"The hands that cradled your face and tilted it upwards to kiss your forehead are soaked in unfathomable quantities of blood."
”But they cradled me, yes?”
💕
How can the soft rustle of tree leaves and the sound of heavy breathing feel like such a heavy silence?
Because it was a silence, not laced but soaked, with such a blood coated feeling of loss and guilt.
Steve, deep down in his quick-beating heart, knew what had happened. He had felt it— the shift; but the words spilled from his bleeding mouth, anyway.
”Where’d he go?” He said breathlessly, looking to Thor and hoping for something like a miracle. “Thor?”
Thor didn’t look at him, and Steve felt his gut drop with desperation.
Steve didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it. He felt denial running through the blood on his face, seeping into the air in his lungs. He felt guilt trickling down his face with the sweat, felt the responsibility just as hot in his hands as the failure.
”Where’d he go?”
That was when he heard it; a couple shuffled footsteps, another gentle breeze.
Then it was Bucky.
“Steve?” The man managed.
Steve watched Bucky’s beautiful blue eyes look down at his skin as it softly fell to thin ashy pieces, then look into his own with a look of pure fear that Steve hadn’t seen since that moment in the Hellcarrier.
It was such an innocent, childlike fear that made Steve forget where he was. It made him reach out to grab at the ashes that fluttered away from Bucky’s body like struggling butterflies.
He got closer and stared at Bucky tenderly.
”Bucky?” He said with a wavering voice, not even sure how to react.
He couldn’t stop it, he knew he couldn’t, but he still tried hopelessly.
Steve grabbed at ash in the air, trying to pack it back into place on Bucky’s trembling shoulders, but those shoulders only wasted away even more underneath his soft, gloved hands.
”Steve?” Bucky whispered, his weapon discarded on the yellow-green grass.
This couldn’t possibly be it. After all those fights, after that war he had crawled his way through just to get his best friend back. There was no way he could lose him again.
They had been through everything together; from the schoolhouse as children to playing cops and robbers in the woods; from the war when Steve became Captain America to the moment when he was assigned as Bucky’s target. So much had happened, and yet Steve had never once given up on him, never once believed that Bucky was truly gone (unless you were to count the grief he’d gone through after Bucky had fallen from that train. Steve was sure of his death, then, so why should he be now)?
There was no way that Bucky, his Bucky was dying like this.
Bucky’s flesh started to deteriorate faster than Steve wanted it to. He held onto Bucky as the latter tried to hold onto him, too, but failed.
”I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Steve mumbled as if it would put him back together, looking up and down the dusty form of his best friend.
This was his fault. He could've stopped Thanos, but he wasn’t strong enough; he wasn’t good enough.
And Bucky? Bucky was crestfallen at the fact that they had lost, but oh how comfortable it felt to die in the hands of the man he trusted most. As he looked into Steve’s warm eyes in the cold world around him, he felt something like contentment. Not at the death of his friends, not at the deaths of the people he didn’t know, not at how afraid he was of dying, but at the feeling of not being alone.
He was afraid; he was terrified, but Steve was there, and that was enough for him.
And just as quickly as it had started, Bucky was gone.
Gone.
Steve fell to his knees, palming the ash all over the ground and grabbing at bits and pieces as if he could jigsaw-puzzle them back into Bucky’s soft shape. He nearly cried out as some of it started to blow away in the wind.
He shoved some of the ash, which translated to as much as his shaking hands could get ahold of, into his pocket; he zipped it up firmly and looked up at the others.
“Oh god.”
For what felt like a long time, nobody spoke. What could anyone say in that moment to make things better? How could any word in the world make up for the billions of lives just lost?
It felt as if even the forest, the rich earth of Wakanda, knew that a great devastation had just fallen upon its people. It felt like the dirt and the trees and the sky grieved their king.
It felt like every heart on the plant ached for their loved ones, every soul filled with wrenched black fear and sorrow.
He was meant to be with Bucky until the end of the line, and he had been.
But at what cost?