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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Katie had tried to force herself back into the mindset she had been in before. Before Sam Wilson had found her, before she'd even considered going to find Barnes, before that frustrating, gut-wrenching encounter in Gdansk. She tried to go back to the person she had begun to believe she was - independent, content, free from her past.
She tried, she really did - but James Buchanan Barnes had clung to her. An itch she couldn't scratch, a memory caught between her teeth that refused to budge, a stone weighing on the pit of her stomach. He was a whisper in her ear that spoke of how, even all these years later, she couldn't forget her past. No matter how much she wanted to, now that she knew he was out there, she couldn't let him go.
She should never have gone, she had told herself. If she had been seeking closure, she hadn't found it. He hadn't wanted her help, and evidently her promise of explanations had been too much for him. Part of her couldn't blame him for not wanting to remember, if she had the choice, perhaps she wouldn't want to either.
Weeks had followed that brief meeting in Poland, then a month, or two - she had tried to find her rhythm again. She woke up, she went to work in the rental shop. She came home, she ran in the park, she cleaned her apartment, picked up a shift in the bar downstairs or went for a drink with Gavin and his friends. She tried to live, but somehow it felt as though she wasn't. Like she was watching her body go through the motions, whilst her mind was elsewhere.
She wondered if he had stayed in Poland, or if he had left after being found. She hoped he was safe, wherever he was.
Sam Wilson's details were packed away in the shoebox of newspaper clippings, she never contacted him to let him know what she had discovered, she knew Barnes wouldn't want that. Well, she suspected he wouldn't - he had made it abundantly clear that she didn't know him, that she couldn't anticipate his thoughts and decisions...
Which made it all the more shocking to answer that knock on her door that evening - fully expecting it to be her landlord Markus asking if she could come down to the bar to help with the weekend rush of tourists - but instead was abruptly confronted by the face that seemed to be constantly hovering in the background of her thoughts.
He had been right; she couldn't anticipate anything this man did.
She could never have anticipated her quiet evening ending with her perched on a stool at her breakfast bar, with the man who had been the Winter Soldier sat opposite her - his left arm laid on the countertop. Bathed in the soft light that filtered in through her window, it was a bizarre image to come to terms with - so familiar and yet so far removed from what she had known. A collision of two worlds she could never have imagined, the shining titanium of his forearm laid out beside her pile of junk mail and the half-drank bottle of lager she had opened after returning home from work. For a moment, the metallic shine of his fingers had captured her gaze just as forcefully as his eyes first had when he had appeared at her door. It was a hand that had both saved her life and threatened to end it several times, which was a difficult factor to ignore.
