Fall of the Mighty ★ [4] ✔

Breakeven

⏳ 2016

A fight was coming. I could feel it in my bones and in the air, tense enough to shatter everything.

With FRIDAY's hesitant aid, I'd managed to find this hole in the snow. I'd heard the gunshots echo down the corridors as I descended down into the dark. And then I found this room. This place where it all began; where monsters and weapons were born.

Zemo had fled to the chamber the moment he saw me. I'd stalked to him, eyeing the now deceased Super Soldiers still trapped in their cryogenic prisons. He'd killed them. Every single one of them. And it was for the best. They were going to die anyway; I'd killed them myself trying to stop them. Peacefully was the best way to go.

I'd glared at him through the glass, my upper lip rising in fury. He'd done so much damage. And I was going to make him pay.

And then I'd heard the metal grinding sing down the corridors, bouncing around the cavernous room. I'd known then that Stark was here. What I didn't expect to see was Steve and Bucky with him.

The look Steve had given me...it was painful. I'd schooled my features into a stone-cold stare. If there was a way back from this for us, it wasn't happening today. But I'd come here for him, whether he saw that or not.

My eyes flicked from Steve's hopeless and worried expression to Tony's scowl of pure rage glaring at Bucky, who wore a tormented and haunted look.

Bucky had done it. He'd killed Howard and Maria Stark that cold night in 1991. They were dead because of him. But it wasn't him. It was the Winter Soldier. Either way—Bucky or the Winter Soldier—he'd done it. And Tony wasn't going to see past the fact that it wasn't truly Bucky to put aside what he'd just seen on that screen.

We waited. We all waited for Stark to make the first move. The power in his tight jaw looked hard enough to shatter the bones holding it together. Steve looked at him as if he were an animal on the edge of lashing out, his eyes deep with both worry and wariness. Bucky and I stood side by side, glaring at the two cautiously like predators watching predators.