Return | Bucky Barnes | Book Two | Marvel Cinematic Universe

Chapter 58

"I'll make you a new one." She muttered between exhausted pants, trying to glance beyond his rigid form. He was still blocking her escape route. "Y'wanna get out of your own way and let me save your stupid life?"

His step towards her indicated that even if he understood her words, he wasn't prepared to make things easy for her – even without a fully functioning metal arm. The words didn't matter though, the fire and sarcasm she weakly summoned was a poor front. It couldn't distance her from the fact that her heart was fracturing painfully behind her ribs, that agony becoming more acute with every second spent in his presence.

There was, of course, her other option. One she hadn't wanted to touch. Not after everything they had been through. She hadn't burned the Red Book with him just to use the triggers again, five years later. She couldn't use them again, not when she knew every awful, intimate detail of how they had been programmed.

But she was running out of time, Steve could already be on his way, she needed to get to him.

Whatever it takes.

The Soldier had drawn his knife, holding it before his body as he advanced on her, his eyes darting to her posture as she lifted the Sceptre once more. Calculating her every move before she could even make it. She knew how lethal he was – it was sheer luck that had carried her up to this point. She couldn't count on it lasting much longer.

"I'm so sorry, Golubyee glaza." She breathed, feeling her heart clenching in her chest as she held her ground, letting him approach as she found the courage to make her lips form the first word. "Zhelaniye."

He stiffened at that first word. His body a coiled spring, practically wavering with tension as that word forced him to halt. As his mind slowly wrapped around what hearing that word meant.

"Rzhavvy. Semnadtsat." The words were so harsh, so foreign on her tongue and yet so painfully familiar – because she never could have forgotten them. Even with the knowledge that they could never be used again in her own timeline, they remained. Branded into her mind by trauma and fear. She heard those words in her nightmares, both in her own voice and in the voices of others. They were always there. Haunting her. Yet now she called upon them as if summoning a demon from her past. Bending them to her will to save the man she loved. To save everyone.

She didn't look away from him as she spoke, not once, and that was why she was able to detect the slightest change in his hardened gaze. That momentary flicker of fear, that tiny crack of something – something breaking through. A deeply instinctive need to resist what was about to happen.

But the Soldier wasn't about to let him go.

The speed at which he launched himself at her was astounding, his blade surging towards her through the air was only stopped by her hands driving the bar of the Sceptre up to block his swing.

"Rassvet – ah – pech, devyat-" She barely forced the words past her lips amidst the effort of forcing back his weight, digging one heel into the ground to turn her body, letting him forcefully push her backwards down the hallway. Away from the door, in the direction she actually wanted to go.

With a frantic shove of her arms, she managed to push him back with the Sceptre long enough to scramble backwards, one hand reaching out to push herself off the wall as she tried to remember how many turns she had taken on her way down this corridor. Darting around the fist corner, she just managed to duck in time to avoid his blade whistling over her head as he threw himself after her, his left arm handing limp at his side, his fingers still spasming slightly as they frantically tried to reconnect to his nervous system. It had to be agony, she realised with a twist of her gut.