Nothing belongs to me. I just wanted to play with Marvel's toys.

Yes, there's an OC in here. Forgive me?

NB: Written in UK-English, but if you see any glaring errors where I use British terms instead of US ones please let me know and I'll change them. :)

Happy reading!

Broken Pieces

A bomb had gone off inside his head. Lights flashed behind his eyes. Red, white and blue. A constant roaring filled his ears. The sounds of battle from a lifetime ago or the sounds from a lifetime of battle?

Given the mess he was in, it wasn't surprising that it took less than twenty minutes for two armed HYDRA personnel to find him. He didn't want to get into the back of the fully enclosed black van. At least, he didn't think he wanted to, but he wasn't too good at thinking for himself. All those endless years of conditioning were hard to throw off.

Something somewhere inside him was screaming. But his body stepped inside the vehicle without a fight. Sat down. Tried very hard to hold it together. Hold him together. His mind was a shattered glass, at any moment it was liable to fall to pieces.

The van's engine rumbled to life. An added sensation that he could have done without, and then he heard the driver's voice from the cab in front, without fully registering any of the ensuing words.

"Who's she?"

"Amy Thomas. S.H.I.E.L.D. engineer. She's on Kraus's list."

"Throw her in the back."

He didn't turn his head as a woman was dragged, kicking, onto the seat opposite him by another HYDRA operative. Her struggle was futile and only served to earn her a punch in the face that split her bottom lip. She gave up fighting after that and the vehicle finally started to move.

Pain.

Pain began to blossom in every inch of his body, as the rush of adrenaline in his enhanced cells finally began to subside. The worst was his right arm, dislocated, maybe broken. But pain was familiar. It didn't have much power to bother him anymore. There were worse things than pain haunting his thoughts at present. That man's face. Finish it.

"You okay?"

James Buchanan Barnes. He didn't have a name. So it couldn't possibly belong to him. Bucky. But maybe, just maybe even he had had one once? End of the line.

"Hey, you okay?"

He hadn't heard the woman's question, at least, he hadn't realised it was addressed to him, but every muscle in his body tensed to attack when she nudged the toe of her shoe against his boot. He looked up. Ready to kill. A pair of blue eyes looked straight back. A shock jolted through him. Blue. Why blue? His chest rose. Fell. He couldn't breathe. He watched her eyes study his face before making a tell-tale flick over his left arm.

"You're the guy we've been hearing about, right? The ghost who killed Director Fury?"

Yes. He felt like a ghost. Hardly holding onto the slivers of his conscious mind. He saw her take in the armed guards that were positioned on either side of him. She shot a scornful smile in his direction, or tried to, but only half of her bloodied mouth seemed to want to cooperate, so it came off as less of a sneer than she had probably planned.

"I thought you'd be in charge."

"Shut up."

The guard who had dragged her into the back of the van in the first place drew his baton. The weapon buzzed, blue and menacing. The other two guards already had their guns drawn, and although they were pointed at him it would only take a second to alter their target.

"I thought you wanted me to talk?"

He watched the guard hit the woman in the stomach with enough force to rock the van. She choked up a mouthful of blood and slumped forward in her seat before sliding onto the floor.

He wasn't sitting in the back of a cramped metal van anymore. He was in a different place. A different time. It wasn't a small woman being beaten in front of him, but a small man. A man he would die to protect.

He wasn't conscious of grabbing the guard by the throat, but a ricochet of bullets off his metal arm summoned him back to the present. Machinery whirred. His grip tightened. Something snapped. He threw the man's lifeless body at the gunman on his left, then kicked out at the other gunman hard enough to send him crashing through the back doors of the vehicle.

A bullet from the second man's own gun dispatched the final HYDRA soldier. A shot from the front of the vehicle clipped his side, but a shower of return fire put an end to that retaliation.

"D'you just shoot the driver?"

The woman groaned. She was still on the floor, alive, just about.

It seemed to take all the effort in the world for her to lift her head. They stared at each other, as the van picked up speed. Neither one moved.

"This is the part where you kill me, right?"

Right.

He hadn't actually realised he was already pointing the gun at her head, but his finger tightened on the trigger.

Wrong?

She wasn't his mission. She wasn't a threat. He didn't need to kill her. He could make a different choice. But she kept looking at him with those hateful blue eyes. The man had blue eyes. He holstered the gun. He only had one arm that he could rely on at the moment and he had just decided that he was going to need it.

She didn't fight him when he grabbed her. Perhaps she was too terrified. Perhaps too injured. He hardly felt her weight as he tossed her over his shoulder and walked to the gaping hole where the back door of the van had been.

They were travelling at maybe sixty miles an hour when he jumped.

He wanted to use the speed of the vehicle, to work with the momentum and not against it, but he couldn't do any of that with a passenger, so he absorbed the full shock of impact with his legs. More pain. Barely noted. They were on a freeway. He ran between the speeding cars, jumped the barrier at the edge of the road and slid out of sight down the steep grass verge on the other side. Behind him, somewhere, the HYDRA van crashed and exploded.

He dropped the woman on the ground. She lay there for a moment, stunned and winded, before gingerly easing herself into a sitting position. She made no motion to stand. He had already started to leave. He didn't know where he was going, but it slowly dawned on him that it wasn't going to be back to base.

"Thank you."

He stopped. Hesitated. Turned around.

"What?"

"Thank you?" she said. She looked a little uncertain, and a lot as though she wished she had kept her mouth shut and he had kept on walking. She flinched under the weight of his gaze. "You didn't have to save me, but you did. So, thank you."

He didn't remember ever being thanked for anything ever before so three thank yous in under twenty seconds was a little overwhelming. She touched her cut lip with the tip of her tongue, gaze slanting nervously to the side.

"Did you kill the Captain?"

"Who?"

"Captain Rogers. I'm assuming he's the only guy who could leave you looking like that."

She nodded at his battered, bloodied, broken body, but he barely noticed.

The name stuck in his brain like a splinter.

"What did you call him?"

"Captain Rogers. Steve Rogers." She waited for something, but didn't receive it. "You know, Captain America?"

Silence fell between them again. The traffic roared away out of sight. Somewhere in the distance, sirens sounded. She studied him as though he were a specimen under a microscope.

"No."

"No?"

"No. I didn't kill him."

"Oh. Good." She tried a weak smile, but didn't have very much more luck than the first time she'd attempted to force her lips to cooperate. "Listen, can I-" she paused, but then pressed on "-can I help you fix your shoulder?"

He scowled down at her, daring her to continue.

"Not your- I meant-" She cleared her throat. "It's dislocated, isn't it? I don't suppose you can just wander into the emergency room."

"I don't need your help."

"I gathered. I'm offering it all the same."

"Why?"

She stared down at her lap.

"Because I owe you. And you didn't kill the Captain. And after today I'm not sure if I know what's right or wrong anymore, but I do know there are more of those men out there and I'm pretty sure they'll be coming after you."

None of that made sense to him, but he sat down on the grass beside her. She eyed him hesitantly.

"So, that's a yes?" she asked.

He didn't see the point in answering. Instead, he gave her a look and tried to determine if this was a trap – but he was the one with the gun and the metal arm. He was the walking weapon. She barely looked like she was hanging on to consciousness – so he decided to wait and see what happened next before she lost that battle and he lost her help.

She winced and gritted her teeth as she got into position beside him. He guessed she had at least a few fractured ribs, if not some internal bleeding, probably a concussion too. He didn't know if she was going to have the strength left in her fragile body to snap his shoulder back into its socket.

And then she surprised him completely.

"Sorry. I think this is going to hurt," she said, catching hold of his wrist in both of her hands.

The sensation of touch was curious. So, as she bent her legs to give herself some leverage, and as she lent her full weight back, pulling his arm slowly straight, he tried very hard to concentrate on the unfamiliar feeling of warm human skin and not the shooting pain that had every cell in his body screaming.

There was a grinding of bone on bone, followed by a blissful pop, and then the roaring pain lessened to a dull throb. He stood up, flexed his fingers and tested the movement of his arm.

"Better?" she asked. Well, it was more of a wheeze. One of her own arms was wrapped around her chest as she took a series of fast shallow breaths before a sequence of hacking coughs wracked her body.

"Yes."

He watched her, waited, realised he was waiting for an order, which darkened the frown that he was already wearing. Slowly, uncertainly, he offered her his hand. She stared back at him, just as guarded, and then, incredibly, she reached for him. He pulled her to her feet. She was about half a head shorter than he was, at least that was the impression he got in the millisecond that she remained standing. The moment she tried it unaided her legs gave out and she ended up on the floor again.

"You know, I think I'm good down here."

She moved carefully, shifting off her knees and onto her back.

He kept watching her, unsure of what to do.

Leave.

Obviously.

But… that faint flicker of feeling returned… the one he'd felt in the back of the van when he'd killed the guard for beating her… there was a shard of his mind that was telling him he wasn't the kind of man who walked away and left someone sitting hurt in the dirt.

He crushed that thought under the memory of a dozen merciless assassinations, as the woman reached into the pocket of her pants and pulled out a cell phone.

"I'll give you five minutes until I call for help," she said.

"Three."

"What?"

"Three minutes. You'll be unconscious in five."

He waited just long enough for her to give her head one small nod of understanding, and then he was gone.