Chapter Text
It wasn’t darkness.
It wasn’t light.
It wasn’t silence, or noise.
It was worse.
A nameless void. An absence so vast it became a presence. A devouring immensity where the mind had no bearings, no borders, where thoughts splintered like broken bones.
He floated—or was he falling?—through a space without space, a time without time. Here, up and down didn’t exist. Here, the word exist had no meaning. His memories decayed like flesh eaten away by invisible insects; even his name dissolved, letter by letter, until it was nothing but a strangled whisper lost in the dark.
Had he ever truly existed at all…?
The cold didn’t bite, it consumed. It erased. His thoughts cracked beneath a pressure no body could survive, yet he no longer had a body to break. He was nothing but bare consciousness, scattered, dismembered, dragged toward an endless, bottomless infinity.
And within that tide of nothingness, other resonances drifted.
Not voices. Not sounds.
But wounds. Fractures. Crawling echoes that slithered beneath a skin he no longer had, pulsing through a heart that was nothing but memory.
Was he the storm that had caused this chaos?
Or a victim swept up in its wake?
Everything blurred. Everything vanished.
A dead cosmos without stars. An ocean of screaming silence. A chasm without an edge.
And yet, within that chaos, something stirred.
A vibration. Faint, but indestructible. A beat that wasn’t his own, a foreign resonance, like a wave cutting through the eternal night, like a shooting star streaking across the void. He felt it before he understood it.
It was a presence. Not a voice, not an image, but an echo. A drifting breath, an unseen soul behind the veil between dream and reality.
And then instinct exploded, brutal, unstoppable. He clung to it like a drowning man grabbing at the smallest plank, like a heart lunging toward a pulse to remember how to beat, to stay alive. It felt like the most natural thing in the world: to cling to this other essence in order to exist.
He gripped, didn’t let go, pulled, anchored himself with all the scattered strength he still had, though he no longer possessed a body. And for the first time since he had drifted into this place, something shifted.
A breath.
A tension.
A thread stretched taut between two consciousnesses in the vastness of the cosmos.
Relief flooded him, absolute. The terror of the void began to fade. He wasn’t alone anymore. He wasn’t nothing anymore. He was bound to that essence, the one that made his heart beat again.
And in that impossible resonance, the echo took root, entwined with the other.
Then came a hum. At first faint, like a filament trembling through the abyss. An unreal tingling that shouldn’t have existed in a place where nothing did.
A silent rumble, deep, almost organic. The sensation of awakening, of flesh he didn’t have, of breath that no longer existed. As if the void itself were cracking around him, as if something had seized him at the edge of dissolution and was pulling him toward somewhere else.
Worse? Better? He didn’t know. There was only the void, the deafening silence, and then—
He opened his eyes.
His cheek was pressed against damp earth. The smell of crushed grass and sun-warmed dust. Blinding light tearing at his eyelids. The rustle of leaves in the wind. The shrill, almost unreal song of birds.
Everything was too vivid, too loud, too alive.
He gasped, dragging in air like a drowning man breaking the surface after an endless dive. His lungs filled in a painful spasm, his whole body shaking from the shock of being a body again. Panic surged. His hands slammed against the ground, flesh and metal fingers trembling, digging into the soil as if he might slip away once more.
He stayed on his knees, heart hammering, head spinning, heavy, utterly disoriented. His throat burned, rough and dry, as if he hadn’t spoken, shouted, or breathed in an eternity.
What’s happening…? Where was he…?
His dazzled eyes caught only fragments, flashes of color and shape, like light refracted through a cracked kaleidoscope. He staggered, then dropped back onto his heels, hands gripping his skull as if to keep it from splitting apart.
He didn’t remember.
No—he did.
Memory crashed back in brutal waves. The battle. The deafening roar of weapons. The metallic tang of blood and sweat. The screams. The fields of Wakanda. Thanos’s army. The Infinity Stones. And then, that gesture.
That snap.
He remembered the tremor in the air, his hand crumbling to dust. Flesh, bone, breath, disintegrating into a whirlwind of ashes. Chaos, but no pain.
He had vanished.
Dissolved.
Dead.
Dead...?
And yet—he was back…?
An image stabbed through the fog, Steve. Standing before him, panic in his eyes, his arm outstretched as Bucky dissolved.
Bucky’s head jerked up, breath ragged, he searched the horizon for that familiar figure.
“Steve?”
His hoarse voice broke, strangled in his throat. Nothing. No one. Around him stretched the fields of Wakanda, empty. The exact spot where he had disappeared. Where he had turned to dust.
Only this time, he was alone.
Or not quite.
A few meters away, sitting on the moss-covered trunk of a fallen tree, was… Zemo.
Bucky blinked, rubbed his eyes, as if brushing away dust or madness, but the image didn’t fade. Helmut Zemo. In his Berlin prison uniform. Back straight. Perfectly calm. A book open in his hands, as if there were nothing strange about reading in the middle of the Wakandan plains.
What the hell…?
It made no sense. Zemo was supposed to be locked away, guarded, watched day and night, never to breathe free air again. And yet there he was, unmoving, eyes gliding over the page as if nothing were out of place.
A wave of vertigo hit Bucky, sharp, cold. His breath caught in his throat.
No. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. It had to be an illusion, some remnant of a broken mind still reeling from whatever resurrection had just brought him back.
And who else would that fractured mind conjure, if not him? The man who had spoken the trigger words, who had chained him like a dog. The man who had accused him of a crime he hadn’t committed. The man whose manipulations had killed a king, plunged Wakanda into mourning, and torn open the old wounds in Bucky’s skull, the ones that had never healed from the Winter Soldier’s reign.
Of course his tortured subconscious would choose Zemo.
Of course it would be him.
Bucky clenched his teeth and pressed his hands to his face, trying to crush the nightmare out of existence, but when he opened his eyes again, Zemo was still there. Still sitting. Still reading.
Panic rose, mingling with a low, acid hatred.
What the hell is happening?! What—
Then, as if the world had tilted on an invisible axis, Zemo lifted his head.
And their eyes met.
Zemo’s gaze locked onto James’s. For a heartbeat, he didn’t understand. His breath caught, the muscles in his neck went rigid as his eyes flicked around, trying to take in his surroundings.
The landscape… it wasn’t one he recognized. Gone were the dull, frozen walls of his Berlin cell. All around him stretched open nature, tall grass swaying in a warm breeze, the scent of damp earth filling his lungs. On his cheek, filtered through the leaves, a ray of sunlight brushed his skin. A soft warmth. Strange. Foreign.
The book slipped from his hands and landed in his lap, his fingers suddenly lifeless. Slowly, almost fearfully, he raised his eyes again to the man standing before him.
James was there.
How…? No. No, impossible.
So this was where his solitude had brought him. As if guilt, grief, and regret weren’t enough, must he now be haunted by the image of the man he’d broken? The one who had already suffered long before Zemo had used him as a weapon for revenge?
They stared at each other. Motionless. Barely breathing. Zemo rose slowly, every movement deliberate, cautious.
Across from him, Bucky stepped back, shoulders tight. They studied one another, searching each other’s faces for the flaw that would expose the illusion. This couldn’t be real. It wasn’t real. And yet… no dream had ever felt so sharp, so tangible.
Time seemed to stop.
“BUCKY!!”
The voice cracked through the air like thunder.
Bucky flinched, reality slamming back into him. He turned sharply toward the sound.
Sam. Running toward him, breathless, eyes bright with feverish relief.
Bucky’s eyes widened, too dazed to react, and Sam almost threw his arms around him, as if to make sure he was solid, real, alive. The contact was brief but fierce. Then Sam, realizing his own awkwardness, stepped back quickly, mumbling an apology before the questions tumbled out in a rush: what had happened, where were the others, how could they even be here when he’d turned to dust too, when he’d thought he was dead…
But to Bucky, the words came muffled, distant, like echoes underwater. His mind wasn’t with him.
He turned toward the fallen tree, toward where Zemo had been.
Nothing.
The space was empty, perfectly ordinary, as if the other man had never existed.
It had been a hallucination.
“Buck…?” Sam’s voice wavered, worried. He followed Bucky’s gaze to the tree trunk, then back to him. “You okay?”
Bucky drew a shaky breath, shook his head as if to clear it, then forced himself to focus on Sam.
“Uh… yeah. Yeah, sorry. I… I thought I…” His eyes flicked once more to the empty spot, then back to Sam. “Nothing. Forget it. We need to check if anyone else came back.”
Sam nodded without pressing. He turned and started ahead, scanning the horizon.
“I already found Wanda, she’s… inconsolable,” he said, shaking his head. “But it was T’Challa who found me first.”
Bucky followed, heavy steps dragging through the dirt, but not without casting one last glance over his shoulder.
Zemo was gone.
Maybe he’d never been there at all.
***
But reality was far stranger.
When Wilson’s voice had called out, Zemo had blinked, and the green landscape had vanished, sucked clean out of his vision. The smell of earth, the warmth of the sun, James’s still figure, all gone.
He was back, between the four gray walls, cold, impersonal. His Berlin cell.
He drew in a slow, unsteady breath, fingers trembling as though he’d just woken from a dream too vivid to dismiss. His eyes swept across the concrete, searching for even the shadow of a tree, a wisp of air. Nothing.
Cautiously, he stepped toward the wall, almost wary, as though it might be some kind of portal that had pulled him elsewhere. His hand reached out, then something crunched underfoot.
His book.
He looked down. The volume lay open on the floor, its pages crumpled and torn. He froze, staring at it as if the object held an answer he couldn’t yet see. Then he crouched to pick it up, his movements slow and deliberate.
That’s when the siren blared.
The prison alarm split the air, shrill, suffocating. Zemo startled, his fingers tightening around the book’s cover. Instinct drove him to the bars. Guards were running in every direction, shouts barely audible over the noise.
“ Was passiert ? What's happening ?” he called out to one, his voice harsher than he intended.
The guard, panting, stopped for only a second, eyes wide.
"Die Verschwundenen! Die, die vor fünf Jahren einfach weg waren! Sie tauchen wieder auf! In ihren Zellen, im Hof, überall! Genau da, wo sie damals verschwunden sind, und da sitzen jetzt schon andere. Totales Chaos!" "The vanished ! The people who just disappeared five years ago, they’re coming back! In their cells, in the yard, everywhere! Right where they disappeared back then, and now those spots are already occupied. It’s complete chaos !"
He took off again, shoved aside by two colleagues sprinting the opposite way. Shouts echoed down the hall, a metallic clatter, the thud of bodies. The first clashes between the returned and the living.
Zemo stayed where he was, motionless, hand clamped tight around the book, forehead pressed to the cold bars. His gaze unfocused, lost in the void.
The vanished… returned.
James was one of them. Of that, he was certain. And perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence, that this vision, this hallucination, had happened at that exact moment.
But why James? Why wouldn't he see someone else ?
It made no sense. Then again, nothing had made sense for the last five years: turning to dust, and returning whole. The impossible made real.
So why not a vision? Why not an echo?
Zemo closed his eyes, turned, and sank back against the bars, exhaling slowly.
Despite the blaring siren, despite the pounding footsteps and shouted orders in the corridor, he stayed still. Eyes shut, one hand clutching his book, the other, resting unconsciously against his abdomen.
That’s when he felt it.
A deep, low vibration, like a distant echo. A breath that wasn’t his. A heartbeat, doubled, out of sync with his own, but there. Persistent.
He wanted to ignore it, to tell himself it was only the residue of confusion, an illusion born of solitude. But no. The sensation was too clear, too intimate, too real.
Something had changed.
And he knew then, with icy, absolute clarity, that he would never again be alone.