This is a Call to Arms

[krasnaya_vdova]

Ava ran when SHIELD came crumbling down. It was maybe not the bravest, most-superhero thing to do, but as the SHIELD Academy went to pieces and she didn't know who to trust, disappearing seemed the best option. She grabbed the bag she kept stashed in her dorm room and she vanished. She'd been told she was safe, that she didn't need it, but being proven right isn't anywhere near as vindicating as one might think. She does what she can, but when a few agents show up and it's down to the cleanup, she's just a name listed as missing in action.

She has enough money stashed for a round-about way out of the country. She doesn't have anywhere in particular she's going, but she doesn't need one. The idea is just to survive. To get away from places where Hydra or SHIELD or the military or anyone else might look and just blend into the city streets. Ava spent three years penniless on the streets of Brooklyn-- she's good at surviving, fitting into the cracks and living off the bottom-rungs. It's a life she fits herself back into, living day by day for months as she keeps herself moving. The uniform she'd put together back when she was almost a SHIELD agent is stuffed at the bottom of her duffel bag as a not-forgotten memory. That she could be something, that she was still the Red Widow.

Instead, she's in a hoodie underneath an over-sized green jacket that looks like it might have come from some flavor of army surplus store. Even with her bright red hair, copper by the sunlight, she hardly sticks out. She keeps her head down, her clothes over-sized to draw even less attention to her body, and usually it works. Usually she's just an unremarkable girl like any other. But her skills are remarkable, and while she doesn't usually have cause to put them on display, even actively tries to avoid confrontations, a few men make the mistake of trying to steal her bag off her shoulder as she stops by the news stall, taking in the headlines and keeping her eyes down. Ava makes a point of giving people as little reason to remember her as possible and as little of her features to describe.

But when that hand goes for the strap of her bag, she's moving in reflex. Immediately in over-drive, twisting him by the wrist, slamming him on his back on the ground, and then it's a fight. Two on one; unfair odds for them. Part of her is honestly a little bit incredulous. Afterall, what sort of thieves target street rats like her? What sort of men care that much about a duffel bag on a young woman who still doesn't really live further out than tomorrow? She doesn't even carry much money on her. But they're concerns for later. And for a few moments she's all graceful movement and brutal efficiency. She moves like a Red Room girl, one of Ivan's special girls, the best of the best. But it's even more than that: she moves like Natasha.

The problem she recognizes all too late is the reminder that fights draw spectators: people watching, people who will remember the red-haired girl, and three men only too eager to complain to anyone who will listen. There's no proof that there's anyone out looking for her, but she doesn't want to risk it. She's been imprisoned before. The SHIELD Academy had been worth it when there'd been a reason, when there were people behind her, but with the chaos that seems to have followed the helicarrier's fall, she feels safer like this.

Ava's good at disappearing, slipping into the crowd, one moment a figure on the sidewalk, and then she's gone. Stepping into the shadows, melting down an alley, trying to let the world pass her by as she gathers her thoughts, decides what to do next -- she'd be hard to trace if someone didn't know the tricks she used, and people like that are very rare indeed. She's only still for a moment or two, planning her course back to the neglected warehouse she's been living in, away from the crowd and then circling back around, just to be on the safe side.

Comments

[krasnaya_vdova]

"Something like that," she answers a shrug of her shoulders from underneath that over-sized jacket, not giving away details about the contents of her duffle bag. No sense in telling him anything she didn't have to until she had a better grasp on what was going on. What he wanted. It's not even a lie, he is part right-- it has her Red Widow outfit from SHIELD, the keys to her motorcycle, SHIELD tech and a number of other things. But a lot of the things she wouldn't want someone like him getting his hands on are personal. The cellphone she calls Oksana on. The iPod Natasha gave her for her tenth birthday, a twist of Alexei's hair. She'd been in the Red Room long enough to know what those sort of people could do with attachments.

She takes that statement in, and her lips thin, and that look in her eyes turns to something that's part defiance and part accusation, though it doesn't color her voice. She's not the same as Natasha, not quite so cold, not so good at killing her emotions. Ava has a lot of the Red Room scars, but she clearly hadn't finished her training. "I remind you of Natasha Romanoff."

She'll have to go through him.

She holds the option in her mind, considers it. It's dangerous, probably the wrong call, but Ava knows far too much about Natasha. But, he doesn't know that, or else his questions would be more precise (unless he's playing her, trying to lure her into a sense of security when all he's really looking to do is confirm what he already knows--) but for the moment she brushes the paranoia aside. Odds are he probably doesn't know about her powers, at least. She might be able to hit him hard enough to get away, throw her bag through the window, dive after it if when she's free.

She's slowly shifting her weight in that subtle way that doesn't really seem like movement. But to the particularly sharp, she's trying to get a line on the side door that goes to the hallway, though her eyes never leave his face. Don't fight the Winter Soldier, Ava. She wants a distraction for this, a way to catch him from behind, give a chance to make sure that first shot really hurts, but any tricks she has are in her bag. Which means if it comes down to it, she'll just have to go with what she has-- which is nothing but a bad idea.

Nat wouldn't fight, she knows. Not yet, anyway. She'd keep him talking, find out exactly what he was looking for, lull him into the closest the Winter Soldier might get to complacency, but the truth was that Ava wasn't as good at the social aspects as Nat was. She could manage a few lines, a smile and a look, even, but really playing someone? Not her best skill, even with the knowledge of how it worked there in her head.

She sighs, shaking her head as she tucks the knife back into the sheath at the back of her belt where she'd pulled it from. Her hands are empty when they come back, her lips thinning. "Why are you interested in her? She'll just disappoint you," she says, letting herself tap into that old anger as her arms cross over her chest and her mouth turns into a frown. They'd worked through some of it, bonded through shared pain, but eight years of resentment was a hell of a thing.

She's intentionally not lying to him -- she assumes he's probably better than her; the perfect soldier, perfect predator, like he might smell it in the dark. But not all truth is honest, either.

[disassembling]

That she was hiding matters important to her was not something unusual. It was the way of the world as he had seen it so far as he scrambled to regain what had been taken from him. Attachments were generally linked to memories, good or bad. Whatever was in that bag was either actually worth protecting, or she just plain wanted so little to do with him that she would guard anything that he might show an ounce of interest in. Which it was, he didn't know yet, but he planned on finding out little by little. Some of her secrets would definitely remain her own, and he had no intention of taking what was hers. He would probably murder anyone that came after the mad scribblings that were found in several diaries; they might look like insanity to some but they were the keys to putting together all the information that he had gathered and recalled.

As for why he was here, her reaction was plainly childish but he enjoyed the peeks of what could be honest expression. And he knew the name, but sometimes there was dislocation between names and faces for him. He was working on it, but that came and went on any given day. He suspected it was to do with having ten-thousand volts of electricity flow through his brain to erase his memories. Some old attachments of neural pathways would never be his again.

"You move like she does," he replied simply. And yes, there were some physical similarities as well, but his attachment for Natasha was something bone deep. When he thought of the red-head who shot him in the face, the one that tried to garrote him on the streets, the one that drove him off with his own weapon, there was an odd sort of sad comfort. He had old flickers of events that came from a time where Natasha was more Ava's age than the one he had so recently experienced. "I've gone rogue, and I have no intention of going back. If you're the same, we have that in common. I imagine that Natalia is pleased with that, since she started the successful trend."

It was true that he didn't know anything about this young woman or what might be in her head or any extraordinary powers that she might possess. However, unless she killed him outright, he would pursue her and his tracking skills were still of high quality. She would have to sleep eventually, and he knew how to drive someone to the point of exhaustion with paranoia. He wouldn't enjoy such tactics, but he would use them if she gave him no other choice.

Of course, he was far more curious of her statement about Natasha, thinking it over and wondering at the source. It was not yet for him to question it outright; they were still in a mini-stand off as far as he was concerned. She could try to give him the slip at any time, but it seemed that maybe she knew more about Natasha than the simple facts. She might even know intimate details. "Is that what she did to you? Disappoint. Because for her to disappoint you, she had to be disappointed in someone else and I suspect that person was me." Like he was supposed to do something, supposed to take more care, stop pushing the boundaries and stretching the rules... he couldn't remember.

And he valued honesty, which was why all of his statements were currently honest. He had come in search of her after all; it would be best that he offer a limited skill that they were trained in. Honesty was Bucky Barnes; lying was the Winter Soldier's talent.

[krasnaya_vdova]

He says that she moves like Natasha does and there's a flicker of something half-amused to the curve of her lips. She doesn't wear makeup, doesn't dress the part of peoples' expectations the way Natasha does. She doesn't give away the answer yet, doesn't explain, tell him why, just lets that praise hang in the air. It is praise-- even if she came by it less than naturally, being compared to the Black Widow is not a small thing, even for Ava, even now. Even if part of her still burns to be better.

She does seem to calm a little when he tells her that he's gone rogue, with no intention of going back. There's a flicker of uncertainty, but she decides to trust him for now. Or at least, to not try and pick a fight and slip out the window. For the moment, anyway. She wouldn't kill him-- not that she wasn't capable of killing, but she didn't think she could take him in a fight that lasted, and he didn't seem to be out to hurt her or drag her back... or he hadn't tried yet, at least.

"She rescued me when I was nine. She called me sestra, told me I could trust SHIELD." She shrugs her shoulders, a jerk of her head that implies just how well that had worked out for her. She'd never really told anyone else about it, her conflicted feelings when it came to Natasha, especially around the SHIELD Academy where all of the Avengers were not just heroes, but like rockstars. She gives him the truth, a sliver of it anyway, and there's something a little cathartic about it. She leaves out the fact that later, Natasha had told her that she should thank her for it. Was it any wonder Ava had punched her in the face?

Ava had a spitfire streak, a willingness to take on the world -- maybe even more now than she had before. "So what are you looking for? What is it about Natasha that you think will give you your answers?" Her body language is almost casual, but there's still an edge to her, looking for anything to tip her off if the situation changed, if paranoia became more useful than trust. She was willing to give him a chance, though, despite the news reports, and the fact that this could go bad fast if he turned on her.

She was broken in her own ways, but she wasn't quite as jaded in those same cold ways Natasha was.

[disassembling]

The Soldier knew well enough about SHIELD to understand how well her life had gone when it came to trusting the organization. It made them closer to allies because they were technically working for the same organization in a sense, but that had all gone up in smoke and left them all high and dry, scrambling to evade and avoid notice from the masters that would no doubt be eager to gather up all the pieces that had strayed from them. It was why he was sneaking around in Brooklyn and she was clearly pretending to be a street rat with no prospects.

And, for some reason, the idea that Natasha was possibly keeping an eye out was like a warning. She had a keen eye, but with her came bigger problems that he wasn't yet ready to face. Somehow, he thought that knowing her was grasping a part of his past that blurred together in many lives where he had established some kind of cold freedom. He simply had to gather information about her from a distance enough to not personally draw her. Right now, he had spent far too long and too much effort side-stepping Steve's attempts to hunt him down. So really, it seemed maybe he and this young woman were avoiding certain aspects of themselves.

"I know I trained her," he remarked softly. "But I can't recall how long, when or even at times where. I know it had to be the Soviet Union because all the information on the web shows when she defected." He wanted to know who the hell Yasha was and all those other names that clamored for his attention, seeming both personal and foreign at the same time.

"Where were you trained? And when?"

[krasnaya_vdova]

"My history is fuzzy," she admits quietly, not entirely meeting his eyes as he asks her where she was trained. Maybe she shouldn't tell him this much, but the more he says, the less he seems like a threat. And she understands that feeling so well it aches in her chest. "They-- they wiped me," she admits, her voice thin and quiet, like it hurts to admit it. "I know I was trained in the Red Room. In Russia, but the specifics are hard. 2001, maybe?" She struggles, trying to remember, but it still hurts, burns as she tries to force her way through the cracks in her memories that still remain, that pinch of pain at the corners of her eyes. "They moved me from Widow Ops into some experimental science program. That's where she rescued me from."

She shakes her head and there's a sound that's bitter, almost a laugh but humorless. "I can tell you more about her than about myself," she admits. It's not duplicitous, but just the effect of what they'd done to her. "Ava's a diminutive. I don't even know my real name." She sighs, moving over to her makeshift bed and setting her duffle down on the sleeping bag on a fake boxspring made from plywood on cinderblocks. She never turns her back on him, and there's still caution in how she moves, the way she keeps her hands in close range of her waist to minimize draw distance, but she's less tight-strung than initially.

She skulks around Brooklyn trying to work up the courage to go see Sana instead of just texting her lies on a burner phone. But she feels like a different person, like being two streetrat Brooklyn orphans against the world that complained about fishsticks and made soup of potatoes and whatever nearly-spoiled vegetables the grocer at the corner would offer for free while dreaming about cupcakes was a lifetime ago, even if it had only been three years. Would Sana even recognize her? It's easier to pretend to be nobody, just a face in the crowd. Safer.

"Natasha was decades before me. Top of her class. The best the Black Widow program ever produced," she murmurs with a curve of her lips.

[disassembling]

Well, it seemed that they had that fact in common. The Soldier - now Bucky - had learned more of his own history from a display in a museum than he could actually recall most times. He struggled to find meaning in the haze that continually plagued him, though he wondered what it would be like to have someone else's history in his head rather than a complete lack of one. He expected that it actually might be more frustrating, since all those associations were taking up space and detracting from trying to find out the truth of one's own history.

He listened to her tale, considering the information that she was telling him. Trained in the Red Room but moved to a different division. How many more were like her? How many more would be forced to copy the one true star of the show? "Would you like to know your history? Who and what you are? How long have you been searching for answers to those questions, or are you here to avoid that part of your life?" He had to wonder if all of this - everything they had lost - was worth fighting for.

He hummed and watched her settle on her makeshift bed. It seemed comfortable enough, but it allowed her to also up and move on without much fuss either. Yet, a part of him that had been searching for clues to the Red Room operations and how Natalia had fit into it all still weren't clear, but maybe he was one step closer. Part of who he was lay with that history, one no doubt locked up and archived in Soviet Russia. Maybe her history - the truth - would be there as well.

"I trained her," he said airily, as if talking about the weather. "I don't recall the details, but I remember impressions. She was... curious of me back then, I think." That's all he knew. That one single detail and everything else was little more than some blackhole from the wipes.

[krasnaya_vdova]

"Yes," she answered softly, a shrug of her shoulders. "I know some pieces, but it's all things I've read in reports and none of it--" It didn't feel real, didn't feel like hers. It was confusing, painful at times. "I know what I was supposed to be. But I want to be something else," she admitted with just a touch of defiance, or maybe even desperation to it. Holding onto the optimistic belief that she still got a choice in it.

Her bed was probably not what most people would consider comfortable, but between the safehouse in DC, living in the basement of a YMCA in Brooklyn, and other stolen bolt holes over the past few years, Ava had never really indulged in creature comforts. She murmurs thoughtfully as he talks about training her. "You were different than the others. You were- something she almost understood, I think." She looks distracted for a moment, her focus not as unflinchingly on him as it has been since he stepped into her little refuge.

"There was a mission in Paris. One of her first. The click of her heels in the rain, meeting the target, you took the shot. She smiled at you, like it was a game." She says it without thinking, then shifts a little awkwardly, fidgets with her fingers. It's hard to explain what it feels like. A movie in her head, except it's not her own, and the picture isn't always in focus. She shakes her head, trying to clear it, blinking him back into focus.

"Sorry," she murmurs, not quite sure what else to say, ducking her head. She has pieces of his answers. Things she can offer if he asks the right questions, strange as it is. Those awkward pieces of memory that outweigh her own, that she knows Natasha hates that she still has, even if they'd sort of made their peace over it. It was a violation for the both of them, in the end.

[disassembling]

In that, it seemed that they could be much the same. He had read reports, mission or progress mostly, and they hadn't never felt as if they actually involved him. It read as the life of someone completely different from who or what he was, never made much of an impression even if it was apparently the action that he had taken while under orders. He had kept those reports because they were his and maybe someday they would eventually fit into the pieces of the puzzle that he was building that happened to be his life.

It was perhaps stranger still to know that there were, to a degree, others out there like him. All of them struggling to regain what had been taken from them. This was perhaps the Red Rooms and HYDRA's legacy. Lives stolen, the attempt at perfect soldiers made.

He watched Ava silently, drinking in the knowledge that she offered perhaps without thinking about how much it might mean to him. The fact of the matter was that he didn't remember any of that, yet what she said didn't ring hollow like some of those other facts that he had read about himself. He could almost smell the rain in his mind's eye, could imagine the smile that would be tossed his way, the elevation of the game, coy and curious.

"Thank you," he said softly and maybe for the first time in a very long time, he actually meant it. When had he forgot sincerity? He closed his eyes, thinking over what she had said and then stepping away as if seeking some manner of privacy but perhaps also giving her that opportunity to up and slip away if she wanted to take it. "I can't... ask her." Natalia he meant. With her came so much other baggage he couldn't yet face. "What do you say to seeking out information on our lives here and there together?"

[krasnaya_vdova]

He says thank you and it actually flusters her for a moment, makes her hands fidget a little, a thin smile as she tilts her head to the side. "It's nothing, just.. lingering pieces," she says quietly. He steps away for a moment, and she could probably make it if she moved fast, quiet. Grabbed her bag, through the window. When he moves he's no longer at the perfect distance to cover the exits. And yet, she doesn't. She stays, watches him as he seems to think over what she'd said, or what it had meant to him.

There's a murmur of agreement when he says that he can't ask her, and Ava understands that feeling entirely. Her relationship with Natalia was rocky on the best of days, and there was so much between them that they hadn't talked about, things that Ava didn't quite know how to touch. It was easier to be here; out on her own, than it was to risk trying to contact Natasha, to ask for anything.

It makes her smile with a little piece of warmth at the offer. The idea of not being on her own is far more appealing than she'll say out loud just yet, but she doesn't bother trying to hide it too deeply. As damaged as she is, she still feels, perhaps even more openly than Natasha. "I think I like that," she offers, a little skittish around the edges, but choosing to trust him. She's pretty sure there were worse people to be traveling with, where ever they ended up going.

If she's honest, she hates being alone. It's just still easier than the alternative.

[disassembling]

Just lingering pieces. There was something familiar about those words and how they applied to him, how it was the pieces he was desperately trying to grasp onto and keep in order to make sense of them. It seemed that she had similar impressions, except hers were a life not even her own whereas the pieces simply felt as if they shouldn't be his own. That they both had massive holes in their history to have to try to fill was sadly comforting, knowing that - finally - he wasn't alone when it came to his struggle, even if it was a young woman who had once belonged to the same organization that he did. Maybe he shouldn't trust her.

Of course, that she didn't immediately take the opportunity to run away from him might have been suspicious except that he knew that he could likely take her in a fight. It wasn't that he was arrogant of his skills compared to what he had seen, but he simply had the added years of combat, a greater musculature and of course his metal arm tended to trump many combat situations. She had every right to try to slip away; who could actually trust the Winter Soldier after all? He asked himself that question a lot, and it was one of many reasons he remained in hiding.

And maybe, just maybe, the trust had to go both ways. He turned his head to regard her, aware that they both had plenty to lose in this. "I know... of some HYDRA facilities that haven't yet been raided which might give us a clue. HYDRA and the Red Room worked together on quite a few projects, including the Black Widow and Winter Soldier ones. We should potentially start sooner than later."

He turned back to face Ava again. "Do you have anyone to tell that you're possibly going away for awhile?"

[krasnaya_vdova]

He looks at her and she looks back at him, a quirk of her lips for a moment, though it fades as he starts talking about plans, about HYDRA facilities that haven't been raided.

"I'm pretty sure OPUS too. They were able to have information passed to Fury to ensure he sent Natasha. That had to be HYDRA." A pause, a sharp inhale. "The people I stayed with when I was brought into SHIELD custody-- they kept me locked in some secret bunker in DC for five years. They'd threaten to wipe me if I didn't behave." She shrugs her shoulders. Telling him too much? Maybe. But the truth is that she knows things about him. Maybe more than he knows himself. Maybe it's a little easier if they can meet somewhere in the middle.

"I-- no. I don't." It's not even particularly convincing, but she's not really trying. She wouldn't try to deceive him, but Sana was complicated. It had been three years and she just... didn't know how to face the other girl.

"We can leave whenever you want." For Ava picking up and leaving really is that simple.