The air tastes metallic—cold, wet, and humming with that low, bone-deep vibration you’ve both been feeling since stepping into this place. The lights overhead flicker in a slow, sick rhythm, like they’re breathing. Bucky shifts his weight and you hear the soft clink of metal plates brushing together.

Except it isn’t his arm making that noise.

It’s the small cluster of explosive charges strapped across his chest—ugly, improvised things Stark would’ve lectured him about for hours. He keeps one hand braced over them like he’s afraid the room itself might try to rip them away.

“You gotta go kid,” he murmurs, turning to look at you perched on the ledge of the window he had just broken.

You cling to the back of his jacket anyway, your hand small against the rough canvas. He can feel the tremor running through you, and it only makes him plant his feet harder, making him tense, but he’s facing the center of the ruined Hydra facility.

The place looks like someone tried to build a science facility inside a nightmare. vines crawl over machines Bucky doesn’t recognize, pulsing with faint red light, like veins under skin. Something distant echoes—maybe a screech, maybe metal warping, maybe something worse.

Bucky doesn’t flinch. He’s been through too many bad places to let this one see him blink. “You don’t have to be scared,” he says quietly. “You just have to run. Get to just beyond that fence, and that’s where your Kryptonite will stop working, i hope.” The hydra agents had set up a device meant to hurt you and only you, to keep you in a weakened state and in constant pain.

You whisper his name—almost too soft for him to hear—and he finally glances down at you. His expression eases, even with the tension still coiled in his jaw. He shifts, putting himself more fully between you and the dark hallway ahead.

The charges dig into his ribs when he moves. He doesn’t react. You reach out, noticing the bulges. You unzip his jacket slightly, spotting the bombs before he catches you, re zipping up his jacket.

“Hey, don’t do that. It’s just a last resort,” he tells you, tapping the edge of the device with his vibranium fingers. “You’re gonna be okay.”

He breathes once, steadying himself.

Then he crouches to your level, his voice low and certain. “You’re getting out of here. I promise.”

A new sound—wet, wrong—echoes from the corridor. The shadows twist as something approaches.

Bucky rises slowly, placing himself squarely between you and the threat, shoulders set, bombs strapped across his chest like a declaration:

If this thing wants you, it goes through him first.

“Time to go, kid,” he mutters.

Then he steps forward.