Chapter Text
The phrase is black and cream-colored, dust-covered, age-addled: some library book right after the ice, and it’s inconsequential. It doesn’t fit.
So it shouldn’t be the thing that ends Steve’s world between heartbeats. It shouldn’t.
Funny, that word. Shouldn’t.
That word’s a son of a bitch, and Steve’s certain that this time, it will kill him.
Because he never should have trusted any of them. He never should have left Rumlow a goddamn chance at breathing.
Because he never should have said he’d come back, he’d do this, he’d fight for them—for any of them. Not at first, even though he was lost; definitely not after he saw, after he knew; after, against all odds and possibility and his most desperate prayers and pleas in the night, Bucky came back.
Because he should have died and this should have been done beneath the ice, like he’d meant it to be. Selfless, selfish, penance, need: it should have been done.
Because there hasn’t been a moment, since the moment he’d had reason to think it, that he hadn’t told himself he should have followed. He should have let go. He should have followed.
He never should have left Bucky alone. Not ever.
And that word, from those twisted burn-scarred lips, shouldn’t be the knife in his heart after all the ones in his back, no.
It shouldn’t.
“Sputnik.”
It’s just a fucking word.
But when Bucky freezes, when Bucky’s eyes roll backward and leave only the whites—the snow, the ice—and his limbs go limp just a millisecond before he does—there are no strings on me—oh.
Oh, but it’s the word that guts Steve straight through.
“Bucky!”
The scream doesn’t even sound like it belongs to him; it’s not his voice that tears at the throat and draws blood from the air: no, no, and it’s not his lips that shape the asking, the begging when he runs, when he drops to his knees next to Bucky’s motionless form, eyes hauntingly wide, staring up but seeing nothing.
It’s not his eyes that cloud with tears as he reaches, and in the end can’t even touch that neck, that chest, the absence of that beating heart because he doesn’t know what it’ll do to him.
He doesn’t think he can even pretend to guess.
“History books got it wrong then, yeah?” Steve only just hears it, the edge of that bastard’s hateful glee at bringing Steve down with a single word, the only thing in the world that Steve can’t take.
“I was fucking well hoping,” Rumlow sneers. “You wear your goddamn heart on your sleeve, but you’re a tough nut to crack, Rogers. I figured that out quick enough.”
And Steve misses a word here and there over the agony of the way that heart rages, the way that heart pounds itself toward oblivion as the moments pass, and Bucky doesn’t move. As the heat builds behind Steve’s eyes. As everything spins and the edges darken and Steve can’t fucking breathe, and his throat too goddamn tight.
“But that heart’s like a pulp after all these years, ain’t it, you pathetic bastard?” Rumlow prods, spits salt in the wound. “Not much blood left to squeeze out, not too many places left to feel the cut,” and he’s right, he’s fucking right, and Steve wants to sob, Steve wants to tear, Steve wants to choke the life out of that voice, that life, and trade it for the one snuffed at his feet—he wants to trade his own, if he has to. If that’s what it takes, because, because...
“And then, there was him.”
And yeah, yeah him, him you fucker, you hateful monster, you, you—
Steve’s thoughts choke for the weight of it as he stares down at Bucky’s lifeless frame, and Steve—in the dark moments, in the shadows of what unfolded after the helicarrier, after the River, after the months and months of searching, of waiting and hoping and despairing and wanting, god, wanting because Steve remembered the taste of fucking air when he saw Bucky, even a Bucky who didn’t know him, even a Bucky who was broken and twisted and wrong, it was Bucky and Steve could feel it and it was sweet and light inside his chest for the first time, so strong he’d forgotten how to live with it, the force of being in a world that meant a damn thing at all: but in the dark hours, in the deep parts of those desperate times Steve wondered if it wouldn’t have been better, had that body that breathed him life stopped breathing at all in between moutainsides all those years ago and skipped the torment, the torture: the nightmare of then and the nightmares of now.
“Oh, shit, though,” Rumlow’s talking again, that bastard. Rumlow’s talking again and Steve wants to cave his skull in; Steve wants to break his neck.
“When he started to come out, when he’d rear his goddamn head between the wipes and sticking him on ice? Hell,” Rumlow chuckles, and Steve loses himself in the implications, in the blank spots in a history, in a memory, in a life that this fuck in front of him holds in his hands.
Steve loses himself in wondering just how quickly this man would bleed out in front of him, where the best place to strike would be to make it painful; make it slow.
“But love’s a funny thing, ain’t it?” Rumlow muses, poison lacing every syllable, and Steve feels it seeping deep, and he’ll go down with it. He’s ready to be done, now. He can’t, he doesn’t want to live through this, not again.
“And you in that fucking costume?” Rumlow cackles sharp. “Almost too easy.”
And Steve barely notices when the footsteps approach, when Rumlow bends to hiss in his ear, when Steve feels the idle flick of the barrel of a gun, just the side—debating, as it grazes the hair on his neck.
“He was always gonna be the way to break you,” Rumlow breathes. “Your Bucky,” and he’s not wrong.
He’s not wrong.
Steve’s own gun’s in his hand, finger on the trigger before he even knows where he’s gonna shoot the bastard: head, maybe. Or maybe, maybe...
Maybe heart.
The shot itself rings loud.
Steve’s pulse, though.
That pounds louder.