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Pick a Star on the Dark Horizon by artist_artists
Fandoms: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TV)
18 Sep 2021
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Summary
In 1945, a Hydra experiment gone wrong sends their prisoner Bucky Barnes to the year 2025, where he meets Sam Wilson for the first time.
In 2025, Bucky is stolen from his happy life living and working with Sam and sent back to his Hydra cell in 1945.
Both of them love Sam, and both of them are trying to get back to where they belong without destroying the universe.
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Bucky tries to imagine it — making a plan, a dramatic escape, making sure to leave no one alive to pursue him once he gets out of this underground dungeon. It will take him a while to find allies, but that’s okay. He has the survival skills to make it, now. He’ll make it back to America eventually, hug his sister long enough that she gets embarrassed and pushes him away. He’s memorized the info he found about what happened to her after he’d been captured, so he knows her kids haven’t been born yet. He’ll get to meet them in a few years. It’s a tantalizing thought, but he rejects it almost immediately.
Bucky doesn’t belong here — he can feel it in his soul. He wants to go home. He wants to hug Sam and pet his cat, make dinner with Sarah and take the boys miniature golfing. He wants to let Dorothy, his 85-year-old landlord, make him tea so they can sit down and reminisce about the past. He’d even miss Joaquín and Sharon and some of the Avengers, he thinks. Would he still live 80 more years in this version of the timeline? Would he ever meet Sam if Steve gets found earlier?
The fantasy gets tweaked. He’ll see the Howlies again, he’ll see his sister, hug her one last time, and then he’ll find Howard Stark. Not to try and help find Steve, but to see if Howard can help Bucky get back to where he belongs. He was smart, he was an inventor, who else would Bucky ask? Bucky knows that Tony had been the one to eventually figure out how the Avengers could travel through time, so his father seems like a good bet.
The thought actually makes Bucky laugh, and the sound echoes throughout his cell and the empty corridor outside of it. “Hi, Howard, lovely to see you again,” he imagines himself saying. “Any way you could find out how to get me back to the year 2025? I murdered you in that timeline, sorry about that. It wasn’t technically my fault but I feel pretty bad about it. Oh, your son dies there, too. Pretty young, fighting aliens. It’s my preferred timeline, though. Love to get back there, please help.”
He wonders, then, if this is his chance to undo all the hurt he’s caused. If he can escape now and live a normal life instead of trying to get everything back to how it happened, the Winter Soldier would never exist. Bucky will miss out on the life he has now, but it’s better for everyone else. Maybe it’s what he’s supposed to do.
Somehow, he spends hours grappling with that upsetting realization before remembering a key aspect of the time travel the Avengers had used — the branches. They weren’t supposed to change anything major. It could be catastrophic, causing a new branch of time and… making the universe unstable? Does this mean he has to stay here, then? Stay in this cell even though he might now have the ability to escape? Live through this hell for the second time, allow them to brainwash him, weld a metal arm onto him, turn him into an assassin, wipe his memories over and over until his brain is so damaged that he needs the smartest person in the world to even attempt to fix it?
Honestly, Bucky’s not even sure if the branch rules apply here in his strange brain swap time travel situation the same as they did to the Avengers. He thinks again of the potential of the Bucky who is meant to be in this cell, living instead in the future with Sam. It sounds crazy, but the thought makes him smile. He hopes it’s true. The version of himself who was here in 1945 definitely could have used a break.
(“What do you mean, don’t belong here?”
“Sam, come on. The guy that belongs here is probably trapped in a Hydra cell in 1945.”
“That’s you,” Sam insists. “Buck, whether it’s time travel or memory loss… it’s you. You belong here. But...” he trails off, lets out a heavy sigh. “Maybe you just don’t belong here quite yet.”
Bucky gives him a sad smile, and they sit together quietly for a moment. He knows they’ll have to figure out what they can do about getting him back to 1945, but it’s too much to think about tonight. He doesn’t want to leave Sam, doesn’t want to wait 80 years to be back here.
“I know you don’t remember when we met,” Sam says after a few minutes. He’s looking down, not meeting Bucky’s eyes. “Really met, talked for the first time. We were in this tiny car, a Volkswagen Beetle, on the run in Germany. You were in the backseat, and out of nowhere, you asked me if we’d met before. And I couldn’t believe it, thought you were messing with me. I said, “yeah, we’ve met before, you tried to kill me.” And you said that wasn’t what you meant. You said, “no, I know you.” And you were just… so sure.”
Bucky shifts closer to Sam on the couch so their thighs are pressed against each other. This is love, Bucky knows. None of this makes a lot of sense, but he knows that much. He loves Sam now and he is absolutely sure that the version of him trapped in 1945 loves him, too.)
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So 🥺🥰