March Catch-All [OTA]

[worthallthis]

Who: Winter (Bucky Barnes) and OPEN
When: March catch-all
Where: ADI headquarters, ADI apartments, around town
Summary: Just working, training, and being a different kind of quietly creepy
Warnings: Struggles with personalization


I. Confessions - Closed to Close CR

There are some people who need to know that they might be at risk to continue associating with him: specifically, Kate, Meredith, Jaeger, and Malcolm Bright. Winter will seek them out one by one and... confess. Or, well, say, "I need to tell you something," and then shuffle around like he's embarrassed, angry that he's embarrassed, and afraid of what their response will be.


II. Study - OTA

So Winter needs to learn how to be a person. This requires... study.

Unfortunately, study seems to take the form of creepily watching people all over town. He no longer wears his mask and goggles unless he's actively on ADI patrol or a mission, but his face is not particularly expressive, and having a large guy in a dark coat and combat boots standing on street-corners or in shop windows or sitting on perch benches staring at people (and still not making eye contact when caught at it) is not particularly reassuring.

He also takes the dive (possibly suggested by one of his people) to try reading as another form a study. Fiction. He starts, perhaps stupidly, with romance novels, as this seems like a good way to learn human interactions. He sits in the cafeteria, his apartment, or in the cold in the park with a book with a pretty lady being leaned back by a shirtless man in floral pastel colors in his hand. Mostly when he's doing this, he's frowning.

Please be the one to almost get beaned by the book when he finally gets fed up and disgusted with what he's reading and throws it across whatever room, hall, or outdoor space he's in with an annoyed growl.


III. Prisoners of Consciousness - OTA

It happens when Winter is on patrol. The ADI hallway is broad, if a little dark, and the ventilation shafts are heavy in the ceiling. He's walked this hall for months, now. He knows it well.

So why does the end of the hall seem so far away? Why are all the doors along it-- why are they shrinking to a size he could barely fit his hand through? Where is that window he knows is on this stretch of hall?

It feels like... it feels like another hall, deep inside a concrete bunker in Siberia. That's what this is. He's owned again. He's a thing again. And he sure as hell does deserve it, for all the people he killed, for the Widows he helped corrupt, for the entity that he let attach itself to him somehow and the people he scared to unwittingly feed it.

Anyone else traveling this hall in the mid to late afternoon can find him huddled against the wall, hugging his rifle like a teddy bear, breathing too hard behind his mask. No goggles today, so it's just Winter's wide, damp eyes fixed on the floor.


IV. Trick of the Dark - OTA

Winter is often out and about after dark, whether staring at the shelves at the grocery store trying to make himself pick something out of the myriad of brands available for peanut butter alone, closing up shop at ADI after a long evening of practice or tutelage, or his nightly patrols of the ADI apartments. He does glimpse the strange woman once or twice, but he sees nothing amiss about another person out after dark. That sort of thing, this time? Does not scare him.

Once he does lever his gun at her when she appears too close, but she vanishes quickly after that.

No, mostly what he sees is people of the city, even friends, attacking streetlamps, rushing into stores to turn off lights, climbing up to try and smash overhead lights in the ADI halls. He follows in their wake, puzzled, repairing what damage he can and turning lights back on. If it gets too bad, he approaches the person in question. "Calm down. What are you trying to do."

Comments

[worthallthis]

His eyes flick briefly, and belatedly, up to her face-- left cheek, or thereabouts-- before going back to the floor. He's aware of her. He doesn't actually know who she is, aside from someone he saw briefly while keeping watch over his people at their Ladies Night.

He has no idea what to say. After a too-long beat, he grates out, "What."

[failedpromise]

She looks a little different than she did then: without her human disguise, she's fully revealed in all her glowy blue glory.

"Are you okay?" Her voice is gentle. She knows the answer is obviously no, but he might not appreciate her saying so.

[worthallthis]

No, he's not okay. He's... not been okay really for a long time. Right now it's just up at the surface. Thanks fear-entities!

He shifts his rifle in his grip, not really in any preparation to use it, more to kind of... hide behind it. "Everything closed in," he says in a small voice.

[failedpromise]

Not okay is entirely unsurprising. She knows what trauma looks like. Seeing it in this man, she almost reaches out to comfort him, but she's not sure how well that'd be taken from a stranger. Better to find out more about the situation before trying something like that, if it's necessary at all.

She lets out a breath. Not wanting to see people hurt like this was one of the reasons she'd wanted to take over the galaxy. (Even if the end she probably just caused more harm.)

"Closed in like a feeling, or did things actually move?" She knows that it could be either.

[worthallthis]

" ... both. There was a window. Now there's not. The doors shifted. They. I. I'm locked in. Because I'm a weapon." He's not supposed to be. He's supposed to be getting better at being a person. Maybe he's not getting better fast enough.

[failedpromise]

"So am I." The smile on Cortana's face isn't a happy one. She'd proved just how much of a weapon she could be, back in her world.

She'd like to try being something different, now.

"I'm not actually seeing anything different." She made an obvious show of looking the hallway up and down. "It might be like with the snow..." Or not. She wasn't sure what was up with the snow. She wasn't sure it had been real, with how quickly it had disappeared, but it had felt real enough before that. "Some kind of illusion? I wonder..." She was musing to herself as much as she was speaking to him.

[worthallthis]

That's... that's a point. It's a difficult point to sink his teeth into, mentally, but he knows it's a good point. Hallways don't suddenly get too long to pass through, windows don't disappear. But it feels real. It feels earned.

Winter tries to breathe through the hints of rising panic. As a distraction, for himself and her, he asks, "How are you a weapon?"

Oh, he knows she's blue and glowing. He knows she doesn't look like that in town-- nobody who looks strange looks strange in town-- but he doesn't know what that means.

[failedpromise]

How?

She supposed a little elaboration wouldn't hurt.

"I'm an AI designed to connect with and infiltrate computer systems. Which probably isn't the kind of weapon you were thinking of, but is very effective when you need to, say, hijack enemy assets and turn them against them." Or crack their communications encryption. Or make their spaceship life support systems suddenly vent all atmosphere. She doesn't want to elaborate further, though. She's always been proud of her capabilities, but now that she's turned them against her own, it's hard to find that sense of strength and accomplishment.

[worthallthis]

No, not really the kind he was thinking, but it's also not-- unfamiliar. The plates in his metal arm ripple with discomfort, trying to figure out why that seems familiar.

He doesn't make her elaborate, at least. He can come up with those creative ways to kill all on his own.

"That would be very effective. Yes." He finally looks at her straight on. There's no eye contact, but he's looking at about the level of her right cheek. "Did you get to. Decide how you looked?" If she's a computer program, someone had to decide that, right?

[failedpromise]

She smirks, just slightly. Even now, it's nice to have her skills acknowledged.

"I did, actually. What do you think?" A hint of playfulness in her tone as she spreads her arms out to give a better view. She likes seeing people react to her appearance almost as much as she likes dazzling people with her intelligence.

Also, it seems to be doing a pretty good job of distracting him.

[worthallthis]

"You are. Very blue," he says. With utter seriousness. He's not the type, these days, to really notice attractiveness. "The haircut is nice." Then, because she doesn't seem to have a lot in the way of clothes (if the icons are to be believed), he adds, "Do you get cold?"

[failedpromise]

Cortana lets out a little laugh at his words. She likes this guy.

After a moment, she sits down. Yes, on the floor. It doesn't seem like he's ready to try leaving just yet.

"A bit, yes. More than I did when I designed this body." Before, she wasn't solid enough to feel things like cold. Now? Well, lets just say that almost getting stuck in the snow a while back wasn't fun.

...Might be time to buy herself a coat.

"I'm Cortana. What's your name?"

[worthallthis]

"Winter." Which, given the question about being cold, now seems vaguely ironic. He finally uncurls a little from his huddle against the wall. Things seem a little... less... closed in now. Weird. He can at least let go of his death-grip on his rifle. "I have an extra sweater in my locker. If you want it."

[failedpromise]

Cortana lets out a little huff of amusement: the irony isn't lost on her. "It's nice to meet you, Winter."

The shift in his posture also isn't lost on her. Good.

"I think I'd like that." She's never received an actual gift before.

[worthallthis]

Which means he's got to get up so he can get it for her. He looks up and down the now-normal hall, wonders a moment how much of what just happened was fear-entity magic and how much was just plain panic attack, and slowly starts to lever himself up again. "Come on. We can go get it."

[failedpromise]

"Alright." So he's feeling well enough to leave now? That's good. A part of her wonders if the illusion has disappeared, or if he simply feels up to challenging it.

She decides not to ask: probably best that his attention is on something else. Instead she gets up to follow him.

[worthallthis]

It appears to be gone, or if it isn't, it doesn't impede his movement. Now that he's determined to move, once he's on his feet, he strides purposefully back in the direction of the gym and training rooms, where he keeps his civilian clothes while he's on duty in his usual tac gear.

He's silent for the whole length of the hall until they hit the stairwell-- he doesn't take elevators; they give him horrors-- where he holds the door for her. At that point he remembers he's trying to be more like a person, and a person would talk more, so he asks, "Do you have a job here."

[failedpromise]

Good. For all that she can be, at times, very talkative, Cortana doesn't actually seem to mind the silence. She'd spent a lot of time around people who preferred it. Choosing the stairs over the elevators is a bit more unusual, but she doesn't ask about it.

Maybe he just prefers the exercise.

She nods in answer to his question. "I work in IT and research, actually. You?"

[worthallthis]

"Security." He slings the rifle over his shoulder. That's probably pretty obvious, frankly, between the weaponry, the tac gear, and the general size and demeanor he's got going. "I don't go into IT much. What's it. Like?"

[failedpromise]

"Mostly it's a bunch of nerds sitting at their desks and drinking coffee while they wait for code to run, or helping people with easily solveable problems." IT really isn't the most interesting career field unless you're really into computers. Or you yourself are made of code. Or both.

She's really not surprised that he works security: even if it weren't for the gear, he seems like the type. She's not bothered by the weapons or the awkwardness, she's spent much of her life taking care of a person who spent his childhood being turned into a killing machine.

[worthallthis]

Oh hey, guess what happened to this guy, Cortana? Maybe that's familiar about him.

"Sounds uneventful," Winter comments. "And stationary." It sounds unpleasant, is what it sounds. He can sit still for long amounts of time with very little to do, waiting for things... but that doesn't mean he necessarily wants to. Not anymore. And he's definitely not great at helping people with easily solvable problems.

Unless those problems require murder. He doubts IT problems require murder.

"Do you get bored?"

[failedpromise]

They do not. In fact, one could argue that the worst aspect of IT is that you're not allowed to murder.

"That was actually why I was wandering around here in the first place." If a task isn't enough to occupy Cortana's attention, she'll just find something else to do. Fortunately, this time it was something helpful. "Sitting and waiting for code to run isn't my idea of a good time."

Winter already seems familiar enough that she'd be angry but not particularly surprised to learn of his circumstances.

[worthallthis]

"Sitting and waiting isn't a good time," he agrees. Usually it meant... well, murder, eventually. Winter is attempting to dial down on the murder. Sort of. Dial it down from HYDRA levels, anyway.

"You don't get in trouble for leaving your post?"

[failedpromise]

"As long as my workstation is locked down so no one else can access my work and the job gets done, my boss is unlikely to care." She'll be back soon enough.

There's not much she can do right now anyway.

[worthallthis]

"Good." He's not sure where to take the conversation next, but they're coming out of the stairwell onto the correct floor now anyhow. "The security lockers are in here," he says, angling for a door across the hall.