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He couldn’t hear anything. That wasn’t right. He usually could hear more than he should, so hearing nothing made no sense.
The last thing he remembered hearing… It was loud. So loud. Louder than when Darcy liked to crank the music up to-
Darcy.
Darcy!
He lurched to his feet, reaching out reflexively to catch himself when the floor seemed to tilt under his feet. His left hand hit something that crunched a bit under his weight, delaying the regaining of his balance by a second.
Something warm and wet was running down his left temple, and both sides of his neck, but he ignored it all.
He remembered, now. He’d dropped by the labs because Jane was on another science!bender, and when she got like that, she tended to keep Darcy busy with copying her notes, holding different instruments in place, etc. In other words, too busy to fulfil her usual ‘keeping the scientist from sciencing herself to death’ duties, such as providing food and drink at regular hours. This meant that someone had to take care of that for her. So, Bucky, despite his well-known aversion to labs, had been going down there on a regular basis, delivering coffee, sandwiches, and snacks.
But something had happened this time. He had just dropped off the last round of coffee and the Smore Pop-Tarts Darcy had requested, given his girlfriend a quick neck rub to massage out the crick she’d developed while hunched over a laptop for ten hours. Then he’d taken his leave, and as he’d been walking away, there had been a shout – just one cry of “Shit!” – and then a massive boom had sounded before he was lifted up off his feet and evidently slammed onto the floor.
He thought he might have hit something else in between the explosion and the hitting the floor, but that wasn’t his biggest concern right now.
Darcy was there, still in the labs. He had to find her. Had to know if she was okay. He’d seen so many people dead from bombs and other explosions, both in his war days and his Winter Soldier days, and it was too easy to imagine her in the same state.
He couldn’t hear anything. No alarms screaming, no people screaming, not even his own breathing or staggering footsteps. But he had to find Darcy. Anything wrong with him could wait.
A strong hand grasped his shoulder from behind and pulled. He resisted the pull and reflexively threw back an elbow, but it was caught as well. He spun around, intending to deal with whoever might be trying to stop him, but the world blurred and tilted around him again. His back hit a wall, and he felt a hand grab each of his wrists.
He still couldn’t hear anything.
Thor was in front of him when his vision cleared. The big guy was talking to him, but Bucky couldn’t hear a word.
“Darcy,” he gasped, at least he thought he did. He couldn’t even hear his own speech.
Thor could, though. Maybe. The Asgardian looked worriedly towards the lab right after Bucky spoke, said something else to him; Bucky thought, through his limited lip-reading abilities, that it was “Wait here.”
But he couldn’t wait here. Not until he found Darcy. He pushed off the wall and staggered off behind Thor, who had already charged down the hallway.
He nearly fell over twice more on the way there. He knew something was wrong with him, since he was normally far more graceful, but now he couldn’t keep his balance.
He didn’t see her until she was only a few feet away. She slammed into his chest, tucking herself under his metal arm when he nearly fell over from the impact. She didn’t look harmed, just scared. She was talking probably a mile a minute, but he couldn’t hear a word she said.
Eventually she resorted to ASL, since the whole Tower had learned it to help him deal with his nonverbal days. ‘Can you hear me?’
He signed back. ‘Are you okay?’
She gave him an incredulous look, reaching up to push his hair away from his face and touch his right ear. Her mouth formed the words: “You’re bleeding.” Then she went back to ASL. ‘You were closest to the blast. You need the help, not me.’
Thor appeared then, with Jane trailing behind him and holding his hand. The big blonde man supported Bucky’s other side, and he and Darcy started steering him in the other direction.