Title: Extraction: Failed
Author: RuckyStarnes
Type: Ficlet
Words: 794
Rating: Mature
Characters: Bucky Barnes, Loki Laufeyson, Reader
Pairing: Bucky Barnes/Reader, Loki Laufeyson/Reader
Summary: The rescue isn’t clean, and it isn’t kind. You live—but the thing that took you doesn’t let go easily. Some magic leaves scars you can’t see, and not even gods can undo them.
Tags & Warnings: Failed Rescue Attempt | Magical Entrapment | Torture Aftermath | Reader Hurt/No Comfort | Emotional Damage | Loki Feels | Bucky Feels | Hurt/No Comfort | Post-Rescue Trauma | Chaos | Angst | No Happy Ending | Confession | MCU Canon Divergence
Square Filled/Prompt: Day 15 - Failed Rescue Attempt
Written for: @whumptober
A/N:
The sky split open the moment they found the coordinates. A spiral of green light tore through the clouds, howling like a living thing. The quinjet bucked violently, alarms shrieking as metal groaned under the strain.
Bucky braced against the console, shouting, “Hold her steady!”
Loki’s reply was half snarl, half panic: “I am holding! The portal’s collapsing—we go now or we lose her forever!” And before Bucky could stop him, he dove straight into hell.
The facility below had been swallowed by the rift. Steel corridors bent in on themselves like warped ribs, and the air flickered between flame and frost. The hum of unstable magic crawled through the walls, vibrating in Bucky’s teeth. His boots splashed through blood that hissed like acid.
“This place isn’t real,” he muttered.
Loki’s eyes burned pale as he surveyed the damage. “It’s half real,” he said. “Half of something worse.”
Then her scream ripped through the static. It wasn’t human anymore. Bucky ran before he could think, shoving debris aside with his metal arm. Loki followed, hands alive with light that cracked and fizzled against the corrupted air. The sound led them to a chamber pulsing with runes. You were suspended midair, bound by molten gold threads that burned straight through your skin. Your eyes were open but unfocused, body convulsing with every flicker of light.
Bucky gasped your name, stumbling forward. Loki raised his hand, shouting something in an ancient tongue. The runes responded instantly, their glow deepening to a blood-red hue. A wave of force slammed through the room, throwing them back. Loki hit the ground hard, blood running from his nose. Bucky ignored the pain radiating up his side as he crawled toward you. “Hang on, sweetheart. We got you.”
You blinked, focus swimming until it landed on him. “Bucky,” you whispered, voice shaking. “It hurts.”
“I know,” he said hoarsely. “You can take a break if you just tell me it hurts, okay? We’re getting you out.”
Loki pushed to his knees, magic flaring again. “There’s a key phrase in the bindings—I can’t read it fast enough!”
“Then break the damn thing!”
“I can’t!” Loki’s voice cracked under the strain. “This magic is older than me!”
Bucky’s jaw clenched as he hooked his metal hand into one of the golden cords. The heat seared through the vibranium instantly, sparks cascading down his arm. The smell of burning metal filled the air, but he didn’t let go. With a guttural shout, he tore through the restraint. The chain snapped, sending another shockwave through the chamber. You fell forward, screaming as the remaining bindings cinched tighter. Loki staggered toward you, catching the backlash as he tried again. Power surged, wild and violent, and he screamed with it—blood spilling from his mouth as the light shattered.
Then everything went white.
When the glow faded, the room was nothing but ash. Bucky knelt in it, cradling you against his chest. Your breathing came in short, broken gasps. The skin along your arms and neck glowed faintly, fissures of gold light pulsing like veins. Loki dragged himself closer, trembling, one hand clutching his ribs. “She lives,” he rasped. “But the spell isn’t finished. It will continue to feed on her.”
Bucky looked up, wild and desperate. “Then undo it!”
“I told you—I can’t!” Loki’s voice broke, sharp with helpless fury. “I hate this job,” he whispered in his hand as he rubbed his face.
“You think this is a job?” Bucky’s voice rose, shaking. “This is her life!”
You whimpered, a soft plea lost in the chaos. “Please… make it stop.”
Neither of them could.
By the time extraction reached them, the rift had closed. Loki sat in the dust, staring at his trembling hands, whispering fragments of dead languages that no longer answered him. Bucky refused to release you even as the med team pried you away. Your eyes stayed open, unfocused, shimmering faintly with gold light.
Weeks later, your body healed, but something inside didn’t. The magic still whispered under your skin, a heartbeat out of sync with your own. You didn’t speak. You didn’t recognize them. You just stared through the reinforced glass of the recovery room, silent and hollow.
Bucky came every day, his palm pressed to the barrier as if he could reach through it. Loki stood once in the doorway, gaunt and wordless, his eyes hollow. “It will take years for her to remember how to be herself again,” he said finally. “If she ever does.”
Bucky didn’t look at him. “Then we wait.”
Loki’s voice trembled, quieter than before. “I hate this job.”
Bucky didn’t disagree.
And for the first time, Loki realized that neither of them meant it as a complaint—only as a confession.
I've been thinking a lot about a pet monster Whumpee who has been beaten and abused by their Whumper, prevented from speaking, and forced to sleep on the floor and eat from a bowl, becoming completely feral when they are eventually rescued by Caretaker. They snarl and threaten to bite anyone who gets too close to them, so the Caretaker has to have them restrained and muzzled in order to check over them and treat their injuries. They try to speak softly and reassure the Whumpee, but receive only fierce growls in response. Eventually, as much as Caretaker hates to lock Whumpee up again, they have no choice but to keep them securely locked in a padded cell for the time being, away from anything that might allow them to hurt themselves or others. Whumpee roars, slams the doors, and tries to tear apart the padding with their teeth, but Caretaker knows it's for their own good. Eventually, Whumpee will know this too.
content warning: paranoia, ex-whumpee sort of thoughts, smoking
His hands were cold.
Jacob shoved them further into the pockets of his jacket and sat up straighter as he watched the little puffs of breath that fogged the glass of the window. The bus rumbled beneath him comfortingly and he smiled faintly, tipping his head to the window and enjoying the rough vibrations of his forehead bouncing off the cold surface. The city lights blurred in the raindrops, and he reached a hand up to turn up the music in his earphones.
It’d been a long day. First, the bus in the morning had been late, and then the… incident with the mugs this morning had led to Caleb spending the whole day apologising profusely through messages. He shoved his phone deeper into his pocket at the thought of the string of texts, all of which had gone unanswered.
A full-body shiver ran through him, though not from the cold. It was a leftover of Then, of the time spent with- Jacob pushed the thought of him out of his mind and took a shaky breath, glancing at the flashing clock at the front of the bus. 9:47
Caleb was going to have an absolute fit when he got home. Yeah, it was kind of late, but he was a fully grown adult. He could spend the day at a café if he wanted to—though how that ended up with him on a city bus so late would be hard to explain. He hadn’t meant to get distracted, and- okay, so there was no way that guy had actually been following him, but he hadn’t been able to shake the feeling! He had just had to lose his tail.
Which meant getting on exactly 4 different random buses and walking over an hour in the pouring rain. The thought of the rain had him shuddering as he was reminded of how heavy and wet his clothes were. Even the horrible sensation wasn’t enough to force him to respond to Caleb, and at this point it felt like nothing would.
Unhappily he sat, on the wrong bus and heading in a wide circle that would only get him a little bit closer to home but feeling out of options. When the bus did finally stop near home, he wobbled his way down the aisle, careful to stay light on his feet and stay silent. That was a rule.
The moment he was off the bus he shakily pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, grateful that the zip-lock bag it was in was at least enough to keep it from getting soaked. The smell would cling to him even in the sprinkling rain and Caleb would be furious- no, no he wouldn’t be furious, but he’d be disappointed and that would almost be worse.
He stopped at the mouth of an alley to pet a small tabby cat, fear of the dark and the night unable to deter him in his exhaustion-caused state of irrationality. He almost considered just staying there, crouched and staring numbly at the gravel. Another message chimed from deep in the pocket of his worn hoodie. Caleb wanted to know if he was at least alive.
The light was still on when he got there at 11:04, and he almost considered turning around and just…disappearing off into the night, disappearing where he couldn’t even find himself. In the end he sat down clumsily, curled up and cold but unable to go inside. Maybe he’d fall asleep out here and if he was likely he’d die of some cold-related disease and never have to face Caleb again.
When the door opened behind him, it did so silently. It felt so much bigger an event than it was, and the shift in the wooden floor was enough to send his heart rate flying.
In the unforgiving cold, Caleb sat down beside him. Pulling him gently in for a hug, he tucked a jacket around Jacob’s shoulders and together, they watched the rain fall.
tag for @whatwasmyprevioususername just in case you still want jacob stuff
First of all, I hope you are okay, it has been a while since you last posted. I have a little prompt. Q was send to a mission without Bond, he was kidnapped and tortured. After he is rescued, Bond has to deal with the aftermath. Thanks so much! Love u and miss u
Thank you, dear anon; my posting is now legendarily irregular, but I’m trying! Hope you enjoy this <3 Jen.
-
Q wouldn’t speak.
“... what...”
“If you ask me one more time, I will not be held responsible for my actions,” Q told him, eyes fixed somewhere in the distant, outside the window of their car; and it would have worked, had his tone not been horribly, painfully dull.
Bond continued driving for a few moment.
Q had been retrieved after a week and a half. Bond had not been on the extraction team. In fact, the mission was so highly classified he had sod-all in the way of information; Q had been compromised, captured, tortured, retrieved. The mission had been a failure of phenomenal proportions, with the only upside being that Q was not dead.
After two weeks in hospital, he had been released. He had barely spoken in that time.
“Q...”
“You want the details, and I am not prepared to disclose them,” Q told him, and finally there was something sharp, an edge somewhere that allowed Bond to know he was alive and had a sense of anger, emotion, feeling. “You will not pursue vicarious curiosity around it, nor patronise me with discussion regarding trauma and/or repression; I have a therapist for that. In short: you have not earned my pain.”
It was the longest speech Q had uttered in Bond’s hearing for quite a while, and it had a learned quality to it.
Bond pulled over.
Q glanced around, and for the slightest moment, Bond could see fear: Q was brave, yes, but he was not unfallible. He was not trained for this, to laugh and compartmentalise everything.
“I don’t care what happened, except what you choose to tell me, and I don’t expect you to tell me.”
“Then why ask.”
“I didn’t.”
“You keep asking...”
“... what do you need. What can I do. What do you want. How do you want to play this?” Bond repeated, the same types of questions; he was never going to ask inanities like ‘are you okay’ (because it was obvious) or ‘what happened’ (because as Q rightly stated, it wasn’t his to know). “You’ve been tortured. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Fuck you.”
“Not an insult, a fact - you are not trained or accustomed to this. Do you want me to pretend nothing happened? Because I can’t, and you can’t, so let’s not. To make jokes? I always prefer that option, Alec can’t stand it. Look after you, or let you test it out? I prefer the former, but try looking after Miller, she’ll eat you alive for being patronising. There are a lot of choices for how you want this to go, how you want me to behave, and I can’t predict it because that’s yours. All I ask is that you tell me and stop snapping at me for things I haven’t done, and won’t do.”
Q was eerily, painfully silent.
Bond let the moment hold.
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
Bond smiled slightly. “Shockingly, I figured that much out for myself,” he told Q, with a gentle murmur of sarcasm; Q’s mouth mimicked the ghost of a smile.
Q’s expression crinkled very faintly, his voice soft on the admission: “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how I feel.”
“That’s alright too,” Bond told him frankly. “The only option off the table is pretending nothing happened. You can’t do it, and you’ll hate that you can’t. I can’t do it, and I can’t pretend otherwise, I can see it. You can feel it. But you have to meet me halfway. I’ll do my best.”
Alarmingly, Q said absolutely nothing, and instead keeled sideways; Bond responded with reflexes born of a lifelong career in espionage, and Q leaned on him with a sigh, avoiding his injuries as best he could.
It took a moment to realise this was it: Q was asking for comfort.
Bond simply stroked through his hair as Q failed to find words.
(and Q quietly realised the thing Bond had been trying to tell him all along: that he always would be there, even if Q tried his best to close himself away. No matter what happened, Bond would be there, stroking his hair, loving him in the weird and fucked-up way James Bond loved people).
Without the abuse, I wouldn't have been this scared in every human interaction. I wouldn't feel like my life depends on saying the right thing and finding my way out of this situation safely. I wouldn't be this timid, this cagey, reluctant, imagining every worst scenario that can come out of a social situation. I wouldn't have images of torture in my mind when attempting to say no. I wouldn't find it this hard to refuse being useful to others when it violates my freedom.
I would be able to speak my mind. I'd be able to be honest in my own way, instead of finding reasons and reasons why I have to be as pleasant and non-demanding as possible. I wouldn't be afraid to ask for information when I want it. I wouldn't be scared to check what my options are.
Abuse forces me to walk the thinnest line of being convenient and nothing else. I don't get to have a personality, there's only fear. I'm different when I'm alone, I'm not afraid, I know what I want. But if you put another human being next to me, all of my convictions are overwritten by survival instinct to appease and escape.
