Always Fight | Bucky Barnes |

35

For one breathless moment, my world is but smoke and shadow and crackling, blue power.

Then, everything goes as still as death.

The smoke clears.

The shadows fade.

The power ebbs.

And then everything fades to black.

|||

When I wake up, I know instantly that I'm not where I was before.

Maybe it's the way my stomach churns and roils, or the pounding ache between my brows, or maybe it's the overwhelming feeling of wrongness that clangs through every fiber of my being. It's only a few seconds before I remember what happened, that I traveled through space with the Tesseract and Loki to God knows where.

For only one moment, I'm scared to open my eyes. Then, I find the courage to pry them open only to find more darkness and a fortress of cold stone.

I look around, managing to shove myself off of the floor only to find no Loki and no Tesseract. I figure out quickly that I must have fallen in the wormhole and been taken to a different place than him and the Tesseract. Where? I can't quite figure that part out yet.

As I get to my feet and glance around, I realize that all of the infinity stone business is now completely out of my hands. I only have enough particles to get me home, so unless the space stone magically brought me somewhere where there's another infinity stone, there's nothing I can do. It's both a sinking and devouring sensation, to know that we might lose and to know that I am completely powerless to do anything.

We lost the space stone. Unless the others can figure out how to fix this, we've lost.

I nearly sink to my knees in raw and utter despair. Unless they find a way, which they sure as hell are going to try and do, we lose. For good. DJ will never see Rose again. I'll never see Bucky again.

I brace one hand on the cold stone beside me to keep from collapsing as a guttural sob rushes over me. My crying echoes through the otherwise empty halls where there's no heat signature in a few hundred feet radius. With my free hand, I clutch my chest to try and ease the stabbing pain.

For minutes on end, I try and force myself to look on the bright side, to think positive. If there's anyone that can figure this out, it's Tony, Steve, and Scott. I have to trust that they will. I have no other choice.

And yet...

And yet I can't stop my chest from threatening to crack wide open. To know that this could truly be it, to know that I could press the button on my suit and travel back to my time and see that we've lost...

It's too much. It's all too much.

This time, I don't stop myself from sliding down the cold, stone wall. The tears stop flowing, but I stare numbly ahead, my mind breaking between all of the things that they could try to get the stone and the despair of going home and seeing they didn't get it. As I simply stare at the button on my suit, warring with myself on whether or not to push it and get the pain over with now or later, failure raw and pure crashes over me.

I failed him.

I managed to make it five whole years on my own. I raised a kid and fought for a way to get him back and when I finally got one, I wasted it. I fought so hard, fought all of this time, fought for nothing.

Have faith in your team.

That little glimmer of sunshine that's left in my weary, shredded soul, that whisper of optimism that can never seem to leave me, pushes me to stop feeling so sorry for myself and get to my feet. I brush back my unruly hair, not knowing what to do next.