Before we begin, I just want to say thank you so much for the 20k reads. I never knew this story would get this much attention. I hope you're satisfied with Rani and her plot.
Be aware that the new 2 chapters are ready, actually the whole story is finished by now. But I want to see you getting excited for it, so please show your support by voting and commenting ~♡
Goals for the next chapter, 40 votes, 35 comments
Now there is a surprise in this chapter. You will find it at the end.
The truck began to move.
Rani didn’t register when or how. It rumbled under her boots, a dull vibration that should have jolted her into presence—but her body remained still, heavy, distant. Like she wasn’t inside it at all. Her heart was louder than the engine. It sat in her chest like a stone. No, not like a stone—stones didn’t pulse. Stones didn’t ache.
She turned slowly, moving as if she were underwater, and sat down on the same narrow bench Bob had just vacated minutes ago. Her palms rested limply in her lap, still slightly curled, as if they hadn’t realized the guns were gone.
The bench was warm. Still warm from his body. That warmth, that tiny remnant of life, undid her more than the sight of his body falling.
She stared at her hands. They didn’t shake. They didn’t move. They were still like her face, like her mind, like everything inside her that refused to respond because it was too overwhelmed to process what had just been ripped away. Her breath was thin. It stayed caught somewhere in her ribs, where grief had taken up space and built a home.
And then—without warning—there it was.
Feeling.
It came over her like a tide she hadn’t seen coming. A wave so vast and so quiet it didn’t crash, it consumed. Slowly. Drowning her from the inside. She hadn't felt in so long. Not like this. Not real feeling. The kind that had weight. The kind that made your muscles ache because even your bones knew something had been lost.
Pain. Not from a wound. Not from a fight. But from the terrifying recognition that someone had chosen to die. For her. Bob had chosen to die. He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t warned. He hadn’t let her stop him. He had just looked at her. And left. The ache spread up her throat. It didn’t burst out. It simmered. Burned. Boiled inside her like it was punishing her for not being softer sooner.
Why him? Why did it have to be him? She hadn’t known him long. But there had been something—some thread between them neither of them had spoken aloud, but it was there. It had existed in the way their eyes lingered just a little too long. In the silence between them that wasn’t awkward but understood. Bob, like her, had been used. Bob, like her, had been broken down into something useful for someone else. Bob, like her, had never really lived.
And now he never would.
Rani exhaled. A soundless breath that felt like it took everything with it. Her shoulders sagged. Her spine curved. Her body, usually so sharp and upright and tense, collapsed under the weight of something she hadn’t let in for years.
Emotion. She was feeling. She wanted to be glad. Some distant part of her whispered—this means you're still human. This means you're not the monster they made. This means you're alive.
But if this—this—was what being alive felt like? She didn’t want it. She didn’t want this grief blooming in her chest like poisoned flowers. Didn’t want this hollow ache that tasted like guilt and regret and too-late. She didn’t want to feel the tenderness that had started to grow for Bob, now with no place to go except inside her where it would fester.
She had spent so long dead inside. Had made peace with numbness. Wore it like armor. And now that armor was broken and underneath, she was soft. Bleeding. Human.
She swallowed. It hurt. Even that small act felt like swallowing fire. She didn’t cry. Rani never cried. Not anymore. She'd taught herself not to. Crying was for people who had time. She had spent her life surviving. Breathing in pain and breathing out silence. But now—now she wasn’t sure how to survive this. She lowered her head to her knees, eyes closed, arms still limp. Her breath came slower. She tried to think of something else. Anything else.
He had looked at her like she was worth something. Like she was someone. And maybe—maybe that was what hurt the most. Because she'd just started to believe it too. She bit her lip until it stung, just to feel something else. But there was no escape. No violence to channel this into. No enemy to aim for. Just her. Just her and this wound inside her soul that no bullet had made—but one man had left.
Rani sat on that bench, in the back of that moving truck, and let the weight of his sacrifice settle into her bones. And for the first time in her life, she didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t know who she would be after this. But she knew, with the terrifying certainty of grief, that she would never be the same.
A sudden knock exploded through the silence, jolting Rani from the weight of her grief like a slap to the chest.
“Rani!” Ava’s voice cut through the metal walls of the truck, sharp and urgent. “Look from the window!”
Rani's head snapped up, her breath hitching. For a moment, her body refused to move—her limbs still heavy with sorrow, her spirit too dulled to obey. But then her legs propelled her forward, as if instinct or something deeper pushed her. She stumbled toward the small rear window, her hands slapping against the cold metal as she pressed her face close. Her breath fogged the glass.
And then she saw it. She saw him. Bob. But not the way he had been. Not bleeding. Not fallen. Not broken. He was flying. Not just lifting. Not leaping.
Flying.
Soaring like a rocket, a blazing arc cutting across the sky—his body surrounded by force, by something unnameable that sent tremors into the clouds. The air behind him tore with the sound of propulsion, and he rose higher, and higher, until he was a glint of fire against the blue.
Rani’s breath escaped her in a single, trembling gasp. Her mind didn’t know what to do with what she was seeing. No one could do this. No human could do this. Not even her. Not with all her training, all her enhancements, all the things they had done to her. This—this wasn’t science. This was something else. Her hand gripped the window edge tightly. Her knuckles were white.
“What…” she whispered, more to herself than to anyone else. “What is this?”
There was a knot in her chest—a tangle of things she couldn’t name fast enough. Disbelief. Hope. Fear. He was alive. That was the first, most blinding truth. Bob was alive. Her chest ached, like it couldn’t contain the joy trying to bloom inside her. Her heart leapt, and her mind staggered after it, not understanding how, or why, or what he had become. But alongside that hope, another shadow crept in.
What is he now?
She had seen his body riddled with bullets. She had felt the air shift when his life ended. She had mourned him like the world mourned the fallen. And yet, here he was, lifted from death like something out of a myth. Transformed. Carried by light and wind and the impossible. And that was what scared her. Because nothing came back like that without a price.
Was this Bob? Or was this something else wearing his body?
Rani’s face remained pressed against the metal bars, her breath catching, her eyes wide. Didn’t register that her fingers trembled now—not from grief, but from the unknown. He had come back. But what had he come back as? In the front of the truck, Ava whispered something—but Rani didn’t hear it. She could only stare as Bob disappeared into the sky, swallowed by the horizon, leaving behind more questions than answers. And in her chest, something new bloomed. Not just pain. Not just joy. But dread—and a strange, unshakable feeling that this was only the beginning.
Only two seconds had passed—just two breaths—when the air around them shifted. It wasn’t just a breeze or a wind. It was something ripping. Rani didn’t move from the window, her eyes wide, glued to the heavens where Bob had disappeared. And then—
She saw him. He was falling. Not dropping. Not floating. Falling like a weapon. Like a meteor crashing back to Earth. His body was a blur of motion, lit by the heat around him, tearing through the sky with the velocity of a god’s rage—like Thor’s hammer hurled from the heavens, like the alien titans she’d once fought in shadow-soaked trees. It wasn’t descent. It was detonation.
He hit the ground. And the world answered. A deafening explosion of air surged outward from the impact, like the earth itself had exhaled in terror. The shockwave struck the truck like a fist.
Everything changed in a blink. The wheels lifted. The frame groaned. And the truck began to fall—not just jolt or tip—but plummet down the ridge, as though the earth itself was rejecting it.
Rani reached out blindly, her fingers scrambling for anything—metal bars, seats, bolts, shadows. Her hand scraped steel, tore skin. The truck rolled. And so did she. Her body whipped from left to right, crashing into corners and benches and walls. Her legs tangled in ropes, her head cracked against something solid. She heard the screams—Ava, Yelena, and John. Not words. Just raw sounds—guttural, primal cries, curses spat between grit teeth, breath being stolen as they slammed against the cabin’s shell like dolls in a drum.
The metal howled. Something shattered. The truck twisted again, this time more violently. Rani was lifted into the air, suspended for a breathless second, then slammed back down onto the floor. She felt her shoulder crunch. Her ribs screamed. Her lungs begged. And still—it kept rolling. Dust blinded her. Pain shot through every limb. And her mind spun with one question:
What the hell had Bob become? Because this wasn’t human. This wasn’t science or serum or anything they’d been conditioned to believe in. This was beyond her understanding—beyond even the monsters she’d faced, the horrors she’d learned to accept.
The world spun outside. The sky was gone. The ground refused to stay still. And as they tumbled into oblivion, she clutched her stomach, curled into herself, and whispered a name through gritted teeth—Bob—not because she needed him to save them. But because she needed to believe he hadn’t just become something else. She needed to believe he hadn’t become a god too broken to remember the people he left behind.
~
After what felt like forever—an eternity trapped in the chaos of tumbling metal and fear—the truck finally stopped. It was sudden. A violent lurch. Then stillness.
The silence that followed was loud, almost unbearable. It roared in her ears, louder than the crash. Rani’s body was sprawled on the metal floor, one hand clutched tightly to her side. The pain in her ribs was sharp, hollow. Something was wrong. A fracture, maybe more.
The back of the truck creaked open. Light poured in. John’s face appeared, blood smeared across his forehead, a cut beneath his eye, but his voice was steady. “You okay?”
She couldn’t speak. Just nodded faintly. Her fingers dug into her ribs like she could hold the pieces together by force.
John extended a hand. She hesitated only a second before taking it. His grip was firm, grounding. She used her other hand to brace herself as she stood, breath hitching. Every movement sent a spear of pain down her side. Her knees buckled slightly, but John steadied her.
Outside, the landscape was quiet but ravaged. The hills were scarred with tracks, the air still thick with dust and the ghost of fire. Yelena and Ava were already out, bruised and battered, but standing. Waiting. She limped forward, feet crunching over gravel and shards of truck metal. They walked, slowly, across the rock-strewn terrain. The world was strangely muted. Even the wind didn’t dare howl.
Then Yelena broke the silence. “To test on a human subject like this…” Her voice was low, disgusted. She held out a few dirt-smeared papers, the edges curled and blackened from the explosion. “It’s inhuman.”
Ava took them and scanned the pages. Her brow furrowed deeper with every line she read. “The powers of a thousand explosive suns,” she murmured. “The Golden Guardian. The Sentry.” She passed the papers toward Rani.
But Rani didn’t take them. Her voice came quiet, strained. “I’ve read it. Months ago.”
Yelena looked up. “What?”
“She sent me to clean up some things,” Rani said, eyes flicking to the distance like she was seeing that day all over again. “A scientist had them. The same papers. He was terrified. Said that Valentina made a huge mistake. I thought he was just another paranoid.”
John cursed under his breath. “Same. Months ago, I got word that O.X.E had made some big breakthrough with human enhancement. Government red flags went up, so Valentina ordered me to shut it down. Erase the evidence.”
“She’s been using us,” Rani said bitterly. “All of us. To erase her footprints.”
John nodded, jaw clenched. “You were right about her,” he told Yelena. “She wants us dead. Always has. We’re just her weapons. Collateral.”
A pause settled over the group, thick with the weight of betrayal.
Ava’s voice broke it, flat and dry. “Let’s just make it back home alive before we get exploded again.”
No one laughed. But somehow, the sarcasm grounded them, gave them breath. They turned toward the horizon, four broken souls walking through dust and fire, chased by ghosts, bound by something bitter and unspoken—truth.
And still, they walked. They moved again, the four of them—silent shapes cast long against the searing darkness of the desert. The air was dry, brittle, like it could crack if anyone breathed too hard.
John stopped suddenly. The others took a few more steps before noticing. He stared at the ground, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “Anyone hungry?” he asked.
The question felt almost absurd in the midst of everything—the chaos they’d just escaped, the ash still clinging to their skin, the tremble still hiding in their bones.
He crouched beside a stubby cluster of cactus. “Cactus pear,” he said, almost to himself, and pulled out a dull, worn knife. He worked quietly, slicing into the fleshy pads, peeling away the thorns with a practiced flick.
He offered the first one to Rani.
She looked at it like it didn’t belong in her hands. The gesture startled something in her. She wasn't used to people offering her anything, especially not kindness—not during survival. Not when the world felt like it had swallowed its own soul. But something in John’s face was earnest, and her body was aching, hollow, and hurting. So she took it.
After peeling the outer skin, she bit into it. It was sour, earthy, but it filled something in her stomach. More than that, it filled something quiet in her chest. She gave John a short nod, not trusting her voice. He nodded back, like that was more than enough.
He passed cactus slices to Ava and Yelena. No one spoke. They just chewed. There was no joy in it—just the raw need to keep moving, to stay standing. To feel human in the smallest of ways.
They walked a few more steps through the scorched rocks and brittle earth. The silence was different now. It wasn’t heavy. It was simply shared.
Then Ava broke it. Her voice was cautious. “That woman… back there. The one I killed.” Yelena turned to her. “Did you know her?” Ava meant Taskmaster.
Yelena’s jaw tensed, just a little. “Yes,” she said finally. “I knew her.” She didn’t elaborate. “She had a tough life,” Yelena added, after a beat. “Was forced to do things no one should. Killed a lot of people. Had no real choice. And in the end, she got killed too. Same as us all one day.”
Ava exhaled. The sound was bitter, cracked. “That’s a tough way to live.”
Rani, who had been quiet, her face unreadable, finally spoke. “That’s it,” she said. Her voice was low, but clear. “Just a screwed up, shitty way of living, actually.” They all understood exactly what she meant.
There was no judgment, only recognition. They had all lived in the shadows. Used. Twisted. Rewired. Betrayed. Surviving didn’t mean innocence. It just meant endurance. It meant carrying ghosts like blood in your mouth.
They kept walking. The desert stretched endlessly ahead of them. And none of them said a word. Not out of pain or fear—but because sometimes, silence said more than all the words in the world. No one spoke until John did.
John’s voice was low, tired, but edged with a quiet certainty. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the only kind of life we have.”
Ava turned her head toward him, squinting slightly under the moonlight. “Yeah?” she said, with something like a smirk curling at the edge of her voice. “Is that what the man with a wife and kid waiting at home says?”
She took another bite of the cactus pear he’d handed her—chewed slowly, deliberately.
“How do you do that?” she asked again, more serious this time. “How do you balance the two lives?”
The silence that followed wasn’t awkward—it was filled with the heaviness of shared truths and the quiet ache of people who had learned how to live on fracture lines.
Rani didn’t speak. She didn't know what to say although the question wasn't for her.
Instead, her thoughts shifted inward like a tide pulling away from the shore. Her father’s face came to her, worn with age and kindness and years of trying. She pictured him standing by the window, still searching, still waiting, still hopeful—for her. Still trying to be better for her.
And suddenly she felt like a monster.
She hadn’t thought of him like this in such a long time—not really. And yet, here she was, changed in ways she didn’t recognize. The vault had broken something open in her. In just forty-eight hours, something had cracked, shifted, transformed inside her mind. The way she thought, the way she saw herself, the way she breathed. It was like her insides had been rewired and then thrown out into the dirt.
She missed him. And she hated that she missed him. Because she didn’t know how to say sorry. She didn’t know how to explain this new person inside her skin. She didn’t even know if she wanted to.
Her chest hurt with the weight of it. The regret. The shame. The confusion of suddenly being human in a way that didn’t feel like hers.
John finally answered Ava, his voice hoarse." We just keep trying. And you never give up.”
Rani scoffed at the answer, bitter and raw. “Trying,” she echoed under her breath. She walked up beside him, gave him a hard slap on the chest—one of those “you don’t get it” kind of slaps—and kept moving.
Yelena muttered from the back, not lifting her head. “Beautiful. That's really beautiful." she said flatly. And still, they walked. With hearts bruised, ribs aching, and memories clawing their way up from under the skin.
They didn’t know where they were headed. But somehow, they knew they weren’t going back the same.
~
Two days ago. Washington, DC.
Two days ago, Bucky stood in his kitchen. The apartment was big—too big. Bigger than anything he ever thought he’d live in. The countertops were spotless, the fridge was full, the view was stunning. And yet, all of it felt hollow without her. Without his daughter.
She had disappeared nine months ago. And not once had he stopped looking. But she was a ghost. The best kind. He had taught her that—how to vanish, how to move without being seen. He didn’t mean to. He never meant for her to use it against him.
Now he stood in the stillness, chewing on a plain sandwich. The crusts were hard. The meat inside was dry. In front of him lay Congress packets, color-coded, urgent. National security briefings, infrastructure updates, weapons containment reviews. He tried to read. He really did.
The phone rang. He glanced at it once, then again. A number he hadn’t memorized.
“Hi, this is Mel.” He straightened without realizing, the name catching in his chest like a wire pulled tight. Mel. Valentina’s assistant. He’d met her two weeks ago, pressed his card into her hand and said, If anything comes up. He hadn’t really expected a call.
“Mel,” he said slowly, “you called.”
“I did. I know that you're in D.C. and I wanted...network.” Network. The word made him grit his teeth. His free hand curled slightly around the edge of the counter.
“You want...network? Okay.”
“So how is your new job? How are you feeling about it?”
He looked down at the Congress packets, then at the sandwich in his hand.
“Yeah, that’s great.” His sarcasm was sandpaper, and she felt it. There was a silence, then her voice softened, curious.
“It’s not ancient history, you know. I was in high school when the aliens came. And then the Avengers.”
He gave himself a tight smile, one that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “High school, huh? I was like 90,” he said. She chuckled, gently.
“It’s kinda strange that it’s all over now. I mean, the Avengers are gone, and no one’s coming to save the day.” The words sank deep. Deeper than she could know.
He looked at the empty house. The city outside was washed in dull gray. Traffic moved like tired blood through veins as he listened to its sounds. Somewhere out there, his daughter was walking without him. Eating without him. Bleeding, maybe. Alone.
He saw Steve. He saw himself. He saw a little girl, hurt and hardened into someone the world could use and throw away. And he saw himself—too late, too broken, too still—to fix it.
“We could be the people that are coming,” he said. But he didn’t believe it. Not yet. But some part of him wanted it to be true. Something real, even for once.
A look of determination flashed across Bucky’s face, subtle but unmistakable. He stood in the same spot in his oversized kitchen, his fingers curling tighter around the phone. His sandwich, now forgotten on the plate, had gone cold. The congressional packets sprawled across the counter looked up at him with ink that no longer mattered. None of it did—not compared to this.
“Just come in and testify against Valentina,” he said. The words weren’t barked. They weren’t desperate. They were calm—deliberate. But the steel in his tone was sharp enough to cut glass. He needed her to understand this wasn’t politics anymore. This was personal.
Mel didn’t respond right away. Bucky could almost hear her rolling her eyes through the static of the line. “You really don’t know my boss, do you?”
He shook his head instinctively, even though she couldn’t see him. A worn-out soldier’s reflex. Still, even without her in front of him, Bucky could feel the layers behind her sarcasm—the tremor in her voice that wasn’t quite masked, the hesitation coiled beneath her bravado. Fear. Guilt. Maybe both.
He softened just slightly, his voice lowering, a trace more human. “We can protect you.”
The moment the words left his mouth, he knew she wouldn’t believe them. Not fully. Maybe not at all.
“Oh, can you really?” Her voice came with a bitter smirk. “Is that coming from the fresh new congressman or the Winter Soldier?”
Bucky flinched at that, not physically, but in the way his breath stuttered just slightly. He closed his eyes, jaw tightening. It was a fair question. The two halves of him had never felt farther apart. He could play the part—he could wear the suit, read the papers, sit in the marble halls—but inside he was still a man clawing through a dark forest for someone who’d vanished without a trace.
He didn’t have time for games anymore.
“Come on, Mel,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Just give me something. Anything.”
There was a silence then. Not dead air, not empty—something alive and shifting. The kind of silence that lives between people who both know there’s something too heavy to say.
On the other end, Mel stood in her tiny office, pacing between the window and the desk. She had kept this secret buried under locked drawers and swallowed fear for nine months. When he gave her that business card two weeks ago, she thought about burning it. She didn’t. It had been sitting under her coffee cup ever since. A quiet accusation.
She looked out the window, breath fogging the glass, the city still beneath dusk’s descending veil.
“I can give you something, Bucky,” she said finally, her voice trembling just enough to betray her nerves. “But you just have to understand that I didn’t have the choice to say it sooner.”
At those words, Bucky moved. Slow, deliberate. He reached out and lifted the phone from speaker mode, pressing it to his ear like a priest taking confession. He wanted no echo. No filter. He needed to hear her. All of her.
His heart thudded loud and uneven beneath his ribcage.
“What is it?” he asked. He could hear the weight in her breath. It wasn’t just about information. It was about consequence—hers, his, and most of all, he thought it was about someone so dear to him.
“I know you’ve been searching for her,” she said, each syllable landing like a drop of water in a quiet room. “I will tell you where your daughter is. I will tell you what she’s been up to.”
Bucky’s fingers tightened around the phone. His pulse was thundering now, but he made no sound. The only motion came from his other hand, drifting unconsciously to the dog tags beneath his shirt, the ones he hadn’t taken off since he came back to his senses years ago in Wakanda. Those dog tags felt real, like his real and true self was aching for his kid.
“But you have to understand,” Mel continued, “she didn’t want to be found. Not by you… and not by anyone else.”
Bucky’s legs buckled just slightly. He leaned against the counter for support. The truth of those words struck deeper than he wanted to admit. He had always known it—sensed it in the silence, in the months without a trace. Rani was his daughter, but she was also something else now. Something forged in pain and secrecy. A ghost of Hydra’s creation, built to vanish.
Mel’s voice dropped even lower, so low he had to strain to catch the words. “But Val told me to do something to her—and another group of people. She wants them gone. And… fortunately, they aren’t dead. They are pretty much alive.”
For a moment, Bucky couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.
Alive.
The word rang through him like a church bell. After everything—every sleepless night, every report, every favor called in—she wasn’t gone. He wasn’t too late.
But his relief didn’t come easy. It was tangled up in rage and guilt and a deep, aching helplessness. For nine months, he had been screaming into the dark, and now that it finally screamed back, all he could do was listen.
His hand trembled as he gripped the edge of the counter. The world outside the window was still. The sounds of the city—a siren in the distance, a dog barking below—faded into nothing. She was alive. But she hadn’t wanted to be found. And yet—he would find her anyway.
Because she was his. No matter what Hydra did to her, no matter how deep she buried herself, no matter how much she thought she had to disappear to survive—he would find her. And he would bring her home.
Even if she hated him for it.
Even if she never spoke to him again.
Even if the Winter Soldier didn’t deserve redemption, James Buchanan Barnes would never stop trying.
"Tell me everything this."
°•☆☆•°
Did you like it?
Thank you so much for reading this chapter.
I know you missed our man(bucky) cuz I did too.
Now with MORE BUCKY.
I'm so excited to share the next few chapters with you, Bucky with Rani is something that is truly dear to me!!!
Goals for the next chapter, 40 votes, 35 comments