Chapter 6
Sickening and feverish sweat awoke her out of the vivid nightmares, tears streaked over her ashen cheeks and dissolved against the soothing warmth emitting from his exposed and chiseled chest. She was entering a void filled with warp fragments of damaged memories.
Images of her mother fading into dingy blackness. Everything had become wave a distant memory, it almost like poison had dripped into her veins, clotting her blood with unrelenting coldness and numbness.
"Mommy!"
The pain stuck into the hollow bones of her rib cage, coating her heart with burning ooze that slowly ate away into her soul. She wanted to scream out her mother's name, but for some reason, she could only conceive faces in her mind, no names or numbers.
Blank pictures, colorless and blemishing into monotonous shades of grey. Each image of her parents and baby sister disjointed with static. Some were spindling into a web, twirling like prey trying to escape from the shackles of the weavers. Red spiders with many heads, slowly crawling a taunting, until it struck at the heart and devoured the innocence of that dream. Everything felt strange. Everything was wrong. She looked about the room. her brown eyes had sharpened her vision and she zoned out the furniture. Many things were old, and seemingly covered with ingraining dust. The pain overtook her, splotches consumed the clarity in her eyes.
Releasing a flood of tears, the girl violently gripped the frayed blanket cloaking over her distressed form, clinging onto something that kept her from drifting further into listened to the drumming sound of his resilient heart beating against her ear brought a knell of comfort to her aching body. She nuzzled her face into the graven creases of his bare pectorals, her tiny fingers traced over the silver crescent scars etched in layers of firm muscle. They were small to the naked eye, barely visible in the shafts of sunlight caressing over his body.
For a vague moment, she became a captive, falling into a trance of a dark past written on the planes of his chest.
She wanted to pound her small fists into the stone floor, unleash all the anguish knotting in her body. She wanted her captors to hear her torture, but her voice had been locked away by exhaustion.
At that moment when she sniffled and buried her face fully into his chest, her nose crunching his metal hand stroked over her back in circular movement, easing away the tension.
The feeling of his touch came to her heart. She shot her head up and blinked momentarily, tying to focus against the tears blurring her vision. It took a few more blinks, until she gained enough clarity from the mushy darkness to stare into his intense blue eyes that pulled her into a winter storm.
Feeling the infliction and confusion hasten in her, the girl lifted her shaking hand and cautiously rubbed her fingers over the dimple engraved in his strong chin. Her brown eyes steadied and lifted as she took in his appearance, each time she looked at him, he seemed less intimating. Squares of light around his pupils, tenderness veiled by fierce semblance, but she knew that he would never harm her. She trusted him with her life, giving him a chance to become human and fight against the morbid programming of dehumanization wired in his brain.
There was a etching of fear written on his face, timidness of mere child trapped inside him, as his unnerving stare never broke his eye contact from her curious gaze.
With a faint smile, the girl straightened against his lap, crossing her little, thinned legs over his black combat pants.
"What do they call you?" she asked in a soft voice. She locked her eyes with him.
The Winter Soldier blinked, but he kept his lips fastened into a taunt line. He didn't know what to say to her, he had never expected this to happened.
Staring in her large brown eyes, made his stern expression flattened out into hint of confusion.
"I don't remember." he spoke in a distant voice, allowing his gravely whisper to carry through the air.
His eyebrows creased, and he tried to collect olden memories, but everything was scramble into a crimson haze or horror.
He wrenched his eyes away from her, and added after swallowing a large gulp of air, more words of disbelief poured out of him. "I don't think I have a name."
"I have a name, but I can't remember it." she replied, biting on her lower lip. Her scattered thoughts were collapsing. "But I know I do have a name."
He lowered his head, lips pulled into a frown. "You will remember," he spoke in a ghostly whisper, his eyes locked on his metal knuckles rolling as he flexed his hand.
"Did the same thing happen to you?" He shot her with a vacant, obscured glare. She didn't flinch. "Did you lose your family and get hurt?"
A heaving sigh erupted from his chest. His Adam's apple was bobbing along the wall of his throat, and he stared at her, struggling to force out a breath. "I don't know." he answered with incoherent words. His metal hand unclenched and raked through his dangling and long tresses of mussed hair. His fingernails dug into his soft, oily surface of his skull, gripping a fistful and screwing his eyes shut. He looked disillusioned and lost in his own mind. His trembling lips moved, but she couldn't hear what he was saying in harsh Russian.
The Winter Soldier looked down at his shimmering alloy, as umbrage of a wraith was overtaking him.
Most of his matted hair concealed his face. Dots of sweat trickled over his brow and a sharp clenched of his jaw revealed inward torment.
He stiffened against the wall, feeling the bare muscular planes of his back settle into the spaces of the stone.
For a long moment, silence hung between them. He looked at her. "I remember feeling pain and snow...Everything else," he paused, his throat creating a clicking noise as he searched for memory. "I keep on seeing a face...A man on a bridge calling out someone's name and his eyes filled with tears. Maybe I knew him, but I..."
His upper row of teeth dragged over his bottom lip. "I don't remember his name." he scalded at those images twining in his brain and then his ardent blue eyes fixed on the dimness still linger around the vast room.
With a sweep of his lashes against skin, he had crushed the tears building watery film in his eyes. Just one had manged to escape. It slid down the chiseled plane of his tensed cheek and fell to her hand with a gentle splat. "I'm not supposed to feel," he half-growled, fasten his lips into a condensed sulk. "They told me I couldn't cry...that I hollow and cold as metal."
He settled his intent gaze on to the girl, his blue irises lightened, and mouth opened, "It's you," he rasped, blinking and looked harder into her small face. "You're not afraid of me. Not like the others around here. I don't understand why you stay close to me, I'm dangerous...I don't mean to be, but I am."
He respected her bravery, and felt a burst of warmth reemerged in his body when he stared into the caramel swirls of her innocent eyes with his own glassy crystal azure chasms. "Why do you allow me to stay with you?" he asked in a voice of desperation.
The lavish shapes of his mouth folded into a pained grimace. "You do know that might hurt you?"
"The woman with the green hair said that I will be someone's...someone's daughter," she spluttered out words and narrowed her head, clasping her tiny hand over her wrist; her voice was threatening to crack. "I do not want a new mommy or daddy. No one can replace them. No matter what the monsters take away from me."
She turned her head away suddenly, keeping her wary focus on the window panes, and stared at the rays of sunlight breaking through ashen clouds. Her eyes watered with stinging tears. "I want to go back home."
The girl crossed her thin arms over her chest, squeezing against her throbbing ribs. "I don't like this place." She combed her finger through butchered strands of her brown hair; some of the locks were uneven in length. She was showing the stoic assassin her distress through forceful yanks that jerked her head. "They do bad things to people. Make them ugly."
Flexing his half- gloved hand on the girl's shoulder, the Winter Soldier applied toasty warm to resonate the echoes of pain moiling in her body. "Hey," he bellowed in loud and unsteady voice that made her quake under his stare and conveyed his order, with a slight inkling of displeasure, "Stop crying."
She blanched at the tone of his voice, and halted her tears, sniffling. Her little heart felt bruised by all the traumatic imagery cultivating in her mind. "I'm scared."
"You're not dead. You should keep that in mind," he discharged out a growl. He didn't know how to converse with a child who appeared around the age of seven. This was strange and disheartening for him.
Listening to the chorus of sobs, he regarded her with a passive gaze, trying to understand her emotions, and watching the wetness streak down her pale cheeks. The remnants of his heart burned against his chest. Feeling repulsed,he ignored the tug on the threads of his soul and searched beyond her glossy stare, blowing out a frustrated breath. A few stands flipped over his blue eyes when she wailed out crackles of grief and shook against him.
"I need you to stop crying, he spoke with a hint of lightness in timbre. His eyes shifted and lips went still. "You can't show that you feel. They will not allow it because it's a weakness for them." He leveled her with tenderness gleaming through the shadows casting over his menacing face. "Do you understand that?"
"Yes," she baited out a heavy breath, and leaned her head into his chest, allowing him to feel the warm tears veneering over his skin. "I understand." Before he could say a few more words, the girl inclined her head, looking up at him with pleading brown eyes. "Will you please stay here with me?"
The Winter Soldier was calculating her heartbreak in silence, and it made him feel like a knife wielded in his heart when her little voice beckoned for his security.
She was so small, fragile and alone. He refused with every ounce of his scarred humanity to allow himself not to abandon his mission. He made a promise once to a young boy with corn silk hair and gentle blue eyes, maybe a little brother that he would never leave his side. Now, those memories felt like a wasted dream, yet the vow seemed to become reborn back into his defective and corroded soul.
"Do you need me?" he asked with a rive of modulation, gazing at her with his unyielding eyes. She nodded for a second. "I will stay with you."
She smiled, and settled her face back onto his chest. She closed her eyes and listened to thumping of his heartbeat. "I like you. I don't care what that witch says about you...You're a good man."
the Winter's Soldier's blue eyes enlarged and breath grew into heavy coattails, "I'm not a good man..." He echoed back, tearing from his clasped lips. Abruptly, he turned his head away and tried to restrain his guarded emotions seeping out of his tensed bones. "The world calls me death...I am the Winter Soldier." He seethed with bitterness mixed with hollowness in his voice. That is my existence."
He clenched his jaw tight. "I am a ghost that haunts good men in their nightmares. The perfect soldier and killer. I am not a good man-I'm a weapon." He narrowed his deaden blue eyes back to her, watching her drift into a peaceful slumber. He lowered his head down and pressed a warm kiss over her shortened locks. He held it there and whispered, "You're pure as light. You're freedom."
