Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;

[grimvisaged]

The hotel, he finds, is home to an inordinate number of mirrors. This was not something he had taken particular note of before unless it helped in surveillance, but now they seem inescapable, tacked upon every wall and rising up to assault him around every corner. He has changed, and now he cannot get away from himself.

It is not Barnes nor the Winter Soldier who stares back at him now, but a grim and sleek hybrid, the place where light and dark meet. He has no opinion on his newly-clipped hair, apart from acknowledging that the style is sufficiently enough removed from both of the people he used to be. Falling in a dark sheet to skim his freshly-shaved cheeks, it would make him look like a wayward college student were it not for the hard line of his mouth which serves as accompaniment.

There's an odd sort of freedom which comes with looking different, however—A feeling of having firmly planted his flag in a place of his own choosing, of asserting that he need not be one or the other. This third option is a buoy, a brace, and it pulls him away from his reflection to find Rogers again.

He's stopped looking for Barnes, but he cannot stay away from the man who was his best friend. The thread which connects them is an invisible but unrelenting tug at his heart.

Comments

[captain_rogers]

Not every hour was spent at the task. Not every idle moment was turned to the shape and weight of a pencil in his hand and the familiar press of a notebook’s binding against the side of his knee as he bent forward, or spread out before him on a table as his eyes focused only on the minute details he drew into the images that filled his memories. His dreams.

Still, the pages of the sketchbook were full to bursting. Had been made so by the months made reacquainted with the Nexus as he waited and watched, distracted and burned himself away in allowing an old friend to choose to come back to him. In whatever form or by whatever name he decided.

There were figures long lost, places long burned or remade into things so far unlike themselves he hardly recognized them in the present. The graceful lines of a bomber’s wings as it soared overhead, painted with the last hope of a pilot with a paintbrush and a desire to remember the girl he’d left back home. The hard angles of a group of men in their laughter as they raised a glass. A stage. A woman, beautiful in images both in the fire of youth and the faded, lined last days of her life.

The past was not unaccompanied on the pages, the vibrant present sidling up alongside old memories and making it all look easier than it ever could have been. The weight of a strange hammer bent one page, a woman shaped in agony and brutality even as her lips quirked and she flew on another. An airbase. A ship. A cafe in the middle of Brooklyn. Another woman dancing across the edges and into the center of more than a few pages, a sword in one hand, her hair a dark stream around her.

One man was missing from their midst. A notable absence only to one who knew the whole of his mind and could understand how and why he was unable to capture the one friend who had meant more than any other. It was the same, as Steve looked up from the fine details he drew of a bow and the smirk behind it, the same man who looked back at him then.

“I like the new look,” he said after a moment, finding no other words that would fit.