Mind Control - OC X BUCKY BARNES

Chapter 15

Once Diana had awoken and they changed into civilian clothes, Steve was wearing a hat while Diana was wearing sunglasses. She slumps against his body as they stand in front of a vending machine in the hospital where he hid the flash drive, seeing it was gone.

They look up at Natasha pops a bubble with her gum, causing Steve to turn and push her into the next room. "Where is it?"

"Safe."

Diana slowly walks inside, holding onto her stomach as she shuts the door.

"Do better!"

Natasha frowns, "Where did you get it?"

"Why would I tell you?"

She tilts her head, "Fury gave it to you. Why?"

"What's on it?" Diana asks weakly.

"I don't know."

"Stop lying!" He raises his voice.

"I only act like I know everything, Rogers."

"I bet you knew Fury hired the pirates, didn't you?" Steve asks.

"Well, it makes sense. The ship was dirty, Fury needed a way in, so do you."

Steve leans in closer, "I'm not gonna ask you again."

"I know who killed Fury. Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe he exists, the ones who do call him the Winter Soldier. He's credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years."

Steve nods, "So he's a ghost story."

"Five years ago I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran, somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff, I pulled us out, but the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer, so he shot him straight through me." she pulls up her shirt to show him the scar on the side of her stomach. "Soviet slug, no rifling. Bye-bye bikinis."

"Yeah, I bet you look terrible in them now." Diana says softly, clutching her stomach.

"Going after him is a dead end. I know, I've tried." Natasha holds up the flash drive. "Like you said, he's a ghost story."

Steve takes the flash drive from her. "Well, let's find out what the ghost wants."

"You think this hospital has some drugs that'll make me feel better?" Diana laughs through the pain.

"What's wrong?" Natasha rushes over to her.

"Rumlow injected her neck with something...it's stopping her powers." Steve holds her side and helps her walk.

"Crap...your powers will slowly come back in 72 hours....it's just a whole lot of pain until then." Natasha says sadly. "They only made three doses in testing, ruling it unsafe. I thought they were destroyed."

"Great."

The three go to the mall, heading to a computer store. Diana keeps her hand locked with Steve's to keep herself up as Natasha types. "The drive has a Level Six homing program, so as soon as we boot up Shield will know exactly where we are."

"How much time do we have?"

"Uh...about nine minutes from..." She pops the flash drive into a MacBook Pro. "Now." Diana watches as Natasha types really fast. "Fury was right about that ship, somebody's trying to hide something. This drive is protected by some sort of AI, it keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands."

Steve looks around, "Can you override it?"

"The person who developed this is slightly smarter than me. Slightly." She smirks. "I'm gonna try running a tracer. This is a program that Shield developed to track hostile malware, so if we can't read the file, maybe we can find out where it came from."