Nora and Sam had been chasing Bucky for over a year now. They would get so incredibly close to him, to the point where Nora was an arm length away from him, and then he would get away. Every single time. Only now they had to rely on their wits to find him as he stopped leaving a trail of bodies behind him.
Someone was leaving a trail of bodies, but hey that was life and it didn't concern Nora. All she cared about was finding Bucky because Steve asked her for updates every single time he saw her. And she didn't have any to give him. Nora didn't like a lot of things. Being second best to anyone was at the top of the list but having people outsmart her and make her feel inadequate was a very close second. The more he got away, the angrier Nora would get as Sam would say. She prefers to think of it as aggressive determination.
This constant cycle of finding him and then losing him had circled back to finding him again, which is how she and Sam ended up slumming it in a crappy apartment in Bulgaria of all places and Nora was on edge. She was snapping at Sam almost every time he spoke and she got all quiet and shaky when he reminded her where they were. Nora just couldn't believe the nerve of Bucky. Why the hell did he lead them here? Of all the places in the world he could have picked it had to be the one place she never wanted to return to.
To make her thunderous mood even worse, Sam was fast asleep and snoring loud as hell. Nora was sure that her new friend would not awaken any time soon, come hell or high water.
She was hunched over newspaper clippings and reports of seemingly random murders throughout Europe. It made Nora quite anxious that she had met most of the men who have ended up dead. Out of the eighty three that had been killed, at least fifty of them had threatened her or ordered an attempt on her life. These were just the people that she never managed to catch.
They ruled Bucky out of the equation a few months ago, the murders were too organised but they had no specific pattern. Bucky was attacking Hydra only and a fair few of the deceased were civilians.
Nora did have a small suspicion though. A few people were killed in one place and just days later Bucky would lead Sam and Nora there. Like he was trying to tell them something but didn't want to actually confront them. There is the possibility of course that the killings are random and Bucky is still completely out of his mind but eight three people dead that she happened to know did not seem too innocent to Nora.
What struck her was four different types of murderers. One was clean and controlled and quick and precise. Another was quick but also very brutal. The third was a display of uncontrollable rage and sadistic ways of killing. It was the fourth killer that threw her, it was also full of rage but it was a more centred, specific rage than the third. The third killer was killing for fun. The fourth was killing with a purpose. Maybe it was what remained of the strike team, it was very rare to see a group of killers with such different personalities. Usually it's a bloodbath, pack mentality drives people to the absolute edge of humanity and keeps pushing.
"Any headway on the murders and why Barnes is so keen on us cracking the case?" Sam whispered in a hoarse voice, courtesy of him just waking up.
"No, I just don't get it. Four types of killer like this are all the macho alpha male type. No one of them seems to be in charge of each other. They'd tear each other apart trying to establish dominance. They're not working for anyone so why come together and do all this?" Nora gestured to the pictures of bodies and crime scenes laid out on the floor in front of her, she separated them into four sections. Which killer killed which person.
"Maybe they have a common goal. Someone they all want dead" Sam suggested, walking into the small, dirty kitchen in the motel room they rented and brewing two cups of coffee.
"Or some one they all want to protect" Sam offered as an afterthought and Nora made a quizzical face and gestured for him to elaborate.
"Think about it. Four guys, all want to protect one person. Now say that Hydra was after this person that they want to keep safe. They kill the threat before they can hurt said person" he explained and Nora made a note of the idea for a later time.
"But what kind of person has four very different types of guys at their fingertips like that. Who could they love that is so special to them that they would do that kind of damage?" He pointed to one particularly horrific photograph. The psycho, as Nora nicknamed him, had torn out some very important organs and nailed them to the wall using the broken bones from the mans body.
"Girlfriend maybe?" Nora said then shook her head, "That's not right. This mass level of killing is almost like an animal. Think about animals like wolves and lions. Yes they would fight to protect their mate but what would they kill for, and die for, to protect?" Nora grinned like she had won the lottery. They were onto something. Sam looked confused for a second before he got the same idea.
"Their cubs"
"They're a family of killers. One of their own is being threatened so they're retaliating" Sam and Nora gave each other an enthusiastic high five.
"This isn't the, protecting a brother your father either. This is what you'd do to protect a female, a sister or a daughter or something" Sam added and Nora nodded in agreement.
"We've got the motive for the killings but how do we catch who it is? And why is it so important to Bucky?" Sam asked and Nora shrugged, sipping her coffee.
"Who knows why he wants us to find out, but it better be pretty important for making me track across the globe. Start looking at mob families or at very least tight knitted communities, and look for these kinds of patterns in the past too. These guys may be blinded by sadistic rage but they're good at it, they've definitely done this before" Nora said, pulling on her jacket and her boots.
"What will you do whilst I'm doing that?" Sam asked and Nora grabbed her key to their motel room.
"I'm going on a coffee run, I am not drinking that cheap crap for the next few days" Nora said, closing the door behind her and walking over to the run down truck they rented. Luckily they chose a motel close to the city so it's a ten minute drive at most. Nora went to open the car door when she heard rustling near the garbage cans. She whirled around, her fingers grazing over the gun in her belt.
After a few seconds of tense silence, Nora turned back around to get in the car when she caught sight of a man in the reflection, stood right behind her like they were in a horror film. Before Nora could even twitch towards her gun, the man had spun her around and pressed her back against the cold metal, pinning her arms in place so she couldn't move them.
Just as Nora was about to break out of the hold and kick this guys ass, she noticed the glint of a metal hand pressing her to the car. He lifted his flesh hand up to pull down his hood and Nora glared at the man towering above her.
"Let go of me" she was struggling against him and if it was anyone else she would have succeeded, but 'anyone else' didn't have a metal arm and a body full of super soldier serum.
"Let go of me or I'll scream" she warned and Bucky didn't respond, he just pressed his fingers to his lips in a hushing motion. He pointed to the garbage bins where the noise from earlier came from.
"There's a man watching from the dumpster and there's a man hiding in the car parked across the street" his voice was quiet and sounded dry, like it hadn't been used in months. Which Nora guesses it hasn't been.
"How do you-" Nora was about to point out the fact that she couldn't see anyone from here but he cut her off by shushing her again.
"I've been following you and the one with the wings for months now. I'm surprised you didn't notice. Someone's after you, but you might have noticed that they keep turning up dead" he was a lot more talkative than Nora thought he would be. She expected him to be broody and quiet and withdrawn.
"And that was you was it?" Nora snarled, she did not need anyone's protection.
"No, that's what I came to talk to you about. It's about your-" one shot rang out and Bucky managed to move to the right so the bullet hit his shoulder instead of his heart. Nora's senses were on high alert as she looked around the parking lot. She helped Bucky to his feet and saw a small red dot on his forehead. She pushed his head down.
"Duck. Here, take my key. Room 703, stay there until I get back" Nora watched Bucky quickly run up to the room and faintly heard Sam's cry of terror but Nora ignored it and sprinted towards the alley with the dumpsters in. The sniper would be long gone by the time she got there and so would the guy in the car but the one in the alley wouldn't have time to run.
"Hey!" She shouted and she could make out the silver glint of a pistol in his hand. Nora sprinted into the alley and the spy had climbed the ladder to the roof of the motel and. Nora quickly followed him up.
It was times like this when she wished Steve wasn't on Avengers business tracking the sceptre from New York because damn this guy was fast and she didn't have the speed of a super soldier. Nora was halfway across the root, chasing after him when the mystery spy jumped from the roof in a black SUV, so typical. Nora jumped down and landed on a dumpster, thankfully without hurting herself and she sprinted after the car. She pulled the gun from her pocket and began shooting the windows, hoping to hit someone in the car. She didn't.
Out of breath and out of bullets, Nora turned around and walked back to the motel. She was pounding on the door of the room as she had given Bucky her key and Sam opened the door, a disapproving and also slightly relieved look on his face.
"That was a short coffee run" he quipped and Nora rolled her eyes.
"How is he?" Nora gestured to the shirtless Bucky sat in the chair across the room, a bandage pressed tightly against his wound, just to stop the blood for the time being.
"He'll be fine, the bullet wasn't too deep" Sam said and Nora went to sit across from the metal armed soldier.
"I'm sorry, I never should have brought you back here. What was I thinking? I practically handed you over on a silver platter" Bucky huffed, clearly angry with himself.
"Who and what are you talking about? What do they want?" Nora asked carefully and Bucky hesitated his eyes flickering down to the bullet hole in his shoulder.
"Do they want me dead?" She asked again after a long silence.
"If they wanted you dead, they would have shot you and not me. It would have taken great effort to shoot around you to hit me from a vantage point like that, which means that they wanted no harm done to you at all and they wanted me out of the way" Bucky seemed to be talking to himself more than Sam or Nora.
"Hey man, we can talk about it in the morning. It's currently three a.m and I kinda wanna go back to bed. Let's all get some rest and we'll figure it all out first thing" Sam reasoned and Sam gave Bucky his bed for the night whilst he slept on the couch.
When they woke up in the morning, Bucky was already gone and there was a note left on the bed with the bullet that was embedded in his shoulder lying next to it.
You should have stayed in DC. They'll won't stop killing until they get you back.