true widow

     “I know you’re following me.”

It’s not an easy fall, but his ribs seem to break most of it– literally, from the feel of it.

          ( he’s fallen from worse )

Bucky tastes the blood in his mouth before he feels it– thick and coppery, and he isn’t sure if it’s from biting the inside of his cheek from her earlier attack or cracking the side of his face against the floor. He spits onto the tile, takes a staggered breath, and tentatively puts weight onto his right arm–

          ( good. not broken. )

He tries to force his body upright, off the floor, even as he hears Belova approach, knowing damn well that any time he’s bought himself lies at the bottom of the hourglass. 

His gaze falls to his own gun in her hand before flicking up to meet her eyes.

At the foot of the stairs, she pauses, cocking the gun to one side and then the other as she considers him bleeding out on the floor. “I wonder what it’ll be like when the Asgardians come home to find you like this,” she muses with a wicked grin . “I do hope it gets them in quite a lot of trouble.”

She bends down, takes aim and fires.

B       A            N                 G

She plans to leave, nothing more is really needed, but then she notices a door, the Asgardian runes shifting into Cyrillic as she looks at them.

                                                WEAPONS ROOM

Bucky feels his back hit the railing and panic flickers through the sting from Belova’s Widow’s Bite. His hand shoots out to stop himself from going over– instinct overriding instinct; save himself from falling and leave himself open to attack, or fight back and risk the fall.

          ( so much of his life is flipping a coin to decide which bad odds he’ll gamble with ) 

His elbow nearly gives out. He feels the muscles in his right arm strain, the tendons in his hand pulled tight– knuckles white with the effort of staying where he stands. It’s a hell of an effort that’d be less of one if it weren’t for the lingering spasms from her attack, the pounding in his skull. 

Through it, Bucky catches her eye, nothing but hate behind his glare, and snarls–

     “Go to hell!”

“Save me a spot.”

She grabs his gun and uses the force of her movement to fling him over properly, watching him fall with a catlike smirk on her lips.

Will his head c r a c k open on the ground? Will his bones protrude from his flesh? Will the metal arm separate? She’s quite eager to see the bloody results.

The Howling Commandos fought on the Eastern Front. The Great Patriotic War– the Soviets called it. All of the war was ugly. Even after decades of having his brain disassembled and pieced back together in whatever ways his various handlers saw fit–  the horrors– the sights, sounds, smells– remain carved into his memory with precision.

All the war was ugly, but the Eastern Front held the heart its horrors. The Soviets were their allies, but they fought for themselves, their pride for their country, their honor– a pride that extended to killing their own, Russian prisoners or deserters who fought with the Germans. And that’s one of the reasons the Eastern Front had been so brutal– it was personal. Amidst its ferocity and wholesale destruction– the hundreds dead at the hands of starvation, exposure, disease, massacres– and greater atrocities, soldier and civilian alike, witnessed in the millions, inducing nothing but rage.

          ( rage and horror )

               I don’t want to stop them.

                    I don’t care what they do.

          ( and that, he thinks, is the difference between them– a justification? sure, but there’s no way in hell those words would ever leave his lips )

Nothing but disgust twists in his gut and it serves as the flick of a switch somewhere along the heated scatter of his thoughts– only solidified with the threat towards Natalia: he wants her DEAD.

But his revulsion is disfigured by the crackling bloom of electricity shooting up his arm– radiating through circuits and into synapse until it feels like his skull might split from it. Paralyzing, blinding agony spreads through his body, refusing to subside, and faintly, in the back of his mind - the part of his brain still cognizant through the pain - he’s aware he’s losing vital seconds.

There’s nothing he can do.

She takes a moment to watch him convulse as the taser does its work. Oh, but he looks beautiful when he’s in pain, she can see why Natalia likes him. But she doesn’t let the moment last too long, lest someone come and find them before her work is done. That simply will not do.

She grabs him by the collar, eyeing the nearest stair as she drags him over.

“Shall we try again?” she hisses. “Where are you hiding the intel?”

His back hits the marble floor with enough force to knock the air out of his lungs. 

     “Why are you working with them?” he hisses, disgust bleeding through the strain in his voice from holding her off. “They’re using you. Do you even know what they’ve done– what they’ll do?”

Bucky reaches his arm up and out– past his head, and locks his ankle around the outside of hers and throws his weight to the side, rolling them.

     “You could help put a stop to it,” he snarls, using his newfound leverage to try to plunge the knife into her shoulder.

“That’s the thing.”

She should be shaken from their positions being shifted, but she’s been trained to account for such things. She deflects the knife with one of her gauntlets, sending it to the floor with a clatter as she charges the tasers in the cuffs and slams them against his metal arm, sending the shock through his body.

“I don’t want to stop them. I don’t care what they do, as long as you and every other thing NATALIA cares about suffers while they do it.”

          ( the seconds draw like skin over bone, seconds in which he knows to be ready, her words gearing up to action– )

Bucky dodges, can feel the bullet rip through his jacket– adrenaline too high to tell if it’s torn through his arm or not. Unexpected but prepared enough to fire his own weapon in turn, two rounds aimed for her knee.

          ( he doesn’t want to kill her. just stop her. )

He can’t afford to create more distance between them– knows it’s the easiest way to get himself shot. 

          ( three years under his belt of wielding the shield with his left arm makes his disadvantage less of an inconvenience and more of habit; the ingrained reflex to block, if somewhat restricted now, still runs strong– his offensive attacks controlled with his free arm– his environment. )

So her advancement works to his favor– holstering the P220 and drawing the combat knife sheathed beside it, Bucky doesn’t waste his opening as he rushes her.

She had been expecting it, she dodges to the side. One bullet grazes her calf, but it is not as devastating as it would have been if he’d hit his intended target. The leg he didn’t hit sweeps out to knock him to the ground.

“The files,” She snarls the words out as he hits the ground. “Tell me.”

( she knows he won’t tell her but it’s delightful to keep giving him opportunities to give into cowardice, to surrender to her, oh, that would be sweet. )

She fires off the PL-15 again, but it hits his left arm, and she has to dodge as the bullet ricochets off him. Snarling, she pounces on him, trying to pry the knife from his hands in the process.

It’s a reaction he half expected– the flicker of contempt across her lips. He files that away for later.

     “Ransacked is a hell of a lot better than coming home to a corpse.” He’s brought Thor enough trouble as it is, and that– that’s the last thing he wants to leave them. “You think I’d keep it here– where they live? You know better than that…. It’s not here, and you know I’m not just gonna tell you where it’s at– and I know that as much as they want me dead, they want those files more.”

He hopes, at least. If Hydra knows enough of his current whereabouts to send Yelena after him, it’s a safe bet they know enough to hazard a good guess as to who aside from him might know of his recent activities, where the hard drive is held– and aside from Natalia–

Ah.

     “So why don’t we take this someplace else. No need to make a mess of things and no one’ll be any the wiser. They’ll think I left. You walk away clean. You don’t have any Avengers hunting you down.”

“It’s adorable how you think the Avengers scare me,” she scoffs. “And of course I know you’re not going to tell me, I was simply being polite. Trying to give you the option of a less painful end.” Less painful. There will be pain either way, because she wants it. Because Natalia is not here to bleed in his stead.

But the mission, the mission is still at stake. Her success will open doors, until she will no longer need to take orders from the likes of Schmidt. Failure is not an option, failure is death, and Yelena Belova has come too far to die now. Not for a pathetic waste of an asset like James Barnes.

“You can tell me now, and maybe I’ll leave your body in an alleyway. Or you can bleed out on their carpets after I beat what I want out of you, I really don’t care.”