Of Home Near

“Captain Rogers. Agent Carter.”

Everyone gathered around the table in the SSR’s war room glanced up at the sound of Colonel Phillips’ voice, though it was Peggy who said, “Sir?”

Phillips dropped a file folder in front of her. “0712 this morning,” he said as she picked up the folder and flipped it open. Steve leaned over to see as she spread the contents out in front of her, photographs of tenement buildings smashed to splinters. One of them he had seen in a book in 2012.

“Whitechapel?” Peggy asked, frowning.

Steve had lain awake the previous night with Natasha asleep against his shoulder, listening to the four V-2 rockets that had struck in the greater London area between midnight and four am. He had been shaving when the fifth and final rocket had struck that morning and still felt lucky that he had had the shaving brush in his hand instead of his razor, which had probably kept him from accidentally cutting his own throat. None of them had impacted central London, but his enhanced hearing had picked up the distant sound of the explosions anyway.

“It’s Vallance Road in Stepney,” Steve said. “Isn’t it?”

“They’re still pulling bodies out of the rubble,” Phillips said in confirmation, his expression grim. “What was it you said?”

“A hundred and thirty-four dead,” Steve said. He made himself picture the page in the book again, the reprint of one of the photographs in front of Peggy, and the dry text beneath it. “Forty-nine seriously injured.”

“Well, I’ll let you know.”

“There’ll be another one in a couple of hours,” Steve said reluctantly. “Orpington – one dead, twenty-three injured. I don’t know what time exactly, but that will be the last of them.”

Phillips eyed him. Steve arched an eyebrow in return and said, “Do you believe me now?”

“Don’t get cocky, Rogers.”

Peggy tapped the photographs together like a deck of cards to straighten them and tucked the small stack back into the folder. “There have been V-2s falling on London since last September,” she said. “One more doesn’t prove anything – two more certainly doesn’t.”

“The launch sites are in The Hague, in the Netherlands,” Steve said, mentally flipping pages. He suspected his slightly abstracted expression meant that everyone at the table knew what he was doing; they had all seen his photographic memory at work before. “The artillery regiments are going to fall back – tomorrow, I think, or maybe the day afterwards, out of range of England. They’re worried about being overrun by our forces, even though Allied troops didn’t arrive in the city until VE-Day, after the Germans surrendered. May 8th.”

Peggy and Phillips both stared at him and Steve twitched a little in response, self-conscious. He had never liked being treated as a prophet just because he could put two and two together; he liked it even less when he actually did know what was going to happen.

Assuming it was going to happen at all. Assuming the butterfly wing flutter of cause and effect hadn’t already reached across the Channel and touched the soldiers manning the artillery batteries in the Haagse Bos and the Statenkwartier, because Phillips and Peggy and Howard and the Commandos were here instead of with the 107th, or because one of the soldiers who had been caught in the SSR’s weeklong lockdown should have been part of Operation Plunder and hadn’t been, or because –

He shoved the fear away, because there was nothing he could do about that. As the Germans said, he had rolled the iron dice; from here they could only go forward, not back.

Steve was well aware of the irony of that particular sentiment under the circumstances.

“We’ll see about Orpington this afternoon,” Phillips said eventually. He glanced down at the table, considering the maps and photographs spread out across it, then shot a hard look at Steve. He didn’t ask if Steve meant to go through with the operation, though, and after a moment he nodded at them and left.

Steve looked back at the table and its contents, turning his pencil over and over in his hands. It felt odd to be back here, simultaneously like wearing someone else’s skin and like slipping back into his own, long forgotten. The sensation was worse now than it had been at any other time in the past week and a half, because this was exactly what he would have been doing six or seventy-three years ago, with exactly the same people. That Peggy still wouldn’t look at him straight on and Dugan, Jones, and Morita were a little skittish around him didn’t make any real difference; they had all been treating him like glass during those awful days after Bucky anyway.

He tapped the end of the pencil against his lower lip, mentally setting the V-2s aside as something that he couldn’t affect right now, and focused on the maps spread out in front of him. Allied and German forces were marked out with different colored pins, with arrows showing the lines of advance and retreat. Other pins marked the locations of airfields, concentration camps, fortifications, bridges and other landmarks; photographs taken by aerial reconnaissance flights were scattered around the table. The previous day’s issue of The Stars and Stripes, the U.S. armed forces newspaper, lay at the corner of the table like a killed bird; the headline read Three Rhine Breakthroughs Hint Nazi Doom.

Steve looked at it, swallowed, and said, “Well, I’m not taking Berlin all on my own. It’s a little big for just me.”

“What, you don’t want to knock out Hitler for real this time?” Jones said. “Was all that practice with the USO for nothing or what?”

Steve snorted. “I’m not saying I don’t want to, I’d just like to survive the experience.”

“And who said you were going to be doing it on your own?” Dugan said. “What are we, chopped liver?”

“Yeah, well, the seven of us aren’t going to take Berlin, either.” Steve scratched at his hairline with his thumbnail, trying to push away his awareness that this wasn’t what had happened in 1945. But it was what almost certainly would have happened if he hadn’t gone into the ice, and there was something horribly disorienting about that, too.

“Seven?” Peggy said, her eyes glinting dangerously, and Steve looked down at the maps and photographs again, picking up one that showed the outside of the Führerbunker in Berlin.

The photographs had been taken by members of the German resistance and smuggled out to the Allied lines, then back to London. In general, Steve had found the German resistance to be more than a little wary of the Allies, especially once news of the Morgenthau Plan had broken, but all the ones he had encountered had hated Hitler and the Nazis more than anything. So many people forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own, Abraham Erskine had told him that last night, showing him the bottle of Augsburg schnapps. Steve had never forgotten that.

Along with the photographs, there were sketches of the Führerbunker he had done from memory; the Soviets had done their best to level the bunker complex in the forties and fifties and Steve had never been there during the war. He had seen schematics and 3D models of the site afterwards, though there was no way to know if they were actually accurate to how Adolf Hitler’s hidey-hole had looked in March of 1945; they would only find that out once they were inside. Steve didn’t know whether or not to hope that he got to find out, since Captain America and the Howling Commandos getting airdropped into Berlin to break into the Führerbunker and capture Adolf Hitler would definitely change the course of history.

“Captain Rogers,” Peggy said, and he glanced up as the three Commandos at the table all looked away, clearly uncomfortable at what they knew was coming next. “That Woman is not going to Berlin with you.”

He could hear the capital letters in the words. Jones seized a map apparently at random and he, Dugan, and Morita bent over it, whispering urgently about potential drop sites.

Steve rubbed at his forehead again. He wasn’t willing to go to Berlin without Natasha, but there was no good way to tell that to Peggy, Phillips, or anyone else. It wasn’t that he was afraid to go into a fight without her at his back; what he was afraid of was the time travel reversing and one of them getting trapped in 1945 because they weren’t together.

“I didn’t say that she was,” he said to Peggy. He could tell from her expression that she didn’t believe a single word coming out of his mouth, for which he couldn’t blame her. He could have been talking about Bucky, a slip he remembered making a few times during the awful days between the train and the Valkyrie, but right now no one was going to believe that. “But even if I did, isn’t that what Monty and Jacques are trying to figure out right now?”

They were supposed to be running Natasha through her paces to figure out if she could go into the field, or at least to the SSR forward command post where Phillips, Peggy, their staff, and occasionally Howard would be. American and British military policy didn’t formally allow women in combat, though both SOE and the OSS had female operators and Steve knew very well that Peggy Carter herself had gone into battle with the 107th on several occasions.

Peggy gave him a withering look in response.

As far as Steve was concerned that was an argument they could have if they actually had to go through with this operation. Right now he and Peggy and Howlies had to treat it like it was real, because to all intents and purposes it was – within a week, two at most, they would all be on a plane to link up with the 107th in Germany, which itself was shifting its position in order to be enfolded into the loving bosom of the Ninth Army. From there, depending on how far Allied forces had advanced into Germany, Steve and the Commandos would parachute into the outskirts of Berlin and make their way to the Führerbunker with the objective of capturing and extracting Adolf Hitler.

It wasn’t a bad plan. If it worked, it could save the thousands of lives that had been lost between now and May 8, VE-Day, as the advancing Allied armies and the retreating Wehrmacht clashed in German and German-held territory. It could end the war in Europe a month early.

It could. There was no guarantee that it would.

Steve put his pencil down and rubbed both hands over his face, aware of Peggy’s gaze fixed on him. “Let’s just get this op planned,” he said, never mind that he would plan it differently if he knew he had Natasha with him versus going in the Commandos alone. Not that he didn’t trust the Howlies to have his back, but he knew Natasha’s capabilities. Having someone else who could speak German like a native wouldn’t hurt, either; they certainly weren’t going to be running around Berlin in their uniforms. After the past year and a half, all of the Commandos had some German, but only he and Jones were anywhere near fluent and Steve was the only one who could pass as a native speaker. His blond hair and blue eyes didn’t hurt, either, but at this point Morita and Jones could probably pass as members of the Ostlegionen and Legion Freies Arabien, two of the foreign battalions whose members had either volunteered for the Wehrmacht or been conscripted from prisoner of war camps. Steve doubted that the desperate Wehrmacht was going to ask too closely why a couple of its foreign troopers had survived the retreat to Berlin. Since most of the remaining Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS were starving, Steve was probably going to stand out more than anyone else amongst the Howlies, who all had a certain scrappy air to them after years of both warfare and rationing.

He looked over at the Commandos and said, “Anything likely?”

Dugan glanced warily up at him and said, “Yeah, couple spots, though anywhere we come in we’ll have to trek –”

“If you need another German speaker,” Peggy said, “then I’ll go as well.”

They all looked at her. Steve dug his thumb into the skin between his eyes and decided that right at the moment, he would have preferred to be punching ravening aliens while they tried to gnaw his face off. It wasn’t that he didn’t think Peggy wasn’t qualified for this kind of operation, but the only thing he could think of that was worse than Peggy and Natasha together in the SSR trying to make Steve look like tempting bait for Department X was Peggy and Natasha together in Berlin while Steve and the Commandos hauled Hitler out of the Führerbunker by the scruff of his neck.

He looked gratefully up as the door to the labs opened and Howard popped out. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie missing, and had the manic air that meant he hadn’t slept in the past twenty-four hours. His bloodshot gaze darted around the war room until he spotted Steve and made a beckoning gesture.

Steve got to his feet, saying, “Let’s see if we can identify possible exfil sites as well drop points,” to the Commandos.

Peggy got up and followed him to the lab. Steve felt his jaw twist a little, since he was in sight of everyone in the war room, but even though the SSR was planning to airdrop him into the heart of Nazi Germany in a week he still wasn’t allowed to be alone in headquarters. Just in case.

“Having fun yet?” Howard asked him brightly as Steve and Peggy reached him.

Steve gave him a thin smile. “Sure, I always wanted to spend my honeymoon in Nazi Germany.”

“I thought you got married in 2016,” Peggy said.

“We didn’t have a honeymoon,” Steve said, which was, technically, true. To Howard, he added, “What is it?”

Howard led them through the main lab back through his office to his private workshop, where Steve’s and Natasha’s tactical gear still lay spread across one of the back lab benches. It was the first time Steve had seen his own equipment since they had arrived twelve days earlier and he let his gaze flicker towards it, a little surprised at how discrepant it looked in the half-familiar setting of Howard’s workshop.

“Are you going to let me use my own stuff?” he asked.

“No,” Howard and Peggy said together, and Steve rolled his eyes, annoyed.

Howard took pity on him. “I’m working on your new gear,” he said. “I don’t have the equipment to make –” He waved back at Steve’s battered uniform, “– but I can do you a little better than the last one now that I’ve had a close look at it and messed around some.” He picked up a square of what looked like fabric and handed it to Steve. “What do you think?”

Steve tested it between his hands, tugging and twisting, then applied more of his strength as Howard and Peggy both watched with interest. A few of the threads at the edges snapped and Howard frowned a little, but it didn’t tear until Steve put all of his strength into it. As Howard’s frown deepened, Steve said, “I pulled a helicopter down once, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Feels good, Howard.”

“What’s a helicopter?” Peggy asked curiously.

Howard explained as Steve handed the material back to him. Helicopters had been developed just prior to the war and they were used in small quantities by the Germans and the Americans, but were nowhere near as widely known or available as they would be even a decade later. Steve wasn’t surprised that Peggy had never seen one or that Howard had; knowing Howard, Stark Industries had a few designs in production already.

Howard finished by turning back to Steve and saying, “You pulled one out of the sky?”

Steve shifted a little, uncomfortable. “Not exactly. It was just taking off, so I was holding onto it with one hand and the helipad – the landing platform – with the other. I didn’t pull it all the way down, but it couldn’t take off. Bu – the pilot turned it to try and shake me off and it was still too close to the helipad – the landing pad – and he crashed it.”

Howard looked a little dreamy-eyed, either at the idea of a twenty-first century helicopter or at Steve manhandling it or more likely the combination of the two. “How much torque do you think it had?”

Steve shrugged.

“Howard,” Peggy chided, frowning at them both.

“Right.” Howard paused, scratching at the back of his head as he collected his thoughts. “Had some ideas about the uniform – where did I –” He turned back to the workbench, setting down the two pieces of torn material, and picked up what Steve recognized as his own sketchbook, flipping through it until he found the page he was looking for. He handed it to Steve and asked, “What do you think? Little of the old, little of the new.”

“It looks good,” Steve said, studying the design. Howard was a draftsman, not an artist – not when it came to drawing, at least; some of what he built was art, beautiful and terrible. “Can I –” He took the pencil Howard passed him and made a few adjustments, making Howard hum with agreement when he saw them.

“I thought maybe darker on the colors this time,” Howard said. “And maybe just a little silver detailing here, not too much –” He pointed it out for Steve.

“Silver there – red here,” Steve agreed, penciling it in. There was still a faint sense of unreality to the process, but he had gone through this with all of his uniforms but that first peacock-bright one SHIELD had done up for him in 2012, and consulted on the one the Smithsonian had used in its display, which was based on one of Howard’s drafts rather than his real uniform. “No white here, it’s too bright and it catches the eye, plus it always looks like a bandage around the arm like that. Blue all the way down the sleeves – maybe some ribbing to break up the silhouette just a little.” He added a note about that. “I’ve done a few of these,” he explained, looking up to see both Howard and Peggy staring at him.

Peggy jerked her chin at the back table. “What happened to the star on that one?”

“I took it off,” Steve said and didn’t clarify further despite her frown.

“That’s great,” Howard said, clearly not paying any attention as he took the sketchbook from Steve’s slack fingers. “That’s really great –” He looked around as Steve and Peggy both stared at him in mild bemusement, then spotted what he was looking for and made a dive for it, dropping the sketchbook as he did so.

“When was the last time you slept?” Steve said.

He made a vague gesture. “Who needs sleep? There’s coffee.”

There were at least a dozen empty cups scattered around the workshops, both ceramic mugs and cups and saucers and a couple of tin Army-issue cups. Steve looked at them, reminded disconcertingly of Tony or Bruce when they got deep into a project, and shoved the memories aside; it wasn’t as though he hadn’t seen Howard like this before.

Howard came up with Steve’s remaining Wakandan shield. “How attached to this are you?”

Steve’s eyebrows shot upwards. “It was a gift.”

“Attached enough that you want to keep it as it is?”

Steve stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“Gift from who?” Howard said, his exhausted brain clearly still running a sentence or two behind.

“King T’Challa of Wakanda. What do you mean?”

“Well, Captain America’s gotta have a shield, right?”

Steve dug his thumb into the skin between his eyes, trying to figure out how he could even begin to respond to that. Peggy saved him by saying, “That’s not enough vibranium, is it?”

Howard shoved the shield at her to free his hands and scrambled around for his own notebook, flipping frantically through it until he found a page full of shield prototype sketches. He ran his finger down it and said, “Should be, just about. This thing’s put together differently than mine, so it looks like it’s less than the old one, but it’s not really. Or I could alloy it with titanium, maybe – I might be able to get more but it will take a minute since T’Chanda’s not exactly too keen on visitors right now no matter how much he likes me and no one at the legation has been answering my calls –”

“What?” Peggy said, clearly having as much trouble following his derailing train of thought as Steve was.

“I don’t – I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Steve said. He felt a little light-headed suddenly and felt a flash of pure annoyance that of everything here, that this was going to be what broke him. He swallowed back a shaky breath and said, “I don’t need another shield.”

Something in his voice made both Peggy and Howard look at him. “Steve, it’s yours,” Howard said. “It belongs to you. I’m making it for you.”

Steve rubbed a hand over his face and whispered, “Christ.”

“Steve?” Peggy said, sounding concerned. She set the Wakandan shield aside and took a step forward, starting to raise a hand before she halted the motion half-made, like she had remembered she didn’t have a right to touch him anymore. “What’s wrong?”

Steve shook his head. He didn’t want to have this conversation. He didn’t even want to think about having this conversation. “I need some air,” he said abruptly and turned to leave the workshop.

He heard their steps behind him as he emerged into the war room, then his enhanced hearing picked out Howard saying, “Peg, come on, give him a minute; you’re not helping.”

Despite that protest, he heard Dugan and Jones get up to follow him out, though they stayed behind him instead of trying to catch up. Steve took the stairs up to the ground floor and then the corridor that debouched into the courtyard at the back of the SSR, where as usual there were a handful of servicemen and women from the half-dozen agencies who shared the courtyard standing, smoking, and ignoring each other; not all of those agencies were real. Since there was a dismal drizzle pattering down, they were all standing under the shelter of the loggia roof; Steve went as far away from them as he could and sat down on a step, resting his elbows on his knees as he rubbed at his face again. He was dimly aware that it was the first time he had been outside since he and Natasha had arrived in 1945 and the cold damp air was a shock.

Dugan and Jones had come out too, but they stayed away from him, Dugan flirting delicately with one of the WAAFs from the Foreign Office next door while Jones lit a cigarette. Neither man did anything as ostentatious as look over at Steve, though he knew that if he had moved they would have been after him immediately. Steve’s abrupt entrance in the courtyard had gotten a few looks, and then a few more startled double-takes as people recognized him. As far as Steve knew, his return to the land of the living hadn’t yet been publicized, but he hadn’t seen today’s edition of The Stars and Stripes yet, so he could be wrong about that. He doubted that it would surpass the headlines about the Allied advance into Germany, at least.

If you’re in this war, Rogers, then you’re in this war, Phillips had told Steve when he had been debriefing him a few days earlier. You can’t be half-in and half-out.

The days when he could have stayed safely out of the war were two or eight or seventy-five years past. And even now Steve didn’t want to be out of the war; he had gone to the Library of Congress when he had been living in Washington and read the newspapers on microfilm, trying to make the half-page headlines of HITLER DEAD and WAR IS OVER IN EUROPE! And NAZIS QUIT! feel real instead of just words on a screen. He had sat there looking at the VICTORY: Nazis Reveal Surrender to Western Allies, Russia headline from the May 8, 1945 edition of The Stars and Stripes and felt numb; he couldn’t even handle the paper. It didn’t feel real.

Steve wanted, very badly, for it to be real.

He couldn’t say that he didn’t want to get his final licks in, either, even six years or seventy-three years late. It was the kind of thing that people didn’t think of when they thought about Captain America, but this was still Steve’s war. He wanted to see the son of a bitch hang.

But even though this might still be Steve’s war, it wasn’t his world anymore. He had talked about time travel with Howard and Natasha, who had the same bits and pieces of temporal theory that Steve did, picked up at Stark Tower when Tony and Bruce had been shooting the shit during the Avengers’ brief tenure in the city. They just didn’t know. If it was all gone – if his whole world had been snuffed out like a soap bubble the moment he and Natasha had arrived – or if it still hung in the balance, dependent on some unknown combination of factors that could shift at any moment –

Steve wasn’t sure he could live through that again.

But he knew all too well that that was what living was, a constant tightrope walk over a precipice. Thinking about it too much could drive you mad, spinning out possibility after possibility, but at least usually it was only one world you might destroy.

Bucky, Sam, Rhodey, Wanda, Bruce, Thor, Tony –

He and Natasha had talked the subject to death. They had no idea how to get back to their own time. They had considered and rejected trying to get Asgard’s attention, but if Asgard hadn’t interfered the first time Johann Schmidt had been messing around with the Tesseract and 85 million human beings had died in the Second World War, then they were unlikely to turn up just because Steve shouted for Heimdall or Thor. The Tesseract was at the bottom of the north Atlantic. The Time Stone might be with the wizards Bruce had mentioned, or it might be somewhere else entirely, and even if it was still with the wizards, neither Steve or Natasha knew if they were in New York in 1945. Howard might be able to build a time machine – or he might not.

Arnim Zola might be able to build a time machine, but if Steve ever saw Zola again he was planning to break his neck, so it didn’t much matter.

Back into the war.

Steve had known it was coming, but somehow he hadn’t quite made the connection between that and being Captain America again with all the bells and whistles that entailed. It had been different during the war than it had been up in the twenty-first century, where seventy years of myth-making hung over him, but in a way that was worse. In 2018 he had the latitude to do whatever the hell he wanted; even before he had left the Avengers he had had the weight of both his legacy and his opinion to throw around. In 1945 he was expected to shut up and follow orders.

Phillips actually gave him more leeway with missions than Fury had for most of his time with SHIELD, but that was partially a consequence of the war. The Howlies were usually operating behind the German lines, out of communication with the SSR’s forward command post. By 1945 Phillips had been well aware of exactly what Steve was capable of when left to his own devices, something that Fury had never quite been comfortable with.

Phillips also would have been thrilled if Steve had been willing to drop the Captain America name and uniform; he and Steve had gotten into a couple of furious rows about it back in 1943, since what the SSR needed was a covert operations unit, not a circus sideshow act, as he had put it. By 1945 that was no longer an option. If and when the Howlies parachuted into Berlin they would be in either civilian clothes or German uniforms – not that Steve was keen on the latter with the Red Army about to overrun the city – but if they were going to join the troops at the front he would have to be in the whole get-up. Steve didn’t mind, not really; he knew exactly what he was and what he had been doing back in 1943 and again in 2012 and 2014. There was a reason he had never put aside the uniform even after he had gone rogue two years ago, the way Natasha had stopped wearing the Black Widow insignia.

That shield doesn’t belong to you. My father made that shield.

Steve, it’s yours. It belongs to you. I’m making it for you.

Christ, Howard. There was no way he could have known, and Steve was damned if he was going to tell him.

“Captain Rogers?”

He looked up at the sound of Irene Lorraine’s voice. He had sensed her approach, heard the distinctive sound of her steps and smelled her Jicky perfume, but had disregarded it as unimportant.

“Are you all right?” she asked, sounding concerned.

Steve gave her a thin smile. “Yeah, I just needed a minute away from –” He made a brief gesture back in the direction of the SSR.

Lorraine gave him a wry smile of acknowledgment and dug her cigarettes out, offering one to him. “Don’t worry,” she said when he hesitated. “I won’t tell Mrs. Rogers, but she doesn’t seem like the jealous type anyway.”

“She’s not,” Steve said, but waved the pack aside; he had forgotten how much everyone in the 1940s smoked. Nicotine had even less effect on him than alcohol these days, so he didn’t see the point in bothering.

This time Lorraine’s grin was sly, with a little satisfaction a year and a half in the making. He’d gotten off lightly by being shot at after Peggy had caught them together, but like Bucky’s sisters and the other girls in his neighborhood whenever there was some kind of social upheaval the situation amongst the women of the SSR had been tense for a while. “I don’t think she has to be.”

“She doesn’t.” Steve turned his wedding band around on his ring finger, still with that sense of astonished joy. Backdated license or not, he had no real idea whether the marriage counted as legal and he suspected Natasha didn’t particularly care; that wasn’t the part that mattered.

Lorraine lit her own cigarette, tucked her pack and lighter away, and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “So, Captain, just between us, what’s the real story?”

There had been a number of contradictory but realistic rumors about his return circulating the SSR; he was particularly fond of the one where Natasha had been, for some mysterious spy reason, in a fishing boat in the north Atlantic and had pulled him out of the water. According to that story, it had been love at first sight and they had ended up consummating that in the little ship’s cabin on their way to the northern Scottish coast. Steve had been in fishing boats like that on a few occasions over the course of the war and once in 2017. Both parties would have to be acrobats to manage it – which, he mused wryly, meant that he and Natasha probably could.

Unfortunately Lorraine had been in the lab when they had turned up, so he couldn’t make vague noises in that direction. Steve let the corner of his mouth quirk upwards a little and said gravely, “Still classified, Corporal.”

She had been promoted at some point in the last year and a half, probably while Steve had been in Europe with the Howlies.

Lorraine pouted prettily at him in response, then took another drag on her cigarette, red-painted lips pursing around it before she took it away and exhaled. “You probably owe her for getting Agent Carter off your back.”

Steve winced a little. “I owe her for a lot of things,” he said, and then, carefully, “That’s…not one of them.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him, thoughtful, and Steve wondered briefly what the gossip mill among the enlisted women of the SSR was saying about the three of them – four if anyone had added Howard into the mix, the unspoken but universally known secret of the SSR. Steve had spent the vast majority of the first twenty-five years of his life too sick to keep up with Bucky and the other boys in their neighborhood, so he had spent a lot of time with Bucky’s sisters and their friends, enough to be aware of most of the undercurrents of feminine society that Bucky had been completely unaware of. The SSR wasn’t that much different from his old neighborhood writ large and like almost every other division in the Allied armed forces, the bulk of its support staff was female. Unlike the girls in his neighborhood, who had largely looked at him with either the indulgence bestowed on a favored but rather decrepit pet or as a piece of the local landscape, the women of the SSR actually regarded him as a prospective conquest – or at least some of them had, anyway.

Steve rested his elbows on his drawn-up knees and fisted his hands beneath his chin, regarding Lorraine. “Did Colonel Phillips send you out here for me?” he asked, not really wanting to pursue that line of conversation further; on second thought, he didn’t think he wanted to know what the rumor mill was saying about him, Natasha, and Peggy.

He knew that many of the enlisted women in the SSR didn’t think all that well of Peggy, which made him vaguely uncomfortable; if he hadn’t been chosen for Rebirth he likely would have ended up doing the same work as them, not carrying a rifle at the front. Phillips would have made certain of that; he was a good CO who didn’t like getting his men killed if there was any way to help it. He would have made certain that Steve was transferred out of a combat division before he washed his hands of him, probably to the Signal Intelligence Service as a cryptanalyst or over to one of the OSS’s noncombat branches. In retrospect Steve wouldn’t have minded working for the X-2, the OSS’s counterespionage branch, which ran the Art Looting Investigation Unit. In 1943 he hadn’t known that either the SIS or the OSS even existed, which was the way both divisions liked it.

Lorraine cocked an eyebrow at him and said gravely, “Senator Brandt is here and the colonel didn’t want you to be taken by surprise.”

Steve jerked to his feet. “Oh shit!”

This reaction got the attention of Dugan and Jones, who had both been keeping an eye on Steve from the other side of the courtyard. Jones came over immediately, while Dugan took an extra minute to extricate himself from his flirtation before he joined them. Both Commandos acknowledged Lorraine with nods; after a year and a half in the SSR they knew her pretty well.

“Senator Brandt’s here,” Steve told them. He’d take Brandt over some of the politicians he had met up in the twenty-first century, since Brandt really was a patriot who meant well, but that didn’t mean he actually wanted to interact with the man if he could avoid it. The two Commandos had met him in passing and had even poorer opinions of politicians than Steve did, since Steve actually did know how to gladhand if he had to.

“Who told him?” Dugan demanded, looking as annoyed as Steve felt.

Lorraine looked surprised that he had to ask. “Colonel Phillips. He just didn’t think the senator would get here this fast.”

“But Captain America’s his baby,” Jones finished, and Lorraine made a gesture of agreement with her cigarette, trailing smoke and shedding ash on the cobblestones.

Steve rubbed a hand over his face. “He brought his aide?” Michael Sherman had gamely shepherded Steve through all four months of his original USO tour.

Lorraine nodded sympathetically. “With a camera.”

Phillips wouldn’t allow a civilian reporter into the SSR, but Sherman had clearance and could ghost-write an article for The Stars and Stripes or the Associated Press, like he had done a few times before. He was a decent photographer, too.

Steve swore softly in the Arabic he had picked up from Clint and the STRIKE boys while he had been with SHIELD, which got him looked at askance by both Lorraine and the two Commandos. It probably wasn’t going to help the concern that he had been turned or brainwashed or whatever the fear was today, but at least it wasn’t German, Russian, Italian, or Japanese.

Like returning to the front, like the uniform, like everything else, Steve had known this was coming. He had also known that he had lost the ability to have a say in the matter as soon as he had committed to staying with the SSR instead of walking out. And as far as everyone else was concerned, he had lost that right in 1943 when he had signed his enlistment papers.

It was 1945, not 2018, and Captain Steve Rogers was a serving officer in the United States Army. That was the part that mattered.

Steve knuckled his forehead, feeling the weight of all his missing years bearing down on him. “Well, let’s get this clown show on the road.”

The next day’s Stars and Stripes headline read NAZIS COLLAPSING IN WEST-CENTRAL GERMANY; above the fold on the first page was CAP’S BACK! Rogers Returns after Harrowing Escape from Nazi Death Plane. The brief column was accompanied by one of the photographs Sherman had taken the previous day, of Senator Brandt bestowing the Distinguished Service Cross on him. He’d also told Steve that he was getting another Medal of Honor, but Roosevelt wanted to handle that himself.

Steve’s second Medal of Honor, the one he had initially received posthumously for stopping Johann Schmidt and which had later been presented by President Ellis in 2013 on the anniversary of his disappearance, was back in his shut-up room in the Avengers compound, unless Tony had thrown it out in a fit of pique. The Smithsonian still had the first one, which he had gotten for rescuing Bucky and the other POWs from Hydra; they had offered it back to him and since it would have just been shut up in a box with his other decorations, he had told them to keep it. He was the first person since the First World War to receive two Medals of Honor, which all the newspapers had reported on rapturously at the time.

Brandt, who was more observant than most people gave him credit for, had spotted Steve’s wedding ring immediately. He’d looked at Peggy’s left hand, which had gotten a glare from Peggy before she left to fetch Natasha, who had still been with Falsworth and Dernier. Steve had gotten a round of backslapping and hand-pumping while Sherman took pictures and visibly mentally wrote articles with headlines like CAP’S TAKEN, LADIES! and Blonde Bombshell Snags Captain America. The photograph The Stars and Stripes used didn’t show Steve’s wedding ring and Natasha hadn’t been mentioned; Brandt was clearly planning to drop the news at a more opportune time.

Steve read the paper in the back of a truck on the way to one of SOE’s training facilities in Hampshire, where the Commandos, Peggy, and Natasha were headed to clear Steve and Natasha on parachute jumps and check them out on various weapons. Pending jump and weapons qualifications, Phillips had approved Natasha going with the Commandos and the SSR forward headquarters to the front and Peggy going with the seven of them into Berlin. Steve wasn’t sure if this was a startling show of trust in his judgment or if Phillips just didn’t think the Berlin operation was really going to happen.

“Your wife is terrifying,” Dernier told Steve rapturously in French as they watched Natasha demolish pop-up metal targets with an array of various firearms. “Does she have a sister?”

“Oui,” Steve said. “Yelena. But she’s up in 2018.”

Dernier sighed in disappointment.

They spent the next three days there, Steve bunking with the Commandos and Natasha and Peggy with some of the SOE women stationed at Beaulieu. The estate, with its dozen country houses, served as one of SOE’s so-called “finishing schools” to train and prepare agents before they were dropped into occupied Europe – one of the many “stately ‘omes of England” where SOE joked it got its name. Steve just hoped the presence of witnesses meant that Natasha and Peggy wouldn’t kill each other.

He lay awake in the night listening to the Howling Commandos breathe, his enhanced hearing picking out individual heartbeats and identifying who they belonged to, so familiar that he had held his breath waiting for Bucky’s to fill in the missing space that had never been there before until he had remembered. There was a distinct sense of unreality to it, just there had been to everything since Steve had been thrown back into the regular ebb and flow of the SSR. He had the feeling that his life was spinning out of control, the weight of present and future and past all pressing down on him.

Only in a very real way it wasn’t. This was exactly where he could have been, should have been, if he hadn’t gone into the ice. If everything had gone just as it should have gone, Steve would have been right here, with these people, in this time. Well, he probably would have already been up at the front, but the Howlies had spent plenty of time at Beaulieu and the other SOE training sites before; the SSR and the OSS both shared them with the Special Operations Executive

His sense of dislocation only increased over the course of the next three days, as he, the Howlies, and the two women plotted out the Berlin operation and kept a weather ear on the news coming out of Germany. Against the wishes of Winston Churchill and the British Field Marshal Montgomery, General Eisenhower had decided not to press on towards Berlin and had turned towards Leipzig instead, intending to meet the Red Army there and split the remaining German forces in two. Meanwhile the Allied forces were moving to encircle the Ruhr in the Rhineland, where most of Germany’s industrial capacity had already been bombed to rubble, but where 370,000 German troops were still holding out along with millions of civilians in what remained of the bombed-out cities there. It was what had happened in the original 1945, at least as far as Steve and Natasha remembered when they had a chance to confer.

General Eisenhower might not want to spend American lives racing to Berlin if he could get the Soviets to do it for him, but he’d be happy for Captain America to dump Adolf Hitler in his lap. Steve suspected that Ike didn’t think the Soviets would be entirely willing to turn Hitler over when they got to Berlin, or more likely, that Hitler wouldn’t let himself be taken alive.

In the original timeline, after all, he hadn’t.

Even in the peaceful quiet of the New Forest – when that peace wasn’t being broken by the sound of gunfire – Steve and the Howlies were all tense, waiting to see if Department X made its move now that they were out of London. Like the other SOE stations, Beaulieu’s location was supposed to be secret, but if there was a Soviet spy in the SSR they couldn’t count on that. But nothing happened, which had the side effect of making Steve feel like he was going to claw his way out of his own skin, waiting and waiting to see if someone took a shot at him. He wished that they would try and get it over with.

His fourth night at Beaulieu without Natasha beside him, Steve’s nightmares came back.

He knew he was dreaming, because he had been here before. Still, Steve kept his steps light as he moved around the Valkyrie’s hangar bay, huge and almost cathedral-like. The drehflügler sat still and waiting in their racks, only when Steve went to look at them, instead of having New York and Boston and Chicago painted onto their sides, they said Power and Time and Mind, and when he put his hand against the nose of the nearest plane he could feel it humming like the Infinity Stones in Thanos’s gauntlet.

Steve took his hand away quickly, flexing his fingers. His hands were filthy, dirt and blood caught beneath his nails and ground down into his knuckles, into the stitching of his fingerless gloves, where the original color of the leather had been stained over so many times that it was no longer visible. He was in the same tactical gear he had been wearing in Wakanda, but empty-handed and shield-less now, the only weapon left to him his own body.

Unlike the first time, the pilots didn’t come out, and Steve made his way through the bay unhindered, the nape of his neck prickling at the proximity to the Infinity Stones. He crept through the quiet tomb of the plane, icy air passing across his face and making gooseflesh rise on the bare skin of his forearms until he rolled his sleeves down. A thin scrim of frost began to whiten the metal walls around him, drifts of snow starting to pile up on the deck. Steve had to slow his pace as the deck grew ice-slick beneath his boots. His teeth chattered in the frigid air; he could hear wind whistling nearby, the endless hungry winds of the Arctic. When he put his hand to his head, he could feel frost in his hair and beard.

There was a door up ahead. Steve remembered that door; it led to the cockpit, where Johann Schmidt was waiting for him. The Tesseract would be there too, and he had to get it, had to keep it away from Thanos –

The door itself was white with frost, the hinges frozen. Steve had to put his shoulder against it and the sound it made when he finally got it open was like a dying thing, echoing through the vast empty space of the Valkyrie. Steve winced at it, wary of the attention it might attract, and stepped through the open door.

His steps splashed into frigid, ankle-deep water. Steve drew back instinctively, but there was nowhere to go; with the door open it was flowing freely down the hallway from which he had come. He grimaced and moved forward, little chunks of ice bumping against his ankles.

It wasn’t the cockpit that he remembered. Instead it was a big open chamber with a sunken pit at its center, holding a chair-like device with open restraints on the arms and legs; it was already being rapidly filled up with water. Around the room were a series of glasslike cryotubes, man-sized and illuminated from within by yellowish light.

Bucky was in the nearest one.

It was Bucky in his service uniform from the war, hair cut neatly and his cap at the rakish angle he had always used, but his left arm was gleaming silver metal, the red of the star running a little, like spilled blood. His face was slack, but Steve could see his chest moving slowly and felt his stomach turn over with relief. He touched his fingers briefly to the glass, then moved on, splashing through the rising water.

Natasha was in the next tube, wearing her black tactical gear and with her hair red again, the gold of her wedding band gleaming on her left hand. Steve watched her long enough to make sure that she was breathing too before he checked the other tubes. Sam, his wings folded at his feet like a fallen angel’s. Peggy in the leather jacket she wore in the field and with her lipstick shockingly red even here, her hand on her pistol. Wanda, her hair falling over her face, something yellow glowing between her cupped hands Rhodey, with the War Machine helmet in his lap. Bruce, the light through the odd-colored glass making his skin look greenish. Howard and Tony next to each other, both resemblances and differences more marked by proximity; Howard neat in a three-piece suit but with his sleeves rolled up, engine grease on his hands, and Tony in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt with the arc reactor glowing on his chest. Dum-Dum, his bowler hat at his feet, his head lolling to one side with his mouth slightly open. Clint, arrows spilling from his hands onto the floor. Thor, Mjolnir resting handle-up at his feet. The Commandos, each in their own tube, sleeping, waiting.

By the time Steve had finished making a circuit of the room, the water was up to his chest and Steve was shivering wildly, his breath starting to rasp in panic. He looked upwards for some means of escape and spotted light high above him, the thin pale gleam of Arctic sunlight. He would be able to make his way out, he thought, climbing the system of pipes that lined the walls.

But he couldn’t leave them.

He splashed over to Bucky’s cryotube, half-swimming now. There would be controls somewhere; he had to get them out. Steve couldn’t leave them.

The water kept rising as he searched frantically, knowing that there had to be something somewhere. He hoisted himself up as best he could, then shook his head at his own foolishness and dropped back down into the freezing water; the controls would be reachable from the floor. They had to be here. They had to.

Steve hoisted himself up again to take a lungful of air before forcing himself back below the water; it was over his head now. He was clumsy with the cold, his hands moving slowly as he ran them across the cryotube for what felt like the five hundredth time, until even his serum-enhanced lungs were burning and he forced himself upwards again. Only this time there was no surface, nowhere to go –

Steve kicked as hard as he could, his gaze fixed on the far-off glitter of sunlight, wavering through the water above him. But even as he reached up with one hand it began to fade, the short winter daylight of the Arctic vanishing into endless night –

And then he was alone in the dark and the cold, drowning, the same way he had been seventy-three years ago.

“Steve!”

He woke up thrashing, convinced he was drowning again and desperate for air. Hands caught at his shoulders, men’s hands, and Steve jerked away, tangled up in sweat-soaked blankets that felt too much like the winding-sheets he had never been buried in.

“Dieu, he’s strong –”

“Steve,” a steady voice said, “Steve, it’s us, you’re okay. You’re okay, okay? Give me that flask.” This last was directed to someone else.

A moment later the metal flask was at his lips, brandy burning down his throat. Steve coughed and Dum-Dum took it away hastily, rubbing a hand over his back until he caught his breath. He pulled Steve’s head down against his shoulder, holding him as if Steve was his younger brother instead of his commanding officer, and made soothing noises until Steve’s racing heartbeat slowed and his panting breath evened out. When that had happened, he helped Steve upright, looked at him for a long moment in the thin light of someone’s flashlight, then pressed the flask to his lips again.

“Thanks,” Steve said hoarsely after he had swallowed, and then, “Sorry –”

“It’s all right,” Dum-Dum said. He offered Steve the flask again, then took a gulp himself when Steve shook his head. “You want to talk about it?”

Steve shoved the tangle of blankets aside and drew his legs up, plucking at the chain of his dog-tags; the tags themselves had worked their way behind his back and half-strangled him. His hair was damp with sweat when he ran his fingers through it, making him shudder a little. When he swept his gaze around the room, he saw that Dum-Dum and Dernier were sitting on the bed with him and the other three Commandos were standing worriedly nearby; he must have woken all of them up.

“How bad was it?”

“You weren’t yelling,” Jones reassured him. He hesitated briefly, then said, “You want one of us to go get Mrs. Rogers?”

Steve shook his head. The women at Beaulieu bunked in a different wing than the men and he was awake anyway; there was no point in going to the trouble of getting Natasha, especially since it would bring Peggy too. “Did I say anything?”

“No,” Dum-Dum said, screwing the cap back onto the flask and passing it back to Falsworth; Steve could see the other man’s initials engraved on it. He kept his gaze fixed on Steve as he asked, “You worried that you might have?”

Steve had been a soldier too long to wake up screaming more often than once every few months or so, which was too often as far as he was concerned. He only knew that he occasionally talked in his sleep because Natasha had told him. He shook his head, then read the expression on Dum-Dum’s face and said in frustration, “You still think I’m a double?”

“Not really,” Morita said. He had stepped away to the pitcher on a table by the door and came back with a tin cup half full of water, which he handed to Steve. “But something had you thrashing around like a fish on a line.”

Steve sipped at the water and said, “I’ve had nightmares for years.”

A tiny line knit between Dum-Dum’s brows. “That’s news to me.” The quick flicker of his gaze to the other Howling Commandos asked the question of them and got the same response without so much as a word being said; they had been together – Steve had been with them – a long time, as such things went. Steve could do the same thing with Sam and Natasha now, though not with most of the other Avengers. It wasn’t quite the same as it had been with the Commandos, even if he had been with them longer.

Steve rubbed at his forehead. “It’s been going on since I got out of the ice. It’s not as bad as it used to be.”

Another quick flickering exchange of sideways glances, a whole conversation carried on in a heartbeat before Dum-Dum asked again, his voice careful, “You want to talk about it?”

Steve drank off the last of the water and set the cup aside, then folded his arms over the tops of his drawn-up knees. “You going to believe anything I say?”

“That depends,” Falsworth said, his voice grave but with enough warmth in it that Steve could hear the gentle teasing behind the words. “Are there aliens in it?”

The good humor made the corner of Steve’s mouth crook upwards. “Not this time.” He was pretty sure that no one believed that part except maybe Howard, since he had run tests on the blood on Steve’s and Natasha’s tactical gear and had quizzed them both on the results.

He scrubbed a hand back through his hair, which was still a little longer than regulation. It didn’t matter as much for the Commandos since they weren’t regular Army; if you did covert ops you usually wanted to look at least a little scruffy. On the other hand, if they were going to be in front of the press again, they would all have to look more than half-decent.

“There was a big museum display on us at the Smithsonian a couple years back,” Steve said, apropos of nothing. “They opened it on the Fourth for the seventieth anniversary of Captain America. It was a special exhibit on me, but they had a big display on the Commandos. Had replicas of all our uniforms on mannequins, a big mural, some newsreel footage, some video interviews Dum-Dum and Jim and Gabe did later on after the war. I used to go there just to – just to see something familiar.”

He glanced up at them, studying their faces – familiar, still, but while to some extent they had been able to fall back into their old patterns it wasn’t as easy as any of them had expected. Steve didn’t really think that any of the Commandos still believed that he might be a double agent, but he knew and they knew that even now he wasn’t telling them everything. That kind of suspicion was the kind of thing that could get people killed in the field, assuming they actually ended up going to Germany.

“It’s different up then,” Steve said quietly. “We’re different. Time…does things to memory, and it’s not as though what we are has ever been – been neutral. When people look at us, read about us, see in the pictures, it’s not – it’s not really us.”

“You think it is now?” Morita said, his eyebrows raised. He had been almost as much a propaganda figure as Steve; the papers couldn’t seem to decide whether to prop him up as one of the “good Japs” or to try and hide him.

“It’s different,” Steve repeated. “We’re not…real. And when someone walks out of your storybooks, no one really knows how to deal with that.” He felt his jaw work a little, his mouth twisting at the irony. “No matter how much they think they are. I wasn’t exactly doing great when they thawed me out, either, that didn’t help. They weren’t sure if I was – if I was all there or if I just wasn’t all Captain America was cracked up to be. Seventy years is a long time.”

“Hardly seems like the sort of thing to have nightmares about it,” Falsworth said.

Steve’s mouth twisted again. “Try living it sometime. Or don’t – I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

Oddly of all the people he knew, the one who seemed to get it the best was Bruce, who over the course of the seven years he had spent on the run had seen Bruce Banner vanish and be replaced by the Hulk in the eyes of the world. It had only gotten worse after the Battle of New York, though at least the opinion of the Hulk was no longer overwhelmingly negative. Or it hadn’t been, until Johannesburg. Bucky understood it, but mostly didn’t share it; it was an afterthought compared to the Winter Soldier. He thought Sam and Natasha got it, Wanda a little, but understanding it and living it were two different things.

Tony had never understood it and never wanted to.

Steve scrubbed his hands back through his damp hair again and said, “That’s not what I was dreaming about.”

Dum-Dum cocked his head to one side, inviting him to go on, and after a moment Steve just said, “The Valkyrie.”

“I read the report,” Dum-Dum said, hesitating briefly after the words, like he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask if Steve had left anything out of it when he had written it up two weeks ago. Steve hadn’t, but the only thing they had to go on about that was his word, and right now Steve knew exactly how much that was worth to them.

Steve met his eyes, daring him to say it out loud, and after a moment Dum-Dum said, “I wish you’d trust us.”

“I wish you’d trust me,” Steve said, and this time it was Dum-Dum who looked away.

Steve lay awake even after the Commandos had dispersed back to their own beds in the long, narrow room. Despite the disturbance, all of them fell back to sleep fairly quickly, and Steve lay in the tangle of sweat-soaked sheets listening to the sound of five men breathing, still absently waiting for the missing sixth even though he knew that Bucky was either a thousand miles or seventy-three years away. Normally officers and enlisted men bunked separately, but the Howling Commandos were a rule unto themselves.

It was good, Steve thought, to be back with them.

He watched the darkness of the room lighten a little with the approach of dawn, though the blackout curtains meant that it wasn’t all that visible. He wondered if there had been any more rocket attacks since they had left London, which might determine whether or not anyone believed a damn thing he said.

When he couldn’t stand the waiting anymore, he got up and dressed, carrying his boots so that his steps didn’t wake the sleeping Commandos. He only stopped to put them on after he had shut the door behind him, then went quietly down the hallway, doing up the buttons on his field jacket as he went; the Commandos had their own gear, but for the time being Steve was in a M-1943 combat uniform, the same as any other American army officer. He still liked it better than the ACUs the Army used up in the twenty-first, which had their points but which he personally thought lacked character.

He cadged a cup of coffee and a roll from the kitchen, where the cooks were already busy, and went out to sit on the steps with his sketchpad. Howard still had his big sketchbook – not out of any maliciousness, Steve thought, just that he had started making his own notes in it and had forgotten to give it back before Steve had left London. He drank his coffee and tried not to get crumbs on his sketchpad, letting the long sweep of lawn, the mill pond, the distant trees of the New Forest all take shape on the page.

“You should burn that, you know. You wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”

Steve had heard Peggy approach, but didn’t look up until she spoke. Like him, she was in battledress, though British rather than American, and carrying two cups of coffee.

He signed his name and the date at the bottom of the page and tore it out of the sketchpad, offering it to her. “I don’t have a lighter.”

Peggy passed him one of the coffee cups – ceramic and balanced carefully on a chipped saucer – in exchange for the page. She studied the sketch for a moment, then tucked it into her pocket. “Well, you didn’t put any of the buildings in, so perhaps it’s all right. May I?”

Steve tipped his head at the step next to him, a little wary. He and Peggy hadn’t been avoiding each other over the course of the past few days, which would have been impossible under the circumstances, but they hadn’t been alone together either. She and the Commandos had apparently only recently decided that Steve could be out of their sight, possibly because the Beaulieu estate was so large that there was nowhere he could go.

She sat down next to him, balancing her saucer on her knee. “Trouble sleeping?”

Steve grimaced. “Who told you?”

She cocked an eyebrow at him, not answering the question. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” Steve said. “I have bad dreams all the time. It’s just another one.”

Peggy studied him for a long minute, until Steve finally looked away. They sat in silence, drinking coffee, until Peggy finally said abruptly, “I need to ask you something, and I need you not to lie to me this time.” She took a breath. “I’m asking you not to lie to me this time.”

Steve hesitated, then nodded. “Okay.”

She was silent for a few moment, like she had to collect her thoughts, then she put her coffee cup and saucer aside and turned to face him. “Why did you tell Howard you were married when you arrived?”

Steve stared at her, and she clarified, “When you – when we were speaking before the power cut, you said that you would marry her if she wanted. That does suggest that you aren’t actually married to Natasha Romanoff, even if you are – even if you are seeing her.” She fumbled for a moment on the polite euphemism before she went on. “So – why? Why, Steve?” Her voice cracked briefly on his name.

He looked down at his hands, still holding the cup and saucer, then put the crockery aside the way Peggy had. “We got here in the middle of a fight,” he said slowly. “Nat and I. We got slapped out of a fight in Wakanda in 2018 and ended up in the middle of Howard’s lab in 1945. I know that lab, Peggy. I know everyone in it. And everyone in it is – was – is dead in 2018. I saw the camera footage of Howard’s murder a couple years ago. I carried your coffin at your funeral. Being here just isn’t – wasn’t possible. But god, I know that lab. And Howard –” He had to stop, trying to collect himself. He knew that his halting explanation probably didn’t make much sense, but he was aware of Peggy watching him steadily, her expression dark with concern.

Steve touched his unadorned left hand; he’d taken his ring off and put it on the same chain as his dog tags when they had come out to Beaulieu. It was a little shocking how quickly he had gotten accustomed to having it there. “If it had been you or Phillips there instead of Howard,” he said slowly, “you would have split us up anyway, but I knew Howard wouldn’t. I didn’t know if this was real then, but I knew Howard wouldn’t, so –” He shrugged a little, self-conscious, but he still couldn’t meet her eyes.

He heard Peggy take a deep breath, bracing herself, and then say, deliberately cruel, “And you just never came clean about it because you wanted to keep fucking her.”

Steve flinched. “That’s not what happened.”

“Then what happened?” Peggy demanded. “Just tell me, Steve. Just – just don’t lie anymore. Please just tell me the truth. Please.”

Steve rested his elbows on his knees and ran his hands back through his hair, quiet for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Peggy, I can’t stay. I can’t – six years ago I would have given anything for this, but it’s not six years ago anymore, and I’m not – I don’t know how to be the guy I was then. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do it. And I…wouldn’t.” He hesitated over the last word, not wanting to admit it even to himself until the words were out. “I thought it was easier for all of us if there was a reason that things couldn’t go back the way they were, whether or not you believed me about the rest.”

“You don’t know that,” Peggy said, small-voiced.

Steve swallowed hard. “Yeah, I do. This is – this – Peggy, I’m not him. I can do this job, but it’s like stepping into someone else’s skin. Anything else – even if I could do it, I wouldn’t. I can’t do that to you, or to Natasha, or – or to myself.”

“You said that before.”

“It’s still the truth,” Steve said, studying his own hands. There were pencil smudges on his fingers and the familiar fighter’s calluses on the insides of his palms, made by years of his shield smacking into his hands over and over again. His knuckles had the same mess of scarring that any professional fighter picked up; sheer repetition had made those the only scars that showed up these days. He flexed his hands, rubbing the graphite smudges off on the knees of his pants, and said, “And I do love her.”

“Do you?” Peggy’s voice was like cut glass. “Is she pregnant?”

Steve jerked his head up, startled into looking at her. “What?”

“Is Natasha pregnant?” she demanded. “Is that why you –”

“She’s not pregnant,” Steve said bluntly; Peggy didn’t need to know any more than that. He blinked at her, trying to organize his thoughts and keep from saying something he would regret before he finally said, “Do you really think I’d throw over a woman I love because I might have a chance at someone else?” He swallowed hard, a little shocked that it was even a question he had to ask her. “Do you really want me to be the kind of guy who’d do that?”

Her voice was hard. “As far as I can tell, that’s exactly what you’ve done.”

Steve shook his head. “Peggy, it’s been six years. I love you. I did then and I do now, but that’s – that’s not enough. It doesn’t change anything. I love Natasha, I’ll marry her if she wants to get married; if she doesn’t, then that doesn’t change the way I feel or what we are. She knows everything about me.”

Her clasped hands were white-knuckled. “And do you know everything about her? What she is? What she’s done?”

“I don’t have to,” Steve said. “I know her. That’s enough.”

They both looked up at the sound of a plane passing by overhead, both relieved by the distraction. It did a couple of lazy loops over the building, showing off the Stark Industries logo on the side, then floated down in a gentle, effortless landing, ghosting across the expanse of lawn to come to a stop in front of the house.

Seventy-three years and Howard Stark was still the best pilot Steve had ever met.

He and Peggy got up to meet him as Howard bounded out of the modified de Havilland Leopard Moth like a gazelle. “Nobody dead yet?” he greeted them.

Steve grinned, bemused. “Well, the day just started.”

“What brings you out here?” Peggy asked.

“Brought you some stuff,” Howard said. He gave them both a quick hug – Peggy looked a little startled by this, but Steve returned the embrace; Howard had the lunatic look in his eyes that suggested he had been working rather than sleeping – then boosted himself back up to dig through the unoccupied back seats of the three-seater Leopard Moth. He tossed a couple of duffle bags down to the frost-dewed lawn, then balanced carefully and turned around with something else in his hands, a big circular shape with a leather cover.

He offered it to Steve, but it was Peggy who reached up to take it from Howard so that he could leap down again. Steve just stood frozen, his mind fuzzed into static like a bad wireless signal.

Howard took the shield back from Peggy and stripped the cover off to reveal the gleaming, untouched surface beneath. “I brought all your paints and stuff,” he said. “I know you hate anyone else touching it.” He flipped the shield around so that Steve could see the back, adding, “I can change this up if you want, I brought some different styles of straps and brackets. It’s as close as I could get it to the old one. Sorry it took so long; I didn’t know if I’d be able to get the vibranium this time.”

Steve swallowed hard, taking a step forward to touch the deadly curve of the rim. “Where’d you get it? I thought – I thought you already used up the last of it.”

“Wakanda,” Howard said, and when Steve stilled, thinking about Ulysses Klaue and some of the favors he, Sam, and Natasha had done for T’Challa over the course of the last two years, he clarified quickly, “King T’Chanda and I knew each other before the war; it’s where I got the vibranium for the mark one. When you and Mrs. Rogers came in with Wakandan gear, I reached out to the legation here –”

“Howard!” Peggy protested, her eyes widening.

“There’s a Wakandan legation in London?” Steve said at the same time, startled. As far as he knew from T’Challa, Wakanda’s participation in the war had mostly been monetary and confined to a few operatives that had been loosely associated with SOE. His grandfather T’Chanda had died before T’Challa had been born and Steve didn’t know much about him.

“They don’t advertise it, but yes,” Howard said. “Run by a lady called M’yra. You’d like her, Peg, she’s terrifying. I took over that shield of yours and your sketchbook –”

“Howard, do the words top secret mean nothing to you?” Peggy demanded.

“– and she’d like to have a long conversation about what you were doing in Wakanda, but since we’re a little busy right now she says that can wait until you get back from Germany. I got the vibranium from her. Stop looking at me like that, I didn’t steal it and getting vibranium on the black market is basically impossible at the best of times, and T’Chanda would never talk to me again if I did, anyway.” He cocked an eyebrow at Steve, who still hadn’t taken the shield from him. “Since we know the Waffen-SS picked up some of Hydra’s strays and we don’t know what kind of weaponry they’re packing, I didn’t want you out there without anything except pure vibranium.”

“But the rest of us will be fine, is that right?” Peggy said dryly. “Does Colonel Phillips know that you were speaking to an outside party about Steve’s, mm, unusual circumstances?”

“Yep,” Howard said. He held the shield out to Steve again and when Steve didn’t move, said, “You’re going to hurt my feelings.”

Despite his light tone, there was a note of earnest concern in his voice, and after a moment Steve reached out so that Howard could slide the shield onto his left arm. A little of the tension left Howard’s shoulders. “How’s that feel? Straps okay?”

“It feels good,” Steve said, making a few testing passes. He had had to upgrade the straps on his old shield a few times since coming out of the ice – including the experiment with the magnetic lock during the Ultron debacle – and so had a fairly good idea of what worked and what didn’t. Unlike SHIELD when he had come out of the ice, Howard knew better than to make any assumptions or do any cosmetic modifications.

He glanced around, warned Howard and Peggy to stand back, and took two running steps forward, letting the shield roll off his fingers with all his strength behind it. The shield bounced off two trees, releasing a shower of budding new spring growth, and the side of one outbuilding before it came back to him; Steve half-turned as he caught it, letting the momentum carry him around until he came to a stop. He slid his arm back through the straps, feeling the strain of the motion in back and shoulders; two years was the longest he had gone without the shield since he had gotten it in 1943, if you didn’t count the icebox years.

Howard looked a little dreamy-eyed, but pulled himself back together to ask again, “How’s that feel? You need me to change anything up?”

“It’s good,” Steve assured him. He switched the shield to his right arm and worked his left, wincing. “I’m just out of practice with it.”

Howard nodded and went to dig in one of the duffle bags he had brought, coming up with Steve’s shield harness from his 2018 tac gear. “Brought this along too. And your new stuff, and some gear for Mrs. Rogers to try, plus some documents for her. They’re finishing up the German stuff back at headquarters now for you to pick up tomorrow. Where’s your ring?” he added belatedly as Steve took the harness, running the familiar leather through his hands.

Steve dug the chain of his dog tags out from under his shirt to show it to him, the gold gleaming warmly against the steel, then tucked it away again. “Howard,” he said hesitantly, “the V-2s –”

Howard’s abstracted gaze sharpened. “There haven’t been any since the one that hit Orpington the day before you left,” he said.

He didn’t say you were right and neither did Peggy, but the words hung unspoken between the three of them anyway. They stood like the three points of a lopsided triangle, a man and a woman Steve had loved six or seventy-three years ago and still loved, but couldn’t have any longer. He started to speak and caught his breath instead; he didn’t know what he could say that he hadn’t said already.

He touched the curve of the shield instead, feeling the elegant artistry that went into everything Howard Stark made even when Howard let his enthusiasm get the better of himself. I know you hate anyone else touching it, he had said, something that no one at SHIELD and few of the Avengers had quite understood. It’s as close as I could get it to the old one.

Howard had remembered.

Steve gripped Howard’s shoulder in lieu of speaking. Howard covered his hand with his own, his fingers still in their battered leather pilot’s gloves and smelling strongly of engine grease. For a long moment they just looked at each other, not speaking, then Howard’s mouth twisted slightly, wryly acknowledging what he would never say out loud. There was no bitterness in it, just a little grief.

He squeezed Steve’s fingers briefly, then stepped back. “You guys got anything to eat here? I left before breakfast.”

Peggy had watched the little tête-à-tête in silence, her expression unreadable, but she said, “I think we can arrange something.”

She and Steve helped Howard carry his bags up to the house. When Steve turned around, shield on one arm and a duffle bag in the other, he saw that the sound of the airplane had brought out Natasha, the Howling Commandos, and a couple of the SOE agents they had been working with. He met Natasha’s eyes as the unpainted shield flashed a little in the thin morning sunlight – it wasn’t overcast today, for a change – and saw the same grim expression that was probably on his own face reflected on hers.

Steve was well aware that between 1945 and 2012 there had been a Captain America-shaped hole in the American psyche, one into which the U.S. government had at various points tried to shove some poor bastard; Howard himself had taken a swing at one of the generals responsible for the most recent attempt in 1984, the year of Natasha’s birth. According to Rhodey, the general had been so startled that a sixty-seven-year-old industrialist was so furious at the insult to a friend almost forty years dead that he hadn’t even tried to stop Howard from breaking his nose.

In 1945 – in March of 1945, at least – it wasn’t a Captain America-shaped hole, it was a Steve Rogers-shaped hole. Despite what he had said to Peggy, Steve knew that every day he was here he was shaving edges off himself to fit back into it. What he wouldn’t do for Nick Fury or Alexander Pierce or Thaddeus Ross – or Tony Stark, for that matter – he would do for Chester Phillips and Peggy Carter and Howard Stark, no matter how much he resisted it.

The knowledge of that was in Natasha’s eyes as she came down the steps to meet them. She put her hand out to touch the surface of the shield, looking at Steve for a long moment before she nodded a little.

They were out of options they could live with, Steve thought wearily. Whether or not Department X ever made its move, they would fight this war, and deal with the consequences when and if they came.

The WAC and the Wren had passed each other on the Underground platform every day for the past week, two more anonymous servicewomen amidst the bustle of commuter traffic. For the past week, the note that the WAC had passed to the Wren whose true name was Lyudmila Plisetskaya said only no soap, meaning that Captain America and the Howling Commandos were still out of reach at one of SOE’s top secret training schools.

Today, Irina Larionova’s chicken-scratch handwriting, once decoded, read, sgr hc nrr returning london tmrw deploying germany day after will be at stork club tmrw evening