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Yelena Belova felt sick to her stomach, her hands curled into useless fists at her sides as she stared at the TV, the reporter’s voice droning beneath the shrill, relentless beep of the countdown timer in the corner of the screen.
Hours. Minutes. Seconds.
Each number that disappeared brought them closer to the end of the world as she knew it—to two universes colliding, to everything and everyone being crushed beneath something no number of bullets, fists, or fury could stop.
And they were all incompetent in stopping it.
For all her training, all the people she had survived, all the things she knew how to break, she was still only human. Only good for punching, shooting, and bleeding. None of it mattered against an incursion tearing worlds apart, and she hated herself for standing there.
For what had to be done.
“Yelena?”
She barely heard it over the television.
Yelena looked up from where she sat rigidly on the edge of the couch and found Ava standing a few feet away, two steaming mugs of tea clasped in her hands. The sight made something tight twist in Yelena’s chest.
Tea.
As if tea could fix this.
As if anything could.
Ava’s expression was carefully neutral, but Yelena knew her well enough by now to see the concern underneath it. She didn’t miss the way the rest of her teammates’ eyes were on her either.
“Did you say something?” Yelena asked, pressing her lips into a thin line as she took the mug.
Even talking hurt, but after taking down several Sentinels and fighting through the aftermath of the attack, Yelena was lucky to be sitting upright at all. Three of her ribs were broken—at least, according to the medic who had wrapped her torso so tightly that every breath felt like a punishment.
Ava sighed. “You’re going to drive yourself insane watching it, you know.”
Yelena let out a humorless snort and turned back toward the screen. The timer kept counting down in merciless red numbers as the cameras panned to the natural disasters now happening around the world because of it.
Tsunamis battering the eastern seaboard. Earthquakes leveling buildings in cities that had not felt a tremor in decades. Tornadoes cutting through entire towns, wildfires spreading without warning, and violent storms gathering over every major ocean.
The reporter’s voice shook as footage flashed across the screen. “Scientists are now warning that the increasing seismic, atmospheric, and oceanic disturbances may be connected to the instability between the two universes—”
“Okay, I think that’s enough.”
Bucky muted the TV before the woman could finish, but the images kept playing anyway, silent and horrific, beneath the countdown ticking closer to zero. Yelena glared at Bucky for it, and then turned to the rest of her teammates.
“What else can I do?” she muttered. “What can any of us do but sit here and wait?”
She hated it.
Hated the helplessness of it. She hated the way every instinct in her body screamed at her to move, to find a target, to load a gun, to do something. Fighting was simple. There was always a next move: hit harder, shoot straighter, get back up before the other person did.
But there was no enemy standing in front of them now.
There was no army to infiltrate, no weapon to steal, no throat to put a knife against. Two universes were tearing toward each other, and all the skills Yelena had spent her life sharpening were suddenly useless.
It was not only because they were injured.
Yes, she had three broken ribs that made breathing feel like a personal insult. Ava was still recovering from the damage the Sentinels had done to her suit, the kind that had left her body tethering between existence and none.
Walker’s shoulder was wrapped and immobilized beneath his jacket. Alexei had a gash above his brow and bruises blooming across his face, though he kept insisting that he was “perfectly fine.” Even Bucky looked worn down, his metal arm scorched and dented from where it had taken the worst of an impact.
But they would have fought through all of it.
They would have gone out there half-conscious, bleeding, and barely able to stand if there had been something to fight.
Instead, there was only the sky. Only the countdown. Only the knowledge that somewhere beyond what any of them could reach, Bob was trying to hold back the end of everything. Yelena looked down at the tea trembling faintly in her hands.
From the other side of the room, Walker shifted where he leaned against the kitchen counter.
“You know that Ava has a point.”
Yelena’s head snapped toward him, scowling. “Did I ask for your opinion?”
Walker raised both hands. “Okay. Damn.”
The room went quiet again.
Even Alexei, who had spent the first hour pacing around the room and loudly insisting that the news was making everyone “too dramatic,” had stopped moving. He stood near the window now, arms folded tightly across his chest, staring out at the skyline, now a deep crimson red.
Bucky sat in the armchair nearest the television, elbows resting on his knees. He had been watching the timer too, but unlike Yelena, he did not look away when she caught him. “I know you’re worried.”
Yelena gave a sharp laugh. “And you’re not?”
His jaw tightened. For a second, she expected him to deny it. To give her some calm, reassuring soldier answer about contingency plans and staying focused. Instead, Bucky looked down at his hands.
“Of course I am,” he admitted. “But it’s going to be okay.”
Yelena stared at him like he had lost his mind because he had, hadn’t he?
Behind her, Alexei straightened, seizing on the words with far more confidence than anyone in the room actually felt. “Yes, Lena. The Winter Soldier is right! It is going to be okay! Trust your daddy.”
Yelena slowly turned toward him. “How do you know that?”
The question came out harsher than she meant it to, but no one flinched.
Alexei’s smile faltered because he didn’t know.
None of them did.
The countdown continued its steady, awful beeping.
Bucky looked back at the television, where another news anchor had replaced the last one. The woman seemed to be more confident than the last one, but Yelena knew. Beneath all of it was the truth no one wanted to say aloud:
They were waiting to see whether Bob could do the impossible.
Then Bucky looked at Yelena again.
“Because it’s Bob,” he said. “And because you believed in him in the first place.”
Yelena’s fingers tightened around the untouched mug Ava had pressed into her hands.
The next few hours were pure agony.
Yelena sat stiff-backed against the couch, her eyes unblinking and locked on the screen. She barely moved except to shift when the ache in her ribs became unbearable, each breath shallow and measured beneath the tight wrap around her torso. The tea Ava had given her sat untouched on the table, long since gone cold.
The news anchors changed every hour. Some spoke with the polished calm of people trained to make terror sound manageable. Others had stopped trying to hide it with the countdown getting closer and closer to the end of it all.
The only one stopping it at the moment?
Bob.
With his own two hands.
“—scientists are reporting a measurable decrease in the rate of convergence—”
“—the two planetary bodies appear to be moving apart—”
“—we cannot yet confirm whether the separation will hold—”
Yelena hated every word of it.
Appear.
Cannot yet confirm.
Will hold.
They spoke like Bob was a line on a chart. Like he was not a person somewhere above the atmosphere, alone with his hands braced against the end of everything. Every time the broadcast cut back to him, Yelena’s stomach knotted tighter.
At first, it was almost impossible to tell that anything had changed. The two worlds remained terrifyingly close, the other Earth looming behind him in the fractured sky. But then the distance began to grow.
At first, the change was so slight that Yelena thought she might have imagined it.
The Earth on the other side of the rupture still filled too much of the sky, its continents and clouds warped behind the violent seam of light, but a sliver of darkness had begun to open between it and their own world.
The reporter’s voice rose as analysts scrambled to confirm what the cameras were showing. Yelena barely heard any of it. Her attention was fixed on Bob’s distant figure, a small, trembling silhouette suspended at the center of something vast enough to make her feel sick.
His arms remained outstretched, palms facing the two worlds as though he could physically force them apart. Golden light pulsed unevenly around him, flashing brighter every time the gap widened, and even through the poor-quality broadcast, Yelena could see the strain in the way his shoulders hunched.
She hated it.
Hated how stupidly useless she felt.
And then, the distance increased by another fraction. Then another. It was not enough to make anyone breathe easier by any means yet, but it was movement in the right direction—proof that Bob was somehow doing what every scientist and hero on Earth had failed to do.
He kept the two realities from colliding.
He bought them more time for now.
Yelena gripped the edge of the couch until pain flared through her broken ribs. She did not let go. She could not look away from him, not while he was alone in the sky with two universes pressing against his hands.
It wasn’t even about the world ending anymore.
It was Bob.
The fact that he’s all alone.
Ava stood beside her in complete silence, and Bucky hadn’t moved from his spot since Bob had left. Across the room, Walker had stopped pacing, while Alexei watched the screen with an expression Yelena had only seen a few times before: afraid, but trying desperately not to show it.
Then the fracture in the sky convulsed. The broadcast feed shuddered as a wave of white-gold light exploded outward, swallowing Bob’s figure for one horrible second before the image dissolved into static.
One moment, Bob had been hovering in the ruined space between two worlds, his arms locked out on either side of him as he forced them apart. He took a shaky breath, sweat dripping down his face.
And the next?
His body had gone slack. His head tipped back, his hands falling uselessly to his sides as the last of that terrible golden light sputtered around him. Then he was free-falling back to earth like a comet, and Yelena felt her heart stopping as she watched his body fall on her screen.
“Bob!”
She was on her feet and moving before she fully understood what she had seen.
“Yelena!” someone called behind her.
She didn’t turn around.
Pain tore through her ribs with every step, sharp enough to make tears sting at the corners of her eyes, but she kept moving. She shoved through the terrace door so hard it slammed against the wall, the cool night air hitting her face as she stumbled out onto the concrete.
The city below had changed.
The sky was no longer split open in red-and-white violence. The looming shape of the other Earth had faded from view, leaving only clouds streaked with the dying remnants of light. Somewhere below, people were cheering. Car horns blared in the streets. Voices rose from neighboring rooftops in ragged relief, strangers crying and laughing because the world had not ended after all.
Yet the Black Widow didn’t care about any of that.
Not when Bob was falling.
She crossed the terrace as quickly as her battered body would allow, heading straight for the Quinjet parked at the far end of the compound. Behind her, she heard the door open again, footsteps following, someone calling her name with increasing urgency.
She ignored all of it.
The Quinjet’s ramp recognized her before she reached it, lowering with a hydraulic hiss. Yelena limped inside, one hand pressed hard against her aching side as she made her way into the cockpit. The screens were already active, several of them displaying emergency broadcasts and live satellite footage from around the world.
On the center monitor, the news feed was zoomed in on him falling through the atmosphere. There was no control in the movement, no attempt to slow himself down. He looked disoriented—barely conscious, maybe not conscious at all—as the atmosphere swallowed him.
Yelena’s breath caught.
“Track him,” she ordered.
The Quinjet’s AI answered in a calm, impersonal voice. “Please specify the target.”
“Bob. Robert Reynolds. The man falling out of the goddamn sky.”
A beat of silence passed as the system processed the request.
“Satellite and news-traffic feeds have identified a probable target descending over northern New Jersey,” the AI reported. “Current trajectory indicates he will make landfall in a wooded area approximately twelve miles west of Newark.”
“Time of impact?”
“Estimated impact in four minutes, thirty-seven seconds.”
Yelena stared at the tiny flickering image on the monitor, at Bob’s body disappearing in and out of the cloud cover.
Four minutes.
After he had held two universes apart with his bare hands, she refused to let him hit the ground alone when he awoke. Not because she was afraid of what might be waiting for them if the other side came out.
No, it’s because she knew what it was like to wake up hurting and alone.
Yelena leaned forward in her seat, ignoring the pull in her ribs as the Quinjet’s engines whined louder around them. The projected path glowed across the windshield, leading them toward a dark patch of woods beyond the city lights.
Before anyone could climb aboard, stop her, or even decide what they were going to say or so, she reached across the console and brought the Quinjet’s engines online. The cockpit flooded with a low mechanical hum that quickly deepened into a roar.
All the while, her attention stayed fixed on the projected trajectory ahead.
A red marker pulsed over the dark sprawl of northern New Jersey, shifting by a few miles every time the system recalculated Bob’s descent. His live feed remained open in the corner of the screen, his body still falling through the clouds with no sign that he had regained control.
“Course locked,” the AI announced. “Target’s predicted landing zone remains unstable.”
“Then keep updating it,” Yelena said, her voice tight.
She wrapped both hands around the controls and pushed the Quinjet forward.
The jet shot away from the compound, banking sharply into the night sky. City lights blurred beneath them as the engines screamed louder, carrying her toward the dark stretch of woods where Bob was expected to fall.
Her ribs flared with pain when the Quinjet accelerated, forcing a strained breath from her, but she kept her grip firm. The warning on the console kept flashing, protesting the speed, the altitude, the incomplete flight checks.
Yelena ignored every one of them.
By the time the Quinjet had landed, there was barely a forest left to land in.
What had once been a dense stretch of dark woodland was now a scorched wound carved into the New Jersey earth. Trees had been snapped in half or flattened completely, their trunks burning from the inside out. Fire crawled across the forest floor in thin, hungry lines, feeding on dry brush and shattered branches, while smoke rose in thick columns and turned the night sky an ugly, flickering orange.
At the center of it all was a crater.
It was enormous—far larger than it had any right to be—and still on fire near the edges. The ground had buckled outward in rings of torn soil and exposed stone, as though something had struck hard enough to make the earth recoil.
Her heart pounded so violently she could hear it over the alarms blaring through the cockpit.
“Warning,” the Quinjet’s AI said. “Landing surface is unstable. Fire conditions detected. External temperatures exceed—”
“Shut up,” Yelena snapped.
There was no time for a careful landing.
No time to circle the site or wait for emergency crews to arrive. She brought the Quinjet down hard in the nearest clearing, the landing gear slamming into uneven ground so violently that the entire aircraft shuddered. One wing clipped the remains of a blackened tree, sending bark and sparks skittering across the windshield.
The jet finally lurched to a stop, and she shoved herself out of the seat.
Pain tore across her side, sharp enough to force a sound from between her teeth, but she staggered toward the ramp anyway. The door lowered slowly, revealing the fire-lit devastation outside.
Heat hit her first and then the smoke.
Yelena coughed into the crook of her arm as she stepped onto the ramp, her boots crunching over ash and fragments of scorched leaves. The air smelled like burned wood, melted earth, and something metallic that made the back of her throat tighten.
“Bob?” she called, her voice coming out smaller than she wanted.
No answer.
She descended the ramp and started toward the crater, limping over uneven ground. Flames reflected in her eyes as she picked her way through fallen branches and smoldering debris, every step pulling painfully at her broken ribs.
Each time, she called out his name and was only met with silence.
And it terrified her to no end that she didn’t reply.
Even more so that the other side hadn’t surfaced.
At least not yet.
The only reply was the crackle of fire and the distant, fading sound of sirens somewhere beyond the trees. When she finally reached the rim of the crater with her heart practically pounding out of her chest, she stopped.
For one terrible second, she could not make herself look down.
Yelena took one shallow, shaking breath, then forced herself to look.
There, at the bottom of the crater, was Bob.
He lay half-buried in ash and broken earth, his golden suit scorched nearly beyond recognition. The bright fabric had been blackened along his arms and chest, torn at the shoulder and burned through at one side, while faint threads of gold still flickered beneath the soot as though the power inside him had not yet realized it was allowed to rest.
He was unconscious.
She could tell from the stillness of him. From the way one arm rested crookedly against the crater floor, his fingers curled loosely into the dirt. But even asleep, even after everything he had done, he looked like he was still carrying something too heavy for one person to bear. His brow was drawn tight, his jaw clenched faintly, his breathing slow and uneven beneath the ruined suit.
God, when could he ever rest?
The harsh edges she had seen in him before—the guardedness, the nervous apologies, the fear that seemed to live beneath every word—had melted away in sleep. What remained was something almost painfully fragile: a man lying alone in the aftermath of saving everyone, too exhausted to even know he had survived.
Yelena’s chest tightened, and for a moment, she could not move.
Only when she knew she couldn’t collapse did she slide down the inside of the crater, ignoring the way loose dirt gave beneath her boots and the sharp protest of her ribs. She stumbled once, catching herself with a hand against the charred ground, before forcing herself forward through the ash.
“Bob,” she whispered as she reached him.
She dropped to her knees beside him, close enough to see the soot smudged across his cheek and the faint tremor that moved through his body with every breath. His hair was damp against his forehead, matted with sweat and dust, and she had to press her lips together when she saw how pale he looked beneath the grime.
Carefully, she shifted closer until she was kneeling beside him, then slid one arm beneath his shoulders. The movement made her broken ribs flare with blinding pain, but she swallowed the sound and lifted his head with as much care as she could manage, easing it onto her thighs.
For a moment, she only sat there.
Bob’s weight was warm and real against her, far too still for someone who had just held the end of the world at bay. Yelena rested one hand against the side of his face, her palm cradling his soot-streaked cheek. His skin was cold beneath the ash, and her thumb moved before she could stop it, brushing gently over the hollow beneath his eye.
“Ты дурак,” she whispered, but there was no actual heat behind it.
Her other hand came up to sweep the damp hair away from his forehead, fingers careful around a scrape at his temple. He looked younger like this and so much softer. Without the strained smile he used when he was trying to convince everyone he was fine, without the fear and unbearable responsibility drawn into every line of his face.
Yelena’s throat tightened even further.
“You saved everyone. You heard them, yes? You did it. The worlds are apart. You stopped an incursion. You are a hero, Bob. How does it feel?” she asked, her voice unsteady as she stared down at him, expecting him to answer.
Yet of course he didn’t.
His lashes remained dark against his cheeks, his breathing shallow but steady enough that she let herself take one small breath of her own. She kept stroking her thumb along his cheek, tracing away soot that only seemed to smear beneath her touch.
The silence stretched between them, filled only by the distant crackle of fire and the sound of her uneven breathing. She had spent hours terrified that she would lose. Now he was here, unconscious in her lap, and she was terrified of how much it hurt to see him like this.
Her fingers paused at his jaw.
“You do not get to do something like this,” she murmured, leaning closer despite herself, “and then leave me wondering if you are going to wake up. That’s very selfish of you. I’ll be very mad, you know.”
The words hung there, too honest and too late to take back.
Yelena looked down at him, at the man who had saved a world and fallen into her hands afterward, and tightened her hold around him as though she could keep him tethered there by sheer force of will.
She stayed there with him, one hand wrapped around his and the other resting against his face, as if letting go might give the universe another chance to take him away. It had already taken so much from her.
Surely, it wouldn’t be this cruel, right?
Time stopped meaning much after that.
The fires burned lower around the crater, their crackling softening beneath the distant wail of approaching sirens, but Yelena barely noticed any of it. Her ribs throbbed with every breath, ash settled into the folds of her clothes, and her knees ached against the ruined earth.
None of it mattered as long as Bob was still breathing.
She counted each rise and fall of his chest without meaning to. One breath. Then another.
Slow enough to scare her, steady enough to keep her from falling apart completely.
Then finally—
A soft groan.
So soft that Yelena might have missed it, had it not been for the way his lips puckered slightly.
“Bob?” she whispered, and that’s when he finally stirred. Slowly, like waking was optional and the world could wait a little longer, Bob’s eyes fluttered open. They were hazy at first, then found her, and for one fragile heartbeat, he smiled as if nothing had happened at all.
But a moment later, his smile faded, and a frown formed, creasing his brows.
“Ye…Yelena? You’re crying.”
She blinked hard, startled by the wetness on her cheeks. She had not even realized she was crying—had been for a while as it fell and streaked down his face—until Bob noticed, until his unfocused gaze settled on her face with something like concern.
“I am not,” she said automatically, but the lie came out thin and broken.
Bob’s hand lifted slowly from where it rested against the ash-covered ground.
It trembled with exhaustion as he reached for her, and Yelena caught it before it could fall, pressing his palm against her cheek. His thumb brushed beneath her eye, smearing away a tear with a touch so gentle it hurt more than her ribs.
“Yes, you are,” he mumbled. “What happened?”
“You did it, Bob. You...you managed to buy us more time."
"Then...why are you crying, Lena?"
Was he seriously asking?
"I thought…” Her voice gave out. She swallowed the lump in her throat, looking down at him because she could not bear the softness in his eyes. She couldn’t bear the pain he must be in right now, and still, he wanted to comfort her. “I thought I lost you.”
For a moment, Bob said nothing.
His fingers curled weakly against her face, as though he needed the contact as much as she did. Then, with a quiet steadiness that did not belong to someone who had just stopped the end of the world and crash-landed a billion-something feet, he said, “You didn’t.”
A sob broke out of her before she could stop it, dragging her back to the time at The Vault—when Bob had so carelessly, selflessly thrown himself between them and certain death. Then came the memory of the darkness that had worn his face, of him becoming that thing and vanishing where she could not follow, and Yelena tightened her grip on him as if she could undo every time he had slipped away.
“Do not do that to me again,” she sobbed, shaking her head. “I can’t do it again.”
Bob’s expression crumpled.
With a quiet, pained breath, he pushed himself upright, one arm bracing against the crater floor while the other reached for her. Yelena barely had time to protest before he pulled her carefully but firmly against his chest, holding her as though he had been the one afraid to lose her.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured into her hair, pressing a soft kiss to her temple. “I’m sorry I made you worry. But I would never leave you, Yelena. Never. You said it yourself that we stick together from now on, right?”
She hiccupped against him, her hands fisting in the ruined fabric at his back.
“You better not,” she sniffed, tightening her grip despite the sharp ache in her ribs. “Or I’ll drag your body back from the grave. I didn’t marry you so I could become a widow before we even got the chance to have a normal life together.”
That earned a laugh from Bob—quiet and bright, fragile in the burned-out silence of the crater, and oh so unmistakably alive. Yelena pulled back just enough to look at him, and he reached up to cup her face again. Then he tugged her down, closing the distance between them with a kiss that was soft at first, careful of everything that hurt, before deepening into something that felt like relief.
Like an apology.
Like a promise neither of them could say any other way.