There was one rule on the mission: do not touch the stone.
Thor had been pretty explicitly clear on that, and Steve was usually pretty good at staying within mission parameters. Not that he never had some flexible interpretations of his orders, but ‘do not touch the stone, or you could destroy the world’ was pretty loophole proof and Steve had every intention of following through.
But when the Hulk slammed a hand into Loki’s chest and sent him flying back, the Reality Stone went flying out of his grip. It was instinct, more than anything, when Steve reached out and caught it, just like that.
Then the world flashed red, and he was standing in the center of the galaxy—his breath caught. For a moment, he thought he was there all alone, but then he saw him:
Bucky.
He was caught suspended just out of reach, his hand outstretched. Steve threw his hand out to catch him, but just like the last time, the few inches that separated might as well have been miles for all the difference it made. He couldn’t reach him.
Someone was shouting, and even as Steve kept screaming Bucky’s name the space around him disappeared and he was back in the middle of an old abandoned warehouse.
And it was Natasha, not Bucky, that was screaming his name.
Steve sucked in a gasping breath, pushing himself up and back until he slammed into a wall. He could see Thor had contained the Reality Stone within the container Odin had provided, and both the Hulk and Loki were gone.
Natasha knelt in front of him, looking pale. “Steve?” she asked quietly. “What happened? Where did you go?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said shakily.
Thor dropped down beside him, staring at him carefully, as Iron Man came rushing in from the other side of the room. “Captain,” Thor said seriously, “what did you see?”
“I don’t know,” Steve insisted, reaching up to pull off his cowl, before clutching at the neck of the suit to pull it down so he could breathe.
“Holy Shit,” Tony cried, pulling up his own faceplate. “The Boy Scout touched it? Jarvis, please tell me I’m still a billionaire.”
“You are, Sir,” Jarvis answered promptly.
Tony held a hand to his heart. “Oh thank god,” he said, “I thought he might have turned us all into socialists.”
Natasha frowned in concern, before glancing towards the doors at a loud bang. “Time for a lullaby,” she said, getting to her feet.
“What happened to Reindeer Games?” Tony asked.
“He disappeared,” Thor said gravely, as Natasha slipped away to bring back Bruce. “But we have the Reality Stone, which is most important. My brother will turn up again.”
“That’s sort of what worries me,” Tony told him.
“I must return to Asgard with the stone,” Thor said abruptly. He looked back down at Steve. “Captain, is there nothing you can tell me before I go?”
Steve glanced up at him. “There were stars…” he started, trailing off, pressing his eyes shut as he saw Bucky, screaming his name.
Thor nodded, and rose to his feet. “There is one in Asgard who should be able to tell me if anything of significance has changed,” he said. “Friends, I will return when I can, once the stone is secure.”
Tony tilted his head once they were alone, eyeing him speculatively. “I guess it was good it was you,” he said.
“What?” Steve asked, glancing up. He was still clutching the neck of his uniform, still needing to remind himself to breathe.
“I mean, if someone had to touch it,” Tony said. “You’re practically a saint. How much damage could you really do?”
- - - - -
The first thing was that Howard Stark was there to greet them when they returned to the Tower. He was wrinkled and frail, and looked so much smaller than Steve remembered, but he had a pen tucked behind his ear and his eyes were bright and knowing and exactly the same.
“Well?” he demanded gruffly, not looking away from his tablet. “Did you recover it?”
“Howard,” Steve whispered in disbelief.
Tony moved past him, oblivious. “Hey, Pops,” he said. “I thought you were going to take it easy today?”
“This is me taking it easy,” Howard said, squinting at something on the tablet, before reaching out to absently type with one hand across the screen.
“Oh my god,” Steve whispered, and Howard and Tony both turned to look at him with identical expressions of confusion.
Once Steve had calmed down enough to explain that Howard had not been alive yesterday, or this morning, or at all since 1991, they sat him down and forced him to review every current event over the last three years.
He couldn’t spot any other changes, except that one article had off-handedly mentioned JFK’s death at age 94. He had apparently served two terms.
“There’s no pattern to this,” he complained, pushing the tablet away. He could see himself rewriting Howard's fate, but even though he had felt bad reading about the Kennedy assassination he'd felt no burning need to make it right. It had all happened outside of his control, there was no attachment to it. "It seems entirely random."
"Maybe it is," Howard said, but his shrewd eyes were narrowed at the files like he didn't believe it.
Steve didn’t really believe it, either.
- - - - -
He slipped out of the tower first chance he got. He’d changed first, and grabbed a ball cap and a pair of sunglasses. So far, nothing catastrophic seemed to have happened. They may have gotten lucky, but he couldn’t shake that feeling from when he’d touched the stone, that cold seeping in, Bucky just out of his reach once again…
So he wasn’t surprised when he found himself riding his motorcycle all the way out of New York, on the hours long drive to the Smithsonian in D.C.
He was even less surprised that Natasha was leaning up against the entrance waiting for him when he got there.
“Am I that predictable?” he asked her dryly.
“You could have just taken the Quinjet with me,” she responded, falling into step behind him when he headed inside. “You shouldn’t be alone right now. We still don’t know what that stone may have done to you.”
“I’m fine,” he told her. “It’s the rest of the world I’m worried about.”
“It could have happened to any of us, Steve,” she told him.
“But it didn’t,” he said. “It happened to me.”
He just wanted to see Bucky. He knew it probably wasn’t healthy, how often he came all the way here just to see the video reels and the large display. Tony had tried to show him how everything was available online, how he could pull it up any time, but it wasn’t the same. Here, he was surrounded by the remnants of their time…here he could pretend.
He stopped abruptly at Bucky’s exhibit, because the area was bare. He frowned. “Did they move it?”
“Move what?” Natasha asked.
Steve spun around, pushing across to another exhibit, the one with their uniforms. But as his eyes scanned over it, he realized Bucky’s mannequin was missing, with Falsworth’s in its place. “Where is it?” he demanded, panic starting to build in his chest. “Where have they taken all his things?”
“Steve, calm down,” Natasha said softly. “What are you talking about?”
His vision was starting to get a little dark around the edges as all the air was sucked from his lungs—he reread the names of the Howling Commandos three times in a row, but Bucky's was still missing every single time.
"Steve, talk to me," Natasha demanded tightly.
“This is all wrong,” he gasped. “Bucky’s gone!”
“Who the hell is Bucky?” Natasha asked.
He felt like the ground was shifting beneath his feet, and before he knew what was happening he was on his knees, clutching at his chest, trying to breathe. He could hear people crowding around him: Is he okay? Hey, give him space. Did someone call 911?
But he couldn’t focus on it, or reassure them, because he’d just lost his world for the second time.
Only this time he’d been left with nothing, without even the black and white film reels that had captured his smile or the jacket he'd worn during the war, without the pictures of them together in Brooklyn before any of this even started.
Bucky being dead had nearly killed him, but he'd still been left with something.
This time, Bucky wasn’t just dead.
He’d been erased.
- - three months later - -
Three days after Steve touched the reality stone, Thor had returned to tell them nothing of significance had been changed—Bucky was the most significant thing in his life—and that the world was, in the opinion of the Gods who saw them as children, essentially unchanged.
Everything was changed.
Steve just couldn’t figure out why it would happen. It was the last thing he’d wish for—Bucky was all he had.
“Even good intentions can bring ill consequences,” Thor had told him solemnly. “The Reality Stone warps your wishes. Perhaps you merely wished your friend not to have suffered.”
And Steve wondered if it was that simple, if he’d wished his best friend out of existence simply because he was too weak to handle the pain of having lost him. He’d practically begged Thor to let him see the Reality Stone again, to try and set things right, but Thor had quietly refused. Steve couldn’t blame him, and honestly, it was probably the right call.
He’d likely only make things even worse.
But he was having trouble living in this world that never knew Bucky. As the one who touched the stone, he was the only one whose memories weren't changed with the world. Whatever tenuous connections he'd managed to make now seemed frayed, and he couldn't be certain that anything he remembered had actually taken place.
So he hadn’t left the Tower since his disastrous visit to the Smithsonian. Natasha had tried to help, but couldn’t understand. None of them understood, because Bucky wasn’t in the text books anymore, and all the films that had been made about them had been rewritten along with everything else.
Steve didn’t understand how his life had remained so unchanged without Bucky having been in it. He wondered if he had changed along with this world, what kind of person he might be. He didn’t think it would be someone he’d like.
“Okay, I’m sorry to intrude on your sulking, but we have a code red,” Tony said, as he appeared in front of Steve.
Steve glared up at him balefully from where he was wrapped up in a throw on his couch, watching another film about the Howling Commandos sans Bucky, as a sort of penance or maybe masochism, he wasn’t quite sure.
“You don’t need me,” he said.
“Uh, actually I do,” Tony said, frowning down at him. “Thor is on another planet, Clint and Bruce are out of the country, and Natasha’s ETA is still two hours out. You really gonna make me go alone?”
Steve let the blanket fall around him, because they both knew he wasn’t going make him go alone, despite that Tony probably could handle it alone. “What happened?” he asked listlessly, as he pushed himself up from the couch. Maybe a mission would be good for him. Maybe some adrenaline might restart his broken heart.
“Hydra,” Tony said distractedly, pulling something up on his tablet. “Jet’s already fueled up. Just waiting on you.”
Steve froze, going cold. “Hydra,” he echoed with disbelief.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “They’ve abducted some of our guys, an Army Special Forces squad. We finally tracked them to the border of Sokovia. They’re—“
“Hydra’s gone, Tony,” Steve broke in slowly. “They were eradicated.”
Tony froze. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Is this another one of those times where you’re like, that never happened, and I have to explain yes it did happen, and pull up documentation, then we finally figure out it’s another thing that got changed because of that damn Reality Stone? Because I’m getting really sick of that.”
“Tony,” Steve snapped.
“Okay, look, I don’t know how you remember it, but Hydra’s been in a thorn in SHIELD’s side since the beginning,” Tony explained. “I mean, they’re pretty ineffectual, but their ‘cut one head off and two more will appear’ slogan or whatever is pretty damn apt. It’s like playing Whack-A-Mole.”
Tony came to a stop in front of him, his expression when serious. “And right now, they’ve got six of the Army’s best and brightest, and we don’t have a whole lot of time. You up for this, or not?”
“Yes,” Steve said instantly, his mind whirling. Had Bucky done something in the war that had helped get rid of Hydra that was missing here? This was the first thing that seemed a direct consequence of Bucky’s disappearance. Everything else was so random: Howard being alive, JFK’s second term. Nothing else could be connected to Bucky at all, as it had all happened years after he’d died.
But if Hydra was back, then Steve owed it to Bucky to burn it down again.
- - - - -
The Deja vu started the moment they arrived. Steve didn’t entirely understand it, because nothing about this placed looked like Azzano. On the surface, everything here was shiner. The bars weren’t so rusted and dirty they were nearly black, instead they were gleaming silver.
And the team they rescued weren’t the Howling Commandos. They weren’t mismatched in uniforms, they were all wearing uniform black camo. Maybe it was the way one of them refused to leave, insisting, “They’ve got our Sergeant.”
The words caused a prickle to start traveling up Steve’s spine, and it only got worse when the man continued. “They took him to the back,” he said. “We haven’t seen him. We were told no one’s ever come back from there.”
“I’ll find him,” Steve said, resolve gripping him as he backed away. He glanced at Tony. “Stay with them.”
“Cap,” Tony started disapprovingly, but Steve ignored him, taking off down the hallway.
He walked down the empty hallway, hearing a drip drip drip of some leaky pipe. He tightened his grip on his shield, and that’s when he heard the voice. It was still far away, but he could just made out a series of numbers.
Then he got close enough to make out the words.
“—ant James Buchanan Barnes, 32557038…Sergeant…’ames…32557038—“
Steve felt himself stall to a stop, glancing into the open door of the next room. There was a metal table laid out in the center with someone buckled to its surface, a weird contraption hanging over the person’s head though it didn’t seem currently attached.
“Bucky?” Steve whispered in disbelief, pushing himself forward jerkily, his hands shaking as he reached out to break apart the restraints.
Bucky turned to look at him, looking almost exactly as he had when Steve found him all those years ago in Azzano. The only difference he could spot was that he was wearing black camo cargo pants and a cotton t-shirt, instead of the remnants of a WWII uniform that Steve had found him in the first time.
“Captain America?” Bucky said, frowning at him. There was no incandescent grin this time, no reverently whispered ‘Steve.’ Bucky didn’t seem to know him, even if he knew his name.
Steve reached out, tugging him up now that he was free. Bucky steadied himself back against the table as he got on his feet, squinting back at him speculatively. “I thought you’d be taller,” he said.
Steve bit back a desperate, hysterical laugh, and just ran his eyes over him. It was Bucky, there was no doubt in his mind—but the dog tags he was wearing weren’t from World War II, they looked brand new, and there was only the usual, vacant sort of recognition in his eyes as he looked back. He knew Captain America. He didn’t know Steve.
This was Bucky, but it wasn’t his Bucky.
“We’ve got to get you out of here,” Steve said, knowing he had to focus on the immediate problem, he could always have another breakdown later. He reached out to pull Bucky’s arm over his shoulder and start down the hall.
“My men—“ Bucky started.
“Already found them,” Steve assured him, reluctantly letting go when Bucky insistently pulled away to walk on his own. He glanced back as Bucky stumbled after him, his mind traveling back in memory again to Azzano. The parallels were like a cruel joke.
“Why’d they send you?” Bucky asked, watching him curiously. “Thought we’d be disavowed.”
“We weren’t going to leave you behind,” Steve assured him, though he made a mental note to look into it. He knew they’d left plenty of men behind, and whether this Bucky was his or not, he was going to do everything in his power to make sure he was safe. If politics were at play here, well, Steve had learned a long time ago just how deadly a game that could be.
But no one could possibly know what Sergeant Barnes would mean to him. No one else remembered Bucky at all.
“How’d you know I go by Bucky, anyway?” Bucky finally asked, he had one hand trailing against the wall discreetly as he followed behind him, using it to keep himself on his feet. Steve desperately wanted to help him, but just like the first time, he knew he had to stay on his guard and be prepared to fight. It was better, if he kept Bucky safely behind him.
“Someone must have mentioned it,” Steve told him stiffly. He’d have to save the we knew each other in another timeline speech for when they were out of danger.
Which, seriously, how was he going to explain that?
Tony was waiting for him at the exit to the facility. There was a line of twenty or so beat-up Hydra agents zip-tied and leaned up against the wall, and it looked like back-up had finally arrived.
“See you found the Sergeant,” Tony said, lifting the faceplate on his helmet. He ran his eyes across Bucky. “You look like you’re about to faceplant. You gonna make it to the helicopter?”
Bucky didn’t remove the hand he had wrapped protectively around his stomach, but he narrowed his eyes. “I’m fine,” he insisted.
Tony snorted. “Sure you are, killer,” he said, as he motioned a medic to bring over a gurney. “But maybe let us take it from here—“
“I’m going with him,” Steve broke in, just as the medic reached them.
The medic looked startled. “Sorry, Cap,” he said apologetically. “We figured the Avengers had their own ride. We’re at capacity.”
“S’okay, we’ve got a jet,” Tony assured them, pushing Steve back.
“No. I’m going with them,” Steve insisted firmly, moving toward where Bucky was being helped—well, kindly forced—onto the gurney. Tony grabbed him with a firm grip of his suit’s metal hand, and tugged him back.
“Cap, what the hell,” Tony said. “They don’t have the room. We’ve got the jet. What’s gotten into you?”
“Where are they taking him?” Steve demanded.
Tony gave him an assessing glance. “It’s classified,” he said finally.
“You can find out,” Steve told him knowingly. “I need to know where they’re taking him.”
“This is another damn reality stone thing, isn’t it?” Tony asked shrewdly. “Who is that kid to you?”
Steve blew out a breath, contemplating his choices, but he knew he was never going to get anywhere without Tony’s help. “It’s Bucky.”
“Bucky, what the hell kinda name—wait, Bucky? Your Bucky?” Tony repeated, his mind going back over the names of the men they’d rescued. “Sergeant Barnes,” he realized. “One of them was a Sergeant James Barnes, and you—“
“It’s him,” Steve said. “I don’t know how, I don’t why, but it’s him.”
“Holy shit,” Tony whispered, before he nodded, and started over to the medic. “Hold up,” he called, before they could make it the helicopter. He reached out wrapped a hand around Bucky’s wrist, turning his arm up and pushing back the sleeve. There were puncture marks clustered at the top of his forearm.
“Yep, thought so,” Tony said. “Hydra’s been experimenting on him.” He looked back at Bucky. “So unless you have some recreational habits that definitely weren’t in your file, they injected you with something nasty. Possibly contagious. We need to quarantine you at the tower, and have our best people look at you. Which, by the way, would be me. And Dr. Banner. But mostly me. So you’re coming with us.”
Bucky pulled his arm away. “I’m not leaving my men—“
“You want to get your men infected if you’ve got some kind of virus?” Tony asked. Bucky kept glaring at him, but let himself fall back against the gurney in defeat. “Yeah, thought so.” He pointed to the medic. “You want to load him up in our quinjet?”
The medic’s affable nature seemed to fall away, and Steve winced even as Tony didn’t seemed phased.
“Yeah, either of you a trained medic?” the soldier asked, looking between them. “That’s what I thought. You’re not taking him anywhere without me.”
“I like him,” Tony decided, glancing at Steve. “Think we can keep him too?”
“What do you mean too?” Bucky demanded.
Tony ignored him, pointing at the medic. “You. What’s your name?”
“Sam Wilson,” the medic said. “And I already know your name, but I don’t care who you are. I’m not handing him over to you without proper approval.”
“Fine. I can do that. Jarvis,” Tony called. “Run this request up the chain of command. Let’s cut out the middlemen.”
“What are you—“ Sam started, but before he could even finish one of the other members of the rescue team was rushing over.
“Sergeant Barnes, we just got a call from the Secretary of Defense himself,” he said anxiously. “Your orders are to go with the Avengers.”
“You can come too,” Tony said, pointing at Wilson. “Because that was actually a good point about us not having any medical training whatsoever. That might have gone wrong.”
None of them looked happy about it, but Sam changed course to take Bucky to the quinjet instead. Steve glanced back and saw that Bucky’s team looked enraged, and they seemed to be shouting something as the rescuers tried to corral them back into the helicopter.
Steve should probably feel guilty about unleashing Tony on them all to get his own way. He wasn’t sure if this was going to be the best thing for anyone, not even him.
Because the thought of having a Bucky that didn't know him was almost more painful than not having him at all.
But only almost.
Steve knew he’d take Bucky absolutely any way he could get him.