In Their Hands ✧･ BARNES ✔

twenty six

   Zola slowly blinked her eyes open. They felt heavy and she felt too weak to hold them open. She would have dozed off again, but she didn't recognize this place and she wanted to find out where she had been taken. 

   It took her a few minutes to comfortably open her eyes. Her eyes weren't adjusting to the darkness of the room, so she could barely see anything around her. It took so long that she would start to fall asleep all over again. 

   She finally sat up off of the floor where she had been laying. It was extremely cold. Her hands had gone numb, so she had a hard time pushing herself up off of the floor. She began to whimper and wrap her arms around her frail body in hopes of keeping herself a little more warm. 

   Zola didn't see anyone else in the small room with her. She also didn't see a door, but that might have been because it was so dark. She didn't want to be in here if there wasn't a way out. Her head began to dart all over the walls as she searched for a door. There weren't any windows, either. Her breathing picked up and she could clearly see it because of how cold it was. 

   It became more of a struggle to catch her breath. She didn't understand it, but she was having a panic attack. She could see all of the times that she was locked away back in Russia playing like a montage in her head, all while she tried to find an exit to this place. 

   She ran to the walls and hit her hands against them as she cried out for help. She ran to every corner and slid her hands over the walls just to make sure that she hadn't missed a door. She fell to her knees in one of the corners in defeat. She was always being caught and taken and hidden and trapped. 

   She pulled her knees into her chest and leaned her head against them. She began to cry into her elbow because she knew that there was nothing that she could do. She was stuck again. She was going to go back to the bad guys and she would be forced to kill ad fight the good guys all over again. She didn't want that. 

   Her head lifted when she heard a quiet creaking from the other side of the room. It sounded like someone was stepping on a old floorboard. It freaked her out when she saw a hand lift one of the planks of wood that she sat on. She waited to see if someone was going to come up into the room, and when they didn't she slowly crawled over to the opening. She looked down into the opening, and there was a ladder that led her down into the main level of what seemed to be a cabin.

   There was light down there, and she saw a blanket, so she climbed down the ladder as fast as she could. She ran for the blanket, but stopped immediately when she saw James standing patiently by the couch where the blanket was. He didn't have on that weird gas mask, it was simply James. He had on a coat and he had on gloves so that his metal arm was hidden. 

   Zola stared at him in fear. At this point, she wasn't really mad at him. She was afraid of him. She was afraid of what he would do to her since no one else was here to stop him, she was afraid of what he must have done to her dad, she was afraid of him. She barely wanted to look at him, but she felt paralyzed. She was in shock: she was so shocked that she couldn't figure out how to move her eyes away from him or how to try and run for the door off to the side of the room. He would hurt her.

   "I'm not gonna hurt you, kid." He offers, for what it's worth. Zola would have raised an eyebrow, but she felt like she really couldn't control her body. She felt like she couldn't move away from him.

   When he saw that Zola had no interest in responding, he sighed and looked away for just a moment. Perhaps he was trying to find a way to explain that he was Bucky right now, and not the person that Zola was used to seeing him as. How could he get a kid to understand? An eight year old who barely understood herself? Trying to understand him? It sounded impossible.