split second, and he did not answer. She clicked her teeth. "Do you just really like Captain America? It's okay if you do, I guess-"

"I don't know."

She blinked in surprise and pushed herself up to sit straight. "No?" She eyed his hand, metal and shiny and probably heavy, and he clenched it into a fist and pulled it out of sight when he noticed her staring. She looked back up at his face, and wondered at the vacant look he sometimes got.

"Crow Man," she started, and he made a noise of acknowledgement. "Did you hurt your head?" she asked carefully, "when you lost your arm?" She didn't expect him to answer, and so went on. "Is that why you… well, do you really not know who you are?"

The second dragged on longer than Ximena was comfortable with, and she wondered if she had said the wrong thing again.

"I don't know."

Ximena wasn't sure if he meant that he didn't know if he hurt his head, or if he meant he didn't know who he was. That was the trouble with I don't know. She figured she knew now why her dad had disliked it so much. It was just so vague.

She nodded, despite her uncertainty in his answer. "Okay."

She considered what he had said, and while she didn't reach for him, she could still feel a sort of melancholy. She wasn't sure if it was from him or from herself. If it was from him, then, it was the strongest thing she had felt from him since he had appeared. And well, Ximena liked Crow Man, despite the fact that he had come in unannounced. He was, from what she could tell, a good egg.

It wasn't fair that he didn't know who he was. She bet he was probably awesome - not that she'd ever tell him that.

"Okay," she repeated, pushing herself up to stand. "Wait here," she said, despite knowing he wasn't likely to run off anywhere. She ran to the cabinets and, despite the trust she had found herself putting in Crow Man - not that she'd tell him about that -, she glanced back at him. He was looking in the opposite direction, and if she had to guess, she'd say he did it on purpose. Content that her collection was safe, she pulled the doors open to reveal her stash.

Little knick knacks, as well as more expensive goods filled the shelves. Things she hadn't needed, that wouldn't do her much good, but that she had taken anyway, if only to alleviate the itching in her palms. Little figurines, books, pens and markers. A small stack of journals.

Ximena grabbed a pen and a journal, slammed the door shut, and ran back to Crow Man. She dropped down in front of him again, and shoved down the sudden flare of awkward shyness before it could take place.

"Lookit," she said, holding out the pen and book for him. He stared down at them, and while nothing changed in his expression when he looked up at her, she felt the shift. A mish mash of amusement and what she could only describe as deadpan. He carefully took the things from her, inspecting them, and Ximena swore she saw the corners of his lips turn up into a barely there smile.

"It's the best one I had, okay? Shut up," she ordered, and Crow Man held up his hands, along with the pen and journal, in a placating manner. Ximena hadn't seen a problem with the journal when she had first taken it; it was standard size, hard cover, lined paper. Though the light purple color and the cartoon sloths stamped at random along with the line "take it slow" did make it seem out of place in Crow Man's metal hand.

"Anyway," she went on. "It's so you can, like, work on figuring out who you are." He stared at her, then down at the journal. She huffed. "I mean, like - Okay so after my parents-" she swallowed hard and steeled herself. "I had to go talk to this doctor lady, and she made me keep a journal. I had to write about how I felt and what I did during the day. And when I remembered anything I might have forgot, I had to write it down too."

"Anything you forgot?" he asked, voice quiet.

Ximena nodded and picked at the frayed strands of denim from where her overalls were torn at her knee. "Yeah. I was having trouble remembering a bunch of stuff, and the lady said that sometimes, when really scary things happen to us and stick with us and make us feel like crap forever after, we can have problems with our head." She paused. "Like remembering things. Things before the scary thing and things after the scary thing. I have like a whole month I can barely remember," she offered. "So, it's okay that you don't know nothing. And!" she added brightly, "if you start writing, sometimes it leads you to remembering stuff you weren't even thinking about."

Crow Man carefully opened the journal. "Thank you," he said, not looking back up at Ximena. She shrugged.

"Yeah. Yeah, whatever."


The man on the bridge was Steven Grant Rogers. He called me James Buchanan Barnes.

I am was am I was called the Winter Soldier.

The Girl calls me Crow Man.


About a week after she gave Crow Man the journal, DC turned into hell.

At least that's how it felt. Which caught Ximena by surprise. It was still the middle of April, and the heat was thick and wet and made her feel like she was drowning. Over the last two years she had spent in New York, she hadn't been able to get over how different the heat was.

She missed the dry heat of the desert in Arizona. She knew how to survive that. She knew how to breathe.

Trips into the city were put on hold. Sure, the warehouse got hot, but it was shaded, and outside was decidedly not. The air felt stuffy, and she wanted to get up and open the door to see if there was any breeze that would blow in, but that would require getting up from her blankets, and she was not in the mood to deal with that nonsense.

"How are you not dying?" she whined to Crow Man on the third day of the heat wave. She was waiting for herself to get used to the heat, but it only seemed to get worse as time went on. Crow Man, the lucky jerkface, didn't seem to have a problem with it from beneath his stairs. He sat, like he always did, quietly and not moving. Worse still, he still wore those jeans and long sleeve shirt, and in the evening when it was cool enough for Ximena to get up and go talk to him, she never saw his face going red and sweaty like she knew hers was.

She hated him a little bit.

"I think I prefer the heat."

Ximena's jaw dropped. "How?!"

"I was kept in a freezer for 70 years," he said with the straightest face and not an ounce of tell tale amusement to reveal the joke he was obviously having at her expense.

"Kept in a freeze-" She scowled when his words fully registered, and she felt a swell of irrational anger at them. Here she was, dying of the drowning heat and this jerk was talking about living in a freezer? "Stupid Crow Man, you're not funny," she muttered. "Where's your stupid freezer now, huh? We can put it right there," she said pointing to her corner, "and I can sleep in it forever."

"No."

She blinked at the force beneath the word, the sudden flair of disgust and resentment that came off him, the way his eyes darkened in a way she had never seen happen to anyone before.

There was something dangerous in his eyes, and Ximena swallowed hard, very much wanting to be anywhere but under his gaze.

"O-okay. I was just kidding." She looked away, brow furrowed. "You're the only one that can make jokes?"

"No," he said, his voice softened. It carried an apology, and Ximena ignored it. The silence stretched between them, and this time it was Crow Man that broke it. "Drink water."

"What?"

"For the heat. Drink water."

"Oh." Ximena glanced back at her cabinets. "I'm out," she admitted, and as though her body decided to wait for this precise moment, her mouth went dry. "I was gonna go before, but it got too gross," she lamented. When she looked back up at Crow Man, his expression was coated in disapproval. "Hey, I don't see you drinking water either!" She sighed, and was about to announce her plans to go in search of both food and water in the morning when Crow Man reached for the bag she had given him. He opened it, and pulled out the water she had given him earlier in the week.

"Drink," he told her, holding it out to her, and she saw that there was about a fourth of the bottle left.

"That's yours-"

"Drink," he repeated, shaking it at her, and then added, in a tone that led her to believe he knew exactly what an asshole he was being, "you're too little."

She snatched the water from his hands with a huff. "I am not too little," she snapped. He hummed in a halfway pleased kind of way, and she decided to ignore him. Stupid Crow Man.

She took a small sip from the water, and stopped herself from drinking more than enough to get the dryness from her throat. She shoved it back at him, and counted it a win when he didn't argue for her to drink more.

"I'll go get more tomorrow morning, before it gets too hot. You probably need food too, huh?"

A pause. "I don't know."

Ximena groaned and threw herself back, careful not to slam her head on the ground. "You're the worst, Crow Man."

True to her word, Ximena woke earlier than she would have liked the next morning. The sunlight was already creeping in through the windows, but she knew she had a while still before it got unbearable to be outside. She wondered how Helen and Marty were, and hoped they found some shade to hide under.

"I'm off," she told Crow Man. He cracked an eye open in acknowledgement, and she thought it ridiculous that the guy didn't have moss growing on him for all that he never moved. The sloth journal was better suited for him than she thought.

She took money with her on this trip; she was looking gross, she knew she was, and she would need to actually buy something to keep the store keeper out of her way.

As she made her way through the alleys, she didn't notice Helen or Marty, and figured that they must have found shelter somewhere else from the heat. She didn't blame them.

There weren't many people on the streets, the heat having scared everyone inside. Ximena huffed and tugged on the straps of her backpack; she didn't like when the city was empty like this. It sent a sinking feeling in her stomach, reminding her too much of her nightmares. Not to mention, she's easier to spot this way. She felt too exposed. Noticed.

She wondered if maybe she shouldn't have made Crow Man come with her, what with how she had gone with him when he wanted to go to the museum.

Too late for that, she thought to herself. Let's just get this stuff and get back.

She headed for her usual corner store, and her steps faltered at the sight of two cops standing in front of it. Their cruiser was parked against the curb, and they leaned on it leisurely, talking amongst themselves.

Shiitake mushrooms.

She was about to turn tail and head back when one looked up and saw her. It would look bad if she turned now. Nothing to do but just do what she needed to do and hope they ignored her.

The universe, it seemed, did not want to grant her these small favors.

One of the cops pushed off of the car as she approached, and she glanced at him warily as she tried to pass.

"Where you heading, kid?" he called, and Ximena hated him for it. She paused, and itched at the way he looked at her. Scrutinizing. Trying to find something wrong.

"Store," she answered, voice clipped.

"By yourself?" It was the partner that spoke.

She scowled, clicked her teeth in annoyance. "Ain't no law against going to the store by yourself." That turned out to be the wrong thing to say. Just like with the security guard at the museum, the cops got that dark look, and Ximena could feel their frustration. She rolled her eyes and started back on her way, not wanting to be around them anymore.

"Hold on, now, girl-" A hand wrapped around her arm, and she really couldn't be blamed for reacting the way she did.

She jerked away, impulse movement, and without looking, shoved at the body behind her. As she heard the cry of shock that came from the cop, she realized that this was probably not the right course of action to take. She glanced back to see him crash into his car, rocking it back a bit with the force, and she didn't bother to wait to explain herself before turning tail and running.

Idiot, idiot, idiot! She thought to herself as she ran; the cops had righted themselves, and she could hear them giving chase, shouting after her. She ducked into the nearest alley - not hers, not one she even knew - and nearly tripped over her feet. She took a split second she didn't exactly have to look around, and there, almost two feet out of her reach, was a ladder that led all the way to the top of the building she stood next to.

She could jump for it. She'd have to jump for it if she didn't want to get carted off to some stupid group home… or jail for shoving that stupid cop.

Her eyes burned, and she could almost see the gold glow as she gave one last look back before running and jumping. She almost slipped before grabbing the ladder's rungs. It shook beneath her sudden weight, and when she looked down, she saw that she had cleared at least three feet from the bottom of the ladder. As she pulled herself up, she tried to ignore how her grip had warped the metal rungs.

The cops ran into the alley right as she threw herself over the building's ledge and onto the roof. She held her breath, trying to calm her pounding heart, and rather than try to listen over the blood rushing in her ears, she reached.

Frustration. Anger. Disappointment.

Ximena huffed, closing her eyes against the sunlight. The emotions she felt didn't fade in the passing minutes, meaning the cops were still nearby, and the heat was creeping up. She could feel tricklets of sweat under her hair.

Fudging great.


Who doesn't love a good ole fashion cliff hanger? I wanna give a shout out and thank you to those of you who have left reviews and have faved/followed this story! I'll be honest in saying that I still have no idea what I'm doing, but it does make me feel better seeing that people seem to actually like the story lolol

I also wanna give a shout out to lorettastwilight (vortexFM here on ff.n), kkiyomizu (KiyUmumaki here on ff.n), and hufflepuff-true over on tumblr for acting as lowkey betas for this story; it'd def be a bit of a mess without them.

Shameless self promo - I have a tumblr for my fanfic stuffs thegalanerd if y'all are interested in checking it out~ Alright, that's enough from me.

Stay schway, y'all