Reminisce: Dear O,

July 29th, 2015

July 29th, 2015

        "I've been shot. I've been shocked into a drooling, catatonic state. I've killed and killed and killed. It never thrilled me, but it made my heart rate sky rocket at first. Whenever I saw that daunting metal device, whenever I was handed another file, another mission. I sensed that I should have felt fear, and so my body created some version of fear in the sense of elevated heart rate. Decade after decade, it dwindled eventually, to nothing but a dull throb that reminded me I still had a heart, that I was still human somewhere deep down.

       When I rediscovered O, last year, rediscovered who she really was to me, I felt something change. I felt something, period. I guess I would say I've rediscovered a large spectrum of human emotion that had been shocked out of me for so long. Something I forgot was fear, true fear. Not the fear that came with worrying about O, worrying that she wouldn't come home from work or that she would be gone when I got there, but the fear that came hand in hand with coming home at three AM and not being able to find her.

          I thought I'd actually lost her, that she'd left or something awful had happened. Because I let my face be seen, that we'd been discovered. We fled America because we were too close to the HYDRA and SHIELD crossfire. So I brought us here, Romania, but we're closer to where we came from. Or, where she came from. HYDRA is everywhere, I suspected they would be more focused on America. When they popped up in Sokovia, I should have taken the sign and ran somewhere else. Maybe somewhere warm. But staying put seemed like the safest option.

       I still believe it is -the safest option, I mean.

       She gave me a scare when she wasn't there when I got home. I thought that she had been taken, of course that was my first thought because it had been on edge of my mind since we decided to locate ourselves here permanently. First I felt my heart in my throat, like someone had stuffed something so far down my throat and I was suffocating. Then anger, I tore apart the house looking for any sign of her. After that came a strange calmness as I tried to piece it together. No sign that there had been a disturbance (though the house looked awful after I tore it apart). This meant that she had left on her own free will, and she would only have left with someone she trusted.

         I wondered if maybe she had left with one of her coworkers; but three AM was early, and Ophelia would have left a note at the very least stating where she would be. Even if she decided she was going back to America to see Steve, she would have left a note. Leaving me behind was one thing, but leaving without a single clue was not O's way of things. I went straight to my journals then, to see if she had slipped something in there. There was nothing, not a damn thing, and I found myself holding one of the pictures of her leaning against the wall, holding my breath.

       That's when she came home; bright red cheeks and dark circles under her eyes. She looked cold, and she felt cold. I had my arms around her before I even knew I'd stood up, her body was like ice. I held her, for what felt like the rest of the night, telling myself over and over that she was there, that she wasn't going to leave. It was needy, it was pitiful, but it was how I felt. She told me that she'd gone up to the roof to watch the night sky; some meteor shower or something. She'd fallen asleep, woke up chilled to the bone and everything ached. We took a shower, warming her, calming me.

       I wonder, was this how she felt every day back in Siberia? Terrified of what was coming next? They used her as a bait dog, they set me against her, I don't even know everything they'd done to her, or what else they would have done to her had we not defeated the odds against us. I try not to think about that."