Aftermath and the Final Mission
The world felt different without him.
Celeste stood in the wreckage of their mission, numb to the cold seeping into her bones. The others moved around her, recovering what they could, but her mind was frozen on one moment—Bucky’s fall, his hand slipping from hers, the vanishing figure swallowed by the abyss.
She barely registered Steve gripping her shoulders. His words were distant, drowned out by the roar of the wind and the hammering grief inside her chest.
She had fought wars. She had lost people before. But this—this was different. This was Bucky.
“Celeste, we need to go,” Steve said, his voice firm but gentle.
She nodded, but as they boarded the extraction plane, a piece of her remained behind in that ravine.
Bucky’s death weighed on them all, but the war wasn’t over.
The Howling Commandos moved forward with grim determination. Celeste fought harder, her attacks ruthless, each mission another chance to direct her pain somewhere tangible. Steve saw it. He tried to reach her, but she was slipping further away, burying herself in the fight.
Then came the final mission—stopping Red Skull once and for all.
Celeste and Steve infiltrated Schmidt’s base together, tearing through HYDRA forces with a shared fury. But as Steve made his way toward Schmidt’s aircraft, Celeste hesitated. Something in her told her not to let him go alone.
And this time, she listened.
She ran after him, catching up just as he boarded. “You’re not doing this without me,” she said, breathless but determined. Steve didn’t argue—he knew better. Together, they faced Schmidt, the Tesseract’s blinding light illuminating their battle.
Schmidt was defeated. The Cube vanished into the unknown. But the plane—
It was going down.
Steve gripped the controls, his voice crackling over the radio as he spoke to Peggy one last time. Celeste sat beside him, staring out at the endless stretch of ice below. She had no words, no last message to give. Just the weight of everything they had lost and everything they would never see again.
She reached for Steve’s hand as the plane hit the ice.
The cold swallowed them whole.
She didn’t dream. She didn’t feel. She simply existed in the frozen abyss, time slipping away as the world moved on without her.
The war ended. Names faded into history. The world changed in ways she could not yet fathom.
But then—
The ice cracked.
Light flooded in, burning against her frozen skin, and for the first time in decades, she took a breath.
And the future was waiting for her.