amends ?
You rolled your eyes as you set your bodysuit on top of your dresser. Bucky was at your doorframe, looking guilty like he had broken your childhood toy.
“C’mon in, I guess,” you say unbothered as you sit on the edge of your bed. Bucky tentatively stepped into your room, admiring the soft decor of the space. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall to stare at you.
“What?” you asked, clearly annoyed.
“I knew you.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“How do I know you?” he inquired. You can genuinely hear the curiosity in his tone of voice.
“If you don’t remember, then it’s not your business to know.”
“How come it’s Tony’s business then? I heard you talking to him this morning.”
“And now you’re eavesdropping on my private conversations. That's just splendid.”
“I just want to know what I did to you so I can make up for it. Make amends. With you.” You rose from your bed and walked over to where Bucky stood.
“Amends mean nothing to me, Barnes. What happened between us was clearly so insignificant that you don’t even remember what happened. I don’t have empathy for you. I don’t feel bad for despising you. And your ‘amends’ are just a way for you to cope with what you’ve done in the past. You aren’t sorry. This is your pathetic attempt to make yourself feel better because deep down inside, you know what you did. You just can't bring yourself to acknowledge that all of it is your fault.”
Your words stabbed Bucky like a sharp sword. He crossed his arms tighter across his chest, almost to protect himself from your wrath. A part of him was telling his mind that what you were saying was false, but he knew you were justified in how you acted. What he did for all those years deserves nothing but harsh words and relentless hatred.
“That isn’t fair. You know that.”
“Do you know what isn’t fair? Having no memories of myself before the Red Room. Being psychologically conditioned to kill since I was 5. Teaching myself how to function outside the only home I’d known for the past 25 years. Life isn’t fair, Barnes.” You sighed, feeling tears threatening to fall. You couldn’t cry in front of this man. You couldn’t show an ounce of weakness.
“You have no idea what I had to go through,” Bucky gritted through his teeth, stepping away from you and heading for the door.
“Trust me, I know more than you think.” You put your hands on his chest and forced him out of your room, then slammed the door in his face. The words you spoke came out harsher than you intended. You sat back down on your bed and put your head in your hands. He genuinely looked so hurt after what you said about him; you had no idea where this hatred of him came from. You glanced down at the scar on your hand, remembering his tender care of you when you had injured your hand. His soft touch, his hand caressing your face, a small part of you missed it. You hadn’t opened up to anyone since you and the Winter Soldier’s fleeting moments in the Red Room. Ever since you defected from the Red Room a few years after the Soldat left, you swore to loathe everything about it. You were on the run for two years until Natasha and Yelena took it down from the skies, which meant it was time to start your revenge tour. You hunted down officials who escaped the institution before it blew up to finish the job. You saw them take their last breaths at your knees, and nothing had fulfilled you more. That was what the Red Room had trained you for, to kill.
In ways, you saw yourself in Bucky. A closed-off assassin whose only purpose on the Earth was to eliminate. But in your eyes, he had the privilege to be wiped of his memory. You had to live with the burden of what you’ve done and the pain you’ve caused. He could say that all the damage he’s done was another person in his mind-controlling him, yet you have no tangible excuse. Dreykov told you who you had to eliminate, and you would kill them out of free will. It was all on you. While he took the route of amends, you figured revenge would bring more peace of mind. Knowing people who have wronged you weren’t alive to do what they did to you to other people. To other girls.
You left your room to visit Nat, the one person who could sympathize with your conflict of feelings. You knocked on her door hesitantly, hearing scuffling in the room before she opened the door with a wide grin.
“Hey, Shadow! What’s up?” she exclaimed.
“Is there someone in there? I can come back later,” you ask, peering over her shoulder to check for anomalies.
“Of course not. Come in, babe, tell me what’s on your mind,” she grabbed your arm playfully and dragged you onto her floor, sitting down in a crisscross position.
“Barnes came into my room to talk to me. I think he caught onto things.”
“Ah, everyone sees it. You hate him, don’t you?”
“Wha- No! No, I don’t hate him, it's just…”
“You love him,” Natasha interrupts your train of thought.
“Nat! That is not it. At all.” You look over to see her smirking. “C’mon, I came to talk to you about something serious.”
“Sorry, sorry.” she raises her hands in defeat. “Continue.”
“I said some things that I didn’t mean. He asked me why I didn’t like him, and I essentially told him that we knew each other back then. Barnes told me he didn’t remember me, and I lashed out at him. I’m scared that I’m still holding so much hatred from my time in the Red Room and that seeing him is resurfacing all those emotions,” you spoke. You glance at Nat, who seems to be deep in thought.
“Feeling emotions is not weakness, Shadow. What happened to us, to you, is not an easy thing to cope with. Any sane person would feel something when someone comes back from their past to haunt them. You should’ve seen me when I came face-to-face with Dreykov. I was seething, holding back every fiber of my body not to take him out right then and there.” Natasha recalls.
“Yeah, but you got to kill Dreykov in the end. Twice basically. I can’t kill Barnes. I can’t phyically make him pay.”
“Holding grudges is okay until you take it too far, Shadow. What he did, was it worse than what Dreykov did to you?”
“Well no, but-”
“That’s just it. Dreykov wasn’t forced into trafficking girls to go his work for him. He was born like that. But Bucky, he’s had a tough life. You need to forgive and move on. No matter how much you disliked what he did.”
“But how? How did you find the strength to forget and move on?”
“I never forgot. I just bargained. My work as an Avenger will precede my reputation instead of being labeled as Dreykov’s test subject. The end goal makes all the bad memories worth it.” You nodded in her response. Nat was way stronger than you.
“Thanks, Nat. I needed this.” You stood up and hugged her tightly. She was the only person in the compound who knew the full extent of the torture you went through because she went through it, too. She was the one person you could confide in without feeling embarrassed. You said your goodbyes and headed for the training room to begin preparing to leave for the field tomorrow.