(Every character depicted in the story below is a consenting legal adult over the age of 18)

A/N: Myk-Zod goes after Bucky.

-x-X-x-

“I’m going after him.”

He waits until they’re both out of the lab before speaking, having followed Peggy out as she left. Howard had stayed behind, no doubt either needing a moment to come to terms with Barnes’ loss… or probably throwing himself into his work to forget about it. He seemed like that kind of man.

Still, Myk-Zod doesn’t say it until it’s just him and Peggy… frankly, he’s not sure whether he should have said it at all, but in the end this feels smarter than trying to go it alone. Peggy whips around the instant the words leave his lips, staring at him with wide, confused eyes.

“Excuse me? What does that mean?”

Straightening up, Myk-Zod grimaces.

“I need to know everything you know about where he would have fallen. If there’s even a chance he’s still alive, I can find him and bring him back. And even if there isn’t… I can still retrieve his remains at least. Provide Steve with closure.”

“That’s not… I don’t understand. The location is hours away even by plane. Days on foot. You can’t possibly expect to make it there in time. It’s over… he’s gone.”

Myk-Zod clenches his jaw and breathes through his nose. It’s not Peggy’s fault that his words have left her incredulous, to be fair. She has no way of knowing just how fast he’s become, how strong he’s become. Months under Earth’s Yellow Sun have left Myk-Zod powerful… more powerful than any one man probably should be if he’s being honest.

“I don’t have time to try to convince you with words… so hopefully this is enough.”

With that, he moves. It’s not the first time that he’s tried to move at his full speed to be fair. He takes the time to practice with his new abilities multiple times a week in private conditions, aiming to try and keep apace with his current physicality. It wouldn’t do for him of all people not to know his own capabilities, after all.

Appearing on the other side of Peggy, he watches her blink in shock at his sudden disappearance for a moment before clearing his throat. The Agent whips around to stare at him… her eyes going wide as he holds up the key to her room, pilfered from her without her knowledge.

“Give me an item, something in your room, and I’ll go procure it for you. Quickly now, please."

For a brief moment, the brunette hesitates... then her eyes narrow thoughtfully.

"There’s a pen on my desk. It belonged to my grandfather. You can’t miss it.”

Myk-Zod nods… and then he’s off. Moving through the bunker without being seen is relatively easy at the speeds he’s going, though he’s careful not to create too much displaced air and therefore cause any accidents. Arriving at Peggy’s door, he unlocks it and steps inside in an instant, appearing in front of her desk.

It takes half a moment to find the pen in question and another second to retrieve it and return to Peggy, holding both it and her room key out to the woman as she takes them with wide eyes.

“Please Peggy… there’s still a chance I can save him. I just need you to tell me where to look.”

Seeing is believing. That’s a human saying that Myk-Zod has become rather fond of. Peggy slowly nods, letting out a shuddering breath before rattling off coordinates that he’s able to easily translate to a location in his mind. Earth might not be his home world, but he’s gotten used to it these past few months. It helped that his spatial awareness had grown apace with the rest of his abilities.

“Alright. I’ll find him. I swear it.”

As he turns to leave, Peggy reaches out and grabs him by the arm.

“Wait… can you take me with you?”

Myk-Zod hesitates… he should have expected she would ask. After all, a woman like Agent Carter hated just standing around and doing nothing. She was a woman of action, a woman of conviction… and Bucky was her friend and comrade just as much as he was Myk-Zod’s.

Unfortunately…

“I’m sorry. You’d slow me down.”

Peggy’s beautiful features scrunch up in frustration, but she doesn’t try to protest his declaration. She knows as well as he that he’s right after all. While Myk-Zod does think he could probably bring along a passenger, he would have to go a lot slower with Peggy in his arms than he would be able to go by himself. And at this point, every second counted if he wanted to try and retrieve Bucky alive.

“… I understand. Good luck.”

Myk-Zod nods at that, feeling rather good about having told Peggy what he was going to do. Trying to go it alone… he might not have been able to pinpoint where Barnes was in time to help him. As things stand, he knows exactly where he’s going and where to check.

With the coordinates firmly in his head, Myk-Zod departs from the bunker as swiftly but also carefully as possible. Then, once he’s properly outside and out of view of any guards… he takes to the sky. This was something he hadn’t shown Peggy… something that even now, Myk-Zod struggled to fully wrap his head around. He could fly. He could lift himself up into the air, ignoring gravity, and fly like a bird.

It was a heady feeling usually, but right now Myk-Zod only had one thing on his mind… the safe return of Sergeant Barnes. Bucky was more than just the first good human Myk-Zod had met after arriving on Earth. He was a friend.

Fortunately, what would have taken a plane hours, only takes Myk-Zod half a minute. He reaches the mountain range in no time at all and finds the train tracks easily enough. The coordinates Peggy gave him correspond to the location where the Howling Commandos were ambushing the train, jumping down onto the moving vehicle and infiltrating it in order to try and capture Zola.

Only, Zola hadn’t been there… frustrating to say the least, because Myk-Zod still needed to figure out where the man had gone with his blood. Still, traveling up the train tracks from the initial ambush point, Myk-Zod keeps his eyes open and his senses on high alert.

His enhanced senses were the other reason that Myk-Zod knew he was the only man for this task. He could quite literally spot a fly from a mile away at this point, and he was capable of processing everything in view of himself at several magnitudes greater than he’d been able to back on Krypton.

Thank Rao for that because he’s fairly sure that he would never have seen the blood splatter otherwise. The moment he catches the glimpse of red among the otherwise uniform white however, Myk-Zod stops and dives.

The place where Barnes fell off the train was over a gorge from the look of things, and Myk-Zod quickly finds the place where he ultimately landed a bit away from the first bits of blood he saw. The landing spot… has a lot more blood on it, enough so that Myk-Zod can’t help but feel a sinking sensation in his stomach.

However, what it doesn’t have… is the Sergeant himself. There’s plenty of blood and even some bits of clothing, but not an actual body. And there’s very visible tracks showing that someone had been here and loaded Bucky up onto a sled before leaving.

They couldn’t have gotten far; the news was less than an hour old from what Peggy had said. Steve and the rest of the Howling Commandos hadn’t even made it back to base yet, but Myk-Zod doubted this was them.

Eyes narrowed, he rises back into the air, following the tracks forward and listening carefully as he moves a bit slower but with more calculated purpose. Within half a minute… he hears them. Within the minute, he sees them.

It is indeed a sled… manned by soldiers that are not of Hydra, but another organization entirely… the Soviet Union. Admittedly, Myk-Zod’s knowledge about the Soviet Union is limited. They are ostensibly allies to the Allied Forces he’s been helping, but it seems to him to be very much a reluctant alliance at best.

Not a day goes by when he doesn’t hear someone back at the bunker disparaging the Soviets in some way, and the only respect they seem to get appears to be because they’re fighting the ‘Axis Powers’ just as much as everyone else is. However, beyond that… they’re tolerated at best.

Still, with all that in mind, and seeing Bucky is on the back of the sled missing an arm and seemingly unconscious, Myk-Zod doesn’t bother wasting any more time. He comes in for a landing right in front of the sled, forcing the Soviet Soldiers to stop when they see him in their way.

Guns are pointed in his direction and orders to surrender are shouted out. Myk-Zod understands them of course, he assimilated Russian ages ago, but he doesn’t raise his hands like they’re demanding. Instead, he replies back to them, his voice clear and concise.

“You have an American Soldier with you. Remand him into my custody and you may continue on your way.”

Admittedly, he knows it’s a bad idea to let them go after they’ve seen him here. But… Myk-Zod has never killed anyone before. He really doesn’t want to start now. And yet… and yet, there’s no hesitation from the soldiers in front of him. Hearing his demands, they exchange looks with one another… and immediately open fire.

He’s not surprised when the bullets that do manage to strike his still form bounce off of his body to no effect. Admittedly, his clothing gets perforated dozens of times over, making a mess of his garments. But the body… the body is bullet proof at this point. Even one of Hydra’s energy weapons isn’t likely to do damage to him anymore.

Still… as much as he hates this, he doesn’t know how much time Bucky has. And it really would be better if nobody save for Peggy, Bucky, and maybe Steve knew that he’d come out here. They would have to figure out a cover story after the fact if he wanted to keep his true capabilities secret from the human leaders, but that was going to be a lot harder if there were Soviet Soldiers spreading rumors about him.

They fired first with lethal intent so… he was well within his right to retaliate right?

Except… even as he launches himself forward, Myk-Zod finds that he can’t do it. He should. He knows he should… but he can’t just kill so easily, even if they are aliens on an alien planet that he’s only been on for a few months.

His hand, curled into a fist that had been rocketing towards the first soldier’s head, instead uncurls and reaches down to grab the barrel of his gun instead. Quicker than any of the soldiers can process, he crushes the barrels of their guns, ruining them in moments and turning them into so much scrap.

Then, he knocks them together and sends the soldiers themselves flying into nearby snowdrifts, disabling them all one by one until there are none left capable of even trying to harm him.

It takes less than a minute, as most of what he’s done since leaving the bunker has so far. And then he’s standing over Bucky, assessing the Sergeant’s injuries and grimacing at what he finds.

… Whatever Arnim Zola had done to Sergeant Barnes while they were both prisoners of Hydra had clearly made it so Bucky survived the fall. His internal injuries are already starting to heal themselves, his body in complete ruins but nevertheless clinging on to life.

However, the fall had ripped his arm from him all the same, leaving him with a stump that even now oozed blood. It was coagulating quickly, quicker than a human’s blood should, but if Myk-Zod moved him right now, if he flew with Bucky at too great of speeds, then the arm would probably begin to bleed much more freely again.

Frustration wells up inside of Myk-Zod at the conundrum. Bucky needed medical assistance, and he needed it from his own people. However, moving Bucky to that medical assistance might be too taxing even for his superpowered body.

That frustration builds and builds as a pressure behind Myk-Zod’s eyes as he studies the stump of Bucky’s arm, the remains of his mangled shoulder. And then… out of nowhere, two beams of blazing hot fire burst from Myk-Zod’s eyes, striking the stump and cauterizing it for a brief moment by accident before Myk-Zod blinks and forces himself to look away.

… What the actual fuck was that? It was one thing for the Yellow Sun to empower him… but where the fuck had the laser eyes come from? How did that even make sense?!

The scientist in him is disgruntled by the strangeness… but he can always figure out the specifics of his Yellow Sun Powers later. Right now, Bucky has to be his priority… and as much as the spontaneous heat vision feels ridiculous, Myk-Zod isn’t about to let that feeling stop him from doing what needs to be done.

This time more purposefully and carefully, Myk-Zod focuses on Bucky’s stump and lets forth the beams of red hot energy once more. This time he doesn’t stop until Bucky’s shoulder is completely cauterized, even as Bucky himself comes alive from the pain, screaming in agony and gaining consciousness.

Planting a hand on the man’s chest to keep him still as he finishes his grisly work, Myk-Zod grimaces.

“It’s me Bucky. You’re going to survive. I swear it.”

Then, because he can do nothing else, he carefully pulls Bucky off of the sled and into his arms. The enhanced human is no longer bleeding at least, so while Myk-Zod can’t move as fast as he did to get here, he should be able to fly fast enough to get Bucky to safety quickly.

Of course, by the time he’s getting ready to depart, some of the Soviet Soldiers have dug themselves out of the snow drifts he launched them into and are gawking at him in wide eyed disbelief. Clenching his jaw, Myk-Zod meets their eyes, acknowledging once more that he’s probably making a mistake by leaving them all alive. Still, maybe…

“I leave you today with your lives. I do not expect you to thank me for it. However, before you go and report to your superiors what happened today, consider this… none of them are going to believe you.”

He doesn’t wait around to see how they react or respond to that. He launches himself and Bucky straight up into the air and begins flying back as quickly as is safely possible.

The important part was that Bucky was going to live. Myk-Zod would make sure of it.

-x-X-x-

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