❨ 𝑴𝑴𝑶𝑻𝑩                 . . .                    𝑏𝘰𝘰𝑘 𝑖 ❩
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
━━━ 𝙱. 𝙱𝙰𝚁𝙽𝙴𝚂 / ❛ i will 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙛𝙖𝙡𝙡,
𝙨𝙝𝙚'𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙡 of 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 ❜

━━━━━━━━━━━━ ∘༄⋅°
𝐅𝐈𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐍,                    𝒃𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒍𝒆𝒇𝒊𝒆𝒍𝒅

𝙲𝙷𝙰𝙿𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝙵𝙸𝙵𝚃𝙴𝙴𝙽 !

"FOUR HOLES, START digging."

It was all Rumlow said to the other HYDRA agents before opening up the van's doors, looking into a pit of nothingness, a hole cut out from the bottom, the edges still red hot. One of the guards had been knocked unconscious, the other nowhere to be found. It was Agent Maria Hill, one of Fury's most trusted advisors, who was inside of that van to take the four people to a secret facility Fury had. "GSW," Maria tells the doctors there. "She's lost at least a pint."

"Maybe two," Sam appends, making sure Natasha had her hand on her wound. 

"Let me take her," a doctor with greying hair and large glasses runs up to them, pressing harder on Natasha's shoulder, breathing heavily through his nose, the smell of iron filling his senses, but he didn't mind; he was used to it. "He wants to see him first," Maria says, taking them to where Fury was held. When she drew the curtains back, Fury picked up his head from his pillow, looking at them with his brown eye, a large bruise forming underneath it, his arm in a sling, the other resting against his chest. The three that have worked with him for years look at him in confusion, wondering how he had survived his injuries. He had flatlined on the operation table. "About damn time," he says in his regular manner.

Later on, as Natasha's wound is being treated, all of them sitting around the bed, Fury opening his mouth to speak. "Lacerated spinal column, cracked sternum, shattered collarbone, perforated liver, one hell of a headache."

"Don't forget your collapsed lung," the doctor reminded him, pressing hard on the broken skin and muscle, Natasha wincing at the pain that shot up through her arm. One of her hands was placed in Diana's, the Amazonian princess letting her squeeze hard if she was in any sort of pain. "Oh," Nick nods, "let's not forget about that. Otherwise, I'm good."

"They cut you open, your heart stopped."

"Tetrodotoxin B," Nick replies. "Slows the pulse to one beat a minute. Banner developed it for stress. Didn't work so great for him, but we found a use for it."

"Why all the secrecy? Why not just tell us?"

"Any attempt on the director's life had to look successful," Maria explains, reminding him of the assassination attempt made by Bucky. "Can't kill you if you're already dead," Fury adds to the previous statement, straightening up. "Besides, I wasn't sure who to trust."

INSIDE A BANK vault, a HYDRA engineer fixed the dents in Bucky's metal arm, blue sparks flying around them, Bucky thinking about the blonde man and the brunette woman on the bridge. They both looked familiar and he wondered who they were and why they seemed to know him, or, at least, his past self. . . if he even had a past self. "Sergeant Barnes," a heavily accented voice comes from one of the memories, a short man with glasses and little to no hair coming into view, snow falling around them.

Then another.

One that showed the two familiar faces grabbing for him.

"Fire again!" Bucky picks up Steve's discarded shield, firing at the man as many times as possible, but he is thrown back by a blast. He dangles on one of the bars that had held on weakly. Steve throws his shield, the agent landing on his back. Diana and Steve run to the hole, holding out their hands in a weak attempt to save him, but Diana knew, her heart knew, that he won't be able to make it.

'He won't make it,' her head kept saying. 'He has to,' her heart kept repeating, protesting. Steve climbs out, trying to get closer to his best friend, Diana holding on to his suit to make sure he didn't fall, but it was loose enough to where he can move. "Grab my hand!" Steve holds out his gloved hand. "Diana would pull us back in." Bucky reached out with one hand, but the bar broke away from the wall and he fell, screaming out in fear, his legs and arms flailing. Steve's eyes collected tears, Diana screaming a loud, "NO!"

He straightens up, chest heaving as another memory came to him. This time, it was only the brunette, and apparently, they had just gotten finished making love because he could feel their sweat mingling, slow breaths pouring out of their lips, smiles written on their faces as they looked at each other. She opened her mouth to speak and he could smell different kinds of fruit from coconuts, pineapples, raspberries to blueberries, and she spoke in an accented voice, "Meet me on the battlefield, even on the darkest night. I will be your sword and shield, your camouflage, and you will be mine. Echoes of the shots ring out, we may be the first to fall. Everything can stay the same or we can change it all."

The scene changes to where the old, bald man from before came back. "The procedure has already started," he smiles down at him, and the sound of a saw alerts him, looking down to see his left arm being amputated to replace it with the new metal arm he had now. "You are the new fist of HYDRA," he grabs someone by the neck, and in the bank vault, he punches the engineer beside him into a wall. "Put him on ice," he is frozen in the dream, Rollins pointing his gun at him, preventing him from attacking any further. Alexander Pierce walks into the vault he's held in. "Sir, he's unstable," a man with a white button-up shirt and red bow tie warns as he walks in with Rumlow trailing behind him. 

"Mission report," he orders and Bucky says nothing, a blank stare on his face. "Mission report, now." When Bucky doesn't say anything, Pierce comes closer and strikes Bucky across the face, the soldier's head whipping to the side at the force. "The man and woman on the bridge. . ." he finally says, having a vision of Steve calling him Bucky. "Who were they?"

"You met them earlier this week on an earlier assignment."

"I knew them," Pierce sits next to him, beginning to speak.

"Your work has been a gift to mankind," Pierce tells him. "You shaped the century and I need you to do it one more time. Society is at a tipping point between order and chaos. Tomorrow morning we're gonna give it a push. But, if you don't do your part, I can't do mine, and HYDRA can't give the world the freedom it deserves." Bucky is torn between HYDRA and the two old friends. "But I knew them," he states again, Pierce turning to the scientists behind him. "Prep him."

"He's been out of cryo-freeze for too long."

"Then wipe him and start over," Bucky's arms are strapped to the chair with metal restraints, a scientist putting a guard in his mouth to stop him from grinding his teeth together or chew on his tongue, the machine leaning back and two metal arms coming down to either side of his head, blue electrical flashes coming from the face plates, Bucky screaming in pain as the procedure starts. 

FURY STARES DOWN at a photo of Pierce, looking much younger than he is now, shaking the hand of the then president. The rest of the group looked at him as he threw the paper down on the table, leaning forward. "This man declined the Nobel Peace Prize. He said, Peace wasn't an achievement, it was a responsibility. See, it's stuff like this that gives me trust issues."

"We have to stop the launch," Diana says, tapping her left leg in a rhythmic beat. "I don't think the council's accepting my calls anymore," Fury replies, opening up a case that held three chips, the wires inside of them forming a network of veins. They all straighten up at the sight of them.

"What's that?"

"Once the Helicarriers reach three thousand feet, they'll triangulate with Insight satellites becoming fully weaponized," Maria turns a computer around, showing them the plans set for the Helicarriers, lines connecting them with satellite-shaped forms on the screen. "We need to breach those carriers and replace their targeting blades with our own," Fury seconds.

"One or two won't cut it," Maria shakes her head. "We need to link all three carriers for this to work because if even one of those ships remains operational a whole lot of people are gonna die."

"We have to assume everyone aboard those carriers is HYDRA. We need to get past them, insert the server blades, and maybe, just maybe, we can salvage what's left. . ."

"We're not salvaging anything," Steve disagrees, shaking his head at the older man. "We're not just taking down the carriers, Nick, we're taking down S.H.I.E.L.D." Fury raises an eyebrow at him, shaking his head at Steve, "S.H.I.E.L.D. has nothing to do with it." Steve still doesn't back down, "You gave me this mission, this is how it ends. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s been compromised, you said so yourself. HYDRA grew right under your nose and nobody noticed."

"Why do you think we're meeting in this cave? I noticed."

"And how many paid the price before you did."

"Look. . . I didn't know about Barnes."

"Even if you have, would you have told me? Or would you have compartmentalized that too? S.H.I.E.L.D., HYDRA, it all goes."