Summary: In which more chases ensue-and our pair have a few moments of welcome insight.
Notes: Hi, All! I'm back. Dunno if anyone cares (I can never quite tell...) but here's the next chapter. This one is pretty low on angst and high on action/drama. Hopefully everyone's good with that. I'm also nowhere near the end of this puppy, so hopefully you guys are good with that too. I've also got a few ideas rolling around (Halloween!) for what might eventually come after this. Let me know how you like this, guys. I know I'm sometimes slow on the replies. In all honesty, I'm usually on my tablet, not my laptop, since I don't really have a desk for it, and it's such a pain typing on a tablet screen. So I am aware of that and I apologize if that turns anyone off. It's really not personal and I do seriously appreciate any and all feedback you guys pause in your lives to give. I'm having so much fun with this stuff, and it's so nice to hear I'm doing something right. So let me know if you like/don't like/have a question/idea or prompt. A few notes: The chapter title is taken from a song of the same name by 30 Seconds to Mars. If you like Jared Leto movies, go and give his band a listen-Oscar-winning acting is not the only thing he's amazing at. Also, the other songs mentioned do not belong to me, but to U2, My Chemical Romance, Bon Jovi, Golden Earring, The Wallflowers, Rihanna, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Tom Cochrane, respectively. Hopefully I didn't miss anyone. The bands mentioned are all their own entities, obviously. I only use them all here to illustrate a funny aside concerning road trips. Wanted is the property of Universal and its affiliates, as well as the writers of the original comic book by Mark Millar and JG Jones. Small triggery warning: There is mention of 9/11 in this chapter. I was writing and it just sort of happened organically. I scrapped it, then it ended up back in here anyway, as I felt it led well into the conversation that takes place immediately thereafter. Just wanted to put that out there, so that anyone who needs to, for whatever reason, wants to skim over it when it comes around. Little aside: Obviously I've changed names and things, but this is pretty much my memory of the whole ordeal. Ick. Felt a little good to type it out, though, you know? Anyway. I'll shut up now. Let me know how you like. Love y'all. Sarah ((()))
"Anything?"
Very gently, Bucky turned both her palms over and studied them. But they were just her hands, her tiny little fragile hands—or, at least, they still looked that way. "You said they turned orange?"
She nodded. "Glowing. And they got hot. Like—"
"Extremis," he finished, heaving a long sigh.
She let her head flop back on the pillow, looking up at a new ceiling in a new motel room, cleaner this time, but still slightly used, what she could swear was an identical crack to the one in their last stopover. "Well, shit."
It was quiet for a long moment, the ticking of the clock on the retro, wood-paneled far wall as it kept the hour.
"That how he got into the beach house? Killian?" Bucky finally asked into the echoing silence.
She nodded, her hair rubbing along the pillow. "Melted the handle on the screen door. Ripped it off one hinge."
He scowled, that old look back on his face, the intense glower, the 'Winter Soldier glare', minus the half-mask that had kept his identity a secret. Darcy had always wondered if HYDRA's intention had been to keep him a secret from the world, from Captain America—or just himself. Was it a muzzle to enforce the idea that he was in their control, like a leashed dog? If he could have looked in a mirror all those long years, would he have recognized his own face? He'd said after 'waking up', as he called it, on that helicarrier, he'd barely recognized the look in his own eyes.
He'd shivered at the sensation, and looked away from her.
The entire ordeal was as far-fetched as it was possible to be.
She'd steered accidentally into a Viking Space God.
She'd been indirectly targeted by a Destroyer thing that had spat fire at her.
She'd been left for hours while her friend/employer traveled through all of space and time, like a companion on Doctor Who.
She'd busted a mentally unstable scientist out of the loony bin.
She'd been attacked by birds. She'd had a sedan half lifted off of her. Now that she thought about it, she wasn't even sure what kind of car it was…
She'd almost been snuffed out by a cosmic shift in worlds from—of course—space. Elves were supposed to be tall and blonde and hot, and good at archery, with British accents. That was the Tolkien-established rule.
She'd picked up and moved and ended up in the tallest skyscraper in New York, in a talking apartment.
She'd gained a Genius-Billionaire-Playboy-Philanthropist would-be father.
She'd made out with a brainwashed former Soviet assassin from World War-fucking-Two, who could move like lightning and shift like liquid shadows.
She'd married him.
She'd been stuck with mechanical parts, and needles, and knives, and now she was this…thing…this subhuman, super-creature that had no name and no place, and her assassin husband was looking at her with a thinly veiled expression of grief that told her just how much he wanted to die over it all.
And she laughed.
It was too much.
She absolutely burst out laughing, starting slowly, low and soft. Then the low, soft thing became a giggle, and a laugh, then a bubbling thing unto itself, until she was laughing so hard there was a stitch in her side and she was in pain, tears streaming down her face, her hands over her mouth as she tried to stop.
Bucky flinched. "Darcy."
She nodded, but couldn't speak.
"Darcy," he repeated, his voice softening. "Darcy, you're hysterical."
She managed to gather a single breath. "I know!" But the laughing didn't loosen its grip.
"Darcy…" He was wincing, now, looking pained and vaguely lost.
"I'm sorry!" she gasped, trying to sit up, half curled in on herself at the will of the awful laughter. There was a hard, crystalline pain in her chest. The stitch had moved and had taken up residence there, in her heart, encasing it in a candy coating that was immediately in danger of shattering in her chest. The laughter morphed and went icy and cold, dampening into gasps, then changing again, until she was barely aware that she was sobbing brokenly, hard, wracking sobs that she couldn't contain any longer.
In an instant, she was back in their kitchen in her mind.
She was curled on the tiled floor, half drunk on empty vodka, and Bucky was gone—taken—and she was alone, God knew how alone, or if he was alive or dead, or worse—if he was the other Bucky that he hated still had a small section of territory in his mind.
She was back in that kitchen, crying harder than she'd ever cried in years, completely powerless against the wave that had swept her up, caught in the vicious undertow and unable to paddle out.
But she wasn't alone.
And she wasn't in their kitchen.
She wasn't even at home, the place she'd come to call home, anyway, the physical space she associated with warmth and enclosed areas, if home was even a real physical place, or a person or a feeling; she was completely adrift, terrifyingly unmoored.
"Darcy…" Bucky whispered softly, so softly, coming around the bed where he'd been kneeling beside her on the floor. The mattress dipped with his weight. His arms came around her, his hard body against her back.
She allowed herself to curl against him, only barely aware of her own decisions, acting completely on instinct and seized by some nameless need to surrender herself completely.
His arms tightened, then tightened again, and again, and his face was pressed into the back of her neck, his mouth warm against her vertebrae, his metal arm cool and stabilizing around her middle.
He was speaking, but she wasn't sure what he was saying. She barely heard him, and only enough to know it wasn't English. Probably Russian. Or German. Or French, or whatever other language was up in that lock-and-key head of his, twisted up like a maze with no map.
He didn't implore her to stop.
He didn't tell her it was alright. This wasn't the time for that particular lie.
He didn't bother trying to dry her face.
He just tightened his embrace until she couldn't stand anymore, all the while murmuring to her soothing things that meant everything and nothing all at once, the feeling clear but the words lost in the language barrier.
Which was probably by his design.
Bucky was clever.
He was so much cleverer and sharp than most people gave him credit for.
And he was so much better a man than most people gave him credit for, too.
Only a good man would just lie there with her while she fell so completely apart and not ask anything; he just let her take.
((()))
They didn't do much talking for a while after that.
They stirred between furious flight and desperate boredom. Or, at least, it seemed that way to Darcy.
He let her sleep late. This was fine by her, since the nightmares were getting more and more aggressive and she knew that he knew it. They'd take off the next afternoon after lunch and drive for a day and a half, sometimes two. He never let her take the wheel, though, going just as far as his physical limits could take him. That amount of time was dwindling and it was doubtlessly due to his return to normal civilian life. Where he and Steve could go for days—hours and hours—without sleep, their limits were shrinking as they became domesticated.
She stopped offering to trade with him.
They made out in the car when he needed a rest in a parking lot, and they steamed up the windows on more than one occasion, laughing like teenagers as she yanked his t-shirt off over his head.
Even in all the solemn silence, she followed him into the shower, or they barely made it into their motel room, the door slamming shut, hard, behind his back as she plastered him against it.
In a short blip of conversation, he confessed that he was so worried over her that he didn't know what to do with himself and had no clue what he'd do if something were to happen to her. When she insisted that she was safe with him—who would dare challenge the fucking Winter Soldier?!—it only made him more anxious. He wasn't so sure his reputation was as untarnished as it once had been and he was terrified that he wouldn't be enough anymore. He spent a lot of time watching through slits in curtains from lonely tables across rooms, those Winter Soldier Glares sharp as flint on the lookout for any potential pursuers. He'd gone from Mother Bear to Alpha Wolf, his haunches on constant arousal.
She had to admit that having a man be so unassuming and yet possessive of her was a serious turn-on. She was sort of bummed she hadn't been able to hang on to her lacy lingerie, not that it had been in any fit state anyway.
She slept for long periods on the road. Once she woke to find her hands glowing again of their own volition, and Bucky pulled over to watch with a fascinated, frustrated furrowed brow, while she stared, wide-eyed and told him not to touch her.
Once she woke to find him scowling at the rear-view mirror, and she was thrown against the armrest when he took a hard right at the freeway exit, snickering as the SUV under suspicion went harmlessly by, too late to turn off.
They drove even longer that time, and she woke in the darkness of yet another motel room, pressed against Bucky's bare chest.
This went on for nearly a week and two states, and she found the next sign they passed mentioned a town on the border of Oklahoma.
"I'd say that it's remarkable we've made it this far without catching any heat, but I'm a firm believer in The Jinx," she said one afternoon, rolling the window down on the black Range Rover Evoque they'd absconded with the day before. It was seriously nice and seriously British and she settled her feet on the dash and leaned the seat back just a bit—there. Perfect.
"So don't jinx it," Bucky said, smirking as he leaned forward to adjust the volume on the radio.
"I feel like we need a soundtrack to go with this road trip, like in Elizabethtown."
He chuckled, checking the mirror. "And what would be on it?"
She sighed. "Oh, you know. Life Is A Highway. One Headlight. Shut Up and Drive."
He was openly smiling now. "Will I know any of these songs, I wonder?"
She snorted. "If I've done my homework, then yes. Hm. What else is there? Wanted, Bon Jovi. That's disturbingly appropriate. Where The Streets Have No Name."
"U2?"
"Very good, grasshopper. Then there's Sweet Home Alabama. Will we pass through—no, we won't. Shit, never mind. Radar Love! There's one a lot of people wouldn't think of." She lowered the window a little more. "We've gotta stop at one of those stupid, cheesy roadside attractions, like the World's Largest Ball of Twine or some garbage."
He let out a surprisingly bright shout of laughter.
She giggled, watching him. His face had the joyous habit of opening up like a beam of sunlight, if you could just manage to hit the right button. She still wasn't quite sure which one it was. But she was looking forward to studying him and figuring it out over the coming decades—assuming they got that far. Listen to her—becoming all domesticated.
"I mean, seriously. Let's be honest—were we really ever going to have a honeymoon like the one we were having? Were we? Logically speaking, this one is way more our style. We were never gonna get away with the other one, just like I said. It was too perfect, it was too spotless. This mess of shit we're in now is way more typical."
"Since we seem to be slaves to Murphy's Law, sure," Bucky said, rolling his eyes.
She grinned at him from the passenger seat. "Is this that cheesy moment where I say that line about 'at least we're together' or some awful crap?"
He chuckled, but his hand wrapped around her thigh and squeezed.
"Hey, are you okay?" she suddenly asked, looking over at him, hard.
He was good—almost good enough—but even the Winter Soldier took just a split second too long to answer, and for Darcy's ears, it damned him. "Fine. Why?"
She watched the flat prairie whip by out her window, a lurking sadness creeping up out of the sunlight, hidden over her shoulder, even in the bright, relaxed SUV. She'd let him have his lie—for now. "Nothing."
((()))
He was different.
She wasn't sure just how, but she knew something about him was.
He was back in his own head again, like he'd been after they'd first met—a little reserved, a little bit too quiet, a little bit brooding.
It wasn't as bad, by any means.
And he tried to hide these dark moods from her, better at it now than he'd been before.
But she still caught him once in a while, all through the first half of Oklahoma.
Usually he either thought she was asleep, or perhaps thought her distracted. He'd sit by the window in whatever motel they'd chosen for the night. His body would be loose and relaxed, boneless and totally still after their lovemaking, and he'd sit by the window, playing lookout, too awake to sleep.
And she'd watch him from the dark corner of the bed, lying on her side, eyes half shut. The glare of sharp watchfulness would slowly melt and he'd stare, unblinking, that old look returning anew: a man out of time. One part old grief, one part Thousand Yard Stare.
And she knew something had changed over those five days she'd been held captive—something aside from her physical transformation, whatever it was. They didn't know yet.
Something in him had changed, shifted, tugging him back a step.
She knew it was working him over harder than even he let on when she crossed the room to him one night and he didn't even budge. "Jamie…?"
He breathed, leaning back into her as she pressed against his back. "Mm?"
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed her face into the warmth of his neck. "What is it?"
He didn't flinch, and he didn't jerk, nothing. "What do you mean?"
She pressed her mouth against his pulse, his soft hair brushing over her cheek. "You're different. What's wrong? I won't break. You can tell me."
His left hand came up and wrapped around her arm, his head turning to meet her face. "We're solid, dollface. Go back to bed." Not at all the sort of thing he said.
She pressed another kiss to his throat. "Not without you."
"Darce, someone should keep watch."
She pulled back, tugging on his metal shoulder. "If they're coming, let them come," she murmured.
He stood, but slowly, and his face gave a jerk of surprise at her pronouncement. "Darcy—"
"Sshh. Not without you."
He let her tug him along by the hand. "But, Darcy—"
"They can do whatever they want. If they beat the door down and torch the place, I don't care anymore. They'll find me peacefully asleep—beside you."
He sighed. "Darcy…"
She sat down on the bed again and tugged on him.
He relented, hesitantly, arranging the blankets around them, loosely. It was the height of summer and they were in the southwest, after all. "I'll feel vulnerable with my back to the door."
She curled up against his front. "Then you'll never see them coming," she sighed, nuzzling his collarbone and pressing against him. "You've done enough running. Enough for ten lifetimes. It's time to rest."
((()))
Famous. Last. Words.
They spent the next few days making very little progress.
Bucky had absolutely no idea how, but they'd been found.
Just like that.
They spent an entire afternoon trying to shake a tail. Bucky was never confident they'd been successful and so they drove twice as long as they usually did. He finally let her take the wheel—after a very quiet, but fairly vicious fight for territory—after which he promptly passed out in the passenger seat.
Darcy would never admit that she white-knuckled the wheel the entire four hours he spent unconscious, eyes glued to the rearview mirror.
It was clear they were being shadowed, although by whom and how tightly was up for debate.
They didn't stop for days.
Bucky finally relented to her doing a share of the driving so they didn't have to stop.
To combat her nerves during these shifts, she blasted music from her USB-connected iPod.
The Beatles.
U2.
Bon Jovi and Whitesnake, Boston and Foreigner.
She mixed it up with old favorites from her rebellious punk years. My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Paramore and Panic at the Disco. The louder it was, the harder, the rougher, the better, the more it hardened her resolve.
A true soldier, Bucky slept through it all, like a machine.
She winced as the old idea crossed her mind.
They went through three days like this, almost to the Oklahoma border.
"Go back to that last one—that was good."
She jumped, letting out a small peep as Bucky spoke from the passenger seat, his eyes still closed, giving the effect that he was asleep, his legs all folded up, his gorgeous thighs on distracting display. "Shit, Jamie," Darcy gasped, checking the rearview mirror again.
He sat up. "Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you. You looked pretty intense."
"Intense?" she snarked. "Nah, not at all. Just watching, on pins and needles, for the next group of bad guys to show up. They always do. It's just a matter of time before our small patch of domestic bliss is overrun with a tiny attempt at takeover from some invasive species."
He stretched.
She huffed out a sigh, trying to center herself. "Which song?"
"The one about the World Trade Center."
She blinked. "9/11?"
He shrugged. "I might've been asleep, but I've got an eidetic memory and a ton of secure files—I know the day almost as well as you. Isn't that what the last song was alluding to?"
She thought back, her memory clouded, as it had been for the past few days, only half the pistons firing. Much like him, she suspected, she was running on one instinct—survival. For the past few days, that mostly meant driving, with only the occasional verbal check in. They'd kissed a total of once. Not that that really mattered. For someone as damaged as Bucky, he was very touchy-feely with her—always had been—and he told her he loved her with the simple occasional gesture of his hand on her thigh. As an unfortunate side-effect of the constant adrenaline overload, she was so strung out with the need for a good bone-shaking she could hardly stand it. Now that she'd been altered, one of these days, she was going to demand he not hold back one ounce with her in bed, just so she could know how strong he was. There was something deliciously appealing about surrender to someone you trusted, deep down, in your blood, someone you knew would never hurt you, and the intoxicating way that it had an opposing effect.
"You mean, that MCR song?" She pressed a button on the steering wheel. "It's called The Only Hope for Me Is You."
The song started over again. It had always been her favorite on that particular album, as much as the subject bothered her—bothered a lot of people her age, she figured.
She sighed. "I was in eighth grade Algebra. No. Geometry. I was in Geometry. Morning Geometry period with Mr. Saltzberg. It was, like, eight in the morning, and he was his chipper morning-person self and I was trying to follow mildly confusing structures and not fall asleep. That was before I'd really discovered coffee."
He didn't speak, but she could always feel when he was listening.
"The other teacher knocked on the door. Ms. Huber. He always called her The Vixen. They flirted shamelessly, though I always suspected he might be gay." She smiled at the memory. "Not that that matters, of course. And he opened the door, ready to joke around, but the smile dropped off his face as she muttered to him, like it had been scripted that way, like he was acting out a part."
He didn't move.
"He rushed over to the TV—all the rooms had them, they televised the morning announcements and all that stupid school bullshit, you know? And he turned it on and it was like he'd been watching the news before we came in or something, because he didn't need to go hunting. It was right there, right there on the screen. Even if you're thirteen and you've got no fucking idea what a World Trade Center even is, you can tell something isn't right when a skyscraper is burning like a Christmas tree in March."
A white SUV went around them in the right lane and she glared at them defensively through Bucky's window. His metal hand landed on her thigh and squeezed reassuringly.
"Only one?" he asked.
She swallowed. "We were just in time to see the second plane hit."
He sucked in a breath.
"He started crying. I remember being dumbfounded and disturbed that my cool Geometry teacher—a volunteer fire fighter on the side—was weeping. But he was. He was standing there, with his hands over his mouth, and he kept whispering "Oh, my God" over and over." She turned the volume down on the song. "We kept it on long enough to see the first tower go down in a plume of black smoke, like a child's toy. All that glass and steel, and it folded in on itself like some kind of action movie special effect. The room was silent. The newscasters were silent. I've never heard quiet like that before or since."
He was quiet, too.
"But I guess every generation has one, right? I mean, we all get more than one, I guess, in an entire lifetime, but every generation has that nasty thing that shapes their world outlook, right? You had Pearl Harbor." She stopped herself before she could mention her grandparents and JFK, reflexively flinching as she pictured him in some 1963 doorway with his HYDRA advanced weaponry, crouched there, just waiting for the perfect angle to snipe the President of the fucking United States. She couldn't decide if her heart hurt at the September memory or at the idea that he'd been responsible for one like it. "That one was ours, I guess." She wondered what other world leaders they'd forced him to eliminate and her hands tightened on the steering wheel until her knuckles went white.
Martin Luther King?
Bobby Kennedy?
What she wouldn't do to Zola if she could've strapped him to a chair for an hour…
She glanced over at him, but he was staring out his window, his head back against the headrest, his hair so soft and tempting. She wanted to curl in his lap and tuck her head beneath his chin, and just stay there for the rest of her life, never moving.
"No, I don't remember what I used," he suddenly said, his voice low.
She jerked in her seat to stare at him.
But he continued to stare out the window. "Some things are clear and sharp and others are still hazy. But it's there, all the same." His reflection gave away an expression on his face that matched the dull, hollow tone, lost in a memory. "And I didn't take that first shot. Someone other than HYDRA was there that day." His tone went grim. "I wouldn't have missed. I didn't miss. I never missed. No matter who was in my way."
Darcy's memories flickered to Natasha, shot straight through and bye-bye bikinis and Steve's same quip every, single time.
"Whoever that was, he was pretty good, but he was an amateur for a job like that. Sloppy, getting him in the neck like that. The angle wasn't right, he was overanxious, and took his shot too soon, never bothered to set it up. Put the job in danger, gave away the game, gave away his position. Should've left it to a professional." He turned to glance back through the rear window at the light traffic around them. "I was gone before he'd even slumped over. Didn't need to confirm kill—Jackie's screams were confirmation enough."
A chill went up her back.
"But I didn't shoot his brother—or King. Dunno who that was. CIA, maybe. AIM."
She blinked, then blinked again. "Conspiracy theories, much?"
He shrugged. "I've seen too many moving cogs to believe the strings aren't being pulled. Hell, I was a cog. Still am."
She swallowed, digesting all this awful information, the nearly inconceivable idea that she was having her very thoughts read, it seemed, and confirmed all on one go. "So…Oswald—"
"Was either a dumb-ass and a shit shot, or a patsy." He leaned to peer around the car behind the one directly behind them. "Get in the right lane."
She checked her blind spot and followed his instructions, still reeling in shock.
"The joys of being manipulated," he muttered sardonically, eyes still sharp on their rear.
"Yeah, I guess we really are a matched set, now, huh?"
"No."
This answer was so direct and assured sounding that she did a double take on him—again. "What? Why not?"
He leaned back the other way to study the side mirror. "A matched set would imply equality." Still, that grim tone lingered in his voice.
She glanced in the rearview, but didn't see anything that appeared worrisome. "Well. Yeah. I mean, you're still stronger than me—you're stronger than, like, almost everyone, but—"
"Strength has nothing to do with it."
His tone was so dark it knocked her flat for a second. "I…I don't understand."
He gestured to the red Cadillac in their kitty-corner. "Get in front of that Caddy, but make it look unhurried."
She went about it.
"Being a matched set implies equality. Which would be fine if I wasn't me," he continued, still watching out the tinted back windshield. If it was a British SUV did that make it a windscreen, even though they were driving it in the US? She wondered. "But…"
"Maintain speed."
She sighed, glancing in the side mirror as she slid in front of the Cadillac, and flicked off her blinker. "So…75?"
"Yep."
She frowned, glancing in the rearview mirror. "Jamie…"
"Just relax. I'm not sure if we're being tailed or not. Might be nothing."
It was silent for a moment and she tried to force her fingers to slacken on the wheel a bit. He didn't know that she'd learned to read his voice for lies. And he was such a fucking liar.
"If I wasn't me, then your statement is perfectly valid. But I'm me."
The Caddy was personally offended by their passing and promptly got in the right lane, blowing past them to play road rage games. She grumbled under her breath. "Meaning?"
He very casually reached down to the pack at his feet and pulled the zipper open. "Meaning there's no possible argument you can make where I deserve you, therefore nullifying your statement." He selected a Beretta, pulled back the magazine, checked the clip, and snapped it back in, the clacking sharp in the cabin. "And we're being boxed in."
She opened her mouth to argue anyway, but just at that moment, the Caddy cut her off and broke, forcing her to slam on the brakes, grinding her teeth as she braced for impact. "Fuck."
"Keep going," he coached, shifting in his seat as the car behind them honked and pulled up slack, disappearing as she gassed it again, the Caddy making sure to keep a just-low-enough speed to keep them penned on the right.
"Deserve me?!" she squawked. "You realize that's bullshit, right?! You're spouting bullshit."
He unhitched his seatbelt. "Babe, we were just discussing my assassination of John F. Kennedy and the whole part where his wife clung to the back of a speeding convertible, screaming for dear life. You don't have any hairs to split." He sat forward to switch off the air conditioning, then lowered his window and reached up to press the sunroof switch.
For a long moment, Darcy's heart pounded while the mechanics growled, the window popping and sliding back with a grinding noise. "Deserve me." She was studying the back of the Caddy. It was an older model, an Eldorado, from the late eighties—perfect for blending in. She was horrified to realize she hadn't been paying close enough attention to remember how long they'd been with it.
A white SUV pulled in behind them in the space left vacant by the honking driver what had to be blocks and blocks back now, the same SUV she'd glared at earlier. "Jamie…"
"Keep it cool, keep it collected," he soothed, his voice low and steady, even over the wind rushing in through his window, and he reached over to adjust her headrest.
"What's that for?"
"We takes shots from behind, I want your head protected. This covers the back of your skull and the most vital parts of your brain stem. Don't mess with it."
She blew out a long breath. "Oh, that's comforting."
"I may not deserve you, but I'm gonna do everything in my power to make sure you come out the other side of this with all limbs intact and your brain unscrambled, thank you very much."
Again, she opened her mouth to argue his various points, but he didn't let her. "Ram them."
She jerked. "What?!"
"Ram them. I wanna get off this freeway and away from all this collateral damage. Ram them, get out ahead if you can and take the first exit you come across. They want to throw down, we'll throw down, but I'm not taking anyone else with us. I've killed enough people, I'm not adding more to my list in the middle of rural Oklahoma."
Adrenaline spiking in her veins and fizzing along her synapses, she gunned it, slamming hard into the back of the Eldorado with a wince.
"Good. Do it again."
She did. The Caddy jerked to the side but held the lane.
"Lock into their backend and then increase your speed."
She slammed more gently into their rear and put increasing pressure on the gas pedal, pushing them forward, little by little, forcing them to speed up, their tires smoking and squealing.
"Keep it up. We have to get past this truck on the right."
It was a red pick-up, perhaps there to keep them boxed in, perhaps merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Finally, they cleared it, and without any prompting, she swung them right and barely made the exit, clipping an orange barrel in the process, the Rover leaning precariously.
The Caddy didn't make it.
The white truck did.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," she murmured under her breath.
"Focus," he coached again, just like the last time they'd been in this situation. "I'm not letting them take you. They can't have you, you're mine." Again, with that grim tone.
Nerves getting the better of her, she laughed shakily. "If you weren't such a romantic idiot, I'd accuse you of being a misogynist."
He pulled another gun from the pack on the floor, that creepy Skorpion, and set it on the console at the ready. "You can thank me later." Then, in a moment of clarity between them, he turned to look her full in the face, and he gave her that smile of his, the one that melted her down to butter. "You're doing great, doll." He winked.
She took a deep, deep breath, watching their pursuers in the mirror.
His hand again, on her thigh, his metal thumb rubbing soothingly along her knee. "Hm?"
She swallowed thickly. "I love you."
He paused. "…We're gonna get through this, okay? We will. I'll make sure of it. You trust me?"
She nodded, her mind's eye supplying an old image, a very early one, of herself, sitting on the floor in her bedroom, her face just a few lousy feet from her old analog TV, Aladdin coming through the adapted VHS player. He stared down at Jasmine with his hand held out, his large, Disney eyes reassuring, his mouth tilted at that angle just so, a little daring, but mostly just open and filled with a bottomless want that had stuck with her all her adult life. So she nodded. "Yes."
"I'm gonna make this up to you. I will. I swear it."
She let a short laugh escape. "You already took your vows, Jamie. I won't hold you to any extensions. And this isn't your fault. You have got to stop assuming everything nasty is your fault. This shit with SHIELD has been dirty since The War, you know that. And I've been mired in this muck for years now. It's about time it caught up with me. Realistically speaking, I'm a little amazed I've even made it this far. By all rights, I probably should've been vaporized by Loki's destroyer back in Puente Antiguo."
He checked the clip on the Skorpion. "Don't say that."
She snorted. "Why not?"
"Because it…" He sounded uncharacteristically vulnerable. "…it hurts to hear." He sighed. "And I know I've probably said worse, but…I've…I've been in this longer than you have. It's too late for me, baby. There's too much red in my ledger, but you…"
She pressed her foot down on the accelerator, watching the truck gain distance on them. "I'm no pure white, sparkly unicorn, Jamie."
He didn't laugh. "I know. It's just…" He huffed in frustration. "I won't pretend it doesn't make me sound like an old-fashioned asshole, but I want to shield you from what I can, and everything's playing against us. So far, this is just one giant chess match."
She blew the stop at the end of the exit and took a right, hopping the curb when she took the following roundabout too quickly.
"It's ironic, isn't it? That the amount of shit you have to go through is in direct opposition to how much you just want peace and quiet? I'm done with excitement, I don't want it anymore. But I get it anyway, it follows me around, Darce."
"Us," she corrected. "It follows us around, Jamie. I volunteered for this, and don't you fucking forget it, you hear me? You ain't getting ridda me that easily, and if we're stuck in the mud, at least we're stuck together. Long as I can still jump your bones once in a while."
He burst out laughing.
Surprised, she followed suit.
And just like that, the tension eased, melting away in the cab of the Evoque.
"There you go again, using sexual innuendo to side-step your feelings," he teased, glancing back behind them.
"I know. I should see a SHIELD shrink," she threw back at him.
That hand on her knee crept up a little higher, then a little higher still, and higher still, and she squirmed. "I can read your face, you know. You don't fool me, with your dilated pupils," he murmured, suddenly there, in her ear, that voice low and husky, the one that turned her limbs to Jell-O. "Part of you lives for this. But I can make you a promise: when we finally land, you can do whatever you want with me."
She shivered. "Well, that's incentive."
He chuckled. "You're not the only one that's getting itchy, Darce."
She nodded. "So, ditch the bad guys, get sex," she muttered, taking another right onto a quiet strip of highway, woods on either side. "Right. 10-4, Master Sergeant."
He set the creepy Skorpion in his lap. "Just don't call me that."
"Got it. Gotta come up with another name for ya."
He snorted, watching their pursuers in the side mirror. "Don't we have enough silly nicknames for each other?" He was particularly fond of 'Jamie'. No one in his life had ever called him that. As it was, only his mother had used his full name, and only when she'd been especially frustrated with him. To everyone else he was, inexplicably, 'Bucky', ever since he could remember, which was becoming clearer and clearer. He wasn't sure how he felt about that. For so long, it had all been lost to the fog in his mind, and now that shapes were becoming clearer in the distance, he wasn't sure he wanted to see it all in such acute detail as his advanced memory could supply. But to have Darcy call him some cute softening of the name he'd always found to be on the slightly strangling side, too formal, too straight-laced, was particularly refreshing. From the moment it had slipped accidentally from her mouth and she'd looked at him with apprehension, waiting for him to get annoyed, it had felt right.
She shook her head. "Nope. Besides, pet names are important."
He was silent, but she nearly jumped when he leaned over into her space and landed a kiss on her cheek. "Gas it, babe."
She sighed. "Yessir."
But that wasn't enough this time. It was a two lane highway, and with no traffic, and the wind working against them, the top-heavy Rover had a hard time outdistancing the lighter truck.
Bucky didn't even get an opening to start firing.
They didn't come under any fire either, which was telling in itself.
"Fuck," he growled, watching their rear.
"Why aren't they firing at us, Jamie?" she asked shakily, suspicious that she already knew the answer.
That grim tone was back in his voice again. "Because they want you alive."
She sighed again, heavily, frustrated. "Well, they can't have me. I don't approve."
He smirked. "That makes two of us." He watched their pursuers at their rear, gaining distance, getting closer and closer, and he looked around, taking stock, doing the math in his head. "God damn it," he muttered. "We haven't got many options here, doll."
But she trusted him blindly. "Just tell me what to do." She was even almost successful at covering the shaking in her voice.
He clenched his jaw and kept hoping for a curve in the road, a turn, a roundabout, some route by which they might perform some automotive hat trick.
But nothing came. It was Oklahoma after all, and they were out in the sticks now. Flat. Empty. No one for miles. There was nothing else for it. Keep the Rover for the metal protection it offered? Or go it on foot and maybe manage to pick a few of the bastards off?
Just then, there was a bang, loud and hollow in the cab of the SUV.
It sounded blood-chillingly familiar.
"What the hell was that?" Darcy asked, her brow screwed up in confusion.
He barely had time to react, his seatbelt gratefully giving way as he hit the release blind. "Darc—"
The car lurched and was thrown up in the air, the backend lifting up off the ground like a child's toy. Bucky threw himself across the cab as the SUV was blown off course, moving just fast enough to cage Darcy in with his left arm.
She gasped in his ear, but otherwise made no sound as the truck turned helplessly over, and landed on its own roof. The airbags burst out, Darcy's catching him in the back, and he punched the side-impact down with his fist. The momentum didn't stop there, though, and the truck skittered off the road surface, tipped, and slid down the embankment on the shoulder and rolled, once, twice, and into the ditch at the side of the highway.
Even bracing himself, Bucky's forehead lashed against the door, and it was hard enough that even he saw stars for a second. "Shit," he snarled under his breath as they finally came to a stop, wondering how the hell a totally unsuspecting Nick Fury had survived the impact of the very same weapon on the streets of DC.
At the time, Bucky thought grimly, the SHIELD director's evasion of him had rather pissed him off. Funny, how things changed on a dime, sometimes.
"Darcy?" God, even he was knocked breathless by that.
No answer.
His heart pounding, he couldn't stop his voice from rising and breaking in panic. "Darcy?! Talk to me!"
She was gasping for breath. "I'm fine. I'm fine, I think. I'm here."
Temporary relief flooded him and he loosened his iron grip. "Thank God." A God he wasn't too sure he believed in anymore, but that was neither here nor there at the moment.
"What the fuck," she gasped. "What the FUCK was that, JAMIE?!"
He swallowed thickly, trying to clear his tangled thoughts. "Mark 13. Magnetic Disc Grenade." Really cool weapon in its own, detached way—when it wasn't loosed on you, and you weren't aiming it at someone else.
The gasping was increasing. "I THOUGHT THEY WANTED ME ALIVE?! Now they're firing fucking GRENADES at us?!" She was losing control.
He had to work to calm and soften his voice, disturbingly shaken by the whole thing. "They also know you're in here with me. Can you move, are you hurt?"
"NO, I'm not HURT!"
He took a split second to take stock of their position. If he knew mercs like he thought he did, they'd stopped to watch the destruction and now would be approaching very slowly, wary of a surprise onslaught from him and from the truck having an adverse reaction to being spontaneously thrown around so unkindly. They had just a few precious seconds, what might amount to a mere minute within which to act. "Try and calm down, Darcy," he murmured. "I know that's a ridiculous thing to ask, but you've gotta try, okay? For me. Pretend this is just Loki's Destroyer." Yeah, Loki, the slightly mentally unstable, lash-y, angry Asgardian-slash-Frost Giant God creature he had no desire to actually meet face-to-face. Sure, him.
"THAT DOESN'T HELP, JAMIE!"
He flinched, but ignored her. She usually settled down. She was quick on the uptake, and just as quick on the roll downhill, if he just gave her a second. It was a second they didn't have, granted, but…
Okay, they were pinned on the driver's side, and his passenger door was exposed, and manageable, if he'd lucked out. It didn't look to have taken any damage in the roll. He reached down, fumbling for Darcy's seatbelt, thankfully still strangling her, bodily, cradling her to the driver's seat, and pressed the release, catching her as she free fell into his arms. She stifled another gasp.
"Jamie…"
"We gotta move, Darce."
"You can't just roll it, can you?" Her voice was brimming with unbridled fear.
"I could, but we don't have that kind of time, sweetheart—and I don't think this thing's engine is gonna turn over anymore anyway." It was no longer running, and was, in fact, ticking, beneath them, and Bucky didn't like the sound of it. "Hold onto me, okay?" He jockeyed his leg free and leveled a solid kick at the passenger door, satisfaction flooding him as it gave under his enhanced strength and burst clean off the truck with a grinding crack. "Come on."
She clung to his metal shoulder as he leveraged them out of the side of the downed SUV, very carefully edging his head past the new roof.
As expected, a bullet zinged past, and he ducked back in again, wincing.
"Oh, God, you're bleeding," Darcy murmured, her voice thin.
"It's from the crash. They didn't shoot me," he reassured her. "Just a flesh wound."
"Flesh wounds kill people, they're not just a Monty Python reference!" she snapped. "I am way too young to be a widow, and black does absolutely nothing for my figure, James Barnes!"
Holding his breath, he hurled himself out of the truck and around underneath it, barely missing more fire. "Damn it, someone over there's not half bad…"
She clambered out after him, drawing no fire.
He tugged the backpack out after them, and slung it over one shoulder, palming his Beretta and handing her the Skorpion. "Hold this for a second."
She blanched, staring down at the automatic in distaste, but traded with him quickly when he offered, the pack secured on both shoulders now.
"You good with the Beretta?"
She nodded. "It's smaller than your SIG."
"Packs a punch, don't forget the blowback. Can't afford to land on your little ass, okay?"
There was a short moment of camaraderie. "If you think my ass is little, you've been looking at the wrong one and we might have a problem."
He snorted. "Nope. Looking at the right one." He hauled her in front of him and shoved her unceremoniously past the trees that lined the lonely highway. "Now get that cute thing moving."
They crashed into the undergrowth, their pursuers hot on their trail, racing past the crashed British truck after their quarry.
Darcy clutched at Bucky's hand as he led the way under branches and around thick knots of trees, over all the molding detritus of a healthy forest. She was proud to say that she kept up with him easily—and she didn't think he was giving her much leeway. "They seriously think they can take you on?" she gasped, glancing back.
He tugged harder. "Don't look back. And of course they can, Darcy, I'm not a God."
"No, you're the fucking Winter Soldier. You're a legend."
"And as you pointed out, I can still bleed, Darcy. They shoot me, I'll still die."
"But—"
"You remember me almost killing Steve, right? Twice? You remember how I almost killed someone that had almost the same serum I've got?"
She grumbled a complaint, but didn't reply.
The harsh echo of a gun blast burst in the forest and the birds in the trees fell ominously silent. A bullet winged by them, and Bucky ducked just enough, all instinct, as it zinged by his right bicep.
Another rapidly followed, this time on their left, and it clanked uselessly off his left elbow. He snorted. "They've seen too many movies. It isn't actually possible to curve a bullet," he said.
"Yeah, but James McAvoy sure was hot in Wanted…" she offered breathlessly. "If you stay in front of me, they can't shoot you—not if they want me alive".
"I'm a bit taller than you, Darce."
As if on cue, another bullet zipped by, and he ducked again, cursing low under his breath. "Feel like I'm back in the trenches."
She swallowed against her dry throat. "Were those better or worse than they're portrayed in the movies?"
"So much worse."
Admitted, they hadn't watched many war movies, as a rule. The closest they'd come was Forrest Gump.
A massive oak loomed just to the right of their path, and he paused, curling them around its trunk to fire off one round, two.
A rustle in the undergrowth a few yards back told them he'd gotten one of them.
"Nice one, babe," she murmured.
"Let's assume that pick-up had a quad axel and an extended cab. That's at least four mercs, maybe as many as six if they're small and willing to cram in. I doubt it, not with all their ammo. So let's go with four."
"Three, now."
"Presumably."
A dark slip of movement caught Darcy's eye and she raised the Beretta without thinking, firing off a shot and jerking as she righted herself against the trunk at the kickback.
There was a shout, but no accompanying sound of a body hitting the soft earth.
"Wounded him."
"Damn it."
"Not bad," he encouraged, taking her hand again. "C'mon. They'll gain on us if we stay here."
They rushed back into the undergrowth, taking a random left, then a zigzag to throw them off. They ran for what felt like forever, and somewhere along the line, Bucky managed to fell a second one. That left two—assuming his instincts were on par.
They came to a massive knot of numerous trees, all gathered together in one lump of bark and growth, and paused.
"What?" she asked, catching her breath.
Bucky's brow furrowed.
"Don't you dare split us up," she warned, reading his face.
"We're not splitting up, no," he began.
"Jamie—"
"But I need to draw them out. I can't eliminate them if we're too busy running, Darce."
She stared at him. "Jamie—"
He grabbed her shoulders and shook her gently. "Focus. You know I've got to take them out, okay? You've got this. I want you to lay low right here. I'll just be a few minutes. You can manage that for a few minutes—you've proven that more than enough by now."
Her heart started galloping harder and she chewed on her lower lip. "Jamie—"
"I won't be long. I promise."
He didn't give her any time to argue. He dipped, pulling her up to his mouth and laid a good one on her, a kiss unlike any they'd shared in a solid week—if that—and she mewled helplessly against his iron grip—
And he was gone, a small rustle the only indication he'd moved at all.
For a moment, she just stood there, a little whiplashed, and glanced around at the forest around her. It was primarily made up of deciduous trees, of varying amounts of growth, and there was no wind, it was so dense and thick in most places.
A leaf dropped to the ground at her side, and she jumped, wrapping her arms around her middle, her t-shirt suddenly too thin and chilly, even in the height of summer.
Another leaf dropped.
A bird twittered off to her left somewhere, and a chipmunk chirped in reply.
Taking a deep, centering breath, she crept around the knot of trees and huddled there, gun arm free and relaxed, feet sore in her sandals, ears open, eyes sharp on what had been their rear.
A gun blast went up, and she jumped, shutting her eyes for a moment in hopes that her husband had been on the delivering end of that blow, rather than the receiving end. There was no return fire, which told her whichever way it had gone, someone was dead—or at least down.
She swallowed. Of course it wasn't Jamie. Jamie was a God damned marksman, for fuck's sake. If there was one rule she'd learned to live by in the past year, no matter how he argued, it was that the Winter Soldier was hard to kill.
Another blast went up.
This time there was return fire, volleys back and forth, a firefight, and she shut her eyes again, clenching her jaw to keep the tears of fear and adrenaline at bay. She couldn't fall apart now, not now, not when he needed her firing on all pistons.
How the fuck had this become her life? How?!
The only moment she could truly trace it back to was sitting in that coffee shop, texting Daniel to stop begging and leave her the fuck alone before Jane plopped herself down on the seat across from her, breathless and distracted as she introduced herself and asked her if she was still interested in the internship. And she'd said 'yes'.
She swallowed, hard, trying desperately to get a grip. She'd been in situations like this before, at least a handful now, and this afternoon from Hell was no different, strictly speaking.
"Darcy…"
She jumped.
Her name, just once, and in a sing-song sort of voice, two taunting notes. Dar-cy.
"Darrrcyy…" It echoed cleanly through the trees.
She swallowed thickly, looking wildly around, her hand tightening around the Beretta, her palm slick with sweat.
"Oh, Darrrrrcyyyy…"
Aldrich Killian.
Her heart kicked up anew, triple time, and she felt her extremities go cold and clammy.
"Come out, come out, little one." A cool chuckle. "That's all so cliché, isn't it? Darcy, dear? Where are you hiding?"
He sounded close. Too close, but she couldn't see him.
"Darcy, Darcy? All alone?"
God, her heart was actually going to burst out of her fucking chest, Alien style. It was painful.
"Your Soldier can't have left you all alone, can he? Awfully irresponsible of him."
Gritting her teeth, she pushed her voice up and out, forcing it to level out. "What the fuck do you want, Killian? You're such a sick fuck, just get on with it already," she called.
There was a rustle, and a thud, and a voice spoke from behind her, nearer the tree. "Alright then."
She jumped, sucking in a breath, and spun around to find him directly behind her, wearing that Stephen King movie grin.
"It's more fun if I pretend I haven't found you yet, dontcha think?"
She took two quick steps back, her right hand shaking, tightening still more around the gun.
"Running away was very naughty, Darcy, dear. That's against the rules."
All her instincts told her to shoot, but she couldn't manage to raise her firing arm, fear flooding every synapse.
So that was why Bucky had focused so much on separating action from reaction. She'd shoved the lesson to the back of her mind, but now it seemed so obvious, why he'd tried to teach her the ability to fight past the body's autonomic response.
He advanced on her, slowly. "We weren't finished yet, sweetheart. You needed some tweaking."
She swallowed again, mirroring him and stepping back, across the small clearing. "Tweaking? Is that the part where I do your bidding like a good little soldier?"
The shark-like grin widened as he continued his slow advance. "I had my heart set on just a few little extra additions, yeah." He shrugged. "This will have to do, I guess." He reached out for her shoulder.
She shrugged him off, eyeing the hand he had behind his back. "I don't get it. This whole game is fucked up, Killian. How were you expecting me to do your bidding, exactly? You figure out the secret to immediate brainwashing or what? You do know it took HYDRA years to perfect their precious Winter Soldier, right?"
But he just smiled again, and stepped in close, closer, so close she could feel his breath on her cheek as he pinned her against the trunk at her back. "Darcy, sweetheart. You don't understand. And how could you? I don't need to brainwash you. That's the whole point. All I needed was for you to survive long enough…"
He lowered his arm, revealing a night stick sort of device, black and all-too-familiar, that crackled in his grip.
"Survive for what?" Reacting on instinct, finally, Darcy fired the Beretta, aiming for his face, but the kickback shot it in a wide, overheard arch, and she missed by a mile.
He snarled, grabbing at her face with one hand, and applying the prod to her belly—right where she'd been gutted just a few months prior.
There was just a split second of nothingness and Darcy almost smiled—the nerves there had been horribly damaged and the scar tissue was as good as numb and half-dead.
But then the pain bloomed tenfold and she squirmed, her body so slammed with a raw, tearing sensation that she couldn't even manage a noise of protest—
And just like that, it was gone.
He stepped back, staring at her, then down at the prod, then at her hands and the color of her eyes. He cocked his head.
Coughing desperately, she bent double, hands on knees, trying to catch her breath, her gaze on the Beretta, dropped, at her feet. Her brain told her to pick it up off the soil, but her hands didn't want to do its bidding.
"Hm," Killian said. "Yes, I thought that might be the case. Sometimes the Extremis takes its good-natured time. Have you experienced anything…odd…since your escape?"
She drew in a ragged breath. "Wouldn't you like to know?" she gasped.
He chuckled.
Again, there was a moment of inaction, like the slow-motion of a movie reel, and somewhere in her head, Darcy marveled at the idea that she was consciously aware of it, in the moment with it, watching everything flare, bullet time, before blooming into action.
Killian brought the prod down on her back, just there, where her spine bent, the other side of the nerve damage, the exit wound from last spring.
This time, there was no pause.
She screamed.
She couldn't stop it.
The ragged sound ripped out of her by the hinges, raw and thin. The electric current slammed through her, but the effect was so intense, there was no comical shaking and trembling—this was no taser.
But then it was gone again, and Killian had grabbed her by the collar of her t-shirt—I Heart Hawaii—and had slammed her back up against the tree again. "You feel that? You feel that, Darcy? You can have that all the time, Darcy!" he gasped, his expression manic and deranged, his breath reeking of old wine. "You can have that power at your fingertips all the time! And you can harness it, you can wield it! For the betterment of the world! We can help shape the next century, we can do it better than HYDRA ever did! You can help me! You both can! I can heal the sickness in mankind that makes us bent on destroying each other—I just need your help!"
Pain lancing hotly through her, she only had the energy to glare and spit viciously in his face.
It landed on his lip, and he flinched, his face slack in surprise.
"Fuck. You," she gasped, jerking until she'd torn free of his grip.
Surprised, he let her go.
She stumbled weakly, finally managing to snatch up Jamie's Beretta off the soft, summer soil and leaf litter. "I'm not doing your bidding in this fucking reality or any other. I may still be stumbling around, looking for my place in all this, but you…" She finally managed to straighten up, clutching a pain in her side that felt like it was irradiated. "You can go and fuck yourself, Aldrich. God knows, no one else wants to."
He turned to watch her, but again, no anger, just a smile, loose and relaxed, confident and full of humor. He shook his head, clucking his tongue like he was impressed. "It's true: he's taught you well. Including how to shoot—although, in all fairness, you did miss."
She ignored the dig. "He's taught me a lot of things; which is ironic," she gasped, still out of breath. "Because when we met, he barely even knew who he was."
He ambled his way back over to her again, and she mirrored him, using the circular shape of the clearing to her advantage. "You could've taken that a bit better, really. The Extremis is stubborn with some subjects, takes a while to take effect—although, again, to be fair, you've got a full dose of Zola's serum floating around in your blood as well. So it's up to fate, I suppose."
"That's right," she said, leveling the gun weakly at him. "You made me a freak. So you got what you wanted, after all."
And just like that, he was across the clearing to her, moving so quickly that Darcy was too weak to anticipate it. "That may be true—to an extent—let's just perform one most test, hm, just to be sure?" And the prod was pressing again to her belly.
She curled against it, her whole body tightening. A low cry escaped her throat. Her scar seemed to prickle with it, conducting the electricity like its own current, and it felt like her whole body flickered in reaction, the pain so intense, for a moment she nearly blacked out.
By some stroke of luck, she managed to squeeze the trigger on the Beretta, and fate had it that the nose of the handgun just so happened to be pointing at just the right angle.
The gun went off with a horrible thunder, and close quarters made Darcy's eardrums practically fucking bleed. The bullet caught Killian in the shoulder, throwing him back one step, two steps, three steps—
And the baton was gone, dropped from his grip as he hit his knees in the clearing, snarling in pain and anger.
But she didn't stop. She knew when she was outgunned, weapon or not, and she took off blindly for the surrounding woods, terror streaking through her and overpowering her basic logic, more so than any perilous situation she'd found herself in before.
Gasping and half limping against the pain in her side, she ran, feeling clumsy but likely faster than she'd ever been capable of moving before.
The woods were silent around her, as though the birds, the small mammals, even the trees were aware of her struggle.
She felt like a bull in a china shop, crashing loudly through the undergrowth, fear streaking tears down her face, but anger determining her stubbornness not to outright cry, panic lancing her feet forward—
Smack into a hard plane that drew her up short.
She cried out, that fear ratcheting up tenfold, and she struggled blindly against the grip around her upper arms. She felt around for the trigger on the Beretta but, just like that, it was wrenched from her hand and she was neatly disarmed.
She snarled, lashing out with her hands—
"DARCY!" Jamie shook her, roughly, his hands like vice grips around her upper arms.
She snapped to, staring him flat in the face. Just like that, there he was, with his arms around her and everything. The scrape on his forehead had closed and was just a smear of dried blood. His pupils were dilated and his hands were so steady around her arms that she was distantly sure he'd just killed one of their pursuers. Hadn't she read somewhere that snipers were always über calm after a kill? "I heard you scream—"
And the fight went out of her, the adrenaline making her a shaking and shivering mess before him. She gasped. "Killian…"
"Are you alright?! I've never heard you make a sound like that bef—"
She gestured vaguely. "Killian, he's…"
He stuck the Beretta in the back waistband of his shorts, all focus. "Killian's here?"
She gestured back the way she'd come. "He's…he's back there—he had some sort of cattle prod—I shot him—I didn't shoot him very well, but he's…he's…" She wasn't making any sense.
Surprisingly, he didn't insist on hunting him down, evidently figuring they stood a better chance continuing on course, and he tugged her along after him by one hand, all business.
She followed him dutifully, trying to find the communication point between her body and her brain, in the vague hope of reattaching her thought processes. She failed. It was really slow going in her nervous system so far. She idly wondered if something had been damaged, fried in the fight. Part of her body was certainly fried. Her belly and back were screaming in pain. She didn't make it very far. The pain was increasing with every step. "Jamie…" She swallowed. "Jamie…"
He must've heard something in her voice, because he stopped, turning to look at her with sharp eyes. She almost jumped at the reminder of his alter ego. In moments like this, he slipped.
She slumped weakly against him, her head dropping to his shoulder. "Just gimme…one second… One second , just to catch my breath."
Looking back on it later, she couldn't have pinpointed exactly what instinct drove him, but he immediately tugged up on her t-shirt and all she heard was the sound of him sucking in his breath.
Then the ground was gone from beneath her and she was cradled, nice and warm, against his chest as he carried her along. It took her a shamefully long moment to solidify any coherent thoughts. "Jamie…I'll slow you down…I'll slow us…down."
"You're light as a feather for someone like me. And besides, it doesn't matter," was all he said.
She squirmed weakly, but his arms tightened, blocking her assault. "Put me down, Jamie. I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
It was becoming clearer now. "But he'll catch up to us…"
"Then we'll go down together. Only way I wanna go down, anyway. So shut up."
She would've argued further, but the world closed around her like the end of a Looney Tunes episode, a black circle descending and closing, little by little, until she was conscious no more.
