Not That Lucky

#26: There Are No Strings On Me

"Wh—What?" I coughed.

"I think I have a lead on Bucky." Sam nodded with a smile. "It's not much, but it's more than we've had. I'm waiting to hear back from some sources that Nat knows."

There was something uncomfortable about Sam saying he was close to finding Bucky when I had just sent the missing man a text twenty minutes ago. In fact, I still talked to him every single night until I passed out. We never missed a day. Panic surged through me. Do I warn Bucky about this? My first instinct was to do just that, but realistically... isn't this a good thing? We want him to come back to New York after all. That was the goal.

"Aj?"

I snapped my gaze up to Sam who looked confused, "Huh?"

"You good?" He questioned.

Quickly, I pasted a forced grin on my face, "Everything is great."

__________

Sokovia was a gorgeous area. A little in the middle of nowhere, Tony didn't plan on buying a vacation home out here anytime soon, but pretty all the same. It was probably the mountains still covered in late winter snow and thick green forests that did it. You don't get a lot of that in Manhattan or Malibu. It lost some points for having a huge HYDRA base in an abandoned castle, but no place was perfect.

Tony left the group, rocketing up the countryside, toward the castle while dodging plasma rounds from the turrets guarding the area. HYDRA made it almost too easy for them. As far as missions went this was easy peasy lemon squ—

"Fuck!" Tony shouted when his suit bounced off an unseen shield around the building. A wave of force shimmered over the surface as Tony course corrected.

"Language!" Steve fired back at him over the comm unit. He banked his motorcycle around the corner. "Jar. That's $20." Tony grumbled over the comm line and Steve ignored him entirely, "JARVIS, what's the view from upstairs?"

"The central building is protected by some kind of energy shield. Strucker's technology is well beyond any other HYDRA base we've taken." JARVIS replied reporting from the satellite above the area.

Thor, who dropped down from a HYDRA vantage point, landed on a solider and immediately threw Mjolnir into a group aiming their weapons at him, "Loki's scepter must be here. Strucker couldn't mount this defense without it." He called back his hammer, but when it got near he stepped out of the way and let it slam into the soldier that was sneaking up at him, "At long last."

Natasha, who was handling her own section not very far away, threw a grenade into the back of a truck as she ran down the path. The explosion gave her enough cover to leap over the sandbags and throw the heel of her foot into the face of the soldier firing the turret. She followed her momentum, flipping down the slight hill, and leaped at the next closet soldier. It took only seconds to wrap her leg around the back of his neck and when his partner came to help him, Natasha grabbed his shoulders with her upper half and flipped them both as hard as she could.

The moment they were down she was quick to roll back up just in case. When no other soldiers were coming at her, she pulled out her gun with a disgruntled sigh, "At long last is lasting a little long, boys." Natasha turned and fired two shots into the soldier who tried to work the turret again. "Can we pick up the pace a bit? It's not like we have the element of surprise anymore."

Clint nodded in agreement once as he sprinted past the red head and fired two arrows in quick succession before sliding behind a tree. The arrows hit their mark, exploding and taking out the turret bunker. He peeked around the corner and fired one more arrow into a truck that was peeling away.