Tear into my heart, make me do it again;

[grimvisaged]

The rose itself surprised him less than the name on the note. Not hers, but his own, the one he's coming to share with Barnes a begrudging inch at a time, nudging into a neutral ground. She's the one who pins it upon him—Rogers remains too skittish, too fiercely optimistic to insist upon a name at all—and he accepts the compromise because she bestows it with such surety. He has to have a name, to her, because it's an anchor when her memories fail her as readily as his own. It puts them on equal footing.

The flower he dropped dutifully into a cup filled with water, but the note he neatly folded and slipped into his right pants pocket. Days now he's been carrying it, reaching down to feel the outline of the paper through the fabric. There's so much written between those two lines, so much he is incapable of deciphering. It tugs on him like leash. He thinks, dimly, that perhaps it always was that way with her.

And so he's waiting again, perched dutifully in the far-flung shadows of her room, the note an ember in his pocket as he watches the door.