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They've had him for ten days - Ava, the Red Widow, brought him in very nearly by herself. Quite a coup, considering the sheer amount of destruction he's wrought in the past, when it comes to both SHIELD and its aims. The first few days he was restrained and sedated, held in one of the cells that's part of the hidden HQ. There were fits of violence and confusion, borderline madness.
The last few days though, there's been clear progress. Oh, his cell's been subdivided by a clear panel, so he can be visited or examined without some unfortunate Agent coming within reach of that metal arm….but there's been a lot less need for either sedatives or binding. Sofia's been working on excavating his memories, which does seem to have helped. At the moment, he's tucked into a bare corner of the cell - there's nothing allowed in it, other than himself and the t-shirt and scrub bottoms he's allowed for clothing. Not even a rubberband. He's got his back against the wall, knees drawn up, arms atop them, and his head resting on them, apparently dozing….though it's hard to tell, with his loose hair veiling his face.
*
SHIELD has many files on its many agents and persons of interest. Surely the capture of the Winter Soldier constitutes a success and another filing cabinet under lock and key to be filled with the fruits of their labours. Interrogation, observation, interviews assuredly provide the essential reams of paper typed in quick lines and corrected with typing fluid by the legion of secretaries employed by the place. What happens when a person of interest is /also/ an agent?
They get given a special badge and a funny look. The senior agent stuck with playing guide does not look happily upon the dusky-skinned brunette almost all in black, but he cannot find a reason to argue with her. Her hands are bare and open, as though a necessity to demonstrate no threat. How would it be different if they exchanged places? "Go," she tells the man. "This I am able to handle." What can a sedated man behind a glass wall do? Wanda Maximoff reaches up to tug lightly on the burgundy collar of her coat, dragging it across the bared shelf of her collarbone. Resolute silence as only can be mastered in the depths of central and eastern Europe under a Slavic auspice remains intact, stony and unfeeling, until the irritated SHIELD handler retreats back to his nook for more paperwork and a pink note on how putting a Russian-speaker in proximity to a known Soviet troublemaker is a terrible notion. If he even remembers he did.
She is not impressive, corseted in leather and young at first glance. Through the glass, there is nothing to imply she is any sort of threat. Communications, maybe. Or an observer with some kind of test to run.
*
Not dozing, it seems. For he looks up, and then unfolds to get to his feet. Barefoot, clean and clean-shaven, at least, the blue eyes lucid and clear. And for someone who's gone toe to toe with him in all his vicious glory, it's readily apparent that the intelligence currently lurking behind them is not really the Soldier himself.
He blinks at her, no real curiosity in his face - the prisoner's deadpan dies hard…..but there're no signs of recognition, either. Those former encounters don't register.
*
She looks back at him, calm, grave-eyed. Such are the state of Wanda's amber-gold eyes, too old by far for the youthful face they are set in. Her countenance carries only the severity of contemplation, brows in a thoughtful line, mouth pinched slightly. Her hands lace together as long digits wrap around barren knuckles, folded into a mild curve before her.
Minutes will tick by in that assessment. Whatever is there to be seen on the exterior, she studies. Expressions worn by the man penned in glass, the way he walks, the speed of his breath. It could be navel-gazing except pupils dilate and shrink, and the line on her forehead deepens a little more.
*
He seems healthy enough, calm and undrugged, save for the ring of old bruises around the one wrist that bruises at all. Content to wait, expectantly. This isn't one of the scheduled times where he's tended to in some way - fed, walked down to the shower, or held in another room so this cell can be cleaned. SHIELD doesn't keep its prisoners in squalor, after all. She won't be the only one who's come more or less to gawk, so he just regards her patiently, brows raised a little. The 'Can I Help You?' expression.
*
The utterly bland face of Soviet statues, softened slightly by the curious admixture of lineages that made her. She will have her own measure of a person in her own time, an unrushed prospect like a fine hanging in the village square. Everything ought to be prepared just so, Is dotted and Ts crossed, formed to be elegant and ghastly in its own like. Long moments to add to the mental tally indexed away in the privacy of her own mind. It takes a good ten minutes before she even speaks.
"Why?" The question is English, accented in a way that puts her between Moscow and Rome.
*
"Why what?" he returns, in English that's distinctly Brooklyn, no hint of Russia at all. His tone's casual, light. For all he knows, she's been digging through the no man's land that is his psyche, for all that mental reconstruction's been going apace. If it's going to be a question and answer session, might as well get it over with. She doesn't seem to have brought thumbscrews with her.
*
The sacred question hangs in the air, curled into a tangle of smoky words. The fact English is not Wanda's native language becomes evident within moments, the accent and the structure of sentences kept to a minimal terseness that gives Spartans a reputation for being longwinded.
"You are here. Why?" This question holds all the edges and glistening transparency of being eminently reasonable, pointed at the dark-haired man and left to its own devices.
*
That has him canting his head at her for a moment, a rather raptorish gesture. There's that little indent between his brows left by puzzlement. "Well, the simplest answer is that I got captured. Why did that happen? Well, honestly, I'm not sure. From all accounts, the Winter Soldier's usually competent enough that one young SHIELD agent shouldn't be enough to take him down and take him in. My theory's that I'm somehow a Trojan Horse." His reply's rapid, tone casual. Like he's had some variant of this conversation more than once, over the last few days. "Or are you asking in some more existential sense?" A flicker of what might be humor, at that.
*
A faint gap in logic might exist, translation failing to supplement a proper translation. "Existential?" The word rolls around Wanda's mouth in a handful of syllables that strike off teeth and shoot over tongue like a pinball. Exaggeration to the final sharp contours push the peaked word out. "This is?" Her arms fold across her chest in expectation of further clarification, or maybe nothing further to a story with a clear beginning and end, as gaunt as a concentration camp victim to her ears.
*
"Ekzistentsial'nyy?" he ventures, trying the Russian word. "Uh, philosophical speculation. I was sort of joking there. Like, why do I exist at all? I dunno," Buck allows, with the faintest of shrugs. "Why am I in America? Well, I'm sure I was sent here by my masters. But I don't have a clear memory of a mission assignment, and I've been vague since before I got here. So….probably I was sent specifically to be captured."
*
A nod barely dips Wanda's head, not enough enough to disrupt the curtain of chestnut waves styled around her shoulders and back. Even if she wanted to look like any other American girl on the street, there's the little matter of her honey complexion and exquisite cheekbones to content with. Unlike Bucky, the Transian witch does not blend. Not unless she wants to. "Maybe." Idle speculation is not her natural, apparently. Terse answers go with the character of a country in the crossroads of Europe, fought over by Axis powers and Allied ones, the unstable alliance of empires from the Ottomans to the Prussians. A healthy dose of skepticism comes from the land. "What now? Wait for men in coats to eat your thoughts?"
*
"Someone here's got the ability to help me recover memories," His voice is softer now, though really, no attempt at secrecy. "We're working on that. I remember some things, both before and after I was taken. But that's the primary aim - remembering and neutralizing the conditioning. That's the way out, if there is one." Which he's not terribly sanguine about, by his expression. Not quite resignation, but a kind of level-eyed acceptance. If they can't subdue the Winter Soldier, there's really only the one option.
*
A good conversation has some give and take, at least by American standards. Long silences can grow destructive unless tolerated. Wanda tips her head slightly, almost listening to things on a dual band of activity if that were even possible. Earpiece communication devices aren't nearly small enough to act as a cochlear implant, allowing translations but remaining invisible. Aren't they? This is SHIELD. Maybe they possess something like that. "Conditioning. The violent kind. You have not broken anything today."
*
"Not *today*, no," he allows, turning his hands to show the palms. "Right now I'm me, James Barnes, what there is of him. The Soldier's not driving. Not now….but he has his moments, and he's a killer. More accurately, when I'm him, I'm a killer," He takes a slow breath, lets it out. His tone's even, his expression's calm, but…it's clear that that matter of factness takes an effort. "And….they," A nod at the corridor beyond, "'ve gotten smarter about offering the kind of temptation that makes him come forward."
*
Not even so much as a frown breaks the surface of Wanda's expression. The beginnings lie there, engraved by the light hand of thought. "What did they use?" Temptation, there's an art to even saying the word without a wryness or oddity to the ears. She hones where the weak point seems greatest. Or simply the strangest. All the while, her body is still except for regular breathing. Not much fidgeting with that one, though to be fair, the leather and steel-boned corset isn't exactly the most flexible when it comes to randomly bouncing around. She might be short of breath most of the time. "You want something now?"
*
"The guys who did this to me? Or the ones who got me?" Buck's tone's conversational. "The conditioning - from what I remember, electroshock, torture, something like hypnosis. But I was pretty brain damaged when they got me, so they had a head start. Here?" A little moue of amusement. "Anything that looks like an opportunity to get out…or to kill someone sufficiently high up. Want something now? I'm okay. I get fed regularly."
*
"Here." Wanda glances over her shoulder to the hallway where a senior agnet diligently takes notes on how miserable his life has become in the dullest conversation. Juicy intrigue? None. Tension of an uncomfortable, prickly sort? Absent. His notes probably attest to the fact no one should use the witch for interrogation. He would well be right on that, too, as her pupils slip out of focus on the brown-haired man with the best eyeliner in the business, the world becoming a dull greasepaint smear compared to the colours she can perceive, details wrought in synesthetic impressions and texturized sounds, luminous harmonies of vision and taste. Time tilts on its proverbial axis. Nothing remotely symbolises what transition just took place, at least not immediately.
"They did what? I do not want to read the folder. I hear what you say better," she explains, in the longest sentence she's given yet.
*
Bucky's lips pinch together, ruefully. "I don't remember a lot of it, still. But…..when I first woke up in Russian hands, I already didn't know who I was. No memories at all. It made it a lot easier for them to convince me that I was theirs always. Think of how easy it is to inculcate things to a child who knows no better. Something like that. Electroshock affects a certain kind of memory storage. Muscle memory, for things like weapons training, is stored elsewhere. So they could keep resetting me, without having to retrain me. A blank slate, every time. No loyalties, no ties, able to be imprinted with whatever cover they chose, no distractions….." His voice trails off, shakily. Costing him, indeed, this calm.
*
"And SHIELD?"
It comes to the forefront as a simple question. His aura is a fingerprint around him, and Wanda wordlessly awaits to see what that might reveal of him if anything. Certainly any mystical influences are sure to show, but the pulse of a person radiates through their chakras to a mystic. There might just be something worth seeing, and probably not. But never wise to be less than careful.
*
That arm….it throws things off, odd whorls in the flow of energy. It's bonded far more intimately than the average prosthesis, but it's still a thing of dead metal and wire. There's that smoky darkness, traces in the bluish-gray of calm and boredom, fingerprints of old violence. "They have me now," he says, and there's a world of surrender in that blase statement. "Might be I go to work for them, if I'm ever sane enough to be trusted."
*
Wanda has a moment of delirium exorcising herself from the enriched universe around her. It's like severing her own arm, cutting away the radiance and standing in the black and white gloom. Always a shock to be divorced from the familiar, her birthright, but forcibly tuning out the bright lustre of reality is essential if she is to hold any kind of conversation. Growing back into the moment requires a little bit of patience and a breath, testing the familiar shapes of herself. The world is stained and altered no matter where she stands, and rightly so. A conduit to the invisible, her. "I do wonder if their temptations are signs then of sanity."
*
There's that furrow to his brow - some of the few lines he's got. Body's still young, despite the mileage and the wear. "What do you mean?" he asks, blankly. "I ….I don't think they're doing it deliberately. I mean, it's not like they need an excuse to just shoot me, if that's what they want. Or….testing me to see if I'm sane enough to be trusted?"
*
"They put you in a glass box. A cell." She waves her hand around if only to illustrate the confines of the world as Bucky knows it. A cube cut from the belly of New York, called protective, insulated against all the news broadcasts, guns, Chitari and occasional monster rampaging through the streets. Not so good for ordering noodles and having a life. "I do not know. It is not a place I would like." This much is the only insight Wanda offers up, and it's a pretty sad handful of crumbs.
*
"It's better than the alternative," he says, simply. "Living on the streets waiting for the Russians to grab me again, take me back…..or lying in wait for my target. No one here's torturing me, freezing me, making me kill anyone. I'm not frozen, starving, or being made to forget my entire life. Do I like it in and of itself? Hell no. But at this point, when I'm myself, I wouldn't willingly leave it." The blue eyes are level. "I have a choice - I can do what I can to work with the people here, regain my memories, my identity, something of my old life. Or I can just….yield to what I've been made to be, and end up so dangerous I get put down like a rabid dog. What would you choose?"
*
Bucky earns an impassive look through those dark honey eyes. Leonine, in a way. Wanda considers what he has to say, the question leveled at her getting the slimmest shrug of her shoulders. "The third way." Whatever the way might be is rather hard to distinguish. "But live. It will matter."
*
Bucky gives her a skeptical look from under his brows. "And what way is that?" he asks, tone a little more pointed. "Hang myself in my cell? With what?" Well, he does have pants on…..but there's the unwinking eye of the camera on him.
*
"Make a different you." Oh, it sounds reasonable and easy, but might as well say, 'Create a new future for yourself by remaking the universe.' The words have no Hallmark greeting element, nor are they going to win any points as a motivational poster sold in a record store. "Stop doing the old learning. This way you are not in any cell." Cell of the mind, cell of the soul.
*
The expression is he has is very nearly feline in its momentary disdain. "I'll consider it," he says, drily. "Actually, now that you mention it, there is something I want. A cigarette. No chance of that, I'm sure."
*
A casual shrug of her shoulder follows. "They have one there." She does not even need to gesture as the blip in reality isn't something SHIELD can track through their sensors, anyways. Wanda will no doubt be taking responsibility for this, however it goes, if they can possibly try to link the appearance of a Marlboro with her. On the other hand, lighting it is going to be a trick and a half, but let Bucky figure that out on his own. Maybe his thumb flicks back and allows a flame to pop out.
*
If only. Things would be so much more useful if they'd just given him a giant Swiss Army knife. But then it appears, and he is visibly startled into….complete pokerface. It might as well be a shout of surprise, though. He turns it over in his hand, sniffs it, inspects it. And then glances around hastily, as if in a moment they'll be busting the door down. "Got a light?"
*
A Swiss Army knife might be useful, but since when has the Swiss Army dwelled in the bowels of SHIELD? Is SHIELD even allied to the neutral alpine nation or would a good multipurpose knife be tantamount to a declaration of invasion and war? Treaties might fall. Men might ruin their suits with tepid glaring and unimpressed diplomatic speech. Imagine, they might put two lumps of sugar in their coffee to compensate being mad bees.
Wanda hasn't moved. The activity in the glass cage makes no remark upon her features other than their eyes marking Bucky's passage. Short of choking himself or setting off a sprinkler, she does not intervene. "You have no light?" Maybe she prefers her ignorance.
*
He takes a very long, meditative breath, lets it out with complete deliberation. It comes off sounding like the sound a parent makes when dealing with a child being deliberately obtuse. "No, no light," he says, on a sigh, and tucks it behind his ear, not really hidden beneath his hair. "But thanks for the gesture."
*
"«Arde»." A whisper of sound, no more, as Wanda flicks the pad of her finger against her thumb in a decisive downward gesture. Her rings give a hint of a sparkle into the lustreless bowels of the building, hidden beneath Chinatown behind a noodle emporium. Her voice gives little inflection or volume to attract attention, but it's close enough to the French curse 'Merde' to possibly prove interesting.
Bucky might be quick to realize the cigarette is smoking at one end, or he might have to wait until the ash falls upon his shoulder or against the line of his neck. Should it be on the prosthetic arm, will he notice the cherry come to life? Let's find out.
*
He feels the warmth, smells the smoke, and snatches it hastily from its perch before it can either burn his skin or set his hair on fire. That isn't the excuse to cut it he's been looking for. IF he's requested a cut, they haven't yielded yet - presumably no one wants to get him near a set of scissors. He slips it to his lips, takes a long, luxurious drag…..and then tips his head back to blow a perfect smoke ring at the ceiling. Rude to blow smoke *at* your benefactress, even with the divider between them.
*
The cigarette is helpfully illuminated, the heat biting into the rolling paper and giving off the scent of raised tobacco to the open atmosphere. A healthy little curl of smoke teases him in grey undulations, dancing like a Berlin burlesque show. Her choice of cigarette is telling: it's not American. It comes from across the Atlantic if he can tell the difference, and the cloying smoothness means to punch the palate and seduce every sense. Wanda nods slightly.
*
He sure can - taste and scent are the most visceral, and the most tightly tied to memory. "Unfiltered Gauloise," he says, and by his expression, that little bubble of memory surprised him. He takes it, looks at it again. "Man, that's been a while."
*
"Hard for Pall Malls or Cabinet." The irony is not to be lost, all said and done. The golden-skinned girl reaches up to thread her thumb along the rim of her coat's leather collar, lapel skimming down to merge on violent angles against the organic curve of bosom raised by her fiercely supple corset or the shelf of her clavicle. "Prisoners even need gifts."
*
Buck slants that sardonic look at her - the surname's as English as they come, Barnes, but by his coloring and bone structure, there's something a good bit further east in that bloodline, too - Slav or Baltic. The smoke wreathes his head like an oracle's, for a moment. "Just so long as that's not the last one before the firing squad," he offers, deadpan.
*
Maximoff, if he ever heard hers, is distinctly not American in origins. But in the great cultural melting pot that is New York — and specifically that is Queens — nearly every nation has representation, and languages lost to time and place live on in the archives of their living descendants. Wanda, though, is an incarnation of the ancient movements of people out of the Scythian homelands to settle over much of Europe. "Oh no. They hang, here."
Is that comfort? Probably not.
*
He makes one of those little moues of understanding, but mostly, he's concentrating on getting that nicotine into his system before one of the guards wises up. "Not me, I bet," he says. "It'd take too long." Another deep drag, and then he exhales smoke through his nostrils, like a patient dragon.
*
"When is speed a matter to the gift of them?" Awkward phrasing will have to do for a girl unlikely to win competitions for poetry unless gauged by e.e. cummings and a haiku master, Basho excepted. Brevity is an artform when she can manage, torture when English supplies no relief or mercy to a girl in dire need of both. Her fingers flex out of mute sympathy for the cigarette, a cylinder blissfully poisoning the air for her coworkers when cycled up through the fans onto the office floor. Or one has to like to think. A kick has to be worthwhile.
*
"Men who don't get their necks broken at the drop may survive the throttling that comes after," he explains, utterly matter of fact. "Especially when they're like me. They're not going to leave it to chance." Still savoring it, smoked off the back of the hand, though there's no wind here to put it out. He'll smoke it down to the shreds, it looks like. No filter to hide after, at least.
*
Still savouring. It might not only be him in the flipped circumstances, all told. Wanda dips her chin and the effect with mildly elevated brows persuades her countenance to offer up the subtlest of inquiries, not quite straddling the line of mockery. Or if that's even possible for her to manifest. She is not the sort to really openly manage it, given Pietro is far superior in all ways to his younger sister at delivering the cutting barbs that matter. "A kind of test. Many tests, here."
*
He doesn't offer any further explanation. "Yeah," he agrees, mildly. And then he switches the cigarette to his metal hand, so he really can smoke it down to the very end…..as if he intends to eat the ember. "Why are you here? I mean, talking to me?" he asks, as if that hit of nicotine's enough to spur his curiosity, or edge him further towards being actually garrulous.
*
To be fair, a squeaky filing cabinet drawer counts as more garrulous than Wanda. A cactus on a good day engages in more conversation than the witch, and proves considerably less prickly about encroachment on personal space or topics. Under surveillance, she constitutes an utterly dull subject and probably worse in her way than him. At least Bucky is unpredictable, and prone now and then to philosophizing on his nature. Not her.
"You are kept in glass." The spin of her hand around her draws a vague circuit. "«Tiergarten»," she explains, the German for zoo lying fast and quick on her tongue like a razor.
*
"Zoo," he enunciates, and the last smoke of the cigarette splashes against the glass dividing them, like the ghost of a kiss, diminishing to nothing. Then he grins, mirthlessly, the blue eyes sharp. "Yeah, I am. Though the pound would be a more accurate metaphor. I'm a real bad dog."
*
"Zyuu." Not quite there. "Zuu." Zuul?
Please don't Zuul be listening. She is a conduit of the first water, an incomparable diamond capable of reflecting only the brightest and darkest qualities. Her mouth tightens somewhat upon the vowels and coming close enough satisfies Wanda's needs. She tips her head. "Bad dog. Bad dogs eat men or die. I think not so much." Maybe it's the innocence of a girl whose age belies very much about the world, and maybe not.
*
"No?" he parrots back. Now who's teasing whom? "Zzzzooo," he tries again, prompting. And then he's dusting the last bits of paper and tobacco from his hands.
*
"Zoo." OoOoOoOoo. It is not the sound of a hungry ghost appeasing the ancestors or turning on the living, so much as an emphatic 'oo' shaping her mouth where the native Slavic hides under a blanket in a grim, dark corner of history rather than accepting that sound often curling her lips and lifting her tongue. "You have gifts. Use them. Not for a shelf."
*
"I will," he agrees, simply. "I will." Her next attempts have him smiling. "Doing better," he adds.