December // A Winter Soldier Story

2

ｄｅｃｅｍｂｅｒ １８ｔｈ， ２０１３

２１°

𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓰𝓲𝓻𝓵

It is freezing outside tonight. The sun hasn't even slipped past the horizon yet -- tonight's sky is a blazing red -- yet it is already as cold as ice just inside the door. She is wrapped in the warmest clothes she could find in her house, and is posted up in a chair beside a window.

From here, she can see her backyard, and the forest that runs so close to her house. Since the trees are empty, she can see for quite a ways.

She used to love the forest. Until a week and a half ago, when she almost died there.

She remembers every second vividly. She had gone for a simple walk outside, just as she does sometimes, when suddenly she looked up from the snow to see five heavily armed men before her. Her heart had stopped. She didn't know why they were there or what they were doing, but she had caught their attention, and clearly gotten in their way.

The one man had nearly touched her. She still couldn't scrub her body hard enough to erase the feeling of his hand touching the fabric of her jeans.

And then there had been that other man, the one with the long hair and the metal covering his arm. Or maybe his arm was made of metal, she couldn't be sure. He was huge and bulky, and looked much stronger than the other men, though it was obvious that he was not with them by the way he carried himself.

His eyes had been simultaneously focused and far away. He'd frequently blinked and shook his head, as if fighting to stay awake. Blood had been dripping down his arm and onto the white snow beneath him, but he hadn't seem to be bothered by it. In fact, the only thing he seemed to have been bothered by was how the first masked man was touching her. She wasn't sure why he would care. He looked like he had much bigger things to deal with than whether or not some random girl lived.

Then she had watched something inside of the soldier snap, and he went from being a statue to a whirling wall of death.

The man who had been touching her had exploded with red a second later, and she didn't stay to observe the rest. She couldn't be sure if that soldier would still protect her once the other men were gone, and she didn't care to find out, so she had high-tailed it out of there the second everyone's eyes were off of her.

And now she sits and stares out at the snow, which reflects the red sky and reminds her all too vividly of that day. She absentmindedly wonders if any of those men made it out alive, including the soldier. If she had to guess, she'd think that the soldier would have been the only one to walk away.

She wonders where he is now.

This is a silly thing to wonder. He is dangerous, and she shouldn't want anything to do with him. She should move on and forget that they ever crossed paths. But she finds herself wanting to know who he was, why his arm was like that, how he became someone who wandered around the woods shooting at people and protecting girls who accidentally wandered into crossfires.

She is curious by nature. It might lead to her doom someday.

She suddenly breaks from her thoughts, exhausted, and decides to retire to her room even though it is still early. Today had been a long day, so she could use a few extra hours of sleep in preparation for tomorrow.

The TV is still buzzing in the corner, bright, flashy pictures lighting up the entire room, and someone mumbles about a deal that she could get if only she calls in the next thirty seconds. She politely declines their offer by shutting the TV off. The lopsided picture frame by the TV catches her eye, so she leans her right arm over to straighten it after the TV goes black.

But she pauses while doing so, because she sees something reflected in the glass of the picture frame that makes her stop breathing.

Her eyes widen and she whips her head around, scanning the tree line just outside of her floor-to-ceiling windows.

Nothing is there.

A frown works its way onto her face, and her heart rate picks up considerably. She could've sworn she'd really seen him. Just a small glimpse of silver, a shadow hiding behind the trees. A man she'd last seen a week and a half ago.

She walks hesitantly closer to the windows, squinting and trying desperately to make out what she'd seen reflected in the picture frame just a moment ago, despite the dying light outside making it harder to scan between the trees. She is filled with a strange feeling - want. She sort of wants to see him there, standing outside of her window like a guardian of some sort. She sort of wants to pretend like this is some kind of mystery novel, that she is for some reason the only one privileged enough to know who this strange man is.

However, after standing at the window for five more minutes, she must concede that he is not there. Whatever she thought she saw, she must've imagined it. The soldier is nowhere to be found.

So she gives up, swallows the strange feeling of disappointment, and turns the living room light off, filling the room with darkness as she turns and makes her way to her bedroom on the other side of the house. She does not look back, not even once, and shifts her focus to the idea of sleep.

She does not feel the pair of eyes watching her wander down the hallway from deep within the forest.