A/N: Apropos of nothing, this is a quick one-shot based on an idea I saw circling Tumblr and now can't find the post for. How does Steve tell the Commandos about Bucky's death? (Ends on a lighter note than one might expect)

(I didn't proof this one all THAT hard, because I tossed it together in a couple of hours while waiting for my desktop to finish doing a backup. More in depth stuff will probably be written later on.)

Steve is colder than he's ever been by the time the train screeches reluctantly to a halt. He drags himself slowly back inside as the cold metal beneath him shifts and jolts, like the death-throes of an angry serpent. The icy wind burns raw, tattered jags over little stretches of exposed skin in ways it never quite has before - even during brutal Brooklyn winters in the rat-eaten slums of his childhood. The world is spinning out of control and he has to hold onto something to keep his feet as he steps back onto the solid floor of the train car. His stomach turns.
With a reluctant wail, the train grinds to a stop and the world hangs still and saturated with dread and loss.

He's fighting for every breath; every inhalation full of the sharp, vicious chill that stings in his lungs and claws its way out on the exhale. He hasn't struggled so hard to catch his breath since before the serum he thinks, turning numbly to retrieve the discarded shield and collect his now-dented helmet. A cloud of icy mist clings to his skin, freezing against him, like a sheen of frigid sweat; climbing down from the metal framed monster that stands silently now, half wrecked along the side of his car. His feet crunch down into a hard-packed layer of snow, sinking up to the ankles in the bitterly cold white crust. From the north, a hard wind scatters the snow like dust around him, frosting him in tiny diamonds. Flakes sting against his face as he stands, staring into the abyss that has just swallowed his best friend. Like tiny knives against his skin: cold, sharp, and merciless.
It fits.

Jones reappears from the front of the train, efficient as ever, with Zola in custody. He marches the little man forward in silence, glancing askance at the Captain as he passes.

Where's Barnes?

The Captain doesn't quite answer.

"I'm forming a search party. I'm going down there once we regroup." Rogers says, half to himself, half to Jones. His eyes are fixed downward, trying to scour the valley floor despite the whirling snow.

Jones says nothing, but nods and keeps moving.

Dernier claps his hands, delighted and relieved, when he spots the others approaching. Another successful mission. Prisoner in tow. Life is good.

He looks pleased for a moment, then passes his gaze over the returning Commandos, and his face clouds. Captain Rogers walks like he's in a funeral procession, and Jones's posture is too tight and drawn, wrong for the end of a successful mission. ...Worse, he can't seem to spot the dark-blue jacket of the third man in the party, bobbing through the snow.
Behind him Dugan's voice echoes what all of them are thinking.

"Where's Jimmy?"

Dernier and Fallsworth exchange a look before Dugan is loping across the brittle snow to meet their returning teammates. He moves with surprising nimbleness for such a large man, kicking up huge clouds of powder that swirl in his wake with the ever rising wind.
Dernier's tightly pressed lips tip down and his expression darkens noticeably. A cold wind nips at the edges of his coat as he shrugs deeper into it.

"You don't… you don't think-?" Fallsworth hesitates.
Dernier says nothing.

In the distance, Jones answers Dugan's approach with a sharp shake of his head, jerking his chin towards the Captain as he steadily pushes his prisoner on. The motion dislodges a flutter of half-melted snow and a small dam of ice from his cap, effectively shuttering his face from view.

The others can't hear the conversation between them, when Dugan reaches the slow-moving Captain - but from the slump of Rogers' shoulders and the suddenly matching slump of Dugan's, the news must be bad.

Zola has begun shouting something in rapidly rising German, something rude if his body language is any indication, as the two of them get closer. Fallsworth picks up on the Captain's name sprinkled in there somewhere, and what might be 'pig', if he's remembering the language correctly.
Jones' expression is neutral, but he doesn't hesitate to bash the spectacled man straight across the face with his rifle-butt the next instant.
Zola stays on his feet, though just barely, and immediately falls quiet, nursing a swiftly purpling cheek. He appears thoroughly cowed. The doctor is miserable, cold, and dejected.
Fallsworth feels a brief flicker of spiteful pleasure at that thought. Serves the bloody bastard right.

Morita remains where he is near the back of the camp, half buried under a tarp, swearing under his breath and trying to get HQ on the radio, with limited success. The snow and ice are interfering with the equipment.

"What's happened? Where the bloody hell is Barnes?" Fallsworth demands under his breath, feeling taut as a live-wire as he moves forward to assist Jones with their newly acquired guest. Whatever it is, he knows it's bad. Something has gone wrong. The question is: what?

Jones sighs.
"Lost him." is all he says.
Fallsworth nods, feeling a frigid weight settling into his guts when his fears are confirmed. He says nothing more.

They bind their prisoner in silence. Jones shoves a dirty rag into Zola's mouth as a gag almost immediately, and doesn't seem much to be bothered with gentle treatment. He's the only one among them that's fluent in German, so he must have taken great exception to whatever rant Zola had gone off on. Fallsworth choses not to comment on it.
The fat man, spectacles still askew on his nose, wisely doesn't protest either. He sits where he's pushed, in several inches of snow, and shivers against the wind.

There had been others, briefly - also captured. As usual, they had managed to kill themselves with a cyanide capsule before they could be stopped. None of the Commandos consider it much of a loss when this happens, aside from the potential information to be gained in questioning them. These men are bastards in the worst sense. Monsters in human guise. They ought to be removed from the world, one way or the other. If they see themselves out? Well, no complaints there.
Only Zola, for whatever reason, had not struggled to die.

"Cap has the details." Jones continues after a lengthy silence, sounding like he's just aged 20 years in the last few minutes. "Wants to form a search party, but…" Jones glances back over his shoulder at the sheer canyon drop below the tracks. It has to be 300 feet down, lined with jagged outcroppings of unforgiving stone, and already half obscured by driving winds. Snow rises like mist from the mouth, blowing hard into their faces until they turn away.
Fallsworth raises an eyebrow as he finishes trussing their prisoner like a Christmas goose. Jones just shrugs, letting his friend work, looking weary as hell.
"I didn't want to argue with him." he says in answer to the unasked question.

They shift away from the prisoner -weapons trained on him to discourage any stupid thoughts of resistance- just as Morita emerges from the half-snowed-under tarp to inform them that he's contacted HQ for extraction. He glances at the others' faces - then at Dugan and Rogers, who are just now reaching the edge of camp. He has clearly noticed that one familiar face is missing.
His eyes flick to the huddled prisoner, the only other human in sight, then back. To the train in the distance. They can see him quickly doing the math.
"Oh son of a bitch- " He breathes, glancing back at Zola in disbelief. "They didn't get- No way..."
A glance at their Captain's face confirms his fears. Despite the cold, he pulls his fraying stocking cap from his head and holds it respectfully to his chest. "Poor Barnes…"

Dernier has joined them now, though Dugan and Steve still stand in quiet, dejected conversation off to one side of the camp. Dugan is shaking his head, and Steve is gesturing over his shoulder at the ravine.

"Is there…" Dernier hesitates, struggling for a delicate way to phrase this with his sometimes choppy English. "Is there anything to bury?"

"No." Jones looks pinched, but he shakes his head firmly. "Not even tags. I asked on the way back."

The four of them falls silent as their commanding officer finally joins them, Dugan uncharacteristically silent on his heels.

"I guess you know by now that we lost a man out there." Rogers begins, trying his best to use his Captain America voice. It shakes, despite his best efforts. None of them comment.
"Bucky… Sgt. Barnes… he fell from the train during the firefight. I wasn't able to catch him in time." There's a long uncomfortable silence where it looks like Steve may start to cry, but he soldiers on in a moment or two.
"There's a chance we can still find-" He doesn't say the body. Can't say that. That means he's giving up, and like hell he's giving up on Bucky. "-find him." he says instead. "I won't order any of you to do this… I know it's dangerous and the chances of success are small, but… I'm going down there to look for him. I'd welcome anyone who wants to help me."

For a moment, they can all see him, the one they've heard so much about: the kid who became the legend. For all his height and bulk, they can suddenly see the tiny asthmatic firecracker with too much determination and not enough to back it up. The one who never gives up.
So this is what Barnes was always on about… Fallsworth reflects. He draws himself up to a crisp attention.
"I'm with you. Of course I'm with you, Captain."

"Me too."
Dugan sounds half deflated, but he's made of steel. It's no secret he was close with Barnes. Thought of him like a little brother even before the isolation ward. After that… well the others had long suspected he'd take a bullet for Sgt. Barnes if asked. Maybe this is being asked.

"Say the word." Jones stands with crossed arms. He hasn't set down his rifle yet, and he's made no move to settle in or rest since they returned. He's been waiting for the call.

"Lead on." Dernier is already readying a knapsack as they speak. His hands never still.

"You know the drill. You lead, we follow." Morita says. He sounds almost reproachful when he adds: "Especially for one of our own, Cap."
His hat is back on his head, and he's retrieved his gun from somewhere.
"But someone has to stay here and watch this bastard." He reminds them, jerking his head towards the dejected little Swiss man, just to their left, huddled in the blowing snow. "Draw straws?"

In the end, Dugan, Jones, and Morita go. Fallsworth and Dernier stay behind. Neither is particularly happy about it, but sometimes necessity is a bitch. The short straws had to go to someone.

They watch the Captain and the others march into the snow and vanish cautiously over the rim of the cliff. They wait. Try to hope. Try to resist the urge to take out their nerves on the prisoner.

They wait, and wait, and wait.

Roughly 24 hours later, the others return without the remains of Bucky Barnes, and barely in time to meet the extraction team.

There is no body to recover... though in one wind-sheltered place far below the tracks, there is a small splash of crimson on the snow and the fragmented remains of a chain with a set of damaged dog-tags still clinging to it, wrapped around a frozen bush. They appear to have been ripped off in passing. The four of them search the stretch of rock around this relentlessly, but there is nothing more to find.
Squinting against the rising wind, Rogers clutches the bent metal tags like they were made of glass, something immeasurably broken in his face, before quietly tucking them away into a pocket without a word. They aren't spoken of again.

Steve tries not to stare at the slightly melted scarlet ice before he turns and presses on. They move, serpentine, down the mountainside. Slowly combing the terrain. The lack of progress is near maddening.

The four of them search the area for hours, battling the weather and scouring the canyon floor, but a fierce storm has set in, and a bitter snow-laden wind is blowing over them, freezing in their hair and numbing their faces. The temperature is steadily dropping and they are running out of time. Visibility is practically nil.
No further clues present themselves.

Steve calls off the search after another two hours have passed.
Sgt. Barnes has apparently vanished from the face of the earth.

There is a war on, and Bucky is certainly dead. Even if the fall didn't do him in, exposure will have finished the job by now. Steve has no real choice but to admit that there's no further hope of finding him alive... and there's no point in continuing to risk the rest of the men's lives in the vain hopes of recovering what remains of a corpse.

There is no body here to find, but there may be three new ones in its place if he doesn't get his men out of here and up to the extraction point soon. He highly doubts the Commandos would be left behind - he's too valuable to the war effort for that- but every moment they stay, the weather worsens and the danger they're in grows.
He has to put aside his own grief and focus on this. On the lives at stake. He knows Bucky would understand, but he hates himself no less for it.

Heart like lead in his chest, he leads the weary Commandos back up the ravine and through the snow, arriving just in time for the rendezvous with transport. He ignores the agents' questions and climbs aboard without a word. After a few moments, they stop asking and leave him be.

A small angry voice inside of him roars with vicious approval when Zola shrinks away from him as he passes. He tells himself he doesn't want to kill Zola, even after all that's happened. Tells himself that Zola, even if he's a cowardly bastard, isn't the villain here. That they need the information that the scientist possesses far too much to let petty vengeance get in the way. Tell himself that it's just grief, and it will pass. That Bucky wouldn't want him to spill any more blood.
… He tells himself this... but he doesn't believe it.

When their prisoner is separated from the Commandos upon arrival in a very changed London, Steve finds himself wandering bombed out streets, and makes his way to the wreckage of the bar where this began. The place he stood when he first asked Bucky to walk back into hell beside him. The place where he condemned his best friend to an early grave.
There's a metaphor in this. He's just can't quite put his finger on what it is.

He sits down at the last remaining intact table in the place, drags a surviving chair to it, and settles in with a bottle of salvaged booze and two glasses. Fills them and drinks. And drinks, and drinks, and cries, and unravels, and marvels at how supremely unfair it is that he can't feel the liquor when he needs it so badly.
The others stay away. They respect the need for private grief. They have their own to attend to.

Peggy is the one who finds him, hours later, red eyed, destroyed, and painfully sober. Rewinding the fall, over and over and over and over. He sees it unfolding before his eyes even as he listens to her trying to tell him it's not his fault. Hears the raw fear in Bucky's screams in every little silence, when she waits for him to speak.
It hardens his resolve and drags him up and out of the darkness just enough. His work isn't done yet. HYDRA has to pay.

He blinks and sees Bucky cartwheeling through the air, screaming as he strains to reach out for a hand, a ledge… anything… until he vanishes from view. The sight… the frantic screaming… it replays on constant loop inside his skull, over and over and over. Just like he will see it in his nightmares that night.
Just like he will see it every night for the next two weeks.
Just like he will hear it until the ice drags him under and he sleeps, thinking that finally, finally, he's done his bit. He's paid his due, and now he'll finally be with his best friend again.

Just like when he awakes, feeling cheated, in a new millenium, very much alive, and very much adrift.
Just like he will see it every time he closes his eyes from the first time they open in this strange new world.

Just like he will hear it, clear and awful, the first time the man with the metal arm -the assassin- turns to face him; suddenly unmasked, and the past is suddenly staring, empty-eyed and cold, back at him.
He drowns in the memory, and suddenly it's 1945 and he's watching his best friend die, all over again.
He swears to himself then and there that he'll die himself, and gladly, before he lets Bucky slip away again.

It's all just the way he will see it, just the way he will hear it, over and over and over and over again until the first time he hears Bucky's voice again -real and present- this time from the doorway of his room. Steve turning from where he's just jerked bolt upright and probably screaming in bed, haunted with the same nightmare as always.

Grab my hand!
Bucky! No!

It's that voice that cuts through all else, laden with worry, with precious recognition. It stops the playback, at least for now, with: "Steve? You ok?"

And just like that, the breath rushes out of him, and the war is over. Bucky came back. A little the worse for wear, but it's definitely him.
And that's when life honestly begins again.

"Yeah, Bucky." He says softly, eyes stinging, though his smile is threatening to crack his face in half. "Yeah."