Always Fight | Bucky Barnes |

39

Bucky Barnes

"You can't leave me, you promised!" 

Even as I feel the strangest sensation of fading away, I feel my heart shatter at the tear-streaked face of Dawn before me. She's begging me to stay, but I don't think I can. Even as I try to make it out that I love her one more time, I feel myself collapse and the world turn to black.

And then, in the next instant, I'm back. The world is light again, but everything is different. Everything is...wrong. I'm left discombobulated for what feels like an eternity as my brain tries to work through the sludge capturing it. There was the war, Thanos, Wakanda, the fight, and-

Fire sears in my chest as the haze of my thoughts clears for one painful, crawling moment. 

Dawn.

Dawn's not here. 

She was in my arms, her skin was on mine. She was right here. And now she's just...gone. As my confusion begins to rise, I glance around expected bodies and blood, the telltale beats of war. What I find instead are trees where I don't remember them and a thick, suffocating silence.

"What the hell?" I mutter, my heart beginning to race. Something is wrong, so fundamentally wrong that it clangs through every fiber of my being.

"Dawn?" I call out, my brows furrowed as I glance around in a confused panic. A million questions ravage my mind.

What happened to me? 

Where is everyone?

Is she okay?

Instinctively, I touch the pocket in my leather suit where I had tucked away the engagement ring before this all began. Finding the rings till there is the only relief I relish in, because the ring means nothing without her. Even though there are a million matters to worry over right now, all I can seem to circle back to is Dawn. It makes sense, considering my world wouldn't turn without her pulling me in. 

"Cap? Rhodes?"

My pulse jumps at the voice breaking the drowning silence of nature. Immediately, I turn towards the direction of the voice and take a few hesitant steps.

"Sam?" I questions. Usually I'd be annoyed to see that smug birdman, but when Sam Wilson breaks through the trees and his confused gaze meets mine, some of the panic snaring my chest loosens. At least I know everyone's not dead and I'm not insane. 

"Bucky," Sam jogs up to me and together we begin to shove our way through the forest, "What happened?"

"Hell if I know," I respond, but he can't say anything else before T'Challa comes stumbling into us, literally. 

"Sergeant Barnes, Sam Wilson, it is good to see you," T'Challa greets, his chest heaving with breath as he keeps himself calm. 

"Who else is here?" Sam prods. 

"Half of my army, but none of your friends except-"

"He actually did it"

We turn our heads to the sound of Wanda Maximoff's voice ringing into the air. The second my eyes land on her, I can see every bit of her shattered soul painted on her face. I've had that look before. She's lost, broken, hurt, angry. 

"Thanos?" T'Challa asks softly. Wanda's haunted eyes brimmed with tears of anguish and fury pan between the small group of us. 

"If he did-" I have to pause, my heart in my throat and burning at the unfinished thought, "If he did take out half of all life, does that make us the survivors?"