#i think the most i found a resemblance was when nat held a rifle and went to Misty's home | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

marvel-girl-13 · 4 years

Text

Discovery

So this is my first time sharing anything I’ve written on here, and based off of what I’ve been lurking I’ll be starting any of my writings with the similar styles I’ve seen. Images and characters used are not my own and I do not claim them as my own (except for Eden).

Warnings: Language, a bit of a Marvel AU (I do realize that Bucky and Steve would have never had a chance to do something like this)

Word Count: 3567

Summary: Bucky and Steve go on a mission together for Fury and discover something they weren’t quite expecting

---

“Steve… I’ve got a funny feeling about this.”

Steve couldn’t help but let a small smile touch the corners of his lips at his friend’s firm, but nonetheless uneasy tone. He knew he had to take this moment very seriously, but to hear Bucky seem even the tiniest bit apprehensive humored him. He didn’t say anything for a moment, letting the soft crunching of their boots against the gravel fill the gap. It wasn’t until he had a chance to look over at his companion that the true gravity of the situation really hit home. “What’s up, Buck?” he asked.

Bucky Barnes shook his head, tucking his lips inward as he glanced around. The woods they were marching through were quiet, save for their footsteps and the occasional scurry of a woodland creature. His eyes, always on the alert, were brighter and more focused than normal. Although the rifle he held at the ready was steady, there was undoubtedly an aura of unease to him. “I don’t know,” he replied at last.

He rolled his shoulders a few times as he and Steve paused in the shadow of a large tree. “I’ve just got this feeling.” He smirked a little bit. “Kinda like when I used to know you had purposefully left your inhaler at home when we had gym class.”

Steve Rogers couldn’t help but smile a little back. “You know I don’t need my inhaler anymore now, Buck.” His blue eyes twinkled. To hear his old friend starting to reminisce little things here and there from their past together warmed Steve on the inside. The gray eyes that gazed back at him were still cold, but he felt that he could see the life coming back to them each day.

Bucky shrugged. “Maybe that’s why it feels weird.”

Steve chuckled. “We should be almost there,” he said, turning his gaze away to peer through the trees. With the captain’s back turned, Bucky’s fleeting smile vanished and his nerves returned to their heightened state. Without another word, the pair continued their march.

It wasn’t long before they had reached a small break in the treeline. The land had been rather flat for most of their trek, the trees dense and their roots occupying nearly every square inch of terrain. Now in the midst of these trees were suddenly mounds of earth and foliage. The mounds stood no more than a foot high and could have been thought as unremarkable. Random for sure, but to find hills within a forest was not that unordinary. But from what Steve had learned from Nat and Fury, this plot of land had been home to one of the more recent experimental laboratories of SHIELD… or HYDRA.

“How do we know we’ve found it?” Bucky asked. Like Steve, he was more of a soldier by nature, and all of the undercover stuff involving actually finding secret locations was a bit out of his league.

Steve checked the GPS he had been provided with to use as a guide. “Well, we’re at the coordinates,” he replied, stowing the device away. “Now we’ve just got to find the door to knock on.” Steve pointed with a sweeping motion to his left. “You start searching on that side and I’ll take the other so we can cover the whole perimeter.”

Bucky nodded, stepping forward towards his indicated sector. As he scoped out the mounds, his brow was furrowed in a mixture of concentration and slight puzzlement. To him, this whole area was bizarre and didn’t make much sense to him. How were these mounds in any way inconspicuous? Indeed, they were hundreds of miles away from civilization, but the odd shapes littering a landscape that was relatively uninhabited was a giant red flag to anyone. Especially to those who had access to satellites images of the area. And yet, no one had found the lab. The silence did not sit well with the uneasy feeling in his gut. Bucky made sure to give the piles of earth a large berth, rifle level with his eye, his back never facing the ones closest to him.

Several feet away, Steve was thinking along the same lines. The mounds looked as if they had been untouched for decades or more, some of them ensnared in the never ending roots of the surrounding trees. If there was something to be found underneath the dirt, then why had no one done so? Steve slowed his walk, his expression similar to Bucky’s as he gazed upon the mound before him. He was about to open his mouth to request a report from Bucky when his partner spoke first.

“Steve? Are there… bodies buried here?”

Steve turned in the direction of his friend’s voice. Through the dark, he could make out only the outline of Bucky. It wasn’t until the moonlight shone off of his metal arm that he could see what the other man was looking at: a small, but unmistakable wooden cross embedded in the grass growing upon the mound before him. Steve’s breath caught in his throat for a moment, and he looked around to see similar crosses sitting untouched on the dirt hills around him.

“Steve, were we asked to rob graves? To be honest, that’s a little fucked up.” For a moment, Bucky let down his guard, his rifle dropping to his side. He shook his head, taking a few steps back. “I didn’t sign up for a lot of shit in the past seventy years, but this I definitely did not agree to.”

“Something isn’t right,” Steve couldn’t help but agree. He pulled out the GPS again, scanning their location with it. The red dot that indicated the general area of their target still held true to where they were. The captain shoved it away, reaching up to his earpiece to page Nat in. “Rogers here. We’ve reached the location, but there must have been a mistake. We’ve ended up at what looks like a burial site.”

“The coordinates aren’t wrong, Captain.” Fury’s voice rang in sternly. “You’re in the right place.”

Steve’s frown deepened as he began to head over to where Bucky stood. “We didn’t sign up to disturb the dead, sir,” he said just as firmly. His gaze met Bucky’s, who now looked more irate than ill at ease.

“You are right where you need to be,” Fury commanded, unmoved. Bucky’s anger was starting to override his firm demeanor, his eyes glittering in the dark as he listened in on the conversation. He began to resume his scan, his fingers tensing on his weapon.

“Fury, there can’t be anything here,” Steve said calmly.

“It’s there,” Fury answered just as coolly. “It has to be. The dead don’t bite, Cap. It’s the ones hiding out underneath all the corpses that do.”

Steve struggled to figure out what to do, looking at the mounds surrounding him in dismay. He did trust Fury, but this just seemed so -

“Steve.” The cold, dead way that Bucky said his name made the avenger start. He looked towards his friend, half expecting to find the Winter Soldier staring back with the rifle aimed straight for his head. He had not heard Bucky speak in such a way since the first time they had been reunited in over seventy years. To his dismay, he found that he was only partially right in his thinking: the way that Bucky was looking at him reflected that frozen, mechanistic creature HYDRA had transformed him into. It wasn’t until Steve noticed that the other man was quivering with suppressed rage that he snapped out of the fear that he had lost his friend again. “Steve,” Bucky repeated, his teeth clenched. “There are children buried here.”

Steve’s stomach dropped as his eyes followed where Bucky’s hand was pointing. Indeed among the adult-sized mounds, there was a small row set aside for much smaller hills of earth. The resemblance was unmistakable. “Fury -”

“Just find it, Rogers.”

“Fuck, man,” Bucky breathed, lost for words. Steve reached out a hand towards him, wary as to how his friend was handling everything. He wondered if maybe he was having a flashback. Perhaps he had some kind of connection to the thought of dead children or even to this place itself.

“It’s there. Just keep looking, Cap.”

Steve had eyes only for Bucky, Fury’s words far away in his ear. His friend heaved a huge breath in, his chest puffing up before he roughly exhaled. Their gazes met, a mutual pleading look shared between them.

“That’s an order.” Both soldiers’ chins lifted and their postures straightened.

“Ten minutes,” Bucky snapped. His expression remained unchanged. “Ten more minutes, and then I’m out.”

Steve sighed, dropping his head as Bucky carefully made his way back to his side. “Buck -”

Bucky shot him a look. “I’m good. I get it. Orders are orders. Lead the way, Captain.”

Steve nodded appreciatively. “Just ten more minutes. I promise.” Walking side by side this time, the two men walked between the mounds. They matched one another’s pace, surveying the ground for any signs that could indicate a possible secret entrance. As something caught his eye, Steve paused. “Wait.” He gazed down at one of the crosses. Unlike the others, there was a message and the outline of a bird with wings outstretched scrawled into the wood.

“‘From beneath the ashes we will rise,’” Bucky read aloud. He exchanged a look with Steve.

“Now why would you mark only one of these?” Steve mused. He and Bucky leaned forward to inspect the writing a bit closer. Their combined breath in the freezing air plumed like a dust cloud, drifting heavily in the cold night. Suddenly, the inscribed bird began to glow with a white light. A low grinding sound echoed, causing the pair to leap back. Bucky raised his rifle, Steve lifting his shield. They looked to their right, watching as one of the mounds slowly began to cave inwards. As they approached, it appeared that they had at last revealed an entrance: a stairway leading down beneath the surface, ending in a metal door.

“With five minutes to spare,” Bucky muttered. He nodded to Steve. “After to you.”

Steve pried open the metal door, allowing the pair access inside. The lights above in the hall flickered on. It was at a much quicker pace than Steve had anticipated, and he had to blink as his eyes adjusted. He looked around, shield raised. The concrete walls were that of any type of bunker, but the facility was on the smaller side than the others they had previously entered. There was a very fine layer of dust on the floor, indicating that it had been abandoned rather recently.

“No activity noted so far,” Steve dispatched back to Fury. He carefully made his way through, Bucky following behind. At the far end of the hallway was the laboratory they had been searching for. The room was immediately lit upon their entrance, casting light on what had taken place here. Along the wall opposite them was a white table that held various vials and an assortment of microscopes. As Steve approached it to investigate, he noticed that many of the vials were smashed; two of which appeared to have contained a dark red liquid. Steve picked up one of the glass remains, squinting to try and read what the yellowed and torn label read.

“The place is empty of agents, scientists, or even soldiers,” he reported back to Fury. “They’ve destroyed all of their work. Probably figured we would be coming after them sooner or later.”

“Steve.” The avenger glanced over at Bucky, who had noticed the mirror that was across from the table. It stretched a majority of the wall, reflecting the two men and their surroundings back at them. “Do most scientists want to see their reflection while they work?” The expression on Bucky’s face told Steve that his friend already knew the answer to his question. He could almost picture the memories swirling around in his best friend’s head. Looking to his left, Steve saw a gray light switch on the wall. Swallowing hard, unsure as to what they were about to see, he flicked the switch upwards.

The “mirror” became illuminated right away, revealing the expansive room on the other side. Lined up like beds in a nursery were two parallel rows of what appeared to be large fish tanks. All that they contained were a haphazard of cords and tubing, free of both water and aquatic life.

Except for one.

“Fury,” Steve said, his tone urgent. “What was the purpose of this -”

“Гребаное дерьмо. (Grebanoye der’mo; Fucking shit)” The Russian growl heightened the avenger’s unease even more. His eyes met Bucky, who now looked pissed beyond belief. Without another word, he rammed the butt of his rifle straight into the glass with all of his might. Then he vaulted over the ledge and into the room on the other side. Steve had no choice but to follow his friend.

The pair skidded to a halt before the single filled tank on the right side of the space. Inside the tank drifted what appeared to be a young woman, her long auburn hair floating about her pale face. Her eyes were closed as if she were asleep; but her brow was creased in a frown, as if she was trapped within a terrifying dream. Her naked form reflected the tension in her face, legs and hands partially curled inwards. Her nose and mouth were hidden from view behind the face mask that permitted her to breathe beneath the surface of the churning water.

“Experiments,” Bucky said in a low voice. He looked to the metal rolling table that sat to his left. His eyes flickered to the cattle prod that lay upon it among the scattered tweezers and scalpels. Then he glanced back over at Steve. “Even SHIELD was trying make more of you.”

Steve shook his head in disbelief. “She can’t be more than eighteen or twenty,” he said. “How can she be the only one…” He trailed off as the images of the mounds above them flashed in his mind.

“Do not try to engage, Cap,” Fury said. “I’ve sent some people to come and take it from here.”

“What does he mean by that,” Bucky asked, his tone icy. His gaze was now trapped on the woman kept within the box, his focus solely on her expression. A flicker of pain seemed to flow into her temples, the muscles growing tighter beneath the skin. The water’s surface, once rolling with a slow churn, was steadily growing to resemble more of a bubbling.

“Sergeant,” Fury warned. “I suggest you stand down.”

Bucky’s stomach twisted like snakes were squeezing his innards. The off feeling was back again; in addition to his gut, something was tugging at the scarred areas of his brain as well. His arms tensed, the muscles recalling the bonds once placed upon them. His breath grew slightly haggard, echoing the panic that had filled his body when the needles and instruments had been pressed beneath his skin. “What are they going to do to her,” he asked, although he wasn’t exactly sure who he was speaking to anymore.

“Bucky.” Steve’s voice cut through the haze. “They know what they’re doing. You have to trust me with this.”

“Do not engage,” Fury repeated. The sound of hurrying footsteps came from the way they had come, briefly drawing the pair’s attention elsewhere. Within moments, a group of armed commandos had climbed through the broken mirror and were encircling the one filled tank. Bucky aimed his rifle instinctively, stepping closer to Steve and directly in front of the young woman. The room echoed with the clicks of unlocked safeties as roughly ten weapons pointed right back.

“Bucky, no!” Steve called. Immediately, he moved in between them all, his friend’s barrel pressing straight into his unshielded chest. “Bucky, take a breath. I need you to focus on me.”

“I…” Bucky faltered a bit, but his rifle remained unmoved. “Steve, I can’t… I just can’t let them treat her like…”

“Buck, we don’t even know her,” Steve said softly. “We need to trust that Fury knows what he’s doing. We’ve completed our part. Time to step back.”

“Stand down,” said Fury. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with here, Sergeant, so I suggest that you step aside before I command someone to make you.”

Bucky held Steve’s gaze, but his mind was racing. He could remember back when he was working with the other Soldiers, other agents, other experiments. He caught glimpses of his transition between facilities and between handlers who used his own brain against him. Guns always directed at his head, shackles holding him still as he lay for the operating or the obliterating.

“We don’t know what she’s been put through, Steve.” Bucky’s voice was low, but the tone had a gentle, almost begging edge to it. “This… this should be handled differently.”

Steve looked away. He knew that his friend was right; but he also could see why Fury was edging on the side of caution. For all they knew, this woman was a danger. “Buck,” he said with a sigh. “I trust Fury -”

“Do you trust me?” Bucky’s expression was defiant.

“Sergeant - “

“Fuck off.” Bucky snarled, his defensive stance broken suddenly as he reached up and yanked his ear piece free. It crumbled to pieces between his fingers as his metal fist closed tightly. Then he stared into Steve’s frozen face once more. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

Steve could see the hurt, the pain, the agony that was reflecting in his friend’s eyes. There was something there that he could sense he didn’t quite understand. But trusting Bucky? He always would without question. A small smile flickered on the avenger’s lips. “Would you be here if I didn’t?”

“Sergeant Barnes!” Both soldiers started slightly as the lead commando suddenly called out. “You have been ordered to stand down. Lower your weapon and step -”

The sound of shaking glass and metal drew the whole room’s attention back to the tank. The water within was suddenly at a roaring boil, and the young woman within was contorting in clear distress. A few of the commandos panicked, causing their circle to tighten in response to the sudden change. Steve stepped forward, now placing himself defensively in their line of fire. “Easy now,” he called.

Behind him Bucky had dropped his weapon and leapt into action, scrambling to figure out the mechanisms behind the tank. His hands traveled clumsily over the surface, finding no clear place to grasp to lid to pull it apart, leaving them to uselessly smack against the glass for a moment or two. He watched helplessly as the young woman struggled and thrashed, her back arching. Bucky’s own lungs ached as his brain flashed back to when he too was struggling to breathe, all of his muscle fibers screaming for oxygen as he struggled fruitlessly. That feeling of submerged panic knowing full well that precious, life-giving air is being held just outside of reach.

With a frustrated yell, Bucky found himself reeling back and taking a powerful swing with both arms down onto the top of the tank.

There was an almighty crash. Glass and water flew everywhere as the case suddenly exploded. Steve dove out of the way, along with the rest of the commandos. Bucky was thrown back, his left arm raised defensively to shield himself against the onslaught. As he rolled to a halt some feet away, he watched as the woman suddenly shot upwards from the burst. Her arms stretched outwards as she slowed her own ascent to hover in the air, fists clenched and mouth open as she took in a deep breath. Bucky’s eyes widened as the woman’s body immediately ignited into flames, her figure no longer of flesh and bone but of pure heat and light. Her eyes then flew open, sockets full of fire as she gazed upon the men before her.

“Hold your fire!” Steve shouted as he stood crouched behind his shield. The commandos’ weapons were aimed directly now at the woman floating above, eyes wide, but still somehow able to heed the captain’s command. The young woman looked over at Steve, her chest heaving slightly as she appeared to regain her composure. Her arms lowered to her sides, gazing at him curiously. Then she quickly took in the rest of her surroundings, noticing the empty tanks, the glass shards, and the absence of familiar faces. A look of realization seemed to overcome her flickering features, replacing her sudden zeal for freedom with fear and uncertainty.

“Bring her in.” The command from Fury was terse and bitter. Steve was about to reply, glancing over at Bucky. But without another word, the head commando shot his weapon. As the bullet struck the young woman in the forehead, her body went into a rapid series of convulsions as electricity flowed through. Then her form became human once more before she collapsed. Bucky leapt to his feet, but Steve was there abruptly to stop him from doing anything more as the team Fury sent rushed forward to pick up their target.

Their eyes met, a conversation silently exchanged between them. Then Bucky dropped his head slightly and strode out without another word.

#steve bucky #bucky barnes #bucky fanfic #captain america #marvel #au #james buchanan bucky barnes #winter soldier #steve rogers

1 note · View note