-15-

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Even after they spoke, tension still hung between the Wyvern and the man named Bucky. They peeled off their combat jackets and tended to their wounds, shuffling around the apartment. The man named Bucky inspected the apartment and found a loose panel in the ceiling – after levering it open with one of his many knives, he brought down a first aid kit, a phone and a laptop. The S.H.I.E.L.D. director clearly liked to be prepared.

The man named Bucky found some ice in the freezer and held it to his shoulder, while cleaning the cuts on his face with a damp cloth. After triple checking the phone and the laptop for bugs and tracking equipment, the Wyvern took the first aid kit into the bathroom and dressed her various wounds.

She didn't think they were the worst injuries she'd ever had – the bullet wound was merely a gouge along her ribcage, the puncture in her thigh was already scabbing over, and the various burns and lacerations in her back weren't serious. Her whole body ached, but she knew it would pass.

She tried to avoid her own face in the bathroom mirror, focusing on her injuries, but when she brought a cotton ball soaked in antiseptic to the gash beside her ear, she could no longer ignore it.

There she was. She'd thought of herself as an asset, a weapon, for so long that her own face was inconsequential. But now she looked into her own dark, bright eyes, and saw herself. There was someone in her eyes, looking back at her. Her damp hair was about shoulder-length, dark brown and beginning to dry into waves. She knew she usually had a hair net to keep it contained in her cowl, but it must have been lost in the bowels of the Triskelion. Her face was pale, clearly not often exposed to the sunlight, and pinched with pain. Her features were… symmetrical, though they held no expression. She was blank.

But she looked back up, into her own eyes, and realised she was a person. A woman. Just like anyone else: like a handler, or a target.

The thought frightened the Wyvern. She tossed the cotton ball in the trash, then stepped back out into the apartment.

Her eyes immediately flicked to the man named Bucky. He was sitting at the kitchen table, the open laptop casting blue light onto his battered face. He looked back at her, taking in the butterfly bandage on her temple, the bandage peeking out from the hole in her underarmour shirt, and her feet still in her waterlogged boots. When he looked back to her face, his eyebrows were pinched in a frown.

She strode across the small apartment and sat opposite him at the kitchen table. He wordlessly slid the laptop towards her.

He had opened up what looked like an information dump: she leaned toward the screen and started scrolling. Her mind reeled at the sheer amount of data. What had he found? When her gaze flicked back up to him, he explained.

"I was looking up… S.H.I.E.L.D. I thought if they found him, they'd keep him alive." His eyes flickered with pain and guilt. "But I didn't find anything, there's only this: the Black Widow dumped all of S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA's data on the Internet."

The Wyvern's eyes widened, and she glanced back at the screen. It looked like a great deal of the data was encrypted, and there was so much of it that searching through it would be a gargantuan task, but… "there might be information about us in the data," she murmured, looking back up at the man named Bucky to gauge his reaction.

His eyes darkened. "How much?"

"I… don't know. I could look, but it will take time."

The Wyvern had something else to check first. She went back to the laptop, opening up a new browser window. Her fingers danced across the keyboard. After a minute or so, she spun the laptop around.

"He's alive," she said.

The breath rushed out of the man named Bucky's chest, and he gripped the edge of the table to keep his hand from trembling.

The Wyvern watched his face. She knew what he was seeing – she'd tracked Captain America to a hospital in metropolitan D.C., hacked their electronic admissions notes and found that he was expected to survive his injuries, much to the doctors' astonishment. The man named Bucky seemed to both relax and tense up as he read the information, as pain, relief and guilt warred in his eyes. She wanted to ask about the man, but she could see that the man named Bucky didn't want to talk about it. She'd spent a lifetime not asking questions, and it was easy to do now.

She pulled her wings toward her. The sharp Adamantium barbs were retracted into the skeleton, but the sturdy metal still scratched the wooden tabletop. Wincing, she opened the left wing. It couldn't extend fully in the small kitchen, but she exposed it in sections, examining it in the afternoon light that peeked through the closed kitchen blinds. The carbon fibre had a few gashes and burn marks from the Helicarrier's barrage, but it was still flyable.

The man named Bucky was still looking at the laptop, a complicated range of expressions flitting across his face. He could look as long as he liked – she'd hidden her tracks.

The Wyvern continued to examine her wings as the light through the kitchen blinds faded away. She had no tools to speak of, but she could run diagnostic tests on the wings and inspect them for damage.

After fifteen minutes of staring at the laptop the man named Bucky stood and began pacing the apartment. He was running checks of his own and peering out the windows, but the Wyvern understood his desire for movement. They'd gone through such a monumental change in the space of a few hours, and her fragmented, turbulent mind was bouncing from thought to thought, making her temples throb.

She threw herself into inspecting her wings, and the use of her hands helped to ease the storm somewhat. She found a tracker and a pair of kill switches, and destroyed them all. She wasn't too worried about the tracker – the man named Bucky had burned down the computers it was likely broadcasting to.

She asked to look at the man named Bucky's arm, and when he saw the smashed tracker he was quick to agree.

The Wyvern didn't know how she knew to open up the arm. She must have done it before. She found a tracker and a kill switch in the metal limb, and destroyed them as well. She closed up his arm again, and turned back to her wings.

She slipped into a reverie, only occasionally throwing glances at the man named Bucky as he moved around the quiet apartment.

As she worked, the Wyvern couldn't stop her mind from working as well. The Soldier, as it turned out, had a name. Bucky. And she remembered hers, or… remembered being told she had a name. Margaret. She mouthed it as she ran an eye over the wiring in the base of her wings. It tasted alien in her mouth, but she couldn't deny the pull she felt toward the name. She was sure she belonged to it, but she didn't know if she wanted to remember who she was. If she used to be someone. She couldn't remember a family.

At that thought, a sharp pain bloomed behind the Wyvern's eyes, and she winced. It seemed her mind was happy to throw out context-less images and voices at will, but the moment she tried to remember, it resisted. She shook her head, and wiped a clump of mud out of a wing joint with a handtowel. Her mind was a snowstorm, and it had already given her so much bewilderment and pain today already. She didn't want to search for more.

But the Wyvern had been five days out of the chair, and her realisation on the Helicarrier was shaking loose all sorts of uncomfortable truths.

When the man named Bucky heard a metal clank from the kitchen, he drew his last remaining gun and darted into the room inside of three seconds.

The Wyvern was still seated at the kitchen table, but the wing she'd been working on was sprawled on the linoleum floor. Her eyes were wide, and her breath came fast. The man named Bucky remembered his hand on her back in a dark garden – yet another memory settling into place in his chaotic mind. The context details were slow to come, and even then it was hazy. He didn't try to push the recall.

He stepped forward and froze when her dark eyes snapped up to his face. There were tears in her eyes, and one spilled down her cheek as he watched.

He saw her tears, saw her clenched fists, saw the shock and recognition in her eyes.

"What do you remember?" he asked.

Her eyes were fixed on his face. "You," she whispered, chest heaving. "Killing my parents."

The man named Bucky sagged, and somehow stumbled into the other seat. Of course he'd done that. He was a monster with a mind of jumbled memories. He knew he'd been a man, once: the man that the target – Steve – had recognised. There was a part of that man inside him, he thought, despite the years and the wiping and the freezing. That man knew enough to be horrified at the monster sitting in the kitchen chair across from the Wyvern.

"Do you remember?" she whispered, fists still clenched on the wooden table.

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, battering against the whirlwind of blood and death. "No," he eventually gritted out, meeting her eyes. She deserved that much. "Or… maybe. I remember… I remember killing a lot of people."

More tears spilled down her cheeks, but she didn't look away. "So do I."

The man named Bucky watched her across the table for a few more moments. They hadn't turned on the lights, but the streetlight outside the closed kitchen blinds was bright enough for him to see the tears gleaming on her cheeks, and the memories flickering behind her eyes.

"Tell me."

"A car crash." She inhaled. "You beat my father's head in. You strangled my mother. You… you grabbed me, here–" she gripped her right bicep with white knuckles. "You put a dead girl in my place. You took me away."

The man named Bucky closed his eyes for another moment, and let out a shaky breath. "You were a child."

Their eyes met, dark brown and blue-grey.

"I was."

The man named Bucky slept first that night, on his back on the thin bed after doing a last check of the perimeter. They hadn't discussed the arrangement, hadn't spoken since their conversation at the kitchen table, but they'd both known it was going to happen.

The Wyvern sat at the kitchen table, listening to his slow breathing, and knew the moment he'd fallen asleep. She got to her feet and stepped into the bedroom doorway. The blinds were closed in here too, but her enhanced eyesight picked out the man named Bucky.

He was a hard line on the bed, still wearing his combat boots and trousers. His metal arm gleamed in the darkness.

She remembered the blazing car, remembered a man with white hair and an open wound for a face, remembered a woman in front of her making choking sounds. She remembered the dead girl, with blood on her face and cold, dead eyes. She remembered the Soldier's feet crunching in the gravel. She couldn't remember what she'd been doing before that night, and what happened after was fuzzy. It hurt to try to remember.

The man named Bucky frowned in his sleep, a deep crease forming between his brows. He fidgeted, flicking his head and clenching his fists. She wondered what he dreamed about. She wondered what demons would come for her, in her sleep. Her clearest memories so far were soaked in blood.

The Wyvern remembered the Soldier. She remembered him at the burning car, and in other places: the snow, a metal cage, the desert. In most of the memories he was blank faced, like her, but there were flickers and secrets haunting other memories.

You are my mission.

She remembered telling him that when he was a demon come to take her away. But what did it mean now?

Hours later, the Wyvern put her hand on the man named Bucky's shoulder. His eyes opened, but he didn't move. He looked up at her in the darkness.

"I've got lots of memories of you," she told him, and she could tell from the flicker in his grey-blue eyes that he had the same. "They're all jumbled. I remember hating you. I remember trying to kill you."

"I remember that." His voice was hoarse from sleep, and from the memories.

"I don't want to anymore." She showed him the honesty in her eyes and let go of his shoulder. She stepped back.

The man named Bucky sat up, hands by his sides. He took in a long, slow breath. "I wouldn't stop you if you wanted to try again," he murmured.

There was a long pause. Neither of them moved; the Wyvern standing by the door, the man named Bucky sitting in the bed. Eventually, she broke the silence:

"It's your turn for watch."

He climbed out of the bed and passed her in the doorway, leaving the scent of gunpowder and blood in his wake. The Wyvern took his spot in the bed, her eyes widening at the warmth he'd left behind. She realised she'd expected him to be as cold as his metal arm.

The Wyvern slept, dreaming of the people she had killed. She dreamed of the scorching lightning behind her eyes from the chair, and of the Soldier stalking her in the darkness.

The man named Bucky sat in the dark at the kitchen table and listened to the small, discomfited noises she made in her sleep. He remembered the small, sobbing girl in the firelight, and he remembered seeing fury in her dark eyes, over and over.

But the fury was a memory – there'd been no trace of it when she remembered her parents today, or when she'd woken him.

I don't want to anymore.

The man named Bucky sat in the dark with his metal arm and his fragmented mind, and tried to understand the woman in the next room.

The Wyvern woke at dawn with a jolt, the last image from her dream following her into her waking mind: her heel spurs crunching through a man's skull and into the soft meat of his brain. The man had crumpled under her, and she'd stepped out of the mess of his head. She hadn't cared.

The Wyvern stumbled out of bed, her aching body protesting the movement, dashed into the bathroom and threw up into the toilet. When she was done, she turned on the faucet and tried to wash the taste of vomit from her mouth.

The man named Bucky was in the doorway when she turned around, and her hackles instinctively rose at having her exit blocked. Sensing her discomfort, he stepped aside. They looked at each other for a few moments.

Neither of them knew what to say. The night was over, and they were still here. Free of their handlers, free of orders, free of purpose. The Wyvern stepped out of the bathroom, eyeing the dark-haired man to her right, and walked into the kitchen.

The man named Bucky's stomach growled, and she flinched at the sound. When she turned to look at him, he looked almost… sheepish.

He looked a little better this morning, now he was completely dry and had more colour in his face. His bruises were already tinged with yellow at the edges, beginning to heal.

"I'm going to get food," the Wyvern decided. She looked down at her grey, ripped underarmour shirt, and her still slightly-damp trousers and boots. "And clothes."

When she looked up, she saw alarm in the man named Bucky's eyes.

"I won't be seen," she told him. "And if I am, I'm less likely to be recognised than you."

His eyes flickered to his exposed metal arm and he clenched his jaw, but he didn't protest. The Wyvern listened at the front door, then unlocked it and slipped into the corridor beyond.

The Housing Authority was a red brick building with hundreds of small apartments filled with colourful people. The Wyvern had stolen supplies on missions before, but usually she had the luxury of fleeing from a location after a theft, rather than walking back down the hall. She eventually climbed to the roof, then scaled the side of the building. She stealthed into a few apartments that way, treading silently through peoples' homes as they slept. When she climbed back to the roof and then down to the safehouse, she had three plastic bags full of food, and another stuffed with clothes. She'd had to guess the man named Bucky's sizes, but she had a keen eye for detail.

She was sure that the residents of the Housing Authority would notice that some of their belongings and groceries were missing, but there was no way the thefts would be traced back to the darkened room on the corner of the building. She'd taken nothing worth calling authorities over, either. She hoped.

When the Wyvern let herself back into the apartment, she half expected the man named Bucky to have vanished. But he was sitting at the kitchen table, looking down at the open laptop. From the surprise that flickered across his face as she entered, the Wyvern guessed that he had been expecting her to take off as well. She found herself – inexplicably – offering him another smile. It was small and tight, but they both felt the tension in the room dissipate.

Her eyes flickered to the open laptop as she placed the plastic bags on the kitchen table. Her wings were propped against the fridge.

"Captain America?" she wasn't used to hearing her voice. She never spoke unless reporting to a handler or faking it for an undercover mission. Asking a question because she was curious was completely alien. She wondered what she sounded like.

The man named Bucky grimaced. "Alive." He shut the laptop. "He's strong."

"I remember." She placed perishables in the fridge. She hadn't really known what sorts of food to steal, as she was usually fed on nutrition bars perfectly designed for her enhanced body. She'd gone for similar types of bars: protein and muesli. She'd also grabbed canned foods, biscuits and bread. She had no idea how much of each a person might need to live.

"You fought him?"

She looked back at the man named Bucky. He was watching her with a furrowed brow.

She sighed. "Yes. We both did, two days ago. He called you Bucky then, and they put you in the chair." She could see some sort of recognition filter into his eyes. She reached around the fridge and lifted her left wing, opening it slightly. She showed him the dent in the metal skeleton.

"He pulled me out of the sky, and his shield did that." She could see that he wasn't suitably impressed. "This metal is Adamantium. It's meant to be indestructible." The man named Bucky's eyes widened.

As she turned to put the wing back, she wondered why she'd felt it was so important to convince the man named Bucky of Captain America's strength. She followed the thought, and when she had it, she turned around. "He's strong. He's going to get better."

She'd wanted to comfort him. That was not an instinct she was familiar with.

It seemed to work, though – the man named Bucky relaxed a little in his seat. The Wyvern pulled clothes out of the last plastic bag on the table, splitting them into two piles. He watched her work.

"What do I call you?" she eventually asked, not looking up at him. She sensed him go still.

"You… I…" he struggled with the words for a few moments. "You can call me Bucky."

At that, she let herself look at him. He was frowning, but nodding, as if he'd come to a decision.

"Bucky," she murmured, and his grey-blue eyes flickered to hers.

"What do you want me to call you?"

She eyed him. "Do you remember if I had a name?"

His brows pulled together and he looked down at the table. She could see his thoughts churning, and he winced – she supposed he got the pain behind his eyes as well, then.

"Call me Wyvern," she told him.

He looked up. "Wyvern."

She remembered him saying it yesterday, his voice cold on the comms. This wasn't like that – he said it like a name, now, and not a designation. He said it like he was meeting her for the first time. Her hands stilled in sorting the clothes.

"We can't stay here for long," she said.

"No," he agreed, reaching for his pile of clothes. "They'll be looking for us – HYDRA, S.H.I.E.L.D., the government, whoever's left. I left an agent alive in the bank, he'll probably talk."

The Wyvern stared at him. "Why?"

He seemed to crumple a little under her incredulity, but he met her eyes. "I… I went there because… I didn't have anywhere to go, and they were responsible. I killed the others, tore the chair apart, but he begged me. Said he had a daughter. I realised this was the first time I had the option to not to kill someone. I took it." His grey-blue eyes were steady on hers, and he lifted his chin.

She sighed. She could hardly judge him for that when she'd made the same choice with the S.H.I.E.L.D. Quinjets. And the idea of choice both thrilled her and sent an electrifying jolt of fear into her gut.

"That was his mission," she said, gesturing at the laptop. Bucky's eyes flashed. "To stop people from being killed. We could go to him. He's got friends."

Bucky was already shaking his head. "No."

She eyed him for a few moments, taking in his tense shoulders and the firm glint in his eyes. He seemed to take her silence as disagreement, because he continued:

"I tried to kill him. I don't even… I don't even really remember him. He's in hospital. You know about the shit in my head, I don't want to…" he trailed off, his hands clenching and his eyes darting back and forth.

"Alright," she replied, and watched his agitation settle. "We should be safe here for a few more days. We can wait for our wounds to heal, and I can build us some covers. But then we should get out of the city. Out of the country."

He nodded and stood, holding his jumble of clothes against his chest. "A few more days," he agreed, and sidestepped around the table, heading for the bathroom. Halfway there, he hesitated. He looked over his shoulder at her.

"We?" His face was carefully blank, but she had long ago learned to read past that.

She levelled her gaze. "That's the mission."

He smiled again, a quirk of the corner of his mouth that startled her even expression away from her face, and then turned back to the bathroom.

Bucky came out of the bathroom in jeans, a black undershirt and a green and blue plaid shirt. The Wyvern had gone to the bedroom to change into her own pair of jeans with a black t-shirt and red knit sweater.

They took a moment to stare at each other. The Wyvern knew she'd never seen the Solider – Bucky – in anything so casual. They'd never gone on undercover missions together that she could remember, choosing stealth and speed over infiltration. He didn't look quite as bulky and intimidating now he was out of his black Kevlar combat suit, though she knew he was a dangerous opponent no matter what he wore. They both wore their combat boots, as she hadn't been able to find appropriate shoes in their sizes. Her eyes flicked over Bucky once more – he seemed a little more comfortable in these clothes, though the Wyvern felt stiff and exposed.

She shifted her weight. "There are gloves in the bag on the kitchen table. And we've both got jackets."

"Thank you."

Once again, he'd startled her. Her eyes widened. She couldn't remember being thanked before, for anything, let alone for providing an ally with clothes. Bucky seemed to realise the cause for her surprise, because his eyes softened.

"Thank… you," the Wyvern replied, frowning as she formulated the words. She was sure she meant them, but she couldn't remember ever saying them before.

Bucky's lips quirked. "Let's eat."

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