INFERNO || Bucky Barnes

1

2024; Thanos is gone; a few months after the events of Endgame;

middle of nowhere Missouri; abandoned cow pasture

A single speck of ash floated in the air and landed on her face. Her cheeks were red, she could feel, and the last heat from the fire faded deep inside her. She felt Force Croixa giving her the stamp of approval, and that the force was relieved. She came back after all this time. Killed again after years of ignoring the pull to death and anger that Force Croixa had always tugged.

Inferno, her real government name, stood up: she had fallen in the blast, years of unuse caused her to be weak in the face of her own power. She looked around the field- the sun was starting to set and the barn that used to stand in front of her was now vanished into thin air, the people inside gone like they blipped. But really they had just burned. Burned in an inferno so hot that the fire was all colors of the rainbow and beyond that. Burned in an inferno so intentional that the burning didn't start on the outside- no- it started on the inside with every nucleus of every cell gone first, and the fire spread from there. The grass that the barn stood on was gone, now just a huge patch of burnt dirt.

The culprit looked at her hands in horror. She could see the red hot wrath pooling in her palms under her skin.

very good

Force Croixa whispered to her soul. She unintentionally relaxed at the words. She couldn't hear the words or see them but she felt them. She felt that Force Croixa was satisfied with her work. She felt that the force hidden in a volcano was proud of her. And despite all her work, despite all the safe guards against Force Croixa she had built over the past five years, she felt that pride too. Inferno could feel the the extra power the Force Croixa's center presence gave her fill her veins and her soul.

Force Croixa, the force that lives inside the only volcano on the small, remote, and top secret Pacific Ocean island of Croix, was always with Inferno, always lingering in the back of her mind, trying to lead her to do what it wanted her to do. But after the Avengers were cut in half by the blip and Thanos was dead, the team of heroes had settled for a while, their names weren't in the news as often. So the anger inside of her wained, the wrath that she was saving for them was left in small passive aggressive acts to random citizens that would never effect their lives, but saved Inferno from trying to, and inevitably succeeding in, burning every last avenger to the ground, and leaving only one piece of ash as a reminder of who they were.

But somehow, and she couldn't remember how, she was there: standing in front of a patch of burnt dirt where she could vaguely remember a barn being. And she could also vaguely remember the two people in it. There vacant screams echoed in her mind.

"What did you do?" she whispered quietly in her soul to Force Croixa. She felt the smile the force would have shown if it were a tangible human being.

I've done nothing

"What did you make me do?" she asked a more direct question, the force refused to answer questions that weren't direct. It was its way of circling blame back onto human life.

I didn't make you do anything

"Did you bend my will and blind my conscience?" Inferno spoke this one out loud. The force liked to hide in her soul, so a question out loud made the force cringe, she felt it, and more likely to answer her exact question.