They were toured around corners, guided so they avoided other oncoming patrols and weaved down pongy paths. Eventually the water thinned and they were marched down a slimy dingy corridor with a sealed metal door at the end. The keypad blinked with a red light in the dark, requesting a pass code.
They all stopped, anticipating the assistance of their guide. The man did nothing, and idly stared at the door. Bucky pressed the keen needle-like point of his knife into the small of the man's back, twisting it like a screw and drilling it through his tabard and into his spine. "Put the code in or I'll wrench this blade in the whole way..." He threatened.
The others were genuinely startled at how flawlessly he could flow from charismatic to menacing. His voice could fluidly change from a harmonious Brooklyn lilt to a gravelly roar if he willed it to, and sometimes the drawl would have the essence of something Eastern European about it - ghosts of his past consuming him.
The man jolted forwards, instinctively lurching from the barbed tip and his sweaty fingers jabbed in the digits. The light on the keypad shone green and there was a rumble as the doors parted and dust was released from where the door ground against the brick, chaffing and eroding.
The interior was revealed and immediately the veritable army of Hydra agents stopped, staring at the group of people lingering at their front door.
"Isn't that Captain America?" One blabbered, jaw dropping.
"Yeah, Director, I don't think there's going to be any chance of a stealth mission..." Clint spoke into his earpiece.
Gunfire rained down on them in an instant. Bucky and Steve ducked in, charging forwards, both hiding behind Steve's shield. Sam and Tony followed up, covering their backs and firing over their heads as they moved in a group.
Skye, Clint and Natasha moved in, darting off down a corridor to the right and disappearing into the base.
Trip and May flanked them, ducking down and firing off shots. They worked in tandem, each taking a go at firing a shot before ducking in again and hiding behind one another.
The gunshots echoed through the spacious facility. It was a cavern carved out beneath the lake with technology and electricity installed into it. They entered into the central unit; it was a gaping high roofed room and they went in exposed, surrounded at every angle in the circular stage-like space. There were higher galleries, carved out of the lakebed, fenced off by metal bars and aided by metal wire walkways. Sharpshooters stood post at every balcony, a fire of artillery swarming down to kill them. Each gunshot sent a tinny prang through the cave-like space and bursts of metal pings rung out as bullets ricocheted off Steve's shield.
"Just like good old days huh?" Bucky managed to mumble above the orchestral apex of the sound of bullets fired in a blizzard at them.
"Yeah... Only we're missing the androids," Steve agreed, snickering and spluttering as they shot their way through the hordes of oncoming agents.
"Shut up about the god damn, androids!" Tony complained over the sound, firing rope-resembling beams of hot white repulsor rays over the heads of the others, taking out two or three oncoming men at a time; blasting blisteringly hot holes through their sternums and sending them scattered to the floor like pins in a bowling alley; tumbling into the men behind them and dragging them teetering to the floor too.
"Can you catch?" Steve turned to Bucky, firing inaccurately around the side of the blooming circular shield, managing to shoot down two men in total.
"Are we going to play ultimate Frisbee?" Bucky asked gleefully, smirking, the words were practically a codename for the smoothest stunt they had in their arsenal.
"Catch," Steve whispered, pecking him speedily on the lips and tossing the shield, spinning, away from him.
Bucky ran out into the open, making accurate headshots, downing every man that rampaged towards him like enraged bulls. They all landed sprawled on their fronts, scarlet splattering from their bodies and spilling across the grey concrete floor like someone had knocked over a glass of cranberry juice. It expanded and clumped as it chugged out the walking blood-bags.
Steve's shield knocked out the first man, clobbering him in the head, bounded off the wall behind, still gathering momentum from the momentous swing of Steve's colossal trebuchet of an arm and walloped the next hydra agent in the chest. He plummeted to the floor and Steve promptly put a bullet through his heart. It rebounded off the rock wall above him and finally soared off diagonally down to Bucky, who was sprinting flat out to catch the shield, whilst still firing off bullets into the bodies of hydra agents.
Bucky leapt, throwing his legs around the head of an anonymous armed assailant, snapping his neck between his thighs and reaching up to snatch the shield out of the air. Bucky caught it. He dropped to the floor with the body clutched between his legs and rolled into a defensive position, behind the shield, curled in tight.
The oncoming brutish scarred man received a bullet through the eye, and the one creeping up on him was outwitted when Bucky whipped around the knocked the consciousness clean out of him.
"Catch!" Bucky yelled at Steve as he rolled to duck beneath Tony's proton beams and evaded the bullets his team were firing at the Hydra agents and briefly jumped up to grab the shield hurled back at him.
"Everyone down!" Tony hollered.
Everyone flopped onto their stomach and Tony whipped around and burnt every standing man to ash, leaving nothing but a glowing orange residue in the air and a fiery line glowing in the cave wall.
"Good timing..." Sam laughed from the floor, seeing that no more men were pouring in.
"Rogers-Barnes... Tell me, do you two rehearse that kind of stuff or is it just spontaneous? Because either way, that was impressive," Tony looked at the two grinning pair of idiots who had just pulled off the most unlikely and incredible of calculated tricks, coordinated down to a t. "As a physicist that was remarkable..." Tony beamed back at them.
"As a field agent, that was remarkable..." Trip spoke from behind Tony. "In all seriousness though, did you guys practice that especially?" He was flabbergasted and stared with his mouth open as he brushed the grime and dirty dust off his combat trousers as he and the others got to their feet.
"Nope," Steve confirmed, slapping Bucky's ass playfully as Bucky sauntered back over, having armed himself with the assault rifle of a dead Hydra militant.
"Onwards?" Bucky commanded, cocking his gun with a smug bite of the lip.
Deeper in the facility, Natasha and Clint were fighting off a swathe of oncoming Hydra combatants.
"Guys!" Clint buzzed in. "A little backup would be appreciated!" Clint grunted, loosing another arrow from his taut bowstring and taking out a couple more as it kebabed them.
"I have their location," Tony announced, zooming off in his suit ahead of them.
The squad of nine of them rushed down the corridor, their feet clanking on the overlayed metal flooring as they sprinted flat out.
Natasha and Clint's burden was relaxed as the rest of the Avengers and Coulson's team began to storm the corridors behind them, shooting them down alongside.
"We need two teams," Steve directed, trying to coordinate the team who were hopelessly firing off rounds in arbitrary directions. "Natasha, Clint, May and Skye; you're with me! We'll head for the computer and control station, infiltrate, download and detonate..." He rounded up his portion of members, still shooting their way down the corridor. "Bucky, think you can handle the rest?" He smiled at his partner in crime and in love.
"Sure can. Tony, Sam, Trip; you're all with me," he clarified. "We're going to stay and hold back the oncoming troops whilst they conduct the objective. I need you to hold offensive positions. You got that?" Bucky swapped looks at his team before reloading and downing another sweeping wave of agents.
"Got it!"
"Affirmative!"
"Yup!"
Steve hung back for a second as his team broke away down a splintering corridor, headed in the correct direction. "Good luck, babe. Oh, and don't get yourself killed, Captain, I need someone to fuck tonight," Bucky whispered into Steve's ear sensuously and their lips clashed untidily, full of adrenaline pumped passion. "Now, go!" Bucky hissed, breaking away and slapping Steve's rear like a race horse.
The smell of cordite began to spread aromatically through the air, the burning scent sumptuously satisfying and deliciously destructive - the smell that fireworks left behind on July fourth. A cloud of smoke erupted from the wisps in the barrels of guns, creating a cloud in the air; the smoke screen playing to their advantage. It left their unsuspecting enemies mystified and them, masked.
Bucky pushed to the front of his team, heading the pack and crouching to get a steadier aim and better angle on oncoming offensives.
Steve, Natasha, Clint, May and Skye all raced as fast as they could, taking out as many Hydra members as they could as they went. Steve battered them with his shield, swinging his arm out and pelting them. Natasha used her spider bites to electrocute them once she'd got a grip on their necks and a knee to their abdomen. Clint skewered countless Hydra members on the spear-tip points of his arrows.
May was throwing disarming and disabling punches and kicks, downing men and putting them permanently out of action. Skye was firing off shots from the handgun clutched in her sweaty palms.
"It's like The Four Seasons in Budapest all over again..." Natasha huffed, throwing bone-breaking punches and gut bludgeoning kicks.
"See! You never remember the fun parts!" Clint dramatically groaned as he shot down a few more, pushing through.
"I do! You don't even remember base jumping from the Hungarian parliament building!" Natasha retorted with an eye roll.
"I tried to forget! That wasn't fun: that was terrifying! And you were the only one with a parachute!" Clint barged past and elbowed her incoming attacker in the nose.
"We survived didn't we? I managed to sail us both to the drop off point!" She growled, pushing Clint aside to take care of her own target. "And the view was miraculous!"
"It was kind of hard to focus on the view when the god damn Soviets were trying to shoot us both down!" Clint roared back.
They finally reached the central unit, it was sealed shut by two heavily armoured metallic doors with a keypad to the side.
"Now what?" Clint asked, heavily out of breath as he whipped an arrow out of his quiver and stabbed it lamely into the last oncoming Hydra representative.
"Skye, can you do your thing?" May requested, entrusting her with working fast.
"I certainly can..." Skye huffed, finally in her element. She slipped the bulging backpack off her back and gently lowered it to the floor, unsure of how volatile the bomb was that was also stashed inside. She pulled out a handheld device and looked at Steve.
"Captain, you couldn't remove that panel could you?" She looked up at the muscular blond happily.
Before Steve could even swing his shield, May roundhouse kicked the metal panel, imbedding her heel in the screen, puncturing the surface and then ripping it open as she settled back into her neutral balanced stance.
"Or you, Melinda. Thank you..." Skype dipped her hand in the panel, yanking out the web of wires, the strands as thin as gossamer and coloured brightly to indicate their different purposes. In seconds she had used her pocket knife to slice open the circuitry and wire it to her handheld hacking device.
Thousands of interchanging scrambled digits filled the screen of the device and she tapped at it seemingly randomly, but ordered the hectic coding. "You all ready to shoot down whoever the hell is in there?" She checked, ducking down by the wall.
"On my mark," Steve said, holding up three fingers. Two. One.
The light switched to green and the doors shucked aside.
Steve frisbee'd his shield into the interior, whamming down a couple men. Clint conjoined a few to the consoles with arrows rupturing one side of their body and imbedding themselves in the board of switched on the other. May put the last few out of action, leaving Natasha to down the nearest to the door; she snatched his collar and whacked his head into a wall before dropping his unconscious body to the floor.
"Clear," Natasha proudly announced, offer one of her few female comrades a hand up and hauling her to her feet. "Do what you do best," she smiled confidently at Skye, encouragingly and held a pose ready to fire off a bullet from the doorway at any second.
Skye shoved a USB cable into a port on the board of computers and clipped in a hard drive on the other in. Her fingers flew across the keys in a blur, decoding the database, opening doors, intercepting frequencies, unlocking passcodes until she had every file at her disposal.
The others watched in amazement as she harvested their field of information until she had collected the entire database on her hard disk. She tapped her foot and drummed her fingers impatiently as she watched the data transfer timer creep along at a snail's pace.
"C'mon, c'mon..." She argued with the inanimate computer.
The bar slowly filled up, indicating progress and then: 'Download complete'.
She got to work again, tapping in coding that wiped the system, clearing it beyond recognition and uploading a virus to their programming so it was unreturnable; if the blast left anything forgeable of their base.
"Done. Now we blow the top on this place..." Skye turned to her team, smiling like sunshine. "Fitz, is this thing on a timer or what?" Skye spoke into her earpiece.
"Uh... Y-yes. Yes it is. You need to press- press... Uh press the..."
"The activation switch," Bruce interjected, looking at the schematics of the device he had on his computer. "Then twist the dial. You then have two minutes to get the hell outta there."
"Okay... Great..."
Steve gave the orders to evacuate over the radio as they primed the bomb.
"Uh... Houston, we have a problem," Skye reported.
"What do you mean a problem?" Bruce sounded panicked over the line.
"Don't get too wound up doctor, but the switch... It's faulty," Skye tried to twist the stiff and locked up twister on the side of the device.
"Oh god... Uh... Oh god... There's no way but to manually detonate it, then."
"Manually?!" Steve blew his top. "You're kidding right?"
"Why would I kid you? No. That's the only way. Unless we don't blow it."
"No!" Coulson joined in. "We need to blow it. We can't give them hope of rebuilding."
"Then what can we do?!" Clint shouted into the mic.
"Dis- disassemble it... Use the... Use... Use- oh god... Use the..."
"What is it you're trying to say, Fitz?" Skye egged him on in a soft voice, trying to soothe him to try to keep him calm. His stutter always got worse when he was stressed.
"Doctor Banner... Use the... The... fifty five," Leo finally sounded convinced, but the whole team was convinced he'd finally lost it under pressure. "Fifty five! Use fifty five!"
"What're you trying to say, kid?" Bruce spoke quietly to Fitz, stress in his wavering tone.
Tony's voice interrupted. "Caesium! For the love of god, caesium! The bomb has caesium in it!"
"Yes! That! Caesium!" Leo chorused in unison with Tony. "Remove it from the... uh-"
"Relax kid. One of you needs to remove the switch, separate the wires and pull out the glass chamber with the caesium sealed within it. But don't, for your own sakes', break it. Not yet."
"Let me," Natasha pushed aside all of them, knelt down and gave the knob a firm yank, tearing it off with its spring and streamers of wires and held out her hand for Skye's torch. Once handed over, she shone the light into the dark central unit of the bomb and saw the clear glass chamber containing a goldish metal. "Gold metal, yeah?" She cross checked.
"That's the one. Please be careful. That's one of the most dangerous alkali metals in existence. That fifty grams in a tube is enough to penetrate the reinforced ceiling for one hundred metres and collapse the lakebed right on you..."
"Now what?" Natasha asked, looking at the twinkling metal concealed in the precious glass case.
"I'm going to need you to listen, then do. Get everyone apart from two people to leave..." Natasha waved away everyone, dismissing them and they all honourably did as they were told.
"All of you, retreat," Steve deliberated and got the call back to return to the sewers and confirmed he was staying. "No, Bucky. I'll be fine - just go."
"You're going to need to hurl that vial as fire as you can away from you. If there's any moisture, hurl it at that. The caesium will react with the water, all of the water and produce masses of hydrogen gas; and then you'll need a spark, if it doesn't spark itself. You'll probably have a twenty second - maximum - grace period to shift yourselves out of that cave before it blows. Think you can handle that?"
"Steve and I have got this... Right, Steve?" She looked up at him with only a glimmer of hesitation in her eyes.
"We have..." He confirmed, taking her hand bravely.
"Go for your life," Bruce gave the order.
"You can do this Nat..." Steve squeezed her shoulder.
"Now or never."
Nat gave a swooping underarm swing, letting it soar through the corridor and the pair were quick on their heels to rotate and dash in the opposite direction. As they ran flat out, they heard a plink as the vial containing the caesium smashed. The fizzing began as it landed in a puddle and bubbled and reacted.
They dashed, sucking in sharp gasps for air and running for survival. Their legs became leaden way too quickly as lactic acid took hold of their bodies as they pushed them to the limits. Arms and legs working in sync as they threw themselves forwards, gaining momentum, throwing themselves around corners, skidding, slipping and tripping.
There was a tremendous explosive purr that ripped through the facility, making the foundations tremble and quake and begin to crumble. They felt heat on the back of their ankles. An orange glow was approaching. A wave of fire was chasing them, intending to swallow them whole and melt them from existence.
It was like how they redirected the fire from a rocket's boosters on take-off, forcing the current down shafts to disburse the heat and the flames. They ran back out into the main cavern, the roof collapsing inwards, rocks tumbling from the ceiling and smashing into the floor, metal detaching from the walls and falling too. They dodged the crumbling debris, leaping about as they ran, fire still at their backs. The rocks collapsed just over the door as they nipped out, nicking Steve's sleeve and ripping the material. Flames licked at the backs of the rocks and the rumble of water flooding the facility followed as it began to pour from the lake and into the Hydra base. The sewers shook. They weren't safe yet.
A/N - I got bored and I have way too much time on my hands (if I neglect my homework). But who's complaining, right? Bonus update!
Yes, Caesium really does that. Some of the things I bloody research for this fic... Gee. I've gotta say some of it has really been educational; like antihaemorrhagics. Others, not so much. I have no idea why I need to now the approximate travel time from New York City to Bangor, Maine. In case you hadn't worked it out, fifty-five is caesium's number in the periodic table. (Again, a useless fact).
Dedication goes to The-girlwhowaited!