oftwentyeight asked:

THE TIME I THOUGHT OF YOU

THE LION ROAR BREAKS THROUGH a convulsing body, unable to attack with the reinforced restraints in place. Somewhere someone beats words into his head like a ritual chanting. Though the words come in a language he’s become fluent in, they pass over his translation and process only as sounds and syllables. The lights shut off and the convulsions stop, words leaving lingering echoes and static noise. He resists the urge to catch his breath, staying silent as to remain undetected and listen for movement, but the dark is silent too. He knows it isn’t empty.

The lights turn back on and the roaring returns only it doesn’t come from him. In his place, shackled down, is a woman. The room fills with screams this time from both of them, drowning out the chants. 

When the screaming stops, he’s lying on an uncomfortable mattress in a hot room. Clenched in his fist is a crumpled newspaper that he doesn’t need to open up to remember what is printed. A picture of the Black Widow over an article inquiring about the agent’s persona. That face was left as a stain in his memories, traces of her in every locked and unlocked piece of his consciousness. She appears in his dreams more often than she doesn’t. She’s been looking for him and he’s stayed hidden. She creates a cyclonic war in his head from day to day -- and he resigns to turning over on the mattress, tucking his face under his arm.

oftwentyeight asked:

💔

When they brought him back with them, and in all honesty it felt like they were taking in a stray who did not want to be taken, he meant to find his out. When they said they could help, instinct told him to refuse. Tests and experiments didn’t seem like a better alternative to the life he’d been living hidden away in a dingy apartment, but it changed when something else made him consider the option.

He doesn’t call this a home and he doesn’t know the extent of his temporary stay, but he sits next to Natasha, knee knocking against knee like kids. Forgetting what they were talking about, they’d fallen into a silence of staring at the same rip on his jeans. They read each others minds somehow, always knowing what the other might be thinking about, predicting their next move. That’s how their eyes end up meeting at the same level.

His calm expression now gone, tension builds at his brow with every inch that he moves to press his lips to hers. Like flipping a switch somewhere in him, he quickly becomes consumed. The second that his hand locks on her knee he retracts and mutters an apology under his breath, turning forward on the couch with a hunched back and clenched fists. It isn’t the kiss that he apologizes for, its everything that he won’t tell her and everything else that she already knows. The light that went off in his head like a muted alarm and the ripple down his back that felt more like vertebrae stacking up for combat. He mentions that they’re starting tests tomorrow, that they’re confident, but doesn’t mention that he isn’t.

He’s back where he began with her, only now he’s the one who’s tearing them apart.