Of Home Near

Now
March 1945

It was raining in London when the staff car drew up in front of the SSR’s Whitehall headquarters, not a particularly unusual occurrence in England at any time of the year, let alone late March. Neither Peggy nor Colonel Phillips bothered with an umbrella in the brief dash from King Charles Street to the doors; the weather was vastly preferable to the horrible muddy, bloody slog that was France, Germany, and Austria right now. With the end of the war in sight, the SSR and the Howling Commandos were doing their best to mop up all of Hydra’s loose ends, which was no less a miserable experience than it had been when they had been chasing Johann Schmidt across Europe. Worse, in some ways; Schmidt had still been trying to win. His acolytes knew he had lost and were trying to cover up the evidence.

Not for the first time, Peggy wished that the fools would just give up. None of them had; most of them might be down to bullets instead of blasts, their fancy weapons beginning to fail without whatever Schmidt had been using to power them, but all of the Hydra encampments the SSR and the 107th had taken had fought tooth and nail until the end. It had kept the SSR from being retasked to the Pacific front, but it was a bloody business that was killing good soldiers who didn’t need to be dying in a war a dead man had already lost.

The SSR took up most of the building, though the ground floor was given over to the fictitious Inter-Service Research Bureau, whose job was ostensibly coordination between the various Allied service branches; it explained why there were so many Americans and Canadians in the building. The woman on duty behind the front desk was a rosy-cheeked Wren who looked up keenly as Peggy and Colonel Phillips came in, her eyes going a little wide at their arrival, though Peggy couldn’t imagine why. They exchanged sign and countersign and the Wren took her hand away from the pistol Peggy knew was under the desk.

“Mr. Stark put us on lockdown until you returned, Colonel,” the Wren told them quietly in response to Phillips’ query, which made his eyebrows go up. Due to the SSR’s mixed military/civilian command structure, Howard technically had the authority to do so, but he had never used it before. “No one in or out.”

This had better be good, she thought as they nodded to a couple of passing WACs and an American naval officer from one of the deception units the SSR worked with occasionally. The American stopped Phillips to complain about the lockdown, which he made placatory noises about but didn’t rescind. Like the Cabinet War Rooms next door, the SSR’s headquarters were in the basement of the building; she and Phillips waited in tense silence as the elevator clunked its way steadily downwards. Not to the lowest level; that was where the holding cells for high-security prisoners like Arnim Zola were, but the level one up from that. When the doors slid open to reveal the war room, everyone in it turned to stare at them as if they had arrived accompanied by a brass band.

“Stark?” Phillips said grimly into the sudden silence.

“He’s in his lab, sir,” said Corporal Irene Lorraine, who had been standing by one of the map tables with an armful of files. She started to hand off the files to another WAC, saying, “I’ll take you –”

“I think we know the way,” Peggy said. In the five weeks since the Valkyrie had gone down everyone in the SSR except Phillips and the Howling Commandos had been treating her like glass, which Peggy had only appreciated during those first few awful days. What she wanted to do now was work, to make certain that the remnants of Hydra didn’t make Steve Rogers’ death a zero sum. In the field there was no time for grief; at headquarters the awful weight of it threatened to crush her, and she suddenly found herself wishing that they were either back in Austria or that the Commandos weren’t still at RAF Tangmere. They wouldn’t get into London until tomorrow at the earliest, since the SSR’s staff car had only been able to bring Peggy and Phillips and they had arrived so late in the day that there was no other transport available.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone was staring at her as she and Phillips crossed the room, headed for the laboratory sections on this level. Some murmur of conversation started again as officers, agents, and enlisted men and women returned to their work, but people kept sneaking looks at them until Phillips turned and snapped, “We win the war sometime in the last five minutes?”

To her mild bewilderment, they got the same response in the labs, despite the fact that Howard’s team of scientists usually barely noticed when the air raid sirens went off. One of the engineers pointed them to Howard’s office, whose door was closed.

There had been some kind of disturbance in the lab lately, Peggy observed as they went past the long lab benches, most of them covered with captured Hydra technology. One of the tables near the center of the room was missing and there was a dent in the floor that had been roped off. She looked around more keenly, marking fresh damage to the walls and ceiling that could have been made by bullets, along with another dent in one of the support columns that was suspiciously man-sized. It wouldn’t have been the first accident they had had with Hydra technology.

“Stark, you are aware that there’s still a war on, aren’t you?” Phillips said as he pushed open the door to Howard’s office. “We can’t drop everything to hop across the Channel just on your say-so.”

Howard had been leaning against the front of his desk, talking to a man whose back was to the door and to a very pretty woman a few years older than Peggy whose red roots were beginning to show against dyed blonde hair. The woman was wearing a WAC’s uniform without insignia and was a complete stranger, though Peggy thought she had known all the women assigned to the SSR or authorized to be in the building. The man was tall, his light-colored hair a few inches longer than regulation and his broad shoulders straining the olive drab wool of his American army uniform. He went still at the sound of Phillips’ voice.

Howard straightened up. “I didn’t think this one could wait,” he said. “And you took your time coming back; I called you a week ago.”

“Because there’s still a war on,” Peggy reminded him. “Well, what is it?”

Howard’s gaze flickered to the Army officer. Peggy saw his shoulders move as he breathed in deeply, then he turned around.

It was Steve Rogers.

Then
April 2018

Steve could feel the Infinity Stones buzzing all around him.

The frisson of unnatural energy raised the hair on the back of his neck, shivering across his skin as he shoved himself ungracefully to his feet. It was the same sensation that he remembered from the Valkyrie back in 1945, in those long drawn-out seconds while Schmidt had screamed as the Tesseract tore him away. He had felt it around Vision sometimes, too, and very rarely the echo of it around Wanda. Then it had been just the one Stone, though, and this was all six of them in close proximity to each other.

Not today, you son of a bitch.

Dirt sprayed as he slid under Thanos’s extended arm like a runner sliding home. He slammed a sharp-edged blow into Thanos’s right knee; another knocked his gauntleted left hand aside, and Steve popped up again to slam an uppercut into the underside of the alien’s jaw. Just behind him he could see Natasha running for them, having dragged herself free of the stone prison; besides Wanda she was the only one still on her feet, probably because Thanos hadn’t hit her with one of the Stones directly. The bastard had been playing with them like a kid with a new toy, testing what they could do and how he could use them.

Just a little more time. That was all Wanda needed, just a little more time –

He grabbed the hand that Thanos thrust out at him, closing his fingers around the gleaming alien metal. Steve was yelling, maybe; the buzzing of the Infinity Stones screamed in his head like a hive of angry bees, drowning out any sound he was making. He saw Thanos’s eyes widen a little in surprise, muscles straining as he tried and failed to close his gauntleted fist, to use the Stones – Steve had seen enough to know that there had to be some kind of physical component to using them, not just a mental one.

Then the alien shifted, dragging Steve sideways; Steve was braced wrong to avoid being moved and he saw the massive purple fist coming at him in slow-motion, unable to shift to avoid it or get his remaining shield up to disperse the impact. The punch snapped across his face hard enough to stun, knocking him to the ground as his grip on the alien’s hand tore free.

The alien stood over him for what felt like a long time, but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. Steve was trying to push himself up again, fisting a hand against the forest floor, when Thanos got a foot under him and shoved him over onto his back, holding him in place with a boot on his chest.

“Rogers,” he said, his tone lighter than Steve might have expected, if he had expected anything at all. Steve closed his hands around an ankle the size of a small tree trunk, trying to force him off, but the angle was wrong even for his serum-enhanced strength.

“You know me?” he said through clenched teeth. He didn’t dare look at Wanda; as long as Thanos was busy with him he wasn’t going after her. He grimaced as Thanos pressed down, feeling something crack inside him; probably a rib or two from the feel of it.

“The soldier,” Thanos said. He flinched a little as one of Natasha’s widow’s stings hit him in the side of the head, but brushed it off as if it was nothing more than a mosquito bite. “The man out of…time.”

Thanos let the last word linger there between them. The Stones set across his knuckles glittered in the fading sunlight as he turned his left hand over, thoughtful.

He was a kid playing with a new toy, the kind of boy who burned the wings off flies with a magnifying glass and a sunbeam, like the boys who had tied a can full of hot coals to old lady Alonski’s crotchety gray cat and then beat the shit out of Steve when he had gone for them with a piece of broken-off fencepost. Steve knew the exact instant Thanos realized he could use more than one of the Stones at the same time, just as he saw Natasha come up behind him, her bites glowing bright blue.

“Nat, go!” he yelled. “Get out of here!”

She was the last thing he saw before the world dissolved in a wash of blue and green energy.

He hit the ground – the floor – hard enough to jar his brains in his skull and make his broken ribs scream protest. Steve was aware of Natasha half on top of him where she had thrown herself at the last instant before the power of the Stones had swept over them both, but he was already rolling to get her under him; he could feel her slack, hit harder by the transition than he had been. She was conscious enough to curl up into a ball beneath him, making herself smaller so that he could cover her more easily. Steve pressed his face down against her hair, grassy-smelling with the bitter tang of alien blood and alien technology under it, and waited for the pounding of blood in his own head to stop, for someone to shoot him, or for the white noise of screaming and shouting to resolve into words he could understand, whichever happened first.

It was the second one, or more accurately the tip of a rifle barrel nudging him in the shoulder. Steve moved without thinking, catching the rifle barrel in one hand and jerking it upwards as he twisted to slam a foot into his assailant’s calves. He heard bone snap at almost the same time a shot rang out, whoever it was pulling the trigger on automatic reflex as the pain registered. He didn’t stop moving, coming to his feet in the same fluid motion even though his vision hadn’t cleared yet, starbursts of blue and green still obscuring the little he could see. For all Steve had better night vision than an unenhanced human, he didn’t need to be able to see to fight; he had learned that the hard way.

The passage of air across his skin told him someone was approaching. Steve’s right hand, the one without his remaining Wakandan shield, lashed out, grabbing the extended weapon and pulling it and the hand holding it forward towards him, letting the bearer fire over his shoulder. He twisted until the pistol came free in his hand with another crack of breaking bone, then he snapped his foot upwards, connecting with something soft and sending it flying backwards. A flip put the barrel of the pistol in his hand and he slammed the butt of the weapon sideways, pulling the blow at the last instant; even an unenhanced human’s pistol-whip could kill if it hit right, and Steve could crush bone with his bare hands. He still didn’t know where he was or who he was fighting.

By then Natasha was on her feet too, sweeping her batons out from their holster as she put her back against his. There was a yell, the thwack of hard metal impacting flesh, and a grunt of pain from behind him; not hers.

Another flip put the pistol-grip in his hand, barrel braced over the top of his remaining shield. The white noise blur of shouting finally began to resolve into identifiable words, just as the blue and green starbursts in his vision began to clear to reveal a big open room, low-ceilinged and brick-walled and familiar.

“Stop shooting!” someone – a man – was yelling. “Stop shooting up my lab, damn it!”

Steve knew that voice, even before the speaker went on, “Steve – Steve, it’s Howard. It’s Howard Stark. You’re okay – you’re safe, okay? You’re at SSR headquarters. Can you give me the gun?”

“Mr. Stark, I don’t think you should –” someone protested.

Howard Stark waved the MP back with an impatient hand, all of his attention focused on Steve. Steve’s most recent memory of him was decades-old grainy security camera footage, preserved by Hydra against future need, but this was the Howard Steve had last seen in the flesh the morning the Howling Commandos and the 107th had stormed Johann Schmidt’s hidden base, waiting at the SSR’s forward command post until the site was cleared for noncombatants to go in. He was a bigger man than he seemed at first glance, dark-haired and sharp-eyed and down to his shirtsleeves now, his tie thrown back over his shoulder as he held his hands up where Steve could see them. A couple of MPs were with him, including the one who had spoken, and three more on the floor between him and Steve. Several soldiers had run in from the main room, their sidearms out if they had them, and a handful of Howard’s engineers were pressed against the back walls, wide-eyed with shock and a little fear. There was a WAC – Irene Lorraine, Colonel Phillips’ secretary – with a camera in her hands, still steadily taking pictures; the engineers must have dragooned her into service to document the Hydra equipment he could see on the workbenches that hadn’t been knocked over during the brief fight.

Steve risked a glance over his shoulder to see what Natasha was dealing with. She looked back at him, her eyes wide and her breath rasping in her throat; there was one MP and a civilian down on her side, probably an engineer who had made the dangerous mistake of thinking that a small woman was relatively harmless.

“Steve,” Howard said again, and he turned his head back to him. Howard took a step closer, his hands still raised. “Can you give me the gun? It’s okay – it’s just me. It’s just me, Steve.”

He reached forward, ignoring the motion the nearest MP made to stop him, and put his hand over the pistol Steve was bracing on top of his left shield. Steve let him take the Colt, his grip slack enough that Howard could pull it out of his hand and pass it back to the MP, who snatched it from him and checked the safety. Howard stayed where he was, his hands where Steve could see them.

“Steve?” he said again.

“Howard,” Steve managed to say. The word came out in a croak, like he couldn’t quite remember how to speak, but it eased a little of the worry in Howard’s brown eyes. They weren’t as much like Tony’s as Steve had thought when he had first met Tony, though the family resemblance between the two men was obvious.

“Hey,” Howard said gently. “You scared the blazes out of us.” He put his hand carefully on top of Steve’s shield and pushed it down a little; Steve let him do it, watching Howard blink once as he started to register that Steve’s tactical gear didn’t match what he had been wearing the last time they had seen each other. His gaze flickered downwards fast, taking in the battered state of Steve’s tac gear; even with the star and insignia ripped off, the aesthetics might have been right for Captain America, but Howard had made Steve’s old uniform and he probably knew it better than anyone except Steve. He looked back at Steve, surprisingly calm and undeterred by either Steve’s beard or the fact that Steve knew he probably looked as if he had been beat to hell, which he had.

“Steve?” Natasha said, a note of strain in her voice.

Steve swallowed, trying to work moisture back into his mouth. It took him two tries before he could say, “It’s okay, Nat – stand down.”

He felt her hesitation, then she slid her batons back into their holster with a click and turned to put her shoulder reassuringly against his, her sharp eyes moving over Howard and the downed MPs. They were twitching, so at least Steve knew he hadn’t killed them, and one of the women who had been a FANY was coming in with a medical bag over her shoulder. There were enough accidents in the lab that there was always someone with medical training on duty, no matter what time of day it was.

Steve’s mind seemed to be moving in stop-motion, unable or unwilling to comprehend what had happened. But he knew the main lab, and he knew Howard, and Corporal Lorraine, and the FANY who had come to treat the MPs, and all three of the engineers he could see, and the officers and enlisted men and women who had come in, from the French pilot Antoinette duMaurier to Jakob Wójcik, the Polish explosives expert they had rescued from one of Hydra’s factories – the SSR wasn’t so big that he didn’t know everyone in it, or at least the two-thirds of it tasked to Europe; there were other divisions in the States and on the Pacific front that he had never interacted with. All of them were looking at him in shock and no little fear, which was about how Steve felt at the moment, so he sympathized.

Out of time, Thanos had said.

“Steve?” Howard said gently, and Steve looked back at him. The adrenaline surge from the fight was wearing off and he was starting to shake, uncharacteristic shock setting in. “Steve, I’m going to hug you now, okay? Don’t punch me.”

Steve managed to make himself nod, and Howard put his arms carefully around Steve. Steve returned the embrace automatically, and god, it was Howard, right down to the smell of his aftershave and the surprising muscle beneath his tailored shirt, the machine oil beneath nails that never really got all the way clean.

“It is you,” Howard said when he had pulled back, echoing Steve’s own thoughts. He looked down, where some of the alien blood from Steve’s uniform had transferred to his shirt, blinked once, and then turned his attention to Natasha. The onceover he gave her was appreciative, but all he said was, “Who’s your friend?”

Natasha looked at Steve, read his inability to respond, and said, “Natasha Ro –”

“Rogers,” Steve said, a split-second decision, and to her credit Natasha didn’t hesitate for an instant; they had played these parts before.

“Natasha Rogers,” she said, and nudged Steve’s shoulder with her own, like she was still a little shy with it.

He wasn’t sure it fooled Howard, though one of the cowering engineers made a shocked sound and Lorraine looked brightly interested, but all Howard said was, “Sounds like you have a lot to tell us about. Starting with what the hell just happened and how the hell you got in here, because, Steve, a lot of people are going to be really happy to hear you’re alive, starting with me, but what just happened?”

Now

A dozen thoughts went through Peggy’s head in an instant, starting with he must have walked out and a coldly clinical we’ll have to get a team to the crash site before anyone else can get their hands on Schmidt’s technology. Mostly, though, she was aware of an enormous sense of relief.

Steve didn’t show any evidence of the crash, though they had all seen his accelerated healing in action at various points over the past year and a half. His hair had grown out and he hadn’t shaved his beard, which had come in a shade darker than the rest of his hair. His eyes were harder, maybe, but that was true of everyone at this point in the war.

He said, “Peggy,” sounding very anxious, and then, to Phillips, “Sir.”

If Phillips responded, Peggy didn’t hear it. She walked forward without conscious thought until she could put her arms around him, the embrace that they had both always put off until later, when the war ends, neither she nor Steve willing to admit that for one or both of them that day might never come. She had spent a lot of time castigating herself for that over the past five weeks, since it hadn’t made any difference in the end. If anyone should have known better, it was her, and it was a relief when Steve hugged her back. It was a relief to shut her eyes and feel his heart beating, hear the sound of his breath, and know that he was alive and real and there. He had come back, after so long –

She pulled back eventually, reaching up to draw him down into a kiss – never mind that the door was open and Phillips and Howard and the strange woman were there – but Steve put his hands up to stop her. “Peggy, wait,” he said. “Wait –”

Peggy seized his left hand, stared at the gold band on his ring finger, said, “You –!” and punched him in the face.

It didn’t succeed in knocking him down, but Steve took a couple of hasty steps backwards until Howard and the blonde woman caught him to steady him. Howard said, “Well, at least she didn’t shoot you this time.”

“Thanks, Howard,” Steve told him, touching his jaw gingerly. “That really makes me feel better.”

“Glad to see you’re in fine form, Rogers,” Phillips said, the relief in his shoulders belying his dry tone. He turned to shut the door on three goggling engineers, two MPs, and Corporal Lorraine, adding, “Is this the lucky lady?”

“Natasha Rogers, Colonel Phillips, Agent Carter,” the blonde introduced herself, releasing Steve. Despite her prettiness, there were fighter’s calluses on the hand she offered first to Phillips, then to Peggy, and up close there was a scar visible at the edge of her hairline, in an awkward spot nearly impossible for makeup to conceal. Her accent was American, though there was something slightly unfamiliar to it that Peggy couldn’t place. When she stepped away, Peggy watched the way she held herself, shifting her weight back onto one foot, and thought, This is a very dangerous woman.

Exactly what Steve liked.

It took more effort than Peggy cared to admit to force her jealousy aside as she shook out her hand, though she didn’t bother trying to smile. Steve kept shooting her anxious little looks even after he took his hand away from his bruised jaw; Peggy refused to meet his eyes, no matter how petty it was. Now she knew why everyone in the SSR had been looking at her on their way in; they had known about Steve and his new girl.

“You were able to bail out?” Phillips said to Steve.

“Not exactly,” Steve said. “I didn’t walk away from the crash, either,” he added, preempting the next question. He took a deep breath, looking first at Natasha, then at Howard, and turned back to Phillips, settling his shoulders as if bracing for a fight. “I’m Steve Rogers, but I’m not your Steve Rogers – I mean, I am, I’m just not from 1945. Nat and I are from 2018.”

Then

Howard put them in his office, which Steve might have thought was very trusting of him under the circumstances if he hadn’t already known that it was nearly impossible for anyone but Howard to find anything there. He did lock down the building and post an MP outside the door; the MP in question looked understandably concerned about it, having just seen what Steve and Natasha had done to four of his colleagues. The fact that Howard had done it rather than handing it off to anyone else meant that he was the highest-ranking SSR officer in headquarters at the moment. Steve told Natasha as much before he put his head in his hands and went back to trying to stop hyperventilating while she searched Howard’s office.

“And I thought Tony was disorganized,” she muttered, tugging experimentally at the door that led into Howard’s private lab, but it was locked. “How does he find anything?”

“He’s got a butler at home,” Steve said, a little distantly. “He says he has a system here. No one’s ever been able to figure out what it is.” His voice sounded tinny and far-off to his own ears; something in it made Natasha stop rifling through papers and come back over to him. She took the other chair in front of Howard’s desk and pulled it forwards until they were knee to knee with each other.

“Talk to me, Steve,” she said.

Steve shook his head, his mind blank. After a moment, a thought swam up and he managed to say, “What’s the latest date you found?”

“March 7, 1945,” Natasha said. “You went down at the end of February, right?”

Steve shook his head again. “Middle – February 14th,” he said. “Valentine’s Day. Fury told me that, um, all the official reports got filed with different dates – just in case. Colonel Phillips and Peggy were…paranoid. They always were. The news didn’t break until –” He had to think about it, chewing on his lower lip; he hadn’t looked it up afterwards, since by the time he woke up in 2012 there hadn’t been a point, but it had been in the Smithsonian exhibit. “– beginning of March. Someone leaked it to the press, I think. Probably not someone in the SSR; everyone here knows better. I’d guess Phillips had to break the news to General Eisenhower or President Roosevelt and it got out somewhere around there.”

He was pretty sure Natasha knew at least some of that, but saying it out loud cleared his head a little.

“This is real, isn’t it?” he said. “That son of a bitch actually did it with the Stones. We’re actually here.”

“I think so, yeah,” Natasha said. “But you’d know better than me.”

“God, I would have done anything for this six years ago,” Steve whispered. “Anything. Now –” He dug the heels of his hands into his temples. “I think I’m going to throw up. Not really,” he added as Natasha made a move for the wastebasket.

She settled back down, then said, “Let me see those ribs.”

Steve put a hand to his side, wincing, but said, “They’re just cracked, I think. I’ll live.”

“Let me see,” she insisted. “You got stepped on by an alien, Steve.”

“I got stepped on by a lot of aliens,” he said, but helped her strip him out of the top half of his tactical gear. His body armor was filthy with dirt and alien blood; he set it down on the floor beside the chair and pulled his undershirt off, letting Natasha inspect the mass of bruises covering his torso. Not all of them were from Thanos, though the largest was; there were finger-shaped bruises all along his throat where the big alien with the glaive-like polearm had tried to crush his windpipe.

“You okay?” he asked Natasha. There was a spray of dark blood on the front of her vest and the usual assortment of bruises and shallow cuts that accompanied a battle, along with a slice against the side of her neck clotted with dried blood, and she was moving more gingerly than usual.

“Bruised ribs, maybe,” she admitted, pressing a hand to her side. “But it’s not that bad. Nothing’s broken, no internal injuries.”

“You sure?” Steve asked her.

She nodded. “Only got stepped on by an alien once,” she said, her mouth quirking a little. She touched his side again and Steve winced. “Can they do something for those ribs while we’re here?”

“We had doctors in 1945, Nat,” he said dryly. “And even if we didn’t, I’ll heal.”

“I know that,” she said, “but you can make it worse. I don’t want to find out the hard way how long it takes you to bounce back from a punctured lung.”

“I have found out the hard way,” Steve said, “and the answer’s about a week, or at least it was in 1944. Ow.” That was in response to another gentle prod; Natasha murmured an apology in response and then sat back on her heels, looking frustrated at her lack of ability to do anything more. They had been going into a fight with the ability to get medical attention afterwards, not expecting to have to patch each other up in the field. “It’s okay,” he told her, and started to put his t-shirt back on, but the movement pulled at his ribs and he stopped with it bundled in his lap instead. He’d put it on again in a minute.

“Why did you come after me?” he asked her.

Natasha pushed herself upright, wincing a little herself at the motion. “We’re Avengers,” she told him as she sat back down. “That means we don’t do it alone. We protect each other.”

“So now we’re stuck in 1945 together,” Steve said.

“Yeah.”

“And we’re in London,” Steve said, and when she nodded, clearly not understanding the significance of that, clarified, “That means the war’s not over yet.”

Natasha stared at him for a long moment before she got his meaning and blanched. “Was there any way Hitler still could have won in March?”

Steve made a vague gesture. “I’m not sure about that,” he said, “but it could have dragged out a lot longer than May, gotten a lot more people killed. And that’s only the European theatre. The Pacific –”

“How involved was the SSR in any of that? I know Howard Stark is supposed to have worked on the atomic bomb –”

Steve shrugged; he had read Howard’s official biography and wasn’t sure the dates added up for that to be true with the addition of Howard’s still-classified SSR service, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he could ask anyone about. “There’s an SSR division based out of Hawaii, but I’ve got no idea about the rest,” he admitted. “I wasn’t around then.”

“Right, stupid question.”

“They were talking about pulling me and the Howlies away from Schmidt for the push into Germany across the Rhine, like they did for D-Day in ‘44, but I slept through that,” Steve said. “I don’t know if the 107th was involved in Operation Plunder at all or if they were still going after Hydra when it started. I don’t think so, but –” He shrugged again. “When I woke up this morning I wasn’t even thinking I’d have to fight a crazy alien who wanted to wipe out half the universe, let alone be back in the war.”

“Yeah,” Natasha agreed. She squeezed his hands, warm and alive and real, a reassuring discrepancy in the dizzying familiarity of Howard Stark’s disaster of an office. “How do you want to play this? I’m guessing you told Stark we were married so he wouldn’t split us up.”

Steve nodded. Peggy or Phillips would have done it anyway, but Howard wouldn’t. Peggy, god, Peggy –

He forced the thought aside with an effort. “I’m going to tell him the truth,” he said, and when Natasha’s eyebrows went up, “If there’s anyone who can fix this, it’s Howard. And I’ve got no idea what he thinks happened, but I can’t come up with a story that’s going to go anywhere towards explaining this otherwise. Can you?”

“Not for 1945,” Natasha said after a moment’s thought. “You know these people, Steve. I’ll follow your lead.”

“I haven’t known them in six years, Nat,” Steve said. “Or seventy-three, depending on how you want to count.” He turned his head as his serum-enhanced hearing picked up the sound of approaching footsteps from outside the heavy door. “He’s coming back.”

“Tell me what I need to know quickly,” Natasha said.

“The SSR’s not SHIELD and Howard’s not Tony,” Steve said. “And Phillips isn’t Fury, either.”

“When did we get married?”

Steve blinked at her and she shrugged in response, adding, “I’d ask.”

“Um,” Steve said, briefly blank, and then said, “Two years ago, after Germany.” It had taken her six weeks to track him down to Athens after he had left Bucky with T’Challa’s doctors in Wakanda and Steve was still a little surprised that she had even thought to look for him in Greece; none of Ross’s people had.

“That probably counts as ‘for better or for worse,’” Natasha agreed, her mouth twitching.

“Though I wouldn’t mention Germany. Or Tony. Or – Jesus.” Steve rubbed a hand over his face. “God, I don’t want to lose the Allies the war.”

They both looked up as the door opened, letting in Howard Stark and Corporal Lorraine with a tray full of coffee cups, coffeepot, and digestive biscuits on a plate. Both of them looked wide-eyed at Steve’s bruises; he pulled his shirt on hastily, ignoring the way it pulled at his injured ribs. It still left the bruises on his throat visible, but he couldn’t do anything about that unless he wanted to put the rest of his gear on again. Lorraine put the tray down on a mostly clear spot on the desk and then hovered like she wanted to stay before leaving under Howard’s pointed stare.

Howard shut the door behind her and stood looking at Steve and Natasha for a moment, his expression strange in a way that Steve had never seen before. Then he said, “Called Phillips and told him to come back and bring Peggy and the boys. It’ll take them a while, since they’re over on the continent hunting down Hydra holdouts. I didn’t tell him why; I didn’t think the news should go out even encrypted.”

Steve nodded. He had stayed away from the SSR’s records from the war after his disappearance, since at the time there had been no reason for him to need to know and because in truth he hadn’t wanted to be reminded of what he should have had and hadn’t gotten, but he was aware that raiding Schmidt’s main base had turned up records of at least a dozen smaller facilities run by his cadre of mad scientists. Some of those scientists had later been recruited as part of Operation Paperclip.

“God damn,” Howard said eventually, “it is good to see you, Steve.”

I’ll get Howard on the line, he’ll know what to do, Peggy had said, her voice scratchy with burgeoning tears over the radio, but there had been no time. Steve had never wondered before how much that knowledge had weighed on Howard Stark.

“You too, Howard,” he said, getting to his feet. This time Howard hugged him back hard, without the slight wariness he had had earlier; it jarred Steve’s bruises, but he didn’t care.

“I knew it,” Howard said against his ear. “I knew a little thing like a plane crash wouldn’t be enough to kill you.” He pulled back, keeping his hands on Steve’s upper arms, and grinned at him for a moment longer before he finally released him and turned to Natasha. “Okay, let’s do this again without the screaming and the shooting and the hitting. I’m Howard Stark.”

She took his outstretched hand. “Natasha Rogers.”

Steve could tell that he recognized the pistol calluses on her hand instantly; Howard had been around enough woman operators during the war that he didn’t even look surprised, just gave her hand a firm shake and visibly mentally classified her as Steve’s girl, not for flirting with. He also looked substantially more interested in her bites than her breasts, with his usual instinct for sniffing out new and interesting technology like a truffle pig.

Howard poured coffee for all three of them, apologizing for the lack of sugar or cream – “Rationing, you know how it is” – then dragged his chair out from behind his desk so that he could sit down with them.

“Now, normally I’d be all sad you got married without even inviting me to the wedding,” he said to Steve, “but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that there’s something a little hinky going on here, am I right?”

“What tipped you off?” Steve said. “The part where we dropped in out of thin air or the part where I’ve been dead for – what’s the date, anyway?”

“March 14, 1945,” Howard said, then checked his watch. “March 15. Yeah, that might have had something to do with it.” He took a sip of his coffee, winced at the taste, and added, “So lay it on me, Rogers.”

Steve looked at Natasha, who nodded to him in response; this was the part that he had never actually had to explain to people, since it had been public knowledge by the time he had been up for actually having conversations with anyone. Anyone ghoulishly interested in it he hadn’t wanted to talk to; the usual best case had been those who simply ignored it, or addressed it once to gauge his response and then never brought it up again.

“I went down with the Valkyrie,” he said eventually, setting the coffee cup aside so he could lace his fingers together. “Schmidt is dead, by the way.”

Howard nodded, watching him with sharp eyes. “We couldn’t figure out your heading,” he said. “We knew Schmidt’s original course, but –”

“We got off course – messed the controls up fighting,” Steve said. “I don’t know how far off course we were – enough.” He had to stop again, swallowing hard. “When I – crashed,” he finally managed to say, “the, um, the cockpit filled up with water. It was – fast. It was really fast.”

Natasha reached over for his hand, but he pulled away from her; he had never even told Fury’s shrinks this, just told them that he didn’t remember the crash. He wished he didn’t remember the crash.

He had broken bones going down; he had known that immediately. He also knew that SHIELD’s doctors had never been entirely certain how bad his injuries had been, since they had spent sixty-seven years slowly healing. The dominant theory that he had let the doctors keep believing was that he had been knocked out by the impact.

“2012,” he told Howard. “That’s how long it took to find the plane. And me. I was –”

“Suspended animation,” Howard said. When Steve looked up at him, startled, Howard swallowed and said, “I theorized it. I didn’t want to tell Peg or Phillips, in case –” He lifted a shoulder, his expression distressed.

Steve stared at him, horrified; he knew Howard had been looking after the war, but he hadn’t thought he had been looking for a survivor, not a corpse –

This time when Natasha put a hand on his shoulder he didn’t pull away, just reached up to grip her fingers until he felt like he could go on. “So SHIELD – that’s who the SSR became after the war – thawed me out and that’s when things started getting weird.”

“Weirder than the Red Skull?”

“‘Aliens invaded’ weird,” Steve clarified, which made Howard’s eyebrows shoot up. “That’s how Nat and I met. And some others,” he added; Howard didn’t need to know about Tony. “That was six years ago.”

Howard gave Natasha a speculative look, then turned his attention back to Steve. “Well, you were obviously in the middle of a fight when you turned up here,” he said, and Steve touched his fingers gingerly to the bruises on his neck. “Same guys?”

“Different guys,” Steve said. “Well, same guys, sort of,” he clarified after a moment’s thought, remembering what Bruce had said about Loki and the Chitauri. “Working for the same guy. He, um, wanted to knock us – me – out of the fight. He found one.” He took a deep breath, then said, “It’s a fight we need to be in, Howard.”

“Steve, I don’t have a time machine sitting in my vault,” Howard said, his brows knitting. “And even if I did, the vault’s back in New York; I can’t exactly hop back and forth these days, not with the war the way it is.”

“What did it look like from your end, Mr. Stark?” Natasha asked.

Howard sat back in his chair, turning his coffee cup in quarter-circles between his hands as he thought. “There was a flash of green and blue light,” he said finally. “It’s late – just after one in the morning now, probably around midnight then – so there weren’t that many of us still working. I thought it was some of the Hydra tech at first; you know how that stuff’s always glowing blue, though not all of it’s working anymore. Some of it just blows up if you push the wrong button, though, so I thought that was what it was at first, except – there you were.” He looked at Steve for a long moment before he said, “God, it’s good to see you.”

Now

“Howard, you cannot possibly believe this ridiculous story,” Peggy said as soon as the door had closed behind Steve and his so-called wife so the MPs could take them back to their room. Steve could probably still hear it, since like all of his senses his hearing had been enhanced far beyond the human norm by the serum, but she didn’t particularly care. In fact, it was better if he heard her; maybe his obviously-addled brain would start working again. She actually took a step towards the door, meaning to pull it open and shout at him, but thought better of it.

She turned on Howard instead. “Aliens, Howard? Aliens? Aliens and time travel? Are you mad? Just because a pretty girl waves her breasts at you –”

Howard’s eyebrows went up. “Give me some credit, Peg. I’m not going to look at Steve’s wife’s décolletage.”

“Just because Steve bats his lashes at you –” Peggy went on, which resulted in the dubious satisfaction of seeing Howard’s cheeks flush scarlet. It was an open but unspoken secret in the SSR that Howard was sweet on Steve.

“Look, I know how it sounds,” he said quickly – to Colonel Phillips, not to her. “Believe me, I know how it sounds. That’s why I believe it, because no one in their right mind would offer it up as an option when there are a dozen more believable ones to choose from. Hell, he could have knocked on the front door and said he had to walk back to the Allied lines after he crashed Schmidt’s plane; it’s not like we wouldn’t have let him in. Besides, I’m not just taking Steve’s word for it – come on, I’ll show you.” He got up to unlock the door that led into his private workroom.

Peggy exchanged a look with Colonel Phillips and followed him in as Howard turned the light on.

“This is the gear that Steve and his blushing bride came in with,” he said. “No one’s been in here but me, including them. And here are the photographs and medical reports we took.” He handed the files to Phillips, who glanced them over before passing Steve’s to Peggy and looking more closely at Natasha’s and the stack of photographs from the incident.

Peggy flipped it open, paging through the sheets of loose paper and photographs. As always, it was a shock to see blood on Steve’s face, even in the plain black and white of the photographs; from the state he had been in, it certainly did look as if he had arrived from the middle of a fight. She went through the medical reports with more care, frowning, and asked Howard, “His numbers aren’t the same?”

“From the tests we ran compared to the last ones a couple months back, he’s stronger, he’s faster, his reflexes are quicker –” Howard shrugged. “I’d guess his accelerated healing is up too but short of stabbing him and waiting to see how long it takes him to heal up from that there’s no good way to find out.” He nodded at the file she was holding. “Those bruises were gone within twenty-four hours and the cuts by the day after that; ribs took a little longer but not as long as they did last year.” He leaned back against the workbench behind him, hands braced against the side of the table, and frowned. “Brandt whisked him off before we could get any numbers right from the start back in ‘43, but we’ve known since Krausberg that his numbers have been inching up. It could just be that he’s getting a better idea of what he can actually do, but Abe and I speculated that there was always a possibility that he’d continue to get – well, better – over time. I ran the numbers and it’s consistent with what Steve’s said, taking into account sixty-seven years of suspended animation.” A muscle in his jaw worked and he glanced aside.

“The girl?” Phillips asked, exchanging files with Peggy.

“Nothing too weird there,” Howard said. “She could probably give you a run for your money in a fight, though, Peg.”

“You might get the chance to test that,” Peggy muttered, looking at the photos of Natasha Rogers. Like Steve, she had clearly also been in the middle of a fight when she had arrived. Her medical report was more interesting; as well as more recent trauma from whatever fight they had been in, she had scars that indicated a lot of healed injuries, some of them old enough that she would have been only a child when she received them. An operator, then, but not one who had come at it the traditional way, if there was such a thing for a woman in 1945. “Did she happen to tell you her maiden name?”

Howard and Phillips both gave her a look that suggested they doubted her motives for asking, which Peggy ignored; it was a legitimate question. After a moment, Howard said, “Romanoff.”

“Russian name,” Phillips observed.

“According to her, she’s from Ohio. Born 1984 to Alexander and Melanie Romanoff, one younger sister, Elaina; graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor’s in psychology in 2006 and was recruited out of college by the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, which is apparently what the SSR grows up to be.” Howard cocked an eyebrow at them and added, “Met Steve in 2012 during an alien invasion and married him in 2016, two years ago. Obviously we can’t confirm any of this.”

“Obviously,” Peggy muttered. It all sounded boringly conventional and excessively unlikely going by the medical report, unless things had gotten very odd in the future, aliens aside. She flipped the folder closed and turned to the photographs Corporal Lorraine had taken. Except for one blurred one near the beginning, she had kept going with steadiness that would have given any war photographer credit. She had gotten the flash of light that accompanied their arrival, Steve rolling to protect the woman, both of them on their feet – they certainly looked like they had come straight out of a fight.

“What about their gear?” Phillips asked. “You said there was something about it that confirmed Rogers’ story?”

“Yeah.” Howard turned to gesture at the clothing and equipment spread out on the table behind him. “Here’s Steve’s stuff.”

Peggy put the photographs down and stepped over to look at it. The suit clearly had its origins in the Captain America uniform, though it was battered and the material was different, and – “The star’s been torn off,” she observed, prodding at the bare patch with one finger. Then she looked more closely, and corrected herself, “It’s been removed. And this isn’t fabric –”

“Now this,” Howard said gleefully, “is body armor. This makes my stuff look like tissue paper. It’s a triple layer of a carbon polymer, like mine, but five, maybe six times stronger.” He stuck his finger through one of the places where the top layer of synthetic fabric had torn to reveal the scaly central layer and said, “This is probably from being shot at point-blank range – see the burning here? This stuff would turn a knife no problem. Flexible as hell, too; Steve could probably do cartwheels in it.”

“Can you replicate it?” Phillips asked.

Howard shook his head. “Don’t have the equipment. That’s the thing with Steve’s and Natasha’s gear – I’ve been hip-deep in Hydra’s stuff for the past couple years and we’re still only starting to peel it apart. This stuff, though – it’s ten, twenty generations down the line from what we’re using now, but I can see how it got from point A to point Z. Some of it I could make right now by hand, but most of it we just don’t have the machining capability for. That’s not even getting into the synthetics. Look at this.” He picked something small and black up off the table and showed it to them.

“What is it?” Peggy said.

“It’s an earpiece for a radio transceiver,” Howard said. “Here’s the microphone – attaches to the wrist. Totally wireless. Both of them had ‘em. We’re at least ten years away from tech this small, probably closer to twenty, maybe more.” He set both pieces back down on the table as Peggy inspected the remainder of Steve’s gear. It was a little reassuring to realize that some of it was just leather and metal, no fancy polymers or synthetics. The contents of his pockets and belt pouches had been set aside, revealing a spare communications set, an assortment of equipment that mostly just seemed to be updated versions of what he already carried, including grapples and holdout knives; there was no sidearm or holster.

“Where’s his shield?” she asked. There was a harness that looked like it ought to go with it, but the shield was a little hard to miss and it wasn’t there.

Howard frowned, from which Peggy assumed he had asked Steve that question himself. “He says he doesn’t have it – he sure as hell didn’t show up with it here. He did have this.” He rapped his knuckles against a kite-shaped length of some dark-colored material; unlike the rest of Steve’s gear, its unfamiliar geometric designs didn’t match the Captain America aesthetic.

Peggy picked it up and turned it over, sliding her hand through the straps on the underside; it was long enough to cover her forearm from fingertips to elbow and when she clenched her fist, the end sprang out in a razor-sharp point. “What is this?”

“That,” Howard said as she set it down, “is pure Wakandan vibranium. Wakandan tech, too, not that I’ve seen much of it.”

“What the hell did Rogers have to do with Wakanda?” Phillips asked, which got a shrug in response.

“Beats me. He had this, too.” He picked something up off the table and offered it to Peggy.

She took it slowly, a lump in her throat. This wasn’t an updated version of his current equipment; it was the real thing. She had to take a deep breath before she opened the compass, not sure what she was expecting to see inside, and let it out in a gusty sigh when she saw her own picture there. It was more weathered than it had been the last time she had seen it, the edges of the photograph fraying, but the compass itself was water-tight and it wasn’t as damaged as she might have expected if she had believed Steve’s story.

She showed it to Phillips, who made a thoughtful sound, but she didn’t put the compass back with the rest of Steve’s gear. Instead she closed it and slipped it into her own pocket. Howard and Phillips both saw the motion, but neither one said anything, just moved down the table to the other set of clothing and equipment.

Steve’s tactical gear had been close enough to his current uniform that aside from the material and the missing star it hadn’t stood out to Peggy as particularly unusual. Natasha’s, however, made her blink; it would have been nearly skin-tight.

“Same material, but single-layer,” Howard said, picking it up to show them. “Except for the vest; that’s got polymer panels on the inside, but the outer layer’s just suede and canvas. Holsters are a plastic polymer; empty when she got here.” He made a pained expression, obviously unhappy about that, then indicated the pair of batons lying beside what seemed to be some kind of harness made of the same material as the empty holsters. “These have a titanium alloy core, carbon polymer outer, and they’re electrified. And then there are these.” He picked up one of what looked like a pair of bracelets made up of long cylinders and a single central casing, slipping it over his wrist.

“What’s with the jewelry?” Phillips asked.

“Up close? High voltage electrical discharge through direct contact.” Howard touched a control Peggy couldn’t see and a ring of glowing blue light illuminated each cylinder and the central casing. “Short-range, electrostatic blasts, and long-range –” He raised his arm, pointing his fist at the wall, and a glowing blue disk shot out of the casing and hit the wall. Energy rippled out from it for an instant, but it didn’t have much effect on the brick wall.

“I want one,” Peggy said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Howard said, deactivating the bracelet and setting it carefully back down next to the assortment of other equipment that had been in Natasha’s tactical belt. “Nice, right? The point is, this is all technology that we could get to within the next couple decades – or seven, apparently. It’s not like Hydra’s tech.”

“Aliens, though, Howard,” Peggy insisted. “And could Steve really –”

It was too horrible to think about. Instead, she said, “I was on the radio with him when he cut out. I grant you that perhaps he didn’t crash – maybe he was mistaken about Schmidt’s death, or there were still Hydra soldiers on the plane – and you know as well as I do that some of Schmidt’s pet lunatics were working on teleportation technology. Isn’t it far more likely that Steve was captured and – and managed to escape using it, or was –” This part hurt to think about too, but Peggy pressed on anyway, “– or that they mucked about with his head somehow and sent him here? Our apparent Mrs. Rogers could be his handler.”

“I thought about that, believe it or not,” Howard said. “Don’t look at me like that; it was my first thought – both of them, actually. I don’t think it’s impossible, Peg, I just…don’t think it’s very likely. The story’s too crazy to make up.” He looked from Peggy to Phillips and back again. “Besides, I pulled blood samples off their gear and it’s – it’s not human. I don’t know what the hell it is.”

“We are talking about Hydra here,” Phillips reminded him sharply. “We’re still figuring out what all they were getting up to. I wouldn’t be so quick to write anything off.”

Howard grimaced. “I’m not writing it off; it just doesn’t match anything else we’ve seen from Hydra. It’s Steve. That’s the part I’m sure about.”

Then

“I’m sorry,” Steve said.

Natasha looked up at him. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in borrowed pajamas, carefully sorting through the makeup bag someone had found for her. Steve had spent enough time in the USO that he could help her if she wanted, but he knew her well enough not to offer unless she asked. “Sorry about what?”

“That you’re stuck in 1945,” Steve said, sitting down on the bed so that they were on the same level. “In the middle of a war.”

The SSR’s spare bedrooms, kept for agents that were working late or for those who were out of the country too frequently to have housing in the city, were on the second and third floors of the building. There were blackout curtains drawn tightly across the window on the opposite side of the room, though the air raid sirens hadn’t gone so they still had a light on. The light was dimmer and yellower than what Steve had gotten used to, disorienting in a way he couldn’t predict.

Natasha shrugged. “If you could deal with being stuck in 2012, I can handle this,” she said. “It isn’t your fault.”

Steve shrugged back, since as far as he was concerned who was at fault was debatable, but it wasn’t worth arguing with her about.

“I know this is hard for you,” she said, sounding a little tentative.

“Well,” Steve said, leaning back against the foot of the bed. “At least I have all my stuff.” His footlocker had still been at headquarters and someone had brought it up to their room, which meant that he had been able to change into his own clothes after he had handed all of his gear over to Howard, gotten the doctors to look at his ribs, and showered the dirt and blood of the fight off. Natasha, of course, had had no such luck, but at least the SSR had spare clothing available.

After a moment Steve rubbed a hand over his jaw and said, “I should probably shave. Having a beard is against army regulations. My hair’s too long, too – yours is fine,” he added.

“I’ll pin curl it tonight,” Natasha said, finally dumping out the contents of the makeup bag in front of her and sorting through it for the little packet of pins. When Steve raised an eyebrow at her, she looked up at him and smiled briefly, saying, “I was one of the agents prepped when Fury decided on that little stage show back in 2012, when SHIELD was waiting for you to wake up. Nick ended up pulling me out because he thought that if you took it badly, you might hold a grudge and that wouldn’t be great if we had to work together later.”

“Is ‘take it badly’ what we’re calling it now?” Steve muttered, and she grinned at him.

“I’ve seen the footage, so ‘take it badly’ is what I’d go with, yeah.” She separated a compact mirror out from the pile of cosmetics and set it with the pins, then gave him a critical look. “Keep the beard for now. It’s a dead giveaway, and I’m guessing you want that right now.”

“Mmm. I hope you paid better attention during the hair and wardrobe part of your prep than the agent they actually used did.” Steve rubbed at his jaw again, then turned his head a little at the sound of approaching footsteps in the corridor outside, then the murmur of voices; they might be in the regular bedrooms instead of the secure cells down below, but there was an MP outside the door anyway. He wouldn’t be able to do much if Steve or Natasha decided they really did want to leave, but it was the gesture that mattered. “It’s Howard,” he said to Natasha, getting to his feet.

He waited for Howard to knock before he pulled the door open. Howard grinned at him with the same disbelieving delight he had worn before and didn’t wait for a greeting before he said, “Got some stuff for you.”

He handed Steve a paper-wrapped parcel. “The unmentionables are for the lady. They should fit. I’m pretty sure, anyway.”

Steve’s eyebrows went up. “Did you take one look at Natasha and guess her cup size?”

There was a choking sound from behind him, but when he looked over his shoulder Natasha’s expression was serene as she shoved everything but the pins and the mirror back into the makeup bag.

“I never guess,” Howard told him. “And you’d know better than me even if I did.”

“I can’t believe you,” Steve muttered, feeling his ears heat.

Howard’s grin widened. “And these are for you,” he went on, making a pair of gold rings appear in his hand.

Steve took them slowly, feeling his blush spread from his ears across his face and down his neck.

“I noticed you weren’t wearing any,” Howard said, watching him thoughtfully. “I don’t know what things are like in 2018, but here –” He shrugged. “Let me know if they don’t fit, I’ve got others, but like I said, I never guess.”

Steve blinked. “Did you just have these?”

“They come in handier than you’d think.”

“Jesus, Howard.”

“You want a diamond ring too? She looks like she appreciates the finer things in life and you can’t tell me engagement rings have gone completely out of vogue in the twenty-first century –”

“Good night, Howard,” Steve said, and shoved him good-naturedly out of the room, shutting the door on Howard’s call of “I’m serious!” He put his back against the door and turned towards Natasha, who was watching him with an expression that was partially amusement and partially contemplation.

“What?” Steve said warily, closing his hand on the rings.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just interesting to see Captain America in context.”

“I don’t think this counts as ‘in context,’” Steve said. “It’s just Howard.”

She crossed her legs in front of her and rested her elbow on her knee and her chin against the palm of her hand. “I thought he’d be more like Tony,” she said eventually. “Not that much like; I’ve heard the stories. Just…more like Tony.”

Steve shrugged; he’d had similar feelings six years ago, only the other way around. He wasn’t about to say as much to anyone, though, not even Natasha. Instead he handed her the paper-wrapped parcel. “Unmentionables, apparently. He’s, uh, probably right about them fitting.”

Natasha unwrapped the parcel, inspected the contents while Steve looked away – four months in the USO meant that he had seen every kind of female undergarment in every combination, and he’d seen Natasha in underwear more than once, but it was the principle of the thing – then set them aside. “And?”

Steve, not being Howard, didn’t bother with the legerdemain and just held up the rings. “He also brought these.”

Natasha unfolded herself and came over to him, holding out her hand. “He just had these?” she said as Steve spilled the rings into her palm.

“Apparently,” Steve said. “I mean, it’s Howard.”

She rubbed her thumb over the rings, frowning, then looked up at him. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Pretend.” Natasha lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “You said it yourself, Steve. You’ve wanted this for years. You could have it.”

He frowned down at her. “Have what?”

“Everything you left behind when you went into the ice,” Natasha said. “This is your home – your friends, your family, your – world. Maybe Thanos did you a favor sending you back here.”

Steve raised his eyebrows, recognizing what she was doing and unwilling to play along. “The guy who wants to wipe out half of all life in the universe did me a favor.”

She shrugged again. “In seventy-three years.”

“Or right now,” Steve said. “A fight doesn’t stop just because you get knocked out of it for a minute. They need us up there. Both of us.”

Natasha put her head to one side. “Are you still going to think that when Peggy Carter gets here?”

Steve shut his eyes, letting his breath out in a gusty sigh before he opened them again. “Nat, I buried Peggy,” he said. “Two years ago. Nothing’s going to change that. And yeah, six years ago I would have done anything for this. It’s not six years ago anymore.” He looked down – not at her, but at the battered floor between them, letting himself come to terms with it before he said it out loud and made it real. “The guy who went into the ice in 1945 died there. I’m the one who came out.”

“I don’t think you died there,” Natasha said.

Steve snorted softly and looked aside. “Sometimes I wish it was that simple.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “Me too.” She held up the larger of the two golden rings. “I guess we do it the only way we know how.”

“I guess we do.” Steve offered her his left hand and she slid the wedding band over his ring finger. He worked his hand briefly, knowing he’d have to get used to having something there, then took the ring that Natasha passed him and the callused hand she laid in his. He slid the ring slowly on, doing his best to ignore the soft prickle against his spine; he had only really ever thought about doing this with one person.

Natasha didn’t take her hand away once the ring was on, just kept looking at him steadily. Steve looked down at her, his own breath suddenly very loud in his ears.

“You came after me,” he said.

“Yeah,” Natasha said.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Steve shook his head, but it was only a gesture, without meaning. “Tell me.”

“You know,” Natasha said again, then she reached up to curve her right hand around the back of his head and draw him down into a kiss.

There was more hesitation in it than Steve had expected, like she hadn’t been sure of the response until Steve cupped her face between her hands and kissed her back. The kiss went on for a long time, until Natasha drew back, breathing hard. Her expression was a little dazed, her mouth slick.

“Oh,” she said softly. “You never said.”

Steve smoothed a strand of her hair back from her face. “I didn’t think you were interested. I wasn’t going to lose a friend just because I made a pass at you anyway.” He ducked his head to kiss her again. “You never said either.”

“Steve…” She flattened her hands against his chest, then looked up at him and shrugged a little. “Same reason. Mostly.”

She pulled him down into another kiss, then drew him with her until the backs of her knees hit the side of the bed and she sat down hard. Steve caught himself with a hand on the mattress before he fell and winced as the unexpected motion jarred his broken ribs.

Natasha put her hands on his forearms to brace him. “Are you all right?”

He straightened upright, pressing a hand to his side. “Yeah. Ow. It’s fine. I think the bone’s already knitting.”

“Mm-hmm.” She took her hands carefully away from him and flattened them against the bed on either side of her, leaning back on them as she looked up at him. “I’m not good for people, you know. I made the decision not to –” She bit her lip, looking briefly aside before she raised her face to him again. “– to try to go anywhere with you a while ago.” Natasha gave him a wry smile. “I’m not the kind of woman who gets to have men like Captain America.”

“I kind of think that part’s my decision to make,” Steve said. He put his fingers beneath her chin and leaned down to kiss her again, slow and careful, then murmured, “What made you change your mind?”

She was quiet for a long moment before she finally said, “You asked.”

“You came to 1945 with me.”

“Yeah,” Natasha said. “Well, I couldn’t let you have all the fun.”

“You might regret that when you try the food,” Steve said, trying to match her tone. There were plenty of things he missed about his own time; there were also more than a few that he was glad had been left in the dust of history.

“I guarantee I’ve eaten worse.” She looked at him for a moment longer, then reached up to undo the buttons on her pajama top one by one, the gold of her ring flashing in the light. “How are your ribs feeling now?”

“Better,” Steve said, a little dry-mouthed as his gaze followed her fingers downwards, and managed to drag his attention back up to her face. “Definitely better.”

Natasha smiled. “Good.”

Now

The WAC wasn’t an unfamiliar sight in London; in March of 1945 there were plenty of Americans to be seen, men and women alike, and there were still those who look baffled at every aspect of English life. This one had come into King’s Cross St. Pancras station and then stopped just outside the gate, balancing her armful of parcels as she searched her pocketbook for the correct fare. She was so occupied by doing so that she didn’t see the similarly-burdened Wren coming up beside her until the other woman bumped into her, hurrying on her way out of the station.

The pocketbook fell with a clatter of loose change; so did the parcels both women were carrying. Their overlapping apologies as they knelt to gather up fallen coins and packages were lost in the burst of sound as newly-arrived passengers from the Metropolitan line came out, along with the Wren’s whisper of, “You’re a week late.”

“Stark locked down the building until the colonel returned. See for yourself.”

The WAC shoved her pocketbook into her handbag, tucking her parcels under her arm, and let the Wren help her to her feet, vanishing into the crowd. The Wren slid the extra parcel she had collected, a slim paper-wrapped one that might have been a book, on top of the others and left the station.

It was a book, as it turned out, as she found when she unwrapped it back in her lodging house room, a slim Agatha Christie novel. When she turned it over, however, half a dozen photographs fell out from between the pages. She sorted through them, studying each one in detail.

The rented room was small, but large enough for a desk, which itself was nearly dwarfed by the typewriter sitting on top of it. It looked ordinary enough, at least until the Wren slid the cover off a can of talcum powder and spent several minutes extending a miniature antenna and attaching a series of wires to the typewriter. When that was done, she put a sheet of paper into the typewriter and began to type, one finger at a time.

CAPTAIN S G ROGERS CONFIRMED ALIVE SSR HQ UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES

She hit the carriage return lever and waited, her hands in her lap. With a crackle of static, the typewriter keys began to move on their own.

AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS NEW MISSION PARAMETERS FORTHCOMING X