Soft Robotics ✧ Bucky Barnes

61. STRATEGY

Bucky's POV

Grace was dead.

I knew it from the way Wanda and Vision were waiting, looking at me gravely in her mom's driveway when I pulled up. I knew it from the open, gaping front doorway with empty, broken hinges. I knew it just from a gut feeling. They were going to tell me Grace was dead.

My phone rang in my coat pocket when I stepped off my bike. Steve was calling. Might as well hear it from him. I answered.

"Just tell me," I said.

"Are you at Grace's mom's place yet?" he countered.

"Just tell me she's dead, Steve."

"She's not—" he cut himself off, rephrasing. Not wanting to lie to me. "We don't know where she is. Where are you?"

"Just pulled up at her mom's."

"Wanda called me. It's not—it's not good, Buck. They went in to check what was going on when she wasn't answering her phone. Her mom is dead in the house. No sign of Grace. The rest of us are coming. We're taking the quinjet, so it shouldn't be long, but SHIELD might still beat us there."

I didn't say anything.

"Are you there? We'll find her, okay? We'll find her."

"Dead. We'll find her dead."

"Buck, try not to—"

I hung up. I called Grace. Straight to voicemail. Hung that up too. Dead.

"Bucky?" Wanda called finally. Her face was red, tracked with tears.

"You didn't go in with her?" I called back as I passed her.

"She asked us not to. I didn't think—I didn't think of someone already being inside."

She followed me inside as I stepped over the front door that had been blasted in. Vision came too, passing us to go into another room that I assumed was a kitchen.

There was a blonde woman slumped over in a chair, dead, her face covered by her hair. If Steve hadn't told me first, I would've thought it was Grace.

I crouched down to look at the body, careful not to disturb anything. No blood, no bruising. Around me, everything was in place. Wanda and Vision hadn't heard anything from the car. There were two mugs of tea sitting out.

"They were drugged?" I asked Wanda.

"That's what we think."

"And it killed her mom."

"Yes."

"Probably killed her too," I said, standing back up.

"Bucky." Wanda was on the verge of tears again.

"They're clones; they have the exact same biology. Look, they drank about the same amount. They both would've reacted the same way. They either fucked up and killed them on accident, or the ones that wanted her dead did it on purpose. Probably took Grace's body to experiment on—"

"Shut up."

A surge of red light, an impact. In a second, I was on the floor of the kitchen, laying in a pile of the drywall I'd just been blasted through.

"This is a crime scene," I called in to her. "You wanna try a little harder to contaminate it?"

Wanda didn't answer, but Vision bent down and extended a hand to help me up. I ignored it, getting up on my own.

"What medications does Grace take?" Vision asked me.

"Prozac."

"Nothing else?"

"No."

"I ask because her mother has a bottle of rather strong analgesics. A bottle that looks a tad too empty for the date it was dispensed. The combination of another drug, one intended to incapacitate her, could have been lethal. I expect the autopsy to confirm the presence of both."

I felt like I'd woken up suddenly, heart pounding, covered in sweat that I'd been completely unaware of until now. It was the feeling I got when I was about to commit whatever murder my mind had been reliving, and then my body shot up and reality crashed over me and I remembered that I'd been having a nightmare. Like I'd just reentered my body.

"You think she's alive."

"I do," Vision confirmed.

I needed to do something. I needed to look for her. I'd wasted time already.

I went out the back door, the way they must've left. The yard was fenced in. How the fuck had they gotten over it, carrying an unconscious woman in broad daylight, without anyone seeing? I tried to think of how they would've had me do it. They would've had something set up. Something impeccably thorough. Something unfathomable to anyone who hadn't been a part of them.

They would've bought surrounding houses, planted spies, threatened neighbors. The whole block would've been under their control before they risked a stunt like this with two of the most powerful beings on the planet sitting in the driveway.

I shouldn't have underestimated the lengths they'd go to. I wouldn't have, if I'd realized how valuable Grace apparently was to them. What did I not know?

I walked the perimeter of the fence, looking at the houses within view. No dogs or children outside of any of them. The silence was eerie for a hot summer afternoon. No one was going to let the vulnerable members of their household outside when they all felt like they had targets on their backs.

I heard voices around the front of the house. SHIELD was here. I picked up Steve's voice, giving orders. I followed it. I needed to tell Steve what I knew. But I stopped on my way over to him when I saw Wanda, who was in an intense conversation with Vision.

"Wanda."

She turned to glare at me.

"I'm sorry. I'm scared," I said stiffly.

She softened, reminding me of Dr. Raynor whenever I successfully identified an emotion. "She's not dead, Bucky," Wanda said, more gently than she'd ever spoken to me.

I nodded. She wasn't dead. But she was scared, alone, in pain. I wondered if she'd woken up yet to feel all of that. I hoped not.

A/N: it makes a lot of sense to me that Bucky would not process fear/anxiety easily and would even dissociate under too much stress.