It had been a really weird day.

Summer was not one to ignore current events, not when they had gotten so bizarre and frightening in the last few years, and especially not when she lived less than three hours away from Washington, D.C.. In a world where Vice Presidents getting in bed with weird fire-breathing terrorists and enabling said terrorists to kidnap the President was now the norm - along with alien invasions and big green rage monsters and 95 year old super soldiers - one had to stay informed to stay alive. At least that's what she told herself, never mind if she was being dramatic.

Especially not now as she sat at her dining room table, peeling potatoes into a trash can at her feet, eyes trained on a TV mounted in the adjacent living room as a cable news network practically salivated with glee over the day's events. There was a lot to cover, what with SHIELD's headquarters and three mysterious helicarriers being demolished and all of the agency's secrets being leaked to the Internet. It was a great day to be a journalist, but not so much a great day to be a citizen. Finding out that your government had been engineering and manipulating history to achieve the death of your freedom was, well, jarring, to say the least, and disturbing on multiple levels for Summer personally.

Talking heads were discussing this nefarious "HYDRA" at length as she listened and continued to peel the potatoes, occasionally glancing out the nearby open glass door to keep an eye on her son as he played quietly outside. She wasn't crazy about him being outdoors in any capacity today, but if David's routine was thrown off in any way at all, there would be hell to pay and meltdowns to be had. Instead she told him to stay close to the door as he played and not dare leave her sight, and so far, he had obeyed perfectly.

And her rifle was loaded and ready nearby, safely away from David's access of course, in case the mayhem in DC happened to spill over into Fall's Church. But that was unlikely, especially here in her neck of the woods, which was literally in the woods and fairly secluded.

She hissed in surprise when she accidentally ran the peeler over her thumb rather than the potato in her grasp. Apparently she had been rather angrily peeling the potatoes because she'd raked the thing hard enough over her skin to make a nice little cut. She rolled her eyes in annoyance at herself and tossed everything aside, glancing at David one more time before going to the sink and turning on the water.

It took her no longer than a moment or two to rinse the cut and grab the closest clean-ish thing - a paper towel - to put pressure on the cut. But, as she discovered when she walked back to the table and felt her heart sink, it was long enough for David to wander off.

"David!" she yelled, rushing out of the open door and looking around the property wildly. Her home sat on a couple of acres surrounded by forest and flanked by a creek that cut through them, but her front yard was not overly large, so she spotted him fairly quickly. Her next words began as an angry yell and died as a frightened whisper. "Da -... David?"

There stood her little five year old boy, among the trees, holding a long stick in his hand, using it to poke at what appeared to be a rather large and perfectly still body laying in the dirt.

She was running before she could scream at David to get away and come inside. It took her only a few seconds to reach the boy and grab him, picking him up and then darting back inside the house just as quickly.

She didn't stop once she got inside, racing towards the basement door on the opposite end of the house as she felt David begin to squirm at her iron-grip on him. "I told you not to leave my sight, David, I told you! Why didn't you listen?"

Before she knew it, she had stowed the boy in the small basement and was holding his shoulders while looking at him as sternly as she could underneath the dim light of a single hanging bulb. "Do not leave this basement until I come and get you. Do you understand me? Do not leave. Stay here and no matter what you hear, don't come up until I get you. Understand?"

He nodded. It was the closest thing to a response that she was going to get, the most she ever got. He was trembling a little bit, and the tension in his face was a giveaway that he was on the verge of a meltdown. He was scared and confused, and that made two of them. She kissed his forehead and then raced off, knowing she had no other choice.

Back upstairs, she made a detour to her bedroom and grabbed her rifle out of its case, rechecking that it was loaded, then held it at the ready as she made her way back outside. She couldn't decide what would be worse, the person lying in the grass being alive or dead. More concerning in her mind was whoever had left the person in that state coming around to finish the job if it wasn't yet done.

Once out the door, she walked slowly towards the body that was still laying in the same position as when she left it. Now that she got a better look at it, she saw that the person was laying face down, potentially not breathing, and bleeding from several different areas. He - it was clearly a man - was also wearing pants that were extremely obviously far too small for his frame, though that seemed insignificant at the moment.

She walked about the property, watching and looking for any potential culprits, but she found nothing. That was a good thing.

She headed back to the body to check it more thoroughly. She shifted the rifle to one hand while she bent down and carefully tried to push the man over by his shoulder. He must have been much heavier than he looked, though, because she frowned as she failed to get him to even budge. His shoulder also felt extremely hard, like it wasn't even an arm. With a grimace, she looked around cautiously and then set the rifle aside before kneeling and putting all of her strength into the task of moving the guy.

It was no small task, and she was fairly sure she pulled something in the process, but she finally got him to his back after much effort. Panting and sighing in relief, she peered at him to get a sense of exactly how bad off he was. He was breathing, but it looked like he was bleeding from two gunshot wounds, one in his shoulder and one in his side. He was bundled up in a hoodie that was comically large compared to his too-small pants, and his ratty black gloves and long, disheveled dark hair completed his overall homeless look. The odd thing was, he wasn't bleeding very badly from his wounds, but they were clearly gunshots.

She debated what to do. Calling 911 was obvious but it generally took ambulances about thirty minutes to get out there to her house, which she knew from experience. Also, somewhat stupidly, she had left her cell phone in the house.

It seemed like a bad idea to leave him out here bleeding in the dirt. Blood poisoning and infections were never fun. But after barely managing to push him on his back - and she wasn't exactly a weakling in general - she doubted she could drag him all the way inside of her house.

Opting in the end to just run in the house and grab her phone, she tapped the man's shoulder awkwardly, as if to pointlessly assure him that she'd be back, and then rose to her feet. She didn't see, but at the same moment, the man's eyes opened. She reached down to grab her rifle only to see it vanish from her sight.

Whirling around, she suddenly stood face to face with the man who had apparently jumped up to his feet in utter silence and found the barrel of the rifle pointed directly at her chest.

Panic sent her hands flying in the air and stumbling back. The man's eyes were wild but laser sharp in their focus, which was currently on her. For one terrifying moment, she was sure that she was going to die, and her last thought was of poor David hiding alone in the basement. She was the one thing he had in the world, and without her, what would happen to him?

To her shock, the man turned around and aimed her rifle at the trees, scanning them as she already had, seemingly bot too concerned about his gaping wounds and apparently not seeing her as much of a threat, either. She didn't allow herself too much relief, however, knowing he could easily turn right around and shoot her still at any moment.

After he was done surveying, he turned back to her, and she stifled a gasp at the sheerly murderous intensity on his bruised face. He did not point the gun at her again, however.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Summer," she answered, her voice sounding quite steady and calm somehow.

She waited for him to reply, to say something, anything. He did not. Instead, his eyes began scanning her house, and her heart sank again.

"You... you need a hospital..."

He glanced at her utterly blankly, then began marching towards her front door, still carrying her rifle as if it were his own all along. Her arms fell to her side and she quickly began walking after him.

"That's my house. You can't - hey! You can't just walk in there!"

But he did. Now she was panicking.

She ran inside after him and closed the door behind her, opening her mouth to let out some extremely tough words that weren't really wise given her current situation, but the sentences never left her lips because the man stumbled to the ground as soon as he reached the middle of the dining room.

He was slumped against the wall behind her dining room table, letting the rifle slip from his grip as he groaned in pain and clutched at his head with his gloved hands. She took the opportunity to grab the rifle, but she did not aim it at him. Instead, she held on to it and went to grab her phone, muttering, "I'm going to call you an ambulance."

That was when he suddenly and brutally seized her wrist, and the force and shock of it sent her stupidly dropping the rifle and stumbling to the floor beside him.

He glared that murderous glare at her and growled only one word. "No."

"Why? You're bleeding, you're -"

"They'll find me."

She took a good, long look at the man. On second thought, he didn't look homeless at all. He was far too focused and intense to be a wandering bum, and apparently on the run from someone who had tried to kill him.

He was still clutching his head with one hand and grimacing like it was killing him, but she could see no head wounds present.

"Who will find you?" she asked.

"They'd kill you, too."

Her eyes widened. Then his grip on her wrist was gone and he leaned forward, holding his head with both hands and crying out in pain. Her hands hovered near him uselessly, and he continued his gut-wrenching cries for what felt like forever but was really only about ten seconds before losing consciousness and falling forward face-first on her hardwood floor.

She swallowed and stared wide-eyed at the man, processing what he had said and giving herself a moment to freak out inside silently but briefly before getting up and jumping into action.

She locked all her doors, closed every curtain, and turned out every light. As she bustled about, carrying her rifle the entire time and wondering why this guy had to show up in her yard of all the other places he could have chosen to go bleed to death in, she did not see the news channel still on her TV showing clips of a slightly blurry video depicting a street fight between a man clearly identifiable by his red, white, and blue shield, and a man dressed in black armor with a shining silver arm, long dark hair flying about his unmasked face. If she had seen the video, and the freeze-framed close up shot of the long haired man's face, instead of turning off her television without so much as looking at it, she might have decided to go drag the injured mystery guy into the creek and throw him in there to drown, to protect herself and her son.

Instead, she looked nervously at the man and kept her rifle in a tight grip as she left the room, running to the basement to check on David and try her best to sufficiently explain to him a situation that she did not yet understand herself.

Ultimately, as it turned out, weird could not even begin to describe that day, nor the month that would follow.

So. Allow me to explain myself, to those of you reading this who has followed my other stories, mostly Ruin: I finally watched TWS a short time ago after dying to see it at the movies but never quite making it there, and suffice it to say, after it was over, I was flailing and drowning in a massive endless pool of Bucky feels. Following this nuclear eruption of uncontrollable feels, I had to write something or else I was going to scream and rip all my hair out and jump out a window. So, I wrote this, and it is already 95% finished, though I'm still revising the chapters, but since I have only an epilogue left to write, I figured I'd start posting now. Now, Ruin is still in the hands of midnightwings96 and will stay with her, and she is working on the next installment around a busy college schedule. I figure I owe the explanation to anyone reading this who might be frustrated that I'm posting a new story when I handed over custody of Ruin awhile ago. I gave up that story for a lot of reasons, partially because of time constraints and also because of the fact that I do not write certain kinds of content for stories anymore. This story, on the other hand, I wrote out in a record amount of time to keep myself from totally losing it. So, to any Ruin fans who see this story, that story is still very much alive, and I hope everyone will understand and not get mad at me lol.

Anyway, aside from all that, thank you to everyone who reads this. As I said before, everything besides the epilogue is written out already and in the process of being edited & revised, so I'll update often without any huge gaps, and probably faster depending on how many folks review (reviews are super motivating :p). I must thank midnightwings96 for always being my sounding board and ever-faithful source of solid, awesome feedback who shares my fandom feels and is always full of fantastic ideas. Since this first chapter was more like a prologue, I'll be posting the next one very soon, probably tomorrow. Please review if you read, and thank you to everyone who did :D