Red, White & Blue | Bucky x Reader

Chapter Eleven

A few days later, I join Steve and Natasha in the briefing room of the Avengers' Compound as we watch the global death toll rising on the monitors in front of us, quickly surpassing 3.2 billion.

Blue wisps dance around me as I sit against the wall, and my hands begin to shake as I try to dispel them. My fingers find Bucky's dog tags around my neck, clasping them tightly as the energy finally dissolves.

"This is a nightmare," Steve mutters.

"I've had better nightmares," Natasha replies, not taking her eyes off the screens.

At that moment, Rhodes walks into the room. "Hey. So that thing just stopped doing whatever the hell it was doing."

After the Snap, those of us who survived returned to the Compound, and upon our arrival, Natasha set out to find Nick Fury, only to return with his pager blinking with a symbol shaped like an eight-point star. Banner connected it to an exterior power source housed in a small, glass chamber, hoping to keep it on while it does whatever it is that it's doing.

We follow Rhodes into the other room, where Banner is analyzing the pager.

"What have we got?" Natasha asks.

"Whatever signal it's sending, it finally creeped off," Banner replies.

"I thought we bypassed the battery," Steve states.

"We did," Rhodes confirms. "It's still plugged in, it just... it just stopped."

"Reboot and send the signal again," Steve orders.

"We don't even know what this is," Banner argues.

"Fury did," Natasha cuts in. "Just do it, please. You tell me the second you get a signal. I want to know who's on the other end of this thing."

Natasha turns to leave, only to stop at the sudden appearance of the blonde woman behind us, and the eight-point star in the centre of her red, blue and gold suit.

"Where's Fury?" the woman asks, confusion etched into her brown eyes.

The woman, who introduces herself as Carol Danvers, otherwise known as Captain Marvel, follows us back to the briefing room as we try to explain everything we know about Thanos and the events that followed.

"We don't knowhow many of us survived," Steve tells her. "Or who for that matter."

"Pepper must be worried sick about Tony," I state. "The last time she heard anything from him, he was sneaking aboard a spaceship as it was leaving New York... We have no way of contacting him, so we have no way of knowing if he's... alive."

Danvers glances at the photo of Tony displayed on the monitor before turning back to us. "If he's out there, I'll find him."

Nearly three weeks later, I find myself sitting with Natasha and Pepper when the entire Compound begins shaking beneath our feet. Steve rushes out of the nearby bathroom, his beard shaved, and follows us as we rush out of the building and onto the lawn, quickly joined by Rhodes, Banner, and Rocket, the raccoon. Above our heads, Danvers, surrounded by a gold light, slowly lowers the small spaceship, landing on the grass ahead of us.

The hatch door opens, and a blue, bionic woman walks out, heavily supporting a terribly thin Tony Stark.

Steve and I run to assist them, and Tony grasps Steve's arm. "Couldn't stop him."

"Neither could we," Steve replies.

"I lost the kid," Tony admits, and I feel my heart ache as I realize he means the Spider kid, Peter Parker.