Of Home Near

Now
May 2018

Bucky saw Steve’s face just before he dragged Howard Stark out of the lab. It was Steve, unmistakably so – not that Bucky had ever thought he might be wrong. He had a couple of new ribbons on his uniform jacket and some fresh cuts and bruises on his face, both of which had been pretty typical for Steve back in 1945; the latter had been true for Steve as long as Bucky had known him. He wasn’t entirely certain how he knew that it was their Steve and not the Steve that had been in ’45 the first time around, but he knew. Besides, back in 1945 Steve hadn’t had the faintest idea what either magic or the Infinity Stones were, the lucky bastard; this Steve clearly knew exactly what he was looking at and didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

Bucky raised his left hand to poke tentatively at the glittering green energy, figuring that the vibranium was less likely to react to it, the same way Hydra’s Tesseract-powered weapons had just bounced harmlessly off Steve’s shield. Rhodes and Sam both yelped in protest as he did so, Sam trying to slap his hand away.

“Don’t touch it, man!”

Bucky ignored him and poked it anyway. He could feel a slight buzz against his metal fingers, but that was all; the light touch sent little ripples of energy outwards the same way dropping a stone in a pond would have done. That was all. Beyond it, the empty lab sat untroubled, full of partially-dissembled Hydra weapons, experimental gear for the Howling Commandos and the other SSR strike teams, and the abandoned bottle of brandy on the nearest table.

Danvers came over to peer interestedly at the window. Sam stepped back to make room for her, while Rhodes tried to coax Stark back into the wheelchair that Pepper Potts had pushed over while he was distracted. Danvers prodded it with a finger that glowed with the same kind of golden energy that had surrounded her when she had brought the alien ship in to land; it didn’t have any more effect than Bucky’s vibranium hand had had. She stepped back and said, “This sort of thing happen a lot around here?”

“Honestly, this is a first for us,” Sam admitted. “You?”

“New to me too.”

All of them looked hopefully in Thor’s direction, since out of everyone in the room he was the one who had the most experience with inexplicable pieces of magic or technology or technology that might as well be magic or whatever the hell this was. Or at least that was what Bucky was assuming, based on what he knew about Thor. Just because they’d fought aliens together and been living in the compound for the past three weeks didn’t mean that they had actually exchanged more than a dozen words. Thor was Steve’s friend, not Bucky’s; Bucky hated the idea of inheriting Steve’s friends just because Steve wasn’t here anymore.

“Thor?” Stark said. “Buddy? We need you over here. It’s weird and mystical and glowing, that’s your deal.” He finally sat down heavily in the wheelchair, more like his weakened legs couldn’t hold him up anymore than like he was actually making the decision to sit; Pepper promptly wheeled him back from the window, ignoring his protests.

“You know more about magic than the rest of us,” Banner offered. “If we can get Steve and Natasha back –”

One of the two of those got Thor on his feet; Bucky was guessing it was the latter, since he had known Steve and Natasha for a long time. Thor walked like he was carrying the weight of his murdered family, his massacred people, like it was almost too much for him to bear and that at any moment he might collapse under the burden. He seemed to have aged a thousand years – another thousand years – since the first time Bucky had seen pictures of him in the papers, four years ago trying to figure out what the hell had happened since the last time he had been in his right mind.

He came over, looked at the window, said, “That is the wizards’ magic,” and made to go back to his seat. Then he glanced at the window again and added meaningfully, “That room is empty.”

Well, under the circumstances Bucky couldn’t exactly fault his skills of observation.

Banner caught Thor’s arm as he turned to go and drew him aside, talking to him in a low voice. Bucky didn’t bother to try and listen in, though his enhanced hearing meant that he could have heard the conversation easily. Instead, he crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at the empty room, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

“That was Steve, right?” Sam asked Bucky. “I mean – our Steve, 2018 Steve, not the OG 1945 Steve? He doesn’t look much different now than he did when he came out of the ice, or at least not from the pictures I’ve seen from back then. Except for the beard, but that’s nothing a razor can’t fix.” He glanced at Bucky and then did a double-take. “What did you do to your hair?”

Bucky ignored that. “It’s him,” he said. He tapped the left side of his chest and added, “He’s got new ribbons on his rack – looked like another cluster on his Purple Heart, a Distinguished Service Cross, and I think I saw a Distinguished Flying Cross too; he didn’t have those before.” There had been an annotated display of all Steve’s medals at the Smithsonian exhibit, so Bucky wasn’t going entirely on his shaky memory of the war. What Steve hadn’t been wearing was the blue ribbon marking the second Medal of Honor he had received posthumously, so maybe if Steve had come back alive Roosevelt, or maybe Truman, had decided it was only worth a DSC.

Barton frowned. “What’s the DFC for? Did Steve actually fly anything back in the ‘40s?”

“Yeah, Schmidt’s plane,” Bucky said dryly. “Before he crashed it into the North Atlantic and froze himself in ice for seventy years.”

Danvers, who like Rhodes and Sam was USAF and had very strict ideas about ground-pounding Army officers getting above themselves, pursed her lips and said, “I’m not sure that counts as flying.”

“Technically the criteria only say ‘while participating in aerial flight,’” Rhodes pointed out; he had a DFC of his own, received for some of his War Machine actions. “They don’t say how you have to participate.”

“I still don’t think it counts.”

“Is Steve Rogers married?” Yelena asked curiously.

They all looked at her in surprise. “No,” Sam said. “Why?”

She held up her left hand. “He was wearing a ring.”

“Steve’s definitely not married,” Barton said, then he hesitated and looked at Bucky. “Is he?”

“No,” Bucky said, but the only thing he could think was that Steve had never gotten over Peggy Carter, and if Thanos really had dumped him back in the past, then maybe this time he wouldn’t take any chances. Carter probably wouldn’t want to take any either.

If Steve had found himself back in 1945 and promptly married Peggy Carter, then they were never getting him back.

“Nat’s gotta be with Steve, right?” Barton said, his voice a little tight. “She just wasn’t in there with him and – was that Howard Stark?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said shortly, when Stark himself didn’t bother to contribute an answer to that question. Howard had been looking at Steve the way he always did, like Steve was Christmas and Hannukah and a Nobel prize and a blowjob all wrapped up in one. Bucky had actually forgotten how obvious he had been about it, even though back in the day everyone in the SSR except Steve had known and pretended they didn’t. Well, maybe Steve had known; Bucky had never been sure and he hadn’t been about to bring it up by asking, just in case Steve hadn’t known. He certainly wasn’t going to bring it up now, not with Howard’s kid right there.

“So where’d they go?” Sam asked.

“Probably standing outside the door wondering what to do about it,” Barton said. “I mean, if they’re anything like us.” He glanced at Bucky, who shrugged in response; it was as good a guess as any. It wasn’t really the kind of situation that had ever come up before at headquarters; they had had plenty of incidents, but they had all been of the explosive rather than the mystical sort. If something had been glowing when it shouldn’t have been, it was usually Hydra’s fault and it usually meant something extremely unpleasant was about to happen. It was no great surprise that Steve had practically thrown Howard out the door in front of him the moment he had seen the window. For that matter, Bucky had no idea what it looked like from the other side, though it was clear from Steve’s and Howard’s reactions that they had seen something.

“Can’t you call the wizards?” Pepper Potts asked. “They must have a phone number.”

“Yeah, well, I doubt it’s in the Yellow Pages,” Stark said, but he looked up and asked, “Bruce? You seemed pretty buddy-buddy with them.”

“That’s because I crashed through their ceiling,” Bruce said. “Thor?”

“I don’t have a phone,” Thor pointed out.

“We need to work on that.”

“Didn’t SHIELD have anything on these guys?” Rhodes asked Barton. “I mean, they had something on everything, right?”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but Fury isn’t – wasn’t – exactly big on sharing,” Barton said. “I’ve heard rumors about the wizards, but it’s not exactly the sort of thing I ever got called out for.”

“Sounds like someone’s going to have to fly over and knock on the door, see if anyone’s home,” Stark said meaningfully. He probably meant Rhodes, who wasn’t about to leave him, or Sam, who wasn’t going to leave while there was a chance they could get Steve back, but Danvers sighed and began to pull the top of her red-and-blue flight suit back up; she’d let it dangle with the sleeves tied loosely around her waist.

“Where is this place?”

“Manhattan,” Bruce said. “Bleecker Street, in the Village –”

Thor was frowning at the window with a little more interest now, as if something about it had finally managed to catch his attention. Bucky glanced at it, started to look back at Thor, then stared at the window again. “It’s growing,” he said.

Pepper Potts took a few prudent steps back, drawing Stark’s wheelchair with her.

Bucky could see a little more of the lab now, including the door that led out into the war room. The sight gave him an odd pang; he had never spent all that much time in the main lab because back then it had reminded him too much of Zola, but he’d been in it often enough that right now it felt comfortably familiar. He hadn’t really been friends with Howard Stark the way Steve had been, not least because he could tell that Howard had been in love with Steve and that was more than Bucky really wanted to deal with. They had been friendly enough, anyway.

Thor was still frowning at the window. A single spark leapt from thumb to forefinger as he lifted a hand, though he didn’t try to touch the window, his gaze going abstracted as he let his hand hover a few inches away. Then he dropped his hand very quickly, another spark playing over his knuckles before fading from view.

“The Time Stone,” he said, which made almost everyone move away from the window. After a moment of thought Bucky stayed where he was, which to his mild interest got Sam and Yelena to stay too. The Widow seemed to be taking her cues from him, though he couldn’t tell if it was because she didn’t really understand the danger of the Infinity Stones or if she just didn’t want to get shown up by the Winter Soldier.

Sam’s fingers twitched a little. “Does that mean Thanos is here?” he demanded.

Bucky wouldn’t have given a copper penny for Thanos’s life if Thor ever got his hands on him, so he wasn’t surprised when Thor shook his head. “It’s not coming from our side,” he said. “It’s coming from theirs.”

“How can you tell?” Danvers asked, interested.

A muscle in Thor’s jaw worked. “Something my brother taught me.”

She didn’t have the context to understand why almost everyone else in the room suddenly looked uncomfortable. Loki had been gone before Bucky had even started scrabbling his way back into his own mind, so he didn’t have any first person experience with Thor’s dead brother the way most of the surviving Avengers did. He didn’t need to have gotten up close and personal with the Chitauri to know that Loki was a sensitive subject for Thor if for no other reason than because Thor had been forced to watch his murder.

Stark stared at the window rather than respond to Thor’s comment, which meant that he was the one who said, “Something’s happening.”

Thor obligingly stepped back out of the way as there was a general rush towards the window. Bucky set his feet and refused to be moved, which ended with Stark and Rhodes next to him again and Yelena and Sam on his other side, with Barton and Banner trying to peer around them. It meant that he had the best view to watch as the door at the other end of the lab opened and Peggy Carter entered, her pistol in her hand.

Definitely standing around outside wondering what to do, he thought dryly, then Steve came in after Carter and Bucky let his breath out in an explosive gasp he hadn’t realized he had been holding in. Barton and Yelena made identical sounds of relief an instant later.

Natasha Romanoff was with Steve, pin-up perfect in a WAC’s uniform with her red hair in elegant finger waves. She looked like the girls in all the dirty magazines they had passed around back at the front and which Steve had pretended not to see, since officers weren’t supposed to know about all that, the kind of girl Bucky would have made a fool of himself over a couple of lifetimes ago, back when he wouldn’t have known to recognize her predator’s eyes. These days he saw enough of that in the mirror not to want it in a woman, or at least not a woman he had any interest in going to bed with. Not that he was expecting to have one of those any time soon.

It only struck him now, seeing Steve back in his army service uniform and back in the SSR, that Steve had those same predator’s eyes. Bucky had no idea when that had happened.

It would have been nice to have had the luxury of believing that becoming Captain America had changed something about Steve, made him less himself and more someone else’s idea of a comic book hero. Bucky knew Steve well enough to understand that getting the serum, becoming Captain America, had only made Steve more of himself. It was as if he had spent the first twenty-five years of his life champing at the bit, desperate to be what had been denied him only by a twist of fate, and having gotten it, had finally been able to be what he always should have been. Bucky loved Steve, but he wasn’t always sure he liked him – but then again, that had been true even in the old days, when Steve had been fifty pounds of crazy shoved into a five pound bag instead of fifty pounds of crazy shoved into a twenty pound bag. Steve could be self-absorbed and self-righteous and had a temper that had gotten both of them into trouble more times than Bucky could count; that didn’t mean he wasn’t a good man or the best friend Bucky had ever had.

He could tell almost immediately that everyone on the other side of the window could see them too, if only because Steve’s eyes met his through the glittering green energy, his whole body going slack with relief. He said something that Bucky couldn’t hear; his ability to lip-read wasn’t as good as Steve’s was, but he thought it was, that’s my team.

Peggy gave them a single astonished look, then turned on Steve; since she wasn’t facing them anymore Bucky couldn’t read her lips.

“Get the wizards,” Rhodes told Danvers. Her footsteps retreated from the room, and a moment later Bucky saw a streak of gold take off from the lawn.

“They’re okay,” Bucky said, so heavy with relief that he actually felt a little nauseous. “Steve’s okay.”

Sam put a hand on his shoulder and gripped it; he was breathing hard too.

“Right,” Stark said; when Bucky glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, not willing to look away from Steve, it was to see him staring past the miniature drama playing out in front of them. Howard Stark had followed the others into the lab. “Now what?”

Bucky didn’t respond, keeping his gaze fixed on Steve, who from all appearances was having some sort of argument with Peggy Carter. They had argued some back in the day, but not all that much, either because Steve liked her too much to pick fights or because the Howling Commandos simply hadn’t been around often enough for their points of disagreement to escalate that far. Possibly both.

Yelena had been right, he saw. Steve was wearing a wedding ring on his left hand.

Peggy wasn’t.

Natasha Romanoff was.

Now
April 1945

“You’re a little late,” Natasha said, partially because she thought that it was a point that needed to be made and partially to buy time for Steve to recover from the nervous breakdown he was clearly having. “We’ve been here three weeks already.”

Except for the color, the woman’s robes looked like the ones that Bruce and Rhodey had described the wizards in New York wearing; Rhodey had met Wong when he had collected Bruce from Bleecker Street before Ross found out he was back on Earth. Mostly during the New York attack people had been to busy running away and screaming to take pictures or video, but a few shaky recordings had filtered out to the internet. These days Iron Man was old hat and the wizards were a rumored if mostly unseen quality; getting murdered by aliens, on the other hand, was something that Manhattanites were only too wary of six years after the Battle of New York. The recordings she had seen of the wizards had only given her an impression of oriental robes the color of old blood and sparking golden energy in intricate mandalas, which Natasha supposed must have been magic.

The other thing Bruce had described had been the amulet Stephen Strange had been wearing, the one that contained the Time Stone. When Steve had asked, he had drawn it for them in his technical draftsman’s hand as best he could remember; he didn’t have Steve’s photographic memory but his own wasn’t bad for all that Bruce said he had killed all of his higher brain functions in graduate school. The amulet the so-called Sorcerer Supreme was wearing was definitely the same one that Bruce had drawn.

Natasha resisted the urge to look at the glittering green window, keeping her eyes fixed on the sorcerer instead. She was as glad as Steve was to see their team alive and well, or at least the members of it visible in the time window, but she couldn’t think of a single good reason for Yelena to be at the compound. Clint, certainly; under the circumstances Secretary Ross might well have lifted the restrictions on Clint and Scott Lang because every extra body counted in a fight like the one they had been having in Wakanda. But the only people who knew about Yelena were Clint and Steve. Clint might have tried to hunt her down under the right circumstances, though Natasha couldn’t come up with any. She had no idea what circumstances would prompt Yelena to go to the compound on her own.

Yelena’s alive, she told herself silently. Clint’s alive. Sam and Bruce and Tony and Rhodey are all alive. That was the important part; they could sort out the messy bits later. That there would be a later and that they were, presumably, not stuck in 1945 filled her with more relief than she would ever admit to Steve. She would have lived with it if she hadn’t had any other choice, been Captain America’s best girl and Liberty Belle for the press and a knife in the dark for the SSR and Steve Rogers’ wife for the rest of her life, but she didn’t want to. Not in 1945, at least; in 1945 that was an entirely different prospect than in 2018.

Steve hadn’t wanted to be stuck in 2012 six years ago either, but he really hadn’t had any other choice.

He was shaking when Natasha put a hand on his arm, like the enormity of what was happening had suddenly caught up to him, the way she had seen it do a few times over the course of the past twenty-three days. He stilled under her touch, his breathing slowly evening out, until he finally drew himself the rest of the way up and looked hard at the Sorcerer Supreme. “The hell are you doing here now and not twenty-three days ago?” he demanded. “Before I got kidnapped, shot, and beat to shit?”

The woman eyed him thoughtfully, that same calculating expression Natasha had seen a dozen times before on people meeting Steve Rogers for the first time and weighing him against whatever conclusions they had already come to about Captain America. Usually Steve came off the better in that competition, but not always; there were plenty of people who preferred the idea of Captain America over the reality. Phil Coulson had been one of them.

“All right, hold up,” Morita said, sounding slightly strained. He had his hand on what Natasha guessed was a hidden knife sheath; none of the Howling Commandos habitually carried sidearms inside the SSR. “We’ve got wizards now? Like magic-magic wizards, not Schmidt’s bull?”

The woman glanced at him. “The sorcerers of Kamar-Taj have guarded the Time Stone for millennia,” she said. “We prefer to keep to ourselves. It’s better for everyone that way.”

“There’s a war on, in case you haven’t noticed,” Peggy said coolly from Steve’s other side. Her pistol barrel hadn’t wavered at all, still pointed squarely between the newcomer’s eyes.

“Who says we haven’t been fighting it?” the other woman countered. “There are more battlegrounds than even the Strategic Scientific Reserve knows.” She looked back at Steve and Natasha and said gravely, “It’s time to go home.”

“You’ve no right –” Falsworth began indignantly, but Steve barreled over him as if he hadn’t spoken.

“Why?” he demanded. “What’s different about now and not three weeks ago? Or three days, before I got the shit beaten out of me by the Winter Guard and eight women killed? People are dead because we’re here, people who would still be alive if we were back home!”

Natasha wondered if anyone else had noticed the way that Howard and Peggy both flinched in unison when Steve said back home.

“But they were already dead.” The Sorcerer Supreme’s response was calm, so devastatingly matter-of-fact that it took Natasha a moment to realize what it was that she had actually said. “This has already happened. You were always here – and you always left.”

“No, I didn’t,” Steve snapped. His gaze flickered sideways to Natasha and he corrected, “We didn’t. It would have been in SHIELD’s records, Peggy would have told me, Howard wouldn’t have – someone would have known. It never happened.”

“But it did.” Her voice was as implacable as a hurricane. “When you go, I will take the memory of you ever having been here, until it seems to be nothing but a dream, long-wished for but never realized.”

Steve and Natasha both stared at her. They said, “What?” together in bad unison.

“What?” Peggy demanded, a beat later.

“Why?” Howard asked, bright-eyed with curiosity. Not the same way that Tony would have been, Natasha noted a little distantly, but so focused on the newness of it that his curiosity overwrote everything else, including his self-preservation instinct. Tony had had to fight for his life too many times to feel anything but abstract about something that might turn out to be a threat.

“The Runes of Kof-Kol,” the Sorcerer Supreme said, as if that was an explanation for anything. “A dangerous spell, but your particular circumstances have left no other options.”

“Our particular circumstances?” Steve said disbelievingly. “What the hell does that mean?”

The woman made a one-handed gesture, making Dernier and Jones jump back nervously as a glittering golden line sprang into being, crossing the lab and passing directly in front of them. Out of the corner of her eye, Natasha saw Tony, Bruce, and Bucky all trying to peer through the window and get a look at what was going on.

“The Infinity Stones create what you experience as the flow of time,” the sorcerer said, as if she were one of Natasha’s old instructors at the Red Room talking about the best way to field-strip an AK-47, which Natasha had learned how to do shortly after she had learned to walk. “Remove one of those Stones, and that flow splits. Use the Stones to remove anyone or anything, and that flow splits.”

As she spoke, branches of dark energy that glittered with sparks of gold split off from the main line. Howard shoved his way between Steve and Peggy for a better look, nodding to himself and ignoring both Peggy’s and Dum-Dum’s attempts to pull him back. Natasha gritted her teeth, well aware that of everyone in the lab, he was the one least able to defend himself, though the jury was still out on if there was anything any of them could do against something like magic. Natasha had come to terms a long time ago with the fact that there were some things that just couldn’t be dealt with by simply stabbing or shooting them, but that didn’t mean she liked it. It was a point of some relief to see Steve shift so that he could put himself between Howard and the Sorcerer Supreme at a moment’s notice. Some distant part of her mind wondered if Tony had seen it, and if he had, what he made of the gesture.

The branches faded from view as the woman went on. “Twenty-three days ago, someone used the Time Stone and the Space Stone to remove Captain Rogers and Miss Romanoff from their proper place in the flow of time and send them here.” A pair of blue and green gemstones appeared, revolving around the golden line, and at another gesture another branch of dark energy arced backwards from them, touching the golden line in front of the woman. The moment it struck the golden line, little starbursts of gold-flecked dark energy began to appear, spreading forwards and out in thin lines from the connection point.

Howard made a soft exclamation of fascinated surprise and tried to move forward again, but Steve caught his arm and held him in place. Natasha bit her lip to keep from laughing as Howard turned an aggrieved look on him – it was the most annoyed she had ever seen him look with Steve – but didn’t try to pull free, just leaned forward as much as Steve would let him. Peggy and Steve exchanged a look over the top of his head, briefly joined in shared amusement, and then just as quickly looked away from each other.

The Sorcerer Supreme flicked an ironic look at them, as if bemused by the interplay, but all she said was, “I thought to return you to your own time immediately, but when I looked into all the possible futures, I saw that once you were here, you had to stay – at least until now.”

One by one the starbursts of possibility began to fade into nothingness. As they did so, the arcing branch of dark energy brightened to the same gold as the main line, until only the two of them were left.

“Something that happened while you were here already happened in your own time, your own reality,” the woman continued, implacable. “Which is also our reality. But things have begun to change again.” Tendrils of gold-flecked energy began to extend from the golden line, growing steadily larger.

Something about them made Natasha’s back teeth ache, though she didn’t do anything even as obvious as shift, let alone step back or move closer to Steve. She did turn her head slightly to study his face and was unsurprised to see that his expression was completely blank, unreadable. He looked back at her but didn’t say anything; it was up to Natasha to say, “Because we started making plans for things that would make major changes. Real plans, not just talking about it.”

“I believe so,” the Sorcerer Supreme agreed.

Natasha frowned. “Department X –”

“Nat.”

She turned to look at Steve. So did Peggy and Howard, both of them frowning.

Steve took a deep breath before he asked, “Where did the Red Guardian’s serum come from?”

Natasha stared at him, taken aback. “Alexei?”

“The – what?” Howard said. “Whose serum?”

“The Red Guardian,” Steve said again. “The Soviets’ only homegrown super soldier. Where did his serum come from?”

Natasha frowned in consternation, not understanding the non sequitur, but said, “He – the official story is that it was created by Soviet scientists during the Cold War, but I’ve seen Dreykov’s files and –” All at once the connection slammed into place like a brick to the head. She let her breath out, slow, and said, “A Leviathan strike team stole a vial of your blood during the war and it was lost when the NKVD became the MGB in 1946. It was lost for decades until Dreykov found it and had the Red Room use it to develop the serum that worked on Alexei – on the Red Guardian. They never got it to work on anyone else and they killed a lot of people trying.”

“That’s it,” Steve said, sounding miserable. “That’s what happened.” He tried to smile and couldn’t manage it. “Guess MI5 didn’t manage to intercept the diplomatic bag after all.”

“What the devil does that have to do with –” Peggy began.

“Alexei Shostakov – the Red Guardian, the only successful Soviet super soldier – is my father,” Natasha said. “Not biologically, but that part’s never been important.” She wasn’t going to say in front of Peggy Carter that she was almost certain that without those three years in Ohio, she wouldn’t have kept enough of her soul to take Clint Barton’s offer thirteen years later. There would have been no Black Widow in SHIELD, in the Avengers, and the Black Widow wasn’t an Iron Man or a Thor or a Hulk, let alone a Captain America, but wheels turned within wheels and maybe if there had never been a Red Guardian, Tony Stark would have been dead in Flushing Meadows or Loki would be sitting enthroned in the ashes of the White House. You never did know.

Except maybe sometimes you did.

“Self-consistency,” Howard said suddenly. When they all looked at him, he said, “We talked about this, remember, Peg? We’ve been assuming that everything that happened since Steve and Natasha got here was new, but the other option is that it always happened, or at least, that the outcome always happened, just that the details of how it got there changed.”

“Oh, the awful option,” Peggy said, scowling; Natasha quietly agreed with her. She and Steve had had this conversation with Howard too, and they hadn’t liked it any better than Peggy Carter apparently had.

Howard snapped his fingers, making them all jump. “The problem’s not just that they’re here, right, the problem’s that they’re not there.” He gestured in the direction of the time window, though he didn’t actually look at it. Natasha wasn’t sure that he had given it more than a cursory glance since it had appeared, even with Tony Stark clearly visible on the other side.

Peggy’s frown deepened. “Explain that,” she said.

“In small words,” Morita muttered.

Howard looked around, then dragged over the nearest blackboard and scrubbed away the equations on it with his sleeve before picking up a stick of chalk. “When we think of time, we think of it as linear, a straight line, because that’s how we experience it. Because we’re only moving forward, we perceive the future as being created as we create it, not as something we move through.” He drew a line across the chalkboard. “Thing is, we only perceive it that way because of our physical limitations, not because that’s actually how it is. Time – space – space-time – it’s really more like –” He scribbled enthusiastically over his line, making them all wince at the sound this produced. Howard himself didn’t seem to notice.

“Everything in it’s happening all at the same time. Steve and Mrs. Rogers are here –” He drew an X on the board, though it was barely visible amongst the rest of the scribbles. “– at the same time they’re here and here and here.” He drew an X to punctuate each word. “But now they’re not here.” He tapped the chalk against the board further along what had been his straight line. “Because they’re here.” He gestured back at the first X. “And if they’re not there, then –” He swept his sleeve across the board, leaving an arm’s width of bare board behind him. “Because they’re not moving linearly anymore. Et voila.” He added with a flourish.

Natasha saw the moment he realized what he had just said.

He looked at Steve first, his eyes huge and hurt and horrified, then he sucked his breath in through his teeth. It still took him what felt like a long time before he said, “You’d better go get your gear.”

“Howard –” Steve said.

Howard tried to smile and couldn’t manage it. “It’s not like I’m going to let anyone else use it,” he said. “I made it for you.”

Now
May 2018

Danvers still hadn’t returned when Steve and Romanoff left the lab. Bucky shoved down his spike of nerves as they vanished from sight, reminding himself that Steve wouldn’t just leave and Natasha Romanoff, assuming she was in anything close to her right mind, had no interest in being stuck in 1945. He wasn’t sure that he entirely understood everything that had been going on in the lab, but some of the wizard’s light show and Howard Stark’s chalkboard drawings seemed to have made sense to Banner, Stark, and Rhodes, who were all muttering to each other with occasional contributions from Rocket.

He was looking aside, chewing on a knuckle – his right hand, not the vibranium one, which probably would have broken a tooth – when Sam elbowed him hard in the ribs. Bucky looked up at him, annoyed, and Sam jerked his head towards the window again.

The Howling Commandos were on the other side.

For a long moment Bucky’s mind simply went blank with a combination of disbelief and panic. Putting aside the stuff about Steve, since there was no way he could have learned most of it except from firsthand experience, he was never entirely sure how much he actually remembered and how much he had simply reconstructed from museum exhibits, Wikipedia articles, history books, and television documentaries. There was an instant when he looked at the Howlies and only saw the same faces that he had seen in old videos, black and white photographs, the larger-than-life murals at the Smithsonian, without anything attached that didn’t come from a voiceover or a placard.

Then he had a sensation a little like shaking out a folded blanket and memories unfurled, slotting back into all of the places they should have been in. He let out a strangled breath of relief that made Sam look at him sharply; whatever was on Bucky’s face must have given him some kind of answer.

Sometimes he thought that Sam understood that part better than Steve did; Steve’s photographic memory, which predated the serum, meant that he could never quite get his head around Bucky’s missing memories, no matter how hard he tried. It was one of the things that he understood in theory, but not in actual practice.

Dum-Dum Dugan’s lips moved as he spoke, but no sound crossed the span of years. Sam glanced at Bucky, saw that he was still trying to get himself under control, and tapped a finger against his ear as he looked back at the window, shaking his head to let the Howlies know that they couldn’t hear them on this side. His eyes were a little wide; four years palling around with Captain America was one thing, apparently, but coming face to face with the Howling Commandos was another.

Dum-Dum blew his cheeks out, looking a little annoyed but otherwise resigned. His hands moved in front of him, the motions entirely unfamiliar until memory clicked suddenly into place.

When Steve had been nine, he had come down with measles and gone deaf in his left ear. He had gotten some of his hearing back in that ear eventually, but at the time no one had known if he would lose the rest of it too. Bucky had taught himself ASL out of a book from the library, then given it to Steve, who liked languages anyway. They had kept it up even when Steve had gotten his hearing mostly back, since it had given them a way to talk to each other without anyone else understanding, though it had gotten Bucky a thick ear from his ma a few times when they’d used it in church. When they had joined the Howling Commandos, they had combined it with the LSF Dernier’s old Maquis group had used to make what speakers of both languages considered an untranslatable abomination, which meant that the Howlies had a secret, silent language that no one else could understand.

Until just now Bucky hadn’t remembered any of that; Steve certainly had never mentioned it in the past two years, but then again, there hadn’t been any reason to; they hadn’t been in the field together between Siberia and Wakanda.

Apparently he hadn’t been using it with his new team, either, because Sam asked with interest, “What’s he saying?”

Bucky licked his lips. “He wants to know if it’s really me.” He hesitated before he began to sign a response, his eyes almost crossing in concentration; he didn’t have Steve’s memory and he’d lived more of the last seventy-three years than Steve had, even if he had been on ice for most of that time.

It’s me.

What happened? Morita demanded.

It’s a long story.

“What are you saying?” Yelena asked curiously.

Bucky repeated both sides of the conversation for his audience, more than a little self-conscious at the attention, then asked out loud at the same time he signed the question, “What happened over there? How long has Steve been there?”

“When is it over there?” Banner added, and Bucky added the query in sign.

He repeated Dum-Dum’s responses out loud. “It’s April 1945,” he said. “Steve and Romanoff have been there for twenty-three days – they turned up in Howard’s lab a month after Steve originally went down in February.”

Put a couple of MPs in the hospital, Morita added laconically. Stark called us and Carter and Phillips back from the continent, took us a week to get here. We’re supposed to go to Germany tomorrow.

“Germany?” Barton said once Bucky had relayed this information. “Why Germany? Uh, besides the obvious.”

“Ike probably wants to drop Steve on top of the Führerbunker in Berlin,” Bucky said. It had been discussed on and off since Captain America had made his public debut as an actual operator, not as a movie star, but nothing had ever come of it. Colonel Phillips had thought that sending Captain America directly after Adolf Hitler was a stupid idea. Sending Steve Rogers, really, because Phillips had never bought into the Captain America thing. As far as he had been concerned, Steve Rogers was a fantastically lucky prodigy with or without the superpowers, but he was still a junior officer without much combat experience. Steve had been making up the lack of combat experience fast, but that still hadn’t been a reason to send him to Berlin. Not the first time around, anyway.

What happened to you? Gabe Jones insisted.

Bucky glanced at him and swallowed hard. He knew – he didn’t quite remember, but he’d read it – that Jones had been the other man with him and Steve on the train. He owed him a response. It’s a long story, he signed again. Didn’t Steve say?

No, Jones said bluntly. He had a dangerous glint in his eyes that made Bucky feel sorry for Steve when he returned. What happened?

Bucky hesitated for a long time before he finally said, Hydra.

He really didn’t want to tell this story if he didn’t have to, especially because if Steve hadn’t said anything, then there had to be a good reason for it. It also wasn’t the kind of story he thought he could tell like this.

After a moment, he added, his fingers moving slowly, There wasn’t anything anyone could have done.

The Howlies all frowned at each other. Sam was frowning too; Bucky hadn’t bothered to translate that last exchange.

What about the hand? Dum-Dum asked finally.

Bucky flexed his fingers; in long sleeves no one could tell that it was his whole arm, not just his left hand. It got hurt and they cut it off.

Who?

Hydra, Bucky said shortly, then flexed his fingers again. He resisted the urge to tug his shirt cuff down over his knuckles, since it wasn’t as though they hadn’t already seen it and also, he needed both hands to talk. Where did Steve and Romanoff go? he asked, changing the subject.

Dum-Dum frowned at him, clearly aware of what he was doing but unwilling to press the matter. To go get their stuff, he said.

Bucky translated that for his audience, not looking away from the window, and heard a couple sighs of relief.

What happened? Falsworth asked again, his eyes glinting dangerously. Bucky gritted his teeth, uneasily aware that they probably weren’t going to keep taking “it’s a long story” as an answer, though it wasn’t as if there was anything they could do about it from the other side of the time window. He certainly wasn’t about to walk away like he might have done seventy-three years ago.

He did turn his head as gold glittered at the corner of his vision. He and the Avengers stared as gold sparks spun in an empty corner of the room with a sizzling sound like water tossed onto a hot griddle. Bucky heard Stark – or maybe Rhodes – charge up a repulsor behind him, but didn’t turn to look even though the sound made the hair on the back of his neck rise. Barton and Yelena both drew their sidearms, though Thor didn’t even twitch.

The circle of glittering golden energy expanded as they watched, revealing the interior of an oriental-looking building that Bucky didn’t recognize. His view was blocked by Danvers and a round-faced Asian man in robes the color of old blood.

“– not wizards,” he was saying.

“Wong!” Banner said.

The man looked up, spotting him and then Stark. His gaze darted around the room, searching for someone who wasn’t there; it was a gesture Bucky had gotten very familiar with lately. A line knit between his brows when he didn’t find who he was looking for.

The portal vanished after he and Danvers came through it, dripping a last few sparks of golden energy onto the floor. “What happened?” he asked. “What –” He stopped abruptly when he saw the time window, then gave the room a second onceover.

“Not coming from our side, buddy,” Stark said, and then, with an awkward attempt at gentleness, “He’s gone.”

Wong’s face went hard. “I guessed that when the culling started,” he said. He came over, silent in soft-soled shoes, and inspected the glittering green rim of the time window, ignoring the way that the Howling Commandos stared out at him. More golden energy sparked as he moved his hands, creating half a dozen mandala-like shapes no larger than a silver dollar, and he prodded tentatively at the window. “How did this happen?”

Banner and Stark started to explain it to him as Danvers came over and said, “Did I miss anything?”

“The family reunion,” Barton said, gesturing at the Howling Commandos, who were standing on the other side of the window and looking irritated.

Danvers glanced in their direction, started to turn away, then did an elaborate double take and stared. “Are those –”

“The Howling Commandos?” Sam said. “Sure are.”

They all looked over as Wong swore suddenly, apparently having noticed the strange woman in the golden robes on the other side of the window. She had seen him too and was coming over, the Commandos reluctantly moving aside for her. Both wizards moved their hands in swift, unfamiliar gestures, trailing sparks of gold as they did so; at a guess, it was some form of Sign that Bucky didn’t know, augmented with magic. Because that was real now, apparently.

“You know her?” Banner asked when they paused.

“The Ancient One,” Wong said. “The former leader of our order – guardian of the Time Stone before Stephen Strange.”

“Was she better at it?” Stark said warily.

Wong made an indistinct sound that probably translated as yes, but under the circumstances I shouldn’t say it and turned back to the window. After a moment of silent conversation, he said, “We may have a problem.”

“Nope,” Stark said. “Not accepting any more problems. Rogers and Romanoff stuck seventy-three years in the past is the only problem we can have right now.”

“What’s the problem?” Clint asked.

Wong’s mouth twisted a little, like he couldn’t quite believe the absurdity of what he was saying. “There’s no Time Stone on this side.”

Now
April 1945

Steve felt hazy more than anything else, the way he felt up in the twenty-first century on his bad days, like the whole world had gone soft and blurred around him and all he wanted to do was crawl into his empty grave in Arlington. His bad days came less frequently now than they had six years ago, but he still had them. Natasha knew, and Sam, and Wanda because he had told her once; maybe some of the others had guessed, since it was harder to hide in close company at the compound or the tower than when he had had his own apartment in Washington. Most people simply didn’t think Captain America could have those kinds of problems.

Natasha’s hand on his elbow was the only thing he was really aware of as they left Howard’s lab and went upstairs. Steve didn’t think he really saw a single thing in headquarters, just the blurred outlines of the hallways and stairwells around them. He made it all the way back to their room and until the door had shut behind them before he started to cry. It came out in harsh, gasping sobs as his knees buckled beneath him; Natasha got her shoulder under his before he collapsed completely and managed to lower him to the floor. She knelt in front of him, her hands on his shoulders, a steady, grounding presence as Steve folded in on himself.

“Steve,” she said. “Steve, it’s okay –”

“I can’t do this again,” he said helplessly, though he didn’t know how coherent the words were. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t do this again –”

He heard Natasha swallow hard, but all she said was, “Then we don’t have to. There has to be some way to make it work –”

“I can’t do that to you,” Steve said hoarsely. It wasn’t even an option he wanted to consider, just a fact. “I can’t do that to Bucky, Sam, Tony, Wanda – I just can’t. But I can’t do this again either.”

Natasha didn’t say anything, just gathered him into her arms the way she had done after Peggy’s funeral, after the last of his loadbearing pillars had collapsed and left him alone. Only he hadn’t been alone. He had had Natasha and Sam, and barely a day later he had had Bucky, too, and that had been enough.

“You could stay here,” Natasha said hesitantly. “I’ll go back. You can marry Peggy – or Howard,” she added, with the ghost of a smile, even though her mouth was trembling.

“I love Howard, but we’d kill each other inside a week if we ever tried to live together,” Steve said. “Probably by negligence on his part and homicide on mine. And I love Peggy, but –” He shut his eyes, letting his breath out slowly before he admitted, “I…wouldn’t. Not after the way she treated you.”

Natasha swallowed. “You shouldn’t make a decision like that for my sake.”

“I’m not.” Steve sat back on his heels, feeling exhausted and heartsick. He scrubbed a hand over his face, trying to wipe away the tears. “I’m not sure we have a choice anyway,” he added, trying to smile.

“Well, definitely don’t make a decision based on what the witch says.”

“I’m not doing that either,” Steve said. He studied her face, aware that she very much didn’t want to be stuck in 1945, but wasn’t willing to say the words out loud to him. “You know, since I woke up there all I wanted was to come back here, and since we got here all I’ve wanted has been to go back there.”

“You never had a choice before,” Natasha said. “It always just…happened to you.”

“I had a choice,” Steve said. “I didn’t know what the consequences would be, but I always had a choice.” He scrubbed a hand over his face again, dashing away the last of his tears, then nodded to himself. “It makes a difference knowing the consequences, but not much of one. I’d still do the same thing every time.”

He pushed himself to his feet, then held out a hand to help Natasha up. When they were both standing, her hand still in his, he said, “Still want to be married to me in 2018?”

“Well, you already gave me a couple of rings, and we already signed the license…” She looked up at him, her expression suddenly shy and a little uncertain. “Are you proposing?”

Steve took a deep breath, fighting back his sudden surge of nerves. “Yes.”

In answer, Natasha put her arms around his neck and pulled him down into a kiss that went on for a long time. When she drew back, she didn’t release him, just asked, “Did you really decide you were going to marry me back in 2012?”

“Only if you were interested,” Steve said, flushing. “I wasn’t going to insist on it if you weren’t.” And he really hadn’t thought that she was, despite those odd little sparks that had cropped up over the years.

She kissed him again. “I’m interested.” Another kiss. “I’m not being called Liberty Belle, though.”

Steve grinned; he wasn’t sure how well that would have gone over even now in 1945, though it would have been interesting to watch. “It was Senator Brandt’s idea anyway, and I’m not seeing Secretary Ross insisting on it.”

Natasha snorted at the idea and untangled herself from him, stopping when Steve caught her left hand.

“Do you want a ring that Howard Stark didn’t pay for?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t care about that.”

Steve pressed a kiss to her knuckles, then released her. He went, slowly and reluctantly, to change out of his service uniform into his tactical gear, the uniform he’d never gotten to wear in combat. It seemed silly to wear it just to walk through a door, but he’d learned a long time ago that you never really knew what you were going to run into on the other side.

He turned suddenly towards Natasha, who was half-in and half-out of her Liberty Belle uniform. “They’re at the compound.”

She nodded.

“They’re not in Wakanda,” he clarified.

She let her breath out slowly, understanding what he meant. “The time passed,” she said. “But – they’re there. So we must have won.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” Steve said, a little more bitterly than he had intended. From the sharp look Natasha shot him, she hadn’t missed it, either. “Tony was there. I thought –”

“I thought so too,” Natasha said, frowning a little. She pulled her jacket on and began to do up the fastenings. “If Thanos sent us – you – here, then maybe he did something to Tony too.”

“He looked pretty rough,” Steve agreed, frowning, but he didn’t have an answer to that. They hadn’t gotten a good look at the rest of the room, so he had no idea who else was there, but seeing Bucky and Sam had loosened the knot of unease he had been carrying around for the past three weeks.

He fished his wallet out of his footlocker to retrieve the photographs of his parents and Bucky, then slid his father’s straight razor into one of his belt pouches. That done, he stood still for a long moment, looking around the room and trying to decide if there was anything else that he wanted to – or could – take with him.

“Steve,” Natasha said quietly, and he turned to see her holding out the shield to him.

He put his hand on it instead of taking it from her, palm and fingers spread out across the silver star, already scuffed up from the fight with Dottie the previous day. “I never told you what happened in Siberia,” he said.

Natasha frowned a little. “You don’t have to. It won’t change anything, no matter what it was.”

Steve shook his head. “The whole thing was a set-up,” he said. “Zemo wanted us there, me and Bucky and Tony. He had footage –” He took a deep breath, then said it out loud for the first time. “The Winter Soldier – Bucky – killed Howard and Mrs. Stark.”

“I know,” Natasha said. When Steve looked at her in surprise, she said, “I guessed. It’s the only thing that made sense. Zola told us at Lehigh it was an assassination and you don’t send just anyone after someone like Howard Stark.” She bit the inside of her cheek before she admitted, “It would have been the Red Room if Hydra hadn’t gotten there first. It wouldn’t have been me in ’91, I was seven, but it would have been someone like me.” She looked down at the shield, then met his eyes again and said, “I didn’t know there was video.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Howard – Howard recognized him. There wasn’t any sound, but – you could see his face, I could read his lips. I don’t know if Tony could. But –” He let his breath out slowly. “He was going to kill Bucky – Tony, I mean. He didn’t care if he had to go through me to do it. I think he didn’t mind that, because he blamed me for not telling him it was murder.” He looked up at her and said, “I knew from Zola it was murder, I didn’t know it was Bucky. I told him that, but he didn’t believe me. And he didn’t care. Maybe I wouldn’t have either, if it had been my folks. If it had been Peggy.”

He would never admit it, but he did wonder, sometimes, why it was Howard Stark that Hydra had chosen to murder and not Peggy Carter. Stealing the flawed serum Howard had been taking to the Triskelion didn’t go all the way to explaining it, not when it would have been easier to take it from SI’s facility in New Hampshire long before Howard Stark had found out about Obadiah Stane’s off-the-books project with Thaddeus Ross. Hydra’s infiltration of SHIELD and the rest of the U.S. government had been deep enough even at that point that they should have just been able to walk into the lab and walk out with it again, even if they hadn’t wanted to wait until it was safely in the Triskelion. Steve had spent a long time looking into it after he had left Bucky in Wakanda and before Natasha had found him in Greece, and he had never come up with any good answers. Maybe it had just been cruelty.

“It doesn’t matter what you would have done, because it didn’t happen to you,” Natasha said, calmly matter-of-fact. “If you can say that to me about me and Irina, you can listen to it about you and Tony.”

After a moment Steve nodded. He let his fingers trail across the surface of the shield, the star carefully and lovingly etched by Howard, ready for him to paint, the same way he had done the first time around in 1943.

“Tony didn’t take it, did he?” Natasha prompted gently. “The shield, I mean.”

“No,” Steve said quietly. “No, he didn’t take it. I used it to smash up his arc reactor and then I left it there. He said…he said that I didn’t deserve it. That it didn’t belong to me, that his dad had made it. I don’t know where it is now, if he left it there or if he melted it down or – I don’t know.”

He looked up at her, flattening his palm across the star again. “I haven’t told Howard. How the hell do you say something like that? And I thought Tony was dead, I couldn’t – I couldn’t tell him that, it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know him, that Tony’s not real to him. I couldn’t say that to him.” Steve let his breath out slowly. “I meant to tell him. It just happened to be right when the god damn Infinity Stone turned up.”

Natasha bit her lip, but all she said was, “I won’t say I know him as well as you do, but – I don’t think it would have made a difference to him.”

“Yeah, I know,” Steve said. “That’s – kind of the problem.”

“I know,” Natasha said. “I know Tony too.” She offered him the shield again, and this time Steve turned so that she could slide it onto his right arm.

She kept her hand on it as she leaned up to kiss him, then said, “Do you want your sling back?”

Steve worked his bad arm experimentally. “It’s just sore.” He cupped her face in his left hand and kissed her again, then said, “You do look good in that uniform.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts, Rogers, I cannot express how much I miss spandex,” Natasha said, sounding fervent. “Not to mention my own bras.”

Steve was startled into laughter. Natasha grinned at him, touched her lips to his for a third time, and said, “Let’s go home.”

By the time they got back down to the main lab – Steve looking around the hallways and trying to memorize them, memorize the faces of the people there, most of them aware that something was going on but not certain what it was – Phillips had arrived and was talking to Howard, Peggy, and the Sorcerer Supreme, his expression suggesting that he wasn’t entirely convinced by their arguments. Under the circumstances, Steve couldn’t blame him.

The time – window, he supposed, there didn’t seem to be anything else to call it – was larger now, and the Howlies and Bucky were having an enthusiastic argument via their own private sign language. Since Bucky’s lips were moving, Steve assumed he was translating for Sam and the other Avengers. Most of the argument seemed to consist of variations on what are you doing alive and in 2018? and what’s up with your arm?

Steve shifted the shield to his back so that he had both hands free and went to join the Howlies. Bucky’s gaze flickered to him immediately and a little of the tension in his shoulders loosened; he had clearly been afraid that Steve wasn’t coming back. His hands flashed, the vibranium glittering in the light of the portal, as he asked, What are you doing in 1945?

I didn’t do it on purpose! Steve protested.

I thought you were dead!

I didn’t do it on purpose, Steve repeated, then translated both sides of the conversation out loud for Natasha, who was watching them with fascination. He added, We thought we were stuck here, but we’re coming back.

Bucky hesitated, not translating that even though Sam looked at him pointedly. Finally, Bucky said, You don’t have to.

We’re coming back, Steve signed, annoyed that Bucky would think he might do that. It’s been exciting enough here already.

Why? What have you been doing?

Got accused of espionage by our side and then kidnapped by the Winter Guard. Remember them?

Bucky eyed him warily. Did you kill them?

Bit a couple of Aleksey Lebedev’s fingers off.

You have got to stop biting people.

It’s been ninety-four years, Buck, you need to get over it, Steve said firmly. We were six.

You were six, Bucky said with emphasis. I was seven. He pointed at his right wrist before signing, I still have the scar!

“It’s how we met,” Steve said to Natasha after he had finished translating, making a face at Bucky.

“You bit him?”

“There was some other stuff going on.” He watched Bucky’s hands move, apparently in response to something Clint had said, but Clint was standing at an off-angle and Steve couldn’t read his lips.

Barton wants to know what Romanoff is wearing.

Steve grinned and didn’t translate that. Oh, her Liberty Belle outfit.

Her what? Bucky demanded after passing that along, leaving Clint and Sam choking on laughter.

Natasha gave Steve a wary look. “What are you saying?”

Steve grinned. “Nothing much.” Senator Brandt was inspired, he added to Bucky.

You have got to stop letting that man make decisions, neither of us voted for him. Or at least I don’t think I did. Wait, why does she get a name? He never tried to do any of that with the rest of us, Bucky added warily.

We’ll tell you when we get there, Steve said after a moment of thought; Natasha had the right to say it herself.

With a nod to Bucky, Dugan caught Steve’s good arm and drew him away from the window with a nod to Natasha, who stayed with the other Howlies after a quick glance at Steve for confirmation. Dugan turned them away so that no one could read their lips and said, low-voiced, “You didn’t tell us about Bucky.”

“I don’t know where the hell he is in 1945!” Steve said, aware that that wasn’t much of an excuse. “I was going to go looking after the war.”

“You mean we were,” Dugan said, then frowned, like he had just remembered that Steve wasn’t going to be here to do that. He shut his eyes briefly, his expression frustrated, then looked at Steve again and said, “It was bad, wasn’t it? What happened to him?”

“Worse than what happened to me,” Steve agreed.

Dugan took that in. “You should have told us.”

Steve met his eyes. “You wouldn’t have believed me.”

Dugan opened his mouth to argue, then stopped and closed it again. After a moment, he admitted, “No. We’d have all just thought you were crazy – or that Hydra had gotten into your head, anyway. You did slip a couple times and that’s what we thought.”

“I know,” Steve said wearily. “I would have told you if I’d thought you’d believe me or if there was anything we could have done right now. I don’t know where he is until 1957, though there are places Nat and I were going to star looking.”

Dugan put a hand on his good shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly. “I believe you,” he said. “But I wish you had told us.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. “I should have told you, even if you wouldn’t have believed me then.”

In response, Dugan put an arm around him and pulled him into a hug, awkward with the shield on Steve’s back but without hesitation. Steve hugged him back, memorizing it, keeping this moment so that he would have it when he hadn’t before – something new from something he thought that he had lost irretrievably a long time ago.

“It’s okay,” Dugan said quietly. “And it’s good to see him here too – good for us, good for him.” He put a hand on the back of Steve’s head, as friendly as if Steve had been his little brother instead of his commanding officer, and waited for Steve to nod before he released him.

He nodded at the time window. “That’s your team?”

Steve nodded and turned so that he could point to each of them in turn. “Nat you’ve met, Bucky you know – that’s Sam next to him, Howard’s son Tony, Bruce, Rhodey, Clint – that’s Natasha’s sister Yelena, I’ve never met her before, and the woman in the back is Pepper, Tony’s girlfriend, the CEO of Stark Industries. Not all of them are there,” he added, trying not to worry about that. He was glad that Clint was at the compound, though not entirely sure what it meant.

“Rogers,” Phillips called. “Both of you.”

Steve clapped Dugan on the shoulder and went over to Phillips and the others, as Natasha signed something to Yelena before joining him. “Sir?”

“Stark says that if you don’t leave, the universe is going to explode,” Phillips said.

Steve blinked and looked at Howard. “It’s what?”

Howard’s expression was deeply unhappy. “It’s on the list. Not on top of it,” he added, like that was supposed to be helpful. “But it’s on the list.”

“What else is on the list?” Natasha said, sounding as resigned as Steve felt; it was always something like this.

“Oh, you know,” Howard said, trying and failing to keep his voice light. “Normal stuff. The universe implodes, the universe explodes, reality collapses, you vanish from existence, my personal favorite, which is nothing –”

“Are you –” Steve didn’t bother to finish the sentence. Everyone, including him, knew that of everything that Howard Stark made light of, the only thing he wouldn’t joke about was Steve himself. “When?”

He made a helpless gesture. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe never. If I’d thought it was all that likely before I would have said something.”

Steve cocked his head. “But you thought it was a possibility?”

“I didn’t think it was a very high one after the first twenty-four hours passed and you guys didn’t explode or evaporate or anything,” Howard admitted. “And –” He hesitated.

Steve let his breath out slowly. “And you didn’t think we were telling the truth.”

“You showed up in a flash of blue light after vanishing with Hydra’s secret weapon, which makes people vanish in a flash of blue light,” Howard said defensively. “What was I supposed to think? I was – I was keeping my options open.” He bit his lip and added, “Steve…”

“It’s okay,” Steve said. “I get it.”

“I didn’t want it to be true,” Howard said. “Like I said, I hate the idea of any of that happening to you. The other thing’s bad, but – not this bad.”

Steve glanced back over his shoulder at the window, where Bucky was having a signed conversation with the Howlies. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” he said.

Howard’s face went hard. So did Peggy’s and Phillips’ as soon as they understood what Steve meant; they might not have believed him before, but having Bucky on the other side of the window, obviously alive and kicking and changed in 2018, was more convincing than anything Steve could have ever said. Phillips looked downright baleful; Bucky was one of his men and Phillips had never dealt well with anything happening to his people, not after what had come out about Krausberg and the other Hydra POW camps.

“It is time,” said the Sorcerer Supreme, who had been listening to the conversation in silence.

Steve flinched a little, and Natasha put her hand on his arm, her touch light and soothing. He could feel her breathing hard, more than ready to go; if she had been stuck here, she would have made the best of it, but this wasn’t her place. It wasn’t his, either. Not anymore.

He knew it, but he still couldn’t make himself move, couldn’t make himself take those final, irrevocable steps.

“You’ve only got the Time Stone,” Natasha said to the Sorcerer Supreme, quietly buying him time. “Thanos – the person who sent us here – had the Time Stone and the Space Stone and used them together. Can you do it without the Tesseract – without the Space Stone?”

A tiny frown knit the woman’s brows, but she turned and looked across the room, where pieces of Hydra’s technology still lay scattered across the lab benches, glowing balefully blue. “Alone of the Infinity Stones, only the Space Stone can transfer its power elsewhere. There is enough of that energy here to use in conjunction with the Time Stone, though it will drain it to the dregs.”

And if it drained Hydra’s weapons, then the SSR – or SHIELD, later, which meant Hydra – wouldn’t be tempted to start using them just because they had them.

“The Tesseract doesn’t concern me,” the sorcerer went on slowly. “What concerns me is that there’s no trace of the Time Stone in your time.”

Steve straightened up and exchanged a baffled look with Natasha. “What do you mean?”

“I thought you said that the Infinity Stones create the flow of time,” Natasha said. “How can the Time Stone just not be there?”

“It can’t,” said the Sorcerer Supreme.

“How is that possible?” Steve asked, simultaneously relieved by the delay and concerned by the subject. He had had too much to do with Infinity Stones in the past six years to take anything about them lightly.

“It’s not,” the woman said.

Natasha shook her head, frowning. “It’s probably not on Earth,” she said. “The guy who took it isn’t…from around here.” She hesitated over specifying space, probably because she wasn’t sure how the other woman would take that. Just because you were a sorcerer or a witch or whatever the hell she was didn’t mean you believed in aliens.

Apparently the Sorcerer Supreme understood the euphemism without one of them having to explain. “The Time Stone’s physical location doesn’t matter. The Infinity Stones exist both inside and outside of time, as well as inside and outside the multiverse. All Infinity Stones are one Infinity Stone, as all Time Stones are one Time Stone.” She tapped a finger against the amulet laid over her chest. “But there is no Time Stone there.”

“Destroyed?” Steve suggested. They had been pretty sure that Wanda could destroy the Mind Stone – and the Vision with it – but he didn’t know if that ability would extend to the other Infinity Stones. At the time they had been thinking solely about the Mind Stone, since it was the only one of the Stones that they had had on hand. If Wanda had managed it, he could see the Avengers destroying the others to keep them out of the hands of people like Thaddeus Ross or Alexander Pierce, never mind Thanos and all the other madmen lurking out in deep space.

A faint smile touched the Sorcerer Supreme’s thin lips. “There is no way to destroy an Infinity Stone any more than there is a way to destroy all of existence.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that; we’ve met a couple guys who’ve given it the old college try.”

“Trying is one thing,” she said gravely. “Accomplishing it is another.”

Steve exchanged a worried look with Natasha, ignoring the bafflement on the faces of Howard, Peggy, and Phillips. He wasn’t sure any of them were following along; he wasn’t sure any of them could, not without more knowledge of the Infinity Stones than any of them had, though Howard certainly looked like he was doing his damnedest to try. Steve wasn’t entirely sure that he was following along, for that matter. “What about the Tesseract – the Space Stone? Or the Mind Stone?”

“I’ve never encountered them,” the Sorcerer Supreme said, her brows arching; she was clearly wondering how Steve and Natasha had come into contact with three Infinity Stones and survived the experience. Remembering what it had felt like to get slapped around by the Power Stone, Steve wished he had only come into contact with three Infinity Stones.

“Is it going to stop you from sending us home?” Natasha asked practically.

“No. I can do that with the Time Stone and the Space Stone’s energy. But what awaits you on the other side –”

Steve took a deep breath. “We’ll deal with it when we get there,” he said.

“No matter what it is,” Natasha agreed.

Peggy’s mouth was a thin red line, though from the look in her eyes she was unwillingly fascinated by the discussion. “Do you do this sort of thing often?”

“Unfortunately,” Steve said. For a moment their eyes met and he was struck by the absurdity of it, the vast gulf between what he had been and what he was. He wasn’t the man he had been. He would never be that man again.

After a moment Peggy looked away.

Steve looked down, breathing hard. Natasha snugged her shoulder against his, not saying anything or reaching for him, just reassuringly there beside him.

“Captain,” the Sorcerer Supreme said gravely. “It’s time.”

“Okay,” Steve said, looking up. He swallowed past the lump in his throat and repeated, “Okay.” He turned to Colonel Phillips, breathing hard, and saluted, saying, “Sir –”

Phillips surprised him by pulling him into a hug. “You take care of yourself, Rogers,” he said gruffly. “And try to actually marry that girl while you’re at it.”

Steve flushed, startled for a moment into a smile, then he hugged Phillips back before he released him. Phillips turned to Natasha, who had her hand out.

Steve looked at Howard and Peggy, who said quietly, “We’ll wait,” and jerked her head in the direction of the Howling Commandos.

Steve had never gotten the chance to say goodbye before. You didn’t, going into a fight, or at least he didn’t; he had never been able to afford to think that there might be a last time. Unlike some of the guys he’d known, he’d never thought it was bad luck; he had simply never thought to do it. He wasn’t entirely certain that he knew how to say goodbye.

“I –” he said, and then stopped, frozen. He had no idea what his face looked like right now, but going by Dugan’s reaction it must have been a study.

“Stark told us,” Falsworth said as all five of them descended on him. “Something about the universe possibly imploding if you stayed?”

Steve tried to smile. “He told me the chances were low.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve all heard that one before,” Morita said. “Usually right before something goes boom. Something that’s not supposed to go boom.”

Steve tried to smile again and couldn’t manage it. He just stood still instead, feeling his mouth start to tremble and knowing that if he tried to speak again he would probably start crying, if he didn’t do it anyway.

“Come here,” Dugan said roughly, pulling him into a hug as if Steve was as easy to manhandle as a rag doll and ignoring the encumbrance of the shield on his back. Steve hugged him back hard.

“It’s okay,” Dugan said against his ear. “It’s okay. We knew this might happen. You told us, remember? It’s okay.” He drew back enough to grip Steve’s shoulders with both hands, forcing Steve to look at him. “Like Carter told us a couple weeks ago when you got here: the worst thing that could happen has already happened. What we’ve gotten, what you’ve gotten – that’s a gift, no matter what happens next. Whether we remember it or not.” The corner of his mouth crooked. “And I’m glad Hydra didn’t have you, the way we were thinking back at the beginning.”

Steve couldn’t help it; his gaze flickered sideways to the time window and Bucky looking anxious on the other side. Dugan’s gaze followed his and he winced, but he tightened his grip on Steve’s shoulders and said, “And we got him back too, even if it’s just for now and just like this. That’s not nothing.”

“No,” Steve managed to say, a lump in his throat. “No, it’s not.” Bucky never talked about the Howlies; Steve wasn’t sure how much he remembered and he suspected that Bucky wasn’t entirely certain, either. He had been torn away from them as much as Steve had – more than Steve, maybe, because he hadn’t had a choice in the matter.

“It’s okay,” Dugan said again. “Go back to your team, take care of Bucky, marry your terrifying girl, save the world. Fight the good fight.” He hugged Steve again, hard enough to hurt, then released him and passed him on to Jones and the other Howlies, moving to take Natasha’s hands and speak quietly to her.

Steve was crying by the time he had hugged each of them and said a goodbye he had never though he’d have to say. He scrubbed the back of his sleeve across his eyes, wincing a little as the rough fabric scraped at his skin.

When he looked up again, Howard Stark was standing in front of him.

The energy of the time window was a cold green glitter on the side of his face, though Howard didn’t bother to look at it, at Tony and Bucky on the other side. All of his attention was on Steve.

Steve said, “Howard –” without any real idea of what words might come after that, and Howard took two steps forward to pull him into an embrace, his grip hard enough to hurt.

“I’m sorry,” he said against Steve’s ear. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I couldn’t fix it, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t find you –”

“There was nothing you could have done,” Steve told him. “There was never anything you could have done, Howard.”

Howard pulled back to meet his eyes, though he kept his hands on Steve’s shoulders, moving them down to his upper arms after a moment so that he wasn’t putting any pressure on Steve’s bullet wound. “I don’t believe that.”

“This fight was lost a long time ago,” Steve said quietly. “There was –” He had to stop and take a deep breath before he went on, because no matter how long he had lived with it, it never got any better. “There was never any way to win it.”

Howard shook his head again.

“Sometimes there’s no way out,” Steve said. “Sometimes…sometimes this is all there is.” He shut his eyes, partially so that he didn’t have to see Howard’s expression and partially because after all this time, he still hated admitting it to himself.

He looked up again when he felt Howard’s grip tighten on his arms and added gently, “You’re the one who said the universe might explode if we stuck around.”

“Might,” Howard said pointedly, then sighed. “I know.” He clung for a moment, then let Steve pry him gently free.

They stood looking at each other for a few moments, until Steve finally reached back over his shoulder with his good hand and drew the shield off his back. He offered it to Howard and said, “You should melt this down and give the vibranium back to T’Chanda.”

Howard put his hand on the edge of the shield and pushed it back towards Steve. “I made it for you,” he said, sounding just aggrieved enough that Steve felt the corner of his mouth turn upwards, a little amused. “Keep trying to give it back and you’re going to hurt my feelings.”

When Steve still hesitated, he added more seriously, “You don’t think I care about anything that happened up there, do you?”

Steve bit his lip. Like he had told Natasha, he knew Howard didn’t care, and that was its own problem.

“Tell that kid of mine not to give you a hard time,” Howard said; Steve thought it was the first time he had heard Howard acknowledge Tony’s existence since he had learned about him.

Given how he and Tony had parted company, he could just imagine how that would go over. Steve carefully didn’t look at the time window to see how Tony was taking this, but when Howard pushed the shield at him again, he swung it back over onto his harness, wincing a little as the motion pulled at his bad shoulder.

For what felt like a long time, Howard just looked at him, then he said, “To hell with it,” and grabbed Steve by one harness strap, pulling him into a hard kiss. It was sloppy and off-center, their teeth knocking painfully together until Howard got them straightened out. He kissed like he had been saving it up for years, like he knew he wouldn’t get a second chance – like he was saying goodbye. His lips were a little chapped and he tasted like the brandy they had been drinking earlier, but he was – as Steve had suspected he would be on the few occasions he had ever let himself think about it – an excellent kisser.

When he pulled back, he said, his voice rough, “Sorry – I’m sorry. Don’t set your wife on me.”

Steve bent his forehead down against Howard’s, breathing hard. “It’s okay,” he managed to say. He could feel heat in his cheeks and ears and there was a tiny voice in the back of his head whispering, great, Tony’s going to kill you stone cold dead this time, but he shoved it aside.

“I’m sorry,” Howard repeated, and then, sounding apologetic, “Sorry. I had to do that at least once, even if I’m not going to remember it.”

“It’s okay,” Steve said again. They were still so close together that he could feel Howard’s breath warm against his cheek, the smell of his Floris cologne mixing with the ever-present scent of machine oil. “I’m sorry too,” he added, and as Howard’s brows knit slightly in wary concern, clarified, “Not for that. For – for everything else.”

“That’s okay too,” Howard said wryly. He took a deep breath, then said, his voice quiet, “You know that I love you.”

“I know,” Steve said softly. He couldn’t tell that Howard that he also knew what had come of that love, and would still come of it when he was gone again – grief and obsession and the kind of wounds that never healed, the kind that left scars on everyone around him and which had come back to bite Steve in the ass more than once in the twenty-first century. None of that mattered right now. He put his arms around Howard, pulling him into another hug, and said, “I love you too.”

He felt Howard nod against his shoulder, holding on tightly before he finally stepped back from Steve. His fingers twitched a little like he was thinking about touching them to his lips, but instead he let his hands dangle loose at his sides. He only looked aside as Peggy and Natasha approached, Natasha looking interested and Peggy’s expression unreadable.

Steve stepped away from the time window as Natasha stopped to talk quietly to Howard, who looked a little nervous about being caught kissing her husband. He relaxed as she said something to him, then managed to smile a little. Steve didn’t dare look at anyone else in the room to see their reactions, but it wasn’t as though how Howard felt about him was a secret, not in this crowd.

Peggy followed Steve, and they stood there staring at each other until Peggy finally said, “I’m not kissing you.”

“I kind of guessed that one,” Steve said, swallowing back the urge to either burst into tears or start screaming. He had done a lot of both that first year out of the ice. He still did, sometimes. He probably would until the day he died. “Peggy –”

She put a hand up to stop him and he went quiet. After a moment, she said, “That was good of you.”

He raised his eyebrows, frowning. “What? Because I didn’t knock his teeth out? I like guys too, you know, and I like Howard.”

There was another long moment of silence, then Peggy said, “I didn’t know that.”

“Oh.” Steve bit the inside of his cheek. He supposed there had been no reason for it to come up, since during the war he had been too busy and it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing he was going to talk to her about. The Howlies knew – Bucky had let it slip once – and Steve was pretty sure Senator Brandt knew, since Sherman had arranged a handful of affairs for Steve during his USO days, not that Steve was ever planning to tell anyone about that. But he had assumed that Peggy knew, the same way he had assumed that she knew he was Catholic.

Some of that must have showed on his face, because Peggy’s expression did something complicated. She wrapped her arms around herself and Steve twitched a little, wanting to do something, anything, to ease her obvious misery. But she stepped back when he started to raise a hand and he stopped, letting it fall back to his side.

“Maybe you were right,” she said quietly. “Back in the Stork Club, when you said that I never really knew you. Maybe I don’t.”

“Peggy…” Steve said hoarsely, except he couldn’t argue that either. “It’s not – it wasn’t anyone’s fault, not yours, not mine. I love you, I just…we just never had time.”

“Time,” Peggy said, a smile trying to flit around the corners of her mouth before failing. She took a deep breath and then asked, “It was never going to be me, was it?”

“I wanted it to be,” Steve said, his voice rough with unshed tears. He flexed his fingers, his hands shaking a little; he didn’t know what to do with them. “More than anything. For years.”

“But not enough.”

Steve shut his eyes briefly, then opened them again, not bearing to deprive himself of any of this, even for an instant. Not when he would never have it again, not when he shouldn’t have had it now. “That’s not how it works.”

Peggy looked at him for a long time. “No,” she said finally. “No, I suppose it’s not.” She swallowed hard, then dashed the back of her hand across her eyes. “Is it good up there? Are you happy?”

“Sometimes,” Steve said. “Sometimes not. But that’s just life.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “That’s life.” Her gaze searched his, looking for something; Steve didn’t know what it was. Then she stepped forward and hugged him, her grip as hard and desperate as Howard’s had been.

Steve returned the embrace, pressing his cheek to the side of her head, memorizing the texture of her curls, the scent of her perfume, the muscle in arms and shoulders. For a moment Peggy clung the same way Howard had, then she released him, tears running down her cheeks. She wiped at them with the back of her hand, looking up at him, and said quietly, “I will always love you.”

She reached into the pocket of her jacket, fumbling for a moment before she found what she was looking for, and reached out to take his hand, folding his fingers around something small and hard.

Steve turned his palm over as she released him. It was his compass.

“Don’t forget where you came from,” Peggy said. She wiped at her eyes again, then said, “Bye, my darling.”

Then she turned and walked away.

Steve stayed where he was, feeling tears stream down his cheeks. He didn’t move until Natasha came over to him. He put his arms out to her without thinking and she came into them, leaning her head briefly against his shoulder before she stepped back and looked at him, her expression searching. Steve didn’t say anything and eventually she nodded, folding her left hand into his right hand; he still had his compass clutched tight in his other hand, the metal cutting into his palm, pressing against his wedding ring. They went handfast like children back to the Sorcerer Supreme, who stood in front of the glittering green expanse of the window, the Time Stone glowing at her breast. His team was waiting beyond it, half a foot and seventy-three years away.

“We’re ready,” Steve said.

The Sorcerer Supreme nodded and turned to the window. There was another sorcerer on the other side, a man Steve vaguely recognized from the shaky cellphone footage that had come out of the fight in New York. The two magicians’ hands moved in unison, tracing intricate symbols that sparked gold on the other side and green here, the Infinity Stone brightening until it almost eclipsed the woman wearing it. Blue energy swam up out of the assortment of Hydra weapons in the lab, swirling around them and making Steve’s skin prickle. He clenched his back teeth against the urge to turn and run in the face of all that awful power, feeling Natasha’s grip tighten on his.

The Space Stone’s energy fed into the glittering green mandalas of the Time Stone as the window enlarged with storm cloud flickers at its edges, just like the portal Thanos had used in Wakanda. All they had to do was walk through it and they would be home.

For one horrifying moment, Steve didn’t know if he could do it.

Then he let his breath out slowly and stepped forward with Natasha, feeling energy wash across his skin as he did so. There was a sensation like falling, like the effortless drop of the Valkyrie when he had driven it into the ocean, and his stomach turned over before his next step fell on solid ground.

Bucky had his arms around him even before Steve could draw in a breath, his grip hard enough to hurt as he expertly avoided the shield on Steve’s back. Steve released Natasha to return the embrace as Bucky said in his ear, “You son of a bitch, I thought you were dead.”

“Not yet,” Steve said, drawing back but keeping a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. They both turned to look at the window, at the SSR and the Howling Commandos and the lives they had left behind on the other side. Peggy was weeping, standing shoulder to shoulder with Howard and Dum-Dum, and when she saw them looking she touched her fingers to her lips and raised them in a farewell.

I’m sorry, Steve mouthed silently; he knew they couldn’t hear him. Goodbye.

If Bucky said anything, he didn’t know.

There was a flare of greenish energy that was flecked with blue, and then the window was gone. Steve staggered a little, the sense of loss almost too much to bear, and Bucky and Sam both caught him to steady him.

“We got you,” Sam told him, moving his hand from Steve’s bad shoulder to his upper arm when he winced. “Is this – are you hurt?”

“I got shot a couple of days ago, it’s fine,” Steve said, which made Sam say, “You got what? In 1945? By who? The Nazis?”

“The Soviets,” Steve said. He let go of Bucky to hug Sam too, then Rhodey, Clint, and Bruce. Thor bowled them all aside to seize him in a hard embrace, pressing a hand briefly to the back of Steve’s head before he reached out to draw Natasha into the hug. He was shaking a little as he did so, like he couldn’t believe that he had gotten them back.

“We’re okay,” Natasha told him, smiling up at him. “We’re both okay.”

When Thor released him, Steve turned to look at Tony, who was sitting heavily in a wheelchair and watching him. He pushed himself upright to face Steve, ignoring Pepper’s attempt to help him, and said, “I guess the old man got the last word after all.”

Steve swallowed. “Are you okay?”

“I got stabbed in the gut and spent three weeks dying in space, happens to the best of us,” Tony said. “On the other hand, I kind of wish Thanos had stabbed out my eyes, because I might never recover from the trauma of seeing what I just saw.”

Steve flushed. “Tony…”

“Only knew him when he was young and single, huh?” Tony said dryly. He shut his eyes briefly, frowning, then nodded – apparently to himself – and looked up again before he put his hand out to Steve. His voice was a little stiff, but he didn’t hesitate as he said, “Welcome home.”

Steve took his hand; Tony’s grip was warm and dry and weaker than normal. “It’s good to see you too,” he said. “We thought you were dead.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Tony said. He released Steve as Natasha came up on Steve’s other side, flanked by Yelena and Clint, and offered her his hand too. Natasha took it, then hugged him when he didn’t pull away.

“All right,” Steve said, looking around the room and marking the empty places where the other members of his team should have been with a little shudder of ill-feeling. He didn’t know the blonde woman in the blue-and-red suit with its golden starburst or the round-faced sorcerer in his blood-colored robes, but he recognized the talking raccoon who had come to Wakanda with Thor; all three of the strangers had hung back from the reunion. “What did we miss? What happened in Wakanda?”