verb.
To fall back under pressure. To shrink back physically or emotionally.
noun.
The kickback of a gun upon firing.
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It takes a stubborn mind to cling to their humanity when the world seeks to strip it away.
It takes a desperate soul to reach f...
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There had been a long pause, as the young woman at his side exhaled a breath, her shoulders lowering from where they had been bunched around her ears, but there was still tension held in her frame.
They were far enough away from the streetlights that she might have been able to hide her tortured expression as she searched for what she needed to say, but he could still read it. In the light reflected by the gently rippling pond they sat above, her delicate features were thrown into high relief. All shadows and soft, pale skin, though her eyes were still reddened. He hadn't fully realised it, but amidst years of watching her, listening to her and now living alongside her, he had come to be able to read her expressions and body language like a book. She had never hidden them from him.
"It's papa's- my father's birthday." Kat whispered after a moment, correcting herself as if he wouldn't understand who she was talking about. "I nearly forgot this year, with everything that's happened... I don't... I've never even talked about him, not out loud, not since..."
Slowly, he nodded, aware he was frowning as he tried to leaf through the mental pages of his memories to find anything he might know about the man she spoke of. There was a face he could pick out, an older man - with hair flecked with silver and eyes the same shade as Kat's.
Soldat, take her. Don't let her watch.
A sharp intake of breath accompanied the echo of a command, as he paired that face to a more concrete memory - and then he wished he hadn't.
"I'm sorry." He murmured quietly to the young woman at his side, his throat tightening as a small sound escaped her lips, not quite a sob but something close, more of a whimper. Her hand moved to wipe at her eyes again as he watched her, unsure of how to help.
"I just... I feel so guilty - with trying to distance myself from HYDRA, I'm scared I'll forget him... I don't... I don't know how to remember him without revisiting that..."
Her words came out in a stilted rush, her anguish barely held at bay by her fingers curling around the railing they both leaned on, her knuckles a stark white in the darkness. "I can't... I'm trying to separate him from that place - because he wasn't like them... He wasn't..." She grimaced and shook her head as she hesitated once more, the sounds catching in her throat as the man at her side looked on.
"Then talk about him." He urged her gently, "Not that place, just... If you want to."
She glanced over at him, those gentle grey eyes glistening with tears that threatened to spill over, but the corner of her mouth lifted in a weak smile. She almost looked grateful - perhaps she had expected him to draw back when she began talking about the past.
"It... He... He was all I had, James." She whispered, for the first time using that name without a hint of teasing or playfulness - and it didn't sound wrong, coming from her. "It was always just us two, my mother left when... I think I was five, maybe six? So it was just us, we were a team." A tiny, fond smile crossed her lips for just a second, before she pressed them together to stop them trembling. "Right up until I went away to study - he always said I could do anything I wanted, he didn't care when I said I wanted to be a mechanic instead of a doctor... He could have done what all the others did - he could have sent me off to one of the HYDRA academies to be radicalised and brainwashed, but I followed him without that. I would have followed him anywhere."
