In the Belly of the Beast
Bucky awoke with a jolt. He was still in the warehouse, and appeared to be alone, but he could sense a presence nearby. His arms were still locked up behind him, and his head swam woozily with fog. He couldn’t think clearly, and it annoyed the shit out of him. A sound came from the doorway, and Bucky was immediately on edge. The door opened. Light blinded him, and he winced, pulling away from it. Voices, saying things he couldn’t understand, filled his ears as people whom he didn’t trust came toward him and held his arms. The chair wobbled and he stood up, finally and slowly, but with much protest. Secondary location. They would take him to a secondary location, and that was bad.
He was led somewhere else; he couldn’t tell how far he walked, whether it was a few meters or a mile. The people gently deposited him down on a soft bed. Someone was shaking him by the shoulders, yelling at him, but his senses were too confused to understand or process any of it. Someone pulled him up into a sitting position, and he lashed out with his legs, kicking at anything around him. He might have even been screaming, too. There was a vague shout of pain as his legs connected with something, and he felt a satisfying crunch.
Bucky was sweating hard. He hated this fugue-like state. A horrible, confusing thought occurred to him at that moment.
Was he back there? At Hydra? Was he the Winter Soldier again?
No. He’d do everything in his power to avoid it. Even if that meant certain death.
He gritted his teeth and strained against the cuffs again, still thrashing around and kicking his legs wildly. It was useless. The ceiling closed in on him, and he was certain that someone was screaming his name.
“Bucky! Bucky! It’s me, it’s Sam, you’re safe! We have to get you out of those damn things- give us a second!”
Bucky flailed. Sam. Sam was good. Sam can help. He stopped resisting, and was breathing hard and fast. His hair had fallen in front of his eyes and over his face, and in a brief moment of stillness and silence he twisted his head to the side to shake it away. Sweat dripped from his brow. He clenched his teeth as the fog began to roll away from his vision, and his senses opened up. Everything was real again.
Sam was on the verge of tears. They’d returned to the warehouse to find Bucky, drugged out of his mind and tied to a chair. Alive, but confused. He and Maggie had pulled him out of the chair and tried to get him to hold still long enough to undo the restraints, but he wouldn’t stop moving and kicking and shouting at them in Romanian and resisting. Maggie was confused when the words he was saying were the lyrics to her favorite One Direction song, but she didn’t bring it up or translate it to Sam.
As they pulled Bucky away from the chair and got him to the bed, his leg connected with Maggie’s face on purpose, and she was harshly kicked when she tried to sit him up further. Now she stood back, clutching a tissue and a bag of frozen peas to her face.
Fed up, Sam began shouting at Bucky over the unintelligible Romanian screaming, and whatever he said must have worked because Bucky had stopped fighting.
His eyes were glazed over, and his lips moved soundlessly as he stared at the wall opposite them. He shook a little when Sam moved behind him and gently began to undo the cuffs. Bucky continued to stare into the distance for a moment until he frowned, and his lips stopped moving. He looked down at his hands, which were now free, and then looked back up at Sam.
“Sammy? That you?”
He smiled wearily as Sam threw his arms around him, and they embraced tightly. He noticed Maggie in the corner, nursing her bloody nose. “Did- did I do that?” he asked, horrified.
Everyone nodded. Bucky’s eyes widened. “Oh god- Maggie, I’m so sorry… I thought I was back at the- in the…” he trailed off. There was no need for him to finish his sentence. Everyone understood.
Sam sat down on the bed. “How’d they find us? Do you know?”
Bucky pointed at Peter. “I guess they followed Peter,” he said quietly. “They saw an opportunity and they took it.”
Sam nodded carefully, glancing at Peter, who looked traumatized. That would have to wait for a moment, though, because Bucky had a nasty cut on his forehead that needed cleaning. Thank god he was safe, at least. Thank god for that. They'd had to let Sharon go, and lost their only lead, but the manner in which the Power Broker's henchmen had acted was so achingly desperate, it almost bothered him. Sam looked around the room, wondering about the exact circumstances of Bucky's little episode. Oh, and why the hell was he muttering about One Direction?
Peter was petrified in the corner. He had been so careful, but it was all for nothing. He bit back tears of anger, which Maggie noticed. She looked at him, concerned, but he just turned away helplessly and ran to the other room. He felt so indescribably angry at himself as hot tears overflowed, and his whole body shook with quiet sobs. It was all his fault. His fault. His own goddamn fault. Peter was nauseous. He stumbled, and pressed his back to the wall until he had sunk down to the floor.
My fault. My fault. My fault.
Bucky knocked on the door a few minutes later, and slid inside. There was a cotton bandage over the cut on his forehead, and the bruises looked like they were starting to heal. He observed Peter, slumped against the wall and depressed-looking, and came to sit down next to him.
“Hey, kid… I know you blame yourself. It’s not your fault. Really.”
Peter was quiet, avoiding eye contact. Bucky sighed when no response came from the head of hair buried in Peter’s arms. “Let me tell you a story,” he began.
“Once upon a time there was this kid. He was a little twerp, and he had a big heart, and… we liked each other a real lot. We were best friends. His name was Steve. He wore newspapers in his shoes to look taller.
“One day we were out, walking the streets of Brooklyn, strutting around like we owned the damn place. Steve, the total klutz that he is, walks smack into some lovely dame who happens to be hangin’ on the arm of New York’s biggest bully, George Russell. Russell thinks Steve is trying something funny with his girl, so he grabs us in a back alley and punches Steve. I punch him back, ‘cause no one fucks with Steve Rogers without gettin’ through me first.
“Turns out the guy has three big, mean friends with him. They’ve got Steve and I cornered in this alley, one of them on Steve and the other three on me, just totally beatin’ the snot out of the two of us. So Steve’s knocked out, I’m knocked out, they leave us bleeding in some alley.
“Steve, the poor kid, wakes up first, and the little punk thinks it’s his fault that I was beat up. It wasn’t his fault, ‘cause I punched the damn guy back, but he still felt real bad.
“All this to say: it wasn’t your responsibility. Even Captain America fucks up sometimes. It wasn’t your fault, kiddo.” Bucky’s voice softens at the end. His Brooklyn accent had gotten thicker the more he told the story, and it hung onto his voice now as he gently leaned over to brush Peter’s hair back from his face.
Peter looked up slowly, his eyes rimmed with red. “You sure?”
“Yeah.” Bucky chuckled a little, and sat back against the wall with a sigh. “You remind me of him. Steve.”
Peter grinned and Bucky rolled his eyes with mock annoyance. “Don’t let it get to your head, though, cause that little shit had a death wish to go along with his heart of gold.” They both laughed. Bucky stood and offered a hand to Peter, who took it gratefully as he was helped up. “You think you’ll be okay?”
“Yeah,” replied Peter, trying his best to smile back. Bucky nodded firmly and left, shutting the door behind him. The moment he was sure he was gone, Peter’s face crumpled into another sob, and he sat down again on the floor. His head was buried in his hands, which were clenched in his hair. Peter’s fault. His fault. Bucky only said that to make him feel better, Peter was certain of it.
With a resigned sigh he stood, feeling wholly self-aware all at once. He removed a pen, paper, and hoodie from his backpack nearby, and began to write.
Maggie, Sam and Bucky had all fallen asleep in their respective areas. Everyone was tired; they were too tired to notice when Peter crept out of his room an hour later, and they were too tired to notice when he left a note on a table. No one really took notice of his disappearance in the morning either, when they awoke and Peter had still not emerged from his room.
Maggie brought a paper plate, laden with scrambled eggs and a bagel, to Peter’s door. She knocked quietly. “Peter? You good?”
There was no reply. She opened the door nervously, her heart thudding in her chest- the room was empty. Peter was utterly gone.
“Sam! Sam!” She stumbled into the kitchen, almost knocking over the plate in her rush. Sam wasn’t responding either; frenzied, she rounded the corner to see Sam standing near the table, dish in hand, horrified and staring at the slip of paper in his other hand. Maggie came and peered over his shoulder to read the note. Her expression changed to a similar mask of shock.
The note read, in Peter’s signature messy scrawl:
Sam, Bucky, Maggie -
I feel like I’ve caused more harm than good. I can’t keep endangering all of you. The only thing I can do is get the feds off our back, and the only way to do that is to satiate them, satisfy the press. They’ll like an arrest. The pressure will be off. I wanna clear your names.
I love you all. I’m sorry.
-- P.P.
Maggie's bottom lip trembled. She burst into tears. Her whole body shook with shock while a dumbfounded Sam carefully hugged her, allowing her tears and snot to dampen his shirt. Bucky rushed in at the commotion and the sound of tears. He quickly read the note, and stood with them, as shocked as the other two. They all stood in silence for a moment.
Finally Bucky cleared his throat, his voice rough with emotion. “Does he mean to do what I think he’s implying?”
“By that do you mean that he’s gonna turn himself in?” asked Maggie in a shaky voice. Her head buzzed with anger. Tears clouded her vision.
Sam stared into the distance, his eyes empty. He pursed his lips and whispered, “Yes. He’s gonna get himself arrested.”
Maggie grabbed for her phone all of a sudden, in a desperate whirl of passion. She pulled up Good Morning America, and then The Today Show, and CNN. On each of the stations, Peter’s face hovered in the upper corner of the screen. The news anchors spoke about him with varying degrees of sympathy.
“It seems a little curious, is all, that a sixteen-year-old kid with straight As, a loving family, and no previous record would be arrested for murder,” said one of the news anchors at the screen, a dubious look in her eyes. Maggie tuned out the rest of the segment as her breath quickened in her chest and her hands started to sweat with anxiety.
She couldn’t stop worrying about him. It almost didn’t seem real. After all, what the hell convinced him to do such a thing? Surely not any of them. That poor kid, always blaming himself for every damn thing…
Peter Parker had walked all the way to the center of New York City. It was incredible that he wasn’t recognized on the way. Perhaps people expected him to walk around in the glaringly-obvious red and blue Spidey costume. He’d walked all the way to be standing in front of SHIELD’s New York field office, the same one that had woken up Steve Rogers after his seventy-year catnap in ice.
He tugged the hoodie away from his face and stood practically in the main lobby of the field office. With a smirk, he went to sit down on one of the couches, thinking all the while: I thought this was supposed to be the most advanced security system on the planet. Ha-ha. No one seemed to be paying much of any attention to him, because they were all too busy with their search for Spider-Man and his friends. Golly, these people were total idiots.
Finally he stood and moved toward the front desk. That was all it took. The receptionist’s eyes widened when he saw Peter, and his jaw dropped. He spoke quickly into his earpiece.
Peter waited patiently. Finally, after, like, way too long, he was surrounded with dozens of agents, their guns all trained on his chest. They were shouting at him to put up his hands slowly, and he did, as if he were in a trance. The sudden and full weight of his decision hit him as someone forced him to the ground roughly, pulling his hands behind him. Peter winced, but allowed the agents to cuff him and lead him away. Someone stuck a needle in his neck - shit! Not again! thought Peter - but the fog rolled in from the sides of his vision as spots danced painfully before his eyes.
He briefly wondered if this was what death felt like before everything went dark, and his body hit the floor.