#trapped together

The mission goes sideways in under ten minutes.

The building collapses inward after the explosion—concrete screaming, steel buckling, the floor giving out beneath you both. You barely have time to grab onto him before the world tilts and slams you down into darkness.

When you come to, your ears are ringing and your ribs feel like they’ve been rearranged. Dust coats your tongue. It takes a second to realize you’re pinned—half under a slab of concrete, half under him.

Bucky’s weight is solid, unyielding. Warm. Too warm.

“Get off,” you gasp, shoving at his shoulder.

He groans, pushing himself up with one arm. “Real welcoming.”

“Get off me,” you repeat, sharper.

He does, rolling to the side with a curse. The movement sends a spike of pain through your leg and you bite down on a cry. The ceiling above you has caved in—no clear exit, no signal, no light except what leaks in through a crack in the wall.

Trapped.

Of course you are.

“You hurt?” he asks, clipped.

“No thanks to you.”

His jaw tightens. “You grabbed me.”

“You were falling on me.”

“Could’ve let me.”

You look at him then, really look—dust-streaked face, blood at his hairline, eyes too blue for how dark everything feels. “And watch you splatter? Yeah. Real tempting.”

Silence stretches, thick and suffocating.

You’ve hated each other for years. Ever since that mission in Bucharest where he ignored your call and you took a bullet meant for him. Ever since he apologized once—stiff, hollow—and then never again. Ever since every briefing turned into passive-aggressive warfare.

He breaks the silence first. “Your leg.”

You follow his gaze. Your pant leg is dark with blood.

“Shit,” you mutter.

He’s already moving, kneeling in front of you, hands hovering like he’s not sure where he’s allowed to touch. “I need to check it.”

“You don’t need—”

“You’re bleeding.”

Something about his voice—low, steady—cuts through your instinct to push him away. You let him carefully roll the fabric up. The gash is ugly, angry red.

His fingers brush your skin as he wraps it, gentle despite the metal hand. You hate how it makes your chest tighten.

“You could’ve died,” he says quietly.

“So could you,” you snap. “But you don’t seem too bothered by that.”

He stills. Slowly looks up at you.

“That’s not true.”

You scoff. “You never listen to me on missions. You don’t trust me. You don’t even look at me.”

“That’s because if I do,” he says, voice rough, “I remember the sound you made when you got hit. And I don’t know how to carry that.”

The words land heavy between you.

You swallow. “Then why do you act like you hate me?”

His mouth twists. “Because it’s easier than admitting I’m terrified of screwing up again.”

For a long moment, all you hear is the distant groan of settling concrete.

“I don’t hate you,” you admit, quieter. “I hate that you decided I was expendable.”

His shoulders sag like you’ve finally hit something raw. “You weren’t expendable. You were—” He stops. Exhales. “You were everything in that moment. And I failed you.”

You don’t realize you’re crying until he reaches out, hesitant, and wipes a tear from your cheek with his thumb. The touch lingers. Too long. Charged.

“You’re shaking,” he murmurs.

“It’s cold,” you lie.

He shifts closer, the space between you disappearing. There’s nowhere to go anyway—just stone and shadow and him. His arm comes around you, careful, like he’s afraid you’ll break. You should pull away.

You don’t.

His breath ghosts your temple. Your heartbeat stutters.

“If we don’t make it out,” you whisper, “I don’t want this to be how we end.”

His forehead rests against yours. “Then don’t let it be.”

It’s not a kiss—not really. Just a brush of lips, tentative, like asking permission. When you don’t pull back, it deepens—slow, aching, restrained by everything unsaid.

You break it first, breathless. “When we get out—”

“We talk,” he says immediately. “We fix it. Or try.”

A distant rumble cuts through the moment. Light spills in as debris shifts above you.

Rescue.

Bucky helps you to your feet, arm firm around your waist. Before they pull you out, he leans in and murmurs, “I’m not losing you again.”

You were still at your desk, three-quarters of the way through Karga’s summary report, when every fixture in the administrative block dimmed to half power and returned the color of a banked fire. The municipal alert did not chime or ask. It simply arrived — a flat synthetic voice pushing out of the wall speaker above your door, repeating itself in Basic, then Huttese, then a trade dialect you had catalogued in your first days on the planet.

RED SURGE ADVISORY. CALDERA VENT SEVEN IS OPEN. ALL RESIDENTS SHELTER AND SEAL. STREET LEVEL IS CLOSED UNTIL THE SCRUBBER CYCLE COMPLETES.

You crossed to the balcony doors.

Beyond the double panes, the plaza had gone the wrong color. The far side of it was already gone — swallowed by a boiling wall of ash the shade of old rust, rolling down out of the crags with the slow, indifferent weight of a tide coming in. It reached the fountain. It reached the lamp posts. Then it reached the glass, and the first grains struck the pane with a sound like sand thrown against a drum.

Your comm unit lit up. Karga, of course, transmitting from somewhere with better ventilation than yours.

“My dear! Don’t panic — this happens twice a year, perfectly routine, the city has systems.” A pause. In the background, something rattled. “The systems are older than I would like. Seal your archway seam. The vent gas is heavier than air, it pools, it finds every gap in a stairwell. Do you have tape?”

You looked at your neat, orderly desk. Styluses. Interface cables. Three grades of datapad. No tape.

“No, Magistrate.”

“Then stay away from the door and breathe shallowly and I will—”

The transmission dissolved into static as the surge front took the relay tower.

You stood in the middle of your quarters in the amber emergency light, listening to the grit hiss along the outside of the stone, and you did the arithmetic. Third floor. One archway. One stairwell below you, unsealed, forty steps of it, filling slowly with a gas that pooled.

The knock landed against your blast door before you had finished the calculation.

Three strikes. Metal on metal. Unhurried.

You did not jump this time. You knew the cadence of it now the way you knew a speaker’s accent from a single vowel, and you were across the floor and keying the release before you had decided to move.

Din stood in the corridor with a sealed crate under one arm and his cape drawn across the lower half of his helmet like a hood against the grit. Ash had drifted into every seam of his armor. It had turned the silver a dull, powdery bronze from the shoulders down.

“Ventilation,” he said, and stepped past you.

He set the crate on your food-prep counter and opened it without ceremony: adhesive sealing strip, three filtration canisters, a pressure gauge, a hand light. He had cleared the whole administrative block, you realized. He had started at the top floor, which was the floor that vented worst, which was your floor.

“Magistrate Karga sent you,” you said.

“No.” He was already at the balcony arch, running two fingers along the frame where the doors met the stone. “Karga’s building. Karga’s problem. He’s welcome to it.”

He found the seam. He tore a length of sealing strip with vibro blade and laid it into the joint with his thumb, working it flat from the top of the arch down to the floor. Then the vent grille above your wardrobe. Then the gap beneath your door, which he packed with the folded remains of the strip and pressed until it held.

The hissing along the outside of the wall did not stop. But the taste of sulfur that had been building at the back of your throat stopped building.

“You’re clear until morning,” he said, checking the gauge. “Don’t open the arch. Don’t open the door.”

“Thank you.” You hesitated. “How bad is the stairwell?”

“Impassable at ground level.” He set the gauge down. “It’ll stay that way until the scrubbers finish. Roughly 0530.”

The sentence sat in the room for a moment before either of you looked at it directly.

Six and a half hours. And the man who had cleared the top floor of the building had, in the process, sealed himself onto the wrong side of it.

“Then you’ll stay,” you said.

“I’ll wait in the corridor.”

“The corridor is a chimney and you know it. You just told me the gas pools.” You surprised yourself with how steady it came out. “There’s a bench under the window. You may not want it, but you’re taking it.”

He did not answer immediately. The T-visor turned toward you and held, and you had the distinct sense of being weighed by something with better instruments than eyes.

“All right,” he said.

He took the bench. He took it the way a man takes a post rather than a seat — back to the stone, rifle within reach, angled so that the door and the balcony arch were both inside his field of view. You made tea because your hands wanted a task, and he did not drink it, and neither of you mentioned that.

Around 2330 a sound surfaced under the storm.

It was faint, and it came at intervals, and it was coming from his helmet: a thin, ragged catch in the cycler each time he drew breath, like a filter trying to pull air through a fouled screen.

“That’s the plasma residue,” you said. “From the bunker.”

The visor came up.

“It’ll clear.”

“It’s getting worse. I’ve been listening to audio for a living for eleven years, and I am telling you that intake is closing.” You set down your cup. “You have replacement canisters in that crate. I watched you count them.”

“To change the canister I have to break the seal.”

“I know what breaking the seal means.”

The room went very still. Outside, the surge threw another handful of grit against the pane.

You had read about the Creed in the archives on Chandrila. A footnote in a monograph on Outer Rim minority cultures, four sentences long, written by a man who had never met one: no living being may look upon the face. You had annotated it once. You had thought it was an interesting linguistic construction, the passive voice doing so much work.

You had not thought about what it cost, on a night like this, in a room this small.

You stood up and went to the sleeping nook and took hold of the three-panel linen screen folded against the wall — the one you had put there your first evening to keep the balcony glare off the cot. It was light. It was badly made. It was entirely opaque.

You carried it across the room and set it up in front of the bench, panel by panel, until the window and the man beneath it were gone behind a sheet of pale cloth.

Then you walked back to your desk, sat down, and turned your chair to face the wall.

“There,” you said. “I’m not going to turn around. I’m going to sit here with my back to you until 0530 and I am going to keep working, and you are going to change that canister and breathe properly. That’s all.”

For a long moment there was nothing at all.

Then, from behind the linen: the soft pneumatic sigh of a seal releasing, and the small, careful click of something set down on wood.

You kept your eyes on the stone. You put your headphones around your neck and did not put them on. You listened to the storm work at the shutters, and to a man on the other side of a sheet of cloth taking his first unfiltered breath in twenty hours — slow, and deep, and startlingly, unarmoredly human.

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