A/N: Welcome back to Chapter 5! Read, review, and enjoy!

I do not own Marvel or the Backrooms.

"Blood. It's fresh."

Bucky lifted his gaze back to the words written on the wall. "WELCOME TO FUN."

And here he'd thought the jaundiced maze of Area 0 was the worst this place would get.

"Whatever this place is, it can't be good," Nebula said from behind him. "We've got to get back to where we were before. Help me punch through the floor." The sound of tearing carpet came from behind him.

He turned back to see Nebula ripping back a section of the carpet and clawing at the concrete subflooring with her cybernetic arm. "It has to be here," she grunted.

Bucky walked over to help her, then froze.

The previously indistinct children's singing in the background slowly took on audible words.

"Желание…."

"Ржавый…."

"Семнадцать…."

"…Рассвет. Печь," Zemo said, pacing around the containment cell he was in.

Stop it, he thought. He tried to speak, but couldn't. The words froze in his throat.

"Девять."

Instead he clenched his fist and yanked his arm out of the restraints binding it to his chair. He reached across his body and tore the binds off his other arm too.

"Добросердечный."

He leapt to his feet and pounded on the cell's door.

"Возвращение на родину."

Again. Again. Again.

"один."

His mind screamed. Stop it, stop!

"грузовой."

The door flew off its hinges. He stumbled into the room outside and dropped to his hands and knees. This wasn't him anymore, it wasn't, it-"

"Солдат?" Zemo stood next to him and shook his shoulders. "Солдат?"

He looked up.

It wasn't Zemo; it was Nebula.

"What happened?" she asked. "Are you okay?"

Bucky glanced at his surroundings. He was back in that room, the one with the red carpet. It had felt so real….

"How did someone know those words?" he asked. He stood up and shrugged away from Nebula. The singing was still there, but the words weren't as clear as they'd seemed a minute before.

"What words?"

"That stuff they're singing, it's something from my…." Time with HYDRA. "…my past."

"Where did you hear that?"

Bucky turned to her. It seemed like she had somehow known the words too…. "Someone in Russia." He wasn't exactly lying. "What does it matter?"

"That not possible. That was Luphomoidian. How would someone on Earth have known that?"

"It was-" There was no way that was an alien language. "No, Желание is longing in Russian, and Ржавый is rusted, and-"

"What are you taking about?"

"The words, what they were singing. Those were the words."

"That's not what I heard."

The singing continued in the background. He tried to focus on the words, but, try as he might, he couldn't make them out anymore.

"Someone's screwing with us," he said, clenching his metal fist. "Someone or something about this place." He turned around and walked towards the doorway the singing seemed to be coming from. He gripped the nearby table with his metal arm and flung it through the doorway ahead of him. "Whoever's here, come out! Show yourselves!"

"Bucky, wait," Nebula said.

He marched through the doorway, and they showed themselves.

Three tall, yellow, humanoid creatures that looked to be made of clay lunged at him from behind the wall. They seemed to have crude smiley-faces painted on their otherwise featureless, blocky heads, and their arms ended in not hands, but twin mouths filled with razor-sharp fangs.

"What the-?" Bucky started.

The first of the creatures slammed into him and pinned him to the wall. It stuck one of its arms to his metal one with a suction-like sound, then looked down at his arm in what seemed to be confusion.

Bucky reared back his other arm and punched the thing in the face. Yellow paste flew onto the opposite wall, but the creature's face re-formed just as it was before. The two others grabbed him by the arms and held them against the wall. He grunted and tried to yank free of them, but couldn't.

Suddenly, the head of the creature holding him to the wall was sliced off. It crumpled to the ground. Nebula stood behind it with her electric batons. The other two creatures turned to face her.

"Get away from him," she said.

Bucky swung his leg through one of the other creatures' legs. It wobbled a bit, and he ripped his metal arm free of its grip. The other one, meanwhile, stuck one of its arm mouths to his biological arm. He screamed as the teeth tore into his skin. Nebula kicked that creature in the back and slashed off the arm biting Bucky with one of her batons. It went limp and fell to the ground. Bucky turned and smashed the other one's head in with his metal elbow. Its decapitated body slumped to the floor.

The remaining creature grabbed Nebula and flung her into the far wall. She quickly got back to her feet, and the thing approached her. "Желание, Ржавый, Семнадцать," it sang through some invisible mouth. "Девять, Добросердечный-"

Bucky shut his eyes and covered his ears. It wasn't going to do this to him, not again. The Wakandans had healed him. He wasn't the Winter Soldier anymore. That wasn't him-

"No, stop," Nebula pled, in a voice Bucky didn't recognize from her. Gone was her usual stoic intonation, replaced by…something else. "Please."

He opened his eyes. Nebula had cut off the creature's left arm, but it had gripped her cybernetic arm and shoved her against the wall. She'd dropped a baton, and her punches were proving ineffective against the creature. Bucky strode towards it and tapped it on the back. The creature turned its head to look at him, and he swung his vibranium fist straight through its face. It collapsed to the ground, letting go of Nebula.

"Are you okay?" Bucky asked.

Nebula breathed heavily. "I think so. Your arm."

Bucky looked for the first time at the bite mark the creature had left. He could clearly see where the teeth had punctured his skin, but the wound didn't seem like it was too deep. Blood trickled from a few of the puncture marks.

"I'll be fine," he said. "How about you?"

"It only bit this arm." She held up her left arm; its metal had been bent, but not punctured, by the fangs.

"Have you ever seen anything like those things before?" Bucky asked.

She shook her head. "No. I thought they were Tralpavians at first, but no species I've ever seen has mouths on the end of its arms."

Well, so much for hoping she might know more about these things than he did. At the very least, they seemed fairly easy to kill. Small consolation, but it was something.

"What did you hear?" Bucky asked.

"When?"

"When that thing was singing. You clearly heard something different than me."

"Oh. Nothing." Nebula turned to the far end of the room. "What's that?"

Bucky followed her gaze. Another table sat in the corner, draped in a plain yellow tablecloth, with three cans bound by a red ribbon atop it.

Bucky frowned. "What the hell?" He warily stepped towards the table. The eyes of the elephant decal on the wall above it seemed to be following him. As he neared the table, he could make out the cans' appearance more clearly. They had pale brown labels with some sort of decorative vines printed on them. The label read "ALMOND WATER," with an image of a white flower below it.

"It's some sort of water," Nebula said, approaching the table as well.

"Maybe, maybe not. Could be some trap these things set up. Disguise some sort of poison as water, hope it'll weaken us, and then more of them sneak up on us and rip us to shreds." He reached towards the table with his metal arm and slowly lifted the cans. In smaller print below the flower image, the can proclaimed to be the "Original Vanilla & Rose flavor you love, now with a new look!"

Bucky ripped off the ribbon, put down two of the cans, and popped open the third with a hiss of air. He sniffed the "Almond Water." It smelled as he guessed it might based on the label.

Suddenly, something gripped him by the legs. He fell over backwards, the wind knocked out of him, and the can thumped to the floor.

The smiling face of another yellow creature emerged from behind the tablecloth and scrambled atop him.