Project 43

Avengers go home!

Elias realized that he most probably should have explained what he was doing before he left for his first fight. Maybe Dimitri would have appreciated the warning before his friend walked through the front door with a black eye, busted lip, and bruises covering most of his arms.

"What the fuck happened to you?" Dimitri yelped immediately running over to his friend with an understandably shocked expression.

"Well, I started fighting for money back in Belize and it seemed like a simple thing to keep going here," Elias explained casually as his friend was freaking out. The former soldier didn't know how he should explain it all so he went with the simplified version.

"Man, your face is all fucked up!" Dimitri exclaimed as he scanned the face in front of him, seemingly ignoring the summed-up story Elias had just told him.

"It's fine. Don't ask how or why but it's gonna heal by morning," Elias tried to calm his friend down.

"What the hell? How would it be healed by the morning?" Dimitri asked, his face all crunched up in confusion. Elias stared off into space for a few moments trying to figure out what to say.

"I took these... dopants when I first arrived in Belize. Had very little effect otherwise but I heal crazy quick," Elias finally gathered his thoughts. Dimitri just stood there shocked, jaw dropped to the floor, unable to even make cohesive sentences.

"I brought Thai food and I'm hungry. You want some?" Elias offered before his friend was able to pick his jaw off the floor and quickly walked around the frozen man. 

After that first match, Elias came to an agreement with Matej and started fighting more frequently, in fact almost daily. Each time Dimitri was just as shocked but somehow he had accepted the quick excuse Elias had made up. 

A few days later Elias found an apartment in the next building over and moved in within a week. Still, the two friends spent most nights in one of their apartments watching some sort of reality TV, a completely new concept for Elias much to Dimitri's surprise. It took Elias a while to understand modern TV in general but the reality format was something almost unfathomable. However, he slowly grew to like it as his friend introduced him to different shows that seemed to always be on.

"When do you think you'll be back at sea?" Elias asked. The two friends were eating some instant noodles while the snow slowly rained down outside the windows. Elias liked the snow. He liked how it made everything look brighter than it actually was and how it covered the dirt and dust of the city under a pristine white blanket, a new start even if it was only temporary. 

"I'm not sure. Right now I like life on land, but I know that soon I can't take it anymore and head back out," Dimitri answered with a shrug of his shoulders.

"This city always seems to be able to push me out," he continued to joke but this time Elias could hear some sort of hidden bitterness in his friend's usually so happy voice. 

The former soldier had gotten better at reading people and tried his best to be there for the few friends he had. Still, it was hard for him to truly understand the rainbow of human emotions, maybe it was just a personality thing or maybe the things Hydra taught him were too deeply rooted in his brain to weed out.

"You wanna talk about it?" Elias asked very carefully, afraid that he was reading his friend wrong. It would he embarrassing if one of the first times he tried to be emotionally available turned out to be a failure. 

"Well, I first left when my parents died and after that, I come back every few years only to leave again," Dimitri explained quickly, like a tap was opened in his throat. Elias just sat there, not knowing what to do or say.