The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 15

Bucharest, Romania

Spring 2016

He was honestly having a tough time keeping his frustration and his disappointment at bay. Which was saying something, really. He was quite used to living with both by this point. Though, admittedly, this was of a different vein than usual.

Usually, it was a matter of him fighting back the familiar feelings of shame and self-reproach and guilt over the horrific things he'd done, frustration at being unable to keep his fluid mind in line and disappointment that he was no further to reaching...what? He honestly didn't know what it was he was ultimately working toward. Oh sure, he had his goals—rebuild his mind, figure out what they'd done to him, track down and...deal with those responsible...to take whatever steps necessary to protect those precious few people he cared for most in his wretched existence—but beyond those?

He knew he would never again be able to have any semblance of a normal life. Not the kind he craved...not like he'd had for however short a time those few astonishing, peaceful months in DC...

...he needed to stop thinking about DC...about everything in DC, really; the Freeway, the Helicarriers, the skinny townhouse and its precious occupant... The churning, pervasive guilt? The aching, crushing feelings of longing? It was not helping him save to taunt him with what he had done and what he could no longer have, threatening his hard won and fragile grasp over his own mind. He knew that. But he couldn't help it. The memories that came after the Helicarriers fell and he'd slipped free from HYDRA's grasp? They were the only comfort he had in his rather cold, grey, tormented existence no matter the regret and remorse still shadowed the memories.

Yet, for all that, they still did not make anything any easier...they just brought along a different kind of pain.

A manageable one...if barely.

No, all he had was the dreary existence he had now and his grim purpose.

And if he was being truly honest with himself? He rather doubted he would have any choice how he would live after...if he even lived long enough to wonder what came after.

But just now, they were providing very little comfort in the face of the potent well of bitter disappointment and the irritable itch of his frustration that currently plagued him. Even the recent revelation that had come on his return from one of his tasks that Bucharest was beginning to almost, almost, feel like 'home' in its familiarity did little to ease the strain on his mind from what felt like a failure.

His mission was not going nearly so well as he had hoped, and his most recent undertaking in pursuit of his larger objective had proven nothing short of a disappointment. Yet another of a growing number of them, as he was slowly being forced to admit.

His goal to track down who and what had made him what he was, to do what he could given his circumstances to atone and amend for what he could—the only way he knew how, of course—and find a measure of closure for what had been done to him and for what he had done, was hitting block after block. Walls and setbacks and dead-ends. As was his mission to rediscover and rebuild not just his past but his own mind. Sure, his memories were beginning to sort themselves back into some semblance of order and there were times, fleeting and brief though they were, where he felt almost human again. But more often than not he just felt...lost. Adrift. Broken.

And after this most recent extension of his larger mission? Harsh, grasping, hungry claws of anger and resentment and despair threatened to undo all the progress he'd made, ripping and tearing at him, trying to drag him back down into the nightmarish mire that had trapped him for so long within his own fractured mind. He had little enough hope as it was, and with each successive failure and setback, a little more of it was eroding away, feeling like it was trying to take the shreds of the sanity he had regained and the fragments of who he was that he was trying to rebuild himself with along with it.