A/N: ...
A Shade upon the mind there passes
As when Noon
A Cloud the mighty Sun encloses
Remembering
That some there be too numb to notice
Oh God
Why give if Thou must take away
The Loved?
~Emily Dickinson
An invisible force punched Avery in the gut.
After all the progress she had made with him, after all the times she had almost seen him break free from the prison of his mind, he had left. Just like that. He slipped away wordlessly exactly as she feared, effectively rendering every moment they'd had with each other meaningless.
And boy, did it hurt more than she thought it would. If he could really leave so quickly and callously, she must have meant less than nothing to him.
Her chest felt tight.
Though that may have been true for the Soldier, the reverse wasn't true for her.
She was terrified for him.
She hoped to God, wherever he went, he was going to stay away from people. Not everyone would be as understanding as her if he relapsed in public. Actually, at this point, she doubted anyone-barring maybe his employers- understood how he worked like she did.
What would happen if something triggered a memory fit as he was walking down the sidewalk? How would he react if someone simply bumped into him?
If she ever saw him again, she did not want it to be on TV in a story where thirty bystanders were injured.
Because of her inability to keep him stationary, there was now a volatile, unpredictable and mentally unstable man loose in the city- and even though the realistic chances of him hurting someone were slim, there was still the problem of the metaphorical knife sticking out of her heart.
Why did this hurt so much? She had known him for all of a few days. Had she really been naïve enough to think he saw her as anything other than a means to get back into fighting shape, that he was her friend as much as she tried to be his?
Well, now she knew better. He had healed, and he had left.
The sun was climbing higher in the cloudy sky, warming her despondent face.
She shook herself. Here she was thinking about herself when other peoples' lives could be at stake. None of her feelings mattered if someone got hurt because of her mess-up.
She should have tried harder to make him stay. She should have swallowed her pride and begged, if she had to. She was an idiot.
Her fists tightened around handfuls of the navy fabric. She looked down, remembering where she was. A dim ember of hope selfishly flickered to life in her chest, banishing the hollowness.
If he really hadn't cared, there was no way she would have ended up where she was. Maybe she meant more to him than she thought.
As quickly as it came, the hopeful bubble was punctured by a prick of anger. All she had done was help him stay sane and help him to get better; she deserved an explanation for why he left- a real one, instead of a vague, elusive maneuver like resting her on a sleeping bag.
As was usual with him, she had been left with more questions than answers. She needed closure, and he had become her responsibility. It didn't matter that he never wanted to see her again. She needed to find him.
If there was even the slightest opportunity for her to locate him, she realized, standing slowly and looking toward the horizon, it was at the Smithsonian.
It was supposed to open in another day. That would be her last chance.
With the rising of the sun came another shift at work. Distracted and unfocused, she drifted through the restaurant like a specter, constantly checking her reflection to make sure that the bruises on her neck were still obscured by her cover-up. Carmen, with her inscrutable gaze, definitely noticed—Avery caught her giving concerned sidelong glances more than once—but the younger girl said nothing. Because Avery's injured hand prevented her from being much help to anyone, she went home feeling useless in addition to feeling dejected.
The dream of the red star visited her again that night. Everything was the same—the peaceful, still field, the pinpricks of happy starlight sprinkled all around, and the crimson phenomenon that pulsed with cool light—except, this time, the red star drifted emotionlessly away from her, pulling with it all the light left in the ebony sky. She was left in the shrouded field alone.
She started awake and didn't fall back asleep, knowing full well that the day had arrived.
She called in sick for work at a halfway decent hour. Donning a green and gray baseball tee and a pair of ripped jeans, she went downstairs and slid into her car.
She tried to ignore her white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel.
The museum was packed for its opening day, so she had to drive around the block at least four times before she got lucky and saw someone leaving. She would still have to walk a few blocks, but it was a miracle she got a space even this close.
Remembering what she had come to do, she felt an angry determination begin to thrum in her bones. It propelled her toward the gray-tinted glass building down the street.
It was impossible to miss the Air and Space Museum. Like most of the Smithsonian museums, the massive complex took up an enormous lot, and was preceded by wide steps that led to its entrance. She'd been here for so many field trips that, by about seventh grade, she could have given the tour better than half the docents. It was also impossible to miss the enormous line stretching down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. Already, people had arrived to take their kids to the exposition on the famous superhero.
She wished her trip had a motive as carefree.
She stood impatiently in the line. Two small kids, a boy and girl both about eight years old, reenacted a make-believe battle with two plastic shields in front of her. The fight soon dissolved into a fit of bickering over whether a girl could be Captain America. Their salt-and-pepper haired dad caught Avery's eye and smiled helplessly. She managed to return a weak one.
When she finally made it inside, a solid wall of noisy chaos smacked her in the face. Behemoth planes and rockets hung from the ceiling hundreds of feet above the crowds, suspended by wires and positioned to look like they were still flying. Children of all ages ran back and forth, excited out of their minds to see the huge aircrafts in real life. With all the patience she could muster, she submitted herself to the security check and paid for her ticket. People were packed so tightly that she vaguely wondered what the maximum occupancy of the place could be.
This was going to make finding him incredibly difficult, which probably guaranteed that he had come.
Her eyes scanned the crowd, having little care for the artifacts and exhibits, as she wove between milling tourists. Up ahead, she saw the sign for the Captain America exhibit directing her upstairs.
Her pulse quickened. It occurred to her that she had no idea what she would say if she actually found him.
Seeds of doubt sprouted in her stomach. The slow and steady movement of the escalator made her feel like she was being carried toward her own execution.
A giant mural of the Captain saluting and looking patriotically off into the distance greeted her as she reached the top floor. A narrator was saying something about the Allied strategy from a movie screen off to her right. A shrill baby's cry was drowned out by the continued din of the open room, and a school group in matching yellow T-shirts shuffled behind a docent who attempted to make himself heard. On the other side of the floor, an enormous gift shop with a built-in café had its doors wide open, tempting people to come spend money on stale scones and plushy planes.
Trying to appear nonchalant, she raked her eyes over the crowd, searching for the telltale brown hair, the baseball cap, the well muscled and intimidating form partially hidden by a sweatshirt.
A figure sped by. Her heart lurched, and she spun, pinpointing him in the crowd. Despite his brown hair and baseball cap, she recognized immediately that it couldn't be who she was here for. His posture was too casual, his gait too fluid.
Of course it wasn't going to be that easy. She tried to get herself under control.
Avery circumnavigated the exhibit as slowly as possible, hardly registering the World War II-era uniforms and machinery that normally would have intrigued her. At any rate, bodies were too clustered in front of the pictures for her to see them.
Honestly, she didn't care much about them anymore.
At least three hours passed. She must have avoided stepping on nearly a dozen screaming kids. Faces were beginning to blur together, none of them the one she wanted to see—yet she had the oddest feeling that she was missing something. When she felt like people were starting to give her weird looks for being there so long, she sat down on the bench just outside the partition that started the exhibit, rubbing her forehead in aggravation. The patriotic mural faced her.
If he was here, he definitely had seen her by now. That implied that he was actively staying out of her sight. She would never find an assassin that didn't want to be found.
She took a settling breath. Maybe he just wasn't there yet.
Alternatively, a tiny voice in her head whispered, maybe he wasn't coming at all.
Her stomach growled. The crummy gift shop café seemed less and less crummy. When it protested loudly again, she decided to let it distract her.
The shop was an echo of the outside of the museum; the line stretched far out into the hallway. It took roughly half an hour to get to the front. She had plenty of time to admire the cheesy blue carpet adorned with cartoonized spaceships.
She again found her place on the bench, noting that some of the crowd thinned out while she sat and half-heartedly chewed a banana. Brief respite over, she took her water bottle in hand and resignedly entered the fray once again.
With most of the people gone, she could actually see some of the black and white pictures lining the walls this time. Avery cracked the water bottle open and took a swig as she stood looking around.
Her eyes shortly landed on the unmistakable figure she had been looking for.
She gasped involuntarily, inhaling at least one mouthful of water, and was promptly sent into a coughing fit. A nearby woman noticed and gently patted her back. Her little boy looked concerned.
"You okay, sweetie?" she asked.
"I'm-" she sputtered and wheezed, "fine! Thank you. Sorry."
She graciously waved the kind woman off, her eyes never leaving the Soldier.
He was about twenty feet ahead, back to her. He had indeed worn his baseball cap and sweatshirt.
Avery was a deer in the headlights for longer than she would have liked to admit. Gulping, she forced herself to take the first step forward, clutching the water bottle to her chest all the while.
He was staring motionlessly at one of the signs. She almost turned back, but mentally slapped herself, remembering that any one of these kids and their parents could be in danger with him there. Although she was practically deaf to the noise by now, a snatch of a narration broke through and made her freeze.
"…Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers were inseparable on both playground and battlefield..."
It was like hearing a conversation in a language she didn't speak; all she registered was that someone said his name. She shifted to get a better angle of the sign he was looking at, realizing that too many people had been crowded around it earlier for her to see it.
The picture nearly bowled her over.
It was him. It was Bucky. His hair was shorter, and he was clean-shaven, without the deep purple circles under his eyes, but it was undeniably him.
The picture was from the 1940's.
A hundred thoughts ricocheted off each other in her head and clicked into place. That was how Steve Rogers knew him, why Bucky kept having dreams and flashbacks. He hadn't realized how long his employers had been freezing him- now it was beginning to become apparent how the Soldier had managed to dance on the edges of the human psyche for the last fifty years and be physically younger than thirty.
The narration she had just heard reverberated in her head. She felt nauseous. If he and Steve had known each other, this explained the memory wiping, too. His employers had used it to control him, to make him a clean slate that they could manipulate into killing whoever stood in their way.
She thought again of his flashbacks and she came crashing back to earth. If anything was going to trigger a memory episode, this was it.
She noted with dread how he stood stock-still in front of the image. Even after how he'd abandoned her, she still couldn't let him drown.
Her approach from behind felt eerily similar to their last interaction two days before- although she definitely wasn't going to risk touching him with other people nearby.
A few feet away, she caught his reflection in the glass. Restrained shock was written all over it. He was so absorbed in reading that he didn't see her. She suppressed the urge to try and read the sign in the event that her unannounced closeness would startle him. She stood as still as she could, uncertain of how to proceed.
A full minute passed. Without warning, like an animal that had sensed the approach of an invisible predator, his shoulders pinched, eyes flicking to find her own reflection in the glass. A myriad of emotions she could glimpse even from her vantage point battled for dominance in his eyes.
He looked back to his picture.
"You shouldn't have come here."
The hurt she felt from his rejection wormed its way back into her chest. She struggled to keep her voice steady.
"I need to talk to you."
He turned reluctantly. They drank each other in.
To Avery, he looked even more on edge than he had a few days before. His face was gaunt and drawn, and the dark stubble on his chin was more pronounced, giving him the look of a homeless man. She was thankful he had noticed her when he did; he was too occupied with her now to reconcile his thoughts about the image. Despite still feeling angry and hurt, she was inexplicably happy to find him in one piece.
He had been inspecting her in the same manner. His eyes lingered confusedly on her neck, which she had remembered to cover in foundation that morning.
A man walked by and brushed her shoulder as he left the exhibit. Avery tore her gaze away from the Soldier for a second, remembering that they weren't the only two people in the room. An elderly man had sat on the bench and was surveying them curiously.
The Soldier twitched. He had been brought back to the present, too. Suddenly, he started toward her, grabbing her upper arm and pulling her in a direction only he knew. He kept his metallic hand shoved in his pocket for the sake of anonymity.
"Where are we going?" she demanded, more exasperated than anything else- although it was mildly frightening to feel how easily he could drag her body weight.
Of course, he didn't answer. Regardless, she felt no need to struggle. He pulled her toward the café, taking a sharp turn just before the entrance and heading for a hallway she hadn't even seen before. The door to an employee's lounge was toward the back. The hall was dimly lit, and no one was around. Knowing him, he had taken her there because there weren't any security cameras.
His piercing eyes pinned her to the floor where she stood. Her hands shook a little. He must have interpreted her shaking as fear, because his eyes took on a pained edge, and he backed up a step.
"Okay, I just- I have one question. Once you answer it, I'll leave you alone. You can go off and do whatever, okay?" she said. "You won't have to deal with me anymore. But you have to answer."
She didn't want to leave him be for the sake of other peoples' welfare, but she was so desperate to hear his answer, the promise just tumbled out.
Shrugging helplessly, she asked, "Why did you leave?"
She watched him for any change in demeanor, but he stayed blank for so long that she thought she might have broken him.
"Either you answer now or I keep following you to make sure you stay out of trouble, it's your choice."
After another beat, he exhaled decisively. "I told you already."
"Humor me and tell me again." She was losing the fragile grip on her temper. The game was getting stale.
He just frowned and refused to elaborate.
"God," she blurted, "What are you so afraid of? I'm begging you- I know it's hard, and I know you've been through hell, but please, just try. Don't you think you owe me that much?"
The Soldier remained predictably silent.
Defeated, voice cracking, she finished, "Yeah. Forget it. You're right, I shouldn't have come here. I don't know what I expected."
She turned to exit the hallway. Her fear had been confirmed. She was just a convenience, a temporary source of meaningless refuge. She was nothing. Shame stained her cheeks.
He caught her wrist as she was on the verge of re-entering the auditorium. Pulling her back almost violently, he pushed her up against the wall, trapping her there between his arms.
An eternity passed as he gathered the words. "I have been through hell. But if I came away from it with anything, it's that I don't want to hurt people anymore. Least of all you."
He looked up at her with a kind of savage desperation. His clear eyes willed her to understand, his face shadowed by the baseball cap. Her heart was pounding so hard that it was interfering with her breathing.
"A weapon doesn't get to choose who it kills. I may not be in control of the trigger, but I can get out of range. That's why I left."
He had a habit of using the only thing he knew to get his rationale across.
She had been waiting for him to say that, since he had healed, he no longer needed her; or because she had proven that she had no connections with any secret organizations, she was useless. Somehow, it had never occurred to her that he was leaving purely for her protection.
When the shock subsided, she shakily reached behind her, sliding his hand off the wall and holding it palm-up between them.
"But you are in control. You chose not to kill me before."
He saw where she was going, and he closed his eyes, beginning to shake his head. She gripped his hand tightly.
"Don't do this to yourself," she said. "If you say you're not going to hurt anyone, then you're not going to hurt anyone. I trust you. You need to trust you."
The Soldier was hunched forward and his eyes were downcast. His hand blindly constricted her fingers in a steadying grip. She was a lifeline, the only thing keeping him from sinking into the fractured remains of his mind and spinning out of control.
He made himself let go. She felt the absence of his cool palm instantly.
"I can't."
His two words hung heavily, weighted with meaning. He gradually backed away from her. A part of her heart splintered. He was leaving a second time, choosing to cut her off and face the demons he couldn't possibly fight alone.
His fiery eyes scorched her soul, but his gaze faltered, and he couldn't hold it anymore.
"Don't look for me again," he murmured quietly. Hands shoved back in his pockets, he sped out of the hallway and back into the crowd.
She stood wordlessly staring at the wall. Her eyes were moist. Jolting, she flew out of the hall and turned the corner, but he had disappeared into the crowd. She listlessly looked back into the hallway and saw a single left handprint in the drywall where he had pinned her.
The only sign that they had been there. The only remnant of what almost was.
She noiselessly leaned against the wall, actually feeling how the blood had drained out of her face.
She forced herself to leave the museum. She didn't look back at the exhibit.
Avery passed through the front doors without the slightest glance from the security guards. That was odd, as she was sure she looked pale and dazed enough to have just broken an arm.
Looking back on it, she should have noticed a lot of other things- for example, how there was a conspicuous lack of traffic outside. Or how practically all the tourists and businesspeople were noticeably absent from the sidewalk. It was like the entire street had been blocked off.
It wasn't until she had fumbled her way to her car, hand hovering over the door handle, that her neck prickled in unease. Resurfacing from oblivion, she whirled around and found two men standing inches away. A sick feeling of familiarity washed over her as she beheld them.
"What are you doing? Who are you?"
When the tall one smirked, her stomach dropped to her feet.
It was the rude customer that had yelled at Carmen the week before. Next to him stood the Asian tourist that had asked her for directions.
She stood dumbly, blindsided by incomprehension. The high-pitched sound of tires on asphalt screeched up behind her; she turned just in time to see a beige van with its side door wide open lurching to a stop.
It was like every kidnapping she had ever heard of on TV. A primal fear gripped her, survival instincts kicking in. Adrenaline began coursing through her veins with every frantic pump of her desperate heart.
They yanked a sack roughly down over her head, and one of them knocked her legs out from beneath her; the other locked her torso between his arms. She felt her body lifted straight off the ground to be carried inevitably toward the van.
Avery didn't even have time to mourn that she might never see her family again; it was a fight for her life that required every part of her to be present. Emitting inhuman screeches so loud that they made her throat raw, she felt her feet connect with something soft, but knew immediately it would take more to get free. With every wild twist, with every scream and demand to let her go, the purr of the engine got louder and closer. She didn't know why they were doing this to her, but if they got her in the van, she knew it was all over.
Crunch.
The man holding her legs shrieked. Her feet hit the ground. Almost instantly, she heard a dull thud next to her head, and the other man let go, collapsing without a sound.
Someone pulled the sack off quicker than even she could, and she reflexively swung her arm out to hit him or her, intending to turn and run as hard as she could in the other direction. An artificially cool hand stopped her.
Her head jerked up toward the controlled figure that had taken out similar targets in the same way for fifty years. His baseball hat had been knocked off. The remnants of an unbridled, murderous rage his face now expressed was an emotion she hadn't seen twist his features before.
She disintegrated right in front of him, falling limply into his arms. Dry sobs wracked her body. He shielded her in a possessive cradle, allowing her press her face to his chest.
A pop echoed suddenly through the street, the noise rebounding off the concrete buildings lining the road. He seized up and grunted. She didn't know what was happening, but he shoved her toward the car and yelled, "GET DOWN!"
The force of his push sent her skidding and rolling at least ten feet across the hot pavement. She scrambled to get behind a blue station wagon. Her freshly skinned hands and knees burned; the stitches on her hand had been torn open and blood streamed down her arm.
Peering around the car, she saw an inordinate number of 'security guards' from the museum pouring out onto the wide-berthed steps, every single one of them armed with an assault rifle or pistol aimed at her friend.
Her vision sharpened, heart leaping into her throat, adrenaline surging through her once more. One of the guards fired with another pop, but the Soldier's bionic arm came up in an L so fast it was almost invisible. Her traumatized brain tried keeping up with what happened next, but she was sure there was a slight delay between reality and her assimilating it.
The bullet hit his arm and was deflected. The guards balked as soon as they heard the metal clang, unable to understand how their target was still standing. A different guard fired, and another, and the Soldier swiftly snapped his arm to two different angles, rebounding the bullets with a clang, clang. This time, he had redirected them with a purpose. Two guards fell dead to the ground.
The shots had torn two openings in the sleeve of his shirt, and in the noonday sun, his arm gleamed like the wicked weapon it was.
One guard realized what had happened. His eyes widened in recognition-and, understandably, fear- and he yelled, "It's the asset! Open fire!"
All hell broke loose. Every guard unleashed their entire payload of ammunition, miniature puffs of dirt springing up wherever the bullets hit the sidewalk. Avery slapped her hands over her ringing ears, but couldn't bring herself to duck behind the car.
In the millisecond before the firing began, the Soldier ducked and barrel rolled toward the beige van. The gunners were slow to follow. Lighting quick, he stood, and with a grating, whirring noise, ripped the door clean off the side of the vehicle. The whirs became metallic screams as he lifted it high above his head and hurled it mercilessly toward the crowd of guards. It was thrown so hard, so fast, it didn't even spin; it sliced through the air effortlessly and pinned at least five men. Some hollered, hopelessly crushed. Some died on contact and lay still.
The man that had given the orders to open fire seemed to know better than anyone that they didn't stand a chance. Amidst the chaos, Avery saw him yell frantically into the walkie-talkie on his shoulder, undoubtedly calling for backup.
Meanwhile, the Soldier had sprinted with frightening agility toward them in the wake of the thrown door. One guard left standing still had his gun in hand, which he pointed at the Soldier's face. The weaponized assassin simply threw his arm forward, looking like a quarterback running for a touchdown. Metal fingers splayed, palm open, he deflected a round of bullets at point-blank range, grabbing the barrel of the gun and snapping the steel clean in half. He shoved the guard with such violence that the man flew thirty feet, proving to Avery that the shove she'd received from him had been laughably gentle.
Another pitiful guard rushed straight at him, intending to throw himself on the 'asset.' Instead, he was caught in midair and launched with unreal force, crashing through glass of the entrance to the distant museum.
One guard knocked straight to the ground in a fatal blow to the face, one visibly broken in half, one backhanded so hard that he cracked the granite of the fountain he hit- it was like the Soldier was swatting flies. They were literally nothing in the face of his ruthless strength.
Now she saw why he called himself a weapon.
The humming roar of an aircraft engine became audible over the sound of screaming and dying men. As the Soldier ended the last guard with a simple snap of the neck, both he and Avery diverted their attention to the deafening noise. It was a quinjet.
The craft swooped in dangerously low, coming to a steady hover not fifty feet above the ground, clearly on a mission to put an end to the slaughter.
With incredible stamina and precision still blatant in his every move, the assassin went for the car door again. He raised it above his head for a final pitch.
Avery got a bad feeling as soon as she saw a man lean out of the open canopy. He held a massive, evil looking gun- and he was pointing it right at the Soldier.
If these people were the back-up, there was no way they would be stupid enough to try a normal machine gun on him again.
The hair on her arms stood up, the air suddenly buzzing and crackling with electricity.
The gun fired. With a loud thwip, a device that looked like an inverted grappling hook engulfed in the bluish-white energy of lightning shot out of the nozzle.
The Soldier barely had time to shield himself with his arm. The van door crashed to the ground behind him as he dropped it, window glass shattering.
They knew his techniques. He had done exactly what they wanted.
CLANK.
The grappling hook found its target and clamped down.
His back arched, his entire body convulsing from the electric current transmitted by the device, his whole figure illuminated in a white corona.
He dropped to his knees. She couldn't see his face.
He hit the ground and stopped moving.
An incoherent, raw scream tore her throat open, her feet catapulting her forward. Someone was cutting her open and turning her inside out. She sprinted, limped, stumbled, and choked on the scent of his burning flesh.
Three men clothed in the color of midnight jumped out of the quinjet and repelled down on thick cord. Grounded, they fastened a carabiner to his belt loop, and each picked up one part of his immobile body- his head, his good arm, and his legs. One pressed a button. The cord went taut, pulling them back up to the aircraft dangerously fast.
Her feet kept moving of their own accord, and she found herself standing where he had fallen not seconds after the ascent.
The Soldier's head lolled backward as their feet touched down inside the aircraft. His eyes cracked open and immediately pinpointed her on the ground below.
His bionic arm reached feebly for her, twitching, twitching, twitching, twitching-
They hauled him inside the canopy. The door raised shut. The craft engaged and jetted away. It was soon a speck on the horizon.
The whole world tilted like a carpet had been yanked out from under her. Her face was tight from streaks of dried tears, and her whole body was numb again.
An ambulance siren wailed from somewhere far, far away. She lay unresponsive on the sidewalk, feeling like every shining star in the sky had been ripped from her hands before she'd even realized they were hers.