The Winter Wraith (Bucky Barnes x Reader)

Chapter 18 - Ruby Red

You are at the door to the building and halfway down a narrow side street before you check to see if the Winter Soldier is following you, the pleas of the citizens suffocating your senses. Your gut is screaming at you to run, to get out of here, but your head tells you to stay low and go unnoticed. Your gun is strapped under your clothes to avoid the sun catching it and alerting anyone of your presence, but the Winter Soldier's arm is on full display. You don't blame him, of course, the only long-sleeved clothes he had was his tuxedo. Stopping in some shadows behind a dumpster, still out of view of the soldiers, the Winter Soldier turns to you. "If you go first, they won't see you. I'll follow, but it's a sunny day and my arm is reflective so there's a possibility they'll notice me. I can fight-"

Seeing the look on your face, he stops talking. "Yeah no, not happening. We'll go together, and if they see us, we fight together."

Grabbing his hand, you pull him after you onto the streets. You make it about halfway down the alley directly behind the soldiers before, much to your annoyance, one of the civilians shouts at you to help them, to get them out of there. Immediately, a small cluster of soldiers begin to chase after you, too organised to not have planned for this event.

You break into a run, taking a right at the end of the alley, left at another until you come to a slightly wider street. The Hydra soldiers have fallen behind, but they round the corner just as you stop. There is still not enough room to fight side by side, caged as you are by towering buildings and steep brick walls, so you signal to the Winter Soldier to move further down the street. He nods, and you pretend you have run out of breath, putting on a charade for the Hydra soldiers. Before the Winter Soldier runs, he hesitates. "We don't have to kill them, you know."

"Go," you command, rolling your eyes.

They only sent four men, obviously mistaking you for civilians. You open your mouth to identify yourself but stop short. Something tells you Hydra isn't the one who invited you here, and you would rather they don't find out about your little excursion.

Two of the men race past you, after the Winter Soldier, while the other two slowly creep up on you. You look to the man on the right. Slightly short, a tuft of dull orange hair peeking over the top of the mask disguising his features, and emanating the purest feeling of elation. Looks like he gets just as much of a kick as you do out of killing people. He dies first.

Already removing the gun from his holster, he charges towards you. He yells something along the lines of 'don't resist and you won't be harmed', which is absolute rubbish but you act like you believe it. You don't let him get closer than twenty metres before you use your powers to remove the pin, twist the lever and detonate two of the hand grenades on the man's body. He explodes in a burst of skin and shrapnel, his blood falling around the street like rain. Along with the occasional organ. The other soldier's mouth is open in surprise, his eyes wide, but he recovers swiftly. He begins creeping towards you, repeating the words of the previous soldier. After all, that was just bad luck, wasn't it? There was no way you could have made that grenade explode.

You try to wrestle your focus back to the task at hand, but that rush of heat when the gunpowder on the man caught fire, that scorching wave that would have singed you had you been any closer, felt familiar somehow. Not just familiar in the way you had blown people up before, but something in your chest.

The desperation the child sees in her mother, the panic in her eyes, frightens her more than the way the flames lick the top of the stairs as the smoke dances down the banister.
But the child has always been stubborn. "Not without you!"
"I have to help your father," her eyes search the flames engulfing the upper level of the house for any sign of her husband.
The child relents, dashing outside to join the small crowd gathered on the gravel road. As their focus turns to the child, they do not notice the first pillar break. They do not hear the first cries of the dying house, do not notice-