Liar

Kennedy’s blue gaze skimmed over the disks as she flipped through her DVD case quickly. She’d decided to avoid war movies which Steve might like or might trigger nasty events that he’d forgotten about. She also didn’t want to have to sit through a movie with the possibility that he would criticize every incorrect thing about the movie. That still left her with plenty of choices and she had many, many DVDs.

She’d managed to convince him that the new technology would come in handy whenever he had a date night with that waitress. Kennedy hadn’t mentioned the waitress but that had been the first thing that popped into her head. Steve liked going to that café for coffee and he liked talking to that waitress. She was in the process of running a background check to see if any red flags might come up.

“Hey,” Kennedy called, head tilting back against the couch, “Steve!”

He stepped out of the kitchen, blue eyes looking over at her. She didn’t turn to face him, just remained with her head tilted back so that he was upside down. It was almost comical for some reason or other.

“Okay so we have the classic bad boy falls in love with good girl known as Grease,” she lifted the case before switching to the next, “or we have the unsinkable love story Titanic, which is ironic considering the ship wasn’t actually unsinkable. And then we have my personal favorite, and easily the best movie, Halloween.”

“They made the sinking of the Titanic into a love story?” Steve asked, the disapproval creeping into his voice thickly.

“Oh, c’mon, you’ve got Leonardo something-or-other and Kate Wins-something as Jack Dawson and Rose Richie Rich as star-crossed lovers who meet on the only ill-fated voyage of the great Titanic. What’s not to love?” Kennedy snarked teasingly.

“Grease?”

“It’s a musical about this bad boy Danny who falls in love with the virginal Sandy. They sing songs about everything, including a beauty school dropout.”

“Halloween?” he sighed.

“Creepy, sociopathic, totally evil guy with a clown mask comes back to his hometown on Halloween to murder pretty much whoever happens to end up in his path.”

“I’ll take the clown movie,” Steve replied before stepping back into the kitchen.

Smiling to herself, Kennedy got up from her spot and loaded the disk into the player. She grabbed the remote and settled back in as Steve came out of the kitchen. He sat down beside her and passed her a beer once he’d gotten comfortable.

“So I figure we’ll start with the actual classics next time,” Kennedy explained as she got the movie started, “and work our way up from there. Disney movies and James Bond, definitely hitting those up.”

“If you talk during the entire movie, I am going to sit on you,” Steve said before looking at her. “Promise, not a threat.”

She mocked him before sinking back into the couch. Her legs were just long enough for the heels of her feet to rest on the coffee table when she was slumped. And while her ribs had healed up nicely for the most part, the Russian’s tight clamp on them had made the area tender again. Slumping helped that, and didn’t put pressure on the cuts to her abdomen.

Periodically, she sipped at her beer and restrained herself from making snide comments during the movie. She glanced at Steve every so often just to see his reaction to the movie. He looked interested enough in, enough that he’d forgotten about his own beer. Or he just didn’t feel like drinking the beer.

“How the hell does a guy-”

Kennedy didn’t even let him finish the sentence before she dove on top of him, her hand covering his mouth. He just looked up at her, brows arched in confused question. She just gave him a look before grabbing the remote and turning the movie off as it hit the credits.

“Don’t question the impossibility of it. That’s a classic character right there.”

Before she could say or do anything else, Steve lifted her and deposited her back onto the couch. She just gave him another look before taking her beer and tilting it all the way back so that she could drink the rest of it.

“I was going to say,” Steve began before shooting her a look back, “how the hell does a guy end a movie like that? The killer is gone after being shot six times and falling from a second story window. I mean, what happens?”

Kennedy felt a smile stretch her face, “you liked it.”

“It’s a decent movie, totally unrealistic,” he just made a face at the glare she shot him, “but decent. You just can’t end a movie like that though.”

“But it leaves room to completely scare the fuck out of everyone in the theater,” she shrugged. “I mean, c’mon. The kid was totally normal until he just got the urge to stab his older sister because she was getting some. How many people were terrified to go home after that, wondering if their little brother was murderous. Or if some sociopath was going to just pop out of nowhere and ruin their lives?”

As the words left her mouth, Kennedy felt an odd chill set in to her bones. She could see the brunette Russian in her head; see his smirk as he walked away. The spot on her arm where he’d pushed his weight down throbbed. Her throat, the finger-shaped bruises still masked with cover up, ached as the cuts began to burn.

Her vision was fuzzy at the edges, her throat dry and her pain neurons white hot. She swallowed past the dryness, eyelids drifting shut for a moment before she forced them back open. The Russian’s face was above her, his eyes smirking sadistically down at her. She flinched and the smirk slipped to include his lips.

Kennedy shifted, one leg lifting slightly, and she felt the stiffness in her body as her knee cracked. As he looked down at her, she couldn’t help but pull her lips back from her teeth. They might have been bloody from where she’d sunk her teeth into her lips to try and hold the pain in.

“Fuck you.”

He just smiled, and it was the type of smile that made her want to grab a gun.

“Kylie?”

Steve’s voice cut through like glass and she blinked, blue eyes lifting to see that he was looking at her with that concerned look again. Her throbbed and she glanced down to realize that she’d cracked the beer bottle. The liquid had seeped into the leg of her pants where the bottle had been resting. Blood dripped from her hand onto her leg.

“Shit!”

She didn’t care that the beer and the blood would stain her pants, that didn’t bother her. What bothered her was the fact that she’d let it get back into her head. She hadn’t slept much the past two days since it had happened, though there had been plenty of beer drinking with Loki. Or, rather, she drank beer and Loki read his millionth and one book as she tried to stay awake. When she had tried to sleep, she’d woken up entangled in her sheets and two inches from face planting onto her boots.

“Sorry, fuck, sorry,” she muttered as she hopped away from the couch to avoid any shards of glass. “Shit…fuck.”

Squeezing her hand into a tight fist, Kennedy went into the kitchen quickly. She turned on the faucet and stuck her hand under the flow of slowly warming water. It burned a little but she didn’t wince. Compared to the pain that she had experienced as of late, this pain was like a walk in the park.

“I’m going to run down to the corner store,” Steve said, walking in and shrugging into his jacket, “and find something to wrap that up.”

“It’s fine,” she muttered as she ran her thumb over the cuts, “I promise. Just stings a little.”

“Humor me,” he sighed before taking her hand from the water and examining it. “Besides, what if you get infected and I have to get a new handler? I don’t want that.”

Kennedy snorted and smirked a little as he prodded at the cut. Blood was trickling out of them again and the bottle had reopened the cuts from her bracelet. Her hand started to curl, to pull away before Steve pressed his thumb down and forced it back open.

He didn’t say anything though and just quietly left the apartment after that. Kennedy watched him go before turning back to the faucet. After rinsing her hand a few more times, she pulled a dishtowel out and tightly wrapped her palm up. Satisfied, she turned and walked back into the living room to find her phone.

She dialed her apartment number and, while it rang, began walking around Steve’s apartment. Her natural curiosity got the better of her as she found a stack of files tucked behind some books on a shelf. Glancing around, she cradled the phone against her shoulder and pulled the files out from the place behind the books. They were SHIELD files.

“Loki, fucking answer the fucking phone,” she snapped as the voicemail picked up. “I fucking swear to God I-”

“It’s nice to know that your time spent with other slightly-civilized human beings has not improved upon your appalling language,” Loki drawled, cutting her off midsentence.

“Is everything okay there?” she asked before he could continue.

“You mean besides being terribly dull and cramped?” he asked. “Then yes, everything is ‘okay’.”

“Don’t be so surly, I’ll take you for a run when I get home,” Kennedy snarked back as she laid the files out. “Besides, I have a question for you.”

He remained silent on the other end as she selected the most flipped through file. CARTER, PEGGY had been typed on the label. She barely noticed that Loki was silent as she glanced over the file before selecting the second most flipped through: BARNES, JAMES.

“How easily could you have put down Captain America?” Kennedy asked without commenting on the silence. “Was Stuttgart like a game to you?”

“Stuttgart was me feeding my overly dramatic ego, if I recall what you said clearly,” Loki said and she heard a book page flip. “But that was just a bit of fun, really. If I had really wanted to kill the man, he would be dead already.”

“So what about a guy with a bionic arm? Like a fully metal arm? Could you still take him down?”

“Are you speaking of your dear Russian friend who easily put you in your place?” Loki asked without answering.

“How do you know he’s Russian?” she frowned, still not having opened the file.

“How and what I know of him are none of your concern. The question, however, is why have you let him so far under your skin to the point of being rolling over like an old bitch?”

Kennedy ignored the question and hung up the phone. Setting it on the table, she picked up Barnes’s file. Steve had spent plenty of time thumbing through this file, for whatever reason. She set it on the table before opening the flap so that she could see why he had spent so much time looking in it.

Her eyes didn’t even reach the first sentence, though, as the picture caught her attention. Her throat locked up and made it hard to swallow as she stared at the picture. The Russian’s face stared back at her and she could almost see him smirking in her head, see him laughing at her.

“Jesus Christ…”