Ghost of You

s i x

"Are you just gonna sit there and stare at me like an idiot?"

My lips parted, mouth falling open slightly. I searched through the files of my brain, waiting for the signals to fire and for words to fall into place but nothing came. Instead I settled on the only word that I seemed capable of saying, shrugging my shoulders. 

"Maybe."

I'm not sure what kind of reaction I was hoping to see from him. A smile? Or a smirk maybe? Being openly self-depreciating with someone I didn't like, not denying his labeling of me as an idiot was not in my nature but I guess in this case it was kind of true. This was Steve Rogers. Captain Asshat. We didn't do this. So why had I felt the need to?

Whatever I had hoped to gain from this interaction was an apparent failure because other than turning his head back to stare at the oh so interesting grey wall on the opposite side of the jet, I got nothing. The wall was slightly reflective, casting an imperfect mirrored image back at us. There had to have been more than two feet or so in between us but the distorted reflection made it look like mere inches, almost touching. We sat in silence for a moment before I felt the need to speak again. 

"Everyone's pretty shaken up." 

I mentally high-fived myself for my remarkable ability at pointing out the obvious. Everyone's pretty shaken up. No shit, Sherlock. What the hell is wrong with me?

"Are you okay?"

Wow I was really on a roll here. Maybe I should ask him about the weather? Or his favorite color?

I expected him not to respond to this either. He hadn't moved a muscle, his back still rigid against the wall, eyes trained forward. I was begging my feet to move, for my legs to carry me out of this seat but still they wouldn't budge. Preparing myself for a lifetime of moody silence on this bench I leaned my back against the wall too, mimicking his position. Then he responded.

"I'm always okay."

I mulled over this response for a moment, wondering if he actually meant it or not. My gut instinct said no. You ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer. But there was something in the tone of his voice that made the answer seem genuine, even authentic. As if he had found some way to not let the horrors, like the ones he had seen today, affect him in any kind of way. He was just in a perpetual state of okayness, not bad, not great, just okay. 

"What's that like?" 

My question was rhetorical, just another lame attempt at lightening the mood. Steve however, seemed to take it literally. 

"As if you don't already know." He scoffed, if anything his eyes had become darker, some charcoal mist clouding over the pale blues.

"I don't. Unlike some other human cyborgs I know I actually feel things. Joy, loss, anger, grief, worry." I listed, resenting the fact that he thought I hadn't experienced these things, wishing I could break that image in his head of my cookie-cutter life without having to give him any personal details. 

"Worry?" He spoke, still staring at the reflection in the wall across. "Having a hard time, Princess?"

I stiffened. His tone was still cool and unaffected but the impact it had on me was anything but. I scrambled, looking for some sort of barrier between me and the words that would come from him next but came up empty, defenseless.

"I can see why you'd be having such a hard time. All locked up, safe and sound in your ivory tower while the rest of us are out in the real world getting our hands dirty?"

My fists clenched tightly where they rested in my lap. So tightly that I was sure my nails would leave scars where they dug into my palms, scratching more than just the surface. I was seriously beginning to question my sanity. Why had I not put up more of a fight when I found my feet dragging me in his direction. Was I some sort of masochist intent on putting myself in painful situations? Or worse, was I some delusional optimist, convinced that I could make an arragont, spiteful, asshole change his arragont, spiteful, asshole ways?

"You're conviently forgetting who locked me up in the first place." I said, not even bothering to hide the anger in my voice. "Of course you'd have to see it that way because if I'm the Princess that makes you the white knight, right?"

I was facing him completely now, I could see his chest was rising and falling quicker than before while he still refused to look at me. My resentment and confusion over the hot and cold of the past weeks with him seemed to finally snap as I was pushed to my breaking point.

"I'm trying to do my job. You're too busy commenting on my clothes and staring at your own fucking reflection to notice that your giant ass horse and giant ass armor keep standing in my way." I said a little louder than I meant to, gesturing at the wall. Thankfully everyone else was still too preoccupied to notice or care. At my words he seemed to snap out of whatever trance he was in, his head finally snapping away from the mirror and in my direction.

"What exactly am I getting in the way of?" He asked, evenly. "What is it other than taking notes and getting concussions that you bring to the table?"

There was no use in hiding the flash of pain in my eyes as he threw one of my biggest insecurities and deepest fears in my face. It was one thing to feel completely useless, it was a completely other thing to hear your boss call you that too. I don't think I had ever felt so small, so inferior. Not that he cared, or would ever know. He would never understand the depth of how badly I had wanted to prove myself with this job and how miserable it felt to know that evidently I was failing. 

I wished there was something I could say to wound him the way he's wounded me. It's the most shameful, selfish feeling, and his constant ability to bring out the worst in me makes me shake all the more with a rage-filled vengeance. I search for an insult, anything that might penetrate through his shield and his red and white striped suit and straight into his soul but I know I will never find anything. I know that there is nothing you can say, no words of venom in the dictionary that could ever hurt a man who has no heart. He is nothing but a suit and it was time for me to stop seeing him as anything else.