seen from T1
seen from China
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from China
seen from Algeria
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Romania
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
Dear Ginny with a hint of lime-
details under the cut
in paradisum
The Winter Soldier: Cold Front (Bucky x Ginny)
note! this fic contains massive spoilers for the ending of the cold front novel - please turn away now if you haven't finished it !
Summary: On the cold snow field, Rostova shoots Vronksy. Or, Bucky and Ginny reunite :) Warnings/tags: this is my version of a fix-it fic, extensive use of religious imagery (Christianity; prayers, God, other concepts of Christianity), discussions of death and afterlife, not any more violent or traumatic than canon lol, technically major character death? (vronsky/bucky) (but that's what we want) Word Count: 4.8k A/N: what is mercy?
READ ON AO3
note! this fic contains massive spoilers for the ending of the cold front novel - please turn away now if you haven't finished it !
"Ave Maria, gratia plena
Dominus tecum
benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
Sancta Maria mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen.”
Vronsky does not know God.
Neither did Bezukhov, nor Bolkonsky, nor Levin, nor Kuragin, nor Karenin. A litany of borrowed names, a carousel of false lives, none of them faithful, none of them blessed.
And James Buchanan Barnes? He’s long since turned his back on God. He thinks that if God exists, He’ll be the one to beg him for forgiveness.
***
The shot is not punishment. Not discipline, not even necessity.
It is kindness.
It is mercy – unearned, undeserved – the compassion of the strong for the broken. It is the very last forgiveness Rostova has to give.
On the cold tundra, the world is nothing but white and wind. Each breath turns to frost before it leaves his mouth; every footprint is erased as soon as it’s made. The snow drifts like ash, horizon and sky dissolving into one unbroken, merciless white.
Rostova steadies her gun. Vronsky can see how her gloves tighten around the grip, the way her breath clouds in the cold. The motion is practiced – she’s done this a hundred times before – but never like this.
She should hate him. He can see it in her eyes, the memory of orders, the ghosts of every ruin he’s left behind. She has every reason to despise what stands before her. And yet – something else flickers there. Not anger. Not duty. Something softer. Something that feels like grief.
He almost doesn’t recognize it until it’s too late. Mercy.
He doesn’t ask for it – he wouldn’t know how. But she gives it anyway. Forgiveness for the undeserving, grace for the damned. For the first time in years, he understands what it means to be seen – not as weapon or myth, but as man.
She exhales. The gun lifts. And he lets her.
Relief floods him, sharp as the cold in his lungs.
At last.
At last, it will end.
No more false names, no more wicked commands, no more waking up shaking with someone else’s blood on his hands. He doesn’t know he’s been waiting for this for years – for his whole life.
Her aim is true. She finds the space between his eyes – the place where every mask is stripped away – and he thinks, absurdly, I’m sorry it had to be you. She will bear this, too, as she has borne everything, and in the end they will damn her for the mercy she showed him. Another sin carved into her ledger for daring to offer grace to something unworthy.
A clean shot, a swift ending.
A false mother’s gift to her false son.
The thunderclap cleaves the air in two, then the body’s answering collapse, knees breaking into the snow – soft at the surface, iron-hard beneath. The world tilts backward, ground rushes up. His body crumples, but he feels only the sudden stillness, as if every nerve has gone blessedly quiet at once.
And then Rostova is falling too.
Not collapsing as he did, but drifting – as if gravity is late to remembering her. Her body folds beside his, close enough that he can see snowflakes nestle like a crown in her hair. She tries to speak, blood flooding her mouth, but she has no words left. Somehow, even dying, she finds the strength to lift her hand and touch his cheek.
The touch splits him in two: handler and mother, bullet and prayer. He is ten again, kneeling at the side of the bed. His mother’s cough rattling the walls, Rebecca’s fingernails biting crescents into his skin as she clings to him. Ave Maria, gratia plena – his mother’s voice, wet and thin, more rasp than prayer. She presses their small fingers together and whispers that he doesn’t need to understand the words – that it is enough, more than enough, simply to repeat them with her. The final plea of a dying woman.
He should weep.
He cannot.
The wind moves over them, patient and inexorable. It pulls their heat away, carries their breath into the white horizon. Footprints vanish, blood fades, even the hollow shapes of their bodies blur into the snow. Soon there will be nothing left – not the missions, not the bullets, not the names they wore like costumes.
In the hollow left by silence, a thought drifts loose: This life has taken us away from ourselves. But maybe, in the afterward, it can give us back. James and Masha. Comrades, perhaps, in damnation if not in life.
Her breath rattles once, then again, then not at all.
The snow blurs. The prayer lingers. He tries – he hears himself stammering syllables foreign, heavy, familiar, spilling from a child’s mouth into a dying man’s chest – Dominus tecum.
Grace. That’s what his mother begged for. Mercy, and a God who stayed near at the hour of death.
And here, in this white silence, with Rostav’s cold hand on his cheek, he understands the cost of such grace – it damns the giver and spares the undeserving.
And still, the Lord is silent.
***
Death is so familiar a friend that Bucky knows that all endings are never clean.
The body breaks; the question stays – was mercy the hand that pulls the trigger, or the one that hesitates?
If there is a God, He has yet to answer.
And so the grey rises to meet him – silent, infinite, patient – as if the world itself intends to try.
***
All of Bucky’s life’s most significant moments have happened in the house of God.
On the next inhale, the grey folds into familiar shapes around him – stone arches, pews dusted in ash, a cathedral long abandoned by both its congregation and its God.
The air smells achingly familiar – of candle wax and rain, though it’s clear that no offering has burned in a hundred years. Weak light slants through shattered mosaic in colours too faint to name.
Mr. Yesterday is already here, seated at the front-most pew, where a priest should be. His suit is immaculate, his hands folded as if in prayer. He has the stillness of a man victorious.
Bucky’s not surprised that Mr. Yesterday is here. He’s surprised that he himself is. His expectations for what comes after were simply nothing – nothing but the blank erasure he begged for.
He certainly hadn’t expected to make it into an afterlife. For after everything he had scorned, after every prayer he had spat at the floorboards, after every life he had taken, God should not show him mercy, not show him grace.
Because there are worse things than Hell; being remembered, for one. Being remembered means the sin still breathes somewhere. No – what he wants is to have never existed; the mercy and punishment of being forgotten.
Bucky’s boots echo once, twice, on the cracking hardwood floor.
With every step he takes down the aisle toward Mr. Yesterday, words claw their way up – fragments of things he’ll never say. Anger, apology, the childish wish that he’d never met the man at all. A dozen half-formed questions rise and fall in his throat – why him, why now, what does it mean? Should he beg forgiveness? Offer it? He doesn’t know.
What comes out of his mouth is simple. “Why you?” he asks.
Mr. Yesterday’s smile is thin, teeth too white, as if he’s been waiting centuries for Bucky to walk through the door. “You make it sound like a complaint,” he replies, voice polished like marble. “Were you looking for someone else? Him, perhaps?”
“I wasn’t.”
The echo rolls through the empty nave and fades. The silence after is vast.
Mr. Yesterday tilts his head, the faintest hint of amusement ghosting his expression. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
Bucky’s jaw tightens. “This Hell?”
“If you like. If you need it to be.” Mr. Yesterday spreads his hands and gestures where a tall wooden crucifix looms – the figure on it pale and frightfully human beneath the fractured glass. “It could be Heaven, if you prefer. The address hardly matters.”
Mr. Yesterday had always dealt in riddles and detours – the kind of man who made the truth sound like a trick and a lie feel like revelation.
“Regardless, you’ve come a long way to look for forgiveness in an empty church,” he murmurs.
“I’m not looking for forgiveness.” Bucky says, the words landing heavier than he means them to. They sound too certain for a man who isn’t sure what he believes.
“Then why are you here?”
Indeed – why is he here? He doesn’t think it’s penance; he’s done too much, for too long, to still think that works. He isn’t searching for God, either – that door slammed shut years ago. Maybe it’s habit. Maybe he’s just following orders no one gave. Maybe he came to find proof that nothing waits at the end of all this, or maybe some part of him, small and naive, still hopes to be told otherwise.
He shrugs. “Nowhere else to go.”
Mr. Yesterday nods, as if that proves his point. “Mercy always brings the lost to the same door.”
The words catch like a splinter in his throat. “Mercy,” Bucky repeats, rough. “Mercy isn’t forgiveness.”
“It isn’t.”
The man’s smile deepens as he leans forward, a gleam catching in his eye – like he’s about to share some great, terrible secret. “Mercy,” he says, drawing out the word, “is a trick of the weak. A way to make their suffering sacred.”
He rises from the pew, the sound of his shoes whispering against the floorboards. “Mercy isn’t deliverance,” he continues, voice soft, almost tender. “It sanctifies the wound, gives pain a halo so no one has to heal it.”
He turns slightly, glancing back toward the altar, where the fractured glass scatters light like broken promises. “Tell me,” he murmurs, almost to himself, “did you ever notice how the prayers always end in funerals?” His smile sharpens, white as bone. “Always asking for mercy after it’s too late.”
And then – the words rise, not from Mr. Yesterday, not from memory, but from somewhere deeper. From God Himself, whose voice sounds far too much like his own, cruel: You ask for mercy when you have none to give. You never stopped asking, even when you said you’d stopped.
And it is as if the cathedral is His throat, His lungs, His voice – Benedicta tu in mulieribus – it rattles through Bucky’s bones.
Incense, rafters, the priest’s voice over his mother’s coffin. Years later, his father’s – the same chant, the same hollow echo. Then Crawford. A coffin draped in a flag, the sour stink of lilies crowding every vase in the house, Mrs. Crawford’s veil trembling as the girls pressed white-knuckled into her sides. There, he clenched his fists and swore he’d never beg for God’s mercy again.
– et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
Blessed fruit, wasted so young.
Bucky’s fists curl, jaw locking until his teeth grind. He can still feel the dirt under his fingernails from when he helped lower the box into the ground. His mouth full of all the prayers he scorned, all the prayers never said, all the penance he never finished. What blessing was it, to bury every last one of them? What fruit, when every future rotted in his hands?
He spits it out like venom. “Prayers don’t save the living.”
“They never did,” Mr. Yesterday replies smoothly. “But neither did you.”
But Bucky can’t shake the sense that it isn’t just Mr. Yesterday answering him now. It feels like God is the one pressing His hand to Bucky’s chest, forcing him to remember every wasted life, every body he consigned to the ground – not as penance, but as proof. Mercy means looking, and now there is nowhere left to look away.
Nevertheless, his throat still burns as he forces words out. “I didn’t save them. I didn’t even try – I didn’t remember enough to try.” His voice fractures on the truth, low and furious. “I wasn’t saving anyone. All I did was bury them, over and over again. And I can’t. I don’t deserve a mercy that wipes the blood off and calls it gone. It doesn’t change what happened, it just lets people feel clean about it.”
Mr. Yesterday’s mouth curves into not quite a smile. “Then what will you have instead? Justice? Retribution?”
Bucky shakes his head, slow, the motion more fatigue than refusal. “If we go down that path, there’s no end to it,” he says. His voice roughens, honest thoughts scraping its way out. “And I’m tired.” A beat. “I just want it to end.”
The man studies him. “At the end, what’s left to believe in?”
Bucky looks past him – past the refracted light spilling through the broken mosaic, shards of red and blue catching in the dust. Beyond that, there’s a gleam of gold, faint but steady, the kind of light that could be sunrise or Heaven or just the world refusing to go dark.
His eyes catch on it, seeing golden sunlight scatter like grace across the ruined floor. His voice comes out thin, almost breaking. “That someone still looks at you after,” he whispers. “Waits for you at the end – knowing what you did.”
For a long moment, Mr. Yesterday says nothing. The silence between them feels almost gentle. Then, very quietly, “Attachment masquerading as grace. Rot that calls itself love.”
Bucky’s mouth twists. “You’d know a lot about rot, wouldn’t you?”
The organ groans somewhere above them – a single cracked note, thin as breath. The sound trembles through the nave, then fades.
Mr. Yesterday’s eyes glint, unreadable. “Then go,” he says quietly. “Find your rot, if that’s what you call mercy.”
The grey begins to split. Light bleeds through the cracks, golden and impossible.
And Bucky breathes once, steady, and steps into it.
***
When Bucky blinks, he’s standing at the Hotel Astor.
It looks exactly as it did that first time: the gleam of the bar, the sweep of brass and glass, the faint haze of cigarette smoke curling beneath the chandeliers. A big band plays somewhere beyond the crowd, the trumpet bright as laughter.
For a moment he can’t move. It’s too real. Too good. A trick, he thinks, it must be a trick.
He’s never believed in Heaven. Not really. But disbelief, he’s learned, doesn’t stop the reflex. Somewhere in him – the part raised on hymns and biblical warnings – there’s still the small flinch of a boy afraid he’s blaspheming just by standing here. And yet the thought comes all the same: maybe he gave the wrong answer in the grey cathedral. Maybe if he’d knelt, prayed, begged for forgiveness and turned his heart back to the Lord, he’d have earned whatever waits for the good believers.
Maybe this is Hell after all – the Lord showing him what it could have been, just before whisking him down into the brimstone.
And then – through the crowd, across the mirrored room – he sees her.
Ginny.
She’s sitting at the bar, one heel hooked over the stool rung, a chessboard open between her and the bartender. Her hair – fuller and longer than he last remembers – falls in curls over her shoulders, catching the gold of the chandeliers. Her mouth is painted a poppy red that looks almost defiant against the soft light.
She’s watching the band more than the board, eyes bright, following the trumpet’s rise and the slow swing of the bass. One hand props up her cheek, the sleeve of a thick knitted cardigan swallowing her fingers, but still she moves the pieces with that same surety, that quick, decisive grace.
Something in his chest cracks open. The crowd hums around him – laughter, clinking glasses, the low pulse of dancing footsteps – and for a second he thinks he might be dreaming of her again, conjuring her the way grief does: out of noise, out of want.
But she’s too real. The shine of her hair, the smear of lipstick on the rim of the glass, the impatient tap of her fingers as she waits for the bartender’s next doomed move – all of it alive, all of it impossible.
Bucky’s moving before he knows it – shouldering through the dancers, the laughter, the clink of glasses – running like the world might vanish if he’s too slow.
And beneath the swell of the big band, something older threads through – a whisper of Latin, faint as breath.
And then the snow crashes through memory: boots on gravel, air sharp with gunpowder, a man forced to his knees in a city he can’t name. No pleading, no bargaining, just a voice, steadier and slower than it should have been, whispering his final words through the cold – Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus…
The Soldier’s finger had already been on the trigger. The prayer freezes him, but he knows not why. For the length of a heartbeat he only listened, letting the man finish his prayer.
And when the last word leaves the man’s mouth, the Soldier pulls the trigger.
The trumpet swells, gold and violent, dragging him back into the light. The crowd comes into focus, the music surges, and the memory burns away like smoke.
He’s running before he can breathe. Through the shimmer of brass and smoke, through the bodies swaying to the band, through the soft spill of laughter that feels worlds away from him.
And then she’s there – closer, closer – so close he can see the dimple of her cheek, the lift of her eyes as she finally notices him, disbelief widening her expression before she even stands.
He doesn’t slow down.
Ginny turns just as he collides with her, the force of it sends the chess pieces scattering across the marble countertop like falling stars. His arms lock around her and he pulls her in, crushing her against him as if he could press the whole world closed again.
For a heartbeat she’s still – stunned as if she’s seen a ghost – and then she’s breathing again, sharp and wet.
Bucky lets out a shaky laugh, choked on fear, on relief. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Her voice cracks, equal parts fury and love. “What the hell am I doing here? What the hell are you doing here? You’re –” she breaks off, hits him once on the chest, “you’re dead! Who said you could die?”
He laughs again, helpless, tears bright in his lashes. “Well, we did say we’d come find each other again.”
She swallows hard. “And you took that literally?”
He shrugs, still clutching her like she might vanish. “Didn’t know what else to do.”
That makes her laugh – soft and cracked and helpless. “God, you idiot,” she whispers, and the words come out like a prayer. Her hands climb to his face, trembling a little as her thumbs trace his cheekbones, his mouth, the line of his jaw, confirming what she can’t believe.
He just stands there, letting her look. Letting her touch.
The band keeps playing – low brass, steady percussion, a sound that feels like the pulse of something too alive to stop. The rest of the room blurs out until there’s only her, her cardigan sleeves brushing his wrists, the red of her mouth trembling between a laugh and another cry.
He leans in, forehead to hers, whispering against her skin, “I missed you.”
“I know,” she breathes, soft and certain, just this side of teasing. “You always do.”
A breath, a flicker, and then he kisses her.
Unrushed, but not exactly gentle – the kind of kiss given when you’d thought you’d never get the chance again. It’s full of everything unsaid, everything undone. His hand cups the back of her head like he’s holding something holy. Her fingers fist in his shirt and she leans into it like she’s falling, falling, falling.
And as he surfaces for breath, skin alight with the nearness of her, he realises that the prayer has followed him here – not as accusation, but as answer.
Pray for us sinners, he thinks. Pray for boys turned weapons, for promises broken and promises kept.
He kisses her again, gentler this time, as if sealing the words between them.
Pray for him, now – here, at the hour of his death.
***
The bartender clears his throat politely. Neither of them moves. After a beat, he sidesteps the chaos they made, gathers the fallen chess pieces, and begins setting the board back up as if nothing extraordinary just happened. He replaces her glass with a fresh one, pours another for Bucky, and retreats with the quiet discretion of someone who’s seen stranger miracles than this.
They sit side by side, not touching but not apart, the air between them soft with something that feels like aftermath.
Ginny sets her glass down, turning toward him. “You look like you were expecting something else.”
Bucky huffs a laugh, thin and broken. “I didn’t expect anything. Not after… all of it.” He gestures vaguely – to the years, the names, the war. “I thought if I made it anywhere, it wouldn’t be like here.”
Her expression softens. “You didn’t think I’d wait for you?”
Three words, one question; chasing the two of them back and forth across continents, till the end of time. He had pocketed that promise like a relic, held it close even when he couldn’t name it.
He looks down at his glass. “But wasn’t that before? I don’t think that you would’ve wanted to wait, after, y’know.”
Ginny doesn’t argue. She only covers his hand with hers, lighter than first snow fall. “You asked. I said yes. That’s all it takes.”
He lets out a quiet breath, the corner of his mouth tugging upward. “It sounds simple when you say it.”
Ginny’s thumb traces the line of his knuckles. “It wasn’t simple. But it was true.”
He studies her hand over his – the warmth of it, the steadiness. “You still think that’s enough?”
That earns a real laugh from her – soft, startled, a little broken. “It has to be,” she starts. “I just –” she shakes her head. “You were always the one showing me mercy first, you know. I was all alone. You could’ve left me. But you let me slip away, again and again. Never finishing what they told you to do.”
She takes a fortifying sip of her drink. “You even let me put a bullet in myself instead of dragging me back. I used to think that if I could not have your mercy, I could appeal to pity. Maybe it was. Maybe it was both.”
Bucky shakes his head. “That wasn’t mercy. I didn’t know what it was. I just couldn’t –” he stops, searching for words, “I couldn’t be the thing they made me be when you were looking at me like that.”
“I’m sorry,” she adds quietly. “Not for doing it – I’d do it again. It was the only way and I wanted it to be you. But I know what it costs to watch. I should probably say sorry for that.”
His jaw tightens. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“I know,” she murmurs. “But I’m saying it anyway.”
For a moment they sit in it – the weight, the years, the impossible gentleness of this strange reprieve.
He’s quiet for a long time after she finishes, tracing the condensation on his glass. When he finally speaks, his voice is low, almost apologetic.
“You always were better at this than me,” he says. “Looking. Staying. Every time I tried, I ended up running.”
She shakes her head, smiling faintly. “You never really ran. You always looked back.”
He huffs a small, uneven laugh. “Didn’t do me much good.”
“It did,” she says softly. “It’s why I waited.”
He glances at her, the faintest crease between his brows. “Waited for what?”
“For you to stop looking away.”
The words land quiet but sure. They sit between them like something fragile and real. He looks at her then, really looks – the soft glow on her skin, the small line between her brows, the freckles catching the light. “You’re not afraid?” he asks.
She meets his gaze, steady. “Of what?”
“Of what I was. What I did.”
“I was there, remember?” she says. “Mercy’s not pretending it didn’t happen. It’s looking right at it and staying anyway.”
He swallows hard. “You make it sound easy.”
“It isn’t.” Her voice wavers, just a little. “But it’s the only way it means anything.”
Something in him loosens – some old knot unspooling in his chest. He leans back, the air leaving him slow, as if his body is only just remembering how to rest.
The bar empties out, the chandelier light softens into candleflame. But as the first notes lift into the air, the world around them begins to loosen. The tables dissolve into shadow, the parquet floor stretches wide, the ceiling vaults higher until it could be sky.
The opening bars of a slow tune drift across the space – the softest lift of strings, the lazy hush of a trumpet. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.
Ginny perks up, her grey-green eyes luminescent in the light. “You remember this one?” she asks, gently teasing. “The one on the radio when we were hiding out in that shitty bar – before everything went to hell?”
Bucky laughs, shaking his head. “How could I forget?”
She nudges him with her shoulder. “So you still know the words to every love song, or did you finally let that habit die with you?”
He still can’t carry a tune to save his life, but to his quiet relief, he can still pick out a perfect moment when it arises. He tilts his head, eyes crinkling with a smile, and mouths the opening refrain: When two lovers meet in Mayfair, so the legends tell, songbirds sing and winter turns to spring…
Her grin matches his as she hums the next line “Every winding street in Mayfair falls beneath the spell, I know such enchantment can be, 'Cause it happened one evening to me…”
He looks at her – really looks – and something young and bright flickers through his exhaustion. “And there’s still another thing I didn’t forget,” he says quietly, standing and holding out his hand. “Dance with me, Agent Gimlet.”
She arches an eyebrow, pretending to consider. “You’ll never let that stupid nickname die,” she sighs faux dramatically, and then she slips her hand into his. “Guess I could manage one more, Agent Bucky.”
The moment her fingers lace with his, the bar disappears. They are standing in a ballroom, in a cathedral, in a golden field – all of it and none of it, shimmering and infinite. The music folds around them like a tide, steady and sure.
He places his hand at her waist, and she leans into him as though she has always belonged there. They sway, slow and certain, as though time itself has stepped aside to give them room.
For a long moment neither of them speak. The air hums with brass and heartbeat. Then, quietly, Bucky asks, “Is this heaven?”
Ginny. looks up at him, her eyes bright in the starlight. “Maybe. Maybe not.” Her smile curves, small and private. “But what does it matter? You and I are here now.”
And her laugh – low, soft, almost disbelieving – feels like something that belongs only to him.
He shakes his head, a breath of a laugh escaping. “You can’t mean that.”
“I do,” she says, eyes steady on his.
He tries to smile, but his voice breaks around it. “You always did know how to make a place feel like one.”
“It’s heaven to me,” she says simply. “Because you’re finally here.”
He closes his eyes, a breath shuddering out of him, and the years pass through him like light through glass – fists, rifles, knives, every trigger he ever pulled – until all of it burns away. Because now and forevermore there is only this; her cheek resting at his shoulder, her smile tilting against his jaw, her body not a mission or a memory but presence.
The chandeliers scatter into stars overhead. The parquet melts into starlight and gold. The song winds on, a circle without end, and still they move together, close as breath.
And this, he thinks, this is what mercy looks like.
Not God, not prayer, not absolution.
Just the endless sway of her in his arms, the courage to look and never turn away.
They dance until the universe itself runs out of ways to measure time.
They dance until there is nothing left to end.
They dance for the rest of eternity.
“Hail, Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.”
DIVIDER CREDIT: @/strangergraphics-archive
WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO ONES EVER WRITTEN BUCKY/GINNY FANFICTION????
Bucky and Ginny are so peraltiago to me
