Chapter Text
Chapter 1
James Buchanan Barnes had survived Hydra, brainwashing, cryogenic freezing, aliens, robots, and one deeply unsettling raccoon.
What finally got him was Boston.
One second there was a blinding white fracture in the air, like reality had split a seam, and the next he was plummeting through open space with just enough time to think huh, that’s new before the asphalt rushed up and punched every ounce of breath out of his lungs.
“Son of—”
“Wow,” a woman’s voice cut in, bright with delight. “I knew Boston real estate was competitive, but that’s a very dramatic way to move in.”
Bucky groaned, rolled onto his side, and let his metal arm absorb the worst of the protest as it whined softly, clearly unhappy with gravity’s attitude. He pushed himself up on one knee and blinked.
The world was… wrong.
Buildings towered like skeletal giants, windows hollowed out, walls torn open by fire and time. Rusted cars sat frozen mid-street like abandoned toys no one had bothered to clean up.
A skeleton reclined in a lawn chair nearby, hat tipped forward like it had simply opted out of existence halfway through a sunny afternoon.
The air smelled like dust, ozone, and something faintly radioactive, his instincts really didn’t like that last part.
Standing about twenty feet away was a woman who looked like she’d walked out of a post-apocalyptic fashion show and then immediately robbed a military surplus store.
She wore a blue jumpsuit, bright enough to be aggressively cheerful, paired with dull, battle-scarred metal armor hugging her chest. A comically oversized watch sat heavy on her left wrist, and a half-full rucksack was slung across her shoulder with practiced ease.
She was smiling lazily, eyes warm and assessing, like she’d already decided he was interesting even as her 10mm pistol stayed trained on his head with intimate familiarity.
Bucky registered all of this in a single, efficient sweep and came to the deeply inconvenient conclusion that being shot by her would be worth the view.
Next to her, a German Shepherd broke formation and trotted over enthusiastically, tail wagging like today was Christmas and Bucky was a surprise present.
“Oh no,” Bucky muttered.
The dog sniffed his boots, his metal hand, his face, and then plopped down like he’d discovered a new favorite chew toy and rested his head on Bucky's thigh with zero subtlety.
“Well,” the woman said thoughtfully, lowering the gun just enough to be polite, “Dogmeat likes you.”
Bucky looked down at the dog. Then back up at her. “Your dog has known me for six seconds.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And already trusts me?”
“Yep.”
“…that feels irresponsible.”
Dogmeat pressed harder against his leg, tail thumping with enthusiasm.
The woman laughed; bright, sharp, and entirely too pleased. “Dogmeat’s a very good judge of character,” she said. “If he didn’t like you, you’d already be missing something important.”
She lowered the pistol fully but did not holster it. Bucky noticed. Appreciated the honesty.
His eyes scanned rooftops, alleys, shadows; everything was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.
She tilted her head, studying him openly now. “So. You fall out of the sky a lot, or am I special?”
“First time,” he said dryly. “I usually use doors.”
That earned him a slow grin. Up close, she was, annoyingly, stunningly, beautiful. Green eyes sharp with intelligence, brown hair framing her face, and a scar slicing down her brow to just before her nose that somehow made her more formidable instead of less.
“Welcome to the Commonwealth,” she said. “”What in the hell’ is our tourism campaign.”
She finally holstered the pistol and offered her hand. “Nora. Righter of wrongs. Chronic over-helper. Local nuisance.”
He took it, helping himself stand.
“Bucky,” he said. “And I didn’t mean to… arrive like that.”
“Yeah, sure,” she replied easily. “Everyone dramatic says that.”
Her gaze flicked to his arm and lingered. “So. Cybernetics?”
“Long story.”
She smiled wider. “Everything’s a long story. Mine starts with nuclear annihilation and gets weirder.”
Bucky grunted in agreement. Dogmeat pressed his head into Bucky’s thigh with more feeling.
“Your dog really likes me,” Bucky said.
Nora shrugged. “He’s got a thing for sad men with murder potential.”
“…fair.”
She glanced back up at the sky—clear, blue, and lying through its teeth.
“So. Any chance you want to explain how you just dropped into downtown Boston like a misplaced god? Because if you’re here to judge us, you’re about two centuries late.”
Bucky followed her gaze. Boston, this was no Boston he could think of. Aside from the devastation, the buildings and burned out cars didn't even look right.
“Last thing I remember,” he said slowly, “I was somewhere else. Somewhere very not… this.”
“Well,” Nora said, clapping her hands once, already turning, “you don’t seem feral, hostile, or immediately exploding, which puts you in the top ten percent of things I meet on the road.”
“High praise,” Bucky muttered.
She tossed him a grin over her shoulder. “Diamond City’s safer than…” she gestured broadly at the apocalypse, “…this. We’ll get you a drink, answers, and something that isn’t irradiated to eat.”
With not many other options, Bucky fell into step beside her as they picked their way down the cracked, overgrown streets.
“So,” he said cautiously, scanning ruined storefronts and collapsed buildings, “why does it look like civilization lost a fight?”
Nora's eyes flicked ahead. “Why don’t you tell me where you’re from? I didn’t think there was a place the bombs didn’t touch, and you don’t exactly scream ‘naive vault-dweller.’”
She tilted her head, her gaze fixed on his metal arm and the quiet, dangerous way he carried himself. “Something tells me trouble follows you.”
Bucky let a slow grin creep across his face. “You have no idea. Brooklyn. Just finished a mission with Sam, ya know, Captain America. We were stopping the Flag Smashers. Headed home after debrief… and now this. Boston, apparently. But—this? This isn’t my Boston.”
Nora narrowed her eyes, then she suddenly stopped and turned toward him. Before he could react, she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead like she was checking for a fever. Then she grabbed his chin, forcing him to meet her gaze. The giant watch on her wrist blinked green, casting a strange, almost alien light into his eyes.
“What are you—?” he started.
“Checking for a concussion,” she said smoothly, dropping her bag and yanking a needle from it. Before he could flinch, she jabbed it into his neck.
“Wait, what the hell did you just stick me with!?” Bucky barked, grabbing himself and backing away cautiously.
Nora tilted her head, watching him like a cat watching a particularly twitchy mouse but he noted her hand didn't stray to the gun at her hip. “Addictol, gets rid of the chems. Not sure what you're on, but it’s gonna be a long walk to Diamond City and I need you to be somewhat lucid if I’m going to keep you alive.”
“You think I’m on drugs?” Bucky shot back, incredulous.
“Uh, yeah,” she said, one brow raised. “Brooklyn’s been gone for two hundred years, and unless you somehow zip-zapped across the eastern seaboard to land on Washington Street, something’s off.”
Bucky ran a hand through his hair, metal arm humming softly. “Zip-zapped… great. So either I fell through a wormhole, someone’s pranking me on a cosmic scale, or I’ve finally lost it completely.”
Nora laughed, the sound sharp and amused. “Or… all three. But seriously, I’ve seen stranger things happen around here. And by stranger, I mean you falling out of the sky counts as a normal Tuesday.”
Bucky squinted at her, then at the ruined streets, the abandoned cars, and deadpanned, “It was Thursday where I come from.”
“You ever hear of the Great War? You know, when humanity decided nukes were a fun group activity in 2077 and left the place looking like someone sneezed on the planet with a sledgehammer?” She quizzed him.
Bucky shook his head. “No, its 2024 where I come from. I guess I can see bombs dropping though, things were pretty messed up after Thanos and the Blip.”
“Thermos? The Blimp?” Nora looked at him down her nose, a slight crease forming between her brows.
“You don’t know the blip, the snap– the ending of half of all life in the universe?”
Nora brushed some errant rubble off her shoulder, “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Bucky ran a hand through his hair, “Right… so you have no context for that, and I have no context for this. Great. We’re basically in a multiversal mess together.”
Nora laughed, tossing her bag further over her shoulder and looping her arm in his marching them forward, Dogmeat trotting along. “Multiversal mess… I like that. That’s actually kind of accurate. Welcome to my Tuesday.”
“Yeah, well… it’s still Thursday where I come from.”
They both seemed to accept, silently, that he’d made it to the future just not his future.
“Do you… know about the Avengers? Captain America?” he asked cautiously trying to gauge just how much of his past is in this past.
Nora shook her head. “Nope.”
“What about World War II?”
Nora looked at him sideways, “Obviously.”
“OK. Hydra? The Howling Commandos?”
“Not at all but both are pretty silly names, what are they?”
At that moment Dogmeat’s ears perked up, and Nora suddenly slowed, tugging him to a stop beside her and crouching behind a burned-out car. She dropped her rucksack with a thump and began rummaging through it.
Tilting her head with a sly smile she looked up at him, “Do you know what a gun is?”
“Of course,” Bucky said, holding out his hand, eyes sweeping the streets and shattered buildings for trouble.
She pushed something into his palm and he looked down to examine it; too light, no clip, no barrel. Definitely not a gun. “What the hell is this?”
Nora’s eyes glinted with amusement. “A gun,” she said simply.
Voices erupted across the street, loud, rough, and very much not friendly.
“And that,” she added, nodding toward the noise, “is the welcoming committee.”
Before Bucky could blink, Nora popped out of cover, sliding over the hood of the rusted-out car and ducking behind a crumbling column. A woman rounded the corner, and just like that, Nora fired, the shot hitting her square between the eyes. The woman dropped.
Her companions scanned the area and quickly shirked back into cover, screaming wildly, “You fucking vault bitch, I’ll rip you apart!” The group fired excessively and unfocused in their direction, untrained Bucky noted, they were barely pinning them down.
Nora screamed back, “Promises, promises Big Boy,” and then looked back at Bucky still crouched behind the car, “Are you gonna let these raiders talk to your new best friend that way or are you gonna help me?”
The eye roll Bucky shot at Nora could have won an award. Bucky leveled the strange laser pistol at the nearest raider as he peeked out from behind rubble. He raider barely got out, “You fucking scar…” before Bucky dropped him. This left two.
“Not bad… for faĺling out of the sky 20 minutes ago.” Nora broke cover, knife in hand, rushing toward the group just as Dogmeat lunged at a raider, teeth snapping, dragging him into the street with a bark that sounded suspiciously like laughter. She sliced cleanly through the man’s throat as Dogmeat unlatched and backed away.
The last man fell to the left of Nora’s focus as a blast from Bucky’s laser pistol took him down. She didn’t look surprised, “Keep that up, and I might start thinking you’re trying to impress me.”
Bucky lowered the pistol and without thinking replied, “Maybe I am.”
The raiders were down, the street a mess, but there was a rhythm to their chaos, unmistakably theirs.
She rifled through the raiders’ pockets, pulling out a handful of bottle caps, soda caps, of all things, and a collection of beaten-up weapons.
“These guns are all shit,” she muttered, kicking a nearby raider for emphasis, “but I’m taking them anyway. Can’t have anyone else getting lucky, fucking idiot.” She stuffed the loot into her rucksack with a satisfied grin.
“Shall we?” she said, turning toward the ruined street.
Bucky caught the rucksack before she could shoulder it, slinging it over his own.
Her eyes widened. “Well, well, well, chivalry isn’t dead!” Fanning herself dramatically, clearly enjoying the show.
Bucky let her theatrics slide and they made their way down the wasted street.
They walked. Which, Bucky quickly learned, was an activity the Commonwealth took very seriously.
Two hours stretched ahead of them, give or take detours around collapsed overpasses, irradiated puddles that made Nora hiss “nope," and one argument with Dogmeat about whether a skeletal hand sticking out of a mailbox was worth investigating.
Dogmeat thought yes. Nora said no. Bucky sided with Dogmeat on principle but conceded for efficiency.
Nora talked as they walked, offering him the highlight reel of the wasteland, but from Bucky’s perspective the world remained unshakably surreal.
They passed a grocery store with a giant smiling mascot frozen mid-wave, half his face melted, the other half still cheerfully promising SAVINGS! in peeling paint.
A family of radstags scattered at their approach, they were deer, but wrong, with extra horns and eyes that glowed faintly.
They crossed paths with a pair of wastelanders arguing loudly about whether a mattress found in a river was “still basically new.” They must not have been a threat because Nora just nodded and walked by while they stared.
Bucky especially hated running across a pack of feral ghouls trapped inside a chained-up subway entrance. Nora explained the effects radiation had on people and that not all ghouls were feral, in fact some of her best friends were ghouls, and she assured him he would be able to tell the difference.
Somewhere in the distance, a strange plane, not quite a helicopter and not quite a quinjet, roared overhead and then, concerningly, crashed.
Bucky stopped walking. “…does that happen a lot?”
Nora squinted at the smoke plume. “More than I’d like. Less than it used to.” She said it like that explained everything.
At some point they broke for lunch, Nora dug into her rucksack and tossed him a glass bottle sloshing with dark liquid. The label featured a smiling rocket and aggressively optimistic colors.
“Nuka-Cola,” she announced. “Try not to think about what’s in it.”
Bucky turned it over in his hand. “This feels radioactive.”
“Only slightly. You’ll be fine…probably.”
He took a cautious sip. His eyes widened despite himself. “Oh. That’s… actually good.”
Nora beamed. “Right? Capitalism died but soda endured.”
She followed it up by shoving a bright yellow snack cake into his other hand. “Fancy Lads Snack Cakes.”
Bucky examined it like it might detonate. “Why is it so… intact.”
“Preservatives,” she said cheerfully.
He bit into it. Chewed. Swallowed. “…this should not still be edible.”
She popped one into her mouth, powdered sugar dusting her fingers. “The future is a miracle.”
Dogmeat sat politely and received a piece, tail wagging like he’d just been included in a sacred ritual.
As Diamond City finally came into view, green metal walls rising out of the ruins like someone had decided to fortify a baseball stadium (oh god, this is Fenway!) and call it a day, Bucky’s soldier instincts snapped into sharper focus.
Guard towers. Elevated firing positions. Narrow entry points. Clear lines of sight. Internally, he could already map fallback routes, choke points, places where things could go wrong if they went wrong fast.
“Well,” he said slowly, eyes scanning, “I’ll give you this. Whoever built that knew what they were doing.”
Nora shot him a sideways grin. “Told you it’s safer. Also has running water and they sell noodles.”
They approached the main gate, the familiar clang of metal echoing as the guards leaned forward.
“Well I’ll be damned,” one of them drawled, armor scuffed, rifle resting easy. “If it isn’t trouble herself.”
Nora spread her arms. “Danny. Sweetheart. You make it sound like I’m not a delight.”
The second guard snorted, eyeing the blood spattered across her vault suit. “You’re a delight in the way fires are warm. Who’s the guy?”
Bucky offered a polite nod that did absolutely nothing to make him look less dangerous.
Nora hooked a thumb toward him. “Found him. He fell out of the sky.”
Both guards paused.
“…of course he did,” Danny said finally. His gaze flicked back to Nora. “You bringin’ him in, or should we be worried?”
“Little of column A, little of column B,” Nora said breezily. “He’s new. Confused. Armed. But he’s with me.”
The guards exchanged a look.
“Last time you said that,” the second guard muttered, “we had a synth standoff, three broken stalls, and Mayor McDonough hid under his desk.”
Nora smiled innocently. “Diamond City is still standing.”
Danny leaned forward, lowering his voice. “We’re just sayin’, Nora… you got a habit of collecting chaos.”
She tilted her head, mock-offended. “Rude. I prefer the term ‘strays.’”
Danny eyed Bucky again, softer now. “You sure you’re safe with her, pal?”
Bucky glanced at Nora. At the blood, the grin, the way she stood like the world had already tried its best shot and missed.
“I think,” he said dryly, “she’s safer with me.”
The guards laughed, the tension easing as the gate mechanisms groaned to life.
“Alright,” Danny said, waving them through. “Welcome to Diamond City. Try not to die. And if she starts a firefight—”
“—it wasn’t my fault,” Nora finished smoothly, stepping inside. She looked back at Bucky, eyes bright. “Home sweet home.”
Dogmeat trotted ahead, tail high.
Bucky followed, still not sure how he’d fallen into this world, but suddenly, very sure he wasn’t facing it alone.