This chapter has some whump in it! :) (Slight Clint, major Steve and Bucky)
Steve looked around at the others in the Quinjet, who were quietly making small talk and cracking jokes among themselves. It was midnight, and they were on a flight to one of the few HYDRA bases that were still in operation. Inside information hinted that they were trying to create a serum that gave people supernatural powers. And the Avengers' mission was to retrieve the chip that contained the information needed for that serum.
"Will be in position for the jump in two minutes," the pilot called. The others began to get ready.
They landed on the edge of a thick forest, where they would take a ride inside a stolen HYDRA transport vehicle which brought them safely through the gate. The vehicle pulled behind a shed and swayed to a halt. Rain was falling gently from the sky as they slipped out of the truck, making the ground and metal glow even brighter with each sweep of the searchlight. Before splitting up, Steve went over the plan for what felt like to the others the twenty-hundredth time: Barton and Romanoff were to go to the tower and cut off the searchlight, then Romanoff would leave the tower and head to the southside of the Research Facility and wait there. Thor and Stark would head to the roof of the building to provide aerial support where the Quinjet could not. Banner was to head to the front of the building and make a distraction, while Rogers and Barnes would sneak into the building from the last two places: the east and north side; the harsh mountain terrain that HYDRA stationed their Facility on their west side for protection would hopefully prove otherwise.
Clint and Natasha ducked low and ran through the shadows on the farthest reaches of the yard, trying to avoid the light. They came across three guards, but maintained the element of surprise, so their takedown wasn't hard. They were twenty yards now from the tower.
"Nat, you go from the bottom up," Clint whispered. "I'll use my grappling arrows to get up to the roof, where I'll take out the searchlight and meet you from the top."
She agreed, and they ran the last sixty feet to the base of the tower. Clint's laser arrow was sufficient to take out the lock while Nat cut off the power to the bottom of the tower. She crept in thru the door, guns at the ready. The faint whirring noise of Clint rappelling up faded away as she placed each foot in front of the other as she rounded the stairs.
Clint made it to the top of the tower, and carefully peeked into the window. There were three soldiers; he could bust the window and take them down, then bolt the door to keep soldiers from the lower room from barging in while he cut off the searchlight. But if they couldn't go up, then the soldiers would go down, right to where Nat was.
"Nat," he whispered, "prepare for some action."
He pulled out his knife and ran the tip along the lip of the seal, cutting it. Once he pried the window out of the way, he shot a multiplying arrow into the room, killing the soldiers in one of the quietest ways he could. Clint slipped into the room and glanced over the controls, frustrated how they all looked the same. Knowing he couldn't just guess, because he could accidentally push something that would set off an alarm elsewhere, he decided to take a look at the wires. The searchlight was on the tower's pinnacle, and the wires powering it were not on the inside of the tower, but on the outside; they were encased in a metal tube that was disguised like a drain.
"I'm going on the roof to see if I can disable it there," he whispered into his comm.
"Don't get yourself electrocuted," Nat mumbled. "And wouldn't you hurry up? I'm getting bored.
"Yes," Steve said, "We don't have much time left, Hulk is getting harder and harder to hold back."
Clint shouldered his bow and climbed back out through the window, using another grapple arrow to clamber up to the top. Cutting the wires wasn't an option; the glass on the searchlight was too thick for a punch, and there wasn't enough room for a shot. Besides, the target was a hundred-pound metal cylinder that was sweeping around once every second. He could try to shove something in there to try and jam it, but with how fast it was able to spin, it would probably break the block with ease. He would have to try it.
He ripped off a pipe from the roof and inched it as close as possible before ramming it into the spinning gears. The metal groaned on the strain, then began to crunch as the gears continued pushing against it. Clint pulled out his knife again and began trying to pry the glass cover off, but to no avail. He pulled off another pipe and began to bash the glass, but after several attempts, the faint trails of breaks were not very encouraging.
"Clint, take out the light," Steve ordered urgently.
"I'm...trying!" Clint grunted as he continued swinging. His blows were starting to push the searchlight to one side, helping the gears break the block. In the room below him, he heard more soldiers enter the room, and heard their discovery of the bodies. It was only seconds before they were pointing guns out the window and shooting at him, which gave him an idea. If these HYDRA soldiers had those plasma blast guns, then just one shot could take out the light. He needed to get them to shoot at him. So, he continued to pound on the glass. Soon enough, a soldier was climbing out of the window. He took a shot before Clint had time to move, and it grazed his leg. He winced, it burned greatly, but he had to keep moving. The next shot hit the base of the searchlight, and almost obliterated Clint's face. The third shot hit the glass, and it resulted in the searchlight exploding, sending Clint tumbling off the edge of the tower. He grabbed onto a bar and kicked the soldier in the head before he could shoot him again. Then he wrapped his legs around his neck and pulled the soldier out of the window, throwing him into the forty-foot plunge down.
Clint swung into the room, wincing as he landed on his bad leg, and simultaneously shooting down the two guards standing there. A third one he hadn't seen ran down the stairs.
"They're coming your way, Nat!" he yelled as he ran down after them.
Waiting in the dark of an evil base is slightly unnerving and listening to the thunderous footsteps of ten or more soldiers running down a stairwell to meet you. Especially when it's in tight quarters and it feels like they all are twice your size. But Nat didn't have much time to think about how she felt; she didn't really even have time to act, as the first soldiers came. Steady, breathe in...she cocked her guns. Breathe out...she raised them. Attack. She ran up, guns blazing with amazing accuracy. The first five fell before they had time to react. The others started firing at her before they started falling from Clint's attack from above. They met halfway.
"You're hurt," she said.
"It grazed me; I'll be fine," he rushed to say. "You go on, I can keep watch. Tony made me some glasses that could help me see in the dark."
She nodded and ran down the stairs.
"Alright, Cap," Clint said. "Let the big guy go."
Steve actually breathed a sigh of relief when he told Banner to let the Other Guy take over. In a couple of milliseconds flat, Hulk was busy bashing things, and soon people on the top of the wall started yelling. Tony and Thor kept an eye on the soldiers running up, while Steve made his way in from the east and Bucky from the north. Hulk's smashing had accidentally busted some of the power sources to the building, so Steve was walking in near blackness. The quietness of the building wasn't helping. Surely everyone wouldn't have just run off when Hulk came? Unless...he began to wonder if they were trying to hide something they had been creating. Tony's voice broke into his thoughts.
"Uh...guys? They're leaving. Most of them have gone already."
"How is that possible?" Clint asked no one in particular. "They didn't know we were coming."
"Yeah, well...I'm watching them leave through a tunnel in the mountains."
"Why didn't we know about this tunnel?" Steve wondered.
"They must have been covering it with some cloaking device," Tony muttered. "Should I blast them up?"
"Does it look like an escape, or does it look like moving?" Nat whispered.
"Neither," Tony commented. "Or both, depending on how you see it."
Bucky listened to their conversation in silence. He always hated going back to these places, but right now, he was getting feelings of something else. He jumped when he heard a noise on the com; it wasn't that loud, but it sounded like a zombie, and he didn't even know how he knew what a zombie was.
"Steve," he whispered, "you there?" No answer. Panic rose, as he repeated his question. Faintly, he heard Steve gasp out one word that gave him chills, Help.
Whenever Halloween came, a couple of the team wanted to have a horror movie festival. Steve had never been one to enjoy them, but surely, with the few he'd seen, he would have known that walking down a dark hallway in a freak lab that was known to create monsters was a bad idea. If he did, he realized it too late. As he was walking past a doorway, a huge hand shot out and wrapped around his throat, lifting him off the ground to slam him into the concrete floor hard enough to make a small crater. The hand completely encircled his throat, with well over a thousand pounds pushing down into it. In the dim light, Steve could make out a monster the size of Hulk, maybe even bigger, kneeling over him. Its large eyes were shaped like a cat's, but the whites of its eyes weren't white-they were golden, and the iris was a blood red. The pupils were alternately dilating and contracting as the creature snarled, obviously enjoying the fear it was inflicting on its prey.
Steve desperately pushed against the claw-like hand choking him, but it didn't budge. He needed to breathe, needed to warn the others that there were complications to the plan. Blood pounded in his head as the little he could see faded away. Seeing him fade, the monster picked him up, and his grip lessened enough for Cap to take a breath and gasp for help, in the vain hope that anyone could hear such a weak cry. The monster growled and proceeded to slam Steve onto the floor over and over and over. It extended its claws to cut the throat of this gasping creature when it was suddenly shot in the eye. It reeled back with a roar, stumbling away and pressing its hand to its eye, where blood was now pouring profusely from. Bucky lowered his gun and charged, slamming into the beast in the effort to get it away from his friend, who was on the verge of unconsciousness. Knowing he couldn't take out such a huge thing on his own, Bucky repeatedly punched the head wound with his metal arm, hoping that Steve would get the initiative and leave.
He underestimated it. The monster roared and, grabbing his arm, started slinging him over and over into the walls and floor, before throwing him down an empty elevator shaft. It felt like he was hitting every single bar and protruding piece of metal in his fall, and the hard floor wasn't very forgiving. His head was ringing with the pounding, and he could hardly think as he struggled to stand, knowing that the monster was-too late, here he was already. The monster punched him through the wall and then slung him up to the ceiling. In the brief second of seeing, Bucky noticed there were rafters, and he grabbed onto one. Pulling himself up, he almost fell again because the monster began throwing things at him. The beam he was on started to break away, and as he moved to jump on the next one, a gigantic metal cage slammed into him, knocking him off. By now, they had caused enough ruckus for the others to locate them, and when Hulk charged into the room the sides leveled.
Able to catch his breath, Bucky cast a glance around the room and saw tell-tale signs of bombs. This place was rigged to explode; classic. He ran out of the room to the nearest stairwell and was horrified to find the mutilated remains of dozens of soldiers. Giant claw marks were dug into the wall. Softly, a low growl was blown down the passageway behind him by a stray catch of wind. He turned, and in the erratic flashing of busted wires, he saw the shadowy figure of some other monster lurking there. He wasn't going to take any chances and ran up the stairs as fast as he could. Bucky found his dropped gun and hoisted it to his shoulder again as he crept along on the first level. A dead silence once again filled the place, and Bucky was surprised that he could hardly hear any of the fight going on down below him. He found the hall where Steve was...and wasn't anymore. All that was left of the fight was a pool of blood.
Bucky tried to quell the rising fear, but without much result. He tried calling through comms, but the static buzzing told him it was useless.
"Steve?" he called out as quietly as he could. No answer. "Steve?" he repeated, anxiety swelling as big as the monster underneath him. He was now standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by the thrown-around remains of a lab. "Steve!" he yelled, not caring what else heard him.
"What?" a voice said quietly behind him. Bucky jumped and spun around, aiming the gun at who spoke and to say that he was relieved would be an understatement.
"Steve!" he said and ran to him. "Where were you?"
"I was trying to look through their records and-hey...you don't look too good."
Bucky was about to give a snarky reply when he looked down and was immediately shocked. A broken metal pipe protruded from his left side. It must have been from when he fell off the beam. He suddenly felt light-headed, and ungracefully collapsed to the ground. He pushed away any of Steve's efforts to help him and fought through the haze to focus on the mission again.
"Did you find the chip?"
"No," Steve sighed.
"Then there's no more reason to stay here," Bucky winced as he stood. "We really have to get out. I don't know what happened here, or what they were doing, but whatever experiments they were working on have all gotten out. And from the sounds they make they all sound big and with really sharp teeth."
"Please don't tell me you're scared," Steve deadpanned. "Because we don't have a teddy bear for you to hold."
Bucky glared at him and then they both jumped when a guttural roar burst from the stairwell.
"And that's one of them," Bucky clipped as he began to run toward another set of stairs to the roof.
As they ran, the last of the power in the building began to run out, and, down below, an explosion shook the ground, then another one, and another. At the far back of the level, the floor began to collapse, which caused one of the bombs here to explode, sending metal and glass shrapnel flying toward the two Avengers. They were ten or so feet from the ladder when the miniature earthquake caused it to start to shake loose from the wall. Bucky ran up it at record speed, and, waiting for Steve, looked back into the exploding, fiery mess down below. He looked hard at where the stairwell was and could've sworn that he saw a dark, rather gangly creature, almost like a lizard, hovering there, its bellows subdued by the detonations around it. Then, it ran out and straight for Steve. The ladder was starting to fall away from the wall, and Bucky could only watch as Steve was going to fall back and die either from being shredded by a bomb or whatever that devil was. In the split second he had, Steve looked back, and saw the black demon racing toward him, then back up at Bucky. He jumped, not knowing even if he could get enough momentum to leap, and his hand was grabbed by Bucky's metal one. Down below, the ferocious fiend roared as it lost its prey, but refused to give up the hunt. It started to climb the wall, its long claws digging in and pulling it up. Bucky hauled his friend up, and they ran away from to hole as the rest of the building started to collapse.
They slid down a pole and ran as fast as they could toward the gate in the wall surrounding the yard. The ground started to break up beneath their feet and they realized that HYDRA meant for everything here to explode and sink into the ground. An explosion sent a truck hurtling their way, and it crashed into the base of the tower Clint had been on moments before, and it began to fall. The gate was so close, yet Steve didn't think they would make it. The fire behind them was so close the explosion was almost pushing them along. They ran through the gate and out into the dark forest but didn't stop running. Then...the biggest explosion of them all erupted, and the force's wake slammed into the two men and sent them flying. They crashed into trees so hard they cut them in half. When they finally stopped moving, they were lying in a pitiful heap on the ground, moaning. Bucky's side burst with pain, and a small fountain of blood was pouring from the wound. He writhed in pain, and, before he blacked out, the last thing he saw was blinding white lights as a ship landed near him.
