thearena | don't believe everything you read

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don't believe everything you read

Who| Skye and Bucky (MCU)
What| A former weapon of Hydra just found Skye's biography, which implicates her as a member of Hydra... Hilarity does not ensue.
Where| Department store
When| Day 3-ish, nighttime
Warnings/Notes| General potential Bucky/Hydra mentions, as well as possible violence

Her first night setting up camp, she almost stays in the lingerie store, because logically, who the hell is going to be visiting the lingerie store? Then it occurs to her that that same thought is probably going to occur to anyone not playing by the rules of Captain America's hug-a-thon, and she settles on the department store instead.

It's a good choice. Once she makes it up the escalator (and isn't that a harrowing experience) she picks a nice, secluded corner and sets up camp under a register. There are supplies here by the plenty--no food, unfortunately, but she's able to change her clothes, the doors lock at night keeping her marginally more secure, and she could probably brain somebody with one of those ridiculous solid glass paperweights if it comes down to it.

The phone she grabbed, it turns out, is less of a paperweight than the glass is. She can't hack anything, she can't use it to begin setting up a network, but at least she can set the alarm to go off every couple of hours to re-check her perimeter. It's dark as pitch when she gets up for the second time that night to patrol, switchblade in hand.

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Chance was what had led Bucky to pick up Skye's biography first out of all the books in the store. Someone had knocked it onto the floor where her picture on the cover stared up at him as he walked through the bookstore.

Curiosity had urged him to pick it up, to flick through the pages and skim over the content inside. It had only taken one instance of the word HYDRA to gain his rapt attention and only sentence marking Skye as a member of the organisation which had used him for decades as its weapon to set his current course and make him forget doing anything else.

He slipped into the department store just as the shutters roll down throughout the mall after glimpsing her inside earlier that evening, he had enough patience to play strategically to that extent because now they are trapped inside together until morning. Good for him, bad news for her. There will be no way to escape or call in help now.

Bucky moves almost completely silently, waiting for her to make an appearance out of her hiding hole. Waiting in the dark doesn't bother him, he's patient when he needs to be and deathly focused on what he's going to do.

The moment he hears her stepping through the darkness he's moving, skirting around her to come up from behind, a knife slipping into his right palm from out of the sleeve of his jacket, one of many he's hidden amongst his clothing. He's going to attempt to grab her from behind, pin her arms to her sides with metal arm and press the blade against her throat before she can notice him.

Edited (urghmistakes) 2014-08-21 17:43 (UTC)

Skye likes to think she's gotten pretty good where combat is concerned. Sure, she's no badass specialist, but she can hold her own against private security, which is a lot better than she could do nine months ago.

None of that matters right now, because someone like the Winter Soldier is on a whole nother level.

She doesn't even hear him approach, there is no warning: just her arms suddenly pinned to her sides and a knife kissing her throat. She can't make out her assailant, and her heart pounds against her rib cage like it's trying to escape her chest. She has a knife of her own started at her hip, but no way to make a move for it with the blade against her neck.

But he hasn't made the cut, so she grabs for her courage and speaks. "Uh, hi? Can I help you?"

"Hydra." One word, hissed quietly into her ear as he bends his head to hers is all he gives her to begin.

Maybe she'll recognise his voice, he doesn't make any effort to disguise it, not particularly caring if she knows who it is who's caught her. In fact, he thinks, if what the book says is true he wants her to know who he is before he kills her.

But Bucky wants to see how she reacts, what she does in response to that name first. It's a small scrap of a chance he's giving her, borne only out of the knowledge that the Capitol is untrustworthy.

"Oh my god," she exclaims, then jerks back into him when the blade scrapes against her throat. What the hell did she do to get lumped in with Hydra? Okay, sure, maybe she was technically part of a cyberterrorist group, if you want to get really technical but, god--maybe call Steve Rogers Captain Communism while you're at it.

She forces her voice to stay calm and reasonable. "Look, I am not Hydra, okay? So maybe put the knife down before I get shanked. Um, please," she adds.

Bucky's grip doesn't loosen, his entire focus is tracked on Skye, observing her behaviour and trying to analyse the tone of her voice, searching for the signs of a lie. He doesn't know her well enough to believe her right away, that's for sure.

"Why should I believe you?!" he demands and maybe he's not thinking entirely straight right now, the name 'Hydra' pulsing through his mind like a dark heartbeat. He's certainly not as calm as Skye is trying to be.

She squeezes her eyes shut and thinks hard, fast. What can she use for proof? She has nothing but her own word to testify and her anger at these stupid lies. If she's going to die in here, it's not going to be because the Capitol managed to convince people she's something she's not.

"Hydra shot me," she says, struggling to keep her voice steady. It's a gamble she doesn't want to take, exposing what happened there, but if the Capitol knows enough to know she's with SHIELD even though she wiped those records, and by all accounts they can already bring people back to life. Maybe she's going to die in here, but she's not letting her clock count down quite yet--not without a fight.

"Twice in the stomach at point-blank range, just to see what my CO would do. So you tell me why you should believe me, because that's the best I've got."

Of all the things she might have said that is not what he expected.

It's a good call. Bucky's brows creases in a somehow even more severe frown, "They shot you." just to see what her CO would do? It's unquestionably the type of move Hydra would make, testing their enemy for weaknesses by exploiting their soldiers (and while they would execute their own if they felt a risk was posed it doesn't match what the books said). "Who were you working for?"

"SHIELD." She almost gasps out the answer, her relief a palpable thing. Not that she's out of the oven yet, because he still has a knife to her throat.

She wonders if it will hurt like the bullets did, two tiny punches in the stomach.

"Like I already told the other Barnes and Romanoff, I work for SHIELD."

"SHIELD is Hydra." he growls lightly, but not all of it. He knows not all of it was. The Soldier remembers killing the loyal SHIELD soldiers who were trying to stop Insight's launch, the good men and women who had unknowingly worked alongside the serpents.

Bucky narrows his eyes when she namedrops two of his allies, it's another point in her favour. If she told them and they believed her... but they were not from his world, that SHIELD was Hydra was not their reality.

He pushes her forwards towards a wall, letting go with the intention of spinning Skye around and pushing her back up against it before returning the knife to her throat. The man she'll see is dishevelled, his face bandaged over the brand the Peacekeepers burnt into his cheek and his eyes burning with dark fervour instead of their usual emptiness.

"If you lie I'll kill you."

For a breathless moment she thinks she's free, and then her back hits the wall, hard, her head thudding into the plaster and making her vision speckle with stars. The bruise on her cheek twinges in sympathy, double the pain front and back.

"SHIELD was infiltrated by Hydra," she snaps back. But SHIELD, SHIELD at its core--SHIELD is Coulson and May and FitzSimmons, Fury and Trip, Mike Peterson, Linda Avery, Koenig, even Hand. Good people. She'd been ready to give it up as a lost cause at one point, because what's one more home falling apart in a succession of Skye's homes cracking into pieces, but her family lasted and her family persevered, and they are going to rebuild SHIELD as it should be.

"And for the record, I have a history of not being a great liar."

"From the beginning, from the top." he tells her, trying not to let the knowledge of the past seep past his calm exterior.

Calm. Is he calm? No, he's not. These are not the actions of the Winter Soldier, are they? The emotionless perfect killer that Hydra had created was not here right now, instead there was a man trying to wear the Soldier's mask, angry and hurt. The Soldier would have just killed Skye immediately rather than give her a chance, uncaring if the information was true or false. He would have killed her just on the possibility.

Bucky's breathes in sharply though, looking down at her. It had been unbelievable when he first read the words before the rage took over, that Skye was one of them. He knew Hydra, knew what they were and what they preferred in their members.

A woman who didn't want to kill was not one of them.

The knife moves back from her neck slightly, not gone but no longer pressing against her skin. Bucky reaches into the pocket of his jacket with his metal hand and brings out the book, showing it to her. "It says you are Hydra."

Hers also says she destroyed Mike's life on purpose, that she consciously put Ace in danger, that she wanted to get shot. It insinuates that she knew from the start Miles was the kind of person to sell out ideals for money, and that whatever she might have had with Ward was real--that she knew he was a lying, back-stabbing murderer the entire time. That that was the kind of person she'd fallen for.

It had been so disgusting she'd had to laugh when she read it, but it's not funny now (it was never really funny to begin with, honestly).

"And yours says Hydra did you a favor," she says quietly, reaching up with one hand to touch her throat carefully, checking for blood. Fortunately, her skin is dry. "One and two add up to three, not twelve."

Something shutters in him, his breath seems to freeze in his lungs, shock clearly expressed on his face. "... what?"

A favour? Hydra hadn't done him a singly favour in his existence, up to and starting with not allowing him to die when he should have.

It's evident that he hasn't found his own book yet, hadn't even thought to look and see if there was one, he'd been so quickly consumed by his need to deal with any potential Hydra threat in Panem.

Jesus. He hasn't seen it yet, she can see it clear on his face. She'd assumed he had because he saw the crap they wrote about her, because wouldn't someone's natural inclination then be to see what was written about themselves? After her run-in with Romanoff, Skye had gone there explicitly to find her supposed biography.

"Hey." She takes a step forward, hands up and palms out to show she's unarmed, the knife at her belt out of reach right now. "Barnes. Hey. They're trying to play mind games, but it's just words."

She takes a step forward, he takes a step back.

It's a marked change from moments ago where he was viciously threatening, every inch the Winter Soldier and now he's on the defensive, off-balance. "What did they write?" he asks, staring at her, his blade still raised, trying to maintain distance.

"What did they write?!" he hadn't thought. He should have thought but a knee-jerk reaction to Hydra had blown all over thought out of his head, spontaneously setting him on a course for Skye.

... which likely was exactly what the Capitol wanted, to see him gut her on the basis of a lie.

At his shout she flinches back again, hands still up. Placating. She wishes she could be angry, at being threatened, at being attacked and scared, but after what she read...

This is what Hydra is. This is what Hydra does. They take good men, loving fathers and soldiers who give their lives in the line of duty, and they destroy who they are and turn them into killers.

"I didn't read it cover to cover, I just kind of skimmed. It...made me want to throw up, to be honest." She swallows. "It made it sound like whatever Hydra did to you was a good thing."

"..." he shakes his head, "That's what they said..." You will be the new fist of Hydra... Your work has... helping the world... you are...

Bucky turns from her, fists clenching and then with a snarl slams his metal arm into the head of a nearby mannequin, knocking it clean off and into a rack of clothing. This isn't the weapon and it isn't a man who's thinking straight.

Of course it made Skye want to throw up, he thinks, it would make any good rational person want to throw up.

He's locked in here for the night and the book she's talking about sits where he can't reach it, waiting to air it's lies for anyone who gets their hands on it and nausea threatens to rise up inside him at the thought.

"... they're like Them..." he mumbles and turns, sinking down onto his haunches and pressing both hands against his head. Metal fingers tangle in his hair while the other still grips the knife like a lifeline.

The violence makes her startle back, and she steps quickly to the side to put a chair between them. He's angry, it's understandable, he has every right to be and to lash out, but she's trapped in this department store with him and she's still not sure she's gotten through to him completely. That's she's not the threat here.

When he drops to the floor she waits out the pounding of her heart before approaching, circling around in front of him so he can see her movements clearly. It's like approaching a feral dog. Finally she crouches down across from him, giving herself enough space to move away quickly if she has to.

"Hey," she says, feeling at a loss for words. It's an awful feeling, that and the sick twisting in the pit of her stomach. "Barnes--Bucky," she corrects herself. "You're not alone in this."

She remembers looking down at Mike, scarred and in pieces, the pain that had ripped through him when they attached his leg. Cybertek's incentives program, and opening that door and finding Ace. And now--this. Brought to another world and stuck in some arena to kill other people for the entertainment of strangers.

Skye's used to being the underdog. She's been that her whole life, kicked around and used, and she learned, painfully, how to adapt and fight back. But she's never been broken down so completely, the way Bucky looks now.

He misses the long hair, the way it could be a barrier and a shield when he bowed his head, a quick separation of himself from the rest of the world. But it's gone, cut away and makes him feel closer to James Barnes than the Winter Soldier, good except at time like these when he wished he still felt nothing.

Dimly, he's aware of Skye moving on his periphery, then approaching. He can feel every highly-trained sense (but not good enough anymore, because of them) tuned to that movement, even while inside his own head he's teetering on the edge of a familiar abyss, raging at the emptiness and loss inside of him and the people taunting him for it.

It's just the same, he's still a pawn in others games except this time they're letting him remember the things he does instead of purging him clean. It's... something. He doesn't want to forget but he also wants to remember and they're withholding that, lording it over him that he can't.

Skye is talking, the words cut into thoughts that are running a thousand mile an hour, echoing the same promise spoken weeks before by the one point of familiarity he had.

You're not alone in this.

... Bucky slowly lifts his head, fingers still tangled up in his hair to look at Skye when she says that. Nothing is said but she has his attention, blue eyes staring at her face, trying to process the compassion she's offering.

Now that she has his attention again she makes an attempt at a smile, small and reassuring. It doesn't quite reach her eyes, which still watch him, wary, but there's a softening there too.

Once upon a time she stood inside SHIELD Academy, looking at a wall with heroes' names engraved into history. She'd traced her own history there, found roots that reach back through the decades, and realized there was a place for her in the world. The world's been turned upside down by then - SHIELD into Hydra, loved ones into traitors. Turn, turn, turn. Those people who died still did good. She's not Coulson, but she can believe in that: a history with meaning.

"Hydra hurt a lot of people." Two bullets in the abdomen, she thinks, and a perforated colon. Coulson lying on a table begging to be put out of his misery, FitzSimmons trapped in a pressurized coffin at the bottom of the ocean, Ace Peterson locked in a windowless room as his father guns men down. Victoria Hand murdered in cold blood. All of the other men forced into the Deathlok program, and their handlers coerced to turn them into cold-blooded killers with the flick of a switch. The list goes on and on and on.

And now from there to here.

"And sure, maybe we're stuck in this hellhole now, but none of us is here alone. We're in this together."

Bucky grits his teeth against the tide of his unstable mind threatening to pull him under. The Soldier is a comfortable shell waiting with opening arms if he would but step inside, shove emotion and memory and all the troubles that come with them aside but it doesn't fit so well anymore, that shield is no longer him. He can try to ignore and forget to little effect and right now he's just doing his best to keep his head above the water when it would be easy to lose himself. Not since the arena has his mind tried so hard to betray him. If this is healing then...

... he needs to ground himself from what he just learned before he detaches, the way he did in the Peacekeeper cells (and he remembers Steve's face when he did that). All he has to do that now is Skye and her voice.

The book exists, the book is out of his reach. He can't change it, not until the morning.

Bucky doesn't realise what a sight he makes right now, pale under the dim greenish glow of the exit lights casting an ill tinge to his skin. His breathing is elevated but slowing, a good sign as he comes down from the edges of a panic attack. "...together..." he mutters. "Us...?"

He looks like a man drowning, and he looks at her like she's some kind of lifeline when minutes before he'd had a knife to her throat. Jesus. When did her life get this complicated?

"Sure. I mean, I understand if you hate the idea. I wouldn't trust SHIELD either in your position." She pauses to consider her words. It's so important she gets them right.

Finally she says, "But it's your choice."

"My choice."

Skye maybe imagines but can't understand the true scope of what those words mean to him everytime they're offered; from her, from Steve, from anyone. It still overwhelms him to have choice so even simple small options are difficult, he still wants often for someone to take over and make the choice for him, the way he's used to. The way he expects.

Other times he's deathly afraid of that.

It's his, this choice, he wouldn't let anyone else make it, even if they offered to. Seconds tick into minutes as he mulls it over, weighing it carefully in his mind and as he does some of tension seems to bleed from his body as he is singularly focused on one task.

Here there is no SHIELD, there is no large organisation, only one woman who claims to be for them and... he is not afraid of her. It's hard to say that he trusts her, but he doesn't fear her. In the past moments she could have left him, run from him but instead she chose to stay and try and help him.

A man, a thing like him doesn't deserve it, especially when he almost just killed her -- but she did it anyway.

"... why?" it's one thing he needs to know, to try to understand.

It would be so easy to write him off, to cut ties and walk away. He had her at knife-point. Any other person would walk away; another person to stay might do it out of self-preservation.

But she's not staying for that reason. She's rooted to the spot because there are strings tied around her heart, and they are so, so easy to pull.

"I know another guy like you." She doesn't realize this is the story she's going to tell until she opens her mouth to say it. Half her heart is apologizing to Mike as she says it, but the other half is urging fiercely that the truth needs to be told. "He's a good guy. Has a kid, and the kid is...he's freaking adorable, okay. He got in something over his head, and I didn't...I didn't exactly help."

She takes a deep breath, remembering the accusation in Mike's voice. And what is SHIELD? "He trusted me to look after his son, and I trusted SHIELD would keep him safe even though I spent my whole life certain SHIELD was the bad guy. And wouldn't you know it, I'd just handed his kid over to Hydra. They put a bomb in his head and a gun to his kid's, and they made him into their weapon."

Hydra is at fault. Reyna is at fault. Garrett is at fault. She knows that, she knows all that. But she can't erase the part she played in it too. She's not the villain, but she's not absolved of all responsibility here either.

"All he wants is to be a hero for his kid, and he is. He was even when Hydra took all his choices away. That's why."

Of course, it makes sense.

He couldn't be the only one HYDRA used that way, not with all their power and the technology at their disposal. The Winter Soldier might have been their best, the pinnacle of their desires and achievements but that didn't mean they wouldn't try to make more like him. He doesn't remember anything else like himself in their arsenal but then of course he wouldn't, he only knew what he had to know to succeed before it was taken away again.

Skye wants to help him because she failed another like him. Another man made into a weapon, another man with a stolen life.

Bucky stares downwards at his metal hand for long seconds after she finishes talking before slowly closing the fingers and making a fist. He can make decisions, he can make choices, there is more to him now than the weapon even if he's still figuring out what that is.

"Okay." he says, barely above a murmur. Then tries it again a little louder, testing the word and the decision it represents. "Okay."

"Okay," she repeats, feeling an uncoiling of tension within her, fear--not dissipating, but diminishing, growing less.

"So no more of the whole--" She gestures with her hand, drawing it across her throat in a mime of a knife. "Alright?"

Bucky stares intently at her for a moment, then deliberately let's her see him put the knife away in his belt.

Not having a knife in his hands doesn't make him any less deadly, he knows many ways to kill with his bare hands especially with one made of metal and it would take him bare seconds to pull the blade back out again. It's the importance of the gesture though, a statement of intent to cause no harm to Skye from now on.

"No more." he agrees.

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don't believe everything you read

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