trainwrecked | For ashyperfume

He didn't move at all.

"Expedient. Forgettable, for him."

He wasn't asking for anything in return. But he was protecting himself.

She didn't move either, though her eyebrows shifted upward. That explanation invited more questions than it smoothed over.

He was still standing, hovering there, and there was only so long that he could do that without attracting the attention he didn't want.

"Isn't that the discussion we are meeting here to have? Or have things changed?"

She watched him a moment more, head slightly tilted, studying, before with a brief nod, she made room for him in the booth.

Somehow she suspected he was the sort who wouldn't like empty space behind him either.

Some of the tension drained out of his body, and he slipped in beside her carefully, taking a quick look and giving her an approving nod, for her choice of vantage point.

'Normally,' he picked up the menu and pretended to ponder over it. Much more quietly, almost as though he was asking her something about the selection, he opened up with the information that he couldn't say over the phone, and he had promised her.

"I used to be a Hydra agent. They want me back, and they have... a very great history of being very good at tracking information in digital form. Any digital form."

Quietly, almost gently, she reached out and pushed the menu downward in his hands so that it met the table, her voice soft and low. "No one's used the menu in this place in years. Talk to me. It's normal enough."

It took a moment to recall the name. It was in a sudden flood of data that had swept through the internet not long ago, released at the time of the incident in D.C.

Admittedly this prompted another flood of questions to be sorted, categorized. He could likely see that in her face, in slightly narrowed eyes that seemed to both see him and look through him within the same moment.

"Why are you here?"

She couldn't say yet whether she believed him or not. But this question would initiate some of the other information that she needed.

He raised his eyebrows at her. "Because I promised you answers."

Letting go of the menu, he lowered his gloved hands under the table.

"And, as I told you before, to learn. I'm... They have repeatedly removed my memories, for a long time. I'm missing parts of everything, and just reading about what I should know, or might know, doesn't really cut it. So I do, also."

Slowly, he turned his hand palm-up. She could take her time to think on that and ask further. He was here.

She watched his hand for long moments, and him in turn.

Very quietly, "And who are you, to be so important to keep?"

"Ah."

He reached inside a pocket and took out a weeks-old leaflet from the Smithsonian. It wasn't crinkled - instead, it was carefully folded, and folded again, util it was neat and small and easy to carry around.

On the one side, it explained about the Howling Commandos exhibit.

On the other, it was about one Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. The picture was pretty recognizable, too. So were the dates listed under it.

She stared at it, absorbed it silently. Then reached into the bag at her side, producing a manilla folder, laying it in front of him.

Inside were a number of documents, obviously printed from the computer. A birth certificate, made out for James Buchanan Barnes, with the names of his parents. A registration into the military. A small assortment of photographs, from boy to young man . . . one of them a quick, faintly blurry photo of two young men, grinning, one small and blond in comparison to the other's darkness.

Military records. And a death certificate.

"It explains nothing." Her voice stayed the same quiet, remarkably even tone. "Even if I am to believe it. So I have to ask you again: Who are you, to be so important to keep?"

At the sight of the file, or, rather, of its contents, he got perfectly still.

On the one hand, it was information he wanted. He'd not dared to pull it up, because it would put a target on him. On the other hand... seeing it in the hands of somebody else? It chafed. Everybody else always had the information on him, and he was left with scraps. It made him angry, and he took the effort to wait until the rage had passed, before answering.

With a question.

He reached up, and his gloved fingers touched, lightly, the picture of him with a skinny, small blond. (It hadn't been hallucinations. He had known him like that, not just the strong, fast target...)

"Do you know who this is?"

"No." Her eyes followed his towards the photograph, taking in both boys in turn. Her hair slid forward, brushing the edge of her jawline. "I only went so far. If there was a story to hear about any of this, it was more than I could guess at . . . and I wanted it from you."

He shook his head quickly.

"I don't have the whole story. He does, but going near him is dangerous. They'll be keeping an eye on him."

His eyes returned to the picture. "He's Captain America. Before the serum that made him look like..." He waved a hand towards the flier. "Like that. But he wasn't the first one to receive the serum. Before it was ready, a Nazi scientist called Johann Schmidt insisted on taking it. He became..." A frown flitted over his features at the echo of a memory. "Disfigured. He was the man who founded Hydra. Arnim Zola worked for him."

And he needed another moment to wrestle his anger under control. The waiter took a look at him, then decided he'd come back for their order later.

"I was in the Army. The regiment I was in was captured, most of it, by Hydra. Zola... experimented on me. So when this happened," he pointed out the page in the file listing his fall from the train, "I didn't die. I was... It hurt much. I lost an arm." This part was from memory, rather than pieced together later. After DC.

"I was made more durable. Stronger. Faster. Like Captain America, sort of." Only not exactly. "I was made their weapon. Suspended animation between missions. No failures."

Silence from her again. Her eyes lingered on the photographs on the table. Briefly they drifted from his hands up to his arm. To his face . . . and away again, staring at the documents resting between them.

"Suspended animation isn't supposed to exist . . . Cryogenics . . . it's an experimental field at best."

But then again, the things that had happened on the other side of the country recently weren't supposed to happen either. People with more power than anyone should have, technology that was only just beginning to be discussed . . .

"James . . ."

But she didn't know what she was trying to say, or what she meant to in the first place. Maybe it was a last chance to take it back, to say all of this didn't exist.

He shivered, minutely, at the memory of the cold. The actual memories of the cryochamber were missing (for now), but nothing could take away the memory of the cold. The helplessness.

So he took a step sideways from that. "Hydra were using weapons that today would be called lasers. In 1943. Only not really, a laser would blow a hole into a person, unless I misunderstand things. Those blue beams could turn a person into ash... and Schmidt had tanks working with them..."

He blinked, then shook the memory. At least he thought it was a memory.

"People don't know much of what's happening around them, unless they need to. That's probably best for most people, too."

Her eyes were shut, blocking out the light.

"Why did they keep you?" The question returned, slightly sharper than intended. "Because of him?"

"Of course not. He was dead - they thought he was dead. When they captured me first, they didn't know there was a connection, either. I was just... good. And I became better."

Better weapon.

"Of course, there is the fact that I was the only one who survived their initial experiments. They probably wanted to know why, too." His mouth twisted in something that had nothing in common with a smile. "I now suspect they wasted their own answer by wiping my mind."

A small nod. Slight.

And then suddenly she was moving, sliding out of the booth to push herself to her feet.

"Need some air."

And she was gone.

He waited exactly fourteen minutes. Then decided that she had thought better about pursuing the acquaintance, gathered the papers from the table. Left a few dollars (careful not to leave foreign currency) on the table, and slipped out of the dive bar...

... only to see her still standing there. He didn't get too close.

"Should I return inside and wait for you there?"

He would, too. If she needed space from him for a longer time, he would give it to her - it was her decision.

Edited (slight addition) 2014-06-14 22:22 (UTC)

She stood there, leaning against the brick of the building, not far from the door. It was dark; the dim pool of the street lamp washed light over her outline. There was a cigarette in her hand, burned down almost to her fingers, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. It had rained recently; the pavement was damp. Likely the building was damp, and the back of her dress as well. But she didn't seem to care.

Her face turned back to him at the movement, at the sound of his voice.

"Why are you here?" Her voice was soft. "Don't give me some answer about how I asked you. We both know if you hadn't wanted to come, you could have vanished. Slipped off to some other country, been some face I saw once at a party, and never again. You came back . . . and that was a choice."

"I want... or don't want, a very small number of things, Fuu." He slipped back against the wall, close enough for very quiet conversation, or very fast reaction, but not quite crowding into her space. "I was a weapon. Weapons don't want things. I have set myself a target, and coming here didn't go contrary to it."

Oh, yes, he knew what her next question would be.

"As long as Hydra exists, they'll come after me. I can't even begin to make up for what I've done until they're after me. So I'll bring them down."

So simple.

So final. He meant it absolutely.

She watched the smoke rise off her cigarette, the thin spiral of it trailing into the air.

"I meant, James, what you want from me. With the point that you didn't have to tell me any of it."

Maybe weapons didn't want anything . . . but he did.

"Ah. That's a different question."

He thought over it for a moment. (No, not many things, not ones he understood or had a clear way of thinking how to achieve, at any rate.)

"I told you back at the party. I need... to learn. About all the things that I've lost, wiped and wiped again. Some of them, I can fill in by watching. You're the first person who wasn't... intimidated away by the way I am. And I still want to learn." A slight head-tilt. "And I don't think there's a way you'll stay safe if you only know part of the story. It's hard to believe with all the pieces available."

His mouth pursed. "Besides, if I didn't give you answers and you decided to pursue them, and me, anyway, I'd have one more person, one whom I don't know and can't predict, to watch for going after me. Hydra's plenty enough."

He may not have realized, yet, that Steve was after him, too, but he knew it wasn't a threatening type of pursuit.

Silence stretched for a little longer, before he added, "and I enjoyed talking with you. Not something I'm used to."

She smiled faintly, staring into the puddle-streaked sidewalk. It bloomed slowly, just the faint upturning of her lips.

"You really haven't had much conversation."

One last breath of her cigarette, and she flicked the stub away, sending it rolling and bouncing into the street. Her eyes were back on him. "All right. Tell me what I need to be wary of, being around you. Men crashing through my ceiling?"

"You have better standards than me," he remarked dryly, but it was. Relieved, too. It was good, surprisingly, deeply, to make somebody smile. It wasn't a thing he remembered doing before, though he must have, at one point. He could guess.

The pictures showed it, at least.

But the relief faded, drained, pooled in the darkness at his feet and tried to pull him under.

"I don't know if you looked much into what happened in DC, but the significant property damage... it was the price for not getting something much worse. There were three massive weapons, ready to take out people in the range of tens of thousands per round of ammo. People targeted by their genetic scan, identified as targets by an algorithm extracting their past, from their digital signature, and projecting their future. Hydra was going to take out everybody who was likely to create problems for them. The estimation was around twenty million, globally."

He knew the numbers. Those had been programmed into him after the last wipe.

"If I am identified, and you through me, you probably won't see them coming. I was the best at that, a ghost, but they have others.

"It's why I didn't want to say any of it over the phone. Keyword searches are far simple and more reliable than voice identification. And somebody, somewhere, records everything that gets onto a digital carrier. Phones in Zimbabwe are analogue. But not so much over here."

This time, his teeth flashed in a sort-of smile in the darkness. "Most people don't quite have to worry about such individual attention. Unless I make a mistake, you're safe from them. And I won't make a mistake."

He wouldn't say that she was safe, considering her job, and her employer. Just safe from the beast in the shadows that he'd told her about.

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