hero_reborn | (no subject)

Living the kind of life she's had, you get to the point where you have to learn the line between paranoid and properly paranoid. Rikki has a bad habit of screwing up that line, which she's fully prepared to blame for the fact that she barely gets in so much as a retaliatory punch when some remnant of HYDRA grabs her.

(In her defense, 'hanging out with your great uncle' isn't usually super-high on her list of dangerous activities.)

Lucky for her, all they actually know about her is that she's been spending time with Bucky and she doesn't seem to have a stable home. Which means that they're pretty sure no one's going to miss her if she happens to disappear. And. They're not wrong.

But it also means that they don't know she's not just some dumb teenager they can toss in a locked room and count on to be too terrified and/or incompetent to pose a threat. When a guard comes in to check on her, it's pathetically easy to play unconscious possum until he's close enough to get his legs knocked out from under him and take an elbow to the face. He's not carrying much in the way of weaponry because that would be too easy, but he does have a taser-thing that she's careful to hold pointed away from her, because fuck hurting herself with their weird HYDRA weaponry.

Her best bet after that is basically to wander around looking for (a) Bucky or (b) some idea of where she is and not get caught. Which is actually going pretty well for her so far.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, most people's great uncles aren't former government assassins. So unfortunately, yours comes with way more baggage than he literally ever hoped or thought he would.

Fucking HYDRA.

Anyway, he'd pretty much dropped everything when he'd found out what happened. HYDRA had Rikki, and he knows better than anyone what they're capable of doing, so he doesn't stop to think, he just acts.

Which is probably why he winds up getting caught too.

Bucky fights like a wolverine when they try to take him in, even though he knows this is probably his best chance of actually catching up with Rikki and figuring out a way to get her out. It's not enough to hold back his instinctive panic, and he has no idea what they wind up hitting him with, but he's pretty sure it would have killed a normal person.

He just feels groggy and disoriented when he wakes up in a cell. Still, he's lucky to wake up with his memories at all, and so of course the priority becomes trying to get himself out of the specially designed handcuffs and other restraints as fast as possible. They need to get out of here.

So, she was kind of hoping he'd have already escaped and had a plan for getting out of this. A little optimistic, maybe, but she's still a teenager, she's allowed a little unrealistic optimism. Lucky for her, she also prepares for the worst.

It's pretty easy to guess that the majority of guards and tech are going to be clustered around (a) high-profile prisoners (i.e. Bucky), (b) high-profile HYDRA heads (hopefully none of which are here), and (c) high-profile tech or weaponry. So when she finds a cluster, she's hit some kind of jackpot. Or, well, would be hitting it if she thought she could take on the place on her own.

Which. No. But she's the only one here, so she'll make do. She can't get near him, but she can find an in to the video and audio feed in his cell, and (lucky for her) they go both ways.

"I know you're not used to the uncle thing, but this is the worst game of hide-and-seek I've ever played."

Thank God, she's still alive. Not that he'd really doubted it - Rikki's pretty scrappy, as it turns out, and apparently this kind of thing is more or less an average Tuesday for her - but accidents, mistakes, whatever, they happen. Even for professionals.

It's how he got into this fucking mess in the first place.

"Yeah, well..." Bucky slams the restraints against the wall again as hard as he can, trying to crack through them with his left hand. He thinks he's starting to feel it give.

"Most great uncles just have to worry about who's cheating at bingo down at the old folks' home."

He looks up at the video feed, squinting a little, trying to figure out where she actually is.

"Where are you?"

"Did you want to go to an old folks home? I bet you could sneak in."

Aaaaand there's the problem. She has access to the surveillance system, but not an actual map of the place. She has to piece it together from the images. "Um, hold that thought."

"What?" Rikki, that's super not good news. Don't just leave things like that! "What's going on?"

While waiting for a response, he's just going to keep smashing the restraints. Because he's kind of got limited faith in HYDRA and reasonably more in you, buddy, but it would be better if he wasn't stuck in here anymore.

"I'm fine, jeez, don't tear out your arm." She sounds slightly distracted, but there's no sounds of a fight, so that's good. "I'm just still trying to figure out this place. I just have video and stuff, there's no files or floor plan."