verb.
To fall back under pressure. To shrink back physically or emotionally.
noun.
The kickback of a gun upon firing.
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It takes a stubborn mind to cling to their humanity when the world seeks to strip it away.
It takes a desperate soul to reach f...
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It didn't make any sense at first. In fact, Kat wasn't certain it made any sense even hours later.
Gradually, piece by piece, as more news channels across the world gathered up fragments of footage, eyewitness accounts, statements, an image began to emerge.
It all felt very reminiscent of the day she had watched in wordless shock as the world's press broadcast images across the earth of a sky full of aliens swarming over New York. It wasn't aliens this time, but it was so inexplicable it might as well have been.
"Are you alright?"
"You don't need to keep asking me that, Kat. I'm fine."
"Sorry, I just... Last time something like this happened..."
"I'm not going anywhere."
A gentle hand brushed her shoulder in a silent reassurance before Bucky resumed his slow pacing over the floor behind the sofa. He still looked ready to run though, still dressed in his cap and jacket. He hadn't been able to stop moving since they had made it back to the apartment, and he had been swift to lock the door behind them - pausing to glance out the window every few minutes as the city settled in the wake of the distant explosion. It had rolled over the entire continent, the Novi Grad shockwave. Raising an entire city into the sky only to blow it up had more than a few repercussions.
With Kat's laptop propped up on a bookshelf, they had watched the constant news stream begin to form a coherent narrative, piecing together the events that had led to the explosion that had rocked Europe. Still, Kat wasn't sure if she was processing it correctly. Androids and robot armies and superheroes - it felt like she was watching a movie.
But in a movie, the casualties weren't real. This was real.
The praise rolled in for the team that had managed to successfully evacuate most of the citizens, cheering on the swift thinking and initiative of those involved - but already the survivors were being counted. Names were being listed, the missing. The left behind. It made Kat's stomach churn as she imagined those who had likely been left on that plummeting lump of rock, the ones hiding in the forgotten corners of the city, the ones that couldn't run - or the ones that had been below when the debris fell.
Even those that had survived were completely displaced - their homes destroyed, hell their entire city was gone. She knew all too well how terrifying that was, to have nowhere to go.
Of course, there was also the sickening knowledge that it had been so close to being so much worse. The world had been minutes away from a mass-extinction event at the hands of some Artificial Intelligence with a God Complex. She and the man now staring out the window a few feet from her could have been wiped off the face of the earth this afternoon before they'd even realised what was happening. As awful as the destruction of Novi Grad was, it had been the lesser of two evils. If the Avengers hadn't obliterated the city, it would have been turned into a weapon that would have wiped out the planet.
