The Hurt And The Healing: Bucky X OC

Chapter Seventy: One More Night

A very big trigger warning for sexual assault, PTSD, and violence, as well as a trigger warning for references to human trafficking.

It had been a bad day, even by Bucky's standards. In fact, it was even worse by Bucky's standards because he had survived it but someone else hadn't. Someone who deserved to live far more than he did.

He had known about the warehouse. Known that there was no way those shipping containers were carrying just Amazon packages. He'd spent the better part of a week watching and waiting. And on the fifth day he saw her. A woman, no older than Mara, dressed in ratty clothes and crying as she was forced into a crate.

He was ready for a fight, and now he knew that it was right for him to start it. Raynor's rules had been replaced by his own criteria. Rule Number One: only the confirmed to be guilty were punished. Rule Number Two: he only hurt those he had to, whether for his safety or for the safety of bystanders. And Rule Number Three: the Winter Soldier had nothing to do with it. It was just him, Bucky Barnes, righting wrongs he had no part in.

And damn it felt good.

Rule Number One met, he leapt from the roof and landed in a single fluid motion. Rule Number Two was also easy. The goons hired by the traffickers were cheap and easily subdued. Their numbers were sparse, the cameras turned away, and within minutes he was at the crate and ripping the lock off.

He should have known the moment he realized there were less than a dozen guards in the facility. He should have known the moment he saw that woman's face and she stared at him as if he were a dead man. He should have known.

But he hadn't known until the bullet meant for him struck her in the chest.

The fight was a blur of fists and shouts and bullets bouncing off of his palm. The smugglers and their goons didn't matter. They would pay for their crimes eventually. What mattered was her. The woman with the tear streaked face and the eyes that saw nothing by the time Bucky reached her.

They had trampled her in their eagerness to kill him.

He destroyed the loading dock in his determination to punish them.

He carried her body to a nearby hospital, along with the address where her captors bodies and the evidence of their crimes could be found. He'd managed enough restraint to leave the majority of her captors alive. Either they would be punished by the courts for their crimes against humanity or he would find them again and punish them himself. Either way they would suffer. He was sure of that.

He couldn't just leave her there, surrounded by the people who had killed her. She had died because of his hubris, the least he could do was take her somewhere warm and bright where her body would be treated with more respect in death than in life.

She was too light and it wasn't because of the blood loss. She was emaciated, a grown woman the size of a prepubescent girl.

As her blood smeared on his jacket Bucky whispered the Lord's Prayer, needing God to look down on them and see her. See her and welcome her into Heaven like the lost child she was.

"I'm so sorry," he said softly as he placed her on the ground before the ambulance bay doors. He gently closed her empty black eyes, brushed the stray hairs from her face, and straightened her clothes. If you ignored the deep red that had finally stopped spreading over her clothes she almost looked asleep. The thought disturbed him and he stood and backed away until he was hidden behind a pillar.

The moment an EMT spotted her gently lain body and screamed for help Bucky turned and ran.

He ran until he reached Mara's street, and it was only then that he stopped and tried to collect himself, knowing that if she saw him like this she'd panic.