literature

Ghost Effect. p10

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GHOST:

First watch her ass. Even in the short time she’d been with Bucky, Ghost knew that he wasn’t going to wake her back up until it was time to leave again the next morning. Sometimes she wondered if he got any sleep at all. There were certainly bags under his eyes, but she couldn’t remember if they’d been there when she’d met him or if they were a new addition.
Neither of them had showered in the time they’d been travelling together, each day adding a subtle layer of grime to their bodies. Bucky too, now had a cropped beard in the works – distancing him further from the steely man who kept her confined in that small bedroom. But he was still moya zevezda. He kept the arm hidden, and made her do the same, but she knew the star was there.
In reality, she had so many unanswered questions about him. Where did he come from? Why did he avoid using English even though she knew from that first day that he spoke it fluently and often enough to automatically curse in it? Where were they going? Were they going somewhere specific? Why was he so insistent on calling her “G” instead of “Ghost?” Why did he want to help her?
She realized her mistake the minute the question slipped from her mouth. They didn’t talk much, yet she realized that there was some sort of intrinsic bond of trust growing between them. If she’d wanted answers then she should have started small. Heck, even asking about his obsession with giving her a name would have been a better topic, but no, she had to start with the motherload. And not only that, but she’d confessed her growing sense of familiarity.
It started when she replayed their first fight in her head. At first, she thought it was just a training method that had given them the same style, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that it stemmed from a way of thinking. They fought the same because they thought the same way, they saw the same indicators in movement and reacted to them identically.
Later, she noticed it in the way he kept watch. He’d insisted on taking the “first watch” and she watched him and pretended to sleep for the first two hours until sleep finally claimed her. After that, the familiarities kept popping up. Just little details, anything from the way he laced up his boots to the nervous tick of rubbing the hilt of his knife, they accumulated each day until she had a hard time keeping track of whether she was just imagining it or not.  The only thing she could say without a doubt that they did differently was eat.  Bucky chalked it up to the fact that she was used to obtaining nutrients while in cryo and graciously taught her the basics, but beyond that she developed her own way of eating.
Bucky may have ceremoniously taken the first watch, but that didn’t mean Ghost was going to sleep. Usually, she just let him think she was, leaving them both to their little islands of solitude. Tonight, however, she just couldn’t allow her mind to drift. It kept coming back to those questions. Finally, she decided to break the silence. She moved over so that she was sitting at the window opposite him.
“Why?”
She said simply, knowing that he would understand the implied question. Why did she feel like she knew him; why was he sure that she did. And then, she braced herself for the answer, whatever it may be. He looked at her and took in a breath before letting it out into a sigh and beginning to explain as best as he could.
“When you’re getting wiped, it feels as though they’re going into your mind with a mixer made of electricity and hate and scrambling your brains, sucking out the bits and pieces until your mind is empty.”
She nodded; it was a familiar feeling, usually accompanied by the grind of rubber between her teeth. It seemed easy now to accept that he’d been in the same position.
“I never thought about it much until I got out, but they have to put the memories, the information they sucked out somewhere right?”
He paused, sounding more human than she’d ever experienced, less guarded; less Winter Soldier, more Bucky.
“I used to think they just sort of threw them out. Tossed them in the trash like a used up piece of paper. But then, when we heard about you, and the reports of your missions came back the same as mine, I began to realize that they kept them.”
He searched her face for some kind of reaction, but she was still absorbing the information, ot ready to make a conclusion yet, so he continued – in a sort of non-linear way.
“When I was in the red-room, in Russia, there were many of us. Only one Winter Soldier, but many who went in knowing who they were and came out knowing themselves as someone totally different. Memory implants were a common thing. You received them for a mission and then had them removed once it was complete. It never occurred to me until I read about you that those memories had to come from somewhere.”
Her eyes lit up with sudden realization, a mix of awe, and understanding and complete horror.
“My memories came from you, didn’t they?”
Set in the Marvel, Avengers Universe and centers around the idea that after Bucky failed to return to HYDRA, 
they found someone with a close enough DNA match that they could basically create a Winter Soldier 2.0 they dubbed Ghost.
The timing of her kidnapping is about two months after TWS, but the story takes place two years later.

Narration skips around between several character's, indicated by the all-caps heading.

p9 <<->> p11

I hope you enjoy!
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