1413/Na lovtsa i zver' bezhit.

Na lovtsa i zver' bezhit.
Date of Scene:	11 July 2017
Location:	Claire's Apartment - Hell's Kitchen
Synopsis:	Summary needed
Cast of Characters:	Claire Temple, Winter Soldier

---

Claire Temple has posed:
A scouring storm drowns the streets of Hell's Kitchen. It pounds down on every crumbling brick-and-mortar building, it rattles the glass of every shut window.

It traps Claire Temple in a constant, concussive drum of noise, amplified by every too-thin wall of her home. Yet, she hasn't even noticed.

Lightning flares stark-bright the darkened streets, yet her curtains pull shut. Thunder crashes violently, but she does not hear it over the phone pressed to her ear.

"No, you gotta pack up, mom," she urges instead, cell phone cradled between her chin and shoulder as she uses both hands to pack. "Yeah, exactly. You could stay with Nell, and she can --"

Claire stops, listening, staring down at her half-filled backpack that occupies the center seat of her couch. She wrestles with the padded straps and velcro of her cast, getting stuck to the folded clothing she tries to quickly stow. Her brows knit. "What? When did Nell move to your floor? Fine. You and her both, you pay cash and stay a motel. You get to Guthrie's. He's near West 151st. Off Powell. Yeah. He sells storage. He owes me. He'll hook you up for a couple weeks. Yeah, he's one of them. Just --"

Thunder hits again, and all the lights go in her living room. Claire startles, surrounded in perfect dark, her lips left parted like she's about to announce it aloud. She does not. She doesn't want to further worry her mother on the line.

Then the speaker hums with an older woman's voice back. What she says widens Claire's eyes with panic. "No," she cuts off. "You don't go to work, mom. That's not -- mom." Her voice thins. "Prometeme."

Her eyes close. Relief cripples her, enough that Claire breaks from packing, leaning her tired, sleepless self against the arm of her couch. "No, I'm fine. Yeah, I'm always fine. Mom... I'm sorry. This isn't -- "

The voice on the line interrupts her. Claire lets go a shaky, deprecating laugh. "Stop saying that, please. Yeah, tomorrow. Now pack."

She goes silent. She looks down at her own hands in her lap.

"Tu tambien."

Claire ends the call, opens the phone, takes out the SIM card, and breaks it in her fingers. She stands to zip shut her backpack.

Winter Soldier has posed:
The night is deceptively peaceful. No calls. No unexpected guests sporting injuries. No fanciful magical monsters. Nothing but the background noise of the city, and-- presently-- the loud cascading rush of a downpour of rain.

In such uninterrupted peace, packing goes smoothly. Phone calls made, arrangements squared away, the last thing to take care of is herself. And Claire manages to make it all the way to her threshold, in fact, before a voice steals through the darkness to stop her.

"Alto ahí." The brief silence after the command weighs with rueful amusement, and the voice adds, "Por favor."

A familiar figure detaches from the shadows of the hall between her living room and bedroom. His left arm gleams into view before anything else, its steel catching the stray hints of streetlight that filter through the heavy rain. His features are next, lit when his head lifts to a cold and appraising tilt.

"A dónde vas?" Humor at his own private joke haunts the slant of his mouth, as he speaks with patient fluency in the language she uses with her mother. "Se requiere su presencia."

Claire Temple has posed:
The last thing Claire Temple always takes care of is herself.

It wasn't always this way. But in the past few months, putting herself dead last is the only thing in a long time that's ever felt right.

She packs her dead phone and pulls out one of her burners, activiating and letting its tiny screen be her flashlight through the dark. No time to even trouble the landlord to check the breakers, and undeterred in her plan, the woman continues stowing a week's worth of what will keep her alive.

This wasn't her idea, really; Claire doesn't want to give up her home. It feels like a surrender. It feels like an abandonment, because -- what if he comes back? What if he gets free of them? What if all he can remember is here, and she isn't home to help him?

But there's too many unknowns. And she can't protect herself, protect her people, here in a place compromised to a group like Hydra. Claire frowns down into the light of her phone. She'll text Thompson when she hits a motel up in the Bronx. She's put the woman out too much. Can't ask to stay with her. She'll remind her to change scenery. It helps to know Mercy isn't entirely alone.

Claire tosses the phone into her pack and closes it. Towed from her good, left hand, she feels through the dark, making a slow journey to the front door. Setting the heavy bag down, she fumbles for her raincoat -- it must be in her bedroom closet -- and turns back. She looks up, and --

-- sees that shine of metal. The Spanish moves through her. She understands every word said, but Claire isn't listening. She's too busy looking gutted with relief, confronted with a face all her worst fears told her she'd never see again.

"James," she says, for that brief moment just so happy to see him. Like his left arm, her eyes shine.

Then it hits. The only reason why the Winter Soldier would be here, standing in her home, asking her where she's going, and smiling. Smiling as he tells her that her presence is required.

"You remember me, James," she tells him, taking one step back. "You know me."

Winter Soldier has posed:
Her happiness to see him hits the brick wall of his blank face and empty eyes. The meager facsimile of a smile that's haunting his mouth dies a quick death, rotting back off his features. Not even the Winter Soldier can find all /that/ much to smile about in these circumstances... especially not an expression he is not programmed to understand or respond to.

It's just work, after all, even if he believes in doing as thorough a job as possible. He's not a cat to play with his prey too overly long; not more than necessary, anyway, to put them in a tractable state of mind.

James, she says. He stares through the name. It might as well be a completely meaningless word to him.

You remember me, she keeps trying. You know me.

"Claire Temple," he answers. His voice is clear, affectless, and unobstructed. Though he's dressed in working gear, armed and lethal and sleek as one of the knives sheathed at the small of his back, he's not masked. No point, right? "092-72-3495. Born at Harlem Hospital Center. Parents Soledad Temple, 582-37-9879, father-- well. Doesn't matter. Dead since 1992." His head cants. "Shooting."

His lidded eyes are empty of emotion or interest in anything he's saying. "You got a scholarship and became a nurse. It was your way out. Now you work at Metro General, far below where your skill and intelligence could have you working. Now you know a lot of interesting people."

His gaze goes distant. "Yeah. I know you. You don't need me confirming everything else I know about you, line by line, piece by piece. All you need to know is that we are interested."

When did he get this close to her? He's practically at arm's length. "You're lucky," he says. "You were offered an invitation." His mouth coils in the familiar insolence that she would remember from their very first encounters. The sharp arrogance of the Winter Soldier. "Not everyone gets to be escorted in on /my/ arm."

Claire Temple has posed:
He confirms her soft request.

And the darkness between their bodies fills with his voice, repeating fact after fact with surgical precision. Claire listens to it all, her entire and not-so-significant life under the lens, everything she's experienced, felt, and done reduced to little more than a few sentences.

The cold remove of it all drops her shoulders and opens her hands at her sides. Sickness rolls through her gut with the realization. It's just as she feared. They got to him. They redid everything she interrupted. She promised him he'd be safe.

Claire blinks her burning eyes. The world narrows out of focus, and she tries to concentrate on her breathing, though even that is hard to do -- drowned out by some deafening sound. She does not realize it is simply the sound of her own blood, moving past her ears. Despair swallows her.

She forces it back. It's not over. She's not finished.

Sobering, the woman comes to, realizing already the Winter Soldier is too close. Close enough she can see the paleness of his eyes in the dark. Close and offering her some gentlemanly escort to her new life -- one among the monsters that enslaved him.

Claire sidesteps to put her couch between them. The same couch he bled on the first night he stepped into her life. She steps away, out of arm's reach, her eyes on him. "Try again," she demands, something steely in her voice. "Anyone can look up that stuff about me. You /know/ me, James. They get into you, but they can't erase you. You keep coming back, and you're gonna come back again. I treated you. You saved my life. I promised you I was going to help you remember, and -- and I can. I know who you are. You have to /come back/ to me."

Winter Soldier has posed:
"Can 'just anyone' look up the fact you cried yesterday night after your shift ended?" His tone is soft and toneless, save for the vague curiosity that inevitably must accompany the asking of a question to which one presumably wants an answer. "Fourteenth floor stairwell."

His eyes are the brightest spot of color about him, as pale and vivid in the dark as glacier ice soaked blue by the fathomless sea. "To your credit," he allows politely, "it was for less than a minute."

He slips into silence. His eyes stare through her, pensive and hollow and patient in the dark. They only focus to her sudden movement, flicking towards her as unerringly as the eyes of a hawk to movement in the meadow.

They observe the obstacle she places between them with little interest or concern.

She is still talking, saying something about how she did this and that and how he saved her life, calling him by a strange name and talking about how he has to come back from-- somewhere. His bored eyes look through her with machine patience. There was only one thing she said that really caught his attention.

Try again.

"There is no second try," he says.

He moves immediately afterwards. It is so fluid, so viperishly quick, that the average eye has trouble following it. No tell-tale tensing, no wind-up, no nothing. He is simply before her in an instant, inches away, backing her against her front door with that same bored patience. You have to come back to me, she insists.

"Here I am," he says, with an ironic twist of his mouth.

It is a mirror of her nightmare. There is no indication whether it will end the same way.

Claire Temple has posed:
His admission branks Claire into stunned, breathless silence.

Because, no, just anyone cannot. Because she was alone. Because she was hiding in the unused fourteenth floor stairwell like a coward. Because the weight she carries, if just for a moment, became too much for her to bear, and she was thinking of him, thinking of every life she let down or had lost through her fingers, and her own tears were wetting her wrists.

She only let herself cry for a minute. A minute is all she is allowed. A minute, or even less. And he was watching her.

The only hope she had to keep her going was the belief she would get him back. Save him, guide him back to his memories and his mind, and see something good come of her broken promise. How long has he been watching? How much does he know? Did she really think her scant plans with her few allies would be enough to oppose monsters who've had decades to refine his enslavement? "James," she implores, in what sounds too close to an apology.

He dismisses her hopes as easily as he does her physical escape, simply there, simply moving until he is inside Claire's personal space. So close she could touch him. So close he could touch her.

Panic stumbles her backward, as far as she can get, until her front door knocks all the bones in her back.

Claire shudders under a nauseating sense of deja vu. Because --

-- this has happened before. Exactly as this. Exactly as she remembers. From that dream. From that nightmare. From that night where he stood before her as he does now, told her she should have let him die, and broke her neck in his hand.

But she woke from that dream. She will not wake from this if he so chooses to repeat it. She will die and make victims of them both.

Claire Temple looks so little where she shrinks against the door. Terror trembles her, and she brings up both arms, one still broken in its cast, to protect her. There is no second try, and she seems to believe it, from the way she does not even struggle: from the way she does not even fight. No second try --

Except there was.

The first time, in her dream, she was afraid. In his, she was not. In his, she reached for him to pull him out of the dark. Stop being afraid, Claire. No more fear.

She does again like she did in her dream. She takes a half-step from the door to cull the few inches left between them. Looking up at the Winter Soldier, her eyes shine black in the dark. He can stop her, he can hurt her, and he can kill her, but still she lifts a hand to try to touch his face. She promised once she wouldn't let him go.

Winter Soldier has posed:
In both his lives-- as James Barnes, during the war, and as the Winter Soldier, through all his decades of ice and death-- perhaps his most defining skill is his skill as a sniper. It has always been one of his sharpest abilities, and not just because of his pure marksmanship, but also because he understood on a visceral level the unique roles of a sniper. What they are there on a battlefield to do.

They're not just there to kill targets from a distance. They're there to use superior knowledge and superior positioning to sow terror. They're there to attack from a remove with fear: fear inspired by the fact someone is watching you that you cannot see, cannot locate, cannot fight back against, cannot detect until it is far too late--

That principle forms the bedrock of why he tells her what he saw, while she thought herself alone. It is a reminder that however private she might think herself at any given moment, she is not safe from his eyes. It is an introduction of uncertainty: how much does he know? Does he already know everything? However much she and hers might scheme and plan, their efforts are as nothing to the patient predator's experience of the monster they would pursue.

The wolf they would bait is already hunting them.

He is in her personal space between heartbeats, so suddenly it startles her backwards. Her spine hits her door with a jolt of unwelcome deja vu. She's been here before. And the last time, he...

No second try, he says.

He looks down at her, small and shaking, her arm still broken from the ordeal he risked his own life to save her from. He does not seem to remember. His distant eyes are bored, languorous, expectant of her lack of struggle. What can she do against him, after all?

She finds something within herself. It brings her to step forward, towards him; the unexpected approach brings him to blink. No predator expects prey to come volitionally close. It throws him off enough that he does not move or react when she finds the courage to raise her one good hand and touch his face.

He looks down pensively into her eyes. His own do not blink even when her spreading fingers fan across his cheekbone.

"Claire," he wonders, as if sleepwalking through a nightmare.

His right hand lifts, and his fingertips press softly into her throat. She's a nurse. She'll know he's cutting off her carotids, and she will know to what purpose.

Claire Temple has posed:
No more fear.

Claire Temple remembers her dreaming. She remembers that faraway desert night. She remembers the fire and smoke. She remembers the screams. She remembers the little coyote at her side, her guide, moving like a wraith through the dark, and always urging her on.

She remembers her decision not to be afraid of him.

To fear is to damn herself. To fear is to let him down. Too much depends on her, lives hanging in the balance, that Claire cannot disappoint them with her cowardice. She's spent too long being afraid, and she won't do it now.

With even the memory of her own neck breaking, that pop of bone in her ears and painful crunch heralding empty nothingness --

She steps forward. And just like the dream, she arrests the Winter Soldier into bemused silence, conditioned to begging, to crying, to the mindless terror of cornered animals, but not to a woman who willingly walks into the jaws of the beast.

One before, her touch pulled him from the dark. There is nothing else for Claire to do but to hope she can do it again.

He doesn't raise a hand to her. He doesn't wield a punishment for her audacity. Her hand, unopposed, finds his face, and the tips of her fingers trace the line of his cheekbone. A touch without pain.

The Winter Soldier speaks her name. Claire shudders with relief, tears licking free from her eyes.

"Yeah," she promises, desperate to encourage him, lifting even her broken arm to to cup his jaw with her right hand. She repeats the words of their dream. "Found you again. I promised you. I won't --"

He touches her. His fingers, like their last memory, beseech her so carefully. Gentle when running the wounds on her side. Gentle when brushing her determinedly away. Gentle now when --

Realization pinches Claire's eyes. She feels the first numbing rush of a deepening blood choke. Nine seconds to unconsciousness, and she's already wasted three. She didn't do it. She didn't reach him. She didn't bring him back...

Tears streak her cheeks. Her hands tighten to hold him. Five seconds. Pressure behind her eyes. Vision narrowing. Hard to focus. Say it now while she can.

Her words thicken and slur, but Claire begs, "Your name is James Ba --"

The last word glues inside her throat. Her eyes unfocus. Her hands slacken. She goes boneless.

Winter Soldier has posed:
His head cants to her approach. It is a curious, animal gesture, befitting the wolf Mercy analogizes him to-- the tilted regard of a predator bemused to find prey willingly walking to meet it. His conditioning understands pleas, it understands screams and terror and tears. It does not understand the gentle touch of a woman reaching out to him, to make some connection that will not end in either pain or death.

It cracks, infinitesimally, as she reaches to lay her hand-- a hand whose whole purpose is to soothe and heal-- along the arc of his cheekbone.

He says her name. He does not say it in the clinical, dead way he said it earlier. He almost seems to ask a question with it, as if to inquire why she is doing this, and where he is, and what is happening in his head...

Her other hand joins the first. She takes his jaw in its palm. Still, there is no pain. There is, instead, almost a sense of familiarity... and when she speaks to him, it seems to him he has heard her words before. Somewhere...

His left eye twitches. His mind clicks back into its enforced calibration. His gaze dulls and goes cold again, distant and empty and dark as a snowfield under a clouded sky. He reaches to touch her back, but his fingertips land on her arteries.

They press down, mechanical and rote, in a gesture he has performed countless times before. Over the course of the nine seconds it takes her to lose consciousness, his eyes stare off aimlessly past her, not even meeting hers, his expression as bored and empty and transactional as if he were waiting for a pot of water to fill.

That only changes in the last second before she blacks out. Just before darkness claims her, as she struggles to tell him his name, she might imagine that she glimpses the sight of his eyes starting to turn her way.

The Winter Soldier catches her body deftly as it slumps. His left arm cradles her shoulders, his right sliding beneath her knees to hook her easily up into his arms. He has already forgotten whatever it was she was trying to tell him. He has already forgotten her name. She is a completed mission now. He will dispose her, and move on.

There are still other missions that must be carried out, and his time is limited.