Chapter Text
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| [00:23] FROM: LEVIATHAN
|
| 17 forest ave, greenhaven, rye, ny
| 9 pm| [00:23] FROM: LEVIATHAN
|
| 30 minute window| [00:24] FROM: LEVIATHAN
|
| dodge charger, hellcat
| black
| outside the garage, 8:30 pm| [00:24] FROM: LEVIATHAN
|
| has shared a pin| [00:30] TO: LEVIATHAN
|
| ok
[ pin has expired ]
[ ... ]
001. [ 17 forest ave, greenhaven, rye, ny ]
He sets the iPod on the dash. The screen is small, lit brightly in the dark, black text on a white background. The bar along the bottom fills with blue, the time counting down, or up, depending on how you viewed it.
He didn’t, really. That wasn’t his job.
He leans back against the leather seat, the back of his head curving into the headrest. His fingers rest on the steering wheel and they move along with the rest of him. The thump of a bass, a spike of treble. It’s the dark of night, the engine cut, the headlights off.
Two earbuds in, sound spilling, ebbing through him. He had nerves once, but now he’s that space between two beats, the jump in blood from one sound to the next. His shoulders move to the music, his foot tapping against the brake pedal without any conscious acknowledgement on his part.
In front of him, framing the steering wheel, peeking out of black, leather driving gloves cut off at the fingers, there’s flesh on side and the ridges of metal on the other.
The moonlight shimmers through the windshield, catches on metal, refracts back into his eyes.
Bucky smiles.
Good thing he has sunglasses.
///
“How much longer?” he asks. His back is pressed against the doorframe, but he looks in over his shoulder. He’s cool in the heat of the moment, but he has to admit there’s something nervy about counting down the clock the way they have.
He looks at his watch, a square screen that lights up with numbers, bright green against black. It’s an older model, too bright in the dark. There’s a scratch across the face of it too and he frowns, taps it with a finger. He needs to get it fixed, maybe with their next—
21:54, it gleams brightly.
“Six minutes until,” he says and this time he can’t really hide how tight his voice has gone.
“Would be quicker if someone could shut the fuck up,” Natasha growls.
“Could be worse,” a voice comes from next to her. Natasha is crouched on the ground, eye-to-eye with the vault, one ear against the cool gunmetal, her hand at the dial. Above her, Sam holds a flashlight, shining down into the general area.
“Could be better,” Natasha grunts back.
“No need for that,” Steve mutters. He shifts the rifle from one shoulder to the other. It was all a bit heavy-handed, but this job left no room for error. Personally, he would have preferred glocks, but try telling Tony you wanted to run a job without the tech he personally assigns. Still, cut off rifles are a bit tall to handle a few uptight billionaires.
“Can you both just, shut up?” Natasha asks and this time she’s not so polite.
Steve’s nerves are getting the better of him.
He shifts from one foot to the other and looks out onto the hallway. It’s still clear, the long corridor shadowed, except for the end, where squares of white moonlight are cast through the high windows, bright against the black and white tiled floor.
“You do know you’re on the clock right?” a voice buzzes into his ears and he hears both Natasha and Sam lightly curse from the room.
“No, Stark,” Steve says through gritted teeth. “That had escaped me.”
“A lot of attitude for someone who has four minutes left until every siren in the tri-state area goes off.” In retrospect, it had been a mistake to let Tony into their ears.
Take upgraded communications equipment, they said.
It’ll be fun, they said.
The proverbial ‘they’ had clearly never run a job with Tony Stark on the other end of the fucking communications device. It was like the persistent buzzing of a particularly irritating gnat with control issues.
“Boys,” Natasha says, sweetly. “If you want to get paid, you are going to shut up and let me finish my fucking job. Another word out of any of you and I will slit your throats in your sleep, that is not a threat but a full, sweet promise.”
A pause and then a low crackle over the line.
“Well that seems a little extreme.”
Steve doesn’t say anything to that. His heart is beating somewhere in the vicinity of his throat, his adrenaline pumping through every inch of his body. He’s aware. He’s hyper-fucking-aware; it’s crawling across his skin, like a live spider. He tries not to shudder.
He lifts his stupid, fucking, broken old watch again and types out a text.
| [21:56] TO: BARNES
|
| running it close. get ready for full throttle.
There’s an answer inside a minute.
| [21:56] FROM: BARNES
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| no one says that| [21:56] FROM: BARNES
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| ok
The watch flicks off and Steve can feel the seconds tick down somewhere inside of his head. He doesn’t like being late, but that’s not really the issue. He doesn’t feel like being caught with his hands in a billionaire’s home safe. It’s a lot messier when you have to clean blood stains off of white carpet.
Steve is about to lose his fucking chill and scream at all of them when he hears the sound of a hiss and a click and the blessed, beautiful sounds of Natasha gloating quietly, in the only way Natasha knows how. His teeth, which he hadn’t realized he had been clenching, loosen, the tension on his shoulders lifting, if barely.
Then—
“Bad news, team,” Tony’s voice comes, sharp over the line. “Our favorite philanthropist is a minute early. T-minus ninety seconds until he pulls up the drive. Get the loot and get out. Fast.”
“Fuck,” Natasha grunts, from near the safe.
“Motherfucker,” Sam says with a sigh. He leans over the top and then, looking mildly concerned, switches his flashlight off.
“Don’t worry,” Steve says, grimly. “This is why they pay us the big bucks.”
By us, he means him and Sam.
And by they, he meant—well, he’s not sure.
“Time to go, handsome,” Natasha says, patting Steve’s chest and sliding out of the room with her small, black backpack slid over her petite shoulders again. It sits heavier than it did before.
“Sam,” Steve grunts, his adrenaline spiking, and Sam nods at him.
The vault behind them is shut again, sealed securely. They close the door and run.
Natasha’s at the back door, turning the handle before Steve thinks to warn her.
“Nat!” he yells, too late.
Within a second, the alarm goes up, a siren so loud, it shrieks, piercing the air, jarring into the place where Steve’s chest was already reacting to everything in hyperdrive. Once upon a time, it would have knocked him over sideways. Good thing he’s grown about a foot and a half and gained a hundred pounds since then.
“Motherfucker!” Sam shouts again.
Steve doesn’t wait. He shoves Natasha and Sam out the door before doubling back, down the hallway to where he had passed the alarm security before. Bracing himself, he takes the butt of his rifle and smashes it in.
Steve doesn’t know who the fuck is employing them, but whoever they are, they were going to pay him and they were going to pay him good.
///
The thing about being the getaway driver was this: he waited in the car, setting the music on his iPod to the right song. The right song was key, he had learned that the hard way, on the dime of a different employer. Pick the wrong song, the wrong beat, and everything was off—the tempo of the job, the rhythm of the night. If it ended too quickly, you were fucked. If it ended too late, you were even more fucked.
Everything was timed, to a second. No one else really understood, but he did. He felt that in his fucking soul, the notes embedding time into him on a cellular level, his mitochondria ready to flick on the ignition at the word.
He waits and he taps his fingers on top of the steering wheel.
He looks at the messages on his phone and smiles; a crooked, pleased thing.
When the siren goes off, he hears it, because he has his earbuds in, but he’s not fucking deaf.
He looks at the dark mansion towering behind him, just up the hill, beyond a wrought iron gate that was meant to be security, but in a half-hearted way, like seasoned criminals with half a mind and a pair of bolt cutters couldn’t case the place and leave the back door open for their escape. It’s the neon-lit, fast-paced, fluorescent future and no one’s got a second thought for things like clever criminal enterprises.
He looks over his sunglasses and raises a single eyebrow.
They come barreling toward him, like three bats out of hell, and it would be kind of funny if it didn’t get right to the meat of him, the vein throbbing at his neck, the adrenaline spike, the heady, bloodrush. Some synth surges in the background, distantly, through his earbuds, and he nearly laughs. It’s like—God, a drug, or something.
He’s not high. He doesn’t need to be.
The doors wrest open and Romanoff and Wilson throw themselves into the back seat, hissing and panting.
Next to him, Rogers opens the door and slides in, all two hundred and something pounds of solid muscle that can barely be restrained by the thin and sorry excuses for t-shirts he wears, tattoos peeking out from underneath the neckline, not that Bucky’s been looking or anything.
“Full throttle, Buck,” Steve hisses and Bucky grunts, holds up a finger.
Almost—
“Anytime now, sunshine,” Tony’s tinny voice comes out of someone’s earpiece.
No.
Almost—
Bucky bobs his head and he sees headlights coming up the drive on the other side of the billionaire’s recently robbed home.
“Now, Barnes,” Romanoff growls from the back seat and Bucky’s not taking orders or nothing, it just so happens that the song hits just the right note, the beat in the back of his throat.
“Don’t say full throttle,” Bucky says to Steve. “And don’t call me that.”
Then, Bucky switches on the ignition, lights the Hellcat up fast and silent, rams the stick shift forward, and, music in his head, road in front of him, smile slowly creeping across his face—guns it.
[ ... ]
art: bucky barnes in a neon-lit setting, sunglasses on, as the getaway driver; art by: buckysnowangel
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