.

.

.

"What's in the arm?" I questioned warily, taking a peek at the screen to find it filled with what looked to be chemical formulas.

She stayed silent. Only the smallest involuntary wince managed to seep through a rather blank mask.

"Valeriy?"

"Apparently me and Hydra think the same? We have the same fucking fail secure plan. Ayers Corp.... We use explosives too."

"...There's a bomb in the arm...."

"Sorry."

I shook my head. "You weren't the one who put it there."

"If I were, it'd be totally simple to remove. I'd know all the traps and triggers," she joked, switching back to the first device and twirling a marker between her fingers. "Mind if I draw on your arm? It'll come off. I'm going to just pinpoint where the things are. Better than digging around mostly blind?"

I merely rolled the shoulder in response for her to go on. For every beep of the silver box in her hand, a little symbol was drawn onto a plate. Meticulously working her way up the arm.

"There's a bomb in the monitors," I pieced together after nine minutes.

Having to move the bracelet away from the arm. What she said. There had to be explosives in them.

Valeriy winced, peering up at me, and that confirmed it. "Oh hey, they're not for you. Got nothing to do with you. They're for me. All these bracelets are made for me."

"Why would you need a bomb?"

"For the most part, it's a fail secure plan? If something of ours ends up where it shouldn't be, we can just dispose of it. Lessen the chances of someone getting my personal info through these bracelets. We can set off the small one, and I'll probably get away less burned than trying to bake? Half of these tools are rigged up too. Even the detector I'm using has stuff that goes kaboom."

"The small one," I repeated, picking up on her word choice, and glanced at the thing wrapped around my wrist. "There's more than one...."

"There's a much louder and destructive one? It has its uses. In need of a distraction, it's loud as fuck. Get stuck in a room or something, blow my way out. Probably makes escaping easier?"

"You're going to get yourself killed."

She laughed, shrugging. "Gramps made it so it never goes off unless we want it to. It's why we can use the small one to dispose of the bigger one harmlessly. If you're feeling wary of the explosives, I can remove the ones in the bracelet while I'm at this."

"No... Better keep it," I muttered. "If I lose control, it would be a simple way to deal with me."

Valeriy looked up from the arm, staring almost blankly at me. "...Bucky, we're not going to blow you up. Not even as a last resort."

I had no response to that, looking away from her when she reached up for my face. Her hand hovered in the air between us. I refused to look away from the television, where two men were trying to escape an old frontier jail with a horse of all things. Wasn't working in their favor.

A couple of tense seconds later, I felt the marker tip gliding across the plates of the shoulder. Silently, she pulled me away from the headboard to draw on the back. She didn't settle behind me, merely rose onto her knees. Probably so I could tell she wasn't doing more than just drawing on the arm from the way her body moved.

Wrap arm around torso. Crush the ribcage. Target incapacitated.

Shaking off the observation, I glanced down at the various symbols marked on the arm that congregated in two areas. One on the forearm. The other on the shoulder.

"There are two bombs in there.... Do they need to put two in?"

"Redundancies?" Valeriy offered with a shrug, settling back down in front of me. "They've got a tracker in each area too. Probably in the same unit or something."

"But why two? Isn't one enough to blow me up?"

"My guess? If you somehow lost the bottom half of the arm, with one boom they can stop any reverse engineering and deal with the people working on it. Doubt they'd use it for distractions. As for the one in the shoulder... yeah... that's a nasty one from what I can figure out from the formula..." she said, glancing at the tablet next to me. "Eve hasn't matched the two random things the sniffer picked up and they're not screaming out explosive to me.... Can probably ignore that...?"

"...You sure know how to make something sound so reassuring," I muttered sarcastically.

"I got no bloody idea what those are," Valeriy laughed, patting the plates of the arm. "So... you got any ideas on how to open this thing up?"

"Pry the plates off." The words tumbled out automatically, and with an automated thought, the back end of the plates lifted.

"Whoa, that's nifty.... I guess it's a little late to ask if they used some special light while they worked on it, huh? But having a light sensor trigger with this setup would be dumb.... I need to check a couple of things."

With that, she grabbed a flashlight, trying to peer into the arm between the plates. She moved randomly from space to space. From the forearm to the shoulder to the underarm. Moving the arm or twisting her body to get the angle she wanted to look inside.

"Could you do that plate flippy thing again? About five times? Slowly, please," Valeriy said, donning a pair of glasses from a case that had dropped to the floor from her reckless habit of tossing things as she searched for something else.

While I moved the plates of the arm, she kept bumping her head against it with how close she was staring at it. At one point, she straight up leaned her forehead against the arm. Likely to steady her sight.

"Okay, whatever you do, this arm does not move while my finger's inside. Tell me if you so much as think you might move so I can back out. 'Kay?" she questioned, a carefree smile on her lips that clashed with her words.

I nodded and held my breath to completely still myself.

She pulled off her gloves and braced her hand against the plates, sliding her pinky between the plates. Felt as if her finger disappeared from the sensors.

I could feel nothing inside. Only what interacted with the top of the plates. What I could sense was her finger wiggling back and forth a couple of times.

Valeriy sat back. Now that her finger was out of the arm, I began breathing again, as she moved the glasses to sit on the top of her hair. Pinching the bridge of her nose for a few seconds, she practically sighed out, "Bucky?"

The lightness in her voice completely gone. Not even an unsettling joke.

"Hmm?"

"Let's try this again. 'Cause I doubt I'm the only jackass who'd program that response to get the wires tripped... if those thinner than hair wires are what I think they are and they seem to be attached to all the plates."

I felt sick. Sick to the stomach. To the very core.

I was still doing what they wanted. They still pulled my strings. I almost blew us up with what I said.

They still ran my life....

Her hand grabbed onto mine, squeezing down almost reassuringly. "They've performed repairs on this before, right?"

I nodded, not trusting my own voice.

"Do you remember any instances of it?"

Another nod.

"Alright then. Let's try it this way. Walk me through exactly what they did to repair your arm. Or as much as you remember." When I was too scared to use my own voice, she spoke up again, "I only really need the first chunk of that memory."

"Val, his heartrate's too high."

"I guess I can always take this old school. Treat this like a bomb you find lying around."

'Why would a person find a bomb lying around?'

She grinned lazily, stretching out her arms and back. "Been a while since I've done this. Shall take some time. Could be fun, ye-ah?"

The slight break in her voice at the question practically screamed that this wasn't going to be 'fun' for her. Even her face was a tad too green to be so.

But Valeriy still pulled down the glasses into place and went back to peering into the arm. Finding ways to run through the loopholes in me.

And all I had to do was to find my voice.

I had the memories with the answers.

One of the first memories after the last time I sat in that chair. Finishing up with the repairs as they had said. Warily. Probably lashed out before they wiped me.

The young woman backed away from the arm. The back of her wrist pressed against her lips. Her pale grey eyes darting towards the bathroom for a moment before she shook her body out and pushed on with the examination.

"They..." I tried, swallowing the lump in my throat.

"Hmmm?" she hummed, her head popping up to look at me. The lenses on the glasses flickered from black to clear.

"...They put a rod between the plates... back here," I stated carefully, pulling off the comforter and showing her the spot at the back of the shoulder. "They do that before they do anything to the arm. Before they pry the plates."

A grin pulled at Valeriy's lips. "Now that's something I can work with."

Felt like a hand unclenched from crushing my heart. A lightness to my body.

It almost lasted if I didn't have to stop myself from shoving her off the bed when her shoulder almost collided with my jaw at her rush to look at the area. Keeping herself in front of me.

"There's no strings attached to this plate either from what I can see. Hang on. Going to look around inside first."

She crawled to the foot of the bed and grabbed a thin wire off the floor. Then dug to the bottom of her toolbox for a tub of clear substance. She pulled out a piece of it, kneading it between her fingers.

"This globby thing will keep the snake cam anchored in place, so you should be able to somewhat move around? No clue if you should move the arm too much. Something inside might shift."

I tried to calm down. Reduce the movements of my body. While she set up the camera. I wanted to turn around so she wasn't at my back.

Valeriy chuckled, placing a hand on the nape of my neck, and I barely managed not to jump out of my skin. Her thumb giving a comforting rub. Almost as if trying to assure me that everything will be fine.

"It's going to be fine, Bucky. You can check out what I'm seeing with the tablet. Seems like there's a hole where the rod would go through.... What do you know of the rod?"

I picked up the tablet next to my leg. The black screen turned into an image of inside the arm. Metal, gears, cylinders, wires, circuit boards.

"They've used metal and plastic," I replied.

"...O...kay...?"

"I don't see anything to complete a circuit."

"Me neither.... Think the snake cam can fit through that?"

"With wiggle room."

With that, the image on the tablet moved forward through the hole.

"How are you seeing this?" I asked. I had the tablet. The phone was halfway down the bed. The television was playing that show still.

Valeriy moved to settle in front of me again, and one of the lenses of her glasses was black. "I get to see two things at once if I wanted to. A little jarring but useful.... And I do believe we've located one of the bombs..." she noted, touching two points on the shoulder plates. "Matches what I've mapped out."

Two black boxes. One attached to the arm with three thick metal wires each with a ring in the space between the boxes. The middle of the three wires was the only support for the second black box that had all the thin wires connected to it.

"That might be a pulley system...? Bucky, could you flip up all the plates again? I want to check something."

I did not like how the second box shifted when I moved the plates. Even if it wasn't by much. It moved even more with her finger back between the plates.

"Those metal eyes are worrisome," the A.I. ghost commented, as the camera did a scan of the area.

"Sucks they're metal. No clue if it needs a completed circuit or not. Plastic doesn't even rule out a fucking thing. Bloody conductive plastics," Valeriy huffed, pulling the camera out. "Bucky, do you know what the metal rods are made of?"

"Titanium."

Couldn't be sure of the information. But it came to the front of my mind.

The young woman grabbed her phone. A few taps on the screen later, she went back to looking through the scattered tools on the bed. "Eve, which spray thingy is nonconductive?"

"...The green can if you're referring to the epoxy spray."

"And Bucky, your head's going to end up on my lap. Going into your arm from the top. So you get to pick between a face full of my stomach or you trust me enough to sit behind you."

I handed her the gloves. "I don't want you getting hurt."

Valeriy crunched up her nose in distaste as she reached for them. "Hoping you'd forgotten about them."

"Not a chance."

.

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Author's Note:

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