' ' Perfect Enough To Break ' '

Aftertaste

Sova

A week since the reevaluation and the compound felt like someone else's house. Every hallway was a sentence I hadn't been allowed to finish. Heads turned when I passed—quick glances skittering off me like rain. Disdain. Curious mockery. A dozen small barbs I felt under my skin and pretended not to notice.

My boots were heavier than they should have been, black leather caked in mud from the perimeter road. A few flecks of blood dotted the sleeves of my suit — not much, just enough for the light to catch and carry the wrong kind of attention. I didn't wipe them in the hall. I didn't look up. I moved with the same economy of motion I'd been taught: head down, eyes forward, no unnecessary noise.

Rumlow's file had said he was a potential threat. Mid-twenties, blond, dark eyes—brown, black, I couldn't swear to the color. Names blurred in the dossier like smudges of ink; I couldn't be bothered to memorize the little details when the mission was what mattered. He might have been Alec, or Alex, or something that sounded like it. It didn't matter.

We'd been in the van, waiting for the breach signal. He rattled about the organization like he'd been wronged by it personally — as if our loyalty should mean we were entitled to the truth.

"They never tell us anything," he said, shoulders hunched back in the seat, voice low and exasperated. "We carry the work. We do the bones and they keep us in the dark."

I let a small smile slip; it was a thing I used now as a tool. I forced warmth into it. "Yeah," I muttered. Not because I believed him, but because he needed to believe me.

"Your story is wild," he went on, curiosity softening his tone. "The way you let the Avengers think you were on their side, then turn. And how you let us think you were compromised. How do you—how do you pull that off?"

I shrugged, the movement practiced. "Training." It had become my domestic answer for everything I didn't want to explain. Training covered the silence, the knives, the things I'd done before memory hardened into scar. It was a sneer I could wear and be permitted to walk away.

He tilted his head, amused rather than suspicious. "Do you only train? That must be... bland."

Trap baited. Men always took that bite. I let him.

"No," I said, a twitch at the corner of my mouth I tried to hide. "You must think I'm so boring."

He laughed softly, leaning forward. "No. You just need the right person to show you how to relax." The words were casual, like a joke. Like the rest of us weren't killers.

Something cold slid through my chest at hearing them. Pierce's voice, years ago, telling me to use all means to complete a mission rang in my head. I remembered small hands—my hands—slipping a phone from someone's pocket in a crowd, fingers quick and proud as I passed it to him. I had been proud, once. Pride used to look like usefulness.

The man in the van stood then, close enough that his shadow folded over me. I felt his breath hit my face when he leaned in. We were close enough that I felt the heat of him. Close enough that if I let my guard fall for one beat, he would be the only thing in the world.

"Want to teach me how to relax?" I said in a voice that was playful.

"If you insist," he answered with the same easy smile people give right before they fall into a trap.

I remember the kiss because I had to remember every precise detail later. His mouth was warm and insistent; his lips moved like he expected an answer. My hand found his shoulder automatically, the motion perfectly practiced. The contact sent a flicker through me I never let anyone see—.

His hand slid to my waist. The scent of him—too clean, too earnest—was loud against the engine's hum. My other hand went up, fingers resting on the hollows of his collarbone while I tilted my head, opening the small space I needed to let him think he'd won trust.

And then the world split.

There was the metallic slide at the base of my palm as the dagger left its sheath. The first time I woke up in the action was the warmth spattering over my cheek. He gasped—surprise, confusion—and then his fingers clawed at his chest. Blood hit my suit, dappling my neck, my jaw, slick and hot. He fell back into the van's seat like a doll whose strings were cut.

For a second there was only the sound of his breath leaving him. Then another motion—half reflex, half practiced kill—and my hand moved again. Steel found ribs. Movement was automatic: the second stab followed the first as if my body remembered angles and pain better than my head remembered names. The third was mindless, brutal—an unconscious cadence of training. He stopped moving. The van smelled of iron and motor oil and something that tasted like all the wrong decisions I'd made.

In the bathroom, my fingers tapped on the marble sink like a metronome—slow, controlled. I turned the water hot and let it run over my hands, over the prints of his blood. The droplets made dark rivers down the porcelain. I scrubbed at myself the way you clean a weapon before you return it: efficient, methodical, blank.

I glanced in the mirror. My amber eyes looked back, raw and tired. Up close I could trace the shallow sheen of sweat along my brow, the faint smears where his blood had dried. There was no guilt in my face that I could find. The lack of it scared me more than if I'd been drowning in remorse. Not feeling anything—real, sharp feeling—was the problem. It meant a piece of me had been filed smooth again.

My lips were stained. I watched the way my mouth moved when I breathed, practiced lines of control. I remembered the crackle of static on the audio Bucky would later hear—the memory of the chair, the straps, the needle. For a second a foreign thing crawled up in my throat: a flicker of nausea, a prickle like I was forgetting something crucial and impossible to hold.

Anger came next, hot and inefficient. I slammed my fist into the tile until pain flared through my knuckles, a bright, white lightning behind my eyes. I punched because pain made me know I was alive. I punched because the whole world felt like someone else's plan and I wanted to hurt something equal to the hurt inside of me—Pierce, Rumlow, HYDRA, Fury, Bucky, even the Avengers who walked around thinking they were better than us. I punched because anger is an action I can control, and sometimes that control is all I have.

The sting of my fist blossomed into a sharp, alive reminder that I existed separate from the suit, the training, the words they put into my mouth. The tile left a bruise that would bloom slowly under my skin—an honest mark amidst everything contrived.

I calmed myself by forcing steady breaths, the kind they taught us when you needed to blend in after a hit. I wiped my jaw clean with the back of my hand, smoothed my hair, and composed the face I knew how to wear: impassive, capable, untouchable.

Then I walked out, leaving the sink to its run-off. The corridor swallowed me up, polished floors reflecting the same woman with blood on her cuffs and nothing in her chest that said she'd done wrong. I kept my head down, boots making a rhythm of mud and purpose, pretending every step forward made me