A Heart So Black

IX

Bucky did not speak while they drove. His was the kind of silence that hushed the conversation of Sam and Steve in the front until they stopped talking entirely; the sort of silence that was loud, deafeningly loud. His legs were squashed against the back of Sam's chair, but he did not open his mouth; he just sat there, holding tightly to his backpack.

They had been in this car for a few hours now, and Morrigan's phone battery had gone to red an hour in, though she kept her headphones on to maintain an image that no one would want to talk to. It turned out that Sam had been using it as a GPS and drained the battery — but she could not find it in herself to be angry with him, not really. If anything, the only thing she felt at this time was unease.

It was a feeling that she was not familiar with anymore. Any original insecurity had been beaten out of her in prison, leaving behind a ghost who lived only for today and cared not for tomorrow. An animal, she thought distantly. That's what she was. A feral creature released from its cage.

The world was passing by her window very quickly. Steve had managed to get them out of the city without arousing suspicion, and now they were on a motorway heading for the countryside, where Tony would pick them up in the Quinjet. And then she could go home and sleep.

She itched the inside of her arm while she thought about home, and the silly, stupid face of her silly, stupid cat (these words were applied to him only with love and affection). Somewhere in the back of her head was Fachtna's face, above her, below her, always too close, his hot breath on her cheeks, the memory all too fresh and clear. Every itch at her arm was another reminder of him, of how she sold herself to him.

Sometimes she felt as though she were lying at the bottom of a freshly-dug grave, and the faces that confronted her every day were piling dirt on top of her, and it was heavy on her chest, so heavy. There was Fachtna far above her, shovel in hand, and beside him was Tony Stark, preparing to lay more dirt on top of her; Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff were not far behind him. She could not cry out for them to stop; could not say I'm still alive! because, for all they cared, she was dead, a rotted corpse without a heart. She was where she was meant to be.

The car jolted over a pothole, jerking Morrigan back to reality. Having passed out of the city some time ago, they were trundling down a country road, surrounded on either side by fields stretching far into the distance, dancing with yellow rapeseed.

Sam and Steve started up a hushed conversation in the front, careful not to disturb the thick silence of the back seat. Not a word reached Morrigan's disinterested ears, but Bucky was tense beside her, hanging on each softly-spoken murmur, as though waiting to hear a word that would trigger him into flight. Morrigan had been told that there was a sequence of specific Russian words, due to some programming by his captors, doubtless by some cruel, cruel torture, that would activate the buried Winter Soldier.

For now, at any rate, they were safe in this car, because none of them, save for Bucky himself, spoke a word of Russian.

That was, of course, discounting the case that he was triggered automatically, due to the instability of his fractured mind, a broken mirror, and lashed out instinctively. She could almost hear it: the shattering glass, the screeching tyres, the splattering of blood against the dirt road. That metal arm alone could tear the doors from this car with barely a sound.

Risking a glance at her silent companion, Morrigan found that he was watching her, unblinking, with those sharp wolf's eyes that could cut her to the bone, but didn't. He analysed her as though she were a new language he was trying to learn: first by looking at how it was presented physically, searching for some familiarity in its image and likeness; then to learn the basics of pronunciation before tackling its structure.