Chapter Text
It is human nature - a failing of human perception - to view the world as static and unchanging. Then there are moments where everything changes so much in a single instant that it becomes impossible to keep telling that lie.
For Bucky this happened in the span of a minute when a Hydra energy weapon blew a hole in the side of a train and Steve Rogers - Steven Grant Rogers, Captain America, the single most important person in Bucky’s life - fell out of that hole and down, down, down till he was lost - forever - in the snow and the ice and the rocks of the Carpathian Mountains.
However, even in these moments of clarity, where change and instability are made unignorable, the essential truth that nothing - nothing - is ever the same as it was before remains obscured. Each minute, each second, adds up to an infinite amount of microscopic changes. Nothing is ever going to be the same as it was before, but the future won't be the same as it is now either.
Bucky’s future holds last, desperate attempts to stop Johann Schmidt from bombing American cities with Tesseract-powered suicide planes.
It’s what Steve would have done, so Bucky doesn’t think twice about following Schmidt onto the plane. It doesn’t go right, of course, because he isn’t Steve. Sure, he prevents Hydra from launching their bombs but it’s not quite enough, is it?
There’s still Schmidt and the Tesseract itself, and Schmidt’s megalomaniacal willingness to crash both into New York City, with Bucky along for the ride.
As far as Bucky can see, there isn’t a future for him past this point, so it’s easy to take that last step. All or nothing. Kill Schmidt, save the city, or die trying.
In the end, it isn’t even him that kills Schmidt, it’s the Tesseract itself that consumes Schmidt in a crackling storm of the energy he was arrogant enough to think he controlled. Bucky isn’t left unscathed by that fire either. It takes his arm, sheering it away from his body at the shoulder so quickly that he has no time to feel pain. One instant he had a left arm, the next he’s watching that arm disintegrate and burn away.
Nothing ever stays the same.
It’s only the complete consumption of Schmidt’s body that stops the Tesseract’s reaction and saves Bucky from sharing Schmidt’s fate. He gives the cube wide berth as he staggers towards the crippled plane’s controls. The Tesseract’s power left him with a fused stump where his arm used to be. He’s trying not to think about it. Luckily, there’s other, more important things that need his attention anyway. They’re still on a course for New York and Bucky will be damned if he’s gonna let Schmidt manage to put a crater in his own city from beyond the grave. Unfortunately there aren’t really a lot of options for stopping it at this point.
He manages to get the radio to work. Somehow he gets a line to someone, somewhere, and that person turns out to be Peggy Carter. Bucky isn’t sure if he wants to talk to her or not. He’s still not sure whether they’re even friends. There was a bond between them, after Steve died, but it wasn’t friendship. Instead it was a silent, shared understanding of the enormity of the hole Steve’s absence left in both of them. But that doesn’t mean Peggy likes him, so it comes as a shock to him when he realizes that the strange, ragged quality of her voice isn’t distortion from the radio.
His last words are “I’m sorry about everything, Peggy,” and then he kills the line.
The last thing he thinks, as the plane dives into the white oblivion of the arctic, is that Steve wouldn’t have had to crash the plane to save everyone. Steve would have found a way to make it all work. Steve was lost saving Bucky on the train though and Bucky isn’t him. He can’t do the things Steve did and it’s his fault that Steve isn’t here to do them. He tried to carry the shield and he couldn’t.