The Coffee Shop Girl ~ Bucky Barnes

Chapter 14

Bucky didn't know how to feel. His head felt like it was all mixed up and he couldn't organise his thoughts, but the one fact of the situation kept throwing itself in his face before he could stop it: he was the reason Katia was blind. It was like someone had speared an icy dagger through his chest, but at the same time he felt like he was boiling with rage. A tiny little voice in the back of his head kept telling him that it wasn't his fault, that Hydra had made him do it, but he kept pushing it back whenever it dared to offer its opinion.

He hadn't left the vents in almost three weeks except twice under the cover of darkness when he had snuck into the kitchen to take some food before he retreated back up to the air conditioning system. If he hadn't been a super soldier, he surely would have given up long ago, but a combination of the serum and his years of training as an assassin meant that he didn't have too much trouble keeping silent for hours at a time when it was necessary.

He had learned a lot during his time in the vents, like that Wilson was prone to start singing karaoke style with a bottle of soap whenever he was in his own room, and Barton had a dart board on the back of his door that he routinely pinned pictures of the other Avengers faces to and took shots at them. The only person Bucky hadn't seen on the board was Natasha, most likely because the blonde man was far too scared of his friend to risk her finding out about what he was doing.

Coincidentally, Natasha's room was also the only place that Bucky strictly avoided when he was crawling through the vents because he knew full well that she would hear him and make him come down from the vents. As much as he hated to admit it, Bucky was actually slightly scared of the red haired woman, even though he had been one of the people to train her during her time in the Red Room. She was a force to be reckoned with at the best of times and he had no desire for her to be angry at him, though he was slightly worried she would be miffed with him because she was Katia's best friend. Sometimes he wondered if she actually knew he was there when he was sitting in the vents above the kitchen or any other communal areas, biding his time to reappear.

He hadn't seen Katia since the incident and had gathered from a range of conversations that she had returned to her own flat later that day and had not been seen by any of the Avengers since. He was sort of glad that she hadn't stuck around, because it was a guarantee that he wasn't going to encounter her, especially seeing as she seemed strangely adept at noticing when he was in the vents near her.

He had also found a couple of small rooms hidden in the vents. Little trap doors in the ceiling that led to tiny, almost cupboard rooms that were perfect for sitting up properly for a little while before he returned to crawling through the vents. Of course, they were generally unused and so a light layer of cobwebs had built up over some of them, but others were strangely clean. Bucky strongly suspected that they had been put there deliberately in case of an emergency situation where they had to hide in the vents, and he did his best not to stay in there for too long just in case someone was able to track him whilst he was there.

In fact, this belief that he might have been being watched had been exactly what kept him out of the reaches of Barton over the weeks. The man had been keeping an eye on the minimum surveillance that covered the rooms. Though Tony had left the majority of the vents disconnected from the security systems, the safe rooms were a complete secret from everyone except the original Avengers. Even Katia didn't know about them. Tony had created them so the Avengers would know where to go if they ever found themselves in a sticky situation, but Tony had added just the basics of security to the rooms so he could make sure no-one was hiding up there more generally. This meant that he and Clint were able to see the abnormality within the oxygen consumed within the rooms and so they did not find it too difficult to track Bucky's progress through the vents.