Project 43

You look happier

"Et puis j'ai trouvé un travail de barman. Cela ne payait pas cher mais les gens étaient amusants à regarder," Elias explained with a chuckle. Agathe had insisted that he explained everything he had done in the last three years in detail. She asked questions about everything and listened curiously to Elias' stories about crazy customers, life at sea, and much more.

Elias was sat on the floor in front of Agathe, sitting on a chair behind him. They had escaped to the employee room for some coffee but Agathe couldn't resist attempting to tame the weird crows nest Elias called his hair. The radio played some old French songs in the background, but Elias didn't recognize any of them. Agathe however hummed gently along whenever she wasn't asking a million questions. 

"Vous avez quitté une vie dans une magnifique ferme italienne pour travailler comme barman ? Pourquoi diable ferais-tu quelque chose comme ça ?" Agathe asked with a shocked smile to which Elias just laughed.

"Je me ennuyais. Le style de vie calme n'était tout simplement pas pour moi," Elias shrugged thinking back to the small farm. It was nice and the people were fun, still he always needed something more.

"Peut-être qu'un jour tu apprendras," Agathe joked.

"Quel âge as-tu maintenant? vingt-huit?" the motherly woman continued as she cut Elias' hair. She had been right, his hair was a bit out of control.

"Vingt-huit," Elias simply replied quickly. He hadn't aged in seventy years but his passport said he was twenty-eight. Elias hadn't thought about it before then, but sooner or later his young appearance would get more attention than he wanted. What would happen if his passport said he was eighty but still looked like he was twenty years old?

"Vous avez beaucoup changé ces trois dernières années," Agathe said with a hum.

"Que veux-tu dire?" Elias asked slightly confused.

"Tu as l'air plus heureux maintenant," Agathe simply answered leaving Elias to think about her words. When he left Paris he was miserable. His brother had adjust come back from the dead and he was panicking about it all. Even tho the past three years had been stressful and Hydra was constantly on his heels, he really had found a new way to live his life.

"Steve!" Sam called and the blonde man soon entered the room. They were in Steve's apartment once more working on their missing persons cases. Something they had done for countless days by then with basically no progress whatsoever.

"What is it?" Steve asked walking up to Sam who stared at his computer screen.

"Remember how we had that one trace of your brother that ended in Paris? Well someone just checked in there with the same fake name," Sam explained pointing at the names and numbers on his screen.

Over the past month, Sam and Steve were able to piece together a supposed timeline of Steve's sibling's life. They found someone about the same height and weight as him who joined the Foreign Legion around the same time he had been declared 'at large'. After that, the two tried to figure out where he had been staying and what he had done after getting a discharge. All the traces seemed to end a couple of years earlier in that hotel. Every once in a while they found small traces from all around the world but never anything they could work off of.

Ten hours later Steve and Sam were walking down the streets of Paris. They could have gotten there quicker if they could have used a Shield quinjet but since the organization went under, the two had to use commercial flights. It was hard being Captain America and going unnoticed for so many hours on a commercial flight still, there didn't seem to be any better way.