She calls him 'Buchanan'. Says he needs a name, and 'Bucky' or 'Barnes' or even 'James' brings up emotions that he'd rather let lie.

He calls her 'Danvers', because calling her 'Carol' would mean he's accepted her as an ally rather than a means to an end.

He knows this because she's told him. (The only SHIELD agent he's known to keep her words and emotions on her sleeve and make it seem like she's got the advantage.

He knows she does.)

She tells him everything when they're on the road to New York (tells him he was born and raised in Brooklyn, and if they have any hope in regaining his memories, it would be there).

She tells him about Mar-vell and Yon-Rogg and the Psyche-Magnetron, which turned her into a half-Kree—an alien, he thinks?—superhuman. She tells him how SHIELD found out and tried to subdue her, take her back in and train her like some runaway lapdog.

(She doesn't tell him about how she lost her memories, and when he asks, she clams up and doesn't speak until they reach the Lincoln Tunnel.)

"I was attacked."

She says it so quietly, he almost doesn't hear.

"I thought they were my friends. I had just moved to San Francisco, trying to start a new life as a magazine editor, of all things. Was angry at SHIELD, spilled a few secrets. Not enough to get on their hit list—I'd gotten too popular for them to simply take me out with a sniper and leave the authorities to their guesses—but just enough to let them know I was there."

Her voice takes on that same detached and indifferent tone it did in the Smithsonian. Her crystalline eyes weren't tearful, but they were glistening with an emotion he couldn't place.

"They were mutants. Outcasts from even their own kind. 'Least, that's what they told me. I could understand that. Guess I was wrong. One minute I'm jogging down the Golden Gate, the next… I was found floating unconscious in the bay. No memory, no powers. They took away everything that made me me.

She frowns and grips the wheel tightly.

"They found out who I was soon enough. ID'd me and shipped me off to some psychiatric center. I busted myself out two weeks later and a couple other mutants found me. Took me to Westchester, to a psychic named Charles Xavier. Apparently the guy'd heard about what happened to me and blamed himself for the whole thing. Him and his team helped me along, I got my memories back, and my powers kicked in soon after. Not as strong as I used to be, though. My powers only come into play when my adrenaline's spiked, apparently. And my memories, well… the emotional connection to the memories I did get back were completely severed."

They stay quiet for about a minute until she leans forward and switches the radio on.

They don't speak until they see the old brick houses and the Empire State Building gleaming in the distance. There is no epiphany, no sudden flashes of his early adolescence. But there's a twinge of… emotion (the feeling is so unfamiliar he panics and breaks the seatbelt of her rental) there in the pit of his stomach.

He watches a couple of kids play basketball in an alleyway, and he suddenly feels like a ghost among the living.

He doesn't notice he's said so aloud until Danvers snorts and says, "That's more than I got."

He asks if they're gonna go see the psychic in Westchester, and she grunts her affirmative.

(He doesn't understand her sudden annoyance until he sees a flash of red and blue flying past, waving madly in their direction. "Damn that kid," she mutters and rolls down the window to flick him off.

"Who was that?"

"Hm? Oh, that was Spiderman.")

The closer they get to the heart of Brooklyn, the tighter the feeling in his stomach coils.

"It'll hurt," she says when his eyes (never his entire face, he's too good for that) flash with anxiety. "You'll remember everything. The good, but the bad too. Professor Xavier said my mind was trying to protect me. I don't know about you, though. Your memory loss is… artificial."

He almost cringes when she says it.

(Almost.)