Vibranium and Chrome (MCU/Cyberpunk 2077)

The first thing he felt was cold. It was not the cold of winter; this one was different. More familiar. It settled on his skin and bit into his bones. James Buchanan Barnes had been in this situation too many times not to know what was happening, so instead of panicking, he remained still. He took in a calm breath, held it for two seconds, then let it out.

His eyes were still closed; however, he could feel the chill receding, and with the slow, steady disappearance of the cold came feeling. He tried to open his eyes, and even that easy motion felt difficult. His eyelashes were sealed shut, and forcing them open would deprive him of their continued purpose, so he stopped trying. Instead, he went back to breathing.

In. Out. In. Out.

He counted the time even as he breathed. He had been self-aware for at least ten minutes. He made another attempt that failed just as much. If he could frown, he would’ve. Instead, he stayed as still as he had for the past few minutes and returned to his routine. Breathing.

In. Out. In. Out.

Thirty minutes. That’s how long he had been at this, so he took another shot at opening his eyes, and this time they cracked open with minimal effort. There was something wrong, a part of his brain warned, that spoke of even greater familiarity with this scene. Opening the eyes after prolonged storage in cryo was always the easy part, and yet even that had taken too long.

Just how long had he been frozen for?

His eyes fluttered open, and his pupils immediately dilated against the dim emergency lights flickering through a haze of frost. There was no sound to accompany the bright red light, only the slow and steady hum of the machine he lay in, as well as the more distant whirling and groaning of less maintained machines around him.

Recover. Analyze. Assess.

Instincts took over, and even with just his eyes, he began searching and taking notes. He was in a wide room. His only light was the flickering red emergency lights. It was enough. He shifted his attention to himself, using the light to better see, and his situation was clear to him. He was lying in a cryo pod.

He tried to move his right hand, and it screamed out in pain at the motion, even though his fingers followed his command. Surviving cryo was impossible for any normal human, but he was no normal human. Yet even with his superhuman-enhanced frame, the pain of moving before his body thawed completely forced him to halt.

If he could not move his regular arm... He shifted focus to his left arm. His eyes moved in their sockets and caught a glimpse of the arm. It was gunmetal gray, with black highlights. He blinked. That was wrong. His arm was supposed to be a shade of gold and black.

For the first time since he woke up, he felt panic. Had it all been a dream? Finding Rogers. Recovering his memories. Fighting side by side with his best friend. First against his teammates that wanted him dead, then against the aliens that attacked Wakanda, and finally against the purple titan.

The arm moved, lacking the need to thaw like his human body. The limb shot out as a blur, punching a hole through the glass. Hardened reinforced glass. His fingers curled around the fist-sized hole he had made, and using his still frozen body as a fulcrum, he wrenched his hand to the side and was greeted by the tortured sound of metal screaming as the frame was sent flying alongside the door.

Move!

His mind screamed in panic. They’d be here soon. Half-remembered memories of a room with bright light, a body strapped to a reinforced chair, and words spoken to him while he screamed and cried in pain burned through his brain. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.

His body jerked forward, screaming in pain as he forced it to move despite the incomplete thawing.

He fell out of the pod face-first, his bionic arm snapping to arrest his fall and prevent him from landing face-first. He was panicking, some part of his brain told him. His panic was needless and made him susceptible to irrational and suboptimal movements. A voice whispered into his ear, but in that moment, he didn’t care. Instead, he forced his knees under him until he was hunched over.

Outside the pod, and with the internal heat generated by his forceful movements, he began to feel life flow into his limbs once more. It was still slower than he was familiar with but faster than it had been in the pod. He was out, out of the pod. He forced his head up to get a better understanding of his surroundings.

Unfamiliar. That was the first thought that came to his head. This was not the pod room he was used to. Unlike the previous cryo storage where he was placed, there were no other pods bearing other members of the Winter Soldier project. His eyes widened at the lack of a giant skull with tentacles that spread from beneath and to the side. Instead, there was a single symbol.

Above the flickering consoles, and half-hidden by the dancing emergency red lights, he glimpsed another all-too-unfamiliar logo. Three black dots placed like a triangle, with lines that stretched from them and finally joined at the middle to create a single long line that went down.

A tree? It was a far cry from Hydra, and that single thought was enough to pull him back to sanity.

Compartmentalize.

He shunted off his fears, his thoughts, his worries, and this time when he blinked his eyes open, they were dull blue with no shred of emotion in them, simply the logic of the brainwashed figure formerly known as the Winter Soldier.

What did he know? He woke up from cryo, but he was not in the previous Hydra facility he had woken up in every other time they had activated him to send forth like a directed missile. Was he in a Hydra splinter group? His eyes went back to the logo on the wall, and he shook his head, a motion that was growing easier with every breath he took.

No, this was no splinter group. He had been introduced to a few during the years he worked with them, and they always had at least some remnant ideological similarities to the primary Hydra logo in theirs.

What did he know so far? He woke up thirty-five minutes ago in a cryo pod that seemed to have lost power recently, judging by the emergency light that still blared in the background. The base, or wherever he was, had lost power for some unknown reason, and the safety measures must have caused an automatic thaw.

His body hurt. Why? He had forced it to move due to his panic, and that action had caused micro tears and stress on his muscles and bones. If he were an unaugmented human, he would be dead. He wasn’t. He was safe, for now at least, and with that realization, he began to breathe once more, back in the pattern that the sages in Wakanda had taught him. A pattern to soothe his troubled mind.

In. Out. In. Out.

He stayed in that position for minutes, long enough that water had begun to pool beneath him. His muscles were sore, and his nerves were raw, so he stayed still until the door in front of him groaned as something grabbed it from the other side.

Contact in five seconds.

He shifted his attention from the door to his body, cataloged the damages he had caused to himself, as well as the slowed processing and speed, a lag that would’ve built up due to being in cryo for longer than he ever remembered being. He was at 45% combat ability at minimum. He would need to attack from ambush. Staying as he was would make him look weak, and whoever was coming through that door would underestimate him.

Who was it? Hydra? SHIELD? The Avengers? Wakanda?

The door groaned open once more as it was physically dragged open. Using the curtain of his hair to mask his face, he looked up as the door was finally wrenched open, and all of a sudden, he was hit with a cacophony of sound. The room he had been preserved inside was soundproofed, which meant that the loss of the door finally brought in the sound and screeching of emergency alarms that accompanied the dancing red light.

Four figures were revealed as the light highlighted their forms.

"You damn gonk, I didn’t spend so much eddies on that arm for you to barely be able to pry down some relic door dozens of years old!" a high-pitched voice called out. A smaller man, with strange cybernetic eyes, dressed in clothes that looked like they were artfully ripped.

He was speaking to a bigger figure, with huge cybernetic palms. The cybernetics went up to his forearms and weighed heavily on his frame, giving him a hunched look like a gorilla with a shaved head. The bulky man had his head bowed as the much smaller man spat expletives at him that involved having vigorous sex with both his mother and aunt. The duo were so engrossed with each other it took two figures behind them to finally spot him.

"Em, boss, take a look at that."

One of them pointed out, this one a woman. One eye cybernetic, as well as a series of lines that trailed her face, while she had a gun, a pistol pointed in his direction.

The smaller man that seemed like the leader of the group finally stopped his tirade long enough to look at him, and judging by his body posture, if he still had organic eyes, he would’ve widened them in surprise.

"Who the hell is this gonk?!"

The last figure stepped forward, this one had a bat, studded with spikes, and he walked into the room, moving toward Bucky’s left, while the woman with the pistol moved toward his right.

"I don’t know boss, but that cyberware looks pretty preem. Do you think I can have it after we flatline him?"

The figure they were referring to as boss didn’t say anything for a second as he stood still looking at Bucky. For a second, Bucky considered he could see his judging and calculating eyes through his mane of brown hair, until he tracked the trajectory of his eyes. The man was looking at Bucky’s arm. Drooling at it.

"Oh, that looks old. Relic kind of old, and he doesn’t look like one of ours," the man said, a cruel tilt to his tone as he took a few steps forward, leering at his limbs. The brute trailed behind him. Whatever hesitation and consideration of their innocence that Bucky had toward them died a cold death as those words were processed. He tensed his body at once, then relaxed it, too fast for either of the four figures to notice.

"Flatline him."

The woman grinned at the order before pressing the gun against Bucky’s head. "My pleasure." She pulled the trigger. That was as far as she got.

Bucky moved. A gun pressed to the side of the head spoke of sloppy training, and he showed her why. He tilted his head to the side at the last moment and watched as the bullet sailed past his vision and buried itself into the bat-wielding man. Another mistake that spoke to how sloppy they were.

The man screamed, but his pain was lost in the cacophony of the emergency siren as well as Bucky’s ringing ear. Before the woman could recover from shooting her teammate, his left hand snapped up like a snake and caught her forearm. He squeezed, and her screams added to the cacophony of sounds in the chamber.

She released her grip, and Bucky’s right hand caught it. He surged upward in a single movement, placing the gun in front of her bionic eyes before squeezing the trigger. The gun was unfamiliar and bulky, but he had allowed her to shoot to ensure there was no safety, and after that, using it was easy.

The bullet tore through her head. The caliber must’ve been low because instead of tearing right through, it bounced around her skull, turning her brain to mash before exploding out of her jaw. A flicker of motion before him, and Bucky was moving again. He spun on the spot, placing the dead woman in front of him as bullets buried themselves into her form a split second later from in front of him. Bucky ignored where the bullets were fired from, confident in his body shield. Instead, the gun in his arm came up once more, and he squeezed it.

Once, twice, thrice.

The bullets buried themselves neatly into the still-falling man with the bat. The first one took him in the chest, while the second and third found places in his lungs and liver.

He had been fast.

His brows furrowed as he hunched down behind the woman that was rapidly turning into more meat than human.

He had been very fast. Fast enough that he should’ve been able to kill at least two figures before the other two were able to retaliate, even as slowed and injured as he was. Yet one of them had been able to react to him just shortly after the woman’s death. A feature of one of the strange cybernetics?

A second later, he heard the familiar click he had been waiting for. The click of a magazine run dry. He flung the body at the smaller man, the one that had managed to recover with superhuman speed. The force of the throw sent the gun flying out of the man’s hands, while the man himself was sent hurling back with a surprised yell, dead body in hand, but Bucky did not follow. Instead, he straightened up, lined up his gun, aimed it squarely at the head of the brute, then squeezed down the trigger, mag-dumping on the man.

The telltale click of his magazine running empty brought a furrow to his brows as he realized, with well-hidden annoyance, that the brute was still standing. The man had shifted into a boxer stance, forearms in front of him in a guard position, body and head tucked behind the massive mechanical appendages.

The man’s augmentations had been enough to protect him, as all the bullets Bucky had shot had simply ricocheted off his form. The few that had found a place in his thighs didn’t seem to hurt him as they should’ve.

At the sound of the empty click, the man brought down his arms and grinned down at Bucky. "Crusher is going to enjoy beating you to death." The man said, referring to himself in the third person. Bucky discarded the strangeness of his speech. Instead, his eyes went to the other man’s discarded gun. An SMG.

The brute shifted position in a way that told him that while the man seemed and looked simple, if Bucky ignored him and went for the gun, he was going to punish him for that choice. So Bucky dropped his spent gun and flexed his left arm. The limb was in perfect condition, untouched by the cold it had spent so long in.

Then he shifted into a boxing stance to match the man. He supposed it had been a while since he showed people why he shifted to a southpaw stance. It was time to remind the world why, and maybe get some answers as well.

A/N: Please put down the pitchforks I can explain...