969/Fugue State

Fugue State
Date of Scene:	14 June 2017
Location:	Hell's Kitchen, New York City
Synopsis:	Confused and disoriented after Claire Temple and Mercy Thompson interrupted his reconditioning session, the Winter Soldier visits Claire for answers.
Cast of Characters:	Claire Temple, Winter Soldier
Tinyplot:	Tayaniye

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Claire Temple has posed:
For all Claire Temple privately bemoans what little life she has left: free of her long shifts, free of her vigilante patients she can't abandon or neglect, free of that driving passion to /fix/ a world that too-long been broken --

-- she finds herself needing it. Tonight finds her with neither work nor her burner phones ringing, the rainy summer night quiet, and Claire Temple feels herself quietly losing her mind.

Without work to distract her, and with all the time of several lonely, late-night hours, Claire marinates in the thoughts she's been days' avoiding.

She thinks on the secrets she's been keeping. She thinks on the picture of a man cuffed and fettered into a chair, burns on his skin from electrocution. She thinks of the weight of a gun in her hands, the feel of it kicking in recoil, and how one bullet empties a body of so much blood.

She's spent two days outstepping these thoughts. Yet they, like all things, eventually catch up.

They leave Claire slumped in the center of her bloodstained couch, staring at the black screen of her television not yet turned on. Every time the phantom grease of blood glues up her hands, she dilutes it with another deep swig of her beer.

Winter Soldier has posed:
THe sound of the rain outside drowns out his steps. But even without the rain covering his approach, it would still have been soundless.

The first and only hint Claire receives that she is not alone is the errant movement of a shadow across the wall. It moves like something alive, not like a random flutter of a curtain or the passing of a cloud. It is the shadow thrown by the backlit form of a man in the bedroom at her back, one who came in softly through the fire escape window. One who is now tracking water on her floor, because he came through this weather with no umbrella, no coat, no nothing.

He doesn't announce his presence. Perhaps he thinks that she isn't aware he is there. Perhaps that's what he intends, because he's here to tie up loose ends.

But he doesn't make any move. Not yet. He remains where he is, out of her line of sight, head bowed, the ends of his hair slowly dripping.

Claire Temple has posed:
The rain beats the windows. The rain scours every frame and corner of her crumbling building. Her apartment amplifies the sound and drowns Claire in that distant roar of water.

Though even if it were not all she hears, suffused in noise, she still would not -- would not have ever -- heard him. Not a wraith like the Winter Soldier.

The woman stares sightlessly through her quiet television, her eyes mirrored with thought. Her lager, half finished -- one empty bottle littering the table before it -- never strays too far from her mouth. She takes another drink -- and the knife of a shadow, long and thin, glides darkness down her wall.

Claire freezes. She is not alone.

It's not the first time she's been attacked in her own home; not the first time she was hurt and dragged away screaming. It could be another mob after her, having finally figured out what she is and where she lives. It could be someone else, masters of the man whose life she stole. The man Thompson let go told them they're making a mistake --

The last thing she wants in her hands is the first thing Claire reaches for. She uses her ankle to nudge her messenger bag, left leaned on her coffee table the past two days, closer. Inside is her gun, last place she stashed it -- since she used it.

She quietly trades her lager for the heavy revolver, curling it into her ten fingers. Aware of her bedroom beyond her line of silent, hearing no longer the rain but her own thudding heart, Claire closes her eyes in a moment of preparation.

Then she stands quietly. Quietly for her standards, not for his, but she moves on her toes, gun pointed forward, aimed into the shadowed doorway of her bedroom. Unwilling ever again to be frightened out of her home, Claire turns abruptly, swiftly, to point her weapon in.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Claire moves. Silently, to her view, but the Winter Soldier hears every step, every breath she takes, every erratic flutter of her heart. He hears... and he does nothing. He only waits for her to round the corner.

When she does, she will find herself pointing her weapon at the wet and bedraggled form of the man who called himself 'Yasha.' He looks a little worse for the wear, though more in the mental sense than the physical. His only visible wounds are an ugly bruise smeared across his jaw and a shallow cut across his brow.

He does not seem threatened or impressed about her gun. He doesn't seem to notice it at all, in fact. He stands like a sleepwalker, dazed and unsure of himself.

"You are still here," he says, after a long silence, and with some considerable effort.

Claire Temple has posed:
There he stands on the other side of her gun. Back from nothing. A stray come back in from the night.

Claire is certain she'd never see him again. She is certain she lost him those two nights ago -- lost him for good.

For a moment, all she can do is stare: her widening eyes drink the Winter Soldier in his gestalt. The frame of his body. The heavy bow of his head. His metal arm. The cut on his face. The drip of rainwater from his hair.

And those words he says to her through the dark.

She takes her gun off him, quickly, hastily, because he is not a threat -- not to her. He is something else; he is the memory she cannot ever chase from her mind of a man locked into a machine and hollowed out of everything that makes him human. Looking at her with empty eyes. An object waiting for her to tell its meaning.

Setting the weapon down on the floor, desperate to have it out of her hands, Claire straightens and steps forward. She pauses within arm's reach of the Soldier, her hands twitching with urgency.

"Never left," she blurts back. There's so many things she wants to say. Wants to ask. But there's only one thing she needs to know. "Are you OK?"

Winter Soldier has posed:
It is all the same to him, it seems, whether the gun is on him or not. He does not react to her haste in lowering the weapon. He does not react to the quick way she comes to him.

Not at first, anyway. After a moment, his eyes lift briefly from the floor between them, and he takes visible notice of the fact she stands within arm's reach. That transparently puzzles him, and his brow furrows a little as if she's just done something that makes no sense and which he cannot comprehend.

Eager to have the weapon out of her hands, she puts it on the floor. That brings him to frown vaguely. "Shouldn't put that on the floor," he says, though he does not stir to fix this outrage.

Staring fitfully at the pistol on the floor, it takes her addressing him directly to get his attention to return. He blinks, squints at her owlishly, as if within those brief few moments he had forgotten who she was and why he was here. Slowly, the recollection returns. Is he OK, she wants to know.

He struggles to think, as if through a jumble of jigsaw pieces in his own head. "What is 'OK?'" he finally asks. He cannot report on a condition if he does not know what the condition entails.

Claire Temple has posed:
The man she pulled from a machine chides her about the gun.

Claire pauses and slants her abandoned revolver a momentary glance. It passes through her attention like a ghost. She thinks nothing more of it, save from the relief to have it out of her hands. Her attention focuses solely on the man in her bedroom -- a look on his face like someone lost and trying to decide if he wants to be found.

Every reflex in her hands begs her to see to his superficial cut and bruises; she feels so helpless and it's something she can do. However, she holds still, patient.

The Soldier's question tightens her chest. Claire's eyes search his. It transcends innocence, the way he speaks. Like an animal's basic failure to comprehend. And they seem to treat him like an animal...

Those cuffs. Those needles.

"I ask myself the same thing often," she answers airily, needing her wryness to suffer the way her heart is breaking. "Whatever it is, it's definitely not you."

Her eyes soften. "Do you remember who I am?"

Winter Soldier has posed:
Despite her urge to see to his superficial wounds, she does not. She holds still. It's probably the correct decision, because he looks like any sudden movement might set him off-- frighten him into flight, like some tentative wolf, just outside the ring of firelight, not yet ready to come in to the domesticating hand.

She just asks if he's OK. He struggles with the concept. He doesn't seem to know what she means, what sort of context he's supposed to assume. Is the mission OK? Is he operating OK? Is his performance OK? It does not occur to him to consider that she means something much more intangible, something not related to a job. To a kill.

She tells him that whatever OK is, it's definitely not him.

He looks confused. His gaze slants back down to the floor. Her eyes and tone soften as she asks if he remembers who she is, and the unaccustomed and unfamiliar tone brings him to shy a step or two back: the cagey, wary step of a nervous animal.

"...Yes," he admits, his gaze slanting sidewise up to meet hers, uncertain. "Why did you interrupt my maintenance?"

Claire Temple has posed:
He remembers. She can't hide her relief. This is good. This is a start. As for the rest...

Claire Temple knows fear. It's every day of her life: her neighbourhood, her profession, her twelve-hour shifts.

It's all she sees. And it's her job to also try to soothe; she knows not to press and not to surround. She knows what tone of voice to use and which sorts of words work best. She knows how much it helps to be patient.

And good with fear -- though not so much her own -- Claire recognizes it in spades across the Winter Soldier. She decides to treat him no different than any patient of hers, someone surrounded in so many unknowns, afraid, and unable to trust -- not even their own bodies.

His question presses her lips down into a brief line. Her eyes also avert, slanted briefly away into the dark, as they reflect the memory of her hands killing a man. Choosing to kill a man.

"Because I couldn't live with myself if I didn't," she answers, low, clear, honest. She looks him over a second time, her eyes strained. "I want to give you a longer answer. But I also want you to get warm, fixed up where you're bleeding, and maybe to eat something too. Are you cool with that?"

Winter Soldier has posed:
Her answer does not seem to relieve any of his confusion. But she promises to give a longer one.

He doesn't look like he's convinced a longer one would provide any more clarity, but he is curious enough-- or maybe just desperate enough-- to linger and see. She offers to feed and tend his injuries first, and he hesitates a few moments before he slowly nods.

The Winter Soldier doesn't sit down afterwards, doesn't try to make himself comfortable, and it's obviously not because he is too polite to do so without asking permission. It's more because he does not understand this is the logical next step.

This level of dysfunction in him is strange. However murderous and insouciant he was before, he at least seemed to act like a person. Something about interrupting that procedure broke... something in his mind, it seems, because he stands passively and stares into space as if trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle in his own mind.

He doesn't say what ramifications might come down from their interruption of the procedure-- their killing of a man. He doesn't say how he cleaned it all up. Perhaps the two omissions are related.

Claire Temple has posed:
He nods; she just looks quietly grateful.

Claire does not reach for the Soldier; she does not make any outward attempt to touch him. She only lingers back through the threshold of her bedroom, casting him a single glance back to ensure he follows.

She leads him to the familiar main room of her apartment -- small and cagey and darkened -- and though she stops once to turn on a table lamp, she leaves her home swathed in shadow. The darkness may well comfort him; she knows well enough too much light can leave anyone painfully exposed.

With another check back on him -- Claire seems either certain or fearful she'll lose the Winter Soldier back into nothingness the moment she neglects him -- the woman busies herself with new tasks. Towels from her bathroom. Her triage kit carried over to the coffee table. And, after a thought, taking a detour to her tiny kitchen to retrieve something else.

An orange. Claire lays some towels down on the couch, and sets the orange on top of them in wordless offering. A gift if one so dares to come closer.

"Sit down," she invites, trying to meet the hollowness of his blue eyes. "You can rest, I can take a look at you, and we can talk. Why did you call it maintenance?"

Winter Soldier has posed:
She leads, and he follows. It is too similar to that terrible night when she and Mercy took him out and away from that awful chair. He is passive in the same way, compliant to her unspoken direction.

He shies a little away from the sudden lamplight, so her choice to leave the apartment mostly darkened seems the correct one. He makes no move to leave or flee, however, emboldening Claire to start fetching her kit and some towels. She fetches something else too, something that draws his eyes, putting a little flicker of muted interest out in them as she places it down on the towels.

He dares closer at her prompting, picking up the orange and sitting down. He turns it over and over in his hands, looking at it, but he doesn't try to eat it. Not yet.

Especially not when Claire asks why he calls it maintenance.

He looks down at the orange, as if it might have answers. His mouth thins, the man transparently struggling with some internal question. "I lost this," he finally says, lifting his left arm, "a long time ago. They told me the same explosion that took my arm damaged my brain. Sometimes I start to have... fits... or think I am someone I am not. They help."

Claire Temple has posed:
The docility grates at her. Claire, for that reason, tries to couch all her words into requests. As much as a more brittle, restless part of her wants to demand this mysterious man sit and stay put and tell her everything she needs to know --

-- more does she want him to /act/ normal, like a man. Even like the asshole she first crossed paths, and assured her moments of terror with his barbed words and sharp tongue. Even that is far more preferable to shades of someone's broken, hollow glass doll.

What does someone need to do to make a person this way?

So she leaves a trail for him to follow if he'd like. As she organizes her supplies, Claire keeps a watchful eye turned on the way the Soldier comes closer to her couch to sit, that olive branch of an orange accepted.

She unfolds another towel. And, very slowly, telegraphing the movement as carefully as she can so he can see her, see her hands, see the intent of her movement, to carefully drape it over his shoulders, flesh and steel both. He can hold his breath for ten minutes, but she still doesn't want him getting cold.

Carefully, Claire eases down to join him on the couch, her hands in her lap. Her steady eyes quietly absorb every fact he tells her. It's the first time, she realizes, he's ever told her anything. Anything save for that name.

She looks down on his left arm and then back on his face. "What they were doing didn't look like helping," she replies quietly. "You were locked into this thing. It had needles going into you. You were screaming. It's wrong. I thought they were killing you."

Claire's hands curl. "That's why I --" killed "-- stopped it."

Winter Soldier has posed:
It is baffling to see what has become of him. The man she first met was a fierce, confident creature, quick-witted and sharp-tongued, deft and skillful in his appointed domain: murder. This broken thing that has taken his place can barely be called a man, so incomplete and passive he is. He sits where he is told to sit, and holds the offered orange without actually doing anything with it.

Whatever damage was done to him during that aborted session has not been repaired.

He has not lost his wary alertness, however, and when she moves towards him with a towel, those blue eyes turn to watch her carefully in her approach. He ascertains early on that she does not mean him harm, but he still watches her up until the moment she drapes the towel over his shoulders. He seems confused at the gesture, but doesn't complain about it. He actually seems to relax, mollifying far more than one would expect for so simple a gesture: as if warmth is not something to which he is accustomed.

He tenses back up when she joins him-- he does not understand the meaning behind this sort of gesture-- but the warmth seems to be intoxicating to him, and after a moment the tension breathes back out of him. Enough that he gives her an answer that seems to contain some actual facts-- or at least, actual information.

She objects. His gaze turns away, staring off blankly at the wall. "It's supposed to hurt," he says. "That's how you know it's working. Without it I would be... yelling crazy shit. Talking nonsense. I can't do my job without it."

He shifts fitfully on the couch. "I'm not back to normal since you stopped it. I should kill you for it." But he doesn't stir.

Claire Temple has posed:
Even her patience -- honed by years of her work -- has its limit. For Claire Temple, it seems to be hearing the Winter Soldier convince the both of them that torture is essential.

That pain is the natural state of the human body.

It offends her on every level. Offends her that someone was made to believe such a thing -- such an insult to life.

"No, it's not supposed to hurt," Claire retorts, heat stoked in her voice. She tightens her jaw to check it, that temper, flaring like embers when poked and poked and poked by memory replaying against the back of her eyes. They were /torturing/ him. They made him look dehumanized in every way a man could. The sight of him made her feel sick. Made her feel a fury she never realized she had. A coward all her life, and yet with that gun in her hands, she made a choice to fight back. Fight for him.

"If that's true, and you have a mental disorder, that's treated with pharmaceuticals and therapy. Not belting you up into whatever the /hell/ that was and -- " Claire pauses, this time holding her breath to cage her ire. Her dark eyes, restless and urging both, turn on him. "Not a single /bit/ of that is right. Whoever that -- whatever they're saying -- you --"

She can't seem to find the words. And then Claire loses them altogether, frozen in place, attention tethered to particular words he says. He's not been back to normal. The implication is clear.

Wherever he went in the last few days, it's not yet back to those people. Or back to their machine. They would be refrying his brain. Whatever she and Thompson interrupted hasn't been resumed.

Then comes that could-have-been threat. The first time she met him, broken into this very apartment, Claire would be electric with panic and her heart hammering triple-time. That does not happen now.

She only goes very quiet. Her eyes do not leave the Soldier. After that long pause, Claire asks, "Did you come here to hurt me?" She is certain of the answer, but she wants him to say it.

Winter Soldier has posed:
No, it's not supposed to hurt, Claire retorts. 'Yasha' falls into confused silence. He looks at her askance, at the anger tightening her jaw and flaring in her dark eyes. He could continue arguing, but he doesn't. He doesn't seem to see much point in trying to convince someone whose mind is made up, much less about something he himself also considers an absolute.

Neither does he have commentary about whether he has a mental disorder or not. It has never been framed to him in that way, either.

Eventually, impatient with her continual talk about things he does not understand, he cuts her off and begins to talk about things he does understand. His missions. His work. His jobs, which he is now unable to do because of their interference with his session. His normal state, to which he has not returned because of the interruption.

Casually, the Winter Soldier ruminates that he should kill her -- not just for her earlier transgression, but as a preventative against further transgressions in the future. Yet he doesn't.

Something else doesn't happen, either. Claire does not react with fear. The Soldier notices this lack after a moment, and his blue eyes turn to her to study her with frank puzzlement.

She asks if he came here to hurt her.

He stares at her a few moments. Then he looks away, at the orange in his hands. He produces a knife from God knows where-- a combat knife, doubtless well-used on countless throats-- and starts to cut up the fruit without answering.

Claire Temple has posed:
He doesn't answer.

Perhaps, a few weeks ago, and with no stake in this but simply to survive him, Claire would let it go. She would trust in her own use to him, see this through until he was finally out of her life --

-- and then never think of him again.

But the stakes have changed, somewhat beyond her own control: the woman whose self-preservation instinct is so strong she had turned the other cheek on others in need. That was how Claire Temple lived her life for so long. That is how she stares up at her bedroom ceiling at night and regrets. She doesn't want to repeat it again. She doesn't want to cut this tenuous thread unless she's forced to.

And his unwillingness to speak is not forcing her.

Still seated beside him on the couch, her turned eyes looking on silently the way the Soldier pulls a knife to begin unpeeling an orange, Claire makes a decision. Her closest hand moves, slow enough for him to see and expect, but it does not stop. She reaches to loosely cover and curl her fingers around his hands, that half-peeled fruit, the hilt of his knife. To stay the action until he answers her.

As they have always done before, the light touch of her fingers do not cause pain.

"I have a lot of people who say that kind of crap to me. Or that will say it because of what I do. I don't want to think of you as part of them."

Winter Soldier has posed:
He doesn't stop what he's doing for the slow approach of her hand, but she can see him watching it out of the corner of his eyes-- can see him slowly tensing the closer she gets. Finally, her touch reaches a terminus point over top of his hands, over the hilt of his blade, and his tension reaches its peak. He waits for some kind of pain.

None comes. She doesn't do anything else. She just leaves it there.

He stares, a little dumbfounded. He cannot remember the last time someone came close and reached out to him when he was holding a weapon. In fact, he cannot remember anyone ever doing such a thing. The act runs counter to how he is usually treated. Trust, where usually there is none. Faith in his intentions, where usually he is regarded with suspicion and fear.

He tries to keep cutting the orange, but her hand is in the way, and he cannot muster his usual cold indifference to brush her off or harm her. He's left to sit, forced to listen as she tells him she doesn't want to think of him as part of those others who would see her dead.

He turns the fruit over in his hands, the only thing he can do while her hand is on his.

"I'm supposed to go back," he admits, very quietly. As if afraid the people he's supposed to return to can hear him, even here. "I've always been handled. I was told I need to be. I am too important not to be."

He looks down, his brows a knot of confusion. "Ever since you interrupted... there are voices that say something different." He hesitates. "You say something different."

Claire Temple has posed:
No pain comes. No retaliation either.

That is Claire's gambit. And for a woman so unwilling to trust, this is her first step toward something new. New for him, new for her too: that simple, light touch of her hand over his.

It stays the action of his knife; also promising. For that reason alone, Claire lets that single bridge of contact linger. His fingers move under hers, manipulating the orange, and her ring finger absently runs his knuckles. She wonders how many lives ended at those hands.

She should be afraid of him. She should be terrified. For a time, she was.

Not wishing to press him for much longer, and she really wants him to eat something, Claire takes her hand back, relenting to simply remain at the Winter Soldier's side. There, on her couch, still dripping rainwater, shouldering on one of her towels.

The strangest things seem to happen in her home.

Her eyes eventually turn on him, and at first it's to appraise that bruise on him, wanting to check for signs of a fractured jaw --

-- when he speaks, and her eyes flick up to meet his. Claire listens, relief a tide across her face. So they didn't find him. So he didn't go back. He's lucky; she's lucky. She has to be careful about this. She shot a man to help him. Shot a man -- she can't think too long about it without her insides twisting up. She can't just lose him again and have it mean nothing.

"I do," she confirms quietly. "You can't go back. I don't want you to. Until we can figure out what they're doing, and why they're doing it to you. I looked for you. I was expecting to find anything, but not that, not you... in that thing. You wouldn't be here if something didn't feel right for you. Even if you don't trust me, you need to trust that feeling."

Winter Soldier has posed:
He tenses to the subtle run of her fingertip along his knuckles. His hand tightens. He doesn't seem consciously aware of his reactions to any kind of touch. They seem involuntary, responses beaten into him by God knows how many years of torture. The reflexive cringe of someone taught that physical contact means only pain.

With that context, it becomes clear why he locks up any time he is touched in a way he does not expect. He is bracing, continually bracing, to be hurt when hands fall upon him. He has not been touched for any purpose that would not cause pain in decades.

Neither has he touched anyone else, in decades, for any purpose but to end a life. Claire can almost feel the phantom sensation of the accumulated blood caking his hands. Much more palpable, as his deft hands move under her touch, are the many calluses worn into his skin from countless years of handling a gun.

She takes her hand back, after a time. He is as permissive of this as he was of her initial touch. He looks down and finishes cutting the orange, and he tells her as he does that he's supposed to go back. The statement implies that he did not.

She urges him that he cannot go back. Not until they can figure out what is going on. Because something is, and it must be wrong, or else he wouldn't be here-- wouldn't be running from his handlers. The idea seems to disturb him, and he eats his orange in lieu of answering, as if fearful it will be taken away if he delays much longer.

He doesn't seem to know what to do after he finishes. He puts the peel precisely down on the table. "I can't hide here," he eventually assesses. His voice is flat, though not due to anger or any negative emotion. There is simply no affect. "They will come look here." And why would that matter if they did? Confused by his own unexpected thought process, he falls silent.

Claire Temple has posed:
He eats a goddamn everyday produce market orange like he's going to lose it in seconds.

Now Claire Temple always had a bit of a bleeding heart. She puts on her show now about hating cats, because everyone has a damn cat and her allergies are a nightmare, but back when she was a kid -- she liked to feed the strays that lingered around the projects. Pissed her mother off to find her eyes constantly glued shut with allergens after petting them, but -- couldn't stop her. She got a lot of joy out of watching something so hungry get a good meal, and all because of her.

There's no joy this time, watching a man eat as guardedly and quickly as one of those starving strays. She really thought the years inured her heart to a lot of hurts, but this one -- nope. She cracks right open.

In the end, nothing in her darkened apartment takes the Soldier's orange away. Claire, frowning pensively to herself, hands still in her lap, holds her questions to allow him to eat.

She looks at that left-behind peel, carved in one continuous line by utterly skilled hands. He tells her he can't hide here, and for a reason that draws her dark eyes. Is it worry about her in the crossfire?

"We have alternatives," Claire offers, grateful to have danger kept far away from her doorstep, yet unwilling to let this metal-armed man be that lone wolf out in the rain. Hiding on his own. Trying to figure himself out without help. 'We' is a word she intends to keep using.

She turns toward him, one leg bending as she swivels sideways on the couch. Again, when Claire lifts her hands, she keeps them slow and easily within the Soldier's considerable field of view. "Gonna check that cut," she requests, and reaching for the towel she's left over his shoulders, does something that isn't quite first aid, rather fussily arranging the thick fabric better on him, presses of her hand gently down on his right shoulder to want to take the cold out. He can see himself mirrored in her very-close eyes, as she lifts a corner of that towel to carefully try to blot and soak rainwater from around his wound.

"There's plenty of vacancies around the neighbourhood -- places good for stashing things. Or people. If you stick to Hell's Kitchen, I can help you. I know most of what goes through here. I can run you food and supplies myself. It can give you time. Time to think. Time to sort things out. I'll protect you, Yasha, if you want."

Winter Soldier has posed:
If the man is aware of the sad figure he cuts in Claire Temple's eyes, he gives no indication of it. This seems normal to him, a lonely and brutal status quo of constantly looking over his shoulder. Watching his own back. Never letting down his guard, in case someone should take the opportunity to attack him while unaware.

It suggests that there has never been anyone to watch his back for him.

He makes short, efficient work of the process-- as short and efficient as she has seen him be in killing men. The peel that remains is sliced as precisely as an enemy throat. He offers no explanation for his decision that he can't hide in her apartment, and the confusion that enters his eyes afterwards at his own statement suggests that he probably could not give one even if he wanted to.

She doesn't pry. She just offers 'alternatives.' His brows furrow a little, but he says nothing of this.

He does not resist or object, either, to her gentle ministrations-- not all of which are strictly necessary for first aid. His eyes even briefly close in a surprising show of trust. He expresses no pleasure in, nor takes particular note or, her comforting gesture, but he seems to relax after a few moments.

His eyes only reopen when she promises to help him-- to /protect/ him. Some hint of the personality she first saw re-emerges, as he tugs the towel closer around himself with a rusty half-formed chuckle.

"Protect /me/," he repeats, his voice faintly amused. "You saw what I do." But he isn't actually saying 'no.'

Claire Temple has posed:
All of this is promising -- so promising that Claire even dares to hope.

Is all of this symptomatic of some trauma to his brain -- trauma she may have provoked, with her wayward rescue attempt -- or is this something else? Is this a man, stripped of all that torture enough that he can think clearly for once in... how long?

The reality crashes down with what little she knows about him. Next to nothing, save that he is powerful, he is deadly, he has a bit of a smart mouth, and that he seems to think himself little more than an object. Or a machine. But this close, and drying his skin so she can brush her thumb against his temple, brief and light to better see his wound, there is no denying he is /human/. Warm to the touch, made of the same flesh as her, and able to bleed.

He even closes his eyes for her.

Claire goes still, her touch lingering, and not because she's absorbed with that shallow cut on his face. She looks into his face. She bites down on her bottom lip.

If she was ever giving herself a way out of this -- too late now.

Her hand lifts away, and she turns only to retrieve a few supplies from her first aid. "You don't need stitches, lucky man," she tells him absently, "but I'll at least clean this for you."

There comes the sharp sting of disinfectant as Claire, with patient hands, attends to the cut, mitigated only by the automatic way her free hand brushes through his wet hair, cradling his head still in support, and by the sentry watch of her dark eyes. Calm and untroubled, the woman is calm seas and clear skies.

The only tide that disturbs her waters comes from his saucy jab; it curves her mouth at one corner. Claire feels something inside her unknot just to hear him speak halfway human to her. Christ, she finds herself missing it.

"Please," she murmurs back, voice soft with her divided focus, "if all you tough guys didn't need someone watching your stupid asses, then my nights would get a lot more free. Could take a... painting class. Or speed date. Or some crap."

Wry as she is, however, Claire still presses her idea. "Think about it, though. I'm right here, and it'd be a waste not to use me. Listen. Nobody's going to look if you just stay here tonight. Take a break from the rain. I'll fry you a steak. You can take the couch and sleep."

Winter Soldier has posed:
The damage to his mind is so obvious in these moments. She brushes his temple, cradles his head still to see to his wound, and he accepts it all with no resistance. At the least, it's no longer the eerie passiveness of a man who sees himself nothing more but an object to be maintained and manipulated. It is the tentative trust of someone deeply confused, with nowhere to turn, who must place his faith in a near-stranger.

The gentleness of her hands puts a heartbreaking sort of confusion in his eyes, unused to tender treatment as he is.

You don't need stitches, she tells him, her hands gentle as she inspects him. He is silent a few moments, before with a sad sort of pride to remember something so small, he tells her, "I said that to you before once."

Such a small victory, remembering something so meaningless, but it tides him through the sharp sting of disinfectant as she cleans the wound. He does not even notice the pain as he absorbs himself in what else he can remember of that incident. "There was a monster," he recollects slowly. "And the other woman. The coyote. And a man..."

She promises to protect him. Something about the way he answers makes her smile, though he does not understand why. "Not my fault people always want to pick a fight with me. Just lucky you're patching me and not the other guy, less work for you," he says, perhaps to experiment more with that tone that made her smile. Perhaps just because even confused, he's an arrogant son of a bitch.

Claire presses for him to consider staying at least one night. He balks visibly, paranoid after a lifetime of pursuit, but mention of a dry place to sleep and food mollify him slightly. He withdraws a little on himself, but after a moment he nods.

"I leave in the morning," he insists.

Claire Temple has posed:
Between a cleaning from the scouring rain and his own amplified healing, the cut is nothing to him. Claire treats it anyway. It gives her hands something to do; it lets her feel like she can do /something/ to help him.

Never before has she encountered so much trauma so insidious that no medicine she knows of could treat or fix. An idea comes to mind: go back to that vault and see if she can get another, longer look at that ghastly chair. That machine. If it's still there, it might hold some answers -- perhaps even some she may be able to parse.

Maybe.

For now, the Soldier is her first priority. Claire gently swabs the cut, gives it a look, and deems it fine. She does not move away so quickly though; she double-checks it, and lets her treatment slow and linger, because it seems this moment -- whatever it means to him -- implores Yasha to speak to her. He seems to remember --

Claire's eyes meet his. She tries to recall the words he speaks, her gaze going distant with memory, before -- right. "Yeah," she answers encouragingly, "you did. Right after you saved me."

She takes her hands away only, after a brief pause, making the decision to roll up the hem of her top, allowing the Soldier a glimpse of her side: her dark skin broken up with laceration wounds, still scabbed over, still healing. She wants to give him palpable evidence that his memory is not a lie; that he can trust this current running his mind.

Just lucky she's not patching the other guy, he tells her with that same, slow-to-return wryness. Claire does smile again at his tone -- at those words too, at their /implication/, because, what she'd love to say is 'actually, that WAS more work for me, dumbass'. But to mention Sam Winchester by name now is too much too soon, even if he wants to help -- even if she still attests his wounds she treated, however significant, were still this Soldier staying his hand.

He could have done worse. "That mouth of yours is why," she teases, happy to indulge this banter, whatever keeps him from escaping back into that doll-like emptiness, "so it sort've makes it your fault."

But she poses an arrangement. Even if he's not staying with her -- too dangerous, and she respects that -- Claire gives the Winter Soldier one night's safety in her home out of the cold. And he accepts. She can't disguise her relief. "Fine by me," she says easily, not wanting him to feel constrained, caged -- forced in another torture chair without escape. "But I want to make a plan with you before you do. No more vanishing into thin air."

With that, the woman pushes off the couch to stand. "Now for that steak."

Winter Soldier has posed:
If Claire were to ask to return to see that chair, it is doubtful that the Winter Soldier would let her-- even if part of his cleaning of the scene had not already involved destroying it, precisely so it could not be inspected and reverse-engineered by enterprising minds. He just does not want her near the thing, really, does not want her stepping back into the world that it represents. For whatever strange reason, he just does not care for her to be caught up in it all-- and in an odd way that transcends the usual circumspectness required of him as a deadly secret operative.

She says nothing, however, and so he says nothing either. He just holds still, quiet and faraway with memory, as she treats his cut. It is unnecessary-- to him, it might as well be a papercut-- but it gives her something to do and it seems to keep him quiescent.

Presently, he tentatively presents the findings of his damaged mind. He thinks he remembers saying something similar to her, about not needing stitches. It was-- a monster, and some people. He remembers, even if the rest of his mind is starting to crowd with phantom memories he cannot tell the truth or falsity of.

She encourages his recollection by showing him proof that he did not dream the memory-- it is real. It happened. He looks on her still-healing cuts with muted interest, reaching to actually brush them with his fingertips without thinking to ask permission. It does not seem to occur to him that he is touching her bare skin, her side, in a way that might be construed poorly. There is nothing carnal about his hand, nor his gaze. He transparently touches her solely to give himself physical, real proof that this thing happened. He did not dream it.

He pulls back soon enough, The reason for her smiling flies over his head, but her return banter gets him rolling his eyes. A shadow of his old self-- perhaps a shadow of his real self-- peeking through all the ruin and damage of his shattered brain. He doesn't retort, though, and doesn't argue either about her insistence that he stay. Her talk of making a plan, though--

"I don't want a plan," he grimaces, as he shuffles over to one side of the couch and curls up against its arm. "No one can know exactly where I am, any given time."

From the way he looks hopeful about the steak, though, he might be bribable.

Claire Temple has posed:
That macabre chair crosses her mind, as much as Claire Temple would rather forget it. It feels like a catalyst.

A bridge that links her world to his, a world she's never before witnessed or would ever believe true -- an unknown hell of dehumanization and torture. She needs to know more to help him. But, for now, she asks no questions. It feels like too much, and a pressing of painful memory that may have him fleeing her apartment a second time.

What's most important is that he's here right now, an making an effort to keep the mind she have accidentally given him: confused, ungrounded, lost, but with something there that he's not gone back.

Claire tries, in her small part, to help dispel the fog. She shows him her own, still-healing wounds from weeks ago, when that monstrous thing attacked Metro-Gen. With no accelerated healing, they still run deep and ugly lines across her side, over her ribs, the skin purpled with lingering bruises.

She expects him to look, but that touch of the Soldier's fingers is something else, and the woman holds her breath for a beat. He touches so rarely, if ever at all, and even in Claire's memory his hands on her have all been brief, utilitarian things: guiding her through a gas-filled building, handing her through a window. Cleaning her wounds. This is something else, something he does not need to do but wants to, and even more surprising to herself, she lets him.

It feels like he's reading a script off her skin. Though, on Claire's part, all she can think about is how gentle his callused fingers move on her.

Then he pulls back, and she smoothes her blouse back down without a word. Something feels different, at least to her, though she's not immediately certain. Maybe the difference between no longer feeling afraid of someone and actually feeling comfortable around him.

"You know that most of the people I come to scrape off the concrete," Claire retorts stubbornly, patting a hand on the Soldier's closest knee before she uses it to help pull her to her feet, "are dumbasses without plans and without anyone knowing exactly where they are." A beat, and she glances back, repeating his words sardonically, "Any given time."

From his perch, he has clear sightline of her disappearing into her galley kitchen, wrenching open a refrigerator whose door contains more please-keep-cold pharmaceuticals than actual food. Thankfully, butter and a store-wrapped t-bone steak appear to be among what she does have.

A clatter of pots herald the way she pulls free a cast iron pan, settling it on her tiny, two-burner stove. Claire turns a glance back over her shoulder. "Is there anything else you remember?"

Winter Soldier has posed:
It is hard to fully picture how terrifyingly fractured and disjointed his existence must be, as of right now. All his routine has been disrupted, leaving him under assault lost in the kind of mental instability his handlers always warned him about. He has been run with a stable false history and fake personality for so long that the re-emergence of his true self, his true memories, is a painful, baffling experience akin to suddenly going mad.

The thoughts in his head are thing that, to his knowledge, he has never thought before, and yet on a visceral level they have far more ring of truth and reality than the too-pat, too-glossy memories that are all he has known up until now.

Besides, there is some deep animal instinct in him that does not think life is supposed to /hurt/ as much as it does at the hands of his handlers--

Especially now he is discovering softer, more gentle things out there in existence. Gentle things like the work of Claire's hands on his wounds, or the patient way Mercy talks him through her repairs. Soft things like the feel of Claire's skin under his hand. He had not intended to touch her healing injuries, when she showed them to him, but before he quite understands what he is doing, his fingertips are trailing down the ugly marks.

A moment later, realization comes. He wants to see for himself that this is all real. He did not dream it. It happened, and he remembers it happening.

Uncomfortable with too-prolonged contact, he breaks off sooner rather than later. Claire pulls back too, albeit with a pat on his knee that brings him to look at her askance in puzzlement. Not that he objects. "Are you calling me a dumbass," he grumbles as she disappears into the kitchen. Apparently, the rest of his mind can be in turmoil, but the one constant-- especially when he finally feels safe enough to relax-- is his smart mouth.

The reason he is not arguing more strenuously against her friendly insults might have to do with his interest in what she is pulling out of the refrigerator.

But his gaze tracks back to her, rather than the food she's carrying, when she asks that question. His brow furrows a little as he tries to plumb his opaque mind. "I remember a lot of things," he finally says. "The problem is they all contradict."

Claire Temple has posed:
"You catch on quick," Claire quips back, turning a quick glance back over the rise of her shoulder as she makes her way to the kitchen.

The distant, low lamp-light catches her dark eyes and makes them shine. Wryness plays at the curve of her mouth. Gentle thing as she is, there is no way Yasha has clemency from her ribbing. She finds herself liking his smart mouth, annoying as it is. Time to keep encouraging it out.

Trying to ignore the way she still feels the phantom touch of his fingers, ghosting down the nerves of her side, the nurse instead distracts herself preparing the meal she promised him. It gives her something to do, and Claire always thinks best on her feet: thinks best when her damn hands are busy doing something else. And all she is thinking now is how she's going to help him.

Rescue him, it seems. This sounds like a rescue mission.

True to her word not to spook him with too much extraneous stimuli, and already well-acquainted with the Winter Soldier's paranoia, Claire turns on her stove light but otherwise leaves her kitchen marinating in shadow. She finds and handles her things in the dark with a deftness that speaks to years of habit. Habit and early-hour, between-shift meals.

Within moments, her cramped, little place steeps in that unmistakable hiss and smell of clarifying butter. Claire lets the steak go to sear, and lets her attention swivel back on the Soldier, turned with folded arms, her hip leaned against the kitchen counter, and her eyes on him.

She considers him there, on her couch, man and metal arm, and all the scars to match the discord in his mind. She considers the memory of him cuffed in that chair. The sound of his screams. He sounded like an animal.

"Remembering a lot of things is good. Want to know why? The thing about the body is it recycles itself, over and over. Blood cells? Replenish every few months. Bone cells? Years. Except there's parts of us exempt from that, and stay with us pretty much unchanged our entire lives. Cerebral neurons are one. Stuff to do with memory. It's a powerful thing, and not easily lost."

She breathes out through her nose, ventilating a resurge of anger -- anger at /them./ "If you want, why don't you tell me what you do remember? We can figure out what contradicts."

Winter Soldier has posed:
Claire's return quip has the Soldier looking affronted. Clearly a man who doesn't take his own medicine well.

That brief glimpse of a more normal mental state is, however, swift to fade. The Winter Soldier lapses back into the troubled seas of his fractured psyche soon enough, his gaze drifting down to the floor as Claire busies herself in the kitchen. The domestic sounds, in and of themselves, seem to prod at half-remembered things buried in his fragmented mind. He consciously has no memory of any family or friends to speak of, but something about the gentle sound of cooking insists quietly that once-- he did.

Whatever's trying to come to the forefront of his mind, it ironically slips away as the smells of cooking strengthen. It seems whatever unnatural tortures a man can endure, and whatever strange broken thing they warp him into, most men still at their core universally appreciate a good steak cooked in butter.

He looks as interested as if he has not seen or tasted decent food in decades.

His gaze cuts back to her with the suddenness of a wary animal when she unexpectedly breaks the silence. He regards her in silence as she speaks of how most things in the human body recycle-- but not the neurons that carry memory. He looks uncertain, as if not really understanding the higher-level talk, but what he does get is her ultimate question. What does he remember?

He looks down at his hands, at the way steel tangles together with flesh as they twist together. "I remember being a soldier on the Eastern Front," he says. "And I remember being a soldier on the Western Front. Running at battlefields from opposite sides."

His gaze is unfocused, faraway, cast across eighty years of war. "I remember malaria in the jungles," he murmurs. "Burning up in scrub and sand in the desert. Snow in the Caucasus." He falls silent again.

Claire Temple has posed:
Even over the span of eighty years, some things never change.

The clatter of tin pans against an iron skillet. The hiss of a gas burner. The smells of browning butter and the flash-sear of a steak.

Memory comes like the play of faint light. To chase it feels like trying to see the farthest stars in the black night sky: dancing brightly at the periphery and disappearing again to the turned eye.

And a turn of hers catches the unmistakable way the Winter Soldier awaits the promise of food. Claire has never seen such a look from a man -- a /man/. She wants to ask him what it is he usually eats. Perhaps, more specifically, what they allow him to eat. Not meals like this? Does he prepare them for himself? Is it administered otherwise? Is --

Too many questions turns her own stomach. She doesn't ask them. She doesn't want to pull Yasha from this moment, one that might have him trusting her. There's far more important things to ask, anyway, in the little time she has with him.

Such as his memory.

He looks on her with wariness; Claire tries to wait it out with patience. More importantly, she tries not to press or force him past a decision he must make. No more cuffs. Her arms cross, habitual and absent, her fingers pressed to her opposite elbows as she takes in --

-- glimpse after glimpse of a fragmented life. Her lips thin to parse it. Eastern and Western Fronts? He must be talking about World War Two. And after.... jungles? Desert? Snow? Claire thinks. Does he mean Vietnam? The Gulf War? Snow in the Caucasus -- she scrapes what little she knows of world geography. Mountains in -- Eastern Europe? Asia?

"All of those sound like wars," she says. "Wars that go back a long time ago. Wars --"

The steak hisses ominously. Claire, distracted, turns to sear the other side, before busying herself to retrieve one of her plates. "It might help to try to narrow it down. Perhaps to a single city. Or a person's face."

Winter Soldier has posed:
It is, perhaps, the wisest course not to try to ask him what he is usually given, or how. The actual answer is probably more mundane than the worst-case scenario she fears-- the food back 'home' is always bland and plain, and when on the job there isn't much time or call for anything but the most utilitarian sources of fuel-- but asking him about it all would get him thinking about such things again. About his nature as a weapon, about the missions that are still outstanding that he has temporarily abandoned.

Less mental bandwidth for thinking about his past, or his memories, or Claire.

Instead, she keeps him focused on those fragments of memories he can recall. Disappointingly, when she asks what he does remember, all he can give her is a record of war. Fragments of a life lived on the successive battlefields of the 20th century.

She says as much. These all sound like wars. His gaze goes a little faraway, staring off emptily into the distance the way soldiers do after too many tours. "Wars," he repeats-- or agrees. It is hard to tell.

She presses a little for specifics. To remember a soldier's life is well and good, but what about the details? Faces? Names?

He shakes his head. "There are too many. I killed them..." And not a one of them means any more to him than the next. All were the same in the end: victims.

Claire Temple has posed:
No specific details seem to dance within his mental reach. Claire waits, the rote patience of a healer tempering her own restlessness to learn /something/ -- to know /anything/ about him.

But there are too many. Too many he's killed.

Her eyebrows knot, and she breathes through a pang of unease that comes and goes. She no longer fears him, and trusts in her strange way that this Yasha has no reason or inclination to hurt her, but the reminder still comes back: she's sharing a room with a murderer. Perhaps a prolific one at that.

Not that her own hands are clean now to judge. Perhaps, even more strangely, his may be cleaner than hers. Murder out of torture and brainwashing and duress sounds far more innocent than one out of fury and clear intent.

The steak finished on its fast sear, Claire thumbs off her burner and plates the food. When she returns, it's with that very gift she promised the Winter Soldier, offering him possibly his first steak meal in -- decades. She sets for him some cutlery on her coffee table -- even so reckless to give the assassin in her home one of her steak knives -- and invites herself back to the couch, settled on the other end to allow him space to eat.

There's a cageyness to him: feral animals don't like to be crowded when taking their meals. Claire respects this stray too.

"That's fine," she answers, her voice both a soothe and a guide to try to lead him mentally back from so much death. "That part can wait for now. We can go back to -- that first war you spoke of. It sounded like World War Two. What are your memories of both fronts?"

Winter Soldier has posed:
He has not hurt her. But his bland discussion of the countless he has killed-- so many that he cannot even provide her any specifics on any given victim-- is an unpleasant reminder that his failure to hurt her is, in the end, a very conscious choice that he makes, and one he can change his mind on at any given time.

He seems unlikely to, at the least. He trusts her, seems to find her a touchstone for his fractured psyche in some way, and he has come to her aid enough times that she seems to hold some value to him. Whether purely practical or-- by now-- something else.

She also gives him food, which is a definite contributor to his disinterest in killing her. He seems a little wary about taking the plate outright-- about reaching out towards her physically-- waiting for her to instead set it down on the coffee table. His eyes flick askance at her when she gives him a knife; he is confused, but has not lost so much of his experience and canniness to not be aware of the show of trust that such a gesture is.

He takes up the knife. There isn't much difference, in the way he holds it, between a grasp to cut meat and a grasp to cut throats.

The space seems to be appreciated. He even subtly opens it up a little further, turning slightly so he can keep the corner of his eye on her even when he has to lower his gaze to cut. He focuses on the task, breaking it down into small precise pieces, and at first it's not too clear how hard he is listening to her attempts to lead him back away from thoughts of death, and towards any other memories he might have. The silence stretches out after her last question up until she must seriously question if he is even paying attention to anything but the food.

"My memories are of serving as a Soviet soldier. Red Army," he suddenly says. "They're blurry. And I don't remember my childhood before that. I was always told it was because of the grenade that took this--" he shifts his left arm. "But I get flashes of... other things, sometimes. Like I was supposed to be in London and not Stalingrad. To hear English voices and not Russian. I remember fire. A shield."

He falters. He refocuses back on the food. "They always said it was the damage done to me. My memories got jumbled. I needed help to keep it straight."

Claire Temple has posed:
He does not take the plate and porterhouse straight from her hands.

Claire pauses briefly, clearly unused to hovering around the wings of a creature forced into a state of such extreme distrust. But she adapts readily, takes no offence to it, and sets the plate down to the neutral territory of her coffee table.

She joins him on her couch, perhaps wanting to habituate the Soldier some degree out of his supposed loneliness that is both unnatural and dangerous to maintain, though she affords him space -- herself space too, really, this is still so much to take in -- and bends her arm to lean her head tiredly against her curled fingers.

He keeps an eye on her, and Claire seems equally satisfied to stay within the Soldier's eyeline. She is a calm and constant presence, making no twitches, no jumpy movements to sensitize him. On the contrary, watching him eat seems to calm her: something for the eye to focus on, the way he handles a knife and reduces a porterhouse steak to a dozen neat pieces. She works with surgeons who have less steady hands. He could probably give her talent a run for its money.

Silence hangs between them, even long after her questions. Claire gnaws on her bottom lip, torn between pressing him again or allowing Yasha his space. She is prying, definitely, in her way -- even if she means well, is doing this to help him -- and privacy is something she guards well enough of her own. However, she doesn't like the idea of him not searching himself harder for answers. If not her, is there anyone else in his life to push him? Be a soundboard?

Her lips part -- but either on cue or coincidence, he answers. And she listens.

Hardly an expert on war history past a high school education, Claire tries to keep up with the terms Yasha tosses out. She seems to follow it well enough...

As for the rest, that requires medical knowledge. And she calls bullshit on that jumbled memory crap. "Creating memories out of nothing is possible, but pretty rare," Claire answers carefully. "Usually what we're better at is forgetting things rather than crafting new ones. So they told you they're... helping you forget the things that don't belong? That's their story?" Her eyes and mouth thin. "Sons of bitches."

Winter Soldier has posed:
It seems he has lived a life that instilled so much paranoia, that even offered food might potentially be a danger.

His wariness persists as he finally takes the plate-- put down in neutral territory on the table-- and starts eating. He turns enough that he can keep half an eye on her while he's vulnerable, not unlike an untamed wolf, and he eats like one: only taking enough time to cut the food before he's bolting it.

It smacks of too many hastily-snatched meals, taken in only tenuously-safe positions, under threat of possible death.

Even with that much haste, however, his cuts are precise and even, his hands steady as hell. It's hard not to think about other kinds of knifework he must be good at.

She tells him, eventually, that it is possible to create memories from nothing, but it is rare. It's easier to forget things than to build new things wholesale. She speaks with obvious scorn of his handlers' claim that they are helping him forget false recollections, keeping him on the straight and narrow.

For a time, he is silent, trying to work through that in his head. He slowly places the cleaned plate on the table in lieu of speaking, arranging the knife precisely in its center.

"What are you saying?" he finally asks.

Claire Temple has posed:
To see and know he's eating -- a proper meal and one he has a right to -- gentles Claire, and gives her some temporary peace.

To actually watch how he /does/ eat, however, is another matter. Even with a man's etiquette, from the frame of his body to the watchful slant of his eyes speaks of a feral animal's guarded instinct. Conditioned never to find the pleasure in a meal. Conditioned never to trust it will always be there.

Her anger is like a sea tide, washing in with such violent surf that she can barely breathe through the fury; then it recedes, pulled back if never completely gone, and Claire can see again.

He finishes his meal before speaking again, and her dark eyes follow the neat, deliberate way he arranges his knife. She'd never seen her own cutlery given so much respect.

Then that question comes and breaks up all of Claire's thoughts. She holds her own silence a moment, considering.

Perhaps recklessly, even though her movements are still slow, the woman dares closer. She moves to occupy the middle of her couch, because for this she wants Yasha to look at her eyes. She wants him, if not to trust, then to hear the severity of her words.

"They're lying to you," she promises. "I don't know yet about what, but between that story and that chair they were using, there's something they don't want you to know. And like you said, they never got to finish it this time. So you can't let it happen. We can't let it happen. The way they treat you isn't right. You're not a thing, or a weapon. You're a man. And there's some part of you that knows I'm right."

Winter Soldier has posed:
It is an odd thing he does, handling a humble steak knife with precision, respect, and even reverence. But it's his habit to handle any sort of weapon with this kind of aware mindfulness. Humble steak knives have saved his life before.

It also serves as a distraction from what Claire is /saying/-- something to occupy his hands while she suggests that everything he knows, everything he has believed and lived for years, is a lie. That his handlers have things to withhold from him. And that he should think critically about why it is he always feels so confused if he misses a session. Consider alternatives to the accepted reasons...

He transparently contemplates what she has to say. What she suggests.

"I was so certain of myself," he eventually sighs, "before this. I knew my place and the work I was meant to do. I'm good at it. It isn't a bad life. I /am/ a weapon... but there's need for that kind of thing, sometimes. I volunteered to serve. I chose this life, even knowing its... hardships..." He says it like he is trying to convince himself. Trying to cling to that which he fervently believed for decades.

He scrubs his hand over his face. "You saw the worst that it gets-- the only painful thing I'm put through, and out of necessity. Is a cancer patient tortured because he's gotta undergo chemotherapy?" It becomes grossly obvious, from his words, that his conditioned docility must block his memories of how he is spoken of during the procedures.

But his refusal to go back is telling-- and encouraging. If he truly and fully believed all that, he would be walking out the door to go 'home.' There is just enough curiosity about what they potentially might be withholding to keep him back...

Claire Temple has posed:
He speaks, and Claire listens.

She knows so little about him; she's spent so long in his presence, strange as it's been, in these past whirwind weeks, that she feels something close to comfortable around him, perhaps even safe -- and yet she knows /so little/. So she absorbs this as much as she can, little factoids of the life he leads -- knowing full well the truth of them may be a roulette spin. It's hard to say whether these things he repeats are real or only that he believes they are.

And to look at him, it seems he's aware of this too.

"Men volunteer all the time," she tells him, her voice low, serious. "My grandfather did. Serving is a burden, but to think any of them or you as weapons is the justification of monsters. They go home when the war is over. It's their right to. You sound like they never let you do that."

He keeps saying he volunteered -- he chose this. "Maybe you chose something, and it sounded right at the time -- but this isn't it. It's a terrible life. It's --"

He scrubs at his face. Something about the gesture unsettles her: the helplessness of it

"Hey," Claire urges gently, and without thinking, reaches out, carefully trying to take Yasha's hand in hers -- trying to urge it from his face. "I see cancer patients every day. I see people suffering. I see treatment plans that seem like torture. I've /never/ seen anything like you in that thing." Her eyes try to hold his. Her gaze burns like a branding. "Never. They were killing you. It looked like -- and they were talking like --"

Her mouth thins. "I've never hurt anyone. I would've killed them both."

Winter Soldier has posed:
He is very still on her couch, an incongruous figure in that place she has used so often for healing, given he is cut and clothed obviously for a life dedicated to violence. His gaze is distant and unfocused, faraway, straining to look past the countless years and the obscuring veils of potential lies to find some sort of truth to which to cling.

Nothing stands out, in his clouded mind. He is certain of nothing except that he cannot be certain of a single thing.

His eyes flick towards her when she speaks. It is a sharp movement, instantly responsive to the first syllable off her lips, the sort of reaction of someone used to assessing and appraising danger from all angles at all times. For all that alertness, however, he listens passively when she speaks.

Something flickers in his eyes when she says even volunteers got to go home at the end of the war. That a man's willing service does not justify calling him a weapon, nor using him as one.

"I am effective as one," he says, a flicker of odd pride in his voice, and in that murmur is thousands of layers of understatement.

Yet this weapon lets her take his hand when she reaches for it, though he does not meet her eyes. She says she's never seen anything like what was being done to him. She says she would have killed them both, thought she's never hurt anyone before--

His hand tightens, where it's held in both of hers. His fingers curl with palpable strength.

"Talking like what?" he asks.

Claire Temple has posed:
"To say the least," Claire says of Yasha's effectiveness, a feeble wryness in her voice. "That isn't the word I'd use, but -- yeah."

He doesn't meet her eyes; he won't look at her.

But he does let her have his right hand. In that gesture, Claire does not give up hope. Nor does she worry for long that the Soldier may be refusing what she wants him to know, or worse, ignoring or disbelieving her memory against the imprint of his conditioning.

Whatever the branding of his masters, it seems to be unravelling. And she can work with this.

Just as all of her many brief touches before, so does this one come without pain. On the contrary, this one seems to communicate a promise of care. His fingers curl with incalculable power, so much so that a handhold with the Winter Soldier may be no safer than sticking one's fingers into an opened bear trap --

And yet Claire handles Yasha as if he were made of glass, fragile, cracks already spidering along its surface, and barely holding together. Her fingers, long and articulate, second-nature in their tactile memory of the human anatomy, curl over and around his. She holds that point of contact, hoping it to be the bridge for her words.

His question pulls her eyes down on his hand between hers, the shapes of his fingers.

"Like you weren't there. Like you weren't real. Things like resetting you, like they've done it before. Like it's a routine." Claire's eyes tighten at he corners. "Talking like they're taking your entire mind away. Talking like you don't matter."

Winter Soldier has posed:
She handles him as if he were fragile. And in a way, he is. Though his hand coils in hers with a strength capable of powdering her bones with minimal effort, the look in his eyes suggests the brittleness of glass and the tenuousness of a house built on sand.

And that is what he is, really. His entire current self is a pretty personality built on sand.

He doesn't seem to take comfort in her touch, nor to reject it. He simply accepts it as a matter of course, as if used to being handled with or without his consent. He's busy thinking, his brows furrowing a little at the things she says. That isn't the word she would use. "What would you use?" he asks.

He falls silent as her fingers moves, and he finally notices the quality of her touch. His blue eyes turn briefly to her, puzzled at contact that promises nothing but care and affection. He thinks he remembers something like this. His hand stills in hers, docile to her attention. It looks deceptively normal for how much blood she knows coats it-- the things she has seen him use it to do.

She answers his question, presently. He is silent. He knows it is a routine, so that does not surprise him, but the rest...

"Taking my mind away?" There is a gritted urgency to his voice: he will hear nothing but elaboration on this particular point. He doesn't care about being talked about like he doesn't matter. He doesn't care about being real or not. What he cares about is the raw evidence. Raw evidence one way or another what might be real or not.

Claire Temple has posed:
What word would she use?

Claire looks down and away, a sightless distance in her eyes of a woman thinking, wanting to give the Winter Soldier her honest answer. "Beautiful," she says. "Terrifying." Her mouth quirks up briefly, minutely, a bit humoured, a bit sad, and a lot in awe. "A force of nature."

Her fingers move over his, a constant, perpetual motion as if made in deliberate attempt not to allow his nerves to be habituated to her touch. Claire doesn't want her hands to feel like his countless cuffs and manacles and fetters, not something utilitarian and unfeeling and used to restrain. She wants to give his emptied mind a memory, a lesson: not everything in the world is here to hurt.

Her thumb runs his knuckles, back and forth. The touch is light and it yields; he would not even need to exercise his strength to break her grip. Claire wants Yasha his freedom.

Through her explanation, he picks out one thing and presses. It draws Claire's eyes, on him and briefly searching. "They want a way to keep you from remembering. That's what they said. I heard it. They called it a patch job. He said I interrupted a reset. That maintenance bullshit? What they're doing is cleaning your mind out. There's something they don't want you to know, and I'm pretty sure it's you."

Winter Soldier has posed:
Claire gives her answer in two words and a phrase. Some of that familiar ego flickers in his eyes, that returned insouciance and brutal confidence that characterized him the first time they met. His mind has so many holes in it, but over the course of his long life, this has been the one constant for him. "I bled to get that way," he allows.

Yet for all that he seems to embrace his violent nature, he does not reject the gentler touch of her hands. He lets her hold his hand captive in both of hers, exploring it in a continual attempt to acclimate him back to living human contact. Not shackles, not restraining manacles, not his Fenrir-fetters that keep him bound down like the wolf his masters must see him as.

He allows it. But his focus turns to her avowed knowledge of what his handlers say when they maintain him. This is something he confessedly does now know.

She tells him.

He is very still, at first. Then his hand jerks free of hers in one sharp convulsive movement. He shakes his head in agitated denial. His expression flickers, twisting suddenly in confusion, fragments of memories-- real and false-- spinning visibly behind his wide eyes.

"How do I know you're not lying?" he demands hoarsely. "There are plenty of people who'd want to take me out with... with lies... turn me against my mission and purpose..."

From the look in his eyes, however, his own mind gives him enough corrobating material he cannot be sure this is not simple subterfuge.

Claire Temple has posed:
He bled to get that way.

The warrior in Claire Temple gives respect to those words. The healer in her, however, stings in contrary empathy -- hurting for him, for how greatly and terrible he must have suffered. The two sides of her heart want to run contrary opinions, in awe of his deadly power and yet pitying the broken man contained in that vessel --

All she can do is speak honestly.

He tears his hand away.

The suddenness tenses Claire and draws up her eyes, the first thought in her head fear he's reacting to something else, someone else, and for the second time in her life, her home may not be safe --

But it is no assailant from outside this time to the Winter Soldier; rather, this is an enemy from within, as he tries to suffer and survive the storm in his head. Even sitting, he has the air to him like a pacing, wild animal, ready to turn and bite even the hand that feeds, and Claire keeps her hands in her lap, calm, patient. There is no fear in her. She seems to trust him, even in his paranoia. Her first instinct is not wariness but empathy, trying to imagine what he would be feeling. What he must be going through. She has no idea.

"You /know/," is Claire's answer, her voice low, measured. "If you thought you couldn't trust me, you wouldn't have stuck around this long. You wouldn't be here."

There's something flinty in her eyes, a refusal to lose her own battle against his distrust. She cannot offer him evidence except this, but Claire knows it's more than enough. "I know you vetted me. You've tailed me. Kept a pretty close watch on me,. You probably know me better than my own mother. I'm not here to lie to you, or turn you against anything.

"You wanted me to fix you. So I am. So I'm trying." Claire's eyes pinch. "You're safe with me. We're going to figure out what's true."

Winter Soldier has posed:
The assailant, as always, is no more than his own traitor mind.

In what must by now be a familiar sight, Yasha tangles his hands in his hair and presses his own skull as if to somehow extract the truth of things through pure physical force. Physical force has served to solve so many other of his problems.

It does not solve this one.

Claire's soft voice tries to apply logic to his confusion. If he truly distrusted her, he wouldn't have come here. Wouldn't have stuck around. He knows her entire life-- assuredly shadowed her, cross-referenced her, and read through her entire on-record history to verify her as an acceptable quantity to approach long before that first time he darkened her doorstep. He knows she has no reason to lead him astray. Has no dark past as a shadow-operative bent on bringing the Winter Soldier down through doubt and subterfuge.

But there is no logic now that can appeal to his damaged mind. Especially not now the source of his distress is not so much fear of her, paranoia of what betrayal she might be fomenting, so much as the painful implications in her words....

"No," he says, and the word is all the worse for how lost it sounds. "I want to go. You're not safe with /me/."

He rises instantly and makes for the door.

Claire Temple has posed:
Something about her words gets through --

But in a way Claire neither intends nor expects. When the Soldier makes some sort of decision among all the frayed pieces of his mind, and that decision is to /go back/ to that lone wolf bullshit, all the woman can do is stare up at him in her instant of shock.

Fortunately, she gets over it fast. Because while even she knows she can't make him stay, she sure as hell isn't going to let him leave just like this --

"Wait!" she calls, half a step after, and between his reaction time and her own pause, he's halfway to her front door by the time she's pushed herself to her feet. So Claire moves on a sprint, trying to insert herself between Yasha and her own door, her hands outstretched, held inches back before they would touch.

Behind the desperate, stopping gestures of her opened palms, her eyes flare wide. In them shines desperation. Surprise. Frustration. "Have you /seen/ me lately?!" she fires back quickly. "I haven't been safe for a long time. And it's my choice. I made peace -- so just wait a second, please!"

There, Claire tries top stop, tries to beckon the Soldier to stop too, even going as far as reaching for his shoulders if he will not for her. "I give a shit about you, OK? Don't you dare disappear on me, or I'm going to come looking."

Winter Soldier has posed:
Lone wolf status is safe. Lone wolf status means other people's voices aren't blending with the thousands already screaming in his crowded head.

He does what he does whenever the noise gets too much. He spooks and tries to flee. She has to sprint to keep up with his stride, but she does make it. With her own body, she tries to block him from leaving again, disappearing back into whatever self-imposed solitude he inhabits when not around her.

He grinds to a halt inches away from her, his taller body looming too-close in her field of vision. He doesn't step backwards, either, staying in her space and tilting his head down to stare into her eyes.

He stays implacable through her deperate insistence. She reaches for his shoulders and he doesn't stop her, though he tenses palpably when she palms down on them. It feels like both shoulders are steel, and not just one.

That tension doesn't abate when she says she gives a shit about him. It only worsens, in fact, and a troubled look comes and goes across his eyes.

His hand lifts abruptly after a moment. His right hand. He gently, very gently, uses it to ease her to one side, shuffling her out of his way and peeling her hands from his shoulders. He is transparently keeping tight rein on his strength, but even that little force from him is not something she can feasibly resist.

"I'm not going far," he promises tiredly, before he steps past her.

Claire Temple has posed:
The unstoppable force meets the immovable object.

The Winter Soldier is an engine of death, resurrected, built, and smithed by countless hands to cut a bloody swath across countries, empires, governments, wars --

-- and Claire Temple is just one person, not imbued with any ability, not trained, and not particularly special: but she is cored with pure iron.

She dares to intersect his path. It bears him close, possibly closer than she's ever been to him, her back nearly to her front door and the Winter Soldier on the other side. But a breath away, he looks down on her, and in a fit of fearlessness, tenacious to make him understand, Claire meets his blue eyes. Her hands find his shoulders, flesh and metal.

He tenses, and she feels it, though she does not let go. He deserves more than that. She will not be afraid.

Even in the wake of her words, something waits in the woman's dark, sleepless eyes. Her fingers curl unconsciously on his shoulders. Something more she wants to say, wants to do --

Very carefully, but also very deliberately, he eases her aside. Even the Soldier at his most gentle is something Claire cannot fight, and the action unpeels her, helplessly so, frustration and pleading and something frightened in her eyes, the fear that the man she's come to care about may step out of this door and never be found again.

Until he says that promise. Relief yields Claire. She does not stop him now, as much as she'd like to: like to keep him from the rain, like to allow him something warm and safe, if even for a night. "You better not," she says after him.

"You don't get to be alone anymore. Message me tomorrow. Tell me you're safe."

Winter Soldier has posed:
That engine of death stops dead on the threshold of Claire's walling presence, as she blocks off her front door to him. Even ordinary as she is, she dares to stop the Winter Soldier. He has mown through men, women, and children, soldiers and civilians, cities and nations, and she puts herself-- one lone, fragile woman-- in his way.

He looks at her. Her hands rest quellingly down on his shoulders, and tense strength coils palpably under her fingers. There are a few fraught moments in which it is entirely plausible he will kill her.

Then he just eases her gently to one side, using the hand that is not explicitly a weapon.

The frustration in her eyes must mollify him slightly, however, because he offers a promise he does not need to. Information that he will not go far. She speaks to his back a she steps out into the rain, the fitful New York drizzle dampening his hair and making his left arm shine.

His hands curl when she tells him he's not allowed to be alone anymore. All but demands he message her to tell her he's safe.

There is a long silence, in which the questions percolate in his mind. Is she genuine? Or is she some kind of saboteur, sent to destroy him. Could she be telling the truth? Is his existence really...

"I will be in touch," he allows finally, rain shining off his left arm, before he disappears into the dark.