He's a ghost or a ghost story, and it's funny in the saddest way because he is. He's Steve's personal ghost. When Steve woke up from being frozen and they played that baseball game - a game he went to with Bucky - he heard Bucky's laugh, and him yelling you got a lousy pitching arm! at just the right moment.
He swore it was real, would swear it up and down. When he slept, he dreamed of Bucky, heard him yell when he did something particularly stupid, or laugh when Steve said something sharp and funny. But that was weaker and weaker, his ghost was fading, the haunting ending. He thought maybe the loneliness would win one day, and that he would finally be able to sleep through the night without the bands of pressure from the feeling around his ribcage, worse than any bout of asthma.
But then Bucky came back.
He's a ghost, Natasha had told him, but Steve isn't any kind of fool. He knows the inside of Bucky's head better than Bucky ever did, and no matter what Hydra put in there, he knows that Bucky won't leave where he is (because for better or worse, he's not a mission anymore) and that if he's getting his memories back, there's a few places he'll be sure to go.
That's why Steve steps into the diner down in the old neighborhood, the one that hasn't looked like it's changed at all in the past seventy years (and with the way kids dress these days, Steve thinks it looks pretty much the same if a little like Howard Stark got a hold of fashion and the girls have tattoos), and he orders two pancake breakfasts.
And then he waits.
(Maybe he's done this 15 times in the last three weeks.)]
It's an accurate description. No longer a flicker on security systems which cut to a loop when he comes through, but an echo resounding in an empty room. He haunts the shell of someone he used to be, insubstantial and lost, retracing old steps.
Well practiced in invisibility, he watches Steve Rogers from a distance. Goes with him to the apartment buildings where Ebbets Field used to be, and tries to understand the way his mouth tugs down, looking up at them. He walks beside Steve at a Brooklyn cemetary, three hours after he's left, and traces the names on the stones. He wonders if he has something like this, somewhere. The man whose bones he walks with is a museum piece, now. His clothes are wrapped around a faceless doll. His photograph projected onto glass.
Does he have a marker, like this one? Something simple. Permanent. Stone.
He doesn't join Steve Rogers for breakfast, but he watches the mechanical way that he eats and stares at the full plate and empty space opposite. He's watched him do this maybe fifteen times, and he knows where the path goes after this. He's walked it with him, every time.
This time, when he follows, he's only three steps behind. He's a ghost, and when Steve finally turns, he expects the man to look right through him.]
[He turned, and not because he heard someone behind him but because he reached into his pocket and realized he had misplaced his phone, because keys and wallets are something he had back home but a phone in his pocket never was and he's not sure if he'll ever get the hang of it.
And he sees him and doesn't look through him, but he doesn't look at him for long, either.
Instead he looks slightly away, although his peripheral vision is still on him, and that's enough for Steve. He can make out details. They're not the only people in the street - it's never been that kind of street, not even when they were kids, dirty kneed and filthy nosed.]
You could have come in for breakfast.
[He knows that he was there, he knows that he was watching. He doesn't have to see him in the window to know that.]
[What Steve can see in his periphery is a mess. He doesn't look like he's eaten, though any lack of sustenance takes time to show on his frame. He's drawn thin and desperate in a different way, something behind the eyes.
Being told he should have come in for breakfast is, for a second, so absurd it almost cracks something in him. There's a lost and howling thing under the surface of him just waiting for the veneer to splinter enough to let it through. There. Behind the eyes, the stare he's fixed on Steve's face.
They're not alone on the street, but there's a pathway being edged around the two of them for reasons no one passing by really understands. People nudge into each other rather than break into that space.
Bucky lifts a hand, the one not gloved, and scrubs it over his face, and then he steps carefully around Steve and he starts to walk.]
[Steve isn't about to let him disappear - not that he's naive enough to think that if he wanted to disappear, he would, and there would be nothing short making a huge public scene that Steve could do about it. So he steps into line with him, half a step behind, hands in his pockets.
His voice is low because he know that Bucky can hear him, and he doesn't want anyone else to.]
I mean it. You look like you could do with meal.
[If he keeps on the food, maybe Bucky won't flee, as if talking about anything even remotely serious (what's your name) might make him just take off. He doesn't want the other man to take off, not when he just found him.]
[He hears him. He doesn't look round (it's still an absurd line of questioning and it occurs to him that Steve Rogers doesn't know what to say. That's jarring, in its way, against whatever he knows of him.
(What does he know of him?)
He knows these streets. He knows that Rogers would call it the old neighbourhood, but that in his own head its just Brooklyn, a grid of brownstones and high rises and redevelopments that won't unravel into meaning. But he's walked the streets, learned or relearned them, and he's sure there's something behind all the new glass veneers and under the cleaned up sidewalks. Something he just can't see.
He's learned these streets, or relearned them, spent whole nights crisscrossing through roads and back alleys. Over rooftops, down rows of rickety stairs. There are just a few crumbling places, grafitti covered and fly postered, where the air smells like something he might once have known.
He walks ahead of Steve, but he's not trying to slip away.
He turns down one of those alleys, and then he stops. It's one of those places where the brickwork's crumbled and old, and high up on the wall where the flat level of a fire rail used to be, there's a few letters etched in childish scrawl.
JBB |||||||| ||| SGR |
The man Steve's following stops. He doesn't look round.]
[He follows, of course he does, the map of Brooklyn overlaid with the shiny new storefronts and the retro one-off stores that line the streets now. It's so shiny (and expensive, it's expensive, he managed to get a nice apartment because it turned out that Howard had bought the building they lived in and renovated it and Tony didn't even know that Steve was in Howard's will as having $40 a month rent through perpetuity in that building) and different but they layouts are the same, the building are only painted and polished over.
There it is. A sign that they were there, once upon a time.]
We used to sit here, when we got more than two minutes without someone chasing us up and down. There was a fire escape.
[We used to sit here. We spent time together. It's not a question, it doesn't need a reply, not exactly.]
[Howard Stark registers in his memory primarily as a mission complete. One shattered window and a car run off the road. He'd stood over them until the woman in the passenger seat stopped gasping through the blood.
He looks up at that marks scratched against the brick. A tally. He'd found this days ago, and he's been back to look at it since. He's spent hours.
(Is there a marker for him, somewhere? Simple. Stone.)]
[There is a marker. It's in Arlington, but like Fury's, there's no one in the grave it marks. There's one for Steve, too, or there was before he woke up and they took it out. Side-by-side, one of the caretakers told him once when he went there, his cap in his hands as they stood in front of the grave of James Buchanan Barnes. The caretaker had been a teenager during the war, too young to enlist, and he remembered Steve's movies and the comics and the news when Captain America died. I won't leave this job until I die. I like being here. It's respectful, he had told Steve when Steve asked him why he was still working.
Steve thinks he has more to say to that man that he does to people who are supposed to be his age.
He takes a moment.]
Home runs.
We used to play ball, right around the corner. I managed one. One summer. We were twelve. You were a lot better at it than I was.
[He backs up as Steve walks forwards, until his shoulders are braced against the wall opposite. It keeps that gap, those three steps between them, but it does something else, too. It forces him to look.]
You were smaller than I was.
[That's how he thinks he remembers him best, when he thinks that it's memory at all. Having to duck to meet his eyes.
But it's a fact, too. Steve Rogers was small. He's seen the pictures, his measurements laid out at the exhibition. He knows that it's correct.
I was smaller than most everyone. Couldn't find a girl who would look at me twice.
[Especially when Bucky was around. What do they know anyway? You're twice the guy I am, three times, Bucky used to say, his head shaking in disappointment at another double date where both girls ended up trying to claim Bucky as theirs.
He wonders what would have happened if they had come back from the war together. If they were finally a matching set. If it would have mattered, then.]
[If they'd come back from the war, whole and intact, Steve Rogers would still have been twice the man Bucky was, with a frame that finally fit. They'd find a girl each and get apartments on the same block. Take the kids to church together on Sundays, where Steve's boys could teach Bucky's what good manners look like.
Maybe they'd move out of the city, somewhere with a tree dropping leaves in identical back years, and be buried together in the same churchyard, with flowers overlapping each other's graves.
Maybe life would never be so straightforward. These days there's little room for fairytales, but he closes his eyes and listens to Steve speak as though it's a lesson he should remember.]
Who was I?
[He leans a little emphasis on the was. Who he is is too fragmented to begin with.]
[Steve doesn't know if he even believes in heroes anymore, let alone fairy tales.
But he still believes in Bucky.]
You're the best man I've known. You're my best friend.
[There is no was, when it comes to this friendship, there is no was where Bucky is concerned. He's still Bucky. Battered and bruised and hurt, maybe, but still Bucky.]
[When New York fell and America rebuilt it, slowly, bringing the streets of Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn back with the help of the great industrialists of the age and not the communist hand that the Soviet Union offered, it was more than just a blow.
And then people started fleeing there, political refugees.
Some of them more important than others.
He's been scrubbed clean.
They tried. They thought that they had cleared out everything, all the remnants of his patriotism, all the remnants of his morals. They found him wrapped around his best friend, both of them alive, somehow, miraculously, tied together. The other man, his arm had suffered irreparable damage, so they took off the bulk, and replaced it, but the good captain was almost whole when they dragged them back.
Steve Rogers, the great American hero, Captain America, wiped clean of all of that, loyal to the bone. They could not wipe away his loyalty but they could reroute it. And James Barnes, equally deadly. This is their first mission together since they found them, the first time they woke them up at the same time, and they're sending them to New York through a circuitous route: Paris then England, then back to New York to find their target and take them out. They speak English flawlessly. The pass for Americans. They don't even really have names for each other, because everything they are has been implanted.
It's been a few days when they finally reach London, and the larger of the two men finally speaks to say more than just confirmation of actions. The silence has given him time to think, which is never comfortable. He feels protective in a strange way to the man who is with him. He can't imagine why. He has no illusions about who he is. He's read the files.]
Have you been to London?
[He does not know his circumstances. He doesn't know anything except that the shape his face takes when he's sleeping is familiar.]
[Follow him. The single order would have been enough, except that this mission was not the usual silent pursuit. And watch him, they added.
And so the Soldier follows the Captain by walking at his side. He watches him with a tilt of his head and is in all other ways obedient to the methods in which he chooses to follow the higher level of their commands. They will go to New York, eliminate the target sparing no prejudice, and return to their extraction point on the date and at the hour given. That is one mission.
But the Captain is a mission of his own, and the Soldier carries a gun loaded with bullets designed for him. (They will not risk their asset, but they will flood his system with enough quick acting poison to leave him comatose for a week, and this is what the bullets are loaded with, waiting for the wrong move).
There are files, and the Captains are messy while the Soldiers debriefs have been neat and clear and precise. He is precision where the Captain is blunt force.
In combination, they tell him, the perfect weapon.]
I know it. [James Barnes tells Steve Rogers, and he doesn't think to question why he should. It's just as he doesn't think to question why he knows the lines and planes of the man's face. This is his mission. He knows what he needs.] London, Paris and New York.
[That latter: he knows what it was. They tell him the city has changed, that there are scars across its face. And he doesn't, quite, know what that means.]
[He is capable of subtlety that is difficult to predict, but the result is the same. He chooses his strategies on the spot, thinking better on his feet than in advance, not willing to muster that long patience to sit on a roof, fingers frozen, watching through the scope.
The Winter Soldier does the job, but the Captain sends a message. They both shape the world.]
This is my first time abroad.
[Maybe that's why they didn't send him alone, or maybe they would not have sent him alone after the wreckage he trailed behind him in Vladimir. They met him at the extraction point, the lines on his face harder than usual, more frightening.]
Are you going to spend the entire trip scowling at me?
[He says it in smooth, unaccented French. They're far enough away from anyone that they probably won't be overheard, but there's no sense in risking it.]
[He doesn't do so, often. The muscles for it are almost confused by the tug, as though atrophy's set in, but the effort shows for a flicker of a moment before he looks across at the Captain with a grin that would be called cocky if it got halfway to his eyes.
Looking across, there is an instant when it comes close.]
This accent's the safest, [He goes on, switching easily out into American.] Anywhere but Russia.
[America came out of the war bloodied but unbowed. The remaining allies still remember their aid and their loss (and their young men with chocolate rations and lazy accents) and welcome them in.]
[Almost to his eyes seems to be enough, because the smile that is returned to him is just this side of genuine. He's better at faking emotions, or maybe at tapping some part of him that was genuine once, they say. Because without a doubt, there is nothing that he feels that is genuine anymore, except maybe his loyalty, and that is even put into question.
(Some people want to decommission him. They think he is too much of a risk, that it outweighs the benefits. This mission is as much of a test as anything, although he doesn't know that.)]
I hear everywhere is safe, these days.
[He says it with a touch of irony in his voice, a certain humor that he retains. But he says it in English, comfortably]
[The Soldier's mind was gone when they found him. Brain damage from the fall and the burn of the cold. He was an animal, they said, nothing left to him but the basest instincts.
(He killed four medics the day they woke him. He retained, then, his instinct for what counted as a threat).
He makes the finest of canvases now, repainted and washed out in different colours every time, and when they tell him the stories of the glorious freedom he fights for (freedom through pain, order through chaos, they will remake the world as it should be) he absorbs it into himself, his flag to follow. There's instinct to that, too, whether they've missed it or not.]
As houses.
[The smile is smaller, more wry, but still something real enough. The access details to their safehouse for the night are written into the lines of code he calls memory.
The reasons the Captain would like his smile aren't. (Like his mouth, that he might have a guess for).]
Your requests are as good as commands. Did they not say?
[He is second on this mission, in every way but one. So far, the Captain retains control.]
That's what they told me. But I hardly think that extends to your moods or your face.
[His smile fades, he leans back a bit. They're clear with his parameters, they're clear with how he should treat his soldier - his is not how they phrased it, but it's how he thinks of it, because if they are on foreign soil then he has to remember how his loyalties lie, he has to think about it more than he usually does, and the Winter Soldier is a good touchstone.]
Better yet: if you want to scowl at me, scowl, but know I'll go out of my way to make you stop.
[Those emotional synapses, they're still in place, it makes him excellent at getting by, at passing for more human.]
[Strange. The Soldier tries for a moment to settle on a definition of that word that makes sense to him. He's asked to blend with the crowds more often than not, but that requires the right dress and accent, little effort. There have been overlays placed on him in the past, false memories pressed into the gaps where he only has a lack.
But the mission ends and they're gone. He's made clean again and set into the ice.
What is normal, in that context. The Soldier thinks of the others he's trained through Project Zephyr. The loyalist. The zealot. None are quite the same beyond their loyalty. They do all have one thing in common.]
If you were conventional you'd be expendable. [Canon fodder. He's been given plenty of that under his command, and never missed the ones who don't return. But there's a question still ticking over in his mind.] How would you make me?
[The Captain blends in different ways. He knows what he looks like, it's been clearly defined as an advantage - not his height but his face, the kindness in his smile, the way his features have been placed. He does not blend in but he stands out only in positive ways. People want to help him. They want him to succeed, even if they don't know what he's doing. He inspires it in people.
He looks over at him, for a long moment, and there's an expression on his face that's hard to read. It's like he's searching for something.]
Don't think it would be so easy. I've seen the standards in training.
[Few of them come close enough to be a challenge, let alone a threat. The department would suffer without him, and - he's heard - the Captain is his superior in the field. He's not certain how he feels about that.
Willing to be impressed.]
Perhaps we shouldn't turn so easily on each other.
[There's a dryness to that tone - it's not literal, that would be unthinkable, but something in him wants his answer. How would you make me. The same thing that issues the challenge of letting his mouth narrow back to a line.]
(He breeds loyalty too easily, he makes it hard for people to keep their priorities straight. He was Captain America, their superiors say with shrugs, that is what he did for years. Part of it is inherent.)]
But it's interesting you say so.
[He watches the other man's face settle into a frown, and he tries a smile of his own.]
Come on, Yashenka. When you scowl you make it look like the entire world is disappointing you by refusing to light itself on fire.
[Yashenka, how familiar, how casual. But this man makes him feel casual.]
[He holds out against it, but there is a familiarity (and overfamiliarity given what they should be together) in that light test of the Captain's will. And there can't be so much wrong with it. If the man couldn't take the slightest of pushes he'd never be woken from the frost.]
That's when I seem as though I'm watching the world burn?
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He's a ghost or a ghost story, and it's funny in the saddest way because he is. He's Steve's personal ghost. When Steve woke up from being frozen and they played that baseball game - a game he went to with Bucky - he heard Bucky's laugh, and him yelling you got a lousy pitching arm! at just the right moment.
He swore it was real, would swear it up and down. When he slept, he dreamed of Bucky, heard him yell when he did something particularly stupid, or laugh when Steve said something sharp and funny. But that was weaker and weaker, his ghost was fading, the haunting ending. He thought maybe the loneliness would win one day, and that he would finally be able to sleep through the night without the bands of pressure from the feeling around his ribcage, worse than any bout of asthma.
But then Bucky came back.
He's a ghost, Natasha had told him, but Steve isn't any kind of fool. He knows the inside of Bucky's head better than Bucky ever did, and no matter what Hydra put in there, he knows that Bucky won't leave where he is (because for better or worse, he's not a mission anymore) and that if he's getting his memories back, there's a few places he'll be sure to go.
That's why Steve steps into the diner down in the old neighborhood, the one that hasn't looked like it's changed at all in the past seventy years (and with the way kids dress these days, Steve thinks it looks pretty much the same if a little like Howard Stark got a hold of fashion and the girls have tattoos), and he orders two pancake breakfasts.
And then he waits.
(Maybe he's done this 15 times in the last three weeks.)]
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It's an accurate description. No longer a flicker on security systems which cut to a loop when he comes through, but an echo resounding in an empty room. He haunts the shell of someone he used to be, insubstantial and lost, retracing old steps.
Well practiced in invisibility, he watches Steve Rogers from a distance. Goes with him to the apartment buildings where Ebbets Field used to be, and tries to understand the way his mouth tugs down, looking up at them. He walks beside Steve at a Brooklyn cemetary, three hours after he's left, and traces the names on the stones. He wonders if he has something like this, somewhere. The man whose bones he walks with is a museum piece, now. His clothes are wrapped around a faceless doll. His photograph projected onto glass.
Does he have a marker, like this one? Something simple. Permanent. Stone.
He doesn't join Steve Rogers for breakfast, but he watches the mechanical way that he eats and stares at the full plate and empty space opposite. He's watched him do this maybe fifteen times, and he knows where the path goes after this. He's walked it with him, every time.
This time, when he follows, he's only three steps behind. He's a ghost, and when Steve finally turns, he expects the man to look right through him.]
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And he sees him and doesn't look through him, but he doesn't look at him for long, either.
Instead he looks slightly away, although his peripheral vision is still on him, and that's enough for Steve. He can make out details. They're not the only people in the street - it's never been that kind of street, not even when they were kids, dirty kneed and filthy nosed.]
You could have come in for breakfast.
[He knows that he was there, he knows that he was watching. He doesn't have to see him in the window to know that.]
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Being told he should have come in for breakfast is, for a second, so absurd it almost cracks something in him. There's a lost and howling thing under the surface of him just waiting for the veneer to splinter enough to let it through. There. Behind the eyes, the stare he's fixed on Steve's face.
They're not alone on the street, but there's a pathway being edged around the two of them for reasons no one passing by really understands. People nudge into each other rather than break into that space.
Bucky lifts a hand, the one not gloved, and scrubs it over his face, and then he steps carefully around Steve and he starts to walk.]
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His voice is low because he know that Bucky can hear him, and he doesn't want anyone else to.]
I mean it. You look like you could do with meal.
[If he keeps on the food, maybe Bucky won't flee, as if talking about anything even remotely serious (what's your name) might make him just take off. He doesn't want the other man to take off, not when he just found him.]
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(What does he know of him?)
He knows these streets. He knows that Rogers would call it the old neighbourhood, but that in his own head its just Brooklyn, a grid of brownstones and high rises and redevelopments that won't unravel into meaning. But he's walked the streets, learned or relearned them, and he's sure there's something behind all the new glass veneers and under the cleaned up sidewalks. Something he just can't see.
He's learned these streets, or relearned them, spent whole nights crisscrossing through roads and back alleys. Over rooftops, down rows of rickety stairs. There are just a few crumbling places, grafitti covered and fly postered, where the air smells like something he might once have known.
He walks ahead of Steve, but he's not trying to slip away.
He turns down one of those alleys, and then he stops. It's one of those places where the brickwork's crumbled and old, and high up on the wall where the flat level of a fire rail used to be, there's a few letters etched in childish scrawl.
JBB
|||||||||||SGR |
The man Steve's following stops. He doesn't look round.]
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There it is. A sign that they were there, once upon a time.]
We used to sit here, when we got more than two minutes without someone chasing us up and down. There was a fire escape.
[We used to sit here. We spent time together. It's not a question, it doesn't need a reply, not exactly.]
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He looks up at that marks scratched against the brick. A tally. He'd found this days ago, and he's been back to look at it since. He's spent hours.
(Is there a marker for him, somewhere? Simple. Stone.)]
What does it mean?
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Steve thinks he has more to say to that man that he does to people who are supposed to be his age.
He takes a moment.]
Home runs.
We used to play ball, right around the corner. I managed one. One summer. We were twelve. You were a lot better at it than I was.
[He traces his hand over the marks]
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You were smaller than I was.
[That's how he thinks he remembers him best, when he thinks that it's memory at all. Having to duck to meet his eyes.
But it's a fact, too. Steve Rogers was small. He's seen the pictures, his measurements laid out at the exhibition. He knows that it's correct.
(What does he know about him?)]
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[Especially when Bucky was around. What do they know anyway? You're twice the guy I am, three times, Bucky used to say, his head shaking in disappointment at another double date where both girls ended up trying to claim Bucky as theirs.
He wonders what would have happened if they had come back from the war together. If they were finally a matching set. If it would have mattered, then.]
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Maybe they'd move out of the city, somewhere with a tree dropping leaves in identical back years, and be buried together in the same churchyard, with flowers overlapping each other's graves.
Maybe life would never be so straightforward. These days there's little room for fairytales, but he closes his eyes and listens to Steve speak as though it's a lesson he should remember.]
Who was I?
[He leans a little emphasis on the was. Who he is is too fragmented to begin with.]
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But he still believes in Bucky.]
You're the best man I've known. You're my best friend.
[There is no was, when it comes to this friendship, there is no was where Bucky is concerned. He's still Bucky. Battered and bruised and hurt, maybe, but still Bucky.]
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And then people started fleeing there, political refugees.
Some of them more important than others.
He's been scrubbed clean.
They tried. They thought that they had cleared out everything, all the remnants of his patriotism, all the remnants of his morals. They found him wrapped around his best friend, both of them alive, somehow, miraculously, tied together. The other man, his arm had suffered irreparable damage, so they took off the bulk, and replaced it, but the good captain was almost whole when they dragged them back.
Steve Rogers, the great American hero, Captain America, wiped clean of all of that, loyal to the bone. They could not wipe away his loyalty but they could reroute it. And James Barnes, equally deadly. This is their first mission together since they found them, the first time they woke them up at the same time, and they're sending them to New York through a circuitous route: Paris then England, then back to New York to find their target and take them out. They speak English flawlessly. The pass for Americans. They don't even really have names for each other, because everything they are has been implanted.
It's been a few days when they finally reach London, and the larger of the two men finally speaks to say more than just confirmation of actions. The silence has given him time to think, which is never comfortable. He feels protective in a strange way to the man who is with him. He can't imagine why. He has no illusions about who he is. He's read the files.]
Have you been to London?
[He does not know his circumstances. He doesn't know anything except that the shape his face takes when he's sleeping is familiar.]
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And so the Soldier follows the Captain by walking at his side. He watches him with a tilt of his head and is in all other ways obedient to the methods in which he chooses to follow the higher level of their commands. They will go to New York, eliminate the target sparing no prejudice, and return to their extraction point on the date and at the hour given. That is one mission.
But the Captain is a mission of his own, and the Soldier carries a gun loaded with bullets designed for him. (They will not risk their asset, but they will flood his system with enough quick acting poison to leave him comatose for a week, and this is what the bullets are loaded with, waiting for the wrong move).
There are files, and the Captains are messy while the Soldiers debriefs have been neat and clear and precise. He is precision where the Captain is blunt force.
In combination, they tell him, the perfect weapon.]
I know it. [James Barnes tells Steve Rogers, and he doesn't think to question why he should. It's just as he doesn't think to question why he knows the lines and planes of the man's face. This is his mission. He knows what he needs.] London, Paris and New York.
[That latter: he knows what it was. They tell him the city has changed, that there are scars across its face. And he doesn't, quite, know what that means.]
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The Winter Soldier does the job, but the Captain sends a message. They both shape the world.]
This is my first time abroad.
[Maybe that's why they didn't send him alone, or maybe they would not have sent him alone after the wreckage he trailed behind him in Vladimir. They met him at the extraction point, the lines on his face harder than usual, more frightening.]
Are you going to spend the entire trip scowling at me?
[He says it in smooth, unaccented French. They're far enough away from anyone that they probably won't be overheard, but there's no sense in risking it.]
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[He doesn't do so, often. The muscles for it are almost confused by the tug, as though atrophy's set in, but the effort shows for a flicker of a moment before he looks across at the Captain with a grin that would be called cocky if it got halfway to his eyes.
Looking across, there is an instant when it comes close.]
This accent's the safest, [He goes on, switching easily out into American.] Anywhere but Russia.
[America came out of the war bloodied but unbowed. The remaining allies still remember their aid and their loss (and their young men with chocolate rations and lazy accents) and welcome them in.]
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(Some people want to decommission him. They think he is too much of a risk, that it outweighs the benefits. This mission is as much of a test as anything, although he doesn't know that.)]
I hear everywhere is safe, these days.
[He says it with a touch of irony in his voice, a certain humor that he retains. But he says it in English, comfortably]
No requirement, just a request.
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(He killed four medics the day they woke him. He retained, then, his instinct for what counted as a threat).
He makes the finest of canvases now, repainted and washed out in different colours every time, and when they tell him the stories of the glorious freedom he fights for (freedom through pain, order through chaos, they will remake the world as it should be) he absorbs it into himself, his flag to follow. There's instinct to that, too, whether they've missed it or not.]
As houses.
[The smile is smaller, more wry, but still something real enough. The access details to their safehouse for the night are written into the lines of code he calls memory.
The reasons the Captain would like his smile aren't. (Like his mouth, that he might have a guess for).]
Your requests are as good as commands. Did they not say?
[He is second on this mission, in every way but one. So far, the Captain retains control.]
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[His smile fades, he leans back a bit. They're clear with his parameters, they're clear with how he should treat his soldier - his is not how they phrased it, but it's how he thinks of it, because if they are on foreign soil then he has to remember how his loyalties lie, he has to think about it more than he usually does, and the Winter Soldier is a good touchstone.]
Better yet: if you want to scowl at me, scowl, but know I'll go out of my way to make you stop.
[Those emotional synapses, they're still in place, it makes him excellent at getting by, at passing for more human.]
You can say I'm strange, I've heard it before.
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[Strange. The Soldier tries for a moment to settle on a definition of that word that makes sense to him. He's asked to blend with the crowds more often than not, but that requires the right dress and accent, little effort. There have been overlays placed on him in the past, false memories pressed into the gaps where he only has a lack.
But the mission ends and they're gone. He's made clean again and set into the ice.
What is normal, in that context. The Soldier thinks of the others he's trained through Project Zephyr. The loyalist. The zealot. None are quite the same beyond their loyalty. They do all have one thing in common.]
If you were conventional you'd be expendable. [Canon fodder. He's been given plenty of that under his command, and never missed the ones who don't return. But there's a question still ticking over in his mind.] How would you make me?
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[The Captain blends in different ways. He knows what he looks like, it's been clearly defined as an advantage - not his height but his face, the kindness in his smile, the way his features have been placed. He does not blend in but he stands out only in positive ways. People want to help him. They want him to succeed, even if they don't know what he's doing. He inspires it in people.
He looks over at him, for a long moment, and there's an expression on his face that's hard to read. It's like he's searching for something.]
I don't know yet.
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[Few of them come close enough to be a challenge, let alone a threat. The department would suffer without him, and - he's heard - the Captain is his superior in the field. He's not certain how he feels about that.
Willing to be impressed.]
Perhaps we shouldn't turn so easily on each other.
[There's a dryness to that tone - it's not literal, that would be unthinkable, but something in him wants his answer. How would you make me. The same thing that issues the challenge of letting his mouth narrow back to a line.]
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[For whatever reason.
(He breeds loyalty too easily, he makes it hard for people to keep their priorities straight. He was Captain America, their superiors say with shrugs, that is what he did for years. Part of it is inherent.)]
But it's interesting you say so.
[He watches the other man's face settle into a frown, and he tries a smile of his own.]
Come on, Yashenka. When you scowl you make it look like the entire world is disappointing you by refusing to light itself on fire.
[Yashenka, how familiar, how casual. But this man makes him feel casual.]
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[He holds out against it, but there is a familiarity (and overfamiliarity given what they should be together) in that light test of the Captain's will. And there can't be so much wrong with it. If the man couldn't take the slightest of pushes he'd never be woken from the frost.]
That's when I seem as though I'm watching the world burn?
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