INDY

Teregova at night was… a little off-putting. Maybe it was because of the few stray men we saw milling around their flatbed freight trucks, only the lit ends of their cigarettes and the spotty light of the street lamps illuminating their capped heads and overall-ed frames. Maybe it was because I knew we were here on a mission and my nerves were just wound tight.

Every tree seemed to reach out to make grabs at us from the sides of the narrow road. In my mind, every noise from birds and small animals belonged to enemy infantry coming to intercept us. I picked at the edge of my sleeve, glancing habitually down at my IED sensor as I walked between Yelena and Bucky.

We all wore black, the two of them in their combat suits and myself in a simple pair of black cargo pants, belted around my waist with a gun stowed discretely at my hip. My long-sleeve black tactical shirt was decently thick, but Bucky had kindly offered me a spare jacket he’d apparently packed, so I didn’t have to test my shirt’s durability in Romania’s chilly nighttime winds. Spring was rolling through, but winter still lingered in the air, and especially in the snowfalls that drifted around the more mountainous regions.

“Anything?” Yelena murmured, sharp eyes scanning shadows I couldn’t see through.

“Nothing yet,” I responded quietly, gravel crunching beneath my boots. My sensor maintained a steady pulse of surveillance, a muffled beep sounding from beneath my thumb every few seconds. “Keep an eye out, though. These terminals don’t go down too easily. It could be a technical malfunction, but we can’t discount the idea that someone did this purposefully.”

“Like Hydra.” Bucky’s voice was a deep rumble from the darkness next to me, his footsteps unsettlingly light for a man of his size.

I nodded in agreement as we took the turn from the main street onto a dirt service road. Three small, leaning houses sat on either side of the road, a somewhat lonely sight. At the curved end of the road was a metal shack, built sturdier than the other buildings in the village. It only looked like it belonged because of the dents and rust that matched the other commercial buildings. The street lamps were spaced farther apart here. I didn’t know if I felt better about being more concealed, or worse about the increased potential for hidden enemies.

As it turns out, I should have been more worried about the locals noticing us. A family lounged in front of one house, kids running in the light pouring over the yard from the open front door, adults calling out to each other with laughs and a few dogs yipping playfully with the children.

Unfortunately for us, their cozy little scene was closer to the road than the other, less outwardly populated, houses. So we had to pass pretty close by. I hid my hand-held sensor up the wide sleeve of Bucky’s jacket; I’d had to roll them up for free use of my hands, but they worked perfectly for concealing gadgets and weapons.

Maybe I should ask Bucky what size he wears and start buying all my jackets this way.

I shook the nervous thought lightly from my head as we drew closer to the family’s short driveway.

Focus, Indy- wait, where is Yelena?

I was looking to my left, squinting into the branches of the trees, the shadows of the ditch, the vast expanse of dark village behind us. She was nowhere to be seen. I hadn’t even heard anything. If it was anyone but her, I might have worried about abduction. I got the sense her disappearance was intentional, though. I saw why as soon as I turned to look at Bucky on my right.

“Buna ziua! Esti pierdut?” a man called from the gaggle of chattering relatives as we came level with the end of their driveway.

Before I could make a question mark with my face, Bucky called back with a shockingly easy smile, “Nu, mulţumesc. Doar o duc pe soţia mea la o plimbare în lumina lunii.”

His gloved metal hand reached out for my shoulder and tugged me to his side so his arm could sling around my shoulders. I shot him a glance out of the corner of my eye before realizing this was some kind of cover and plastering a smile on my face, leaning into him with an arm around his lower back.

“Ah,” an old woman in a rocking chair called out, holding a hand to her chest in what I hoped was an overly dramatic display. “Tineri iubiţi!”

The others around her laughed, and a few gave us fond smiles, like we’d done something cute.

Bucky even let a polite chuckle out.

“Stai in siguranta!” the first man called with a wave as we passed the drive and continued on, arms around each other.

“You speak Romanian?” I murmured out of the corner of my mouth once our backs were all the family could see. It was a split second later that I remembered he’d hidden in Romania for a while just a handful of years ago. Well, a handful if you were blipped away like the two of us.

“Yeah.” His hand was fisted on top of my shoulder like he was playing rock-paper-scissors rather than palm down on it. With my arm around his back like this, I could feel how tense he was, muscles coiled beneath his jacket. Did his super soldier senses tell him something my ordinary human ones hadn’t picked up on?

I looked around us again, head whipping from side to side as I searched for Yelena or any threats. “So, what did you say?”

“What?”

“To those people back there,” I clarified. “What did you say? I don’t speak anything but English.”

His blue eyes met mine for a split second before he narrowed his eyes and glared into the distance. “They asked if we were lost. I told them we were just out for a walk.”

I scrunched my eyebrows. “Wonder if they saw anyone else come through here.”

“I would’ve asked, but I figured that might seem suspicious,” Bucky said in a harsh voice.

“Alright, alright,” I said lightly, pulling my arm back from him so I could check my sensor again. “No need to get defensive. Where’d Yelena run off to?”

He frowned up ahead of us and inclined his head. Yelena was walking toward us, blank-faced and seemingly at ease.

“The surrounding area is clear,” she said as she came closer, the clips of her vest’s buckles catching in what little light was available.

“Good work,” I said, impressed with her initiative. “Let’s get in there.”

The shack was a dummy, really. The AI terminal and all its associated machinery were stored underground, in the shack’s deceptively large basement. I unlocked the shack itself and started to enter when Yelena spoke up again.

“I will keep watch from out here. Yell if you need me.”

Bucky and I gave her short nods before closing the door and heading further in. The place measured about 8 feet by 8 and smelled like mulch and bugs. The floor was made of dirt. Decoy farming equipment was hung on the walls, along with tattered posters from the 80s.

Both Bucky and a faded picture of Slash from Guns N Roses watched as I kneeled in the dirt and began brushing it away with my hands, my IED sensor still benignly beeping away on the floor beside me.

“Aha,” I breathed when the metal ring of the hatch became visible. “Bucky, can you-?”

“I got it,” he huffed, leaning down to grasp the ring in his hand. He gave it one swift jerk, and it squealed open.

I cringed at the noise and peeked out of the window of the shack door. Yelena had glanced back with a cocked brow, but it hadn’t gained any other attention.

“I’ll go first,” Bucky said, staring into the hole with distaste as he shrugged his jacket off, tossing it onto one of the nearby shelves. “Make sure no one’s down there waiting for us. If I yell, you run. Got it?”

I gave him a look. “What, and leave you?”

“Yes,” he said, meeting my eye for the first time that night. His were tight, something almost antagonistic behind them. “Leave me.”

A cold shudder went through me. “Buck, I-”

“Let’s get this done.” He turned his back to me and, annoyingly durable as ever, just stepped into the hole in the ground, completely disregarding the perfectly fine ladder bolted the wall.

I rolled my eyes. “Show off.”

I waited a solid thirty seconds (that felt more like hours) until I heard Bucky call up to me that the immediate area was clear. I hooked the IED sensor into my waistband and descended the cold iron ladder, boots thudding onto the concrete floor below. Bucky was already on alert, eyes darting from every corner of the singular hallway we stood in. Four rooms branched off this one dim hallway, each containing sensitive information-gathering computers. Bucky pulled a handgun from one of the holsters his jacket had carefully hidden and started making his way slowly down the hall.

“It’s the second on the left,” I whispered, pulling my flashlight out and shining it toward the door in question. “There.”

Bucky jerked his head toward it silently, urging me forward. I moved toward the door and unlocked it, using one of the ungodly amounts of keys I was responsible for. I felt a little like the Key Maker in the second Matrix movie sometimes. We made our way into the room quickly, shutting the door behind us.

The lights were off, the small space illuminated only by the AI terminal screen. Bucky did a sweep over the room, then went to stand by the door, arms over his chest while I worked.

“There are no obvious signs of tampering,” I said slowly, observing the wiring and the panels that covered what wasn’t exposed. “The sensor hasn’t shown anything, either. Maybe this really is just a computational error.”

Hope was building in my voice, the nerves slowly fading out as I pulled a crate from the wall and sat in front of the terminal, entering credentials and wading through surface-level security measures.

“Just hurry up, I’m ready to get out of here.”

I whipped my head around at him. He was much more bitter tonight than usual.

“What’s your deal?” I asked, typing with my eyes on him instead of the screen. I knew he hated that. “You’ve been cranky since we left the house.”

“Cranky,” he scoffed. “There’s no deal, Indy. I just don’t want to be here any longer than we have to. I… have a bad feeling.”

“About what?” I turned back to the screen, frowning when I saw that the codes I’d input had floated through with no problem. They should have been caught by the firewall. Something wasn’t right there, but it was fixable.

“Just… this.” He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t really need him to; I was feeling pretty on-edge myself.

“Well, I’ll be done when I’m done,” I said evenly, still typing away. “So, you do what you do best: be silent and intimidating and shoot any bad guys that show up. And I’ll do what I do best: everything else.”

I heard his almost silent “tch” behind me, but couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or amused.

The firewall didn’t appear to have been manipulated, either, just required an update. That shouldn’t have set off the alarms we’d received back home at the onset of this mission, though. So, one secondary issue dealt with. One massive gaping issue left to find and fix.

Troubleshooting manually is the worst. It’s time-consuming and frustrating. Especially when it turns up nothing.

“What do you mean? Look again,” Bucky said impatiently after 45 minutes of pacing while I frantically sifted through code.

“You really want to be down here another hour? I checked everything. If there was something there, I’d have found it.”

“Then we should leave like I told you twenty minutes ago.”

We haven’t sniped at each other like this since we first met. It’s been ongoing during the 45 minutes of clickety-clacking Bucky apparently couldn’t stand. We’d been bickering back and forth about how fast I was going, whether being here at all was a good idea, whether we should cut our losses and head back, really anything.

“We can’t leave without fixing this. There’s too much our opposing forces could stand to gain if we just left it,” I repeated, trying to draw some semblance of calm back to myself. “Just… chill out and give me a few more minutes.”

He set his jaw, blue eyes paradoxically fiery as he crossed his arms and leaned in an angrily resigned way sideways against the wall.

I forced a hand through my hair and deliberated for a moment, bouncing on the balls of my feet. “Alright, I have an idea. But you have got to be patient.”

BUCKY

Indy’s plan was logical, I guess. She couldn’t find anything wrong in the digital contents of the computer, so she had slid her toolkit out of a deep pocket of her cargo pants and set to work unscrewing paneling and tracking wiring with her tongue between her teeth.

I didn’t know why I was being so combative with her. She was right; since we’d left the house I’d been short and irritable with her. I felt bad about it, but… I didn’t know how to stop. I didn’t even know why I was doing it. Maybe it was a subconscious effort to push her away.

I rubbed a hand over the back of my head, chewing the inside of my cheek guiltily. I wanted to speak up, to say I was sorry for being an ass for the last couple of hours. But the words stuck in my throat.

I’d wanted to learn more about her, of course. In that half-impulsive way I did to avoid feeling like I was betraying my own sensibilities. But now, I was learning things that made the yearning sensation in my chest claw at me with renewed vigor. Things like her childhood crush on me. Things like what Sam had accidentally let slip a week ago…

15 minutes later, Indy was securing another panel back onto the system, moving on to the next, and my patience was thinning. I exhaled heavily. Paced. Glanced agitatedly from Indy, to the door, and back.

“You’ll wear a hole in the floor and fall down another level, Sarge,” Indy said in a teasing, sing-song voice, not lifting her head as she twisted another set of wires together and capped them.

“Focus, Indy,” I snapped. “We’ve already been here too long.”

I didn’t need to see her face to notice her flinch. My throat tightened, and a leaden feeling settled into the pit of my stomach. Her hands hesitated for only a second, hovering loosely in front of a set of switches. Then she set back to work without comment.

I huffed out a sigh. “Indy, I’m-”

“It’s fine, we’re almost done here,” she said robotically, shoving paneling back over the wires and switches and screwing it back into place with her tiny screwdriver.

God, I wanted to throw myself into a wood chipper sometimes.

Why do I always fuck this up with her?

Why does it matter? You can’t have her, anyway.

She was unscrewing the next panel when I got a strange, skin-crawling feeling. I shifted nearer to her, peeking over her shoulder as she removed what must have been her dozenth metal panel of the night.

She sucked in a sharp breath of air, already twisting to stand and run. Inside this compartment was a pressure cooker, jagged bits of metal stuffed inside with a blasting cap and a kitchen timer ticking down right in front. It was only at :03 when Indy lifted the panel away.

At :02, she twisted out of her seated position, heading toward the door. The forgotten panel clattered to the floor.

At :01, she reached my side, and I knew we weren’t going to make it.

Just as it timed out, I snagged her around the waist and pulled her to me, curling my body around hers with my back to the explosion. My metal hand held the back of her head, protecting it and tucking her face into my chest. If she wasn’t so small compared to me, I might not have succeeded in shielding her.

The blast sent us hurtling forward into the wall, and while it probably bruised her quite a bit to be caught between a concrete wall and a super soldier, it was better than being blown up. I gasped painfully when I felt shrapnel hit my back, some of it ping-ing off my left shoulder. Then came the impalement.

I didn’t feel the internal pain at first, just the pressure of the force it was propelled by. But then I heard Indy’s muffled scream, forced my eyes open to peer down at what looked like a small, studded fence post sticking out of my right side, miraculously only scraping a deep cut across Indy’s arm on exit. Our blood mingled and dripped from the pointed end. It was between my lower ribs, I could tell now. Every breath resulted in the same scraping, burning sensation.

Then there was the sharp piece of scrap metal that skewered my right thigh. And the railroad spike that had gotten my left calf.

After the deafening noise of the explosion, our breathing was intensely loud. Her short, panicked gasps. My heavy, labored panting.

“Bucky,” she whimpered through the rain of dust falling all around us. “Bucky, holy shit, are you okay?”

I groaned and bent my head lower over hers, squeezing my eyes shut as I worked out an answer to that for myself. “I’ve… survived worse.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Even as terrified as she looked, she still managed to sound disgruntled.

I let a thin wheeze of a laugh out, then cringed when it made my side ache like it was rotting. The edges of her face were growing fuzzy, a slow ringing building in my ears. “We need to get out of here.”

“Can you really move? You’re kinda pincushioned,” she breathed in horror, eyes roving over me in the scant space between our bodies.

I had to have been pretty out of it from the pain, not thinking straight. I lifted a hand and put it to her cheek the way I’d wanted to so many times before. Just to make sure she was really there. That fuzziness in her outline made me uncertain. My thumb left a bloody streak across her cheekbone and I frowned down at it.

“Don’t worry about me.”

I would have worried about myself if I could have processed how strained every word sounded.

She didn’t look convinced by me in the slightest. Instead, she put her hands on my chest, pushing me a step back so she could better examine my new appendages. I couldn’t see much in the destroyed, unlit room, but I could almost feel her grow paler.

“We need to get you to Rhonston.”

“Is that his name?” I asked weakly. I don’t think I was standing very straight.

“His name’s not important,” Indy said urgently, stepping to my side to pull my arm over her shoulders. “Lean on me. We need to get you out of here.”

I started to pull the bits of metal from my body, trying to get them out of the way, but Indy stopped me.

“Wait till we get you to the doctor. You could hurt yourself more.”

“Alright, fine,” I grunted. “I gotta make these smaller, though, or I'm not going anywhere. This is going to hurt like hell.”

She watched with her face twisted in secondhand pain as I took either end of each piece of metal that had pierced my body and snapped off as much as I could to maximize my mobility.

After making the metal spikes shorter, I let her lead me from the room, but kept most of my weight off of her so I didn’t collapse her spinal column. Of course, our progress was slow since I still had to put quite a bit of weight on her due to my injuries. Every step made each alternating leg feel half-numb and half-dying. And then there was the formerly two-foot-long fence post laced through my upper torso. I should have been used to having so much metal become part of my body.

Apparently, I’d spoken that last thought out loud.

Indy let out a shaky giggle and bit down on her wobbling lip before sniffing and saying weakly, “That’s not funny.”

We made it back to the ladder finally, and then our next dilemma hit us. How the hell was I going to climb up there like this? Indy, with an uncharacteristic sheen over her hazel eyes, ran her hands through her hair, staring frenetically around like a winch might appear out of thin air.

“Just… stay here for a minute, okay? Will you be alright?” She put her hands on my arms and helped lean me against the wall next to the ladder, watching my face worriedly.

“I’ll be fine,” I nodded, catching her hand to squeeze it just before she turned to climb the ladder. I watched her the whole way up and then kept my gaze upward as I tried to breathe around the intruders in my body.

It was only a few minutes before Indy reappeared with Yelena, their faces looking down from above.

“You doin’ okay, Sarge?” Indy called down.

“I’ve been better,” I responded as loud as I could manage.

“We’ve called the others. John is on his way with a truck. We’ll get you back to the doctor soon,” Yelena said clinically. I could almost hear the “but” at the end of that sentence.

Indy didn’t let me linger in suspense long. She leaned over to murmur something in Yelena’s ear that she nodded at. Then Indy swung herself back down into the hole, descended the ladder, and skipped the last few rungs to drop to the floor.

“What’s the bad news, doll?” I rasped.

She barely hesitated before saying, apologetically, “You’re gonna have to drag yourself outta this hole, big guy.”

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment before sighing carefully and nodding. “Figures.”

“I’ll be right behind you. Not that I’ll probably be much help.” She fidgeted, her eyes lingering on the blood dripping from my pant legs, from my hand beneath the post in my side.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said through gritted teeth, letting her pull me into a standing position in front of the ladder.

O o 0 o O

By the time Indy and Yelena respectively pushed and pulled me up out of the hole in the ground, John was already waiting outside in a truck with the tailgate down. I was wavering slightly on my feet, my vision growing steadily blurrier.

Indy sat in the truck bed with me, looking sick with worry and curling in on herself on my right side. I could see the thoughts in her eyes every time they hesitated over my topmost injury. If I were a normal man, not a super soldier, I wouldn’t have survived. She was still concerned, but mostly she seemed to feel guilty. What for, I wasn’t sure. I definitely didn’t blame her for anything. Unless you counted my recent addiction to The Great British Bake Off.

I didn’t realize I was leaning sideways, my eyes glued to her, until she looked up and started talking.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?” It was hard to speak loud enough to be heard over the wind. I leaned a little closer.

“Like I’m telling you the most interesting story you’ve ever heard,” she shook her head, unable or unwilling to meet my eye.

“I’m trying to figure out what you’re thinking. What you’re feeling,” I admitted, more freely than I should have.

“I feel like I led you into a booby-trapped room and let you get turned into a voodoo doll to protect me.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and leaned her chin on them.

“This is the job, Indy,” I said slowly, trying not to let the pain from the bumping truck distort my words. “People get hurt. I get hurt more than most. I’d still rather be the one stuck through all over than see that happen to you.”

She looked up at me then, with that look like she was pleading with me not to say anything else, not to be nice to her because she felt like she didn’t deserve it.

“Stop expecting so much out of yourself,” I said, lowering my voice as the truck’s engine shut off. “You do more than any of us.”

She didn’t respond for a minute, instead glancing away from me and at the house where Sam and Kate were coming out of the front door. “Come on,” she stood and held a hand out to me. “Let’s get you off your deathbed.”