Leave Me Broken [Winter Soldier] II

Life Without Me [Chapter 5]

"But you held your course to some distant war

In the corners of your mind

From the second time around

The only love I ever found"

"Angela" - The Lumineers

              "Cinci lei?" Ophelia asked in almost flawless Romanian, having had a lot of time to learn the language. She had a few under her belt now - it was easy to pick up when she could slip in and out of minds, though she used this skill frugally. 

              She handed the money over to the street vendor. Sliding her change purse back into her jacket pocket, Ophelia grabbed her small bag of groceries and walked down the street towards the public library. She had grown accustomed to the small apartment she and Bucky lived in, but it had very little. If she wanted to learn anything that was going on in the rest of the world, she had to use the internet and the computers at the library. After a librarian had helped teach her how it all worked in her first few months in Bucharest, she had gotten the hang of it pretty quickly.

             Being in Romania, there was very little information on the people Ophelia kept tabs on. Sure, the Avengers made headlines often, but she didn't get American papers here, and she kept an eye on a lot of topics. When she arrived at the library, she picked a far corner where no one would overlook what she was doing, and went straight to the websites of four different American newspapers. She read everything that they posted, and she came to the library every other day if she could squeeze it in. Headliners, obituaries, side columns, personal ads. Ophelia read it all and tried to fit all of it into her brain. Perhaps it was the history of not being able to learn much that made her want to soak in and absorb everything she read, but either way, Ophelia just liked being informed.

               Not only was being informed on worldly events good for her, but she saw things that others would easily overlook. Some of it was noise, and some of it brought back the demons of her past. It had been a week since Bucky let Ophelia read the memory that haunted her, and it no longer bothered her. It no longer got underneath her skin and whispered that she was useless, worthless, pitiful. Knowing what she knew now, about how Bucky stopped her potential death for an underlying reason he didn't quite understand at the time, it was as if something she needed to do had been crossed off of her list. Everything was beginning to sit right with her, she had more and more hope each day that things were going to turn out for the better.

              Nibbling a granola bar secretly so that the librarian wouldn't see her, she scrolled through the obituaries, which was what she always ended on before she packed up and went home. Normally they were all faceless names, people she never knew, never heard of, and would never know aside from their death date and what their loved ones wrote about them. This was the first time she read a name that she recognized, and it made her heart sink not in a sad way, but in one that echoed terror. Though the name she read over and over again was one she would only want to hear of dead, it was his cause of death that made her shudder to her core. After reading the obituary, she plunged into searching for more articles on the topic.

              Vasily Karpov had been found dead in his home in Cleveland. Not just found dead, but murdered through horrible means. They had found him when a neighbour had spotted water leaking through the front door, and when the police went it, he had been hung upside down and drowned. The place was trashed, and it was clear items had been taken. No one knew what items they were, and given the small article with minor detail, it was not hard to guess that Vasily was not a man with many friends or connections. He had made his mark in the world, settled down when things went south for HYDRA, but his dark past found him.