Bucky Barnes (itwasstillme) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-05-23 22:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, bucky barnes (winter soldier), clara oswald |
Who: Clara and Bucky
What: Bucky dreams of the Thanos Snap and gets dusted. The TARDIS says no.
When: Today
Where: Their flat, then Clara’s TARDIS
Warnings: Mentions of the Battle of Wakanda, half the population of the universe dying simultaneously and Bucky briefly turning to dust in this world.
Bucky had known from the moment when T’Challa and Okoye had arrived to his little home that it could only mean one thing: War was coming. He had been given a new metal arm, and the battle weary White Wolf was being called back to war. He didn’t want to fight, but he would because it was the right thing to do. Of course, he’d told Clara of the impending war that was looming in his Dreams after having that one.
Then came the Battle of Wakanda. He’d fought in World War II, he knew the horrors that could be waged on the battlefield, and on prisoners of war. But even that had not prepared him for what descended upon Wakanda. He fought on because the universe was at stake, and he wouldn’t simply stand by and watch innocent people die just because someone arbitrarily decided that killing half of the people in the universe was the solution to the vast problems across all civilizations.
Death of innocents who had nothing to do with the problems at hand was never the solution.
But Bucky had to wait to learn the conclusion of the Battle of Wakanda. And tonight was the night he’d learned of it. Thanos’ arrival in Wakanda was one that couldn’t be mistaken. They had to protect Vision at all costs. Bucky charged in to do his part, only to be tossed aside by a blast from Thanos’ gauntlet. But there was a momentary joy as Wanda was able to destroy the Infinity Stone Vision had.
Though as all things seemed to go in his dreams, their victory was undone. Thanos used the Time Stone to turn back time and he gained Vision’s stone. Thor intervened, and seemed to almost have won the day, until the Snap.
Instantly, the battle ceased. An unsettling and deafening silence fell over Wakanda. And then it happened. People started to turn to dust all across the universe, not just in Wakanda. Bucky started to not feel right as he walked towards Steve.
“Steve?” He asked shortly before he turned to dust, his gun falling from his hand as he became one of the fallen.
Bucky woke with a start, sense on high alert as he looked around the room. He wasn’t in Wakanda, a glance to Clara beside him confirming that. But something was...wrong. And Cap seemed to recognize that because he was at Bucky’s side, starting to whine. Bucky looked at his hands, but he was still whole. Though the feeling he had was the same one he’d had in the dream right before turning to dust.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
With Bucky’s new arm as well as what he had told her about his Dreams starting up again, Clara had been worried. She knew that something was coming. How could she not? Perhaps that was why she’d been having repeat dreams as of late. Well specifically the ones that left particular marks on her. Reminders of all her ghosts.
Between that and reminders of her own immortality, giving Cisco distractions and what the rescue mission had brought up….Clara wasn’t in the best of mindsets though she pushed through and focused on her own life here. Adventures, spending time with Bucky and friends…. Really anything that kept her from dwelling too much on the things that left her hollow inside.
Asleep and curled up against Bucky, the images that flashed in her Dreams were the ones that broke her heart. Danny dying in such a normal way.
I swear to god, if you say I love you, I’m going to hang up on you
And then him as a Cyberman. Having to turn off his emotions and losing him all over again.
Even so, these were repeat Dreams, which meant she wasn’t locked in sleep. So Bucky shifting and the muttered comment brought her out of her sleep.
“Bucky? What is it?”
Sitting up, Clara wiped at her eyes for any tears that might have been there from her own Dreams, more concerned about her boyfriend. Especially given the fact that Cap also seemed on edge.
“What’s wrong?”
Something seemed off. Clara couldn’t tell what in the dark and so she reached over to the nightstand to turn on a light.
Bucky was so tired of fighting in his Dreams. Of course, he couldn’t blame his counterpart after everything that had been done to him. He’d found some peace, finally, in Wakanda. He’d enjoyed his time there, with Shuri helping him recover from the brainwashing and getting more knowledge about pop culture than he’d ever anticipated having.
But as happened with all things, the peace didn’t last. He’d been called upon to fight for the greater good, and that’s what he did. But in the end, none of it had seemed to matter. Thanos had won, and half the universe had paid the price. He glanced at Cap for a moment, then over at Clara when she sat up and turned the light on.
“We lost.” Even heroes lost at times. It was something he knew, but when the cost of them losing had been so high, it was a far harder pill to swallow. But then, it came. “Clara,” he said as he reached out for her, but even as he reached, his arm started to turn to dust, which spread across his body until there was nothing left.
In some ways, peace never lasted. Clara had gotten a so called happy ending. She died saving someone and she got to postpone it by going the long way around back to Gallifrey and thus Trap Street. But there were always things to remind her. There were always adventures that broke her heart.
“What? What do you mean you lost?” Because even knowing that not all stories had happy endings and that heroes could lose, that just seemed…. How could they lose? But Clara also had no real time to try and make sense of it because suddenly Bucky was turning to dust right in front of her and all she could do was stare in horror.
“Bucky…? Bucky no!”
She tried to hug him, as if holding him would keep him there and alive but all she end up doing was hugging air.
“No no no no no, this isn’t happening, this can’t be happening! I can’t lose him!”
No one but Cap was there to hear her though. If she had a heart or the use of her lungs, she’d have stopped breathing. Instead in her desperation, Clara got up and first tried to contact her dad. No answer.
“Bloody hell. No!”
She wasn’t thinking rationally, that much was certain. But Clara didn’t care. Instead she just raced to where the TARDIS was. She didn’t know what she would do as it wasn’t like she could go back in time and stop Bucky from Dreaming because that just….wasn’t possible. The stopping Dreams from happening that is. But it didn’t matter. So help her, Clara would find a way to save Bucky. She had to.
As for the TARDIS? Well, it had sensed something. Something wrong and pulled the dust fragments of one Bucky Barnes from the air into the control room. He wasn’t dying, not now and not like this.
The odds had seemed to be stacked against them from the start. Thanos had a head start on them for gathering the Infinity Stones. If he hadn’t had the Time Stone when he came to Wakanda, they would have won. But they hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Oh, they’d tried, they’d fought as hard as they could and it still hadn’t been enough to stop Thanos.
Oddly enough, turning to dust didn’t hurt. It was an oddly peaceful way to die as opposed to most other ways a person could die. But Bucky didn’t want to die. He wanted to live, to be with Clara, and have a good life. But his Dreams apparently had other thoughts on the matter.
And yet it...wasn’t the end? Because he found himself to be somewhere not his apartment. After the dust particles reassembled into Bucky, he stood there, trying to get his bearings for a minute before his brain caught up with where he was. This was the control room of Clara’s TARDIS?
“What...just happened?” He asked. But then his legs gave out and he slumped down to the floor. Bucky had just died and somehow been pulled back together by the TARDIS? He looked at the console in a state of shock. After all, he had just gone through a trauma of dying both in his Dreams and here.
Clara just ran. There was nothing else she could do but run and get to the TARDIS and find a way to save Bucky. Because losing him was just not an option. Clara had lost too much and the universe owed her.
Making her way into the TARDIS, Clara didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t alone. She was too focused on getting to the control room and finding a way to fix this. So when she did get to the control room? It took a moment for her to realize that Bucky was there on the ground.
But only a moment. Part of her was terrified that it was her mind playing tricks on her but honestly, Clara didn’t care at the moment. Instead she just rushed to her boyfriend and hugged him.
Bucky’s mind was still reeling, trying to process what had just happened. He didn’t realize that he was shaking, not from being cold, but from the adrenaline of it all. Or perhaps it was anxiety, he didn’t know. All he knew was that one moment he was dying and turning to dust, the next he was here in the TARDIS.
And then Clara ran in and then she was hugging him. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly, as much as to assure her that he was there and was real as it was to assure himself of the very same thing. He didn’t even notice he had tears in his eyes, just that Clara was in his arms. She was real. He was real. He was alive.
But they had lost. Thanos had done what he’d set out to do. Part of Bucky was crying for those who needlessly died in his Dreams. The other part of him was crying because he wasn’t actually dead.
Clara well knew what it was like to die and then come back. It was unsettling and there was so much confusion and thoughts to sort through. It could feel impossible in a way at times. Yet wasn’t Orange County like? Her dad had wasted regeneration energy to bring her back. The TARDIS had interfered in Bucky being dust. At least permanently.
Once Bucky returned the hug did Clara truly and finally believe that he was okay. That she hadn’t just lost him to be added to her list of ghosts. Oh, he undoubtedly would be added to her list of ghosts but not for a long time if she had any say in it.
Nor was Bucky the only one shaking and crying because it was too much. It brought up so many things for Clara that the relief of him being alive and there and holding her…. It had been the straw on the camel’s back, that which broke the dam.
The confusion of dying and coming back was intense, but Bucky wasn’t focusing on that right now. No, he was focusing more on holding Clara and being there in the moment. But his head was a mess. Images of the attempts at stopping Thanos from getting the final Infinity Stone, to the deafening silence right before people started to turn to dust, were all flashing through his mind.
But it seemed that the couple that cried together stayed together. Or something of that sort. At any rate, both of them had clearly been carrying a lot since that dragon had appeared in Orange County. Bucky hadn’t been as okay as he tried to be after the rescue from Hydra. His PTSD had come in full force after that, rendering him unable to get a full night’s night because of trauma-related nightmares and repeat Dreams from when he was experimented on and turned into the Winter Soldier by Hydra.
And now he had a death trauma to add onto it, but he couldn’t hold it back anymore. He just clung to Clara, letting it out and burying his face in her shoulder. He was briefly worried that he was holding her too tightly with his metal arm, so he loosened his hold ever so slightly with that arm.
Hugs were good for that. Sometimes you couldn’t trust a hug since they hid the face. But sometimes hugs were important because they gave you something to hold onto, something physical and solid in the midst of all the chaos and crazy.
It seemed the rescue mission had brought up a lot of issues. Of course they would help. And yet, Clara had been back in that place, constantly killed to see how she survived and those experiments overlapping with being turned into a Dalek. But in typical fashion, she had ignored it. Helped to distract Cisco. Focused on Bucky.
Even if Bucky had been holding her too tightly, Clara wouldn’t complain. It wasn’t like it could actually do anything to her. Still, it was probably a good thing for the two of them to let it all out, everything they’d been dealing with.
Bucky never said no to hugs, unless he wasn’t himself. And if he wasn’t himself, that meant he was the Winter Soldier. So he was more than glad to cling to Clara, reminding himself that he wasn’t alone, that she was there. It gave him grounding even as he still felt lost in the swirl of emotions.
Like Clara, Bucky would always help rescue people from Hydra despite knowing it would trigger his PTSD. And even though he was deprogrammed, he still had a fear that they could still easily reprogram him with just a few words. There was such power in words and having complete control over another person with only a few spoken words? That was the definition of terror. And it was one that Bucky had, but managed to forget was there until Hydra popped up.
That was probably the only good thing about his Dreams. Hydra had been more of an afterthought after Steve had helped him remember some of who he actually was. There were far more dangerous things in the universe than Hydra at the moment. Though whatever numbers of theirs had been left were now dwindled even more thanks to Thanos.
Perhaps that was a very small silver lining to having lost.
At any rate, he didn’t even know how long he sat there clinging to Clara crying, but eventually he’d managed to cry so hard that his tears ran out. But he made no move to let go of Clara. His body was shuddering and shaking after the exertion of crying.
It was terrifying and Clara had those same worries about her boyfriend. About what could come of him. She knew how his Dreams could be and she knew how Hydra could be. Even with the deprogramming and everything they had done to help him…. Yet them losing to Thanos and Bucky turning into dust and for that to happen here? That hadn’t even been on Clara’s radar. Though perhaps part of it was because of how many she had lost and so she made that possibility seem unthinkable and refused to even consider it.
Funny how that could work though. Where the dangers from the Dreams seemed more real here than in the Dreams because there was always some other drama to be had.
As the crying seemed to come to an end, Clara just remained as she was. It wasn’t like she needed to breathe. And even then, part of her was afraid to let go, as if doing so would reveal this to be a trick of her mind. That Bucky was still gone.
Bucky had no way of knowing if Steve or any of the other Avengers were still alive. Hopefully at least a couple of them were. If they were, maybe there was some way they could fix what had happened. But perhaps Bucky was being too hopeful in that respect, and yet he didn’t exactly want to be dead. He’d wanted to live, but he’d wanted to live in peace. He’d seen too much war, too much of the horrors the universe had to offer. Though perhaps in a way, death was peace. It would at least mean he wouldn’t Dream any further. But part of him still hoped that whoever was left could find a way to undo what had been done, to bring back everyone who had been killed by Thanos snapping his fingers.
He took a couple slow, steadying breaths, trying to calm himself down. He kept hold of Clara, not daring to let go for fear of turning into dust again, as if Clara was the only thing holding him together right then.
There was a passing thought that he should call Jemma or Martha about getting looked over medically, make sure he was fine and healthy. But he was still grappling with the whole having died and not completely certain if he was real or if this was the afterlife.
“I seriously hope this is real,” he finally muttered against Clara’s shoulder. Clara felt and smelled real, but Bucky’s mind was a little scattered at the moment.
Clara had no idea who survived but she did know that, once Bucky was ready, he could reach out to Natasha and see if she’d had the same dream. See if she knew who survived or not. But that was for later when emotions weren’t so high. And it did take a lot to die and then just come back. Clara had gone through it herself.
Even though she didn’t need to breathe, Clara also took the steadying breaths. It did help to focus her after all. She wasn’t going to complain about Bucky still holding her. Like him, she was afraid of letting go as if he’d turn to dust all over again.
“So do I…” Because Clara didn’t want to lose him. She couldn’t lose him. She had lost so many, she was owed. They both were owed this being real. Pulling away just enough to look at Bucky but not enough to break the hug, Clara just scanned his features before kissing him, resting her forehead against his as yes, this was real.
“Let’s go home.”