Brooklyn slept, or pretended to. It was a different borough than the one James Buchanan Barnes had left behind in the 1940s, but the bones were the same. The stoops were steeper, the bodega signs brighter, the ambient hum a constant, electric thrum instead of the distant clatter of the El train. He lived on the top floor of a pre-war building, a small apartment with good sightlines and two exits. It was spare, clean, functional. A soldier's quarters. The only real decoration was a small, healthy succulent on the windowsill that the old woman downstairs, Mrs. Gable, had given him with a stern instruction to "not kill this one, mister."
Bucky wasn't sleeping. He rarely did for more than a few hours at a stretch. The nightmares were less frequent now, more whispers than screams, but his body, engineered and hardened, seemed to need less rest. Or maybe it was just used to waiting. He sat in an armchair by the window, a book open in his lap—a modern history of Sokovia, a country that no longer existed. He was trying to understand the context of his own actions, the foggy, red-tinted missions the Winter Soldier had undertaken in that part of the world. The words blurred together.
A vibration, subtle and wrong, traveled up through the building's foundation. It wasn't seismic. It was deeper, a resonance that made the vibranium plates in his left arm thrum in sympathetic disharmony. He closed the book, setting it aside slowly.
Then the screaming started.
It wasn't the ordinary nighttime chorus of the city—a siren, a shout, a bottle breaking. This was raw, collective terror. Bucky was at the window in an instant, his right hand instinctively reaching for the knife on the side table.
The street below was… wrong.
The familiar asphalt of his block was overlaid with a shimmering, ghostly image of cracked European cobblestones. The parked cars seemed to phase in and out of existence with the husks of burning, unfamiliar vehicles. And descending from the low-hanging clouds, silent and immense, was the mangled, metallic corpse of an Ultron Sentry.
It was an echo. He knew it immediately, the same way he knew a sniper's position or the smell of HYDRA's fear. This wasn't real, not fully, but the danger was palpable. The air crackled with static, and the screaming from below was real—his neighbors, panicking as their reality dissolved into a silent, horrific diorama of a warzone half a world and several years away.
The Sentry's broken form, trailing cables like metallic intestines, plunged toward the intersection. It moved in a jerky, four-second loop: falling, crashing, a muted explosion of debris, then resetting to fall again. With each loop, the cobblestone overlay grew more solid. A fire hydrant on the corner groaned, its metal twisting as if pressed by an invisible force. A lamppost flickered, its bulb shattering, then reforming, then shattering again in time with the loop.
Bucky's tactical mind assessed. Panic. Structural instability. Potential for real-world collateral damage from an unreal event. He needed to evacuate the immediate area, contain the chaos. He grabbed a dark jacket, shrugging it on over his gray shirt, the knife secured at his back. He was halfway to his door when a flicker of movement in the reflection of his darkened window made him freeze.
There was a man standing directly in the center of the chaotic intersection below. He wasn't running. He wasn't looking up at the falling Sentry. He was looking up, directly, at Bucky's window.
The man wore a strangely tailored white cloak and cowl that seemed to drink the sickly, flickering light from the Echo. His posture was rigid, but not with military bearing. It was the tautness of a coiled spring, or a man holding back a scream. And his face… even from four stories up, Bucky could see the eyes. A fractured, unstable gaze. One moment focused and sharp, the next darting around in frantic confusion.
Bucky knew that look. He'd seen it in his own reflection for decades. The look of a fractured mind.
The man in white pointed a finger, not at Bucky, but at a spot just to the side of his building. Then, he turned and strode directly into the path of the looping, falling Sentry.
"Damn it," Bucky muttered. He abandoned the stairs, throwing open his window and leaping out onto the fire escape. The metal shrieked in protest under his weight, but he was already descending, not with the careful clang of steps, but with the silent, fluid drops of a predator. He hit the alley pavement, rolled, and emerged onto the street just as the Echo-Sentry completed another crash.
The sound was wrong. It was a pressure wave more than noise, a physical force that shoved the air outward. Bucky braced himself, his vibranium arm coming up instinctively. He saw people stumbling, clutching their ears. The man in white was now standing where the Sentry's head had impacted, unfazed, staring at a specific point on the facade of the bakery across the street.
"You!" Bucky called, moving toward him, his senses scanning for threats beyond the obvious. "We need to clear this area!"
The man in white turned his head. His expression shifted, the confusion melting into a wan, polite smile that didn't touch his eyes. "Oh! Hello! Terrible weather, isn't it? Always raining robots." His voice was a London accent, light and anxious.
Before Bucky could process that, the man's body jerked. His head twitched to the side, the polite smile vanishing, replaced by a grimace of pain and a harder, flintier look. The accent roughened, becoming American. "Shut it, Steven. He's not here for the tourism." The man's eyes locked onto Bucky's metal arm. "Soldier. You've seen fractures like this before. In your own head."
Bucky stopped short, ice forming in his veins. "Who are you?"
The man shrugged, a motion that seemed to cause him internal conflict. "Currently? It's… debatable. Call me Marc. The point is, you see it, don't you? The tear isn't there." He pointed again at the falling Sentry. "It's there." His finger shifted to the bakery's wall, where the brickwork seemed to be… breathing, pulsing in and out of reality with the loop.
Bucky looked. The man was right. The epicenter of the wrongness wasn't the spectacular falling robot; it was a seemingly mundane patch of wall where the Echo's reality and Brooklyn's reality were grinding against each other like tectonic plates. The Sentry was the symptom; the wall was the wound.
"We need to stabilize it," the man—Marc—said, his voice tight. "Before it sets. Before this street becomes permanently stuck in 2015."
"How?" Bucky asked, his training forcing him to accept the insane assessment. He had worked with wizards and talking raccoons. A man with multiple voices in his head identifying a reality-wound tracked.
"We have to… speak its language." Marc's face contorted again. "No, no, not language, you idiot, it's a memory." The accent flipped back to the Londoner, Steven. "Perhaps we need to provide a counter-narrative! A stronger memory of this place!"
"Or we punch it in the face," a third, lower, guttural voice snarled from Marc's mouth, his body shifting into a fighter's stance. For a second, his white costume seemed to shimmer, threatening to reshape into something more armored, more brutal.
"Jake, not now!" Marc snapped, regaining control, his American accent firm.
Bucky made a decision. He didn't understand, but he could follow a tactical lead. "The counter-narrative. What does that mean?"
"This place," Marc said, gesturing around. "What is it now? What is its… essence? Its strong memory?"
Bucky looked at the bakery. Fortunato's. Old man Fortunato had been here since the 70s. He made sfogliatella that could make you cry. He'd kept his door open during the Blip, a quiet place for people waiting for loved ones who never came back. Bucky bought bread there every Saturday. It was a anchor.
"It's a community place," Bucky said, the words feeling inadequate. "A constant."
"Good. Hold onto that. Think about that. The taste, the smell, the… the feeling," Steven's voice piped up, then retreated as Marc shook his head.
"He needs a focal point. Something from here, now." Marc looked at Bucky's metal arm. "That's vibranium. It's from another place, but it's part of you, and you're part of now. It's stable. More stable than this." He pointed at the pulsing wall. "When I give the signal, touch the epicenter with it. Don't punch. Just… connect. Let its stability scream louder than the memory of the fall."
It was the craziest plan Bucky had ever been part of. But the Echo-Sentry's loop was speeding up, the cobblestones becoming more solid. He could hear real bricks in the wall beginning to crack.
"Do it," Bucky said.
Marc nodded. He closed his eyes, and when they opened, they were glowing with a faint, white, lunar light. He didn't chant. He didn't weave spells. He simply stared at the fracturing point, and his gaze seemed to have weight, to have texture. He was focusing a terrifyingly fractured consciousness into a single, laser-like beam of perception. He wasn't seeing the wall or the Echo; he was seeing the seam between them.
"Now!" Marc growled, the strain evident in his voice.
Bucky lunged. He didn't attack. He placed the palm of his vibranium left hand flat against the pulsing, phasing bricks. He closed his eyes and did what the man had said. He thought of now. The taste of Fortunato's ricotta pie. The gruff "morning" the old man gave him. Mrs. Gable's succulent. The quiet peace of his apartment at 3 AM. The difficult, fragile, earned present.
The vibranium hummed, a pure, resonant note.
The grinding, phasing sensation under his palm intensified for a heart-stopping second—a battle between the memory of destruction and the assertion of a calm, ongoing life. He heard Marc let out a choked cry of effort.
Then, with a sound like a pane of glass shattering in reverse, the pressure vanished.
The Echo of the falling Sentry froze, then fragmented into a million shards of silent, orange light that dissipated like embers on the wind. The cobblestones faded. The screams from the street turned into confused murmurs, then shouts of bewildered relief. The wall under Bucky's hand was just a wall—solid, slightly sooty, Brooklyn brick.
He pulled his hand back. The vibranium was warm.
Marc was on his knees, breathing heavily, the lunar light gone from his eyes. They were just haunted again. "Told you," he rasped, a hint of the London accent returning. "Not the punch. The connection."
Bucky walked over, offering his right hand. Marc looked at it warily, then took it, letting Bucky pull him to his feet. He was lighter than he looked.
"Who are you?" Bucky asked again, more measured this time.
"Marc Spector. Occasionally others. I was sent."
"By who?"
"By a voice in my head that belongs to a moon god. But more immediately, by a wizard in a magic cloak who pinged my… unique perspective." Marc rubbed his temples. "He's dealing with a bigger one over the East River. Said there might be more. Smaller fractures. Said to look for the man out of time who knows about cracks in the mind. Figured that was you."
Doctor Strange. Of course. Bucky looked around at the confused, gathering crowd. Police sirens wailed in the distance. "This is going to keep happening."
"Yes. And they'll get worse. That was a minor one. A panic attack in the fabric of reality." Marc's eyes, for a second, all three personas seemed to align in a moment of grim clarity. "Someone is picking at the universe's scars, Barnes. And if they pick too deep, the whole thing might unravel."
A sleek, black quinjet, silent as a ghost, descended from the clouds, its running lights painting the street in red and blue. It hovered, and a figure in a Captain America suit, sans helmet, repelled down on a line. Sam Wilson landed lightly, his shield on his back, his face all business.
"Buck. Got a priority alert from Wong about 'temporal incursions.' This look related?" Sam's eyes took in the scene, then flicked to the strange man in the white cloak. "And you are?"
"Complicated," Marc and Steven said in unison, then frowned at each other.
"He helped," Bucky said simply. "Stopped it."
Sam nodded, trusting Bucky's assessment instantly. He tapped his comms. "Wilson here. Incident contained. One stabilized Echo, civilian panic but no major injuries. We have a… consultant on site." He looked at Marc. "You coming? Strange wants a debrief."
Marc Spector looked at the quinjet, then at the whispering moon only he could see, then back at the two veterans. A slow, weary smile touched his lips, the first genuine expression Bucky had seen.
"Khonshu says the conversation will be tedious," Marc said, his American accent dominant. "Steven is worried about the seating arrangements. Jake wants to know if you have any weapons on board." He shrugged. "So, yeah. We're coming."
As they boarded the quinjet, Bucky took one last look at his street. It was just his street again. But the air still tasted of ozone and burnt memory. The cracks were out there, invisible until they bled. And he had a feeling his war, the quiet one for his own mind, had just become a smaller front in a much bigger, stranger battle.
Inside the jet, as Sam piloted them towards the New York Sanctum, Marc Spector sat stiffly in a seat, staring at his own trembling hands.
"It's not just places," he said quietly, so only Bucky could hear. "The Echoes. I could feel it. They're tied to people. To our pain. That one… it was tied to her. To Maximoff. Her grief made that moment. And someone is using a grief they don't understand as a crowbar."
Bucky looked out the viewport at the glittering, wounded city below. "Whose grief?"
Marc closed his eyes, listening to the voices in his head. "The weaver's," he whispered. "The one who thinks they can fix everything by cutting out the bad parts."
The quinjet shot forward, leaving the echoing ghosts of Brooklyn behind, heading towards a sanctuary that might no longer be safe, towards a puzzle that threatened to undo not just the world, but the very story of how it came to be.