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Bucky isn’t watching Walker’s every move.
There is an active fight, after all.
But he does notice when Walker gets caught off-guard.
One of the Flag Smashers catches him from behind, wrenching his arms behind his back, and it’s like a switch flips. Walker’s eyes go wide and glass-bright with panic and fury, teeth bared in something like a snarl. Every trace of fear disappears beneath something raw and wild and trapped. Like a creature that has suddenly decided it would rather tear itself apart than stay caught.
Bucky has seen animals look like that.
In feral dogs snarling through broken teeth. In wounded wolves backed against fences. In strays that stop thinking and snap at everyone. In terrified things that have forgotten the difference between defense and attack. Walker thrashes with that same frantic intensity, with a violence that seems completely disconnected from reason.
The Flag Smasher holding him is clearly not prepared for it.
Across the room, Karli is dashing for Walker with a knife.
Bucky starts toward them, but Hoskins reaches the collision point first.
The tackle brings them both to the ground.
Walker tears himself free with a shout.
Karli and Hoskins are quick to scramble upright.
She draws her fist back and—
“Lemar!”
Walker doesn’t beat Karli to the punch.
Hoskins goes flying back.
The room goes silent after the echoing crack.
Walker strikes Karli hard enough to knock off her mask.
She staggers back, stunned expression exposed.
But Walker doesn’t press the advantage, already dropping to his knees beside Hoskins, fingers pressed onto his neck with a mutter of, “Please, please, please—”
A moment passes. Then two.
Walker doesn’t find the pulse he’s looking for. He shakes with a terrible, hiccuping laugh, before he folds over, head falling onto Hoskins’ unmoving chest, and lets out an inarticulate scream. Bucky glances over to Sam, and there is an echo of his own words in his head: I know crazy when I see one, because I am crazy.
Something isn’t right with Walker.
Karli has gone pale beneath the blood on her mouth.
She looks poised to take on his rage.
Walker’s hand drops from Hoskins’ neck to the gun at his belt.
But he doesn’t move to retaliate.
He doesn’t even turn around.
He just raises the barrel to his head and—
Oh.
The realization hits a fraction of a second before the gunshot.
The bang echoes through the room.
Walker collapses atop Hoskins.
The room seems to pause, as does Bucky, though this is hardly the first time he’s been witness to deaths. He’s seen people die more times than he ever wants to remember. He has watched soldiers die in trenches, and forests, and prison camps. He has ended lives himself through the sights of a sniper rifle and felt them end beneath his own hands when Hydra turned him into a weapon.
Death itself is far from unfamiliar, but this is still unexpected. Even with what Bucky has seen of Walker’s brittle temper, frantic desperation, and increasingly frayed state of mind, this ending had never crossed his thoughts. He expected violence directed outward, expected retaliation, expected the kind of blind rage that leaves everyone else paying the price.
He hadn’t thought Walker would choose to—
Well.
The gun has already clattered out of his limp hand.
The shield remains strapped to his arm.
It’s a bloody sight.
Panic breaks the shocked paralysis.
The Flag Smashers scatter toward every exit they can find.
Bucky turns to Sam, and Sam is looking back.
A thought flashes through his mind:
They could take the shield back. Right now.
There’s nothing stopping them.
The same realization seems to hit Sam, too.
For one ugly moment, it is an incredibly tempting impulse.
But Sam shakes his head sharply, rejecting the thought as quickly as it forms, tearing his gaze away from the shield resting between the two bodies.
Then he turns and runs after Karli.
He doesn’t look back again.
Bucky lingers for another heartbeat.
He had hated seeing the shield in Walker’s hands.
He’d hated every reminder that Steve was gone and someone else had been chosen to stand where his friend once had. But staring at the two bodies on the floor, all his anger and resentment feels hollow. There’s no satisfaction or vindication to be found here. It would feel less like reclamation, and more like scavenging a corpse.
Whatever else Walker was, this wasn’t an ending Bucky had wished upon him.
(Wasn’t it? says a voice in the back of his mind. Didn’t you?)
Bucky turns and follows Sam.
They rush through stairwells and hallways, but there’s no trail to follow, with footsteps long gone by now. Super soldiers can cover a lot of ground in seconds, and Karli’s group had scattered in every direction. They may as well be trying to catch smoke. Bucky keeps pace with Sam anyway, though both of them know the pursuit is probably pointless.
It is.
They don’t find anyone.
Their search slows, then stops, with nothing to show for it. They circle back to the building where the fight had begun, though Sam stops short of the room where it had ended, and the bloody scene still waiting there. His jaw is tight, expression unsettled in a way that has nothing to do with the failed chase.
He’s thinking about Walker and Hoskins.
Bucky knows it. He is too.
The silence stretches between them.
He crushes down the guilty twist in his chest.
“We’re free agents,” Bucky says; an attempt at absolution.
He means: Walker made his own choices.
He means: They’re not responsible for how this turned out.
He means: The government problem just solved itself.
He means: They could take the shield and walk away.
Sam exhales slowly, though the action doesn’t seem to steady him the way he intends for it to. “We should at least notify up the chain,” he says. “So their families...”
So their families could know.
Bucky understands the words left unsaid.
His mind immediately follows them to the next question:
And then what?
What exactly are Hoskins’ and Walker’s loved ones supposed to do with that news? One man died in a fight. The other decided he couldn’t keep going afterward. There isn’t a report in the world that makes that easier to hear. Except, are there even families to be informed? Did they have anyone except each other? Did Walker off himself because there wasn’t anyone else to stick around for?
His stomach twists uncomfortably with that unknown.
What happened in those final moments?
The only one who could say can no longer do so.
Later, Bucky writes two more names into his notebook of amends.
He never gets an answer to the crux of it all: Why?