Grade A American Beef

After their run in with the law, they made good time getting into the city. The Blueberry was parked and the luggage unpacked and distributed to the proper bedrooms by late afternoon, giving Bucky enough time to run to the corner grocery to restock the kitchen and get what he needed to make dinner.

Before leaving, he paused to hold Darcy for a couple breaths, inhaling the smell of her shampoo and treasuring the fact that he could hug and kiss her anytime he desired. He swept a half dozen smooches over her hair and face, only stopping when she waved him away with warm hands and laughter in her voice.

“Get out of here, Bucky. I’m going to get hungry soon and you know how awful I can be when I’m hangry.”

He affected a pout, jutting his bottom lip out absurdly. “Trying to get rid of me already? Doll, I’m hurt.”

Darcy rolled her eyes and pressed her palms to his chest, guiding him backwards to her front door. “Go. Food. Now,” she grunted, opening the door and pushing him out into the hall.

Bucky ducked his head back in the apartment to sneak attack her lips, darting back from her and down the hall before she could further reprimand him. She leaned against the doorframe, a content sigh escaping her lips as she watched him make his way to the elevator.

“Hate to see you go, but love to watch you leave!” she shouted at his retreating back. He paused mid-step, turning his head to glance at her over his shoulder, his brow furrowed in confusion as he tried to suss out her meaning.

Darcy flicked her eyebrow up, then deliberately dragged her eyes down the length of his body, stopping to leer at his denim covered backside, licking her lips with exaggerated intensity. Illumination lit up his face a second before he turned fully to face her, strutting back to her with purpose.

“Oh no you don’t,” Darcy cried, hands splayed out in front of her to ward off his advance, but it was no use. He swept her up into his arms, pressing her back against the door jam and pulling her legs around his waist so that he could kiss her senseless. It took maybe half a second for her to reach a senseless state. He was really hitting his stride with remembering how to kiss. Damn. Just, damn.

Bucky suddenly released her, letting her feet fall back to the floor and stepping back from her with a cheeky grin. “Something to remember me by.” Then he spun on his heel and marched back down the hall, hopping on the elevator and out of sight, leaving Darcy dazed and breathless against the door.

She shook her head gently, heading back inside and wandering to her bedroom to start the slow process of unpacking her luggage. It wasn’t usually a slow process, but her mind was just the tiniest bit distracted at the time, making it difficult to do simple things like organize or unfold clothes or unzip her suitcase.

She’d just about got her things all put away nice and tidy when she was interrupted by a knock at the door. Oh, Bucky had been faster than she was expecting, she thought. Darcy practically skipped to the front door, opening it wide as her face shone with joy at his return, only to fade when she saw that it was not, in fact Bucky, but some random white guy she’d never met.

“Oh, hi, can I help you?” Darcy asked politely.

The man gave her a bland smile, nodding his ash blond head as he answered, “Yes ma’am. I’m here to do some maintenance work on your apartment.”

“Um, okay, normally I get an email when there’s a scheduled maintenance visit.” Darcy’s brow scrunched in mild confusion, but she stepped back, letting the man pass into her entryway.

The man hummed, “Ah, yes, extenuating circumstances today, suspected gas leak, needed to be taken care of right away. You understand.” He made his way further into her apartment, heading towards her living area.

Darcy followed behind, arms crossing over her chest. “Yeah, I guess. Where’s Mr. Kalashnik?” Darcy asked.

The curmudgeonly little old Ukrainian man had been the maintenance man for her building since before she’d moved in. He wasn’t much for conversation, but damn, that old man could fix just about anything. And once she started plying him with baked goods during his visits to her home, his disposition brightened considerably. Well, he’d stopped scowling and mumbling Russian crankily under his breath while he worked. He was getting up there in age though, so she hoped he was alright.

Mr. Whitebread’s face went slack before he pasted another polite smile on his thin lips. “Ah, he’s ill today.”

Liar, whispered a small voice in the back of Darcy’s head. Something was off about this guy, she could just feel it. He was too...boring. He had the kind of features that would easily blend into a crowd, neither handsome nor unattractive enough to elicit undue notice. Average height, average build. The kind of person that your eyes would glance over if you saw them, leaving no impression or memory of them ever having been there in the first place. And his smile…it was just... wrong.

“Um, actually, if you could come back at another time, that would be great. Now isn’t really good for me,” she said, trying to keep her tone light but firm. If this guy really was shady, she needed to get him out of her apartment asap and without him picking up on her suspicion.

White boy’s bland smile turned sharp. “No,” he said simply and then made a lunge for her.

Darcy yelped and jumped back, hip-checking the edge of her couch. She spun with the impact, but used her momentum to get around the arm of the sofa, using it to block the path of the asshole that was most likely trying to kill her.

God, where was Bucky when she needed him?

She stumbled back as Eminent Danger stalked slowly after her around the edge of the couch, her hands scrabbling for purchase on something, anything, she could use as a weapon. The first thing she landed on was one of her throw pillows which was not helpful at-fucking-all. The guy didn’t even flinch when it bounced off his stomach. The next thing she landed on was the thick hardback novel she’d left out on the coffee table. She chucked it at his head as hard as she could, a grim satisfaction pinging in her gut when the edge caught his forehead, breaking the skin and causing a satisfying gash on his pale skin.

Her satisfaction was fleeting. The injury only served to piss the bastard off, his cheeks flushing and nostrils flaring in irritation. He ceased his torturously slow pursuit, opting instead to run at her headlong, hands outstretched into claws. In a blind panic and with blood pounding in her ears, Darcy turned and grabbed the small, wooden side table sitting at the end of her sofa. She raised it and swung it into his chest, using his own momentum to increase the impact, hoping to god it would be enough to down him so she could escape out into the hallway.

No such luck. The thing splintered across his chest and ribs, knocking him off kilter to stumble over her coffee table, but he was up and after her in less than a second. Within two of her racing heartbeats, he had her by the hair, tossing her into her sound system where it was tucked against her living room wall. The glass cabinet that housed it shattered with the force of her weight. Shards of glass dug into the exposed skin of her hands and arms as she tried gain purchase and keep from toppling to the ground.

Her attacker seized her by the throat, tossing her around to slam her back and skull down onto her coffee table, using his weight to bear down on her neck. Fuck fuck fuck, she was running out of time. She dug her nails into his hands and arms, trying to break the stranglehold he had on her. She kicked her legs out at him weakly, trying to think past the pounding in her skull and the various spikes of pain throughout her body, but he easily dodged her efforts.

She could feel her lungs screaming for air, the edges of her vision blurring. Goddammit, why had she never taken those fucking self defense classes from Nat? Stupid. She was so stupid. And now she was going to die because she hadn’t wanted to wake up early and sweat.

Darcy’s limbs grew achingly heavy, the strength slowly sapping from her body as she looked up into her attackers soulless, dishwater grey eyes. He smiled at her, a sickly thing that made her want to vomit. Like hell was she going to let this dickhead be the last thing she saw on this earth. She shut her eyes tight, focusing on the thrumming of her slowing heartbeat pounding in her ears, pulling the faces of her family, of Bucky, from her memory as she descended into unconsciousness.

There was nothing but the pressure at her throat, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, the pressure was gone. Her lungs filled with air in a choking gasp, her hands rising of their own volition to stroke at the tender flesh of her throat. She rolled to her side, landing on her hands and knees beside the coffee table, coughing and sputtering as she tried to suck in enough air to calm her oxygen-starved lungs. Her heart thudded heavily in her chest, blood roaring through her ears as her body tried to regain equilibrium.

It took her a minute for her choking spasms to stop, allowing her mind to clear somewhat. She jerked her head up when she heard the crunch of drywall caving in. Bucky was standing in front of her, legs spread wide in an attack stance, his back to her and his attention on the assailant, who had apparently been thrown off of her and across the room into her wall. Go, Bucky, go. Kick his evil ass.

Blondie staggered back onto his feet, shaking plaster off his shoulders and returning his focus to the supremely pissed off supersoldier standing across the room from him. Bucky started advancing on the guy, keeping his body angled so the other man could never get a clear line of sight on her.

Bucky probably had about fifty pounds of muscle over this guy. The asshole should have been pissing himself by this point. Instead, that smug, leering smile returned to his face and he calmly began speaking in what sounded like Russian to Darcy’s untrained ears.

Bucky’s head jerked back, his spine straightening and his shoulders tensing as he slowed his advance. Oh shit, Darcy thought. If those weren’t some of his trigger words then she’d eat her maroon beanie. Her mind skittered to what she could remember of Bucky’s treatment in regards to his triggers. From what she could recall, therapy and an assist from some Stark and SHIELD hybrid mind-whammy machine had put the kibosh on all of those. God, at least she hoped they had, otherwise they were royally fucked.

Smug Jerkwad reached the end of whatever trigger phrase he was spouting off and Bucky stopped in his tracks. Tension trembled across his body as he hunched in on himself and then, with a guttural moan and a violent shake of his head, he resumed his approach.

Smug Jerkwad became Scared Jerkwad real fast after that. He started in on a new phrase, this time in German, no longer lingering on the syllables with perverse pleasure as he had with the Russian phrase, but spitting it out as fast as his mouth could move.

If anything Bucky increased his speed in response to the phrase. Jerkwad changed tactic, turning to run back towards her front door, only to have Bucky catch him by the throat and rip him back into the living room. His metal hand clenched around the other man’s throat, holding him above the ground by a good foot and a half. Evil Asshole gripped both hands around Bucky’s arm, legs kicking and swinging like a suspended marionette.

Darcy watched as the man released one hand from Bucky’s arm, reaching for a weapon concealed at the small of his back. Before he could even get his hand halfway around his waist, Bucky had slipped a knife from somewhere in his jacket. He flipped it once in his hand, adjusting his grip so he could plunge the knife into the soft, unprotected flesh just below the other man’s sternum, angling the knife up to slice through his diaphragm and pierce his heart.

Bucky jerked the knife back out, flipped it again to change his grip, and lowered his metal arm so he could reach behind to slide the blade between the man’s vertebrae at the base of his neck, severing his spinal cord.

The man immediately went limp and Bucky released him without a second thought, letting his lifeless body hit her living room floor with a wet thump. He turned towards her sharply, eyes darting over her face and body where she was still huddled by her coffee table. He seemed to be doing some kind of assessment on her person, but she wasn’t really sure.

The man looking at her now was not one that Darcy had met before and the ice in his eyes and the passiveness of his usually expressive mouth were unsettling, sending shards of ice into the very marrow of her bones.

“Bucky,” she croaked, extending a shaking hand out to him. It was a plea or an invitation, or some combination of the two.

At the sound of her voice, some of the coldness left his features, allowing a touch of warmth to come back to his eyes. “Yeah, I’m here Darcy.” He reached for her hand, helping her to her feet and pulling her into his arms.

The embrace was shorter than Darcy would have preferred and he didn’t melt into her the way he normally did, holding himself tensely against her instead. He stepped back, eyes grazing over her again as he made a secondary inspection of her wellbeing. Seemingly satisfied, he turned abruptly, returning to the body bleeding out on her floor.

Shit, she was never getting her deposit back now.

Bucky bent over the body, rifling through various pockets before pulling some identifying papers from one of the guy’s pockets. “Definitely Hydra,” Bucky mumbled.

Darcy nodded numbly, watching as Bucky rose swiftly to tread down the hallway, disappearing into his room. Leaving her alone. In the living room. With the dead guy.

All things considered, Darcy was significantly less freaked out than she had assumed she’d be if faced with a dead body. Really, her main concern was how much it would cost to replace the carpeting in her apartment. The blood and gore was a bit much, but she’d seen the Winter Soldier’s handiwork before when she’d gone through his file. It could have been much worse.

But beneath all that, the guy was fucking Hydra, and she was glad the fucker was dead. After all they had taken from Bucky, the thought of one of those assholes barging into her home and trying to recapture him….if the bastard wasn’t already dead, she was mad enough to kill him herself.

Bucky took that moment to return to the living room, his huge black duffle bag slung over his shoulder. He set the massive thing down on her coffee table with a heavy thump, unzipping it before glancing at her with a considering gaze.

“How good are you with firearms?” he asked firmly.

“Uh, I mean, I know what one looks like,” she shakily replied.

Bucky muttered a few choice curses under his breath as he dug around in his duffle. He found what he was looking for and motioned for her to come closer. “You saw where I stabbed him in the chest?”

“Yup. Hard to miss it.”

“Good. Someone comes at you head on, put the blade in where their sternum ends, angle it up and slightly to your right. Hopefully you hit the heart, at the very least you’ll clip a lung and puncture the diaphragm.” He pressed his fingers into the soft skin of her abdomen in demonstration, then drew his hand around to her back an inch beneath where her ribs ended. “Kidneys are here, stab upwards and twist.” He tapped the inside of her thighs. “Femoral arteries here. Slice across, to the bone if possible.” He reached up to gently brush his fingers across the abused skin of her throat. “Carotid arteries are here.”

He paused, chewing on how he wanted to phrase his next words. “If someone attacks, you keep slicing and stabbing until they stop. Don’t stop until they’re on the ground and not moving.” He stared into her eyes intently. “Even if it’s me.”

“Bucky, no, I can’t-”

“Yes. You can. And you will. Or I cannot, in good conscience, be with you. I need you safe. You understand me?” He laid a heavy hand on her shoulders, the weight of it pressing her solidly to the floor as his eyes pleaded with her.

“Okay,” she breathed. He raised a skeptical eyebrow at her lukewarm response. “Okay,” she repeated a little more strongly.

Bucky nodded his head sharply and returned to rummaging in his bag, pulling knife after knife of various shapes and sizes from its depths. He began strapping them to her body: two tucked at the small of her back, a short, stubby one hooked between the cups of her bra to hang against her abdomen, one giant bastard strapped around her right thigh, and one final blade secured along her left side between her rib cage and arm.

It was just her luck that the first time he took her shirt off, neither of them had the time nor inclination to enjoy the experience. What a waste.

When she’d tugged her shirt and coat back on, gingerly avoiding the shallow cuts running along her arms and hands, she turned expectant eyes to Bucky. “What now?” she asked quietly.

“We run.” He hoisted the bag to his shoulder, reaching out his flesh hand to her. She took it, grasping his fingers tightly despite the stinging pain of the cuts in her hands, following blindly as he tugged her through her apartment and out the door, heading to the elevators at the end of the hall.

He pressed the button to take them to the garage and watched as the metal doors closed them in. Darcy examined the stoic lines of his face, her mind a swirl of questions.

“There are more coming?” she asked. It seemed the most pertinent question to ask.

“Yes,” he confirmed brusquely. “That agent was likely only sent in to see whether or not the triggers still worked so they could judge how much manpower they’d need to bring me in. He was expendable.”

“I don’t think he got that memo,” Darcy quipped.

Bucky’s mouth quirked up into a facsimile of a smile. “No. Probably not.” The smile faded. “I don’t know how they got the intel on me staying with you. There’s either a leak in information or it’s connected with whatever mission the other Avengers are on. Either way, we need to get the fuck out of dodge and let Steve know what’s going on.”

“Where do we go? Stark Tower? SHIELD facility?”

Bucky shook his head. “With the team gone, going to the Tower would just be a good way to get a lot of innocent people killed. They know the triggers won’t work now. They’ll be bringing in the big guns. And if there’s an information leak, the most likely culprit is someone within SHIELD. For now, we get out of the immediate area as soon as possible and try to get ahold of the team. You have your Stark phone on you?”

She nodded, pulling the slim mobile from her back pocket.

“Good, text ‘protocol 87188’ to Jarvis.” She did as he asked, fingers flying over the keyboard as the elevator dinged, announcing their arrival to the underground garage. She made to step out, but Bucky motioned for her to stop, pulling his sidearm from his waistband and peering around the open doors of the elevator.

His eyes swept briskly over the expanse of the garage a couple times before he silently directed her to follow him out. She reached out to curl two fingers into one of his belt loops, the thought of being separated from him causing panic to well up in her throat.

They made their way to the closest, nondescript sedan they could find with a fairly dark window tint and Bucky had the thing unlocked and running in a hot minute. He tossed the bag in the backseat, motioning for her to get in. She got settled in the seat, buckling up and pulling her phone back out of her pocket.

Bucky held his hand out for the device. “Nuh uh. We don’t know if they’ve got that thing tapped. We need to ditch it.”

Darcy tucked it protectively to her chest. “I need to send one more text to Jarvis. You’re not the only one with fancy protocols.” She tapped in the message lightening fast, and then handed it over to Bucky, who promptly crushed it in his left hand and tossed the remains out the window to the garage floor.

“What was your protocol command?”

She chewed worriedly on her lower lip. “Alerting my family that I’m going into hiding, but I’m safe and will contact them when I can. It also sends an alert to Pepper so she can reallocate my work duties in my absence. It was part of the requirements for getting the PR position.”

Bucky hummed his approval and turned his focus to the fading evening light as they pulled out of the garage and onto the street. He kept his speed steady, heading deeper into the city in the hopes of being lost in the sea of cars heading home from work. His alert eyes darted from mirror to mirror watching and waiting for suspicious vehicles that might be tailing them.

Darcy watched him, his unnatural stillness ratcheting up the unease in her gut. She was sore and tired and hungry and terrified and the urge to move was near maddening. The adrenaline in her system was screaming at her, railing against the slowness of traffic and the stillness of her body. She should be running, she should be hiding, and yet there she sat in the passenger seat, feeling exposed to the world and the dangers lurking in the shadows.

Her teeth began to chatter, her muscles vibrating with pent up energy and low blood sugar. Bucky’s eyes shifted to her momentarily and he reached a hand out to run his palm over her knee, trying to reassure her. She gave him a tight smile, trying to communicate her appreciation for his concern.

“I’ll keep you safe,” he murmured.

“I know,” she responded just as softly, placing her injured hand atop his and brushing her fingers lightly over it.

He squeezed her knee once more, then withdrew his hand to place it back on the steering wheel. They drove in silence for a few more minutes until Bucky suddenly tensed, face going dark in anger.

“We’ve picked up a tail,” he grunted through clenched teeth. Darcy dug her nails into her thighs.

“What do we do?” she asked, alarm tightening her voice.

“Stay calm, try to shake them. Try not to get fucking shot.”

“Oh good, something easy.”

Bucky snorted but didn’t reply, focusing on angling the sedan through traffic without alerting the other vehicle to the fact that he’d clocked them. Darcy was expecting some kind of high speed getaway, a voice in the back of her head shouting out for Bucky to drive freaking faster, but he kept to the sedate pace, keeping with the flow of traffic. He made smooth lane changes, slowly adding cars in between them and the vehicle following. When they got closer to the heart of the city, Bucky was able to coast through a yellow light, leaving the Hydra tail stuck at the light, six cars back. Bucky continued on, driving down three city blocks until he could no longer spot the tail in his mirrors, turning down a side street and parallel parking behind yet another nondescript sedan.

Within seconds, he had the door jimmied open, moving them and his bag into the new vehicle and hot wiring it in under a minute. They continued their journey through Midtown, then went zigzagging back through Hell’s Kitchen before heading towards the Lincoln Tunnel and crossing the Hudson.

They reached the outskirts of Newark when Bucky’s pants began trilling loudly. He reached down to fish the sat phone that Steve had left them out of his pocket, pulling it to his ear.

“Steve,” he greeted simply.

“Bucky! Jarvis contacted me, said that Hydra was making a play for you. Are you alright? Where’s Darcy? Where are you?”

“We’re both fine. Had to take out one of their agents in Darcy’s place. You may want to have Jarvis send in a clean up crew.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Had to shake a tail as well. I think they had her apartment bugged while we were at her family’s place in Virginia for Christmas. They knew as soon as we got back and cornered Darcy when I left to grab groceries.”

“You spent Christmas with her family?”

“Steve, not the time for this discussion,” Bucky responded through clenched teeth.

“Right, yeah, sorry. Where are you headed now?”

“Out of the city, preferably off the grid.”

“You suspect an intel leak.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah, either someone in SHIELD or working at Stark Tower keeping eyes on us, saw me leaving with Darcy, connected the dots.”

“Fuck. Look, Buck, I wish we could come back and protect you guys but...this mission. I...it’s pretty fucked up. I can’t say much but...a sect of Hydra, they, they...shit, they’ve been experimenting on kids. We can’t pull out now, not when we’re so close.”

Bucky’s gut clenched with nausea, memories of the experiments he’d been subjected to overlaid with images of helpless children taking the place of where his body should have been. He swallowed hard on the bile rising up his throat, trying to regain awareness of his surroundings. He felt Darcy graze a warm palm over his thigh, helping him focus on the world outside of his broken mind.

He breathed deeply through his nose before responding to Steve. “Stay with the mission. I can handle getting us to safety. You...you get those kids out. Stevie, you gotta get those kids out.”

“I know. We will. Do you have a safe house you can get to?”

“All the safe houses I have are Hydra ones. I’m not sure where we’ll go but I know how to disappear even without a safe house. It took you two years to find me after all,” Bucky teased. Steve chuckled darkly on the other end of the line.

Darcy, who had been listening intently to the conversation, suddenly swiveled her head to face Bucky, snapping her fingers together to get his attention. “I’ve got a place we can go. It’s on the northern border of Pennsylvania, tucked away in the Allegheny Forest. Isolated, private land with a fully equipped cabin and most likely surrounded by a fuckton of booby traps.”

Bucky raised a curious eyebrow at the last statement and Darcy was quick to clarify. “It was Rob’s paranoid-as-fuck step dad’s bug out spot. I’ve only been there twice, but if you can get us to Bradford, Pennsylvania, my photographic memory can get us the rest of the way there.”

Bucky nodded at her and returned to his phone conversation. “Hey Steve, I think we’ve got a place to go. I’m not sure on the exact coordinates, but I’ll get them to you as soon as I have them.”

“Alright Buck, keep yourselves safe.”

“Will do. You do the same.”

The men made their quick goodbyes and Bucky hung up the phone, flipping it into an empty cup holder.

“Hey sweetheart, do you think you can reach back and find my map? It should be somewhere in my bag.”

“Sure, no problem.” Darcy unbuckled and twisted in her seat, unzipping the nearest half of the bag and sifting through the cluttered contents. Gun, gun, knife, zip ties, switchblade, underwear, gun, book..aha! Maps.

She pulled the folded map from the bag, waving it triumphantly above her head before unfolding it and refolding it to show the roads running through New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and handing it to Bucky. She pointed out where Bradford was, watching as his eyes scanned the map, silently deciding the best route for them to take. Having made his decision, he steered the car towards their destination.

They made a quick stop to bandage up Darcy’s arms and hands and grab some food on the western outskirts of Newark before continuing on to the series of back roads that would get them to Bradford. It would extend their journey by a few hours, but Bucky wasn’t willing to risk the surveillance cameras at the toll booths.

Darcy took a couple advil for the throbbing in her arms and neck, leaning her head back against the seat and finally letting some of the tension of the afternoon seep out of her. The loss of adrenalin and her full stomach had her succumbing to exhaustion within seconds of closing her eyes.