Back to Reality
Day 18 at the Retreat
(part 2)
"Bucky, talk to me, please?"
Taylar lagged behind him as he broke the trail. Deep snowfall in the field surrounding the Retreat made the going slow and tedious. Even though the Quinjet's landing pad was only a hundred yards from the cabin, that hundred yards was covered with a couple of feet of snow. Bucky scanned the treeline, keeping the rifle lowered but his eyes moving.
They could already be here. The paranoid voice in his brain warned him. Just like Hydra to wait until your guard is down.. He wouldn't let his recurring nightmares come true. There was too much at stake, too much for him to lose this time. They had to figure it out. Them. Because she liked him. Because the feeling was mutual. He needed to keep her safe so they could have time.
"Goddamit it, Bucky, stop for five seconds!" A snowball hit him square between the shoulder blades, showering his back with snow.
The absurdity of the moment cut through the paranoia and turned him around. Tay was bundled up against the cold in a sea-foam ski parka and white knitted hat. She looked like she should be hitting the slopes, not shouldering an APC9K submachine gun and a Bergen pack stuffed with her current worldly possessions. Her cheeks and nose were apple-red against the cold. A cold Bucky didn't feel.
She trudged the few extra steps to close the distance between them, her breath pluming in the cold. "I'm not one of them. You know that, right?"
Bucky felt his focus stutter; his awareness of the silent, cold landscape begin to narrow down to the singular point before him. He swallowed his first answer, clenching his jaw as he refused to acknowledge how much her doubt hurt him. His second option was a far smarter reply.
"I know. But they're after you. And we don't know why. So, until we figure that out..."
"We do know why," She countered before he could come up with a good until. "I have unexplained powers from who-knows-where. I mean, I'm practically a walking billboard that shouts 'Experiment on me, gain world domination.' " She gestured with her hand as if laying the words out on a placard as she intoned them. Bucky scowled, and Tay's expression quickly mirrored his. "No, no, you don't get to give me that look. Because you and I both know that is exactly what they do."
She reached out, grabbing his left arm, curling her fingers around metal that should have been rightfully colder than it was. The vibranium was warmed from within by it's own power source, but it wasn't the pressure of her fingers against metal that made his expression soften. It was the phantom sensation of the missing flesh arm; it was him imagining what it would feel like to be whole and not weaponized. What it would meant to be fully himself for a few moments again.
Bucky didn't voice the expletive he felt lodge in his chest. Instead, he closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. "You're right. That is the most logical reason." Opening his eyes, he scanned the area behind her, before looking down, and tucking a stray curl back into her hat. "Doesn't mean I have to like it."
"Yeah, and I very much like knowing I'm being hunted." Rolling her eyes at him, she cracked a smile, softening the sarcasm. She gave his arm a squeeze before dropping her hand.
Scuffing his feet in the snow, Bucky half-turned towards the muted sound of an approaching aircraft. The sound was a mixture of hope and dread. The Quinjet was their ticket back to civilization, but that also meant exposing Taylar's unstable powers to more people. It meant exposing himself to the possibility of failure; that he wasn't Avengers material.
"You know, you could just be like other girls and tell me when I'm being an absolute ass." The comment was passed over his shoulder as the Quinjet came into sight over the trees.
The engines kicked up a whirlwind of snow, turning the small field into a miniature blizzard. Bucky squinted against the whipping snow as Tay hid her face, holding her hat down. The jet settled before the flying snow did, massive turbine engines powering down to a dull hum. Bucky was already grinning by the time Steve met them on the cargo ramp.
Taylar felt her spirits lifting as she knocked snow off her boots, hanging back from the brief reunion of two best friends. Even as they embraced, Taylar was working on sorting out who was feeling what. It was Bucky's spirits lifting, Bucky's hope that was buoyed by the presence of his best friend. Steve was both happy and relieved at the same time. There was a wary thought, something worried in the undercurrent, that didn't belong to either of them, or herself. Without thinking, she followed Bucky's lead and unloaded her firearm, joining him by a bulkhead rack to secure it.
"You must be Agent Hardy." The voice belonged to the wary undercurrent, a steady tenor with a confident clip. "I hope that Sergeant Barnes was an affable host."
Wearing his trademark trenchcoat, Director Fury cut an imposing figure. Having never met the man before, Taylar took a moment to try to get a better read of him. He was wary and cautious, but not alarmed. Maybe that was just his natural state?
"He's pretty decent company," she offered, as she began to unzip her parka. The inside of the Quinjet cargo hold wasn't cramped, but it was certainly too small for her liking, when surrounded by three men nearly twice her size. "I can't complain."
"Good!" Clapping his hands together, Fury turned and gestured the two other men toward the cockpit. "Back to D.C., I think. I've got a little more red tape to get through before we can decide what to do with you."
"What to do with me?" Taylar echoed quietly as she exchanged a worried look with Bucky.
In his turn, Bucky glanced at Steve, who clasped his best friend's shoulder tight. "Agent Hardy, it really is a pleasure to meet you. C'mon, Buck, I need a better co-pilot than Fury."
Over his eye-patch, a brow raised at the teasing tone from America's favorite son. It was a tense moment as Bucky weighed the options before him, studying Fury through narrowed eyes. It took the soft thump of Taylar's backpack hitting the decking, followed by her parka for the choice to be made. It wasn't like the cockpit was separated by more than seat backs and a narrowing of the bulkhead after all.
"What to do with you, indeed, Agent Hardy," Fury mused as he folded down a jump seat and settled into it.
After a moment looking around, Taylar found the latch to free her own jump seat, shrugging into the attached shoulder-harness as she settled in. Inside the Quinjet, the whirring drone of the engines spinning up was muted.
"I don't supposed I get to go back to just being a field agent again, huh?" Her hopeful tone got Fury to smile, a momentary expression that disarmed him into something slightly less threatening.
"Afraid not." Crossing his legs, Fury laced his fingers together around one knee, purposefully keeping his hands in view. Taylar recognized the move; they were all taught how to be non-threatening in an interrogation setting. She mimicked him imperfectly, tucking her feet beneath the jump seat, ankles crossed, her hands folded in her lap. "Believe it or not but being something beyond just a normal human takes you out of the realm of being just a field agent."
"And into the realm of just what exactly?" She tipped her chin up a little, knowing she was voicing a direct challenge to the man that signed her paychecks. "I didn't join SHIELD just to turn into some science experiment just because my brain works a little differently."
Fury smirked at her casual gall. Already he liked her. "No, no you didn't, did you?" Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out his cellphone, tapping the screen to let it hook up to the SHIELD servers. His brows raised as he pulled up her personnel file. "You joined up after the Blip. Dropped out of college, where you were dual majoring in Psychology and Social Services?"
Fury flicked his eye up to the woman seated across from him. She seems unbothered by the distilling of her life into a series of facts. "Smart woman. High school valedictorian. National Honors Society. You could have done anything, been anyone. And yet, you joined SHIELD. Why?"
Folding his arms again, Fury stowed the phone in his jacket once more, tilting his head, waiting to be wowed by her answer. Taylar felt the expectation rolling off of him in waves. She wanted to tell him to mind his own business and that her reasons were her own. But there was a balance happening. She could feel it in the gentle turn of the Quinjet as Steve altered it's flight path further south. She wasn't being judged, but her reaction would determine how the next few days played out.
"I saw a way to help more people, faster." Shrugging one shoulder, she risked a glance towards the cockpit, meaning to look out the windshield, but pausing a moment too long on the profile of Bucky's face as he grinning at something Steve said. "The whole world ground to a hard stop, and the only organization that I saw that seemed to move forward was SHIELD. Constantly. But...
"But also, in a world where Norse gods can drop out of the sky, and... and scientists turn into eleven-foot tall green rage beasts. There's SHIELD agents. A bunch of vanilla-ice-cream, run-of-the-mill moms and dads and such, standing toe-to-toe with gods and super-powered robots and just being between the rest of the world and the threat. I needed to feel like I mattered, in a world that I could go poof if someone snapped their fingers.."
Fury's expression was unreadable. The scars that peeked out from beneath the contoured eye-patch made every nuance seem stony and cold. So Taylar tried to sort out the atmosphere. Bucky was the easiest to sort out: even the shared warmth of camaraderie with Steve was painted with an undercurrent of penitence. Steve's emotions were brighter and bigger, as she would have expected. But Fury's where hard to read, hard to pinpoint. She couldn't tell if he was pleased or impressed. He just seemed to be waiting, with an air of expectation and certainty about him.
Narrowing her eyes at him, she suddenly realized that she'd told him exactly what he'd wanted to hear. It hadn't been a matter of giving a right or wrong answer. He'd been baiting for a show of her truer colors. Fury nodded to himself, then leaned forward enough to extend his hand.
"Go on, take it. I'm not gonna bite." He had to prompt her to accept the offer. But when she did, he solemnly shook her hand. "Once we land in D.C, you have 24 hours to get your gear together. Starting tomorrow, you're an Avenger. In-training, as it were."
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Further Stories for Bucky and Tay, as well as an edited/cleaned up version of The Retreat, will be found on an Archive Of Our Own. This will be the last update of a story.
