verb.
To fall back under pressure. To shrink back physically or emotionally.
noun.
The kickback of a gun upon firing.
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It takes a stubborn mind to cling to their humanity when the world seeks to strip it away.
It takes a desperate soul to reach f...
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It had all been too much, the girl, the things she had said, the way she had suddenly appeared and then was simply gone.
Of course, he had let her go – he had needed to. He couldn't breathe in that space, her words swimming around his head. It had all been too much in that moment, he had needed her gone and somehow she had sensed that. Part of him had anticipated a fight to make her leave, but she had slipped away so quietly that in the moments after her footsteps had faded from beyond his door he almost struggled to believe that she had been there at all. But she had, the physical evidence of the encounter was laid out in the crack he had left in the linoleum countertop and the neatly written details on the back page of his notebook.
The other evidence existed in the form of the sparse information she had shared before he had cut her off. Words and dates that left his fractured mind spinning as it tried to match memories to what she had said.
We met in nineteen eighty-nine.
I was brought in to maintain your arm, back in Siberia.
Running away was never something I was good at.
You saved my life.
I was always on your side, Barnes.
She clung to him like the cold in his bones, a constant reminder of where he was, what he was, what he had been. Her voice, her face, her words. All of it tugged and pulled at him in ways that left his head throbbing, his frustration bubbling over as he tried to make sense of it all. He couldn't forget her, of all the things in his life he had been able to forget, he couldn't shake this girl. Katrina – Katie, she had called herself. Kat, a flicker of memory had informed him, someone had called her Kat. She hadn't used that name when she had found him, but it had come back.
It wasn't the only thing that had come back. Her sudden appearance that day had triggered such an aggressive flood of memories that he had been left reeling for weeks. Things he had forgotten, or been made to forget, things that he had done and heard and experienced – they resurfaced in snippets, flashes. Like torn pages of a novel that he was trying to piece back into an order that would form a coherent narrative.
He should run from this, all of this. The memories of that place and who he had been, they all threatened to pull him back there. He knew he needed to move on, but he didn't know how. He didn't know who he was supposed to be. James Buchanan Barnes was a dead man, a museum exhibit. A war hero.
And now he knew for certain there was someone else looking for him. Looking for the man he had been. He could guess who it was.
He couldn't face that.
He was no hero. He didn't even know if the man they wanted to find still existed, beneath the programming and the memory alterations and half a century of heinous deeds. If he wanted to find that man again, he would have to confront things he wasn't ready to face.
