потеря
loss

THE METAL ARM haunted Emily's dreams since her little brother mentioned it as his last words. It shone in the darkness, and Emily dreamt it repeatedly hitting and punching something – someone. She could hear her little brother's cries echoing, begging for the man who killed him to stop. She could hear her father desperately asking for the man to save his wife and son – to just kill him and leave the rest of his family alone.

She didn't know how she dreamt of the moment her family died so precisely, as though she was there the entire time. She didn't know why she kept dreaming of it, when it only served to remind her of how everything was taken from her. No – she knew exactly why she kept dreaming of it, during the day when she was so utterly bored and during the night when nightmares clouded her brain and left her without sleep.

It wasn't a reminder of how she lost everything. It was a reminder of how she will get everything back by avenging their merciless deaths.

Growing up, Emily was trained by various SHIELD agents and Nick Fury. She knew the ins and outs of the entire organization, calling upon a few double agents herself. She was the first to find out how Captain America was found in the ice, and was there to witness him wake up to see the world seventy years after he supposedly died.

She was there when Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff returned from their mission in Budapest, though she didn't know what exactly had happened there – Clint and Nat were entitled to keep their own secrets. She was the first to know SHIELD's plans of building nuclear weapons and although she did not agree with the means of wanting to defend the earth, she couldn't do much to dismantle the entire program. She was there when Clint Barton was taken by Loki and reported shamefully to Nick Fury how she obviously failed to defend him.

Emily knew a lot of things – but she definitely was not informed of the man with a metal arm killing dozens of people.

"He's a ghost story," Natasha insisted, seeing the younger girl's stone cold face. She knew the feeling of having something forced away from her – while Emily lost her past, Natasha lost her future. "Look – Steve and I handled it. T'Challa helped, a lot, actually, and he's been put in cryo somewhere for the past year."

"You found the ghost though," Emily grumbled, bothered by the fact that Natasha knew about the man who killed her parents and talked to him and protected him. She couldn't help but feel betrayed; she had been searching for this ghost for nearly twenty years and suddenly he shows up on Nat's radar and didn't even bother to tell her. "I've been searching for him, and you fucking found him, and you didn't even tell me."

"He's Steve's best friend, hun," Natasha told her softly, like she was afraid that if she talked any louder, Emily would snap. "If I'd had told you, you would've done something rash and dangerous."

Not hearing a reply from Emily, Natasha stood up and muttered a calm goodbye before leaving the room and Emily to her silence. The silence was deafening – it screamed and howled at Emily until she felt herself losing her steady grip on sanity. The ghosts of her past haunted her and it terrified her how they affected her still.

»»

THE NEWLY-APPOINTED director of SHIELD, Phil Coulson, was the one to inform her that the man who killed her family – Winter Soldier, he was called – was released from his cryogenic state in Wakanda. "He's stable, I think," he said, scratching his chin lightly as he thought about his next words. "They've been testing him – making him go in and out of cryo to make sure he still remembers everything. He's been good for a couple of month, but he's just been released about a week ago."

She could feel her chest tighten and her breath hitch at his words. Beads of sweat rolled down the side of her temple, not that Coulson could notice it, and she bit her lip nervously. She couldn't believe how they just released someone who had killed so many innocent lives into the public, that could perhaps cause even more chaos. She knew that he could, once again, go on a rampage and put everyone's lives at risk.

She knew she was treading carefully on dangerous waters; one wrong move could potentially ruin everything she had worked and trained for.

"Do you happen to know where they've relocated him? Um – " she paused, trying not look fazed at the alarmed look Coulson gave her. "Well, being one of the top agents, I think it'd be best for me to keep an eye on him, y'know? To make sure he doesn't go haywire and on a killing spree again."

Coulson looked at her suspiciously – eyeing her like he could see through all her facades and could find all the secrets she had been burying the entire time she had been with SHIELD – and she was almost sure he knew her intentions and would send her away to prison or something.

But then he said, "They've brought him to Brooklyn, I think. Steve – err, Captain America – I mean, Captain Rogers – he thought it'd be best to bring him back to his roots. He used to live there in the forties, you know."

The new director looked particularly proud for knowing that little factoid.

"Thank you, Director Coulson," she smiled politely to her superior but smirked inwardly, knowing that Phil Coulson loved being called Director. Emily got what she needed and was proceeding with her plan to get what she wanted.

She wanted revenge – the Winter Soldier would pay for his deeds.

She was on a plane to Brooklyn before the sun went down and the moon rose up, before the unseen stars were sprinkled across the sky and covered by the thick and hazy clouds. If Nick Fury had eyes everywhere to replace his lost one, so did Emily. Hacking the government was easy – she didn't know how they still had a running government with nuclear missiles when it took her less than a day to get inside their system – and accessing most of the street cameras was easier. If the Winter Soldier crossed a street and had accidentally shown even a tiny glimpse of his metal arm, Emily would know.

Call her a stalker, but she watched and skimmed through more than a hundred and fifty hours of footage, searching for the most minuscule look of a weird looking arm – and the closest she got to it was a man-looking woman who constantly had socks on her hands. It was pitiful, not leaving the apartment she rented to watch several more hours of blurry videos, but it was step two of the plan she was so proud of.

If step two failed, so would she.

It was miracle that she found him walking as casually as possible to a café near Emily's apartment. He was scratching his head with his metal arm, which looked slightly more humane than what she had imagined, and the sleeve of his jacket went down just enough for it to reveal the bionic arm she was looking for. She studied him – what cafés he went to, how they varied every Monday, where he went once he was done eating, where he usually went when he wasn't eating.

She knew his routine and it became hers too. She got a job at what seemed to be his favorite café, after seeing that he had been going there for nearly five Mondays, and occasionally helped the elderly woman running the library he always went to everyday an hour before it closed. She passed off as a simple woman who loved to serve others, helping being one of her favorite hobbies.

Her favorite hobby was thinking up of more ways to kill the Winter Soldier, really.

She found out his name, James Buchanan Barnes, thanks to Coulson who gushed about everything about Captain America and his past. He told her all she needed to know – how he was experimented on by HYDRA after his whole infantry was captured, how he had supposedly died from falling from a freight car, how HYDRA got to him and turned him into their best assassin.

"Are you alright, dearie? You've spaced out for quite a few minutes," Miss Evers, the old woman running the large library in Brooklyn, asked her, placing a hand on Emily's shoulder. Her ring – something Emily was curious of but didn't have the heart to ask – gleamed in the light and Miss Evers' aged face wrinkled even further with worry.

She knew that she was treated like Miss Evers' daughter, and the strange feeling that she was only using the kind old woman to get to Barnes killed her. She deserved far more to be fooled and get tangled in a web of lies and crimes.

"You are wondering about my ring, aren't you, Em?" Miss Evers smiled knowingly at Emily, who faked sheepishness and nodded bashfully. For obvious reasons, she didn't want the old lady to know that she was plotting to kill the man who sat only a few meters from them. "He was in the military, James, and I wrote to him as he was off fighting the Nazis in the forties. And one day," she faltered, "He just never wrote back. Killed in action."

"I'm sorry," Emily muttered softly, not knowing what else to say. She had experienced loss and the painstaking heartbreak when she went through one, but she never actually thought of how the people around her had experienced it too. The words I'm sorry were said to her over and over again and she always hated how it was everyone's go to response after hearing about a death.

And yet, here she was, being a hypocrite and saying the exact words in the exact same situation.

"No need to apologize," Miss Evers gave out a throaty chuckle before having a coughing fit. "He proposed to me before he left for his last mission – I said yes, of course, I don't think I could've said no to that cheeky lad – and I haven't been able to stop loving him since."

Love, that was something Emily was sure she hadn't experienced since her family died. Their deaths ruined her – emotionally, mentally and psychologically – and she was terrified of losing another person she loved. It tore up her insides and destroyed everything she believed in and it hurt so fucking bad that it affected her whole entirety and it, to put it simply, broke her. So she took the easy way out and opted not to love at all.

She remembered it was tough, putting as much distance as possible between her and people who actually cared for her (why they could care for someone whose thoughts consisted of a specific man's agonizingly gory death, she never knew) and trying as much as possible not to take a liking to them. It was tough, training herself both physically – so she would be ready when she finally found the bastard – and emotionally – detaching herself from everything and everyone until she was left numb so she wouldn't let any attachments get in the way of her mission.

Her family's deaths broke her, but she destroyed herself.

»»

BUCKY DIDN'T KNOW what to think of the lady that seemed to be literally everywhere he went. Perhaps she was a friendly, one of Stark's or Fury's assigned to keep an eye on him, or she could be a HYDRA spy, lurking around and waiting for the perfect opportunity to activate his trigger words and unleash the infamous Winter Soldier. He knew he had to ask Steve about it – but the damn captain had been too busy fondue-ing with that blonde dame Sharon, who helped them escape with Wilson.

He still grumbled at the thought of Wilson getting to sit in shotgun and not moving his seat up.

The library nearby his favorite cafe was emptying slowly, until it was only him left reading a history book. Trying to learn what had happened to the world in the seventy years he was HYDRA's puppet was difficult, and he couldn't understand how a man could reach outer space and walk on the moon. The man, Neil Armstrong, he read, had ridden the Apollo 11 to the moon and had stayed outside his spacecraft for more than two hours.

It seemed unreal to him, but the world had changed so much he really couldn't tell the difference between fictional and reality.

He could feel the lady he always saw, Em, he thought as that was what the old librarian called her, watching him from the corner of her eyes, glancing at him every minute or so – as if constantly checking up on him. He could see her eyes sparkle with interest – though it wasn't the only thing he saw – even from the distance, and he couldn't help but notice her and how her lips quirked up in what seemed to be a smirk.

Maybe she's attracted to me, he thought in amusement before he remembered who he was and what he's done and frowned. He's a monster, someone who killed for killers and felt no remorse for the killed. He wasn't human, his metallic arm constantly reminded him of that, and he didn't deserve to be. He should've just died – should've let the tin man kill him when he discovered he killed his parents.

It wasn't only his past that haunted him, it was also himself. He was called a ghost story for a reason. He was to be feared, to be hated, to be avoided at all costs. He was the monster in the closet everyone was afraid of – the monster that he was afraid of.

Bucky didn't realize he nearly tore the pages of the heavy history book he was reading until the lady that helped out in the library coughed for his attention. Her unruly blonde hair fell onto her face as she leaned down to him, gently prying his fingers from the book, and he nervously swallowed a gulp of saliva when her fingers reached for his metal arm.

"Please don't ruin the books," Emily's voice faked innocence and naïvety as she clutched the book in her arms. She honestly didn't give a damn about the book, but Miss Evers had told her to retrieve it as the library was about to close and she thought it as the perfect opportunity to finally interact with the damned man.

He cleared his throat, hastily standing up and withdrawing his arm, hiding it as much as possible to not scare the nice looking girl in front of him. "Sorry," he muttered, his eyes turning to the floor as she turned to place the book back in its proper place. Embarrassingly enough, she could barely reach the top shelf where Bucky had gotten it. He stifled a short laugh and grabbed the book from her, putting it back to where it belonged, before walking away.

He failed to see Emily's narrowed eyes of annoyance and the scowl plastered on her face. Mumbling a quick goodbye to Miss Evers, who looked absolutely dumbfounded at the girl's sudden change of persona, she grabbed her coat and put it on outside, where her eyes quickly followed Bucky's movements on the street.

The dagger stuck inside the back of her pants slightly touched the small of her back and she touched if faintly before sauntering to the direction where the Winter Soldier was heading. Her plan of attack was simple – lure him into a dark alley with her damsel in distress act, trap him against the wall and stab him repeatedly until all his internal organs bled out and he was limp on the ground. Fast and easy.

He walked only a few meters ahead of her and it was when he passed by a coffee shop weirdly named Starkbutts that he heard a soft cry of pain. He turned around rapidly, ready to attack a sudden assassin when he saw Emily on the ground, clutching her ankle while biting her lip in an 'attempt' to hold back her tears.

"You alright?" he asked gruffly, walking towards her and holding out his hand. Emily almost laughed, it was too easy. A look of hesitance mirrored on her face, as if she was frightened of taking a stranger's hand, before Bucky helped her stand up on her feet. Only a second passed by when she grabbed the dagger from her jeans and held it against his throat, his back flat against the wall.

He looked down at the girl in front of him, not scared but just curious as to why she wanted to kill him. He was barely resistant, simply standing against the wall and in her grasps, even though he could easily escape and turn the situation around. "Why?"

She scoffed and couldn't believe he had the guts to ask her that question, like he had killed so many and couldn't remembered who he had killed. But she knew that he knew – Coulson told her that he remembered everything that happened before he plummeted to his supposed death. He fucking knew and had the nerve to ask.

"Why?" she snarled, a sneer masking her features and Bucky didn't like it a bit. She looked to soft and delicate and innocent to be holding a knife against his neck and to be threatening to kill him. "You killed my family seventeen years ago. Brian and Olivia Wright, do you remember now?"

Anger and rage flurried in her eyes, and it totally clouded her vision that she didn't see how Bucky's shoulders visibly dropped and his blue eyes held shame and regret. His jaw clenched, and he couldn't meet her eyes as he muttered under his breath. "The 28th of November 2000. Your parents, they were – "

"Yeah," she snapped harshly, cutting him off and stunning him to silence as her body shook. The knife was going to deeper into his flesh, and he tried hard not to focus on the pain he was feeling from the knife but on the pain that the girl must have felt when she found out her family had died. "They were in the car and it was snowing and they were driving peacefully. And you drove a knife to their chests – "

She withdrew her knife from his neck, eyeing the trickle of blood that rolled down, and got ready to stab just where he had done to her parents. But she swerved and hit the wall right beside his head. "They did not deserve to die. William did not deserve to die – not like that. Not by your hands."

Bucky could remember the screams of a little boy, begging and pleading for him to spare their lives – to stop beating up his parents. He cried and screamed and shouted, until he grew tired and simply whispered for Bucky to end his life, to put him out of his misery. He remembered how his eyes glistened with tears, much like Emily's as he stared into them, at a loss for words.

"I'm sorry," He fell back, clutching his head with his real hand while clenching his metal one. He swore at himself, hitting the back of his head on the wall because he felt like he deserved the pain and he needed to inflict the same amount of pain to himself as all his victims combined. He wanted to get the dagger Emily held against his neck and plunge it to his own chest and kill himself, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.

He found himself weak – not only could he not stop HYDRA from making him do all that stuff, but he also couldn't punish himself for the things he had done.

"Please, just kill me," he told her, looking up at her like she was the sun and he was the world and she lit up the darkness he was. He looked up at her like she blinded him. Tears fell from her eyes, and onto Bucky, and her lip quivered as she tried to keep her sobs quiet. "I don't deserve to be here – to live. Your parents and brother should be alive, not me. I'm sorry – please, just kill me now."

"Why did you do it?"

Her question caught him off guard and it was a moment before he replied, "I wasn't myself, except that I was. I didn't mean to do it but I did because they made me do it and I didn't have a choice. I – "

It was like his voice was trapped in the back of his throat and he couldn't talk anymore, just shut his eyes and block out the memories that haunted him still. Closing his eyes and covering his ears didn't stop the screams that echoed in his mind and it couldn't change a single thing. It was under the bridge now, in the deepest depths of the water – no matter what he did, he couldn't change the past because it had already happened.

He could hear her fumble with something and a cloth wrapped around his neck in what he thought to be a feeble attempt to kill him. But he didn't care, he was ready for death.

Except it never came.

It was after a few minutes when he opened his eyes to see Emily gone and a scarf that smelled much like strawberries around his neck to try to stop the blood from flowing out. It only reminded him of how he had tainted her innocence so effortlessly, and how much he regret it.

The first word was loss – something both Bucky and Emily knew far too much.

»»

From Gabriella —
Hello! Thank you all so much for all the lovely comments and for all the votes. I really appreciate them all! It motivates me to keep writing tbh haha
Fun fact: Yes, Starkbutts is a play on Starbucks™ and I honestly just found how my little sister mispronounced it so amusing that I had to put it somewhere HAHA