[Quiet in the Chaos]

~9~

                                  ~9~

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HESITANTLY THE girl eases her tensed body slightly before the Winter Soldier, or Bucky, effortlessly shifts her back onto her feet.  She finds her lungs starved of air as she stares up at his haunted face. She's all too aware of his flesh hand firmly, but carefully, on her hip. She should be scared, any sane person would be. And maybe she is. But she knows what HYDRA does to people better than anyone, so she can't bring herself to be mind numbing my afraid of him.

She understands him.

He holds her gaze for only a moment longer, his brows creased. He studies her cautiously, before moving himself back to his old comrade, easily pulling him in tow.

Her heart beating loud through every vein in her body, she slowly follows in his wake. She remains a few steps behind, her hands clenched to prevent the shivering, the cold of the water causing her body to tremble fractionally. Goosebumps claim the skin of her hip, although these don't appear from the temperature.

Her shoulders move up towards her neck as she steps out of the water. Bucky drops Steve on the coast, his haunted gaze lingering on the man he knows he knew before turning away from the woman, his heavy boots scraping against the gravel.

His movements are laboured and foreign, these thoughts are foreign. This body, this mind. His.

But they haven't been his for a long time.

"Where are you going?" She calls, fumbling with her words. She winces at the the urgency of her voice.

The man pauses, unsure of whether she is asking him, he turns his torso sideways, enough to catch the side of her face. Every inch of his body is wary, his mind fighting with his body. An internal war.

His mind, as jumbled and nonsensical as it seems, urges him to move, to run, to get out of whatever city he is in. But his body seems to be rooted to the ground. His eyes are distant, widened slightly as he attempts for the first time in decades to hear his own thoughts.

Her eyes run over his structured and bruised face. "I can help you."

The man's shoulders go rigid. He knows almost nothing, but he knows that he doesn't deserve help. He moves away from her, his head dipping as he continues marching.

"I was like you," she states, softer this time as she takes a single step after him. This sentence causes him to halt yet again. "I hurt people. I didn't want to, but I did. I know how you feel. Running, it doesn't help, I've tried."

This strikes something within the soldier. A pain. A vulnerability, that he still struggles to comprehend. He doesn't understand anymore, nothing makes sense, but the woman's words seem right.

He hurt people. That he remembers, vividly. Why, or who? He can't say. The questions her statement sparks causes a dull throb beneath his dark, neglected hair. It spirals his mind into flashes of faded and blurred images of people and places that he struggles to recognise.

He feels utterly overwhelmed.

And desperately confused.

Dani doesn't probe him with more words, she watches gingerly, almost viewing the cogs turn behind his startlingly blue eyes. She remembers the man in the chair, who remembered Steve. The haunted man who didn't even know his own name.

The man who held more emotions than anyone ever should.

She reminds herself there is a person beneath the mask of the soldier.

The man, still turned at an awkwardly rigid angle, parts his lips slowly, as if learning how to move for the first time. He pauses, his breathing shallow. "My name," he murmurs, his voice hoarse and raw from years of neglect.

Her head raises slightly, relieved fractionally at his choice to find his voice. She cranes her neck automatically, straining to catch his quiet words.

After a few painfully long moments of still, his tentative stare flickers to meet her eyes. "You said my name," he says slightly louder and Danielle quickly realises it's a question.

"Bucky, that's what Steve called you," she answers gently. She's careful to keep the sympathy she feels from seeping into her tone. He doesn't want sympathy. She didn't.

His eyes glance down to Steve's motionless body, regret flooding onto his face as he takes in his bloodied face.

He did that.

He flinches as the hum of a helicopter becomes audible and silently, the woman curses Fury's timing. Like a deer in the headlights, Bucky's eyes widen, his expression stoic once again, his fists readied at his side.

"I have a place, out of the city. No one would know you are there, I wouldn't tell anyone. You can stay there. It's safe," she calls urgently, her brows pulled together in desperation. "Away from the city, my car is outside my apartment there's a map in the compartment, it's marked cabin."

She's afraid if he disappears now she will never see him again.

She doesn't have time to question why that bothers her so much, except for the fact that he would be alone.

Like she was.

No one deserved that.

He barely spares her a glance, though she doesn't blame him as the aircraft comes into view, by the time she glances back, he is gone.

She swallows the guilt in her stomach. She wonders whether he even heard, or cared. She shakes the encounter quickly from her mind, her wet hair whipping around her wildly as Fury lands beside her.

She crouches down, her mind still racing as she loops an arm under the super soldier's shoulder. She grits her teeth, heaving as much of his weight as she can tolerate onto her own already battered body.

Sam rushes over to bear the rest of his weight, his face engraved with concern, his dark eyes dancing to both of his friend. "The soldier?" He calls over the helicopter's sound.

The girl doesn't hesitate, a protectiveness falling over her being then and there. A need to help someone like her. A desperate want to have someone who understands her.

A desperation to not be alone.

"Gone."