"Rest," the phone said. "You are safe. We will talk more later."
I began to back away slowly towards the door. Her eyes followed my every move, her expression a maelstrom of rage, fear, and confusion. She didn't trust me. She had no reason to. But she also hadn't attacked.
I reached the door, opened it, and stepped out into the hallway, closing it softly behind me. The moment the door clicked shut, I heard a crash from inside. I checked the micro-camera I had placed in the smoke detector. She had thrown the bedside lamp against the wall, shattering it. Then she had ripped the curtains from their moorings and was now pacing the room like a caged panther, her rage and confusion boiling over.
[Well, she's redecorating,] the System deadpanned. [I don't think she likes the minimalist aesthetic.]
I let her be. She needed to vent, to feel some semblance of control after having none for so long. I went to my office and ordered more food to be sent up to her room, instructing the staff to leave it outside the door.
The next few days fell into a pattern. I would enter her room in the morning, always announcing my presence first. I would sit in the chair while she glared at me from her corner. I couldn't rely on the impersonal translation app forever. If I was going to break through to her, I needed a real connection, and that meant speaking her language.
Normally, learning a language as complex as Japanese would take years of dedicated study. I didn't have years. But I did have an advantage no other language student on Earth possessed: a brain and body supercharged by the Super Soldier Serum.
My mind was a finely tuned machine. My memory was nearly eidetic, my cognitive processing speeds were off the charts, and my ability to recognize and replicate patterns was extraordinary. I instructed my staff to procure every available resource on the Japanese language textbooks, audio courses, dictionaries, and thousands of hours of native film and television.
What would have been an insurmountable mountain of data for a normal person was, for me, a challenging but achievable curriculum. I dedicated every waking moment I wasn't with Kimiko to this task. I absorbed grammar rules like a sponge, my enhanced mind seeing the logical structures and patterns that would baffle a normal student. I listened to audio lessons at five times the normal speed, my brain effortlessly parsing the sounds and committing them to memory. I watched movies, my mind cross-referencing the spoken dialogue with the subtitles, building an intuitive vocabulary.
The System helped. [Hey, you missed a kanji on page 347. Don't slack off, Boss. The angry super-wolverine is waiting.] It acted as a perfect proctor, pointing out my mistakes and keeping me on track.
In three days of non-stop mental processing, I had done the impossible. I was fluent. It wasn't the native fluency of a lifetime speaker, but it was a functional command of the language.
The next morning, I entered her room.
"Good morning," I said, my voice calm, the Japanese words feeling practiced. "I have brought you breakfast."
The first time she heard me speak her language, her reaction was profound. Her head snapped up, her eyes widening in genuine shock. It was a bridge across the chasm of language that separated us.
She still didn't speak. But she listened.
I would sit there for an hour each day, talking to her. I told her about the city outside her window, about the weather, about the food I had brought her. I told her sanitized stories about Spencer Industries, painting it as a force for good, a rival to the evil Vought. I built my cover story piece by painstaking piece.
I told her about the "Z-Drug" crisis, the news of which was now everywhere. I explained that Vought was claiming a new designer drug was responsible for the deaths of sixteen Supes at a hotel party.
"It is a lie," I said, my voice serious. "My sources confirm there was no new drug. It was a targeted assassination. Vought has no idea who did it, so they invented a story to control the public and hide their own weakness. They lie about everything," I told her, my gaze steady. "They lied about Compound V. They are lying about this massacre. They are the enemy."
Slowly the tension in the room began to lessen. She stopped growling every time I entered. She would still retreat to her corner, but her posture was less aggressive, more watchful. One day, I came in to find she had used the charcoal pencils and sketchbook I'd left her. On a single page was a drawing. It was an angry-looking bird, its wings spread wide, breaking free from a cage of thick bars.
It was the first piece of communication she had offered.
The breakthrough came a week after her arrival. I was sitting in my usual spot, telling her about a ridiculous news report I had seen about The Deep causing a traffic jam with a pod of dolphins in the East River.
On a clean page in the sketchbook, she began to draw. Her strokes were fast. She drew a stick figure representation of a man in a hero's cape, his face an arrogant smile. Then she drew another figure, a girl with long hair, tears streaming down her face.
She looked up at me, her eyes burning with a question she could not speak. It was a test. Was I just another monster in a costume?
I understood immediately. I took the sketchbook and a pencil. Next to her drawing, I drew my own. I drew a simple stylized "V" of Vought Tower. Then I drew an arrow pointing from the Vought logo to both the leering Supe and the crying girl. Then, I drew a large 'X' over the entire Vought logo.
They are the cause of all of it.
I slid the sketchbook back to her. She looked at my simple drawing, her eyes tracing the lines. Her expression softened for the first time. A flicker of understanding passed between us.
She picked up the pencil again. This time, she drew a figure representing me. Then she drew a figure of herself next to me. Then she drew an arrow pointing from the two of us towards the Vought logo. At the end of the arrow, she didn't draw an 'X'. She drew a fist.
The message was unmistakable. Us against them.
A slow smile spread across my face. "Yes," I said softly in Japanese. "Us against them."
I knew then that I had succeeded. I had pulled her back from the brink. The feral animal was receding, and Kimiko Miyashhiro was beginning to emerge. I was offering her a new cage, in a way. A cage of vengeance. But it was a cage she had just willingly stepped into.