My Good Opinion
This dream is different from the ones he’s had hitherto. It feels more distant, older, yet more real as the images and sensations rip through him like something that has burned itself into his skin down to his very bones and the scar lines are now being retraced. There is a train and snow and howling wind and the relentless pull of gravity as he falls. It is the first time his screams don’t stick to the back of his throat, choking him, but break free, faint to his own ears as he is still falling and the wind in his ears drowns out all other sounds almost completely, but clear and loud and startling to you as you sit bolt upright in your bed.
“Hey,” you called softly into the darkness of your living room, “Are you alright?” His wheezing and panting is loud in the otherwise still night. The sounds he emits are worrying, and you cautiously go to investigate. He is curled up in his customary spot where wall, couch and coffee table form a cave, bedding undisturbed for the fourth night now. Undisturbed but for the cat Becky, who had been sleeping on the plush pillow, but is now up as well, meowing at you woefully. You address him again, patiently, kneeling down at an unthreatening distance. His shoulders spasm as he pulls himself up, eyes wide and unsettled as they land on you. He moves to speak, but his throat is too raw and parched and torn to get out anything beyond croaking.
“Water.” you suggest pragmatically, as his eyes go out of focus again, widening at some horror you cannot see. When you return with the filled cup, he has drawn himself up on all fours, still breathing heavily, shoulders rising in erratic motions. His hands are shaking even though they are gripping the carpet for dear life and half his weight rests on them.
His throat constricts violently, convulsively. A hand cups the back of his neck intrepidly, cool against his heated skin. He is a furnace, he is burning; fire needs air, which he cannot get in sufficient quantities, or water to put it out. There is water, he realizes, rejoicing on a deeply archaic level of nerves and instincts. He tilts his head back against the hand, which is small yet able to support his head which feels like it weighs tons, and lets the edge of a cup be placed against his chafed lips and a slow, thin trickle of fresh water run down into his parched, raw throat. He is too greedy, forgets to breathe; it leaves him sputtering and reeling. The small cool hand around his neck is removed to administer some firm pats to his back, shaking loose the drops that would have lodged in his lungs. He leans back, forcing himself to stop breathing altogether for a moment, regaining control over his body. He draws a long slow breath and releases it, repeats this process a few times until the shadows in his visions clear and the blurriness subsides. Your worried face comes into focus, brows knits together, at a loss. He tries to speak, but his throat is raw with the ghosts of screams from graves. You offer him the cup again. He is restless, coming apart at the seams. You observe his darting eyes, wide and with deep dark circles underneath them, but for the first time not so terribly, inhumanly hollow. You observe, similarly, his diminishing frame, the sharp angles of his cheeks and jaw becoming more pronounced by the day. He is not eating as much as he needs to for someone with his built, you strongly suspect (this is more due to him throwing back up most of what he eats each day when you’re gone, which in turn you can’t know since he doesn’t mention it). He is haggard and fading under your very hands. He is slipping away, you can feel it, drifting into a void of darkness and pain. You need to pull him back. You have no idea how to deal with so much trauma barely contained within one lone human, but you need to pull him back from the edge or he will fall.
Your hands cover his, still fastened into the carpet. Your hands are so small in comparison, and their touch is so light that he blinks, testing whether they are really there. Your voice registers with him almost as an afterthought. It’s nothing substantial, you are rattling off random facts and blithe anecdotes. When you run out of those you snatch a book at random from the small pile on the coffee table and end up reading him three chapters from le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. It’s not about the content of your words; their purpose is to draw his attention away from whatever is clawing at his mind and anchor him in the now with the grip of your fingers. He fell from a winter train directly onto the brash metal of an operating table, and even though he can move and is moving he feels like he cannot and his back is shattered and his arm is phantom fire and he has no air inside of him and he will surely die and wonders what the hell is taking so long. He fell from a train through winter and landed on a cold metal table but the carpet under his fingers is soft and your hands on his are warm and your voice in his ears is both as it pierces through the veil and carries him back to the present.
After a while he had calmed down enough to know where he is again and even drifts back into a dozing, if not particularly deep, sleep. He was still curled up on the floor, and you had no means to move him. You draped the blanket over him, figuring it was the least you could do. Not wanting to leave him alone when he’d been in such a state of distress, you elected to stay and curled up on the couch after retrieving another of your countless blankets for yourself. Becky snuggled into your side warmly and within moments you were fast asleep.
The night had been intense, but you decided not to mention it unless he brought it up, chances of which were slim at best. He looked a bit puzzled to be under a blanket when he woke, but other than that you thought he looked comparably well. Not quite as dreadfully pallid as before, you fancied; a slightly livelier shade of ghost. You smiled down at him tiredly, yawned widely and closed your eyes again, ready to drift back to dreamland.
“Don’t you have to go to work today?” he asked hesitantly. It was a fair enough question, seeing as you had gone every day since bringing him home with you. All week long. Goodness, had it really been a week already?
“Nah.” You yawned, shifting under your blanket. The couch wasn’t uncomfortable by any stretch, but you were used to having your queen-sized bed all to yourself. Or had grown used to it since breaking up with that scumbag you’d called your boyfriend half a year ago at any rate.
You felt his gaze on you, and heard the blanket rustle as he moved. With a groan you forced your eyes open.
“You got anywhere to be, champ?” you drawled, too tired to be bothered to speak clearly. It seemed he understood you well enough. He shook his head.
“Okay good, didn’t think so.” You grumbled, drawing your blanket up over your head to block out the light. No noise and no movement next to you indicated that he hadn’t moved and still sat huddled on the ground, observing you. You tried to ignore it and go back to sleep but it was no use. Like it or not, you were awake now. Too awake at least to just go back to sleep (but not awake enough to willingly get up either). Still tired and somewhat annoyed, you pushed down your blanket just far enough to fix your guest in a mild scowl.
“Why don’t you have to go to work today?” he asked earnestly.
“It’s Saturday.” You answered matter-of-factly. He considered your answer at far more length than you thought it could possibly warrant and felt yourself drift slowly back to the sweet realms of sleep.
“________?” he said softly after a long pause. You grumbled something unintelligible, refusing to open your eyes. “You said you had to take me to the hospital again.”
You let an affirmative huff. Becky chose this exact moment to start stirring and knead her paws into your kidneys insistently. You sighed, cursing your propensity for taking in strays, especially those who would team up to bother you when you wanted to sleep. It was true, though. You had said that, because the doctors had instructed you to return. Not that you’d planned to follow their instructions at any point, though that was mainly because you’d hoped the situation would have resolved itself by then. Instead you’d unwittingly ended up with a live-in household fairy, and one with a mysterious past and issues as deep as the Mariana Trench at that.
“You don’t wanna go there again.” You observed, cracking your eyes open just a fraction to see his response since it was probably just going to be a nod. It was.
“Okay.”
“What?”
“You don’t wanna go back to the hospital. Okay. I’m not fond of the place either. So we don’t go; it’s not like they’ll send out search parties.” You yawned demonstratively and turned on your side suddenly, forcing the cat to abandon the assault on your lower back. She jumped away with an indignant meow, landing in his lap and looking up at him with big, wounded eyes.
“Be a darling and feed the cat and just let me sleep some more okay?” you grumbled, pulling the blanket back over your head. You felt his eyes linger on you insistently, but this time you managed to ignore it and eventually he got up, pitifully meowing Becky trailing at his heels until she got her food. By that time you had already drifted back into a light sleep, barely registering the myriad small noises around you. To his credit it must be said that he did his best to be very quiet as he moved around the apartment, going about his morning routine of checking the perimeter and shaving after a short hot shower. You awoke about an hour later to the scrumptious smell of fresh pancakes wafting through your apartment. Considerably more rested, you threw off your covers and stretched your back. Quietly you got up and padded over to stand at the kitchen entrance, watching him pile pancakes onto plates while Becky looked on with intrigue. You contented yourself with doing the same for the moment. He’d helped you cook the days before, after awkwardly hovering in the spot that you presently occupied, until you’d relented and given him something to do (he turned out to be a remarkably accomplished vegetable chopper).
“If only I’d known beforehand you’d make such a good house spouse.”
He whirled around, spatula raised ready to strike, but relaxed as soon as he saw it was just you. The corners of his mouth curled the tiniest bit. It wasn’t quite a smile yet, but definitely getting there. The stacks of pancakes looked like they could feed a family of four by now. Luckily you were famished.
---
Normally, Steve Rogers wasn’t one to hold grudges irrationally. He also detested being lied to, no matter how well-meaning the intentions. Sure, rationally he knew they needed the help if they were to ever find Bucky, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
“Neighbor.” Steve said coldly, letting the blonde woman in grudgingly.
He caught Sam’s pointed look and sighed inwardly, trying to muster his manners. Let it not be said that Sarah Rogers raised a complete lout.
“It’s Sharon, actually. Sharon Carter.” She quipped nonchalantly, brushing past him purposefully and setting her heavy looking bag on the floor. “So what exactly are we doing?”
Steve is halfway through explaining that they’re looking for Bucky and have run out of leads and maybe hopefully she can help because to find a spy you have to think like a spy when the gears click into place. Carter is a common enough name, but he distinctly recalls Peggy telling him proudly about her baby brother’s little girl the up-and-coming SHIELD recruit in one of her more lucid moments. It’s a good thing he was already sitting. Sharon has been setting up her equipment as he was speaking and is now typing away on a laptop while explaining that she’d first go with facial recognition via public security cameras, which might be a tad harder to do than it once was since SHIELD’s servers aren’t exactly available anymore but she’ll do what she can with the limited resources. Steve just nods dumbly.
“That’s… odd.” Sharon said, hand hovering over the keyboard.
“What is?” Sam asks from his place in the open kitchen where has graciously been making them all some coffee, and since Steve is still very invested in his impression of a beached codfish.
“SHIELD’s main servers – they aren’t down. They’re still active.” Sharon squints at her laptop screen over folded hands, running through several different scenarios as to why this may be the case in her head, none of which she can really confirm or refute from here. Unless…
“I wonder whether…” my login still works, she completes mentally, punching in the appropriate codes. No instant viruses or blaring alarms happen, so that’s a good sign, she reasons, and proceeds to feed some footage of the Winter Soldier’s, Bucky’s, face to the facial recognition software, setting the parameters for the wider DC area in the time since the Helicarriers went down.
“Anything?” Steve inquired apprehensively, pacing behind where Sharon is sitting in a most vexing manner now, having gotten up about three minutes prior, and stopping only to look over her shoulder occasionally. She tries not to let it irk her too much as she sifts through the possible matches, discarding most quickly. One pops up, the image recorded by a traffic cam on the outskirts of DC. It shows four shadowy figures in full tactical combat gear in hot pursuit of a lone figure with a decidedly metal arm. He looks back as he aims a weapon at his pursuers, taking out two. He faces the camera fully, and enlarging the image only serves to confirm what they already know at this point.
“It’s him.” Steve breathes, clawing into the back of her seat and leaning in slightly too close for comfort. His eyes are glued to the grainy footage of the pinched and bruised face of the Winter Soldier on an empty intersection heading out of Washington in the direction north-north-west.
“That’s all. It’s from the same day the Helicarriers went down.” Sharon stated, a subtle feeling of dread and regret settling in her stomach. Now they knew he was headed towards Bethesda some two weeks ago, HYDRA agents all but snapping at his heels. That was not actually very reassuring. Steve’s jaw did that clenching thing, brows furrowing darkly, nothing of which could escape Sharon since they were still basically cheek to cheek and staring down at the screen of her laptop.
“So, any other ideas?” Sam said calmly as he put down that mug of coffee for her and placed a reassuring hand on Steve’s tense shoulder.
“A few,” she conceded, stretching her fingers before beginning to type away at the keyboard again, “I can’t make any promises though.”
---
“Sorry for being so grouchy earlier. Not a morning person.” Ever the articulate one, he just grunted in reply while tearing through his pancakes like a very potent weapon of breakfast mass destruction. Though if you were honest you were glad to see that his appetite hadn’t been impacted by that latest nightmare. You also noticed that he’d taken off his splint already and was moving the recently broken arm as if nothing ever happened to it. Really, those healing abilities of his were superhuman. That brought you to another thought.
“You’ll still need your stitches pulled though.” His reaction was instant, fork clattering back on the table loudly, making Becky jump and hiss. You flinched.
“You said you wouldn’t make me go back.” He whispered diffidently, tone half wounded, half suspicious.
“I’m not, sweetie, really I’m not, but those stitches still have to come out.” He looked ready to bail at a moment’s notice, shoulders tensing and eyes darting to the door. You put up your hands in a gesture of placation. “Relax, I can do that here, but it has to be done.” You replied firmly. His expression changed from fright to confusion.
“You can do that? Are you a doctor?” It occurred to the Winter Soldier at this moment that he’d never asked you what you do for a living. In fact, he’d never asked you anything about yourself. Discerning that you were associated with neither HYDRA nor SHIELD had been enough for him so far. He had grown careless.
“Oh no,” you smiled affably, “I wanted to be one, originally, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. And I hate being inside hospitals, so, not really favorable conditions.” Until that realization though you’d done whatever you could to foster your ambition, taking first-aid courses, doing volunteer work, interning at local hospitals and clinics – it had left you with the revelation that you weren’t cut out for the job on account of caring too much, getting too invested in every single patients’ fate, but also a sound medical skill set. Pulling stitches was as easy as chopping carrots to you.