just doing some lazy astronomy.

Natasha's expression tightened, all traces of wry humour gone. Her jaw set, her eyes went flat and calculating. She stomped on the gas, the little car lurching forward. "Hold on," she said, her voice oddly calm.

She drove like she fought—efficient, brutal, and without a single wasted movement. She didn't just turn the wheel; she threw the car into a hard right, tires screaming as she cut across two lanes of traffic with millimetres to spare. Angry horns blared from every direction, but Natasha didn't even blink. The SUVs followed, their heavier frames plowing through the gap she'd created, crushing fenders and shattering glass with significantly less finesse.

You gripped the door handle, your knuckles white. "They're not trying to stop us. They're trying to run us off the road."

"Or box us in," Natasha agreed, her eyes scanning the road ahead. She took another sharp turn, this time down a narrower side street. "They want us alive. Or at least, they want you alive. You're too valuable to HYDRA. I might be more negotiable."

The side street was a dead end, blocked by a delivery truck unloading crates. Natasha didn't slow down.

"What are you doing?" you yelled.

"I'm making a new exit." She wrenched the wheel hard left, aiming the sedan straight for a set of metal garage doors set into the brick wall of a warehouse.

You bit back a scream as the poor sedan crunched through the thin metal doors and careened through the—thank God, empty—warehouse. It nearly ripped the hood off the car, but Natasha managed not to blow the airbags as she swerved, exiting through the cargo doors and sending the car skidding out onto the opposite side of the building.

"It won't take them long to figure out which street we're on," you cautioned, your knuckles white as you gripped the dashboard.

"Tell me something I don't know." Natasha muttered, stepping on the gas again. "We can lose them on the overpass. Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"S.T.R.I.K.E. used to work with Rogers—they're as annoyingly persistent as he is." The Widow growled, before she slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The sedan shot forward, its engine screaming in protest. She swerved onto an on-ramp, accelerating up onto a high overpass that cut through the heart of the city. The three SUVs followed, their larger engines giving them a terrifying advantage.

"They're gaining!" you shouted, watching in the side mirror as the lead SUV pulled up alongside.

A gunshot rang out. The passenger window of the SUV shattered, and a S.T.R.I.K.E. operative leaned out, rifle in hand.

Natasha swore, yanking the wheel hard to the right. Your car slammed into the side of the SUV, metal grinding against metal in a shower of sparks. The operative was thrown off balance, his shot going wide.

But the other two SUVs were boxing you in now, one on the left and one behind. The lead SUV recovered, pressing in again. You were trapped.

"Hold the wheel!" Natasha barked.

You grabbed the steering wheel, your heart in your throat, as she let go and reached into the back seat for her rifle.

"Just keep us straight!" she ordered, rolling down her window. The wind roared into the car.

She leaned out, bracing the rifle against the door frame. A single, sharp crack echoed over the rush of wind and engines. The front tire of the SUV on your left exploded. The vehicle swerved violently, careening across two lanes and crashing through the concrete barrier of the overpass. It plummeted toward the street below.

But the distraction cost you. The lead SUV saw its chance and rammed you from the side. Your car skidded, tires screeching, heading straight for the edge of the overpass.

You screamed, yanking the wheel back with all your strength. Gravity lurched, and the car teetered on the brink, two wheels spinning over a several-story drop, the abyss yawning open beneath you. For one suspended breath, you were weightless—then the sedan slammed back onto the road with bone-jarring force.

The remaining two SUVs were closing in, black steel monsters filling your rearview mirror.

"Brace!" Natasha shouted.

She didn't hesitate. She slammed on the brakes.

The world dissolved into violence. The SUV behind you couldn't react in time. Its front grille crumpled into your rear bumper with a deafening CRUNCH. The impact threw you forward against the restraints, the seatbelt locking and cutting into your healing shoulder. Glass exploded. Metal screamed.

But the collision had done something else. It had slowed them down just enough. Natasha floored the gas again. The damaged engine coughed and sputtered, but it held. She wrenched the wheel to the right, taking a tight exit ramp at a speed that threatened to roll the car.

The SUVs tried to follow, but their larger bulk made the manoeuvre clumsy. One clipped the guardrail, sending up a shower of sparks and forcing them to brake. You were free—for the moment.

"We need to ditch this car," Natasha said, her breathing ragged.

She steered the battered vehicle into a narrow alleyway, slamming to a halt behind a dumpster. "Out. Now." She barked, reaching back to grab the rifle.

You scrambled out of the car, your legs trembling. The alley smelled of rot and wet pavement.

"Did we lose them?" you demanded.

"We slowed them down. There's a difference," Natasha replied, grabbing your forearm and hauling you forward as the two of you slinked down the alleyway towards the street. But she didn't get more than five feet before a hail of bullets rained down from the overpass, and you had to grab her and shove her behind a nearby dumpster for cover.

"Pretty sure they know we're here," the Black Widow growled. She unslung the rifle, bracing the barrel on the corner of the dumpster, finger on the trigger. "I'll cover you. Ready?"

"Ready for what?" you asked, your voice tight as bullets chipped away at the brick wall behind you.

"To run. On my count, you sprint to that fire escape," she said, nodding toward a rusty ladder dangling two buildings down. "I'll keep them pinned."

You shook your head, your heart pounding against your ribs. "No. We go together."

"This isn't a debate," she snapped, her eyes never leaving the overpass. "They're not trying to kill you. They'll capture you. They will kill me. I'm the better shot. It's the only way."

Another volley of gunfire forced you both to duck lower behind the dumpster. The metallic ping of rounds ricocheting off the metal was deafening. She was right. It was the only logical play. But the idea of leaving her behind made your stomach clench, your breath coming shallow and too fast.

"One..."

You tensed, your muscles coiling. But every instinct screamed against this. Do not take risks, the Soldier had rasped. I will be here. Leaving a teammate behind felt like a betrayal of the code he had drilled into you, the code you had built together in the dark.

"...two..."

You met her eyes. There was no fear in them—only a terrifying competence. She was giving you an order, and she expected you to follow it. Not because you were weak, but because the mission required it.

She gave you a sharp, imperceptible nod. Trust me.

"Three!"

Natasha rose from behind the dumpster, the rifle cracking with precise, punishing shots. You didn't wait—you shoved off the ground and ran, boots pounding against the cracked asphalt, the world narrowing to the rusty ladder ahead.

Bullets kicked up sparks at your heels. Natasha's rifle fired again and again, a steady, covering rhythm. Your fingers closed around the cold, rough iron of the ladder as you leaped for it, scrambling up despite your injured shoulder screaming in protest, not stopping until you reached the first-floor landing.

You risked a glance back. Natasha was still behind the dumpster, but one of the SUVs had pulled up to the mouth of the alley, and armed figures were piling out, advancing on her position.

You were supposed to keep running—that was the plan. But you couldn't leave her behind to die.

You still had the pistol you'd taken from Voss's driver. You raised it, bracing your arms against the rusty railing of the fire escape. Your enhanced senses narrowed your focus. The lead S.T.R.I.K.E. operative, moving with a confident, aggressive stride. Your finger tightened on the trigger.

The shot was loud, echoing in the confined alley. The operative stumbled, a bloom of red appearing on his thigh. He went down with a cry, his rifle clattering to the ground. The advance faltered, the other operatives scrambling for cover.

Natasha looked up, her eyes finding you on the landing. Her expression was a mixture of fury and something else—surprise, maybe. She didn't waste the opening. She rose from behind the dumpster and fired two more shots, dropping another operative, before sprinting toward the fire escape.

You laid down covering fire as best you could, the pistol bucking in your hands. The S.T.R.I.K.E. team was disciplined, returning fire and forcing you to duck behind the metal grating of the landing.

Natasha reached the ladder and climbed with a speed that was almost inhuman. She hauled herself onto the landing beside you, her chest heaving.

"I told you to run," she gasped, but there was no real heat in it.

"I don't listen very well," you replied. "The Soldier could have told you that."

A sharp huff of exasperation escaped Natasha's lips. "Yeah, I'm getting that impression." She slammed a fresh magazine into her rifle. "He must be a terrible influence."

Below, the S.T.R.I.K.E. team was regrouping, shouting into comms. Reinforcements would be coming. They had to keep moving.

"Up," Natasha commanded, already climbing to the next level. "We need to get off this street."

You followed, your boots clanging on the metal steps. At the roof access door, Natasha didn't bother picking the lock. She simply raised her boot and kicked it hard, right next to the handle. The metal around the lock splintered, and the door flew inward with a crash.

The rooftop was a flat, gravel-covered expanse, offering a panoramic, and terrifying, view of the city. In the distance, the gleaming towers of the Triskelion dominated the skyline.

Natasha ran to the opposite edge, looking down at the next building over—a four-foot drop to a lower, adjacent rooftop. "This way."

She dropped down with a soft thud, rolling to her feet, and you followed.

It was a twelve-foot drop. For a normal human, it would be a broken ankle. For you, it was just an impact. Your boots hit the gravel with a heavy, solid thud, the shockwave travelling up your shins. Your knees bent, absorbing the force with a groan of protest from your healing joints, but you didn't roll. You didn't need to. You just landed, stabilized, and were already moving before the dust settled. You both sprinted across the new rooftop, leaping a narrow gap to a third building.

The thrum of a helicopter cut through the air, growing rapidly closer. A sleek, black bird crested the skyline, its side door open. A figure in tactical gear was visible, manning a mounted machine gun.

"Shit," Natasha hissed, skidding to a halt. "They're not playing around."

The helicopter swung toward you, its rotors whipping up a furious wind. The gunner took aim. Natasha shoved you hard, sending you sprawling behind a large ventilation unit, just as the gunner opened fire. Bullets tore across the gravel where you'd been standing, sending sharp fragments flying.

You huddled behind the metal housing, your pulse hammering in your ears, your ribs aching with each too-fast breath. Natasha was pinned behind a low parapet a few feet away, unable to return fire without exposing herself to the withering barrage.

The helicopter banked, trying to get a better angle on your position. The wind from its rotors was deafening. You looked around desperately. A service hatch for the building's HVAC system was set into the roof a short distance away—a long shot, but the only option.

"The hatch!" you shouted to Natasha over the roar.

Her eyes followed your gaze, narrowing. She gave a sharp nod.

You took a deep breath, timing the rhythm of the gunfire. As the helicopter swung wide for another pass, you made your move—bursting from behind the vent and sprinting for the hatch.

The gunner saw you immediately. The chatter of the machine gun started again, bullets kicking up gravel at your heels.

The hatch's latch was rusted shut when you reached it. Throwing your weight against it sent pain screaming through your injured shoulder, and though the metal groaned, it didn't give. Your fingers slipped on the corroded surface just as a bullet ricocheted off the door inches from your head.

Then Natasha was there. She slammed the butt of her rifle against the rusted latch once, twice. On the third blow, it snapped. She wrenched the hatch open, revealing a dark, narrow shaft with a ladder descending into the building's depths.

"Go!" she yelled, shoving you toward the opening.

You scrambled into the shaft, boots finding the rungs so fast you almost slipped. Natasha followed right behind, pulling the hatch closed just as another volley of bullets peppered its surface. The sound was muffled but terrifyingly close.

The descent into near-total darkness was quick, the helicopter sounds fading above. The air was thick with the smell of dust and machinery. Dropping the last few feet onto concrete, you landed with Natasha silent beside you.

The vast, dimly lit maintenance level stretched around you. Pipes snaked along the ceiling, and the distant hum of generators filled the air. Safe, for the moment.

Natasha leaned against a wall, catching her breath. She looked at you, her face illuminated by a single emergency light. "Remind me never to get on your bad side," she said, her voice a dry rasp.

A ghost of a smile touched your lips. "Noted."

"Come on, then. Let's go."

The stairwell was like a concrete throat, descending into the building's old guts. Emergency lighting cast everything in sickly yellow, and the air tasted like rust and old paint. Three floors down, Natasha paused, raising a fist. You froze mid-step.

Voices. Muffled, and coming from below. S.T.R.I.K.E. had sent a ground team to cut you off.

Natasha's jaw tightened. She gestured upward with two fingers—back up—but before you could move, the stairwell door two flights below you banged open. Footsteps—ascending fast.

You were being boxed in.

Natasha grabbed your wrist and hauled you through the nearest door, which opened into a maintenance corridor. Pipes lined the ceiling like metal veins, dripping condensation that pooled on the concrete floor. The corridor stretched into darkness, lit only by the occasional bare bulb.

"This way." Her voice was barely a whisper.

You followed, moving as quietly as you could, but your shoulder throbbed with every step, and your lungs burned from the chase. The adrenaline was starting to ebb, leaving exhaustion in its wake.

Behind you, the stairwell door crashed open. Shouts echoed down the corridor—they'd picked up your trail.

Natasha broke into a run, and you forced your legs to keep up. The corridor branched and split, opening into a boiler room thick with heat and the rumble of machinery. She navigated it with practiced ease.

An exit sign glowed green ahead—a service door that led outside.

Natasha hit the push bar hard, and the door flew open. Cool night air rushed in, carrying the smell of rain and asphalt.

The emergency exit spat you both into a narrow back alley that reeked of spoiled food and stagnant water. Dumpsters lined one side, and the wet pavement reflected the distant glow of streetlights. You could still hear the distant thrum of the helicopter, but it was searching the rooftops now, not the streets.

For a single heartbeat, you thought you might have made it.

Natasha pulled you close to the wall, both of you catching your breath in the relative safety of shadow. "We need to get to the street," she said. "Blend into the crowds. They're looking for two women running. Not two friends out walking."

It was a good plan. You nodded, and the two of you started moving, keeping close to the walls, Natasha's rifle hidden under her jacket. The mouth of the alley opened onto a busier street—cars passing, a few late-night pedestrians. Safety in numbers.

You were maybe twenty feet from the sidewalk when you heard it.

The low rumble of a heavy engine. Close. Too close.

Natasha's hand shot out, stopping you. Her eyes were locked on something past the alley's edge.

A black S.T.R.I.K.E. transport truck rolled into view, moving slowly, deliberately. It stopped at the mouth of the alley—blocking your exit.

Your stomach dropped.

"Back," Natasha hissed, already turning.

But when you spun around, two more S.T.R.I.K.E. operatives were emerging from the shadows at the opposite end of the alley, rifles raised. They'd been waiting. Herding you.

You were trapped.

The truck's rear doors flew open, and armed operatives poured out, boots hitting pavement in a synchronized rhythm. Eight. Ten. More. They fanned out in a practiced formation, weapons trained on you and Natasha, cutting off any angle of escape.

And then Brock Rumlow stepped down from the truck's passenger side, his face tight with barely controlled rage. His eyes swept over Natasha with pure contempt before landing on you—and there, his expression shifted. Satisfaction. Victory.

"End of the line, Romanoff," Rumlow called out, his voice cutting through the alley.

He walked forward with the confidence of a man who knew he'd won. His tactical vest was pristine, his weapon holstered—he didn't even need it. Not with ten rifles already trained on you.

His eyes swept over Natasha first, cold and contemptuous. Then they landed on you, and his expression changed. The corner of his mouth twitched upward. Satisfaction. Like a hunter who'd finally cornered his prey.

"And the prize," he said, his voice almost soft. "Pierce will be very happy to see you."

You curled your lip at the man. Natasha raised her hands slowly, the rifle hanging loose from one hand, and you mirrored the gesture. "All this for little old me, Brock?" The Widow crooned. "I'm flattered."

Rumlow's eyes never left you. "Don't be," he said, flatly. Then he gestured with his chin, a casual, dismissive movement. "Kill her and take the girl. We need her alive."

Your heart dropped into your stomach.

The operatives' fingers tightened on their triggers. You could see it—the minute shift in posture, the subtle lean forward. They were going to fire. They were going to execute Natasha right here, right now, in this filthy alley that smelled like garbage and wet concrete.

You tensed up. The cold part of your brain that the Soldier had honed to a razor's edge calculated the distance. The angle. You could reach her. You could take the bullets meant for her. You'd heal; Natasha would not.

Your weight shifted forward, your legs preparing to lunge—

—but then, the blare of a police siren cut through the tension. Two D.C. squad cars skidded to a halt behind the S.T.R.I.K.E. truck, their red and blue lights painting the brick walls. A second helicopter's rotors whooshed above.

"You really going to shoot an Avenger in front of D.C.'s finest, Brock?" Natasha taunted.

Rumlow's jaw tightened. He glanced from the advancing police cars to Natasha's defiant smirk. Shooting a publicly celebrated Avenger in cold blood, with multiple civilian witnesses and a police helicopter now hovering overhead, was a line even they couldn't cross without catastrophic exposure.

You could hardly comprehend the unbelievable stroke of luck the two of you had just fumbled into. Neither, apparently, could Rumlow. He made a sharp, slashing gesture with his hand, and the operatives lowered their weapons.

"Cuff them," he barked, and two operatives moved forward.

The one who grabbed Natasha was rough, slamming her face-first against the brick wall hard. Her cheek scraped against the rough surface as he wrenched her arms behind her back, and the plastic zip-tie ratcheted tight with a series of sharp clicks, biting into her wrists. She didn't make a sound.

The operative who approached you was no gentler. His gloved hand clamped around your bicep like a vise, fingers digging into the muscle as he spun you around and shoved you against the wall beside Natasha, zip-tied in a similar manner.

"You're making a mistake, officer," Natasha said, her voice remarkably calm despite the blood trickling from the corner of her mouth. She was addressing one of the D.C. cops who was cautiously approaching, hand on his holstered weapon, confusion written across his face. "These men are not S.H.I.E.L.D."

"Save it," Rumlow snapped, stepping between Natasha and the cop with the ease of a man used to authority. He pulled out a S.H.I.E.L.D. badge, the eagle emblem gleaming under the streetlights. "These women are wanted for treason and conspiracy. This is a classified detainment under federal authority."

The cop hesitated, looking between Rumlow's badge and Natasha's bloodied face. "Sir, I—"

"—you can file a complaint with S.H.I.E.L.D. if you have concerns," Rumlow said, his tone brooking no argument. "Until then, back off. This is above your clearance."

The cop stepped back, uncertain, but certainly outranked.

Rumlow nodded to his men. "Load them up."

Rough hands grabbed you, hauling you upright and shoving you toward the open rear doors of the transport truck. Your boots scraped against the asphalt as you tried to keep your balance with your hands bound behind you.

The truck's interior was a dark, windowless metal box—reinforced walls, no seats, just a cold steel floor. A cargo hold designed for prisoners, not passengers.

You were pushed inside first, stumbling as your boots hit the ribbed metal floor. Natasha was shoved in right behind you, landing more gracefully despite her bound hands. The impact sent a jolt through your shoulder, and you bit back a grunt of pain.

One of the operatives—masked and anonymous—climbed in after you, taking up position against the far wall. Then the heavy doors slammed shut with a metallic clang that echoed in the confined space.

Darkness swallowed everything.

For a moment, the only sound was your own breathing, too loud in your ears, and Natasha's steady, controlled breaths beside you. Then the engine roared to life, a deep rumble that vibrated through the metal floor, and the truck lurched forward.

You were thrown sideways, your bound hands making it impossible to catch yourself. Your shoulder slammed into the wall, and you bit down hard on a gasp of pain. The truck swayed as it took a corner, and you had to brace your boots against the floor to keep from sliding.

Your eyes were adjusting slowly to the darkness. Not complete—there was a faint strip of light seeping in from somewhere, maybe a gap in the door seal. Enough to make out vague shapes. Natasha, sitting with her back against the wall, legs bent, her posture deceptively relaxed. And across from you both, the third occupant—the S.T.R.I.K.E. operative in full tactical gear. Helmet, vest, and rifle resting across their lap.

The zip-tie around your wrists was cutting off circulation. Your hands were starting to go numb, fingers tingling. The plastic bit into your skin with every small movement, and you could feel the warm trickle of blood where the edges had worn through.

The truck rumbled on, taking turns that threw you against the walls. Minutes passed. Maybe five. Maybe ten. Time felt elastic in the dark.

You tried to focus on your breathing and tried to slow your heart rate, but panic was a living thing clawing up your throat. You were being delivered to Pierce. To HYDRA. And this time, there was no Soldier to come for you. He was already at the Triskelion, probably fighting for his life. Or worse—captured. Wiped again. Reset.

You might never see him again.

"Where are they taking us?" you asked Natasha, your voice betraying your panic.

She, meanwhile, looked surprisingly calm. "Most likely the Triskelion, which, ironically, is where we need to be," Natasha replied, her voice low enough that only you could hear over the engine noise. "Except they'll probably shoot me before we get there, so..."

Her gaze drifted to the operative sitting across from you both. Silent. Unmoving except for the slight sway with the truck's movement.

Natasha went very still.

You'd spent enough time with the Soldier to recognize that particular quality of stillness—the kind that came right before violence. Every muscle in Natasha's body had tensed, her focus laser-sharp on the figure across from you.

Your pulse kicked up. Was the operative going to shoot you both right here, right now, in the dark? Dump your bodies somewhere between here and the Triskelion, where you might never be found?

"Natasha?" you whispered, barely audible. But she didn't respond. Just kept staring at the operative with an intensity that made your skin crawl.

The operative's helmet turned slightly, the visor reflecting the thin strip of light. Acknowledging Natasha's scrutiny.

Then, slowly, the operative's hands moved—not to the rifle, but to their helmet.

The helmet came off with a soft hiss of released pressure, and a woman's face emerged from the shadows. Short, dark hair slightly mussed from the helmet. Sharp features. Hard eyes that had seen too much.

"God, it was stuffy in there," she muttered, setting the helmet down beside her.

She looked at Natasha first, and there was something in her expression—recognition, maybe respect. "Romanoff."

Then her eyes shifted to you, and you saw calculation there. Assessment. The same way the Soldier looked at tactical situations.

"And you must be Schmidt's granddaughter," she said, her voice matter-of-fact but not unkind. "Maria Hill. Fury called me in."

For a moment, you couldn't even begin to process the words. Your brain was still stuck on HYDRA operative and execution, and this is how it ends. But Natasha's posture had changed—the coiled tension bleeding out into something much closer to exasperation.

"Looks like I'm not getting shot after all," Natasha said dryly.

Hill's mouth quirked. "No, not by me. I can't speak for everyone else at the Triskelion, though."

The relief that slammed into you was so potent, so sudden, that it left you feeling dizzy. Your vision swam, and you had to focus on breathing—in, out, in, out—to keep from passing out.

She was one of you. An ally. Fury's inside agent.

You weren't being delivered to Pierce like a lamb to slaughter. You had a chance.

"Fury figured Pierce would try to intercept any loose ends," Hill explained, her voice low and efficient. She reached into a compartment on her tactical vest and produced a small, ceramic blade. "Let's get you out of those." She quickly sawed through the plastic ties binding Natasha's wrists, then yours.

The feeling of blood rushing back into your hands was a sharp, prickling pain. You rubbed your wrists, the raw skin already starting to heal.

"What's the situation?" Natasha asked.

"The Triskelion is locked down," Hill replied, grimly. "Pierce is in the command centre with the World Security Council. The Insight launch is imminent." Hill's eyes were hard. "Rogers, Wilson, and the Soldier are already inside with Fury. They'll be raising hell any minute now."

The truck rumbled on, the vibrations thrumming through the metal floor. You were still a prisoner, but now you had an ally on the inside. The game had changed.

"How do we play this?" you asked, your voice steadier than you felt.

The corner of his mouth tugs up, at that. He climbs back into bed and the mattress dips under his weight, rolling you toward him. You don't resist, tucking yourself against his side like the space was made for you. His arm comes around your shoulders, metal fingers cool against your bare skin, and you press your nose to his collarbone and breathe him in.

"What time is it?" you mumble.

"Almost eleven."

"Disgusting. We're wasting the day."

"We're not wasting anything." His chin rests on the top of your head. "This counts as doing something."

You smile against his chest. This is what surprises you most, about being with Bucky. Not the sex, though that remains undeniably spectacular. Not even the quiet intensity he brings to everything, the way he focuses on you like you're a mission objective he's determined to complete with full marks.

It's the quiet.

The man who spent decades in motion, in violence, in the rigid machinery of someone else's agenda, is remarkably good at doing nothing. He can lie in your bed for hours, one hand in your hair, the other scrolling through his phone or resting on your hip, and seem genuinely content.

You, on the other hand, are terrible at it.

Not because you're restless. Because your brain won't stop cataloguing.

The glass of water. The way he always walks on the street side of the sidewalk. How he checks the lock twice when he leaves your apartment, not out of paranoia but because he wants you to hear it and know you're safe. The food he stocks in your fridge now, things you mentioned liking once in passing, appearing without comment. The way he says your name, lower and softer than the voice he uses for everyone else, like it belongs to a different vocabulary entirely.

You are building a case. Stacking evidence. Every small act goes into the file, and the file keeps pointing to the same conclusion, the same three words you haven't said because saying them first feels like stepping off a cliff.

"I can hear you thinking," Bucky says. His hand moves from your hair to the back of your neck, thumb pressing into the tension there. "What's going on in there?"

"Nothing. Sunday brain."

"Sunday brain," he repeats, skeptical.

"Symptoms include existential contemplation and an unwillingness to put on real pants."

He huffs a laugh. "Sounds serious."

"It's terminal."

His thumb keeps working your neck, finding knots you didn't know you had, and you melt incrementally into him. This would be a perfect moment to say it. The light is right, the mood is right, you're wrapped around each other in rumpled sheets and the apartment smells like the coffee he made an hour ago. The words are right there, sitting at the base of your throat like a swallowed stone.

I love you.

You think it so loudly you're half convinced he can hear it.

"Hey," he says, and you tilt your head up. He's looking down at you with an expression you've come to recognize but can't quite name. Something open. Something careful. Like he's standing at the edge of the same cliff and weighing the same math.

"Hey," you say back.

His mouth opens. Closes. His jaw works the way it does when he's choosing between words, sorting through options and discarding them.

"Breakfast?" he says finally. "I'll make eggs."

"Sure." You smile. It only takes a little effort. "Eggs sound great."

He kisses your forehead. Lingers there, lips warm against your skin, and you feel him exhale slow and deliberate. Then he's up, pulling on a shirt from the chair where he tossed it last night, and disappearing into your kitchen.

You lie there. Stare at the ceiling. Press your palm flat against the mattress where his warmth is already fading and think about the physics of what just happened. The way his mouth opened and something gathered behind his eyes and then dissipated, redirected, swapped out for breakfast.

He was going to say something.

But he didn't.

You've been here before. Not often, and not dramatically. Bucky will cross a room to fix your collar. He'll memorize your schedule so he knows when to text and when to leave you alone. He'll sit through your rants about interdepartmental email chains with the focus of a man receiving a tactical briefing. He'll hold you after sex with both arms and breathe against your hair like he's anchoring himself. He'll kill for you. You're pretty sure about that last one and it doesn't scare you the way it probably should.

But he hasn't said it.

From the kitchen, you hear the crack of eggs, the hiss of butter in a pan. Bucky hums something when he cooks. Always does. Low, tuneless melodies you're pretty sure he doesn't realize he's producing. It's one of your favorite things about him, this tiny unconscious proof that somewhere beneath the training and the trauma and the careful control, there's a person who hums while making scrambled eggs on a Sunday morning.

You get up. Pull on his discarded Henley because it's closer than your own shirt and because it smells like him and you're not above that kind of sentimentality. It falls to your mid-thigh, sleeves hanging past your hands, and you pad barefoot into the kitchen.

He's at the stove, spatula in hand, and glances over his shoulder when he hears you.

"That's my shirt," he says.

"That's correct."

His eyes travel down the length of you, slow and appreciative in a way that makes heat bloom across your skin even after three months. "It looks better on you."

"Obviously."

You hop onto the counter beside the stove, legs swinging, and watch him cook. He moves in the kitchen the way he moves everywhere; efficient, deliberate, no wasted motion. Two plates are already out. Toast in the toaster right on time. Your tea steeping in the mug with the chipped handle that you refuse to throw away.

He remembered which mug.

Of course he remembered which mug.

"You know," you hear yourself say, "if the whole Avengers thing doesn't work out, you could have a career in breakfast."

"High praise from someone whose idea of cooking is microwave popcorn."

"That's slander. I made pasta last week."

"You boiled noodles and put butter on them."

"Uh, yeah. That's pasta."

He plates the eggs and slides yours over, before he stands in front of you, close enough that your knees bracket his hips, and hands you a fork.

"Eat," he says. "Before it gets cold."

You take the plate. Your fingers brush his, and he doesn't pull away. Just stands there, looking at you in his shirt with your messy hair and bare legs, and something moves across his face again. That expression. The one that's almost a confession but isn't.

"What?" you ask softly.

"Nothing." He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. "You just... look real good in our kitchen."

Our kitchen. This is your apartment. But neither of you corrects it, and the slip hangs in the air between you, warm and revealing.

"Our kitchen," you echo.

His hand drops. "Your kitchen. I meant your kitchen."

"Oh. Right."

He turns back to the stove, and you watch the back of his neck flush pink above his collar. Bucky Barnes, legendary sniper, former ghost operative, brought low by a simple possessive pronoun.

You eat your eggs. They're perfect, because everything he does for you is done with the kind of attention that borders on devotion, and you love him.

You love him so much your chest aches with it.

And one of these days, one of you is going to say it out loud.

That day just... isn't today.

And then it starts with the shirts.

You stop wearing his. Not consciously, not at first. You just start reaching for your own clothes in the morning instead of grabbing whatever he left draped over the chair. One day you do it and he doesn't comment. The next day you do it again. By the third day it's a pattern, and patterns are harder to break than impulses, so you let it calcify into routine.

It's a small thing. Meaningless, probably. You have plenty of shirts.

Bucky notices the change on day two.

You know he notices because his gaze tracks you when you come out of the bedroom in your own oversized tee instead of his Henley, and something flickers behind his eyes. Quick. Quiet. Gone before you can name it. He doesn't say anything. He hands you your tea—chipped mug as always—and you sit on opposite ends of the couch and read the Sunday paper like two people who are fine.

You are fine. You keep telling yourself this with the dogged persistence of someone reciting a mantra. The relationship is good. Bucky is good. You are a functional adult woman with a stable career and a gorgeous, attentive boyfriend who makes you eggs and fills your water glass and makes your tea just right. There is nothing wrong.

Except.

Except there's a distance growing in you, and you can't figure out whether it's a problem or just the natural settling of a relationship finding its level. Three and a half months now. The initial fever of it all has cooled into something steadier, something with a rhythm you can predict, and within that predictability you've started to hear the silence where certain words should be.

So you compensate. You're good at this. PR is, after all, the art of managing perception.

At dinner, you laugh at his jokes but don't lean into him the way you used to, your shoulder finding his like a compass finding north. You let a centimeter of air live between your bodies. On the couch, you tuck your feet under yourself instead of draping your legs across his lap. In bed, you roll to your side after sex instead of sprawling across his chest, and when he reaches for you, you go, but you stop reaching first.

Tiny retreats. Imperceptible, you think. You are building a cushion between yourself and the fall you're increasingly sure is coming, and you're doing it so gradually that no one could possibly notice.

But Bucky Barnes was trained to detect a target's change in breathing from eight hundred meters.

He notices.

"You good?" he asks you on a Wednesday night. You're at his place, on his couch, your laptop open on a press release you've been staring at for twenty minutes without typing a word. He's on the other end with a book, but you haven't heard him turn a page in a while.

"Yeah, fine." You don't look up from the screen. "Just work stuff."

"You haven't typed anything."

"I'm thinking."

"For twenty minutes?"

"It's a complicated release." You make a show of clicking keys, adding a sentence you'll delete later. "Lots of stakeholders."

The silence that follows has texture. Weight. You can feel him looking at you, that particular quality of attention he gives to things he's trying to figure out, and your skin prickles under the scrutiny.

"Okay," he says eventually.

He goes back to his book. You go back to your blank screen. Neither of you acknowledges the lie sitting between you on the couch cushions, taking up exactly as much space as the distance you've put there.

I'm fine is such a small lie. Two words. Practically nothing. But it's the first one you've told him, and some part of you registers the transgression with a flinch you keep off your face.

The problem, you've decided, is that you are being unreasonable.

You build this argument in your head during your commute, during meetings, during the twenty minutes of silence you carve out in the women's restroom on the fourth floor when the office gets too loud. The case against yourself is thorough, well-reasoned, and damning.

Exhibit A. Bucky Barnes spent seventy years as a prisoner of his own mind, stripped of autonomy, language, identity. The fact that he can form a relationship at all is extraordinary. The fact that he's good at it—attentive, generous and present—actually borders on the miraculous. Expecting him to also produce the exact verbal affirmation you need, on your timeline, in your preferred format, is objectively selfish.

Exhibit B. Words were weapons in his previous life. They were commands, triggers, a red book of horrors that rewired his brain. Of course he's careful with them. Of course he shows instead of tells. His love language—and you wince at the term even in the privacy of your own head—is acts of service because acts were the first thing he reclaimed. His hands learned gentleness before his mouth learned softness. You should honour that. You should be grateful for it.

Exhibit C. You are not owed those three words. Hell, nobody is owed those three words. Needing to hear them is a you problem, a product of your own insecurity, your own inability to trust the mountain of evidence right in front of your face. He fills your water glass. He hums when he cooks your eggs. He pulls you closer in his sleep, unconsciously, like his body is solving for the distance between you even when his conscious mind is offline. What more do you need?

The prosecution rests. The verdict? Is guilty. You are, in fact, guilty of wanting too much, and the sentence is to stop wanting it, or at least, to stop letting the wanting show.

This train of thought works for about five days.

Then Sam Wilson opens his mouth.

It's a Thursday. You're in the compound break room, refilling your coffee, existing in the pleasant background hum of people going about their business. Sam is leaning against the counter, telling a story about something that happened during a training exercise. Natasha is perched on the counter beside him, eating an apple with a knife because she's Natasha. You're half listening, half mentally drafting a statement about the upcoming charity gala.

"...and Barnes just stood there," Sam is saying, gesturing broadly. "Didn't say a word. Stone cold. You know how he gets."

Natasha makes a sound of agreement.

"I swear the man could win a staring contest with a statue. I've never met anyone so allergic to expressing a feeling out loud."

He says it lightly. It's a joke. It's the kind of joke Sam makes about Bucky constantly because their entire friendship is built on a foundation of mutual antagonism and genuine affection, and under normal circumstances you'd laugh and file it away as another entry in the Wilson-Barnes comedy archive.

Under normal circumstances.

Your coffee mug is very interesting all of a sudden. Ceramic. White. A hairline crack running from the rim to the handle that you've never noticed before. You trace it with your thumbnail.

"He's getting better," Natasha says mildly. She's watching you. You can tell without looking because you've developed a sixth sense for when Natasha Romanoff's attention lands on you, and it feels like a laser sight settling between your shoulder blades. "In his own way."

"Oh, sure," Sam agrees. "The man's a romantic. He just shows it like a Cold War spy. Dead drops of affection. Encrypted compliments. You gotta be a codebreaker to know what he's feeling."

He means it fondly. You know he means it fondly.

Your throat is tight anyway.

"Excuse me." You set your mug down. "I have a draft to finish."

"Hey. You alright?" Sam asks, and the genuine concern in his voice makes it all worse, somehow, because you know they care.

"Yeah, totally fine." You smile. It's a good smile. Professional-grade. You've been building smiles like this for a living. "Just on a deadline, you know?"

You leave before either of them can respond.

Your office is small, windowless, crammed with filing cabinets and framed press clippings, and right now it is the most welcoming room in the compound because it has a door that closes.

You close it. Sit in your chair. Put your hands flat on the desk and try to breathe.

Allergic to expressing a feeling out loud.

It's not fair to let Sam's joke land like this. Sam doesn't know about the gap you're feeling. Sam doesn't know about the way Bucky's mouth opens and closes around words he won't release, or the way your chest tightens every time it happens. Sam is just being Sam, ribbing his friend the way friends do, and you are the one turning it into something painful.

But the thing about pain is that it don't care about whether it's fair or not, to hurt.

It just hurts.

You pull up the press release on your computer. Stare at it. The cursor blinks with the patient indifference of inanimate objects.

What if he can't ever say it?

The thought arrives fully formed, as if it's been assembled somewhere in the back of your mind and has simply been waiting for the right moment to step forward. You've been keeping it at arm's length for weeks, but Sam's joke tore the wrapping off and now it's just sitting there, ugly and bare.

What if it's not about timing or readiness? What if the wiring in his head is damaged in a way that can't be fixed? What if HYDRA took the part of him that could say those words and burned it out, the way they burned out everything else? What if he feels it but can never say it, and you'll spend the rest of this relationship reading between the lines of his actions and hoping, always hoping, but never truly knowing?

And then comes the guilt. Because you're sitting in your temperature-controlled office, at your comfortable job, projecting your emotional needs onto a man who survived seventy years of torture, and framing his survival as a deficiency. As though the issue is that he's broken. As though he owes you his reconstruction on a schedule that's convenient for your anxiety.

You press your palms against your eyes.

I'm selfish. I'm selfish for wanting it and I'm selfish for pulling away because I don't have it, and he's going to notice, and he's going to think it's about him—

—it is about him—

—but not the way he'll think, not because he's doing something wrong, but because he's doing everything right and it's still not enough, and what kind of person needs more than everything—

—Your phone buzzes, and you drop your hands.

📱 Bucky: Heading out for a run. Dinner tonight?

You pick up the phone. Your thumbs hover.

📱 You: Sounds good. Your place or mine?

📱 Bucky: Yours. I'll cook.

📱 You: You don't have to do that.

📱 Bucky: I know. I want to.

You set the phone down. Press your fingers to your mouth. He wants to. He always wants to. He wants to so loudly and so consistently that the absence of the words shouldn't matter, and you hate yourself a little for the fact that it does.

📱 You: Okay. See you tonight ❤️

The heart emoji is a coward's substitute. You know it. He probably knows it. You send it anyway, because a red cartoon heart is easier to deploy than the real one beating traitorously behind your ribs.

That evening, he makes chicken. Some recipe he found online, slightly over-seasoned and over-salted because he's still calibrating his palate after decades of nutritional paste and whatever HYDRA fed its assets. You eat every bite and tell him it's great, and it is great because he made it for you, and when he smiles at the compliment you feel something fracture quietly in your chest.

He shows up unexpected on a Friday night.

No text first. No warning. Just three knocks, and when you open the door he's standing in the hall with a metal case tucked under his left arm.

It's small. Matte black. The kind of container designed to look nondescript yet announcing, by virtue of that very effort, that its contents are anything but.

"Hi," you say.

"Hey." He's watching your face with that particular intensity of his that you've only ever seen briefings, or in the field footage they sometimes screen for the PR team. It's his mission face, which is an odd thing to wear to your apartment on a Friday evening.

"What's in the case?" you finally ask.

He doesn't answer right away, which makes your anxiety spike. He steps inside, past you, and moves to set the case on your kitchen counter. With his thumbs he clicks the latches open, and lifts the lid. Inside, nestled in molded foam, sits a glass vial of clear liquid and a sealed syringe.

Your body recognizes it before your brain does. Something in your nervous system fires, a sense-memory that bypasses cognition entirely; the prick of a needle, the slow warmth spreading through your veins, the absolute inability to keep your mouth shut...

Your pulse spikes.

"Bucky, is that—"

"—yeah. Sodium thiopental." He says it the way he'd say olive oil or laundry detergent "Pharmaceutical grade. Lifted it from the med bay."

"You stole truth serum from the Avengers compound?"

"Borrowed. I borrowed it."

"Bucky." You stare at the vial. "Why do you have truth serum in my kitchen?"

He leans against the counter. Crosses his arms. The leather of his jacket creaks. "Last time, you were the one who couldn't lie. Figured it's my turn."

"Your turn," you repeat dumbly.

"Yeah. My turn, because you've been pulling away." No preamble, no easing in. Straight to it. "You say you're fine and you're not fine, and I can push or I can wait, and pushing isn't something I'm willing to do if it ends up just pushing you away. So." He nods at the case. "This is option three."

"Option three is injecting yourself with a drug that makes you incapable of lying?"

"No, option three is making sure you actually believe the answers." His voice is steady, but there's something underneath it, something running hot beneath the calm surface. "So, ask me anything. I won't be able to dodge it, spin it, or soften it. You'll know it's true because I won't have a choice."

You open your mouth. Close it. Open it again.

"Bucky, that's insane."

"Probably."

"No, that's actually insane. You can't just—Bucky, that stuff—I know what it does. I lived what it does. You lose control of—"

"—I know what I lose, and I'm choosing to lose it. For you."

Your heart is doing something unsustainable now.

"You don't have to do this," you say, and your voice comes out smaller than you want it to.

"I know I don't." He uncrosses his arms. Reaches for the vial. "But you need to ask, and I need you to believe the answers, and right now we're stuck because you don't trust the words without proof." He rolls the vial between his fingers, glass catching the kitchen light. "So here's the proof."

You watch him prep the syringe with the efficiency of someone who's been on the receiving end of needles more times than any person should be. Draw, tap, flick. No hesitation. His left hand holds the syringe steady—metal fingers don't shake—and he pushes his sleeve up his right arm with his teeth.

"Wait," you say. He pauses. Looks at you. "Just... are you sure?"

"Ask me that again in about two minutes and you'll know I mean it."

The needle goes in. He depresses the plunger with his thumb. Slow, measured, watching the liquid disappear with clinical detachment.

You can't breathe.

He pulls the needle out, sets the syringe on the counter, and drops into one of your kitchen chairs with the unhurried ease of a man settling in for a conversation. Rolls his sleeve back down. Flexes his fingers once, twice, like he's testing for a change.

"How long does it take?" you ask.

"Faster metabolism, so it should already be—" He blinks, then tilts his head. "—yeah. That's... yeah."

"Yeah... what?"

He rolls his jaw, testing. "Ask me something you already know the answer to. As a baseline."

You sink into the chair across from him. Your knees are unsteady. "Okay. Okay, um." Your brain casts around for something simple, something verifiable, and lands on the obvious. "Do you like blueberries?"

The change is immediate. His mouth moves before the rest of his face catches up, like the words have a head start. "No. Hate them. They tasted different before, in the forties. Sweeter, or maybe my tongue worked different back then, I don't know. Now they taste like watered-down nothing."

You press your hand over your mouth to stifle a hysterical little laugh. Because the delivery is so him—blunt, slightly indignant, more detailed than the question warrants—and because it's almost word for word what you told a room full of mercenaries three months ago.

"It's working," you say.

"It's working," he confirms. There's a flicker of something in his eyes. Amusement, maybe. Or anticipation.

"Okay. Okay." You tuck your legs up onto the chair, settling in, and some of the fear starts to give way to something else. Curiosity. The same reckless, giddy curiosity you imagine a scientist feels right before they throw the switch to a mad science experiment.

"What do you really think of Sam?" you ask, riding the momentum.

"He's one of the best people I've ever met. Genuinely good in a way that I don't think I've been, maybe ever. He's annoying and loud and he never lets anything go and he gave Steve his trust without hesitation even when he had no reason to, and then he gave me the same thing even though he had every reason not to." His expression looks almost pained. "If you ever tell him I said any of that, I will deny it under oath."

"Noted." You're grinning. He's scowling, but it's the fake scowl, the one that means he's not actually mad. "This is fun."

"For you. Fun for you, you psychopath."

"Very much for me, yes." You shift in your chair. The giddiness is still there, buzzing under your skin, but underneath it something else is rising. A tide. The real questions, pressing against the back of your throat.

Bucky sees the shift. You watch him see it. His body changes, some subtle rearrangement of posture that means he's bracing.

"Go ahead," he says. Quiet now. The humour's drained out and what's left is steady and open and terrifying.

You take a breath.

"When you go quiet," you say carefully. "When you're looking at me and you start to say something and then don't. Is that because of me? Because of something I did?"

His answer comes immediately, as though the words were already assembled and just needed permission to deploy. "Yes and no. It's because of you in the sense that you're the reason the words exist. It's not because of you in the sense that you're doing something wrong. I go quiet because I have something specific I want to say and I'm afraid of what it'll do once it's out. Not to you. To me. Because once I say it, you'll have it, and I have a long history of having things taken." He swallows. "That's not rational. I know it's not rational. You're not HYDRA, you're not a threat, you're the safest person I know. But the flinch is still there. It fires before I can override it."

Your eyes are burning. You blink hard.

"Are you happy?" you ask.

"Yes." The fastest answer yet. "I mean, not in every moment. I still have nightmares. I still lose time sometimes, get stuck in my head. But the overall shape of my life is something I would choose. You're something I would choose. I choose you every day. It's the easiest decision I make."

You press your fingers to your lips. Breathe through the ache.

"Do you think about leaving?"

"No." Just as fast. "I think about whether you'll leave. Whether you'll wake up one morning and do the math and realize you could be with someone uncomplicated. Someone who doesn't check the exits when he enters a room or sleep with a knife in the nightstand or flinch at fireworks in July. I think about that more than I should."

"Bucky—"

"—you asked." His voice is raw. "I'm answering. Can't lie, remember?"

You nod and swallow. There's one more question in the chamber and you both know it. You can feel it in the air between you, the way the room seems to contract around the weight of what hasn't been said.

"When you don't say it," you whisper. "Is it because you don't feel it?"

"I feel it constantly." His voice cracks on the second word and keeps going. "I feel it when you steal my shirts. I felt it when you stopped. I feel it when you hum while you're working and when you fall asleep during movies and when you eat my cooking even when I put too much salt in because you think I don't notice your face but I always notice your face. I feel it when I fill your water glass, which I know is a stupid thing, a small thing, but it's the first thing I thought of when I started staying here and I just kept doing it because it meant I could take care of you in this one tiny way while you were sleeping. I feel it in the morning when you haven't opened your eyes yet and you look so..." He stops. Breathes. "I feel it all the time. I feel it right now. The words aren't the problem. The words are easy. I've just been so afraid that saying them out loud makes them real, and real things can be taken away."

The kitchen is very quiet.

"Okay," you manage. Your voice is wrecked.

"Okay," he echoes.

You sit with it. Let the weight of it settle into the room, into your bones. He's watching you, and for the first time in weeks the gap between you doesn't feel like a gulf. It feels like a doorway.

You wipe your eyes with the heel of your hand. Breathe in. Breathe out.

"What are you thinking about right now?" you ask, and the register of the question has changed. Dropped lower. You're not sure when it shifted. Somewhere between I feel it constantly and the way his eyes went dark when he said I always notice your face.

Bucky's throat works. "You. Specifically, the fact that you're sitting in that chair in my shirt."

You look down. You are wearing the Henley. The one you stopped wearing. You grabbed it tonight without thinking about it, pulled it on after your shower because it was there and it was soft and it smelled like him.

"I thought you stopped," he says. His voice has gone lower too. Rougher. "When you stopped wearing them I thought it meant you were pulling away for good and it scared me more than most things I've faced, which is a long list."

"I'm wearing it now," you say.

"I know." His gaze drops from your face to the collar of the Henley, the way it's slipping off one shoulder, the bare skin beneath. "I noticed when you opened the door. Thought about pushing you against the wall right then."

The heat that moves through you is immediate and liquid. "Why didn't you?"

"Because we needed to talk first." His jaw is tight. "And because the drug means I'm going to say exactly what I'm thinking, and what I'm thinking right now is not about talking."

Your mouth is dry. "What are you thinking right now?"

"That I want to put my mouth on your shoulder where that collar is slipping." The words come out like they're being pulled. Low, strained, deliberate despite the supposed compulsion. "That I want to find out if you taste different when you've been wanting something. That you're sitting four feet away from me and it's too far."

You uncurl your legs from the chair. Place your bare feet on the floor. The distance between your chair and his is exactly the length of the kitchen table.

"Tell me," you say slowly, "what you think about when I'm not here."

His pupils dilate. You watch it happen.

"Specific or general?"

"No, specific."

He leans forward. Forearms on his knees. The posture should be casual but there's nothing casual about the way he's looking at you. "Tuesday. You left for work in that gray skirt, the one with the slit up the back. You kissed me goodbye and you tasted like the vanilla latte you'd been drinking and I stood at the window and watched you walk to your car and thought about pulling that skirt up."

Your breath catches.

"I thought about bending you over the kitchen counter. Right here. Pushing that skirt up around your waist and finding out what sounds you make when I take my time. I thought about it for twenty minutes after you left. I was late to training."

"Bucky." His name comes out thin.

"You asked." That phrase again. But this time there's a darkness in it, something that runs hot. "You want me to stop?"

"No." The word is out before you can think about it. "What else?"

He exhales through his nose. Controlled. Barely. "I think about your hands. The way you grip the sheets when you're close. The way you grab the back of my neck when you want me to kiss you harder. I think about the sound you make right before you come, that sound like you're surprised every time, like you can't believe it's happening, and I think about how I want to hear it over and over until you can't make any sound at all."

You're gripping the seat of your chair now. Your knuckles ache.

"I think about last Saturday," he says. "When you rode me on the couch. The way you looked. Your head tipped back and your mouth open and my shirt riding up your thighs because you'd stolen it again. The way you said my name."

The kitchen table is between you. Four feet of oak. It might as well be an ocean.

"What do you want to do to me?" you ask, hoarsely. "Right now?"

Bucky stands up.

The chair doesn't scrape. It just ceases to be beneath him as he rises with the fluid, deliberate motion of someone who moves through space like it owes him something. Two steps and he's in front of you, looking down, and the overhead light puts his face in sharp relief: the line of his jaw, the intensity of his eyes, the way his chest is moving faster than his expression would suggest.

He leans down. Hands on the arms of your chair, caging you in. His face is inches from yours.

"I want to take this shirt off you," he says, voice barely above a whisper. "Slowly, because you wearing my clothes does something to me I can't explain and I've been thinking about it since you opened the door. I want to pick you up and put you on that counter and find out how sensitive you are right now, because your pupils are blown and your breathing's changed and I can see your pulse in your throat and it's fast."

His mouth brushes your ear. "I want to make you come with my hands first because I want to feel it. Then with my mouth because I want to taste it. And then I want to fuck you so slowly that you forget every question you were going to ask, because the only word I want you to remember tonight is my name."

Your hand comes up and fists in the front of his jacket.

"Then do it."

He lifts you out of the chair like you weigh nothing.

Your legs wrap around his waist on instinct, arms looping his neck, and he carries you three steps to the counter before you pull back and say "No."

He stops. Instantly. Every muscle locked. "No?"

"Chair," you say. "Sit down."

Something shifts in his expression. Understanding, maybe. Surrender, definitely. He reverses course, sinks into his chair with you still wrapped around him, and now you're in his lap, knees bracketing his hips, looking down at him for the first time all night.

He's beautiful like this. Jaw tight, pupils blown, hands hovering at your waist like he's waiting for permission. The overhead light catches the planes of his face, and you think about all the times you've looked at him across conference tables and break rooms and crowded briefing halls, wanting exactly this. Proximity. Access. The ability to take his face in your hands, which is what you do now, tilting his chin up with your fingers.

"Rules," you say.

His throat bobs. "Rules."

"You can touch me." You drag your thumb across his lower lip and watch his eyes darken. "But you don't lead. You don't guide. You don't take over." You lean closer, mouth grazing his. "And you answer every question I ask."

"I couldn't lie right now if I wanted to." His voice is strained.

"I know." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "That's the point."

His hands settle on your waist. Light. Obedient. The restraint in his fingers, the controlled stillness of a man who could bench-press a truck choosing to hold you like glass, sends heat curling through your belly.

You kiss him properly. Slow, deliberate, your tongue sliding against his, and he groans into your mouth. One hand flexes on your hip, tightens, then consciously loosens. Following the rules you'd laid out.

You pull back. "What are you feeling right now?"

"Your weight in my lap." His reply is immediate and completely unfiltered. "Warm. The inside of your thighs against my hips. Your fingers on my jaw. My heartbeat in my throat." He swallows. "Want. A stupid amount of want."

You roll your hips. Just once, slow, testing, and his breath punches out of him.

"More specific," you murmur.

"I'm hard and you're right there and every time you move I can feel the heat of you through my jeans and it's making it very difficult to follow your rules." His hands are trembling on your waist. Fine, barely perceptible tremors. "I want to pull you down against me. I'm not going to, because you told me not to. But I want you to know the not doing it is costing me something."

"Good." You reach between you and pull his jacket off his shoulders. He helps, shrugging out of it, and then your hands are on the hem of his shirt and you're peeling it over his head.

You've seen him shirtless dozens of times. It doesn't matter. The topography of him still makes your mouth dry. Scarred skin and dense muscle and the gleaming juncture where vibranium meets flesh, and you flatten your palms against his chest and feel his heart slamming under your touch.

"My turn," you say, and pull the Henley over your head.

Nothing underneath. You hadn't bothered with a bra after your shower, which means you're bare from the waist up, and the sound Bucky makes is low and wrecked and involuntary.

"Tell me what you see," you say.

"You." The word comes out rough. "Your skin in this light. The mark I left on your ribs last week that's almost faded, and I want to put it back."

Your breath catches. His eyes drop to the spot in question, a faint yellow-green shadow above your hip, and his thumb finds it. Presses gently.

"Here," he says. "Right here. You made this sound when I did it. This gasp, like you weren't expecting it to feel good. I've been thinking about that sound for eight days straight."

You take his hand, lift it to your breast, press it flat. His fingers curve around you, metal cool against your skin, and a shiver runs through you. His thumb drags across your nipple and your hips roll forward involuntarily, grinding down against the hard line of him through denim.

"How long have you wanted this?" you ask, breathless. "Tonight. This specific thing."

"Since I loaded the syringe." His thumb circles, slow and maddening. "Before that. Since I decided to do this. I spent three days thinking about how it would go. Whether you'd ask the questions I needed you to ask. Whether you'd end up here." His free hand slides up your spine, fingers splaying between your shoulder blades, and even now he's not pulling you closer. Just touching. Mapping. "I hoped you'd end up here."

You reach down between your bodies and work his belt open. The metal clinks in the quiet kitchen. His stomach muscles jump when your knuckles brush them.

"Lift up," you tell him, and he does, hips rising just enough for you to drag his jeans and boxers down. He kicks them off, and then he's bare beneath you, hard and straining.

You stand just long enough to shed your own bottoms. His eyes track every movement, heavy-lidded, intent, and when you climb back into his lap the first press of skin against skin makes you both hiss.

You're wet. You've been wet since he started talking in that wrecked, helpless voice, and when you settle against him the slick heat of your cunt meets the hard length of him and his head drops back.

"Christ." His hands grip the sides of the chair. White-knuckled, both flesh and metal. "You feel—I can't—you're so warm and I can feel how wet you are and I need—"

"Need what?"

"You." His head comes back up. His eyes find yours. "Just you. Always you."

You rise onto your knees. Reach between your bodies and wrap your hand around his cock. He's hot and hard and his whole body shudders when you line him up against your entrance.

"Ask me," you whisper.

He understands. "Please."

You sink down.

Slowly. Inch by inch, letting gravity and your own slick heat do the work, and the stretch of him fills you so completely that the breath leaves your lungs in a rush. His jaw clenches. His hands abandon the chair and find your hips, fingers pressing in, but he doesn't pull. Doesn't guide. Just holds on.

"Tell me," you breathe when he's fully inside you. "Tell me what I feel like."

"Tight." The word grinds out of him. "Hot. Like you were made for—" He cuts off. Tries to stop. Can't. "—it's like coming home. Every time. That's what it feels like. Like I spent seventy years in the cold and you're the first warm thing I've ever felt."

Your eyes sting. You start to move.

Slow. Rolling your hips in a deliberate rhythm, taking him deep on each downstroke, savoring the way his face contorts. He's fighting himself. You can see it. Every instinct in his body wants to thrust up, to grab your hips and set his own pace, and he's holding back with the same iron discipline he brings to everything, all because you asked.

"What do you think about when you're inside me?" you ask, and your voice is barely steady.

"How you move." His breath is ragged. "Like right now, the way your stomach flexes when you roll forward. The sound you make at the bottom, that little catch. The way you get tighter when I say things like this, like the words themselves are doing something to you."

He's right. You clench around him involuntarily and he groans, fingers digging into your hips hard enough to bruise.

"I think about making you come," he continues, and his filter truly has dissolved entirely. "I think about it constantly. At dinner, in the field, in the shower at 6 AM. What angle, what speed, what words. I catalog everything that works. I have a mental file on what makes you fall apart and I add to it every time we're together."

You're trembling. Your thighs burn with the effort of maintaining this rhythm, slow and grinding, and the pressure is building, coiling tight.

"Bucky..."

"The way you say my name." His voice breaks on it. "Right there. That tone. Nobody's ever said my name the way you do. Like it belongs to someone worth wanting."

You lean forward and kiss him, messy and desperate, hips never stilling. His hands slide up your back and pull you closer, chest to chest, and the change in angle drives him deeper and you gasp into his mouth.

"What do you want right now?" you ask against his lips.

"To tell you something I should've said weeks ago." His forehead presses against yours. "I've been trying. Every morning in your kitchen and every night in your bed I've been trying to get it out and I keep choking on it because I'm terrified."

Your rhythm falters. "Terrified of what?"

"That saying it makes it real, and real things—"

"—can be taken away." You finish it for him. Your hands cradle his face. "I know. I know."

"But it's already real." His voice is raw, scraped down to bedrock. "It's been real for months."

"So tell me." You're barely moving now, bodies intertwined, your foreheads pressed together and your breath shared. "Tell me, Bucky."

He looks at you. And you watch every wall, every defense, every carefully maintained barrier come down at once. Like a building demolition. Like controlled collapse. Everything falling inward to leave clear ground.

"I love—"

"—I love you." It tears out of you first. Unplanned, uncontrolled, ripped from the exact place where you've been keeping it locked for weeks. Your eyes are blurring and your voice is cracked and you say it again because once isn't enough, because the dam is broken now. "I love you. I love you, I've been so scared to say it, I've been pulling away because I was afraid you couldn't—"

—he surges up and kisses you. Hard, bruising, both hands in your hair, and the careful restraint he's been maintaining all night shatters. His hips snap up into you and you cry out against his mouth.

"I love you," he says between kisses, between thrusts, his voice wrecked and fierce. "I love you, I've loved you since you stood up in that press room and told a man twice your size that his question was inappropriate and your hands were shaking but your voice wasn't. I loved you when you brought muffins to a briefing. I loved you when you walked into a wall because I held a door. I loved you when you told a room full of mercenaries about my blueberries because even drugged out of your mind the only secret you had was me."

He's fucking up into you now with purpose, one arm banded around your waist, the other gripping the back of the chair for leverage. The rhythm is punishing and deep and every thrust drives the breath from you.

"I love you when you steal my shirts." His mouth moves down your throat. "I love you when you hum. I love you when you sleep. I love you when you lie and say you're fine because even your lies are about protecting me and I don't deserve—"

"—no, you deserve," you gasp, grinding down to meet each thrust. "You deserve everything, you deserve the words, you deserve—"

"You." His arm tightens. "Just you. That's everything."

The orgasm builds like a wave, like pressure against a wall, like something too big to contain. You're holding his face in your hands and he's looking at you, right at you, no walls left, nothing hidden. Just his eyes, wide and wet and full of something so vast it terrifies you.

"I love you," you say again, and his jaw flexes, and his hips stutter, and you feel him swell inside you.

"Come with me." It's not a question and it's not a command and it's not a compulsion. It's a request, from the most honest voice he has.

You shatter.

It rolls through you, deep, total, pulling every muscle taut, and you bury your face in his neck and shake apart. You feel him follow. His arms crush you against him and he groans your name, the one that belongs to a different vocabulary, and spills into you with a shudder that runs through his whole body.

For a long time, there is only breathing.

Your face is wet. His shoulder is wet where your face has been pressed. You're not sure when you started crying and you're not sure you've stopped. His hand is in your hair, moving in slow strokes, and his chest rises and falls beneath you in a rhythm that gradually steadies.

"Hey," he whispers.

You lift your head. He looks wrecked. Beautiful. Open in a way you've never seen, the last of his architecture dismantled, and what's underneath is just a man who loves you. That's all. That's everything.

"Hi," you say.

He traces the tear tracks on your cheeks with his thumb. Flesh hand. Warm, calloused, impossibly gentle. "You okay?"

You laugh. It comes out watery and broken. "Yeah. Really okay. The most okay."

"Good." He kisses your forehead. Your temple. The bridge of your nose. "For the record, I didn't need the drug."

Your brow furrows. "What?"

"To say it. I didn't need the drug. I just needed you to believe it when I did." He tucks your hair behind your ear. "The drug was for you, not for me."

You think about this. About the vial and the syringe and the way he sat down in your kitchen chair and said ask me anything. About the elaborate architecture of permission he built so you'd trust the answer to the one question you were terrified to ask.

"You're a very strategic person," you tell him.

"Tactical vulnerability," he agrees.

You laugh again, less broken this time. He pulls you closer, shifts so your weight settles more comfortably in his lap, and you wince slightly at the movement.

"Sore?" he murmurs.

"Worth it."

He stands, still holding you, carrying you the way he did at the start of the night, and takes you to the bedroom. Lays you down. Disappears into the bathroom and comes back with a warm cloth, cleaning you up with careful hands.

You watch him from the pillows. "You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The taking-care-of-me thing."

"I always do the taking-care-of-you thing."

"I know." You catch his hand when he's done, press your lips to his knuckles. "I love you."

The smile that breaks across his face is the most unguarded thing you've ever seen him produce. "Say it again."

"I love you."

"Again."

"I love you, you impossible, dramatic, tactically vulnerable lunatic."

He drops next to you in bed and pulls you against his chest, both arms locked around you like he's defending the perimeter, and you feel his lips move against your hair when he says it back. Quietly, like a secret that's no longer a secret.

"I love you."

Then, after a pause, he says, "I'm going to fill your water glass."

"You don't have to."

"Yeah, I know. I want to."

Bucky really did feel it hit him.

A warm bloom at the injection site, spreading up through the vein, reaching for his brain with chemical fingers. Sodium thiopental. The same compound that turned you into a forty-five-minute monologue about blueberries and forearms in a warehouse three months ago.

For you, it had lasted hours. For him? It lasted about... six seconds.

Then the serum in his blood burned it out of his system with the brutal efficiency of a system designed to neutralize poisons, toxins, and everything in between. By the time he sat down in your kitchen chair and said ask me something you already know the answer to, he would've passed a drug test with flying colours. His mind was sharp. Every synapse firing exactly the way it always did, free of compulsion.

He knew that would happen. He'd confirmed it with Bruce two days ago, framed as a hypothetical. If someone with the serum were exposed to sodium thiopental, how fast would the metabolism clear it? Bruce had looked at him over the rim of his glasses and said almost immediately and then asked why he wanted to know, and Bucky had said curiosity and left before the follow-up questions started.

He could have stopped every single answer that you coaxed out of him.

He chose not to.

Bucky shifts onto his side, careful not to disturb the arm you've slung across his chest. You're deep under, breathing slow, face slack with the particular peace of someone who got the answer they needed. Your fingers are curled loosely against his sternum, right above his heart, and he covers them with his own.

The truth is simple. He'd rehearsed every answer. He knew which questions you'd start with and which ones you'd build toward, because he knows you, because knowing you is the thing he's best at, better than fieldwork, better than the rifle, better than any skill HYDRA ever burned into his bones.

He knew you needed to believe that he couldn't lie. Because you'd spent weeks building a case against yourself, constructing an argument that wanting the words made you selfish, and no amount of voluntary honesty was going to dismantle something that fortified. You had to think the answers were compelled so you could trust them completely. So the part of your brain that interrogates everything, that qualifies and second-guesses and builds escape routes, would finally stand down.

You needed him to tell that one little lie, and it was the only one he told tonight.

Pressing closer, you murmur something in your sleep, your nose finding the hollow of his throat. He tightens his arm around you in response, and presses his mouth to the top of your head.

"No, no trouble at all," you say quickly, pulling her into a hug. You can feel the delicate bones of her back through her pajamas. "It's just a check-up. A special one. We'll get to ride in Aunt Peggy's fancy car."

She pulls back, her suspicious gaze moving from you to Steve. Your daughter is too smart for this; she knows something isn't right.

She gets that from her father, you can't help but think. That sharp, perceptive look that sees right through a well-meaning lie. Bucky had always been able to read you the same way, his blue eyes missing nothing, even when he was teasing you.

"Can I bring Mr. Bearington?" she asks softly, her small voice pulling you from the thought. She clutches the worn stuffed bear—a gift from Steve on her fifth birthday, and one she hasn't been separated from since.

Your chest aches to see it. "Of course you can, sweet pea," you say, your voice thick with something akin to grief. "Mr. Bearington should definitely come along."

"And... how long are we going to be gone?" Jamie asks, her voice small and threaded with a child's inherent anxiety about the disruption of routine. She's clutching Mr. Bearington so tightly, his button eyes seem to bulge out.

"Only for the night, sweetheart," you assure her, smoothing a hand over her sleep-tousled hair. The lie tastes like ash, but you coat it in a mother's certainty.

"Okay." She nods, a little mollified, her concern shifting to the practical. "I don't want to miss any school. We're starting a new art project on Monday."

You smile, somehow, a genuine, aching bloom of love for this good, normal child who is worrying about crayons and construction paper while her world is being quietly dismantled around her. "You won't miss a thing," you promise, the words a fragile shield you desperately hope will hold.

You rise back to your feet, your knees feeling weak. The floral pattern on the wallpaper seems to swim for a moment. You turn to look at Steve, who is watching the exchange with a heartbreak so profound it seems to have carved new lines into his face. "Can you help her pack?" you ask him, softly. The request is as much for him as it is for you; a concrete task to keep him grounded in this storm. "I... I'll go get a bag ready for us."

He gives a jerky nod, his eyes saying everything his voice cannot. As you step out into the hallway, you hear him begin to speak to Jamie, his tone forced into a cheerful cadence. "Alright, kiddo, let's find your good dress. The blue one with the little flowers. And some sturdy shoes."

You walk into your own bedroom, the door clicking shut behind you muffling their voices. The room is exactly as you left it this morning—your book open on the nightstand, Steve's sketchbook on his dresser, and the bed neatly made.

The moment you are alone, you let yourself break. Your vision swims with tears, and you can't help but bury your face in your hands. A sob catches in your chest, strangled and wrenching, the kind that comes from a place deeper than grief, a place of sheer, unadulterated terror. The solid floor beneath your feet feels like it's made of glass, and you are falling through it.

Alive.

The word echoes in the hollow of your skull, a ghost rattling its chains. For ten years, you have built a life on his absence. You learned the contours of that loss, the specific weight of it. You folded his memory away like a precious, painful letter, to be taken out on anniversaries and quiet nights when missing him was a dull, familiar ache. Now, that certainty has crumbled.

What if he is out there? What if he has been out there all this time, hurt, changed, and used as a weapon? The thought is a physical sickness. And Jamie... your sweet, fierce Jamie, who has his smile and his stubborn chin and now, apparently, something more. Something dangerous left behind in her blood by a monster in a lab.

Gasping for air, your shoulders shake. The tears come for the husband you mourned, who might be a ghost in a different way than you ever imagined. For your daughter, whose childhood innocence was shattered along with the bay window today. For yourself, for the woman who now has to be strong enough to face a truth that could destroy everything you'd believed to be true and real.

The sound of Steve's and Jamie's muffled voices from down the hall pulls you back. You can't fall apart. Not now. Wiping your face roughly with the heels of your hands, you take deep, shuddering breaths before walking to your dresser. Your reflection in the mirror shows red-rimmed eyes and a pale face.

You scrub at your eyes again, taking a fortifying breath before you move to fetch one of Steve's good bags, the ones the army issued him a lifetime ago. The simple task of preparing an overnight bag for the two of you is good. It's normal. You fold one of his shirts, the fabric soft from countless washes, and catch the faint scent of his cologne still clinging to the collar. You place it carefully in the bag. Next, a sturdy skirt for you, a nightgown, and your toothbrushes. Each mundane item is something solid to hold on to, a reminder of the life you are desperately trying to protect.

From the hallway, you hear Jamie's voice again, though clearer now. "Daddy, why does Aunt Peggy need a doctor to look at me? Is it 'cause I broke the windows with the ball?"

You freeze, your hand hovering over a hairbrush, listening intently.

Steve's reply is measured and patient. "It's just to make sure everything's working right after such a big scare, honey. Sometimes, when our bodies get really surprised, they do things we don't expect. The doctor just wants to check that you're A-okay."

"Oh." She pauses. "Will it hurt?"

"Probably just a little pinch," Steve explains, his voice thick with a lie he clearly hates. "Like when you get a shot. But you're brave. You can handle a pinch, can't you?"

"I guess so." Her voice is small, but resigned.

You close the bag, the clasp clicking shut with a sound of finality. One last look around the bedroom takes in the life you and Steve have built—a life of quiet mornings and shared coffee, of Jamie's drawings on the fridge, of a grief that had finally settled into a bearable quiet. It all feels impossibly fragile now, a diorama that a single breath could scatter.

Moving towards the bedroom door, ready to leave, you stop. Sitting on your vanity is the box where you've kept all of Bucky's letters, these past ten years. Both the ones he had sent you, and the ones you'd written to him, posthumously, were your way of trying to cope with the grief.

Drifting away from the door, you open that box with hands that are surprisingly steady, taking the careful bundle of letters and wrapping it in a silk handkerchief before carefully nestling it in the overnight bag, too.

It feels wrong to leave them behind now.

Picking up the bag once more, you finally do open the door and step back into the hallway. Steve is standing by Jamie's door, his face a mask of strained calm. He's holding one of your daughter's hands. The other is currently pressing Mr. Bearington to her chest. She's wearing a simple, practical little dress now, with good, sturdy shoes.

And she's looking up at Steve with so much trust that it makes your chest ache. In her eyes, he is not Captain America, not a war hero, not a man burdened by impossible secrets. He is simply Daddy, the steady mountain in her world. The sight of them together, a united front against the coming unknown, solidifies something inside you.

Regardless of whether or not Bucky is alive... This man is a part of your family. He's the one who helped Jamie take her first steps. Who cried when she managed to squeak out papa and then mama. Who can't help but try to give her the world. The love you feel for him in this moment is a different creature than the breathless, wartime passion you had for Bucky—it is deeper, weathered, built brick by brick through years of shared joy and quiet grief. It is a love that has become your foundation.

He meets your gaze over the top of Jamie's head, and you see the same fierce, protective devotion reflected in his eyes. It's a silent pact, renewed in the dim hallway light. Whatever comes next, you will face it together. For her.

"All set?" he asks, his voice low.

You nod, hefting the bag. "All set."

The three of you descend the stairs, a sombre little procession. You pause only to grab your coat from the hook by the door. As Steve turns the knob, the cool night air rushes in, carrying the distant sounds of the city. It feels like stepping off a cliff.

Peggy's car is idling at the curb, a sleek, dark shape under the streetlamp. She gets out as you approach, opening the rear door with a quiet efficiency.

"Hi, Aunt Peggy," Jamie chirps shyly, clinging a little tighter to Steve's hand as they approach the car. She's only met Peggy Carter on a few occasions; those rare times when Captain America's family being trotted out for the spotlight had coincided with an event she'd attended. To Jamie, Peggy is a figure from a glamorous, distant world of grown-up importance, someone who wears sharp coats and has a car that purrs like a contented cat.

Peggy's stern expression softens into a genuine, warm smile. "Hello, my dear," she says, her voice losing its official edge. "It's lovely to see you, even under such peculiar circumstances. I hear you're being very brave tonight." She gestures into the spacious back seat. "Shall we? It's a bit of a drive, but I've been told the seats are quite comfortable."

Jamie allows Steve to help her into the car, scrambling onto the plush leather and immediately settling Mr. Bearington into the seat beside her with practiced care. You slide in next to your daughter, placing the overnight bag at your feet. The interior of the car smells of polished leather and cedar, a world away from the familiar scent of home.

Steve hesitates outside the door, his broad frame silhouetted against the light from your house. He looks back at the brownstone, at the warm glow in the windows, shattered front and all, as if memorizing it. Then he climbs into the passenger seat beside Peggy, pulling the door shut with a solid, muffled thud that seems to seal your fate.

Peggy catches your eye in the rearview mirror. Her gaze is steady, reassuring. "Everyone comfortable?" she asks, her tone deliberately light.

"Yes, thank you, Peggy," you say, your voice surprisingly steady. You reach over and take Jamie's small hand in yours. It's warm and trusting, and your thumb worries over her small knuckles.

As the car pulls away from the curb, you don't look back. The brownstone recedes in the darkness, its warm light fading as Peggy turns the corner. Jamie's breathing has already begun to even out beside you, her small hand still clasped in yours. The city sounds swell around you—distant horns, the rumble of late-night traffic, and the hum of the engine beneath.

You don't look back, so you don't see the living shadow detaching itself from the alleyway across from your building, after you leave, either.

You nodded, pulling the straps of your own tactical vest tight. The fabric pulled uncomfortably against your healing shoulder, a sharp reminder of the stakes. You slid a compact pistol into the holster at your thigh.

The Soldier turned to you, his blue-grey eyes searching yours. His hand came up, his thumb brushing a stray strand of hair from your cheek. It was a gesture so tender it felt out of place amidst the grim preparation.

Neither of you said what you were both thinking. This might be the last time. Fury's contingency sat there, unspoken—a weight neither of you could name. If Pierce got the words out—if the Soldier became the asset again—

—you couldn't finish the thought. You wouldn't.

"Do not take risks." The words scraped out of him, meant only for you. His thumb lingered against your cheek, and you saw it there, unmistakable—the way he was already bracing for the worst.

"You either," you whispered back. Your hand came up to cover his, pressing his palm against your face for one selfish, stolen moment. "Come back to me."

His mouth pressed into a flat line. He didn't promise. He couldn't. But his forehead dipped to yours, a brief, fierce press of skin, and you felt him breathe you in like he was memorizing the feel of you.

Then he pulled away. A curt nod was his only reply. He turned and strode toward the second SUV without a backward glance, sliding into the passenger seat beside Steve. The door slammed shut with a sound of finality.

You watched the vehicle until Steve pulled it out of the hangar, until the taillights disappeared around the corner. Your chest felt hollow, scraped out.

Come back to me.

Natasha opened the passenger door of the lead SUV for you. "Let's go ruin a banker's day," she said, a grim smile touching her lips.

You took one last look at the other vehicle, then slid inside.

Natasha hopped in the driver's seat. "Gear's loaded in the back," she explained. "Have you ever shot a rifle?"

"No. Only handguns."

"You'll be my spotter, then." The Black Widow tossed you a scope, which you caught with only a slight fumble. She put the SUV in drive, rolling it out of the hangar with the kind of smooth efficiency you'd come to expect from her. "I know what Kruger looks like, but you'll need to confirm it."

You looked down at the scope and nodded. "I can do that."

"Good." Natasha leaned over and flicked the radio on; Happy by Pharrell Williams filled the cabin. You blinked.

The Widow just shrugged. "What? It's a bit of a drive. I'm not interested in spending it in brooding silence, which, by the way, you've definitely mastered."

"Thank you. I think." You muttered, setting the scope down in the cupholder and crossing your arms.

The drive into the heart of Washington, D.C., was surreal. The early morning sun cast a golden glow over the city; people were heading out for coffee and going for jogs. Life was carrying on, completely unaware that in a few hours, helicarriers might rise into this very sky to decide their fates.

Natasha drove with an almost preternatural calm, one hand on the wheel, the other tapping the rhythm of the song against her leg. She didn't seem bothered by your silence.

After a while, she reached over and turned the music down slightly. "He's stronger than you think, you know," she said, her eyes on the road. "And so are you."

You looked at her, surprised by the sudden seriousness.

"I've seen plenty of people completely ruined, by a lot less than what you two have been through," she continued. "So the fact that you can still worry about his future, and that he can still worry about yours... that's not a weakness."

"Captain America is concerned by it," you mutter, trying not to sound bitter.

Natasha huffed. "Yeah, well, Steve's concerned about anything and everything; it's practically chronic for him." Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. "For what it's worth, I know what it takes, to survive impossible things. What it can do to some people, it's not pretty. Maybe you and the Soldier aren't pretty." She shrugged. "But who wants something pretty, anyway?"

She turned the music back up, leaving you to your thoughts as she navigated the morning traffic with practiced ease. The song's upbeat melody felt like a bizarre counterpoint to the grim mission ahead.

Eventually, she pulled the SUV into a multi-story parking garage adjacent to the Ideal Federal Savings Bank. The place was as imposing as its name, a grand, old stone building that looked more like a fortress than a bank.

Natasha killed the engine, and the cheerful music cut off. She turned to you, her expression all business once more.

"Kruger needs to be at the Triskelion for the launch at 8 AM, sharp," she explained. She nodded towards the SUV's clock, which read 7:15. "With traffic this morning, it's a thirty-minute drive. Meaning she'll be coming out of the building in exactly fifteen minutes, ten if she wants to be early."

"She will want to be early," you muttered, mostly to yourself. "She values punctuality."

The Black Widow merely nodded. "Then let's not waste time."

You grabbed the scope and stepped out of the SUV. Natasha popped the trunk, hauling out a nondescript-looking duffel bag and slinging it over her shoulder. "C'mon," she jerked her chin. "We're heading to the top. Find our vantage point."

Tightening your grip on the spotting scope, you nodded and followed.

The access stairwell of the parking garage was dim and smelled of concrete and stale air. Natasha moved silently ahead of you, her footsteps making no sound. You followed, your own movements a little less graceful, the strap of the scope digging into your palm.

The rooftop was flat and gravel-covered and offered a perfect, unobstructed view of the bank's main entrance across the street. The grand, columned façade looked quiet, dormant. A single black sedan was idling at the curb, a driver visible behind the wheel.

Natasha dropped the duffel bag with a soft thump and unzipped it. Inside was a disassembled sniper rifle, along with several magazines. She began putting it together with a speed and precision that was almost hypnotic. In under a minute, the weapon was assembled—a sleek, deadly piece of machinery.

She settled into a prone position behind the low parapet wall, nestling the rifle's stock against her shoulder. She peered through the scope, her breathing evening out into a slow, controlled rhythm.

"Scope." One word. No inflection.

You moved to her side and crouched low, lifting the spotting scope to your eye, the world magnifying into sharp, crystalline detail. You scanned the bank's entrance, the sidewalk, and the idling car. Your heart hammered against your ribs, a frantic counter-rhythm to her stillness.

The seconds ticked by, marked only by the distant hum of the city waking up. Then, the bank's heavy brass doors swung open.

A woman stepped out. Tall and severe, with her blonde hair pulled back into a tight bun. She wore a sharp, expensive-looking pantsuit and carried a slim briefcase. It was her. Dr. Ilsa Kruger.

"Target confirmed." The words barely made it past your teeth. "It's her."

Natasha didn't respond. Her finger rested lightly on the trigger guard.

But then you froze up when a second shadow stepped out from behind her.

It was Dr. Voss.

The world tilted. For a nauseating instant, you weren't on a rooftop in Washington. You were strapped to a table in a concrete room, and his hands were on you—clinical, unhurried, taking notes while you screamed. Increase the voltage. Let's see how much the tissue can tolerate.

His voice. His calm, measured voice while your nerves burned, while they cut away pieces of you.

You hadn't known he would be here. But it made sense—the two of them always seemed to be lurking in each other's shadow. You had not seen him in months. Not since Romania, when you'd been too weak, too drugged, and too broken to do anything but survive.

You weren't weak now.

Bile rose in the back of your throat. Your fingers trembled—not with fear, but with something older and colder. The scope shook in your grip.

Natasha didn't notice. She just exhaled, and calmly put a bullet in Ilsa Kruger's head.

The street below exploded into chaos when the blonde doctor collapsed in a truly magnificent spray of blood and viscera, and you dropped the spotter's scope. That made Natasha glance over. "What are you—"

You didn't hear the rest of what she was asking.

The mission didn't matter. Kruger was dead. The objective was complete. But Voss was right there, stumbling on the sidewalk, alive and breathing and free after everything he'd done to you. After all the nights you'd woken screaming with his voice in your head.

Something snapped.

Like a trap springing open.

And you jumped from the parking garage roof.

A bullet was too impersonal for Voss. Too clean. Too quick. He deserved to see your face. He deserved to know exactly who was ending him.

You'd kill him yourself.

Yours wasn't a controlled descent. It was a desperate, gravity-fuelled plunge toward the street below. The wind tore at your clothes, your hair whipping across your face. Four stories. Your enhanced physiology screamed at the impact, a jolt of pure, shattering force that travelled up your legs and stole the air from your lungs. The asphalt cracked beneath your feet.

Rising from a crouch, your vision swam for a second, before sharpening with predatory focus.

Voss had stumbled back, his briefcase forgotten on the sidewalk. He was fumbling for something inside his suit jacket—a sidearm. His eyes, wide with terror, locked on you.

"You..." he breathed, the word a disbelieving gasp.

You were on him before the pistol cleared his holster. Your hand, driven by a hatred so pure it felt like clarity, closed around his wrist. The bones crunched under your grip. He screamed, a high, shrill sound that was immensely satisfying.

The driver of the sedan was shouting, reaching for his own weapon. You ignored him. Voss was yours.

You drove your knee into his gut, doubling him over. Then, grabbing a handful of his impeccably styled silver hair, you slammed his face into the hood of the idling sedan. Once. Twice. The metal dented. Blood splattered across the pristine black paint.

A shot rang out.

You whipped around in time to see an agent in heavy tactical gear drop like a rock as soon as he'd emerged from the shadows of the bank entrance. Natasha, you realized grimly. She was covering for you the best she could, but you were running out of time.

The driver of the sedan finally got his door open, raising his own pistol. You didn't give him the chance. Still holding the dazed Voss by his shattered wrist, you pivoted and used him as a human shield, shoving him bodily into the open car door. The driver's shot went wide, punching into the sedan's roof.

With a snarl, you released Voss, letting him slump against the car, and lunged for the driver. Your hand closed around the barrel of his pistol, wrenching it upward. His finger was still on the trigger. The gun fired again, the bullet shattering the driver's side window.

You drove your forehead into his nose. Cartilage gave way with a wet crunch. He cried out, his grip on the weapon loosening. You ripped the pistol from his hand, reversed your grip, and cracked the butt into his temple. He went limp, sliding down into the foot well.

The world went muffled, your ears still ringing from the gunshots—broken only by Voss's ragged breathing and the distant wail of sirens.

You turned back to him. He was trying to push himself upright, blood streaming from his broken nose and a deep gash on his forehead. His eyes, filled with a mixture of terror and fury, met yours.

"Y-You monster," he spat, the words garbled by blood.

"No," you replied. The calm in your own voice surprised you. You knelt in front of him, the stolen pistol hanging loosely in your hand. "You're the monster. I am only what you made me become."

His eyes widened, the terror finally overwhelming the fury. He scrambled backward, his fine suit scraping against the asphalt, leaving a smear of blood. "Please... the data... my research... it doesn't have to be lost!"

You watched him crawl, a cold, detached part of you noting the sheer patheticness of the man who had presided over your torment with such clinical arrogance. The pistol felt heavy and right in your hand.

"We are done with your research."

You raised the pistol, aiming it squarely between his eyes. His pleading turned into a choked sob.

A sharp whistle cut through the air from above. Your gaze snapped upward. Natasha was leaning over the parapet, her expression urgent. She pointed emphatically down the street. The sirens were getting closer. She gestured for you to move.

You looked back at Voss, at the sheer, undiluted cowardice in his face. Part of you wanted this so badly your trigger finger twitched.

But another part—quieter, colder—whispered that this wasn't enough. A bullet to the brain wouldn't undo what he'd done. It wouldn't give you back the years, the screaming, or the pieces of yourself he'd carved away. It would just be over. And he didn't deserve the mercy of it being over.

The sirens wailed closer. Natasha was right. HYDRA wasn't finished. The Soldier was still out there, still at risk. And you had promised him—come back to me.

You lowered the pistol. Voss whimpered in relief, slumping against the car tire.

You leaned down, close to his ear, your voice a venomous whisper. "Run, Doctor. Run and hide. Because when this is over, I will come for you. And I won't be this merciful, next time."

You stood, turned your back on him, and sprinted for the alley Natasha had indicated. The sound of his ragged, grateful sobs followed you, a bitter soundtrack to your escape.

Natasha was there in the alleyway when you hit it, the rifle slung over her shoulder, her expression hard. "What the hell were you thinking?" She demanded. "We're going to have S.T.R.I.K.E. all over our ass in five minutes. HYDRA probably saw you on the cameras."

"Voss was with her," you explained, through gritted teeth. "The other doctor, the one who worked with me."

Natasha's expression didn't soften, but the hard edge in her eyes shifted from pure anger to a cold, calculating assessment. "And you decided a public execution was the best way to handle that?"

"He deserved much worse than a bullet from a rooftop," you shot back, the adrenaline still singing in your veins, making your hands shake. "He deserved to see it coming."

"He's alive," Natasha stated. "Which means he can talk. Which means he's a liability." She glanced back toward the street, the sirens growing louder. "We need to move. Now."

She turned and began moving swiftly down the alley, her movements fluid and silent. You fell into step behind her, the stolen pistol a dead weight in your grip.

"I'm sorry," you said after a moment, the words tasting bitter. "I... I lost control."

Natasha didn't look back. "Control is a luxury we don't have today. Save it for the people who matter." She paused at the end of the alley, peering around the corner before gesturing for you to follow. "We can't loop back to the garage. They'll be expecting that."

As you moved through the backstreets, putting distance between yourselves and the bank, Natasha spoke again, her tone quieter. "Kruger's dead. That was the primary objective. Voss is a loose end, but he's a scared loose end. Scared men make mistakes." She glanced at you. "And now he knows you're coming for him. That might be useful."

You didn't answer. The cold fury that had propelled you was ebbing, leaving behind a hollow, sick feeling. You'd wanted to feel his life end under your hands. And part of you was disgusted with how much you'd wanted it.

"For the record," Natasha said, finally. "I probably would've done the same thing. But it was still a stupid thing to do."

"I know."

"Good. I'll be reminding you of that fact, when we're turned into grease spots on a D.C. highway," the Widow replied dryly, nodding towards an unattended, nondescript sedan up the road. "We'll take that."

You looked over at her. "I don't know how to steal a car," you admitted, and only realized after the fact how idiotic that sounded.

Natasha gave you a look that was equal parts exasperation and amusement. "You can leap off a four-story building, beat a man near to death with your bare hands, but you can't hot wire a car?"

"Priorities were different in the Soldier's curriculum," you muttered, feeling a flush of embarrassment.

She shook her head, a faint smirk touching her lips. "Yeah, okay. Stand watch."

While you kept an eye on the mouth of the alley, Natasha knelt by the driver's side door of the sedan. She pulled a small multi-tool from a pouch on her belt, jimmied the lock open in seconds, and slid inside. A moment later, there was a spark under the dashboard, the engine coughed to life, and she was unlocking the passenger door for you.

"Get in," she said, already adjusting the seat and mirrors with practiced ease. You slid into the passenger seat, and Natasha pulled the sedan smoothly into the early morning traffic, blending in instantly.

"Where are we going?" you asked, watching the cityscape roll by.

"Triskelion. The boys need our help."

"Are they in danger?" Your heart crawled into your throat, but Natasha just huffed.

"No. But I know Rogers, and I'm getting to know Wilson." She gave you a side-eye. "So they'll need our help."

"Oh." You relaxed only minutely, at that. Hitting the gas, the little sedan jumped forward, immediately merging into traffic as Natasha wove through the roads of D.C., heading for the highway.

For a few moments, it almost looked like you were in the clear.

Blood drips from your split lip onto the mat. You don't wipe it. Wiping it would be a tell—would signal that you're aware of the injury, that it's affecting you. The Asset would see it. The instructors on the observation deck would note it. Neither outcome serves you.

"Again," he orders.

His voice is flat. Not cruel, but certainly not kind. Just... operational. Like the word is a function being executed rather than a command being given.

You reset your stance. Your left foot forward, weight distributed, hands up and waiting. Your left shoulder is screaming—you landed on it wrong twenty minutes ago and something shifted that shouldn't have—but you keep your guard even.

He comes at you without warning.

The first strike you block. The second. The third clips your ribs and you feel something crack, a small wet sound inside your chest that you file away for later. The fourth you redirect, using his momentum to spin out of range, buying yourself half a second of breathing room.

He doesn't let you have it.

His metal hand catches your wrist and twists, and suddenly you're airborne, the ceiling spinning past, and then the mat slams into your back hard enough to empty your lungs.

You don't stay down. Staying down is death. Staying down is for the other girls, the ones who washed out, the ones who went to the infirmary and never came back. You roll, get your feet under you, come up swinging.

He blocks it. Of course he does.

"Sloppy," he says bluntly. "You're favouring your left side."

You don't answer. Answering would be an admission. Instead you adjust your stance, redistribute your weight to compensate for the shoulder, and wait for him to come again.

He does.

The next exchange lasts eleven seconds. You count them in your head—one of the few things that's still yours, the counting, the quiet catalog of data that runs underneath everything else. Eleven seconds of blocking and redirecting and trying to find an opening that doesn't exist.

He puts you on the mat again. This time your vision whites out for three seconds when you hit.

"Get up."

And you get up.

The observation deck is dark, but you can feel them all watching. Two instructors, maybe three. They're evaluating. They're always evaluating. Every session with the Asset is a test, and the passing grade is your survival.

You've been passing for six months. Some nights you're not sure if that makes you lucky, or cursed.

The Asset resets to neutral. Feet shoulder-width apart, hands loose at his sides, face utterly blank. The arm gleams under the fluorescent lights—the only part of him that looks like what he actually is.

"Your breathing is irregular. Control it."

You control it. Four counts in, four counts out. The cracked rib protests but you don't let it show on your face.

He watches you. Those eyes—pale, empty, like someone scooped out whatever used to live behind them and left only the machinery—track across your stance, your hands, your center of gravity. Reading you the way you can't read him.

"Better."

It's not praise. Praise doesn't exist here. It's an assessment. A data point. You've moved from inadequate to acceptable and that's all the acknowledgment of it you're going to get.

He comes at you again.

This time you last fourteen seconds before you hit the mat.

Which is progress.

The session ends at precisely 04:15, on the dot.

You're still standing. Barely. Your left shoulder is definitely dislocated now, and the cracked rib has company—two more, maybe three, you'll know for certain when the adrenaline wears off and the pain comes back online. Blood is drying on your chin, your lip swelling where it had split, after he'd punched you square in the face.

At least he hadn't broken your nose. That was something.

The Asset stands three feet away, watching you. He's not even breathing hard. "Report to medical," he orders. "You have four hours before the next session."

You nod. Speaking would require energy you don't have.

He turns to go. The instructors are already filing out of the observation deck, their clipboards full of notes you'll never see. Another session logged. Another night survived.

You should move. You should get to medical, get the shoulder reset, get taped up before the next round. That's the protocol. That's what a good Widow does.

But the Asset pauses at the door.

He doesn't turn around. Doesn't look at you. Just... stops. For three seconds—you count them—he stands there, metal hand on the frame, and something in the line of his shoulders shifts. Not much. Anyone else would miss it.

You don't miss it.

Then he's gone, and you're alone on the training floor with your blood on the mat and four hours until you have to do this again.

You start walking toward medical.

The hallway is empty—always empty at this hour, the other Widows in their bunks, the instructors gone to wherever instructors go when they're not watching you bleed. You're halfway to the infirmary when you hear the footsteps behind you.

You don't turn around. You don't have to, because you know exactly who it is who's following.

His hand closes around your arm—the good one, not the dislocated shoulder, which is a small mercy—and he pulls you sideways into the nearby equipment room. The door clicks shut, and the lock snicks into place.

There's no cameras in here. You know this because he'd made you map the blind spots in the facility your second week here, filing them away under potentially useful. You never thought about why until he first shoved you against the wall in one of them and you understood exactly what kind of useful he meant.

It's strange. He doesn't do this with the other Widows. Just you. Just you and him in locked rooms and abandoned corridors, as if you'd both made some unspoken agreement about the things that happen in the dark.

The Asset doesn't say anything. He never does, not during this. His hands are already on you—metal fingers curling around your hip, flesh hand fisting in your hair, tilting your head back until you're looking at the ceiling instead of him.

He smells like gun oil and sweat and something colder underneath, something that isn't quite human.

You should fight. You're trained to fight. Every instinct Madame drilled into you says resist, redirect, escape.

But you don't move.

One breath. Two. Your body makes the decision before your mind catches up, because his mouth is on your throat. Not gently—nothing about him is gentle—but not entirely brutal either. His teeth scrape over your pulse point, then his tongue drags salt and copper from your skin, following the line of dried blood from your split lip down to your jaw. He's tasting you. Cataloging you the same way he catalogs your weaknesses on the training floor.

Your palms flatten against his chest. The tactical vest is rough under your fingers, warmed by his body heat. You're not sure if you're pushing him away or pulling him closer. Neither is he. That's the thing about this—neither of you knows what it is, or what it means.

That uncertainty terrifies you more than the Madame ever did.

He spins you around. Your cheek hits the cold concrete wall and you hiss at the pressure on your split lip, but his hand is already between your shoulder blades, pinning you there, and his other hand—the metal one—is working the fastenings of your training suit.

"My shoulder," you warn flatly. It's the only protest you're going to make.

He pauses, and it lasts only a fraction of a second. Then his grip shifts, avoiding the dislocated joint, and he yanks the suit down to your waist.

The air is freezing against your bare skin. Goosebumps rise in its wake, nipples hardening from cold and something else, something your body knows even when your mind refuses to name it. You're shaking—not from the session anymore, not from exhaustion. From this. From him. From not knowing if this is something you want or something that's been programmed into you the same way combat sequences are programmed into him.

His metal hand traces the line of your spine. The plates are cold, inhumanly smooth, and you arch into it despite yourself, despite everything. The seam between two plates presses, just barely, against a bruise he left last week—a sharp reminder of what he is, what you're doing, and why you shouldn't want it.

And yet, here you are.

When he kicks your feet apart, you let him. Those metal fingers of his slide between your thighs, beneath the waistband of your underwear and find your cunt already soaked—slick and swollen, your body betraying you the way it always does with him. You don't know if it's fear or arousal or some fucked-up combination of both that the Red Room bred into you both.

You don't know if this is just the result of animal instinct or if there's something more to it.

You do know that he doesn't ask first before touching you—he never does.

The Asset starts with one finger first, circling your entrance patiently, as if he has all the time in the world. He waits, letting you feel the threat before he delivers on it. Then he pushes inside—two fingers, knuckle-deep—and your forehead hits the wall, a choked sound dying in your throat.

"Quiet," he growls. It's the first word he's spoken since this started.

You bite your already-split lip to keep the sound in. The taste of copper floods your mouth as the flesh rips anew. He doesn't care. His fingers are moving—rough, efficient, the same way he does everything—and you clench around them helplessly, body responding even when your mind is still trying to catch up.

He adds a third finger, and you gasp.

His flesh hand comes up to cover your mouth, immediately, and it squeezes tight in a silent warning across your face. Be quiet or we get caught. You know the calculus. You've done it before. Whatever this is, it will cease to exist if anyone sees you.

You nod against his palm and he takes his hand away. In the same motion, his metal fingers withdraw, despite the way your hips buck to keep them inside you. Wordlessly, he pushes those slick fingers past your lips and into your mouth, making you gag slightly.

"Clean."

The order is utterly degrading. But you've been trained to obey such orders without question, and so you do—tasting a heady mix of your own blood and essence and the metallic tang of his fingers. As you work, he yanks your suit and underwear both down and over your hips, baring your ass to the cool air.

You hear his zipper. The rustle of fabric. Then the head of his cock pressing against you, thick and blunt, and you brace your palms against the wall because you know what's coming.

He doesn't ease in. The Asset doesn't know how to ease into anything, you think.

The first inch burns. His metal fingers are still in your mouth and you bite down on them, but he doesn't stop. He pushes forward—slow, relentless, inevitable—and your body screams at the stretch but you take it. Inch by inch.

When he finally bottoms out, he stops. His hips flush against your ass, his cock so deep you swear you can feel him in your throat. His thumb strokes against your jawline in a gesture that's almost tender, even as your teeth dig into his artificial fingers hard enough to leave marks.

Two seconds. He gives you exactly two seconds to adjust.

Then he starts to move.

It's not kind. It's not cruel. It's necessary, somehow—that's the only word you can think of for it. Like both of you need this the way you need water or air, like the programming left a gap in both your heads, and this is the only thing that can possibly fill it.

His hips snap ruthlessly against your ass—the slap of skin on skin, the creak of his tactical gear, the slick sound of him fucking into you filling the little equipment room—and you bite down harder on his hand to keep from making noise. Your cracked ribs scream. Your dislocated shoulder screams. Everything screams except your mouth, which stays perfectly silent.

He fucks you like he fights you—relentless, mechanical, and utterly focused. Your fingers scrabble against concrete, nails scraping yet finding no purchase. That coil in your belly winds tighter and you hate it, hate how easily he can take you apart. Hate that your body responds to him even when your mind is screaming that this is wrong, so wrong, you shouldn't be doing this, neither of you should be doing this.

But you don't want him to stop. That's the worst part. You want him to break you open and leave you empty and do it again tomorrow night. You want this to be yours, even if nothing else is. You want him to be yours.

You push back against him—not to escape, to take him deeper. You control the angle now, grinding down on him, and he stalls for half a second—surprised, maybe, or just processing the new information—before his grip on your hip tightens and he meets you thrust for thrust.

You try to whisper please around his fingers but the words are garbled nonsense. You don't know what you're asking for, anyway. More? Less? Something in the between? Does it even matter? He'll give it to you, whether you beg for it or not.

And, predictably, he doesn't answer. But he knows. That's why he reaches around youand finds your clit with his fingers—pressing exactly where you need it, ruthless, unrelenting—and you come. Hard.

Your vision goes white. Your cunt clamps down on him hard, spasming, your legs shaking so hard that you would've collapsed if he wasn't pinning you to the wall. A sound tears out of you—louder than before—and he withdraws his metal fingers so his hand can clamp over your mouth again, swallowing it, muffling it, and he doesn't stop. Doesn't slow. He fucks you through it while you shake apart against the concrete.

When you come down from the orgasm—if you come down at all—he's still moving. Faster and rougher this time, chasing his own release. So you let him use you. You're loose. Pliant. The aftershocks are still rolling through you, your cunt still fluttering, oversensitive and aching and his.

He comes with a low grunt that sounds like it's been torn from his throat. The sound is almost feral, nothing like the controlled efficiency of his fighting or the flat assessment of his training. For a moment, his entire body goes rigid against yours—the metal arm spasming, the flesh hand gripping the wall so hard, you actually hear the concrete crack under his fingers. Then he shudders, a full-body tremor that runs through him and into you, and he pumps his load deep inside you, claiming you in a way that has nothing to do with the Red Room or Dreykov or any of the programming that brought either of you here.

For a long moment, neither of you moves. You're both just breathing and suspended in the aftermath. His forehead is pressed to your back now, his weight still pinning you to the wall, and you can feel his heartbeat hammering against your spine even through his tactical vest. It's the most alive you've ever felt him, the most human, and the thought terrifies you almost as much as the way your body is still responding to his, still clenching around him inside you.

Then, he pulls out. At once you feel his come dripping down your thighs and you know you should clean up, should get to medical, should pretend this never happened the way you always pretend.

But he's still behind you, still trapping you against him. His forehead has moved to rest against the back of your neck, his stubble scraping your skin, and his breath hot and damp against your spine. You feel him shaking—barely, minutely, the kind of tremor no one else would notice—but you're trained to notice such things.

"Don't..." he starts, then stops. You wait, but he doesn't finish the sentence. You don't know if he was going to say don't move or don't go or don't tell anyone, and you'll spend the next twenty-three years wondering that.

For exactly seven seconds he stays there. Not moving. Not pulling away. Just... present. His breath syncs with yours. You memorize the rhythm.

You want to turn around. You want to see his face. You want to know if he looks as broken as you feel, if this breaks him open the way it breaks you. You want to see what he almost said.

You don't move.

Then he steps back.

You hear him fixing his clothes. The rustle of fabric, the zip of his tactical gear. You don't turn around. You're not sure what you'd see if you did.

"Medical," he finally says, in the same flat voice as before. Like nothing happened.

You manage to nod. You pull your suit back up, ignoring the ache between your legs, the throb of your shoulder, and the taste of blood still fresh in your mouth. You swipe at your mouth with the back of your hand, trying to wipe away the evidence.

When you turn around, he's already gone.

The door is unlocked. The hallway is empty. Four hours until the next session.

You start walking toward medical again.

This time, you make it.

The mark is late. If you had enough free will to care, you'd be annoyed by this. But you don't.

Your tactical watch reads 17:42 when you check it—it's 2016, the wind biting at any exposed skin. Budapest, rooftop overlooking the Danube, the river dark below and the Parliament lights reflecting like broken glass on the water.

You've been in position for forty-three minutes. The wind cutting through your tactical gear. The temperature dropping rapidly, as soon as the sun sets. These are facts. You catalog them the way you catalog everything—distantly, clinically, filed under mission parameters.

Facts are all that your world contains, ever since your training had been complete and your mind subjugated. Ever since, you've been a puppet, dancing to the tune of your handlers. Living separate to your own body, watching from the outside.

And yet, it's still you.

Anya's voice crackles in your ear, and that familiar, cold tone of hers snaps you back to focus. "Status," she demands.

"In position," you reply.

"Target approaching from the east. ETA two minutes."

You adjust your scope accordingly. Your sight lines are clear. The exit routes are mappe and the contingencies planned. You're efficient. You've always been efficient.

My best work, General Dreykov had once called you, a proud glint in his beady eyes. That praise was like a drug to you, a high like no other that you chased after every successful mission—

—there's movement in your peripheral vision. It's coming from the wrong direction. Not the target. Someone else.

You pivot, weapon coming up, and that's when you see him.

He's on the adjacent rooftop. Thirty meters out and watching you, the same way you're now watching him.

Your training catalogs the threat automatically. Male, approximately 1.8 meters, heavy build, tactical gear, metal left arm. The way he moves—controlled, purposeful, combat-trained—triggers something in your memory that your programming immediately suppresses.

You don't know him.

No. You do know him.

That contradiction doesn't compute. You push it aside and sight in on his centre mass.

He doesn't take cover. Doesn't draw a weapon. Just stands there, watching you with an expression you can't read.

"Interference," you report to your fellow Widow. "Neutralizing."

But Anya doesn't respond and you don't have the time to wonder why that is.

The man on the other rooftop moves before you can squeeze the trigger. Not toward you—toward the fire escape, dropping down to street level with the kind of efficiency that makes your muscle memory scream with recognition you're not allowed to have.

He's coming for you.

You abandon the mark, dropping your rifle and running. Training dictates threat prioritization; unknown combatant in close proximity supersedes all. You move to intercept, dropping through the access hatch into the stairwell.

He's already inside the building.

You know this because you can hear him. Footsteps—measured, deliberate, not trying to hide. Like he wants you to know where he is.

You clear the third-floor landing and he's there, standing in the corridor, hands visible and non-threatening.

Withdrawing your sidearm, you put three rounds centre mass.

He moves. Fast—too fast for someone his size—and the shots go wide. Concrete dust explodes from the wall behind him, and despite the pistol holstered at his hip, he doesn't return fire.

"Stop!" He yells instead. You don't stop. You never stop. You close the distance, planning to disable him permanently, but he's faster than you expect. His metal hand sweeps out and knocks the pistol from your grip before you can fire again. The weapon clatters across the concrete floor, out of reach.

Disarmed. But your training adapts, always adapts. You engage hand-to-hand without hesitation.

He blocks your first strike with his right hand—precise, controlled. Your second he meets with the metal arm, the impact vibrating up your bones in a way that's terrifyingly familiar. Your third strike he redirects, using your momentum to spin you out of range, and the movement is so familiar your body completes the counter before your brain catches up. The same counter he taught you on the training mat in 1993.

You've fought this man before.

No. That's impossible. Your handler would have briefed you. Your files would show it.

And he's not attacking you, not really, not in the way he should. He's defending—blocking, redirecting, burning down your energy—and the whole time he's talking. "You don't have to do this," he says.

Incorrect. You do have to. That's what you are. What you're for.

You go for his throat. He catches your wrist—flesh hand, not metal—and the grip is controlled, not brutal. You twist, break his hold, drive your knee toward his solar plexus. He absorbs it with a grunt.

"I know you're in there," he continues. "Deep down. Let me help."

You don't know what that means. Of course you're in there, in your mind, caged by unseen bars. You drive your elbow toward his face. He blocks it with his metal arm and the impact vibrates up your bones and suddenly you're on a training mat, bleeding from a split lip, and—

—no. You shove the fragment away. Focus. Mission. Eliminate the threat.

But he's not fighting like a threat. He's fighting like someone trying not to hurt you, and that doesn't make sense, nothing makes sense. Your conditioning is screaming at you to disengage but your body won't stop fighting.

Your next strike falters. He doesn't capitalize on it. He just stands there, bleeding from somewhere—you must have landed a hit, you don't remember—and looking at you like you're a person instead of a weapon.

"I'm not going to fight you."

He sounds so resigned to this fact.

You hit him anyway. He takes it. Doesn't block or redirect. Just lets your fist connect with his jaw and he rocks back on his heels, the impact jarring his entire frame. Blood drips from the corner of his mouth—your blood, actually, from when your knuckles split against his teeth.

You're breathing hard. He's breathing harder, like he's been running. He's bleeding from somewhere—his temple, maybe, or his ribs where you landed a solid knee strike. Neither of you is winning. Neither of you is trying to win in the traditional sense.

He reaches into his vest slowly, deliberately, giving you time to react. His eyes never leave yours.

You tense. Gun. Knife. Weapon. Your hand drifts toward the knife at your ankle, the backup blade they always make you carry.

But his movements are too slow for a weapon draw. Too careful. He pulls out a small vial, no bigger than his thumb, and holds it up between you. The liquid inside catches the fluorescent light of the stairwell.

It's red.

"I'm sorry," he says, and his voice cracks on the word. Then he crushes the vial in his metal hand, and a crimson veil descends.

For a moment, nothing happens. The red dust hangs suspended in the air between you, glittering in the fluorescent light like deadly confetti. You tense to retreat, to escape, but his hand shoots out—his red-flecked metal fingers wrapping around your upper arm—and he yanks you forward into the cloud fully.

You try to hold your breath, try to fight, but his other hand comes up to hold the back of your neck, squeezing hard enough that it panics you into inhaling. The dust floods your lungs—sharp, burning as it goes down—and you struggle against him, but it's too late. He's stronger than you, and he's not letting go.

Then, it hits you—

—like waking up. No, like remembering you were asleep. No, like drowning and surfacing and the air is too bright, too sharp, too real—

—the Red Room the training floor the Asset his hands his mouth the cold the counting the thing without a name—

—Madame's voice Dreykov's conditioning the handlers the marks the missions the blood that wasn't yours the blood that was—

—his name your name the names you swallowed the words you never said the four seconds with his forehead against your neck and you thought please but you never said please stay—

—1993 to now every locked door every mission every kill and none of it was you it was the thing they made you and oh God oh God oh—

—he releases you and your knees hit the ground, hard.

The world is too loud. Your body is shaking. There's blood in your mouth but it's old blood, twenty-three-year-old blood, and you can taste the iron and the split lip and the way he never kissed you on the mouth because that would have meant something.

Someone is crying. You don't know if it's you or not, but it must be, because the tears are hot on your cheeks.

Then there's hands on your shoulders—you flinch away from the touch, your training screaming threat threat threat—but they don't tighten and they don't hurt. The hands just steady you, hold you together while you shake apart. Slowly, so slowly, you're adjusted until your head is pillowed by a metal arm and your back is pressed against a warm, solid chest.

Your vision is swimming. You can't see him, can't see anything but the red dust and the fluorescent lights overhead and the way every memory you thought you'd buried is clawing its way back to the surface.

"I've got you. You're safe. I've got you." It's like a mantra, whispered in your ear, over and over as you're rocked, slowly. "I looked for you. I looked for you everywhere."

His lips brush your temple, a feather-light kiss that you barely feel. Your senses are completely overblown right now, and every sound, every touch, every smell is amplified a hundredfold as the red dust burns the poison out of your mind.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Finally, your eyes focus. He's so close, his face inches from your own. The Asset, you recall dimly. It's the Asset who is holding you now.

Bucky walked to the far end of the courtyard, where a thin strip of grass struggled to grow against the base of the wall. He leaned against the cold concrete, tipping his head back to catch the weak autumn sun. He closed his eyes, trying to block out the sight of the barbed wire, the sound of the guards' boots on the pavement, the low murmur of the other prisoners.

"The fresh air is not the same as it once was, is it, my friend?"

Bucky didn't open his eyes, just let out a low, humourless chuckle. The gravelly texture of Pavel's voice was a constant in the disorienting quiet; he was beginning to understand why Charlie leaned on him so much. "Doesn't taste like Brooklyn, that's for damn sure." He finally cracked an eye open, taking in Pavel's battered form leaning against the wall beside him. The fresh scabs on his knuckles were a dark, violent red against his pale skin. "Still giving 'em hell in the pits?"

Pavel gave a slight, weary shrug, the gesture speaking volumes about the kind of hell it was. "It passes the time. Better than the alternative." His gaze, sharp and assessing even in his exhaustion, scanned Bucky from head to toe. "They worked you over good."

"You could say that." Bucky pushed off the wall, rolling his shoulders in a futile attempt to loosen the tight, coiled feeling that the injections had left behind. It felt like every muscle was wound too tight, ready to snap. "Feels like I got run over by a tank, then they backed it up and did it again for good measure. What about the others? Ray? Sammy?" He'd started to learn the names and faces of the others, slowly. It was a scrap of humanity to cling to, in this rotten place.

A shadow crossed Pavel's face at the mention of them, though. "Kline is holding. Barely. They took Ray back down this morning. He was... not good." He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. The image of Ray's vacant eyes and trembling hands was seared into Bucky's memory.

Bucky grimaced as he scanned the handful of other prisoners shuffling in the yard. He checked the corners. The shadows. He looked for the smaller frame, the messy chestnut hair that always caught the light. He looked until he ran out of places to look.

But she wasn't there.

A cold knot, different from the ache in his muscles, formed in his gut. He turned back to Pavel, keeping his voice low. "Where's Charlie?"

Pavel's expression didn't change, but something in his posture shifted—subtle, guarded. He glanced toward the nearest guard, standing stiff-backed near the gate, then back to Bucky. His voice dropped lower, barely more than a breath beneath the brittle air.

"Brandt took her yesterday," he said. "Right after you left."

Bucky went very still. "And?"

"And, nothing." Pavel rubbed a thumb over his scuffed knuckles, his gaze fixed on the dirt. "She did not return to the ward, last night. I asked. But, no one says anything."

Bucky's fingers curled into his palms, the tension in his body ratcheting tighter. He didn't like that. Didn't like it at all. He'd barely begun to understand the rhythm of this place, but he knew one thing for certain—when someone disappeared, they didn't always come back. And if they did, they definitely weren't the same.

He turned his face back to the sun, but the warmth no longer reached him. His mind replayed the moment from the night before—Charlie's trembling breath, the way she'd flinched from his touch, the fear in her eyes when she whispered her brother's name. He hadn't pushed her. He'd stayed. He'd given her space. And now, she was gone.

He forced his voice to remain even. "Where would they take her?"

Pavel didn't answer right away. He studied Bucky for a long moment, then gave a slow, reluctant shake of his head. "Not where we go," he said, finally. "I—"

"—Ruhig!"

The guard's sharp command cut through the cold air, like a whip crack. Bucky didn't need a translation; based on the tone, it probably meant something along the lines of 'shut the hell up'. He fell silent immediately, his jaw snapping shut with an audible click. He kept his gaze fixed on the distant wall, on the jagged line of the pine trees beyond the wire, forcing his expression into a mask of weary indifference.

Pavel did the same, his face becoming a blank slate, all trace of their conspiratorial exchange wiped clean. The guard watched them for another long moment, his hand resting on the butt of the energy weapon holstered at his hip, before turning his attention back to the other shuffling prisoners.

But Bucky's mind raced. Where the hell had they taken her? And why?

He glanced at Pavel out of the corner of his eye. The Czech's face was a study in grim resignation. He'd seen this before. He knew the patterns of this place, the unspoken rules of its particular brand of hell. And whatever he knew about Charlie's disappearance, it wasn't good.

The remaining minutes of their yard time dragged. The weak sun did nothing to warm the chill that had settled deep in Bucky's bones. Every shuffle of a foot, every distant clang of a metal door, made his heart jump. He kept expecting to see her, to see that flash of chestnut hair, to see her small, determined frame walking back into the ward.

But she never appeared.

Finally, a whistle blew, sharp and shrill. Yard time was over. The guards began herding the prisoners back toward the heavy doors that led into the bowels of the base.

The march back to the ward was a grim, silent procession. The brief taste of fresh air and weak sunlight had only made the return to the sterile, humming confines of Block C feel more suffocating. The heavy door clanged shut behind them, the bolt sliding home with a sound of finality that echoed in the tense quiet.

Bucky's eyes immediately went to the cot beside his. It was still empty. The chain lay on the floor, untouched.

His own cot felt more like a cage than ever. He sat on the edge of it, the worn springs groaning under his weight. The electric hum of the facility seemed to amplify in the silence, vibrating through the concrete floor and into his bones. He could still feel the ghost of the injections, a strange, lingering buzz beneath his skin. But that physical discomfort was nothing compared to the dread sitting heavy in his stomach, and the bite of the manacle refastened around his wrist.

He looked over at Pavel, who had settled onto his own cot with a weary sigh. The Czech met his gaze for a brief moment, his expression unreadable, before he lay back and closed his eyes, effectively shutting down any further conversation.

Bucky was left alone with his thoughts, which circled relentlessly around one thing: Charlie's empty cot. Not where we go. Not the labs. Not the pits. Somewhere else.

The hours crawled by. The ward was quieter than usual, the absence of her quiet presence a palpable void. The other prisoners kept to themselves, lost in their own private miseries. The only sounds were the low murmur of the guards outside the door, the occasional cough from one of the men, and the relentless, oppressive hum of the machinery.

Bucky lay on his back, staring up at the cracked, stained ceiling. He tried to sleep, to escape into unconsciousness, but it was useless. His mind wouldn't quiet.

The clatter of the door bolt sliding back was unusually loud in the hushed ward. Bucky's eyes snapped open, his body tensing automatically. It wasn't time for the evening meal. This was something else.

Dr. Brandt stood in the doorway, her auburn hair a severe slash of color against the drab grey walls. She held her clipboard like a shield, her gaze scanning the room before landing on him. Her face was professional, blank, but he thought he saw a flicker of something else in her eyes—nervous energy, perhaps, or the strain of long hours.

"Subject 24-BBJ," she said, her voice crisp. "With me."

The guard assigned to him moved forward, key in hand, to unfasten the manacle from his wrist. The cold metal fell away, leaving a raw, red band of skin. Bucky sat up slowly, his muscles protesting, every movement a reminder of the last twenty-four hours. He kept his face neutral, a blank slate, but his mind was racing. Was this about Charlie? Had something happened?

He followed Brandt out of the ward, the door closing behind them with its familiar, heavy finality. The corridor was empty, lit by the same unforgiving fluorescent lights.

Brandt didn't speak as she led him through the labyrinthine passages. The route was different this time, taking them deeper into the complex, away from the familiar examination rooms. The air grew colder, the hum of machinery louder, more intense. It was a sound that vibrated in his teeth.

Their footsteps echoed on the concrete floor, the only sound in the empty corridor. Bucky's unease grew with every step. He had to know. The not knowing was worse than whatever answer she could give him.

"Where is she?" he asked, his voice low, careful to keep any hint of accusation from his tone. He didn't look at Brandt directly, keeping his gaze straight ahead. "The girl. Charlotte. Where did they take her?"

Brandt didn't break stride, didn't even turn her head. For a long moment, he thought she wouldn't answer at all. Then, without looking at him, she spoke.

"Subject 17-CHL is in solitary confinement."

The words stopped him cold. Solitary confinement. Bucky's stride hitched for half a second before he forced himself to match her pace again. He knew what that meant. He'd heard stories, back in basic training, about what prolonged isolation could do to a man. To put a woman, already fragile from whatever Zola had been doing to her, in a hole by herself... His hands clenched into fists at his sides, the raw skin of his wrist stretching taut.

"For how long?" he asked, the question coming out rougher than he intended.

Brandt's pace slowed almost imperceptibly. She adjusted her grip on the clipboard, her knuckles white. "Forty-eight hours. It is a disciplinary measure." Her voice was clipped, professional, but there was a faint tremor beneath the clinical tone. She finally glanced at him, her gaze skittering away almost immediately. "Dr. Zola's orders. She was..." Brandt hesitated. "Uncooperative."

The corridor seemed to tilt around him. Uncooperative. It conjured images of Charlie's stubborn chin, the defiant set of her shoulders, even when she was trembling with fear. He could picture it too easily—her refusing to give Zola whatever he wanted, standing her ground in that quiet, furious way she had. Anger flared in his chest, so intense it stole his breath.

"She's just a girl," he growled. He couldn't help it. The image of her, small and alone in some dark, cold room, was unbearable.

This time, Brandt did stop. She turned to face him fully, her expression sharpening. The nervous energy he'd sensed earlier was gone, replaced by a brittle, defensive anger.

"You think I do not know that?" she hissed, her accent thickening, her fingers tightening around the clipboard until the knuckles turned white. "You think I enjoy this? That I choose this?"

Bucky didn't flinch. He held her gaze, his own steady, unreadable. He didn't trust her—how could he? She was one of them, after all. But there was something in her voice, in the way her eyes darted around as if afraid of being overheard, that told him she wasn't as indifferent as she pretended to be.

She exhaled sharply through her nose, shaking her head. "She is not just a girl," she muttered, almost to herself. "She is... complicated. Dangerous, in her own way. Zola does not tolerate resistance. Not from anyone. Not even her."

Bucky's jaw tightened. "She's not dangerous. She's trying to survive."

Brandt let out a short, bitter laugh. "So are we all, Sergeant Barnes." She turned abruptly, resuming her brisk pace down the corridor. "Come. You will not see her again tonight. Not until the sentence is served."

Bucky followed, his mind churning. Forty-eight hours.

That was a long time to spend in the dark, with nothing but your own ghosts.

He kept his hands loose at his sides, his expression carefully neutral. But inside, something shifted. It wasn't just anger at what they were doing to a girl. It was recognition. She was fighting back. In a place designed to strip you of everything, she had found a way to say no.

He didn't know what Zola had planned for him next. Didn't know what was waiting at the end of this corridor. But he knew one thing.

He needed her to hold the line.

Finally, Dr. Brandt stopped before a heavy, reinforced door marked with a series of complex symbols. She produced a keycard from her lab coat and swiped it through a reader. A light on the panel turned from red to green, and the door unlocked with a heavy thunk of withdrawing bolts.

She pushed it open, revealing a room that was unlike any he'd seen so far.

It was dominated by a vertical cylinder of thick, leaded glass, reinforced with bands of iron. It didn't look futuristic; it looked industrial. Brutal. A bank of fat ceramic insulators crowned the top, connected to heavy cables that ran across the floor like black veins. Inside the glass, coils of copper wire sat waiting.

Inside the chamber, Dr. Zola and Dr. Reinhardt were waiting. Zola stood before a complicated control console, his small form dwarfed by the machinery, his spectacles reflecting the flickering lights. Reinhardt was nearer the apparatus itself, adjusting a series of dials with his unnervingly precise hands. He was humming that same, tuneless melody.

Zola turned as they entered, a thin smile stretching his lips. "Ah. Sergeant Barnes. Right on time. Dr. Brandt, your assistance is no longer required. You may return to your duties."

Brandt gave a tight, jerky nod. She didn't look at Bucky again. She simply turned and left, the heavy vault door sealing shut behind her with a sound of terrible finality, leaving him alone with the two doctors and the humming machine.

"Please," Zola said, gesturing to the center of the chamber, where a metal chair, studded with electrodes and restraint clamps, sat bathed in the machine's eerie glow. "Take your seat. We are ready to begin the next phase."

The Girl From Graz

Time had become a formless, viscous thing. Without light, without sound, without the rhythm of meals or the distant murmur of other prisoners, it stretched and warped around her.

Was it night? Was it day?

Charlie had no way of knowing. The only certainty was the slow, measured sound of her own breathing and the occasional, terrifying skitter of something small and unseen in the far corner.

Her stomach was a hollow, aching pit. The single canteen of water was nearly empty, and she rationed it in tiny, careful sips, letting each drop sit on her parched tongue before swallowing. The cold from the concrete floor had seeped into her joints, a permanent ache that made movement agony. She had long ago given up on the metal chair, preferring the hard floor, curled into a tight ball in the corner farthest from the door.

She dozed in fitful, nightmare-riddled bursts. Visions flickered behind her closed eyelids, disjointed and chaotic. The falling man, screaming into the void. The star-spangled man on the stage, his smile a mask of pain. Bucky's face, pale and strained in the dim light of the ward. Her brother Leo, calling her name from a great distance.

She jolted awake, heart hammering. The darkness was absolute. A suffocating blanket that pressed against her eyes, her nose, her mouth.

She needed an anchor. Something to hold onto before the silence dissolved her completely.

Mama.

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to summon the kitchen in Graz. The smell of yeast. The warmth of the oven. The way her mother hummed when she kneaded dough. It was a safety raft she had clung to a thousand times before.

But she was too weak. Her mental walls, usually so carefully maintained, were paper-thin from hunger and fear. As she reached for the memory, she slipped. The image of the warm kitchen wavered, distorted—and then vanished entirely.

She didn't mean to look. She didn't want to look. But the current caught her, dragging her down into the dark.

The darkness behind her eyelids swirled, coalescing not into a kitchen, but into a vast, muddy field under a leaden sky. Barbed wire. Endless rows of ragged, emaciated figures moving like ghosts. The stench hit her first—a putrid miasma of human waste, decay, and woodsmoke that was so sharp she gagged, her empty stomach convulsing.

And then she saw him.

Papa.

He was at the quarry at Mauthausen. She knew the place instantly by the granite—the terrible, unforgiving stone that had built half of Vienna. He was hauling a massive block up the Stairs of Death, his back bent at an impossible angle. His clothes weren't clothes anymore; they were filthy rags that clung to a skeletal frame. His face, once round and cheerful, was a death mask. Hollow eyes. sunken cheeks.

He stumbled. The stone wavered. A guard's baton came down on his shoulder with a crack she felt in her own bones.

He didn't cry out. He didn't have the breath for it. He absorbed the blow, his body shuddering, and heaved the stone forward another inch. The sheer, soul-crushing weight wasn't just physical. It was the weight of a nation that had turned on its own.

She tried to push further. Mama? Leo?

The vision fractured. A barracks, overcrowded, reeking of typhus and unwashed bodies. A pile of gold teeth on a table. A mountain of shoes—small shoes, children's shoes, women's heels—all of them grey with dust.

The stranger's eyes held her, trapping Charlie in that silent scream.

Then the ground shook.

The muddy field, the faces, the sky—they shattered as the floor beneath her bucked, a physical force that hit her knees and teeth and skull all at once.

Charlie gasped, snapping back to the cold concrete of her cell. It wasn't a memory; it was happening now. A low, resonant hum drilled up through the floor, a frequency so deep it made her teeth ache. The air in the cell grew heavy, charged with static.

It built slowly, a rising crescendo of power that made the darkness around her feel charged, electric. She could almost see it, a blue-white light blooming in her mind's eye, though the cell remained pitch black. It was coming from below. Deep below. From the heart of this terrible place.

Nausea buckled her knees, sudden and violent, nearly as strong as what her vision had brought on. Her head swam, the world tilting on its axis. And then, a flash—not a vision of the past, but a jolt of pure sensation from the present.

Pain. A scream, choked off before it could begin. A body arched against restraints, every muscle locked in agony. The taste of copper flooded her mouth. The scent of ozone and scorched flesh.

Bucky.

The connection was instantaneous and brutal. She felt the energy coursing through him, a foreign, violent power that was tearing him apart and remaking him cell by cell. It was a burning voltage in his veins, a pressure behind his eyes that threatened to shatter his skull. His thoughts were a frantic, animal scramble of survival, a single, repeating litany: breathe, hold on, don't scream, breathe—

—Charlie gasped, her forehead pressed against the cold concrete floor. The residual echo of his agony throbbed through her, a phantom pain in her own nerves, her own bones. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. She could still taste the ozone, the burnt flesh at the back of her throat.

The deep, resonant hum from below had faded, leaving behind a ringing silence that was worse than the noise. She knew that sound now. It was the same frequency that vibrated through the walls during Zola's more invasive procedures. It was the sound of the machine. The sound of the thing that was changing Bucky.

She had felt his defiance, the fierce, stubborn core of him that refused to break even as the energy tore through him. It was a raw, terrifying strength. And beneath it, a flicker of something else. A desperate, wordless call. Not for help. For recognition. For someone to know what was happening to him. For someone to witness it.

He knows I'm here. The realization was a cold knife in her gut. He might not understand how, he might not even believe it was real, but on some primal level, he had felt her presence in that moment of shared agony.

She pushed herself up, her body trembling with exhaustion and the lingering aftershocks of the shared pain. She leaned her back against the cold wall, drawing her knees up to her chest. She wrapped her arms around them, resting her forehead on her knees. The darkness was absolute, but she closed her eyes anyway.

She focused on that flicker of awareness, that fragile thread of connection. She couldn't reach him, not physically. She couldn't stop what they were doing to him. But she could be there, in the only way she knew how. She could bear witness.

Her breathing slowed, matching the faint, shallow rhythm she had felt from him in that single, excruciating moment. In. Out. Steady. She poured every ounce of her will into the thought, a silent message sent along that impossible, electric thread. You are not alone. It was a frail defense against the machinery and the men who wielded it, a whisper against a storm. But it was all she had to give.

The phantom pain in her own body began to recede, replaced by a deep, aching cold that had nothing to do with the temperature of the cell. It was the cold of dread, of helplessness. But beneath it, a new resolve hardened, fragile as ice. They were connected now, bound by something Zola could not measure or control.

She stayed like that for a long time, a silent witness in the dark, her consciousness holding the thread of his suffering, alone in the roaring, electric void.