Chapter Text
Somehow, the Winter Soldier ended up in a diner in Brooklyn. So if he was trying to run from his past, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.
This was the kind of diner that had maybe been updated once since the 1940s, and he could still pick out the details that betrayed age and history. Linoleum stained dark with heavy foot traffic no matter how hard it was scrubbed, aluminum tables, and the words “Blue Plate Special” embossed across the menu board. The waitresses wore jeans, t-shirts – modern fare – but the logo on their aprons was distinctly old-fashioned. Some deeply buried part of him had steered his feet through the front door and to a booth in the back, furthest away from the counter and by the window so he could keep an eye out for… what? The Winter Soldier wasn’t sure, entirely, but he did it anyway.
Outside it was early morning, light enough that he could be seen or spotted if someone cared enough to look, and for the first time in years, the Winter Soldier worried about detection. Decades had passed him by in a jumbled, disorganized fashion, but through all his missions he remembered the calm confidence that he could not be caught.
He blinked and there was a menu in his hands, the swaying hips of a waitress walking away and he had the strongest urge to call after her. A car backfired outside, sounding almost like the word ‘Bucky,’ being shouted by the blonde man from four days earlier, and images of painfully earnest blue eyes flashed through his mind. This man he was seeing wasn’t Bucky, he was Captain America, wasn’t he? And Bucky was…?
His head throbbed with the – memory? Winter Soldier supposed that this man and this Bucky were memories. Visiting the Smithsonian had made his head throb viciously, pain enough to match anything the Russians had done to him in seventy odd years – enough even to rival the excruciating noise and pain of metal seared to flesh. It felt like there was still electricity coursing through his brain, washing out his thoughts until they disappeared under a flood of confusion and blank, white, nothingness.
A local radio station was on in the background, familiar yet grating, sounding like orders being repeated over and over again. There was a wad of crumpled cash in his pocket that was heavier than lead, a tick in his eyelid that wouldn’t quit, and a waitress waiting for his order.
“Do you think that you know what you’re going to order?” The scruffy looking man had been sitting in June’s section for some time now, holding a menu open in front of him, unmoving. From her position next to the booth, she could see new beard growth and a frown under long, tangled hair.
He glanced up at her quickly, and she got the distinct impression that he felt uncomfortable interacting with her. “No.” The words were spoken gruffly without any eye contact.
His clothes were dark enough to disguise most damage and dirt, but June could see rips here and there – the wear of hard living becoming evident under only the most determined scrutiny. They looked well-made enough, quality, as if he’d fallen recently into some hard times, and that tugged at her heart strings. Having just dragged herself by her bootstraps out of a life of couch surfing and women’s shelters, June could empathize.
And she wanted to do something, for him. The pancake special was their Deal of the Day – the cheapest on the menu for the most food.
“I’ll get you a #1 then. Pancakes are the best here.” She found herself saying before thinking, and when he looked up, startled, and caught her in the full blast of his eyes, she remembered how often empathy had gotten her into trouble in the past.
In the back of the diner, a loud clock rang to signal that the 7 a.m. breakfast rush would be starting soon. The man flinched but it was almost as if he was practiced at finding the small clock when he looked for it – like he’d done it a million times before. As he returned to suspiciously look her over, June thought his eyes seemed dark, tragic but beautiful like a raw cliff falling into the ocean. Made her want to sit and stay a spell, as the diner’s old owner Archie often said.
They pulled in a way that was dangerous and addictive, a whirlpool that wouldn’t stop until it consumed all; and hat was a warning she needed to take well in hand. Maybe the effect would have gone on forever, but other customers behind her were calling impatiently for service, growing more and more agitated, peeling June from table thirteen and turning her back on the sad, lonely predator she’d just encountered.
When June returned and placed a white ceramic mug on the tabletop next to his gloved left hand because he looked like he needed it – not because it was included in the special. His fist curled as if he had to restrain himself from reaching out and grabbing for her. He watched suspiciously while she poured a stream of steaming coffee that just filled his cup to the rim, and asked in a low, monotone voice, “What did you put into that?”
She stared at him, puzzled, and cocked one hip to sling the carafe handle into the waistband of her apron. “Water and coffee beans? What else would go in there?”
The Winter Soldier stared at his full coffee cup and didn’t move to pick it up. Vaguely he could feel some thought about creamer and sugar lumps in the back of his head, but it was half-eaten away and useless, so he let it die. Instead he thought of all the things the Russians, HYDRA, had given him for sustenance over the decades. Bland, chalky things packed with protein, always with the burning aftertaste of chems meant to regulate him. Or at least that’s what they told him.
And despite all their conditioning, he’d never particularly believed them.
This woman though didn’t look too much like a HYDRA weapon –thin but without tone like it’d been a diet of necessity rather than effort. Recently though, she’d begun to fill out on a steadier diet – he could tell by the way the effects were still uneven. Her moderate breasts and hips were beginning to swell past the point were they’d fit in her worn clothes; but her red-brown hair was still dull and frazzled – not yet grown past the older chemical composition of long-term malnutrition – and her arms were still too thin on her frame.
He thought, as she looked him over with an expectant but strangely gentle eye, that if she’d been a mission, he would have gone in for a 1 on 1 kill. She was the type of person that scurried about like a mouse from one hole to the next. Too weak to fight back and not resourceful enough to have any chance for running – her only talent was hiding. And sometimes it was just too much trouble to lure the mouse out of it’s hole.
Although, the Winter Soldier decided as he inspected the sloshing coffee in her carafe for any suspicious bubbling or coloration, that if this one had been a mark, this one would have given him some regret. And he couldn’t begin to decide why.
A low buzzing sounded from the back of the diner broke June’s concentration – someone’s order was ready – and the unshaven predator opened his mouth like he wanted to reply but was suddenly discovering that he was at a loss for words. From the flash of distress and frustration that flew across his features before he tucked it away again, June suspected this was not the first time this had happened to him.
Distracted, she noticed the radio finishing up it’s report on the Winter Soldier and the fall of the Triskelion, whatever that was. Maybe it had something to do with that building’s collapse a few days ago in D.C. – June’d caught a few minutes of news coverage here and there in between shifts. It switched to a report on American soldiers in Iraq and their hopes of coming home, and perhaps that was the answer she was looking for.
Maybe he was a veteran, she decided, noticing the red, calloused knuckles of his bare right hand and the fact that he’d picked a booth with a vantage point on the rest of the diner. Maybe he’d come back from Iraq to find his life in ruins around him, maybe he suffered from something like PTSD and had fallen to the wayside like so many others before him had. The idea that he might finally be someone she could help rather than the other way around, piqued even more sympathy and had June diving in before her brain could catch up with her mouth.
“Don’t worry. It’s on the house.” She told him, braved herself to reach out and gently pat a shoulder that was clenched and knotted under her palm, and left to surreptitiously dig through her pockets for a coffee’s worth of change.