Who Am I? » [Stucky]

173. Anthropology and Neurology

"What do you mean he's coming?!" Steve crowed into the communicator, scrabbling his way up flights of stairs with Bucky winging him: clammy hands slippery on the varnished glossy banister and feet stumbling as he lumbered his weight up the archaic carved stairs.

"What do you think I mean, Captain?" Sam stressed, kicking the floor in a feeble attempt to vent his baffled defeat. "He's ascending the stairs with the dame in the red dress right this second!"

Whitehall was politely hand in hand with the masked woman, old-fashioned and courtly as he tenderly cradled her alabaster digits in his hand: clasped between fingers and thumb. She sashayed up the stairs enticingly, still disguised under the mantle of her facial ornamentation, augmenting the plainness of her past skin and modifying the angles of her jaw and cheekbone, and concealed under that pretence.

And the orchestra struck up once again, and couples returned to the glitzy polished ballroom floor, forming a wall of figures. Sybaritic whorls and bunches of materials ebbed and spiralled and swished like the current of a bubbling brook as they waltzed as if in Vienna.

"Can't you do anything?" Steve gasped, already scrabbling with the thin oxygen to claw it back into his undernourished lungs.

"Apart from cause a ruckus? No. They're dancing again," Maria informed them with a cynical wince. They were locked in by four walls of encompassing people, circling them like a tornado.

Their footsteps hurried, flurrying up the creaky steps in a frenetic dash, arms and legs moving in clockwork, propelling them higher and higher and racing to the safe. Rugs as lengthy and spindly as coastlines were bunched up into peaks and twisted out of line marched into arbitrary shapes by the galloping feet destructively bounding along them.

They bounced off panels of the walls and steered themselves by gripping corners and veering themselves around corners by manipulating centrifugal force. They thumped along obtrusively, passing doors by as instructed by the navigational voice barking orders in their ears.

"Stop!" Fitz cried, his voice a booming crescendo with a staccato timbre. "That's where the safe is! The door to your left!"

"Give me space for a second, babe," Bucky on politely directed, smooching Steve lightly on the cheekbone and waving him away. Steve scurried back.

Bucky balanced himself with the placement of his arms and recoiled his leg so his knee was raised to his ribcage. He rotated and jerked his leg back with a twist of the hips, angling his heel behind him and busting open the door with a rattling kick to the lock, cracking it through the wood and posting it onto the floor the other side. He stood straight, gave a swift small tug at his lapels to tighten the wrinkles and lines out of the rumpled material and nudged the door open.

Inside the temple like room, with lines cast across it by the pillars sparsely scattered about the room, was a gigantic safe. It consumed the whole wall with its presence and it's silvery door shone in the moonlight as the silvery glow flooded in through the crissed-crossed leaden window panes.

Just as Steve intended to clumsily stalk in through the doorway, Bucky prevented him with an arm, barring him back in the hallway. "That was too easy, hold it..."

Remembering all of the espionage training he had incurred over the years, mind filed with stacks of information about various security mechanisms he tried the oldest trick in the book. He wiped his hand over the dusty untouched floor, clearly having been left to rot in the absence of buyers interested in the information concealed in the vault and blew the thick feathery clumps from his palms and watched as the infra-red beams showed.

"See..." He demonstrated with a snarling twisted and bitter gritting growl.

"We're never going to be able to cross a massive grid, disarm or figure out the location of the beams in the seconds we have left!" Steve declared, ramming his foot into the wall with irritation. "Coulson, we can't reach the safe! Team, we need someone up here now to disarm this grid!" Steve spewed with aggravation.