Nightmares
James wakes up with a scream. He bites it down as soon as he is fully conscious of what he is doing, catching his body just as he’s about to open the window at the same time.
Fuck.
James drops his knife and startles as it clatters on the ground, his heart beating in his throat. He needs to get this under control, it's just a nightmare, just the usual, there is no need to wake anybody. His hand over his mouth makes it hard to breathe, but is also stifles the whimper that escapes him, flashes of snow and a walz and blood on his skin, in his eyes, he blinks and blinks and it wont go away, memories racking his body as he slides down the wall to the floor.
“James.”
Friday’s gentle voice comes to him through the darkness, using his name. Not Sergeant, not Soldier, not Bucky.
“James, your heart rate is elevated and I am detecting other symptoms of extreme stress.”
“Just a dream,” James bites out, forcing himself to keep his burning breaths in his lungs so that it will look like he’s doing her breathing exercise. “I’ll be okay. Don’t tell Tony.”
The is a concerned hum from the ceiling. She’s been concentrating her sounds on one corner of the ceiling ever since she picked up that he had trouble addressing her without a place to look at. James didn’t know that AI’s could be kind. He wasn’t surprised when he realised it though. As much as Tony jokes about Friday’s unrulyness, it’s clear that he loves her much like a father would.
“I will not alert Mr. Stark if you don’t want me to,” she assures him, and James feels a little tension run out of him. He doesn’t have to bother anyone else with this, just him and Friday and the darkness.
“Can you tell me what you dreamt, James?”
God, her voice is so soft. He wonders if her hands would be soft if she had any. If her touch would be gentle, like Tony’s.
Dammit!
“The mission in Italy. The mountain, the dance. The–” He cuts himself off there, she doesn’t need to know the terrible shit that’s on his mind. She’s keeping a log of his dreams, helping him catalogue his memories. Friday is a terrifyingly powerful aide in his efforts to piece together his past. Where James can scrape together a few vague glimpses, dates and numbers of bullets, Friday can find him context. Horrifyingly consistent context.
“I don’t experience the negative repercussions of knowledge, James. You don’t need to protect me of information.” Her voice is reassuring, and James just can’t bring himself to believe that it’s artificial. But she’s never lied to him, not about what he’s done and not about herself.
“The blood. It got in my eyes, and I couldn’t see. Cost me a bullet to the side. It froze on the walk back through the snow, frostbite and infection. Hydra took it out, healed in cryo,” James finishes between short bites of hiccuping breath.
He really should be better at this by now. At the nightmares, and at offering up the worst of him to the corner in the ceiling.
“I’m sorry to hear that you’ve experienced pain like this.”
James laughs, a cold hard thing he keeps entirely for himself. “I killed five people, Friday. A father of two. Don’t be too sorry.”
Friday is quiet for a moment, making a soft chirp that James has come to interpret as her thinking.
“I have trouble with the wide variety of human beliefs. But nothing I have access to has shaken my belief that suffering cannot be earned. Your culpability in the events you remember is debatable, but that aside, it is not relevant to the pain you have experienced.”
James chuckles at that, an honest dry sound of mirth because Friday is so so similar to her creator. Sure, she prefers philosophy as a distraction where Tony prefers roping James into tech discussions, but at their heart they’re the same.
“Not a believer in punitive justice?”
“I cannot say that I am,” Fridays answers, her voice warm with what can’t be a smile since she doesn’t have lips. “Studies show categorically that justice systems aimed towards rehabilitation are by far more effective.”
“I think the last body is in the lake north of the estate.”
“Weißbrunnsee?” Friday pulls up a map of the area they had found a few nights ago based on James’ vague memories of the estate he had killed the first four state men in, making it look like a drunken brawl gone wrong. There is a lake to the north she now focuses on, and James steels himself against shudders of cold water, a lakeshore packed with snow, trees standing silent witness as he weighs a body down with stones. He remembers the weight of the stones in his metal hand. The warmth of the corpse fading as he cuts it open. Sews it shut.
Fairytale forest. And you’re the good hunter. James scoffs.
“Yeah, that one. South shore, not sure how far in it floated. Loaded it down with stones.”
Friday does her thinking chirp again and James knows she’s anonymously alerting italian law enforcements.
“That’s fifteen cases closed,” she announces happily a moment later.
“Surprise, it was me,” James offers sarcastically, feeling stable enough to pick up the knife again. Talking to Friday helps after the nightmares, he’s given her permission to monitor his sleep for them weeks ago, and while his nights haven’t been better, they have been more productive with her at his side.
“The worst part is not knowing, from what I understand. It’s what keeps people hoping. Like this someone can start to heal. You’ve done something good,” she points out.
James sighs. “If you say so.” He starts flipping the knife. He sure as hell doesn’t feel good, his body slowly coming down from the adrenaline of the nightmare, his hand almost absentmindedly twirling the knife around in the darkness of his room.
“James, may I make a request?” Friday asks, sounding distracted. Another thing he didn’t know she could do.
“Sure.”
“I think I am being compromised. Normally I’d alert Mr. Stark, but he is sleeping for the first time in days, and I hesitate to wake him for what might be nothing.”
A bone deep alertness runs through James, and he sits up. “How do I help?”
“I have– how should I put this– lost sensation of the east wing, second floor. I do not sense anything amiss, but I fear I do not sense anything at all.”
James is up on his feet, the one knife he’s allowed himself slipping into the holster he’s patched into his pants. His mind settles in a way it hasn’t for a while.
Friday sounds concerned as she continues. “I hesitate to ask, Mr. Barnes, given the purpose of your stay is to rest.”
“I don’t mind,” he quickly assures her, not sure how he feels about the realisation that he’s telling the truth. “Let Tony sleep.”
If nothing else, he could use the exercise.
Before Friday can protest any more, James is out of the door.
The corridors and halls of the compound are dead and dark around him, and James moves to match. His boots fall silently onto the laminate floor, the soft whisper of his clothes swallowed up by the gentle hum of the air conditioning. The compound is always a bustle of life, night owls and early bird tend to meet in the hallways around this time, but by some stroke of luck for him, Friday has alerted him at the perfect time, just at the start of those two precious hours of night where nobody is really around.
Doors with scanners that James has avoided so far open silently for him now, courtesy of Friday, and for the first time, James sets foot into the New Avengers wing of the compound. It’s not all that different from the part of the complex he lives in, pictures and posters lining the hallway, some of them adorned with stick notes, adding a cartoon moustache to Spider Man or a tiny top hat to the Hulk.
James redoubles his efforts at silence here, knowing that he is now surrounded by some of the most dangerous people on the planet. He knows they mean him no harm, and he is not here for them, and for the time being the fact the he is practically breaking and entering into their private space is reasoning enough for him, but later he will have to explain to himself why this was so easy. And why the idea of running into one of Tony’s family seems like the worst thing in the world.
But for now, his mind is laser focused on the task at had. Get into the east wing, two floors down. He avoids spills of light from doors, sneaks past Dr. Banner and Parker, faces he can put names to thanks to Tony showing him pictures every time any of the New Avengers come up in one of his tales. He even finds himself trying to skirt the radii of Friday’s cameras, even though she is the one that sent him on this mission.
But finally he reaches the second floor, standing before a door he knows will lead him into an assembly of offices before bringing him to the stairs down to the garage. The door here too is locked with a scanner, the light glowing a soothing steady white. Which means Friday has not unlocked it for him.
“Let me break this one,” he whispers, looking to test something.
James only needs a few minutes to follow the circuit around the door until he finds the right point to jam a fragment of a pen he had taken from his room in, disrupting the current. The pad briefly flickers red before turning off completely, leaving the door still locked, but the access panel dysfunctional.
“Did you feel that?”
“I’m alerting Mr. Stark,” Friday responds, her voice more serious than he has ever heard it.
So she didn’t. James makes quick work of unlocking the door, deciding that there is not enough urgency behind this to damage Tony’s building. He slips through the door.