Gold to Airy Thinness Beat

Chapter Twenty

Luckily, there were no less than six Hydra bases waiting for her to come and remove them from the map with the promise of a seventh if they could find it.

For the first one, Stephanie decided to go with the direct approach.

She and her men, who had decided their team needed a name and chose the Howling Commandos for reasons known only to the male brain, walked up to the front door, kicked it in and started firing.

In hindsight, there were several problems with her strategy. For one thing, she had picked her men for a reason, and promptly failed to use any of their abilities in the attack. Not only that but it was sheer dumb luck that none of them were shot in the initial charge through the door. She had her men stand behind her and her shield but they were forced to fan out on either side of her as they entered to avoid shooting her in the back. If they had run out of bullets faster than Hydra, or if the enemy had been given the chance to circle around so they weren't facing a wall of ammunition head on...things could have gone quite different for any one of them.

And it would have been entirely on her. She was supposed to be protecting them, not putting them in needless danger.

Another problem was Stephanie quickly found out just how much she hated using a gun. She hadn't wanted to at all at first but Phillips had insisted she be armed with something other than her good looks, dumb luck and reckless disregard for her own safety. Bucky had dragged her out to the range to train and Stephanie had felt confident when she'd shoved the gun into the holster they'd given her and set out on her mission.

She'd continued to feel confident, right up until she had to draw the weapon, aim it at another human being, and pull the trigger.

She'd missed every shot she took.

Bucky had not been happy.

Oddly enough, that turned out to be one of the pluses of the mission, aside from the obvious fact that they succeeded and none of her men got hurt.

Things had been off between her and Bucky since the lab. Bucky had been so mortified by what had happened that he'd started checking himself every time he moved to touch her. She, in turn, found every time she came in physical contact with him in any way something like a bolt of pure electricity shot right through her. It made her terrified she'd give herself away and, since they were only ever together in public, it'd mean revealing her emotions in an environment not on her terms and in a setting where she'd be unable to properly talk to him about it. So, rather than the ease they'd had around one another for the entirety of their lives their relationship had suddenly turned into exactly what she'd been most afraid of.

Awkward.

Suddenly neither of them were touching or, worse, one would make start to make a move, born of years of familiarity, only to find themselves halting mid-step, hands dropping and smiles faltering.

She was partly to blame, she knew, for not having gone after him immediately from the lab to talk to them right then. She'd let it linger, at which point it had begun to fester, a silence allowed to go on for far too long and now it had turned into a veritable wall between them.

Of late, they'd taken to almost avoiding one another entirely rather than try to tiptoe around and make suddenly stilted, awkward polite talk.

So, in a weird way, her sudden failure to use a gun had been one of the positives to come out of the first mission.

It had gotten through the wall.

It had been after they'd cleared out the base while they'd been hiking back to where they'd hidden the vehicles. Stephanie had been focused on the ground, trying to stop the involuntary shivers wracking her frame. With the weapons facility, she'd been utterly focused on finding and saving Bucky. Most of the fighting had happened without her present and, while she'd seen the dead, it hadn't been a focus. She'd been more worried on getting back home and, thankfully, she'd had a huge army at her back in case something went haywire, including experienced officers more than willing to help guide her.