Of Home Near

Now
May 2018

Steve’s dead.

The knowledge was a dull ache in the pit of Bucky’s stomach, the way it had been for the past three weeks. Steve wasn’t lost like he had been in 1945, not snapped away like Wanda Maximoff or King T’Challa, but dead.

Bucky flinched a little as he nicked himself with the razor, the sudden sharp bite of pain shocking amidst his numb agony. He set the razor aside to dab at the blood on his cheek, then considered his reflection and wiped the remainder of the lather away before rinsing off the razor; he had finished anyway.

The face that stared back at him in the mirror was unfamiliar. It felt like it belonged to someone else, to the guy in the museums and the history books. But Steve was dead, and maybe that was what they needed – the guy from the history books. Bucky didn’t think he knew how to be that guy anymore, but Steve would have done it, so he had to at least try.

He ran his hands back over his cropped hair. It made his head feel oddly light, made the rest of him feel exposed and vulnerable. He’d cut it himself and it stuck up in spiky, uneven clumps that would have made Steve laugh himself sick if he had been here to see. If he had been alive to see.

When Bucky had gotten away from Hydra four years ago, his shattered mind had come back in bits and pieces. Most of it was here now, but not all of it; Bucky suspected that he would never really know what hadn’t come back, since almost everyone who could have filled in the blanks was dead.

Steve was dead.

The old horror of the Howling Commandos, the 107th, the SSR, and anyone else who had been unlucky enough to be in the field with them had been Hydra’s energy weapons. That had taken a while to swim up out of the depths of his memory, but it was still there, floating around. Mostly irrelevant these days, or so he had thought until he had watched Steve and Romanoff vanish in that same damn flash of blue light, nothing left behind, not even the ashes the Snap had left of everyone else. Seventy-three years and after all of that, after putting Johann Schmidt in the ground and burning out Hydra twice over, the damn thing had still gotten him in the end. Thinking about it made him want to start screaming and not stop, because if nothing else, Steve should have been free from that of all things.

Bucky couldn’t shake the quiet voice in the back of his head that suggested that if Steve had still had his shield, then he would still be here, and he would have still had it if not for Bucky. Logically he knew that wasn’t true; no one knew exactly what the Space Stone had done, but Bruce had said very firmly that there was no way it was the same thing as Hydra’s old weapons. It all came down to the same thing, though. Steve was dead.

He scrubbed a hand over the back of his head again, staring bleakly at his reflection in the mirror. Maybe he could get Sam or Barton to straighten out his uneven trim; he wasn’t stupid enough to ask Yelena to do it just because she was a woman. Natasha’s sister had shown up at the compound not long after the remains of the Avengers and Bucky had arrived, frantic about Natasha’s ongoing radio silence. She hadn’t left; no one was sure if that was because she was hoping that Romanoff would somehow reappear or if she just didn’t have anywhere else to go. No one was brave enough to ask, either; she was even scarier than Romanoff, and that was saying something. Bucky knew enough about the Widows to want to stay as far away as he could; Steve being sweet on Romanoff would have been all the proof Bucky needed that Steve had been batshit insane about women – and men, for that matter – if he hadn’t had the first twenty-seven years of his life backing it up. Well, most of it.

He had been staring blankly at the mirror for at least a minute when he realized that the glass was vibrating. Bucky put out a hand to steady it, puzzled, then felt the vibration intensify. The razor rattled where it was balanced on the edge of the sink, then fell in. He could feel the low hum in his bones, from his feet up through his head and everywhere except his vibranium arm.

He left the bathroom at a jog.

Apparently it wasn’t as serious as it sounded, because he found Yelena standing by the window in the living room holding a gun and looking annoyed. From their short acquaintance, Bucky was pretty sure it was her default expression.

“It’s a spaceship,” she informed him in Russian.

Okay, maybe it was as serious as it sounded. On the other hand, no alarms were going off and no one else in the living room had gotten up. Sam was standing by the window on Yelena’s other side and when Bucky peered around her at him, he said, “I think it’s Danvers.”

“Oh.” Bucky had taken the glow coming from beneath the spaceship for something to do with the engines, but it did look more person-shaped the longer he stared at it. “Is that good or bad?”

Sam stared out the window for a moment longer, then said, “I’m going to go find out.”

Rhodes, Barton, and Banner were already out on the front lawn, along with the raccoon, Rocket. They must have thought it wasn’t much of a threat, because Pepper Potts was out there too, and Bucky thought Rhodes would have kept her back if he was really worried.

Sam looked back at him. “You coming?”

Steve would have, so Bucky nodded and followed him out. Yelena trailed after them, her expression dissatisfied; she didn’t put down the gun. Thor didn’t emerge from wherever he was hiding to see what was going on. Everyone around here was pretty depressed, but Thor seemed determined to come out on top. From what Banner had said and Thor had let slip, he had plenty of reason to be, so no one blamed him for it. Bucky certainly didn’t.

The night air was cool against his skin, damp with the promise of coming rain. It was utterly silent except for the scuff of feet against grass and the wind in the trees, on the surface of the lake. There was no engine noise coming from the spaceship, no sound of birds or other animals; whatever was left after the Snap was obviously freaked out by the new arrival. Half of all life didn’t just mean humans.

The glow was fading from Carol Danvers as a hatch clunked open on the spaceship, which huddled on the lawn like a broken-winged bird. The gangway creaked as it descended, a visible dent in it, and it stopped about two feet off the ground, tilting to the left. The woman who appeared at its top had to stomp her foot against it several times to get it to descend the rest of the way. If Bucky hadn’t been having what was easily the worst three weeks of his life – which was saying something – he might have been more surprised at her appearance; she was bald-headed, blue-skinned, and with metallic implants on her skull and a prosthetic left arm that made him feel a little less self-conscious about his own. Her gaze swept around them, searching, then focused on Rocket, who had started running when the hatch had opened. He stopped at its base, looking up at her. She shook her head a little and his whole body slumped, his ears and tail going slack with disappointment and dashed hopes.

The blue-skinned woman ducked briefly out of sight and reemerged an instant later, supporting a gaunt man who leaned heavily on her shoulder as she helped him down the metal steps. Pepper Potts cried out, breaking into a run, but it was Rhodes who got there first, taking Tony Stark’s weight from the strange woman and saying something to him. Stark’s shoulders went slack with relief as he saw Rhodes and Potts, relaxing for a moment into their arms before he straightened up enough to look around. His gaze tracked Banner and Barton, then Sam, which got a slight frown, and Yelena, whom he looked at without recognition.

Then he saw Bucky.

He went tense, almost surging forward despite Rhodes’s restraining hand against his shoulder. He looked past Bucky, searching, then around again, looking for someone who wasn’t there.

“Who’s dead?” he said.

“Tony –” Rhodes began. “Let’s get inside –”

“Who’s dead?” Stark insisted.

“Steve’s dead,” Bucky said flatly. “So is Romanoff.”

Yelena flexed the fingers of her left hand and Barton looked aside, his jaw clenching; he had shown up at the compound the day the Avengers had released the lists of their dead and missing soon after their return from Wakanda. Bucky didn’t know them, but he knew their type, knew that they were both thinking, if I had been there, then maybe –

Bucky had been there, and Steve was still dead.

“Vision’s dead,” Rhodes supplied, when it was clear that Tony wasn’t going to take another step towards the main building without a response. “Thanos did – he got Steve and Natasha. Wanda, T’Challa, Fury, Hill, Lang and his entire crew – they’re all gone. So is Happy,” he added, and Stark flinched, full-body. Rhodes tightened a hand on his shoulder and added gently, “Come on, man, let’s get you inside.”

“Tony, please,” Potts insisted.

With another hard look at Bucky, Stark let himself be hustled into the building. Sam watched him go, waiting until the door had shut behind him before he said, “That could have gone worse.”

“There’s still time,” Bucky said.

Sam frowned at him as Barton came close enough to hear; Banner had followed Stark and the others inside. “Something we oughta know?”

Bucky had no real idea what Steve had told his friends about what had happened in Siberia, or even if he had told them anything at all. Knowing Steve – and he had known Steve once upon a time, even if he was never sure that he knew him these days – he probably hadn’t. But it wasn’t fair to anyone not to say, and Steve wasn’t here to make that decision one way or another, even if it had been his decision to make.

“I killed his parents,” Bucky said, and went into the building.

Behind him, Barton said, “Well, shit.”

Bucky might have made himself scarce after that, since he doubted Stark wanted to see him and there wasn’t exactly anything they could do just now, but Sam came and hunted him up after a couple of hours, hustling him back down to the living room like a particularly determined sheepdog. Everyone except the blue-skinned woman – Nebula, Sam said – was in there, with Stark in a wheelchair and hooked up to an IV under the watchful eyes of both Bruce Banner and Pepper Potts. They’d even dug Thor out from wherever he had been hiding.

“¬– it’s been twenty-three days since Thanos came to Earth,” Rhodes was saying as they came in. His gaze flickered towards them, but he went on talking without interruption, indicating the holograms that glittered in the air above the round table, cycling through the profiles of Avengers or Avengers associates whose absence had either been confirmed or were still missing. Bucky had seen them a dozen times, but he glanced up anyway, watching Erik Selvig turn to Maria Hill and then to Hope van Dyne. People he didn’t know, mostly, except for their names.

Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, The Vision, Loki Odinson all hung in the air off to one side, the confirmed dead. The last was just another name from a file to Bucky, but his inclusion seemed to be for Thor’s benefit; the Asgardian was sitting in a corner of the room, looking morose. At least they had gotten him into the room, which was more than anyone had accomplished some days.

“Every government out there’s in pieces,” Rhodes went on. “What’s left has been trying to take a census and it looks like Thanos did exactly what he said he was going to do. He wiped out fifty percent of all living creatures.”

The words hung in the air as the holograms continued to cycle. Harold Hogan. Wanda Maximoff. T’Challa. Jane Foster. Alexei Shostakov.

“Where is he now?” Stark asked. “Where –”

“We don’t know,” Sam said. “He just opened a portal and walked through.”

Stark looked at him and frowned, his expression darkening when he saw Bucky. Bucky resisted the urge to look away and met his eyes instead, crossing his arms over his chest and wishing that he had had time to get someone to fix his hair. What he had done – not what the Winter Soldier had done, what he had done – wasn’t forgivable, but right now they were past that. Maybe tomorrow they wouldn’t be, but for right now, they had to be.

Stark looked away before he did. “What happened to Rogers and Romanoff?” he demanded abruptly.

Bucky felt a muscle in his jaw work and had to look away, but at least Stark didn’t see.

“We don’t know,” Banner said.

“I thought you said they were dead.”

“We think Thanos hit them with one of the Stones,” Banner said. “Or a couple of the Stones, maybe, we’re not sure. There was a massive surge of energy and they were gone, nothing left, no bodies, nothing. If he just sent them away with the Space Stone…if they were anywhere on Earth, they’d have come back by now, or called, something. There’s been nothing. If they’re not on Earth…” He let the words trail off.

“If they’re not on Earth, then we’ve got no way of finding them,” Sam filled in for him. “And that’s if they survived the –” He made a gesture to indicate the culling; no one seemed to know what to call it. After a moment, he added, “Apparently it looked a lot like what Hydra’s weapons used to do back during World War Two, the ones powered by the Tesseract.”

Stark’s gaze flickered to Bucky, since there was only one person in the room who had any idea what that looked like. Bucky met his eyes again, watching a mix of emotions chase their way across his face. He had no doubt that Stark still wanted to pull his head off and probably Steve’s too and couldn’t really blame him for either. But even if Stark hadn’t known Steve quite as well as he thought he had, he had still known him well enough to be aware that if there was any way at all that Steve could have been here right now, then he would he would have been here. The same went for Romanoff.

Neither of them was here.

Bucky saw the realization cross Stark’s face, the weary understanding that however much he wanted to blame Steve for what had happened, for not being in New York to stop it before it ever reached Titan or Wakanda or anywhere else, for splitting up the Avengers so that no one else had been there either, for anything – he couldn’t do it. Not when Steve wasn’t here to argue with him, not when Steve had paid a price that Thanos hadn’t bothered to extort from him. For what felt like a long time but probably wasn’t more than a few seconds the resentment was clear on his face, a little bleak aggravation that Steve had won the kind of competition you only won by losing, and losing badly. Steve hadn’t thought of it that way, but it didn’t really matter.

He looked at Bucky, his chin dipping a little in something that wasn’t quite a nod, then turned his attention back to Rhodes. “What happened? Give me the Cliff Notes.”

Rhodes and Sam gave him a summary of events in Edinburgh and Wakanda, with Banner and Rocket chipping in to fill the parts they had missed. Bucky watched Stark’s face as he listened; he didn’t know what Stark had thought had happened on Earth, but he clearly hadn’t expected the answers he got. When they had finished, Stark slumped back in his wheelchair, running his fingers absently over the arc reactor stuck to his chest. He looked like some of the soldiers Bucky had met during the war, the ones who had been fighting for so long that they couldn’t recognize when the fighting was over, still waiting for the next barrage to begin even when they were home safe, or as close to home and as close to safe as you ever got out there. Steve had looked like that sometimes too, back in Brooklyn years before the war was a glimmer in a madman’s eye.

After a moment, Stark looked at Yelena and said, “You, new girl – who the hell are you?”

She gave him an unimpressed glare in return and said, “I’m Yelena.”

His eyes narrowed. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“I’m Natasha’s sister.”

Stark did a very credible double-take. “Romanoff’s got a sister? I thought she just sprang fully-formed out of the head of Stalin. Next you’ll be telling me she has a mother and father too –”

Yelena glanced at the cycling holograms, one of which was showing Melina Vostokoff’s profile, and said, “She used to.”

There wasn’t much that anyone, even Tony Stark, could say to that, though Bucky saw him scrabble briefly for a response. Evidently he had enough self-preservation instinct to read Yelena’s intent expression as searching for a reason to blame him for Natasha Romanoff’s death and didn’t want to risk giving her an excuse. Bucky suspected that Yelena would have blamed Steve for dragging Romanoff into it if he had been here to blame, but he wasn’t. Besides, Natasha Romanoff wasn’t the kind of woman anyone dragged into anything; if she was somewhere, she wanted to be there.

“Can we –” Stark waved an arm at the holograms. “This is ruining the mood, I’m depressed enough already.”

“This is ruining the mood?” Rocket muttered as Banner leaned over the table. “Also, what mood?”

The holograms flickered out of sight as Banner found the controls. It left all of them staring at each other, the room suddenly much smaller without the ghosts the holograms promised. Bucky pressed his palms together, then his thumbs to his forehead. It wasn’t as though he wanted or needed the reminder of what they had all lost in Wakanda, but the sudden absence of the holgrams left him feeling vulnerable and exposed.

“I realize I’m new here,” Danvers said slowly, “but that’s not supposed to be there, is it?”

Bucky looked up.

There was a quarter-sized circle of glittering green energy hanging in the air, probably originally concealed by the flickering holograms. Bucky slid down from the edge of the table he had been perched on, wary and figuring that of all the people in the room, he was probably one of the most likely to survive it if it turned out to be inimical in any way.

“Yeah, that’s not supposed to be here,” Rhodes agreed, then had to grab for Stark as the other man got to his feet and wobbled a little, pulling his IV out.

The circle of energy was about halfway between Bucky and Stark. They both reached it at the same time, Sam at Bucky’s shoulder as all four of them tried to peer at it at the same time without banging heads. Energy hummed across his skin as he drew close to it, making him grind his teeth in irritation. The feel of it was familiar somehow, though Bucky had the impression that when he had felt it before, it had been stronger. A lot stronger. When he got close enough to see, he could tell that there was a definite border to it, made up of intricate runic symbols he was pretty sure he had never seen before in his life.

“That’s the wizard stuff,” Stark said, coming up on Bucky’s other side and too fascinated by the glittering energy to notice. He frowned at it in narrow-eyed concentration, his fingers twitching a little. “That glowy shit, with the runes, that’s the wizard stuff.”

In the center of the circle was something like a window, revealing the pinhole view of a big, familiar room. It was brick-walled and windowless, with a groined ceiling and long metal tables, most of them cluttered by an assortment of partially-dissembled WWII-era Hydra weapons that Bucky knew all too well, a few others with more prosaic equipment – more prosaic by some standards, at least. Every other time he had seen that room it had been busy with people, but today there were only two men there, sitting at the nearest table and sharing what looked like a very expensive bottle of brandy, if Bucky was any judge.

Only one of the men was facing them, though his attention was on his companion and if the little circle of energy had an equivalent on the other side, he didn’t seem aware of it. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a thin moustache and smears of engine grease visible on the backs of his hands where he rocked an empty glass back and forth on the table as he spoke. Bucky’s breath caught in his throat, his metal hand closing into a fist and the phantom memory of shattering bone under his hands all he could feel before he forced it away.

“Dad,” Stark whispered.

The other man was sitting with his back to them. He was big and blond, his broad shoulders straining the wool of his olive drab uniform jacket. When he shifted a little to cork the brandy bottle and set it aside, the artificial lights caught a glitter from the silver captain’s bars on his shoulders.

Bucky didn’t need to see his face to know Steve Rogers when he saw him.

“What is that?” Sam asked. “Where is that?”

“It’s the main lab in the London headquarters of the Strategic Scientific Reserve,” Bucky said. He heard the words like someone else was saying them, even though he could feel them vibrate in his throat. “Thanos didn’t kill Steve. He sent him home.”

Now
April 1945

There was a restless, unsettled air in headquarters that matched Peggy’s own mood as she made her way through the building’s quiet corridors. It felt like the Brooklyn compound had felt the day after Krüger’s attack two years ago and for the same reason. Outside in the courtyard they were still scrubbing the matryoshki’s blood off the cobbles the same way they had been scrubbing Abraham Erskine’s blood off the Vita-Ray platform.

She found Steve in the empty canteen, sitting over a cup of ersatz coffee with one elbow on the table and his head resting against his good hand; his left arm was back in its sling. He had had his reopened bullet wound bandaged after he had returned to headquarters the previous day, but the scrapes and bruises he had picked up during the chase were already lighter than they had been during that morning’s briefing; the ones he had gotten from the Winter Guard were already gone. He looked up warily as Peggy sat down across from him, his shoulders tensing.

It was the wariness that made her hesitate. It had become Steve’s default expression around her lately and she had been angry enough that she hadn’t thought much of it until he had been gone and then come back again. He had never looked at Peggy like that before. She didn’t like it.

Steve rubbed a hand over his forehead and said, “If you’re going to yell at me again, can we just skip it and I’ll fill in the blanks? I’m not in the mood for another fight.”

Peggy produced the flask she had abstracted from Howard shortly before he had lost his temper and thrown all of his engineers out of the lab and poured a tot into Steve’s coffee cup. He looked down at the contents and said, “You know that’s not going to have any effect on me.”

“It might improve the taste,” Peggy pointed out, picking up a coffee cup and saucer from the stack at the center of the table and not bothering to pour in coffee, just Howard’s good brandy. She wasn’t worried about Steve coming to the conclusion that she was a lush, at least, and after the week they had had she needed it.

“Mmm.” He took a sip of the brandy-laced coffee and made a sound that was probably appreciation, but his gaze was still fixed on her, and it was still wary.

Peggy was very tired of Steve Rogers not trusting her. She drank some more of her brandy before she said, “Was it true, what you said to Mrs. Rogers yesterday?”

Steve put his cup down to rub a hand over his face again. “Oh, god,” he said wearily. “Yes, but you’re going to have to be more specific about what exactly you’re talking about.”

“So some of it is true but you’re not sure of what?”

“All of it’s true but I’d like to know what we’re about to have an argument over,” Steve said flatly. “And I don’t know how much you overheard.”

The frustration in his voice made her hesitate again. It had been eavesdropping, of course, and Peggy hadn’t thought anything of it at the time despite Rose trying to get her to go back upstairs when they had realized what Steve and Natasha were talking about. Until she had been transferred to the SSR, most of her wartime service had involved listening in on other people’s conversations, either on the wireless or from behind closed doors. Steve and Natasha had been having the kind of conversation that you wrote up for your superiors when it was the enemy having it and pretended you hadn’t overheard when it was your own people.

It was a little late for that now.

Peggy bit the inside of her cheek, then said, “About not being able to have children.” It wasn’t actually what she had come in here to talk to him about, but it was a question she wanted an answer to.

Steve looked even more annoyed. “I can have kids, or at least I probably can; I’ve never gotten anyone pregnant so I don’t know for sure. I just won’t. If you heard enough of that conversation to ask, then you know why.”

“Dr. Erskine –”

“– was paranoid about the serum,” Steve interrupted before she could go on, flattening a hand against the table. “You knew him longer than I did, you know that. He wasn’t going to run the risk that our government, that any government, would try to –” His mouth twisted a little before he finished bluntly, “– to try and breed the serum.”

Peggy flinched a little. Steve met her eyes, obviously furious, and what she had been about to say died on her lips.

She had known Abraham Erskine, and if there had been a way to control who got the serum, he had taken it. Up until now, Peggy had only thought about the serum as something that you actually received; it hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder whether or not it was transmissible from parent to child, but Dr. Erskine had always thought about every possibility. She also knew that he would never have brought something like that up to a woman, especially when it would have been completely irrelevant to her in 1943. Peggy had liked Steve well enough back then, but she never would have picked him for Rebirth if it had been up to her. She had to admit, if only to herself, that she never would have stepped out with him either.

What she had been about to ask was if Steve had any idea if Natasha had been telling the truth about not being able to have children, but she could tell that if she said as much right now, he would simply leave the room and probably contrive not to be alone with her again. Ever. Peggy could, just barely, get away with asking him about his own choices and anything to do with the serum; she thought she had that right. She didn’t have the right to ask about his wife.

She looked down at her brandy-filled coffee cup instead, unwilling to apologize.

Steve glanced down at the table, winced when he realized that the metal had deformed under the pressure of his grip, and knocked back the contents of his coffee cup. He set it back down on the saucer with a clatter of ceramic and said, “Is that it? Because if it is, we’re still going to Germany tomorrow and there’s a lot of work to do before –”

Peggy looked up again. “No.”

He rubbed his hand over his forehead again. “Oh, for –”

“Is Sergeant Barnes alive?”

Steve froze in mid-gesture, his eyes going wide, and that was all the answer Peggy needed.

“Two months ago,” she reminded him, “you looked me in the eye and you told me that Bucky Barnes was dead. I don’t believe you were lying then, which means you’ve been lying now, because every time you’ve mentioned him since you got back, it’s been in the present tense. And you told Mrs. Rogers she could speak to him back home. So I’m going to ask you again, Captain – is Sergeant Barnes alive?”

Steve covered his face with his good hand, breathing out slowly, and nodded.

Peggy felt her jaw tighten, but all she asked was, “In 1945 or 2018?”

Steve nodded again, still not looking at her.

Peggy reached across the table and grabbed his wrist, meaning to pull his hand away from his face so that he would actually look at her. Steve flinched back so violently that he nearly fell off the bench and Peggy stared at him, badly startled by his reaction until she remembered that he had been a prisoner not even forty-eight hours ago.

“Sorry,” Steve apologized after a moment, breathing hard.

“No, I’m sorry,” Peggy said quickly. “I didn’t think –”

They stared at each other across the table. After a moment, Steve said, fast, like he had been storing it up for a long time, “We know Hydra experiments on Allied prisoners of war and has been doing it for years, pulling people out of the labor camps and factories. They were doing it at Krausberg, too, we already knew that, we knew that that’s why they pulled Bucky out from the rest. I knew that. I – we – never thought that Zola had the chance to get anywhere with him because he was fine when I found him, just loopy, he was – he was fine.” He looked down at his empty coffee cup and repeated, “He was fine.”

He took a deep breath, pressing his hand against the table again. “Zola was trying to replicate Dr. Erskine’s original serum – not the one I got, but the one that Schmidt got, only he was trying to do it without all the side effects, so he was trying to – to break up each serum he was giving to his – to the Allied POWs he was experimenting on. We think the one he gave Bucky enhanced his healing. It’s not as dramatic as mine is, but it’s more consistent. It kept him alive after the fall, long enough for someone from the Red Army to find him. We don’t know exactly what happened then, but he ended up with SMERSH, the NKVD’s counterintelligence division. Hydra – before Schmidt went nuts, his big plan was infiltration, conversion, and he started with the Soviets. Well, I mean, he started with the Nazis, but he got people into the Soviet Union back in the ‘30s, sort of a reverse Comintern. There were already a lot of Hydra plants in SMERSH even before the Reds started picking up Hydra’s leftovers and they knew what Zola had done to Bucky. So –”

He looked down at the table, realized that he was digging grooves into its battered metal surface again, and lifted his hand away. “What you thought Hydra did to me? Brainwashing, psychological conditioning? They actually did that to Bucky. They shot him up with at least one other serum that got him closer to me, strength-wise – he’s pretty close to me, but he doesn’t –” He hesitated briefly, searching for the words, before he finished, “He doesn’t keep changing the way I do. And he looks the same. Hydra kept him in cryostasis, only took him out when they had a mission for him, maybe a couple dozen times over the past sixty years or so. He’s the one who shot me four years ago, put a bullet in Nat too. Seeing me helped him break through his programming – through the psychological conditioning – and he was able to get out. He was with us in Wakanda when Thanos sent me and Nat here.”

Peggy stared at him, speechless for a good thirty seconds until she finally managed to say, “That’s absurd.”

Steve actually flinched back from her, his blue eyes going huge with hurt and shock.

Peggy resisted the urge to throttle some sense into him, since he had already been slapped around enough the past few days, and tried to make her voice gentle instead, which wasn’t exactly one of her stronger qualities. She reached across the table and took his hand in hers, remotely glad that it was his right and not his left with its wedding ring. Steve started to pull back, but she gripped his hand, keeping him in place as she said, “Steve, your friend is dead. He’s been dead for almost two months now. You wrote the report, remember? You told me about it.”

A muscle in Steve’s jaw worked. “Why do you ask me questions if you’re not going to believe anything I say?”

“It’s not as though I want to disbelieve you,” Peggy said in what she thought was a reasonable tone, though going by Steve’s expression, either she had failed or there was nothing she could say that would sound reasonable to him. The arguments they had been having lately went both ways.

Steve pulled his hand out of hers. “You know, I came out of the ice six years ago and I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and it was. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.” He met her eyes. “But it’s not the worst thing that could ever happen. I’ve been in this war long enough to know that; I’ve been in other wars too. What happened to me was just…time. It’s nothing on what men can do to other men. We’ve both seen it here; I’ve seen it up there, too.”

“I know that,” Peggy said, frowning.

“No, you don’t,” Steve said. “Not really. The worst of this war hasn’t come out yet, and that’s just regular humans.” He looked at her for a long moment, long enough that Peggy could see the weariness in his eyes, the sharp line of his cheekbones, almost enough to make her wonder if the time really had passed for hm. “You’re never going to believe me, are you? Not really. Not the way it matters.”

“Steve...” She took a deep breath, picking her words carefully before she went on. “I know that something terrible happened to you, and maybe it really was what you said. I don’t know that I ever will believe that, no matter what you and Mrs. Rogers say, because you’re here now. You’re not there.”

A muscle worked in Steve’s jaw, but he didn’t say anything.

“What I do know,” Peggy went on, “is that even if it did happen to you, it wouldn’t have happened twice. We did debrief Sergeant Barnes after you returned from Krausberg; we debriefed everyone, and I handled Sergeant Barnes.”

“I know,” Steve said stiffly. “He didn’t tell me any of it either. I’m not sure he knew back then.”

“There’s no indication that Dr. Zola actually did anything to Sergeant Barnes in his medical files or in any of the Hydra documents we’ve retrieved over the last year and a half,” Peggy said. “If Dr. Zola had done something to him – given him a version of Dr. Erskine’s serum – then either we would have found the records or it would have showed up in his medical exams. Or while he was in the field with you and the Commandos. It’s not as though there’s no comparison point.” She raised her eyebrows at him, and after a moment Steve glanced away.

She hesitated again, then said, “If you did think Sergeant Barnes was out there somewhere, I can’t believe that you wouldn’t have gone after him immediately when you arrived here, the way you did in Italy. And you didn’t.”

Steve flinched. “I don’t know where the hell he is in April 1945,” he said stiffly. “The earliest records we ever found were from 1957. I might have been able to backtrail it if the Winter Guard had actually managed to get me into the Soviet Union.”

Peggy looked up sharply. “Is that what you meant by the message you gave Sergeant Dugan for Mrs. Rogers? That she would have to backtrail the Winter Soldier?” She had assumed the Winter Soldier project Natasha had described had something to do with the Winter Guard.

Steve frowned a little, but nodded. “That’s what they called him.”

“Aleksey Lebedev –”

“That name’s just coincidence,” Steve said. “The Winter Guard works for Leviathan; Hydra – through the MGB and then the KGB – was the one pulling the Winter Soldier’s strings. Leviathan never had anything to do with it.”

“So there are two sets of secret Soviet assassins working for two different agencies,” Peggy said, trying not to sound too disbelieving. “Three if one counts the Winter Guard. Not to mention the NKVD’s regular duties,” she added; from what she knew they weren’t terribly different from the OSS, SOE, and MI6 in those regards. Except for all the rumored atrocities on the Eastern Front, of course, but that was hardly unusual at this stage in the war.

Steve shrugged. “Two different agencies,” he echoed. “It’s not like we don’t run multiple teams either, we’re just less awful about it. And they didn’t start running the Winter Soldier until after the war anyway, a long time after they shut down the Winter Guard.”

Peggy frowned. Natasha had said something like that about the Winter Guard before. “Why bother?” she asked him. “It seems like a great deal of trouble to go to when there are plenty of loyal communists like Aleksey Lebedev to do the job without the bother of – of psychological conditioning.” Brainwashing was a ridiculous word. “Especially if they’d already worked out the serum.”

A little of the tension in Steve’s shoulders lessened, as if he was relieved by the practical question. “Nobody’s ever worked out the serum, not exactly,” he said. “I don’t know all the details because everyone was always trying to keep it from me and I never really wanted to know anyway, but from what I do know Hydra could never get it to work on anyone but Bucky. Leviathan’s successor got a different serum to work, but that was years later, not until sometime in the eighties, and from what Nat’s said that one is mostly strength and speed, a little enhanced healing, but not on my level or Buck’s. It was stable, though, unlike most of the others.” A muscle in his jaw worked and he flexed his fingers absently, touching each finger to his thumb in turn. “The Soviets killed a lot of people until they managed to get one serum that worked on one guy, and then they killed a bunch more people trying to do it again. So did we, by the way, trying to make another me.” He glanced aside, his jaw working again, then said, “There are a lot of things you can use a super soldier for other than fighting, even if you’ve only got one.”

Peggy bit her lip. She did know. The SSR had had Steve do a few of those things on occasion, black bag operations that he couldn’t take the rest of the Howlies on for one reason or another. She still wasn’t entirely certain if it had bothered him; if he had ever argued their necessity it hadn’t been to her.

Steve touched the grooves he had left in the table, then said grimly, “Brainwashing’s easier to figure out than the serum, I guess.” After a moment he looked up again. “Nat and I talked about it. A lot. If we…weren’t stuck here, then removing the Winter Soldier from the equation means that it changes too much about the future, about our time, and it’s – it goes beyond Earth. If we are stuck here, then none of that matters, because it’s changed anyway and we are going after him as soon as the war’s over, no matter how long it takes.”

“Steve –” Peggy said, and didn’t know what to say after that.

He raised his eyebrows. “Do you believe me?”

She hesitated, meeting his clear blue eyes across the table, and finally said, “I believe that you believe what you’re saying.”

Steve’s mouth twisted. He pushed himself to his feet, fluid and graceful as a leopard, and said, “Yeah, I bet you do. But you don’t believe me.”

Steve left Peggy sitting in the canteen with her head in her hands, looking as though she knew she had taken a wrong turn with him somewhere but unwilling to backtrack. He had the impression that his life was spinning out of control, which wasn’t exactly unfamiliar but wasn’t something that he enjoyed, either. Despite the Winter Guard’s arrest and the assassination of the matryoshki, he and the Howling Commandos were still scheduled to deploy to the front in Germany tomorrow. When he had protested to Phillips, the colonel had reminded him that the war was going on with or without him and the immediate threat to the SSR had already been resolved. The matryoshki’s infiltration was awkward and embarrassing for everyone involved, but since they weren’t there anymore and the USSR was an ally, it was less pressing than getting to Hitler. Besides, they were only women. SHAEF’s verdict was that it was someone else’s problem to investigate; the SSR had bigger concerns.

Now that he wasn’t being tailed either by a couple of MPs or the Howling Commandos, he more or less had free run of headquarters. More or less because he had his old security clearance back, and that hadn’t quite accounted for the entirety of HQ, though the parts it didn’t weren’t sections he had any real reason to be interested in. A few people looked at him askance as he went wandering through the building, but no one tried to stop him. He had the distinct impression that most of the SSR was relieved that Captain America was no longer under suspicion and things were back to normal.

Well, not Captain America, because that had always been an afterthought for the bulk of the SSR personnel, except for a few of the newer ones. Most of the SSR either quietly or openly agreed with Peggy and Colonel Phillips that Captain America was more trouble than he was worth, and Steve would have been better off handing the role over to a USO performer and being just Captain Rogers instead. Sometimes he thought that only Bucky, who knew him too well and had been grimly resigned to the whole Captain America thing from the start, and Howard, who was used to playing parts both on and off a stage, were the only people in the SSR who actually understood why Steve had resolutely refused to do just that. In 1945, anyway. He’d had the option in 2016, maybe, but he hadn’t taken it; there was a reason he’d still been wearing the same uniform in 2018, with or without the shield and the star.

He was still so angry that he was practically shaking. Between that and his expression, it warned off everyone in the SSR who might have wanted to speak to him, which Steve would probably feel bad about later. He could tell the moment Peggy had realized that she had gone too far, but of course that didn’t mean that she had actually stopped, just that she would feel bad about it later.

And Bucky –

He had to stop and brace his good arm against the wall, his forehead pressed against his forearm until he could get his breathing under control. After the past three weeks he had been almost certain that no one would believe him about Bucky, since they barely believed what he had said about himself and Natasha, but he had still hoped. It was something he would have liked to have been proved wrong about.

Steve was grinding his teeth so hard his jaw ached. He fought back his urge to go and find Natasha and lose himself in her; she was with Jones, Falsworth, and Dernier, doing some of the last prep before they were deployed tomorrow. She had cried over the matryoshki the previous night, curled in his arms as Steve had stroked her hair, then she had pushed him down onto his back and ridden him as if she had needed the reminder that she was still alive, that both of them were. Then she had cried again.

“Captain Rogers?”

Steve tried to rearrange his features into something that looked less like he wanted to bite someone’s head off and turned to face Rose Roberts, who was standing behind him with an armful of folders. From her expression, he hadn’t entirely succeeded, but she went on gamely, “Is everything okay?”

“Rough couple of days,” Steve said, which was true enough. He remembered uneasily that Rose had been with Peggy when she had been eavesdropping on him and Natasha, but at least she didn’t have any reason to bring it up.

She had stayed with the SSR after the war, he remembered, but had gone from being a cryptanalyst to holding the position that the SSR coyly referred to as a receptionist – protecting the then-secret agency’s existence from the public by pretending to be whatever the building’s cover happened to be. A telephone agency in the New York station, then a talent agency in the Los Angeles one.

He nodded at the folders she was carrying. “Is that from Leviathan? The white whale?”

Rose shook her head. “They’ve gone quiet,” she admitted. “Nothing since yesterday. These are Hydra facilities talking to each other.”

Steve frowned. “Anything interesting? Or –” If they’d used Bucky’s name, Rose wouldn’t have kept that from him. He was almost certain of it, anyway.

“Nothing I should share without talking to Colonel Phillips first,” Rose admitted.

And since Steve and the Howlies were going to Germany to link up with the Ninth Army in the Ruhr, it wasn’t going to be anything they’d be dealing with. Not immediately, anyway; General Eisenhower’s decision to deploy Captain America in the invasion of Germany trumped Phillips’ desire to stamp Hydra into so much red paste.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Rose added, sounding a little awkward.

Steve felt a muscle in his jaw twitch, but all he said was, “It’s okay.”

She was turning to go when he thought of something and said, “Rose –”

“What is it?”

Steve leaned back against the wall and started to cross his arms before remembering his sling. He shoved his good hand into his pocket instead and said, “In all those Hydra transmissions, do they ever talk about American POWs?”

He saw her run the mental calculation about whether that was something she could reveal to Captain America, then she nodded, “Yeah. We’ve taken out all the labor camps and manufactories, but there are still labs out there that are experimenting on Allied POWs.” She grimaced at the thought and Steve echoed the expression. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. “They’re the smaller labs, the ones Schmidt and Zola weren’t working with directly.”

“Have any of the communiques you’ve seen in the last month or two talked about just one American prisoner?” Steve asked carefully. “It might be coming from the Soviet side of Hydra.”

Rose thought about it. “Not that I’ve seen. None of the Russian stuff comes to us except the white whale and we didn’t know that was Soviet.” She frowned at him. “Why?”

“Will you keep an eye out for anything like that?” Steve said. “Let me know if it turns up? You don’t need to keep it from the Colonel or from Agent Carter,” he added when her frown deepened.

That made her relax a little. “Who are you looking for?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Steve said. “I’ll know it when I see it – I hope, anyway.”

“Something that you heard about when you were –” Rose fumbled for a moment for the right euphemism for his extended absence between the Valkyrie’s disappearance and his reappearance in Howard’s lab twenty-three days ago and finally settled on, “– out there?”

“Something like that,” Steve agreed. Well, it wasn’t even really a lie. He smiled at her, which had its usual effect on women inclined that way. “Thank you.”

She left after a few more minutes of conversation, SSR gossip about people they both knew and whom, by and large, Steve hadn’t thought about for more than six decades. By the time she left, Steve felt less like ripping someone’s head off and had another idea for something he wanted to get sorted before they went to Germany.

The main lab was empty when Steve went in, the MP outside opening the door for him. Howard was the only one in the room, surrounded by tables full of partially-dissembled Hydra equipment glowing a malevolent blue and sitting alone at a lab bench with a bottle and a glass. He glanced up at the sound of the door opening, then made a gesture for Steve to join him.

“I sent everyone else home,” he said as Steve came over and perched on a stool next to him. “Or – whatever, since most of them can’t go home until the war ends. Out, anyway.”

He rubbed a hand over his forehead, looking tired; he had lost an argument with Phillips that morning about whether he could go to Germany with the rest of the SSR’s forward command staff, on the grounds that since they weren’t dealing with Hydra was no reason for the SSR’s chief science officer to be there. He was still dealing with the fallout from Lorraine’s espionage and would be for a while; he couldn’t get out of it by going to the front. Given what he had said on the Isle of Dogs the other night, Steve also suspected he wasn’t happy about letting Steve out of his sight to get shot at, but no one had actually said as much to Howard’s face.

After a moment, he poured more brandy into the glass and pushed it over to Steve.

Steve picked it up and turned it back and forth, looking at the way the light illuminated the amber liquor. “You know this doesn’t do anything to me, right?”

“Uh-huh,” Howard said. “Nothing at all?” he added, with academic curiosity.

Steve glanced at the level of liquid in the bottle, though that didn’t tell him anything if it hadn’t already been full when Howard started in on it. “I used to get a little buzzed, but not for a couple of years now, and even back then it didn’t last for more than a couple of minutes.”

“Back then being –”

“1945, the first time around.” He drank the brandy anyway, then passed the glass back to Howard. “Dr. Erskine told me it might happen.”

Howard nodded in understanding and poured himself more brandy. He didn’t seem surprised, though Steve didn’t think he had ever had this exact conversation with him before. They sat in silence for a few minutes, until Howard asked abruptly, “How’s the shoulder?”

“Still has a hole in it, but I think the hole’s smaller now,” Steve said, working his left arm gingerly. He wasn’t thrilled about reopening his bullet wound, but it wasn’t as though it wouldn’t heal sooner rather than later.

“Mind if I take a look?”

Steve nodded and pulled his sling off over his head so that he could unbutton his jacket, then his shirt, tugging his tie loose and the knot open so it wasn’t in the way. “I think I had another fight with Peggy,” he admitted, as Howard unwrapped the layers of bandage so that he could prod gently at the injury. The doctors had patched him up again, but there wasn’t all that much they could do except clean it and bandage it.

“You think?”

Steve sighed and looked across the top of his dark head, which had a few early stands of gray in it. There was a dent in the wall opposite him where Steve had thrown someone during the fight after their arrival three weeks earlier. “I had another fight with Peggy.”

Howard made a sound in the back of his throat that seemed to be resignation. “What was this one about? If you want to talk about it.”

Steve wasn’t sure he did. “Do you believe me?” he asked instead. “Really believe me, I mean, not just say that you do.”

Howard looked up at him and frowned. After a moment he sat back, tugging a piece of bandage absently between his hands. “I think I do,” he said slowly. “It’s a lot to get my head around. In a way it would be easier if I didn’t – believe you, I mean, the way Peg does. I hate to think of any of that happening to you. Of – of letting any of it happen to you, because I wasn’t good enough to find you or fast enough or smart enough to help with the Valkyrie when you went down.”

Steve looked at him in surprise. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It was my decision. You did everything you could do.”

“I could have gone in with Peg and Phillips,” Howard said practically. “Then I’d have been there to talk you through an emergency landing on the radio.”

“The whole idea of going in when we did was to keep Schmidt from taking off,” Steve pointed out. “It wasn’t supposed to get that far.”

“Yeah, well, when do we ever get what we want?” Howard started to wrap up his shoulder again.

Steve let him finish, then pulled his shirt and jacket back on, buttoning up the former but leaving the latter open and his tie undone around his neck rather than try to execute a Windsor with his bad arm; Natasha had done it for him that morning. Howard made a gesture towards it, then hesitated until Steve nodded and let him do the knot again, his fingers quick and deft. When he had finished, Steve tucked the end of the tie inside his shirt and finished buttoning up his jacket. He left the sling on the table, thinking for a moment before he asked, “Did Bucky ever talk to you about Krausberg? About Zola?”

Howard frowned at him. “Why?”

Steve looked at him sharply, since that wasn’t a no. “Did he?”

After a moment Howard nodded. “The first thing he did was make me promise not to tell you,” he added dryly.

“I know Zola experimented on him trying to get another super soldier serum out of it,” Steve said bluntly. “What I don’t know is if he knew during the war.”

Howard stared at him for a long moment, his brow furrowed, but didn’t respond.

“Okay,” Steve said, more gratified than he cared to admit that Howard wasn’t going to break a promise just because Steve batted his eyelashes at him. He was pretty sure no one else in the SSR would have believed that Howard wouldn’t do so; Steve wasn’t sure that he had believed it until just now. “I’ll tell you what I know, and you can decide if you want to say anything.”

Howard put up a finger. “One thing,” he said as Steve cocked his head, curious. “This have anything to do with the Winter Soldier project your lady love told me about? I speak Xhosa,” he added as Steve stared at him. “So she had to tell me a little more than she told Peg and Phillips when Dugan gave us your message.”

“You speak Xhosa?” Steve said, startled. “Since when?”

“Since before the war,” Howard said. “I told you King T’Chanda and I go back; you think he just hands out vibranium like party favors?”

“T’Challa doesn’t,” Steve agreed.

Howard accepted that with a nod. “You’ll probably meet T’Chanda after the war, since he wants to know where you got the chunk you showed up with.” He paused to let Steve absorb that, then said, “So? Does it have anything to do with the Winter Soldier project?”

“That depends on what Nat told you,” Steve said cautiously. He thought she would have told him if she actually had had to tell Howard or Peggy about Bucky, but there were a lot of ways she could have skirted around it.

Howard eyed him thoughtfully. “She said that when the Soviets started overrunning Hydra bases, they got hold of some of Zola’s stuff from when he was trying to replicate Schmidt’s serum off Schmidt’s blood and Abe’s notes and experimenting on our guys.”

Steve nodded a little.

“She also said she didn’t know if they have any of our guys.” Howard met his eyes. “Only they do, don’t they?”

Steve nodded again and said quietly, “Yeah.”

“Barnes?”

Steve nodded again, not quite trusting himself to speak in the face of Howard’s calm acceptance.

A frown knit between Howard’s brows. “But not from overrunning the labs. They knew about him from overrunning the labs?”

“Maybe,” Steve forced himself to say. “I don’t know for sure. The earliest records we found were from 1957 and he doesn’t really remember anything from –” He stopped abruptly, but he had already said too much; Howard’s face had gone white.

“He’s there?” he said. “Up there? In the future?”

Steve nodded, biting his lip.

Howard swore and rubbed his hands over his face. After a long moment, he said, “He was pretty cagey when he talked to me, wouldn’t tell me exactly what it was about. He said he’d seen them carrying out what was left of the last guy Zola had worked on when they took him in and it wasn’t pretty.” His mouth worked a little. “He was worried about you.”

“Figures,” Steve said quietly. “He’s been like that since we were kids.”

Howard met his eyes. “I won’t tell you the details, because I promised him I wouldn’t, but he didn’t know, not for sure. Zola worked on a lot of stuff and even if Barnes would have let me run any tests, I didn’t know what to look for. We had no reason to believe that Hydra was working on the serum at Krausberg.”

“I would have told you if I’d seen anything like that in the lab,” Steve said, “but Zola was running out when I got there, with a bunch of stuff, so he – he must have taken it.” He bit the inside of his cheek. “If Bucky had told me –”

“Then we would have shipped him back stateside to the SSR labs in Alamogordo,” Howard said without hesitation.

Steve looked at him sharply. “You didn’t do that, even though he told you –”

Howard shrugged. “Like I said, we didn’t know for sure. I wasn’t about to make all that trouble maybe for nothing. And you seemed pretty set on having him around,” he added wryly.

Steve swallowed. “Yeah, well, given what happened, maybe I shouldn’t have been.”

“I don’t think he was ever going to give you a choice,” Howard said, his voice kind. He toyed with the empty glass on the lab bench, looking at the brandy bottle, but didn’t make any move to pour himself another drink. “What brought this on now and not three weeks ago? I’d have thought you’d have gone running after him as soon as you could.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Steve said glumly. “And we couldn’t risk changing the course of the war, especially if there was a chance we could get back home. Except I think Moscow made it pretty clear that that ship’s sailed.”

“In more ways than one,” Howard said grimly. When Steve looked at him in concern, he gritted his teeth and said, “The Winter Guard was able to hand off a sample of your blood to someone from the Soviet embassy. We’re trying to intercept the diplomatic bag before it leaves the country, but…”

Steve put his head in hands and swore wearily. Howard leaned over to grip his shoulder, saying, “It’s not your fault.”

“The whole op was my idea,” Steve pointed out. “I came back from the dead and the first thing I did was get two of our guys killed and myself kidnapped.” He felt a muscle work in his jaw. “And eight women murdered.”

“None of that’s on you,” Howard said. “Give the Reds some credit for their own bad decisions. No one knew the Winter Guard was going to be there; if it had just been the matryoshki it would have gone off without a hitch. Besides, we flushed Lorraine, and that’s not nothing.”

Steve looked up at him, read the utter seriousness in Howard’s eyes, and nodded after a long pause. Howard squeezed his shoulder again and then released him.

“Okay,” he said. “What do you need and when do you need it? I probably can’t fly you into Russia, even after the war ends,” he warned. “But I might know some guys from the old neighborhood.”

Steve cocked an eyebrow at him, well aware that Howard’s “old neighborhood” in the Lower East Side was the Manhattan equivalent of his own neighborhood in Brooklyn – that was to say, a tenement slum, though Howard’s was probably a Jewish neighborhood rather than a mostly-Irish one like Steve’s. He was also certain that when Howard had still lived there his name hadn’t been Stark, though Steve didn’t have any idea what it had been originally. Both were Howard’s best-kept secrets and as far as he knew, Tony had no idea about either. America liked underdogs and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but there was a limit to how far that could go. Steve got away with a lot just by being blond-haired and blue-eyed and with a good Anglo-Saxon name, and the papers kept real quiet about the rest of it, but he wasn’t in the circles that Howard Stark was.

Howard flushed a little, but met his gaze.

“We can’t do anything until after the war,” Steve said slowly. “And there’s no way that Truman won’t send us to the Pacific even if the European war wraps up sooner than it did originally.”

Howard grimaced at the reminder that President Roosevelt was on borrowed time. “I can start poking around,” he said, “quietly. And hope I don’t actually give anyone the idea that I’m thinking about defecting,” he added grimly.

“You don’t really strike me as a communist,” Steve said dryly.

He snorted. “Not really. Anything else?”

“Convince Peggy I’m not lying,” Steve said wearily. “That’s what we were fighting about.”

Howard winced again. “Oh, sure, something nice and easy, no problem there.”

Steve picked up the cork of the brandy bottle for the sake of something to do with his hands, passing it back and forth between them. Howard’s gaze flickered to his left arm, watching the range of motion, and Steve answered his unspoken question, “It’s a little sore, but not too bad. I wouldn’t want to try doing anything too much more strenuous than this until tomorrow, though, which is good because that’s when we’re leaving.”

“You went up that wall pretty quick,” Howard said thoughtfully.

“The wall wasn’t the problem, and tossing Nat up there wasn’t either.” Though it probably hadn’t helped. “I landed right on my shoulder when Dottie threw a grenade at me. Shield does great there, by the way.”

Howard beamed in a pleased sort of way. Steve grinned back at him, briefly delighted just to see him happy and filing it away in his mind. He had been doing a lot of that lately, storing up memories against later need, in a way that he had never done before. He had a photographic memory – it predated the serum – but that didn’t mean it was exactly easy to sort through, and the awful stuff usually overwhelmed the good memories. He wanted to remember this first, not Howard getting his head bashed in on grainy security camera footage.

Howard finally picked up the brandy bottle and poured himself another drink, though he didn’t drink it immediately, just swirled the amber liquid back and forth before he finally knocked it back. “Barnes wasn’t exactly a big talker,” he said, his voice a little raw from the liquor. “Not with me, anyway – I think the longest conversation we had otherwise that wasn’t about guns was the time he told me he didn’t like the way I looked at you.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “He said that, did he?”

“Yeah.” He looked at Steve for a long moment, then glanced aside and added, “He might have had a point. Not that I’m not happy for you and the lovely Mrs. Rogers.”

Steve thoughtfully moved the bottle out of Howard’s reach. “When did you figure out we weren’t really married?”

The corner of Howard’s mouth curled up, amused. “Well, I guessed when you said her name was Rogers, about two minutes after you got here, but I wasn’t sure until later.”

Steve stared at him. “Is that why you gave us the rings?”

“Well, I was also hoping you were actually sleeping with her,” Howard said brightly. “Since that would make it easier when Peg got here. Well, sort of easier.”

Steve put his head in his hands, his ears burning. “Jesus, Howard. Were we that obvious?”

“I know you,” Howard said, suddenly serious. “She’s gorgeous and terrifying – exactly your type. But you wouldn’t do that to Peggy if you really had been lying. And you wouldn’t do it without a good reason.”

Steve didn’t know if he meant sleeping with Natasha, marrying her, or lying about it to Peggy and was a little afraid to ask. “You didn’t say anything.”

“You are the most stubborn fella I’ve ever met,” Howard said. “I figured I wouldn’t get anywhere and might as well save my breath, especially since Peg would take it out of your hide anyway. Though I was expecting her to get here sooner than she did. Anyway, if you were screwing the radiant Natasha, then –” He stopped abruptly, looking down at the glass in his hand, and said, “Maybe I have had enough.”

Steve corked the bottle for him.

“She’s a gorgeous dame, Steve,” Howard said again, tipping the empty glass back and forth between his hands. “And terrifying. And very, very much in love with you.”

“Howard…” Steve started, flushing under Howard’s intent attention. His calm, unhesitating trust made Steve a little uneasy, like it was something he hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve. Maybe back in 1945 he had, but not in 2018, not anymore. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Is it immediately relevant?”

“No, but I don’t want –” He stopped as Howard’s gaze suddenly sharpened, focused on something over Steve’s left shoulder.

Steve whipped around, automatically moving to put himself between Howard and whatever had gotten his attention. It was a glowing green circle of energy no larger than a quarter and Steve felt the hair rise on the back of his neck, the too-familiar frisson of an Infinity Stone in close proximity.

The first thing Peggy said when she arrived was, “What did you do?”

The question was directed at Howard, not Steve, which under normal circumstances was an entirely reasonable response. As Howard protested, “I didn’t do anything,” Natasha stepped up alongside Steve and murmured, “What is it?”

“I think it’s the Time Stone,” Steve said, equally quiet. He had dragged Howard out of the lab the moment he had seen it, ignoring Howard’s protests that it couldn’t hurt just to get a closer look at the circle of energy, they were going to have to do it sooner or later anyway.

They were all crammed together outside the door to the main lab – Steve, Natasha, Howard, Peggy, and the Howling Commandos. Peggy had rung up Phillips, who had been over at MI5’s London headquarters having an argument, and he was on his way back to the SSR. Since the main lab connected directly to the war room, Steve and Howard had cleared out the latter, leaving them alone in the big room. Steve had never seen it empty before – even in the middle of the night there was someone on duty here – and he didn’t like it.

He gently shoulder-checked Falsworth aside so that Natasha could get a look through the tiny window in the metal door that divided the lab from the war room. She had to stand on tiptoe to do so, grumbling to herself before she came back down on flat feet and moved back so that Falsworth could return to peering worriedly through it.

“Why do you think it’s from an Infinity Stone?” Natasha asked him, keeping her voice low as he drew her back from the crush by the door.

Steve frowned. “It feels like the Tesseract,” he said. After Sokovia, Thor and the Vision had speculated that he would always be a little sensitive to any Infinity Stones because of his experience with the Tesseract on the Valkyrie and so much extended exposure to Hydra’s weapons, but at the time it hadn’t seemed like a topic of much concern. He could be around Vision without wanting to claw his skin off and that was the part that had mattered back then.

Natasha took that in with a nod, her frown deepening. “Thanos?”

Steve lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “It must be –”

“And what exactly is an Infinity Stone?” Peggy demanded.

Steve glanced over to find her glaring at him, an experience that was by now so familiar he would be more surprised if she wasn’t looking at him like she wanted to rip his skin off than if she was. In these close confines he wasn’t surprised she had overheard, even though she wasn’t going to like the explanation. There was also no way that she was going to believe it.

He exchanged a look with Natasha, who shrugged back at him and turned to Peggy and an interested Howard to say, “The Infinity Stones are six sources of cosmic power created at the beginning of the universe, each of which controls – how did Bruce put it?”

“They control an essential aspect of existence,” Steve said; he was pretty sure that Bruce had been quoting someone else, since the cadence in his memory wasn’t quite Bruce’s.

Natasha nodded. “Time, Space, Reality, Mind, Power, and –”

“Soul,” Steve said when she hesitated; it was the one that they knew the least about, which was saying something, since they knew almost nil about any of them, including the two they had had up close and personal contact with. “The Tesseract – the Cube’s one, the Space Stone. That’s where Schmidt and Zola were drawing the power for their weapons, and why it was able to –” He stopped abruptly, realization dawning after seventy-three years of relieved acceptance, and said abruptly, “Schmidt’s not dead.”

“What?” everyone but Natasha said at the same time.

“What do you mean?” Natasha said.

Steve turned to her. “It’s the Space Stone, it creates portals.” Thinking about it made him feel a little hysterical, since the firm knowledge that Johann Schmidt had to be dead had been one of the few good things about waking up sixty-seven years late. “The damn thing didn’t kill him, it just sent him somewhere. It felt exactly the same when Thanos showed up in Wakanda and when Thor took Loki back to Asgard.”

They were all looking at him like he had lost his mind. Sounding horrified, Morita said, “So he’s coming back?”

Steve shook his head. “No, he can’t; the Tesseract’s at the bottom of the North Atlantic right now, and afterwards – what did Thor say, that Loki was only able to use it at a distance because he was Asgardian?” he asked Natasha.

“Something like that,” she confirmed. “He said no one other than an Asgardian would be able to use it that way, because the Tesseract had been in Asgard’s possession for so long before Odin left it on Earth and even then it probably only worked because Loki used the Mind Stone to connect to the Tesseract in Dr. Selvig’s set-up at Pegasus. He and Vision weren’t sure if it would have worked if the Tesseract had just been sitting in storage somewhere, but they weren’t sure it wouldn’t, either.”

This wasn’t making anyone look at them any less like they’d lost their minds. Steve could practically see Peggy mentally writing a report that would probably end with him in another interrogation room, if not in one of the rooms with padded white walls.

Howard jabbed a finger at the door to the lab. “But that thing’s not the Cube.”

Steve shook his head. “Color’s wrong, unless it’s like the Mind Stone in Loki’s scepter, when it was linked to the Tesseract. Bruce said the Time Stone was green when he saw it with the wizards in New York, and Thanos had it in Wakanda –” He hesitated, then admitted, “Thanos – the alien warlord we were fighting – was trying to get all six Infinity Stones, which would essentially give him the power to do…anything.”

“Phenomenal cosmic power, itty bitty living space,” Natasha quoted dryly, and Steve snorted laughter despite himself. Everyone else looked at them like they were insane.

“He’d gotten five of them and came to Earth trying to get the Mind Stone, which we had in Wakanda.” There was no point in trying to introduce the Vision, that wouldn’t go over well and no one would believe him anyway. Well, maybe Howard, but he would just be disappointed that he couldn’t meet Vision. “We sent the Tesseract to Asgard in 2012 and a few days ago – our time – he killed everyone there to get it; the Time Stone was in New York and he sent his people after it, I wasn’t there, I don’t know the details.” And the last thing he wanted to do was look Howard Stark in the eye and tell him that the son he had never met had almost certainly died trying to keep the Time Stone from Thanos. Steve knew in his bones that if Thanos had come to Earth with the Time Stone, then Tony had to be dead.

Peggy and Howard exchanged baffled looks, but no one bothered to ask why Steve and Natasha hadn’t told them before; the answer was obvious. The Infinity Stones were so outside the realm of anyone’s experience in 1945 that no one would have believed them. Until Howard had pulled the Tesseract out of the ocean in 1948 all anyone had known about it was rumor and the few mocking hints that Arnim Zola had let slip; Steve was the only person in the SSR who had had any personal experience with it, and that not until he had gone up in the Valkyrie.

“The man out of time,” Steve said softly. He touched a hand to his chest, where he had torn away the silver star on his uniform so that it wouldn’t catch the light, where Thanos had kept him on the ground with one massive foot pressing him down. “That’s what he said. So he did it. Nat just…got caught in the middle.”

“No,” she said, and he looked down at her in surprise.

“No,” Natasha said again, steady as a stone. “I told you. We’re Avengers; that means we don’t do it alone. We protect each other.”

Something cracked for just an instant on Peggy’s face, but it was gone when Steve looked back at her.

“So what’s it doing here now?” Howard asked. He glanced back at the door and frowned. “That’s just a light, not a rock. And all my equipment’s in there,” he added, sounding so peeved that Steve almost laughed.

“Thanos?” Natasha suggested. “Or our team, trying to get us back –”

Steve felt something lurch in his chest and stared at the glitter of green energy just visible through the tiny slit of window. If Wanda had been able to destroy Vision’s Stone, then she and Thor together might have been able to hold Thanos off long enough for the others to get back on their feet. Once they had defeated him, then Bruce and Shuri could work out the Stones and figure out how to use the Time Stone –

He took a step towards the door and Peggy’s hand shot out to clamp on his elbow. She didn’t say anything and released him almost immediately, but Steve stopped anyway.

“Listen,” Dum-Dum said, “we don’t know anything about what that thing in there is. Just because you had a feeling doesn’t mean it’s actually this Time Stone thing.”

“And we’re not going to figure it out from out here,” Morita added laconically. “We need to get a close look at it.”

“All the Hydra stuff’s still in there,” Falsworth offered helpfully. “Could be that. It has been every other time something’s gone odd in here.”

“Not every other time,” Howard said, pedantic, and gestured at Steve and Natasha.

“Almost every other time.”

“Well, someone needs to have a look,” Peggy said, and before Steve could stop her, she yanked the lab door open and went in.

Peggy drew her pistol as she walked across the laboratory, her heels clicking with each step. The glowing green circle of light just hung there, dead center of the big room and just over the still roped-off dent in the floor that Steve and Natasha had left when they arrived. It probably wasn’t a problem she could solve by shooting it, but having the pistol in her hand made her feel better anyway.

She felt energy hum across her skin as she drew close to it, vibrating through her bones and making her back teeth ache. It was about the size of her open hand now, and up close she could tell that there was a definite rim to it, made up of some kind of runic script she couldn’t read. Inside that was a pool of lambent green energy, and beyond that was a room full of people whose faces she recognized from Steve’s sketchbook.

Peggy knew at once that they saw her, too. Most of them were on their feet, peering at what she had to guess was the same circle of energy on their side. She saw Bucky Barnes immediately, with a truly terrible haircut and a left arm made of some kind of gold-veined black metal, standing next to a gaunt man who looked very much like Howard and had a glowing device on his chest visible beneath a half-open shirt; he was being supported by a handsome man with dark skin and a worried expression. There was another man by Bucky, the one Peggy remembered because according to Steve he had a pair of mechanical wings, along with a blonde woman on Bucky’s other side who hadn’t been in Steve’s sketches. Peggy had the impression that there were other people just out of view.

From behind her, Steve said, “That’s my team.”

Peggy turned toward him, her gun hand falling slack by her side. She looked at him and Natasha, then back at the circle of glowing energy – it looked like Bucky was trying to say something, but there was no sound – then at Steve again. “It was true?”

“Yeah,” Steve said, not looking at her. “It’s true.”

“That’s the compound,” Natasha said, staring at it. “Why are they at the compound? Why is Yelena at the compound?”

Steve shook his head in answer, his expression a little blank. He put his hand out towards it; without thinking Peggy reached out and caught his wrist. He looked at her at last, his expression agonized, and Peggy said, “You can’t.”

Steve looked at her, at Natasha, at the room on the other side of the circle, at Howard and the Howling Commandos, who had followed them in and were staring at both Bucky Barnes and the circle of energy with various expressions of shock, Dernier exclaiming in French and Morita in English. Peggy gripped his wrist, feeling that terrible strength, restrained, beneath the circle of her fingers, and repeated, “You can’t. You belong here.”

“That’s my team,” Steve said again.

“We’re your team,” Peggy said. Her voice came out harsh, choked with tears, and she tightened her grip on him as if she could keep him bound to this time, this place. “Steve.”

His gaze flickered to hers. Peggy felt as if she was holding onto the thinnest of tethers with both hands, keeping him here with everything she had.

It hadn’t been real before, all the tales that he had told, especially since they had been dragged out of him uncovered lie by uncovered lie. Something had happened to him, something awful, and he had paid a terrible price, but in the end he had come back here to them. That was the part that mattered at the end of the day. The rest could all be sorted out later, assuming it didn’t get them all killed first.

She hadn’t expected later to be now.

“Steve,” she said again, trying to keep her voice calm. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a – a window. It doesn’t mean that you can – can step through it. It doesn’t mean anything. You’re here. You belong here.”

“Steve,” Natasha said on his other side, but that was all. She didn’t say anything else, didn’t reach for him, but he looked at her anyway, then at the circle of energy again, where Bucky and one of the other men both seemed to be talking at once, frantic and silent through the span of years.

A tear slipped down Steve’s cheek, lingered for an instant on his chin, then fell. “No,” he said, quiet and miserable. “No, I don’t.” He looked at Natasha, who stared back at him, her eyes wide and a little disbelieving, like she had never expected him to say so. “And neither does she. But you do,” he said to Peggy.

“Steve,” Howard said hoarsely. He had barely even looked at the circle of energy, all of his attention on Steve.

“But where the hell did it come from?” Dugan asked, and they all looked at him.

“From me.”

Peggy spun, releasing Steve and jerking her pistol up to point at the woman who faded into view in a corner of the lab, the spike of adrenaline temporarily drowning out everything else. The newcomer was shaven-headed and wearing saffron-colored robes like something out of a Hollywood picture about the Orient, striding confidently across the laboratory floor. She was wearing some kind of pendant made out of heavy twists of brassy metal, and at its heart was a glowing green gem.

From Steve’s and Natasha’s expressions, they had never seen her before. She came to a stop in front of them and said gravely, “Captain Rogers, Miss Romanoff – or should I say Mrs. Rogers?”

“Who are you?” Steve asked, his own voice hoarse. “What are you?”

“The Sorcerer Supreme,” she said. “Guardian of the Time Stone. And you, Captain, are out of time.”