verb.
To come or go back to a place or person.
noun.
The firing of a weapon to counter a shooter's shot.
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They recoiled from their pasts, and in doing so found each other.
But the universe isn't kind enough to let a moment of peace last.
It took se...
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She had almost forgotten how blue his eyes were.
It wasn't the first thought that Kat should have had in that dimly lit stone corridor, clutching the Sceptre in one hand as she stood utterly paralysed by the stare of the Winter Soldier.
But even in this hideously grey place, his eyes were still so blue.
"Bucky..."
Her lips had formed the name before she could stop them. She could feel the shock reverberating through her body, her head spinning as she tried to remember how to breathe. How to move, when she hadn't glimpsed those eyes for five years.
No.
They weren't his eyes. It wasn't him. Not the mind she loved. Not yet.
The man stood before her was still under Hydra's control, dressed in those restraint-like combat leathers, his face unmasked, clean-shaven, likely operating under orders to retrieve the Sceptre in her hand.
And, she recalled with a sickening jolt, operating under the order she had given him in 1992.
The next time you see me, you kill me. Break my neck, shoot me, it doesn't matter, but you have to be fast.
She had always promised Bucky that those words wouldn't come back to haunt her. He would never have hurt her.
But the Winter Soldier would. He didn't have a choice. It would be another year before he broke from his programming and ran from Hydra.
Each of those thoughts passed through her over the course of a few seconds. A few frantic beats of her heart – before he moved.
Lurching to one side, she managed to dodge the bullet he fired into the door behind her, at the exact level her head had been positioned. She had barely even seen him draw the weapon. She had forgotten how fast he was when he wasn't holding back. Rolling, she glanced up looking for something – anything – in her environment that would help her get out of here without hurting him, eyeing the cracking stone of the ceiling and aiming her pistol up at it.
The gun in her hand only offered her a dull click in response to the pull of her finger. Her magazine was empty, and her spare one was tucked beneath the layers of an oversized boilersuit. Inaccessible. Useless.
"Shit..." She exhaled, leaping out of her crouched position as another bullet embedded itself in the wall behind her – he was walking forward, steadily covering the ten or so metres that lay between them as he held his gun aloft in his right hand, once again aiming for her head.
Frantically, Kat did the only thing she could think of to throw off his aim, hurling her own useless pistol at him with all the force she could muster, wincing as he easily blocked the projectile with his left arm.
The same arm he had taught her to fight, she realised in the split second she bought with the reckless move. The same arm she had spent years perfecting, the one she knew like the back of her hand.
