Hell Bound

I forgot that Bucky had trouble with the stairs until I was in the kitchen getting waffles ready. He didn't seem to have any problems with pain once I got him to relent and let me take over. So it didn't dawn on me until I got the waffle maker going, and he still hadn't appeared in the kitchen.

"Aw, crap," I said once I remembered. Then I hurried out of the kitchen and found him stuck on the landing, clutching the banister with his metal hand. His right hand was pressed tightly to his side. "They didn't rip, did they?"

"Just pulled," he said between clenched teeth.

"I'm so sorry. I forgot. Come sit down." I wrapped my arm around him and helped him hobble back to the couch. He sat down with a sigh, and I moved onto my knees to examine the stitches more carefully in the sunlight.

I was still prodding at the sutures when the front door opened. Bucky's hand quickly slid into the couch cushions for the gun, but it was just Graham.

"Jesus," he said, stepping inside and shutting the door. "Sock on the doorknob."

"Oh, shut up. I was just checking his stitches." He still had his head turned away dramatically, and Bucky still had his hand in the couch cushions. Graham waved some papers in our direction.

"Right, well. Gonna go fill these out." He hurried off down the hall to the kitchen, and I looked up at Bucky. He watched Graham leave and then moved his hand back into his lap. His eyes turned to mine.

"I told you he would think that," he remarked. I smiled and trailed my finger down his stomach, enjoying how it made him tense.

"Well, he wasn't wrong," I reminded him. He returned the smile and smoothed my hair out of my face. I had to bite my lip to stop myself from smiling like an idiot. I could see exactly what Graham meant by "starry-eyed," and I was pretty sure I had that look on my face right then.

"Um—are you cooking waffles?" Graham asked from the kitchen.

"Shit," I said, bolting away from the couch.

"You should really get a timer for that thing," Graham said. He was sitting at the table filling out applications while I jumped around the waffle maker, trying to salvage breakfast.

"Good idea. You can buy me one when you get hired." He groaned.

"If that ever happens."

"What makes you think it won't?"

"Burrito torpedo, remember?"

"Right. You might want to cut back on that."

"Well, Arbys seems promising. The guy seemed really enthusiastic when we talked." I went to get a plate from the cupboard, and he yelped from behind me again. "Christ Almighty," he whispered. "You really gotta stop doing that." I turned around, and Bucky was standing in the kitchen.

"I just wanted something to drink," he said.

"Oh jeez. Sorry. I'll get you some water," I told him.

"It's alright. I can do it myself." I knew he hated being helpless, so I stepped back as he went to get a glass from the cupboard. I glanced at Graham, who was staring down at his applications, his neck, and cheeks bright red from embarrassment. I looked back at Bucky and finally noticed the state he was in. He had red marks on one arm—his chest—and his neck. Marks that I had undoubtedly left behind without noticing. They would fade in a matter of minutes. But it was obvious what caused them. And what exactly I'd been doing when I caused them.

"Ah, no. It's okay. I got it," I said, putting my hands on his shoulders and spinning him back around. "You need to rest."

"I can get my own water."

"No, I got it." He grumbled something in Russian and then disappeared into the hallway. I turned back around to find Graham snickering into his hand. "Oh, shut up," I said, returning to the counter to get Bucky's cup.

"I didn't say anything. But you should maybe consider giving him a shirt."

"Oh, bite me."

"It looks like Bucky already did that. Or was that just you?" I swung around and chucked a potholder at him. It didn't phase him, though. He laughed until he was nearly falling out of his chair.

We had the whole day to do whatever we wanted. Only there wasn't anything to do. Graham was perfectly happy filling out applications and then reading all day. But Bucky was eager to return to whatever he'd found in the book. So after breakfast, he helped me carry the plates back into the kitchen to wash them.

"There's a code in the book," he whispered once the water was loud enough to drown out our voices.

"What kind of code?" He shook his head.

"Certain letters are bolded. It's almost unnoticeable. Some of them spell out words and numbers."

"Like what exactly?"

"The first set is undoubtedly Beata Weisberg. IGH might be the next. It's hard to make sense of. The numbers could be coordinates."

"To where?"

"I don't know."

"We can check my computer." He glanced behind me at the hallway.

"I don't want him to know what we're doing."

"He saw you writing something in your notebook. So I'm pretty sure he knows you're up to something."

"I don't just write down codes. I'm always writing in my notebook, but I don't want him to know the coordinates. If that's what they are."

"You didn't write them down?" He shook his head. "Where are they?"

"In my head."

"You can memorize large groups of numbers?"

"Coordinates are easy." I shook my head.

"It took me half a year to memorize my own phone number. And it's the only number I know by heart."

"I'm sure that's not true."

"What makes you say that?"

"Your commanding officer would have had you memorize numbers and codes. Coordinates, serial numbers, and Morse at the very least. If Russell didn't develop his own sequences."

"I honestly can't remember learning anything like that." He opened his mouth to speak but hesitated instead.

"If you really did—what you think you did—why didn't Russell have you arrested?"

"I don't know. That's the only part I don't understand. There would have to be a record of it somewhere, right? But you did say he was trying to protect me."

"And you said it felt like you had no control. He'd want to know why."

"I didn't have anything to do with Hydra before working with SHIELD. And I didn't even know what was going on until the incident. So how could they have gotten control over me?" He shook his head.

"What did it feel like?"

"I kept telling my body to stop, that it wasn't right, and it wouldn't. Like there was something in my head. Burrowing." His jaw went tight, and he turned toward the sink again. The dish he was washing was already clean enough, but he kept scrubbing anyway. I was afraid it might break in his hand. "Does that sound familiar to you?" I asked. He shook his head once.

"They were always trying new things—experimenting on people. One asset wasn't enough. They wanted an army. But I wasn't allowed to know what they were doing. I had my job, and they had theirs. I was asleep when I wasn't useful. But I still could have seen or heard something. I don't know. It just feels—like I've heard it before. Like—controlling people with low sound frequencies. But that wouldn't explain why it affected you and no one else." I ran the dish under the water, but I couldn't come up with an answer.

"I don't know." I looked up at him again. "I just can't remember."

"Who were you fighting? Do you remember anything?" I put the plate down on the counter and leaned against it.

"I remember being briefed. They said it would be short. There was a threat against a school. We were only supposed to guard the kids. A small school. One or two classes. They never said who made the threat or why. If they did, I can't remember it. Just that we had to be there in case it was real, or something went wrong." I shook my head as if it would clear the haze in my mind. "I don't even remember seeing a school. I know there were kids. Some of them ended up out on the street. I watched them die. We separated into formation patterns when the first gun fired. Russell had me stay with him. I told him something felt off. I was shaking. He thought I was just scared. And then—I pulled my gun on him. But one of my teammates interrupted us—I shot him in the face."

"And Russell didn't subdue you?"

"There was an explosion, and I ran off. It must have knocked enough sense in me so I could get away. I shot another teammate. Almost shot another, but—I managed to fight it off. For a while. There was a grenade. Knocked out my hearing for a bit. Russell shot me. Talbot went down, and I went to help him. That's when it came back. It was telling me to kill him. To sever the femoral artery. I didn't. I shot my Lieutenant instead. That's it. That's all I can…."

He waited for me to finish. My fingers were dripping water onto the counter, and I was gripping it tightly. I stared at the stream running out of the faucet. He put his hand on my back, comforting and encouraging, as something poked through the haze of memory.

"What else?" he prodded.

"Lights. There were lights above me. Water. In my lungs. I was drowning. Trees and cold. And—that's it. I don't even know what that means. The next thing I can remember clearly is waking up from surgery. Russell was there."

"What did it look like? The city."

"I don't know. Older architecture. There was an old church. Catholic. It was falling apart. Some of the streets were paved. The main ones. But the smaller ones were cobbled. Narrow alleys. Foreign graffiti. Eastern Europe, maybe?"

"Sokovia," he said confidently. He was staring out of the window and into the yard.

"What makes you think that?"

"It was one of the words in the book. Sokovia. That must have been where you were. You don't remember. If you can't remember—it means they were hiding something. If Russell put it in your book, he must have expected you to put the pieces together. He wanted you to remember. So he can't be the one who made you forget."

"I stopped reading after I got home. I used to read a lot to pass the time between missions. He must have thought I'd keep the habit."

"Why did you stop?"

"It made me dissociate." He nodded slowly in understanding. "I don't know what any of this means, Bucky." I dried the plate and quickly stuck it back in the cupboard. Bucky went silent as he waited for me to finish. But once I was done, I put a smile back on my face. "Let's go find something to watch."

"Don't do this again," he said.

"I'm not. I'm not avoiding it. I just—can't deal with everything all at once. I need time to think, okay?"

I turned toward the living room, and he followed after me. I sat on the couch, but he took the book before sitting down. He opened it on the coffee table and turned to the very back of the book. Then he flipped a knife out from under the pillows and stabbed it into the cover so hard it stuck straight through into the coffee table.

"Jesus," Graham said from the chair. The sound apparently broke him out of his reading trance.

"What are you doing?" I asked. Bucky shot me an irritated glance and ripped the knife down the length of the cover, revealing a hollowed-out center.

"You don't have enough time to process," he said. He pulled a small key out of the book and held it up to me. I had absolutely no idea why it was there or what it belonged to, but I took it anyway. It was small enough that I never noticed it. But Bucky did.

"What's this for?" I wondered. He tapped the side of his head, reminding me of the coordinates he was too afraid to write down.