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The Winter Soldier

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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.
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Rogers is not as good at this game as Romanoff. He is a man who lives the whole of his life in the open and has little knowledge of shadows, little use for subterfuge. Sometimes, his attention will find the right spot a moment too late. More often, Rogers doesn't know to look at all.

This should not be admirable, yet it is.

Nearly three weeks he's been trailing Rogers, quietly watching him, trying to find the footing he so thoroughly lost in Washington. He's less secure than he wants to be, the very sight of the man a perpetual punch to the gut, but curiosity eats at him, fed by an emotion beneath that he can't give a name to.

(lovelovelovelove)

In the long, late afternoon shadows of the gardens, he waits. Watches the figure jog through stands of trees, hurdling effortlessly over bushes, a distant smear of white on green growing rapidly closer. Predictable. Easily avoided.

This isn't how he intended this to go. He hadn't intended anything at all. Yet his right hand pulls the hood down from the stringy mess of his hair, and he takes one deliberate step from behind the pale and spindly trunk of a birch. Not line of sight, just on the periphery.

It'll be enough.

He doesn't realize he's holding his breath.
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