Better Love || A Bucky Barnes Fanfiction

- After -

They moved back to America soon after it happened. There was only so much they could do in Wakanda and, in truth, Elena couldn't bare to be in the country where she had given birth to her daughter and started a family with Bucky. Here is where it had all occurred. Here is where she had lost them and so many more.

Elena felt for Okoye. Losing her king, her princess, and even the queen mother in one swoop had left the woman just as confused and lost as she herself was feeling. However, Elena had to give it to Okoye: the warrior was strong. With her husband they had stepped up to the plate, taken charge of the country that they loved and deciding that they would be there for them in their time of need.

"We'll be here if you need help from us once more," Okoye had also told them before they had left. "If you find a way and need our help... We'll be there to bring them home."

So they had left Wakanda and returned to American soil. As soon as Elena had set foot inside the abandonded Avengers headquarters she headed straight towards the phone in one of the offices only to find the phone's line dead. As it turned out, there was limited signal anywhere.

"It's only just happened so I guess they're still trying to get things up and running again," Bruce had said when he had caught her trying again and again to get the phone to work. Elena had scowled at that, throwing the phone down on the desk and stalking out of the office.

"This is supposed to be a state of the art building filled with state of the art technology. How can it not make one damn phone call?!" She snapped. Watching from the dining room was Natasha who had only shaken her head, putting her own phone down.

"Cellphones aren't working either," she had murmured, patting the other woman on the arm comfortingly. "They'll work again soon enough. We just have to give it some time."

But that was something that Elena couldn't give, not when the people she loved had none. 

Slowly, eventually, phone and cellular signals came back to life. News stories of what happened were appearing on tv, interviews with those who wanted to know what exactly had happened, where were their friends, their family, their dogs? That part hurt Elena a little more than she first expected. She didn't know animals had been affected too. 

They were calling it The Decimation. Soon enough people were realizing where the power surge had originated from and were connecting the dots. The aliens had come again. The Avengers had fought them. The Avengers had lost and, in turn, so had the rest of the world. Now everyone was wondering: What next?

That was the question Delilah had asked when Elena had managed to get in contact with her. Thankfully, her oldest friend had survived The Decimation and was alive in Seattle, now planning to make the journey to Elena. When she had heard what had happened to Bucky and the young girl she had never got the chance to meet, she had cried down the phone line and Elena had cried with her. Elena knew that Delilah had a soft spot for Bucky. To learn that the man she had housed and cared for, the man she considered a son, had died in The Decimation, had almost broken the old woman's heart in two. So she was travelling to Elena, the question of what next still hanging in the air, only to be answered once she had arrived.

It had been almost a month since it happened. They were all still trying to get their heads around the event, still trying and failing to decide what was to happen next. Delilah had arrived while Elena had been on the phone with her eldest brother Sean, adding to her list of misery the loss of her parents and other two brothers and their families. For Sean and his family of six, only his baby daughter survived, only weeks old when it happened. 

"She won't know what happened to her mother," Elena was saying to Delilah, the pair sitting in the living room with the television playing on mute. All it ever played nowadays was videos and interviews revolving around The Decimation. "She won't know what happened to her older brothers and sisters. She won't know why her dad is so sad. It's tragic, Dee. Everything that's happened..."