A/N: Can you believe our little weiner soldier turned 32 yesterday? *tears happily* Also, ya'll need to see Guardians of the Galaxy. asdfghgj. In other news, does anyone else see storm clouds on the horizon?
"All the hardest, coldest people you meet were once soft as water. And that's the tragedy of living."
~Iain Thomas
As the pair passed through the same street section where the Asian man had asked Avery for directions the other day, a flash of red, white and blue caught her attention. Before she even knew what it was, she tensed up and clamped down on the Soldier's forearm.
Oh my God, if he sees Captain America here-
Pedestrians were everywhere. There was no telling how many people would get hurt if they decided to duke it out again. Her vision focused on the colorful object, and she swallowed painfully.
It was Captain America—but not in the flesh. A life-size picture of the city's hero was plastered on the side of a bus stop overhang.
Just a street ad. She let go of the breath she didn't know she was holding.
Completely unalarmed, he looked quizzically down at her.
"Sorry," she set, stepping off him. "Look."
He followed her gaze, eyes narrowing as he recognized the image.
Something was plastered over the Captain's torso, but it was unreadable from where they stood. Avery took a detour and crossed the road. The Soldier didn't pursue her immediately, but watched from a distance while she dodged prospective bus riders.
"Captain America: The Exhibit of the Living Legend and Symbol of Courage," she read to herself. The Smithsonian emblem was emblazoned just below it, with the dates of the exhibit's opening.
She turned, coming face-to-chest with the Soldier. He had materialized without so much as a warning scuffle.
Avery stepped back and watched him read the sign. "If you're looking for answers," she said so only he could hear, "I bet this is a good start."
He looked thoughtful. She raised her eyebrows at him in questioning. "It opens in two days..."
He exhaled and murmured, "We'll go in two days, then."
She knew she had work in two days, but she nodded anyway. She could take a sick day. It wouldn't kill her. Besides, even with gloves, handling the food could be rough with stitches.
When they neared the front steps of her apartment, Avery noticed that the light in the living room window was on. Her time to imagine an excuse for the broken window was up. It was the afternoon; her mom had definitely seen it by now.
She turned to him, her eyes lingering on the light. "Maybe you should go around the back-"
Realizing she was talking to a pocket of empty air, she turned in a small circle. He was gone already. Somehow she wasn't that surprised.
She was surprised, however, when she heard the click of the front door behind her, immediately followed by a sharp "Avery!"
Startled, she instinctively shoved the tool bag into her purse and spun back toward the door. Her mom stood in the doorway, a troubled look on her face. She paused in mid-breath upon seeing her daughter. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing," Avery replied a little too quickly. She heard the nervous quality in her own voice, and immediately began babbling to cover it up. "How was your shift last night? Did you get home okay? I would have waited for you to go for a walk, but it was really nice this morning and I didn't want to miss it."
"My shift was fine," she said, pursing her lips. "Come inside, I have to show you something."
Avery's internal monologue consisted of a continuous string of Crap crap crap crap. She was silent as she ascended the stairs and entered the front hallway, not making eye contact and feigning a blank face. "Okay..."
Avery's mind began racing, trying to come up with all the scenarios of how this would turn out, and trying to formulate a million different excuses. If she wasn't convincing enough, the Soldier's cover could be compromised, and she would lose any chance she had of helping him.
They climbed their way toward Avery's bedroom. Her mom pushed the door open and stood just inside, arms crossed. Avery cautiously crossed the threshold, looking questioningly at her.
Her mom jabbed a hand at the opposite wall. "Did you do this to your window?"
The gaping hole was still there, and in the light, Avery could see glass fragments sparkling on the carpet. She silently prayed that her one year of taking Drama at school was about to serve her well.
"Oh. No. I think a bunch of kids were getting high in that back alley last night. Someone threw a freakin' huge rock at the glass."
Her voice was on the verge of getting squeaky, just like it always did when she lied. She silently thanked Carmen for having pointed it out a few days before and forced herself to speak normally. "It woke me up at, like, 2:30 in the morning and scared the living crap out of me."
"What?!" her mom gasped, pretense gone.
"Yeah."
"Are you okay? Did you see what they looked like?"
"I'm fine. It was too dark to see anything, though."
"Oh, sweetheart," she said, coming toward her daughter, "You were probably terrified!" She went in for a bear hug.
"Mom. Look at me. I'm okay."
She let go of Avery and went to inspect it. "I thought maybe you were messing around outside when we were gone and you had to break it to get back in."
Avery twitched. She had thought of saying just that, but then she would have had no way of explaining how she broke the glass without hurting herself. She could have shown the hand injury as proof, but Avery had no way to explain the stitches- she didn't know how to do them herself, and her mom knew she hadn't been in the hospital to get them.
Avery balled her injured hand in a fist and nonchalantly hid it behind her. She was suddenly really happy she had had the foresight to clean up the bloodstain that morning. "Nope."
"Well," her mom went on. "At least it wasn't a break in. I was worried about that, too."
"Nah, it was just your run-of-the-mill hoodlums."
"Mmh. Your dad is going to be so pissed. Maybe we have a tarp we can tape over it-"
"Uh, no. I mean- I kind of like the breeze."
"...You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Okay...I better go call the insurance company. But stay right there, I want to clean up the glass first."
Avery offered to help, and not long after they had picked up the shards and vacuumed the carpet, her mom was downstairs on the phone with the home insurance agent. Avery set her purse on the bed and slipped on a jacket before going down, pulling the sleeve over the stitches on her hand. She paused to listen for noise from the roof, and as she had hoped, the Soldier was remaining silent. Avery briefly wondered whether he had been listening in on their exchange.
When Avery entered the kitchen, her mom was just hanging up with the insurance agent. They contacted Avery's dad next. Of course, when he heard what happened, he immediately wanted to talk to his daughter, so Avery spent the next half-hour or so reassuring him that she was okay. The more she repeated the lie about what happened, the more realistic it sounded. Eventually, however, she began to find it hard to focus on the conversation; her thoughts kept flitting back to how she would go about fixing the Soldier's damaged arm. After a dinner consisting of Avery's attempts to not seem preoccupied, she drifted back upstairs, leaving her mom to watch TV by herself in the living room.
It was beginning to get dark again. As Avery opened her bedroom door, a myriad of silent shadows greeted her. The Soldier's familiar silhouette was half-visible just by the window. She flipped the light on. He had taken off the sweatshirt and ball cap, leaving on only his black undershirt, combat boots and cargo pants. His hair was still pulled back in a ponytail, and he stood with his arms crossed, leaning against the wall like he had in the hardware store. One of his eyebrows was raised in uncharacteristic mockery.
"'Run-of-the-mill hoodlums?'" he repeated.
Avery locked the door behind her and glared, suppressing a small smile. Having no comeback, she settled with a simple "Shut up."
She went for her purse where it sat on the bed and pulled out the prying tool. As she forced the plastic packaging open, she heard him cross the room wordlessly and sit down in the wicker chair behind her.
Taking the tool in hand, she knelt in the same spot as before, just to his left. She looked up at him once, as if asking permission, before clasping the bent shoulder fragment between the tool's ends. "Here goes part two," she murmured. She was careful to avoid contacting her stitches on the handle.
Rather than staring straight ahead, this time he kept his gaze trained on her hands. She met his eyes grimly before returning to her job, distractedly wondering if his attentiveness was intended to keep her from hurting herself again.
The metal fragment bearing the red star's image remained securely lodged in the grasp of her tool. She began forcing the plate out toward her as best as she could- even with the help of the industrial device, she strained with all her might. It was hard to imagine the force it would have taken to dent it in the first place. As she worked, she felt the metal start to give way beneath her urging.
With a mighty creak, the plate flew off, crashing to the floor and spinning for a few seconds with the torque of the release. Avery winced, hoping that the noise of the metal rattling on the hardwood hadn't been loud enough for her mom to hear.
"You okay?" she whispered in the dark of the room. She hadn't forgotten that, while he didn't feel 'pain' like she did, this process couldn't be the most comfortable thing in the world.
He didn't reply; his attention was diverted to his arm. The moment the shoulder plate was gone, each individual link of the futuristic armor gave a sudden jolt outward, letting out a singularly faint, high-pitched squeal. The rectangular plates began rolling away in unison, spreading further and further apart in the manner of a clock's interlocking gears. One plate stopped short, struggling in vain to keep pushing outward, throwing off red sparks in the process.
Avery had backed up as soon as the arm started moving of its own accord. The Soldier's nonchalant expression soon put her at ease, and she scooted closer.
Their faces were bathed in a faint turquoise glow as the arm opened. When Avery neared him, she saw it was due to the thumbnail-sized circuits that lined the inside of the metal. Each one hummed and gave off a shred of the eerie blue light, a collective mockery of the stars that blazed in the night sky. It was unlike any technology she had seen before- the handful of small cerulean circuits looked much too simple to run such a powerful piece of equipment.
The metal plate that had sparked seconds before seemed to be bent inward, caught on one of the glowing squares.
"I think I see what's wrong," she told him, lowering her face to the damaged piece. Half thinking that it would shock her, she gripped the crooked plate with the tool's tongs and tried to bend it the other way. The metal straightened with a victorious pop and clicked into place.
A beat passed. "Is that it?" she asked.
He clenched a fist, gave his the arm a short shake, and snapped his wrist back in a practiced motion. The metal pieces leapt into action, sliding together and interlocking again. The soft blue glow vanished as the circuits disappeared. The surface of the arm was once again smooth and impenetrable, apart from the gaping hole where the shoulder plate fit.
She turned and squinted at the floor. After shuffling around ineffectively, her palm contacted the shoulder plate where it had come to rest. She picked it up and brought it back over to him, but not before sitting back on her heels and trying to straighten it with the tool. It had gotten even more warped by her efforts to pry it off.
He was silent while she worked. When the plate had been fixed to her satisfaction, she took a moment to run her hand over its surface. "There." The red star had multiple scratches on it- a few of which she knew had come from her.
She looked back up at him. He was leaning slightly forward, his good arm braced on his knee, his metallic arm resting on the chair. He was observing her with unnerving closeness- yet there was an undeniable tranquility in his expression.
She watched him curiously, anticipating him to speak. He continued his noiseless examination. Her stare faltered. Was he at ease here with her? Or was his stare predatorial? Did he think she would ruin the shoulder plate or something? What could possibly be going through his mind that he wasn't saying?
It wasn't becoming any easier to get a read on him.
It's on purpose, she thought silently. An assassin could never be an open book. They had to internalize their feelings, putting their mission above whatever they truly thought. And from what she had gathered, this man had been made into an assassin: first, last, and always. Even though he didn't have a mission now, he was acting the same way he had before- bearing his own perceptions to no one, remaining silent as the victims whose lives he snuffed out.
Then again, Avery had never been that great at reading people. Maybe he just needed someone to remind him what it was like to be human.
She brought the plate near to his shoulder- avoiding his eyes- sized it up, and pushed it back into place. It fit into the hole with another satisfying clink, electricity visibly crackling around the edges.
She sat on the floor again and watched as he stood. He flexed the arm forward, backward, side to side, spreading his fingers and balling them into another fist. No more red sparks flew.
He looked down at her and held out his newly repaired hand. Reasoning that he wanted to test its ability to bear weight, she took it and stood with him.
"Better?" she inquired.
The Soldier gave a short nod. When he dropped her hand, he lingered like he was unsure what to do. An awkward silence settled over the room.
Every other time someone had fixed him, she reflected, he had probably been given a new mission objective right away. He didn't know what to do with himself now that that was gone.
She backtracked and plopped on the bed. "So."
He looked over at her with mild interest, but remained standing.
"When was the last time you ate something?"
A few minutes later, she was sneaking back up the stairs with a box of leftover pizza. She wasn't sure what assassins ate, but she figured everyone liked pizza.
She re-entered the room and found him looking critically at a picture on the opposite wall. It was the painting of a horse she'd drawn in a 5th grade art class. She shut the door behind her, holding the pizza box in one hand.
"Enjoying my masterpiece?" she asked wryly.
He turned back to her. "It's yours?"
She walked over and handed him the pizza.
"Yeah. My art teacher gave me a C- on it for not being 'realistic' enough." She went back and sat cross-legged on the bed. He followed her lead and eased into the chair.
"Granted, horses aren't usually pink and blue, but I worked really hard on that thing." She looked at her hands in her lap and smiled at the memory. "I started crying when I came home and showed my mom. She proceeded to frame it and declare it the most artistic picture of a horse she'd ever seen."
He gave her a sidelong look, eyes gleaming evilly. "She's a good liar."
Her mouth dropped in mock injury. "Hey!"
A slow smile spread across his face.
She gawked happily, surprised at the unexpected jibe. "Shut up and eat your pizza," she said, chucking a pillow at him.
He inspected the box skeptically.
"What? Don't tell me they never gave you pizza at super-secret assassin camp."
He flipped the cardboard open and frowned. "That they did not."
She watched as he cautiously lifted a piece and held it in front of his face. He shot her a look again, and she nodded eagerly. She'd never seen anyone bite something so dubiously in her whole life.
"I'm pretty sure it's not poisoned," she said sardonically.
He chewed guardedly, never taking his eyes off her. Suddenly, he stilled, blinked, and looked back at the slice in his hand.
"Good?"
Nodding sincerely, he continued eating with vigor. She sniggered. "Need anything else?"
He swallowed. "Water?"
"Yeah, of course."
She decided to go downstairs to get it so she could double-check on her mom. Avery spied her napping on the couch, so she deemed it safe to fill a glass with the filtered water in the kitchen.
Bringing it back up, she crossed the room to him and held it out. His hand brushed her fingers when he took it from her. It was freezing, just like he had been the night she'd been pressed against him in the rain.
"Geez. Is being constantly cold a side effect of the memory wipes, too?" she asked, half kidding.
He looked at his hand. "No, but it might be a side effect of the cryopreservation."
"The- what?"
"It's still not entirely clear, but from what I can piece together, they froze me after every mission."
She stared dumbly. A trickle of unease dripped down into her stomach. "What do you mean, they 'froze' you?"
"I mean that I'm pretty sure they stuck me in a metal coffin and piped in liquid nitrogen to keep me on ice in between jobs." It looked like the pizza wasn't sitting well with him anymore. He put it down in distaste.
"You can't be serious."
The dark circles under his eyes stood out as he shook his head in the negative.
"Oh...my God, Bucky." She couldn't find her voice for a few seconds. "That's not- how often? How long have they been doing that?"
"Don't know."
"Why? Why the hell did they do that to you?!"
He shook his head again.
The picture of his previous life was becoming clearer and clearer, and it was horrifying. With the amount of discomfort running through her veins at the mere implications of what had been done to him, she could finally understand why he had retreated so far into himself. This was why he had looked like a frightened child when she first touched him on the roof. This was why he was wary of everyone on the streets. Even now, the emptiness was creeping back into his expression as snatches of his past resurfaced.
"I'm so sorry. I can't..." she trailed off. "Maybe..." Her voice came out sounding strained, so she took a breath and tried again. "Maybe the museum exhibit will tell us something."
The tension lines around his mouth told her that he wasn't overexcited about it.
She didn't blame him. Who knew what they would find out?
He stood, signifying the end of their interactions for the night. Before he turned toward the window, he gave her another inscrutable look.
"Avery." Her name sounded strange in his mouth. He opened and closed his mechanical fist. "Thank you."
The way he said it made her think that he was thanking her for more than just the food.
She smiled weakly and acknowledged him with a nod.
He scaled the fire escape, and she was left alone.