Lost + Found [Bucky Barnes] ✓

Chapter 48

Everything hurts.

My head, my stomach, my hands, my throat. It feels like I was run over by a semi-truck then dumped off the top of a mountain and covered in ten feet of concrete. Every muscle hurts, every cell - hell, I think even my hair hurts at this point. I can feel the cold air brushing over the bare skin of my arms sending a chill down my spine, but I'm unwilling to open my eyes.

I don't want to see anything. I don't want to see anyone.

I just want him.

God, that thought hits me like a sledgehammer to the ribcage.

Him. Bucky. James Buchanan Barnes.

The man I started falling in love with from the very moment I overheard Steve talking to him when he was still frozen in Wakanda. I never got to tell him how I felt. We never got to go on a real date. Now we never will.

I've got to be honest, part of me wishes I could take this whole month back. Erase the stress, erase the death, erase the pain and the heartache, but...I can't. I can't take it back, and even if I could...I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't change meeting him.

A shuffling noise pulls me from my thoughts, and I debate whether or not I should feign unconsciousness or open my eyes to whoever is intruding on my wallowing session. As much as I want to force myself back to sleep, I doubt it will come, so I take a deep breath and allow my eyelids to flutter open and accept the light.

Everything is blurry at first, a smattering of light and colors blended together in front of my face until I blink it back into focus. Next to me, Steve Rogers is sitting on an armchair with a book open in his lap. Bandages cover the right side of his body, his face decorated with shiny pink burns that certainly weren't there before.

My sister did that.

It takes him a minute to notice that I'm awake, and when he does he smiles slowly at me. The book claps shut, dust particles swirling in the air above it, and he tucks it on the floor next to his feet.

We stare at each other in silence for what seems like an eternity. Every heartbeat pounds against my chest, bruising my already torn and tattered body from the inside out, and the silence ringing in my ears is deafening. I can't take it anymore. I can't.

"Chloe..." Steve's voice is a low rumble in his chest, the words sticking to his throat as he tries to force them out. "Um..."

I grimace, blinking back tears, "Just say it, Steve."

"Okay," he exhales. "Artemis is dead."

Oh god. Oh my god, no. Not my sister. A shaky hand covers my mouth as tears begin to well up in the corners of my eyes, and I barely manage to suffocate a sob that slips out of my mouth. She's gone, the little girl I helped raise. The young woman who had become one of my best friends, my closest confidantes. She's gone because of me. God, I hate myself for it even more because I don't want to cry for her. I don't want to mourn the loss of the sister I watched murder countless innocents. She killed my colleagues and patients at the nursing home. She nearly killed Mara. She killed...

"Bucky, um..." Steve clenches his fist, staring a hole at the ground in front of his feet like he wishes it could open up and swallow him whole.

Someone clears his throat, and my head whirls around to face the other occupant of the room. The person I didn't notice standing in the corner steps out of the shadows, a smirk decorating his face.

"What Captain Sad Pants over here is trying to say, my dear, is that your boyfriend is alive," Tony Stark says, rolling his eyes.

I gasp, "What?"

"Yep," Stark stuffs his hands in his pockets, kicking an imaginary dust bunny away from the floor as he steps forward. "He survived."

Shaking my head, I try to speak but my words sound more like a croak, "H-how?"

"You, um..." Steve rubs his hands together nervously, "You healed him."

Stark snorts, "Healed him? You basically brought him back from the dead. He had four rounds put into his chest, including one straight to the heart, but he walked away without a scratch on him."

"So," I look between the two of them. "Where is he?"

That's when it gets quiet again, both of them staring at the floor before exchanging veiled looks. Neither of them wants to speak, like they're afraid that the words will break me, and I furrow my eyebrows at them. What can be so bad? If Bucky's alive, that's all that matters. I don't want to waste anymore time when I could be telling him how I feel, starting fresh, moving past this horrific experience with my sister.

Steve's blue eyes are brimming with sadness as he sucks in a deep breath.

"He's gone, Chloe. He left."