Chapter Twenty-One

The house was deathly quiet. Fury had been used to silence while secluded in his holding cell, but the feeling was different from being alone in a house. The hush invited memories, which he could still barely understand.

Or rather, he was finally beginning to comprehend the difference between a memory and the information that came to him from his computer system. The two systems — his brain and the operating system on his chip — worked similarly on the most basic level. They stored information for later recall and use. But the computer was reliable and organized. Fury could count on it to pull up exactly what he needed when he needed it.

His brain didn’t work the same way at all. He was at its mercy as it felt things and played memories whenever it wanted. They always came at inconvenient times, such as yesterday evening.

He and Natasha had been in the living room. They had spent the day cooking, cleaning, and looking things up on the Internet. Natasha was perfectly happy to spend her entire day working in the house, but Fury was restless by the time they had finished dinner. He was beginning to wonder how the humans managed to rattle about in the same buildings every day of their lives. The cyborg was ready to get outside and go other places, perhaps even meet new people. The last part, in particular, would have worried Natasha, so he avoided telling her about his desires.

A commercial came on for something called car insurance. The term seemed familiar, but he didn’t understand it. Still, he watched the ad with interest, eager to learn from it.

There were two people in a car, one of them driving and talking happily to the other. The scene went black. The sounds changed to crashing and screaming. When the picture returned, the television showed a destroyed car and an ambulance driving away without its sirens blaring.

The image shifted again to a man in front of a white background talking about safe driving, but Fury wasn’t paying attention anymore. Instead, the memories were playing in his head again. Fury had been driving a car, just like the person on television. Something had happened, and he lost control of the vehicle. Unlike the commercial, he could see everything that happened during the crash. There was no fade to black. The view through the windshield alternated between the sky and pavement, mixing as the car flipped through the air. Every item in the car floated in midair, giving the scene an anti-gravity sensation.

There was a woman next to him who had been yelling at him up until the crash. Fury struggled to hear her words and understand why she had been upset. Fury no longer knew who she was, but he had cared for her. In his mind’s eye, he studied her cheekbones, dark eyes that tipped up at the outside corners, and ebony hair that shone brilliantly in the sunlight.

The memory spun back in time.

“I’m not going to a stupid counseling session with you,” the woman said. She had folded her arms across her chest, and she sulked in the car seat. “You and the therapist are going to gang up on me.”

“It’s not going to be like that.” He carefully laid a hand on her leg. “I just want to give us a chance at making things work.”

“Whatever you do, it isn’t going to help. Why don’t you be a man and let everything go? You want to sit around and talk about our feelings. There’s nothing to discuss. I slept with him, I apologized. It’s time to move on.”

“It doesn’t work like that.” Fury could feel his lips moving in real life as he replayed the scene in his head. His memory was suddenly at his disposal, having been jogged significantly by the commercial. “We need to figure out why you cheated on me. There’s something bigger going on here.”

“Fuck you.”

Fury turned to look at his wife. He knew that was who she was. She’d never spoken to him like that before, and he hadn’t expected her to. The shock had pulled his eyes off the road for an instant. But that split-second made all the difference in his life. He went off the road, overcompensated to get back in his lane, and that was when the world began to spin around him.

“Fury? Can you hear me?” Natasha’s voice sounded like an echo that played loudly in the background of his memories. It slowly brought him back to reality. He found himself still staring at the television. The insurance ad was long gone.

“Yes. I’m fine.” He wasn’t, but he didn’t want to say anything. She would worry and ask questions. Fury wasn’t ready for answers yet. He still had questions of his own.

The nurse stared at him skeptically for a moment before returning to her book.

It was those types of memories that kept him from being happy in the house. He was going to get out of there, no matter what Natasha told him. Fury knew he would come back. Natasha belonged to him, after all.

He’d made his feelings apparent on their first night together. He knew Natasha was going to need further convincing. There was more to her underneath the surface. He could see it in her eyes and feel it in her touch. The woman avoided touching him most of the time, but he knew she wanted to. Fury saw her resist temptation by reaching her hand out, then yanking it back. Her eyes had hunger in them. He was going to make her understand what she wanted and give it to her.

But Fury also had needs of his own, like getting out of the house. Slipping out the back door in the wee hours of the morning to cut flowers for the table wasn’t enough to stop him from feeling trapped. Natasha would be angry at him for leaving, but she would be far angrier if he could no longer control himself. He was thinking about ways to excuse himself when a knock came at the door.

The nurse had explained that she was expecting a delivery from UPS, which would leave a box at the door. Natasha had thought Fury needed to learn how to interact with other people eventually, and accepting a package was the most innocent thing she could imagine. The driver usually knocked but raced back to his truck before she had a chance to open the door. Like most of the things he was learning, it seemed familiar once someone described it to him. It felt like he was looking at everything from a great distance.

Fury headed for the front door, checking through a crack in the curtains to make sure the large brown truck had backed out of the driveway before grabbing the package. It felt cowardly to conceal himself. He had nothing to hide from anyone, no matter what Natasha said.

To his surprise, the vehicle in the driveway was not a delivery truck. It was a long car, lowered close to the ground and covered in images of flames. The knock came on the door again, and Fury narrowed his eyes. His visual interface automatically activated, trying to help him prepare for the situation, but it didn’t have the right information to process this scenario.

After another impatient knock, Fury flung open the door and blocked the entrance with his body. The skinny punk Natasha referred to as her husband stood on the stoop. Nick had someone with him this time. The other man looked cleaner and did not have the visible tattoos Nick proudly displayed. He had a scrutinizing gaze and clear, bright eyes. The new man seemed nervous. A bead of sweat rested on his upper lip, and there were stains under his armpits.

“What do you want?” Fury demanded. Any visit from Nick was guaranteed to be an unpleasant experience.

“Hey there, big fella,” Nick said amiably. He didn’t realize Fury could see his heart rate skyrocketing. “Is Natasha home?”

“It doesn’t matter if she is or not. You’re not going to speak with her.”

“That’s not a problem. Maybe I could talk with you for a few minutes.” A thin smile spread across Nick’s lips, and he glanced sideways at his companion. “This is my friend Colin. He could use a handyman, so we thought we would come by and interview you.”

Fury replayed the scene between Natasha and Nick from the other night. Fury was not a handyman, and he didn’t know why she had said that. He was willing to go along with the ruse until he could talk to her. “I’m busy right now.”

“Busy doing what?” Nick challenged. “My wife?”

Fury’s fists clenched unconsciously. This man had no right to refer to Natasha as his possession. The cyborg didn’t care if she was married to him or not. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

“We will in a minute,” Nick replied, putting up a hand to placate the big man. “But first, my friend has a few questions for you.”

The man with the sweaty armpits had a tablet in his hands, ready to take notes. “What’s your serial number?”

Fury squinted at him, wishing for the hundredth time that his facial recognition system was live. It had always been buggy, but it was nearly non-existent after the upgrade. The only people he could reliably identify were Natasha and John. Everyone else was just a guess. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“How about your lab of origin? Do you know that?” Colin leaned toward the cyborg, his tongue flicking out to wipe a bead of sweat from his lip. It made him look like a frog catching a fly.

The soldier shook his head. There was the lab in the basement. Was that what Colin meant? Fury didn’t go down there anymore unless Natasha asked him to carry a box to the storage area. Vague memories of another lab haunted him at night, where he was in a different holding cell. He experienced pain and anger there, more than he could remember at any other time in his life, but the recollections only came in flashes. Fury didn’t know the location of that other place. Even if he did, he wouldn’t have told this miscreant about it.

“Don’t get me wrong, but I thought all the cyborgs who went through the rehabilitation program had that information burned into their memory banks.” Nick had a gleam in his glassy eyes. “And aren’t you supposed to be living in housing designated for cyborgs?”

Natasha’s husband must have known more about the cyborg program than Fury did. He was not familiar with the concept of cyborg housing. It was impossible to tell if this skinny man was speaking the truth or just trying to be irritating.

When the soldier didn’t answer, the two men on the porch looked at each other and exchanged a conspiratorial glance. “Why don’t you come with us?” Colin asked. “I have a shed that needs painting. Maybe you can take a look at it and figure out how much you would charge for your handyman services.”

Fury noticed Nick held a small syringe in his fist. It was the same thing Natasha had used on him once before. At the time, he was angry at Natasha for using the needle, but he understood it later. The chemical helped keep him in control. Back then it was okay, but he did not want to experience the feeling again. The sedative made his vision dim around the edges and numbed his muscles. He didn’t trust anyone but Natasha.

An enormous brown truck pulled up at the curb. A smiling man with dark hair and a brown uniform matching his vehicle hopped out. He carried a box. “Hi there, guys!” His teeth were straight and white and his smile dazzled in the sun. “I have a package here for Natasha Daniels.” He looked at the three of them, waiting to see who was willing to claim the delivery.

“I’ll take it,” Fury said without taking his eyes off Nick.

The driver stepped up, scanned a barcode on the box, and handed the parcel to Fury.

“Thank you.”

“You guys have a great day!” The driver waved as he walked back to the truck, jumped inside, and drove off.

Nick and Colin shifted uncomfortably. Fury had the advantage over them now. “He’s seen you here. There’s proof of exactly when he was here. I suggest you leave.”

“Are you afraid of us, big boy?” Nick seemed to enjoy pushing the limits.

“Yes. I am afraid I might do something to you that Natasha will regret.”

“Fine.” Nick slipped the tranquilizer in the pocket of his jeans and took a few steps toward his car. “We’ll be back. I know there’s something not right about you. I’m going to find out what it is.”

The two got into the ugly car and drove off, leaving big puffs of blue-gray smoke in their wake.