verb.
To fall back under pressure. To shrink back physically or emotionally.
noun.
The kickback of a gun upon firing.
•
It takes a stubborn mind to cling to their humanity when the world seeks to strip it away.
It takes a desperate soul to reach f...
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It was amazing how familiar the sensations were, her boots crunching through that hardened layer of ice atop the snow, the sting of flakes whipping past her cheeks as that frigid wind whipped around Kat's body. For just a brief, fleeting second, she could have been standing at her father's side, stealing a mouthful from his hipflask and feeling the burn of alcohol hitting the pit of her empty stomach.
A shiver threatened to creep up her spine, but it was driven back down. She wasn't sure if it stemmed from the breath-taking cold, or the sight of the steel door set into the rocky outcropping before them. The steel door that sat slightly ajar.
Evidently, this doctor wasn't concerned about covering his tracks. It meant Kat didn't need to hope and pray that she had remembered the passcode correctly.
"He can't have been here more than a few hours."
Steve's low murmur at her side drew her gaze from where it had dropped to the boot prints in the snow before them, the hollows beginning to fill with fresh flakes.
"Long enough to wake 'em up." Bucky breathed at her side, his jaw tightening grimly as Kat rolled her shoulders.
"We don't know that." She countered softly, unsure as to why they had dropped their voices so low, as if they were afraid of being overheard. It seemed overcautious out here. "We won't know what we're looking at until we're in there." Unbidden, her hand drifted to the pistol at her side as she looked up to Bucky; "See you downstairs?"
"Stay safe." He murmured; the words tense as his eyes locked on the darkness beyond the doorway facing them. His mind already set, that wall against what he was about to face down already built. A stony exterior formed to protect himself against the spectres that lurked beyond the doorway.
Swallowing thickly at the hardened expression that had come over him, Kat darted a small glance to the man beyond Bucky's shoulder, meeting Steve's eyes yet seeing none of the trepidation she was sure her own carried. It was reassuring, it that brief moment of wordless communication, little more than a blink. She was sure he read what she was trying to convey. Look after him.
She was sure he would.
Allowing herself one more glance at Bucky's tense shoulders as Steve stepped towards the entryway, a small, unsteady breath left Kat as she turned to jog across the hostile plateau, her own eyes set to the path she needed to follow. Find the records, hope against hope that there was some control trigger for the soldiers, and then follow the boys into the fray.
She could do this.
"Ah jeez- fuck, it's cold..."
Kat's low grumble to herself was barely audible over the wailing wind, her lips pulling back into a grimace as her boots skidded on the ice beneath her feet, the notable change in terrain alerting her to the fact that she was crossing the concrete helipad – though now long buried under decades of ice that had gladly settled on the flat surface. The surface where Bucky had first broken his programming for her, laying a hand on her shoulder to prevent her skidding further across the ice after she had been thrown by the serum test subject.
