The Pen is Mightier! (penismightier) wrote in chaotic_library, @ 2015-07-30 10:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | bruce banner, bucky barnes, marvel, novel, pepper potts, r-rated, steve rogers, tony stark, yuuo, yuuo: marvel |
[Bucky Barnes; R] Puddle Of Grace: Chapter 6
Character/Series: Bucky Barnes; Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: R
Notes: If you get the reference in the color code used, you are forever my hero. And yes, I also snuck in an Emilie Autumn reference. I am that damn good.
Title: Puddle Of Grace- Chapter 6: Strange Things Have Happened Here
Author: yuuo
Word Count: 5854
Summary: It felt still inside the base, dust only kicked up by their footsteps, but there was a thin haze of cobwebs and whispers in the air.
are you, are you
coming to the tree
wear a necklace of rope,
side by side with me
strange things did happen here
no stranger would it be
if we met at midnight
in the hanging tree
-MockingJay
It felt still inside the base, dust only kicked up by their footsteps, but there was a thin haze of cobwebs and whispers in the air. Sunlight filtered in through dirty and broken windows. There was a chill that felt more than a little unnatural, like a strange blur on a photograph; uncertain what it was, more than likely nothing more than a trick of light. But there was always that possibility that it was something else, something unexplainable.
"This place feels like I'm on one of those ghost hunting shows that people think belong on science channels," Tony said, his voice interrupting a stillness that even his clanking metal-clad feet hadn't been able to chase away.
Bucky lingered back behind Tony and Steve, navigating through the main part of the warehouse, the rusting metal shelves, the haphazard scattering of boxes that may or may not still have medicine in them, the graffiti on the walls, and the way that nature was growing around the crumbling cement that made walking require a bit more care.
His gaze swept across the room, first the left, the shelves and stacks, then in front, Steve and Tony picking their way across rubble, then to the right, where a pair of the giant shelves were knocked down one on top of the other like fallen dominoes. The wall behind them had red graffiti in very plain script that read 'father, why have you forsaken us?' in Russian.
"There're a lot of ghosts here," he finally said. He made his way forward to catch up with Steve and Tony again.
Only, one of those ghosts was among the living.
He saw Tony and Steve exchange a look. He pretended not to.
"Hey, Snowman," Tony said, and it took Bucky a second to realize he was the target of that statement. "Anything on this floor we should investigate?"
"Did you just call me 'snowman'?"
Tony looked over at him. "You've already got a nickname for your real name, you need one for your code name. I could've called you Mister Freeze."
"If you ever call me either of those names again, I will have strong words for you, Tony." Irritating bastard. Irritating, annoying bastard.
"Ah, good, you still have reactions. Okay, I repeat my question. Anything on this floor we should investigate?"
Still have rea- asshole. Manipulative asshole, although Bucky couldn't quite prevent a small smile behind his mask. Thank you, I needed that break. He shook his head, looking around. "Not unless you wanna see if they have any hypodermic needles left."
"Not exactly what we're here for," Steve said.
"Unless we wanna make a killing in the drug market," Tony added. "So Bucky, this entrance to the basement. Your map said it was off on the right somewhere. Is there a secret entrance, or do we just stroll down?"
"There's stairs," Bucky said, moving to take the lead. He was careful of where he placed his feet over the rubble and plants, sidestepping carefully around a tree root that had grown up and over the concrete. "It leads into a maintenance/utility area. The guts of the building are back there."
The doors leading to the back rooms were rusted, creaking in protest when Bucky grabbed one with his left hand, before snapping completely off its hinges and finding itself flung halfway across the room. Steve grabbed the other, but refrained from knocking the door completely off.
Damnit Steve. You and your self-control.
"It can't honestly be this easy to find a classified training area," Tony said. "Just walking into a utility room?"
"It's not," Bucky said, turning a corner, into a very large room filled with wires and cables, an emergency power switch, a small generator whose size belied how much power it could produce, and multiple circuit breaker boxes. "We just gotta hope that generator still works. They pretended it was in case of a power outage, but that was just public smoke blowing."
"Ah, there, a job for me," Tony said, stepping in past Bucky. "If it's dead I'll get it working."
Bucky didn't argue that he could've done it, it made Tony feel useful and Bucky was more interested the circuit breakers. He started looking for the one that opened the door to the basement stairs. He'd never had to use the door in there going down, he wasn't sure which box had the code. He knew the code, that was programmed into his brain, but which circuit breaker was the right one wasn't in there.
Guessing games. Because he just loved guessing games.
"What're we looking for, Bucky?" Steve asked, opening a circuit breaker box and staring at the various switches.
"One that has color labels instead of text," Bucky said, brow furrowing as frustration began to frazzle his already fried nerves. I don't want down there, please let this box be gone. "There's about fifty fucking million breaker boxes in here." And 'here' wasn't exactly a small crawl space. There was quite a bit of maneuvering room, big enough that he knew the door to the basement was wide enough to carry sizable pieces of equipment up to the first floor.
Fifty million was probably a conservative estimation.
"There's a couple above me," Tony said, and Bucky turned, spotting the two boxes just above the generator, one of which was larger than the others in the room.. "Give me thirty seconds and this spot is all yours."
Steve closed a breaker door and joined Bucky in waiting patiently while Tony worked. "I'm guessing the bigger one is the one we want."
Bucky almost agreed, but something in his gut said that was wrong. "We'll find out in a minute here."
"Less than," Tony said. The generator grumbled to life. "It wasn't completely dead, just needed a few old wires reattached." He stood and turned to the breakers. "So one of these has color coded switches, right? We just flip them in the right order then?"
Despite Tony being out of the way of the breaker boxes now, Bucky couldn't make his feet move towards them to see which one was the one he needed. That code that he desperately wanted to forget that very second was all that stood between him and a past he didn't want. He knew he had to sort through the place to look for anything that could harm him or Steve, and destroying it would prevent it from being used the way it had been on him ever again.
But he didn't want to go down to join the shadows and ghosts and silent screams.
Praise the goddamn Flying Spaghetti Monster that Steve rescued him from answering, walking over to the boxes. He opened them both. "Bucky? They're both color coded. Which one is it?"
Wait, what? Oh, fer fucks sake.
Bucky forced himself to look for the programming inside his brain without regressing back so far that Hydra took over again. "The small one. Open and then close the fuse switch for each color."
Steve closed the bigger box, focusing in on the smaller one. "I see pretty much every color in the rainbow in here. Are we going to use them all?"
Realizing that it'd be far easier to do it himself than to relay the code to Steve and hope he didn't fuck it up halfway through, Bucky stepped in next to him, having to look around Steve's broad shoulders a bit. Stupid serum making him stupid big and no, he was not going to let that go. "No. Here, let me do it."
Steve backed out of the way, and Bucky saw him exchange another glance with Tony. Bucky really wished they'd stop that. He wasn't on display for their judgment.
Instead of focusing on that, he went still, searching his brain for the code. Hydra answered him, although he didn't like it. Yellow, blue, red. Open and close the circuit. Blue, purple, blue. Open, close. Purple, green, yellow. He flipped the last circuit, hoping that he had it right and wouldn't have to retreat in his own mind further to get it if he was wrong.
To his immense relief, the far wall, with no small amount of groaning, slid back and then to the side, revealing wide steps leading down to the first basement.
Now to make his feet move again, this time down the stairs. He felt like a child afraid to go to sleep after hearing a scary story, certain he'd have a nightmare if he did. It was a bone-deep fear that he couldn't quite get his mind to articulate, couldn't vocalize any protests, though he desperately wanted to.
It's dark down there.
Once again, Steve came to his rescue- he was going to owe him later -taking one quick look at Bucky before walking to the stairs. "Let's go see what's down here. I'll go first. Tony, cover our rear."
Which put Bucky in a position of being escorted, an old and familiar one that made the whole trip feel like yet another one into the past. Don't trust the weapon. Keep the weapon secured. Never let it get a chance to run.
Steve speaking up with warnings about the stairs, where the concrete was loose, which ones were steeper than others, pulled him back a bit; he was being flanked by friends, who were doing nothing more than protecting him. Something Hydra never did.
Thank you, Steve. I might share my cookies with you later.
"The generator must've turned on the lights," Steve said, staring up at the ceiling once they'd finished navigating stairs that were decades old, but still strong.
The nice thought of cookies couldn't make the lights make it not dark in there for him. So much for that.
"Master of the obvious," Tony said. "It's a good thing you have me around. You would've been in here in the dark all day."
"I think we would've been fine with that thing," Steve said. "JARVIS, on the other hand, could prove useful. You said he scanned Bucky's map from the tablet?"
"Of course he did," Tony said, sounding wounded. "Bucky, anything we should be looking for down here, or should we skip right to finding those stairs into the great abyss?"
And when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you. Thoroughly prefect time for Neiztche to come back to him. Thanks a lot, philosophy professor whose name has been lost into the void of Bucky's memories.
Bucky. Be Bucky. Bucky could find his way down there without Hydra's help. Be Bucky. Try not to sound like a goddamn robot when answering questions. "Unless you feel the burning need to see a lot of training rooms, not a lot to look for."
"Not trying to make this harder than it has to be," Tony said, "but anything besides gun ranges and big rooms to train hand-to-hand in might be something we need to investigate."
"I can stay back with Bucky," Steve said, "if you wanna go check it out, Tony."
Tony scanned the various hallways, and Bucky knew that JARVIS was analyzing what might be on the opposite side of those walls, walls that went on forever, dividing rooms and large training areas. "I'm picking up signs of old equipment that booted up with the generator, way down that way. They might be nothing of interest, but they might be computers that measured progress of the retraining project once the surgeries and chemicals had done their job."
Don't make me go back there. Get me out of here. "They took their notes by hand. We have the only known paper copy."
"They might also have recorded the notes into those computers in later years. We don't need a digital copy that can be downloaded at someone else's convenience."
Tony just had be right.
Damnit.
"Besides, you said known copy," Tony pointed out, motioning towards the sound of something unknown running somewhere down the hall. "We want to look for others. That's why we're here, isn't it? To make sure this doesn't get found so it can't hurt anyone?"
Damnit, Tony, stop being right. Right this instant. You're being annoying.
"Then we'll check."
Steve put his had on Bucky's flesh shoulder. "If you want, we can send Tony and stay back."
Bucky shook his head. "No, if he has questions, I won't know what he's asking about if I can't see it." I don't want to. I can hear gunshots. I smell blood.
Gritting his teeth, Bucky forced himself to walk forward, trying to push away Hydra. He'd already used more of that Winter Soldier than he'd promised himself outside, with the code hiding in his programming. Stay away. He tried to make the memory of his internal map be nothing more than that- a memory. Not programming.
It wasn't really working.
"So you said this place was used for training by more than just you, right?" Tony asked, falling into a place just off Bucky's left, a bit behind, letting Bucky lead the way.
Bucky made a vague noise of acknowledgment. "After the experiments, if they seemed successful, they were brought up here for further testing."
"So our equipment that lit up with the generator probably isn't going to be in any of those rooms. Less risk to expensive equipment than to put them next to dangerous people with dangerous weapons."
Another noise. "I don't remember ever seeing computers down here."
"Might've been added later," Steve said. "Or in rooms you were never taken into."
This time, Bucky didn't bother with a noise.
They explored the basement as much as possible, leaving the electric signal JARVIS picked up on for whenever they found that room. It wasn't going anywhere, they had time.
Several times, Bucky had to hang back and force himself to simply breathe and nothing else. In. Out. He was not there, not in training, these were just old rooms, rooms that were no longer prison cells to keep a person they were molding into a weapon in. Steve and Tony didn't say anything about it, merely slowed their pace, explored the room more thoroughly than really needed until Bucky could force himself to join them again.
They passed through a larger room that looked like a jungle gym, walls to scale, stairs to climb, ceilings to maneuver along, and a smaller room along one side, wide open glass separating it from the bigger part of the room. An observation room.
Observing the reset procedures. Observing how effective the Winter Soldier was, how well the experiments and conditioning were performing. I shouldn't be here. Get me out.
Steve put a hand on his flesh arm again, startling him slightly. He didn't ask why Bucky had stopped, possibly didn't need to, possibly just avoiding it for Bucky's sake. Bucky pursed his lips together, nodded once, then resumed walking, Steve by his side. Partners. Something Hydra's weapon had never had. It got him through the room.
As they worked their way through rooms, they finally started to find areas that Bucky had only been in briefly, areas that had no particular meaning to him, just a path from the labs to the testing rooms.
"Here we go," Tony said, interrupting the silence. "This is the room with the signal." He pushed open the rusted door, similar to so many before, and just as noisy. The room wasn't terribly big, didn't need to be it looked like. There were computers and desks, with larger computer towers along the walls.
"These computers don't look as old as the ones Zola was in," Steve said, glancing at Bucky before wandering away, brushing the dust off the monitor of one of the computers. "So sooner than the seventies."
"Looks like late eighties, maybe early nineties," Tony said. He motioned Bucky over, holding up the case with the explosives. "Come hold this. I need to get into the servers."
Bucky didn't protest to being relegated to the muscle, it meant he didn't have to do anything but continue to keep his brain in the right place and not worry about the labs just yet.
It took Tony several minutes, arguing at the computers the whole time and JARVIS giving him status reports in a tone that suggested he either was trying to calm Tony, or rile him up further. Tony didn't respond as if that tone were either. "Okay, this stuff's no younger than when the Soviet Union went down," he announced. "And we're not finding any backed up record older than sixty-five. Nothing even remotely related to the Winter Soldier project. Mostly just stuff about medicines that we've got today. Nothing to really bother with. We could plant some of the explosives here, though. It's a support room, according to the map."
"Bucky, want the honors?" Steve asked.
"I wouldn't let you do it anyway," Bucky said, now in a familiar routine that let him respond like Bucky. "You're terrible at it."
While Bucky began setting up the explosives, wrapping them around the servers to create a slow burn fuse that'd be ignited by the electric current, Steve made a token noise of protest. "I am not."
"You are too," Bucky said, not looking up from his work. "Tony, read the map, where else would be a good place for these things? The second basement's too far underground, planting explosives down there would be a waste of time."
Tony didn't answer right away, not beyond a mumbling that sounded like he was just talking to himself as he looked through the map. "There's a second support room just down the hall. They're middle supports, not wall supports. If you have enough, I see a couple wall supports on that side, too. That should drop the building in on itself."
Bucky paused, giving Tony a glare. "Yes, Tony, I know how to blow up a building. I just needed to know where the other supports were." He repacked some of the explosives he wouldn't be using in that room and handed them to Tony. "Here, go be useful and set those up in the other rooms."
"I've been useful," Tony argued, but he took the explosives box. "But since I'm so nice, I'll ignore that unfair statement and go set up in the other rooms."
Steve crouched down by Bucky once the sounds of Tony's footsteps had faded. "You gonna be okay?"
No. The labs are next. "Yeah, I'll be fine."
Steve knew Bucky better than that. "Even when we get downstairs?"
Once again, Bucky had to pause what he was doing, putting the fuse down before he did something horrible. "Maybe." That was as honest as he'd get.
"Did you want to skip that level? Just let the top two floors crush it?"
Yes. Let me out of here. Don't make me go down there. "Can't. Gotta make sure there's nothing down there we need first." He resumed wrapping the electric coil, trying to tune out the screams he was hearing from downstairs. They weren't real, just more memories haunting him like nightmares.
Steve put his hand on Bucky's flesh shoulder, thankfully having waited until Bucky was no longer messing with explosives and fuses. "Bucky, I'd have to be blind to see that you don't want to go down there. We can skip it. The explosions will bury it."
It was tempting. Very tempting. The words 'get me out of here' scratched at the back of his throat, trapping themselves there.
But the tiny chance that there was something more down there, a record, or a chemical that could be used to replicate the project, or equipment that needed more than part of a building dropping on it to destroy it, made it impossible for him to give into that temptation.
And some small part of him knew he had to face it. Try to reduce its power over him. Take himself back from Hydra. He didn't want to live in that lab anymore.
"No," he finally managed to say through the hoarseness that his thoughts had embedded into his voice. "We can't risk anything down there surviving to be used again."
Steve, ever annoying about it, knew better than to believe everything that came out of Bucky's mouth. "Used on you." Not a question. Not a statement.
Bucky closed his eyes, grinding his teeth together. "Stop it, Steve. Not now."
That had to be better than the silent treatment, right?
Steve seemed to accept that, didn't give a verbal reply, just squeezed Bucky's shoulder before standing. "How's it going over there, Tony?"
"You wanna give me a minute?" Tony's voice replied through their ear pieces. "I had to travel to set these up. We're going downstairs after this, right?"
"Confirmed," Bucky said, then bit his tongue. He'd done it again. He wasn't even in hell yet and he was already backsliding. The others wouldn't notice, that was standard military speak. But inside Bucky's head, it wasn't the sergeant that answered, it was the weapon. He was so sick of the base, so sick of the backsliding, so sick of losing six hard-earned months.
At least he wouldn't have to be approached by Steve about it.
"I'll meet you at the stairwell," Tony said. "I'm setting up the timer in JARVIS's system. Want me to stop in the computer room again and set that fuse up too? Get them both at the same time?"
"Please," Steve said. "We were just going to use the phone, but JARVIS is probably more reliable."
"Damn right he is," Tony said with no small amount of pride in his voice. "Go ahead, old guys. I know you need a head start."
"Can it, Tony," Steve said.
Bucky normally would've found Steve's reaction funny, or have had a reaction to Tony himself, but he was focused on keeping himself in one piece. Just a bit longer. Get through the basement. Search it, get the fuck out and blow the place to hell.
The air by the stairwell was chilly, as expected from a floor two levels into the ground in a cold month. The whole basement would be cold. Don't put me back in there.
"We need to get you a coat for your uniform," Steve said, drawing Bucky's attention just enough for him to blink in confusion. "You look cold."
"Yeah, maybe," Bucky managed to say. A coat wasn't going to help in this situation; he supposed that lowering the chances of frostbite or heat stroke from the port on his shoulder getting exposed to extreme weather wasn't a bad idea. So yeah. Maybe.
Steve seemed at a loss of what else to say, and the situation made it obvious enough that he probably shouldn't try. Bucky thanked his lucky stars for that. He wasn't in the mood for idle conversation, not even with Steve. He couldn't think like that, was trying too hard to keep in one mind and not another. I don't want to be here anymore.
It seemed like forever, but Tony finally joined them. "Explosives armed and ready," he announced as he joined them. He looked past Bucky and Steve to the dark stairs. "Looks like that generator didn't kick on any lights down there."
Oh good, a momentary distraction. Bucky reached forward with his left hand until he felt the resistance of hitting something against it. He flipped the light switch, and the stairwell lit up. He looked at Tony.
"You don't need to rub it in."
The sound of the draft in the basement, the sound of a soft dying breath, pulled Bucky's attention back to the stairs. Cold continued to whisper up, wrap itself around him like walking through cobwebs that were invisible to the eye. He did his best to not hide from it, to not regress into someone who simply knew it to be his reality. Each step down thudded against the dusty stairs, stirring ghosts and night terrors.
It was so cold.
There was another light switch at the bottom of the stairs. This one illuminated several branches of hallways, each leading down to the other side of the foundation.
"These are where the drug experiments were done?" Steve asked, stepping over to one branch to look down it, then another. "They all look alike."
"JARVIS isn't picking up anything," Tony said. "The only power usage is the overheads." He looked at Bucky. "Should we split up? Cover more ground?"
The way he asked that made Bucky think that he was giving him a chance to back out, to force them to stick together, or even just retreat.
But if Bucky ran away, he was taking Hydra with him. And he'd be running from them in his mind his whole life. He had to do something to tell his brain it was okay to stop, to go home and stay home. It wasn't that easy, wouldn't be that easy, but maybe putting some voices still lingering in that basement to rest would help. He was desperate.
"Split up," he said, his voice sounding distant to his own ears. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Steve was gearing up to argue. "Captain, take the far left. Stark, take the middle. I'll take this side."
Backsliding. The speech patterns of the Winter Soldier as mission head. Hopefully, it'd tell Captain America that now was not the time for a heartfelt talk.
"This is your mission, Soldier," Captain America said, almost chasing Hydra away with that name again, but the Winter Soldier was starting to grip his brain. Bucky could try to navigate the place all he wanted on his own, but he wouldn't make it far. Bucky was too fragile. The Winter Soldier had conditioning, programming. He feared, he screamed, but never cried. Never broke. Continued to be a working weapon.
At least until Captain America had come along.
But that didn't change that Bucky Barnes couldn't go back down these halls as easily as the Winter Soldier could. So with extreme reluctance, Bucky went back on his attempts to not become the weapon again and let it happen naturally. Maybe he'd survive the place in one piece if he did.
Iron Man took the hint. "You heard him, Cap," he said. "I'll take the middle, we'll see if it meets up at the end."
The Winter Soldier walked with a deliberate care, not looking for combatants or even human life of any sorts. Not down there. Not with the state of the grounds. But he couldn't afford to miss anything that might be part of the mission.
The various rooms lining both sides of the hall were basic exam rooms, once sterile tables and counters with rusty steel syringes and bottles that may or may not still contain experimental medicines cluttering the tops. Straps attached to the exam tables were mostly rotted in many of the rooms.
He slowed to a stop by each one, performing a quick inspection, before moving on to the next. He stopped in the doorway of one, taking in details as he had the others. The same medicines and various medical tools were scattered about, but this one had a stand by the bed, with more syringes, scalpels, and an amputation saw. The counter had a spread of torn up computer pieces, no longer useable, evidence of something more that room was used for than simple medicine testing.
His arm began to hurt.
He walked on.
Get me out of here.
Ignoring the voice that seemed familiar in his head, the Winter Soldier reached the end of the hall and glanced down as it followed to his left. It looked like the halls all converged on the far end, where a larger room was.
The others hadn't caught up to him yet, and with no worries of danger, the Winter Soldier continued his mission to search the basement labs. He entered the large room, groping around on the inside wall for a light switch.
It was waking up into a reality that overshadowed everything in his mind. Before Hydra was gone. After Hydra never existed. Every terror he'd ever had was in there. A mindwipe chair. An isolated observance room. A phlebotomy chair with half-rotted straps over the arms and wrists and ankles.
At the far end, the cryo unit, the thick door, the one view window, the pipes and cooling machines spread across the wall like a spider web wrapping around a spider's prey.
There were screams in that room, not voiceless, loud in his ears, loud in his brain as terror boiled over and burned away rational thought. It hit the cold with a deafening hiss; fire and ice slammed into each other with enough force to shatter the thick steel wall he'd tried to erect between Bucky and Hydra. The Winter Soldier couldn't protect Bucky from the weapon.
He scrambled backwards, tripped over his own feet and hit the ground hard. He didn't stop moving, skittering back until he could get around on his hands and feet to get up.
"Bucky!"
Don't take me back there don't take me back there get out get out get out.
"I got him!"
No no no.
Fear was still screaming in the back of his mind, in the back of his throat and he didn't give a damn if that scream was coming out of his mouth, he could not go back there.
A strong arm caught his left arm and hauled him up off his hands. "Easy!"
He twisted his arm, trying every trick he knew to get out of the agent's grip, but somehow, the vice on his arm was at least as strong than his metal arm. Of course. They'd take preventive measures.
It was cold. It was freezing. Everything inside of him wanted to run, but ice slowed down his blood. The fire had been extinguished as fear returned to its natural state of a cold terror.
"Bucky!"
A voice he remembered. The last he'd heard. He tried to reach back, hoping that the source of the voice could catch him this time. The person gripping his metal arm didn't let go. He was falling again.
Someone else caught hold of his flailing flesh arm. He dropped himself into deadweight, trying to get away from them, get them to let go so he could run. I don't want to go back.
"Bucky, easy!" The metal arm was free, but the flesh one was still held tight as he landed on the ground, backed against the wall. His metal hand shot out, trying to assault whoever had a hold on him. His fist was caught in someone's grip. "Bucky, it's Steve! It's okay now!"
"We should get him out of here," another voice said.
Wait.
He knew these voices.
He drew his knees up to his chest, only weakly struggling to get his arms back, his whole body shaking hard enough for his teeth to chatter and his stomach want to upend itself. His arms were released and the contact was replaced by Steve wrapping his own arms around his shoulders. "Shh, Bucky, it's okay now. You're not back there."
Bucky curled up his arms over his face, buried in the safety of Steve holding him, every muscle sore from tension. Tears burned his eyes. It was cold and lights were on and he wanted a dark and warm corner somewhere.
As seconds ticked by into minutes, he felt his heartbeat slow down, and he was able to breathe normally, coughing a couple times, clearing away the sobs he didn't know he'd been making. His eyes stung from salt, his face slightly wet where the mask slipped over his cheeks.
"It's okay, Bucky," Steve repeated.
Take a breath. One more. "I'm okay," he said. "I'm here."
A clank of metal and the familiar hum of servos running just barely took his attention away from the warm grip Steve still had him in. "You okay to get out of here?" Tony asked.
Breathe. Bucky nodded, too shaky and still too cold to be anything but eager to get out of the lowest level of hell with its freezing air. He might feel shame later that Tony had seen another violent episode, but right then, he just wanted out.
Tony led the way. Steve stayed next to Bucky, an arm around his shoulders, keeping him grounded, navigating for Bucky so that he didn't have to focus on more than keeping off any more panic.
Up the stairs.
Through the labyrinth of the first basement.
Back up to the utility room.
Past the graffiti that said 'father why have you forsaken us?'
Out the door and down the streets.
Steve led him back towards their quinjet, getting only a block away from the former base before Bucky finally had the presence of mind to stop and look back. "What about the explosives?"
"I'll set them off after you two are out of blast range," Tony said. "Just worry about getting back to the jet."
He was too tired to even think of that as a mission. It was just a combination of words that meant nothing beyond that if he followed the instructions, he'd be away from hell, maybe even clawing his way out of its darkness and ice.
Steve didn't push any conversation, just kept his arm around Bucky's shoulders, keeping the rest of his attention on the streets around them.
After walking several blocks, behind them an explosion filled the air with dust and noise, noise that thundered like a strike of lighting had just hit. Bucky nearly jumped out of his skin with the thunder crack, whirling and reaching for his derringer with a hand too shaky to handle it.
Steve put a hand on his shoulder. "Easy, it's just the explosives."
Bucky clenched his right fist to keep it still as they waited for signs of trouble. There was nothing to see except the dust and the glow of Tony's repulsors as he approached them. The thunder-like growl coming from the building as it collapsed made it impossible to hear him.
He landed next to them. "One building successfully turned into a crater, as planned."
"Then let's get out of here," Steve said, not dropping his arm.
Bucky rolled his shoulder out of Steve's grip. Steve looked at him with slight questioning on his face. Bucky nodded once. "I'll be fine," he said, just barely above a whisper.
Steve didn't argue, but he stayed by Bucky's side, Tony taking up the other, putting Bucky between a barrier of friends ready to defend him.
It was nice, but not enough to shake off the exhaustion and sickness from that basement.
I don't want in this head anymore. It's cold.