pennysheets | A Different Snap for @ofmarble

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A Different Snap for @ofmarble

Bucky drops to his knees in the quiet forest in the wake of his best friend, his favorite person, turning into ash and floating away right in front of him. He runs a hand through the ashes, not the fancy new one from the Wakandans, but the old one. The one that can feel the ash is fading, too. He tries to catch some in his palm but it's gone before he can scoop it up.

"Where is he. Where did he go," he hears himself ask, his voice strange in his own ears, strained and tight, fingers digging uselessly into the loam. He's not sure if he's asking about Steve, or about Thanos, as other Avengers and Wakandans stumble through the trees towards where their leader had stood just a moment ago.

Now there's just Bucky, looking up at all of them. Banner and Rhodes with confused expressions still inside their metal suits, stern Okoye looking stricken for once, the Norse god-alien with helpless fury in every line of him, the talking raccoon who is no longer staring at his arm, and Natasha.

God, Natasha.

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Natasha feels her chest hitch, like there's shrapnel hooked into her lungs, and trying to draw a full breath will leave her bleeding. She can hear, distantly, the reports coming in across her earpiece. It isn't just Steve, and Sam, and Wanda, and T'Challa, isn't just the fighters, isn't just--

It's everyone.

She swallows hard, forcing down the horror and the faint first stirrings of grief. Of dread, because there are people who aren't here in the forest, aren't part of the fight, aren't within reach.

One step forward, then another, and another, and then she's beside Bucky, reaching down to lay a hand on his shoulder, and it's an attempt to give what little comfort she can offer, yes, but it's also an attempt to draw his attention, because out of all of them, only Rhodes and Okoye have any real idea of what he can do. If that wounded shock turns to rage, he'll go through her like she's made of paper, but that will at least buy her people some time.

"He's gone," she says, and is surprised to find that her voice is steady - quiet, yes, and heavy with regret, but not shaking, not strained. The training goes deep enough to carry her, even here. "I'm sorry."

It doesn't even cross his mind, right now, that she'd be worried about him bugging out and killing everyone left on the field. He knows what comfort is supposed to look like; he's even been relearning how to accept it.

He swallows heavily. He doesn't have an earpiece like Natasha, not being part of the leadership. Among these people, he's just a grunt. A warm body for the lines. A source of bullets that doesn't go down too easily. (The only person who ever saw him as more than that just turned to ash in front of him.) So he can't hear what else is going on. But-- Steve told him the purple guy's plan. He can imagine. He can extrapolate.

And that means they're not done.

So he stuffs it down. He knows how to do that, too. He might be better at that than he is at accepting comfort. He looks up at Natasha, past her at the others, then back at her. "What would he do right now?" he asks after a long moment, voice quiet enough that it's meant just for her.

The question comes as a surprise. She's an Avenger, yes, but she's never positioned herself as their leader, never especially wanted that particular mantle. But the silence at her back from those still standing is an almost physical weight. No one else is stepping up, no one else wants that job, so in the end, it's her, or it's no one.

"Regroup," she says. "Assess the damage, target the places that were hit the hardest for relief and to mop up any stragglers."

Anybody looking to Bucky Barnes to lead them is barking up the wrong tree, so Natasha is who he's got, right now. Maybe Rhodes will step up eventually, maybe Thor or Rocket, but Bucky lost what little leadership ability he ever had under HYDRA. All he knows how to do anymore was shoot things, follow Steve, and feed goats.

And now there's no Steve. And the thought of shooting more things makes him feel sick.

He draws a shaky breath, and pushes himself off the ground that doesn't even have Steve's ashes anymore. "Then. Then that's what we should do. Right?" Somehow. He's a late comer to this party, he doesn't even know what regroup means in this situation. But she'll know.

He puts his hand on her shoulder, tentatively, in return, once he's on his feet.

Natasha gives him a brief, wan smile, as though to reassure him of his welcome. Without Steve, and without an immediate threat, she's not certain how long he'll remain a part of that 'we', but for the moment, she'll take what help she can get.

"Yeah. That's what we should do."

She glance toward Okoye; before she can offer any help, here at ground zero, the stern woman says, "Go. Wakanda will take care of Wakanda."

She can read the grief there, and nods once, sharply, before surveying the shell-shocked remnants of the Avengers.

"Fall back to the Quinjet. We still have people out there." Somewhere. In space, given what Bruce had told her. "Bruce, we're going to need you to boost our comms. Rhodes, make contact with--"

And from there, it's easier. Small tasks, stepping stones that can't quite mask the enormity of the situation, but give them the momentum to get moving again.

In any other situation, she'd have a hard time keeping from laughing when the raccoon, of all people, takes over modifying their communication equipment, running roughshod over Banner as though the man weren't several times his size and capable of turning into an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction.

Bucky pauses to put a hand on Okoye's shoulder, as well. He doesn't know if they're friends, but he's fought with her before. He'll have to check with Ayo later. If she's-- if she survived this.

God, he hopes she survived this. There aren't many people he trusts, and he just lost a big one.

But for now he follows Natasha, taking whatever little orders she gives him, side-eying the raccoon who seems to have forgotten about his arm, at least for now. But there really isn't much for him to do, at least on the quinjet. They don't even need him to pilot, as Rhodes takes over that immediately. So he winds up tucked into a corner as out of the way as he can get, unbuckling the Wakandan version of a tac vest and then staring at his mismatched hands blankly. This morning he only had one.

This morning he had Steve.

If no one bothers him, that's where he'll stay until they touch down back in New York.

For the most part, they give him space. Thor has opted to fly ahead in his own fashion, and Natasha almost pities any of Thanos's forces who might have been left behind when the army decamped. Bruce is withdrawn at the best of times. Rhodes is busy, and she doesn't even want to look too hard at what the raccoon is doing; as long as he doesn't decide to take control of the plane, she'll leave him to his own devices. And she has SHIELD contacts to pull on, people who owe her favours, or are desperate enough for direction to go where she sends them.

Half the world vanished in the blink of an eye. There's so much to do to keep the death toll from climbing even higher.

Eventually, though, there's nothing more she can do until she's on the ground. She makes the rounds, finally fetching up by Bucky's side and thrusting a bottle of water into his view.

"Here," she says quietly. "You need this."

"Technically I don't," he counters, but listlessly, and he accepts it anyway, twisting at the cap without actually taking it off yet. He'll get there. Probably. Right now he's just going to fidget with it.

"Sit down," he suggests then, forcing himself to rally a little. Only a little, but enough to think outside his little bubble of shock. "You must be done with the important stuff if you're coming to talk to me."

"Keeping the team on their feet - metaphorically speaking - is the important stuff," she replies as she sinks down beside him, back against the cool metal of the plane's interior. She can feel the faint hum of the engines along her spine, the only indication from here that they're still in motion, still hurtling towards New York, towards more chaos and death and pain.

"It's just not the part of the important stuff that might cause a nuclear war if we aren't all very careful."

Bucky doesn't laugh, but the soft noise he makes is... adjacent to it. "I'm not your team, Widow. Not really. I'm. I'm Steve's tag-along. I don't even know what I'm doing on this bird." Except staying in Wakanda in the midst of their national grief seemed impossible, and Natasha had orders, so he just. Followed them. And followed her.

Hell, he doesn't even have a change of clothes on board, all his meager belongings split between a hut that smells like goats and a tiny apartment in the Wakandan capital for when he visited Shuri's labs. Shuri, who he doesn't know if she survived the purge.

At least he has his komoyo beads in a pocket. So he can check in. Later.

"Which makes you as much a part of my team as the fuzzy engineer from outer space, the man who's been out of communication on another planet for a few years, and Tony Stark's best friend," Natasha counters, bone-dry. They're all just following her because she'd been the first one to start giving orders. Maybe that will be enough to keep them going. Maybe they'll splinter apart the second they stop moving.

Right now, it seems like equal odds either way.

"If all you're doing is hitching a ride back to the US, fine. You don't owe any of us any loyalty. But while you're on this plane, you're one of my people."

She does have a point. There's a talking raccoon and an actual colonel from the army or marines or whatever, in here, and they're not exactly Avengers.

Still: "There's no 'back', for me," Bucky says quietly, leaning his head back against the seat's headrest. "I don't have anything in the States. I hardly had anything in Wakanda. But I guess if you've got something I can do, I won't turn it down." Going back to look after goats when the world has suffered this kind of loss seems... more selfish than usual, even for him.

"You'll rebuild," she says quietly. "There's going to be a lot of that going around."

Half the planet, gone. They're going to have to put things back together from the ground up. Just the thought of how tremendously ugly that's going to be leaves her feeling exhausted, on a level far deeper than the ache setting into muscle and bone after the battle.

"We'll have plenty to keep you busy. No one's prepared for what we're going to be walking into."

Bucky is pretty sure rebuilding isn't in the cards for him-- not now. Maybe not ever. Certainly not unless they can fix this. But if the actual Avengers couldn't stop it from happening... what chance does a washed up ex-assassin have?

"Just point me at whatever you need done," he says wearily. "I'll do whatever. I spent the past year and a half raising goats and fixing roofs."

There is the faintest twitch of her lips at that, as though some small part of her, buried deep beneath the shock and exhaustion and aching numbness that will crystalize into grief only once she truly stops moving, wants to smile at the mental image of the Winter Soldier carefully tending baby goats.

"I don't know if we'll have any livestock for you," she says. "But there will be plenty of repair work - there doesn't seem to have been any pattern to who was taken." Which means cars suddenly without drivers, planes plummeting from the sky, trains derailing, construction equipment uncontrolled.

"But the first order of business is going to be dealing with the kind of people who are going to want to take advantage of the chaos."

Well. That is a job one washed up ex-assassin can probably do. "Well, sign me up. I... don't really like killing people anymore, but I'm damn good at incapacitating." He'd killed alien dog monsters two hours ago, sure, but that had been... for Steve. And T'Challa. Because those were two people he couldn't say no to.

And also he hadn't exactly enjoyed it.

"Think we'll need to get some kinda. Paperwork for me?" he asks, then. "I don't wanna make trouble for you all by being there." Natasha was technically on the run, too, but she wasn't an international terrorist, just an Accords breaker. Not quite the same thing.

Given some of the things she'd done while she was still a Red Room operative - given what she'd had to do to break away from Dreykov and get into SHIELD's good graces - international terrorist isn't far off the mark. But it pays to have friends in high places, especially when they have access to as many skeletons as Fury does. Or did.

"That's one benefit to the chaos: everyone's going to be too busy to take a shot at a fugitive who isn't actively trying to make things worse. And once we get New York settled down, we'll have some leverage to get the proverbial price off your head." She gives him a small, crooked smile. "I'm willing to make a little trouble of my own, if I need to."

The idea that anyone but Steve would be willing to make trouble for him is hard to believe, but right now, he'll take her at her word. The only other option is to vanish once he lands, but he's pretty sure that vanishing would only make him miserable this time. He tried that once, and while there's no Steve to hunt him down this time-- well, there's no Steve to hunt him down, this time.

So he nods, throat tight. "Okay. I'll lay low until we're sure. You guys have some kinda compound, right?" He's never seen it, but Steve mentioned it now and then. He can only assume that's where they're going, now.

"Last I heard, Stark hadn't burned it down in a rage," she says, a bid to downplay just how close an eye she'd been keeping on her former teammates that she's fairly certain he, at least, will see through. With the exception of Bruce, she's fairly certain the others won't.

"So yeah. Upstate, fairly remote, decent security. Or it was, by 2016 standards. You can help me evaluate what needs to be updated, while you're laying low."

She wouldn't be who and what she is if she didn't keep track of old co-workers turned unhappy enemies. The only reason he hasn't is Wakanda kept him relatively isolated from the outside world, both for his health and possibly theirs. So yeah, he sees that deflection for what it is.

And he skates right by it without calling her on it. He's already going to owe her so much; he's not going to make it worse by being an ass, especially in the middle of all this. "I'll do that." He probably won't be able to help from doing that, the moment he walks in.

He finally actually drinks some of the water she brought him, settling back in his seat. "We are okay, right?" he asks after a pause. "You and me. I know I kinda. Tried to kill you a few times, and all." And they haven't exactly had the chance to talk it out.

"To be fair, I'm pretty sure you weren't trying to kill me the first time," she says, one hand dropping to touch her abdomen, where the scar of a bullet wound hides beneath her shirt. "You're a good enough shot that if you had been, I wouldn't have walked away."

It is, she knows, down to good fortune that she had survived that - but an inch or two higher or lower, a little closer to the centre of her body, and he would have killed both her and his target, with no chance of medical help arriving fast enough.

"I wasn't supposed to leave witnesses," Bucky says wearily. "I'm not really sure why I didn't kill you then." Maybe he respected her skills; getting out of that car with his target both alive was impressive. He doesn't remember that one clearly. "But the other times were definitely just because I got interrupted."

He looks over at her fully, now, and promises, "Nobody can make me do that again. Shuri. Shuri got that shit outa my head. So that's not something you've got to worry about, ever."

“Oh, good,” Natasha says. “I think I’ve hit my quota of people under mind control trying to kill me for the next few decades at least.”

She tries to smile, but it’s strained and weary, and only just fits over the renewed spike of anxiety at the reminder of the fact that she hasn’t been able to get in touch with Yelena and her task force of Widows. It could just be the overloaded communication system, but dread sits like a sliver of ice in the pit of her stomach.

“We’re okay,” she says, backtracking to the question that had sparked this line of conversation in the first place. “Our previous encounters were something that was done to you, not something you did. I won’t hold that against you.”

He understands strained and weary right now. They're probably all a little bit that. Or maybe a lot of that. So he makes no comment. He just gives her knee a gentle little pat in gratitude for her forgiveness, says, "Thanks," quietly, and leans his head back against the headrest on his seat.

He's done talking, and he's done making her talk, unless she has anything to say to him. He'll take the rest of the flight in silence until they land, at which point they'll have to let him into the compound and show him around. He's never been here before, or even seen it from a distance.

She sits with him in silence for a few minutes, and if it's not exactly companionable, it also isn't entirely strained. But there are things to do, people she still has some hope of being able to contact, and after that little while, she gets up to resume the work of preparing, as much as they can, for what they're going to be walking into.

Rhodes is gone almost as soon as they touch down. He promises to check in as soon as he can, but he's a military man, and is needed in more than just his capacity as an Aventer. It's Bruce who lets them into the compound - and the fact that his codes haven't been deactivated, even though he's been missing for years, would make her smile under other circumstances. Stark, much as he might deny it, is sentimental.

Also gone. She doesn't know if he's coming back, if there's even a him to come back.

"I'll work on getting you into the system," Bruce says, glancing briefly between the three of them, spy and supersoldier and alien raccoon, then vanishes into the depths of the facility to do just that.

"And then there were three," Natasha says, a little wryly.

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