Chapter 2
There had been eighty years between his time and the American Civil War. It was one of those random facts that Bucky had known, had reminded him of whenever they went to watch some movie taking place in the Old South or in the Old West, or some other supposedly “old” something, often with costumes and horses, looking epic and exciting. They romanticized the immediate past so much in movies, and yet the Civil War was only one lifetime removed from the time they were living. In that period they’d gone from horses and carriages and charcoal fed steam engines to automobiles with combustion engines and airplanes that could cross continents in a fraction of the time a train could. Telegraphy and mass communication was just starting to be a thing when Lee and Grant were leading armies, while they had telephones and radios. Even back then, Bucky had carried on excitedly about this new thing, television, something Howard Stark had sworn would replace both film and radio as being the main form of entertainment in the home. Had General Lee or General Grant found themselves somehow waking up seven decades later in the 20th century, they would have been shocked to find how different the world was, the new technologies it had, the different ways of thinking, speaking, dressing.
Steve thought about that now as he stood watch on the balcony of Peggy’s apartment, high above everything in what had once been Lincoln Square. He supposed it still was, as he studied the well lit and lovely building across the way, a performing arts space that hadn’t existed there when he had last been alive and wandering in Manhattan. This was part of the city he hadn’t ever gone into. It had always had a dangerous reputation back then, even back before the same Civil War, but now it was all civilized and artistic. His mother would have loved it.
He should be more cold, Steve realized, as his breath fogged in the icy air. It was February after all. Perhaps after all the decades under a glacier, he didn’t feel it anymore. He had wandered out for fresh air, to just…see what his city looked like now. It wasn’t Brooklyn, but it was still home, in a way. Instinctively he turned to look in the direction of the borough he loved, or at least towards Queens, which was the only part he could reliably see from this angle, and to all the twinkling lights between here and there. So much had changed.
“Are you doing all right, sir?” The solicitous, and somewhat creepy, voice of the…what was it Peggy had called it…artificial intelligence, JARVIS, spoke through some system cunningly set up in the apartment. Did it have eyes as well as a voice?
“Yeah,” he grunted back to the still night, feeling ridiculous in talking to a disembodied voice, no matter how human it sounded. “Yeah, just…restless.”
“After your time in suspended animation, a certain restlessness is to be expected.”
He…Steve attributed the pronoun “he” to the thing, even if it wasn’t “he” in the strictest sense…anyway, “he” sounded so politely understanding, as if a thinking machine could get it. Maybe he…it…did. If it was a Stark creation, who knows what it did.
“Just so you know,” the machine’s voice continued on, blithely, just like any overly attentive butler would. “Miss Carter has in fact fallen asleep. She didn’t need much coaxing to do so.”
Steve hadn’t imagined she did. While he’d had decades of sleep, she looked as if she hadn’t slept at all in that entire time. Even as they spoke in her tidy and barely used kitchen, she’d been nodding off, good food and the strain of the day finally catching up to her. He’d gathered plates and shuffled her off, keenly aware of the snap of her bedroom door down the hall. While she’d thought nothing of bunking him up in the spare room she’d set up for him, he’d squirmed. In their original time such an arrangement would have had them both called up before Phillips and Peggy’s honor questioned in ways that Steve wasn’t comfortable with. Now, she hadn’t even considered it, laughing at his “prudishness” as she called it. Prudish? As if he hadn’t witnessed her take down men half her size for suggesting all manner of lewd things to her face just because she was a woman daring to transgress into their space? Out in the field had been one thing, they didn’t precisely have a ton of options, but in HQ they had always been scrupulous. Now, it seemed any such rules were completely out of the window. Perhaps that was a good thing, perhaps not. He didn’t know. He was honestly just more bothered by the fact he had no idea what the rules of engagement were on anything anymore. How did he maneuver in this strange landscape, with its strange new rules of etiquette, decorum, and interaction with everyone? How did he maneuver here and survive without offending someone, or worse, picking a fight he actually didn’t want by being careless? How was he going to do this?
Ruefully, he turned from the lights and sounds outside, into the warmth of Peggy’s apartment, cozy and bright compared to the darkness outside. Next to the dingy apartment he and Bucky used to share across the river, it was palatial, five times as big, with carpets and gleaming wood and tile. It had multiple bedroom and no radiators that rattled and hissed, or stopped working without any warning. It looked both familiar and modern, and he couldn’t make sense of it. He had gathered from Peggy that the flat, black piece of glass on the far wall was what televisions had evolved into, and that the strange device in the kitchen with a number clock on it somehow heated up food from the sleek, silvery refrigerator. And an automatic dishwasher? Something about that almost scandalized him. He could almost hear his mother and Mrs. Barnes’ disapproving protests at the the expense of something like that when you could just scrub up the washing on your own.
A different world indeed!
For all that it was filled with strange appliances that baffled him, it was comfortable, if bland. Very little of Peggy marked this space, nothing that said this was her domain or gave insight into the life she had carved out for herself here. There was a book on an end table, a mystery novel, of course, and in the area he guessed was a dining room was a stack of papers and files, along with another strange device called a “computer,” which had a whole different meaning to him than it did now. Here and there were photographs, though, framed simply and left on shelves and tables. He picked up an official looking portrait of a distinguished man, grave in robes as he posed, cast in the dark sepia many photographs had when they were young. He guessed it was her father. He never met her parents, never had a chance to, but he’d heard stories. Harrison and Amanda Carter, he remembered that much, her father was a judge, her mother a professional man's wife with higher society aspirations. Steve studied him, grave and stern in the photograph, but even so, he could see hiding in the other man’s dark eyes a quiet amusement winking at the photographer, a wry glint to his eye that said that while he may be wear the armor of a very serious officer of the court, he was privately laughing at you. How many times had he seen that same look in his daughter’s expression?
“JARVIS,” he called, softly, wondering if this disembodied voice had any answers. “What year did Peggy’s father die?”
“Harrison Carter Senior died in November of 1964, sir.” The computer voice was as polite and obsequious as if he had been flesh and blood. “His wife, Amanda, died some five years later.”
She never even got to say goodbye to them. Steve set down the photograph, gently, back into its space on the dusty bookshelf, frowning at the aristocratic profile. “She has family alive, still, at least.”
“Yes, the descendants of her older brother, Michael. She’s quite close with one of his granddaughters, Agent Sharon Carter of SHIELD.”
He nodded, turning away as he roamed the space lazily, restless and uncertain. “She left them all behind on purpose and…time traveled?”
“So she says, sir.” How in the world did a voice created by a machine sound so lifelike? It even had a pinch of doubt in it, just like a person would!
“You don’t believe it?” Steve had no better explanation, given how he awoke in the future, but to hear a fake human voice have doubts made the whole thing more dubious, if that were possible.
“It isn’t that I don’t believe or disbelieve anything. I am not a person,” the voice said matter-of-factly. “But I know that Mr. Stark has his doubts. Time travel is impossible, even in this time, and quantum physicists are divided on whether it can even be done.”
Somehow, Steve wasn’t surprised a Stark would be invested in all of this. “Then how else did she get here?”
“Outside of a cryogenic sleep, such as what happened with you, time travel would be the only method we are aware of. Since Miss Carter does not have traces of the Dr. Erskine’s serum in her blood samples, the only logical conclusion is that she is telling the truth.”
He nodded, the question he didn’t want to ask on the tip of his tongue. He felt awful even giving voice to it, doubting Peggy. “And she is…Peggy Carter, right?”
“Oh, yes,” JARVIS assured him, nonplussed. “In this timeline, Peggy Carter disappeared between December 31, 1948 and January 1, 1949. She was last scene at the L&L Automat in Manhattan in the company of a dark haired man meeting the description of one Scott Lang, currently serving time in San Quentin State Prison in California for theft and computer crimes. He was described as wearing a strange biker outfit, carrying a helmet. He disappeared along with her that night, never to be seen again.”
“And then she showed up here two years ago, looking for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Steve looked down the darkened hallway towards where her bedroom lay. It wasn’t as if Peggy’s story was the craziest he had heard that day. “Why give it all up looking for me?”
“As to that, I can’t say, sir.” JARVIS’ voice was dutiful and pleasant, but he thought, or maybe imagined, a hint of sympathy there. “I will say that from what I can tell, Miss Carter is a singular woman, and very determined when she puts her mind to it. But I feel I should note it isn’t just for you she came forward in time.”
She had mentioned that. “Some alien threat, then?”
“That is what she says. Her story is that this Scott Lang came to her from a future in which this being, Thanos, killed half the known universe, all with the snap of his fingers.”
Steve had seen death many times over. After all, his own father and mother were dead, as was Bucky. He’d seen good men cut down in the prime of their life in battle, either by actual bullets or by Arnim Zola’s death rays, whatever they were. He’d known that horrific, gut-wrenching feeling of seeing another’s life drain from their eyes, had known the blood, and the gore, and the smell of it. He was sure most of it would haunt his dreams until he died…if he died at this point. But even in that sort of nightmare, it was only ever a small portion. A half of the planet all at once seemed nigh on incomprehensible.
And what did he mean by "known life"?
“This is bonkers,” he sighed, wandering, restless again. “I feel I’m in one of those stories where you hit your head and wake up in a different time, like…like a Connecticut Yankee waking up in the court of King Arthur.”
“And unlike Mr. Twain’s novel you are actually alive and awake in the year 2012, sir.” JARVIS’ hardly seemed bothered by the strangeness of all of this. Of course he wasn’t, he was a disembodied voice. “I can assure you all of your vital signs indicate you are alive, you have normal brain function, and you seem to be healthy and well.”
“You can read those?”
“Of course, sir.” JARVIS said it with mild affront, as if he’d been accused of stealing the silver.
So, here he was, in the 21st century. It was nothing like Buck Rogers, or Flash Gordon, or any of those other stories he and Bucky read so assiduously. It was…hell, he didn’t even have words to begin describing what it was, let alone begin to understand it. He paused, staring at the slim device, looking like a notebook, on Peggy’s dining room table.
“Say, JARVIS, think you can help me out?”
“As best as I can, sir.”
Steve wandered over, picking it up to run his fingers over the smooth, cool metal. “This is a computer, isn’t it?”
“A type of one, yes, though there are many other kinds.”
He didn’t need the full rundown. “Peggy said you can find just about anything on it, correct?”
“Most things,” JARVIS agreed. “Would you like to begin researching this world?”
“Yes,” he said, simply, opening it up. “And maybe walk me through how this thing works.”
“Gladly, sir!”
He pulled out a chair, rummaging through the piles of files and other papers to find a legal sized notepad, along with a pen, a strange one without a nib on it. “Does no one write anymore?”
“Rarely, as electronic devices are more popular, especially among the youth, but when people do, they prefer ballpoint pens, usually with some sort of fast drying gel ink.”
Steve opened it, scribbling on the blank page, finding it suited, even if it wasn’t as elegant of a script as the nibbed pens he grew up with. “What sort of electronic devices are we talking about, JARVIS?”
“Let us begin with the rudiments of a laptop computer, Captain Rogers, and then explain the idea of the internet to you, and maybe from there, if you aren’t too overwhelmed, I can move on to the evolution of the mobile phone.”
Steve nodded, feeling as he did long ago, sitting in his first officer training class. He’d get through this and figure it out…he hoped.