Save Me || Bucky Barnes

28

"You're in for it now, Blondie."

The soldier's glare pierced daggers through his head. Rumlow flinched, regretting his decision to open his mouth in the first place. The drive back to the facility where Pierce waited for them was agony for everyone in the car. The soldier suddenly felt the urge to run, to find someone who could help her.

But she couldn't run. They would catch her and everything would be worse than it was before. Each time she ran away before, they always found her and they always came up with new ways to torture her. Eventually, after twenty years of trying to run, to get away, she stopped. She gave in and became the good, submissive soldier sitting in the back of the vehicle bound for certain hell.

"Where the hell is she?" could be heard as soon as the soldier walked in the door. She resisted the impulse to flinch. She could handle whatever the man had to give her.

"Tell me exactly what happened." the older man demanded Rumlow as soon as they were in the same room.

"She bombed the car like she was supposed to, but it didn't kill Fury. He used some sort of laser technology to create a tunnel to the sewers. We lost him." Rumlow explained, careful to make it seem like the soldier wasn't at fault. Maybe he regretted what he said in the car, but it was most certainly her fault the target got away.

Her tracking skills are some of the best in the world, she should have been able to track him. But the other soldiers messed up the signs as soon as their boots hit the tunnels. She should have told them to let her go down first, so she could start tracking him. But voicing her opinion goes against orders, orders she's had since the very beginning.

"Never tell your mission leader what you think, what you want. You are a weapon for them to use. You do not, nor will you ever, have an opinion. Is that clear?" 

This phrase had been engraved in her memory, it was the one thing she never forgot. If she showed the slightest signs of forgetting her first order, her handlers would make sure that it was thoroughly enforced until she showed she wouldn't forget it again.

"Find him and get her back out there. This needs to be finished tonight in order for the schedule to go on as planned. If she screws up again, it's your neck on the line." the older man threatened Rumlow before he turned on his heal and stormed out of the room.

"You heard him. Don't screw up." Rumlow hissed as he gripped the soldier's arm and tugged her back out to the vehicles.

"Get Fury back on the grid. She's got a job to finish." Rumlow ordered before he shoved the soldier into the backseat of a vehicle. 

Sundown arrived and yet they still hadn't found the target. The soldier was getting impatient. She roughly pushed the vehicle door open, sending the soldier standing guard in front of it tumbling to the ground. 

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Rumlow demanded, bewildered, as he turned his attention to the soldier. 

Instead of answering, the soldier ripped the tablet from one of the other soldier's hands and scanned her eyes over it. She maneuvered the screen to her liking and within minutes, she had located the target. She shoved the tablet back into the soldier's hands and stalked back to the car. Rumlow and a few other men exchanged a confused look before they shrugged and went with it. 

By the time they reached the apartment complex Fury was hiding at, the sky was dark and the streetlights had turned on. The soldier ditched her eye wear in favor of dark streaks of black paint around her eyes. 

This was the time of day that the soldier worked best in. She could effortlessly blend into the shadows and easily avoid the streetlights. Before the vehicle even came to a stop, the soldier was already out of the car and had disappeared into the shadows.

"Dammit. Alright, let's just wait here for her." Rumlow cursed. He prayed the soldier came back. He had never faced Pierce's fury, he wasn't about to face it now.

Meanwhile, the soldier was just a block away, scaling the side of another apartment building in order to reach the target building by rooftop. The gaps between buildings didn't phase the soldier. She had jumped across gorges before without even a scratch. To her, this was like stepping over a crack in the street.

Within minutes, she was in position to take care of her target. She could see him through the apartment's tiny window from her position on the roof across the alley. She pulled a rifle off her back and checked to make sure it was loaded before she took aim at her target.

Just as she placed her finger on the trigger, a muscular blonde blocked her view of the target. She decided to wait a minute before she fired through the new man. She wouldn't let anything get in her way of completing her mission right this time. Before she could even count to thirty, the muscular blonde had moved out of her way.

She took aim at her target again and pulled the trigger. Three rounds should do it she thought without taking her eyes off the target. As soon as the third bullet left her rifle, she was on her feet and sprinting across the rooftop. As she ran, she carefully hooked the rifle back into its place. The soldier hadn't gotten more than thirty feet away from the now crime scene before she sensed someone following her.

Her curiosity got the best of her and before she reached the alley where she had left Rumlow and the others, she slowed down. She could hear thundering footsteps quickly gaining on her. She waited for them to reach the same rooftop as her before she decided to look at who was in pursuit of her. 

Halfway across the last building, she slowed her pace to a light jog until the person following her landed on the same roof. As she reached the edge of the building, she heard a disturbance in the air behind her, almost as if someone threw something at her. She turned around and, in the nick of time, caught the painted metal frisbee in her left hand.

Her eyes locked with the man's. She recognized him from the apartment her target was in. 

The first thing the man noticed was the pain her eyes reflected. He couldn't so much as tell what color her eyes were, but he knew she was in pain. Involuntarily, he took a step towards her. He didn't know who she was, but he wanted to help her the way he couldn't help his sister Charlotte. He knew he could save her if she let him.

But the woman whipped her arm around and hurled his shield back at him. When he caught it, the force from her throw was enough to send him sliding backwards across the roof. His attention was torn off the woman and instead focused on catching his shield. Seconds after he caught his shield, he looked up again, only to find the woman wasn't on the roof anymore.

He ran to the edge of the building and looked over the edge, but she was gone. Like a ghost, silent and seldom seen, the Winter Soldier had disappeared.