Chapter Text
For a moment the world was still. It was suspended in between chaos and terror and the bubble was threatening to burst at any second with the walls of uncertainty and fear pressing closer and closer and closer. Then he said your name.
He said your name and you turned and in the second that you saw him the bubble burst and you realised that the bubble was your heart and it had just exploded in your chest. He said your name and reached out to you and then he was slipping away from you again. There was nothing you could do as you watched him reach his arm out to you, like he had done all those decades ago when you watched him fall and felt your entire being plummet down with him. Like last time, he reached out to you to save him, to catch him before he fell but he stumbled towards you once and that was it. That was all he had time for. He had time to say your name one last time before he was gone again.
Your heart crumpled with him. He was your heart and he was gone again. Later, when the shock of it all hadn’t suspended your entire world you’d remember this moment for the details that hurt most. The look of fear in his eyes as he was torn away and the soft plead for you to save him. You’d see him fall, always falling, always out of your reach, over and over again, replayed over and over again in your vision as you take in the chaos all around. You never seem to be able to hold on to him. He’s always gone from you, always taken away from you. This time there’s so Hydra base to storm, no rescue mission, no risking everything to get him back, just the memory of a ravine in France and a ghost on a bridge asking “Who the hell is Bucky?” This time there’s going to be no miracle that returns to Bucky to you. There’s no raid to plan or plan to track him across the world or science to help straighten out what was broken. There’s dust where he once stood, there’s nothing but the ghost you want to keep in your mind’s eye but that’s fading too. The world is grey and fading and gone. For a moment the world was so perfectly still, a stasis of impending doom and then the pendulum fell and the countdown was gone and the world sped up for a second before it slowed down so unbearably slow. It slowed so you relieve both deaths at once. Simultaneously Bucky fell in front of you in a forest in Wakanda, the Winter Soldier reborn as the White Wolf, and in a train in France as Sergeant Barnes of the 107th. Simultaneously Bucky falls, falls, falls, fades and dies again and again in so many ways and it takes your breath away and stops your heart as it did the first time. You’ve lost him again. He’s gone once again, with your name falling from his lips like a prayer for one last miracle from you that you can’t give him. You can’t save him, not this time, not ever it seems.
The world fades away from you and your name sounds like heartbreak as it rushes like a river from the dead man.