Chapter 1
“There’s a lady in the yard,” Cass announced.
Bucky glanced up from where he was fiddling with the busted coffee maker on the kitchen table.
“Is it Mrs. Randall?” he asked. “Thought your mom told her not to come this week.”
He glanced at the wall clock and grimaced. Of course the percolator decided to break on Christmas goddamn Eve. If he didn’t have it fixed in the next few minutes, he’d have to run out and grab a new one quickly before the stores closed early for the holiday; Sarah loved her coffee and he wasn’t in the business of denying her anything she loved, especially not coffee on Christmas morning. He really, truly, dearly did not want to brave a last-minute trip to the store on the brink of the holiday, but he’d come to learn there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for a Wilson.
“It’s not Mrs. Randall,” Cass said. “She’s blue.”
“Oh.” He bit back a curse, because yup, shit, that little plastic nub holding the wires together was definitely broken. God, everything was made of such cheap crap these days, like it was deliberately designed to break as soon as possible. His poor mom would have been furious with all this twenty-first century wastefulness. Did Sarah still have some of that superglue kicking around in the junk drawer…?
“Wait,” Bucky said, blinking, “blue? What’s blue?”
“The lady in the yard,” said Cass impatiently. “She said I had to get you.”
“The blue lady in the yard,” Bucky echoed, unsure he had heard correctly, “said you had to come get me.”
“She’s kind of scary,” Cass said.
And that made Bucky put down the screwdriver and stand up without a second thought.
“Show me,” he said.
For the first time, he regretted that there were no weapons in the Wilson house. This was the one caveat of his arrangement with Sarah: he was welcome and wanted in the Wilson home, but dangerous items were not.
He had balked at first. He had nearly given up on the whole idea and gone back to his miserable hollow life in New York; after all, he may have been a free man legally, but there were plenty of people who didn’t care about laws. HYDRA and a thousand other dangers were biding their time, waiting for a moment of vulnerability, if not actively hunting him. Most nights in Brooklyn he couldn’t sleep at all without something sharp in his grip. Just the thought of living without weapons had made him twitchy.
But Sarah was firm. She didn’t want anything around the boys that could hurt them. And he’d caved like a wet paper bag when he realized that he didn’t, either. He couldn’t bear the thought of them coming across a knife or, God, a gun. Hurting themselves or each other by accident. Fucking Christ. Just the thought of it made the backs of his hands crawl, made his sternum feel like it was being stoved in.
God, but he had it bad. Not just for Sarah. For all of them.
In the mudroom, amid the winter coats and the grubby boots of various sizes, Bucky kicked off his slippers and tugged on the grass-stained sneakers he usually wore to mow the lawn or take out the trash. Cass opened the front door and pointed out into the fading afternoon light.
“There,” he said.
“Stay inside,” murmured Bucky, pushing past him. Cass’ mouth was drawn tight, his eyes narrowed. His face looked just like Sam's the moment before he leapt into flight, and for a dizzying instant Bucky caught a glimpse of the adult face the boy would grow into.
Oh, hey, he thought, with a swell of something he couldn’t name. He’s growing up.
He couldn’t say things like that out loud. But he gave the kid’s shoulder three quick squeezes as he walked past him out the door.
It was code. A secret Wilson code. Three squeezes meant I love you.
But for once Cass didn’t smile at the touch, or even look up. His focus was fixed on the yard, the way he might stare at an escaped lion.
The visitor stood still and straight in the wispy December fog.
She was indeed blue, in a horrifying patchwork sort of way, and bald, and dressed in sleek, rugged body armor that Bucky couldn’t help admiring just a little. Her eyes gleamed black. Metal was seamed into her skin — strange implants around her eye, and on top of her hairless head, and probably in more than a few other places he couldn’t see. They did not look comfortable. Nothing about her looked comfortable. She was every inch a warrior. A survivor of long terrible darknesses. Even from this distance, he knew well what that kind of grim, desolate grit looked like in a person.
He prowled down the porch steps and stopped in the frosty grass, keeping his distance.
“Hey,” he called, and waved casually across the yard like his heart wasn’t pounding. “Don’t I know you?”
She had been at Stark’s funeral. And on the battlefield before that. A blue patchwork alien face like that wasn’t easily forgotten. That whole final desperate fight had seemed like a brutal acid trip, and Bucky had been a little disoriented, what with being freshly recorporealized from ash and all, but yeah, he was pretty sure she’d been there. Pretty sure they’d been on the same side, too.
What he wasn’t sure about was the way she was standing in the gravel driveway now. Boots a little more than hip-width apart. Spine straight, arms loose and ready, knees just slightly bent. It was a fighter’s stance. Like a coiled snake waiting to spring.
The steely stare she was pinning him with also didn’t help.
“Barnes,” she said. He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard her speak before. Her voice was low and hard and carried a guttural burr that was almost mechanical, somehow.
“Galaxy?” he tried.
She smirked a little. Tilted her head. Nope.
“Uh. Comet?” God damn it, he heard the door creak and then Cass’s soft steps behind him on the porch — fuck, he’d told the kid to stay inside, he’d told him—
He moved a step to the left, tucking Cass neatly behind his flank, out of her direct line of sight. He had no doubt she could still glimpse him, but Bucky didn't want her fixing that predator stare on anyone but him.
“Come on,” he said, “I know it’s a space word, help me out here.”
“Nebula,” she said.
He snapped his fingers. “Nebula, that was it. Hey, wanna tell me what the hell you’re doing in my driveway, Nebula?”
Her fathomless black gaze flicked down to his left arm, then up to his face again.
“The arm,” she said. “I require it.”
He blinked.
“Huh,” he said. “Is that all.”
He wasn’t as shocked as maybe he ought to have been. It made an exhausting kind of sense, didn’t it. Shuri was a genius engineer, and he was just one man carrying a priceless vibranium weapon around on his shoulder. There were plenty of people who’d want his arm, whether for its raw materials or its mechanical artistry. Or, hell, it would make an impressive trophy for anyone who wanted to prove they’d beaten the erstwhile Winter Soldier; there were plenty of assholes like that around too. He’d seen some of them eyeing him in Madripoor. He’d seen them thinking about it.
So. Yeah. He’d kind of figured this day would come. Sooner than this, actually.
Did it have to be Christmas Eve, though?
“Hand it over and I’ll go,” she said.
It crossed his mind to make a joke about handing over his arm, which told him a lot about how much time he’d been spending around the Wilsons.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” he said. He raised his metal arm and wiggled the fingers. “Bye, now. Merry Christmas.”
Her eyes flicked past him.
“You have more to lose than an arm, Barnes,” she said.
Cass’ breath was a shiver just behind him up the steps, soft and ragged and quick.
The boy was afraid. Nebula was staring at him, and he was afraid.
A shard of pure ice went straight up through Bucky's heart like an arrow.
Look after the kids for me while I pick up Sam from the airport? Sarah had asked earlier. She had kissed him deep and sweet on her way out the door, lingering a little, like she couldn’t quite pull herself away from him.
Always, he’d murmured into her hair.
He was gonna make the boys spaghetti after he fixed Sarah's coffee maker. He was going to help them finish wrapping a few last-minute gifts for their mom and uncle, using the extremely unseasonal Minecraft-print wrapping paper Cass had insisted on. When Sam and Sarah got home and were all settled, they were going to make cocoa and let the kids unwrap one early present each, and then the adults were going to drink boozy eggnog and watch a movie while the kids played with their new stuff upstairs. He didn’t think something called Die Hard sounded very festive, but Sam insisted it was.
And here was Nebula, with those hard black insect eyes fixed on him. And Cass, right behind him on the porch, terrified and nine years old but ready to plow fists-first into a fight he'd never win. And AJ, upstairs on the Playstation with his headphones on, oblivious to any danger because danger never came to the Wilson house.
And no one else around for a quarter mile.
For a moment Bucky couldn’t think at all, struck stupid by the idea of Nebula going for the boys. He’d forgotten what this kind of fear was like, how it could paralyze you. It had been so long since he’d been truly afraid; he’d gotten spoiled and careless since he moved to this warm gentle place with these warm gentle people, and now the cold white rush of fear hit all the harder. His heart thrummed so hard he could feel it in his clenched teeth. The arm whirred, shifted, recalibrated.
It was a long breathless moment before finally some old mechanism in the deep low part of his brain kicked forward as the rest of him froze and failed, and his thoughts started moving again, running rough and thready like an old motor.
Step one, get the children away from the predator, said that ancient, animal part of his brain. Keep the children safe.
“Hey Cass,” said Bucky, keeping his tone light and not for an instant taking his gaze off Nebula, “go make sure that gift for your uncle is still in the closet where we put it, okay?”
“But I—“
“Go on. Don’t want him to find it when he gets here tonight, right?”
“But—”
“Now, please, Cass.”
“I don’t wanna leave you with her,” said Cass fiercely, rushing down the steps and clinging to his side. Startled, Bucky glanced down; the kid’s big brown eyes were bright and determined, his jaw set. Yeah, he was definitely his mom’s son, his uncle’s nephew. “I don’t like her.”
His heart swelled to brimming — god almighty, how lucky, how fucking lucky had an irredeemable piece of shit like him been to pry his way into the Wilson clan? How had he earned this kind of love and loyalty from kids as dazzlingly smart and brave and golden-hearted as Cass and AJ?
“It’s fine, pal,” he said gently. He turned halfway, still carefully keeping Nebula in his peripheral vision, and crouched down so he was looking up at Cass earnestly. “She’s not gonna hurt anyone. I’ll make sure. Go on, go find your brother and check on the presents.”
“Why does she want your arm?”
“It’s okay. We’re just going to talk about it and then she’s gonna leave. I just wanna talk to her in private for a minute. ‘Kay?”
“Okay,” said Cass, though he sounded uncertain. He didn’t move.
“You trust me?”
Cass didn’t blink. “Yeah.”
“Go on, kiddo,” Bucky said gently, and ruffled the boy's short fuzz of hair. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”
With one last fiery glare at Nebula over Bucky’s shoulder, Cass reluctantly turned and made his way up the steps and back into the house. The door didn’t exactly slam shut behind him, but it did rattle a little.
“Your son is very brave,” Nebula observed.
He almost corrected her, but — well, Jesus, he’d planted himself pretty solidly in these kids’ lives for about a year and a half now, hadn’t he?
He’d been through it all. He’d fed them chicken soup and taken their temperatures when they were sick. He knew the absurd plotlines of all their weird Japanese cartoons in alarming detail. He had taught them little things his own dad had taught him a whole century ago, like how to climb a ladder safely and how to swing a baseball bat so it struck the ball just right. He’d cooked them countless breakfasts and walked them to school countless times. And every night he peeked into their bedrooms and made sure they were safely asleep before he could relax and go to his own bed with Sarah, yes, every damn night.
He sure as hell loved them like they were his own. And he sure as hell made sure they knew it.
So he straightened his shoulders and said, “Yeah, he is,” and it came out just as proudly as he meant it.
“Just give me the arm,” Nebula said. She sounded almost regretful. "Don't make this difficult."
“Not gonna happen,” he informed her. “Why the hell do you even want it?”
“It’s a gift.”
“A gift? For who?”
She rolled her shoulders. “A friend. We are going to celebrate Christmas.” She said the word like it was a strange delicacy she wasn’t quite sure she enjoyed.
“Lady,” said Bucky, blinking, “if you’re here to steal an amputee’s arm, I think you kind of missed the fucking point of Christmas.”
Something like a smile passed over her face, although her lips didn’t really move.
“Perhaps,” she said. “It's a very strange holiday.”
For a long moment, a stillness hung between them like the white December mist. Then Nebula began to move, pacing sideways. Beginning to circle him.
Hell, no. He stood his ground. She could prowl closer if she wanted. He wasn’t moving out of the path to the door. No way he was letting her get between him and the kids.
God, he hoped Cass had locked the front door behind him. Then again, a lock wouldn’t slow Nebula down for long. Not unless he stopped her.
And at once he realized: whatever was going to happen next was going to happen. There was no stopping it, no avoiding this fight. He'd minded his business and lived quietly and done it all correctly, and violence had still come to his doorstep. As it always fucking did. And now it was here. It was happening. What was in motion could not be stopped. All he could do was deal with what happened next, and try to mitigate the outcome.
Nebula had come armed. He counted two large-caliber handguns on her belt and something resembling an assault rifle strapped to her back. Couldn’t make out their make; alien, probably. God only knew whether they even shot bullets, or whether they dealt some worse kind of damage. He counted three knife hilts visible to him at this angle, and he was certain there were more.
And him — shivering in a t-shirt and jeans and muddy sneakers, empty-handed.
That was all right; he didn't need a weapon. He was a weapon, if only he could awaken the part of him that still remembered.
He straightened his shoulders and settled his weight down into his hips, feeling out the balance of his body, loose and ready. He could feel every fingertip — the tingling cold human ones on his right, the heavy powerful joints of the dark metal on the left.
He unfocused his gaze and reached inside himself — past the easygoing fatherly part that had just begun to bloom, deep into the darker thicket behind it, down into the dark cold roots of him. Down into the part of the Soldier he still carried in him, the thing he would always carry like a scar.
But the Soldier didn’t wake easily. Not when he’d put it to sleep with such determination.
He tried. Soldier, report, he imagined hearing in the old voice that had haunted him, the Secretary's smooth commanding voice, but he had not heard it in a decade except in nightmares, and it didn't come easily. He tried to remember how it felt to be a thing rather than a man, tried to look out at the world through the asset's cold empty eyes. Tried to assess the field [damp, darkening skies, slippery, a potential (dis)advantage]. And the enemy herself [smaller, lighter than him, but probably more flexible and agile; enhanced, armed, armored, confident, suggesting likely hidden advantages; unpredictable].
But digging up the Soldier’s training was like trying to remember a long-ago dream, and a part of his brain was still buzzing with terror, thinking about the boys in the house and how long a simple wooden door might hold against this intruder if she got past him—
“You’re not going to get what you came for,” he said. His voice didn’t sound strong.
Nebula paused in her long slow circle. Her lip curled.
“You had your chance,” she said softly, and—
She was across the driveway and on him in a blink. Her fists went straight for the solar plexus, then the nose, then the throat, whip-quick, snap snap snap.
Shit, she punched hard.
But so did he.
And when his metal arm raised to block a blow and connected with her arm, he heard her wrist crack hard against the vibranium and she drew back as though scalded, hissing in pain.
Weakness, yes — he lunged forward, grabbed her injured wrist, and twisted viciously. Something snapped and she howled, the bone breaking cleanly into an L shape, her hand dangling uselessly, an old familiar grotesque sight—
—and then the wrist twitched, contorted, and snapped itself back into place.
"What the fuck," he said out loud, still grasping her now-whole arm.
Her grin was a slice of white teeth in a blue face. And she sprang at him again.
Well, shit, he thought, as he fended her off. Shit. Shit motherfucking shit fuck fuck.
But James Bucky Barnes had been fighting for ninety-odd years, and it was Christmas Eve, and his kids were scared, and he was not having this shit. Sure, Nebula was quick as a cobra and her punches could have felled a tree and apparently her goddamn bones could unbreak themselves, but he had a pretty good pedigree himself. Once upon a time he’d been the welterweight boxing champ of his borough and he knew how to move, how to duck and dodge, how to take a punch and keep his head. Once he’d been a dancer—
“Yield!” she snarled—
“Get the fuck off my driveway,” he replied, landing a right hook solidly in her solar plexus that made her gasp and slip backwards in the slippery grass—
—and after he’d been a dancer he had been a soldier, Captain America’s right-hand man.
And after that he had been nothing, a long dark awful rotting nothing, utterly empty except for the mission and the blood and the violence.
And now he was him. At long, long last.
And he was getting really fucking sick of people helping themselves to parts of him.
Perhaps the Soldier was waking a little at last, because something in him was sickly pleased by this fight, maybe even honoured. Nebula was lightning-fast and vicious, and skilled, and ruthless in a way that he almost admired. She fought like she had nothing to lose, taking unwise risks that Bucky would have smacked Torres upside the head for during training — leaving her vulnerable areas open as a feint to lure him closer, striking like lightning when he tried to take the bait.
It goddamn worked, too. But after the second or third time he fell for that nasty little trick, he kicked her ankle inward so she stumbled, and he caught her around the throat with the metal arm as she fell, lifted her off the ground, clenched a little to show her that he meant business.
Her black eyes bulged — but there wasn’t fear there, only an excited sort of hunger. Like she liked what she saw. Like he was just giving her a demonstration of the arm, of what she’d come for.
Like she knew he wouldn’t kill her.
Oh, Jesus Christ. He was going to lose this fight.
Because he wouldn’t kill her. And she somehow knew that.
He tossed her away into the mud and gravel and let her scramble back to her feet, coughing, blue hands rubbing at her bruised throat.
“Enough,” he said, trying not to show how hard he was panting, but his breath was rising frosty white in the cold air. His nose hurt like hell and was dripping blood, and he could feel the warm wetness trickling over his lips.
“I need a Christmas gift,” she hissed.
“Well, Target’s fucking open until four!”
Her eyes lit up. “Do they sell those?” she asked, pointing at his arm.
"Wha—no,” he said, blinking. “Of course not, Jesus."
She snarled in frustration and lunged forward, and they tangled together again.
Back, forth, back, forth. They traded blows like sledgehammers. It began to seem like she was imitating him, mocking his movements. He kicked her in the face; she kicked him in the knee. He grabbed her by the neck and threw her; she grabbed him by the hair and returned the favour.
Was she just toying with him?
She slammed her knuckles into his ear and his world spun. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a tiny smirk on her face, even though she was limping and bruised.
He was slowing.
She was not. And they both knew it.
Spinning forward to gain momentum, she levelled a swift and brutal kick at him, and he leapt backward across the muddy lawn to dodge, but not far enough—
The metal tip of her boot caught him sharply in the ribs—a clean hard snap inside him—
He gasped and went wheeling backwards, off kilter. The broken ribs burned like white fire, up and through his entire chest, sparks of bright agony rippling all the way down to his goddamn knees. He managed to keep his feet but couldn’t quite straighten up anymore without gasping.
“Fought together,” he managed, bent over with one hand on his knees, the other clutching his side. He turned his head to the side and spat a thick gob of blood. “Thanos. Why…?”
“You assume we’re friends because you helped kill my father?”
Hold the phone, Thanos was her father?
“Your dad,” he informed her between heaving breaths, “was a fucking nutjob.”
“Yes,” she agreed easily. “But this is not about him.”
She reached behind her, unhooked something from her thigh holster. It telescoped out into a long black baton, and then it lit up at the tip, crackling blue and white.
Oh, Christ, he knew what that was, all right. He staggered backward by instinct, driven only by the thought of getting away from the shock stick, but the broken ribs made him clumsy and slow, too slow.
She didn’t dash toward him. She didn’t need to; he was not getting away from her. She walked to him calmly, as he scrambled away from her in a wild haze of instinctual fear, and she jabbed the crackling electric tip directly into his smashed ribs.
He smelled the cotton of his t-shirt burning at the same instant he felt the fire that made him arch, made him rise up almost out of his own body.
So much for being a legendary ghost story, he thought as he went down onto the grass writhing, the hysterical shocky urge to laugh bubbling up under the agony. Once he’d survived a plane crash and then walked back to base on two broken ankles across six miles of tundra. Once he could take hours of punishment at the hands of a dozen bored HYDRA thugs without making a sound until commanded. A single stun baton, even one of alien make, would have meant little to the Winter Soldier.
Well, for the first time, he felt certain of it: he was no longer the Winter Soldier. He’d gotten soft inside, these last couple years. He couldn’t take pain the way he once had. He’d grown accustomed to gentleness.
What an awful paradoxical shame it was, the way love left you too soft to protect the ones you loved.
The white-fire lightning was ripping through his world, his face, his throat — his body jerked and swayed and crumpled to the ground, writhing, cold mud on his mouth, the hot burnt stink of blistering skin and smoking cotton at the crux of the fire, the tip of the electric stick rising and falling, digging savagely into the same tender place just under his arm where AJ liked to tickle him —
This he knew — this he remembered — the white lightning sticks burning him, the rippling fire in his ribs from the strike of a boot—
“Just yield,” Nebula hissed again.
She jammed the electric stick deep into the soft flesh under his jaw, and he was nowhere, he was no one, he was nothing, nothing, nothing again—
The fire stopped at last and he came back to himself a moment later, still shaking, writhing, weak. Life came in flashes. The wet grass under his cheek. The bitter grit of mud in his mouth, on his wet lips. His vision was spitting gray stars. Nebula stood above him, a ragged blue giant against the darkening sky, swaying closer.
Somewhere in another world, forty feet away, he heard the front door open.
It was both of them this time. Cass had gotten AJ. He’d brought his big brother downstairs to help out. AJ was gripping a wooden baseball bat covered in Pokemon stickers.
The boys stood together frozen on the porch, and his eyes met theirs — first AJ, then Cass. There was horror in their eyes. World-shaking horror. An expression he had never, ever wanted to see in those young faces. In his kids.
“Go back inside,” he tried to say, but he didn’t think they heard him. He wasn’t sure if he’d made any sound at all. He tried to raise himself off the ground but faltered, his right arm trembling under his weight, and collapsed again and cried out as his ribs were jostled. The prosthetic was no longer responding at all; it dragged at his side, a dead metal weight. The electricity, he thought. The arm didn't like electricity.
"Leave him alone!" someone was screaming. It sounded like AJ.
When he managed to focus his gaze, Nebula was staring at the boys, her head cocked like a curious hawk. Considering them. Her gaze lingered on the baseball bat.
God, no.
“Not the kids,” Bucky slurred. He had just enough strength to roll onto his side toward her — agony, the broken parts of him gritting against each other inside him — and stretch out his arm, reach for her leg. As though he could have stopped her. But he couldn’t not try. “Not the… not the boys. Please. Please.”
She kicked his hand away lightly.
“I only came for one thing,” she told him, almost a reassurance.
“Go inside,” he tried to say again to the boys, who were both shouting now, high-pitched voices of rage and fear, but he couldn’t quite see them anymore.
Small footsteps started thudding on the grass, coming closer—
—and then a gun cocked next to his ear and everything went very silent.
The cold metal muzzle pushed against his cheekbone. It almost felt nice.
“Get back in the house and close the door,” he heard Nebula say, above him. She did not raise her voice. “One more step and your father dies.”
Someone was crying, big hard wracking sobs. It was an awful sound.
“You’re hurting him!” someone cried.
“All I need is the arm, not his life. You’ll be the ones who take that.”
More sobbing.
A long moment. The sounds retreated.
And at last the front door clicked shut.
They were safe, he recognized dimly. Good. His boys were smart. They’d call for help.
Under the spinning sky, Nebula knelt down beside him in the mud. She took his left arm in both hands and hefted it, finding a good grip around the bicep. He closed his eyes tightly and braced himself.
“You could have made this easy,” she said, and twisted.
She must have thought it would pop off easily. Like he was a doll, with a plastic ball-socket arm that would come out if you just yanked. Or like a flesh arm. He’d ripped some of those off, back in the bad old days. If you twisted an arm just right, you could snap the cartilage and tendons that held the whole shoulder assembly together, and the bone would pop out of its socket like twisting a drumstick off a chicken. Then it was just a matter of the soft elastic skin and flesh holding it together, and a little extra force would do the trick with that if you didn’t have a knife. You could get a man’s arm to come right off in your bare hands if you were strong enough and knew what you were doing.
And Nebula was strong. If it had been his real arm, his right arm, she’d have gotten it off him without a problem. But even she wasn’t strong enough to break vibranium bare-handed. The arm’s anchor twisted and wrenched and groaned, the sound an awful vibration within his chest, and she grunted and leaned harder into her grip—
—he felt something snap and splinter inside him but it wasn’t metal—
—something in his shoulder began to lift and tear—
—and he tried to scream but the muscles of his throat weren’t working anymore, and the only thing that happened was he gasped and gasped and his eyes began to sting hot and run from the incandescent pain that was eating his shoulder and ribs and arm.
Nebula let go with an enraged grunt, and settled back on her haunches, considering him like a puzzle. She huffed out a hard sigh, as though he’d gotten on her very last nerve.
The arm wasn’t sitting correctly on him anymore. Out of the corner of his eye, his shoulder looked… wrong. It thrust into his vision at an unnatural angle.
“How do you remove it?” she demanded. “There must be a way.”
He couldn’t have told her if he’d wanted to. His jaw flopped open weakly as she leaned over and jostled him, yanking at his shoulder to find the secret. Everything was white and rushing and hissing into gray light like television static.
He wasn't quite in his body anymore. He was retreating, receding into the deep quiet merciful fold of darkness where he went sometimes, some awful times, when they laid him out on the metal table under the hard white lights and tucked a strap of leather over his tongue and brought out the tray of little metal tools and told him not to make a sound—
“Useless,” she hissed, standing up again, and kicked him in the solar plexus like a sack of potatoes, and his broken ribs roared hot bright pain, a flood of fire, dragging him back into the world.
Something in his breath was catching now. His lungs would not fill. He floundered for air, choked for it, and white spots popped at the edges of the world.
"Tell me,” she said. She lifted one of the guns off her hip. “Tell me, or I will go inside the house and find them.”
And there it was.
The one thing that could rouse him. The one thing that would make him surrender the gift, the weapon, that the Wakandans had so graciously given him. The one thing that would make him give up anything.
She could have the arm. He’d give her his entire body, piece by piece, if she wanted it. He would cut his belly open and hand her his own organs one by one.
Anything, so long as the Wilsons were safe.
“Code,” he choked. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe—
“Tell me,” she said. Something slapped him hard across the face. “Barnes! Stay awake. Tell me the code. The code! Now!”
In the gray place between worlds, the words filtered through the distance and arrived meaningless. He was only vaguely aware of the pain.
With his right arm he reached up to his left shoulder. The code. His fingers found the panels — one — agonizing — movement — at a time. Just there, and there, and there.
The arm hissed but something inside it was damaged from the way she had tried to rip it off; it wasn’t releasing, it wasn’t coming off cleanly like it was supposed to. Nebula twisted and tugged and the pain lit him up, being yanked back and forth like a rag doll as she pulled, and at last something clicked into place and the whole thing came free and he fell back to the wet earth with a thump.
She staggered back, panting, the trophy in her hands. His own detached arm, dark and shining. The gold seams glimmered faintly red and green, reflecting the house's Christmas lights.
“Merry Christmas, Barnes,” she said, and turned to walk away.
But then she paused after a few steps, and he felt her eyes lingering on him. He could just glimpse her face out of the corner of his eye if he strained to lift his head, and for a strange moment he thought she looked… uncertain.
Then she was gone.
Birds flew overhead, a little black V against the grim sky. Something rumbled and whirred in the distance and another shape joined them in the air — a silvery shape, a ship, rising out of the forest, vanishing quickly into the atmosphere.
The wet grey afternoon light was dimming; it would be full dark in a few more minutes.
The stores would be closing by now, he thought, tipping at last over the verge into a faraway painless darkness. He’d missed his goddamn chance to replace the coffee maker.