Ashes

Steve sat in the forest where he had fallen after Thanos disappeared, nerveless fingers useless, breathing automatically only because his body had no conception of what his mind had just witnessed.

"Steve?" Bucky's last words echoed hollowly in his heart before a pile of ash appeared, gun fallen useless to the ground with a dead thud. No body. Nothing to mourn. Steve had touched the ashes and they were warm, like a live body. A pit of sorrow opened in his stomach and began to fill with the ash of loss.

The ashes were everywhere. All he could hear was his own mechanical breathing, and the wind slowly blowing bits of friends and warriors all around him like a swarm of insects on the breeze. He watched the pieces swirl and fall like a horrible grey snow. There was no smell of death or blood, but only broken trees and crushed leaves. The ash had no odor except suggesting something lost.

His broken heart kept time in his chest and each beat was a painful stab of mind numbing defeat. Each beat marked time from that single terrorizing moment when half the world vanished.

What just happened?

Glancing down, the colorless, stiff lifeform of Vision was at his feet like a macabre mannequin, Wanda's ashes swirling gently around his face as if the very atoms she had been made of didn't want to let him go.

Looking up, the sky was grey. Ash filled it. It was then his heart shattered like it never had before and became ashes.


A/N I just want to say... I am not ok. None of this is ok. Bucky... T'Challa... Peter! (weeping to self) ** yes, I know they will be back, but DANG this was a gut punch**