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Berlin, 2016
━━━༻❁༺━━━
War.
It was endless, it was agonising, and it was Ella Stark's closest companion. The war lingered within the shadow of her every step, and, even as her whole world crumbled beneath the weight of her choices, it remained loyal - enveloping her breaking soul within its numbing embrace. Its touch was gentle, yet seeping with the malice of a million dying suns. It was intoxicating; drowning her with an addiction to the chaos she could never escape.
War.
It is merciless, it is terrifying, and it's tearing them apart. The tendrils of naivety had released their grasp upon Ella's mind, condemning her to drown within the ice-cold currents of the truth. At the heart of the Avengers' disintegration weren't the accords that'd threatened a divide, but, instead, the life of a man who'd known war all his life.
The Winter Soldier.
The flames within Ella's heart are ablaze with a newly lit conflict as her eyes linger upon the soldier's face; defeat scattered across his exhausted features. A television screen stands between them, yet it felt like he was right there, before her fingertips. An agonising unrest sparks chaos within the darkest corners of her heart, and, beneath the weight of her rushing thoughts, her mind threatens to collapse.
"Was it him?"
Her words narrowly escape the threshold of a whisper; tasting of poison upon her tongue. The searing gaze radiating from her darkened eyes remains ensnared by the pixilated sight before her, but her words are directed elsewhere. Though others lurk within the room, the spearhead of her words strikes against the eardrums of Steve, piquing his attention within a second. Apprehension brews within her gut as his eyes befall her tense form, and, though he attempts to hide it, a spark of guilt lingers within his eyes. "He wasn't in Vienna."
"That's not what I mean, and you know it." The action of dragging her eyes away from the screen is agonising, but the aching fire within her veins wills her forth. With one, lonesome glance shared with the Captain, the fears that had long corrupted her mind were confirmed. But she wanted to hear it; she needed to. And, as she asks once more, her voice breaks beneath the truth's unbearable weight. "Did he kill them?"
The heart of Steve Roger descends into a gaping pit of darkness; guilt ebbing away at every corner of his soul. "Yes."
The deepest fragments of herself screamed within her mind, begging her to hate the assassin that shattered her family; the creature that left her family in ashes. And she did - every inch of her soul despised the Winter Soldier. Her bones ache with bloodlust, longing for revenge against the weapon Hydra so carefully crafted.
But the man plastered across the television screen was not that soldier; he was the broken shell of a man.
James Buchanan Barnes had been at war his whole life; such was agonisingly obvious to the eyes of any who cared to look. The fractured shards of a man decimated by his past illuminate his worn eyes, and, with his every word, his tongue burns with the guilt of surviving long enough to speak, when so many others couldn't.
Once, the Winter Soldier had been but a horror story to her, but, as her eyes linger upon Bucky, it was as if he'd become a mirror into the darkest remnants of herself. And it terrified her.
Perhaps that's why she saved him. Why, meagre hours later, she'd dragged both him and Steve from the wreckages of a crashed helicopter. Whispers plagued her mind, tempting her to leave Bucky in the river from which he once came. But, in the depths of her heart, a flickering light ached in sympathy for the broken man whom she thought she despised - combating the eternal darkness within herself.
And, as Ella Stark unknowingly abandoned her own flesh and blood in a child's quest to save a far from innocent man, war laughed hysterically at her misery.
