Re: log: Tony's Super Secret Facility
"No," he said. His voice was still rough from not speaking. He tore open another water packet and drank it, slower this time, watching the doctor at work.
Banner wasn't like other doctors the Soldier had known. There had been flickers of doctors in his defragmenting memories for weeks. White coats and stares that went straight through him, efficient pens on paper, a firm thumb pressed against his jaw to hold his eyes up to the light.
Zola. One of the few names he could catch between his fingers, matched to a face like a rat's with glasses. He'd had a smile like a child's.
The Soldier counted the bullet fragments as they dropped on the bedspread to distract from memories of tweezers, scalpels, and blood. More than the pain, those wormed under his skin like splinters. The little pieces of metal dropped onto fabric lacked the familiar metallic sound of a bullet plinking a surgical tray in a truncated trail of blood. But the pain and the methodical removal were an effective distraction.
Matched up to the doctors of memory, Banner moved slowly and with care. He had to know that being careful wasn't really necessary as long as the bullet fragments came out, since the Soldier would heal once they did, but he actually sighed when he had to pick up the scalpel. The Soldier didn't remark on it, but he watched with interest.
"It's fine" he said.
He didn't know what he meant by it really - he wasn't trying to reassure Banner, but the doctor seemed distressed about widening the opening. It would be a deep cut, but it would be clean. Even the pain kept him grounded in the present. There was something - a doctor with a scalpel who never met his eyes, even as he watched him. Always awake whenever possible, every single thing a lesson in loyalty.
His leg had tensed while he went away for a moment. His eyes flickered to the corners, to Stark, to Banner, and it relaxed.
"You've run before," he said, circling back to Banner's preparedness. Oh yes, that had been in the file. Months off the grid, only to reappear in New York, working for Stark. Once a clean around the collar academic, perhaps, but Banner had undoubtedly been to dark places and seen the things you found when you were under the radar and on your own.
So many things were still gone, but the missions were burned in. They stayed. What he'd done, how he behaved, schedules, names, photographs. There was no name that lay comfortable on his tongue, but the details of those missions was muscle memory. The light in Trinidad, the taste of dal at a state dinner in Mumbai, the rich shadows of West Germany.