Farewell to Arm
Bucky sat in the main hall of the Avengers tower and listened for the ever present quiet hum around him of JARVIS in the walls. The kettle on the counter was off, the wall panels were dark and the ever present feeling of JARVIS watching him was missing.
It was hard to believe it’d come to this.
“So I’m dead,’ James Buccanon Barnes said at full volume, if only to hear the echo answering him in the desolate stillness. “Is this heaven or hell?” Because sometimes during his life they had been one and the same. “Hell,’ he decided, an eternity later when no one had continued to answer him. If it was heaven he’d probably still be there, in the Avengers tower that had become his one and only home.
But Steve would be there too. And Natasha. Even Tony and Clint. Probably Sam, but he might be here too.
“If this is hell,’ Bucky began again, telling the stillness that was his only companion, ‘then I must not have done much bad in my life. No torture or anything?”
Being alone in the tower was torture.
“No?” Bucky looked to the support of the audience who wasn’t there. “Well Bully on you then,’ he sighed, and headed for the elevator. The elevator didn’t open.
This was definitely hell.
Climbing the emergency stairs down was a torture, not for his body, but for his fraying heart. Steve’s floor was empty. Tony’s. Nat’s. Banner’s. Thor’s.
Bucky stopped on the communal deck and stared at the dark large-screen TV. He was the only one who went to hell. He raced to the window overlooking Central Park.
“Banner’s done some not great things!” Bucky shouted off the balcony, ‘Stark too!”
The silence lengthened. Bucky wished to see them, either of them. It was torture in this tower alone. He wished to see any of them. Even Sam. Especially Sam. Especially Steve. Especially anyone.
“Don’t send them here,’ he whispered, then, shouting again, “I’M GLAD THEY’RE NOT HERE!” And finally, he meant it. He turned and ran for the stairs, not waiting for the echo.
Down down down the stairs he went, losing track of what floor after the fortieth and forgetting to look after a while. The landings passed in a blur. Which is how he ended up in the basement. Tony’s workshop.
Beeep? Dum-E asked, rolling up to Bucky and lightly nudging their mechanical arms together.
Bucky hugged a robot and didn’t think about what that meant. His mechanically armed brother turned itself painstakingly around him before hammering his back none too gently with the grasper for comfort, winding him a little.
“Guess you’re a bad bad robot,’ Bucky laughed, sniffled, angrily wiped his face clean of hot tears he hadn’t known he’d been releasing throughout the prolonged hug. “We’re bad bad robot arms, huh.”
Beep. Dum-E disagreed, and Bucky managed a smile.
“Yeah,’ he agreed, mostly with himself, ‘let’s make the best of this hellscape, huh?” Then, as an afterthought, ‘I guess this is why Steve didn’t wallow in it. Not like we can ever get out of hell, but at least we can be in hell together.”
“What are you even saying?” An annoyed voice asked, and Bucky whipped around, throwing himself between the robot and the newcomer without so much as a thought.
The man hung in the air, red cloak billowing despite a lack of wind. He had a goatee similar to Tony’s and the same snooty air of entitlement. The floating was only enhanced by the way he held his arms.
He was definitely posing.
“You Satan? Always imagined Satan would look something like you. Pictured more horns, but hey. I never believed in that crap anyway.” Bucky wished he had a gun. Shooting Satan might not help, but it sure would be fun for two seconds. “Is this when the eternal damnation starts?”
“I’d have said it started at the beginning of this conversation,’ the man replied dryly. “I’m Stephen Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme.”
He said it like Bucky should be impressed.
Like Bucky hadn’t seen super heroes and heard ridiculous names before. A floating asshole was the least interesting thing he’d seen in years.
He saw Tony Stark every day.
Ha, that was funny. He should say that to Stark when he saw him again.
“Great. Can you sorcer-us out of hell?” He asked instead.
“Not as much, no, and this isn’t hell,’ Strange replied, still speaking like Bucky was a toddler and knew virtually nothing.
While that was fair, Bucky didn’t have to like it.
“Great, so you’re stuck here too. If this isn’t hell where are we and what happened with Thanos?”
“We have been, for lack of a better word, removed from the living world.” Strange began, and Bucky had the distinct impression this was going to be long and arduous. As it was, before Strange could launch into it, Dum-E rolled around Bucky and unceremoniously clamped onto the billowing cloak, giving it a hard tug.
“Excuse me,’ Strange said to Dum-E directly, put out. “If you’d let me go, I will tell you what you want to know.” Then to Bucky, ‘please control your pet.”
“He’s my brother, not a pet,’ Bucky began, frowning, ‘and I can’t control him. He just… does what he wants.” Bucky shrugged once. “He’s an AI robot.”
“Nonsense,’ said the man who had declared himself Sorcerer Supreme not two minutes ago, ‘robots don’t have souls and wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
Bucky looked from the clearly-present robot arm to the “Sorcerer Supreme” and decided very quickly that this man also had no idea what was going on.
“Well,’ Bucky began, the word a drawl, ‘we’ll just be going. Out. Good luck sorcering or whatever.” Bucky stepped back, “Come on Dum-E. We’re gonna take a car with a trailer so I can bring you. Maybe JARVIS is here somewhere or something.” Dum-E’s delighted beep was followed by a prompt removal of its grabber from Strange’s cloak. It spared him a small dismissive beep before following Bucky as he headed into the garage.
Strange floated after him.
“Where do you plan to go?” The sorcerer demanded almost petulantly. “There’s only the dead out there.”
“Dead friends hopefully,’ Bucky replied, strangely lucid in this after-life. “Dum-E’s a good start. I’ll see if Steve and Tony are here, maybe even Nat, Clint, Sam. The others.”
“I know Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are not here. That much was definite.” Strange told him, floating faster to keep pace. Bucky didn’t bother to look up at the man, sure that was what he wanted.
“Well great,’ Bucky grumbled, checking out a pickup truck and turning the ignition to see if it worked. “I’ll keep that in mind.” As the engine turned over, he whistled for Dum-E, who was putzing through some scrap. “Get a ramp, we’re going out!”
The robot carefully found a few things, none of which were ramps, while Bucky talked to Strange.
“Our fates are sealed until Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are able to reverse the effects of the Infinity Gauntlet,’ Strange explained as Bucky constructed a rudimentary ramp in the very likely event Dum-E was unsuccessful.
“Maybe for you, magic man,’ Bucky scoffed. “I’m getting out and seeing what’s out there.”
“The dead,’ Strange reiterated dryly. Somehow he’d climbed into the truck with Bucky, which he didn’t appreciate but wasn’t about to throw out the company. Dum-E slowly climbed the ramp, Bucky slammed the gate shut and they were off.
The world of the dead was as bleak as its name. As they drove, Strange seemed less and less annoying the more quiet and subdued they became. The silence of the world was deafening. They drove through an abandoned New York City, heading for the Brooklyn Bridge when the first sign of life showed up. Or fell down, really.
The thump on top of their car almost drove them into an accident with Dum-E shrieking in the back, Strange muttering incantations and spinning his hand around desperately, and the car spinning even faster as Bucky tried to swerve without hitting anything.
They rammed into a pole and the car hissed as Bucky leapt out to whirl on the enemy.
“Uh, hi, I’m Spider-Man,’ Peter Parker said, holding onto the roof of the truck so hard his fingers had left imprints in the metal.
“You’re dead?!” Bucky blurted, remembering the sheer strength of the teenager from the one single time they’d tussled before becoming a big happy super family.
“I guess so,’ Spider-Man mused, dropping down to the ground and dodging Dum-E’s angry waving arm without so much as looking at it. “Is Mr. Stark… did he make it? How about the weirdo with the Kevin Bacon fetish?”
“They’re alive,’ Strange told him, trying for sympathetic and gentle, Bucky guessed, but getting curt and snooty to the tone naturally.
“Great. That’s great…” Spider-Man sighed, ‘I mean I didn’t want to die, but as far as dying is going this isn’t the worst, ya know?”
He sounded so sad. Bucky patted his shoulder gently with his organic arm.
“Let’s get some new wheels and see who else is here,’ Bucky mustered an unsure smile for the boy, and Spider-Man pulled his mask off to smile back at him. The boy looked tired, unnaturally so for someone as strong and kind as he was.
“My aunt May isn’t here at least. I woke up at home,’ Peter sighed, turning around to look for a new truck for them. They moved independently, with Peter doing most of the talking while Strange interjected every so often. Bucky stayed quiet, concentrating on the task and the thought of his friends somewhere out there. A pickup was parked in a nearby structure, and Bucky was about to hotwire it when Strange wiggled his fingers and the truck started right up. Peter was more interested in a nearby Audi, but Bucky gestured to Dum-E, sadly chirping in the back of their truck, still crashed below. There were no more arguments.
Even backing the two trucks up together, Dum-E was having trouble getting from one truck bed to the other. Bucky was about to ask for some ‘supreme’ assistance from Strange when Peter just climbed up and picked Dum-E up and hoisted him into the new truck. He looked as though he picked up tons of robots every day. Maybe he did.
Stephen Strange seemed as shocked and purposefully aloof as Bucky was trying to be and they shared a surprised look.
Then they were off again.
“So you can hotwire cars and fly?” “Yes. Obviously.” “Does the car need gas or is this running on magic now?” “The car will require gas.” “Can you conjure more gas? And if so can you create matter from nothing, thereby refuting one of the laws of physics, or are you transporting gas from another location to our current one? If so, is that a matter transfer via molecular or atomic means?” “…I can conjure gas from the dimensional matter between worlds.” “Rad. So is that on the atomic scale or the molecular scale?” “What grade are you in again?”
The conversation had meandered from Peter’s school life (so hard!) to Strange’s past profession (so rigorous!) and even at one point to Bucky’s war effort in World War II (shut up.) Now, Strange and Peter seemed to have figured out they were both geniuses.
Great. Bucky was not a genius.
“I’m in ninth grade,’ Peter replied innocently, ‘but I am in AP classes.”
“Of course you are. Well,’ an awkward pause as Strange seemed to notice he was speaking to a child, ‘stay in school, I’m sure it’ll go very well for you.”
“Mr. Stark says I can do an internship with him next year, I’m really excited about it. And it pays too, which should make it easier on Aunt May!” Peter is very very pleased with himself.
Which is also when they remember they’re all dead.
“Guess Aunt May will have to manage on her own… now that I’m dead.” Peter looked into the middle distance in a way Bucky had seen soldiers do when they were remembering something back home during the war.
“We’re not… dead, strictly speaking.” Strange attempted to make ‘not dead’ sound like ‘alive’, but Peter was a teenager.
“But we’re not alive either.”
“No, not in so many words. We’re between worlds, in a dimension of the non-existent.”
Bucky wanted to ask if this guy could hear himself, and a quick glance at Peter showed a similar expression.
“When you get tired of being cryptic let me know,’ Bucky grumbled, and that got a laugh out of Peter, which warmed Bucky’s heart a bit.
“I’m not being cryptic,’ Strange objected strongly, frowning, ‘I am merely relaying that…’
And like that he was back to his ‘sorcery’ and ‘supreme’ tangent.
Bucky kept driving and listened to the ever-present hum of conversation.
At least this wasn’t a total hell.
