Bring Me Home // Bucky Barnes

Chapter XXXV - Forget The Forgotten

Sam didn't quite know how to react when Bucky reached towards him. He could have pulled away and Bucky would have understood but instead he froze, his eyes on the ground and his body stiff, ready for the blow.

As he felt the gentle squeeze of his shoulder Sam's eyes flicked up and he was greeted with the honest emotions of a man on the edge. Bucky's blue eyes were dark like an abyss and his jaw was firm, set in place as if he might break if he spoke again. The set of his jaw did nothing to hide the fact he was shaking, almost unnoticeably, but shaking still. He nodded slightly before letting go and turning away from Sam.

The wind picked up around them as the early morning sky turned grey and they marched forwards, Bucky taking the lead, never once checking the signal, as if his body somehow knew where she was; where to take him. The howling cries of the wind were the only sound, save for the gravel beneath their feet, and the three men marched on.

*

The anger was harder to hold now he was standing in the middle of a desolate street, Barton still tracing the signal of tags Bucky knew were his, tags she had kept. His chest ached as his body cried out for him to stop. Stop moving. Stop searching. Stop thinking. Just stop. He didn't know how to do this: how to keep himself together when he wasn't sure who he even was anymore, when he knew the key to who he was was the woman lost somewhere in one of the half dead buildings towering over him. The woman that even now, with the images she created still burned into the depths of his mind, he couldn't recall. The woman who, even before the misty memories in the gentle moonlight, he ached to be beside. Clint signalled to the rubble and ruins of an old apartment block, motioning for them to stay low until he gave the order, before running off to the left in search of his vantage point.

"Buck can you hear me?" Steve's voice crackled over the coms system as a high pitched screech was emitted into their ears.

"Hardly." Bucky huffed, adjusting his ear piece and brushing his hair out of his face as the wind blew around him.

"When you have Lizzie you've gotta get her out of here immediately." Steve's voice was frantic, desperate almost. "The city's going up. Ultron is lifting it."

"Shit." Sam kicked the dirt beneath his feet and leant back against the crumbling rubble of a single wall, programming RedWing and sending him up into the air to search the buildings.

"Clint -" Bucky barked into the coms, his instincts kicking in and drowning out his emotional torture, "- take out anyone in our way. Bird Brains, once we've got her you have one job: fly her out. Got it?"

Sam watched the shadow of clouds reflect on the metallic arm Bucky now swung around as if locking it into place, ready to fight, and he felt the hit of adrenaline he always felt before a fight: the rush of power and performance.

"Got it." He echoed.

*

Elizabeth was resting against Wanda while Pietro paced back and forth from the window, determined in his role as look out. They knew Ultron would come and they were not ready. The silence stretched on forever as Elizabeth turned the dog-tags over and over in her hands, watching the dim light flicker on the silver of them, her mind lost in the fear she would never make things right.

He had stared at her with such sad confusion that night; stepped towards her with so much fear in his eyes. In a blinding moment of weakness Lizzie found herself wishing she could forget, just as he had. At least then they would both be spared the pain.

"Your force-field," Wanda's voice, gentle and low, pulled her from her sadness and back into the dingy, abandoned home they now occupied, "can you project it?"