Over the next few days, Ari learned some things about the Winter Soldier. For one thing, he rarely spoke. The cliché "man of few words" existed but the Winter Soldier took this to new levels. It wasn't just that he didn't speak much…it was that he had absolutely nothing to say. He'd never engaged in chit-chat or any type of aimless conversation back at HYDRA. He said "Yes," and "No" and "Target acquired" and "Target terminated" and a few other phrases, but that was the extent of his conversation. The talking he had done with Ari had been the most he remembered ever speaking with anyone—and even that was minimal talking, by normal human standards.

For another thing, his body seemed completely out of control and this was worrying to him. HYDRA had monitored everything about his existence: his dietary needs, how much sleep he got, monitoring his vital signs, the levels of fluids and neurotransmitters in his body… They'd basically controlled every single thing. When he wasn't frozen in the ice in a cryo-cell, he'd been hooked up to machines for different testing and training. He'd slept on a cot with machines constantly hooked to his human arm. He'd trained in a private gym with all sorts of sensors attached to him, to test which ability he was lacking in. Slowly, serum by serum, piece by piece, they had built the perfect human. He got basic illnesses but he fought them off almost instantaneously. He never got severely ill. He never aged. He never had to deal with troublesome human emotions like guilt or love. He was physically superior.

But now that he wasn't at HYDRA anymore…it felt like he was unraveling. He was still a superhuman, and he always would be—but he wasn't being monitored anymore. He slept without machines hooked up to him. He and Ari both quickly realized that he needed as much carbs as an Olympic gold medalist swimmer and she'd had to run out and buy more food than she'd ever bought before in her life. He didn't have machines to monitor his vitals, so the first time his blood sugar had dropped to a dangerous low, he hadn't understood what was happening and had almost punched a hole through a wall (but Ari had stopped him). Now Ari monitored his vitals.

She'd called her mysterious brother but she'd been told that it would be a few days before he got back to her. She'd set her phone down with an ugly expression and had muttered, "I'm going for a walk. I'll be back," and the Winter Soldier had watched her go. Clearly something about this brother bothered her very much. He couldn't quite figure out what it was, but he decided to ask.

"What's wrong with your brother?" he asked that night, as they sat at the kitchen table and Ari assessed him like she did every night. She assessed his vitals and she did routine checks of his systems. Right now she was in the middle of checking his eyes' reaction to light and accommodation.

She froze and then slowly said, "There's nothing wrong…"

"He makes you angry," stated the Winter Soldier. This wasn't a question. He wasn't going to let her evade him. She'd asked all sorts of questions about him, now he was going to ask questions about her. It might be useful later if he ever needed to eliminate Ari.

Ari sighed. "It's a boring story that isn't… You don't need to hear this."

The Winter Soldier tried to gather his face into an expression that looked touchingly curious. It was true; he didn't need to hear this. But he wanted to, though not out of personal curiosity. But if he told Ari, "I'm gathering information on you in case I ever need to take you out," he had a feeling she'd react unfavorably. So he tried to act interested. This was what normal people did, right? They were interested in other peoples' lives. "I want to know."

She cut him a somewhat suspicious glance, clearly not buying his terrible false sincerity, and said, "You're the worst actor I've ever known. Don't assassins usually have to be good actors, so they can, like, schmooze their way into high-profile parties to get to their targets?"

"I'm not—I wasn't that kind," he said slowly. "I was the…heavy hitter." He had been the last resort, the one they used when their needs were urgent or it was going to be a very high-profile kill.

She sighed. "Okay. Whatever. I guess I'll tell you. My brother…is a loser. Actually, he's a huge loser, alright? Growing up, we didn't have a lot of money and my parents wanted us to become doctors or lawyers or something. I was the good kid, I followed their requests. I became a nurse. I mean, I like being a nurse, but it also pays well and it's a respectable profession. Anyway…" She scowled. "Alex wasn't like me. He was really into computers. My parents tried to get him into programming or something—but he was into hacking. And tracking. Which is illegal."

The Winter Soldier felt that it probably wasn't a good time to let Ari know that he'd done his fair share of hacking into systems as well. And his missions usually ended up with one less person breathing on Earth.

She took a deep breath. "Anyway…as if him hacking wasn't bad enough—and it was, trust me, it got him into all sorts of trouble which caused so much stress for my parents—he didn't care about school, he didn't care about his grades, he hung out with the wrong crowd… He got arrested a bunch of times for the stupidest stuff. And this was so hard on my parents. They were really nice, gentle people. And Alex caused them so much stress. They both already had health issues and he was so…he's so selfish that he didn't give a crap." She clenched her penlight in her hand so hard he thought she might crush it. "And then—get this—after years of us begging for him to get his life back on track or finally leave us in peace once and for all and move out or something…after years of him being lazy and selfish and tormenting my parents…and making my life miserable…he got a job working for some high-end, super-expensive compute company in California! They're very modern and trendy, they only hire young hipster geniuses." She rolled her eyes. "And Alex got hired by them after he tried hacking into their system. And he got in, too. And what does he get? Jail time? NO. He got a freaking job!"

She took a deep shuddering breath, her face flushed with anger, and the Winter Soldier waited. There was clearly more on the way. This was actually vaguely interesting to him, the way a fly might be interesting to a cat. Humans were so mundane…but more complex than he'd thought. All of this drama sounded a bit weak to him—what was having a stressful brother compared to being shot at?—but then again, he'd never had a family (that he recalled anyway), so these tedious and troublesome human connections and family ties fascinated him in an odd way.

"My parents died a year later," she said bitterly. "Both from heart problems. They were elderly, I admit, and they already had heart problems and hypertension—it runs in our family on both sides—but the stress that Alex gave them drove them to early deaths. It's pretty clear. So basically, my a-hole brother basically kills our parents, wastes his life, commits crimes, and then gets rewarded for it by getting a high-profile, high-paying job in one of the nicest states in the country. Meanwhile I get to live in the house that my dead parents owned. He didn't even come to the funeral," she added bitterly.

Now the Winter Soldier understood why the house seemed so old-fashioned. She hadn't decorated it, presumably her dead mother had. He also didn't know what to say in response to her story. A normal person would have comforted her, but he wasn't a normal person. He finally settled upon the eloquent, "That sucks."

She looked at him, startled, and then let out a short laugh. "You're right. It does suck. Still, I like my life. I just hate Alex. A lot." She grimaced. "But we're going to need his help. Alex is an amazing hacker and he can trace people and basically do a lot of computer tech-y stuff that I'm hopeless with. If we need to look up information on you, Alex is the one who can help us."

"We need to find my files," the Winter Soldier said. "From HYDRA." He'd finally told her the name of his organization; what did it matter, at this point? He still wasn't sure if Ari would survive knowing him—she might die, or he might have to kill her, at any point—but he was positive by now that she wasn't going to out him online or to the authorities.

"Alex can help with that," she said. She paused and then she said in a rush, "Okay, so let me get this straight…HYDRA is an organization that is responsible for almost all of the world's instability since World War I?"

"Since even before that," he said.

"And they infiltrated an organization called SHIELD…which is—or was, I guess—an organization that was basically the good guys."

"What makes them good?" he asked bluntly. "We all killed."

"Yeah, but HYDRA started genocides," she said. "I think that makes them the bad guys."

The Winter Soldier shrugged. He didn't have much of an idea of "bad" or "good." It had always come down to "obedience" and "disobedience" for him.

"God." Ari rubbed her temples. "How could all these random secret organizations exist while the whole world goes on without knowing about them?"

"That's why they're secret," he pointed out.

She rolled her eyes. "Yes, Soldier, I get that. Anyway…according to you, Captain America was fighting for SHIELD? That means the rest of the Avengers must be fighting for SHIELD as well." She had explained to him what the Avengers were, since they were quite recent to the world: a rag-tag team of superheroes who had saved New York two years ago when an alien prince had tried to take over the world with an alien army. Comprised of an Norse god of thunder, a billionaire with a metal suit, a brilliant scientist who was genetically mutated in some ways, and two spies who were ordinary humans but more skilled than an ordinary human.

Captain America was a constant source of confusion for the Winter Soldier. A superhuman, a superhero, a good guy. Working for the opposite side. And yet he and the Winter Soldier had been best friends. He had been the only person that the Winter Soldier had been unable to kill. As kind as Ari was, if he had to kill her, he knew he'd easily be able to. But something about looking into Steve's bloodied face had felt so wrong. Something about killing him felt so wrong. It felt like turning on someone. So he had done what he'd never done before and he'd let Steve go. But he still wondered about him every day. He'd finally ended up telling Ari that the Steve who told him his name was James Buchanan Barnes was the one and only Captain America and she had gaped at him.

"But that—that means you were best friends with Captain America!" she had said. She leaped to her feet and began to pace. "This actually all makes sense! Both of you were frozen in time…from the same time period…and you clearly had some sort of response to him. Your subconscious was telling you that you knew him. See? Your memories are stronger than you think, Soldier! Reading HYDRA's files on you should only strengthen them! And then…then if we can get you to talk to Captain America…" She gave him a shifty look.

"No," he said forcefully. "Not right now." Maybe eventually, but right now the thought of talking to Steve made him feel anxious and physically ill and confused. And angry. Extremely angry. Steve had been his target and the Winter Soldier had failed to terminate him and decades of learning how to be obedient contributed to him feeling like a total failure by letting Steve go.

Finally, Ari's brother called back. She had turned her back on the Winter Soldier while she talked, hiding her expression, but he could see how her muscles stiffened and how tense she was. Her words were short, terse, to the point. At one point she'd gone outside and shouted for a few minutes. But finally, after an hour-long conversation that seemed mostly snappy, she'd come inside looking relieved. "Alex says he's on his way. He wants to meet you first and then he'll help us."

The Winter Soldier was immediately on his guard, suspicious to a fault. "Why?" he demanded. "What did you tell him about who I was?" Did he need to disappear?

It was a good thing Ari was a nurse, because she was very in-tune to how she was supposed to behave when he got into a certain mood. She had been tempted to joke, "At ease, Soldier," but her quick eyes took in his rapid breathing, slight twitchiness of his fingers, eyes that were darting around the room more quickly than they normally did (she had finally figured out that he was constantly assessing escape and attack routes) and she seemed to realize that he was very on-edge. "Nothing," she reassured him. "I told him a friend needed his help."

"He agreed just like that?" he asked. He had assumed this Alex person might refuse Ari, since they were on bad terms. (If he had, the Winter Soldier had secretly been planning to make his way to California and hold this Alex figure at gunpoint until he tracked down HYDRA for him.)

"We made a slight deal," she admitted, "but it's nothing you need to worry about."

The Winter Soldier frowned at her. She shook her head, smiling, telling him silently Don't even bother.

"What day does he arrive?" he asked.

"Today," said Ari. "He's getting on the first flight he can. Perks of working at a company like his—they allow their employees a lot of freedom as long as they keep churning out brilliant products. Speaking of work…" She checked the time on her iPhone. "I need to go to work. I'm covering a short shift for another nurse. Stay here, okay? Alex won't arrive till I get back, so don't worry about meeting him alone."

Ari headed off to work and the Winter Soldier decided to go out for the first time since he'd been with Ari (which had been approximately one full week). She'd told him not to ("The neighbors will be annoying about it," was her reason, though he suspected she was more worried he might run away or harm someone) but he didn't particularly care what she'd said. He was getting more used to not having constant orders barked at him, and orders thrown at him from someone half his size who had no control over his mind were even easier to ignore. This newfound independence was terrifying but also enticing.

Ari had gone out shopping for clothes that would properly fit him. She'd bought them in all black. When he'd questioned why with a raised eyebrow, she'd shrugged and said, "I think you'd look cool in black. It suits you, you know? I just can't really picture you in everyday clothes."

So now he knew he looked "cool" in black.

He shrugged on a pair of black jeans, his black combat boots, and a black t-shirt. He shrugged on a black hoodie on top of that. Looking at himself in the mirror, he realized he looked a bit…well, terrifying. And extremely out-of-place in a small town. He'd have to tell Ari to buy him some clothes with color. He pulled on his black gloves. They made him look like a robber or a serial killer but he couldn't help that. It was better than flashing his cybernetic hand to the public. Then he left.

Ari's little suburb was quiet and peaceful, mostly full of elderly people or families with kids. It didn't seem like a place where anything bad could ever happen. She worked at a hospital at the other end of town, twenty minutes from her home, a small-town hospital where "nothing ever happens" was how she put it.

Physically, he was healing better than ever. He could barely feel his old wounds anymore and the nausea and blinding headaches only came when memories from his first life resurfaced. And resurface they did. Almost every day he received some sort of snippet or flash of a memory and he was slowly piecing them together, though the memories were so short and random that nothing made sense. He was at the beach in one, sand in his toes. He was staring at a chalkboard in another. In yet another, he was stroking someone's hair, someone's long wavy red hair. Looking up at a kite. Feeling his fist connect with someone's face and saying, "Watch it!"

Little things like that. Sometimes his memories were slightly longer, like the nurse one, but that was rare.

He walked down the street, feeling out of place and self-conscious. He swore he saw several curtains twitch. Were people looking at him? He scowled. He itched for the urge to give someone something to look at him for. And it involved beating someone to a pulp. He hadn't engaged in combat for a while and his muscles were aching to beat someone senseless.

Would Bucky Barnes do that?

He rubbed his eyes and kept walking, looking around. Several kids played on their driveways, giving him curious glances as he walked by. They were used to everyone in this neighborhood and he stuck out like a sore, bruised thumb. He rounded the bend and kept walking. Up ahead, a little girl who looked like she was five or six, with long dark black hair and light brown skin, looked up when he came around the corner and her eyes widened. She wore a strange silver helmet on her head (if it could even be called that, since the Winter Soldier suspected it was nothing more than some Styrofoam with tinfoil plastered onto it, taped together to death) with silver wings on either side of the helmet. She also wore two rectangular pieces of Styrofoam covered in tinfoil taped to both sides of her chest and she held a plastic hammer in her hand. A red sheet was taped to her shoulders, dragging on the driveway behind her, like some sort of cape. The overall effect was mystifying, if a bit laughable, and the Winter Soldier was a little confused. Not that he'd ever thought about it, but didn't little girls usually wear dresses and sparkly things? What was she supposed to be, anyway?

He expected her to ignore him like all the other kids he'd passed but she marched right up to him as he walked past her driveway and said, "Hey!"

He stopped and turned to look at her. He pointed at himself as if to say, Me?

"Are you a ninja?" she asked in all seriousness.

He was instantly on high alert. Why would she ask—

Oh. He was wearing all black. And she was a child.

He was about to briskly say, "No," and walk away, but something about the childish hope in her eyes stopped him. Her entire existence would be made if he said yes. And he was a type of ninja…right? (Not really. Not at all, actually, but the rationalization worked at the moment.)

So he said, "Yes."

Her eyes widened and she moved towards him. He uneasily moved back, alarmed. What was she doing? Why was she coming towards him? She stopped hesitantly and then asked, "Can I hug you?"

Alarmed, he backed away and said, "No, don't do that."

"Please?" she asked, clasping her hands together. Hadn't this child ever been taught to not talk to strangers? And especially not to solicit hugs from strangers?

"No," he said, backing up so quickly he stumbled. Then he turned and quickly hurried back towards Ari's home, his heartbeat accelerated. Amazing. Decades of doing dangerous missions and fighting in life-and-death combat and what truly terrified him? A child trying to hug him. He would have said yes except he didn't understand children at all. Small, squirmy things that were always getting in the way. HYDRA never cared if innocents died on his jobs (though they had told him to try and avoid civilian casualties, to avoid drawing attention to him), and generally he was pretty good at avoiding civilian casualties. However, those times had come when he had needed to harm civilians. He'd done it, but he'd always tried to stay away from children. Something about killing them felt…odd. They were so small. It was kind of like killing a small animal. He couldn't comprehend why anyone would do that, unless they had a serious reason to. Wouldn't it be easier to just brush it away?

When he arrived back at the house, he blinked. When had it gotten to be twilight? Streetlights were coming on and he hurried inside the house. The door was unlocked and the house smelled like cheese. Ari was in the kitchen when he walked in and she gave him a somewhat disapproving look. "I see you went out."

"Yes."

"When I told you not to."

"Yes."

"You know, I had my reasons in telling you not to go out," she said. "I'm not just a killjoy. You're not stable enough to—"

"I had to get out," he cut her off. "Okay?"

She looked like she wanted to argue but she bit her lip and then she smoothed her expression over. "Okay, what's done is done," she said. "Did anything happen while you were out?"

He sat down at the table and looked down at his lap, pulling off a glove and idly playing with it. "A little kid tried to hug me."

"What?!" Ari had been bending over to pull something out of the oven, her hand outstretched. She whipped her head to look at him—and then she yanked her hand back from the oven, hissing, "Ouch!"

"Did you burn yourself?" he asked.

She hurried over to the sink and quickly ran ice water over it, wincing. "It's nothing. Tell me what you said. A little kid tried to hug you?"

"A little girl," he said. "She looked like a…a robot." He frowned. "She wore this stupid helmet with wings and silver armor and a red cape."

Ari grinned. "Did she, by any chance, have a hammer with her?" She pulled on oven mitts and slowly slid the tray out of the oven, setting it on the table and waving at the heat with her hands. It looked like some sort of casserole with browned cheese bubbling on top, sliced green onions scattered across the top. The Winter Solder's stomach grumbled and he looked up and asked, "Yeah. How did you know that?"

Ari laughed. "She was dressed as Thor. One of the Avengers. He's the Norse God of Thunder. Big guy, pretty touch. Even you'd be no match for him."

The Winter Soldier wasn't so sure about that but he didn't say that to Ari. She set plates in front of them and they both served themselves. For a few minutes they didn't speak, only ate. The Winter Soldier observed Ari while she observed him. She looked a bit tense, a little anxious, and he thought it was sort of interesting how they were both obviously assessing each other blatantly. She as a nurse, he as…someone who needed to have information about people and places.

Suddenly she asked in alarm, "Wait, you didn't hug her, did you?"

"No!" he said, taken back.

"Good." She looked visibly relieved. "Sorry, it's just that…if her parents or someone had seen…they'd have probably called the police and reported you as a pedophile or something. And then I'd be harboring a fugitive. Although I may already be," she added pointedly, looking at him with sharp eyes. "Are you ever going to explain your role in what happened in D.C.?"

"No."

"Soldier!" she said, frustrated. "I can't help you if I don't know the story!"

"There's no story," he said honestly. "I had a mission. Terminate Captain America, the director of SHIELD, and Black Widow. There were setbacks. Things exploded. End of story."

"And somehow this ended with Captain America alive and in the hospital," said Ari doubtfully (this had been on the news), "and you wandering in North Carolina."

"Like I said—setbacks."

She chewed the inside of her cheek and her eyes darted to the clock. Her fingers tapped out a frantic, senseless tune on her thighs and he thought her breathing looked a little different. "My brother will be here soon," she burst out. "And he's really…"

"An a-hole," said the Winter Soldier, repeating Ari's words. "I remember."

She cracked a small smile at that, fiddling with her gold necklace. "Yeah, he's that…but he's also just really annoying, okay? He's going to make jokes about you…your looks and stuff like that." Seeing the Winter Soldier's mystified expression, she explained, "My brother doesn't look like a typical geek. You know, all skinny and greasy-haired and gross." A second later she covered her face in her hands. "I'm sorry. That was so rude and stereotypical of me. What I mean is…my brother is handsome in a conventional, football-player sort of way. He gets a lot of girls." Her mouth twisted with slight disgust. "So he thinks he has the right to comment on everyone's appearances and love life. Or lack thereof."

If he commented on the Winter Soldier's appearance, the Winter Soldier was half sure that he would strangle Alex. As for a "love life"…well, there was no such thing. The Winter Soldier didn't feel emotions like that; he'd never been allowed to, never had the chance to, never even given those emotions a second thought. From the few memories of being James Buchanan Barnes that had returned, it sort of seemed as if Bucky Barnes had been a ladies' man. The Winter Soldier couldn't be more different. He was more likely to throw a lady off a rooftop than he was to date her. (And he had thrown ladies off of rooftops. Romania, 1976. A rather unfortunate event for her, but HYDRA had been getting a bit desperate and they needed her to vanish pronto.)

"I'll be fine," he told her.

"You sure? You won't stab him or anything?" A slow smile crossed her face. "Because I wouldn't stop you…if you wanted to do your assassin thing…just kidding," she said quickly, as if afraid he might take her seriously, but he knew she was joking.

Joking. Another thing foreign to him. Had there been nothing HYDRA hadn't stolen from him? He was more robot and less human. He was like that little girl, except he wasn't pretending to be a robot or an alien. He actually was one. The thought was depressing and a little bit eerie.

Ari was clearly very keyed up over her brother's arrival. She largely ignored the Winter Soldier and even forget to assess him physically. She kept tidying up things that were already clean and muttering under her breath and clenching her fists. The Winter Soldier couldn't tell if she wanted to impress her brother or murder him. A part of him privately thought she was a little jealous of her brother. From what she said of him, he made lots of money, lived comfortably, was good-looking, and "got lots of girls." Ari made decent money and she was reasonably decent-looking (though the Winter Soldier wasn't the best grader on this, never having given a thought to peoples' looks before this) but she was clearly stuck in her parents' home and seemed a bit trapped and lonely. After all…she'd taken in a dirty and strange man from the streets. That had to say something about her.

Finally he left the family room because Ari acting anxious was making him get anxious, and when he got anxious, he tended to get a little violent. He sat on the bed that was in "his room" and looked around. The room was vomitously pink and floral, with so many glass figurines and flowers that it was almost incredible. The wallpaper was yellow with pale floral print and it was peeling slightly. This house might have been older than he was. The thought unnerved him. He might have walked through this house as Bucky Barnes and here he sat, still the same age, decades later. Not normal. Now that he wasn't been frozen in a cryo-cell anymore, he'd start aging…though it would be a very slow process. He would age more slowly than a normal human, he already knew this. So he estimated he had a good 100+ years ahead of him. The thought was dizzying, especially because he knew he would never sleep through a large chunk of it again. He sat there on the bed staring at the wall, lost in empty thought, not noticing that the room was getting darker and darker. His eyesight was fine in the dark so it made no matter. If Ari had poked her head in now, she might have been a little creeped out at how still he sat, still as a statue.

Finally, he heard the doorbell ring and Ari called, "He's here, Soldier!" He stood up, shaking himself off, flexing his cybernetic hand, and headed outside.

"Wait here, in the kitchen," hissed Ari. She headed to the front door and he heard it open and then a man's voice said, "Little sis! Look at you! You look…exactly the same." And then a loud guffaw. He heard Ari sigh and say, "Hello, Alex. Come on in."

A tall, well-built but sort of beefy blonde man strode in, looking around with faux-fascination. "Wow! I love what you've done with the place! It looks so…so 1960's, Ari. You've gotta tell me the name of your interior decorater, I—" He finally caught sight of the Winter Soldier, standing there, arms crossed, staring at him with a hard expression. Alex Madden looked shocked for a moment and then a gleeful smile spread across his face. "Oh? What's this? A guy? Wow, Ari, moving up the ladder!" He laughed loudly as Ari entered the kitchen, rubbing her temples. She shot the Winter Soldier a What did I tell you? look.

"He's just a friend, Alex," she said tiredly. "He's staying here for the moment because he's in a tough situation."

"So, tell me, Ari the Humanitarian!" said Alex, clapping her on the back so hard she winced. "Why've you decided to adopt a new pet? What's his name, Gothic Hobo? What's with all the black? Dude, can you speak?" he asked the Winter Soldier. "Or has she got you on a leash?"

Ari groaned and the Winter Soldier slowly fingered the knife he had looped through his belt, gritting his teeth. He suddenly sympathized deeply with Ari's urge to murder Alex Madden. No one insulted him to his face like that and walked away with their head still on their shoulders. Ari shot him a look that said Control yourself and the Winter Soldier suppressed a deep sigh, his fingers itching to wrap themselves around Alex Madden's overly large throat and choke him to death. He had a feeling the next few hours would test his patience like no other.