The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 54

Siberia

Spring 2016

It was over.

And the only thing that kept Steve going was his focus on getting Bucky back to the Quinjet. On getting them out of there.

He simply couldn't think about anything else. Not yet.

Otherwise he risked breaking down, himself.

He couldn't do that.

He didn't even have the words to describe just how badly things had gone. He could hardly imagine that it could've been any worse.

Well, one of his friends could be dead, now, the pragmatic side of him considered wearily. He had at least managed to prevent that.

But it honestly felt a small accomplishment.

Especially given the toll the fight had taken. From all of them.

It left him feeling hollow. Hollow, drained and heartsick.

Something in Tony had snapped the moment he'd realized not only had his parents been coldly murdered, but that it was Bucky who had done it.

And that Steve had known about it.

He'd been relentless. Remorseless. Completely single-minded in exacting vengeance on the man he perceived as responsible for killing Howard and Maria. Nothing Steve had said, nothing he had done had gotten through to him. He'd been lost to his grief and rage.

Lost to the drive to try and ease the pain finally learning the truth had brought crashing down on him.

It was a pain Steve could sympathize with. It had crushed in on him too, leaving it hard to breathe around the weight of it. Howard had been his friend, one of the few who'd seemed able to look past 'The Captain' to see him as just 'Steve'. It had gutted him to find out that Howard had been murdered from Zola. And to now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bucky had been the one to carry it out? To watch it happen and be helpless to stop it?

Steve didn't even have the words.

He couldn't even fathom how exponentially worse it must've been for Tony.

Steve might have never known his own father, but his mother had been his world. She was the only family he'd ever known. She'd been all he'd ever had aside from Bucky. When she had died...it had devastated him. And he'd been left completely alone.

Save for Bucky. If it hadn't been for Bucky? He wasn't sure how he'd have gotten through it.

But Steve's mom had been stolen from him by a disease. By pure, blind chance. And that had been hard enough.

Maria had been ripped from Tony. Murdered on the whims of evil men.

Steve couldn't even fathom the anguish gripping his friend.

And while he knew Tony hadn't been on the best terms with Howard, he could easily believe that made the pain all the worse as he also suspected that was one of Tony's deepest held regrets. And Tony's mother... The way Tony had spoken of her on the rare occasions she'd come up? What he'd said down in the bowels of the base—I don't care...he killed my mom—the way his voice had threatened to break, the hollow, grief-stricken cast to it that overwhelmed even Tony's rage?

It left Steve with no doubt that Maria had been Tony's world just as Sarah had been Steve's.

So as much as Steve had desperately tried to get through to his friend, hoping that he might be able to get Tony to pause long enough to think rationally?