Chapter 1: The fall.
The alpine wind screamed through the shattered train car, carrying the smell of ozone, cordite, and blood. Bucky Barnes fired the Thompson submachine gun, the recoil a steady, familiar rhythm against his shoulder. Brass cartridges pinged on the steel floor beside his boot. A Hydra soldier in a gray-green uniform fell backward, vanishing into the blur of white-capped mountains rushing past the gaping hole in the side of the train.
“Left!” Steve’s voice, deeper and louder than it had any right to be, cut through the chaos.
Bucky spun without hesitation, squeezing the trigger. Another soldier dropped. He didn’t need to look. He knew Steve was there, a blue and red bulwark covering his right flank, the shield a blur of motion catching and deflecting energy blasts that seared the air. This was different. This was… good. For years in Brooklyn, and then in the war, it had been Bucky watching out for Steve. Shielding the skinny kid from alleyway blows, dragging him out of fights he was too dumb to walk away from. A one-way street of protection.
Now, it was a circuit. A loop. Steve blocked a punch that could have caved Bucky’s ribs in, and in the same breath, Bucky put two rounds into the knee of a soldier aiming a plasma rifle at Steve’s back. They moved like gears in a perfectly tuned machine. A grin, wild and free, spread across Bucky’s face.
“Getting slow, Rogers!” Bucky shouted over the din, ejecting a spent magazine.
Steve knocked two soldiers’ heads together with a sickening crunch. “Just making it interesting for you, jerk!” he called back, his own smile bright and clear.
Bucky slammed a fresh magazine home. The fear was there, sure—they were on a damn train speeding through enemy territory on a mountain ridge—but it was buried under a pure, electric thrill. He wasn’t fighting alone to protect Steve. Steve was fighting beside him, protecting him. The distinction was everything. It felt like flying.
The train hit a curve, metal screeching. The sudden lurch was violent. Bucky’s feet slipped on the slick floor. For a terrifying second, he was weightless, sliding toward the jagged tear in the train’s hull. The frozen, infinite drop yawned behind him.
A hand, impossibly strong, clamped around his forearm. Steve hauled him back, his face a mask of sheer will. “Not today, Buck,” Steve grunted, shoving him to safer ground against the interior wall.
Bucky’s heart hammered against his ribs. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Steve was already turning, shield up. “We clear this car, push forward. Commandos are in the next one.”
“Right behind you.” And he was. They fought their way forward, back-to-back, a dynamic duo in the truest sense. For those few, glorious minutes, the war felt winnable. The future felt like something they might both get to see. It felt like Brooklyn playgrounds and stupid arguments and a shared life waiting on the other side.
Then the world tore open.
A massive explosion from the coupling ahead. The train car bucked like a spooked horse. A support beam, shredded by shrapnel, swung loose. Steve saw it first. “Bucky, down!”
But the beam wasn’t aiming for Steve. It was a twisting spear of metal coming straight for Bucky’s head. Steve moved, shield raised to intercept.
It was the opening a hidden Hydra soldier needed. A searing blue blast of plasma ripped from the shadows, not at Steve, but at the floor under Bucky’s feet.
The steel plating vanished in a flash of superheated light. There was no ledge, no grip, nothing. One second he was standing, firing his gun. The next, he was in the air.
The fall was silent at first. Eternally long. He saw Steve’s face, contorted in a scream he couldn’t hear, arm outstretched over the void. He saw the train, a black scar on the mountain, pulling away. He heard the wind then. It didn’t scream. It bit. It razored through his jacket, his skin, like a thousand frozen knives.
He hit the first rock outcropping sideways.
A sickening, wet crack echoed through his bones, louder than the wind. Agona, white-hot and total, exploded from his left shoulder. He tumbled, the world a dizzying carousel of slate-gray rock and blinding white snow. He hit again. And again. Each impact was a new universe of pain, a new bone giving way, his flesh ripping open on the sharp, unyielding stones. His arm was a separate entity, a tangled, mangled thing of shredded fabric and ruin.
He landed finally in a deep drift of snow at the base of the cliff. The impact drove the air from his lungs. He lay there, paralyzed, staring up at the slate-gray sky.
The train was a distant, receding dot. A tiny, broken sound echoed down from the heights, torn away by the wind. It was his name. Steve was screaming his name.
Then, nothing but the cold. It seeped in, gentle at first, then insistent. It numbed the edges of the agony in his arm and side, which was a mercy. It promised sleep. He was so tired. The sky darkened above him.
The first day was slow, the light a bright, piercing white that seared his closed eyelids, and he clung to a hope so fragile it felt like a prayer. Each ragged breath was a victory, a rebellion against the cold and the horrible, grinding agony in his shattered left side, because Steve would come—Steve promised, with you ’til the end of the line, and this deep, gouged-out valley littered with train wreckage wasn’t the end.
Each ragged breath was a victory, a rebellion against the cold and the horrible, grinding agony in his shattered left side, because Steve would come—Steve promised, with you ’til the end of the line, and this deep, gouged-out valley littered with train wreckage wasn’t the end.
The second day went by just as slowly. Hunger hit, a hollow, gnawing fist in his gut. Then thirst, a worse thing, making his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. It was cold, so cold the air felt solid in his lungs, and the snow beneath him was no longer a cushion but a sheet of glass leaching the last warmth from his core. Bucky still thought it was going to be okay. Bucky still thought Steve was coming. He promised. And Steve Rogers never broke a promise.
He watched the clouds drift by lazily, tracing their shapeless paths against the darkening blue.
His arm had settled into a dull, distant ache, a numb horror he could almost ignore. If he kept watching the clouds and focused on them, really focused on the way they frayed at the edges like old wool, his arm didn’t hurt at all. Yet each tiny, involuntary twitch of a finger, each shudder against the cold, made the pain hit sharper than ever, a lightning bolt of pure white that crackled from his shoulder to his teeth. It’s okay, he thought, the words thickening in his mind like syrup. Steve will come.
The third day, the hallucinations hit.
One second he was freezing to death in the snow, the mangled wreck of his arm throbbing in time with his heartbeat. The next, the air was warm and thick with cigarette smoke and the familiar, sour smell of cheap army-issue gin. Steve was beside him on a rickety bar stool, nudging a glass towards him, his brow furrowed. “You okay, Buck? You’re zoning out on me.”
Bucky let himself relax into the illusion, the warmth of the phantom liquor spreading through his chest. He wasn’t hungry anymore. He was drinking, so the thirst was solved. It was okay. Steve was coming. He always comes.
The fourth day, Bucky wondered why he wasn’t dead. He was so tired. So fucking cold that his skin felt like it was burning, a deep, shuddering sweat breaking out beneath his frozen clothes. Why was he alive? That weird serum shit Zola had put inside him during those experiments, maybe? It was the only thing that made a sick kind of sense.
Oh, another hallucination. This one was clearer. A dimly lit room, music from a phonograph. Steve was there, laughing, his hand on the small of Peggy Carter’s back as they swayed. Strange. Steve always seemed to leave Bucky behind when that woman was around. It’s okay, Bucky thought, the snow crunching softly as he tried to shift his weight. Steve will come back. Steve always comes back.
…Right?
The thought didn’t sound like his own voice anymore. It sounded small, and very far away. The dancing figures of Steve and Peggy shimmered and dissolved into the endless white, leaving only the wind and a deep, creeping silence that felt final. His eyes, crusted with ice, fluttered shut. He didn’t have the strength to open them again.
He didn’t have the strength to open them again. The sound came first, a crisp crunch of compacting snow that was too rhythmic, too purposeful, to be the wind. Through the slit of his vision, a dark shape resolved against the endless white—boots, sturdy leather, standing beside him. A shadow fell across his face, blocking the punishing glare.