#seeing a feline in the dead of the night; mist and smoke; all could be signs of t.ezca's presence in the world | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

storiesof2018 · 5 years ago

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Gripping onto the dented edge of a backdoor of the occultic convoy, with enforced feline-honed agility that rapidly surged through his enhanced bulk, his blurring vision caught the last sconces of October twilight glimmeringly deflected off the monolith cityscape-titanic environs of downtown Manhatten against manic processions of nightly traffic accelerated over the Brooklyn Bridge; after launching his gunned momentum over roofs of obstructive vehicles, he vault atop of the transport rig, crouching down as his tactical boots anchored. Gnashing his teeth against a raw snarl, Bucky reared his cybernetic arm into a thrusting arc, Bucky flexed his vibrainium fist in mechanized sync of robotic whirring and unremittingly crimped the latch off-hinged.

There were days in life James Buchanan Barnes believed that he had been plucked from another world and replanted into another that was completely alien. Fighting actual aliens over the past few years had made the battle-weary soldier long for the simpler times when the least dangerous threat to lurk around the corner was some punk wielding a handgun or a two-bit mob-enforcer extorting an honest business. Then came the grim shadow of war that forever changed the scope of the world and escalated the threats for the worst. Months ago he was fighting aliens in New York. And now he found himself hanging on for dear-life at the edge of a semi carrying a shipping container out of Gotham City and heading through Jersey enroute to the Brooklyn Bridge. Life continued to throw him curve balls and a different enemy to fight with it. Now it wasn't aliens, or even HYDRA scum looking to gain a foothold in the world.

If reports were to be believed, what he was up against now were Occultists who were practicing witchcraft. If that wasn't the worst part of it, they were also human trafficking-kidnapping orphaned children off the street and using them for their evil demented rituals. Bucky never thought he would find something he hated more than Hydra, but now he was certain he'd found it.

Or actually-THEY found it.

Hanging onto the edge of the roof, he could hear the revving of a motorcycle a few cars down amidst the honking of bewildered drivers surrounding them. "That you, kitten? Was beginning to think you'd left me to have all the fun." Bucky spoke into his radio as he hoisted himself onto the roof of the container.

With her neoprene gloved hands clutching a the curved-high handlebars of a matte-black Ducati Diavel, against the feverish rush under her smoke-faced helmet; Selina notched up the rpm torque with maximum acceleration, maddeningly incoming vehicles fishtailed as she opened the bike's throttle, becoming a sleek blur against in earshot pursuance of the veering refrigeration transport. "I like to keep my distance for the chase, Barnes..." she transmitted back through the com, in a gritting cadence, bitingly. "With this damn squad of hags grabbing kids like strays, caution needs to be our second thought..."

"Can't argue with that!" Bucky grunted as he wrapped his metallic hand around the chocks of the door and began to pry them open. Inside he could hear the cries and whimpers of the imprisoned children and teenagers who were no doubt convinced they were driving closer to their deaths. Filled with raw anger, Bucky ripped the chocks and then padlocks. He lifted his eyes and suddenly shouted "WHOA!"

He threw himself back, laying flat on the floor of the roof before his head could get struck by the traffic lights above. Thick strands of wolfish dark tresses were splayed across his sweaty brow, his blue eyes were wide and filled with mild apprehension. That was too close. He ran a hand through his hair then grimaced as the winds continued to blow it across his eyes as they sped through traffic. "Remind me to get a hair-cut when this is over, darlin'." It was a generous quip that he knew she would take exception to, knowing how much she loved his long hair.

"You do that, and I'll enjoy pushing your ass back into a freezer-" A teasing pitch of vixenish snark wickedly challenged in the decadent smokiness of her undertone, as she fluidly swerved the bike around taxi-cab, snubbing off ballistic curses from the irate driver who, lividly gestured a wrathful fist out of his window as she deviously whacked off his side-mirror in the rapid wake of her undeterred speed."Besides you have better style than your Avenger friends ..."

"I'd love to see Sam and Thor's reaction to that." He allowed a wry smile to pull at his lips at the thought. He felt his edge wearing off from his near encounter with the traffic light and his composure returning. His focused gaze took in the harsh surroundings as the trailer suddenly rocked and the semi honked as it made a turn at an intersection.

Bucky knew the route and braced himself as he could see the bridge up ahead. His heart sank into his stomach as he listened to the cries of "help us" coming from inside the container. He needed to get these people out of there now. "The bridge is close, Lina. If I'm gonna get these people out safe, I'm gonna need to now! Can you cause a distraction?!" He yelled as the semi lurched forward and the speed picked up. He fell off the edge of the rear and hung on long enough to grab the door and throw it open. "Damn!" He cursed, as gunfire suddenly erupted from inside followed by a chorus of screams. There was an armed thug inside-a guard no doubt. A slew of Albanian curses were thrown at him from the gunman as he fired his assault rifle.

People in traffic screamed and cars began to swerve and back away. Maybe that would be a distraction enough? He listened to the sound of a door opening and closing. Bucky waited until he heard the gunman begin reloading his weapon before swinging into the container. The rank smell of urine and human sweat hit him like a punch to the gut. The guard wore a mask to protect himself from the smell, but it did little to protect him from a merciless bionic fist smashing his face. The container rocked and the dim lighting showed him the heartbreaking sight of over two dozen caged children. Flashbacks of the POW camps hit him and Bucky found himself trembling with rage. Sneering he looked down at the gunman and picked him up by his throat, slamming him against the wall.

"You disgusting piece of crap! You did this all for money?! For your cult?! You plucked these kids from the streets and think their lives belong to you?!" He roared.

Against the manic succession of predatory variance, crushingly with explosive aggression of his breakneck reaction, gnashing his teeth against a full-throated snarl, Bucky grappled the bald-headed Albanian trafficker-mercenary- bodily into a straight-arm choke-hold; gut slamming the armored cultist's bearish form with a hammering thrust of vicious momentum, as the metallic sheen of his cybertronic arm glinted underneath his torn Kevlar jacket's sleeve. A rabid fusion of high octane combat became savagely ignitable akin to a Siberian wolf pinning down a reared cobra; an elemental cadence of menacing-bestial caliber.

Under the roguish length of his grungy, sweat-drenched tresses, Bucky's aquamarine irises gleamed murderous-knifing heat as he edged closer to neutralize, mercilessly angling his bionic elbow to with jaw-breaking force as blood gushed out of his ape-like opponent's nose, while hulking shadow ducked low behind the hunky beast machine, only to jerkily waver back in eruptive wake of red-misted haze spurting from a bullet-size gouge in his tattooed skull as Selina rapidly fired off another kill shot from her clutched Beretta 9mm that was undeviatingly aimed sidelong on the Ducati's handlebar. "You owe me for that, Barnes..." she breathlessly purred out, snarkily, under the sleek helmet's tinted visor, her dark coffee irises disarmingly captured silhouetted forms of the abducted-child- hostages shiveringly huddled in stacked cages.

The noise of the gunshot and the fact that Selina had just saved his skin from an unseen assailant had Bucky shaken for a moment. The burning rage he had felt began to dim as a cold splash of reality hit him as he listened to the kids in their cages continued to cry and beg for help. He lost focus of the mission, a tactical error that would've cost him his life. Remorse washed over him as he looked away from the children and clenched his jaw as he watched the guard rise up to his feet. He was groggy and clearly in pain as he clutched his ribs. "You're not worth it." A loud thud echoed inside the cramped container as Bucky's bionic fist collided with the guard's jaw, knocking him out. "But I'm sure Gordon will have some questions for you." Bucky fastened the thug's wrists and threw him outside on the pavement beside his dead comrade. Bucky would have preferred to kill him but didn't want to traumatize the children any more than these monsters already had.

"Its gonna be okay, I'm gonna get you guys out of here," Bucky said to them with a soft look. He went to work immediately, knowing the driver of the truck would catch wind soon enough. He began ripping off the doors with ease thanks to his cybernetic limb. The kids were timid at first, especially the ones who had been held captive longest. Those that weren't were quick to make a mad-dash for the opened doors to the container. The fresh air was a blissful reminder of freedom that had many of them softly shedding tears. Bucky held a smaller injured young boy outside while Selina told the others to get clear.

Evading the spotlight of convenient heroism supressingly became a riotous impulse, throngs of cell-phone recording motorists exceedingly barricaded the semi-truck as EMS and NYPD vehicles blared to the clear the route; with a variant of cool ease of her dismounting poise, Selina lifted her gloved palm over the helmet as sleekier mahogany whorls tantalizingly cascaded off her neoprene-clad shoulders. "Well, it wasn't a terrible night," she quipped tersely under breath, and impassively eased her svelte curves against the metal door, feigning up leashed tension."We should go before it's too cramped for us here..."

On an ordinary day where they were chasing nothing better than some two-bit Hydra thug, Bucky would've agreed. The children were safely being escorted to the curb where a number of police cars had begun to swarm in. No doubt the intercepted traffic, the chase, and the gunshots and the children had caused quite a stir. Sticking around would only ensure Selina and him would need to answer some difficult questions and probably get arrested for vigilantism. But before Bucky could voice his approval as he moved to step outside, he and Selina were shocked when the semi suddenly lurched forward as the engine roared. Someone was in the driver's seat! Bucky snapped his gaze to Selina who looked equally confused, having assumed the man she gunned down was driver. "Someone's in the driver's seat, Lina." The police sirens were growing louder and hysterics were running wild as the semi sped through the blockade and towards the bridge. Bucky didn't have time to step off before he was thrown back into the container by the sheer speed of the furious retreat.

The world spun on its axis while a loud ringing deafened him-the sound of sirens and honking motorists on the bridge. Bucky's head throbbed but and he used one of the cage's as a hand-grab to pull himself up to his feet. Static rang through his ears and he grimaced at the noise until Selina's voice came through.

Detecting a morbific aura shadowily radiating from the seized truck, unnervingly Selina felt an intrusive coldness shunting in her heart; nipping on the pillowed lushness of her lips, she gazed down a runtishly gaunt eight-year-old boy finding secured refuge in a uniformed paramedic's arms, while the other traumatized children were embraced by the cloaking heat with thermal blankets, starvingly they clung onto a protective reality of being embraced away from the disgusting cages. It was the mortal engine of survival-to foster onto an extension of hope.

Keeping her tigerish-brandy irises collectively indifferent on the obstructive media fringe; Selina cunningly sashayed her curvaceous form behind an EMS vehicle, waiting for her sniper-wolf to follow. "Get out of there, handsome before there's any more surprises..." she urged, imploringly.

A polished obsidian fingernail painstakingly glided over the blood-smeared window in arcing motion of scorpion tail on vexed accord; the vacuous expanse of the unloaded trailer became sickeningly contractive with a paralyzing-morphic onslaught worming through Bucky like an infectious fever as he staved down a gut-razing throb. Gravity jackhammered against diesel fumes inducing a bilious surge that clamorously racked in his veins, as he scowlingly waged a step closer to the driver's cab with determined precision. His reckless proximity harrowingly beckoned vengeful deviances of eldritch incarnate conjury.

Against the cushioned seating, blonde tresses smokily fringed with auburn draped alluringly over ivory flesh of hawkishly-thinned cheekbones, evident to viperous intensity of steel-cobalt irises warningly glared up at him-staking him down on the receiving end of a death sentence. "The little strays would have given a permanent home away from that decayed city," she murmured chastenedly, the stretch of her full-curved lips belied a covetous-possessive thirst while she arrestingly drove pulse-stealing intensity over virile, rugged menace that was hunkily etched in the knife-edge curves of his broader-set jaw-an untamed vitality to choke out. "... but you had to chase my shadow and steal away that promise and now I guess my unsated indulgence of vengeance has shifted to watching your handsome beauty fade into a worthless silhouette..."

Bucky didn't need to listen to another word to know the woman was crazy and dangerous. The unfaltering speed of the semi still barreling down the bridge through swerving motorists told him that she didn't care about self-preservation and was willing to die to ensure he paid for sticking his nose into her business. "Doesn't look like you're in the mood to negotiate. That's okay, neither was I!" Bucky snarked angrily. He balled his cybernetic fist, listening to the whirring coils as the vibranium hummed with anticipation. He swung and smashed his hand through the viewing-glass, sending shards exploding into the driver's seat. The blonde gasped but made no move to slow down her speed, but the distraction caused her to begin bumping cars and terrorizing the people driving them. "Damn it! Pull over!" Bucky roared, trying to reach for the wheel. The container rocked causing him to bump his head against the wall. "Pull over before you get us both killed!"

"It doesn't matter, there are many zealots that will cleanse out innocence deviants ..." Emitting a raving cadence of gleeful crackles, maniacally with deceptive ease of her serpentine poise at the volcanic-charged moment she detected the full-measure resolve of Bucky's desperate-reckless- assault; her steely cobalt irises banked soul-grippingly with demonic amethyst that sinisterly veined in her blacken pupils as his cybernetic arm unwaveringly drove robotic momentum up with a thrusting arc to gain instant control of the steering wheel. "That disgraceful sentry-the chosen keeper of the Eye of Agamotto will finally choke on his failure..."

A mutative clash of astral energy irrevocably torpedoed into Bucky as he shifted the bestial ferocity muscled heaviness of his warrior bulk over the seat while the occultic-vampirish impresario propelled the rigid slenderness of her leather-garbed calves blindingly with boot-ramming speed of unmerciful precision into the slackened, blood-drenched corpse of her lifeless driver, knocking out of the window as the semi-truck veeringly careened against the bridge's suspension cables.

Angling his stubbled jaw with jutting clench against the supple fineness of her alabaster features, under lengthy-wolfish brunette tresses that shaggily clung to graven edges of his jaw; Bucky's steel-aquamarine irises grew feverishly blank as he gnashed his teeth against throated strain- he felt a possessive tracery of carnal heat burningly ghosting over his flesh. The gravelliness of his contralto-pitched timbre scratchily forced out his warring resistance. A slithery glide of her fingers that caressed over his dimpled-chin made Bucky torque back on his abdomen blindingly in countered reaction against the blood-slick cushion. "N-Not gonna happen..."

In that addictive contrast of tempered heat, fractionally he braced the corded-plane solidity of his chest above her, a viperish-witchy sneer conveyed her mephitic intent; she was destabilizing him into amorous thrall of parasitic seduction. "Play nice and I might keep you close..." she taunted, headily, beckoning a definite challenge of enslaved-amorphic unity against his sensuous wide-bow lips, poutily edging to yield a throb of reluctance for her to stingily devour. "On a leash..."

A lifetime ago, Bucky would have been sheepish, maybe tempted by the seductive proximity of the woman in front of him. But time had a way of changing him the day he met a clever beautiful cat-burglar who stole his heart. "As much as I hate to disappoint a woman, I'm off-limits, lady. There's only one kitten in my life." Bucky sneered, his tone conveying anything but disappoint as he glared at the woman with open defiance. The memory of her crimes, of the people she hurt and the children she had abducted was painfully fresh and made him want to see her locked up. But the dangerous predicament they were now in made that thought seem unlikely as the truck teetered near the edge of the bridge, dangling by a thread as the chasm of death waited for them down below.

His heart raced with mild apprehension, telling him to try and get out while he still could. But the woman-the witch in front of him didn't appear to take his refusal kindly if the venomous look in her eyes was any indication. He watched as her hand hovered above him, a wave of discomfort spreading like a poison she was inflicting through tendrils of magic.

A sorcerous implosion of apparitional glyphs fierily convergence in arcs of white-heat, as her polished fingernails possessively dragged infectious energy over the resiliency of tautened flesh of his braced forearm; voraciously feeling jacked-up echoes of rampant predatory tension flex in his stoking veins—clamorous tempo of bestial aggression-ferocity that rode through him against the vertiginous aura that rushingly deadened him into atrophied thrall as his muscles locked reactively to the immobilizing fruition.

A heaving rush of breath gutturally scraped his throat as Bucky felt the vitrioious reality of her unassailable wrath bleedingly jackknifing him beyond mortal restraint. "Let's see how long you can resist me..." she waspishly dared against the ruggedly boyish planes of his feverish cheek, her copper-blonde tresses sultrily draped over his tenser shoulder with sensual reign, hungrily driven by vampiric thirst, in a blinding variant of urgency, she saddled him down with a possessive glide of her litheness against heavier taut-edge ridges etched over bracketed flesh that intimidatingly delineated his kevlar garbed mid-drift "All it takes a snap of my fingers and I will steal that beautiful kitten of yours..."

Against flushed-neasous strain over tensing edges of his pinched features, the rasping stubble Bucky's heavy jaw thrust a hairbreadth above her with mirroring voltaic heat of stark revulsion; the female mage thirstily unleashed a parasitical barrage of divesting-chimerical havoc over him in an incendiary wake of a soul-damning cadence, and watched the silvered intensity of his glacial aquamarine irises blankly fringed into stuporous depths against the mordant paralytic of her inexorable spell casting.

Grungily shadowed by the unkempt, roguish length of askew brunette tresses, Bucky's widened pupils had piercingly contracted into razored slits of a mutative infusion; evident the pointed edges of his throbbing ears as he blurringly clutched the lithe curves of her collared throat with desperate pressure robotic sync of bone-splintering choke-hold, anchoring her under his steeled grip of dredged up mercy.

He said nothing, feeling as if his vocal cords had been scraped to shriveled threads that wouldn't allow words to spew from his lips. His eyes conveyed the sum of open defiance mixed with mounting agony as he felt the witch's power undo him from the inside out. There was no illusion in his thoughts. He knew his chances of survival were diminishing by the second. Darkness pulled at him, like a vacuum seeking to swallow him whole. The anger he felt was replaced by a steely poise to eliminate the threat posed to not only him but to all the innocents that would suffer at the hands of evil magical scum. His cybernetic hand mercilessly squeezed until he felt the witch's pulse stop and her breathing ceased. Her bloodshot eyes remained open while the remainder of her magic poured into him, infecting him with her malicious spell that would spell his doom.

It was at that exact moment, the cables to the bridge that held up the semi snapped. The world fell away as he bathed in magical fire. It consumed his flesh, causing a wildfire of fur to sprout across his skin. His mind howled with the shriek of a distressed animal. But in his ear-piece, a voice screamed-anchoring his humanity to keep from slipping away into the belly of the beast growing inside of him. "S-Selina…"

Every dire second was heart-stoppingly flatling against an eruptive implosion of heartache that scythed through her; vaulting over police barricaded saw-horses with blinding acrobatic precision, rushingly, in a low-crouch, Selina grounded herself on a metal grater, avoiding a detached suspension cable that whiplashed over the teetering semi's trailer. The obstructing dissonance of the crowd excruciatingly deafened into an ear-splitting cadence of white-noise; her world exploded into a supernova, knifing contractions throbbingly amplified in her heart, wrenching to propel out her chest.

"B-Bucky..." she railed out chokingly in desperate pitch, her leather-gloved palm gripping over a collapsing edge to stave down an infinite onrush that resurrected apparitions of deadened panic; she couldn't reach him. Grappling onto a prevailing chance to him out of careening vehicle was like firing a bullet against a bolt of lightning- the beckoning knell of eternity was damningly snatching him away. "I'm not letting you go, James..."

Her words to him went unresponsive as the semi and its empty container plummeted over fifty feet into the cold river below. Police sirens blared wildly as first responders and trapped motorists looked on in horror. Selina's looked on from several vehicles back, her pale complexion stark white and suddenly lifeless. The radio transmission went to static. His voice was lost-he was gone. Plucked from her reality so suddenly before she could even process what had happened. The semi was adrift, floating before its mass became too much to maintain as the water seeped into its interior and flooded every airpocket within. The witch's body floated lifelessly, sinking to the depths of darkness within the vehicle while a shriveling mass of bulky flesh and fur was sucked out of the window and into the current, as if he were being uplifted by divine intervention.

Evicting the bruising pressure of the metallic grater that numbed her knees, quakingly a semblance of impassive-feline- composure brandished over the sleekness of her elfin features unremittingly splintered against soul-razing heartache; the visceral eeriness of the carrion sirens hauntingly accorded into volumes of phantom dirge-a heart-crushing revelation that her sniper wolf-beast machine wasn't coming back.

Keeping herself braced with enough force of her gloved palms into a hunching crouch, with a cascade of mahogany tresses lankly half-draped over her blank features, Selina felt paralyzed-frozen on the soul-crushing edge of chasmic anguish. She was captive into a nightmarish throe, the pain didn't recede as she gulped down a breathless sob. Tearily narrowing her tigerish coffee irises to gaze unblinkingly down at the lingering ripples of Hudson River; she forcibly quashed down the vomitous urge as mewling heaves voicelessly choked out her shivery lips. "J-James..."

Bucky's world was consumed by darkness but a pale light could be seen on the horizon. It was a mosaic of colors shifting from night-blue to dreary orange. He felt as if he were suffocating, being smothered by unseen forces that obscured his senses. The darkness kept him anchored but he was too stubborn to remain still. So he pushed, he tugged and clawed his way towards the light-determined to find his way back to reality, to Selina.

He awoke with a gasp, coughing and spewing the rancid taste of polluted water that burned his lungs. The chill of nightfall caused him to mewl and shiver due to his wet state. Confused lasted mere moments before reality quickly caught up to him. He was alive. Somehow, someway, he had drifted out of the crash and now found himself on the slope of wet cement roughly a mile away from the bridge. How was it possible? Was he that lucky? Why was he hungry, and itchy? He couldn't speak, feeling as if his throat was scratchy and clogged with something. His coughing fit increased, forcing him to roll over and gag, retching up a bile of water and something sticky.

His glazed eyes adjusted to the dimness of nightfall and he stared down at clumps of fur… Furballs? No...he couldn't be. He raised his hand and stared at it with wide unblinking eyes, seeing but not quite comprehending the unreal sight of a hand made of patches of dark wet fur. The witch, her spell...What had she done to him?! "Not good…" He said to himself inwardly. His voice wasn't the same soft baritone that came from Brooklyn-born natives. He cringed and forced himself stand up, pushing himself to stand on wobbly legs. He had to get out of here. He had to find Selina.

"Selina, darlin', you there?" He called, reaching to his ear. The radio transmitter was gone. Lost in the crash. Bucky considered his options; calling Selina or Steve (no phone), hailing a cop car (he'd be shot on sight if he looked like a furry freak), waiting for a search party (he'd freeze to death first). He could only move forward. It was night out. With luck, he'd barely be noticed.

Each step he took felt like he was pulling dead-weight. The wet clothes certainly weren't any help. His limbs ached and burned, but he knew it had little to do with fatigue and more to do with the permeating energy seeping into his nerves, transforming his DNA from a human to something less. He walked away from a small harbor, trodding and limping with whimpers of discomfort escaping him. The streets weren't crowded but the occasional bystander glanced at him weirdly before looking away, assuming him to be a drunk. Bucky crossed the street of a quiet residential area, but paused near a bus-stop to gaze at the reflection staring back at him.

"No..." He whispered in mute horror. His eyes weren't the soft blue he recognized but were instead a chilling sapphire with the slits of a feline iris. "What the hell did she do to me?" He groaned, suddenly feeling a jolt of agony rip through his leg as he stumbled against the wall of an antique shop. His limbs had felt like dead weight, but each step he had taken on foot made his left leg feel like he was stepping into a bed of needles. He hissed and shuddered, stepping into shadow to avoid the stares of a group of teenagers that were walking passed him. It was at that moment he realized what was wrong with his leg. It had been punctured somewhere during the crash. It wasn't bleeding but the pain was undeniable. If he didn't die from shock or blood loss, there was always the risk of sepsis after coming out of the river with an open-wound. Dizziness and nausea suddenly overcame him, causing him to drift into a spell of disorientation. The world spun on its axis and he found himself unable to remain vertical. He stumbled and groaned, falling face-first into an alley.

The pain from his wound and the weight of exhaustion siphoned off his remaining energy as he began drifting into unconsciousness. He was dimly aware of the fact his limbs were stretching and fur was continuing to spread across his body. He wondered if he was truly dying this time, if not in body than maybe in mind? Would he remember anything after the spell was done with him? Would he ever find Selina again? He didn't know, but dared to hope.

It was minutes later a single old homeless man would shuffle out of his cardboard box he called home and shivered at the decreasing temperature of autumn moving through the city. What he wouldn't give for an extra quilt to keep him warm tonight, and an hot meal. He shuffled his way down the alley beside an antique shop and a local coffee-house. Sometimes the owner of the latter threw out stale donuts that no one wanted. Maybe he had that much to hope for. What he wasn't expecting to find was the shriveled remains of clothing laying unattended on the ground. Nice clothing too by the looks of it. A bit wet, but nothing a little sunshine couldn't dry off. Curious, the old man adjusted his glasses and brushed his mustache as he began digging through the pockets. A fancy knife, a receipt for gas, a mint. Ahaha! Jackpot! $50 in loose cash. Enough to maybe get a cheap blanket and a cup-of-joe tonight.

"Guess it's my lucky day." He mused. But that when he noticed the shape of something undeniable feline laying motionless inside the folds of a ripped jacket and t-shirt. "Poor little guy." The old-man shrugged as he looked on what he assumed to be a dead-cat sporting a nasty wound on his leg. He'd seen too many dead strays in these parts. Least he could do was make sure this one wasn't run down by a car. Left with little option, the old man carried the cat and dropped him into the open dumpster. It wasn't until he was a block away that the cat released a soft meow into the night.

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The reckoning of her heartbeat crescendoed against a soul-cleaving throb of phantom anguish; being a destitute orphan—a vermined stray—within the congested boroughs of Brooklyn was a damned-homeless existence she was tragically careened into when the candescent intensity of white-heat searingly drove her into converged reality, as cosmic nova of prophetic destruction robbed her memories into blackout throes of amnesia in the wake of her descent.

For weeks after escaping a hospital room, she wandered against shadows, concealing herself from occultic denizens of arcane conjury while harboring a instinctive semblance of protection in mechanic garages during the night hours. With the herald of October-Halloween encroaching and unprecedented scourage of child abductions had grown infectiously rampant.

Being eight years old, inevitably marked her down in the incarnate crosshairs of sorcerous dread; she needed a home to run back to. Garbed in a navy blue threadbare, bunchy wool-sleeved sweater that she collected from a charity bin, Lena stealthily kept hidden on a rickety-iron fire-escape latter, her disheveled blonde tresses were silkily wind-tousled as she rigidly tucked her denim sheathed knees against the litheness of her chest.

Against the amber halos of streetlight, her grayish-turquoise irises feverish bleared with a surging onrush of tears. She was alone to face the demons that relentlessly preyed for innocent blood. Nowhere was safe. Quashing down a neasous shiver, Lena blearily pressed her delicate cheek onto her knee, allowing the barren ache of clamoring hunger to ebb down-she couldn't risk going to the Red Cross shelter to collect pocket-sized rations, tonight she needed to starve.

While fostering onto that cruel reality, Lena angled her head back against the chilled railing, exhaustingly, and narrowed the voltaic intensity of her teary gaze down at her sleeved wrist, gliding the ratty material up to expose an inked - the Asgardian sigil -a branding mark of her forgotten birthright on her delicate wrist revealingly exposed the arrow of the Valkyrie piercing the three silver leaves that entwined into circular pattern:skjebnens opprørere (rebels of fate)—the empyreal runes of Asgard.

Closing her eyes to salvage onto innate resilience, her ignited senses registered a meowing cadence of utter distress unquestioningly being emitted from an injured feline was beckoning for her to daringly answer those heart- gashing volumes. Nipping on her underlip, riskily, Lena eased off the grated latter in a variant of balletic momentum of kittenish prowess harnessed in her svelte form. Her unlaced sneakers grounded her defensive poise as she paced with measured caution, edging towards an eroded dumpster that smellily reeked a miasmal stench of urban decay.

Gratingly the meowing amplified in detected succession, haphazardly, Lena drove a gaze down at heaps of plastic trash bags, resting on a torn bag, a male raven-black furred cat was rackingly slackened on his lanky side, evidently half-paralyzed by the strain of contractive throbbing; a shard of bloodied glass dug tellingly into his lithe girth as he stretched his whiskered muzzle, raspily choking out a throated hiss while his needle-point fangs were poised to blindingly deliver a knifing strike of reactive-feral menace.

"It's okay, little friend..." Lena murmured with British lit fringed her melodic undertone and deftly eased her dainty hand a breadth over the notched glass that penetrated through his sleek, drenched fur as the wounded feline reared his tinier head back, slashingly a forepaw arced with a defensive snick of his claws in vicious effort to deter her.

"Be gentle, I will not hurt you..." she promised in gentled timbre, cautiously gliding her fingers over a smooth glass edge, as she gazed into the mesmeric depth of silvered aquamarine that starkly contrasted against razor-slit pupils-a glacial sapphire that piercingly held warred echoes of soul-deep valiance in that banking intensity. Bracingly with virtuosic flex of her clutching palm, with a rapid yank, Lena extracted the shard out of him, as throat-ripping screech deafened against the surgical onslaught in a nascent wake of grounded trust. "Easy little blackie..."

Ripping off a disposable sleeve, with battle-tested instincts of surviving in backlit streets-the birth grounds of occultic reign; Lena unerringly staunched out a hiking trek of blood with a tightened knot, her lithe fingers soothingly graced a tactile caress over the velvet-sleekness his unkempt, ebony fur, easing down his pained meows. She wouldn't abandon him. The spookish ambiance of passing klaxon sirens dauntingly heralded another infinite night of abduction harvesting to slake vampiric indulgence-a soul-stealing implosion.

Reeling against brownstone wall in a frantic rush, Lena despairingly became an extension of shadow; jarring the feline as his pointed ears reactively twitched up, attuned to white-noise knells of a mordacious terror strain-phantasmic conjury that raided households. A pinched grimace rapt over his tinier muzzle, aware of his penetrative injuries; the feline nonchalantly arced up his rangy form and purringly nuzzled her denim-clad knee, conveying telltale recognition of his genuine-thanks.

As she quelled down the addictive urge to cradle him into a protective embrace of her arms, Lena kept a shaky palm anchored on his tensing back, while the defiant feline staggeringly limped on the dragging traction of his paw-steps, only to collide tactlessly against the dumpster, ensuing a vexatious hiss. "Ow..."

Tamping down a giggle, the delicate curves of her ruby lips quirk up as the cindery-furred slink frustratingly slashed the rusted edge, seething out aggressive hisses, in the raw utterance of a graveled drawl. "I-I don't believe this..." Increasingly his furred muzzle stretched wide to jut out his needle-point fangs against a choked-off screech. "Damnit..."

Slitting whitish heat of his grayish- sapphire opals narrowingly at the discarded glass shard that she graciously extracted out of the lithe contours of his bruised grith, half-exhausted against an onrush of grogginess, fiercely the ebony-furred feline barred his needle-point fangs with apparent caution rapt on his scrunching muzzle; aggressive tension resonated as he felt grippingly saddled within a divested reality of being an abandoned, rangy stray: a damn cat.

Joltingly his blacken almond-shaped pupils thinned against blurring wetness that dampened his velvety sleek fur as his tiny fanged- muzzle stretched gapingly poised to lash out a hissing cadence. "No...I gotta save em'... A rapid onslaught of soul-deep awareness explosively burgeoned him with a deafening pulse akin to a concussive blowback of a depth charge. The occultic spell caster had tragically dissected out his humanity into a sorcerous-morphic- rebirth of being a slinking phantom; a grievous extension of unbidden defeat.

The spawning breed of psychotic-homicidal zealots that emerged from viper nests would nightmarishly conduct a demonic rhapsody of soul harvesting carnage -a fatal epidemic that wouldn't be staunched out. If the hurricanic celestial energy of the Dark Verse was unleashed from the astral plane: Halloween would be on lockdown.

Disgustingly the odorous reek of heaped garbage stinkily assaulted his feline nose, against reactive tension, instinctively the litheness of his back arched up as Bucky defensively swatted a fore-paw. "Okay, now that's just bad..." he grumbled, scathingly, trying to evade another miasmic whiff encompassing over him-a carious stench from gutted out rodents infused with noxious diesel fumes. "Urgh...That better not be me-" Banishing the headlong urge to plunge back into the Brooklyn harbor, Bucky glacially flashed his luminous grayish-cerulean orbs back onto disheveled-haired orphan who compromised his steeled resolve. "Uh...Thanks for helpin' me, I guess..."

Hearing the meowing cadence noisily echo within the backlit contrasts of the vacant alleyway, in the near-darkness, Lena cautiously edged her dirt-smudged cheek against the rusted dumpster, catching a glare of advancing headlights of a black Escalade that unquestionably was a dispatched convoy of 'the snatching' enforcers-the nocturnal patrol that dauntingly set the duel intensity on high beam akin to a searchlight against the urban backdrops-abandoned brownstone divisions.

As vestigial panic gripped her; out of effective urgently, Lena removed a torn map pamphlet that was stowed in her sweater's pocket and glanced down at streets circled with blue marker-only a few streets close to the West End Line of subway transit gave her the advantage to head into the direction of Sunset Park. "Okay, first we need to get there..." Shakily her finger glided over the fanned out creases, memorizing the shadow- routes-dead zones of NYPD surveillance cameras that were covertly mounted on the telephone poles. "We need to cross through this park..." she whispered in a lower pitch, shifting her frosted cobalt irises onto the dumbfounded ebony feline, consciously nipping on the delicate swell of her underlip. "How can I carry you, little friend...?"

"Yeah like that's gonna happen..." Bucky hissed out starchily, his sapphire orbs grew refractive in the strain of the papable moment as the beaming headlights blindingly illumined over heaping trash bags, disturbing the scurrying furry inhabitants underneath the stairwell, as his bulkier lissom form tensed on defensive edge against a bone-chilling gust creepily raking over his cinder-brunette fur: she was locked within the isolated crosshairs of the shamanistic butchers' unsated-cancerous tantamount of reaping child vitality, by suffocating the city's mortal prevalence. She would be another targeted mark on the Pacific war grounds-Brooklyn. Harnessing dredged up tactical vigilance of sniper vision, moodily Bucky roved his steely gaze over the shadowy elements-high points to utilize for an effective avoidance from the hell-spawn convoy by gunning for a sidestreet. "Okay, Barnes, first you gotta help the kid and then find Lina...If these jerks don't make ya become roadkill."

Against a blood rush, feverishly Bucky kept his impassive poise stealthily half-crouched on wavering traction of his hind paws a harboring variant of his stolen humanity; slashing the furred length of his tail, readily, he jutted his whiskered muzzle up, his feline-honed senses, and became sweepingly attuned to encroaching dissonance of screeching tires; heavy boots thumping in converging unison for a drive-by snatch and grab.

The blood-thirsty denizens-agents of the Mystic Arts- were relentlessly barbaric—demonically insane within Gotham's East Quarter days before, ushering a sanguineous wake of crimson rain, filling cells of Arkham's subbasement with a stockpile orphaned- innocent children as if it was a damn-lurid- saintly act to become infused with astral energy veined within the chaotic planes of the Dark Verse. With the trusted-genuine alliance of Commissioner Jim Gordon and Alfred Pennyworth, they had succeeded the infiltration mission after a rundown with Sofia Falcone's informants of the underground trafficking market, that escalated in the headlong pursuit of the semi-truck-being grappled into a sorcerous unity of quenchless malice that saddled him into the craven-divested existence of being a Brooklyn stray.

The carious reek of viscid fluids mephitically wafted off the converging 'second wave' enforcers' garments of leather Gothic hooded long coats, their wraithlike prowess became hauntingly viperous as fleeting shadow against the alley's brick walls; feeling his furred back rangily arched up, involuntarily, like a mechanical pulse thrumming in his lanky form; Bucky snicked out his foreclaws on defensive accord, blindingly slashing a paw a breadth from the dumpster. "Hell, I guess these guys never quit..." he murmured grittily, in chagrined pitch, sensing their callous-depraved intent to openly abduct the little girl-another orphan to ignite the butcherous ascension of their avant-garde rituals. "I gotta do somethin' fast..."

Imposingly the miasmic vapors sickeningly enwreathed the alleyway, Lena blindingly clutched a taped razor blade that she utilized as her survival weapon to gash open a stranger's hand; holding the makeshift knife effortlessly point-first that the advancing mystic enforcer, bravely she controlled unshakable ease of her defensive poise, not reeling the traction of her feet into a wall. "I'm not afraid of you..." A pitch of steeled defiance gratingly chased her melodic tone as Bucky driven by the extent of hinged trust, wobbly slinked near her denim-clad leg with instinctive ease. "We're not afraid of you..."

A tall broad-shouldered man stepped forward, garbed with tight fabrics of wool and cotton. Vestments of black and red hugged a powerful frame that told Bucky this was a dangerous man who didn't need magic to be a threat. His athletic form boasted power and his smug facade spoke volumes about his character. A cocky individual who thought highly of himself and saw the child and cat in front of him to be of minimal threat. Such people weren't strange to Bucky who had encountered many soldiers who were so full of themselves, they went rogue against their superiors who they believed they'd outgrown. The man was in his 30s, dark-haired and pale skin. Bucky narrowed his feline eyes as he detected a whiff of something that made his stomach churn with revulsion.

"You should be, you little freak. You are alone in an unforgiving city that preys upon strays like you for breakfast, lunch and dinner." The man spoke with a British accent. Not cockney like Lena's, but a deep Geordie that spoke of privilege and self-importance. This was a man who was used to having his way and what he wanted was to do unspeakable harm to both Lena and himself. "You thought you could elude us indefinitely? It is a wonder you have survived this long."

"The kid's a survivor. Something your flock of geese have been having a hard time doin' tonight." Bucky cut in with a grating meow, shifting the enforcer's focus onto him. Good. He wanted him focused on anything other than the little girl next to him. "The last one took a swan-dive off the Brooklyn Bridge because she thought it was okay to abduct kid's off the street. You won't be doin' any better than her, so why don't you go home?"

"Ah yes, Barnes. The infamous assassin who believed his barbaric skill-set would avail him against the mystical arts. How well has that treated you?" The Enforcer taunted with a cruel smirk. Bucky made a mental note to scratch that look off his face. Discreetly he watched as Lena edged her way towards a turned over garbage can. "You should have stuck to your neck of the woods and chased after petty criminals." In a sudden act of hostile intent, the dark wizard began a series of hand-gestures that sparked mystical energies into the vicinity. Bucky and Lena watched as glyphs began to form and surround them. It looked shockingly familiar. "Now you and the girl will be coming with me!"

"I'm not going nowhere...!" A railing scream tore out of Lena, as she harnessed lightning-fast precision of her inventive tack, and distractingly threw her razorlike shard into the air, catching the vulturous enforcer off-guard-it wasn't enough to make a break for it. The silvery glint of trashcan lid hastily steered her brazen intent, in a breakneck thrust of her tinier hand, straining against a feverish onslaught, readily she gripped the dented edge and careened the disklike lid with an unerring trajectory of a decapitating head-shot in the line of shadowed assault; the lid deafeningly clonked off the wall and blurred over the hooded enforcer who stumblingly hunched low in breathless reaction-losing his focus to conjure up a deadening mantra that veined with nocuous astral energy pulsing ghoulishly in his clenching fingers.

"Take cover, kid!" Bucky screeched as he jumped off his hind-paws and pushed Lena against her side. The startled youth fell behind a dumpster and pressed herself against the side just in time to avoid a burst of light that was flung in her direction. The contact hit a car parked on the street, causing it to turn over amidst frightened civilians. The air felt humid as if the oxygen had been sucked out in a vacuum. The Enforcer sneered at evasive tactics of the girl and cat; two strays that should have been easy targets. Bucky bounced and hid himself in a small alcove by the nearest brick wall. The shadows hid him from obscuring eyes but he knew it wouldn't last long in this situation. Bucky could see Lena hidden behind the dumpster, staring at his direction. He blinked repeatedly, knowing she could see him and wondering how she caught his slip.

The Enforcer stalked forward in the direction he saw Lena take cover. Bucky felt his apprehension take hold and he knew he had to distract him again. "The cops won't take long to get here. You're makin' too much noise, Master Moron." He taunted the sorcerer who spun and glared at him with irate eyes. "Or did Strange give you the boot before you could reach that rank? Somethin' tells me he caught your stink real quick."

Twisting his garbed wrist in a counterclockwise motion, fiery sigils of an Eldritch circlet formed a vitreous gauntlet over his arm, evident to manic glint in his viperous pupils as he glaringly fixed his crimson irises on the lanky-worthless- feline who had snarkily challenged the rigged gravity of his murderous intent. "I will relish in the pleasure of dissecting you, Barnes," he seethed out, fumingly, shifting the demonic intensity of his stare at the noticeable wall crevice his furred prey slunk into. "You're a diseased vermin that needs to be scraped off roads of humanity...That beautiful thief of yours will become a savory treat to devour..."

Bucky had very few sore-spots that an enemy could exploit. Training and discipline kept his mind on a balanced level that was unshakable to external threats. But no amount of training could quench the fire of raw anger pulsing through him in that moment. His vision became red and his furry coat bristled as if he were raked by electricity. "You picked the wrong thing to threaten me with!" He hissed. For a moment he completely forgot the fact he wasn't a human on two legs capable of punching holes through walls. He charged out of the alcove on racing paws and pounced at the mage. He extended his razor-sharp claws and slashed at the Enforcer's thigh, feeling his nails tear through clothing and flesh, drawing a loud cry of pain from the surprised mage. Bucky wasn't done. He spun with all the grace of his feline form and bounced off of a trashcan and up onto the mage's back. He hissed and latched his kitty-fangs onto the shoulder, biting down hard.

Against the implosive onrush of bestial adrenaline, harnessing agile variants of feline-combative graces in the breakneck momentum of his explosive agility; in knifing succession of his destabilizing assault, viciously in a rapid strain, Bucky dug his fore-claws scratchingly with gouging force into the enforcer's broad shoulder as he effectively utilized the furred length of his svelte, grungy form to bodily deliver a rear-choke hold. "Just keep talkin'-" he hissed out in screechy-timbered pitch, the grayish coolness of his sapphire orbs piercingly slitted on the razor-thinned intensity, out of blinded instinct, he gnashed his needle-point fangs, with a vertiginous thrust of his whiskered muzzle, aggressively, his tinier jaw pinched over an exposed flesh akin to a viper bite. "M'not gettin' off..."

A heaving pant ensued, Bucky alarmingly mewled against the contracting throbs of bruising pressure of merciless underhand grip forcing him to choke out a high-pitch screech gaspingly against the bone-crushing volition that rode the sleek contours of his lithe form-his claws tore over the cloak as the livid enforcer wrenched his arm back, and yanked at Bucky's flitting tail. "Arghh..." A throated cry gapingly railed out feline, as he became propelled into the wall, paralyzed to react to damaging back-slamming force. Blood was convulsively draining out of him as he collapsed on his side to half-stunned gravity.

Bracing on his clenching paws in assuage of dredged up warrior-honed resilence, Bucky felt searing arcs of white-heat infinitely raze his veins-a concussive tenor of warring desperation that wouldn't avail. A laced boot ominously eclipsed over his bleared vision, killingly poised to stomp the breath of him-to would be too damn easy. Rearing his feline head up against feverish strain, Bucky caught a disheartening glimpse of the orphan girl-staked down in sorcerous trenches of a freakish warzone-he needed to her pull out of this before the maniacal denizens surgically robbed her vitality-soul under the knife-point. "K-Kid you gotta move..." he meowed scratchily against ragged heaves, making a conscious effort to gesture a fore-paw up. "R-Run..."

"Such a pathetic attempt to resurrect your tainted valor, Sergent James Barnes..." The nefarious enforcer demeaningly taunted in hostile cadence; painstakingly edging the heel of his boot over the slenderness of Bucky's furred girth with forceful pressure to crush the jutted indention of the ebony feline's ribs, sneering morbidly as he registered a shuddery breath dragging out of Bucky's slacken muzzle-for an instant he relished to sate his vengeance on the sniper-cat who drove his 'mistress' into the watery fathoms of the Hudson, unaware that his furry captive had aggressively slashed a paw over his calf and pierced his vein until he felt a slick trek of blood reaching his ankle, distracting his baleful resolve for instant termination. "I'll throw you into the freezer for that...!"

The pressure on his small furry body made him feel like a car was squashing down on him. The pain the black feline was feeling could barely measure up to the dread in his bones when he thought of what might happen the kid if he couldn't get out of this. Bucky lamented the thought this could be how his story ends. Having survived decades of war and chaos so he could return to the light, but now he was at risk at being crushed and sent into an eternal abyss. He blindly scratched and struggled to free himself but it did nothing except embolden the sadistic thrill of his attacker. Bucky mentally began to panic and squirm, refusing to give up, refusing to let this be the end. "R-Run, kid!" Bucky meowed out with a strangled voice. He could let this be for nothing. He couldn't let this animal take away this sweet little kid who pulled him out of the dumpster rather than leave him to rot. He had to fight back! He had to do somethin-

"Leave that kitty alone..." A raw cadence of brazenness demandingly railed out of Lena at the heart-stopping moment the enforcer's boot poundingly hammered over the screeching ebony feline without traction of mercy. With blinding swiftness driven by the rapid voltage of warrior instinct- reckless adrenaline channeling through her veins, she effortlessly jumped behind the cloaked demon, unwaveringly fringing dagger-edge precision of a brandished sword in her controlled momentum as she fisted a tugging grip over the frayed length of his grotty leather garment-a battle song cadence viscerally revved against her pulse. Blonde whorls unkemptly draped over her dirt-smudged cheeks as she nimbly dodged a clawing hand viperously reaching for her delicate throat, and spunkily teased. "You're too slow for me..."

A vicious snarl erupted from the Enforcer's throat. The sum of aggression and biting pain lancing through him drove his mind into a tail-spin, robbing him of all focus of his surroundings. He was oblivious to the light reflecting off of a pristine state-of-the-art sniper-scope attached to a Barret M82, mounted on a rooftop across the street. The barrel had its target in line of sight by an angry yet steady hand. Vengeful eyes glared at the magical creep that was attacking an innocent child after brutalizing a helpless cat. With the squeeze of the trigger, a boom echoed throughout the night and a bullet sailed through the night-sky until it exploded it out of the shoulder of the Enforcer.

Shock, pain and confusion raged through his mind. The sight of blood pouring profusely from his body was enough to alarm even Bucky and Lena, the latter of which immediately had taken cover after gingerly swiping Bucky off the ground and hugging him close to her. The cat meowed at the pain moving through him but somehow found the sensation of being cradled against the girl's chest to give him an odd sense of security. "There's a sniper out there, kid. Keep your head down-" Bucky's warning fell short when he was hit by another shock.

From out of nowhere, like an angel descending from heaven, a familiar shape of red, white and blue leapt down from a neighboring rooftop with a circular shield in hand. "Steve?" Bucky was torn between happiness and total-shock. A reaction which mirrored the Enforcer's who immediately came under-assault by a flurry of thrusting fists and swinging kicks. Captain America entered the alley and had become nothing short of an avenging angel of justice as he bashed his shield against the magical practitioner's face before he could even begin to conjure a spell against him in his wounded state. "It's okay, kid. Run! Take your cat and go!" Steve yelled.

Conveying a gracious nod, Lena attentively reacting to the urgent command edging raggedly in Steve's deep timbre evident to the valorous glints of stormier heat melding in his azure irises; golden-blonde tresses ruggedly clung in his temples as the vibranium edge of patriotic shield was forcibly braced against the enforcer's neck. Firming the rigid flexion of his leather-buckled wrist, poised defensively with a cast of readied-tactical determination over bristled planes of his hard-edged features, Steve had bodily driven adamant-waging ferocity surging in his unshakable grip as his opponent's neutralized stance was faltering to a level of submission: a blown-out knee had waveringly impeded retreat.

Harrowingly registering the sulfurous aura demonically pulsing in the shadows, with a measured variance of embracing delicateness invested in her steady underhand of anchoring clutch around his furred girth, Lena tentatively snuggled the ebony feline against her chest, keeping Bucky protectively secured as his tiny head rackingly pillowed over her angled forearm with conscious ease, as hitching purrs feverishly emitted out of his scrunching muzzle. "I'll get the kitty out of here..." she whispered in a promising cadence, before racing out of the alleyway and stealthily hunched low behind a parked vehicle.

The moment Lena had safely disappeared from the scene, Steve reacted with conscious instinct and hoisted the hostile man up off his feet and threw him against the wall of the alley. Despite his height of over six feet, Steve held the man off his feet as if he were a sack of potatoes. Any who knew Captain America or worked with him would've been startled by the furious look in his eyes that showed a lack of restraint. Steve wasn't having a good night. He wasn't have a good year in fact.

The fallout of the Endgame battle had cost the lives of many allies. He hoped-believed-that it hadn't been for nothing. That so soon after such a cataclysmic war, humankind would stop trying to kill each other for one good year after being given a second chance. But after receiving the call from Selina Kyle, telling him about how children were being abducted and reduced to hideous practices by some kind of magical cult, the captain was filled with disgust. That disgust quickly turned to heartbreak and anger when she explained that Bucky had fallen into the Hudson and was presumed dead.

"I'm only gonna ask you this once, and only once. You give me lip, and its going to get ugly from here on." Steve said through clenched teeth as he glared at the wounded Enforcer in front of him who clutched his bleeding arm. "What did you want with the kids? What did you do to James Barnes?"

"You can't obstruct the reaping of innocence, Captain America," the enforcer snidely taunted in a hissing rasp, while manically coiling his head back with ophidian motion to ease the choking pressure unmovingly wedged against his straining throat; a wetted streak crimson viscously trekked over his thrusting jaw. Mockingly, he grazed his bladelike nose with a possessive drag over the bristled-roughened edge of Steve's cheek, a distractive tactic of shudderingly making the First Avenger lose his clutch on the shield. "You must be so used to resurrected failure that cuts so deep into your bleeding heart, makes you paralyzed to carry on the damn fight..." He continued, sneeringly, arresting Steve's heartbeat into a grievous extension of a condemned reality. "Sergent Barnes is now a stray phantom in the shadows he crossed..."

Steve's reaction was quick and to the point. His helmeted head reared back and headbutted the Enforcer across the face, smashing lip and nose into a blinding hit of pain that caused the Enforcer to release an aching groan. It was a vicious move Steve wouldn't have inflicted under ordinary circumstances but he wasn't ready to ask for forgiveness. Not now. His heaving chest pulsed with heavy intakes of breath. His fists clenching at his sides relaxed when he heard a distinct set of footsteps approaching from across the street. "You're gonna want to rethink that answer, son. Because the lady here won't be asking as nicely as I did." Steve said, glancing to his right as the street-lights revealed the cold visage of one Selina Kyle.

Against the backlit contrasts of the litter-infested alleyway, an electrified voltage of lethal tension bankingly clashed through her veins like a blood rush of ignitable diesel; under the bordering sleekness of her domino mask, tigerish brandy irises murderously glinted with deadened intensity fusing into liquid steel; the cool fineness of her elfish pearlescent features indifferently belied vital restraint, teemingly she advanced the controlled prowess of her, curvaceous silhouetted form toward's Steve, as he fiercely pinned the enforcer with back-breaking force against the wall. Clutching a threadbare collar in intimidating unison of his enhanced strength, his whiten knuckles achingly dug into the material of cloaking garb, not releasing his unshakeable grip.

"I wouldn't waste your breath on him..." Selina bitingly snarled out, rawness threaded in her undertone against gritted teeth."He's not worth a second of it..." Her leather-gloved fingers tautly clutched over black-matte steel of her Beretta 9mm, as she lithely arced up her neoprene garbed arm to unerringly squeeze back the trigger for point-blank trajectory—just a fringed extension of her rampageous-destructive heartache. She evicted apparitions of phantom grief-fostering onto relevance of infinite hope against a knifing throb shunted through her heart.

She didn't care if blood dripped off her fingers; every parasitic rank of that child- abducting syndicate was disposable. The marked players were high rollers of a toxicant—vatic crusade that surgically gouged out innocent orphans-strays. She needed to remain unbeaten against the calamitous reality encompassing her fractured world into a dark -unforgiving vacuum. "We need to make this dance quick, Soldier boy..." she urged out, scathingly, knowing that her core reticence was bleeding on the knife-edge.

Steve looked at Selina reluctantly. Despite his anger over Bucky and witnessing what this dark wizard was about to do to an innocent girl, he didn't approve of personal executions. "Look I know that-" Before he could fully object Selina's proposal, they were both taken by shock when the Enforcer suddenly slipped from his cornered position and began to conjure what looked to be a mirrored-shard from out of the very air. The Mirror Dimension, they remembered what the Strange had called it.

"You have won nothing. Every young life you save will always be vulnerable so long as the Circle Sinister thrives in the shadows." And with that, the Enforcer impaled himself with the shard, the bloodied tip extruding from his spine as it pierced his heart. Steve recoiled at the gruesome sight while Selina remained stoic and unmoved. They exchanged an unsure look, before stepping out of the alley. What the hell just happened?

Not too far away from the scene, Bucky was stricken with shock at the sight of Selina sauntering into the picture like an angel of death descending to dispense justice upon his would-be killer. One look at her told him she was inwardly distraught and brimming with pain. Both she and Steve believed he had died in the river when he fell from the crash. Hadn't they not discovered his body was missing from the submerged truck? His first instinct was to call out to her, to rush head-first across the cold sidewalk and back into the alley where he could set matters straight. But the soft gentle brush of a comforting hand against his head reminded him that he wasn't alone out here. Lena. She needed help. But not the kind of help he could offer in this...body. He meowed and shifted in her arms, getting a good look at her worried features that made him wish he could envelop her in a comforting hug. The kid needed him. She was a target out here on the streets.

"Its gonna be all right, kid. I know em', they can help us. Try not to be afraid," he meowed, placing his paw on her arm. The sound of him must've been louder than he expected when he saw Lena's face morph into a look of anticipation. Turning around, Bucky's eyes widened to see Selina walking in their direction.

With collective poise as she edged painstakingly momentum near the abandoned vehicle that the orphaned girl had instinctively utilized as a refuge out of the hellish crossfire; in Selina crouched low on her neoprene-sheathed haunches, the razor-edge metallic of her razor-edge stiletto heels gleamingly captured strobing crimson of NYPD cruisers that were dispatched obviously to barricade the backlit environs of the alleyway-crime scene. Flitting her dark coffee irises over the meowing bundle of ebony fur protectively cradled in the girl's tremulous arms.

A deft quirk played over her voluminous- pillowy full-bow lips that were distractingly silkier with cherry-infused burgundy; Selina kept her grounded distance tentative while errantly shifting an incredulous gaze at the snug male feline who reactively cocked up his head against Lena's forearm, arrestingly staring at her with luminous—the glacial intensity—cool smokiness of aquamarine. It was too hypnotic—visceral to indifferently evade as she registered a woodsy-virile whiff of cinnamon, sandalwood that headily electrified her stilted awareness—maybe it Steve's Gucci aftershave had seeped into her disheveled mahogany tresses. Betraying her impassive demeanor, she clenched her jaw against a riotous throb slivering in her veins. "You should probably get out of the dodge, kiddo..." she murmured under breath coaxingly, lasering her gaze vehemently back at the lifeless corpse of the suicidal enforcer dumped on a trash heap. "This isn't kitty play..."

It was a moment of woe and desperation. Akin to a hostage being trapped inside of a prison while salvation laid just within arms reach and yet so far away. The cinder-furred feline meowed and tried to reach his paw out to her. "Mrroww-lina, its mrooww!" Inwardly he was calling to her, his words sounding clean as plain English, but his hearing wasn't playing tricks on him when all he really heard were the raving noises of a distressed cat. Bucky's heart sank into his chest, his blue eyes gaze up into Selina's curious gaze with a pleading look, trying to convey his innermost thoughts since his voice was failing him. He needed her-Lena needed her.

Before he could take things further, he watches as Selina glances over her shoulder to see someone coming their way. It was Steve. The trouble blonde came to a pause his unexpected partner then noticed Lena standing in front of her. "Hi. You okay there? Do you have any family or friends that can come for you and your little friend?"

Inwardly, Bucky was reaching the end of his patience. 'Now's not the time to be big brother, punk!' Bucky inwardly yelled as he tried to gain Steve's attention now. 'You gotta help us here, Steve. Selina. Both of you…'

The clangorous volume of ravaging manic echoed deafeningly against the breeze, rabidity of insanity was soul-hammering throughout the darkened streets- an October tempest of impending carnage was ushered by the occultic extremists was ghoulishly bordering-like an unbidden cavalcade of demonic thirsting. In moments the NYPD homicide unit would close-down the alleyway.

With a cool semblance tellingly brandishing over exquisite sleekness of her kittenish- elfin features, against a definite moment of chaste lucidity as the lanky male feline screechingly beckoned for her in a resonance of urgent volume. Begrudgingly easing onto her spiked-heels with painstaking motion, Selina dragged out a terse breath, fringing with a sardonic undertone, not allowing the orphan's indigent gaze to breach her impassive demeanor; she wasn't a rigged for a charitable breach of warranted trust-it was a harsh blunt of reality that the stray kitten needed to foster onto: nothing would distract her out of the vengeful wake.

"If you're expecting me to keep on the rails, it's not happening..." In sauntering graces of her breakneck pace in fluid succession of her trenchant momentum undeviatingly at Steve's imposing form with a rueful glint in the knifing decadence of her shadowed brandy irises-a vixenish fusion as she errantly quashed down a biting seethe."If Bucky is still out there, we need to level up the dance card-"

"MRRROWW! (I'm right here!)" Bucky screeched, his volume alarming both Selina and Steve who looked at the cat with mild surprise. Lena instinctively rubbed his head and neck, trying to soothe his distress. Steve took a moment to stare at the cat closely, finding his mannerisms and expressions oddly familiar. It almost reminded him of his youth, when times were simple, and he wandered over the Barnes household to wake his best friend up. Bucky would lash out wildly, his hair a furry mess that made him looking like a hissing feline. How strange…

Speaking of. "Wanda said she might have a lead. She and Strange have been tracking some kind of magical cult that's been growing on the Eastern Seaboard-from here to Gotham. Maybe we should check it out. If Bucky's out there, we stand a better chance at finding him with their help…" It wasn't the news Selina wanted to hear, Steve knew. Like him, she felt less anxious and more confident if they kept on looking for themselves without relying on others to do it for them. But after encountering this homicidal mage in the alley, he wasn't so sure if their search would be any easier without help.

A rapt scowl curved over the fullness of her crimson lips, derisively she recognized Steve's half-hearted attempt unmistakeably geared to derail her rampageous heart-a white pulse of stemmed fury explosively careened within her veins, akin to fissionable dynamite. Saddling him with a pointed glare, enragingly evident to an untamped hiss, Selina blindingly whirled on her stiletto heels, countering his adamant intent of recruiting more dance partners to their 'witch-hunting' party. "I'm not settling with this damn plan of yours, Rogers" she gnashed her teeth, fumingly. "I don't need magician tricks as backup, I have to rattle all the cages, so either you turn around or follow my lead..."

Steve knew Selina long enough to know she wouldn't back down when she had her mind set. She wasn't a soldier like him who relied on gathered intel, she went out and looked for it herself. But in many ways, she also reminded him of himself. Too stubborn, unwilling to stand idly by and let things play out while hoping for the best. The first time he ever defied a direct order, he saved the lives of close to a hundred men including Bucky. A small nostalgic smile graced his features at the thought. "Then I guess we'll have to split up from here. I'll keep an ear out for Bucky and try to find out more about these cultists that are running through the city. You let me know if you find any leads on where he might be."

He looked at the cat and the little girl, wondering what might become of them. "Stay sharp, kid. Run home and be safe." He saluted her with a friendly smile.

As Steve vanished into the environs of the night, a rushing variance of detachment starkly cast raw tension achingly in her coffee irises, fervently keeping the orphan girl curbside near a gridlock. Aware of child's rebellious measures of adaptively- a brazen determination that visibly conveyed with a purpled bruise that evidently bulged on her delicate cheek; Selina disarmingly eased back into a mid-crouch; red strobes of incoming patrol cruisers glaringly reflected off the sharp curves of her turned-up inferred goggles-colors that impulsively signaled her to run out of crossfire.

With a deft stretch of her gloved hand, in caressing minstartions she glided her thumb over Lena's dainty knuckles, tentative pressure of chaste heat as she breathily quipped. "You're one tough kid..." In that stalled moment, as amber streetlight haloed over them, she gazed unblinkingly at the male feline snug in the cradling embrace of Lena's twined arms; as his forepaws were gripping onto her frayed sleeve, in a conscious effort of anchoring himself while his rear swung loosely. Reacting against the visceral rush of instinctive reaction, brushingly Selina hefted her palm to keep him bodily wedged against the girl's chest, and shivery felt the virile sleekness of his obsidian fur deliver a trace of phantom-vestigial- heat, nakedly contrasting the glacial radiance of his sapphire orbs. "You know furballs like him, are worth keeping close since they like chasing your shadow..."

It was sage advice from one wayward orphan to another, Bucky knew. Selina always cared about kids lost in the gutter who had the misfortune of sharing her own childhood trauma. It wilted his resolve to reach out to her and make her realize that he was right in front of her. No longer the handsome broad specimen she would snuggle against at night, but a small furry stray. It wasn't important-not right now. Lena needed help, she needed his help. He had a lifetime of guilt eating away at him. He vowed to spend every day forward trying to redeem himself. This was as good a start as any.

Keeping his silence would be the hardest thing he'd ever done knowing that so many things could go wrong from here on out and he might never see her again. Reaching his paw out, gently this time, Bucky rested it against the back of Selina's hand. Her brown eyes shot down to him, curious and assessing as he nuzzled and licked against her ivory skin. "YA lyublyu tebya, kotenok… (I love you, kitten.)" Despite his words sounding like a soft meow, they conveyed the sum of his forever burning affections for her. His one true love and guiding light that he would claw his way back to when this was over.

A smooth glide of soul-driven reverence arrestingly caught her stunned pulse with ghosting wet heat of his tiny pinkish tongue, as the feline's whiskered muzzle featherily kneaded the lithe bones of her gloved palm in sensuous-ardent pressure that he bruisingly grazed his fanged mouth in flexing tenor of intimate-unadulterated- fervency while meowing in ragged hitches of straining breath; cats were never this affectionate-starved. "Probably attachment issues..." she deadpanned under terse breath.

Detecting that penetrative breach of masculine vitality, involuntarily Selina yanked her arm back in whipcord traction, calculatingly glaring down at him with inscrutable depth-a curious flit of her lashes betrayed her impassive poise. The visceral way his feline spheres gleamed mesmerically like cool steel that edged roguishly with voltaic menace, how the fierce scrunching of his tinier-whiskered muzzle frustratedly belied unrepentant stubbornness against contractive dregs of deep-seated exhaustion.

She couldn't deny that he was enchantingly beautiful for a lanky feline-a damn good score off the street. "Get your little friend out of here, kid..." she urged, breathlessly, and easily slipped a wad of cash 'easy grabs" that she had deceptively swiped off the enforcer's rancid corpse into Lena's pocketed sweater." I'll clear the way for you..."

"Don't worry, pretty lady, I'll keep him tucked close..." Lena echoed back in determined cadence, nauseously against feverish strain thrumming to implode; drafty gales became infinitely frigid as the midnight hour passed over the Eastern horizon. The dynamical luxury of genuine trust wasn't expandable; being a vagrant stray of Asgard, Lena was driven by breakneck-innate spunkiness as she evaded -the child snatchers-demons of sacrificial vengeance that consumingly ravaged in neighboring boroughs. She needed to gun her targeted paces to the West End subway tunnel while avoiding detection from the camera grid.

In a thievish cadence of her phantom graces readily,Selina guided their exit route of practical stealth behind a flashing patrol squad car, with her Beretta angled point-blank, in a measure of deft steadiness, her unkempt blonde whorls bedraggledly over her lithe shoulder as she gingerly lowered her chin with protective ease over the passive sniper-cat's furry head as his velvet-tipped ears flitted against her cheek in mirroring caress of temperance; his purring of low-timbre was an untrammeled revelation that he was genuinely comfortable to be secured in her arms.

"You're my kitty now..."

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The desolated ambiance of the isolated warehouse loft in a Brooklyn Heights dockyard-a convenient hideout within a shadow-zone; adopting to safe house locations like in Bucharest- Romania was a strategic tactic of off-grid survival. For two years of stealthily backpacking Eastern Europe-being marked as a defective-amnestic fugitive of HYDRA; Bucky efficiently harbored his sniper instincts to use ramshackle apartments as his imperative refuge points to evade rogue operators-dispatch agents commanded without a stint of undeterred mercy. Being a beast machine of elemental periphery he unerringly recognized how to detect an intrusive HYDRA cockroach breaching his position.

Exhaustingly feeling his whiskered muzzle scrunch rigidly against the potent stench of discarded oil rags and eroded moorings that grew mustily intolerable, scowlingly Bucky nudged his tiny furred head against a glass planed window, dodging another vaporous barrage.

It was a damning extension of conquered reality that his mortal existence was a half-starved feline-a wraithy bestial phantom gripped down against the sorcerous reign that murderously sired unprecedented depravity— being a gawky feline couldn't stoke up his hellbent spirit to fight with a furred tail and retractable claws; not when he was being put on the ropes of mutative -unendurable dregs. He wasn't the suave hellbent Brooklyn kid or the Siberian beast machine; just a downsized-worthless- extension of condemned failure."T-This can't last forever..." he rasped sulkily, easing a fore-paw to despairingly splay against the coolness of glass that was paralytic to deaden out a soul-hammering throb; he couldn't surrender to that warring extent of heartache: not without a fight.

The prevailing relevance of unbridled hope was extinguished into a weaponized cauldron that he was agonizingly launched when the semi-truck plunged into the Hudson. As his whitish-sapphire orbs became fixed on amber sconces of the looming harvest moonlight that was gleamingly captured in the lapping waves, Bucky felt his ears spearing up against the soul-neutralizing frequency of an Eldritch mantra-a ghoulish assonance of maniacal rabidity that blipped out panic-induced cries. Just waves of rhapsodic static that pulsed heartbreakingly against his flitting ears. There were no lines to cross: no visage of hindrance against the unstaunched appetite of the expansive installation of zealot harvesters. Kids were targets of life-draining rituals if he could save Lena, hell it would damn worth it.

He did his utmost to curb the thought that this was something he couldn't shake off. That the tendrils of magic that seeped into his body had turned him into something that couldn't be unmade. If that was the case, would he ever see his kitten again? Would Selina ever know what really happened to him after he went into the river? "Keep it together, man." He told himself repeatedly. He couldn't surrender to the grip of fear. Not now. Not when he had a kid depending on him to help see her to safety. The thought of Lena caused Bucky to shift his stare away from the window and look down at her near a set of doors she was trying to force her way through. "Lena. Hey, this way, through here." He tapped his paw against the window and meowed to catch attention.

So far this was the only way he found himself useful of helping the wayward young child who puzzled him as he sensed there was something unique about her. He might not be a super-soldier with the strength to fight with his fists, but he could still be a guide that could at least help her elude any dangers ahead of them.

Harnessing up amplified resilence in her undeterred momentum as she lowered onto denim-clad knees with effortless poise, Lena sneakily ducked between a dent-in garage door and enforcing a variant of cautious furtiveness in her crouching stance behind an eroded row of oil drums. Fostering the prevalent-harsh reality of being a street-honed runaway gave her inventive tactics for using elements of the urban labyrinth-to remain undetected in plain sight. They were trudging into a blackout spot, no NYPD surveillance mounted outside in the shipping yard. It was a convenient harbor point for staking nocturnal refuge.

Bating out a tenuous breath as the litheness of her shoulder grazed with a throbbing pinch against metal coil poking from a barrel. Riotous instinct grippingly thrummed in her veins with frenetic surges of an electrifying cadence-a warrior strain that was latent unbeknownst as the Asgardian sigil inked on her wrist radiated with celestial heat. "All clear, friend Bas..." she whispered melodiously in girlish cadence, beckoning him by a quirky name that had once belong to a brawly- gallant feline slinking the stable grounds of the warrior destriers-Bastian-that he decisively accepted.

Searchingly Lena roved the fevered intensity of her grayish-turquoise irises at the feline silhouette impassively hunched near the grimy window, as the swaying length of his furred tail reactively arced up while she watched his tiny muzzle aggressively stretch wide with a rearing thrust of his head, jutting his needle-point fangs to stiflingly rasp out a vexatious hiss. "This will be a good hiding spot for the night, just mind the smelly rats..." Lena jokingly giggled as Bucky's darkened pupils dauntingly thinned razorlike into slits against the invasive wake of banking hunger as he starvedly registered a frowsty scent of appetizing vermin-definitely scurrying rodents locked in the periphery of his sniper-vision. "Don't worry I'll find you something good..." she promisingly winked.

Smelly rats should have been the first thing on Bucky's mind, but he couldn't help but blink repeatedly when he realized what she had called him. "Bas? Is that short for something?" It was an interesting name. Not what he would've expected but he had been called worst in his time. Pretty Boy, Buck-Teeth and Manchurian Candidate to name a few. The more he listened to Lena talk, he realized that despite her Cockney accent, her dialect was familiar. Asgardian, he realized. How hadn't he seen it? Thor mentioned that when his people arrived on Earth, different pods landed at different locations around the world. Despite the majority of the refugees landing in Norway, some were still on the opposite side of the globe, far from their new home.

But if she was an Asgardian, did that mean… "C-Can you understand me, kid?" He meowed softly. Wondering if the All-Speak wasn't something Thor just made up.

The gravelly scratchiness of his purring drawl croakily fringed with a choked-off breath, Lena unblinkingly gazed at crestfallen feline scrunching his brow into a tautening pinch as he frowningly bolstered on his clawed-paws atop of a rusted oil drum, not breaking his crouching poise. A conducted manifestation of danger was loomingly sulfurous around them, he tensely angled his tiny muzzle against the carrion breach, isolating the reeky scent wafting against the frigidness of the midnight air-nowhere was safe.

In tentative advances of her measured footing, genuinely Lena closed the distance between them, stretching out a tatteredly leather-sheathed hand to featherily deliver a kneading caress over the sleek ebony of his muscled back-a fusing glide of thermic-desperate affection that he wouldn't reject. "Sometimes I hear the low volumes that no one else can..." she whispered in a hitching stammer, nipping on the delicate swell of her underlip. "Back in the dark alley, I heard you, friend Bas..."

Bucky was at a loss for words at the suddenness of this unexpected reveal. When he woke up this morning, he hadn't fathomed the idea that he would have been chasing a gang of magical cultists out of Gotham City, crashing into the Hudson, being transformed into a cat, and meeting a wayward Asgardian child on the streets. How did my life become this crazy? He wondered. But like all kids from Brooklyn, he knew how to keep his chin up and not let this wear him down. He had to think positive or risk being crushed by the gravity of what he was facing.

Lena was an Asgardian child who was on her own out here. A pup separated from her pack and it was up to him to see her to safety somehow. But to do that, he had to communicate with her. He had to know her. "You were there when no one else was, kid… Not many people would help someone in need… Thanks for pulling me out of the dumpster," he said with gratitude, allowing her to keep petting him. "But what's a girl like you doin' out on the streets alone? Why aren't you with the rest of the Asgardian refugees?"

Pinching her eyes shut against a trepidatious moment, Lena felt an errant glide of fevered wetness on her moon-paled cheek, the urgent timbre of curiosity in his questioning drawl painstakingly fed a careening memories-apparitions that young braves of Asgard quivered in a hailstorm of titanic dread when cosmic salvos of nova white blindingly devasted the massive transport ship that had been idly steering through nebula quadrants to the interdimensional coordinates of Midgard; the plaguing immensity of a galactic warship-a helmed vessel of genocidal conquest had barricaded their voyage.

Emitting an indrawn breath, tearily, Lena eased her chin down onto a denim-clad knee that dampened as concussive volumes of soul-deafening pandemonium imploded in an ear-splitting dissonance of fusion blasts hellishly raining over them with unstoppable-lightning precision. "I remember boarding a ship on the Rainbow bridge-" she whimpered sobbingly and tucked her knees bracingly against the sweatered layers of her chest. "Something big came on and took everyone away..."

Thanos. Sanctuary II. The words send dread throughout Bucky's furry body, recalling Thor's long and gut-wrenching after-action report that he and many others listened to after Blip brought them back to life. According to Thor, only half his people had managed to escape the single life-boat that survived Asgard's doom. If he had to guess, they all didn't make it back to Earth as a group. Somehow Lena had been separated from her people when they landed. The others settled into New Asgard while she had to live on these streets-alone. Bucky was filled with both heartbreak and anger at the thought.

"I know this is gonna sound strange, but the Big Scary thing that you saw take everyone away...he's gone and he won't be coming back. You're gonna be all right. You're not the only Asgardian to survive. The rest of your people are out there." He said, trying to cheer her up and give her some semblance of hope. "They found a new home." He purred rubbing her hand with his paw in what he hoped was a comforting gesture.

"N-No-" A railing cadence of raw anguish cuttingly tore out of her, in frantic momentum, lurchingly against the coaxing pressure of Bucky's fore-paw deftly graced an echoing variance of brotherly tenderness driven by chaste instinct over her gloved hand; Lena thrashed her arm back, involuntarily unaware that her fingers were rampantly clenching into a rigid fist with a pulse of Aesir's vitality as her knuckles forcefully dented the barrel against a whip-lash flex. "I can't remember-" A breathless mewl edged with an underlying pitch of crescendoing desperation. "The pain in my head...It still hurts..."

Red flags began waving in Bucky's mind and he felt as if he were in a car that was screeching to halt. This was too familiar-too close to home. "Lena! Hey, don't fight it, kiddo. I know you're going through." He meowed long and hard, conveying the sum of his heightened anxiety as he watched her begin to unravel in front of him. Whatever it was she had been through in escaping the Asgardian ship had left her with a form of memory loss. Short or permanent he couldn't say. But he knew that whatever it was he mind was trying to remember was etched in pain.

He climbs near to her lap and puts his paw on her elbow, meowing again, this time low and steady-reassurance. "Memories can't be forced back, kiddo. They take time. Believe me, I know...I was once like you." She looked at him, teary-eyed and confused. The cat dipped his head. "This might come as a shock to you, but before tonight I used to be human. The magical bad guys that were chasing you-they did this to me…"

Attentively casting a bearly gleam of her pale cerulean depths over the enchanted feline's sanity raven fur, beneath taut sleekness of his lithe form, an invincible cadence warred against thralls of vulnerability-heartache. Dregs of weakness that graspingly encompassed her into a defective visage of mortal indigence. Staring into the feline's iced sapphire orbs nakedly gleamed with errant blear of unshed tears-she found no deterrence of stark betrayal in the virile radiance alight of his chastened depths-a warrior's spirit. "I have a good sense that you knew that pretty lady in the cool mask..." She murmured timidly, and with a poised caress, kneaded her chilled fingers over Bucky's arching back, as his feline head purringly nuzzled with a bopping reaction against drifting her palm. "She must be your hjerte (heart)?"

At the mention of Selina, Bucky mewled in what would've sounded like a sign of pain. "Yeah. Guess you can say that. I...used to be a very confused man. Lost. Angry. That was until she found me. Selina...She helped me find my way back onto the light. Her and the big blonde with the shield…They're my family. Right now they think I'm dead. Lost at the bottom of a river where no one can find me. But I'm not lost, kiddo. Know why? Because I'm with you." He smiled and swayed his tail slightly, his furry cheeks puffing with warmth. "The way I see it, we're both being chased by the same mystical jerks. We gotta stop em before they hurt more kids. You with me?" He looked at her with big blue eyes, kind and encouraging.

Quirking her delicate lips up into a half-smirk, angelically, Lena emitted a melodic giggle as rivalrous tension of the defensive fringe ebbed against the vibrant-long-denied revelation that she wasn't alone."Yes, until the battle is won..." A subtle clash of heartening trust was evolving into full measure hope driven by a warrior's unalloyed covenant to the votive extent of sacrifice-tomorrow was going to be one helluva of a ride.

Unabashedly emitting a breathy-threaded rasp, with cool smoothness of addictive-boyish charm, roguishly Bucky thrusted his pert muzzle with coaxing pressure against her knee as Lena drowsily sunk back into a heap of tarps collected near the barrels that would be used for a makeshift bed. Feigning a stretch of a telltale yawn, Lena invitingly gestured the ebony feline to swiftly nestle into the open solidary of her cradling arms.

The prevalent knell of bloodshed would irrevocably clamor at daybreak, for now, they needed to salvage onto attuned resilence, allow exhaustion to belatedly grapple them down as they geared up battle-tested adrenaline to endure another ruinous wave of the child harvesters. As she tentatively rested her slack cheek against roughened material of a ragged tarp, Lena felt him sveltely nudge his rangy mass against her curved forearm, purring throatily in a murmurous tenor as she whispered faintly. "Thank you, friend Bas, for staying with me..."

"Okay, okay, just watch the ribs, kiddo." Bucky meowed with a high-pitch. Being coddled into a child's arms was something Bucky never anticipated feeling. His new form made him small and easy to hold in a warm embrace that made his fur feel warm and his muscles relaxed. He didn't realize he had purred into he settled comfortably into his make-shift bed. Was it like this for all cats? He wasn't sure but chose to enjoy this moment of rest that he needed sorely after such a long and chaotic night where he'd almost been killed. Slowly he felt her breathing begin to ease as she held him close as if he were a line-line she was clinging to desperately. Inwardly he felt an odd twist in his chest that was painful in a way that made him realize how much this kid was beginning to affect him. She'd lost so much. He couldn't let anything happen to her. He'd die before letting those evil bastards get their hands on her. "Its gonna be all right, Lena. Good night," he meowed to her.

The exhilarative dynamic of mirrored rust—hope—resonating within the svelteness of his embraced form reined down the blazoning assonance of soul-gripping dread as she cherishingly held onto him against a tremulous clutch; murderous reams of phantasmal bloodthirst eclipsed the Eastern horizon. A crippling sense of her ancestral home became denoted against the vacant detachment of protective solace hollowed out her veins in the unimpeded fruition of urgent awareness that she was a severed -homeless extension of the surviving ranks of Asgard. Being clingily dependable on bridled hope made her vulnerable- she needed to find the Noric routes that would usher her to a safe harbor of Tønsberg.

Grazing her tattered palm over his velvetlike fur with tactile ministrations of gentled caresses that nonchalantly evoked a throated -growly purr as Bucky consciously dragged his muzzle into the crook of her sleeved arm, making no traction of effort to slip out of reach-he was longing for a visceral reality of irresistible warmth to clung onto. Narrowing a heavy-lidded gaze at the snuggled feline, Lena brushed her shaky lips feather-light between his twitching ears, stammeringly hitching out a rivaled echo of unwarranted heartbreak. "I-I wish I could keep you forever..."

Sleep tugged heavily at him and he found himself falling deeper into its dark embrace. But as he listened to her wistful words, sensing the familial longing inside of them, he knew just how precious such a thing was. Seeing so many young innocent lives lost at the hands of those monsters and the price he paid, he knew there would be a cost to freedom, to protecting Lena from the same fate. It was a price he wouldn't be afraid to pay in full. As he fell towards slumber, Bucky released a low meow, conveying the sum of his warm reassurance. "Well, seeing how you're givin' me tail room, I guess M' yours for now, kiddo..." As he finally fell asleep, feeling Lena hold him tighter, Bucky dreamed of both he and Selina at home, making room for one more at the dinner table.

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A sorcerous gale had warningly fringed over sectors of Manhattan, heralding astral convergences out of implosive rifts of the Dark Verse; a reaping tempest of euphonic butchery veined within telestic gateways-transcendental planes of mortality that would demonically rapture on the predicted hour of the encroaching Halloween night. Being a vigilant sentinel-a primed maestro of harnessing the Eldritch manuscripts was a full-time gig, no cutbacks of altering shifts: not even for a midnight candy run.

Nonchalantly sitting on the bottom cherry-wood step of his capacious sanctum, against the infuriating torrent of warring uneasiness, Doctor Steven Strange gripped a leather-tattered book propped on his Monolith leather boots -a mosaic Tibetian journal that relic curator (bane of his existence) Wong had maddeningly given him instruction to skim over before making a venture to a convenience store—he wouldn't discard a clean-break of chance of obtaining his preferred chocolate bars for reading session that gripped him into thralls of mounting boredom.

Every Halloween, as an unbreakable tradition, his cherished-dependable- friend Christine Palmer would devotedly spoil him with a Hersey's Bar and Musketeers that she emptied from the vending machine outside the ER wing of Metro- General; she always tucked a goody bag in his surgeon's coat with 'Trick or Treat' scribbled in marker. "How naive pasts have changed," he grumbled in a cavalier pitch, ruefully, pressing his scarred index finger hard against his silver-gray temple, feeling metallic pins flex on the strained accord of marred tendons. "Remain on task..."

He could never go back to the nanosurgery division-that was a one-stop reality of limited performance. After trading off the Eye of Agamotto-Time Stone to the maniacal-tyrannic cosmic Titian and becoming a disposable hostage into a celestial realm-the Soul World of a forged time paradox of the Multiverse. For the expanse of five years in dormant stasis after the soul purging of the Infinity Gaunlet, Strange had kept everyone anchored into a mirrored reality of an astral bridge-untouched by the of quantum plane elements.

With a hawkish shift of his draconic grayish-azure irises, dauntingly Strange felt the astral pulse flatline and launch into the eternal crossway-another ritual incantation was conjured. The mystic sentries of defensive ranks were aware of the orchestral rapidness of kidnapping that rogue zealots of the Dark Verse penetratingly ushered over his breached domain- carious malice that lanced against the dimensional shield for hungrily tapping out pure vitality of harvested children. He would rue the day of bargaining with antagonistic extremists of an occultic syndicate-there was no demand to be met when children would collateral damage in a gambit of sorcerous warcraft. "Damnit..." A terse seethe ripped out of his throat as his goatee-fringed lips stringently compressed into a vexatious grimace. "All decks are out..."

"The immediate threat of the zealots is evolving, Strange..." Arching up his eyebrow indignantly, evident to a knifing glint of his crystallize steel-gray irises, flamingly he leveled a guarded stare on the stout, Asian baldheaded master of the Kamar-Taj temple grounds, who stood impassively on the stairway, practically garbed in his archaic burgundy kimono tunic, nothing detracted his tolerant countenance towards preserving his intractable -po-faced decorum as he grumpily addressed. "We've detected a conjuring breach of the Eldritch incarnations that are weaponized extensions of the Dark Arts over the Hudson..."

With quick precision of his stubby hand, Wong convincingly revealed a torn Kevlar jacket that was latterly collected at the NYPD alley-way crime scene. "A forbidden spell cast that disrupts the natural order, tragically morphing targeted victims into nameless vessels as fitting judgment..."

Releasing a derisive breath sardonically against the urgency fringed the gruffiness of Wong's stern timbre, evoking frustration to infuriatingly ride through his veins. In a measure of practiced ease of his tenuous hand, involuntarily Strange had placed the journal on a vacant step. Engaging a cataclysmal threat -overture of embittered zealots detonating a Pandora box on the Manhattan homefront wasn't on his Halloween 'to-do-list-'.

With his reserved semblance broodingly fracturing, Strange felt a eurythmic shockwave of a resurrected mantra soul-morphic volumes being clashingly harnessed in unison with assailing-callous intent. His grayish azureous steered insouciantly at the sanctum's front doorway as the hawkishly smooth-edged planes of his goated features raptly pinched. "Well, this should be fun Halloween..." he tetchily gritted, quirking an eyebrow at Wong as he scathingly delivered his unshakeable request. "You owe me a Musketeers bar after, maybe two if I decide to keep score on those kidnapping douchebags ..."

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Bolstering the disheveled lankiness of his body with concentrative poise, achingly Bucky tilted his muzzle up against the grey slants of daylight gleamingly captured over his obsidian-raven fur; keeping himself unflinchingly ducked-low a breadth of a Daily Bugle newsprint vendor kiosk on a curbside in a stemmed variance of tactical prowess against damp frigidness of the morning air. Seeking out clear points of refuge on the gridlocks against oncoming Upper East Side traffic, wasn't an easy feat to wage against—he was saddled on the incarnate fringe of a sorcerous reality.

Abandoning the errant coziness of the dockyard warehouse, Bucky spent the early hours of a tedious morning, slinking behind parked vehicles, scaling fire-escape ladders with the spunky Asgardian maiden-Lena- to briskly evade dispatched convoys of the occultic abductors had rushingly tested his acrobatic graces—mechanized endurance. Every svelte curve of his feline body was explosively honed with agile precision—readiness of an ignitable fusion that electrified his veins like a voltaic surge of diesel. Having the earshot advantage of being a sleek-furred phantom lurking through urban contrasts kept Lena effectively out of the crosshairs while trudging the East Side borough's gridiron.

At the stilted moment, they were in a convenient dead zone of traffic surveillance; undetected—for now. Quashing down a thready meow, underlying a clamorous raid of unabated hunger, his driven senses became rackingly arrested by a flavorous-sugared aroma of cinnamon glazed crullers wafted from a proximal coffeeshop that beckoningly stunted his resistance as if being held by knifepoint. Ensnared in chimeral throes against the infective reign of mephitic conjury, made him feel like he was soldier-crawling under barb wire, bleeding out stacked-up defiance.

Against his vexatious chagrin, Bucky stubbornly neglected to slake down the mounting emptiness under the lithe ridges of his girth. Staving off a throated groan, he murmured starchily. "Uh...I definitely need one of those..." Thrashing a silvered forepaw up to grimacingly brush against his twitching pinkish nose, unblinkingly he watched Lena enforce a girlish visage of tentative shyness, her blonde whorls dishevelledly curtained under a Yankee baseball cap that she found in a charity deposit box; a quirking smirk edged cockily over his muzzle as she purchased a refrigerated bottle of orange juice from a curbside vendor; using the generous wad of cash that his intoxicatingly beautiful-thieving kotenok-his Lina- had given to her. "Atta girl, kiddo..." he meowed breathily, arcing the length of his tail up against the whooshing speed of maddening traffic. "C'mon Lena, we gotta stay ahead of these guys..."

Bucky wished they could be a bit more inconspicuous on the streets of Manhattan where flocks of civilians traveled up and down the streets wearing costumes. Halloween night might've been more commercial than from what he remembered back in his old time, but the spirit of it was still kept alive as he watched a number of teenagers dressed as the Avengers and horror monsters laughed and joked while taking selfies with their phones. It was a cloudy night with gray skies looming above but there was no indication of rainfall. It told Bucky that both he and Lena should have a clear path to a certain townhouse in Bleecker Street. Which was about a dozen or so blocks away. The feline released a long vexed meow, knowing that it would take him and Lena an hour, maybe longer to reach their destination.

As he and Lena continued to walk quietly along the sidewalk he noticed her silence and looked at her. She was staring at the number of kids passing by wearing costumes and appeared perplexed. "I take it they didn't have costumed holidays like Halloween on Asgard?" He asked curiously.

Twisting off the bottle cap, Lena cautiously braced her garbed shoulders against a brownstone railing adorned with cotton webbing that had plastic spiders tangled within the stretch of it, her turquoise irises shimmeringly grew alight under the shadowing brim of her threadbare Yankee cap, when she incredulously noticed gripped bags with printed Disney characters that she observed from storefront windows in Soho; each bag was stashed with delicious, wrapped chocolate bars-candy that was generously proffered on doorsteps by strangers when the group of costumed teenagers knocked and excitingly repeated a jovial mantra in unison: Trick or Treat.

Gnawing on the delicate swell of her underlip, collectively Lena drew out a tense breath, keeping her distance latent from the passing freakish candy scavengers who mobilized in breakneck pace towards the next decorated residence that was ominously lit with bulbous carved pumpkins flickering on the cement steps. "We revel in grand feasts when swords are raised for victory...When our heroes return to tell us stories..." she answered in a faltering pitch, sheepishly. "What I remember is thrusting a blade just how the beautiful Lady Sif did..."

"They taught you how to fight," Bucky realized. Asgardians no doubt taught their children from childhood which given their lifespan could mean centuries. That Lena had managed to survive so long on her own out here told him she was more than just lucky, but she was also pretty handy with pointy objects. Selina would no doubt approve. "Did they teach you to have fun? To live like a child who could...I don't know, play or make or sport with the other Asgardian children?" Bucky knew he couldn't judge an ancient powerful civilization that many saw as gods in the way that they raised their off-spring. From what Thor had mentioned there were many different castes in their civilization. Warriors, scholars, witches, wizards, teachers, smiths. If Lena remembered training with a sword then that told him she might've been picked to be a warrior. But was it by choice or duty.

As the ebony feline harnessed a surge of athletic grace, breathlessly vaulting over the railing in propelling ease as he barely collided into a sneering pumpkin, sulkily Lena dragged herself onto her crouching haunches, clashing her palm over the delicate bones of her branded wrist inked with the sigils of the Valkyrie maidens-the storm riders of Asgardian ranks that daringly ventured to realm's edge when Odin thundered his warrior call; she deftly lifted up her ratty sleeve for him to unwaveringly gaze at the intricate mark of her fractured birthright. "I-I don't remember what this symbol means, friend Bas," she rasped stammeringly, gliding her thumb in reverent motion over arrow design. "I think it was meant for something noble..."

The feline scrunched his nose in consternation while staring at the arrow mark on Lena's arm. He didn't know what it was, but he had a good idea it was some precursed destiny that was chosen for her. Those kinds of things often didn't end too well. He suddenly felt an anxious need to reach out and protect her from whatever it meant. But at the same time, he knew to be hopeful that it could mean something good. "I can't say I know what it means. But maybe this wizard I heard so much about could explain it to you. Or he can find someone else who can." Bucky meowed, letting his tail sway in the soft breeze. "I wouldn't worry about it too much, kiddo. Here on Earth-Midgard-it could be a fresh start for you. You can do anything you want, be whoever you want."

The galvanic depth fringed in his scratchy-froggish timbre was anchoring-brotherly-resurgence of hope to lance through her amnesic stupor-the instinctive caliber of a sword-wielder echoed the valorous spiritedness of Asgardian vitality; the cataclysmal Twilight reckoning of firey novas had grievously conducted her to Midgard vistas; fashioning her battle-tested resilence.

Maybe she needed to save Bas-free his captive soul from the morphic severance he was forced heartbreakingly to endure-he was too charmingly kind-hearted to be deemed as a furred stray. Quirking her lips with angelic poise, smoothly Lena ghosted her palm over the silken rigidly of his back, evoking him to noncommittally purr against the brush of girlish-pure- affection. "I know what I want, friend Bas..." she whispered in a promising cadence. "I-I want to you change back..."

Bucky would have chuckled with equal enthusiasm if his body were still capable of it. The scratchy surface of his throat itched as he released a loud meow with a jovial wag of his tail. "On that kiddo, I'd definitely agree with you. Can't say I envisioned retirement living as a fat house-cat coughing up furballs." He joked getting a mental image of himself being a cranky old cat screeching at young kids from the porch to keep off the lawn. But at least the petting felt good. He released a purr as Lena giggled and rubbed the back of his neck, getting a very sensitive spot behind his ears that made him feel like melted butter. "Purrfect, kid." He meowed jovially. He licked her palm in gratitude, an act that came almost instinctively to him that it made him inwardly realize he was becoming more feline as time went on. He didn't know if that was good or bad.

Angling her chin up to the amber-tinted horizon that loomingly contrasted against ghoulish darkness over the Manhattan labyrinth, challengingly in a tempo of a divisive heartbeat, with fierce steeliness, Lena sprang to a defiant height; brandishing her dwarfed hand into a fist, revamping a pulse of unbeatable Asgardian strength-she was on the edge of the fight. Gesturing a telltale wave of her hand to Bucky to follow her direction of the Sanctum Sanctorium without the fleeting retraction of caution, she hastily chucked the emptied bottle into a trash can and uttered in hearty volume, readily. "Let's go find this wizard, friend Bas..."

Emitting a throaty meow in crestfallen response, arrestingly Bucky felt the hammer-blow of contractive reality infinitely paralyze his mobility for an unwarrantable moment—at the breadth of daybreak he would agonizingly lose himself in the soul-cleaving thralls of the damnable witchery forever. His disposable-mutative existence was reaching the end of the line. He was now a lanky silhouetted phantom of Halloween-starvingly he craved to return back to his snarky vixen—Lina in their Midtown loft, to recklessly dip a bar of Hershey's white chocolate into a jar of creamy peanut butter of while indulgently viewing a classic-reel monster film: nothing would beat that Halloween tradition.

Clenching his little fanged muzzle grimacingly into a vicious scrunch, on destructive accord of implosive aggression, Bucky swiped a forepaw lashingly over the decorative webbing; his grayish-sapphire orbs nakedly bleared with onrushing wetness as he tactlessly bumped his furry head in a jutting thrust against the iron railing, murmuring out a despondent timbre."A-At least you're gonna be off the ropes, kiddo..."

Suddenly a ground-quaking volume of sub-woofers made Bucky jumpily screech out "What the hell...!" His back arched up thrashingly on defensive flexion when a matte-black Jaguar F4 drove sped by the gridlock curb, blaringly with earsplitting clashes of strumming acoustic guitars bass and erratic drumbeat was amplifying into a masculine screaming pitch as his furred ears swiveled back registering the symphonic rockin' ballad of Led Zeppelin: We come from the land of the ice and snow...From the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow...

It was like Tony Stark had charged into the streets with this music heralding his arrival. Loud music had never bothered Bucky before but somehow his feline ears were ultra-sensitive to the acoustic guitars and drums. Bucky meowed loudly and shrank back, nimbly putting distance between himself and the offending sound while Lena could only look on with worry. "Argh! I can't stand this music," Bucky shuddered but calmed down as Lena began petting his back. His senses had nearly gone into haywire, but his focus immediately climbed back when he looked at their surroundings. There were too many people on the streets wearing costumes, it would be almost impossible to blend in and avoid unwanted eyes. But Bucky's sharp instincts told him to scrutinize every face in the crowd.

He could feel Lena's concerned gaze on him as he sat quietly, watching a group of kids and a school teacher dressed as a witch at the bus-stop. A second teacher dressed as a witch stood with them. As the bus came to pick them up, the kids and only one the teachers stepped onboard. The second stood on the curb, looking in every direction until her stare landed on Bucky and Lena. "Oh no…"

Being pegged-down into rabid crosshairs of lurid bloodthirst had disarmingly forced Bucky to reel on his paws, his glacial feline orbs widened in blank intensity when he sniffed the carious aura noxiously radiating from the witchy zealot garbed in a hooded Gothic burgundy cloak with impassive prowess of a taunting viper, as she remained grounded on the curbside adjacent of their marked position. Whipping the length of his tail up in reactive sync, Bucky attempted to stoke up his rampageous momentum as the female zealot twistingly eased her lithe hand in a circular motion, rooting a vitric pulse of fiery-kinetic skeins that incandescently melded into an eldritch glyph of archaic-suffusive design. "Bas..." Lena rasped out questioningly as she clumsily hunched near cement steps.

"Lena…" Bucky's voice was edged with nervousness as he noticed another cloaked figure sitting at a table on the patio of a coffee shop. A third at the edge of the block, a male standing near six feet with a gruesome scar on his face. They were everywhere. He and Lena were all but surrounded in the wide-open street where hundreds of civilians moved up and down the streets amidst traffic. There was a time when Bucky would have charged into the jaws of death fearlessly with his gun held high, but he wasn't that man anymore. His little paws could only allow him to do so much against a group of wizards. And he wasn't alone, he reminded himself. They weren't here for him. They had come here for Lena.

"We're gonna have to make a break for it, kiddo," Bucky meowed, tapping her leg repeatedly with his paw. His whiskered muzzle ruffled and his big blue eyes looked up at her imploringly. He could see her expression fall and felt his heart ache at the sight. "You know where we're headed. No matter what happens, don't stop running. I'm looking out for you."

The congested throngs on the sidewalk blurred out, heaving in voiceless pants, Lena cannoned her propelling momentum explosively like a battle-charge of adrenalized succession; in warring cadence, her hands blurringly razored slashed the air, pushing herself to break distance. Notching up her speed at the crosswalk, the reddish sconce of the mounted traffic light didn't impede her desperate precision, she hurriedly glanced at Bucky mirroring her unstoppable pace as he breathlessly leaped over a parked vehicle's hood, urging her to keep running with high-pitch meowing.

His muscles burned in a way that made him feel pain lance through his small furry body with every breath. But Bucky didn't stop running. The sounds of wailing traffic rang through his ears, matched by the hustle and bustle of passing civilians. His blue eyes never left Lena for a moment as she ran up ahead of him, navigating their way through the swarms of Manhattan. Inside his did his utmost to ignore the voice of despair that told him it was too late. They wouldn't make it to Doctor Strange's house before midnight, not with these homicidal mages chasing them all the way there. Thoughts of Selina ran through his mind. The thought of never getting his chance to settle down and start a family with his best girl. But this couldn't be about him. So he kept on running, vowing to see Lena to safety no matter the cost to himself. He didn't need to look over his shoulder to know they were being pursued if the confused shouts were any indicator.

But as their unending pace began to lead them across a busy street, Bucky felt his skin grow cold when a Lena decided to run through a green light. "LENA LOOK OUT!" He meowed frightfully. That was when she did the unthinkable. For a little girl appearing no older than a pre-teen, she held out her arms and stopped a screeching car dead in the street using only her hands. "Right...Asgardian," he said shakily, feeling his heart sink back down into his chest.

Feeling her smaller knuckles fist-ramming into the dented metal with vicing force, waveringly as she lifted her hands off the caved-in vehicle's hood, Lena reeled back against a blood-rushing tempo of attuned combative ferocity-a scything wake of harbored rebellious-honed strength crescendoing through her veins."Woah..." she uttered out, flitting her alighted silvery turquoise irises while she flexed her hand with a reined measure. In a daring shift of balletic grace as she felt the caliginous aura of demonic thirst ghoulishly sailing over the barricaded street, Lena instinctively fixed her gaze in the direction of an iron-gated entrance, only a few paces to reach. "Come, friend Bas..." she imploringly beckoned, as the cinder-feline answered, rushingly gunning his tactical -phantom-agility back to her side.

Central Park. Bucky guessed if Lena knew half of the grim stories that were about the historic New York landmark, she would've picked a different place for them to take refuge in. But there wasn't any time left to argue. One glance over his shoulder confirmed his suspicion as he saw two zealots push their way through a crowd of teenagers, sending a few of them toppling to the ground with their candy and eggs spilling on top of them. Bucky bounced off a car-hood and charged through the gates of the park. Nightfall had now descended upon the city and all the ghouls that festered within the urban decay began to come out.

Once he felt enough distance had been put between him and their pursuers, Bucky slowed his pace and struggling to regain his breath. "Lena!" He called out to her up ahead as where she was looking for a new way to cross as they reached a fork in the maze of trees. "Slow down, kid. It's easy to get lost in this park-"

"We have to go through..." In a threaded hitch, driven by headlong urgency to evade the vulturish legion of child-butchering cultists, bodily Lena rammed delicate litheness of her shoulder with bludgeoning force against the park's gates; as they creakily swung open, she inexorably collided into an outstretched gnarly root bulging out of the ground, that lanced stingingly into her exposed knee, tearing denim as treks of blood slickly oozed from the apparent gouge. Forcibly against throbbing strain, Lena choked out a kittenish mewl, as she involuntarily braced her clenching hands over chilled grass to anchor her into a half-crouch. A child-little maiden of Asgard never allows a visage defeat to reign over her.

In the flurrying speed of his thrusting paws, Bucky leaped shadowily through the bars in mid-air, at the heart-thumping moment his cool luminous depths piercingly caught Lena her daintier palm splaying over the bloodied gash, as they both registered a white-hot flash that possessively crippled her into a vulnerable-nocuous deadlock. The cloaked zealots' unrelenting pursuance would breach the park grounds-they advanced in wraith-like unison as Bucky warningly hissed, arching his back against her blood-soaked calf. Pillowing her cheek against her knee, feverishly Lena panted, the delicateness of her tear-sheen lips tugged into a breathless smirk. "Good kitty, Bas..."

The eccentric Cockney accent somehow managed to make Bucky grin and release a hiss that constituted as a chuckle. "You know I think that nickname is growing on me," he remarked. Squatting low on his paws, he felt the vibrations in the ground that told him there were still dozens of people in the park spread out across several miles. But the ones in their immediate proximity moving at a fast pace where the ones he was worried about. "There's at least five of them, Lena." The feline meowed long and dreary. The look in his blue eyes conveyed only a resigned desperation. Maybe more. We can't afford to slip up or they'll have us cornered here. I don't think we're gonna make it out of here on our own. You need to get to a phone and call Selina. She's the woman you met last night in the alley...She can help you."

It was Lena's only chance of getting out of this safely he realized. He had hoped that by leading her himself she would be less inconspicuous than traveling with Selina and Steve. He now realized those cultist wizards had to have been tracking her by some other means.

Shifting on her sneakers with conscious ease against knifing throb, Lena feigned a subtle grimace; hauntingly the sulfurous rancidity enwreathing over them didn't avail. They needed to find a rendezvous point out of the demonic crossfire. Blurrily, in a daring flash of steeled turquoise of unabandoned determination, her incredulously gaze roved to a vacant path bordered with shadowing arid trees—a clear outlet of escape. Nodding while shakily nipping her underlip, she murmured in a raspy hitch. "Okay, I'll find your pretty maiden Selina..."

As she pulled herself up in a wavering stance, fiery sigils-veins of the Dark verse glowingly merged into geometric-eldritch- circlets as the soul-reaping harvesters encroached their manic convergence around them vampirically commanded by insatiable thirst. Each hooded zealot advanced in a predatory stride of ritual execution as their sorcerous energy became weaponized-a demonic arsenal. Defensively rearing himself onto his hind paws, Bucky kept the ranginess of his satiny-furrier mass rigidly braced on her denim calf, his whiskered muzzle stretched gapingly against stark resonance of a voiceless—grating meow. "Bas..." Lena cried out stammeringly, the moon-glow above reflected off his slitting orbs as the glacial sapphire vacantly melded into silvery-ember-a deadened fringe of bestial surrender. "No...You're my brave kitty..."

Something about the desperation in her voice made Bucky feel a creeping dread inside of him. But it didn't compare to the hazy he was suddenly beginning to experience. Wordlessly he looked up at her and tried to ask her what she meant by that. But the words didn't come. It was like a noose had been thrown around his neck and a knot was secured around his larynx. Whatever sound he did make was nothing but an empty grating meow that lacked depth. What was happening to him? Why couldn't he speak? Why couldn't she understand him now? The dread he felt gave way to panic as the feline openly hissed and screech, trying desperately to hear his own voice in the midst of the primitive feline noises.

He felt distressed, but more than that, he felt an amplified sense of foreboding causing the fur on his back to rise up. He could smell the stench of magic as four massive shadows turned a corner of the tree-line and stood across from him and Lena. He could only hope she understood the screeching of his voice- a cry for her to run.

Unwarranted tension ricocheted with heart-shunting panic, keeping herself motionlessly crouch in bordering shadow, fleetingly Lena gazed at the monkish vampiresque clocked denizens threateningly stationed on the pathway with crimson sigils poised like dueling saw-blade to cuttingly scythed her down as they chorused a Tibetain mantra in sinister-mantic accord.

Flashing his needle-point fangs a rapt muzzle scrunch of telltale aggression, bristlingly the cinder-ebony feline slashed a forepaw up, evident to a vicious seething hiss- he wasn't going down without a fight, despite the high -infinite cost stacked against him. Grounding his fiercer stance, heatedly, Bucky registered the apparitional implosion of the sorcerous cimmerian resonated damnably under his paws. A fallout -cancerous soul-purging of child vitality was hairbreadth away from rapid acceleration.

Steadying her palm unhesitantly over the sleek contours of his taut back, Lena understood the banking-soldiery extent of his full-measure resistance that couldn't be warded off. They needed to run. Quirking her dainty lips into an errant smirk that rebelliously conveyed brazen intent, she melodically whispered, straightening her sneaker traction with pistoning readiness to ignite a chase. "Let's see if they can take us..."

Brink of panic was beyond describing what Bucky was feeling. He was close to full and utter collapse as he watched the five magic users begin circling him and Lena like wolves ready to pounce. No amount of meowing and hissing would get her to turn and run. She was an Asgardian, raised from infancy to be brave and strong-a warrior upon the battlefield with enemies beyond her power. Despite the apprehension, Bucky felt for the girl, he also felt pride. She wouldn't back down from bullies. She fought and survived this long on the streets, on her own. Just like a kid from Brooklyn. Her eyes met and his and he watched as a brave smile formed across her freckled cheeks, uplifting him from his own pit of sorrow as he nodded and faced the mages with a hiss. 'Okay, kid. Let's take em.'

The five zealots, three men and two women were tattooed and dressed in robes that made them look like monks. But Bucky could see the evil intentions in their eyes that spelled nothing but violence. Two of them moved in towards Lena. Bucky hissed and allowed his feline instincts to react as he pounced forward and slashed his paws at the waist of the tallest male. His claws scratched cloth and flesh, drawing a sharp cry of pain from the man while the second was surprised by the ordeal, giving Lena the distraction needed to kick him in the shin. A sickening pop rang out followed by a gasp of pain. They had underestimated her alien strength.

In a hammering tempo of combative aggression became a raid of voltage, defensively lightning-fast, Lena surged her foot with bone-splintering ferocity as the faltering zealot garbed in a maroon cassock wavered back towards an iron lamppost in floored- paralyzed momentum, emitting a throated yelp as he blunted off the white flash of convulsive pain; his brutish fingers were dementedly thrusting down in viperous flexes to squeeze the sniper-cat's tinier neck into a mephitic clutch of python force. Sensing that murderous aura of rabid heat, in a stifled rush, blurringly harnessing fluid precision of his amped swiftness, in high pounce of synced cadence, Bucky arced the litheness of his furred body, rotating every poised, svelte muscle with acrobatic graces as he sleekly back-flipped on his paws. "Good Bas..." Lena snickered girlishly, careening her grayish-azureous gaze with fevered intensity at the approaching bedizened scavenger who hypnotically belied mordacious prowess of a taunting cobra.

"You will come with us, girl! After we kill your pet!" The rough-looking zealot who had his stomach slashed by Bucky came to his feet and took up a defensive posture. Bucky recognized it immediately as a magical gesture that would mean he was in big trouble. The feline raspingly meowed in a pitch that meant was construed as aggressive. 'Bring it on,' he would have said if his vocal cords were still capable of sounding out human words. The zealot gestured his palms and eldritch magic sparked into existence as he created a fiery whip. Bucky felt his fur rise off his skin and watched as the zealot began twirling the construct in a sadistic manner meant to impose fear. The two female zealots who had stood by as background enforcers began to move on Lena. "Die you furry little demon," the zealot brought the whip down but Bucky gracefully leaped away and avoided the singeing attack.

Hot air licked at his fur due to the proximity but Bucky didn't stop as the whip continues to follow him as he pounced from ground to bench to lamp-post. 'That the best you got, punk?' He hissed at the zealot who grew increasingly frustrated at his inability to hit him. As Lena moved to help him, she was confronted by the two females who formed ring-disks on their hands. "Come with us, Asgardian. Your talents will serve the Baron who leads us."

The galvanic pulse of astral energy morbifically suffused through orphan Asgardian's veins in converging into a nidorous onslaught, edging desperate-vertiginous traction near the lamppost, she wouldn't abandon the interminable fight: it didn't reign in her blood. Leveling a defiant glare at the obstructing insatiable zealots that spookily circled a gap of trees; errantly Lena understood the prosaic reality of her marked abduction-the incarnate vitality of Yggdrasill-that burningly manifested within her like a tempestuous fusion, celestial deviance that was craved like narcotic ecstasy. Raising her steeled fists a breadth from her chin, unshakingly Lena grounded her battle stance, catching in her teary periphery -mirrored crimson glyphs that hellishly fused into vaporous spires to unremittingly pierce her kitty friend-Bas- to induce her deadened surrender. "No-" she roared out in careening volumes of stark panic. "Don't you hurt him.."

He felt as if he had been hit by an IED, no different from the one he used in his days as an assassin. Pain and bewilderment hit his feline body and he found himself plummeting to the ground in a hard collision. The world spun on its axis and he released a wailing meow, feeling the burn of eldritch sorcery permeating his veins. The zealot wielding the whip cursed and stood over him, looking down at him with disdainful eyes. In the darkness of night, the whip made his rough features appear barbaric-monstrous. "You will suffer, man-cat, for trying to halt our great journey. Your mortality is beyond reach and now you will lose what remains of it." Looking at the female zealots, he nodded his head to them, telling them to take away a distressed Lena who tried to defend herself as they surrounded her.

'Lena…I'm sorry, kiddo.' Bucky meowed, staring after her weakly. The blast of magic that hit him was immobilizing, weakening as if his very nerves were numb solid. What was happening to him? Why couldn't he move? Why did he feel so heavy? To his horror he soon realized the magical spell that hit him was like a flesh-eating parasite-consuming him from his paws upward, his furry soft body was crusted and hardening into marble...into stone.

The echoing tenor of his heartbeat was impaled against the knifing lance of demonic conjury, tearily her grayish-turquoise depths narrowed at vitreous crimson ghosting possessively over Bucky's atrophied form, his slacken ebony fur became encompassed by spawning treks of bone-chilled obsidian as his mortality-soul- was being heartbreakingly razed in the vampiric wake of their infectious-plaguing thirst.

Gnashing her teeth in tear-choking pitch, sobbingly, Lena poised her balletic footing against incendiary pulses of rigged aggression; haphazardly extending out her hand to clutch a phantom vein of kinetic energy that she lethally fashioned into a morphic blade forged by the elements of vapory shadow- an ebon Necrosword of cosmic warcraft that sailed from the underworld realm of Helheim. An eclipsing flit of carnal-driven intent contrasted over her angelic elfin features as she gripped the pommel that was etched with runic jade, daringly she hefted the blade up at the ghoulish zealots without a betraying flex of telltale hesitance."You will not take my Bas..."

The zealots were stricken with surprise as they watched the Asgardian child demonstrate her own form of magic that felt raw-untrained, but immensely powerful. She was like an unstable bomb prepared to go off in their vicinity the more they cornered and threatened both her and her friend. The quintuple group stood looking at each other with uncertainty, facing down the lone Asgardian child who glared at them with fierce eyes, ready and willing to rip through them with a cleave of her necrosword. Before they could mount their own offense to trap her, they were in for an even greater surprise that this time spelled nothing but dread into their stomachs.

Lena spun around and watched as a wheel of crackling sparks formed out of thin-air behind where she stood. Like a buzzsaw of flames it spun and grew in intensity until a gateway was opened, bathing the nighttime park with amber glow of sorcery. Out of the rift, a man with a flowing red cape, floated into their midst like with a tight jaw and calculating blue eyes that shone with intelligence. Around his neck hung an exotic amulet that emanated great power. The zealots backed away, each of them forming their own weapons as the newcomer landed behind Lena and stood protectively at her side.

"Jaabal, Anders, Aumund, Mariot, Niobe. I never thought you'd lower yourself to abducting children. Is this what Mordo has led you to?" Doctor Strange shook his head with disappointment at his once fellow students that trained with him at Kamar-Taj. Noticing the confused young Asgardian beside him, he nodded to her. "If its all right with you, Little Xena, I have a bone to pick with these five drop-outs."

"Charlatan! You are no better than your predecessor, we refuse to follow your reckless path!" One of the zealots, Aumund, sneered at him. "Mordo shows us the way. The child is our key."

"Well, you won't be getting your hands on her. And not on-Where is James Barnes..." It was then that Strange noticed the immobilized cat on the ground and his confidant expression turned to remorse. "My new acquaintance is not gonna like that."

Smirking callously beneath the hooded fringe of her cloak, the female zealot revoltingly seethed in raving pitch; she was an occultic spawn of the world-devouring behemoth of the Dark Verse; gesturing her leather-guarded hand in serpentine motion as destroyer sigils condemningly wheeled over the ebony feline bolstered-cemented down listlessly against the lamppost as obsidian-granite parasitically delineated in contractive throb over the virile sleekness of his feverish-grungy fur; a jutting strain of his gaping muzzle nakedly conveyed a voiceless screech- soon he would be a verminous-disposable-trophy of Mordo's scrouging penance. "The Ronin spirit of the forsaken street-filth named James Barnes will be soon purged by the resurrected sentiment of vengeance that came from your failing design, Stone-Keeper..." she hissed, mockingly. "Surrender the Asgardian brat over to the legion of Master Mordo and you can have the tongueless cat as an ineffective relic..."

"I didn't come here to bargain, Niobe. I've had more than my fill of that," Strange said with a dour look. He watched as the zealots tensed and became rapidly unstable. "Don't do it." He warned. His hands began weaving and extending the tendrils of magic in the air in the hopes of transporting the injured feline to a safe place away from the fighting. But the zealot reacted faster, her mind a vengeful train speed without pause. She casts the Destroyer spell, sending it barreling in Bucky's direction until it slams into him. The injured feline meowed weakly while Lena let out a vicious cry of rage. It was the tipping point to this standoff and her rage caused her to barrel towards the zealot with her sword held high. Strange fell into motion, his hands conjuring the Sacred Sword of Vishanti and moving in on the zealots.

Their weapons met his in a flurry of sparks and slashes, each thrust aiming to kill and maim in a burst of sorcery. With quick efficiency, he manages to disarm and incapacitate both Aemond and Mariot with corkscrew attacks. The Cloak reacts as the eyes at the back of his head and wraps itself around Niobe's head before the zealot can sneak up on him. Lena hacks and slashes, using her greater Asgardian strength to force Jaabal and Anders back. Tears stain her cheeks as they continue to flow from her anguished eyes.

Strange finished dispatching his opponents but was unprepared for the sight of another portal opening and a painfully familiar face emerging from it. Lena felt herself struck with an immobilizing spell and gasped, dropping her sword and falling to her knees. A dark set of hands hauled her up and held her captive. "Did I not tell you, Strange. The bill comes due, for us all?"

"Mordo...Let her go," Strange pleaded with his one-time friend and teacher. "She's an innocent."

"Innocent, but dangerous. The world is filling up with too many of her ilk. How long before they rise up and destroy all we were sworn to protect?" Mordo spat with a hardened look, no trace of compassion in his eyes.

Bucky felt disconnected from his body. The fur that encompassed his small form had become solid and slick as the magic continued to consume him. His blurred vision watch the fight unfold as the world grew darker. The ability to see, to think became as hard as the idea of standing up on his own feet. He was dying. There was no question about it. Whatever spell the zealot hit him with, it wasn't just ravaging his body but also his mind and spirit. The thought should have made him terrified but instead, Bucky felt only an ebb or remorse and resignation.

Teetering between the reality and the brink of oblivion, his eyes lazily looked at the portal where a dark silhouette, bathed in golden light, stepped into the park. Angelic and graceful, her features shone brightly in a way that made him think of heaven. He knew her face...

Against the bordering graphite of her domino mask that smokily contrasted sirenic allure of her exquisite-kittenish features , thievish decadence melded in her brandy irises gleamingly fixed on the barbarous impassiveness brandished on Mordo's rugged plane dark visage as he uttered in low monotone a Tibetian incantation of the soul-grappling unison of his ravening-fanatical- zealots while menacingly poised a breadth from the orphan alleyway stray—a target of valuable interest. This was no variant of a cheap trade-off; a child's life was being stacked in his expandable deck of cards that he would unquestionably singe into ash.

In a seductive charade, she played a cool semblance of banking restraint, in brazen traction of her stiletto-heel boots, deviantly, Selina curved the sheening fullness of her crimson lips with vixenish quirk, as she clutched her Beretta in a deceptive flex of her gloved hand. "I have to admit when Mr. Tricks over there said you were worth a dance, I wasn't expecting this..." she purred wickedly in rueful pitch. "It's really disappointing for a girl of my style..."

Mordo was surprised as well as confused by the unknown woman's arrival. He didn't recognize her as any of the Avengers nor did it appear she was Asgardian in origin due to her leather outfit and firearms. "I don't know who you are, Miss. Nor do I care. But I would warn you not to interfere in this fight. It doesn't concern you." He flicked a glare towards Strange while at the same time, conjuring a flamming dagger that he held near Lena's throat. "Get back. Now," he said, watching as Selina fearlessly approached with hard punctuating clicks of her high-heels. The look in her eyes was cold and unforgiving while her hand hovered close to the Glock holstered at her thigh.

In a blinding swipe of her hand ghosting over taut curves of her neoprene-clad thigh, against a breathless drag, her brandy irises stealingly glanced at the neolithic pendant reverently fastened over Strange's neck-Eye of Agamotto- a cosmic accessory to switchback reality. Selina riotously in painstaking ease leveled the pistol at point-blank range, with an evident glide of her thumb, reserved the hammer-trigger back in mechanical succession as the flaring intensity of her dark gaze riveted on the fiery dagger uncompromisingly arced over the delicate length of Lena's sized throat. "Touch the kid, and I'm going to enjoy watching you choke..." she gritted back viciously, calculating dead- straight precision of an effective headshot. "I'm not joking..."

Strange peeked at Selina through the corner of his eye, understanding even if he wasn't told that she was buying him time to disarm his old colleague. Mordo stood with his back near to a tree. The sorcerer knew that if he were to open a portal to sneak up behind him, Mordo would know it instantly and maybe do something rash. He couldn't discount anything, having never expected the former master to abduct children from across the country.

"And I'm not bluffing," Mordo sneered at her, his patience rapidly running out the longer he remained in the open with his prize unsecured. "But if you wish to test me, so be it." The sorcerer began to conjure what would be a spell meant to paralyze Selina the same way he did the Asgardian child. That was before Strange leapt forward and threw his arms up. The force of nature reacted to the spell as the Winds of Watoomb slammed into Mordo, sending him flying across the park and into a tree. "He can't get away. Stop him if you can," Strange urged Selina as the sorcerer rose to his feet and faced her down.

"Enough of this!" Mordo cried, preparing to unleash a storm of seven suns. But Selina was quicker.

"Now where's the fun in that...!" A detonative pulse thrummed in her veins akin to a rigged powder-keg; inadvertently evicting a viscerous clash of bone-raw heartache, undeterred graces, bracing on her spiked-heel, against a resurge of electrifying adrenaline, on the mirroring edge of dynamical-symphonic combat, balletically Selina pivoted her acrobatic momentum as the fleeting second she registered a concussive quake of astral energy that nefariously converged into voltaic crimson tentacles weaponized by a phantasmic command of ungenerous mercy that Mordo punishingly ushered with a careening thrust of his shadowed hand to reptilianly grapple the delicate bones of her wrist into a stun- neutralizing hold. He was a reaping-vengeful leech, conceived by the unbidden revelation of mortal betrayal from his deceased mystic teacher-the Ancient One; his portent-orchestral reckoning of sorcerous harvesting wasn't charitable.

Suppressing a racking snarl against gritted teeth, as the bleared periphery of her dark coffee irises gazed at the motionless silhouette of jet- granite figurine of a lanky cat paralyzingly abandoned under the amber sconces of the barricaded lamppost- mesmeric embers of glacial sapphire hauntingly flickered, akin to waxen candlelight radiating from a carved-out pumpkin. In a razored fringe of blood-rushing aggression, she readily braced for a conjuring hailstorm of vitreous fiery veins twistingly cruising demonical fusion over the subdued Asgardian orphan. 'Hold on kid...'

Bruisingly, in a planking motion of her elbows, disheveled mahogany tresses sultrily webbed askew on her flushed temples, Selina dragged her lithe palms flatly in conscious sync over heaps of desiccated leaves, harnessing tauten momentum in agile tenor of her curvaceous mid-drift; arcing the sleekness of her tone legs straight in fluid—pistoning accord to frontally scissor the mirrored edges of stilettoed boots at knifepoint a breadth from Mordo's cloaked shoulders, waiting of Strange to brusquely gesture his one-fingered signal for her to propel disarming attack. 'Don't keep a girl waiting, Tricks...'

Mordo released a curse under his breath as he set his murderous sights on Selina. It alarmed Strange who had until now never seen this viciousness out of his old friend and instructor. With a gesture of his finger to Selina, the Sorcerer Supreme gave her the signal. There would be no restraint against the self-proclaimed Baron of the Mystic Arts. Mordo's hatred and disdain flowed, giving the color of his magic a sickly green tint as he looked to curse Selina with a life-draining spell. Not missing a beat, she ducked beneath the magical projectile by doing an underhanded twirl on one leg. Mordo didn't have time to fathom how she managed to dodge his attack before her second leg came back down and her stiletto heel smacked his arm and impaled his wrist into the ground. Strange grimaced as Mordo's cry rang throughout the park.

The doctor inside of him noticed how much he was bleeding and wondered if an artery had been severed. But as his mind thought over the number of dead or abducted children in the past few months he couldn't be bothered to care.

A feverous implosion rackingly seared through her veins, bone-drilling pressure mounted unavailing; Selina poised rigidly over him in a kneeling crouch, unforgivingly corkscrewed her lasered-edge stiletto heel into his bloodied wrist, straddling him to the rampant gravity of tenser submission with starving-unquenchable abandon as the choking flexion of his fingers reactively kneaded over the exquisite curves of her throat. With a seductive variance of a thievish glide of her cool neoprene in shadowed contrast, Selina intimately angled the lavish swell of her voluminous lips, tracing silkier-penetrative- heat featherily over the darker planes of his stubble-roughened cheek like a sensuous anesthetic, bitingly whispered as the spiked-heel gored forcibly deeper into the lanced bone. "You should be so lucky it wasn't your damn throat..."

The choking cry died in Mordo's throat as he glared at Selina with open animosity. His eyes were large and filled with defiance despite being laid at her mercy. The pain lancing through his impaled wrist made it impossible for him to move his fingers and conjure any spells. Pain was a constant in his life ever since losing family and faith in his cause, but it didn't measure against the pain of defeat. Worst still he wasn't beaten by the Sorcerer Supreme but by another powerless costumed Avenger who should have been an easy opponent. "You will regret ever having cros-"

Selina's fist collided with Mordo's face, knocking him out cold. She retracted her heel from his bleeding wrist, sneering down at his unconscious form. A soft gasp entered the vicinity as Lena was freed from Mordo's spell, the Asgardian youth coughing and rubbing her aching limbs. Strange secured any of the zealots still alive with magical restraints, but then his eyes fell on the dreadful sight of a feline...statue, laying on its side.

"Ms. Kyle, I'm afraid we might be too late," Strange said with a tone of foreboding. His blue eyes meeting hers and gesturing to the motionless cat that only minutes ago was full of life and Brooklyn spirit. Bucky Barnes was gone…

A vestigial raze of unwarrantable heartache betrayingly grew definite, composedly against onrushing contractive throb that suffocatingly reigned through her veins, in breathless tension, Selina reached a gloved hand over the cool smoothness of granite that had morphically solidified the orphan's precious feline into a catatonic Halloween figurine; gripping on the length of Strange's timeworn cloak that ghostly reacted like a magic carpet shielding her from the breezy frigidly. With girlish resilence, Lena angled her chin up, her blonde tresses messily damp as she clingily pillowed her bruised cheek, against the navy-blue silk of Strange's tunic. "I-I promise Bas..." she mewled out whisper-soft, her grayish-cerulean glisteningly stared at the granite statue of her only-cherishing friend. "I promised him..."

Enwreathed by a cast of parkland shadow, and whitish luminance of moonlight, Selina mistily feigning an errant trek of wetness slipping down bone-chilled features as the delicate-chaste reverence over her palm caressingly beckoned a phantom touch-amorphous echoes of a callback promise that dueled against the scything cadence of arrestive eternity.

Achingly, clenching her jaw, Selina leveled down a soul-knifing glare, it was too damn agonizing to believe that her sniper-wolf...Bucky was an exorcized hostage, irrevocably shoved into the astral dimensional rift when the semi-trailer had careened off the Brooklyn Bridge. The votive extent of his valorous, hellbent defiance—sacrifice was a payoff of redemption—daybreak: Bucky was an invincible-eternal soldier of Brooklyn. She needed to know if a fringe of resurrected hope still existed on the knife-edge. "Tell me where he is..." she demanded in hitching rawness, under mahogany tresses draped slickly over her tear-fevered cheek, her dark irises flashed questioningly alight as she gazed back at the repulsive visage of Mordo's slackened-defeated form, not wavering a blink. "W-What did these cloaked bastards do to him...?"

Strange was never good at bedside manner as a surgeon and his skills certainly hadn't improved when he became master of the mystic arts. So he stood speechless for a moment as Selina gazed at him with hard searching eyes, desperate to have her fears debunked. But a harsh cry from the distraught Asgardian child had them both shifting their attention to Lena as she rushed forward and fell beside what looked to be turned over the statue of a cat. Selina's expression became pale as dread sank in the moment she began to put the pieces together. With one look at Strange, he nodded at her to confirm her suspicions. "When you thought they killed him in that truck. It appears they didn't. Whatever was left after they turned him into a feline, they looked to destroy by turning him into a soulless piece of marble."

Strange stopped talking as Selina joined Lena, sinking to her knees and staring down at the life-less statue that appeared too realistic and haunting given the death-throes and tightly closed eyelids the cat depicted in his frozen state. It was the same cat she had seen the girl holding close in the alley just last night. The same cat who appeared remarkably fond of her...

"No...Bucky..." A threaded pitch scoured up her throat against the implosive heart-stabbing ache that robbed her breath, disarmingly in a break of cynical, her brandy irises blankly flitted down at the granite figurine that ephemerally harbored the soul of her beast-machine-Bucky Barnes; a rampant onrush of blearing tears revealingly strayed down the sleek pearlescence of her kittenish features, her fisting gloved hands urgently braced into the leaves enveloping over the mesmerizingly enchanted figurine as Lena viscerally caressed a chaste glide of her tinier palm over the feline's svelte rigid contours in beckoning ministrations that edged in child reverence that she had lovingly fostered with him, murmuring a Nordic cadence of Asgardian valor against hitching-pained sobs that intensified with rigged heartache as Selina fractionally eased her hand with subtle pressure of gracing comfort without the retraction of tentativeness over her quaking, threadbare shoulder. "He was pretty cool, huh..." she whispered in a gentled undertone, as Lena nodded in voiceless response. "I know that he thought you were very cool too, kid..."

Strange silently watched the two unravel in their grief with remorse. A feeling he knew all too well when he watched families in the ER sink into despair when they were told a loved one died on the operating table. In his arrogance, he believed that had he been the surgeon in charge he would have saved the patient and saved the family the pain of grieving. But he still felt their loss, still felt the pain emanating off of him that he secretly wished he had the power to undo the tragedy with a flick of his wrist… But so much had changed in the span of a few years. He DID have that power now...but it was dangerous and often came with a cost, as Mordo so often put it. But perhaps that cost had already been paid months ago when the Mad Titan was snapped from existence? The sorcerer didn't know. The only thing he did know was that this was a needless casualty and it was a wrong that he could make right.

"If you'll allow me, ladies… I might be able to do something about this. Just take a few steps back," Strange looked at Selina who glared at him with tear-filed eyes filled with anger and grief from behind her mask. She didn't want to see anymore hocus pocus especially on what remained of the man she loved. The sorcerer didn't fault her at all for that feeling. Lena on the other hand looked hopeful but equally unwilling to step away from cat she had grown so close to over the past couple of nights. "You'll have to trust me, as difficult as that may sound." Strange conceded before gesturing his hands in a cross fashion to magically open the amulet hanging from his neck. The cosmic green energy of the Time Stone glowed brilliantly throughout the area and encompassed three individuals, two of which were apprehensive while the other was immensely focused.

Keeping herself inadvertently distant from verdigris skeins of celestial energy, securing Lena under the protective grasp of her hand, Selina watched the intricateAgamotto pendant of Tibetian gold ethereally open on the commanding accord of the mystic virtuoso's unbreakable intent that arced over the granite feline-Bucky-without a breaching deterrence of kinetic extensions; painstakingly Strange channeled the restorative essence-clockwork lapse of time with symphonic flexion of his gesturing, scarred fingers in aura-wielding unison as a turning circlet bracketed over his garbed wrist against the soul-converging wake of astral plane-the knife-edge elysian that had chastened Bucky's hostage spirit through gateway barriers of strayed mortality.

Time reversed in a fascinating display that to Selina looked like a film was being rewound in real life. Strange's concentration commanded the Time Stone to focus its power on the marble feline, the cosmic energy seeping into the cracks and undoing the evil curse that was placed on the unfortunate soul within. The sorcerer rotated his arm in a counter-clockwise fashion, the chronal-energy wrapping around his forearm as he slowly reversed time. Selina and Lena watched in awe and fascination as the marble exterior of the cat faded away to reveal the familiar coat of healthy black-fur. But Strange didn't stop, knowing to restore the cat to life wasn't the preferred outcome. He kept the spell in-place, watching along with the others as the feline shape began to take the form of a man.

James Buchanan Barnes.

Strange released the spell and looked upon the motionless man on the ground. Selina instinctively covered Lena's eyes once she realized said man was wearing his birthday suit. Apparently the time-stone didn't restore missing clothes, go figure. "Give him some decency," Strange said to no-one in particular, but Selina was nevertheless thankful when his magic cape flew off his shoulders and covered Bucky's naked form as if it were a towel. Selina was at his side immediately along with Lena, checking on him worriedly when he had yet to move.

"Bas..." Feigning a confused semblance, in a visage of cautious traction, half-exhausted, Lena warily edged closer on her denim-scuffed knees that crunched over leaves a breadth near the heavier solidity of banded ridges of sculpted-graven muscle that hunkily bracketed tauten flesh of his slack abdomen as the scarlet cloak draped around his youthful flesh; wolfish menace etched hawkishly over the hard-edge planes of his razored cheekbones graced with boyish-suaver radiance; he was a charming warrior prince freed out of the dregs of a morphic enchantment-her furry protector was gone. "W-Where is my kitty, Bas...?"

A throaty moan gutturally resonated out of Bucky's shapely-wide lips sulkily jutted against the frigid ground as Selina's gloved palm tantalizingly caressed the cool-mechanized vibrainium of his laden bionic hand, the tactile shift of her lithe fingers delivered a headier tenor-wonderous contrast of exquisite-sirenic heat reverently attuned to evocative fusion ardently mirroring her pulse-an intimate-unrestrained variance of amorous beckoning; with controlled poise, her thumb glided a phantom-trace over the dimple notched in the heaviness of his stubble chin, as she felt the grazing softness of his velvety-sensuous lips cushion brushingly against her knuckles-an echo of feline tack as she snarkily cocked up at eyebrow registering a breathy purr. "Yeah...I'm going to have fun with that..." she quipped out, coyly.

The childlike innocence and confusion in Lena's voice filled both Strange and Selina with equal parts unease and remorse. Neither of them was sure on how to explain to the Asgardian child that the cat she had been running around city with, the one who she protected and cared for, wasn't, in fact, a true animal. As the silence stretched and Selina calmly stroked Bucky's bearded chin, Strange decided it would fall to him to explain the ugly truth to the girl. That was until a familiar soft baritone spoke out in a tired whisper. "I'm right here, Kiddo." Bucky's eyes fluttered open as he laid on his back. The world sharpened into focus as he stared at two beautiful sets of eyes. One light turquoise and the other a rich coffee brown. Both were focused intently on him and he for a moment thought this was a dream as it was too good to be true.

But the soft caress of longer slender digits across his chin told him otherwise. He was alive, so was Lena-and Selina had found him. "I told you we'd be okay," he smiled up at the confused child who slowly appeared to recognize him by the twinkle of his steel-blue eyes.

As his grayish-aquamarine irises grew rivalrously alight in brotherly intensity, Selina didn't abandon the precious extent of the inseparable bond that was adoringly evident to his sensuous-bow lips quirking up a roughish smirk toothily; he deftly rested his flesh-palm over delicate suppleness of Lena's cheek, melding an infinite promise of trust—love, as he nuzzled the picky stubble of his broad jaw against her chilled temple as his shapely lips achingly brushed a chaste drag of whisper-soft heat. Lena was a stray kitten-Asgardian hellraiser who deserved a home: a safe harbor to reforge a stolen life. It was a heart-driven moment she wouldn't dodge away from—the interminable—pythonic tempest of occultic mayhem that was heralded by Mordo's vatical reckoning, no longer eclipsed the spawning ambiance of dread over the Manhatten horizon. Giving him a watery smile that beautifully conveyed her bridled acceptance, Selina murmured hushedly. "I think you're going to have fun showing her the ropes, Barnes..."

The notion wasn't lost on Bucky who felt a strange sense of excitement come at the thought of taking Lena under his wing. "I like the sound of that. The kid packs quite a punch," he said with a proud smile aimed at her which caused the Asgardian child to grin brightly. That was until reality set in as his eyes scanned the area and he saw a number of unconscious or dead zealots laid out. A number of portals opened and the trio watched as Strange beckoned Wong and the other Masters to take away Mordo and his followers. Selina helped Bucky to his feet while Lena hung loosely at their side, slightly timid of how things had changed. "Strange?" Bucky called to the sorcerer and gave him a nod of thanks.

"Don't mention it. This is kinda my job," Strange shrugged as he gave Bucky a thoughtful look. "As much as my little friend here makes a good towel, I think I'll you'll be needing something more snug." Out of nowhere the sorcerer conjured a miniature portal large enough for his hand to squeeze through. He pulled out a black tuxedo. "I think we're roughly the same size, even if you're packing extra weight on the left side." He gestured to Bucky's cybernetic limb. Bucky wondered if Strange actually just conjured a portal into his personal closet before with a quick gesture of his hands, the Cloak of Levitation and the suit switched places and Bucky was suddenly dressed from head-to-toe. "There better," Strange remarked.

"Is it?" Bucky groaned, barely able to move let alone breathe in the tight outfit as he proceeded to loosen the collar of the shirt. He felt ridiculous in this thing. Looking at Selina she shrugged and rolled her eyes. "What happens now?"

"Now...Mordo goes away, somewhere he won't be causing anymore trouble." Strange shrugged.

"If I see him again, I'll make sure prison is off the table-permanently," Selina warned with a dark gleam in her eyes. She wasn't kidding and both Strange and Bucky felt she didn't need to be talked down. "What about the kids?" She asked.

"If they're not relocated to their families, they'll still be in good hands," he assured. That was when he looked back at Lena and suddenly realized something. "Which brings me back to you. Miss Oxidottir." He said, surprising Lena that he knew her full name. "The streets of New York aren't safe for an Asgardian refugee. I don't know if you're aware, but the rest of your people settled safely into Norway a year ago in a place they now call New Asgard. Queen Brunhildde asked me to send any lost refugees to your new colony."

Strange opened a portal before their eyes and on the opposite side could be seen a view from the other side of the ocean. The dim light of dawn was creeping over the horizon but it bathed the small settlement in an amber glow as Asgardians moved about their new daily lives. Lena looked through the portal with tears in her eyes. Bucky suddenly appeared apprehensive and solemn, despite the small smile on his face. He could feel her slipping away...back to her people-her home…

"Unless...you're having second thoughts?" Strange asked realizing why the child was hesitant and why Bucky looked as if his heart was cleaving in two.

The Nordic sea-breeze welcomingly caressed over her elfish features as she felt incarnate-cosmic vitality of Asier clash in her veins, she was on the reachable edge of a home-sanctuary; only a measured heartbeat away of being inevitably embraced by the surviving people of a Twilight sword-ravaged Asgard. Being sired to the ranks of the shield-maidens was a fated reality branded with the prevalent sigil of Valkyries; she was no longer a vagrant amnesic.

Nipping timidly on her underlip, against a blearing pinch of tears Lena gazed at Bucky nonchalantly shoving his flesh and cybernetic hands into the pockets of his tailor-designed Armani jacket, somberly pivoted away from the fiery gateway, a defeated cast heartbreakingly rapt over the hawkish angles of his masculine, stubble features as he didn't look back-the mission was finished. "Thank you, kind wizard but I'm a kid of Brooklyn..." she drawled jovially in kittenish pitch, evident to her soul-driven choice that propelled her warrior-speed until she collided gigglingly into the bulkier corded muscle of Bucky's tailor-garbed back as he throatily forced out a breathless 'oomph' when she twined her arms snugly around him, nuzzling the material with her tear-dampened cheek, "I'm not letting you go, Bas..."

Bucky had a hard time keeping his composure as he felt her wrap him in a close embrace, reciting the same words she told him last night when he had four furry paws. A watery smile formed across his lips and he sank down to his knees, enveloping Lena in a warm hug. "Good kiddo, because I'm not letting you go either." He places a kiss against her forehead, chuckling at the beaming grin on her face that was enough to light up Rockefeller Center. Doctor Strange nodded with an approving look as he closed the gateway. Selina had anticipated just how close Bucky and Lena had become, but couldn't help but find this development to be an exciting surprise she wanted to explore with him.

"Before I forget," Strange said, as Wong came up to him snacking on what looked to be a bar of chocolate. Strange looks at the proffered bars and frowns at his fellow master. "Did you have to eat all the Twix Bars?" Instead of responding, Wong merely bites into his Twix bar in front of Stephen which causes the sorcerer to shrug with exasperation. Wong chuckles as he leaves into a portal for Kamar-Taj. Strange turns to Lena and tosses her a chocolate bar, a Snickers. "Trick-or-Treat, kid. There's more where that came from." With that, Strange steps through his own portal. He had a certain nurse to pay an exciting visit to.

"Ready to go home, kiddo? Kitten?" Bucky asks his two girls.

Selina clicks her tongue and looks at Lena who bites into her Snickers bar. "Junior here is riding with me. Try to keep up, Binx." She winked at him as she gestured Lena to follow her to her motorcycle. Bucky shrugged with a defeated look as he followed.

"She'll never let me forget this." He chuckled.

The End

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