Recovery || Bucky Barnes

01 | Longing

Желание

"identity cannot be found or fabricated, but emerges from within, when one has the courage to let go." – Doug Cooper

★★★

She was a miracle. She was a fighter. That's what they had told her at least.

She wasn't sure if she believed that, or if she ever would. Miracles were attributed to a divinity, and she was the furthest thing from it. She had done terrible things to terrible people and she would continue to do so until she had rid them from the living. The closest she would ever get to any deity was her codename. As for the fighter part, she couldn't deny that fact. The people that she had put six feet under could attest to that.

Tess stared at the leather-bound book she had in her hand. It was aged from the pages indented with her words, corners folded over and the sheets thick. It was over filled with names, dates and highly confidential information which was written in a variety of languages which were all coded differently. Eighty-nine entries for eighty-nine assignments that she had all completed successfully and had been paid well for. And now it would be ninety, she thought, dating the recent entry back to a month ago. The flicker of dark emotions were smothered once she put the book back in its concealed place.

She stepped out to the balcony, dark strands of hair swept onto her face from the breeze. The black top and shorts she wore allowed her skin to breathe in the humid weather. The sun had started to set, and she watched it slowly dip behind the mountains of Tucson, Arizona.

She pulled out her lighter, the cigarette between her lips as she lit it. She took a deep breath and watched the puffs of gray smoke swirled around her. The sound of the busy traffic below kept her mind occupied as she smoked. The deep orange glow from the sun was painted across the sky. Dark streaks of midnight blue pushed it back over the horizon as she blew out more smoke.

It had taken a year and a half for her to fully readjust to the world. It seemed like she had been out of touch in the chaotic reality of ordinary civilians. They had jobs – simpler than her own, and families. A concept she had never considered as an option for herself, not that she remembered it ever being an option at the place she was raised in. They weren't trained to kill or be proficient in several languages. Neither did they have enhanced bodies with abilities that went far beyond the imagination. It would've been a culture shock, had she remembered her past when she had first awoken in the civilian world.

She had slipped up in the beginning. Looking back she would've done things differently, efficiently. But she was naive and it meant having to kill a few less than innocent people to protect her identity. It didn't faze her. Not when it was for the greater good. It was hard for the public to distinguish whether she was a citizen-serving vigilante or just a cold-hearted villain, but the labels that the media pinned on her didn't matter. As long as she could remain faceless and do her work, she was fine – if fine meant severely damaged, with more blood on her hands than she could wipe.

Tess had wondered at what point she would be done with all this. The assignments, the overwhelming amount of money that she let sit in her accounts and the crushing guilt they bore. She didn't feel the guilt of what she had done. The ninety names she had written in her book had all deserved the fate she had mercilessly given them. Rather the question of whether she was the person to decide their fate.

She sighed and tapped the excess ash that had built up at the end of her cigarette.

No one else had offered to take the job, and it was a job that was very much needed in this day and age.