Can't Catch Me - Bucky Barnes

Chapter 16

Erika blinked the blurry vision away. Everything appeared to look like she was peering through a blurred glass window. She felt weak. Her body fought her when she tried to rise, that and the hand restraints.

She tugged her arms aggressively. It only hurt her sore body when she attempted this. Shit. How did she get stuck in this situation? She knew why, she'd let her guard fall so far that she forgot that anyone else existed and would attempt something like this.

She'd trapped herself in an imaginary world where she got the man and the money. She forgot the part where she was internationally wanted dead.

Erika gave another last pull at the restraints and only struggled more. She heard a voice give a tut, tut, tut sound.

"That's not gonna work Erika." They said, Erika knew the voice was male. It was also very russian.

"Who are you?" She said, that was what she attempted to say anyways. Her world's slurred together as if she was drunk and it sounded more like Whoo er yoo.

The man laughed at her. She felt a hand caress her face. She jerked away but finally felt the tug of a neck restraint she hadn't noticed before.

"I once pined for that face. To hold it in my hands." He grabbed her chin with his hand. Erika squinted at his face as her vision slowly returned. She could see warm brown skin. perhaps brown and black hair. "Now I can only remember the worst of you."

"Who the fuck are you?" Erika shouted. He shushed her. The same voice that had shushed her in the alley.

"You know who I am. Look at me Erika. Look at my face." He grabbed her shoulders and stared into her eyes that were slowly gaining vision.

She saw his outline. His broad shoulders and his terribly familiar features. His dark eyes and the guilt of the past.

"Oh god." Erika muttered.

"Recognize me now do you? After everything we've been through." He rubbed her shoulders and she slammed her back into the chair causing him to release her.

"I think we remember the past very differently." She said and watched him shake his head.

"I remember what I want." He smiled.

"Sergei, we thought -"

"That I was dead? Yeah it really seemed that way didn't it. You probably forgot when I fell that day that Hydra was right on our tail. Watching me fall. Receiving the chance to pick me up." Sergei stared at her while she just looked in shock. "I always wondered when you and Nina would return. To save me from my fate. You never showed up."

"How long have you-? Where are we?" Erika peered around him and looked at the room. Stone walls and a familiar door that clues her in. They were definitely sitting in a Hydra base. "Oh shit."

"Look at me Erika. We really should've never saved you. I was such a fool. A fool in love." He looked down as if disappointed with himself.

"You loved me? I was barely even myself back then. You loved a killer Sergei."

"Yeah, I know. That same Killer that murdered my family." She stepped back from her.

"No, you know what happened. I had no control over my first attack. I couldn't save your mother on the second. When you fell, we thought you'd died!" Erika said, still trying to reclaim some humanity.

"Yet I still loved you."

"What! How could you love that? Why are you telling me this now? Why did you take me here? What is Hydra doing to you?"