Just another warning. Major Winter Soldier Spoilers.

The Soldier watches the Man fall.

He falls perfectly, heedless of the wind, flat on his back. The Man's face is empty and bruised as he splashes into the water. Soldier knows him.

The Soldier doesn't recognize anyone. They are strangers. He only sees features that move without pattern. They order him to kill, and he does. He is completely alone.

But he knows him.

The Man called him Bucky. James. James and Bucky, and both scratch at the walls of the Soldier's mind. It is a distinct twinge in the recesses of his memory. It is painful. He feels pain.

Pain.

Wake up. The Man keeps sinking. He grows blurry.

There is a growing swell of emotion rising in the Soldier's chest. It feels like crashing through ice during the spring. He's done that. Soldier has done that. He can't lose this. He watches the Man sink into the water and he realizes that he cannot lose him.

He throws himself from the helicarrier, careens through the debris in a smooth dive.

The Soldier finds the Man five feet below the surface, and his eyes are closed and he won't breathe. Soldier's heart starts pounding. He wraps his metal arm around the Man, clenches him tightly to his chest. He's done that before. When they break into the open air, the Man slumps over the Soldier's shoulder. There is an aching silence in his left ear. When he looks down, the blonde hair at the base of the Man's skull has a distinct curve. The Soldier's breath hitches.

He starts swimming towards the river bank. He has to use his metal arm to keep the Man against him (and he has to use three fingers to keep the Man's head tipped against his neck because heads are important and he must protect this one). With his weak, human arm, he slowly advances them towards the shore. Once he reaches the point where he can stand on the bottom of the river, he discovers that the fastest way to land will have to be dragging the Man. He's heavy.

The Soldier sets the Man on the sand and drops to his knees beside him. The Man's not breathing.

He's not breathing.

The Soldier grabs the ridiculous suit at the Man's chest and crumples it in his hands. He shakes him.

Nothing.

"I know you," he growls. He leans closer to the Man's face. He is almost inhumanely flawless, the Soldier notes. Long eyelashes (devastatingly blue eyes, he knows, heartbreaker eyes), full lips, pale skin. One look at the those baby blues and they'll fall at your feet, buddy.

The Man still won't breathe. The Soldier shakes him harder. "I know you," he yells, voice broken with gravel. The Soldier's chest aches furiously, terribly, indescribably painfully, with the lack of air. The Man's skin drains gray.

"Steve!"

Steve. Steve Rogers. Steven Rogers. 1918. Born at the dusk of the Great War. Raised at the dawn of World War II. Dead by the end of it.

Steve laughs with his whole body, that's what makes him so damn infectious. His shoulders shake and his head falls back and his eyes turn into half-crescent moons of dark eyelashes and good humor. Bucky growls that it's not funny, you punk. Steve laughs harder, like every ounce of happiness was just shoved into his smile, and Bucky tosses him over his shoulder and spins him around because Steve's too small to be such a pain and because Steve pretends to hate it and because Steve just laughs more.

"Steve!" He pulls him halfway up from the ground. Steve's head lolls back. "I know you!" he thunders. "You said until the end of the line!"

This is not the end of the line. Lines don't end. They go on forever, James knows that.

Steve, lit up by fire. Stupidly handsome. Steve saving Bucky. Steve and the way his face creases when he says, "It's okay."

Steve's eyelashes are dangerously dark against the hollows of his eyes; his throat is silent and empty from where James stares at it, wills it to move. James shuffles closer, and he shifts Steve's heavy and limp body into his arms with one exhausted grunt. He presses his hand against where Steve's heart is and feels a slow, weakening throb against his palm.

"Jesus Christ, Steve, I almost killed you!" Bucky yells. Steve's quiet and smiling with his lips closed like he always does. He gazes, steady and sure, at Bucky.

"But you didn't, so it's okay. It's all okay, Bucky," he says.

"I almost shot you!" Bucky pulls at his hair.

"But you didn't," Steve soothes. He's quiet and shaking his head and smiling that infuriatingly calm smile at Bucky. "It's all okay," he says, and his voice feels like getting dipped in holy water, like Bucky was religious and holy water cleansed people of their sins. "It's okay," Steve says.

"Steve, Steve, no," he says. James feels like he's running out of breath. "You can't die. I know you. You don't die, not this way. You don't die."

A horrific agony bursts across Bucky's chest.

He yells, an animal sound of pain and anger and terror, and shakes Steve again. An uncomfortable burning wells in Bucky's eyes, and his heart wrenches with the deep, twisting pain that there are tears sitting on his eyelids. He pulls Steve closer, like he could make him melt through his chest, and presses his forehead against Steve's. "I said not without you. I said that I wasn't going anywhere, not, without, you," he emphasizes. Bucky glances at the river and calculates how long it'll take for him to drown. Bucky closes his eyes. "Not without you."

A gurgle sounds from Steve's mouth. Bucky lifts his head, watches a weak cough make Steve's throat shiver. He tracks the movement to his jaw, and his bones shatter with relief as Steve feebly dribbles water between his lips. James sits up straight, suddenly alert, and shifts Steve so he can cough easier. He spits up dirty river water down James's shoulder. He's boneless and entirely dependent on James to keep him upright. The Soldier's hands ache with their mission as he holds Steve against his chest.

Bucky fights it back and surrenders to his desire to wrap both arms around Steve's back and feel his lungs shudder against his own. He listens to Steve wheeze in his ear.

That's a problem. He releases his grip and lays Steve on the inclined shore. The raspy, perilously weak gasps of air struggling through Steve's lungs heighten the worry thrumming through James's veins.

His eyes catch on the blood staining Steve's shoulder, his stomach, creating a river of red from where his thigh is against the sand. Too much. He doesn't know how to get the suit off, so he cuts it down the middle. He pulls it from Steve's belt and slides his arms out and then tosses it to the side. Steve's wearing a black undershirt, though tattered with holes, that sticks to his body. James rips off the sleeve from his uninjured arm and ties it around the knife wound on his shoulder.

Blood pulses out of Steve's stomach in waves, and a sickly dread swirls in Bucky's stomach. He presses both hands against the bullet hole. The bullet hole he put there. He shot Steve, watched him slide down the helicarrier, watched him lose consciousness as he fell in midair, watched him almost drown.

"You need to leave."

The red-headed woman from before emerges from the woods. Her eyes flare when they land on the body underneath James. She drops to her knees, hands fluttering helplessly in the air over all the blood.

"Shit, Steve," she says. "Shit." She pushes her hand under Steve's jaw, probes the wounds that are killing him. She dares to lift James's fingers and groan at the dark red mess beneath them. She replaces his hand with her own. "You need to go," she says. "I don't know who you are right now but—."

"I know him," James says.

Her eyes are green and piercing and familiar when they meet his. "I figured. I cannot restrain you. I'm going to assume that you saved his life, because that's what we need to have happened. You have to go. The CIA is going to kill you if they find you here."

James blinks. "I know you, too."

The woman closes her eyes, features tight with emotion, before she shakes her head. "You might. Now go. You have to go. Steve desperately wants you to live, and you desperately want Steve. Am I correct?"

He nods. James watches her free hand card through Steve's hair, pull open his eyelids, and finally cradle his cheek. She's gentle.

"So you have to go. I promise he'll live," she smirks, strokes the fragile bruise under Steve's right eye, "he's stubborn like that."

Bucky skin rattles with barely restrained emotion. He surges forward and grabs Steve's hand. His fingers are limp and cold, but they are the same fingers that used to draw Bucky's face seventy years ago. They are the same fingers that twitched when Steve slept next to Bucky on the couch. He used to do that all time, fall asleep on the couch with his hand dangling over Bucky's shoulder from where Bucky was listening to the radio on the floor. They were draped with sunlight, then.

Bucky presses his lips to Steve's knuckles and flees.

He looks back once.

Steve's coughing again, wheezing and panicked as he tries to expel the leftover water in his lungs. The wo—Natalia—leans over his face and shushes him. Her eyes are worried and warm with affection. She holds his temple. "Shh, it's okay. You're okay, Steve. Just let it come out. It's okay."

James—Bucky—turns away.

"It'll all be okay, Buck," Steve says, "you just gotta believe that it'll all be okay."

Bucky shakes his head and asks, "How can you believe that all the time?"

Steve punches Bucky in the shoulder. "No choice, Bucky. You always said that we were the champs of starting over. Because even when we had nothing, we had each other. And that means we gotta fight to start over, because we promised each other we would."

"You mean that?" Bucky asks. Dumbly.

"'Til the end of the line," Steve says. "You promised."

Bucky stares at the determinedly hopeful look glinting in Steve's eyes. They were always so damn blue. "Of course I promised. You and me. Always."

This is the ending the fangirl in me desperately wanted. Although, the ending I received wasn't half bad as far as whump and feelings go. (Basically I sobbed so quietly that I started hiccuping because of it.) I mostly cried through the whole movie. The entire thing.

It was, far and away, my favorite Marvel movie to date. Obviously I'm biased because STEVE but still.

Anyways. As far as this fic goes, tried to illustrate the grinding that comes with Bucky flipping between two-three personalities. And I had issues with him walking away after he pulled Steve onto the beach because getting shot in the stomach? Lots of blood. Lots of almost-dying.

Obviously my version on the Winter Soldier is that he's a lot closer to Bucky Barnes than is portrayed in the movie, and that's okay. I'm submitting to my feeble desires. ^_^

I might write another fic in which the Winter Soldier doesn't have a clue why he's trying to protect Captain America, but he's doing it anyway. Alas, review if you'd like!