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Brooklyn's a cobweb today, clotheslines strung from window to window like spider silk spanning the city; the tall imposing arches of the bridge are stretching from your side of the river to the sharp gleaming towers of Manhattan, and the sky's a reflecting mirror-blue, and you think you might be a little in love.
You're on a roof. The city smells of thunder, the sharp ozone that comes just after rain, and the sun is burning away the puddles from the pavement. It's the first time in months that you've been outside without a jacket on; the wind is running its cool fingers along your arms, kissing at the back of your neck. You lean back into the gravel of the rooftop, look straight at the sun.
The gravel scrapes behind you, a door opening. You say, “What’s the word, soldier?”
He says, “I brought strawberries.”
“Too early in the year for strawberries,” you say, but you sit up, turn around, and there he is with a carton in his hands green as the strawberry patch. The daylight's gleaming gold on his hair; he's standing in the doorway, all five-foot-nothing with a body like a pipe cleaner and a smile like an angel.
The strawberries aren't ripe yet, pale pink on the outside and white on the inside, but Brooklyn's shining like the sun and you lick the sourness from your lips. You might be a little in love, but that’s all right. It’s just spring, is all.
The Captain's eyes are ice-pale when they wake him up from cryo. You know this without looking.
You’ve been frozen for a long while, now, drifting in the slow and dreamless sleep of the half-dead, where everything is silence and everything is white and the winter stretches on for decades. Your breath is shallow in your lungs. Your heart is a patient drumbeat, like the ocean. Your eyes are half-open, and all you see is ice.
You hear, though—know, more, the way a compass knows north: the Captain is awake and moving, red rushing into his cheeks. The Captain is brushing ice off his shoulders, and cracking his knuckles, and cracking his neck. The Captain is stepping, hesitant and wobbling, out of the cryotank, and reaching out blindly with one hand for a gun.
You drift, in the cold and the white and the silence, and wait to wake up.
The man spits blood out onto the cold cement floor. It's 1949.
Berlin is cracked in two, planes humming their way from Western skies to East. The Soviet Union has exploded its first atomic bomb, under a hundred layers of stealth and secrecy, in a town called Semipalatinsk-16. In a dirty cellar in an abandoned building in a forgotten corner of Moscow, there is blood under your fingernails, and you are looking up at your Captain for orders.
Your Captain is tall, and your Captain has a black coat that reaches down to his knees, and your Captain's hair is gold, and his eyes are the color of ice. He purses his lips.
You are in this cellar with this man because he is a traitor, and you are in this cellar because this man has been telling Americans things that Americans ought not to know. More precisely: you are in this cellar because you have been ordered to be here, and because you are weapons with faces and hands, and because today, it is the only thing you know how to do.
The Captain says, “Ask him where the plans are.”
“Where are the plans,” you say to the man in Czech, and you shift your steel arm across his throat.
The man babbles. You say, “He doesn't know.”
The Captain slides his hands into his pockets, glances to the side. The interrogation room is far underground, away from the prying eyes of cameras or passerby; but nevertheless, always nevertheless, eternally and inescapably nevertheless, and your Captain turns back and frowns and says, “Tell him you're going to break his fingers.”
Afterwards, when the job is done and there is nothing left of the man but blood and meat and bones, you are taken together to the cryotanks. The Captain walks with his back ramrod-straight down the steel hallway. You walk at his right hand, only a step behind him.
Your arm is silver, and the Captain's hands are red.
This is true most of the time.
When you walk, you always walk the same way: the Captain ahead, you a step behind him, watching his back, watching him move.
This is almost always true.
Winter comes; the sun dies. The frost sinks deep into the earth. Snow covers the world in white. Somewhere in a tiny room in an enormous building in a locked and secret and forbidden corner of the Soviet Union, there are two cryotanks with two names etched into them.
This is always true.
In a hotel room in Volgograd, the Captain takes your hand, rubs his thumbs along the steel joints, crooks in and rolls out each finger. You let him. Neither of you are breathing.
There is a mission to be done, and there are orders to be fulfilled, and somewhere outside, the snow is falling. The Captain's hands are slow and careful on your arm.
This is true very, very rarely.
You are a pair; you are inseparable. You are a storm, you are destruction, you are chaos in two bodies. You walk a step behind your Captain, at his right hand.
He has a hundred names, from Budapest to Beijing: they have called him Red-hands, they have called him Stalin's Eagle, they have called him the Archangel of Death. You have only and always known him as the Captain.
You have only one name, and he has never spoken it to you.
At the corner of an alley in Krakow, you see him, silhouetted against the light; in the evening sun his hair is the color of rust and dried blood. He is deadly still and deadly slow, and he glances back at you for only a split second before he nods at you, lifts his gun, moves forward.
He leads; you follow.
It feels too-familiar, like a pattern scratched deep into your brain from birth, and even that thought is a glimmering silver fish wriggling through your mind and out into nothingness. It feels like habit, and like love, and like necessity. It feels like orders written below the orders to find and hurt and kill and act; it feels like something inherent in your nature, impossible not to obey, impossible not to want to.
You are havoc, you are desolation, you are a pair of weapons in the hands of whoever owns you. You are twin cryotanks with two names etched into them. You are following the Captain down the halls of Moscow, of Prague, of Kiev. You are following the Captain anywhere.
The new mission comes, and her name is Natalia Romanova.
Her hair is red, red, red, and she moves like a dancer. For the first time you can remember, you have been out of your cryotank for weeks.
Time goes by more slowly when you live it one day at a time. Her body is a live wire in the room where they have told you to train her, and in the field where she accompanies you on missions, and in the streets and back alleys of Moscow, and she is red and beautiful and red.
It is winter and you don’t know what year it is. It is winter and Moscow is covered with ice, frost ferns curling in the windowsills and dirty grey snow piling up at the curbs and the sidewalks. It is winter and your Captain presses his nails into your neck, two sharp points of pain like fire in the dark, and says, his voice rusty and quiet, “Careful.”
You meet his eyes.
Natalia Romanova looks at you on a mission just outside of Kabul, and in the ancient brown mountains she is a wild creature, something more natural to her environment than you will ever be. Natalia Romanova looks at you like a lion in the desert, and her lips quirk in a smile, and her fingers trace careful and light over your steel hand.
In your bed she is bare and unrestrained, all laughter and quick movement, the curves of her breasts pale in the thin yellow electric light that filters through your window. She is warm and soft, and her hips flex on top of yours; you thrust up involuntarily, and her lips curl. She presses you down into the mattress, runs her hands over your chest, smiles at you and bends to kiss you hard.
In the morning there are bruises on your collarbone and scratch marks on your hips. Natasha's hair is a tangle of red on your pillow, and she is smiling in her sleep, and you know it is the only time you will see her as soft as this.
She is gone the next day.
Your Captain says nothing, but he watches you from the corner of his eye as he has never watched you before, walks at your side where he would walk a step ahead. His eyes are sky-blue.
Your hands are itching for the weight of a gun. Your hands are itching for the weight of something real. Your hands are itching to touch.
Your head is aching.
When you sleep, you dream in white.
You dream of mechanisms, when you sleep. You dream of engines, enormous and gleaming, greater than the eye can perceive. You dream of cogwheels, of wheels themselves, of iron and steel and the endless, eternal sweep of the snow.
You dream of cold.
You dream of falling.
When you wake, you think of nothing. You are clean; you are blank; your mind shines like steel, with no hint of white and no hint of red. You are a knife. You are a gun. You are a labyrinth. You are nothing more.
When the Captain wakes, there is something missing from him.
It is not a thing that you can name; whenever you try, it slips away, a rat disappearing into the maze that is your mind. A brightness, perhaps. A wildness. There is something of stars in it.
You walk with him, one step behind him, down the hallways of Moscow and Leningrad, Kiev and Odessa, Volgograd and Sevastopol. The Soviet Union stretches from the West to the East, and its shadow stretches longer than that; the Captain walks one step ahead of you, and your second duty is to your mission, and your first duty is to follow him.
Someday the bullet will come, or the knife, or the bomb, and you will protect him, and it will cost you your life. It is something you know as surely as you know the law of gravity.
You will die for him. Everything falls.
On some forgotten roof in Leningrad, with the sky the color of sodium and the streets grey with dirty snow, the Captain shakes out his wrist like it’s hurting him. You toss a knife in the air so you can watch it catch the light, search your Captain’s face for something you don’t quite know the name of.
The wind smells like metal. Winter is coming.
A memory, drifting isolated: on a day when the air is so cold even the wind itself has stilled with the frost, your Captain dabs a cloth over your face. His hands are rough, but his eyes are gentle. You do not think he is thinking of the mission.
The cloth comes away stained with red. Your face is throbbing with pain. You had not noticed.
There’s ash in the air, floating high above the ground; there’s been a bomb. You do not know where you are. You do not know what year it is. You do not know the mission.
You open your mouth to tell the Captain; the Captain says, “Don’t speak,” dips the cloth in some liquid, wipes it over your cheek. It stings: iodine, or rubbing alcohol.
There’s a cut beneath the Captain’s right eye, and his other eye has been blackened, and his lip is bleeding. You reach out for him, unconscious, with the hand that is not metal; your fingers brush along his lips, and come away with blood.
You say, “Return to base.”
“Not now,” says the Captain. “Not yet.”
You say, “The mission.”
The Captain says, “The mission has been changed. The mission is over. Don’t speak.”
It’s 1984, and Natalia Romanova has disappeared.
There’s whispers in Moscow. You don’t know them; your mind is iron, your mind is steel, your mind is frost, and there is a gun in your hands, and a gun in the hands of the Captain.
They tell you she is the mission. They tell you that you are going to kill her. They show you a picture.
It’s 1984, and Natalia Romanova has disappeared.
They tell you she is a traitor. They tell you that you are going to kill her. They do not show you a picture, though they show a picture to the Captain.
In one of the hallways, the Captain catches you by the arm, opens his mouth to tell you something. His eyes are blue, and worried, and blue.
It’s 1984, and Natalia Romanova is gone, and your head is aching.
You are a knife.
They have maps, and they have files, and they have been tracking her over the past weeks. They know her every movement; they know where she has been, they know where she is, they know where she will be. Or so they tell you.
You are a knife.
In a cellar in Leningrad, the floor dark and rust-red, the Captain runs his fingers over the joints in your metal arm, rolls and unrolls your fingers with careful precision, presses his hand to yours as if he can warm you with the sheer force of his body. He looks up; his eyes are soft.
You are a knife.
Your head is aching worse than it has ever ached before.
You are a knife.
You dream of falling.
You dream of falling, and you dream of snow, and you dream of the endless, endless cold. You dream of noise, and you dream of a weight on your arm, bright and brilliant and heavy—heavier than anything you have ever felt before, or will ever feel since—a weight that is red and white and blue.
You think you dream of engines.
You dream of falling, and you dream of a face, and you dream of a hand, stretching out for you, not quite reaching yours. You dream of a name, one that you cannot remember when you wake, and you dream that the name is yours. You dream of eyes the color of the sky.
You dream of falling, and when you dream of falling, you dream of someone else falling, just behind you.
You used to dream of machines.
Now you dream of ghosts.
They track down Natalia Romanova’s location a little ways outside of Washington.
She’s in an apartment, and she’s not alone. She’s not alone, and she can’t be alone, and you know it, and your Captain knows it, and you say you will go to America without backup anyway.
It feels a little like an ending.
America is just what they said it would be, all neon and advertisements and road and sky. The people are tall and their smiles are wide and white, and the English feels foreign to your ears in a way the hundred other languages you speak never have, and the air is bright.
The two of you go out to scan the ground, an hour before you are set to collect Natasha, and by the time you are returning to your base, your Captain is crying.
You don’t think he knows he’s doing it. His face is wet, but his eyes are clear; his voice is steady, but his hands are shaking like he hasn’t slept for weeks.
In a back alley next to a movie theater in Washington DC, beside the trash cans, you let him shudder and shake, watch the entrance for passers-by. None come; it’s as if the whole country is empty except for you.
After some time, you feel his hand on your arm.
His lips are on yours before you know it, and when your hands go to his waist it’s not a conscious thought but instinct, something that comes as naturally to you as the way you walk or speak or breathe, and when you kiss him back it is because you do not know how to do anything else. His face is wet, and his fingers are soft on your cheek, and you can feel his heartbeat against your own.
In that back alley somewhere in Washington he presses you to a wall, covers you with his body, kisses you until your lips are chapped and numb. The wind is soft, and his arms are around you, and he is warm as nothing has ever been. You don’t know when you begin to cry.
This is what they do not tell you about America: it is a summer country.
There is summer in the heart of it, summer in the air, summer in the sky and the earth and the rivers. It is a country where summer is what you breathe, a country that has forgotten how to die with the earth. It is a country that does not know how to let the frost take root in its heart. It is a country that does not know how to grow old.
There is a world, you know, where you could have been a sunshine patriot. There is a world where you could have been a summer soldier.
You arrive at Natasha Romanoff’s apartment an hour later.
She is red, and brilliant, and red. Her eyes are sharp, and her body is all curves, and she is holding a gun, and you are holding a knife.
She moves slow. You could destroy her.
Brooklyn's a seamstress today, clotheslines strung from window to window like stitches holding the city together; the great stone arches of the bridge are stretching from your side of the river to the tall shining towers of Manhattan, and the sky's a clear sweet river-blue. You think you might be a little in love.
You're lying on a roof. The city smells of rain, the sharp lightning scent of the sun after a storm, and the puddles on the pavement are shrinking one by one. It's the first time in months that you've been outside without a jacket on, and the warmth is coming up from your toes straight through your ribcage and into the blush of your cheeks, and you rest your chin on your hands and look straight at the sun.
There's a rustling behind you, the scratching of the gravel. A door opens. You sit up, say, “What’s the word, soldier?”
He says, “I brought strawberries.”
“Too early in the year for strawberries,” you say, but you turn around and there he is with a carton green as summer itself, the daylight gleaming gold on his hair, a five-foot-nothing angel with arms like pipe cleaners and a smile like there’s no one in the world he’d rather see than you.
The strawberries are just coming ripe, deep red on the outside and a pale blushing color on the inside, and Brooklyn's shining like the sun, and you lick the sweetness from your lips. You might be a little in love, but that’s all right. It’s just springtime, is all, spring at last, a glorious spring that unfolds over the world the way spring always does.
The fountains across the city will spring up, and the trees will grow leaves, and grow flowers, and grow fruit. The ducks will return to Central Park. The sun will grow warm, and the sky will grow bright, and the world will be born again, and again, new and gleaming. Winter never did learn how to last forever.
You might have been a little bit in love all along.