Chapter Text
"You got a fetish for my love. I push you out and you come right back." - Selena Gomez (Fetish)
Bucky didn’t know her name, but she was going to make him late for the mission briefing down the hall. He’d seen her in the lab on the rare occasion he had a reason to be there, but here she was standing in front of him with papers scattered all over the hallway. He was placing the blame firmly on her; she’d come around the corner at full tilt with a stack of loose papers clutched in her arms. It wasn’t his fault she was too busy looking at her phone to see where she was going. It wasn’t his fault she’d walked right into him. Civilians.
He’d pushed down the annoyance and reached out a hand to grab her arm. She would have fallen flat on her ass otherwise. He hadn't been able to save the reports she’d been carrying, though. Those had flown up into the air and landed like confetti all around them.
“Oh, shit,” she muttered, pulling away from him and dropping to her knees to gather her precious papers. Bucky looked at his watch and then down at her. Yeah, he was going to be late.
“Here,” he said, “let me help you.”
“Uh, thanks, dude. Sorry, I didn’t see you coming.”
He bit back his response, which was to point out that she’d had her nose stuck in her phone, and instead, squatted down to help her gather up the sheets of paper. They had a list of targets and mission objectives on them. “What’s this?” he asked. Bucky thought she was one of the science nerds. She shouldn’t have the information she did. He immediately wondered if she was a mole, trying to sneak out information.
She crawled down the hall on her hands and knees, grabbing papers as she went. “Fury gave me one job to do, and I fuck it up. Don’t look at the things. They are classified things. In fact,” she said, pushing herself up to her feet, “give them to me. You aren't allowed to…”
He watched her eyes widen as she realized who she’d run into. Bucky wished he could say that he’d gotten used to the way people looked at him from the corner of their eyes or the way people in the building would avoid walking near him. He’d even caught some of the lower level employees trying to covertly take pictures of him with their cell phones in the lobby of the building. It all just made him feel like a fucking freak. Now he was going to be late for the briefing and she was going to make him feel like shit. Great.
“Well, uh, so I guess you can look at the papers after all. Because you’re, like, totally on the team and stuff and... “ She inhaled and blew her breath sharply out the corner of her mouth to lift a lock of hair off her forehead. “Jesus, I need a drink,” she muttered.
He’d come to the decision that she wasn’t a mole at all. She was too flustered to be a mole. Or she was the best actress he’d ever seen. “Are you working for Fury?”
“Uh, not fucking likely,” she said before bending over to pick up two papers at her feet.
She was a very confusing person. He scooped up the last few sheets and thrust his hand out to offer them to her. “Here,” he told her.
“Sorry, for disturbing your space like that, dude. Fury asked me to make copies and bring them to the briefing, and I was thinking that this was like an audition or something. I mean, working for Jane is cool and all, but, like, Fury can pay me way more than science can. Science doesn’t pay shit when you’re not a genius. I’m not a genius, if you couldn’t tell. Then again, science doesn't pay much even if you are a genius. So, yeah, audition and copies and then–boom–you.”
Bucky stared at her, still holding out the papers. She snatched them away and added them to her pile. “I have no idea what you just said to me,” he admitted.
“Yeah, me neither.” She looked at her phone and groaned. “Fuck, I’m late, and I don’t even know where the conference room is.”
“It’s this way,” he told her, nodding down the hall. She fell into step behind him, and he could hear her shuffling the papers to get them all turned in the right direction.
“Can you, like, feel stuff with your fingers?” she asked.
Bucky turned his head to look at her. “What?”
She lifted her hand and wiggled her fingers. “The metal ones. Can you feel stuff? Or is it just… metal?”
He stopped walking and turned to face her. No one asked him about his arm. No one. Sometimes he wished they would so it wouldn’t be such a taboo thing, so he wouldn’t have to endure nosey people taking furtive pictures of him like he didn’t know exactly what they were up to. “Yes,” he said after a moment.
“So, yes to feeling stuff or yes to just metal?”
He turned back around to keep walking. She hurried after him. “Yes to feeling stuff,” he answered.
“Huh, that’s pretty cool. They had that technology back in the forties?”
Who the fuck was this girl? She obviously knew who he was, but she sure as shit didn’t seem to care that much about how dangerous everyone made him out to be. “Guess so,” he replied, turning a corner. The room was at the end of the hall.
She was hot on his heels, and they were both five minutes late to a meeting that was to start at four o’clock on the dot. Fury was a stickler for that kind of thing. Bucky stopped at the door and put his hand on the knob. She almost bounced into his back, pulling up short a fraction of a second before walking right into him again.
He turned his head to give her a questioning look, wondering why she couldn’t keep her phone out of her face and just walk. Her eyes were wide again, but she didn't have her phone out.
“What?” she asked. “I didn’t… I mean, I was putting the papers in order. I wasn’t looking at your ass.”
Bucky furrowed his brows.
“What?” she asked again. “I wasn’t.”
Narrowing his eyes at her, he said, “Yeah, I believe you.”
“Oh. Good. Is this the place?”
“You got your papers in order?” he asked.
She flipped through the stack. “Yep, lead on Sergeant Barnes.”
He opened the door and stepped aside so she could go in. Bucky watched her make a beeline for Fury at the head of the table. She laid the stack of papers in front of him and bent down to speak to him in low tones. She looked like she was apologizing for her tardiness. He frowned and walked around the table to take the empty chair next to Steve.
As he settled into the chair, she wrapped up her conversation with Fury and hurried out of the room. The mission objectives lists, which she’d just delivered were passed around. His was crinkled from flying all over the hallway minutes before. Bucky smoothed out the sheet and turned his attention to the front of the room.
It was good she worked in the lab. Maybe they could make messes and talk out of turn in the lab. Knowing Tony Stark, that’s probably just what happened. A clusterfuck of loud music and food and equipment parts. That was where she belonged.
The mission was a waste of time. The intel they’d been given was outdated and the HYDRA cell had moved on. Most of the elite ops squad was still in eastern Poland. He and Steve had arrived back at the Avengers facility in Newark a few minutes before. They had taken the quinjet with a handful of others. Natasha and Clint had stayed behind with the larger group.
Steve was on some protein drink kick and had offered to make Bucky one as they rode the elevator down from the landing pad on the roof to the apartment they shared on the twenty-first floor. He wanted real food, not that powdered shit Steve mixed with milk and drank by the gallon, so Bucky took the elevator all the way to the lobby. He pulled his baseball cap low and shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat to hide the prosthetic and hopefully not draw any attention to himself. He wasn’t in the mood to be gawked at by anyone.
The lobby was high-ceilinged and open. The front of the building was glass that went up three stories. Odd-looking, modern light fixtures hung from above, but most of the light came from the wall of windows overlooking the street. He exited the elevator and hunched his shoulders up. His eyes scanned the area; it was a habit that was hard to break. There were maybe fifteen to twenty people milling around the doorway and seating area by the windows. The security desk was manned by a young kid who looked like his shirt was two sizes too big. He reminded Bucky of Steve, before the serum and the War.
The girl–the one who worked in the lab and had insisted she wasn’t staring at his ass–was standing by the security desk with a FedEx package. She appeared to be struggling with a roll of clear packing tape. Bucky shook his head and turned away from her. She’d just cause a scene if she saw him. That’s what girls like her did. She was too loud and too brash and too… much.
He looked outside as he approached the exit and saw a beat up white station wagon double parked right in front of the doors. His mind started assessing the situation, cataloging the dialogue around him and the way the car was sitting there, idling, waiting for a ticket from the police car that drove by every fifteen minutes. When he got to the door, he saw two black SUVs parked down the block.
“Code G in blue sector, code G in blue sector.” The robotic voice sounded from the radio the kid at the security desk was wearing. Code G was innocuous. It was just a notification that the security system was resetting itself because of a bug. It happened from time to time and would only take half a minute. The building was set up with different sectors, so the only part of the building that was vulnerable at the moment was the back entrance where the loading dock was. It had its own security guard.
Except all these little things were adding up to something that made the back of his neck prickle. He pushed open the door and looked up the street. An unmarked box truck was parked a block up. Bucky looked back at the idling station wagon. There wasn’t a driver. He had a very bad feeling.
Elite ops team in Poland, a security system bug at the loading docks, unfamiliar vehicles parked just far enough away from an out-of-place and driverless station wagon. He took one step out the door, which gave him a view of the interior of the car. A small, stubby antenna was attached to the dashboard. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.
Before he could turn to go back into the building, the flashing red light next to the antenna switched over to a steady green. Bucky whipped around and yelled for everyone to get down. He had just enough time to take two lurching strides into the building before the blast hit his back and propelled him further into the lobby, chunks of glass flying through the air around him. He saw the glass hit the floor, but he couldn’t hear the tinkle it made because his ears were roaring from the boom.
Crawling across the floor of the lobby on his knees and elbows, he risked a glance back at the doorway. Some of the glass in the upper window panes was still intact, but shattered and barely holding on to the frames. The glass right in front of him was gone, the thin strips of metal between the panes the only thing remaining.
Bucky reached around to the small of his back and pulled out his Beretta. It held eighteen rounds, which didn’t seem like enough when it came to a situation like this. He just hoped that someone on an upper floor received an alert that the lobby had been compromised. The loading dock around back was probably also hit, though it was more likely that the men hiding in the box truck were on their way to take it over.
He stumbled to his feet and made his way toward the security desk. The kid with the too-big shirt and oversized badge was out cold on the floor. He’d probably stood up to see what Bucky had yelled about and been thrown into the wall by the blast. The desk wasn’t the best cover, but it was the only cover he had.
“What happened?”
He glanced over his shoulder and saw the girl–the lab girl–watching him with wide blue eyes and parted lips. She had blood on her arm and glass in her hair. “Get down,” he hissed at her. When she didn’t react, he reached over and grabbed her arm, pulling her down to her knees behind the desk with him
“Was that a bomb?
“What do you fuckin’ think?” he asked. Bucky did not need a civilian to babysit during a crisis like this. All their best men were out of the country, and Steve was upstairs making a milkshake. “You get down and stay down,” he barked at her.
“Okay,” she agreed, crouching down next to him.
He could hear the sound of gunfire from the back of the building. She wasn’t registering it, probably because her ears were still messed up from the explosion and because she didn’t have enhanced hearing courtesy of Dr. Fucking Zola.
The people who had been near the window when the bomb went off and weren’t knocked out were slowly getting to their feet. “Stay down!” he told them. “On the floor!”
Some of them obeyed and others still struggled to stand. He swept his gaze over to the blown out doorway as a group of men in black tactical gear and assault rifles approached the building. One of them lifted his weapon and shot through the empty window frame, catching a middle-aged men in a suit right between the shoulder blades. The gunshot propelled the man’s body forward a couple steps before he fell on his face. Before the blood began to pool around the man, Bucky lifted his gun and aimed for the shooter. His pistol could kill just as well as their rifles, and he proved that when his shot hit the intruder right in the forehead. The hostile crumpled to the ground. Bucky was able to pick off another member of the assault team before all hell broke loose and they realized they had an unfriendly behind the security desk.
Chips of the thick wood flew as they sprayed bullets around him. Bucky grabbed the mouthy girl and curled his body around her to keep her from getting shot. She was trembling and her breathing was rapid and hot against his arm. When the gunfire died down and the men entered the building, Bucky let go of her. “You stay here and don’t move. You got it?”
Commotion from the hallway behind them took his attention from her wide eyes. It didn’t take long for him to put two and two together and realize the team that had taken the loading dock was on their way to meet up with the team in the lobby. He couldn’t take them all. He heard another gunshot just yards away, and a woman screamed in horror. They’d shot another civilian in the lobby. Where were the cops? Where was the building security team?
“Can I have that?”
He looked over at the brunette beside him. He didn’t even know her name. “What?” he asked.
“Can I have that?” she asked again, pointing at the gun strapped to his ankle. His lifted pant leg exposed it.
“No,” he snapped. “You stay here.”
Now there were gunshots in the hall behind them. They were surrounded, and he had no idea how to get lab girl to safety.
“I think I can help. Can I have the gun?”
“You don’t even known how to use one, sweetheart,” he muttered, popping his head above the desk to survey the location of the hostiles in the lobby. They’d spread out while one was attaching explosives to the elevators. Another was working on the keypad to the stairwell.
They’d been played. HYDRA had sent them off on a wild goose chase in Poland while planning to hit the headquarters for the Avengers all along. They just hadn’t counted on some of the team, like him, being back early. Not that he was doing much good right now, hiding behind a fucking desk.
“I can shoot,” she told him.
“Sure you can,” he said, taking aim at the man on the keypad. The elevators could go, but if they gained access to the stairwell, then the building would be fucked.
A commotion behind them made him second guess the shot, especially from such a distance with a handgun. If he had his rifle, then he’d pick the guy off without a thought. A door banged open and the second team from the loading docks hurried into the lobby. Bucky’s position was too exposed; the desk didn’t hid him or the girl from their eyes at that angle.
He moved to shield her from them again, when he felt a tug on his ankle. She’d unbuckled the strap holding the Glock into the holster and pulled it out before he could react.
“I can help,” she repeated to him before adding, “I think,” under her breath. “Who do I shoot?”
Bucky widened his eyes at her. “The people shootin’ at you, sweetheart.”
“Okay, fuck, you don’t have to be such an asshole about it,” she whispered.
“We got two over here,” a man called out, making his way over to where they were half-hidden behind the desk.
Bucky swung his gun up, but before he could pull the trigger, he heard a pop. The man approaching them crumpled to the floor, and that frustrating fucking girl from the lab looked from the smoking barrel of the Glock to him with wide eyes. Bucky would have felt sorry for her if they’d had the time. As it was, her shot had brought down a shitstorm on them. He picked off three men before the others reacted and started firing at them. He counted his shots. He had fourteen left. Under a hail of bullets, he pulled the trigger four more times to clear the lobby floor.
He’d been hoping that the men behind them would be slow to react and the fact that he didn’t have a bullet in the back of his head told him that his hopes had been answered. Or not. There were five men dead on the floor in the hallway. Men he had not shot.
He looked over at lab girl. Her upper teeth were pressed deep into her lower lip as she took aim at the man by the staircase. Just as he opened the door, she fired and hit him dead center in the back of the head. They had to be twenty or twenty-five yards away and she had his subcompact Glock in her hands. One of Fury’s elite ops guys would be hard pressed to do what she’d just done with a gun not made for accuracy at distances. Obviously she was responsible for the bloodbath behind them, as well.
Two men came around the bend of the hallway and took aim at her. She was so focused on making her next shot, which happened to be the man by the elevators, that she didn’t even notice. Bucky lunged forward and wrapped his left arm around her waist, pulling her back. Her finger hit the trigger and her next round lodged itself in the ceiling right before the spot where she’d been lit up with bullets.
“Holy shit,” she said, struggling to right herself in his arms. The two men who had shot at her were advancing. Without letting her go, Bucky lifted his gun and fired, hitting the man on the right. Before he could take aim at the other man, she had him lined up in her sights. The guy didn’t stand a chance. She shot him right in the center of his chest.
Suddenly, Steve’s shield flew across the room and knocked back three men approaching them from behind. Bucky looked up, never more happy to see that punk.
“The roof is compromised and they’ve gained access to the stairwell,” Steve said. “I put in a call to our backup team. They should be here in five.”
Bucky and Steve both jumped when they heard a shot. Bucky looked down at the girl, who was still wrapped up in his arm. Smoke wafted from the muzzle of her gun. “What?” she asked. “He was going to shoot Captain America. I can’t let him do that.”
The man she was referring to was limp and lifeless on the floor, a hole in his forehead. “Sweetheart, what the fuck?” Bucky said on an exhale.
The building alarm started blaring and a confused mass of people spilled out of the stairwell, screaming and crying and yelling for help.
“Give me the gun,” Steve said, reaching his open hand out to the girl.
“Let her keep it,” Bucky told Steve as he pushed himself up to his feet. “She's a good shot.”
The girl stuck her tongue out at Steve. Actually stuck her fucking tongue out and scrunched up her nose like she was eleven years old and getting her way after her dad told her she couldn't have something for her birthday. Bucky shook his head and offered her his left hand. He hadn't actually expect her to take it. It came as a bit of a shock when she slipped her hand into his without hesitation.
Pulling her up, he said, “Hide the gun in your jeans and leave the building. Go five blocks up Fifth and knock on the side door to Silky’s Bar. Tell them you're there to see Winston.”
“No, I'm staying here to help,” she told him, letting go of his hand and turning toward the staircase. The stream of people had stopped, but Bucky could hear the steady clop of heavy boots descending. The team from the roof was coming, and he could hear a helicopter outside. If they were organized, they’d have a larger team ready to come through the front within a minute.
Steve was already heading to the staircase by himself like a suicidal idiot. No surprise there. “No, you're not. I need you to get the fuck out of here or you're gonna get us both killed.”
She lifted her chin. “I saved your ass.”
“You did,” he conceded. “But I'm gonna get killed trying to save yours again. Silky’s Bar on Fifth. Side door. Ask for Winston.”
“Who is Winston?”
“No one. Doll, get the fuck out of here. Now.”
She shoved his gun in the waistband of her jeans and flipped her shirt over it. The look she shot him was dirty, like she wasn't happy he was bossing her around. Frankly, he didn't really care what she thought. Although, Bucky would have been lying if he said the way she'd tucked his gun away in her pants wasn't a little hot.
There was a commotion in the stairwell and then a series of echoing gunshots. Muttering under his breath, Bucky gave the girl one last stern look to get her on her way before jogging over to help Steve.
It took five hours to get the building under control. A team of HYDRA operatives that had come in from the roof had compromised the computer system. Bucky didn’t know exactly what that meant, but the tech nerds on the seventh floor were up in arms over it. Two of them were nursing serious concussions from being bashed in the back of the head with the grip of a rifle, and the other three were sitting in the corner, voices at a whisper.
“What’s the hold up?” Bucky asked Steve, holstering his Beretta in its spot at the small of his back.
Steve shook his head and walked out of the room to stand in front of the stairwell door. “HYDRA pulled some sensitive information off the server. They still aren’t sure what. I talked to Fury. He’s out of the country taking care of some political crisis in the UK. He pulled some strings and talked to the head of the CIA.”
“Yeah, okay,” Bucky said, motioning for Steve to get to the point.
“They think HYDRA has been operating out of Trenton for months. At first they thought it was a drug operation for the Russian mafia, but the drug packaging and distributing is just the cover. Which is probably why it never showed up on our radar.”
“And it shows up on the CIA’s? Why didn’t they pass along the info?”
Steve shrugged. “Bureaucracy. You know these agencies don’t share info.”
“Fuck that,” Bucky replied, turning away from Steve and pacing along the wall. “What’s next? Where’s this place in Trenton?”
“Buck, no. We can’t go off all half-cocked.”
Bucky laughed. “That’s rich coming from you, punk. Can’t go off all half-cocked, you tell me. Like that isn’t the story of your life.”
“We are responsible for other lives, Buck. The team in Poland is en route. They should be here in less than twenty-four hours. Natasha and Clint are headed back now and should be here soon. We need to wait until we’re fully staffed before we can go after them.”
Bucky didn’t like it. If the team was back in twenty-four hours, then it would take at least another twenty-four to come up with a game plan to go after the HYDRA base. That gave them two whole days to pack up and move locations or get out of town. It sounded like they got something of worth from the computer system, if the stench of anxiety from the tech nerds told him anything. “Gives them too much time to react,” he told Steve.
“Ain’t nothing can be done for that, Buck. We can’t take on the whole base ourselves. The CIA estimates they have over a hundred people coming and going at any one point in time, and that’s a conservative estimate.” Steve laughed under his breath and added, “Unless you want to ask that brunette to give us a hand.”
“What brunette?” Bucky asked. As soon as it was out of his mouth, he knew exactly what brunette. “Ah, fuck. Her.”
“Where’d you send her?”
“To the safe house at Silky’s.”
Steve nodded. “I’ll send someone over to check on her.”
They walked back into the large office that housed the technical support staff and the servers that ran the operation and building. The three techies huddled around the corner desk looked up at them.
“What did they get?” Steve asked them in that authoritative Captain America voice that Bucky still thought was just a little funny. Apparently, the nerds didn’t think so because they all looked close to jumping out of their skin.
“Uh, well, a few things,” a tall, balding man said. “Security camera footage around the time of the accident. Maybe twenty minutes before and five or ten minutes after the blast.”
“Okay,” Steve said. “What else?”
“And, uh, the files on a few agents, including, uh, well…” The man’s eyes shot to Bucky and then bounced back to Steve.
“Including mine,” Bucky said, his voice flat. He really should be used to it by now. It was just hard to swallow that constant, dogged harassment by those Nazi fucks that thought they knew how to run the world. They just wouldn’t stop until he was in a grave or running around being their bitch again.
“Your psych evaluation and…”
“And confirmation that I still got their shit in my fuckin’ head,” Bucky snapped. He walked out of the room, clenching his left hand into a fist and trying to restrain himself enough that he didn’t punch a hole in the wall.
“Buck,” Steve said, following him down the hall. “Just because they have it, doesn’t mean they can do anything with it. You’ve been working on getting it under control. What’s to say they’d still be able to use your triggers against you?”
“Is that a chance you wanna take, punk?”
“I know you, Buck. I know you got this under control. Who cares if they have anything on you. Ain’t like they can use it.”
The elevator door to their right opened and Fury stepped out.
“I thought you were in the UK,” Steve said.
“Was. I was on a plane fifteen minutes after I got your call because we have to deal with the shitstorm that just happened here. What the fuck went wrong with our security systems?”
“They caught the system in the loading dock going through its reset,” Bucky said. “And they blew the front of the building out, in case you didn’t fuckin’ see.”
“I saw it, Barnes. Believe me, I saw it.” Fury’s lips were flattened out in a grimace. “How’d they know about the system reset? How’d they get the car double-parked and not towed? The Newark PD drives by every fifteen fuckin’ minutes.”
“You think they have someone inside?” Steve asked.
“I don’t know,” Fury replied, “but I’m going to find out.”
Bucky flexed his left hand. He wanted to fight something or someone. They were wasting time standing around holding their dicks. It was giving HYDRA too much of a jump on them.
Fury was looking at his phone. “Who the fuck is this? Is this Lewis?” he asked them, holding his phone out toward Steve and Bucky.
The picture was grainy, like it had been taken from a video and blown up. Bucky didn’t have to give it more than a cursory glance to answer Fury’s question, though. It was lab girl, the brunette who had taken his Glock.
“She works here,” Steve said. “In the labs, I think. I don’t know her name.” He looked over at Bucky.
“I don’t fuckin’ know her name,” Bucky replied, a bit defensive. “I was trying to help her get out of here.”
“Lewis,” Fury said again. “What the fuck was she doing in the lobby? Someone is willing to pay fifty thousand bucks for positive identification. My Intel guys just found the request on the dark web. Why are they looking for the name of a lab employee?”
Bucky snorted. “Because she shot and killed at least nine of their guys.”
“What’s she doing in the lab, then? I've been having her run goddamn errands like a secretary,” Fury said. He and Steve both turned their attention to Bucky.
He threw his hands out. “I don’t fuckin’ know. I’m not in charge of hiring. I didn't even know her name.”
Steve dropped his voice and stepped over to Fury. “She’s at the safe house at Silky’s. Or at least that’s where Bucky sent her. I was about to send someone to check on her.”
“Not until I figure out if we have a leak or double agent,” Fury replied. “One of you can go check on her.”
Bucky assumed Steve would. Steve was all about saving damsels in distress. Lab girl wasn’t really a damsel in distress, but Steve had a soft spot for chocolate brown hair and red lips.
“In fact,” Fury continued, “I’ll take care of two of my problems at once. You go check on her, Barnes. And while you’re at it, why don’t you camp out there for the night. The security in this building is fucked until we can get a cleanup crew out here. They have your file, and I’m not taking the chance that they’ll fuck with your head again.”
“He’s fine,” Steve said before Bucky could even open his mouth.
“I’m sure he is, but I’m not risking my men. If he goes off, he could take out my entire elite ops team.”
“I’m good,” Bucky said through clenched teeth.
“Not up for discussion,” Fury replied. “Give me twenty-four hours and I’ll pull you out. For now, I need you out of the picture just in case.” He checked his phone screen again. “And keep that girl in there, for fuck’s sake,” Fury added. “I don’t need a lab assistant to get kidnapped and killed because of a glitch in our security system.”