"You have to calm down," James says to me. "You're making me anxious just watching you."
"Then don't watch me," I retort.
"Impossible," he says with a grin. It makes me smile like an idiot. I've been pacing back and forth next to the window for about twenty minutes, trying to fill the space with something other than our waiting. He's been sitting at a small desk in my cramped "office" in the medical wing of the Tower and looking through my brain books. Stopping only occasionally to ask a question, I think he's been most interested in the pictures and case studies that are highlighted. Earlier, I gave him his first shot of the compound we'd gone to the hospital for, a synthetic version of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, that would help his brain as it heals itself during the memory rebuilding. A secreted protein in the brain, the BDNF boosts the brain's neural connections and synapses and supports the growth and establishing of new cells. We'd been experimenting with the synthetic in mice and it seemed to help their ability to retain new information and to bounce back after trauma. I figured it wouldn't hurt to try a round of it.
We've been in the medical wing most of the morning, waiting for Steve to come looking for me. James had wanted to confront him first thing, but I told him I wanted to wait for Steve to come to me. I know it's the passive aggressive way to deal with it, but I want to feel in control of the situation and this is as good as home turf as I can find. I feel in control in this setting and it helps to have James here. But I am still nervous as hell.
"Alina," James calls to reach me in my pacing and I stop in my tracks, taken abruptly by my name on his lips. "Come here."
He holds a hand out to me and I go over to the desk where I lean against it and he rests his hand on my waist. I press a hand to his cheek and he turns his head to kiss my palm but I swoop in and catch him off guard and press my lips to his. It's gentler than kisses we have shared in the past days but it settles the butterflies in my middle and I break it to scooch back on the desk and look down at the book he is studying.
"Do you feel smarter?" I ask him, my tone joking and give him a little push on his shoulder.
"Should I?" he muses. "Are you sure this stuff isn't going to make me stupider?"
"Well we'd be hard pressed to find someone to compare you to," I say and the side of his mouth turns up in that lopsided grin.
"I walked into that one," he says. I only nod. He drapes his right arm across my lap and keeps flipping through my book. His fingers linger over the pages, and he tries sounding out words for structures and processes but they sound so strange coming from him. My language gets fumbled in his beginner mouth.
"Why'd you pick this stuff, anyways," he says. He sounds almost like he's in awe of it and shakes his head a little as he looks up at me. I don't admit it to him but it's my favorite question.
"Brains are pretty cool," I say, I know it sounds lame and it makes James smile but I press on. "I mean, they're made of cells, and two kinds of matter, but everything that makes us who are as humans is locked up in that lump of protein. Our ability to be kind, to create art, to love, to build cities that last centuries, to nurture each other and to dream impossible things, is all locked up in there. But on the flipside it's all the bad stuff, too. Everything that makes us evil is there, too. It's a delicate dance of the good and the bad inside people and it all depends on what is turned on in your brain and what is turned off. Nobody knows exactly what controls it all, and that's oddly beautiful to me. We've been so obsessed with learning about the world around us and reaching out into space to explore far beyond our world, all the while forgetting the infinite universes that are inside our brain. It's just beautiful."
A pause stretches between us and he's looking at me like I've transformed before his eyes, probably because I have.
"You're beautiful when you talk about brains, you know that?" he says and we both laugh.
"It felt right, to go into this field, especially after what my grandfather did before-" I stop in mid-sentence and it hangs there. Before what. Before he was taken to a camp? Before he was taken by HYDRA? Before his work with James? It could be any one of those. But I have to define it or else it will poison the moment.
"It's okay," James says, releasing me from the responsibility of needing to clarify. It'll always be there and we'll have to learn to navigate these pot holes together. I have a feeling we'll manage, though. We stay quiet with each other and his thumb traces lazy lines where his hand rests against my side.
"Are you worried," I move forward with the conversation. "About seeing him again?"
James shakes his head, but he's staring off like there's more going on in his head than he wants to admit.
"I don't think I'll lose control," he muses. "But I don't know what will happen." Another thing that we will be dealing with: the unpredictability of what will surface when he encounters loaded situations that could send him into violent flashbacks. It's during our ponder of this when there's a knock on the tiny office's door and we both turn towards it. My body stiffens and James lets out a breath. We both prepare for jumping off this precipice in our different ways.
"Here we go," he whispers.
"Come in," I manage to say and James removes his arm from my body. I wish he would leave it there. The door opens slowly and Steve enters, his eyes settling on James and I and it seems to give him pause. He stays in the doorway and seems to need to brace himself by leaning against the door frame. He tries to do it casually but I can tell he still feels a shock when he sees his friend still alive.
"Bucky," Steve finally says. "Good to see you." James nods but doesn't say anything. He told me he wouldn't. He looks up at me, a sign to me that I need to make the first move.
"Steve," I say, and he looks my way. "I'm not leaving. I'm staying here and sticking to the plan."
He looks confused. Understandably so. So I take my opportunity.
"This whole time I've been pushed and pulled in different directions because of what other people wanted and I didn't have a choice in it. But this is my choice right now and I'm choosing to stay here and do what I can to help. I'm not going away and I'm not hiding. I need you to understand that."
Silence. Instead, he comes into the room and takes a seat at what would be a consulting chair, where a patient would sit when having bad news delivered to them. I stand to face him and James stays in his chair but there is an undeniable tension in the air around us.
"That's what you want?" Steve says, the doubt on his face clearly evident.
"Yes," I answer. I try to make my voice as strong as I can. It surprises me how steady it sounds, like it's not even me that is behind it. I have changed in these few weeks and draw a strength from a new place inside me.
"What do you think about this," Steve says to James, their differences seemingly set aside for the moment.
"She has a right to choose her life," James says. His eyes and voice never waver from Steve. "If this is what she wants, then she stays. It should be beyond us to choose people's lives for them." Steve's jaw tightens when James says this, because he can understand being the other side of the coin in those terms. That it's just as wrong to make the decision for someone else even if it's meant for good.
"And you know the risks, that we can't guarantee anything."
"You keep saying that, that you can't guarantee my safety or anything like that.," I say. "But I can be useful here, and I don't have anything else. I'm staying. And to be honest, even without you there's always a chance I get hit by a bus or something just like that so no one can guarantee my safety, really."
Steve does that thing again where he weighs me in his mind. His eyes drift from me to James and back to me, I wonder if he knows there's something between us and how much that is affecting my decision, I push that out of my mind and don't take my eyes off of him.
"If you stay," he says, "there is no going back to your old life. We take care of the details, but once I put those wheels in motion they can't be stopped."
"You think I could go back now?" I demand of him. "I can't walk away and pretend like this never happened. You all are in my life now whether I like it or not. I can't go back to trying to forget what I've seen here and pretending like it didn't have an impact on me. I need to be here. I need to be here just as much as anyone else. It's all that I have left."
I stop there because I didn't want to descend into begging. Steve actually looks sorry for me. His face is laced with pity and he lets out a long sigh, his body giving in to the answer that I want him to give me. But why does he pity me? Because I'm stuck in this life with the rest of them? Is it because there is a certain futility to what they do here in the Tower, always trying to stay one step ahead of 'the bad guy' even if that turns out to be your best friend? His pity could be for a thousand different reasons but I don't want to hear any of them.
"This is what you want," He says, but he's looking at James when he asks and when I say yes, I can see him resign himself to it. "This isn't a game, this place. And the world is so different than what you knew before, but we're all here for the same reasons. Just remember that."
He stands, and seems to hesitate a moment before holding his hand out to me and I shake it heartily. When he turns to James, his hand hangs in the air before James slowly raises his own and they shake once. I can feel the electricity radiating from James' body, I know that he's fighting the conditioning he underwent to see Steve as an enemy, as a target to be destroyed, but he manages to push through that weight and make it through to us.
"You know," Steve says, trying to keep things light. "You should really get a haircut. It might help you feel like your old self again." He winks at James and I smile.
When Steve leaves, James collapses on the chair and the effort it took for him to resist is clear on his face. I feel a sense of calm, that I am no longer in upheaval and that I can settle in. The uncertainty and fear are gone, replaced by a lightness I didn't think was possible. I put my hand on James shoulder and his skin is hot through his shirt, a byproduct of his struggles. I reassure that I am there for him, that I am not going anywhere.
He responds by pulling me in again, pressing his face to my belly and holding on to me as tight as he can. I kiss the top of his head.
"I like your hair," I whisper.
He laughs and the sound fills me.