[ The dank, concrete basement of an underground bunker is silent, aside from the hum of air circulation and water passing through pipes between the walls, as the Winter Soldier waits with Black Widow for the others to make it back from a run for supplies. SHIELD, or whatever remained of them, had become a much more literal underground operation since the incident with the helicarriers, and while he had no intention to be working alongside Steve Rogers, the man had an annoying habit of showing up anywhere he'd tried to disappear to. And getting himself nearly killed in the process of trying to follow him.
Thus, begrudgingly, here he is, sitting across a debriefing table from the Russian assassin who seems to know more about him than what his files alone entail. Whose eyes and hair and set of her lips seem to nag at his mind, somewhere in the back, tugging at a string that won't come loose. ]
You haven't told him you know me.
[ Not 'you haven't told me', because the Winter Soldier - not James Barnes, not Bucky - still doesn't look at his hands and think that they're his. That he's flesh and blood and soul and agency, not a tool put on a dusty shelf until someone needs to die, quickly and without making more of a ripple than needed.
But Steve Rogers is a man, a hero, with morals and emotions and attachments. Things the soldier feels as word echoing around in the shell of what he is, and since waking from the cycle HYDRA put him in, Steve had been the only one that really stuck to a part of him and refused to be washed away. Natasha (Natalia Alianovna Romanova) has become the second. They'd met before - he knows that because they told him that - but he doesn't memorize the faces of targets or roadblocks. They doesn't show up in dreams, or seem to burn an after image in the back of his lids. He doesn't hear short catches of conversations he never had echoing in their voice just as they leave the room.
She knows him, and for whatever reason, she's keeping it to herself. Perhaps it's not a great memory (most involving him and what he was wouldn't have been), but something's there. ]
herp derp comics history au-thingy with amnesia and idefk super hero pain
Thus, begrudgingly, here he is, sitting across a debriefing table from the Russian assassin who seems to know more about him than what his files alone entail. Whose eyes and hair and set of her lips seem to nag at his mind, somewhere in the back, tugging at a string that won't come loose. ]
You haven't told him you know me.
[ Not 'you haven't told me', because the Winter Soldier - not James Barnes, not Bucky - still doesn't look at his hands and think that they're his. That he's flesh and blood and soul and agency, not a tool put on a dusty shelf until someone needs to die, quickly and without making more of a ripple than needed.
But Steve Rogers is a man, a hero, with morals and emotions and attachments. Things the soldier feels as word echoing around in the shell of what he is, and since waking from the cycle HYDRA put him in, Steve had been the only one that really stuck to a part of him and refused to be washed away. Natasha (Natalia Alianovna Romanova) has become the second. They'd met before - he knows that because they told him that - but he doesn't memorize the faces of targets or roadblocks. They doesn't show up in dreams, or seem to burn an after image in the back of his lids. He doesn't hear short catches of conversations he never had echoing in their voice just as they leave the room.
She knows him, and for whatever reason, she's keeping it to herself. Perhaps it's not a great memory (most involving him and what he was wouldn't have been), but something's there. ]
Why?