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Ward laughed, he couldn't help it, comparing him to Bucky Barnes of all people. The famed Winter Soilder. There was nothing at all that linked them. Barnes had been made into a dammed HYDRA lab rat, made into a machine and dragged out of cryo whenever they needed someone dead. He'd never failed, not until the Triskelion. And he'd vanished.
"Is that what Stark told you? That I was brainwashed like Barnes was? That I was something Garrett made? I'm nothing like him. I saw, just once. Maybe 6 years ago, I was there when they pulled him out for a mission. Garrett wanted to show me. And no, I didn't ask questions. I didn't try to stop them. Maybe someone else would have done differently, but I was never that guy. I saw what they made him and I know its different, no matter what Stark has decided makes it easier not to hate me like the others do. I chose to help John, chose to save him and yeah I knew what it meant to make that choice."
He couldn't do this. Couldn't be told to trust his heart. He'd spent so dammed long convincing himself he needed to bury it. Needed to push it all down, that weakness that had kept his dog alive when he'd been ordered by Garrett to shoot it, to prove he was stronger. The weakness that was his feelings for Skye. Dangerous. But there all the same. Rogers was asking him to stop denying that, to choose something different, but what was there? What did he want? Really there was only one thing.
"I want Skye." he said finally, suddenly horrified that Damon was in earshot of any of this. He felt exposed, confused. He hated it. "You said to trust in what I want, she's what I want and there's nothing that will make her see me as anything other than a monster. She saw what I was willing to do, what I had to do --"
She'd called him a good person too once, before she knew the truth. He'd tried to prepare her, told her there were things she wouldn't like about him, but she'd been so convinced and it had been so easy to let her be. He knew even then his feelings for her were stronger than hers for him, but he would have convicned her. He could have.
He shook his head, still trying to fathom how this had gone so confusingly wrong. Oh he had his life, he hadn't been punched across a room yet. Generally it was better than he'd expected. But there was more Rogers needed to know before deciding Ward should follow his heart and skip on his merry way.
"There's something else." he added, his mind focused on the memories of that day in Panem. And further back, the Asgardian bitch Lorelai, using him, making him hers, making him weak. Making him nothing. The arrogance of their people, it had disgusted him. Lead him to an action he'd taken alone. Free of orders, his first thought had been murder. Revenge of a sort.