trainwrecked | For ashyperfume

He snorted, quietly, but the delivery came before he could actually answer. He moved like a shadow behind her, and, before she could actually unlock, let alone open, the door, he was behind it, weapon in hand. Ready to deal with any threat that might come through the door, should there be such.

He didn't try to stop her.

But he was ready to react, if she'd made a bad call.

Fortunately, she hadn't. The delivery boy had a more extensive reaction to her appearance, but along the same lines as his (appreciative), and almost tried to chat her up, but he was probably instructed not to hassle the customers or he'd get fired, so he swallowed most of it.

When she was ready and closed the door, he was there, his eyes glittering in amusement from the shadows. "I've grown appreciative of my choices, yes. I wouldn't have called you the other day, if I wasn't trying. And you said you were going to take your safety in your own hands, rather than rely on my protection. You've survived long enough that I took your word on it - and I still will. Don't prove me wrong."

Fuu took her time with the deliveryman. It was possible, in fact, that he'd even been there before, and he was young, barely college age. His Adam's Apple slid gawkily up and down his throat, fumbling for words that seemed appropriate without getting him fired. At last he seemed prepared, at last the nerve to work out more than one or two cracked syllables . . .

And the door shut in his face.

Fuu balanced the load of food in her arms, raising her eyebrows to the shadow formerly behind her door. Her neck arched slightly, hair sliding away from the bared line of flesh and tendons, her voice completely dry.

"And if I prove you wrong, Mr. Barnes, what exactly will you do? Will you save me? Rush in and snatch me from the jaws of death? What will that do for you -- confirm that I needed protection all along? In the end, who would you really be serving -- me? Or yourself?"

Her eyes narrow, pale and silver. "Let's not misunderstand something from the beginning. I live or die because I choose -- and because I choose to rely on myself."

A flick of her fingers, and the small point of a blade emerges in her own hand beyond the wrist of her robe, close to the wrist. "Nor am I exactly defenseless."

The smile that was in his eyes spreads to his mouth. It's not a nice or kind smile.

"That wouldn't have saved you from rifle fire to the chest, when you opened the door. Nor would I have been able to." He shrugs. "I was here for my protection. If I can help, I will. The way I wouldn't let a person get run over by a car on the street, if I can help them," he flexes his left hand, making sure the whir or the mechanism is audible, because he usually can, "and the way I'm bringing Hydra down for more than just myself.

"On the other hand, from what I've learned about," his smile turned just a little less predatory, just a little more uncertain, "friends, they don't leave each other in lethal situations. You're probably better equipped to explain who's served by that, should such a situation arise."

He hesitates a moment, then adds, "what would you like a weapon to do, sit around idly while the fighting passes me by? And I'm a very good weapon."

She stares back at him. Her eyes are silver now, narrow like a knife blade, and she advances on him, one bare foot after the next. "There is one thing you will understand. I make my own choices. And I will not put myself in your hands, no matter how it hoists your penis. If you're here because you think I'm weak, that I'm laughable in your eyes because I'm not like you and haven't faced the life you have, I'll be glad to show you how very stupid and wrong you are."

His eyebrows went up.

"I'm entertained by your anger, not by anything else. If I were to perceive you as weak or inexperienced, I wouldn't have met you last night, Fuu, let alone come here tonight.

"It's war. If I choose laughable allies, I'm dead, and I have work to do before I die. It's got nothing to do with my penis." He shrugged, but, after a moment's consideration, decided not to turn his back on her, not right now. He did trust her, but it would be accepted as a slight, at the moment.

"But I don't remember the life I've faced. Everything that I think I remember is potentially false, planted there during one programming or another. Why would I laugh at somebody not being this way?"

It wasn't placation, or a bid for her pity. Merely a reminder that his perspective was like no other she'd ever encountered, from man or woman or anything else.

And she was very welcome to attack him at any point of time.

She didn't. She didn't move forward. Her eyes seared at his face, calculating every inch of it. Every muscle was taut, as though charged with a surge of electric current.

"Well, one way you are like any other man." The words were sharp, but flat, blank. "Thinking that this is about you."

Twisting, she headed back towards the kitchen, feet striking dull pounding across the floor.

He shrugged, though he took a moment before actually speaking up, after her.

"What I do is about me. What you do isn't." He waited until she'd reached the kitchen, before finally stepping out of the niche behind the entrance door. He thought it safer not to assume what it was about, what she did.

After a moment's hesitation, he followed her, leaning slightly against the door-frame.

"What is the food, anyway?" There was some familiarity in the way it smelled, as she opened containers, but the sight brought no clear associations. It wasn't a conscious effort to change the subject, either. He actually didn't know.

Cupboards opened. Closed. Fuu moved about her own kitchen with the quick precision of a honed blade, her hands slicing through the air to bring a bowl down here, a glass there. Doors and drawers hit wood with punctuation marks; small paper boxes snapped open from their staples. It was more food than either of them could eat, open, exposed to the air.

"Chinese." The word was again sharp, punctuated. "Dig in. Work will begin later."

And again she was gone, off to the small corner of the apartment that served as a bedroom. There was no door . . . The shoji screen snapped shut behind her.

He didn't realize when it snapped, when the steel in his spine, the programming that had been done over and over again, tightened the noose around his neck, and her anger and command took on power over him.

But, by the time she'd promised him work later, he was completely in the mindset of listen-and-obey.

His voice was a little different, when he answered, duller, more child-like even. "Yes, ma'am."

The simple, dead words slipped after her before the door was closed. He took a few automatic bites from the food she had set before him, without registering any of the flavors, then settled against the bar, not quite at ease though not fully at attention, his eyes fixed on the screen she'd left through, and waited.

Behind the screen, Fuu let herself cry. Rage and cry until the fury of her tears could no longer be contained and she stumbled into the bathroom, letting the force of them hiss between her teeth, the heave of air muffled by her throat.

The tears came anyway, even if the sobs did not, warm and thick on her lower lashes until they spilled over down her face. She held herself for a long moment upright, erect . . . then gave into it, sliding to the floor, pulling legs close to bury her face into her arms.

Proof, sometimes, that she was still just a child. What was she if words -- just words -- could still reduce her to tears? Her hands tightened, forearms flexing as though she could strike -- if, indeed, there was anything to strike.

But there wasn't even that. Her fingers slackened, and she wept.

The sounds were soft, and she bit through every one that she could, but they still might carry to the kitchen.

Edited 2014-08-03 00:54 (UTC)

The sounds took him a while to identify, and a little longer to snap him out of programmed stimuli-response sets. Crying did not add up with the person issuing commands.

Ever.

Crying was the target, sometimes. But Fuu wasn't a target. This datum was acquired after all programming, and he didn't doubt it in the least. Which forced him to focus, on what it mean, and on what he could do.

He moved quietly - most of the noise he made coming from his left arm, and the running of the faucet. Until, in the end, he scratched lightly on the screen in warning that he was coming in - and he only did so to leave the glass of water on the ground beside Fuu. There was neither humor nor mockery on his face, as he moved through the small space.

He didn't intrude as directly for long. But he knelt in front of the screen, close enough that the light from the rest of the apartment outlined his shadow. He was sitting in a correct manner, his body held with care - the Western World hadn't been the only place where the Winter Soldier had been supposed to blend in, to disappear.

"I apologize, Fuu. I don't know what mistake I made, but I would rather correct my behavior than..." He hesitated, considering the options. "Than risk repeating it mindlessly."

There was no derision in his voice, either. This was not in any way 'the woman went into hysterics, have to appease her' - in various ways, he had accepted her as a teacher, or maybe guide, when it came to actual interaction with people. Actual being people. He wasn't imposing his opinion on things over her, nor was he asking for what he clearly had forfeited - respect, probably. Trust didn't quite occur to him, because he didn't think anyone, not even her, should trust him.

But he was extending his own trust. In supplication. For her to decide what to do with.

She stiffened at the sound of him. But there was no room to move, no time to react, and suddenly he was in her space. Caught off guard, she froze exactly where she was, face buried into her arms, waiting for the next move. Waiting for him to sit, to speak . . . to intrude enough into her space to create justification for a strike.

The water glass clinked faintly as he set it down on the tile. She startled at the sound of it, at his footsteps moving away. Her head shot up only in time to catch his foot as it left the doorway. She heard him settle. Wait.

Damn him. God damn him.

It would be so much easier to condemn him. So much easier to fortify herself by hating him. The words were like a hand, cool against her cheek, turning her to look.

No. It wasn't that easy. She wasn't that easy.

"You want me just to tell you." The words were measured, held, but they shuddered beneath the surface, the syllables too sharp, gripped between the teeth. "Explain it to you. Factually, like it doesn't have any meaning. Everything has logical and structural pattern to you; it can be sorted and categorized and filed away. But people aren't like that. I'm not like that."

Her voice rose like a challenge. "You hurt me."

Edited 2014-08-13 14:29 (UTC)

He let the noise die out, after her outburst. Partly because he didn't know how to address her points, other than pointing out what she already knew - he was made, in his current existence, to hurt people. He was aware that he shouldn't have, but that wasn't the same as having control over it.

Instead, he focused his analysis on at least attempting to see things from the other perspective. Not emotionally, he couldn't, or couldn't afford to, do that. But he could attempt to see more points of view. It was better than following what his trained reflexes said. Go in for the kill.

"I suppose," he said, slowly, "there are at least two ways to take my question. It could be fishing for more information. Trying to get data on how to do it again. Or, it could be my trying to find out how to stop doing what I was trained. Is there anything not like that which I could do to prove to you which one it is?"

Saying sorry might have helped, but that wasn't one of the courses of action that had fully come back to him, and it had definitely not been programmed in even once, over the last seven decades.

"That's not what I meant." She sucked a burst of air in between her teeth, her jaw clenched. Logic and emotion collided dizzily in her brain; she fought for clarity, for her own single-minded rage. "You want me to tell you why I'm pissed off. If you want it, you don't get it in a nice little package, all analyzed like I'm a data stream rather than a person. When you did wrong, you get the whole fucking ball of shit, and you deal with it."

"When I deal with it," his voice was very quiet, and completely without infection, "they are still trying to find out what caused the damage to the dead bodies decades later."

It wasn't a threat, not even a warning. Just a reminder.

He remained silent, still, for another long moment.

"I should go."

"No." The word was spit between her teeth, sharp. "You sit, and you listen. Because that's part of being a decent human being. You sit. Everything else destroys and walks away."

"If you say so." Still the same inflection-less voice. "I wouldn't know." Though, after a moment, he added, quieter yet, more with contemplation than with contained anger. "Though, while I do want to hear, 'sit and listen' seems more like what one would expect of a dog, or a child. Appropriate, in the situation."

Was he trying to irritate her? Sometimes she would swear he was, even in his idle contemplation, even in his "reminders." He could have, after all, chosen to be quiet, to not comment. But he still somehow felt the need.

Whether he believed it or not, it still spoke of something wholy human to her, something rebellious, lurking just beneath the surface.

She expelled breath sharply through her nose, shifting to her feet, coming out to plop down in front of him, settling on her knees until her position was an echo of his. Her eyes were icy pale, fixed to his face.

"Most of my life gets played by someone else's rules." Her jaw tightened. "No matter what, ever, I don't seem to get to choose. Because someone always thinks they know better. You can argue that every single thing I've done is in reaction to something else, someone who 'knew better.' I don't need that from you too. I don't need someone else who looks down on me, who thinks I can't or shouldn't make my own choices. I want to make my own choices, James. Even if they're 'bad' to you, even if they put me at risk, they're still mine. It means I'm alive. It means I am -- or can be -- something more than what I was supposed to be."

"So if you want to guard me, protect me from whatever's out there, look down on me because you know what it is and I don't, scoff that I hold up a dagger against the world and it's not enough . . . I don't need that. Not from you, not from anyone. If you're going to do that, you can get out now."

He traced her motion from the moment she was in his line of sight again, but her words. Her words made him freeze. On the one hand, he could comprehend the familiarity of what she was describing. On the other hand, it was infuriating, how she could even think to call her life controlled by others. She was eating food she was choosing, drinking wine she probably knew about and had selected herself. She probably hadn't spent decades being fed intravenously, leaving her incapable of selecting her own nutrition for weeks...

She knew nothing of people taking her choices away, compared to him.

But he had learned already that he was not a fair comparison. For anyone.

She knew about people taking her choices away, was what he was left with once he stifled that anger away. And he had done it to her, too. That... was an explanation that he understood, and he gave her a slow, thoughtful nod, his own eyes gradually clearing even if his left hand was still locked tightly enough that if he were made to move, it would screech with the howl of metal forced too hard. Slowly, he tilted his head to one side.

"Why would protecting you equate to looking down on you?" A moment, and he clarified his question, "usually, if a person was assigned protection - against me - they were people that were looked up to, whether they were actual employers or not."

They used to be the people who were his targets. There was always a reason for that.

As to her actual point... he'd thought they'd addressed that last night. She wasn't going to rely on him to protect her, and he had agreed to it. For him, that had settled that. So he said out loud the answer that he had. "I was protecting myself, not you."

He'd told her so already, hadn't he? She could have died, if the person she opened the door to had a gun on him and shot her from close range. But it would have still left him with cover and a great point to take on the attackers. Yes, if the attack was of a different kind, he would have protected her, as well. But those were more complicated hits. People rarely went for complicated.

Though he certainly often did.

It wasn't a comparison, her lack of control against his own. Just a separate type of pain. One, like fire, at the hands of a group wholly unfeeling, absolutely all-consuming. One, like drowning, at the hands of those who should have loved and been loved best. Both taking, reassigning, reshaping fate, sending fissures, then cracks, decaying and snapping and twisting, recreating into something completely unpredicted.

Better for them both that it was a road left untaken. There was no fair comparison to make.

Her eyes flicked away at his question. Rested somewhere beyond his sight line. Saw nothing at all.

"And your commentary about how I could still have been shot in the chest when I pulled my knife? That expression in your face? Your comparison that I might need to be helped like a person who might get run over by a car in the street? The question about if I should just let you sit by idly when you're such a good weapon? Your fervent reminders about how dangerous you are?" The line of her brow puckered. The words had started sharp, but ended thin, hollowing until they were almost empty. "How small we must all be to you. Little ants, so fragile."

"My commentary how you still could have been shot was exactly what I mean - I wasn't there to protect you. I could not have protected you. It would have been futile - it was the strategic position. Yes, if the opportunity presented itself, I would have preferred to both neutralize the threat and keep you alive. But you chose your risk, there. I chose the safer - safest - place in the apartment."

He didn't even realize that the admission was still there. Not so much of guilt - he hadn't moved to cover her weakness - but of being invested in her survival.

He watched her, after the words had all sunk in. "My words are truth. You are free to see what I do, if you can observe it without endangering my job, whenever I strike. There's little else I can do to warn you." And, with the same even tone. "Ants have no choice. They do what their queen requires to survive and propagate." One finger pointed at her, without his hand stirring from his knee. "You're the one who has choice. I... am learning. To avoid the choices that were made for me."

She watched him through his first explanation, silent, her eyes clear, quiet.

She didn't believe him. Words. He was filled with words, logical tangles fighting to be untwisted and reasonable. Explanations, purposes. He believed them. He wanted to. But actions, intentions spoke louder, wound and twisted through his words.

She didn't know how to feel about them. They closed like a fist inside her chest, shook, even as they cooled. She only knew that both reactions should not exist at the same time.

"You're under the misguided notion," she said softly, "that those who haven't been through what you have have full, free will. Maybe we're not as constricted. Not in the same ways. But we're limited by the people we bond to and the people we become. One day . . . we wake up and realize we're trapped. We don't know how to be anyone else."

He didn't know how to explain it, though his anger burned hot, in his eyes, just for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was back to neutral.

"You know you like wine. I was fed intravenously for most of seventy years." His shoulders rose, and dropped. "Maybe it's a misguided notion. You'd know better."

Her fingers stretched out before she thought better of it. Grazed, braced against cheek and jaw -- a feather-light touch that was a bid for his attention, to draw him back to her. Her thumb smoothed the skin next to the bridge of his nose, under his eye.

"It's not a comparison, James." Her own tone had steadied, leveled. "Life here to life there . . . I'm not naive enough to think that there's a comparison. The only thing I'm saying is . . . life out here has its own bindings, and its own way of stealing your choices."

A breath. "Can we try again?"

Edited 2014-09-07 20:10 (UTC)

He stilled, not even breathing, when her hand was on his face. But didn't flinch, didn't strike, either. It brought up a very mixed reaction in him, and he wasn't ready to explore what it was exactly, not right now. Curled up on the floor and throwing up from the headache wasn't going to help the interaction any.

After a moment, he half-closed his eyes. Not quite, but almost. And nodded.

"If that is something that can be done, yes. Please." After a moment, he looked up at her again, trying to clarify, a little. "I see myself as apart. As... damaged. Flawed? I know exactly where my reactions are faster than baseline human, where I'm stronger. But the physical enhancements. They don't make me more. Only a better tool. You're not ants. Not... despised. Or pitied."

A small cant of his head to one side. "I wouldn't be trying to learn from somebody lesser, would I?"

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