Books
Words no long flit through the Asset’s mind like butterflies, but stay there, solid. He’d noticed that when he’d gone to the exhibit. He thinks that he was just unused to reading. The Asset was never really required to do so to any real degree. And when it was, it was in Russian. Things are happening in its mind now, more than they were before. He has frequent headaches, sometimes loses track of everything for what must be hours on end. Some days he’s back with HYDRA - wakes up and they’re around him, touching him, prodding him, hurting him. When he opens his eyes to his current safe house, he doesn’t know if it’s real. He doesn’t eat for days, and the pain in his shoulder increases. The Asset is driven out of the shelter out of fear, cradling its metal arm. It eats. It is safe for now.
On one of these missions for sustenance, he finds a book. It’s empty, void of letters. A little like him. He takes it - Steve always needs paper - he thinks before realizing that’s not right. But he has this little book. It’s lined, so it would be bad for drawing anyway. One day, after he’s been unreal for what might be around eight hours, he remembers that the scientists always wrote things down. Dated them. These dates repeat around his head, and he gets an idea.
Finding a pen that works takes some doing, but he does it eventually. He has the book and he has a pen. He holds it in his human hand and attempts to write, like he’s seen people do. What comes out is blocky and muddled and in Russian. His Cyrillic characters are barely legible, even to him ten seconds after he’s written them. But they’re real. He tests their realness by closing the book and waiting until it is a new day to check. They’re still there. Experiment concluded, he goes out on a fact-finding mission and determines the date. He also steals a watch. He needs to know what time it is, so he knows how much he has lost when he goes into the pool of his mind.
The journal entries vary by day. Sometimes they are a simple mission report - what foods were eaten, what the Asset did, what foods the Asset does not want to eat again. Other days, it’s repetition. Cyrillic bleeds into Latin alphabet, bleeds back, bleeds into several languages at once. The most common ones are Russian, English, and German, but there are hints of others as well. Italian one day. Spanish another. And then some attempt at phonetic Arabic written in Cyrillic characters, which is absolutely incomprehensible upon later reading, but he must have had something in mind. And he does go back and reread days, because sometimes he doesn’t remember writing. Those entries tend to be undated, but he can sometimes figure out when they happened.
The Asset has a bag now, too. It has acquired more clothes - jackets and another shirt. It has also acquired a knife from a man that tried to take money from him in an alley. The man is dead. He wrote this in the journal, so he can remember. He doesn’t remember all his killings, but he knows there are many more faces than he sees in his dreams. His dreams are a nonstop rush of horror, of missions twisted by his healing brain into being worse and worse and worse. He writes them down, so he can figure out what is real and what is unspeakable horror created by his own mind. He keeps the journal, with the pen neatly on top, next to his fully packed backpack wherever he stays. It is the smallest of routines, but it makes him feel balanced and quite possibly good. The Asset is learning about good. How people can feel things that aren’t a dull buzz of pain, that they laugh for a reason other than being told to.
There’s a list on one of the first pages of his journal. There is the word Good written at the top of the page. He underlined it a few weeks later and he adds things that are good to him onto the page as he realizes them. There is so far: sun, food, tomatoes, birds. He doesn’t keep a list of bad things, because he is unable to forget them. He is reminded of the bad things constantly, and he thinks that this book is supposed to be about good things when it can be.
The Asset learned that the sun is good when it sat in a pool of light that comes through the window of its current dwelling. The window is too high even for it to reach to tarp over, so it allows it to exist and simply avoids being in the sightline of it. But one day it lost time and the angle was such that he woke up warmed by the sun. He felt alive, like he might be a person in it, and did not move. When he goes out, sometimes he finds secluded areas and sits in them, feeling the sun on his face. This is how he found out about birds, because he sits so still that they come hopping around, thinking that he’s no threat to him. He is, and they are smart to fly away when he moves. But he thinks it is good that they do not avoid him. They live their little lives as he watches and he might enjoy that.
He fills that first book and must find another. This one he pays for, since he is also buying food. The money is from a wallet he took. He doesn’t think that stealing is bad. He has to stay alive, and the mission must be completed, after all. He also buys pens, since he used the last one until it was all dried up. He keeps the old book in the bottom of his bag, by two more knives that he has collected since. The books are his and he will keep them. No one is allowed to take them from him.