infinity wars spoilers

capgal:

(my exam is over so i’m here to unload some angsty thoughts on the dash)

The one thing that’s been haunting me more than anything else is Bucky. Like, we all know that Bucky’s life has been severely lacking in peace and happiness since like 1943 –– but it didn’t quite hit me how badly until after Infinity War.

In every movie Bucky’s ever been in, we lose him by the end of the movie.

First Avenger is pretty obvious –– that Train Scene™. Civil War, not only is he an internationally wanted fugitive but he’s also going under yet again, because he feels like he doesn’t have a choice. Infinity War, he gets dusted or disintegrated or whatever-the-fuck that was.

The happiest ending he gets––and by extension, the happiest ending Steve/Bucky gets––is the end of Winter Soldier, where Bucky disappears yet again, but at least there’s the implied sense that he’s coming back to himself and rehabilitating. At least there’s hope.

In Civil War, Bucky said “It always ends in a fight.” And it breaks my heart how he’s proven right, again and again.

Every time he manages to build some peace and a slice of home for himself, the fight shows up at his doorstep and forces him back into it.

He’s buying plums and smiling and relearning himself in Bucharest when Zemo frames him for blowing up the damn UN and the entire world is looking to kill him again. He’s finally free of his trigger words (presumably) and living quietly in a little hut in Wakanda and learning to be comfortable without an arm when Thanos tries to kill half the universe and he has to get back out there again.

He might be tired of fighting, T’challa says, right before offering Bucky his new arm.

And he’s right. Bucky’s been tired of the fight since 1943, since he got off of Zola’s table. But Steve needed him, and then Hydra had him, and then the entire world was trying to arrest him, and then there was the possibility of rogue Winter Soldiers, and then there was Thanos and the end of half the damn universe.

He doesn’t ask if there’s a fight, if they need him, if the world’s ending again. He already knows. He doesn’t say that he doesn’t want to fight, because for all that he might be so goddamn tired of fighting for 70 years, he can’t walk away when someone needs him, even if that someone a world that’s tried to destroy him ten times over and never thanked him for saving it.

Where’s the fight, he says, because what else can he say? He can’t run away from the fight, because it always finds him again, no matter how much he doesn’t want it to. He gives up, because he’s never going to be free, and he’ll be fighting until the day he dies.

And he was right.