pennysheets | For Sabetha

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For Sabetha

It's been five days since he missed their rendezvous, vanished from all their usual haunts. Even with her connections and skills, it took that long for her to find this little sliver of HYDRA and find its root. The building Sabetha traced them to looks abandoned from the outside, an old hospital in a rural part of Russia, now overgrown with weeds. But the lock on the gate is new, and she'll note subtle security cameras. Not beyond her skill, though, particularly if she takes the time to note when guards arrive-- out of a dirt track in the back, not the main road-- and takes out one with the right size to steal her uniform.

She can sneak inside to the modern lab below ground, and she can slit the throat of the guard outside the white-tiled cell, and she can put said guard's eye to the scanner to open the cell, but inside she'll find not her twitchy but implacable companion in murder and thievery, but a blank-faced weapon that lunges for her as soon as she pokes her head in the door.

It's been over twelve hours since they last refreshed his programming, but it still rattles around in his skull. They don't have a Chair here, but they do know the Words, and it's only a matter of time before they reassemble a Chair to complete he recalibration. To make him truly mission-ready.

Something inside, deep inside, where the Words can't touch, doesn't want that. But he can't help but feel his body grab for the intruder, knowing his duty here, knowing he can only go with his new handler. She'll have to be quick on her feet to avoid him, but it's not impossible: they also haven't fed him in those five days, in the hopes of keeping him easier to handle if the brainwashing fails, and he's not nearly as fast or as strong as he ought to be.

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Sabetha Belacoros has never had much tolerance for fools and flatterers, and many mistake this for impatience. In truth, she is meticulous. She tracks the movements of the guards. She calls in favours, and gathers resources, and waits for her moment.

And all that planning nearly goes to shit when the man she's come to spring from this chemical-reeking hell lunges for her throat, and she just barely manages to skip out of the way, sidestepping over the corpse of the guard and his still-spreading pool of blood.

"Fuck," she barks, shock half for the unexpected attack, and half for the fact that she's not currently pinned to the wall and deeply regretting being a mere mortal, with a need for things such as oxygen. "I know you treasure your privacy, but this is a little much."

Her tone is all sharp-edged humour, but she watches him carefully, trying to keep the body between them. There's a part of her that hopes he's just reacting on instinct, that he'll recognize her and pull up short when he realizes she's cavalry, and not captor.

It's a small part.

He overshoots when she avoids him, but doesn't stumble; he spins smoothly, eying her like he might a troublesome bug. Without obvious recognition. She's seen him hunt, she's seen him enraged, she's seen him afraid, but this is-- not any of those. There's nothing there except calculation.

He knows that voice. He knows that hair. But he can't stop. Somewhere beneath the programming he's beating on the walls of his own brain. Not again not again not again, that little part of him wails. He's already killed the person he loves most once. He doesn't think he can do it again and stay remotely sane. If what he is now even counts as remotely sane.

He circles the dead body of his guard, only giving her a breath to get smart with him before dropping and aiming a sweeping leg to try and take her out at the knees. It's a move she'll be familiar with, and at his current condition, she can avoid it.

Edited (lost a word somehow) 2022-03-08 06:59 (UTC)

She falls back, and she can swear she feels the air part just in front of her. It's wrong, almost as wrong as the chilling absence of expression on his face. Now that he's in the light, she can recognize the slightly-hollow look of someone who's gone too many days without a proper meal, and down in the centre of the maelstrom of fury that's fueled her over the past five days, she contemplates altering her plans to grant the architects of this particular piece of fuckery a spectacularly slow death.

"Think," she says, retreating another pace down the hall. "I'm not your enemy. I'm not your target."

The latter, at least, she knows to be true. If she was, none of this would have been necessary - he could have made the rendezvous and snapped her neck before she even knew there was anything wrong.

If his captors had been smart, they would've arranged that anyways, just to tie up the loose ends.

She doesn't really expect it to work. She's just hoping to buy a little time.

His captors, lucky for them both, are not particularly smart. They didn't even know she existed. They wouldn't have trusted him on a mission yet, anyway. Not without the Chair. It's been too long-- twelve hours is nowhere near the amount of time it should take for them to need to say the Words again. He shouldn't be awake in his own head yet, but he is.

If only he could do something with it.

He surges back to his feet, advancing with a swing of the metal arm, but he manages to make himself stumble before it can even come close to connecting. Not again not again-- It's still driving her back, either way. If he can get her far enough, he can either see the extent of the damage she's caused, or run her right into whoever is coming to investigate the ruckus.

He hopes she's caused enough damage that there's no one coming.

There are no alarms ringing, no sounds of running guards. The fact that she activated a signal jammer on the way in might be contributing to that. The fact that there's a nasty virus playing merry hell with most of the door locks is probably also a factor.

Sabetha doesn't have the requisite skill to take on even a small black ops facility full of guards in a straight fight. What she's very, very good at is cheating.

A talent she puts to good use now, pulling a small silver cylinder from her belt and depressing the trigger on the top and lobbing it almost gently at his feet before she drops to the ground, eyes squeezed tight and arms up over her ears.

The detonation of the flashbang still hits her like a swat from an angry god, and the space behind her eyes goes bloody red. Her, with her purely human senses. Hopefully, it's even worse for someone with his auditory and visual acuity.

She'd asked, the one time he'd broached the topic, if there were any phrases to make him stop if one of HYDRA's lingering tentacles managed to wrap itself around his brain and start squeezing. In the absence of any convenient verbal safeties, she'd made contingency plans. It's inelegant, and she can only hope he'll forgive her for the migraine once he recovers his senses, but in the absence of any fast-acting elephant tranquilizers, it's the best she has.

That's one of the many unfortunate problems with having had your brain fried repeatedly for decades: he doesn't even remember the Words themselves, let alone any counter-Words, if there are any. He might even have told her if he remembered.

He recognizes the device as some kind of grenade, and launches himself back away from it. He's not expecting the bright light and loud noise and while he manages not to break his neck (or a leg, or anything) in his landing, he does wind up crumpled in a ball with his streaming eyes squeezed shut, ears ringing violently, and a headache the size of mother Russia.

Yes, he can still function. No, he will not function well. He tries to peer through the tears for where Sabetha wound up, but all he sees are the spots of the flashbang's after-image.

Sabetha pushes herself up to her feet, wincing a little as she sees him huddled on the floor, eyes not quite focusing. It's exactly the effect she'd hoped for. It's not at all what she wants.

The dead guard has a heavy baton clipped to his belt, and she pauses to claim it, expression tightening as she turns it over in her hands and notes the toggle on the bottom. Stun baton. Charming. Still, it's sturdy enough for her purposes, and she prowls over to the doors separating the small cell block from the lab proper, jerking them open and using the baton to wedge them shut again.

She has no idea if it will hold if - or when - her partner in crime recovers from the sensory overload. If he were at his peak, she wouldn't trust the jury-rigged solution for a second, but these bastards have been starving him like a circus lion, so it might buy her a little time.

Time to start copying all the files in this godforsaken hell of a lab, so she can loose the viruses her contact had so lovingly prepared. Time to look for something that might render the goddamn Winter Soldier pliable enough for her to get him out of here so she can burn the facility and every soul inside it to ash.

There is in fact one thing that she could use, but unfortunately it drops him rather than breaks the programming. Still, maybe it will be a good last resort. Sputnik. Remember that one for the future, Sabetha.

The door won't hold for very long, because starved or not, he's still got a metal arm, and it still works even if he's lacking in calories. Lucky for her, though, when the screaming of metal that heralds the door coming off its hinges and clattering to the hall behind him, Bucky just leans on the door frame and blinks blearily at her, rather than attacking.

He hasn't entirely shaken it off, but he's close enough that he keeps his distance. He can't make his voice work, but he can keep himself from attacking. The litany of not again not again not again keeps circling around in his head.

She commits it to memory, grateful that it has the decency to be a single word and not a complicated code phrase - not that she wouldn't be wholly capable of recalling the latter, but the more complicated, the greater the chance of error.

She'll make it work. It's not ideal, but she'll make it work. She'd spied a gurney in the corner - don't think about it, you don't have time to cut someone open and embed carnivorous wasp eggs in their fascia - and it wouldn't be the first time she's had to steal a vehicle to get to her intended exit.

She tenses at the shriek of rending metal, bracing herself at the terminal she's claimed in order to wreak her digital havoc. Timing. Timing is critical.

But he's not coming into the lab, just slumping against the doorframe, and she jerks a little, hands clenching on the lip of the desk as she stops herself from actually approaching to check on him.

"You look like you've gone eight rounds with an elephant," she says, crisp and precise, and not at all hiding the tightness in her expression as she searches his face, looking for anything familiar.

There's something in there. The corners of his eyes crinkle a little, not quite a smile because his mouth isn't involved, but there's recognition this time at least. No anger or dismissal. Just exhaustion.

He doesn't answer out loud, but he does nod. He feels like he's gone eight rounds with an elephant. But he is pretty sure he won't try to kill her, now.

He finally forces out two words, and they sound like a croak. "How long?" How long was he gone? How long to they have? He can't offer more clarification, but hopefully she'll pick the right one. Or answer both.

Her shoulders drop slightly, and the jagged constriction in her chest loosens, enough for her to feel like she can take her first full breath in-

Well, in far too long.

"Five days since you missed our meet," she says. "Eight since last contact, so unless their timing is as impeccable as the rest of this fuckery is sloppy, no more than a week."

She pauses a moment, then adds, "Incendiaries are primed, so once I hit the switch, we have fifteen minutes to get clear. Do you think you can walk out of here?"

She's mostly worried about nasty little barbs in his programming, compulsion to stay and burn with the rats on this festering plague ship. But there's a part of her that's afraid that his legs might go out from under him before they can get to the exit point. If he were anyone else, she'd say he looks sick, drawn and weary and hurting in ways she knows she'll never be able to fully comprehend.

It's a valid worry. It occurs to him, too, as he feels the little twitch inside that says he needs to go needs to find his handlers needs to get them out. He doesn't actually know if he can fight it off. Walking itself won't be a problem; he can keep going under worse situations than this is the mission dictates it. But the direction he'd walk... he doesn't know.

"Come here," he says hoarsely, rather than answer.

She doesn't miss that he hasn't answered the question. She considers him for a moment, then rounds the terminal and strides across the lab towards him.

"If I tell you Lange and his men are dead, will that help?" she asks.

The name wasn't that difficult to find, once she had access to the facility's system.

He closes his eyes for a moment, a very slow blink, and shivers. "Some," he says. Because he also knows that Sabetha lies when it suits her and it's entirely likely she's lying now in the hopes of getting him out without him trying to kill her again.

But even that helps a little, too.

He holds out his right hand, the flesh one, not like he expects her to put anything into it, but more like he's groping for something he can't quite see. Maybe touching her, without hurting her, will help. He needs to make sure this is real.

"I could be more explicit," she says, a small, vicious smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

It would not - in all cases - be true, but they both know she can spin a convincing story. Whether convincing would be enough to trick his programming, though...

She reaches up to take his hand in both of hers, clever fingers tracing lightly over his knuckles. It's a risk, but not much more of one than being within arm's reach in the first place.

His eyes go a little unfocused, looking at their hands, but his fingers curl around one those hands, careful rather than crushing, noting the warmth and the texture of her skin. He can feel her. He can smell her. She's real. And he didn't kill her.

Then he bends a little, turns her hand over, and brings it to his mouth to kiss the palm, fingers to his scratchy sheek. She might hit him for it, but she did just bust into a HYDRA facility to get to him. Maybe she'll forgive him for a little sentiment when he's still dazed from bombs and trigger words.

And he wants to hear her bloody stories of how she may or may not have killed his latest handler. He doesn't care if it's a lie. "Tell me."

Her breath hitches a little at the brush of his lips against her palm, pulse pounding harder against the walls of her chest. Just adrenaline, she tells herself. Carryover from the fight, brief as it had been, and the knowledge that they're not out yet.

She's never been as good at lying to herself as she is at lying to everyone else. Her fingers curl, tracing the line of his cheek, and she notes the rasp of stubble against her faint calluses.

"You remember my friend in Monaco?" she asks. "His contacts are doing fascinating things with multicompound poisons. Obscenely expensive - assuming they don't accidentally murder themselves, the chemists will be shitting in gold toilets for the rest of their lives - but brutally effective, and impossible to find a counteragent for."

Poison. Not something he can do anything about, if it's true. Another little thread inside him lets go, because if it's true, he can't save his handler even if he goes to him now. He's as good as dead whether or not he's actually dead right this moment, and pulling him out of the building right now won't make him not as good as dead.

It might not be true. But he doesn't care. It helps.

He leans his cheek into her palm, since she didn't hit him or pull away. He's going to take what he can get. "Very you," he dredges up. "Untraceable?"

"Utterly. The reaction burns itself out while making them bleed to death from their eyeballs." She pauses briefly, then adds, "That's not an exaggeration. There wasn't time for finesse, so I had to get creative with one of the guards who was rotating out."

There's something a little bit haunted in her eyes, in spite of her almost cavalier tone. It's pragmatism more than morality that leads her to prefer finesse - people are more likely to come looking for vengeance when there are bodies on the ground - but that kind of ugly death still leaves its mark.

So there's definitely poison, even if it isn't necessarily as widely dispersed as she's allowed her words to imply.

(That's what the incendiaries are for, in part.)

He knows. He knows that look, and he knows the feeling behind it. He's got enough back since killing Steve that he knows intimately what looks like that come from. Another thread of Words inside breaks, falling on the edge of what compassion he has left. Of what care he has for her.

He wants to help her more than he wants to obey his handlers. He thinks he might even be able to kill any other guards they come across. There's a smoldering anger at the last couple tangles of the Words left, and the people who put them there.

He kind of wants that, too. He takes her hand from his cheek, kisses her wrist this time, then asks, "Did you do everything you meant to do here." Is she ready to go? Because he is ready to go.

"Everything important," she says, meeting his gaze steadily. Another day, another facility, and she might raid the labs on the way out, recoup some of her costs by way of the black market. But that isn't her objective here, and she doesn't think to care about the lost opportunity. She's here for him, and she's stolen enough intel to further his hunt once it's been decrypted.

Everything else is trivial.

"Time to start the fireworks."

"Good," he says, firmly. Then again, more fiercely, "Good. Burn it down." No one's going to survive. Sabetha is thorough. Maybe he can't slit all their throats, but he can watch them burn. And if any of them get in his way, on their way out, he is... 84% sure he can take care of them. That's solid enough odds.

He pushes up from the wall and lets her hand go, turning towards the door, forcing himself to walk straight. "Fifteen minutes." He's going to assume Sabetha has a car waiting.

There's a faint chime as she arms the incendiaries - and god, but modern technology is occasionally terrifying - and she nods briskly. "Starting now."

There are only three guards on the way out. Three, out of however many are in the facility, who were clever enough - or unfortunate enough - to realize where the trouble might lie, and able to escape the chaos Sabetha'd made of their locks. She's armed, and more than willing to fight, but unless he seems to need the help, she's more than willing to let him vent his rage on those foolish enough to get in the way.

The first one Sabetha does have to handle herself, because Bucky freezes-- after that, after watching her leap out from behind him to handle the threat, after seeing someone supposedly on his team go down without any urge to help them, another Word shatters in his brain. He gifts the body with a few vicious kicks before he's ready to move on.

After that, he takes out the last two himself, and happily.

He's exhausted by the time they get to Sabetha's getaway car, and they only have a few minutes of leeway before the timer is due to blow.

"Are we far enough away from the blast radius?" he asks, leaning on the car a moment and staring at what little they can make out of the building from here. He sounds a little more like himself, at least. A tired, angry, slightly unsteady him, but the jerky, halting speech is gone. "Can we see it?"

The car's solid, utilitarian, a far cry from the sleek, swift bikes that are Sabetha's preference at heart. It's built for rough terrain, for the risk of having to cut through brush and field, and for the ability to blend in to rock and forest with just a little help.

"We're far enough," she says. She'd built her windows carefully, given them longer than they should need under most circumstances to get to safety, and to transport.

She pulls one of the doors open, but lingers by it only long enough to pull out a bottle of water and an MRE bar before circling back around to his side and pressing both against his chest in silent command. It's not likely to be particularly satisfying, but it's calories and hydration, and he'd need both even if his metabolism didn't run well above human baseline.

"It's going to light the sky up like fucking Armageddon. We can watch."

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