Who Am I? » [Stucky]

185. Termination

"We need to get the hell out of here..." Steve breathed; feeling the burst of vibration buzz through his body.

Sam and Clint got to strangling their Hydra overseers with their shackles whilst Fitz panicked. Sam looped the thin chain around once, twice, and yanked on the two wrist-pieces: the chain restricting the masked-man's airways. Sam buried a knee in his gut and pounded his head against the wall behind them.

Beneath them, they could feel the facility collapsing away, the foundations crumbling as they were disintegrated by the hungered flames, baying to be fed and the blasts shaking them apart. The bowel of the mountain rumbled; the cavernous space imploding and a pile of rubble amounting as the rock and metal sheared through like twigs.

Clint outstretched the wrists that tangled the man's throat and somersaulted: feet using the man's stomach, then sternum to put around. As he landed, he used the taut leverage to flip the assailant over his shoulder.

Fitz was dodging punches, remembering what Skye had taught him on a drunken evening of celebration; dipping and squatting at the speed of a ferret. Sam called a swift conclusion to his trouble with a bullet.

Maria ran up the corridor and took out one of Steve's captors. Bobbi took the other with a snappy click of the trigger. Skye snapped her gun twice and killed both of Bucky's imprisoning guards. Then as she went to step over a body - she realised there was a body - she saw who the body was.

"Trip!" She shrieked. And though she knew that the clock was ticking, and the whole structure was caving, she dropped to her knees and wept.

Natasha stopped in her tracks, feeling a deathly shiver go through her as she saw the body of her team mate lay inanimate on the floor, soaked by his own blood, eyes vacant, no longer alight with consciousness. She squatted down behind Skye, wrapping her arms around her waist. "Skye, I'm so sorry... I'm so sorry," she whispered tearfully, feeling the claws of emotion ensnaring her once again. "We have to go... We need to leave. We can't take his body with us... It's not going to happen!" She tried to shake the bawling young adult out of her grieven frenzy.

"We're not going to get out of here! We can't go down... There is no down-"

Clint gained purchase on the window sill at the end of the room, one foot poised on the raised platform. He observed the swirling sink below, frothing with misty clouds and collecting the rain, and his heart jumped into his throat. But through the stormy haze, across the canyon, with his hawk eyes he spied a ledge within reach. He aimed his bow through the iron-man shaped hole Tony had crashed through the window; through the jagged glass edges like jaws he fired an arrow with a wire attached to it. The stretch of sinewy wire twizzled across the gap and clamped onto the rockface the other side. He tied the other end of the rope around one of the de-glassed metal panes of the window: one of the indestructible metal tubes that pegged it up.

"I have us a way out!" Clint yelled, stepping aside and revealing the tempestuous gap he'd bridged.

Jessica and Carol dashed past Natasha and Skye, rushing to escape before they were buried alive in a stony grave. But Skye was too caught up in her maelstrom of heartache to care.

"That's Clint, we have a way out... We need to go!" The redhead insisted, trying to peel Skye away from Antoine's idle body.

Skye threw her arms back, fending Natasha off; face pressed against Trip's unbeating chest. Her hands squelched in the blood that had collected around him, but she was too distressed and depressed to notice. "I don't want to go!" She screamed back at Natasha.

The growl of the pit about to swallow up the cavernous interior of the mountain was approaching, like the roar of waves rolling in on a tempestuous day. And each shockwave was more powerful than the last, like an earthquake. The walls around them spat flecks of dust, starting to quake apart.