Whew! I need to visit Bananabird more often, we just write like demons when we're together! : D

This has been brewing ever since I saw the movie, because this scene started and within ten second I was imagining it with an Autobot instead of just a talking computer... but it took me until now, inspired by Age of Ultron, to actually write it. Oh well.

It was supposed to be a one-shot, but... I like this dynamic. So expect more of this. Eventually. : P

The Car Chase Scene, Captain America: the Winter Soldier

"I'm just saying, this doesn't look good, and when it blows up it ain't gonna be pretty." Cardinal muttered.

They both fell silent, brooding in their own minds over the conundrums facing them. Cardinal was convinced for ages afterward that he should have been paying more attention and the situation was entirely his fault for slipping up like that.

The police cars came out of nowhere, he'd barely even registered them on his sensors before he got T-boned, and a moment later as he gathered his wits another backed into him, a third rammed him from behind, and a fourth pulled up beside.

"Frag!" he barked out, running a quick scan over his passenger and throwing the image up on the windshield. "Nick, your arm's broken."

The human didn't answer, obviously in shock and handling the first waves of pain, both from his arm and from the impact of the airbag. The police vehicle that had T-boned him backed up to make room for an armored van and Cardinal hastily tried to get a comm out to his unit as he brought up the police dispatch feed and ran a system diagnostic.

"Anesthetic's in the glove compartment." He grunted, and his partner came out of his shock quickly, reaching almost instinctively for the shot. "Get the laser while you're in there, might need it." Men in SWAT uniforms started piling out of the van and Cardinal swore vehemently again. "D.C. Metro police dispatch shows no units in this area. They're Hydra." He growled, tensing as the enemy agents surrounded him, guns drawn. Luckily, he noted nothing powerful enough to completely pierce his armor, though he suspected these next few minutes were gonna hurt like Pit…

"Get me outta here," Nick ordered.

The disguised agents opened fire, and Cardinal flinched. "Can't, propulsion system's offline."

"Then reboot, dammit!"

"I am!"

He threw up the damage report as he worked furiously to hurry along his self-repair, ignoring the bullets pinging off his inner armor and windows. His armor would withstand this damage, but not for forever, and Hydra wasn't stupid. The shooting stopped and he cast his sensors out while his partner's biometrics fluctuated in concern. They undoubtedly had bigger guns coming.

Or already here, he corrected himself with a cycle of air as the fake SWAT team unloaded a special pile driver.

"This ain't gonna be pretty," he muttered as their enemies set it up right outside his driver's side window. "That window's not gonna hold long." He warned.

"Ya think?!" Nick Fury snapped back. "How long to propulsion?"

"Uh…"

He was still calculating when the pile driver fired. Impact pain radiated from his door and window, hissing air out of his vents and static from his vocalizer. "Window integrity 31%" he managed to grind out. "Deploying countermeasures."

"Hold that order," his partner disagreed, and Cardinal was too busy to argue.

He braced as the pile driver fired again, rocking him violently. "Integrity 19%! We should probably counter—"

"Wait!" the human barked, and it was then that Cardinal finally caught on and fell silent, kicking his self-repair into an unsustainable overdrive so he'd be ready to move when his partner needed it.

The pile driver fired again. "1%" he reported, blocking the pain as well as he could.

"NOW!"

His passenger machine gun popped out of the center console and Nick finished off the window as he opened fire on the Hydra agents. Watching them fall like flies and blowing up the armored truck was totally worth the pain.

"Propulsion's online!" he reported, shifting into gear with an uncomfortable grinding. Towaway was gonna kill him when this was over, but…

"Full acceleration, go!"

Smashing the counterfeit police car behind him was worth the added injury while Nick kept shooting out the broken window. That was going to be a weak point in their defense, he knew that, and with his self-repair focused on more important stuff like self-propulsion, flight systems, and comms, it was just going to have to stay that way. He peeled out of the ambush, thinking through their getaway options and admiring his human's tenacity once again. There wasn't much that could slow Nick Fury down, that was for certain.

"Vertical take-off, Cardinal, get us in the air!"

"Flight systems are down, no good." He grunted back.

"Then activate guidance cameras!"

Nick scooted into the driver's seat, crying out as he jarred his broken arm, and Cardinal ran another scan over him, relived to see he hadn't done much more damage to it.

"Gimme the wheel," his partner ordered, and Cardinal quickly complied, glad that the human knew by now that he would have other things to focus on.

"Get me Agent Hill."

"Comms are damaged."

"Well what's not damaged?" Nick demanded in frustration.

"Air conditioning's fully operational." He supplied helpfully.

"Smartass."

They fell silent while Nick dodged them down the street and Cardinal worked his systems, trying to get comms and flight online despite the damage and keeping tabs on the Hydra agents and their route.

"Traffic ahead," he warned, his voice level and somewhat calm despite the circumstances. They weren't in deep water yet. Getting there, though.

"Need an alternate route," Nick said, more for his own benefit that Cardinal's, since he was already on it.

"Roosevelt Bridge's stopped, but 17th's clear three blocks ahead." He reported. The human muttered a curse under his breath, but that was the best they could do.

Nick rammed the pickup in their way and he flinched, but the wreck it caused blocked the Hydra agents, if only for a moment.

"They're on foot." He told his partner as he tried to shove through the traffic jam. "Closing in fast," he waited tensely as an agent rushed up alongside them. "On our left…and behind."

Nick threw them into reverse and backed into the agent behind them, throwing him into a windshield.

"Toast," Cardinal muttered with satisfaction. Nick pulled forward again, hitting a car that hit the agent to their left. "And also toast."

With one more push they were clear and Nick turned down 17th with several Hydra cars in pursuit. Cardinal grunted as they skidded into the curb. "They're comin' up fast, Nick!"

An agent leaned out the window with a gun and started shooting, and Cardinal was quick to shift the seat back enough to give his partner some cover.

"Semi'll provide cover, ram 'em after." He suggested, and Nick, crazy human that he is, did exactly that, grabbing the scummy human's arm and wrestling the gun away while Cardinal took over driving for a moment. "Intersection ahead, semi collision imminent!" he warned.

Nick slammed on the brakes, and right on cue the Hydra vehicles got T-boned by a yellow semi. Cardinal chuckled to himself as they turned onto the road the truck had come from, but his partner put him back on track.

"Get us off the grid!" he yelled.

"Calculating route to secure location," he replied, snapping back to business. There would be more Hydra on the way.

A human was standing bravely in the center of the road about half a block ahead of them. That should have bothered him more, he supposed, but he expected Nick to simply swerve around him. Hindsight is 20/20, as the humans say.

Nick's biometrics spiked with concern again, just as Cardinal sensed the weapon firing. The magnetic charge skittered across the road, and he didn't even have time to start swerving before it latched onto his undercarriage, filling him with an awful sense of dread.

"Nick," he started quietly.

The charge detonated, sending broad, flaming pain shuddering through his whole chassis as the force of the explosion flipped him over, and with damage errors swarming his vision, Cardinal dropped into stasis without another word.

The airbag had already deployed. Nick was lucky he only hit the steering wheel as hard as he did and that it wasn't hard enough to knock him out. He groaned as he reoriented himself in his new position against the roof of the Autobot, fighting through the pain.

"Cardinal?" he called out for his partner, but there was only the tik and snap of cooling metal to answer and he knew he was alone. Out his window, he saw the Winter Soldier approaching. Time to disappear. He grabbed the laser cutter from his pocket, glad Cardinal had thought to suggest getting it from the glove box, and winced as he activated it with his broken arm. "Sorry, partner." He muttered as he started slicing through roof and road. "At least you're not conscious."

By the time the Winter Soldier ripped Cardinal's door off, Nick Fury was gone.

~0~

"Card dropped off the grid, sir, and we're getting floods of police and news reports about a car chase with a black sedan."

"Hydra probably went hot, get down there for assist and extraction, ASAP."

"Already en route, sir."

The frontrunners were fast, but not fast enough. By the time the two black four doors with heavily tinted windows got there, Cardinal was upside down on the street and deep in stasis. They moved around the wreck with the rest of traffic slowly before finding somewhere to park about a block away, but well within sensor range.

"Too late, boss. Cardinal's down for the count and his partner's MIA. Hydra didn't get him, though. He's underground. We'll need Towaway on sight for extraction."

"En route. What's the glitch managed to do to himself this time?" Towaway's irritated voice floated in over their comms.

"Mostly outer armor damage, flight system and comms, and driver's side window's gone. His undercarriage looks like it took a major hit, though."

"How the frag did he get hit in the undercarriage?"

"Dunno, Tow, but it kind of looks like an explosion of some sort."

"If Cardinal was stupid enough to fall for a landmine trap, then he'll get no sympathy from me. Primus, you Black Ops, you should know better than that by now…" the femme muttered under her breath until she pulled up alongside her fallen comrade and sent a scan over him. Ouch. That landmine looked like it had done quite a bit of damage, except… the scorch marks radiated wrong, out from a point of origin on his undercarriage. Surely Cardinal hadn't been stupid enough to not notice a planted bomb on his own undercarriage. He wasn't a complete idiot, after all.

"We got camera footage in the area, from some traffic lights. Hard to tell exactly what happened, but looks like the Winter Soldier's back in play." The boss' voice growled over the airwaves.

"Glitch of a human." Towaway muttered as she moved into position to pull her comrade upright. With the help of a few holoforms, Cardinal was back on his wheels and easily hooked up to the femme's tow cable. She pulled away without ever drawing a second look from the civilians or the Hydra agents, and within a half hour she had the mech in her med-bay for repairs.

Two hours of work and a few minutes of cussing the ops agent out for what he had done to his internal repair systems later, Towaway started the reboot process and stepped back, letting her trained assistant take her place at the mech's side. As expected when an Ops went under fighting, Cardinal came out fighting. Rollbar wasn't surprised, of course, and long vorns of experience in his job had him ready to counter everything the half-conscious agent threw at him, pinning the smaller mech until he stilled, blinking up at his comrade in momentary confusion before his optics widened and he started struggling again, but for a completely different reason.

"Nick! Where's Nick?!" he demanded, twisting desperately in Rollbar's firm grip.

"Calm down, now, Card." Rollbar soothed in his deep, slow southern drawl. "Ya took a pretty hard hit out thar."

"The boss' looking for Fury as we speak, but the human went underground and he's not easy to find." Towaway supplied.

"Hydra didn't get 'im?" Cardinal asked, relief in his voice, and he started to relax under Rollbar's steady hands.

"Nope. Cut a hole straight through your roof and the street to get out, but he got out. We probably won't hear from him until he wants to be heard, though." Towaway waved Rollbar off and stepped up beside the berth with an irritated glare. "Now, let's talk about your self repair system, mech." She growled.

Cardinal laid still and remained silent through the lecture, a slight frown on his face, and didn't hear a word his medic said. His partner was out there, injured and alone, and Cardinal would be damned before he let anything stop him from searching for his friend for long. Now if only Towaway would hurry up with the lecture…