Winter's End [winter soldier//Bucky Barnes AU]

Chapter Twenty Two

*Bucky's POV*

When we finally arrived at the top level, everyone else was there. They breathed a sigh of relief when they saw us.

Taking a look around at the group, it was obvious that they were banged up. May and Skye had bruises and cuts, but looked relatively unarmed, which made sense because they were on the safest level. Peter, Clint, Tony and Bruce were slightly worse, with anything ranging from cuts to what appeared to be broken limbs. Peter was clutching his arm to his chest, a grimace on his face. Tony's armor appeared slightly damaged, as did Clint's bow, and I hoped that the damage wasn't that bad.

Bruce had clearly hulked out at some point, because of how destroyed the place was and how ripped his clothes were. He had a guilty look in his eyes.

"Where have you been?" Clint asked, pushing through everyone else with an angry frown on his face. I looked at Steve, who sighed and started talking.

"There was a bit of a hold up on the last level. After we took the bottom, we went to help Nat and Sarah, and found out that Garrett is still alive, and that they have way more super soldiers than we thought. They call them centipede soldiers, and they have an orange centipede structure on their right arms. Hell of a lot stronger than they look, so they held us up a bit." He said, slightly out of breath like the rest of us. A skeptical look crossed Clint's face for a moment then quickly disappeared.

"Yeah, we ran into a few of them too. Took us a while to get past them." Tony said. "What was on the bottom level? Did you find any mutants?"

"Yeah, we found hundreds. But most of them are mortally wounded. All we could do was tell them the way out, and if they make it, good for them. If not...death would probably be kinder." I answered uneasily, a guilty feeling building up in my gut. I wanted to save them, no matter how futile it was, but the entire world was at stake here- and I couldn't risk the lives of seven billion for a few hundred mutants, that probably wouldn't even live. It was a hard choice, but I know I had made the right one.

"Wait, you mentioned that Garrett was still alive. But how? And where is he? Did you kill him?" Peter asked, his brows knotting together confusedly. Sarah spoke this time.

"We don't know how he's still alive, but we left him on the fifth level. I froze him. When we blow the place up, hopefully he'll blow up too." She said. Peter nodded.

Suddenly we heard a loud bang from the elevator doors, the sound echoing loudly across the room. It sounded as if someone was stuck and trying to break through to get to us.

Skye immediately grabbed a device from her pocket and clicked a button hurriedly, before typing furiously on the screen.

"Ok I just locked the doors, so it'll take them a while to -"

Her sentence was cut short when the doors exploded, flying off of their hinges and across the room. I yelled and dove for Sarah quickly, yanking us both down to the floor and shielding her body with mine. I held on to her tightly and she grabbed my shirt with her fist, both of us pulling ourselves tighter to avoid the shrapnel from the doors. I could hear the crackling of fire, coming from the now-gaping hole where the elevator should be, and released Sarah cautiously to look closer.

I slowly looked around, seeing that most of the team was standing up like us. I coughed from the horribly thick cloud of smoke.

Sarah started coughing too, and I reached my hand down to pull her to her feet. She clasped it tightly and shakily stood, blood still oozing from her leg wound. My eyes adjusted to the smoke- making out the shape of a human standing in the empty doorway. The smoke had barely cleared before I knew exactly who it was.