Headfirst
Steve strides onto the troop transport, casts his eyes around. All the hostages are accounted for, but several men are out cold and an unconscious Anya is trussed up like a turkey on the floor.
“Let’s get moving!” someone yells once he is inside, and he quickly takes a seat as the transport jolts forward.
“Where’s Da- the other woman?” he asks, realising who is missing.
“She sent us back, covered our retreat. Wouldn’t have made it back without her. Who was she, anyway?”
Steve pauses, reconsiders. “That was the Lynx,” he says, finally, wincing at the past tense as it leaves his lips. There is a murmur of acknowledgement, some solemn nods.
He knows better than to ask them to wait; he can hear sounds of pursuit from behind them, even over the engine. He just opens the door and jumps, landing on his shield and rolling to absorb the impact. There are cries of surprise from behind him, even more from their pursuers as he bursts into their midst.
He fights his way through to the room where the hostages were kept. One body on the floor catches his eye and he leans forward to retrieve a familiar knife. The floor is sticky with blood, but he is initially relieved to see Darcy does not lie among the broken dead. Unfortunately, on second glance, there’s no sign of her at all.
Oh, Bucky is going to kill him.
Bucky paces the room. This was a mistake. He should have gone with them, UN be damned. How many of them would have heard of the Winter Solder, anyway? Darcy is more than his soulmate, she’s his anchor, something to tie the broken pieces that he’s been clawing back from the abyss. Without her, his mind spins, memories and nightmares tangled together.
Friday chimes and he halts mid-step. “Yes?”
“Excuse me, Sergeant Barnes, but you have an incoming call from Captain Rogers.”
His gut turns to ice and he claws at his shirt to reveal his soulmark, still a reassuring black. “What is it?”
“Buck, I’m sorry.”
“What have you done?” he growls.
“She was covering their retreat, and -”
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” he roars, causing Katya to poke her head out of her room, eyes wide.
“Not enough. They got her, Buck. We got Anya, but they got her.”
The ice spreads, caging his mind in crystal clarity. He is going to kill them all. Especially Steve.
Stark taps the display and it magnifies, showing a pulsing beacon somewhere in Europe. “According to her Widow’s bites, she’s on the move, headed west. From their speed and route, it seems they are travelling by road, which gives us some time. It’s a good thing Europe have tightened rules on cross-border private flights since that plane went down.”
“Can we tag local law enforcement to intercept?” Clint suggests, having reappeared at the Tower with Nat some hours before the furore started.
“We don’t know what vehicle they are using,” Stark reminds him.
“It also dooms those poor officers,” Katya says. “They have no idea what they’re dealing with.”
Friday chimes. “Sir, Captain Rogers has arrived with the detainee.”
“Great, direct them to the Hulk-cell.”
Bucky grits his teeth and heads to the elevator.
Steve taps the buttons Friday tells him, and the door to the Hulk containment module slides shut, obscuring Anya’s limp form from view. He removed the sedative patch from her neck before he left her, but can’t say how long it will take to work through her system. He turns around — straight into Bucky’s fist.
“This is all your fault!” Bucky yells, and Steve tries to explain but has to dodge an enraged Bucky and it’s soon clear Buck’s not listening and he does feel terribly guilty about it all so a part of him wants to just take his lumps…
Overall, it’s a bit of a relief when Katya lands on Bucky’s back and screams in his ear.
“Chort vozmi, what is wrong with you?” she yells. “Do you think this is going to help get her back?”
Bucky stops so suddenly, Steve actually hits himself trying to get out of the way of a fist that is no longer swinging. His friend slumps to the floor, head in his hands. “What am I going to do?” he asks, voice shaky, more to himself than to either of them there. “I can’t do this.”
Steve looks down at his friend, more vulnerable than he’s ever seen him since the rescue of the 107th. “We’ll get her back,” he promises, holding out his hand. “With you to the end of the line, pal.”
Bucky looks up, reluctant hope warring with anger. "We'd better get her back," he mutters, and takes the proffered hand.
“Sure, whatever, we’ll keep an eye out. Just the one, get it?” Tony jabs a button, ending the video call, and looks over to where they stand by the elevator, outside of camera range. “How much of that did you catch?”
“That was Director Fury,” Steve says. “Why did he call?”
Tony fiddles with the interface in front of him. “Funny thing, that. Somehow, SHIELD has become aware that Stark Industries, or the Avengers, he wasn’t very clear, may be harbouring Russian fugitives. We’re supposed to release them into SHIELD custody should we become aware of their whereabouts.” Photos pop up on the screen — Darcy, Katya, Anya, and Bucky, though he is masked. “Someone on your little UN trip must have squealed.”
Steve shakes his head. “That wouldn’t explain the other two.”
Katya’s eyes narrow as she studies the screen. “Where did SHIELD get those photos, anyway? Those are the ones on our files — not sure about the Soldat's, you can barely make out his face in his one.”
“Your file? From the Red Room? Are you sure?” Clint sounds sceptical.
“It was many years ago that I saw them, before our escape, but yes, I am sure.”
“Could those files have fallen into the hands of the Russian government?”
“Perhaps,” Katya says, looking unconvinced and shifting nervously.
“Fury seemed to imply his source was from within SHIELD.”
“Someone he trusted,” Natalia adds, a small crease between her brows. “He thought it was a waste of his time but did it anyway.”
“Are you saying someone Nick Fury trusts has ties to the Red Room?” Steve looks disturbed and the room erupts in denials and suppositions.
“Can we get back to Darcy?” Bucky yells, drawing everyone’s attention. “Stark, you got her position?”
“Yeah, she’s still on the move. They’ve passed several private and commercial airports so we can assume their final destination is somewhere in Europe.”
“Then let’s go,” Steve says, clapping one hand on Bucky’s shoulder. He looks around, notices someone missing. “Where’s Katya?”
Just then, the elevator chimes, swooshing open to reveal the woman in question, side by side with a familiar stranger. “I made a call,” Katya says as they saunter out.
“Just for the record, I’m here for Darya,” the other woman adds, hair swept into a tight bun. “Anyone else get themselves in trouble, they’re on their own.”
Clint squints at her. “Yulia?”
“You expecting someone else, Katniss?”
“I like her,” Tony announces to the room at large, before remembering who she was and what she had done.
“Are we going now?” Bucky demands. Almost guiltily, everyone starts moving. It takes long than he’d like to get Yulia outfitted, but he doesn’t deny the extra help is welcome. There is a brief argument over the value of interrogating Anya, but the point is rendered moot when Friday reports that she is still comatose, the sedative working better than expected.
Several hours into the flight, most conversation has lapsed into a tense silence. Yulia and Katya murmur together in Russian as Steve watches Bucky methodically dismantle, check, and reassemble every weapon on his person. He is so tightly wound, he barely seems to be breathing.
“I think she’s stopped moving,” Tony notes, studying a tablet .
Bucky becomes even more still for the slightest second, snaps the cartridge back into place. “Where is she?”
“Looks like an abandoned fortress in Sokhovia, just outside of Novi Grad. We’re less than an hour away.” He taps away at his tablet. “I’m just repositioning a satellite for up to date- ah.”
Yulia leans closer, studying the clearly visible gun turrets and patrols. “That does not look abandoned.”
Tony’s tablet lets out a chime. He takes one look and swears quietly. “That’s not good.”
In two short strides, Bucky has him pushed against the side of the jet, metal arm against armour-clad throat. “What’s not good?”
“The bracelets are no longer registering a pulse.”
Bucky stumbles back, face greying, one hand coming to rest over his mark.
“This doesn’t change anything,” Steve says firmly. “They could be malfunctioning or taken off. We go in, we get Darcy, and we shut them down.”
“I’m cloaking the jet now,” Clint reports from the cockpit. “Have I mentioned how much I hate being designated pilot?”
“We couldn’t have borrowed a SHIELD pilot for this,” Steve reminds him. “Not when we’re technically invading another country on nothing more than a couple of trackers. Everyone know what they’re doing?”
Nods from around the jet. There’s a whirring as the ramp opens behind him, revealing an empty courtyard. Yulia slips her earpiece in, cracks her knuckles. “It’s showtime, folks.”
Natalia, Katya, and Yulia head for the walls, to disable the turrets. Bucky takes the tablet off Stark and heads into the complex proper, Steve and his shield two steps ahead. Stark puts up his visor and scans the complex for power sources. Today, he gets to blow stuff up, and that almost makes up for the best coffee-maker in the Tower being a Russian assassin. Almost.
“Who’s ready for fireworks?” he asks, as his targeting systems come online.
“Fireworks?” he hears Yulia ask. “Please tell me he has actual fireworks.”
“Yulechka, what part of ‘sneak’ do you not understand?” Katya hisses.
“Just do it, Stark,” Nat says, so he does.
The room shudders and the lights go out. Unable to move, she lies there in the dark, gathering her frazzled thoughts. Her entire body aches with remembered pain and feels about as strong as an overcooked noodle.
“What is going on?” someone demands.
“The generator has failed,” comes the reply. “The backup generators will be on any moment now. Continue when they do.”
The technician mutters under his breath until the lights return, dimmer than before. “Finally,” he says.
She spits out the mouth guard, tilts her head towards him. “Stop. Please.” It comes out as a garbled mess of sound, but it gets his attention.
His glance flickers over to her, shifts to exasperation when he notices the mouth guard. He picks it up, holds it to her mouth. When she clamps her lips together, he pinches her nose shut.
It might be quite nice to pass out, she thinks, as black spots swim in her vision.
All of a sudden, the technician collapses onto her and her airway is clear. She takes a gasping breath as footsteps approach at a run, and then the weight of the technician is pushed aside and another man stands beside her, trepidation on his face.
“Do you know me?” he asks, and she wants to answer in the positive but there’s a space where his name should be and her tongue lies thick and heavy in her mouth. “Darcy, please…” His voice breaks.
Darcy. That’s her name. Like jigsaw pieces slotting together, information falls into place. That’s Bucky and over there is Steve, gaze flicking between them and the door. “Bucky,” she says, testing the word out, and it sounds like a revelation.
His eyes widen. “If I undo these restraints, are you going to attack me?”
She thinks about it. ‘I don’t think so,” she replies, forming the sentence carefully.
“You would say that,” he mutters, but releases her anyway.
“My things,” she says, gesturing weakly in the direction of her confiscated weapons. With a sigh, Bucky fetches them for her, helps her slot them back into place. By the time the last bracelet is fastened, she feels a lot more steady.
He helps her stand, one arm looped around her waist, and they follow Steve into the hallway. She has to stop every few seconds to catch her breath, but he makes no move to carry her, for which she is grateful. She was a prisoner, not a victim.
“The jet is this way,” Steve says, peering around an upcoming corner. “Stay behind me.”
"Let him absorb any gunfire," Bucky tells her.
"I heard that," Steve yells.
They are nearly at the exit when a scream echoes down the corridor. It is obviously female and Darcy wonders who exactly came on this rescue mission. Steve looks over at them, torn.
“We can take it from here,” Bucky insists. “Go find out who that was.”
He gives them a sharp nod and doubles back, disappearing up one of the side passages they had passed earlier.
“I thought he’d never leave.”
They both turn and Darcy recognises the man who had overseen her time in the chair. She snarls at him; Bucky already has a gun out, but the man doesn’t seem worried. There is an odd humming that makes her hair stand on end and Bucky’s shot goes wild. She can feel his surprise — he never misses — but as she watches, the gun moves on its own, pulling itself out of his grasp. For a moment, Bucky resists. When he lets it go, it flies from his hand to stick to the wall beside them.
“Electromagnet,” the man clarifies, smirking at their confusion. “Handy, isn’t it? Now, if I turn it up…”
With a clunk, Bucky’s arm is fastened against the wall. With her primary support gone, Darcy stumbles, landing on the floor in an ungainly heap. Bucky reaches out to her and she grabs his hand, anchoring him as he tugs at his trapped arm.
“Don’t bother,” the man says, shaking his head. “You’re not moving until I turn it off. Don’t worry, I won’t keep you long.” He opens a red folder, leafs through the pages. “This really makes things a lot easier. We won’t have to wipe nearly as often, not with a matched set. Soulmates make such excellent leverage.”
He laughs at their surprised expressions. “You thought we wouldn’t work it out? Highly compliant assets don’t just go missing. Of course, we couldn’t be certain until Darya came home with a readable mark.”
“Came home?” Darcy spits. “You’re dreaming. And in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re hardly on our own here.”
“Yes, yes, you brought the whole gang. No matter. None of them are here and you can hardly stand unassisted. We’ll wipe the useful ones and kill the rest. Now, zhelaniye. Rzhavyy. Semnadtsat’- ”
Bucky groans, shaking his head. “Stop…”
Gritting her teeth, Darcy pulls herself up with her grip on Bucky’s free hand. She can feel him shaking as the man drones on; the seemingly innocuous words are causing him pain. She takes an even, measured breath; one arm locks around Bucky's waist. She will only have one shot at this…
The man’s recitation chokes off with a gurgle and her knife in his throat as he topples backwards. Bucky blinks, swings his gaze to her. “The magnet?”
“Ceramic knife, remember?”
With a pat on his cheek, she lets him go and staggers down the corridor to the body. It’s a simple enough matter to find the remote and disable the magnet, less simple to stumble back to where Bucky sits against the wall, still shaking. His gaze darkens as they land on the red folder she carries.
“I’m not leaving this for anyone to find,” she tells him. “Come on.”
Leaning on each other, they make their way outside.