Imagining Steve

Elsie Moore: Winter Soldier

"You mean to tell me that you brought my shooter with you?" I watched the older African American man converse with... Steve Rogers. I still didn't even want to say his name in my mind.

"All due respect sir-" he began with a not so respectful tone.

"That wasn't me," I interrupted their conversation. "That was my... Old fellow operative."

The Winter Soldier, even I didn't know much about him. Hydra had mind wiped me as much as they did him. But I remembered a bit of the night when he'd shot Nick Fury.

In only the 48 hours since my last mind wipe, my head had become filled with cloudy memories of recent events. The Winter Soldier was the most common thing in them, probably because I was deliberately focusing on him. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I knew about him.

They weren't real memories, they were more like muscle memories. I must've been his partner for so long, yet I couldn't remember because of the memory scrambling process they'd used on me. Wait! Partner? Where had that thought come from? Had we actually been partners, had my mind filled that fact in?

"Old fellow operative?" The man in the makeshift hospital bed was skeptical.

I stared at him, I guess my offer to help might've been suspicious, but I wasn't sure what I needed to do to gain their trust.

"I don't intend to crawl back to Hydra." My voice was oddly bitter, and even I was a little surprised by it. I really didn't remember a lot, but when I thought about it my head started to hurt. It was almost like my mind was trying to reconstruct the memories. I wondered if my brain could actually do that.

But like I said, I didn't intend to go back until I had my full memory, and honestly, I didn't plan to go back to hydra ever.  I looked at the man, and he stared back at me, I didn't even flinch.

"They've been brainwashing me, and he knows why." I continued, raising an arm to point at Rogers. He looked at me as if I were a ghost, and I looked at him, wondering who he knew me as.

"Your name is Elsie Grace Moore, you were born on November 5th, 1918. Your parents died on the line of duty in World War 1. I knew you from birth until you were captured by Russian forces in 1943." He spoke rapidly, and I blinked. He remembered all that? From what I knew people didn't just remember details like that. It seemed odd.

I didn't know what to say, the names and dates sounded so incredibly familiar, but I couldn't gather any clear memories. I looked at the mirror in the room, catching a brief glimpse of my reflection. I looked dirty, wild, and tired. My black uniform looked rather beat up. My light carmel hair was a mess, and my face had a few dirt streaks. My light blue eyes were the problem though, my emotions were practically bleeding right out of them.

"I guess you two have some catching up to do," the older man said, eying me. "Try to get her to help us, we need all the super human help we can get." He told Rogers, and the super soldier nodded.

He briskly walked out of the room, and I followed him, not needing to be told to do so. We walked to an empty room, and as soon as I closed the door behind at me he stopped walking. He turned to stare at me with arms folded. He looked like he was staring at a ghost, and I assumed that I looked much the same.

"Who was I?" I asked, my voice cracking as I spoke. I'd been trained to keep my emotions under control, but control was pointless now. I could feel my eyes start to water, and I tried to keep my breathing even. "Who am I?"

He looked at me with a pained expression, almost like he could feel my pain. Almost like seeing me near tears was his worst nightmare, the look was so tender and oddly familiar that I found myself even more confused.