Suddenly, Bellamy found herself with a new occupation. Even after immersing herself with all the raw facts of the file, nothing could prepare her for living in close quarters with the Winter Soldier.

The three hour drive from Washington, D.C. to New York City wasn't awful; her car was discreet and he was sat in the back, silent. She wondered how long he would stay that way, knowing she still had her mission, but also knowing he couldn't avoid talking forever.

"Well, here we are." There was no way else to dress up her welcome, if you could even call it that, as she guided him inside her apartment. He stood awkwardly just inside the front door, staring around, and she too did the same.

"This is just an ordinary apartment. What makes it any different or safe." It was more than one question posed, more than one question that popped into her head. Her building silence added to the tension between them, and she opened her mouth to speak.

"...Do you know who I am?" It occurred to her after she spoke that the correct form would have actually been who she was. It didn't matter however, she just needed him to remember the past. His eyes focused on her but after a moment, it seemed that he was looking right through her. "You said that, it's as if you're missing parts. Do you remember who I am?"

"Should I." His questions always lacked normal curiosity and sounded flat, as if he actually didn't care, but his eyes showed that he did. They were back to the back and forth and she took a small breath. Thankfully, she learned over the years to develop a good deal of patience. It proved useful every brief time she dealt with Tony Stark and men like him.

"I don't think it's a bad place to start."

"I'm just here to lay low." His jaw clenched. Persistence was another one of her strengths.

"Maybe we should sit." She gestured over a few feet to the siting area and took a few steps. His feet stayed planted.

"I don't think I should."

"Sit. Please." They locked eyes and she moved to sit in the armchair, watching expectantly, making sure he knew it wasn't a request but a demand. Finally, he was sitting rigidly in front of her, on the edge of the loveseat, looking anything but comfortable and more or less a statue.

His eyes first went from the rug on the wooden floor to the loveseat he was sitting on, before his gaze swept upwards, and their eyes met again. It sent shivers up her spine, realizing they were the last thing both her brother and father saw before taking their last breath. Now, she could feel her own jaw clenching. She swallowed hard and cleared her emotions from her mind to focus.

"The place, where you found me, the bank…how did you know to go there?" He shook his head, slowly back and forth to the side. "Do you remember what it really was?"

"I spent a lot of time there." He finally spoke, breaking his cold expression with his words. Suddenly, he looked much more like the human she saw that night, getting tortured for remembering who he was, until he could no longer remember.

"Do you remember being there, with me?" His thousand yard stare vanished as he locked eyes with her again.

"Why," the word was curt. Their eyes seemed to shout an argument more than they did with their voices, but it was now that she realized more so than ever before how silence was a sound. Silence had different tones. Each time one of them replied, the following silence was an exclamatory screech, blanketing them in suffocating tension.

"I want to know what you remember."

"I told you I don't want to talk about it." His hands made fists at his sides, the metal one glinting from the slight sunlight filtering in through the window. Her own hands were clasped together tightly, atop her crossed leg.

"I'm only trying to help you, if this isn't a mutual coopera—"

"I don't want your help." The conversation was now escalating, his jaw stressed and eyes glaring.

"James—"

"No," he cut her off again, ducking his head, his eyes shutting tightly as if he heard a nails on a chalkboard. Did she say the wrong name?

"Er, is…would you prefer Bucky?" He stood abruptly, and she jumped. "I'm sorry, I wasn't sure which one—" His arm suddenly swung, knocking over the standing lap beside the loveseat and sending it to collide with the wall, effectively disheveling her favorite painting. "Hey!" Her words were void as he reached down and flipped the loveseat into the door.

"Where are they?" He demanded, turning his attention to her with wild eyes. Bellamy couldn't catch her breath as she stuttered unintelligibly. "Why are you keeping me here!" He was ready to go off again, eyes flashing from side to side. Her instinct was to reach for her gun on her hip, but knew the action would set him off.

"James, I want you to listen to my voice." She began shakily, her words wispy and faint against the blood pounding in her ears. "I'm Bellamy. You're in my apartment—there's no one else here. I'm trying to help you." He only stared at her, his silence blaring, before he dove towards her. Bellamy barely had time to duck and throw herself away to the ground. James broke the arm off the chair she had been sitting in.

As soon as her wits came to her, she kipped up, her feet crunching into broken glass from the shattered lamp and lightbulb. Very narrowly, she missed a combination of hooks and punches James threw at her and landed a roundhouse kick, only to receive a hard punch in the jaw with enough power to send her flying into her destroyed loveseat.

"Snap out of it!" She cried, looking around the room for some kind of weapon. There was no way she could take him down with her own strength. "This is not you!"

He only grunted, picking up the standing lamp's pole and charging at her, pressing the bar against her neck. The taste of blood seemed to add to the difficulty of the situation surrounding her as she strained in vain to fight against his strength. The last time someone had tried suffocating her this way, it had been a simulated fight lesson with the Black Widow; fighting wasn't exactly her strength, certainly not against someone with a metal arm.

"This isn't real, what you're…seeing," she managed out, gritting her teeth. His arm clicked as he forced the bar closer to her neck. "It's not real…Bucky." The name seemed to click in the worst way.

"Shut up!" He threw the lamp post and it took a chunk out of her bookcase, a purchase from a Brooklyn antique shop. Now with bar gone, she immediately latched onto his shirt collar.

"Bucky, it isn't real. This isn't real! You have to fight it!" He smacked her across the face with the back of his metal hand, sending her to the ground in a heap with a thud. Her face stung and throbbed; it was like getting hit with a car.

"Shut up!" He repeated again, picking her up by her neck with both hands latched. "You're my mission!" Then, as she stared at him through her weakened sight, she remembered being back in Steve's hospital room when he had awoken. He had been relieved to see her, to know she was even alive, and the feeling had been mutual.

"Bucky?" Was the first thing Steve had asked her immediately when he saw her, and she had to shake her head, disappointing him.

"I…I did see him though." She began hesitantly, not sure whether she should tell him, but not wanting to see his disappointment. "HYDRA kept us in the same building, separated by confinement bars. They wiped his memory, Steve. That's what they've been doing all these years. Erasing every shred of his real identity and stuffing him with what they wanted him to be: a malicious and inhumanely cold assassin. A winter soldier. But this last time, when I was there…they had to wipe his memory again, because he remembered you." Steve had straightened up in his hospital bed, his swollen face from the punches of his former best friend still able to smile despite it all.

"It did work." He had murmured to himself before his face collapsed and he sighed heavily. "When we were fighting, all he could say to me, over and over, was, 'you're my mission, you're my mission." Steve had looked down, and he didn't have much else to say, but the renewed look of hope in his eyes were clearly visible, and she knew then that hope would never leave Steve.

"I'm trying to help you!" She protested in a plea to James, refusing to punch him now, or kick him as she should've. No longer could she fight back after remembering Steve.

"No you're not!" He punched her again and she folded under herself on the ground, her eyes seeing double of him as he raised his fist again. They rolled backwards in her head, and in her fight against her body's auto-pilot of her controls, she caught sight of the coffee table, a sturdy wooden table framing stone tiles in the center. Summoning every ounce of strength she had left, she locked her legs around his neck in a gogoplata hold and lifted her lower back off the floor, grunting at her exertion of force, and sending his head straight into the center of the coffee table.

"It's not real." She breathed out weakly, the taste of blood stronger than before as she fought the feeling of fading out and waiting for James to stand and attack again. But he didn't, and she saw him out on the floor beside the table before she drifted away as well.

It was sometime before sunset when she awoke again that same day, still in the wreckage surrounding them; James was still in the same position from earlier. Her body was aching from the abuse of the last two days—she knew she had at the very least a bruised rib or two, along with an added busted lip and swollen face. It was hard to make her body get up, but she was used to forcing herself through these things, though, she did pause and muster slight shock at the sight of her not only swollen, but muddled purple-bruised face in the unmoving television screen, miraculously untouched.

"I definitely didn't plan for this." She muttered to herself before staggering over to James' body. Gingerly, she turned him over to his back and inspected his chest. He was still breathing, and she realized how much of a relief that was, although it did surprise her that his eyes didn't snap open and his hand didn't wrap around her throat as soon as she touched him. His body surely had to be past its limit too.

With slow movements and wincing, she passed James' body on her way to wash the blood from her busted lip away from her face, and retrieved one of the torn blue paisley pillows from the couch to place underneath his head. The mirror in her bathroom made her look worse than the TV did, and she only sighed uncaringly as she splashed cold water onto her face, making herself see instead the hope that had been in Steve's eyes rather than her suffering.

"I've never blacked out two days in a row." She murmured lowly to herself as she sank down to rest with her back against the overturned sofa a few feet away from James' body. Her eyes landed on the painting with a hole through it—a print of water lilies by Claude Monet, now ruined. That was okay—she'd found the painting in a thrift shop, but her grandmother's armchair was a different story.

The sun turned to russet, to violet, and James stirred only when the sun had reached a navy color. She watched him now rather than the sky, feeling her heart pound and her palms growing sweaty. It was obvious to her that she could have very well died today, and well, the day wasn't over yet.

But she knew—when she saw his eyes—that he was no longer in his murderous state, the way his eyes looked around in bewildered horror at the mess. He landed on her, and she was almost insulted at the look of disgust on his face.

"Hello." She greeted him stiffly.

"What happened?" He asked her, pushing away the pillow his head had been resting under.

"I'm guessing you didn't like my décor too much." Was her very dry reply, and he threw her a look that reminded her she didn't have a sense of humor.

"I did this?" He asked, gazing around the room with detached shock, as though he was both surprised and not at the proof of his own ability of destruction.

"Yeah. I suppose I said the wrong thing, triggered something. Regardless." The detached emotion evaporated to reveal pain as it really hit him. He looked at his undeniable destruction before he shook his head slowly, covering his face.

"I knew it would happen again. I can't escape this." His weak voice, full of exhausted anguish, made her feel prickly with guilt. It wasn't his fault, far from it, and she tried to remember that. That he was a victim.

"Not you." She assured him with the most reassurance she could, as soft as she could, but he only sighed at the attempt. "You didn't know what you were doing. But you stopped." She hoped he didn't remember how she had to knock him out for that to be possible.

"Are you trying to tell me that means I'm capable of being saved?" He mocked.

"Of course." He snorted again, shaking his head in loathing.

"Have you seen yourself?" He demanded, turning his head away as if even he couldn't bear her external injuries.

"Yes. It doesn't hurt as bad as it looks." He sent her a subtle eyebrow raise. "Alright, it hurts like hell, but like I said, you didn't know what you were doing. And if we're being honest, I'm more distraught over my grandmother's chair." He buried his face again.

"I almost killed you." He reminded her, reminded himself, before he sighed. "Again."

"I'm strong." She told him, glad he couldn't see her wince as she stood. "You've got to do a lot more than that to take me out."

"I shouldn't be here. I'm not ready yet." He said, standing up with quicker ease that her.

"You never will be if you don't try." She argued. He finally allowed himself to look at her. "It's going to uncomfortable at first, being back around people."

"What makes you think I should even be around people anymore. Why are you even doing this? Why are you letting me stay here?" He demanded. She sighed, moving to stand in front of him.

"We've met before." For some reason, he winced and avoided her gaze. She frowned a bit, and realized how fragile the situation was before her; all she could see no matter what she tried to plan was a path of eggshells. "Back at that bank, I once told you a lot about me. My name is Bellamy Burke, and I help people. It's what I do." He looked back up at her. "If you let me, I can help you too." No response. She hesitated; one concussion a day was enough. "…Why don't we start with what I should call you?"

"Call me whatever you want." He grunted, avoiding her gaze again. A sigh escaped her lips as she turned away from him.

"Alright, James. I'm here to help, and you can help me."

"Just give me my file and I'll go."

"And where will you go? You can't go anywhere right now." He glared, although this time it wasn't directed towards her, it was out of realization. "Now, how about you help me clean up a bit? There's a broom in the pantry, over there in that door." He stood there for a moment longer, several moments longer, even after she had begun dinner, until she wordlessly sighed. "Or, I'll clean up." More quietly under her breath, she muttered, "It was my own fault anyways."

"I only destroy things." She heard him mumble later that night as she tossed a salad. Nonchalantly, she turned towards him.

"That'll change. In time."

James didn't touch his plate after she finished dinner, and she noticed him sitting in the corner of the living room as she washed her plate in the sink. His head was between his knees, creating a self-made barrier to the world.

"Are you not going to eat?" No reply. She gritted her teeth as the silence grew longer. "Fine. Suit yourself then—starve." With loud and jerking gestures, she threw the plate out and washed that too, and crossed the room towards him, only to stop in her tracks at the sight of his face, distraught now as he stared at the floor. It was much like the face she'd seen on him moments before Pierce had forced HYDRA to wipe him. Immediately, she was overwhelmed with the memory, the setting, overwhelmed with guilt as the echo of his screams filled her head.

Quietly, she moved and got blankets and pillows from her hallway closet to make a bed on the loveseat that she pushed from the door back to its normal spot. Finished, she approached him closer this time.

"…James?" After a long moment, he looked up. His eyes connecting to hers made her realize once more that she was being a bit harsh. "I made you a bed here, when you're ready. And if you get hungry at any time, just let me know, okay? I'm down the hall." He said nothing, only looked down again. The silence felt like a question left hanging in the air. With slow-moving care, she kneeled down before him. "What are you thinking about?" He didn't look up again, so she bit her lip, regretting the question, before finally standing. With one last look around the mess of the room, she just decided to go to bed.