#winterassassin

A) if Desmond was suddenly dropped into Pokemon, how would he react?

B) What would you like to know about Des and I?

They were closing in on a year. A year with Tali. It didn’t seem like that long ago that they had fumbled through Russia and came home with a child, but it had. And in that time, they had been no closer to finding out anything about her. She was five-ish, maybe six now, maybe not. They knew every little about her history outside of the room they had found her in, and they could make assumptions all night about what had happened to her. (Or why she slept with a hand above her head. Or if she had a family that had missed her — or when she had been born, so she had some arbitrary day to celebrate being on this planet for another year.)

The questions had piled up, and they had done their best (and with a lot of help from Tony) to give her a normal life. To get her into school despite them not having any documentation that she was legal here. Despite not having a day to write for her birthday so Sharon had left it blanked and played dumb when the school called to ask her to fill out the form properly. Sharon would say that she would and then get ‘too busy’ to go to the school and she’d always find a way to get of the phone with them when they asked her to simply give them the information there.

Sharon didn’t know why it stuck with her the way it had, but Tali had everything taken from her. But she had taken her life back with small things. Like choosing her name. Finding out that she liked candy — having opinions of her own even when everyone in the family looked at her and told her no — she was a person here. And Tali lived so loudly. Like now, she was sitting in the living room with a rubber duck on her head describing the show she was watching with immaculate detail, as if her toy could really hear her. It was so funny and so normal. And Sharon was sitting across the table from James, her feet in his chair, nudging him with the balls of her feet as if she didn’t already have his full attention.

Time was precious. To some, that meant that time was well spent with those you loved — and for Natasha, it could easily refer to a window of opportunity to take out a target. But when it came to the Avengers and Sharon, it was closer to the first one. And Natasha had spent a lot of time away. From SHIELD. From the CIA. From her. And now, the only reason she was knocking on the door was because of the trail she had picked up in Russia. The prints in the sand and the movements inside a Hydra bunker that reminded her of one agent.

And someone else. Her mind had tried to fill in the blanks, tried to make sense of the prints in the snow next to Sharon’s. The small ones — she knew Sharon had taken the child, but the larger ones? It couldn’t have been Clint or Tony or even Steve. The gait was wrong. She recognized them as the Winter Soldier’s — James Barnes. But he was in Wakanda on ice.

But he wasn’t.

The door opened and she could hear the heavy footsteps from the other side of the door. Again, the weight was wrong to be Sharon. “James.” A thousand unspoken questions. How did he get out of the ice? When? Did he feel any different or was he learning to cope with what he had stuffed in his head?

No.

There was a look in his eye. A kind of recognition she hadn’t gotten from him before. A sense of loss. He looked like he had seen a ghost when he was the ghost. He was the man of mystery who vanished into the Russian snow banks. He was the man who had no name and no face for years. To the point that people wrote him off as a story. So why was he looking at her like he was seeing something else? Why was he looking at her the same way Steve had looked at him when he realized who the Winter Soldier was. (What had she done to earn that gaze? Nothing that she could remember —) Narrowing her eyes, she lifted the brown bag in her hand. Wine. For Sharon.

“I was planning on getting her drunk so that she’d explain to me why the hell she thought it was a good idea to head into a Hydra base and bring a child home.” She passed him the bottle. “The wine is still for her. But you get to explain.”

Daisy didn’t need to explain over the phone to Bucky. It was almost funny that she suggested they meet up and put on some gloves and beat the shit out of each other for stress relief and he didn’t question it in the slightest. She had sent him a location — Fogwell’s Gym. One of the other kids in the orphanage had talked about it a lot and Daisy, at this point, was reaching out towards anything that even seemed familiar. Something solid and familiar for her to hold onto so that she didn’t slip away at the same time.

When Lincoln died, she had thrown herself into robbing banks and running across the states as a vigilante with nothing in her mind except liberating money from assholes who hated inhumans and using their money to fund charities that would help those people they tried to destroy. It hadn’t been a perfect plan, and it hadn’t been legal by any means, but it had been effective. Though she had been labeled an enemy of the state, and then she was a hero, and then she was a monster. (There were few people who had been through a similar pattern, and Bucky was one of them. It hadn’t been in the order she went in, but he, at some point, had been labeled those same things.)

Stretching her arms above her head, she looked at Bucky as he slipped between the ropes and got inside the ring. “Traditional rules? Or are we dogfighting like it’s the real world?” Daisy quipped.

winters-assassin said: let out your inner eagle. let the freedom burst out.