Chapter 1
Time travel is messy, and when he wakes, he awakes to himself standing right by a cliff’s edge, snow sloshing beneath his booted feet. The Austrian Alps, a zip-line strung from start to end, locked in place — he remembers this. He finds himself in old clothes, amongst old friends, and the only thing that reminds him of the present is the strap around his left hand.
Out of all days to return to, he’s returned to this fateful day. Steve can feel his stomach seize up — it leaves him feeling so empty, and yet also oddly constipated with a cold stone sitting in the pit of his abdomen, weighing him down and constricting his breaths.
Maybe it’s the adverse effects of time travel, or maybe he’s just overcome with fear of what’s about to come, but his stomach is unsettled and he’s two seconds from throwing up.
“Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?” The voice pipes up from beside him, in his left ear.
To his left, a youthful, pre-tragedy Bucky Barnes stands tall and steady in his military manner, matching up to him on the cliff’s edge. Bucky still sports the same old pouf — a 40’s staple, if he had to give it a name — and a navy coat buttoned crisply across his chest.
Steve realizes how far the man has fallen after the fall. His shoulder-length hair is, at best, a well-organized mess that looks best in a half-bun. His clothes are always crumpled, stained with perspiration from countless restless, nightmarish nights. The Bucky now, the Bucky that’s also gone, is not nearly as put together as compared to his old self.
In this instance, it’s evident. He never really did realize this, until now.
The words leave his lips without thinking, like a record on playback. “Yeah, and I threw up?”
Bucky hides a smug smirk, pressing his lips together into a tight line. He stares down at the train tracks. “This isn’t payback, is it?”
“Now, why would I do that?"
Again, the words leave him like he’s running on auto-pilot, and it takes a minute before he realizes that everything is playing out exactly how it had been in the past. It hits him as a memory, first, until he remembers that this is time travel. He’s passing through a very real, very existent moment in time.
This is the very moment, just bare minutes before the fateful incident, that everything had gone absolutely, immensely, truly wrong.
When it truly hits him, and the realization sets in in full, Steve panics. He turns to his best friend, only to have his best friend spare a glance right back. His ocean-blue eyes, not the least bit dulled down by the ominous nature of what was to come, light up like a warm bulb to complement the slight grin he returns to Steve.
Disregarding any second thought, he pulls Bucky aside and closer to the enclosure of snow-capped trees, a slight distance away from the rest of the team. He tugs on Bucky’s arm, and Bucky trails right along behind him, no questions asked.
“On second thought, maybe you should stay up here, Buck,” the Captain starts.
Bucky pulls a face, as if reacting to a sour joke. “Hah, not a chance.”
“You’re a sniper, so that means you see better from a distance, right? We could use someone from up here, from afar,” Steve persists.
“More than half the boys’ll be staying up here as overwatch. If anything, they’ll pick up a gun and start shooting, if they have to.”
“They don’t have your aim.”
“And they don’t have your back better than I do, especially when you have knack for making stupid split-second decisions,” Bucky argues, amused. “Why’d you think I’d follow you anywhere, other than to keep you alive?”
“I’m being serious, Buck. You’re better off up here.”
The soldier claps him on the shoulder, a wide grin still stretched across his face. “I am too. I’m not going anywhere, bud. Not a chance. You’d take all the stupid with you, and you know I can’t let that happen.”
“Please, just- I need you to trust me. Stay up here. I need you to stay up here. Don’t go down there. I’ll take someone else.”
“What’s the worst that could happen down there?”
“I don’t want you down there,” Steve snaps, a little less than friendly. But maybe a-little-less-than-friendly is what it’ll take for his best friend to finally listen to what he’s trying to say.
“Woah, there. What’s going on with you today? What’s up?” Bucky pulls away, his blue eyes peering into his face, as if searching for answers. “Talk to me, Stevie. Is everything alright?”
No, everything is absolutely not alright. Steve is about two impulsive decisions away from breaking the sacred rule of time travel and spilling his guts all over.
“I-“
No, Bucky. If you go down there, you’re gonna die.
Not at all, Buck. You’re gonna get blown off the fucking train if you go down there.
Listen to me, Buck. If you go down there, you’re going to fall from the train and lose an arm, and be brainwashed into HYDRA’s very own weapon.
Do you want to be tortured for over seventy years? Do you, really? ‘Cos that’s what’s gonna happen if you even think of going down there.
I know what’s going to happen if you head down there, Bucky. I just can’t sit around and let it happen. They’re going to take you apart and break you, and you’ll be stuck.
I can’t lose you, Buck. Not again. Not like this.
All these thoughts running through his headspace, and threatening to reveal themselves. Steve nearly gives one up when he notices a familiar figure in the background, coming from behind the trees. A modern figure. A tether to the real world.
As the figure stumbles out of the shadows from beneath the trees, he realizes that it’s Natasha. Up on a mountain she probably has never been on, in a moment in time well before she even existed, Steve is confused on how she had ended up here in the first place, in his timeline, in his sequence with Bucky.
But it’s clear, she’s been there for awhile now. Hadn’t anyone noticed her there?
“Don’t say it, Steve,” Natasha warns. “Remember what Lang said. We’re just passing through.”
“How are you here?”
“I don’t know,” she shakes her head, possibly just as confused as he is. “Lang said that we’d be displaced if we weren’t careful, if we were too attached to a place in time. All I know is that we’re supposed to end up in New York, 2012. We’re way off course.”
“But this is my memory. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Beats me,” Natasha shrugs her shoulders. “Maybe I’m here to keep you on track, like an anchor. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work. Time travel’s messy.”
The captain’s eyes shift from the blonde to Bucky, still searching his face for answers he wasn’t getting. Concern is evident in his features by now.
He redirects his gaze back at Natasha. “This is where it happens, Nat. It’s where he’s gonna fall.”
The russian’s hardened features seem to falter at his words, softening by a fraction. She glances to the landscape behind him, the Austrian Alps in the background and the icy ravine at the very bottom of it all. She eyes the tracks below, and the steam-fueled locomotive that’s beginning to inch out into the long stretch of tracks before them.
“So, this is where it starts,” she says. Her voice is uneasy, and the words come as barely a squeak. Steve nods, and she nods in acknowledgement as well. “You need to let him do this, Steve.”
“I can’t. Not when I know what’s gonna happen.”
“And what’s gonna happen, will happen. Steve, you can’t change the timeline, not this one. It’s too far back. The ripples into the future will be catastrophic. Please, just think about this for a second.”
As much as he hates to admit it, Natasha isn’t wrong. “But I can’t let this happen to him, Nat. They’re going to tear him apart.”
“I know.”
“I can’t do this. If I do this, it’s as good as handing him over to those bastards. I can’t,” he shakes his head, just as much as his own hands are shaking.
“I know-“
Steve is nearing his limit. “You keep saying that you ‘know’, but you don’t know,” he retorts.
“I know,” Natasha corrects, repeating herself. There’s something about the way she says it that strikes a chord within him. For some unbeknownst reason, the weight of her words somehow urge him to listen, to not contest this any further.
She continues. “It’s going to hurt, and it’ll hurt like hell, but you have to do this. You have to let it go.”
“I don’t know if I can, Nat.”
“You have to. If he doesn’t fall today, there might not be a Bucky for you to save in the present. You need to remember that.”
He can almost feel an odd heat begin to burn behind both his eyes. Both eyes start to get slick with moisture. He can’t really breathe right, and all of a sudden, in that very moment, he finds himself as a reflection of that small, scrawny kid from Brooklyn again.
“What if I can’t do it?”
“You can. I know you’ll do what you have to,” Natasha offers up a watery smile. “And I’ll be right with you, every step of the way.”
Steve looks to his hands, hands that won’t be able to save his best friend from the unfortunate fall that’s to come. From the seventy years of pain that present-day Bucky still can’t sleep through. From soft, pelting raindrops each resounding like a hailing gunshot to his ears. From empty eyes and perpetually trembling hands and watery smiles that slip right past him, and the twenty different ways that he can somehow concoct just to say: I don’t know if I’m worth all this.
Then he looks to Bucky, who’s brushing a hand over his shoulder by now.
“Stevie, what’re you lookin’ at?” Bucky questions. He turns his own head to the spot where Steve had been conversing with the blonde.
“Um...”
Natasha is closing the distance between herself, and the pair of them. In open air, the captain finds it hard to wrap his head around how he can be in two existences at once, and she can’t. Because Bucky sees right through her, as if she were a ghost.
She shrugs her shoulders once more. It’s as if he can already hear the words in her voice: time travel’s messy.
His best friend then turns back around to watch him, with concern still eminent in his manner. “Did you see something? What’s going on with you?”
“What?” Steve is flustered.
“You spaced out a little, back there. You were about to say something, and then...” The brunette soldier gives him a once over. “You sure you’re alright there, bud? You’re a little off.”
The blonde is shoulder-to-shoulder with Bucky by now, eyes observing the man’s side profile intently. She watches as his jaw tightens up, then slackens, as his ocean-blues scan Steve’s own features for what seemed like a long minute.
She then looks over his broad shoulder again, down to the tracks. “There’s not much time left, Steve,” she starts, just as Monty gives them the go-ahead in the background. He can hear the Schnellzug wail on the tracks. She spares one last glance at the soldier. “We have to go.”
Steve can feel the panic rising, along with the anger. The empty, heavy feeling in his stomach grows even heavier as before, more so when Bucky’s eyes catch sight of the incoming train as well.
“I...” He struggles to find the words. “I-it’s nothing. Train’s coming.”
“It is,” Bucky even beams. “You ready to give them hell?”
He’s all suited up and ready to kick some HYDRA ass. He doesn’t know what’s coming. Little does Bucky really know that he’s running head first into a fight that’ll last decades, a fight that will carry on even long after he finds himself incapacitated.
Steve can’t do this. He just can’t. He knows deep down inside that this moment will stay with him for the rest of his life.
“Yeah,” he has to lie, and his insides feel rotten.
He takes one last look at Bucky, and then another one at Natasha who’s just half-there like a temporal shadow. She nods reassuringly, but he doesn’t feel any more reassured than before.
Steve finally turns, and walks up to the zip line. He shakes the tremors from his gloved hands and places the first hand on the trolley handle. He sees the Schnellzug approaching the drop zone.
When he says it, he doesn’t quite know who he’s addressing it to, Bucky or Natasha: “Stay close.”
And then Dernier gives him the go-ahead, and he makes the first drop.