Bring Me Home // Bucky Barnes

Chapter XXIII - If She Was His

Steve stopped his jest as he watched the colour drain from Elizabeth's face, the light pour out of her eyes leaving a void he had seen too many times before.

"I was an experiment," she stuttered, her lips struggling to form the words as the face of Artim Zola swam in a blue mist around her mind.

"There is no use in your crying, Miss Halsted," she could feel the insurmountable pressure building in her chest all over again as his words wrapped around her like a python suffocating its prey, "no one is coming for you. You are ours now."

"I was an experiment," she repeated, her voice stronger as her eyes met the forest green of Natasha's. "A disappointing one, all things considered, but Zola injected me with HYDRA's own version of the serum. It didn't work the way Erskine's did for Steve but that could be how I survived."

She took a deep breath as she turned her back to her friends, feigning distraction as she worked on trying to drown out the memories of her screams and, even worse, the pain of what those days had lead to.

His hands were gentle as he took her arm and turned her to face him. Their connection was unspoken, but Steve always seemed to know. His thoughts had gone there too. To Bucky. He pulled her into his side and squeezed her to him, something he had done countless times before to pull her from the torture of her own mind; of her own guilt. She needed the reminder of the here and now.

"It could have been that," he mused as he placed his chin on top of her head, "or it could have been the weird blue stone that exploded and killed Shmidt. Your miraculous survival with that could always be linked to your miraculous survival in the ice." He chuckled as Lizzie muffled her agreement into his chest.

Furrowing her brow and tilting her head to the left Nat searched her mind for references to the stones. She knew them by name, but never by colour. "Weird blue stone?"

"Yep," Elizabeth put on her best smile for her friends as she pulled out of Steve's embrace, knowing they worried for her each time she let herself sink into the depths of the darkness that was always clinging to the back of her mind. "Long story short: I'm here, I'm alive, but we don't know how. What we do know though is that I'm not a super soldier, and it's lucky for Steve I survived, or who else would tell him he dresses like it's still the forties?"

Natasha laughed as Steve playfully pushed Lizzie away from him in feigned outrage.

"That's rude Lizzie," he scowled.

"Very," Nat laughed, "and besides, you're one to talk. You won't let me take you shopping to modernise you either!"

The piercing screech of Stark's alarm system filled the room and the three friends instinctively flinched away from the sound as it deafened them.

"Stark has to get the volume controls for that down. He's killing me." Elizabeth groaned.

"Jarvis?" Nat shouted over Elizabeth, "what's the situation?"

"Attention all Avengers. 911 Call incoming. Director Fury is under attack. All counter-attack measures have failed. Avengers engage." The soft voice assigned to Starks A.I. system somehow made his message much more sinister.

Without another word Natasha Romanoff and Steve Rogers were gone and Elizabeth was left alone, standing in the middle of her consultation room, with no idea of what was to come.

She slipped out of the small heels she wore around the medical suite and bent down to grab the running shoes she stored under her desk, not once thinking that she might be in the middle of making a bad choice.

"Jarvis?" She called out over the banshee screech that was still ringing through the compound. "Where's Fury now?"

"Director Fury is just two blocks from here Dr. Halsted."