Chapter 2
Everything that comes after is historically accurate, which at least means that he hasn’t fucked up the timeline yet. But Steve knows that the worst is yet to come.
“I had him on the ropes,” Bucky huffs, almost itching to pop another few rounds into the fallen guard.
He takes a moment to catch a breath of his own. “I know you did.”
Soon enough, he can feel it coming. It hits his senses first as a low, rumbling sound, then growing louder like a plasma jet powering up. He feels it in his throat, an odd lump that makes it a little harder to breathe, just as much as he can see the light sheen of blue soon coloring the smoke that first hid their assailant.
The assailant holds the tesseract-powered assault rifle up, locked on and aimed straight for the pair, just like old times.
Like second instinct, Steve swiftly pulls his friend behind to safety behind him, and Bucky stumbles into place.
“Get down!” He yells, and Bucky follows.
He holds his shield up just as soon as a blast is jettisoned from the assailant’s contraption, the blue light launching itself into the shield and knocking them both back with its sheer force. The shield is forced out of his hand as he gets thrown to the side, leaving him winded after having taken the brunt of it.
At the same time, the diverted blast blows a hole through the side of the heavily armored vessel. He can feel the cold and familiar snap of arctic wind graze his skin. It’s about to happen.
Steve tries but fails to flip himself over from his fallen position on the floor, catching a glimpse of an out-of-place Natasha as soon as he looks up. He’s in search of Bucky, but he finds her instead, ducking herself in a corner and out of reach from the jet’s blow. It’s through her line of sight, one that he follows, that his glances fall back on his best friend.
The soldier is grappling for the shield now. His shield.
No, Steve thinks to himself.
Bucky draws his handgun as well, the vibranium shield held tight in one hand and his chambered gun in the other.
No, no, no no no no no no no, Steve doesn’t want to look. But he can’t find it in himself look away.
Just like he had been paralyzed in shock the first time around, now he’s paralyzed just the same. Except, it’s not shock holding his bones in place this time around. This time, it’s fear. Fear of what he knows is about to happen. He wants to get up, but his body doesn’t catch up quite as quickly to his mind.
The assault rifle begins to power up again, the blue liquid energy brightening up and launching yet another blast in the direction of Bucky. It bounces off the shield, and Bucky can’t hold onto it as he gets thrown off his feet.
The captain sees his body flying into the debris of the gaping hole of the carriage, and Natasha flinches at the sound his body makes as it crumples and ricochets off the surface. Before the HYDRA assailant can power up for a third time, Steve manages to pull himself to his feet and grab his fallen shield in one fell swoop, launching it straight into the assailant’s chest.
“Bucky!” He can’t help but yell out as he pulls off his mask. His voice is loud and hoarse, and no match to the rigorous gusts of wind that’s drowning his voice out.
Sparing no second thought, Steve climbs out onto the outer side of the vessel, gloved hands wrapped around bare steel bars. His hands try their hardest to hold himself into place against the force of the wind, with the train’s speed at full throttle sparing him no extra favors at that.
He watches Bucky, with just two hands on the steel bars that are keeping him from falling, try to maneuver himself closer to the carriage, closer to him.
“Hang on,” Steve yells out again.
He’s hanging on by his hands and his feet, doing the same and doing his best to close the distance. He closes in much further than the last time. He’s confident he can grab Bucky before he falls.
His eyes dart to the steel bar that Bucky is on, watching it loosen bit by bit. He reaches for him. “Grab my hand!”
“Steve,” Natasha starts with a warning tone. She’s holding herself steady by the metal shelves in the carriage, right by the hole in the wall. “Steve, don’t do this.”
“I can save him, Nat,” he pleads.
His gloved fingers barely scrape Bucky’s right wrist. The first time he swings himself over to grab Bucky’s arm, it’s a miss. Bucky tries to inch closer, stilling when the steel bar he’s on begins to creak at the shift of his weight towards a loose side.
And then, the steel bar drops, just by a fraction. His heart almost skips two beats, and for a moment, he sees white.
“This is where it has to happen.” Natasha’s voice is assertive as she dishes out the reminder.
She repeats it again, but her warning falls on deaf ears as he tries to reach for his best friend’s hand, swinging his left arm over a second time. This time, he’s successful. His grip is tight on Bucky’s forearm, grappling for him just as the steel bar gives way.
The sudden additional weight on the steel bar he’s on causes it to loosen as well. The bar begins to whine, dropping by a fraction. With just his left arm, he tries to lift Bucky up high enough, for Bucky to be able to catch his own footing on the grooves in the debris.
He can feel his glove loosening, and then, the steel bar dropping a second time. He knows that this bar is about to give way as well.
Natasha’s eyes are on the whining steel bar, widening with panic. “It’s gonna go, Steve. If you don’t let go, you’re going to fall too.”
He knows. He knows that too. He knows that the next drop the bar takes is going to take both him and Bucky down with it too.
But his best friend is grappling frantically for help, to pull himself up. Bucky’s grip on his left wrist is beginning to slip, pulling his glove down with him, and he can feel Bucky struggling to get his left arm into a firmer hold as well. But his legs are dangling freely below him, and Steve knows that both of Bucky’s arms are getting tired.
The Russian sighs, doing her best to lean over to place a firm hand on his shoulder. Her hold on him isn’t unlike a vice grip, reminding him that this is the past and grounding him to the present.
“If we get to New York, we can bring them back. You’ll get him back,” she reasons.
“I won’t,” he argues.
Because the Bucky he can save this very second is the Bucky he knows. The one before HYDRA. The one before the fall, before the torture, before the metal prosthetic. The one who has followed him right into the jaws of death so many times before, always itching for the next fight. The one who’s a sucker for art, and literature, and poetry.
The one who’s happy.
The one who’s healthy.
The one who tells jokes.
The one who sleeps at night.
The one who isn’t a ghost. Who is neither a ghost in his head, nor a ghost of his former self.
The Bucky he’ll get back from the Decimation, as much as he hates to admit it, is a shell. Like a shell casing from a bullet that’s been used. A discarded remnant of something that used to be lethal. The cataclysmic aftermath of something, or rather someone, that is nothing more than a weapon that’s been made use of one too many times, to a fault.
The Bucky that just isn’t... Bucky.
“Steve?” He hears the fear in Bucky’s voice, accompanied with a sudden stillness, because he stops writhing below him.
It’s as if the gravity of the situation has finally hit the soldier. Somehow, seventy years before, he still manages to sound just like he had before he’d disintegrated as a result of the cosmic snap.
“Steve, you need to let him go,” says Natasha.
He doesn’t want to. But Steve knows that he really has to. And just before the bar gives way, and just before he may as well follow his best friend down to the icy ravine of a frozen-over Danube, he presses both his eyes tightly shut as he does.
The screams all still sound the same, even when they’re seventy years apart. It’s exactly as he remembers it, except this time, it leaves him feeling so much worse. Even someone as versed with death and destruction, and as apathetic as Natasha has to look away.