The roof was empty and breezy, and the horns from the cars below drifted ever so slightly up towards them. She picked a corner and sat down, taking a gulp. Bucky stood a bit away from her, staring out.

"What else were you lied to about," he asked lowly.

"Where can I start?" She muttered darkly, wallowing in her own despair.

"You were an agent, for S.H.I.E.L.D., I know that. Of high rank." She looked up at him. "When I didn't kill you, or Steve, or the Black Widow…they took you hostage." As he pulled the memories from his head, he was already beginning to sound much more aware than she'd ever heard him, capable and observant and intuitive. Like Steve, Bucky was already capable of adapting to the times quite quickly.

"They were keeping you hostage too. You remembered Steve, so they wiped your memory again. The next day, you were supposed to finally kill him, and HYDRA were to win. That night before was when we talked."

"About what?" He turned to glance at her. She stared down at the bottle.

"I told you about Steve. I told you about yourself—your name, your hometown, a mini biography. I told you about me."

"You told me you were an agent?"

"I told you about me. Who I am." Another small drink downed, and she chuckled to herself thoughtfully. "Funnily enough, I never even talked about being agent. Sometimes, I wonder if that's all I ever thought I was. It became my identity. It was just easier to tell you about me because you were a stranger. It's always been easier that way."

"How?"

"Well, strangers, you meet them and they have no prior idea of who you are, only what you tell them. And you could tell lies to them, if you wanted, or the truth. The truth so true you can't even tell your friends. And they don't judge you half the time, because they have no expectations of you. In a way, you can just be who you are."

"At what point do they stop being strangers then?" She didn't answer.

"I guess…until you choose. My strangers tend to remain strangers. I don't have a lot of friends. I have a lot of acquaintances, and a lot of peers, former peers I suppose, but lots of strangers. It helps to not feel lonely."

"Lonely." He whispered the word before he nodded to himself, as though he were an author struggling to find that one best fit infuriating word and had finally found it. Because words and things like that, you could never really find them. They found you. She inspected him a bit longer before she took a longer gulp. When she looked up again, he was watching her.

"I'm trying to get drunk," She explained defensively, almost. He said nothing, only removed the top and sat down.

"How did you get out of there?" He asked, his eyes squinting in confusion. She stared back at him.

"You. They let you out, for your mission. You took out the HYDRA agents and doctor. One of the agents with the key landed near me, enough that I could get the key."

"I wouldn't say that was a conscious effort." He mumbled.

"You were supposed to kill me." He blinked at her. "You pulled Steve from the water. Sure, maybe it was hazy, but you made some decisions that day."

"It happened for a reason—you were never supposed to die. I was. Steve should've killed me." Bellamy only stared, shrugging her shoulders.

"Well, things worked out the way they did for a reason." The words themselves could be taken as soothing, but her tone wasn't.

"Steve was…protecting you. Are you…close?"

"I…suppose. It wasn't always this way…Actually, he didn't like me too much to begin with." Bucky looked up at her in confusion. "He was first called in to work with the Avengers when we met and he didn't trust one damn thing about me."

"Why not?" Bucky asked, looking her up and down with a returned wariness. She shrugged, and realized it was probably better not to be smirking, even out of amusement.

"Do you trust me?" He didn't answer, and she took a sip. "Well, Steve had just woken up. He wasn't sure he liked the way the world was. On top of it, no one knows every secret of S.H.I.E.L.D. The director never told one person everything, sometimes he never told anything at all. Steve doesn't operate that way, as I'm sure you know. And me, well, my grandmother was best friends with one of the founding members—she was an USO girl. My mother was a secretary for S.H.I.E.L.D, and my father was one of their best field agents. My brother believed in it, therefore I believed in it. I put everything into it." Her words had darkened their atmosphere, despite the sky growing a light navy lavender hue.

"…Your brother…"

"…Bronson. He was, um, my twin." Talking now, forced her to take another drink before she could go on. "I was six minutes older—I was supposed to be a boy, actually, so I surprised everyone. The name stayed…my dad called me Bella, though." Bucky glared down. "Bronson and my parents basically got me a job at S.H.I.E.L.D. after the UN, where I helped with response to disasters. With S.H.I.E.L.D., I was a peace ambassador, my brother led the original S.T.R.I.K.E. team." She didn't need to go on, they both knew his fate all too well. The two of them drank in silence, full of grief and guilt. She bit her lip hard. "God…why me." Bucky turned his deeply frowning eyes to her. "Why, what makes me so goddamn special that they had to be taken from me, when they were so much better."

"You just explained it yourself. You were a threat to them." Her breath hitched as she opened her mouth to argue, but she was unable to voice anything and felt her face crumble.

"What were their last words?" Her voice was a whisper. She saw Bucky's jaw clench and he turned away from her.

"Your brother told me to take him, to leave you alone. Your father…he said… 'You'll have to kill me before I ever let you hurt my girl'."

The silence between them was unable to be heard over her soft weeping that took over. Even though she hated it, she couldn't control it, she couldn't even think to realize she hated it.

"What…what else…did you tell me," Bucky's voice was soft, almost afraid. When she looked at him, all she could see was a face conflicted; his eyes flickering between the two of hers and the tears that fell from them. He was uncomfortable at the sight of her lament, likely because she wasn't the only one being hit with realizations—he was the cause for it. With a sniffle, she gave into the bait.

"About what?"

"About you."

"There's not much to me." Her fingers played with the bottle before she drank more.

"You don't like opening up." He said and she focused on him. "But we're strangers, aren't we." It was fair; it was hard trusting someone you didn't know a thing about. She was always on the easy side of the coin, where she knew everything about everyone else. He had to know who he was beginning to trust, that she was worth beginning to trust. After all, she had read his file and claimed to not have it. She knew things about him before he knew it about himself.

"I…suppose." His eyes waited and she sighed, downing her largest drink. The bottle was much lighter now. "I…" It was harder than normal, harder than when she would share tables at a local coffee shop with strangers, like the Uni student from Ghana, or the two paramedics on a coffee break. Maybe it was harder because it was personal. They weren't strangers, there was a deep-rooted history between them she was just barely finding out about. "…You've been after me all my life. Don't you know me?" Her tone was no longer accusing, nor bitter, but curious, albeit darkly. He looked at his hands holding the bottle, frowning.

"I don't even know myself. But you, you're there in the glitches in my memories. For the longest time, I didn't know why. In the museum, I learned about Steve, a little about me. But you were there, in person…I didn't know if you were even real or why you were so engrained. Until I realized…" He sighed. "For the longest time, I looked at you like a target. It would help me if I could teach myself you're—"

"A person?" She suggested. He hesitated, his eyebrows furrowing and apprehension pooling in his eyes.

"I know how it sounds." Bellamy stared off towards the sky, towards the point where it was growing brighter. Maybe it was only hard to try and explain herself because she was at a point in her life, for the first time, where she didn't know.

"I used to do cross country in school. I played the violin, and I took ballet and tap dance classes. None of that mattered, I was also a part of a model UN program and that was my future. I didn't mind it, I didn't entertain…unrealistic thoughts of being anything else."

"Are you sure," he asked lightly. Was she? She tilted her head.

"At that time, yes. I was told I had the body to be a ballerina; long legs and lithe and lean from running. But I didn't want to hear that. Everyone told my brother he was the perfect man—strong sturdy shoulders, above 6'0", hard muscles and sharp mind. He was perfect for his path. Everyone tried to tell me to do different, besides my parents, and Bronson. It didn't bother me anymore when people started nodding their heads in respect." She took a drink, but shrugged. "Now, right now, I wonder if HYDRA would've just let me be if I were dancing on Broadway."

"It always goes back to it." He said. She turned to him.

"What?"

"What you did for a living was your life. Now, it's gone." And I feel like I'm gone with it, she thought instantly, before she snorted, shaking her head defensively.

"No, no, no, of course it's not my entire life, I do more, I have more than that. Of course." Bucky didn't try and argue, it was herself, rather, who did. Their conversation so far had felt the opposite of being helpful, it felt like sitting in a lie detector chair, only in a room with a mirror staring straight at herself. Before, she'd always walked past her reflection without a second thought more than did she look stern enough to be taken seriously. Now, it was more about seeing past her narrowed eyes that she'd never noticed looked so cold. What did she have in her life? Almost nothing, she realized with a sigh and downed more of the deep red liquid, feeling tears beginning to spring from the corner of her eyes.

"…Maybe you're right." She snorted at the painful irony. "You get ambitious and then what. The floor just shatters beneath you and you get buried in all the rubble." Bucky shifted uncomfortably, both his body and his eyes, before he sighed.

"I keep…making you cry." They said nothing. He nudged the other wine bottle in between them. "You can have it." Silently, she took it and opened it.

"I do, do more. I am, more." He didn't try to argue or disagree, just watched her as she fumbled with her own embarrassing human emotion pouring out. "When I had time, I would volunteer my time wherever I could. Most of the time with children, even more so with orphans. They feel a special emptiness in their lives, and yet, their eyes still light up at the simplest things. And, and I…I read." Her mind was a bit foggy now, but she knew it was anticlimactic and sighed at herself, noticing how Bucky's eyes had almost widened. "You don't have to try and act so intrigued, I know I sound pretty pathetic."

"No, no…I…I knew that." She remembered his destruction of her personal bookcase in her room.

"Of course, you saw the books."

"No, no…" He leaned forward, his eyes squinting, his mouth open as he sat, thinking. "You like people, and peace. You called yourself a protector of peace." She said nothing in surprise, and he kept going, uncertain again as recognition grew in his eyes. "You don't like chaos. You like to read. That was what you told me at that bank." She nodded slowly. "You said, you said that the world was meant to be peaceful enough to sit on a balcony and read…" She snickered.

"And you told me I was in the wrong profession." He snickered now, his eyes gleamed in a certain relief as he finally remembered the memory in full.

"And you said, 'I never said I was the one reading. But I do, like to read.'" He chuckled, nodding slightly to himself before the gleam disappeared and his lips turned down. The nodding turned to shaking. "You shouldn't have been in there." Bellamy lifted her head from examining the bottle to him. Finally, she said,

"Neither should you." He looked up at her. "You know, it would help me too. If I knew more than what a file told me about you." He swallowed, before he snickered, bitter realization coloring his eyes darker.

"Because, when you look at me you see a monster? That is what I am. It doesn't matter who I once was."

"Yes, it does." She suggested. "How else can you move forward if you don't realize every part of you?" He didn't speak. "…It would help me a lot in moving on too, to try and…forgive."

"You shouldn't forgive me." He disagreed and took a drink.

"You're not a monster." His eyes, empty, stared at nothing in front of him so intently she didn't want to know what he was seeing.

"Tell me that when you believe it."

"What was it like back then?" She decided a different route. "I enjoy history. But I didn't live in that time."

"You're asking the wrong person. I don't really remember."

"There are some things you can't forget." She insisted. It appeared that he was trying, maybe searching for something but didn't know what to look for. Instead of looking at her, he turned his head towards the sun.

"…That's what you would think." It was growing brighter, sunrise had finally come. Bellamy leaned her head back against the wall that enclosed them on the roof. Their silence now sounded worn out, but it was easy to instead focus on the whisper of the air around them. Until his voice filled it.

"It was…different. Easier, in some ways…no, maybe just, simpler. I don't remember much more than that." Bellamy's eyes shut.

"It's a start." Her grip on the bottle had loosened, but she didn't hear it slip from her hand completely and shatter as it fell on the ground next to her.