|
  |
A few journalists throng about a rather handsome, expensive townhouse in an area that already reeks of wealth. Their usual vigil for anything newsworthy is interrupted by a young woman in a high-collared jade swing coat, and she refuses to answer questions, brushing off inquiries with her usual sunny aplomb. The blithe student they see is just one facet of a complicated creature, though she fits the role well as she falls into a steady pace up the sidewalk through this most tony of neighbourhoods, where the captains of industry steer the entire country in given directions. No one is likely to believe her one of their children, but she finally slows to a comfortable amble about two blocks up. Only then is it finally safe to breathe, and pause, putting her hand to her brow.
*
There's only so much blending in one can do, with hair that long. It's years before that's in any kind of vogue, and in deference, he's tied it back, sleek enough that it passes for short and groomed from the front, at least. White shirt, plain dark pants, a better overcoat than he usually wears. He's even clean-shaven, for once, without a hint of that shadow of scruff he usually sports. He's watching her in apparent idleness, no particular expression on his face. But his eyes are sunken, face drawn - he doesn't look well, not at all.
*
Long hairs around here scream bohemian, beatnik, or another counterculture. It'll be a few months or years yet before they call themselves hippies and earn the derision of all clean-cut fellows earning a real living. That she's a bohemian may be somewhat tolerable, in part because graces for women differ somewhat. The girl takes a few minutes where she is, paused beneath a tree branch one day soon sure to come into green bud. While he may not look well, she suffers a peculiarly parallel malady, albeit likely for entirely different reasons. Great discs of her eyes turn heavenward for a long moment, as if the cloud-scuttled sky might offer reprieve. It doesn't, of course, and she eventually shakes her head. Skimming the street with a look is easily enough disregarded, except by her own admission, he's probably taught her to look. Watch. Read, and read deeper. Whether that green Chevy is really taking so long at the curb, or the couple walking up the street is rigid from a fight. Or the man there is, in fact, playing it cool instead of plotting death or questions or directions to an ice cream shop. She finds him, though probably well after he knows of her. Her head tilts; opportunity enough.
*
"You said you know how I was broken," Greetings and pleasantries remain a waste of time, even in this new iteration of Jack, it seems. "I need to know." As if they were just picking up that conversation from a few days ago. His hands are in his pockets, and his shoulders are slumped, weary. The encounter with Sofia's left him raw and exhausted, the night spent battling nightmares rather than in any kind of real repose.
*
Scarlett's vivid gaze marks him as the predator he is. No one ever mistakes the Winter Soldier for anything else, if they know how to look. Her hands remain clasped in front of her, Columbia bookbag pinned to her hip. "Tell me what happened." That much is her cost, laid bare. "Do you remember? You have been sleepwalking too close to the fire."
*
He looks at her with that animal patience. "I don't know," he says. "How I got this way? No real clue. The papers say I'm someone else, a soldier who died in the war. But that's twenty years ago. Someone else says the Russians took me, somehow. Made me this. Sounds as good as any. I speak Russian, anyway. I don't have many clear memories. And I was here before - one woman said we'd been lovers. You remember me. But that's all gone." All delivered in that flat, matter of fact tone.
*
Scarlett starts walking up the street, gesturing for Jack to continue. Scarlett won't keep too great a distance from him, though all is relative with arm's reach. "Before we get too deep, understand your mind is a mess. I am no psychologist or neurosurgeon to tell you the scientific details." She is, but that's beside the point, it's not relevant now. "Most people are a chronological line, child to adolescent to adult. You… You are a patchwork quilt with pieces missing. I can't tell you everything that happened, but I can tell you that Russians tortured you. I remember cells. Darkness. Fights in places with no light, leaving men with broken necks behind. Lying in a pine forest half-buried under snow and deadfall, holding a rifle, waiting for the right shot at someone halfway across their dacha." She pauses, tasting the word from rusted memory. "I think that's what it is called? The estate. My Russian isn't the best. You were fighting for them, at one point. When you left to join Stark Industries, I think you were breaking with that. You had an apartment. A girl you slept with, that's Pepper. Redhead, this tall, dances?" Shorter than herself, at any rate. "The times when your memory fragments don't make any sense. It's not like I can recall us all at the drop of a hat, but if that's the only way you will trust me, I can do it. I can also do a bit of minor help on your arm, but I'm not an expert by any means. Keep the damn electrodes out of me, though."
*
His pace is measured, heavy, like a big cat's, even though he's not a big man at all. Only barely to medium height, and not all that bulky in terms of muscle. "I….have fragments like that," he admits, after a moment, all reluctance. "You can manipulate memory?" he asks, after a moment. "But…..I taught you how to maintain my prosthesis?" Not his arm. It's not his arm. It's a thing that's been grafted on to him, and the fact that it's vastly superior to the ones the veterans of Korea and France and North Africa have doesn't make it inspire any less revulsion, it seems.
*
The girl's smile is winter pale, her skin fair as the moon. "You taught me to fix it, in case. I told you, I was your partner. I can hot wire a Triumph or just about any other kind of bike, too, and keep up with you riding half the time. That's how we got out of the city when it got hot or your shadows crept up on you. Ride up the Hudson, go racing down to Norfolk. Follow roads until you had no idea where we were and it didn't matter." Her grave, dark eyes of glittering plasma green land upon him. "You were working on a mission. Two of them, for most of the time we worked together. The second was undermining antisocial factions, organizations stirring up trouble against civil rights sorts. I thought you had gone to ground with the assassination of the President, and I didn't blame you. It wasn't your role at all, but I cannot help feeling someone out there handling you at one point or another might not have seen it that way." Her mouth tilts up in a grave smile. "Not all the skills you bequeathed me. Some I remember, and some have probably faded."
*
"What was the first one?" he asks her, still watching her with those pale eyes. Still letting her lead, all but ambling along at her side. "Did you know? And can you affect memories?" HE rolls and stretches that shoulder, as if an ordinary man were trying to make the joint pop. Of course it doesn't work like that, and there's that grating sound of metal. The Tin Man needs his oil can, it seems, and red-headed Dorothy will have to step up. "Nice to know I didn't kill the President," he adds, drily.
*
"No, you didn't. I know who did." Poor Tin Man, he warrants a wince out of her and a terribly dry look through copper lashes. "What was the first what? Mission? Foment riots here, especially among students and civil rights demonstrators. They weren't particularly nice people, and during one of those riots that ran out of your control, you dragged me out of there." Scarlett's tone holds an element of poignancy, remembering. "If you mean the first memory, I'm afraid it doesn't work that way, Jack. Selective choice only happens after I see everything. And not exactly. You initiated the transfer. What I do has no easy description, and you likely wouldn't believe it so well if I tried. Suffice to say I gain intuitive insights and see absolute truths. They aren't always clear, because your emotions and memories aren't clear. No one's are, but you have been through so much. If it gives you any comfort, you're a damn good athlete and make a halfway decent hamburger."
*
He slants that sardonic look at her. Oh, that's so reassuring. Thanks. But the sarcasm stays nonverbal, at least. "I let you have all these broken shards of memory? Can you give them back?" he asks. "Or copy them back to me?" There's impatience in his face, behind that veneer of impassivity. Slavic stoicism's never been more than a thin overlay, for him. He glances up and down the street. "We should work on the prosthesis again, soon. I've been here a few weeks, and there's stuff that needs maintaining that I can't reach. I've got the tools for it."
*
Sardonism does not go unnoticed. "I have never found a way to reverse the process. There could be one, but that requires intervention on a high level and trust I simply don't have in most people. I know someone who could facilitate it, and that means trust all around." Burning impatience meets a wall, and she rounds on him. "Ethically, I'm obligated to tell you I can help you, if you let me. I can put together a fresher picture, and it is not an easy experience. Even in your spectrum of intense experiences, it probably lands on the top. I don't offer this lightly, I won't say it again unless you ask. You were my friend. You aren't now because you lack the memories, apparently, but I do not. You have the choice to walk on that, or find out. Knowledge isn't a two-way street though. Once you go through the door, you can't go back to ignorance, or at least I can't, and I will tell you everything I find." Friendship, manners, that bloody loyalty. Life is an odd thing. "I can help with the mechanical bits, yes. Have you even eaten a square meal this week?"
*
He's got that lip-pinched look she knows. "I'll take whatever you're willing to give. Even if it's things I don't want to know about myself. None of the picture I've been able to put together's been anything other than ugly, so far…..but it's still mine. Even if it's only more things to add to the account owed by those who made me like this. I want to know what happened, what's real. Even if these nightmares I have prove true." His jaw's tight, his eyes clouded. "And….I've eaten. Some," he says, a little bemused by the segue.
*
Pinched lips and shadowy eyes, right down to thick warpaint eyeliner, are his calling cards. Scarlett inclines her head and sighs. "You have a story deeper than that. A man bound by his friendships, duty, honour. Someone fallen into distress. You climbed your way out. You reshaped your life." Her fingertips skim along the hairline of her lustrously sunbright hair, and then breathes out through rounded lips. "Nightmares. You had those before? I do not recall them being worse than… flashbacks. Times when I should not approach you. Is that worse? Fine, you will need something to eat and somewhere to lie flat if I have to work. After fixing your arm, and doing the rest. What order do you want to do this in?"
*
"Work first," he says, without hesitation. "Both," he adds, after a beat of hesitation. "Do you have somewhere? I do, but it's hard to get to." Of course it would be. Not for him the comforts of a hotel room, even a cheap one. "I had one last night - I think a woman I ran into sparked it. She was touching memories, too, I guess."
*
"I do, fairly deep into the Village. Up for a walk?" Scarlett shoulders her bag easily, adjusting its weight via the thick strap against her coat. "Memories? What did she hit upon, and what started upon this? I can peel back the dark only so far, but not like this, it sounds like." Setting a course directly east, it will take them eventually into Greenwich Village, and East Village in its shadow, the cluster of artists and dreamers and idealists, exactly where she belongs. The contrary position to all she holds dear.
*
He nods. Of course he's up for a walk. He's up for a twenty mile hike through the mountains to perch for three days up a tree in a ghillie suit to make the necessary shot. The Jackal can eat his heart out. He licks his lips again, silent, as he considers the way to phrase it. "I remember being frozen," he says, the words flat, dull. "And I remember talking to a man by a campfire."
*
Someone claustrophobic probably wouldn't like Greenwich Village. Not when the buildings are tall and set close together, bisected by jagged lanes that sometimes disobey grid patterns, speaking to how old it is. Others might find no love for the musicians and the dens of iniquity, cafes and clubs and bookstores with seditious ideas and brilliant thinkers. By afternoon, most of them are only revving up for the long night ahead. Burning lights and neon signs attempt to attract pedestrians to magpie places. Scarlett knows where she travels within this labyrinth, headed through a block of bricked buildings to reach another forgettable tenement with not much to recommend it but the usual music pouring through the windows and friendly souls, some very much interested in marijuana, friendly conversation, or sketching those who go by.
They won't think much of the bohemian, a known quantity, but they do smile and grin at Jack in passing. Such is their nature. Five floors up by stairs leads to a landing lit reasonably well, and a third chamber on the right. Plucking out several keys, she goes through two before the third opens the door. "In we go." The interior isn't much to speak of, clearly an artist's flat, a lumpy loveseat and sofa in ketchup red facing one another, the kitchenette set up with plenty of coffee and powdered soups, the newest innovation.
*
He's the skeleton at the feast in this little bacchanal, though the long hair, still bound back, might signal allegiance to a clan less 'square' than the mainstream. He's had an elf try to teach him Beat lingo, of all things. He's already shrugging off his coat as he enters - there's a pistol riding at the small of his back, a Makarov. Must've been all that was left in the cache he raided. His rifles are in Widow's delicate hands, at the moment. "Where to?" he asks, fishing in the coat to produce a little black case. The necessary tools - he's not quite as delicate as a good Swiss watch, but sometimes the parts and the work are almost that fine. A glance's taken in the place, no sign of either envy or pity. It's where she lives, and apparently a temporary refuge, at least for this little span of time.
*
An elf teaching anyone Beat poetry is terrifying enough. The redhead inclines her head. "Wherever you want to sit. I can probably put together a decent soup, but let me see whether the cupboards have anything else worth the time and place." Scarlett's light footsteps echo on the squeaking floorboards, her boots close enough to a go-go boot to be purely fascinating in design for those inclined to look. "Sit down there, I can get started." Doors open and shut; she pulls down the instant soup mix, a box of pasta, a tin of tomato sauce. Spices are rare, but one can hopefully forgive the oversight of proper oregano. With a little work, she gets a pot of water onto the hot plate, and dumps in the pasta like a damn heathen. "That should take long enough for me to perform the rest of the work. Arm or memories first?"
*
"Arm," No 'please' involved. "One of the lower back lamina is coming loose and it's grating over its neighbor." He doesn't sound particularly irritated by it - reverting to that nearly mechanical lack of affect. Only the pale eyes are alive.. He's settled on her couch, for the moment - wearing jeans, a faded henley shirt. Always with that just one step above homelessness sort of garb, just as one would expect from a nearly destitute veteran.
*
The scent of cooking pasta will follow in time, forgotten for the moment. Another old, worn saucepan serves for the tomato sauce, neatly whisked open by two long twists of a very old-fashioned tin opener. Neat work will prepare a suitably filling meal.
Pulling a bit of oil down from over the sink, Scarlett returns to Jack. Yep, no please, how polite. She circles around him and measures up the effect. "How did you manage that, just use? I can see where it's rubbing, and lamellae are placed a bit oddly." Gazing over the downward angled plating of the tricep, she settles in leaning across the back of the couch. For anyone that ought to be an utterly ridiculous position, but she has the benefit of mastering yoga and practicing almost religiously; her abdominal strength is not to be questioned. "Do I need to get the usual tools or are you carting them about?"
*
He hands off the little black case, with its pieces each in its foam slot. And then he simply takes off his shirt - the problem's right where the bottom rear of the prosthesis meets the radiating proud flesh of the original graft. "Someone kicked me down a story in a ruined building," he explains, turning to offer her the back of his shoulder. No hint of shyness or modesty - his body's been treated like a piece of equipment for so long, the attitude's sunk in. "Do you want me to lie down on the floor? Might be easier."
*
"Not particularly. I can make adjustments without disturbing you." Scarlett opens the case and goes over the pieces, plumbing the depths of memory to recall the use of each. This is like as not to prove as delicate as surgery, and all the better she has thin leather gloves to worry about. Those will be pulled out momentarily once every instrument has its day, and she picks out a long, thin tool. "A bit of pressure, feeling the displacement." A pause allows the protective layer to be pulled on, tugged over her wrist, and then she trails her fingertips feather light across the scarring to the metal, allowing touch — even muted — to distinguish between damage correct placement. The reverse stroke meanders up and crosses again over the uneven merging of flesh and metal. Where the contoured curve goes, she can feel the misalignment rather than see it immediately, and that leads Scarlett to reach for another of the implements, a file as much as anything, something to slot in. Metal squeaks, a twist of her wrist testing if the lamina will shift at all, wiggling about. "Good thing they didn't leave so much of an impression. How did they mount this? It feels like an inner clip, but you have a bolt?"
Significant, all told, as she slides the file to either catch or loosen the interior mechanism.
*
He pauses a moment, comparing the sensation of touch to the mental schematic. Somehow, that piece of information remains, despite all the jarring of his memory. "It's the bolt. You'll probably have to tighten it - you may need to remove the plate just north of it, make sure the bolt's not been cracked. The clips you're feeling are just to provide a little give, they mostly prevent this from happening." Then he's silent again, jaw almost clamped shut. It's like hearing Hyde offer commentary to Jekyll - those parts of him he doesn't want to remember piping up helpfully.
*
"Thank you." Scarlett's soprano voice gently floats rather close, an intimacy she cannot help. If he actually looked back, Jack might see her bent over the couch, back a straight plank angled just so, and the steady movements of her hands akin to a cellist approaching a particularly difficult piece; Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante, for example, or Schnittke's second concerto. Exchanging the file for the thinner screwdriver, or what has to amount to one on a longer, finer scale, she skims up the length of the lamellae along their margins and wedges her pinky finger into the gap. Metal pinches hard, but the wiggle room gives what she needs to nudge the bolt and ease it slightly back, assessing whether the threading is damaged or the head is damaged any. A slight nudge might just shove the soldier forward, jarring enough only to attest to careful applications of force to ease the plate along. Another scrape of the implement betrays her, but her work requires a delicate touch, and that's a measure of hesitancy for inexperience or disused skills called up to the fore. She twists slightly, feeling for resistance, nudging the metal tool pinched between her fingers. "In terms of bruising, you look remarkably unlike a leopard. I should be jealous."
*
"I heal fast," he states, flatly. He's got his head bent forward, spine curved just a little to create the necessary stretch. "And I caught myself during the fall. That's why it came loose." He smells cleanly of soap, laundered wool….but the arm injects that metallic scent, like gun oil and warm metal. The bolt's worked loose, but there's no sign of real damage. This particular Pinocchio's sturdier than the average real boy, it seems. No spare flesh on him, the other scars on the torso and the real arm only faint silvery lines.
*
Another quick twist tightens the bolt, bearing down with considerable force to give the solidity needed. "Test that for me. I think that should be good. Oh, stars and night, the pasta." Clutching the tools in her hand, Scarlett slips back over the couch to a standing position and bolts at a run into the galley kitchenette. Water bubbles over the pot onto the hot plate, hissing in complaint. A quick flip of the nearest utensil at hand — a wooden spoon — eases back the boiling water and stops the starch-laced pasta water from becoming a geyser. Quickly she rotates her wrist and pulls off the pot, leaving it in the sink. That it's done with the thinnest gloves on the handles of the pot says something about pain tolerance.
"There, we can leave that for a moment. Let me find the strainer, there should be one somewhere." Banging through the cabinets is uncustomary for her, but it serves to cover one gaffe with another. "Tomato sauce still okay, or would you prefer plain?" Finding a battered, dinged mesh, she anchors it on the sink and pours out the pot.
*
He performs an oddly sinuous movement of the arm, hilariously reminiscent of a belly dancer's snake arms movement. There's that slithery chime of metal, but it's all one smooth scale up, without a hitch or a break. Nothing pops, creaks, or rasps. "Good," he says, and has his shirt on again in a moment. "Tomato sauce is fine." They even beat out his opinions on food, save for a positive yen for the bitterest possible Russian tea…..which is easy to find if one's willing to shop in Little Odessa.
*
The girl stops her work at the hotplate, figuring out how to balance the tomato sauce with a bit of salt and pepper. She watches the unfolding, and whether there may be anything amusing about it, Scarlett probably could give a lesson or two in classical Indian dance. Not far off. "This will take a few minutes more to thoroughly warm. Limitations of lacking a proper stove." Returning the instruments to the kit, she slides the two tools back into place and folds the black sleeve over. "Here. You may want to wait on the food if you wish the memory transfer. If you do not remember, the impact can be significant. Not enough to make you sick, but it helps to be comfortably propped up."
*
"I don't remember," he says, and it's infinitely weary. He's so tired of spitting out that phrase. So very tired. "I'll wait then. Not really hungry." When is he really ever. It's been mere fuel for so long that the refinements of taste and anticipation are nearly entirely forgotten. He sits back on the couch and looks at her, expectantly. "This good?" he asks, pale eyes searching her face for some sort of sign.
*
"You will be the judge of it." Scarlett pinches the middle finger of her glove firmly and pulls her hand back, extricating long digits from the kidskin enveloping them. Palm and fine-boned wrist bare, she catches the glove and tucks it into the pale seafoam pocket of her coat. A sadness coats her iridescent gaze, the hue of those irises tinged to surreal, the colour of the auroras at high latitudes. The contour of his face she ghosts without touching, the electrical static lying heavy as a curse in the space separating them. So vast a gulf, so narrow a layer of protection against the damnation promised in every strand of her genetic code spun around a doomed helix. Concentration indents a line against copper brows, the lone hint of what she's about to deliver. Confessionals between most are at the discretion of the speaker, but the Soul-Thief rips away all the veils. "As hard as it may be, try to relax."
Hers fatalism, there, as though she knows full well those words be in vain. And they very well are.
If Jack allows her, her fingertips catch beneath his chin. For a breath, nothing happens but the warm imprint of her skin. Electric anticipation explodes, converting possibility into kinetic actuality. Unshackled from the rigid control that checks the void, her cursed gift won't have anything to halt its course. Life calls it, summoning up memory and powers alike. The greatest horror is saved for last: the experience is, in its way, rapturous.
*
It's that torrent of fragments - same as before. She's touched this skin before, taken these memories. Another iteration of the burning cold, the electroshock that wipes away memory and its ties, other allegiances. Dark chambers, glass caskets, death after death after death, each with its own satisfaction. But the last time…..that familiar procedure gone wrong, leaving him bewildered and lost. None of the surety of target and mission, just confusion and whispered urges that lure like shadows. He's learning names, facts, though. He knows the name James Barnes is his, truly. And now, in the forefront, that familiar blonde in his red, white, and blue uniform: Steve Rogers. There is, bizarrely, the faintest ghost of affection there.
He's limp under her hand, relaxed in a way that even sleep doesn't render him. She could end it all in a heartbeat - close her fingers around his throat, or take up the sharper of those little tools - if she chose.
*
Certain parties assuredly wish she would assassinate him by touch. How easy to describe: an act of mercy, on the threshold of ruin. A man having a heart attack, an embolism, nothing out of the ordinary. Scarlett holds no temptation for that, the kick of stolen being flooding through the broken pathways of her conscious mind and saturating those forgotten corners of a crystalline prison. So much like the desert responds to a passing rainfall, flowering memories awaken from their dormant state, renewed from the incident when she nearly ended his life the first time around and supplanted by fresher visions.
Bliss crackles across the connection as much for her as her victims, the most insidious of elements, dousing the eternal anguish of separation. Her hand snaps away, seized to her breast, the visceral shudder tearing through the bohemian all the way to the turbulent core. It speaks to something she hasn't gone to her knees, legs locked against descent, staggering back just out of reach in case volatile rage or a last gasp of self-defense kicks through him, and seeks to strike her down. They're both perilously vulnerable, in their ways. "Captain… America?" Oh, as if that name wouldn't be known. Tears swim over her blurred gaze, bled every bit as dark as his own, haunted in a face far too young to know those archaic pains and depth of suffering. Far away words even carry his damn Brooklyn accent, the one she doesn't have on the best of days and would be hard pressed to imitate. It's there, crystal clear. "The pattern broke. Changed. Incomplete, I think."
*
It's almost comical, the self-contained assassin left in a debauched sprawl on her couch. He doesn't even lift his head from the cushions. "Yeah. Cap. He an' I usedta be buddies, or so the papers say. An' this lady I met the other night…..she did something similar, and I remembered him. Just a moment of it, but….it was mine." And then, more quietly, "He was mine. My friend." He takes a deep breath, and still shows no inclination to gather himself up into his usual coil of tension, limp as a shipwrecked sailor spilled onto the beach. "Yeah. I think I'm breaking down. I don't have more than that memory, but it was my memory. James Barnes's memory."
*
"I've fought with him. Not recently, but we tried to help people during the alien attacks and others. Finding Captain America — Steve Rogers — may take me a little time. I could, to help us. You. If you thought it was something you wanted." The slip of the proper noun is a curse on her even as she braces herself with an arm around her narrow waist, the lengthy spill of her braids weaving and twisting contorted fates in a glorious summary of confusion to her waist. The upwelling of his psyche and her own conscious efforts to let it spill over her without losing herself keeps Scarlett silent, though in those in between moments, she's far more James Barnes than the redhead with a name adopted for propriety, amnesia driven too deep through the meniscus of identity. The superego and ego rotate on kaleidoscopic fractals, and she dares to look his way. Once looking at him, looking away is impossible, for it's the double vision of an out of body experience and being the medium, a spiritual blur. "No wonder it's so important to get a reversal. The sum of me is more than that, so much more. Extraction is far worse than the other way around." Her eyes blink, unfocused, blurring away through a cascade of shattered images that force her to flinch. Skin rises to dappled shivers against her forearms and she unconsciously chafes her sleeve to release it. "What else can I do? I don't want you to fade. Gods, no."
*
"I don't know," he admits, finally sitting up, just a bit. "I….it doesn't make sense that I'm here. I don't think I escaped. And they don't let me out without a mission. But if I'm supposed to do something, I don't know what it is. I'm being hunted, but not hard. Truth be told, if they wanted me dead, I'd be dead. I'm way off my game, and I know it," No pain in that admission - whatever his professional pride, he'll abandon it when it's warranted. Ego's another bit of baggage too heavy to carry. "So….I don't know. Did I really break out on my own? Am I a diversion or bait for something else? Did I ever get this far before? OR is it just a game and they'll reel me in when they want me again?"
*
Too many spider threads to seize hold of and put into a web. The redhead drags her nails a little deeper into her palm, raising the faintest pink lines, not enough to last. It takes more than that to sting her skin. "Too much. I cannot remember at once when so much. They kept taking away your memories, stripping you down. Like a preparing a parchment, stripping off the top layers of paint and ink, to make it ready to write on against. Except that, you can sometimes see the impression of what came before if you know how to." Rambling, yes, but the point is there; echoes in memory might exist for someone who can unlock them, and they do have at least one earlier self preserved, not to mention whatever nightmares came from the shadows. "It makes sense. This place is the epicenter of all things. I've seen the patterns, it always comes back to New York. Something about it. You were here, from here, and you will be called back. Something hunts you. Out of convenience, maybe to flush something else out? Bait seems… maybe. But who are you enemies?" Those grave eyes are still his, rimmed in auroral green.
*
"In the broadest sense, the US government," It sounds absurdly grandiose, one man against a superpower, defiant. "I don't know, beyond that. CIA? FBI? Someone else in the alphabet soup?" He shrugs, and there's no sound, which earns the now-behaving arm an approving glance. She does good work. "Am I even supposed to be in New York? I'm from here - is it just instinct that's got me here, instead of…..Washington or somwhere else? That might be, though. I'm being coat-trailed to lure out their agents….and to see if I'm genuinely defective?"
*
"Delightful. One of a dozen agencies." Her knees give and Scarlett finally drops to a kneeling position, rather than fight with gravity and the giddy rush of a fiery afterglow, sinking into oblivion. "I doubt you are a pigeon, drawn home regardless of where you were set free. It seems perhaps you could be. But defective. You're human. Whatever else you can say about yourself, you are still human, still a man, and deserving of all dignities and respect that entails." The words come out, gritted somewhat, but there as she identifies the oddness of her own voice above and beyond listening to it through the white noise crackling of thoughts that were never generated in her own mind. "I insist on that, James, and no matter how injured, you have the right to live without a bullet put in the back of your head."
*
Now he fixes her with that old sardonic stare. Americans. So earnest. "You may be the only person in this hemisphere who believes that. You know what I've done…..and how many are gonna believe I did it 'cause I was brainwashed, and not a traitor? I've been a widowmaker since before the war ended, that's a long trail of hot brass and dead bodies. But…." He stretches, languidly, spine taut as a string of beads for a moment. "I'm not gonna just walk up to the NYPD and turn myself in, believe me."
*
Scarlett's answer comes after a very dark, length pause where shadows cavort in blind abandon behind the glitter of her eyes. "Yes, I do. And did you exult in every last one of those deaths now and then, the opinion would be different. Do you accuse someone forced to act in a particular fashion by influences outside their control?" Her chin lifts slightly. "How many indeed. We had a shapeshifter impersonate another alien to murder the president. You might be surprised. Some will never forgive you. Some will. The significant factor is that someone — ones — must speak for others. Silence makes for culpability." Her gaze follows him; it's the most she can do. Movement may take a few moments to come around, and unlike someone subjected to the wearying effects of her life-draining curse, it's the opposite for her. Mustn't bounce off like a lunatic to offer a plate of spaghetti quite yet. "What do you wish to do, at this point?"
*
His expression goes opaque again. "At the time, I might've done," he admits. "But now, it makes me tired and sick. I'm sick of killing and sick of blood. I don't want them to take me again. I'd kill myself rather than go back." And she can see the thought pass through him, like cloud shadows racing down a road. Why not take care of it, make the final decision that pre-empts all others? But he shakes his head at himself. "I don't know. I don't know of anywhere they can go that they can't find me. If I turn myself in to some agency, they'll just take me apart….maybe even trade what's left of me back."
*
"And your friend? Do you honestly believe he's the sort of man who would stand to do that?" Quiet, the query lies between them on a drifting feather of Ma'at, weighing broken souls and broken deeds against the dishes of justice. Scarlett shakes her head slightly. "I can find you a more secure place. The apartment you had before isn't really fit for occupation given the building is full of students. Another building in East Village makes for a good temporary spot until you know what you want to do. You taught me how to go on the run, but in the end, running doesn't work. Build a web of connections, alliances. Those who will stand if someone tries to take you."
*
"Steve Rogers is a relic," he states, without heat. "He's a mascot, and an icon, and a soldier. I don't remember him personally, except for that moment, but a lotta reporters spilled a lotta ink about that guy. Ernie Pyle appears to have thought he was damn near the second coming. But that doesn't mean he's gonna be able to save me from the deals the suits make behind closed doors." He waves away the idea of a permanent habitation. "Nah. Better to be of no fixed address. Summer's coming, it's a big city. I'll be fine on that front."
*
"You are relentlessly stubborn and I could argue all night. Sit down and I'll bring you a plate of spaghetti, and we can see what comes out of that. You have a friend, if you want one. Remember that." A sigh might be appropriate, but there's no point to prolonging the inevitable. Getting up takes the redheaded bohemian a moment, and she glides across the floor, fetching the saucepan and setting that about.