Dust and Sorrow

Part One of the Unnamed StuckyNat Miniseries

By: LiquidVamp

Author's Note: This is my very first MCU fan fiction. As much as I've have loved the MCU for the past ten years, I've never been inspired to put pen to paper. This, however, wouldn't leave me alone after I watched Infinity War. I walked from the theater shocked and as dazed as any character on screen appeared. The need to write got so much worse after rewatching it. I must have watched it a dozen times now and each time I feel like there is a story left unsaid. There has always been subtext with Steve and Bucky but there somehow seemed to be the hint of a similar subtext between Steve and Natasha. Borrowing a little from the comic history of Bucky and Natasha just felt right. So here you have it.

Story Warnings: This story mentions triad relationships, gives Avengers Infinity War spoilers and is solidly AU in nature as it doesn't follow established cannon relationships. Consider yourself aware.

Happy reading,
LiquidVamp

He had kneeled at Vision's side and rolled him over only to see the aftermath of the stone having been ripped from his head, as Natasha ran up behind him.

"What is this? What the hell's happening?" Rhodey questioned.

He collapsed back onto the ground next to Vision's grey, lifeless body as the sheer volume of what had happened settled on him like no weight he had ever felt before. "Oh God," he breathed out on a stunned breathing.

But he couldn't stay there long, unable to pull his heart away from the fresh loss is his best friend, his best guy, his heart. So, he picked himself up, tired and broken, and let himself walk back through the trees to the last place he had seen him alive. How was it possible that the last thing he would ever hear was Bucky calling his name, full of confusion and question?

He wanted to scream, to cry, to rage at Heaven or Hell or whatever came after death, but he couldn't seem to make himself do it. Instead, he sat down gently on the ground and stared into the dry, leaf-lined earth of the Wakandan forest. The dazed shock that had settled in after the Vision only seemed to multiply on top of itself. With it, the feeling of being frozen, immobilized, as truly as all his years within the Arctic ice, seemed to settle deep into his body, mind, and heart.

The rational part of his brain was silent for the first time...well since the last time he had watched his world crumble beneath him off that train. There was nothing the least bit rational about a person falling away into dust, or being attacked by alien invaders, or being utterly destroyed by the snap of a finger for that matter. He simply couldn't quantify how any of this had taken place.

The not remotely rational part of his brain was screaming that this was a trick, a bad illusion or the vision of a nightmare. It simply couldn't be true, Bucky was alive, perhaps playing the world's meanest prank, but there was just no possible way the universe was that messed up as to take Bucky from him...no, from them, a second time. He shook his head in utter disbelief. He'd watched him fall to his death for the second time and it seemed so wildly illogical to him that he physically hurt to consider it. How did any person, how did two people, get so unlucky as to lose a person they love twice over? God he just didn't know…

He was vaguely aware of his own hands shaking. Not for the first time he considered that was all just a nightmare. He would certainly wake up at any moment and Bucky would be there, concerned and mothering him like he had before the war and the serum. She would be on his other side reminding him that it was only a nightmare, that he could relax against them like she had so many times before.

He was vaguely aware of cries and yells in the distance and nearby, and he felt torn between going, trying to help, or staying right where he was surrounded by the unbelievable, yet real remains of their love as they mixed with the leaves and soil. He couldn't make himself move.

"Steve." He looked up and saw her, eyes red-rimmed and silent tears tracking through the dirt and blue blood smeared on her face. He knew she must know. The look on her face said she knew. She had read it on his face or maybe it was the fact that Bucky wasn't at their sides when he was checking on Vision. She didn't say anything then but now the question was thick in his name. He didn't know what to say or how to even say it. He dropped his head, "he's…"

He watched as her knees failed with the unspoken confirmation and she dropped to the ground at his feet broken, her hands digging into the dirt. "No!" It was barely more than a broken whisper. Be body betrayed her as it shook where she kneeled in the dirt. Suddenly tears that had refused to fall previously suddenly spilled over as he reached forward and pulled her to him, gathering her much smaller form into his lap.

"Steve," she quietly pleaded once more, twisting her dirt-covered hands into straps of his uniform, begging it to not be true. He knew, where others knew nothing, that her loss was as sharp as his own. She too had lost the man she loved and now lost, twice over. First at the hands of Hydra and Red Room handlers and now to an alien with delusions of universal grandeur. She wouldn't allow most to see it, but her heart, the one she once claimed not to have because "love is for children", was shattered into unrecognizable pieces that may as well lay mixed in the dirt at their feet.

He wrapped his arms around her as tight as he could, knowing she was strong enough to take it and broken enough to want it. "I don't know what just happened Nat, but I swear we'll fix it." He didn't know why he said it, only a sliver of his brain even remotely believed it. The rest was lost in a haze of unbearable sorrow and aching grief that he knew she shared as intimately as anything act they had ever shared.

She shook her head where it laid against his now damp left shoulder, "don't say that, please, just don't…". She trailed off, but he knew what she meant, 'don't make promises that you can't keep'. Still, he had to at least entertain the idea, or he would shatter as surely as Bucky had.

Her body shook as she cried silently against him. "I know doll, but I have to...I have to hope." He knew she would understand. Maybe not now in this second with its white-hot pain, but eventually. She had understood when he had chased a "ghost story," even when she warned him he wouldn't like what he found. She had even helped as much as she could, though she kept some secrets to herself at the time, and that he had later decided was okay. She had understood when he didn't sign the Accords. He knew she more than understood that choice, but also, he knew she had been conflicted in her own right about them and that had led to her to ultimately choosing to sign them herself. She had understood when he and Bucky had made a run for the Quintet and even helped them, knowing it would land her in more trouble than it was probably worth with the Accords, Tony and the Wakandan King. She had more than understood when he had tracked her down after she had gone rouge following that decision. She had understood when he asked for her help to break into a supermax built for super soldiers. She had even understood when he had brought her to Wakanda even though she made it very clear she didn't expect to be welcome. She always seemed to understand him even when he didn't understand his own thoughts or actions.

What had developed after all that neither of them had seen developing until it already had. The first months were spent near constantly on the run, only occasionally returning to Wakanda when called or when they needed to completely drop off the map.

Sam and Wanda were with them near round the clock. Still, even with their near ever-present presence things developed and escalated over the common ground that was the mission and Bucky. Each day spent in close quarters, closer than ever before, allowed him to see a little deeper into the secrets she wore like armor. The more he knew about her and her past, the more he realized that he didn't just respect her, he cared for her, he loved her, he needed her. He never acted on it though. Running wasn't conducive to romance and love stories. More so, it wasn't just her he ached for. He pined for his first and best friend, the love that he had never truly explored because of a host of circumstances, frozen in a cryo chamber in a Wakandan lab.

With every return to Wakanda, it became very clear that he wasn't the only person pining for what was. Her gentle fingers on frozen glass. Her looks of longing as she watched his face, serene behind frosted glass. The silent tears that she hid from everyone but still he managed to see. And when the call came that Bucky was being awakened, it was her that rushed them to complete their latest mission, destroying a former Hydra stronghold, so they could return.

There was a time when the idea is loving two people at once would have made him blush and stammer, maybe even give you're the good Catholic reason why that was a sin, but he had come to realize it was too precious a gift to deny. The fact that Bucky had begun to remember having some previous feelings of his own for each of them certainly didn't hurt things. If anything, he had been the final catalyst that allowed them both to admit they had feelings for each other. More so, they both had feelings for him. Despite it all, they had managed to find a new love in each other and in him. Their moments were stolen and short, Bucky had been too leery of himself to leave the safety of Wakanda and them unable to remain there for more than a couple days at a time lest they put the very people willing to support them at risk. Steve had flat refused to put Wakanda at risk after the kindness they had extended to Bucky and their broken team.

So, it was still strange and new, or at least it had been. They went from being perpetually alone to a triad and now here he and Nat sat, broken, lost and the jerk was gone again. He didn't know how either of them would continue without him, but he knew they must try, hard as it would be. Because without him they were only parts of the whole. They were incomplete. There was only one choice really; try and make sense of the mess before them and maybe, just maybe...

Sorrow and Hope, part 2 in the Sorrow Series now posted!