w i n t e r

Climbing the steps at a soft pace, James fished out his keys from his right pocket, the brown paper bag of food cradled in his opposite arm. The stairs that led to his one bedroom rental were stained and creaked with every footstep, groaning under his weight as testament to how long it had been since this building had been renovated. He’d assumed he’d be unbothered if he located himself on the outskirts of town in something nondescript and non expensive, and it helped that the walls were so thin that he could hear everything. It made the nights pass quicker, when he was lucky enough to find sleep. 

It had been years since he’d been trapped in HYDRA’s grip, but he was only recently coming down from the worst of it. Completely sleepless nights had become restless, but manageable, and he was learning to detach himself from listening to the countless sounds that echoed around him. It didn’t change that he purposefully sought out an apartment that betrayed the littlest of movements with not much of a landlord presence; a few years and few name changes didn’t erase decades of HYDRA control. Didn’t erase an engrained system that caused more automatic responses than not.

It was why he paused at his front door, his keys hanging loosely in his palm. Beyond the sound of the bag rustling in his arm, and beyond the sound of faint talking from his neighbors, he swore he heard the distinct clink of a glass against a wooden table, a wooden table with a false bottom where he’d holstered a gun to. It was so quiet that it blended into the footsteps, movements, words exchanged, all the bustling life happening around him and it prompted him to still put his key in the lock and turn. It clicked and he pushed his way in, shutting the door with his foot. Inside, he stood still for a moment, his ears picking up on the faintest of sounds, anything out of the ordinary that stood out against his bland, hardly furnished apartment. After a few heartbeats and a whole lot of nothing, James took a few steps forward until he rounded the corner, towards the kitchen, just as the lightest sound of clinking glass fluttered into his ears. 

It was fast, the movement happening on an automatic scale that required no conscious thought. James leveled the gun he’d had tucked away in the band of his jeans at the blonde woman who was sitting at his tiny kitchen table, a singular bottle in front of her. He knew her, he knew her as an extension of Natasha, and what he knew wasn’t pretty.