Chapter Text
The battle was devastating. Every Avenger stepped up, along with heroes Bucky had never even heard of and armies from all over the galaxy - or the nine realms, whatever. Hela, Thor’s niece and the queen of the realm of the dead, brought an army of winged warriors known as the Valkyrie. They were ruthless and efficient. Up until Thanos and his forces arrived, Bucky thought they actually stood a chance.
Thanos was something else entirely. He was an army unto himself. He took out swaths of enemies like he was batting away particularly annoying insects while his hordes threw themselves forward without seeming to care at all for their own lives. Bucky supposed they wouldn’t, if they chose to side with someone who intended to wipe out half of the universe. That or, like Gamora, they’d been taken and brainwashed into it. He did his best not to think about that.
The casualties were tremendous. Bucky had seen a lot, back in the war, in World War II, in his war. He’d seen lines of men mowed down by enemy fire, come across fields where an entire squadron had been taken out by mustard gas. It never got easier, and it wasn’t easy now as the fighting went on and on. He’d been exhausted. His body had ached, his shoulder inflamed at the joint with his metal arm. He should have fallen back, should have fallen to the rear lines for a few minutes of rest and to scarf down a protein bar or two to fuel the serum burning through his body - burning too quickly. He hadn’t, though. He’d been careless. It was stepping on a body that’d thrown him off-balance, and the spined tail of the alien beast was driven right through his chest. He lay on the ground, amid the piles of other bodies he would soon join, and gasped what he was sure to be his final breaths. It was a familiar feeling. He’d felt it once before, when he was falling from that train. He hated to think about how much his death would devastate Steve. He’d already lost so many people.
“Hello,” a voice chirped from above. It was young, bright. It had no right to be here. “That’s a nasty wound. You’ve punctured a lung. You have another ten minutes at most, and that’s unlikely.”
The boy who leaned over him looked as young as he sounded. He had soft chestnut hair and big amber eyes. His smile was warm, completely at odds with the scene around him. In his compromised state, it took Bucky several moments to place him. When he did, his gasp had nothing to do with pain.
“Tony.”
His great, black wings shifted behind him, feathers ruffled by a fiery man streaking past - Johnny Storm. His smile didn’t falter.
“I’m the Merchant of Death,” he said, rather than acknowledging the name one way or the other. “Do you want to live?”
Bucky groaned from the pain, head dropping back to the rock beneath him. Did he want to live? So much had happened, and there was still so much that had to happen. Even if they win this war - when they win this war - there’s going to be another. There was always another. No one knew how long he and Steve would live. Maybe being killed was the only way they could die. Maybe that was the only way for it to end. He looked at Tony, remembering the choice he made and the peace it seemed to give him in that moment.
It was tempting. No more fighting. No more struggling. No more looking over his shoulder or waking up from nightmares that were more often memory than fantasy. No more guilt weighing him down over the blood that stained his hands.
But it also meant no more quiet mornings watching the sunrise while he ran side-by-side with Steve. No more being able to tease small, secret smiles out of Natasha. No more watching out for the new heroes - barely kids, really - as they found their footing. No more just sitting and reading a book. No more plums or perogies or tacos or any of the other foods he’d discovered and was continuing to discover. Life was an experience, and it was impossible to separate the good from the bad. The only way was to accept both or lose both.
“Yes, I want to live,” he groaned out. “The work isn’t over yet.”
Tony beamed.
“Alright, I can help you with that. I’m sure Mistress Death and I can come to an arrangement.”
Bucky lost time after that, vision going hazy. When he came back to himself, Tony was gone and there was a medic beside him - one of Strange’s people who studied healing. He didn’t really understand how it worked, but he knew it was something about the magic holding the body together and forestalling the injuries. It was enough to keep people on their feet or back to where real healing could be done. The wizard was a young man with messy brown hair, and he smiled at Bucky.
“Hey, there you are. We’re gonna get you taken care of, alright? This area’s still pretty hot, though. We need to move.”
As Bucky stumbled off the front lines, helped along by the wizard, he shook his head. He must have imagined seeing Tony - the last version of Tony he’d ever seen. His exhausted, blood loss-addled, and near-death state took this man’s vaguely similar features and created the fiction of a Tony Stark still helping people, still helping the Avengers and defending the universe. He needed to get himself together before he went back out.
Less than an hour in one of the Asgardian healing tents, and Bucky was back in the fight. The only sign of the hole in his chest was the tear in the front and back of his armor. He crammed some food in his mouth, restocked on ammo, and hit the ground running. The fight was far from over and he couldn’t leave others without backup.
He nearly tripped over his own feet when he caught a glimpse of black feathers cradling a slender frame. Tony held the hand of some alien from one of the other realms - an elf of some sort. He laid the hand down gently on their bloody, torn-open stomach before closing their eyes. For a child, he wore a solemn expression, but it turned back into a smile as he caught Bucky looking. Moments later, he took off into the sky with heavy beats of his large wings.
Bucky hadn’t been mistaken before, then. He really had seen Tony. Tony had... bargained for him? He didn’t know and he didn’t have time to think about it. There was still too much left to be done. He was going to have so many things to break down over when this was over. He was going to need at least a week to hide in a corner and question his entire reality. This was just one more thing to add to the pile.
Still, once he saw Tony, it was like he couldn’t stop seeing him. It was always in his periphery, a flicker of dark wings or the snatch of a child’s voice. Hours of fighting later, he caught Tony in full again, kneeling over Peter before pulling him back to his feet with a grin. Peter’s mask was almost completely gone and Bucky could see the shock on his expression. The kid - though he wasn’t really a kid anymore, Bucky thought - didn’t move, just stared after Tony as he flew away. Bucky jogged over quickly, afraid that some enemy would take advantage of Peter’s state to put him right where Tony had brought him back from.
“Hey, kid, shake it off,” he said as soon as he was close enough. “I know. It’s a lot, but don’t waste what he gave you, yeah? He wouldn’t want that.”
Peter’s wide eyes snapped to him.
“You saw him, too?”
Bucky nodded, scanning their surroundings with his rifle braced on his shoulder. This was really, really not the time to be having this discussion, but there wasn’t exactly a way out of it.
“Yeah. Yeah, I did. Had a hole through my chest and was bleeding out faster than the serum could fix me. I don’t know what he did, but the next thing I knew, one of the wizards was there.”
He squeezed off a burst of bullets, downing a charging creature like the one that had nearly killed him. He guessed, from a certain perspective, it had killed him. Tony had to bargain for his life, after all.
“It was him. It was Mr. Stark,” Peter insisted, like Bucky didn’t realize.
“I know. But now is really not that time. We’ve got to get through this first, okay? You with me, kid? Or do I need to get you back behind lines so you can process this?”
It was an accusation or a judgment, but he was going to get himself killed if he didn’t get his head on straight. Peter shook himself, visibly pulling himself back into the moment.
“No, no, I’m good. Sorry, that was just- I wasn’t expecting to ever see him again.”
“Neither did I. So let’s make his bartering worth it, yeah?”
Peter grinned.
“Yeah. We got this.”