Who Am I? » [Stucky]

169. Know Your Enemy

"Whitehall..." Coulson slapped the lithe flimsy remote into the palm of his hand, roaming the front of the board room. "He's our target. The kingpin of the organisation. Like any figurehead of any political system, I figure, if we topple him, we toppled the entire empire..."

"And by topple you mean..." Steve began, skating around the word like a water boatman on a pond.

"Kill him," Bucky completed; clogging the gap in the sentence.

As he saw Steve swallow thickly, he laced their fingers together and squeezed their ringed hands together.

"Do we even know where he is?" Tony piped up, twiddling with a pencil and absentmindedly sketching armoured droids on lined paper. Equations mapped the page beside it in abbreviated scrawls.

"Finding that out was the whole point of the Moscow mission; and we owe it to Rogers-Barnes for pulling off the operation without a hitch." Coulson commended the couple who were quietly uttering to one another.

Steve's eye was still ringed with a blueberry coloured bruise and his lip still torn with a maroon scab resealing the rip. Twenty-four hours had passed, but evidence of Bucky's endeavours still mutilated his face.

Bucky had gushed his commiserations an contrafibulations non-stop once they were in the clear. He had apologetically wept into Steve's chest on the journey home; being exposed to the familiar hostile environment and grievously harming his beloved had severely damaged his mental stability.

Steve grappled with Bucky's clammy hand, thumb tracing the ridge of Bucky's knuckles to keep him calm. All in all, they couldn't help feeling that what was gained was almost lost in equal measure.

"This man is powerful and dangerous. He captured Steve and Bucky previously in Salt Lake City, with one word and the thwack of a gun. He's untouchable. He plays mind games, instigated verbal taunts and commits violence for the sheer joy he gains from it. If you looked up sadistic in a dictionary, there would be a little picture of Daniel below it. He has information, torrents of it: he's amassed an archive worthy of a library on all of his enemies. His resources are limitless and he's absolutely fearless..." Coulson lectured, pacing, unsettled by his own words.

"I strangled him with my metal hand, had a cocked gun at his head and repeatedly walloped him in the face and his only reaction was to bear his bloodied grin and choke out laughs; spitting blood back in my face. And I have memories of him going back further than Alexander Pierce..." Bucky shook his head and bristled with sickened chills, the encounter replaying in his mind's eye like a horror flick.

"Well, he sounds charming(!)" Hunter grunted from across the table, slurping at his glass of water.

"A complete psychopath..." Bruce mumbled quietly, making a subtle addition to the conversation.

"Oh wow, Lance, you two have so much in common..!" Bobbi chorused with a disingenuous grin and a swish of her wave of twirling glossy curls like the breaking of waves on a cliff. "Power hungry, manipulative-"

"Sorry, wait, are we describing you now?" Lance squinted angrily back at her, lurching forwards with his forearms balanced against the table. He was like a provoked jaguar; eyes narrowed as if calculating the angle required to shatter her neck with a sharp jerk to the side and twist.

"No? Pretty sure I'm describing you!" Bobbi snarled back with a sarcastic sneering grin, lips curled like she'd just for a whiff of a bad smell: that bad smell being the presence of her ex-husband.

"No, because if you were describing me, you'd be saying: reasonable, level headed, honest-" He counted out the adjectives on his fingers and glanced around the room seeking recognition of his troubles that manifested in the form of his ex-wife.