I'll Be Seeing You ☆ A Stevebucky Fic

4; The Winter Soldier

After another minute of thinking about the whole thing, Bucky decided that he must've been a ghost. Oh well. He could manage, he supposed. It really did suck that he couldn't move, though. Was that supposed to be a normal thing for ghosts? It wasn't like he would know - he'd never been dead before.

He'd also never be alive again.

Alive. What did it mean to be alive?

Alive, alive, alive.

Being alive meant summers swimming in those waves at the beach, ice cold water splashing over his head as the ocean tried to take him in. He never let it do so  - he always swam back out to shore just before the undertow could take him. Being alive was spending days at Coney Island, spending all of his lunch money on ride tickets instead so that he and Steve could take the Ferris Wheel. Being alive was like those harsh winters, so helpless and bitterly cold that Bucky had thought neither of them were going to see spring. Being alive meant all of those sleepless nights in Brooklyn, when Bucky had saved Steve from fights with bullies twice his size and had to patch him up afterwards. Being alive was the feeling of adrenaline in his veins as he ran laps during military training, those hot, summer days nearly being enough to make him pass out. Being alive was like flying - being so high above the world, the wind whistling in his ears as he looked towards the ground, that no one could touch him.

For a second as Bucky had fallen, he'd thought that he was flying.

As he remembered what it meant to be alive, he tried with everything in him to get himself to move.

His right fingers twitched, and his head tilted in the same direction.

He couldn't feel his left arm - that was strange. But he'd worry about it later.. for now, at least he knew that he could somewhat move. His strength would come back with time, he was sure of it.

And then he realized why his hand was stuck - it was buried right in a pile of snow. Fuck, that was cold. If he could move the muscles in his face, he would've grit his teeth together, or made a complaint about the cold. Instead, his lips barely opened, and he watched cold breath fly out of them as he tried to speak.

He felt like he was being stabbed by a thousand needles below him as he tried to twist his head, tried to make some sense out of why he couldn't feel his left side. He could hear the sound of snow crunching below him, but couldn't see any of it. All he was looking at, still, was the train tracks above him.

Train tracks.

Something clicked within his head, and he promptly realized that death must have started where it all ended. The beginning of the end.

Steve was still up there somewhere.

Maybe if he hurried, if Steve had been able to stop the train, he could-

All at once he was scrambling to get up out of the snow, to go see Steve complete his mission to capture Zola before they disappeared off to another continent and Bucky was left behind to haunt the woods. He could make it in time, he just knew it. He always seemed to make it in time when it came to Steve.

He pulled his right arm out of the snow and thrust himself forward against the cold and the wind, trying to use it for support as he attempted to stand up.

A wave of pain was sent through him instead as he realized his arm was completely limp, and that his legs were caving in underneath him.

He fell back to the ground just as quickly as he'd tried to stand up, and when he landed, it was in a puddle of red.

Red, red, red. Just like the blood of all those men he'd killed while serving.

How many times had he killed while in service of his country? How many times was he willing to do it again?