Betrayal?
"Bucky!" Two young voices chimed excitedly as she and Steve followed Skye to the interrogation room. Two ten-year-olds hugged Bucky from both sides while Steve looked on with a mixture of confusion and repressed laughter.
"Anna! Charlie! How are you guys?" Bucky was still angry that SHIELD had to take them under its wing, but she was happy that they were at least safe.
"Good! Look. I practiced what you taught us." Charlie piped, then, without warning, brought Steve to the deck with a flip. Steve rolled to his feet, no longer so amused.
"Is this your boyfriend? He seems nice." Anna looked up at Steve with a wide grin before she crystallized into ice and slid away down the hall.
"Children. With superpowers." Steve noted as Charlie proceeded to set his own fingers alight like ten birthday candles. "That you trained in Judo and told you had a boyfriend."
"All of the above." Bucky nodded as they turned down the corridor towards the interrogation room.
"They're wild." Skye added with a knowing sigh, "Kind of sweet though. They remind me of you guys. Not that I just said that why did I say that?" Skye chuckled.
"How so?" Steve asked, adjusting the shield on his back.
"They're inseparable. Like in the comics you're always saving each other." Skye noted as they reached the door to the interrogation room. "Not that I read the comics regularly, it's just that Coulson's office is filled with old Captain America stuff and I--" Skye stopped short as she opened the door to the interrogation room. Astrid was gone. Bucky quickly looked up, tensed in preparation of an attack, but there was none. Astrid was simply gone without a trace. Steve whipped around to Bucky, an expression of betrayal in his eyes that almost brought Bucky to her knees. Skye kicked into action, drawing her gun and pointing it at Bucky's head.
"That better be you in there or I swear to god--" Steve snapped, looking into Bucky's eyes as if he could find truth there.
"I know I can't convince you with words." Bucky replied, moving her right hand slowly towards her left shoulder. "But let me convince you with my actions." Quickly, she slammed the red star button on her shoulder and her arm whirred as it opened. Skye's eyes widened in wonder as Bucky removed the papers and capsule from the interior compartment. "This--" Bucky held up the papers, "Is all the intelligence I have been able to amass, and it is all the intelligence that was torn from my memory. Some of it might be outdated. But most of it wont be." Bucky sighed with relief as the pain in Steve's eyes evaporated. Skye lowered her weapon, though she didn't holster it. Not yet. Bucky walked over to the table in the center of the room and spread out the papers. There were a few hand-drawn maps, stolen blueprints, and a few pages of scribbled writing in Bucky's hand. Carefully, Bucky unscrewed the metal tube and poured its contents onto the table. Maybe fifteen clear, shinning stones winked up at the trio.
"Diamonds?" Skye brushed through the cool stones with an inquisitive finger.
"Most likely conflict, from the mines of South Africa." Bucky noted, picking up the largest of the diamonds and looking at it carefully.
"Why South Africa? There's mines all over." Steve added, taking a deep breath. He had to start trusting Bucky. Fully, in the way he had when they were children. He had thought he was already at that point, but he had been proven wrong. Steve didn't trust Bucky because he was worried that it wasn't really all her inside that brain. There was something that HYDRA had broken in her besides the obvious. Sometimes Steve swore that Bucky--the girl from Brooklyn that he knew before the war--was gone. Entirely. Like some kind of sick magic trick. But then she would come back in short bursts, when they were dancing, or when she held her left hand over the toaster for a while so when she touched him it didn't feel like ice down his back, or when he came home to find that she had made a fort out of pillows and blankets and had fallen asleep listening to old records. 'War changes everyone.' Steve decided firmly as he watched Bucky roll her left shoulder anxiously.
"Astrid slipped up. She mentioned Johannesburg, and these diamonds were only cut recently. There's a time stamp on the tube for six months ago. I was still working for HYDRA at that point. Hiding these must have been one of my last fights against the conditioning before you broke it entirely." Bucky gave Steve a familiar, small smile and after a brief moment he returned it.
"So you think whatever was going down in Johannesburg is still underway?" Skye asked, finally sheathing her weapon. Bucky nodded adamantly.
"I am--I was their greatest asset. They were efficient because they had me under control and I had their issues under a control of my own." Bucky didn't feel smug, just pained, "None of their snipers are as trained as I am. Their targets have an escape rate of above ten percent, which means that HYDRA's proceedings are set back by months of not years."
"Is that where you think we'll find Astrid? South Africa?" Steve gestured to the empty room as Bucky replaced the documents in her arm.
"No. I think we are going to find her on this plane. Which means we're also going to need to find the mole." Bucky replied, her voice dangerously calm.
"How on earth are we going to do that?" Steve wondered aloud as Bucky stepped out into the corridor.
"No clue." She gave him a cheeky grin and replaced her mask over her face, and pulled down her goggles. "But we should start by killing the lights."