14. fade to black
It was supposed to be a routine mission. Flying robots—really? They’d had enough of that to last them a lifetime and yet here they were again, wreaking havoc in the damn middle of Trenton, New Jersey.
Fuck, Bucky hated New Jersey.
He especially hated it when there were flying robots trying to take over the town because there was some damn new “super-villain” running around with a vendetta against humanity and the Avengers. That was what it all boiled down to, anyway, under all the semantics—though Bucky had no idea what kind of moron thought they were going to be able to take over the country from Jersey. He’d stopped sniping after seeing how much more effective punching the robots straight through with his left arm was; Clint and Natasha had taken over sniping and crowd control.
Things were actually winding down, the situation mostly under control. He stalked through the ravaged streets as Steve barked orders to them on the comms, eyes scanning the surroundings to see if he’d missed any robots. But then—he saw a little girl crawling out from under a car, face smeared in ash and soot.
—And then, a loud whirring from behind him. Bucky ran forward without thinking, wrapping the screaming girl up in his arms and yelling for backup. More whirring, robots swooping in from behind them, chasing them aggressively, and where the fuck was he going to hide a kid? Bucky turned his head towards the robots to track them, cradling her head with his metal arm as Sam swept in, and—
Burning pain exploding all over his back, a fault in his steps, his head cracking against something, and he couldn’t remember anything from there.
