Of Home Near

Now
May 2018

The other inhabitants of the compound, minus the aliens, wandered into the conference room to watch Steve laying out piles of cardboard file folders and loose paper, pulling them from the boxes he, Bucky, and Sam had stacked along one wall of the room. He was doing it to get things sorted out in his own head, not with the intention of making any kind of presentation, but it was obvious from the way that the Avengers were gathering that they expected one. Steve ignored them as best he could, though he was aware of Tony coming in with Rhodey, leaning heavily on the wall as Rhodey hovered near him, ready to grab him if he fell. After a few moments he grabbed the nearest chair and sat down heavily; it might have been random except that the stack of files nearest him all had Howard Stark’s signature scrawled across the front. He touched the topmost file warily, like he was afraid that it might bite, then snuck a glance at Steve to see if he had noticed.

Steve had, but he didn’t bother to look back at him. He put down the last sheet of typewritten paper, yellowed a little from time, and braced his hands on either side of it, feeling like he was trying to put two and three together with the intention of getting six. There was a way to do it, but it wasn’t the first option that came to mind.

Natasha put a hand on his shoulder and Steve turned his head a little to look at her, not saying anything. Her gaze went to the paper in front of him, which had Colonel Phillips’ signature on it but seemed to be a draft, since several lines had been crossed out in pencil. Steve watched her mouth tighten a little as she read it.

“So?” Tony said. “Any of this solve the great mystery?”

Steve raised his gaze to him and Tony snatched his hand back from the file folder like he had been scalded, then seemed to realize that he had done so and put his hand down flat on top of it again. Steve felt a muscle jump in his jaw, but kept his voice calm as he said, “Yeah, I think I know what happened, or the part of it that the SSR handled, anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Bruce asked, looking up from the notebook he had been leafing through. Steve had brought it in, but left it in the boxes with his and Natasha’s gear, since it mostly consisted of Howard’s notes on some of Hydra’s equipment rather than anything relevant. “Wouldn’t it have just been the SSR?”

Steve let his breath out slowly, then pulled out the nearest chair and sat down in it, rubbing a hand over his face. “The OSS – the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s great-granddaddy – took over the investigation into Lorraine in April, right after we left,” he said, feeling exhausted. The SSR’s relationship with the OSS had been functional, but they had never really had all that much to do with each other.

“Lorraine?” Thor asked, confused. He had been leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, watching Steve with his concern in his storm cloud eyes.

“The doll – a Black Widow before the NKVD, the Soviet intelligence service, started using the name – who had been undercover in the SSR,” Natasha explained, after a quick glance at Steve to see if he had explained Irina Larionova to all of the Avengers or just to Sam, Clint, and Bucky. She gave a brief rundown of events as Steve propped an elbow on the table and rubbed at his forehead, feeling old and exhausted. She finished by saying, “I’m not sure about the CIA’s records from back then –”

“Langley,” Clint provided, throwing himself into a chair next to Natasha and stretching with his arms out over his head, his fingers locked together. “Their security is going to be shit right now, everyone’s is. They’re probably not digitized either, right?”

Steve looked at Natasha, who shrugged.

“The stuff from the war isn’t digitized,” Bucky said. “And the records are really easy to get into – I mean, for someone like us.” When they looked at him, he added, “What? I had stuff I needed to know.”

Rhodey pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “I don’t – why do you people turn to crime as your first option for everything? This is why –”

Steve and Sam both looked pointedly at him. “I don’t think the CIA is going to take my calls,” Steve said.

“Or they’d take them, but they’d show up to collect personally,” Sam said.

“Not the CIA,” Clint said, pedantic. “They don’t have jurisdiction inside the U.S. They’d have to pass that tip on to the FBI or probably directly to Ross now that SHIELD’s out of the picture. He’s been calling, by the way.”

Steve exchanged a look with Natasha and said, “Great.”

“What’s he want, anyway?” Tony asked, frowning. “What exactly does he think we’re supposed to do about all this?”

“I don’t think he knows,” Sam said.

Steve hesitated, then asked, “Has he said anything – done anything – about –” He let his gaze flicker across Sam, Bucky, and Clint.

Rhodey shook his head.

Clint said, “He knows we’re here. Hasn’t done anything about it. The president – the new president, Reiko Korematsu, the Speaker of the House before the Snap – has been pretty outspoken about the Accords and you for the past couple years, so he might not want to piss her off. She also dumped half the former guy’s cabinet – half of what was left, it’s basically just Ross and the SecDef now – you know, the only two competent ones there.”

“‘Competent’ might be pushing it,” Tony muttered.

Rhodey made a pained expression that wasn’t quite agreement, but didn’t go so far as to say it out loud. Steve guessed that Ross had never gone through on that court-martial he had promised.

“He hasn’t been by,” Bruce said, his voice carefully neutral but his mouth tight. He shot a hard look at Rhodey that Steve couldn’t interpret. “I guess things are pretty bad up on the Hill and he figures we’re not going to do any harm, so he’s been leaving us alone except for the phone calls.” His gaze flickered to Tony, then Steve, and he added, “I think losing our heavy hitters shook him.”

Sam bit the inside of his cheek but pointedly didn’t say anything, just sat down and set his coffee cup carefully to one side, away from the nearest papers.

Steve rubbed at his forehead again, then forced himself to say, “Let’s save breaking into the CIA for Plan B.” He moved Phillips’ letter draft – an official complaint to General Eisenhower about the OSS’s interference – and touched the transport order beneath it. “While the OSS was picking up after Lorraine, Phillips took Peggy, Howard, and the Howlies back to Austria to keep chasing Hydra holdouts.”

“Why Howard?” Natasha asked. “He was in London when we got there.”

“I have no idea,” Steve admitted. “Maybe Phillips just didn’t want to leave him to the OSS. Or maybe –” He hesitated, trying to figure out a way to say that maybe Howard couldn’t be in London for what the Sorcerer Supreme had done to work, but he wasn’t entirely sure of that himself.

“I thought Dad was in Los Alamos then,” Tony said. “You know, with Oppenheimer and the rest of the guys working on the Manhattan Project.”

Steve bit his lip.

“Oh, Jesus,” Tony said. “He worked on the bomb, right? Everyone knows he worked on the bomb.”

“He was in Europe that whole summer, in the field with the SSR’s forward command staff,” Steve said slowly. “From what we’ve found, none of them went back to London until after V-J Day, including Howard. ”

Sam sat back in his chair, tapping his fingers against the dining table. “If Howard Stark was supposed to have worked on the Manhattan Project, but everything here says that he was in Europe the summer of 1945, then couldn’t that be something that changed? I don’t know that much about it, but would Howard Stark being there have made any difference? I mean – everything still happened, none of that changed.”

Steve frowned. “I don’t know for sure – I didn’t ask him – but I don’t think he had time to work on the atomic bomb during the war. Maybe he consulted on it by mail, but I don’t think he ever went out there. He was only back in the States a couple times after I joined the SSR in ’43 and one of those times I was with him; it was a fundraising gala in Washington in ’44. But he spent the whole war working for the SSR, even before there was an SSR, back when it was still part of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.”

“That’s where the Manhattan Project started,” Bruce said, straightening. “I took a class on it in grad school – it’s where Betty and I met; Ethics and History of Science or something like that.”

Clint frowned at him. “Did you pay attention during it?”

“Hey, I experimented on myself, not anyone else,” Bruce said defensively. “Which is a lot better than anyone else paid by the U.S. government has ever managed.”

Bucky gave Steve a pointed look. “He might be onto something there.”

“I volunteered,” Steve said defensively.

“That doesn’t make it better.”

Steve elbowed him familiarly, then looked back at Bruce, gesturing him to go on.

Bruce frowned, shooting a last glare at Clint as he collected his thoughts. After a moment, he said, “President Roosevelt started the, uh, Uranium Committee in 1940, which turned into the National Defense Research Committee a year later, before the U.S. joined World War Two – and Howard Stark was a founding member. I remember, it was a quiz question. When Roosevelt founded the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the NDRC got absorbed, and they started seriously working on the atomic bomb after Pearl Harbor – the S-1 Section, it only picked up the name ‘Manhattan’ later.”

“The SSR started as the S-2 Section in the OSRD,” Steve said. “Howard was with it before Phillips or Peggy came in, but I don’t know that much about anything before that.” The corner of his mouth crooked up. “For a while in ’42 and ‘43 they – S-1, the Manhattan Project, or part of it, anyway – they were working out of Manhattan and the SSR was working out of Brooklyn. Howard said he got a kick out of Senator Brandt running around between them, but I don’t know that he ever went over there himself. It was mostly before I joined the division, though, I don’t know any details.”

Tony made an inarticulate gesture with one hand, grinding his teeth so hard that Steve could hear them, and finally said, “Is there literally anything that man said that was true? Literally anything? One thing?”

Natasha glanced at Steve and he made a slight gesture in response, a quick I’ll tell you later that got a nod from her.

“I don’t –” Steve said, and then had to stop, thinking. “I don’t know what he told you,” he said finally. “Since before today we’ve had a grand total of three conversations where Howard even came up, and the last time wasn’t exactly a conversation.”

Tony blinked once, his lips parting slightly, and Bucky glanced aside. Rhodey looked mildly horrified, which Steve took to mean that Tony had told him some version of what had happened in Siberia.

After a moment, Tony said, “That’s dirty pool, Rogers.”

“That one’s the truth,” Steve said. “From me, anyway.”

Tony blinked again, then looked at Natasha, who raised her eyebrows in response. “You met him,” Tony said. “What – what was he like?”

“I liked him,” she said after a moment of hesitation. “He was a good friend. He – believed in what he was doing.”

A muscle jumped in Tony’s jaw. “Yeah, I guess he did,” he said. “A little too much, hmm?”

Steve rubbed his hands over his face, thinking a little longingly about going out onto the lawn and spending a few minutes screaming. Only it would probably scare the aliens camped out there.

“Tony…” Rhodey murmured.

“No, I mean, I’m the one who just found out that Dad was a compulsive liar, so I think that I –”

Steve got up and walked out of the room. In Tony’s place he probably would have felt the same way; a couple years ago he might have tried to placate him, even assuming the conversation had gotten this far in the first place, which Steve wouldn’t have bet on back then. Right now he didn’t have the patience for it, not after the way the rest of the morning had gone, not with the memory still so fresh that he ached with it. They had all been alive yesterday.

He heard several people get up, presumably with the intent to come after him; from the sound of it, it was Bucky, Sam, and Rhodey. To his surprise, it was Thor who said, “Let him be,” and his heavy step that followed Steve outside. He leaned against one of the decorative pillars outside the building’s front entrance while Steve paced restlessly back and forth along the portico, his hands linked together across the back of his head.

From this side of the compound they couldn’t see the Benatar and its current occupants, which might have made everything feel a little more normal except for the eerie quiet of the surrounding woods. It wasn’t totally silent, but it wasn’t as loud as a normal spring day should have been, either. Even the humidity in the air felt off somehow, though it was impossible to tell if that was just because this time yesterday Steve had been in London in early April, not upstate New York in May. He hadn’t even had the benefit of intercontinental travel to prepare him for it.

Thor didn’t say anything, just watched Steve with concern in his eyes. When Steve finally came to a stop, he asked, “Were you and Stark’s father lovers?”

Steve shot a glare at him; by his count, it was the sixth time someone had asked him that today and it wasn’t even noon. After a moment, he realized that Thor hadn’t known Howard Stark and had no preconceptions about him except for what he had picked up from Tony or Steve back when they had been at the tower, which probably wasn’t much, given that both Steve and Tony had avoided ever talking about him. As far as Steve knew, the Asgardians didn’t have any hang-ups about same-sex relationships, either. The question was just for Steve.

“No,” he said, taking his hands down and looking at them, turning them back and forth to pick out the familiar lines of callus across the insides of his palms and fingers, the prizefighter’s scarring on his thickened knuckles. Aside from the scars he had had prior to getting the serum, they were the only marks he kept on his skin, apparently as a result of sheer repetition. None of the injuries he had received since he had gotten the serum had scarred. Not in any way that showed, at least.

“No,” Steve said again. “We weren’t. Same as me and Peggy. We might have been, but –” He started to shrug, then winced; his bad shoulder was still sore. It would be gone by tomorrow. “The timing was never right. Which is probably for the best, since I don’t think Tony would ever forgive me otherwise.” He tried to smile and couldn’t quite manage it.

Howard was dead, and Peggy was dead, and the Howlies were all dead, and all the might-have-beens that had still been could-bes yesterday were ash.

Suddenly exhausted, Steve glanced around, found the bench he remembered being out here, and went to sit down, resting his elbows on his knees as he put his head in his hands. Thor came and sat down on the other side of the bench, not touching him but close enough that Steve could lean against him if he needed to.

“When I woke up,” Steve said finally, “I spent years wishing that I was back there. I would have done anything to go back if someone had offered it to me. And then – I was there, and I’d have done anything to come back here. And now I am, and – and it’s not that I want to go back.” He hesitated, then confessed, “I mean, I do, part of me always will, but I…can’t. I’m not willing to be the guy who could go back, not anymore.” He looked at his hands again and added, “Sometimes I wish I was.”

He scrubbed his hands over his face, still not looking at Thor, and said, “I don’t know why Howard did anything he did. In the thirties, yeah, and during the war, I can guess because I know what it was like then, but not afterwards. I wasn’t – I wasn’t there. And I sure as hell don’t know why he didn’t tell Tony any of it.”

They were both quiet for a few moments, then Thor said, “I was on Earth when my brother went mad.”

Steve glanced up at him, surprised. Thor wasn’t looking at him, his gaze fixed on the edge of the tree line across the wide stretch of lawn. He didn’t talk about Loki often, probably because he was aware of how uncomfortable it made the rest of the Avengers, but Steve remembered only too well his overwhelming grief after he had come back from Asgard. He hadn’t said much then, just that Loki was dead, along with their mother. Steve hadn’t had to ask to know that whatever had happened had been bad.

“What happened?” Steve said when Thor didn’t go on.

Thor shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t there and after – either no one knew or no one was willing to tell me. And now my brother is dead, and my father, and my mother, and my friends, and all the line of my people back to the dawn of the universe.” He looked down at his hands, which were as battered as Steve’s own, the sign of someone who made their living with violence.

“I’m sorry about Loki,” Steve said quietly.

Thor’s gaze flickered towards him, like he was trying to judge whether the words had been meant seriously or only out of politeness, then he nodded. “It’s not a fair comparison,” he apologized.

Steve wondered if from Thor’s perspective, it wasn’t fair to compare Tony’s father to the alien who had tried to take over the world, or if it wasn’t fair to compare a god and his brother to a human. Both at once, maybe. Steve wasn’t sure himself. “It’s okay,” he said.

“What happened to Stark’s father?” Thor asked eventually. “To your friend? I know he’s dead now, but it doesn’t seem like it’s only that he died while you were – when you weren’t here.”

Steve shook his head. He ran his fingers back over his cropped hair, biting his lip, then said, “Howard was assassinated by Hydra. It was, um, almost thirty years ago now; Tony was twenty, twenty-one, something like that. It was a long time before I came out of the ice. I found out when Nat and I were on the run from SHIELD four years ago; it had been covered up with a car crash. Howard’s wife, Tony’s mom, was killed too.” He looked down at his hands again, flexing his fingers. “I never told Tony; I didn’t think there was any point. And god knows that he's never wanted to talk to me about Howard anyway.”

“But?” Thor prompted.

“I don’t know how much anyone’s told you about the Sokovia Accords,” Steve said slowly. “What happened two years ago.”

“I’ve heard some,” Thor said. “You and Tony broke over them.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “There was a guy, a Sokovian; he’d lost his whole family to Ultron and blamed us for it. He got Tony and Bucky and me up in this old Hydra facility in Siberia and –” He stared out at the tree line. “He had security camera footage of Howard and Mrs. Stark, the night they died. That’s how Tony found out, not from me telling him.”

“And Tony blamed you for his father’s death?” Thor asked, sounding mildly bewildered.

“No,” Steve said, and shut his eyes. “He blamed me for not telling him it was the Winter Soldier who did it.”

Thor was quiet, taking that in; Steve had told him about Bucky a few years ago. “And?” he said eventually.

Steve glanced aside. “And then he tried to kill Bucky, I tried to stop him, he tried to kill me, and I stopped him. And until we got back yesterday that was the last time we talked.”

“Ah,” Thor said.

“I didn’t tell Howard either,” Steve said, rubbing his thumb over the line of callus across the inside of his palm, formed by years of catching his shield over and over again. “Maybe I should have. I still don’t know. Even if it wouldn’t have made a difference, maybe – I don’t know.” He shook his head, feeling bleak, and said, “But he’s dead, and he was alive yesterday, and he’s been dead since 1991, and he was my friend, and Tony still hates him. And I’ll never see him again. I’ll never see any of them again.”

He put his head back down into his hands, his tears running between his fingers and dripping onto the concrete between his feet. Thor put a hand on his back, and after a moment of resistance Steve leaned against him and cried.

There was a horrified, awkward silence after Steve walked out and Thor went after him. From Steve’s increasingly strained expression, Natasha guessed that he had been fielding ribbing about Howard all morning. She wasn’t sure how many people even amongst the Avengers had known that Steve was bisexual; it wasn’t so much that he had been in the closet as that he had been utterly uninterested in going out with anyone, male or female. Except her, apparently, but he had also been completely unwilling to let anyone else know about that, including Natasha herself.

What she was positive about was that until last night, no one had known that Howard was bi, let alone in love with Steve. Given what Tony had just said she was guessing that Steve had also told him a lot more about Howard Stark than just his sexuality. Neither of them looked like they’d been punching each other in the face, so at least they had been on their best behavior about it, a state that clearly hadn’t lasted.

Tony was staring after Steve in open-mouthed astonishment. He said, “He’s my dad,” like he couldn’t quite believe he had to say it.

“He was Stark’s best friend,” Bucky said.

Tony shot a glare at him. “You don’t get to talk about him.”

Bucky flinched a little, as if he had been trying to forget and didn’t want the reminder. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked aside, his jaw set, unwilling to give ground by retreating now that Steve had already walked out.

Tony’s gaze flickered to Natasha and then away, apparently deciding that he couldn’t count on her to take his side over Steve’s. As far as Natasha was concerned, there weren’t sides at the moment, but the last time she had thought that it had ended badly for everyone involved. There was no one in the room, except maybe Bruce, who didn’t know that.

She tried to catch Tony’s eye, wanting to convey the necessity of not dredging up old wounds when they had bigger problems to deal with, but he wouldn’t look at her. He pushed himself upright, using the edge of the table for support, and as Rhodey leaned over to brace him said, “Come on – I need to move something heavy.”

“What, and you need muscle?” Rhodey said, but he got to his feet anyway, flashing the other occupants of the table an apologetic look. He put a shoulder under Tony’s to help him out of the room.

Bruce waited until they had left before he said, “So things were pretty bad two years ago, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s one way to put it,” Sam said. He rested an elbow on the table and rubbed at his forehead, looking tired. “Well, they haven’t killed each other.”

“Yet,” Clint contributed.

Bruce stared after Tony. Natasha guessed that he’d gotten the cliff notes of what had happened with Helmut Zemo around the Accords, but had no idea what he had actually been told. “I thought they were friends.”

Bucky looked away. Clint and Sam looked at each other, then at Natasha, like she had an answer to that. Yelena said, “You guys are weird.”

“Okay, you got that one,” Clint said.

Bruce shook his head a little and stared back at the dining table, which was covered with little stacks of paper from the boxes Steve and the others had carried in. It was organized – according to Steve and his own idiosyncratic idea of what organization entailed, which the past six years had taught Natasha wasn’t universal. If she couldn’t figure it out, she didn’t think anyone else could, either.

Besides, Steve was the one who wanted to know. They couldn’t do anything until he came back.

One of the pieces of paper was the faked marriage license for Steven Grant Rogers and Natalia Alianovna Romanoff, backdated to the beginning of March 1945. Bruce stared at it, then glanced at Natasha and cleared his throat. When she raised her gaze to his, he said, “Do you, uh – have a minute?”

Don’t, Sam mouthed at him silently, but Bruce didn’t seem to notice.

Natasha sighed silently to herself, because she didn’t particularly want to have this conversation either, but she had known it was coming from the moment Bruce had stepped into Rhodey’s lab in the compound three weeks ago. He had been squirrely around her and Steve since they had arrived last night – around her, at least, and from the tension in Steve’s shoulders when he and Bruce had been in the same room this morning she guessed that extended to him too. On the other hand, every time Steve and Bruce had been in the same room, Tony had been there too, so it might have been Tony’s presence bothering him.

She pushed her chair back, ignoring the hand signal that Yelena gave her below the table where no one else could see it. Sam turned and gave Natasha a meaningful look; she flipped him off in response, angling her body so that Bruce wouldn’t see it.

In 1945 she had always been seen as an accessory to Steve, usually an unwanted one even after most of the SSR had decided that she probably wasn’t a Soviet or Hydra mole. Back in 2018 everyone here knew her for herself, which was mostly a positive, but on the other hand meant that people wanted to talk to her about her, not Steve.

She and Bruce went down the hall to one of the labs, which Natasha guessed he had taken over for his own use, since the equipment there didn’t match up with anything that Rhodey would have used. Tony’s brief attempt at having a full R&D support team in the compound had failed miserably and Pepper had quietly shuffled all of them off to various Stark Industries positions, except for a few like Erik Selvig who had gone back to their previous jobs.

For a few moments they stood staring at each other. Natasha knew that she should say something, since Bruce deserved an apology from her at the very least, but she didn’t even know where to start. Normally she didn’t have to bother with apologizing to people.

Eventually Bruce said, “You, uh – you changed your hair.”

“What?” Natasha said, confused by the non sequitur.

“You were blonde a couple weeks ago,” he explained. “Or, I mean – it was just a couple weeks for you too, right? Steve said it was…”

Natasha put a hand to her hair, self-conscious. “I dyed it back to red so that my roots wouldn’t show in all the propaganda photos they were taking with me and Steve,” she said.

Bruce’s eyebrows went up. “I didn’t think that you cared about that sort of thing.”

Natasha wasn’t sure if he meant her hair or the photographs. “The Captain America propaganda machine was pretty intense back in 1945,” she said.

Bruce’s eyebrows stayed up. “Steve hates doing PR. Or propaganda –”

Steve and the president had clashed over that after the Battle of New York, Natasha remembered, during the upswell of patriotism that had followed an alien invasion on American soil. Back then Steve had still been pretty miserable and had wanted nothing more than to be left alone, not to be paraded around as a symbol of American ingenuity; Nick Fury had eventually had to step in. Natasha had been vaguely aware that the Army had been trying to get Steve back – probably Thaddeus Ross himself, in retrospect – but Fury had been able to keep them from doing so and Steve had remained seconded to SHIELD. She had no idea how much Steve knew about that.

“It was different back then,” Natasha said slowly. “Steve…Captain America had a lot less capital than he does now. If they wanted him to take propaganda photos, he took propaganda photos, and Captain America coming back from the dead with a wife was big news for them.” She let the corner of her mouth crook upwards and added, “Today he can pretty much tell people to fuck off and they tend to listen, even though he’s at the top of America’s Most Wanted. Back then he was still just a junior military officer. A good one, but not a living legend.”

Bruce’s brows knit as he took that in. Natasha supposed it was odd to think about, especially from the perspective of an American who had grown up with the myth of Captain America, not to mention someone who had been intimately involved in attempts to recreate the super soldier serum.

“How did you get dragged into it?”

“Mrs. Captain America didn’t have the option of being left out of the Captain America propaganda machine,” Natasha said dryly. “Besides, it’s not anything I haven’t done before, though it was framed differently for the Avengers.”

He hesitated briefly before he said, “So it’s – real, you and Steve. Not just made up for the SSR –”

Natasha touched her left thumb to the inside of the rings on that hand and said, “It’s real.”

A muscle in Bruce’s jaw worked briefly and he said, somewhat in apology, “It’s not that I think Steve was lying or anything, just – I guess I needed to hear you say it.”

Natasha looked up at him for a long moment, twisting her rings around her finger and suddenly having a great deal of sympathy for Steve and every conversation he had had with Peggy Carter. “I love him,” she said slowly. “I’m going to marry him.”

Bruce swallowed. “Has that – you’ve – for a while now?”

Natasha mentally filled in the missing verbs, hesitating over a response. She finally said, “It’s not that simple.”

His face did something strange and Natasha looked away before she could stop herself. He waited until she had looked back, only a fraction of a second later, before he said, “Was any of it real? Any of – any of us, I mean.”

If anyone deserved the truth, it was Bruce. Natasha still hesitated before she admitted, “I don’t know. I – I wanted it to be.”

Bruce didn’t answer immediately. Finally, he asked, “Was it the other guy?”

“No,” Natasha said, though she wasn’t entirely sure that was true. She had never quite managed to shake her fear of the Hulk, even while they were fighting together; it was probably one of the reasons she had pushed herself towards Bruce in the first place, because she hated being afraid. But she wasn’t going to tell him that.

“Was it Steve?”

Natasha arched her eyebrows, letting some of her own surprise at the question show. “No.”

“Then what was it?” When she stared at him, he insisted, “Come on, Nat, just – come on.”

“I pushed you off that cliff,” she said slowly.

His jaw worked again. “It was the right thing to do,” he said, equally slow. “Then, anyway. For Sokovia – Ultron –”

“But I did it,” Natasha said. “Not Ultron. I shouldn’t have – taken that choice from you, not after you’d already made it.”

Bruce’s chin dipped slightly. “You wouldn’t have done it to Steve,” he said. His mouth twisted a little, and he added, “You wouldn’t have had to do it to Steve.”

Natasha shook her head. “No, that’s not –” She let the words go and her breath out at the same time, then forced herself to meet Bruce’s eyes. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Steve,” she said. “I did it. Me. I’m not supposed to be the kind of person who does that, not anymore, not to a – a friend. But I did. And I am. And I have to live with that.”

“And I put you in that position,” Bruce said slowly, understanding spreading across his face. “I’m sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I am,” Natasha said. “And I am. Sorry.”

Bruce swallowed. After a moment he nodded and said, “Okay.”

Natahsa pressed her lips together. “Is that it?”

“I don’t –” Bruce said. “I don’t know what else to say.”

“Okay,” she echoed, and they stood staring at each other until Clint rapped on the door and stuck his head into the lab. From the length of the time between her last word and his arrival, Natasha suspected that he had been standing outside in the hallway, waiting for them to finish rather than interrupt. She wondered how much he had overheard.

“Hey,” he said, as casually as if he had just arrived. “Steve and Tony are back and they haven’t killed each other yet, but they probably need a distraction.”

“I need a minute,” Bruce said. “Tell them I’ll be there soon.”

Clint nodded. Natasha hesitated, wanting to say something else so that she didn’t leave him on that, but there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t make this worse.

“I’ll see you in there,” Bruce told her. “It’s okay.”

Clint put an arm around Natasha once they were out of sight of the open door. She tipped her head against his shoulder, feeling suddenly exhausted.

“You okay?” he asked her quietly.

“Sure,” Natasha said, more or less truthfully. If she needed to go punch an alien in the face she could do so. “Are you?”

“No,” he said bluntly. He touched his lips lightly to her hair, then added, “You know Laura always had a thing for Steve, right?”

“She did not,” Natasha said firmly.

“Yeah, she did,” Clint insisted. “There’s a whole shelf of books in the house with titles like From Sea to Shining Sea and Born on the Fourth of July and basically every single lyric in the National Anthem. Well – a thing for Captain America, before he came out of the ice, but she liked him all right after too. Maybe not quite as much as in the abstract since in person Steve’s – uh – crazy.”

Natasha pulled back so that she could look up at him and asked, “Did she blame him for –”

“No,” Clint said before she could finish. “I’m not saying that she probably wouldn’t have appreciated an apology – from him and Tony – but she knows me. She knew me,” he corrected himself, the grief suddenly harsh on his face.

Natasha put a hand on his arm. Clint leaned into it for a moment, then drew back and said softly, “Thor’s got dibs on first shot at killing that son of a bitch, but I’m right after him in line.”

“No argument here,” Natasha said.

Clint glanced back down the hall, apparently to see if Bruce was close enough to overhear – he was still back in his lab – then tried the handle on the nearest door. When it opened, he drew her into the deserted lab and shut the door behind them as the lights flickered on automatically. Natasha settled her shoulders back against the door, looking up at him. “I thought you were worried Steve and Tony were going to kill each other.”

“I’m pretty sure Thor can stop Steve if it gets to that point and Tony’s about to fall over, so they’re probably fine,” Clint said.

Natasha let her breath out, feeling tired. “What is it, then?”

Clint frowned down at her, studying her face with the same careful intensity that he must have used watching her through a sniper’s scope in Paris ten years earlier. “Do you love him?”

“Yes.”

“Do you –” He hesitated, then admitted, “Sorry, I don’t think there’s a good way to ask this, but I remember what happened with Mason and Carter ten years ago, and as far as I know there hasn’t been anyone since. Except Bruce –?” He let the words trail off into a question.

Natasha shrugged, glancing aside. “I don’t date. You know that.”

Clint took a breath, then asked bluntly, “Are you and Steve sleeping together? I know he was in your room last night, but I haven’t seen either of you in two years, not since your little jail-breaking stunt.”

Natasha pressed her lips together, but she knew exactly what he was talking about, and he wasn’t trying to be pushy or nosy or lewd. There was a reason he and Laura had stopped trying to set her up on dates ten years ago. “You know, Yelena asked me a question a lot like that this morning. She didn’t know the details about before, though. I mean – after I left the Red Room, not during, she knows all of that for most of the same reasons.”

Clint winced; he knew it too, or at least her side of it, because he had been the one to debrief her after her defection. “What did you tell her?”

“That I know Steve well enough to know that he would rather be dead than ever put a hand on me I didn’t want him to, and that he knows me well enough to know when I want him to or don’t want him to, even when I’m not sure about it,” Natasha said quietly. “Yeah, Clint, I’m sleeping with him. It hasn’t been going on all that long.”

Clint picked up her left hand, inspecting her rings. “But you’re still going to marry him?”

“I was in love with him for a long time before I slept with him,” Natasha said.

Clint’s gaze lifted to her face as he released her hand and he frowned briefly, clearly startled. “I didn’t know that.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to tell anyone,” Natasha pointed out. “Least of all him.”

“That’s not how – never mind.” His expression was serious as he went on, “I like Steve plenty, and I respect the hell out of the guy, but he’s nuts.”

“You’re the one who fights aliens with a bow and arrow, Hawkeye,” Natasha said dryly.

“Yeah, well, I was in the process of trying to retire from fieldwork when the aliens showed up, and Steve’s never going to retire.”

Natasha met his gaze and said, “Neither am I.”

Clint shut his eyes briefly and said, “Yeah. I know. I just – I don’t want you to get hurt again.”

“Steve knows what I am,” Natasha said slowly. “And I know what he is, too.” She licked her lips before she said, “I try not to want things, especially people, because I’m not the kind of person who gets anything I want. That’s not…that just wasn’t something that was ever going to happen.”

His frown deepened, but it wasn’t anything he had never heard from her before. “But?”

“It’s not actually up to me,” Natasha said, and managed to let the corner of her mouth crook upwards into the hint of a smile. “Or not just up to me, anyway.”

“What changed?”

“Steve told Howard Stark we were married when we landed in the middle of his lab in March 1945,” she said wryly. “He didn’t know what was going on and he didn’t want Howard to split us up. He said Colonel Phillips or Peggy Carter would have done it anyway, but Howard wouldn’t. And he didn’t.”

Clint stared at her, open-mouthed. “In 1945?”

Natasha flushed. “Yes.”

“That was three weeks ago!”

“I know,” Natasha said self-consciously. “I was there!”

“And you’re marrying him?”

“I was living with him for four years before that! And working with him for six,” she added, feeling defensive. She had found out at the SSR that it hadn’t been uncommon for whirlwind romances to develop during the war; the surprise for most people there hadn’t been that Steve had married a woman that he had apparently only known for a few weeks, but that he had thrown over Peggy Carter to do so.

“Jesus,” Clint muttered, rubbing his hands over his face. “Nothing against Steve,” he added, not sounding like he was sure he meant it. “You’re not worried that it’s a little fast?”

Natasha stared at him blankly. It wasn’t a concern that had ever occurred to her. Finally, she said, “I made that decision a long time ago, I just…I never thought it would actually come up. And Steve and I have talked about it.”

Clint took a breath, and then another, clearly trying to figure out the right thing to say in response.

Quietly, Natasha said, “If I get hurt, Clint, and I might, then it will be because of something I chose to do, not something that someone else did to me or something I didn’t have a choice about. Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. But that’s on me.”

Clint stared at her for a long moment, and then said, “Okay. Okay.” He put an arm out to her and Natasha took a step forward into his embrace, leaning her head briefly against his shoulder. It was good to be with him again, the way it had been good to talk with Yelena this morning. She had spent the last three weeks in Steve’s world. It was nice to be back in her own.

Bruce had beaten them back to the conference table. He gave Natasha and Clint an odd look when they came in, but didn’t comment on their tardiness. Steve and Tony were sitting at opposite ends of the table, not looking at each other; Steve was talking quietly to Sam and Tony had one of Pepper’s hands in both of his. The other occupants of the table hadn’t exactly divided into camps, the divisions blurred by the fact that a number of the people present hadn’t been here for the fiasco with the Sokovia Accords, but Natasha could tell the way it was trending.

Steve and Tony had never really gotten along, Natasha knew. They could work together perfectly well as long as there actually was an enemy to fight, but when there wasn’t then things had a tendency to get messy. And that had been before the Accords and Siberia. No one really knew what was going to happen between them now.

She wasn’t the only one who had suspected it before, but right now it had to be painfully obvious to everyone, including Tony, that Steve had liked and gotten along considerably better with Howard Stark than he ever had with Tony. Which was, as it had always been, a significant part of the friction between the two men. Only now everyone knew instead of just suspecting.

Steve’s gaze flickered to her as she and Clint came in. He had been crying again, Natasha saw; the skin around his eyes was red and swollen.

He gave her a quick, questioning glance and she shrugged in response, taking the empty chair next to him. Yelena slid over a seat before Clint could sit next to her and he shrugged, looking a little amused, and took the chair on her other side.

“So do you two actually talk anymore?” Tony asked, frowning and making a vague gesture with one hand. “Or is it just mind to mind communication now? Because this is kind of freaking me out.”

“We talk,” Natasha said.

“I don’t mean dirty talk – ow!” He shot a glare at Pepper, who had just nailed him in the ribs with an elbow. “What was that for?”

“Tony!”

Steve pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. While he was looking down, Natasha glanced across at Sam, who grimaced and spread his hands.

“The National Archives is still closed,” Pepper said. “I couldn’t get through to anyone who would be able to help us, but I’ll try again tomorrow.”

Natasha blinked. “Why the National Archives?”

“They’ve got some of your stuff from back then,” Clint said. “Remember that database problem you had when you joined SHIELD?”

Natasha blinked again, and then said, “Yeah, I – wait, that was me? Even back then?”

“1945 is before 2008,” Sam pointed out.

“Right, but –” She gritted her teeth, touching the engagement ring that Howard Stark had bought for Steve Rogers to give her seventy-three years ago and which had been missing all that time, and added, “I hate time travel.”

“Get in line,” Tony said, and shoved something down the table in their direction. It only made it a third of the way there; Clint picked it up and leaned back to pass it behind Natasha and Yelena to Steve.

“I think I’m at the front of that line, since I actually traveled in time,” Natasha pointed out.

“What is this?” Steve asked, holding up what Tony had given him. Natasha could tell it was brightly colored, but that was about it.

A muscle worked in Tony’s jaw, but all he said was, “It was in with Dad’s stuff from the old days. You know, the stuff Fury handed over back when you were doing your first little double agent act,” he added to Natasha.

“You mean when your arc reactor was killing you?” Pepper said, her voice tight.

“Listen, I had it under control –”

Rhodey made a doubtful sound and Tony said defensively, “Hey, I’m not the one who let my suit get hijacked by a crazy Russian in order to lead a robot army.”

“That’s not –”

Steve glanced at Natasha, ignoring them, and she explained, “Some of Howard’s belongings that Nick dug out of SHIELD storage. What is it?”

He set it down carefully on the table between them. It was a glossy-covered comic book that boldly proclaimed CAPTAIN AMERICA LIVES AGAIN! with a smaller subtitle that read Introducing the beautiful and beguiling…LIBERTY BELLE! The illustration featured Captain America standing on top of a submarine, punching out a Nazi while a redheaded woman whom Natasha assumed was supposed to be her emptied a Thompson submachine gun into several other men in German uniforms. In the background, the wingtip of an airplane protruded from the choppy ocean.

Yelena took one look at it and started laughing.

Natasha elbowed her, flushing, and said to Steve, “When did this happen?”

“I knew Senator Brandt had his guys at Timely working on it, but I didn’t think they’d actually gotten this far,” Steve said, his ears slowly turning red. He flipped through the comic, then stopped, pulling something out from between the pages.

It was a black and white photograph of Steve in his service uniform, sitting on top of several stacked crates with one knee drawn up and his hands clasped around it, looking a little past the camera and his lips parted as if the photographer had captured him mid-speech. The shield was leaning up against the base of the crates.

Steve had been talking to her. The photograph had been taken during the photoshoot Michael Sherman had made Steve, Natasha, and the Howling Commandos do just before they had gone to the Stork Club. Natasha could see how the overhead lights gleamed off the wedding ring on his left hand.

The photograph was battered around the edges and creased, as if it had been folded into a wallet or a notebook, carried around for a long time. Steve’s mouth worked again and he looked for an instant like he was going to cry before he met Tony’s gaze across the table.

Tony didn’t say anything, but a muscle in his jaw twitched. He was the one who looked away first, not Steve.

Bucky slid the comic out from under Steve’s hand and flipped through it quickly to the end, then closed it and studied the cover. “Steve,” he said. When Steve blinked and looked over, he pointed at the publication date.

“It’s the day President Roosevelt died,” he said. “Timely Comics must have delayed the release, or – something, I don’t know. I’ve never heard of this one before. But they had to clear everything with the SSR during the war, just in case they accidentally covered something classified, so Howard must have gotten an early copy.”

“That was the official story, wasn’t it?” Natasha asked him. “That I’d pulled you out of the water. I thought it was a boat, not a sub.”

“That’s not really how comics worked back then,” Steve said. He set the photograph down on the table and rubbed his hands over his face, looking exhausted. “I used to string for the ones in New York sometimes.”

“God, you really were a starving artist,” Tony said, but the words were perfunctory.

Bucky had passed the comic to Sam and seemed to be trying to communicate with Steve with his eyes, but Steve wasn’t looking at him. Natasha nudged his ankle with her foot and when he glanced at her, jerked her chin towards Bucky. Steve looked at him and they stared at each other, apparently communicating in minute eye twitches and slight head-tilts.

“I have a question,” said Yelena, who had been sorting through the stack of documents in front of her while undoubtedly aware of everything else that went on. She held up an artistically-battered tan booklet with a green stripe on the cover and asked, “What is this?”

Steve and Bucky stopped staring at each other or communicating mind to mind or whatever they had been doing to glance at it. They both said, “Nansen passport,” in unison. Steve elaborated, “Refugee identity papers issued by the League of Nations before the war – well, after the First World War. One of the times the League of Nations actually managed to do something useful,” he added, scowling, then explained, “The SSR was trying to backstop Natasha in case any reporter tried to dig into her history.”

Bucky raised his eyebrows. “And they went with ‘stateless’ instead of just faking a birth certificate?”

Steve shrugged. “Russian. No one from the American press was going to be able to look too closely over there. Or at all, never mind closely.”

Natasha took the Nansen passport from Yelena and leafed through it, frowning at her own picture and a signature that was a decent facsimile of hers, but which she didn’t actually remember signing, unlike some of the other documents the SSR had faked up. The text said, in French, D’origine russe, n’ayant acquis autre nationalité. Of Russian origin, not having acquired another nationality.

Bucky’s eyebrows went higher. “They were going to let Captain America marry a stateless Russian refugee?”

“Well, if she was a White Russian, then she wasn’t going to be a communist,” Steve pointed out. “And that would have been a problem; they could spin the refugee part, especially once the war ended.”

“A what?” Tony said blankly.

“Anyone who left when the Bolsheviks took over,” Steve said.

“No one asked me how I felt about this,” Natasha said dryly. She didn’t have strong feelings about it either way since her ties to both Russia and the Soviet Union had always been fairly weak; national pride hadn’t been something the Red Room had been interested in instilling. Not Dreykov’s Red Room, anyway. From the SSR’s perspective, making her a Russian émigré whose family had fled the new Soviet Union made sense, since it would account for the holes in her background, but she would have preferred if they had at least told her first.

Rhodey was frowning. “Was the Red Scare even a thing then?” he said doubtfully. “I thought that was the fifties –”

“Well, I missed it,” Steve said. “But communists weren’t exactly popular before, either.” He flicked a glance at Bucky, who shrugged back at him. Natasha guessed that one or both of them had been registered members of the American Communist Party before the war, or at least sympathetic to it. Probably Bucky; if it had been Steve it would have come up in the decades of scholarly research on Captain America and to the best of her knowledge it never had.

“There’s this one too.” Yelena held up another passport, this one with a green cover but the familiar American eagle on it, and a folded piece of paper that turned out to be a naturalization certificate, not too dissimilar from Natasha’s real one except for the date.

Natasha took both from her and checked the dates, then said to Steve, “Apparently I only got citizenship after we got married,” and passed both passports and the certificate to him. The name on the inside of the American passport and on the certificate was Rogers, not Romanova like the Nansen passport.

Steve inspected the documents and said, “I know the SSR was talking about doing them up, but I thought they hadn’t gotten around to it yet, since they were still doing prep for the Berlin operation.”

He laid the papers back down on the table as Rhodey asked, sounding confused, “Berlin op?”

“They were going to parachute us – me, Nat, Peggy, and the Howlies – into Berlin to kidnap Hitler,” Steve said. “Only I got kidnapped by the Winter Guard first.”

Everyone at the table stared at him. Bucky just asked, “Why was Carter going?”

Stev’s mouth twisted a little, but all he said was, “We needed another German speaker.”

“Kidnap Hitl – would that have worked?” Rhodey asked.

Steve shrugged. “The Führerbunker can’t be harder to get into than the Raft; it’s not even in the middle of the ocean.”

“Okay, that one was a low blow,” Tony said.

Steve’s jaw worked silently; Natasha guessed that he had thought of a sarcastic response and bitten it back as inappropriate under the circumstances. From Tony’s expression, he guessed it too. She wasn’t entirely certain how many times Tony had seen Steve actually lose his temper, but it couldn’t have been all that often. On the other hand, once was enough, and she had been there the first time all those years ago. Tony watched Steve with sudden wariness, as if he had just remembered that Steve had, in fact, beat the shit out of him two years earlier and presumably was fully willing to do it again if the circumstances called for it.

But all Steve did was slouch back in his seat, propping an elbow on the arm of his chair and his chin on his fist. His gaze was bleak as he stared out across the stacks of papers on the table, the detritus of the world he had lost twice over, and for a moment he seemed to have forgotten that Tony existed.

Bucky nudged him and Steve glanced at him, visibly remembered what they were all doing here, and straightened up. His big hands with their thickened fighter’s knuckles and long artist’s fingers straightened the nearest pile of weathered documents, lingering briefly on the faded ink of a signature.

“We didn’t find any of the documents from the OSS investigation into Irina Larionova and the other matryoshki,” he said. “The CIA probably has them, if anyone does. I can’t tell if it had anything to do with what happened to the SSR after the war or if that was just normal post-war restructuring, like what happened to the OSS and SIS. The OSS officer that ran the investigation, Roger Dooley, ended up in charge of the New York SSR station after the war.

“While OSS was running that investigation, the SSR command staff – Phillips, Peggy, Howard – all went to the continent, along with most of their staff and the SSR strike teams, including the Howling Commandos. They were there through the rest of spring and all of summer; they were in Germany on V-J Day, but it looks like they were transferred back to London pretty much immediately. Then they just packed headquarters up and sent everyone home as soon as the ink was dry on the surrender papers.”

“When was V-J Day?” Bruce asked, frowning. “That’s – Victory over Japan Day, right? End of the war?”

“August 15, 1945,” Steve said. His fingers flexed and he put the paper he was holding down carefully, as if to keep from creasing it. “Official surrender was in September. V-E Day is May 8. They were in Austria then.”

It was his war, Natasha remembered, watching him. He had deserved to see it end, not just read about it on Wikipedia seventy years later.

“And – what?” Tony said warily. “What about you and Romanoff?”

Steve’s gaze lifted to him. His eyes were bleak, looking somewhere else, seeing someone else. Maybe it was Howard, but Natasha thought it was more likely that he was thinking about that last view he had of the lab the previous evening, all of the people whom he had loved and lost and would never see again except in photographs.

After a moment he blinked and looked back down at the typewritten papers stacked in front of him, straightening them carefully. From where she was sitting, Natasha couldn’t read them, but she recognized the signature on the top page as belonging to Chester Phillips. Steve’s mouth worked silently; he had to lick his lips before he finally said, “I think they really did just forget.”

Rhodey frowned. “How can you tell?”

Steve looked like he was going to cry. Sam glanced at him, concern in his eyes as he gauged Steve’s inability to speak without weeping, and said, “It’s hard to tell because we don’t have the OSS files, but it looks like everything that happened with Steve and Nat just got muddled up when they took over the Larionova investigation. Phillips and Stark – Howard Stark – were pretty circumspect about what they actually wrote down. If no one in the SSR talked, then from all the documents we found, the OSS team just assumed that it all happened before Steve went missing in February.”

“Dad wouldn’t forget,” Tony said. “He was crazy about –” His gaze flickered to Steve, then away; Steve didn’t look at him, but his gaze was fixed on the photograph on the table in front of him. Tony’s jaw worked briefly, then he said again, “Dad wouldn’t just forget.”

“The SSR European command staff were on the continent then –” Sam began.

“Yeah, we covered that part already,” Tony said shortly. “So what? How do you know that they – what, forgot? Just let it go? Dad never let anything go in his life. Or maybe this is the thing that made him crazy, did you ever think about that?”

A muscle in Steve’s jaw twitched and Natasha knew that he had thought about it. Had probably been thinking it since the Sorcerer Supreme had first told them what she was going to do.

Bucky’s gaze flickered between the two men. He was obviously aware that hearing about Howard Stark from him was the last thing that Tony wanted but equally cognizant of the fact that he was one of the only people in the room who had actually seen Howard and Steve interact in person. Tony’s gaze slashed sideways towards him, then back to Steve, and Bucky bit his lip rather than speak.

Natasha said, “Everyone at the SSR was pretty clear about Howard Stark being crazy about Steve for a long time before he got magicked over it. It was the worst-kept secret there.”

Tony shot her a betrayed look, but his gaze flickered quickly sideways to Bucky as if to confirm, and Bucky nodded once. Steve didn’t look at any of them, though his fingers brushed the stack of papers in front of them again. After a moment he scrubbed his other hand hard beneath his eyes and turned to Bruce, who tensed at the sudden attention. From his wary expression, Natasha suspected that he was still half-thinking about her, rather than about magic or whether Steve and Tony were about to kill each other right here and now. She was also certain that if jealousy had ever crossed Steve’s mind, it had been three years ago, not now.

Steve’s voice was thick as he said, “The Sorcerer Supreme said that when we got there, there were a lot of possibilities for what could happen, but the longer we stayed the fewer there were until there was just one future, something that had to happen because from our perspective – now, in 2018 – it had already happened. But after it happened or we did something or who knows what, a bunch of possibilities began to open up again and there was no way forward that would lead to the future that actually existed, our future. So she had to take us out of 1945 and then wipe everyone’s memory because remembering would change things. Howard said that if she didn’t do that, then the universe might collapse.” A muscle in his jaw twitched and he added, “And it was Howard and he was talking about me, so…he wouldn’t screw around with that.”

“Temporal paradox,” Bruce said, his shoulders relaxing a little when he realized he was being confronted with quantum physics rather than a jealous husband. “It’s theoretical, I mean, time travel wasn’t real until…yesterday. But how would she – I mean – how would anyone know that? Magic?” He looked dubious.

“It’s the Time Stone,” Tony said. “The wizard – Strange – did the same thing on Titan before the big guy showed up.” He shook his head, his jaw tight. “Said he looked into all the possible futures and saw exactly one that turned out. Of course, half of everyone’s dead, so his ‘this was the only way’ crystal ball didn’t really work. And he handed the Stone over. So, you know. Maybe the Wicked Witch of the West was better at it.”

Bruce shook his head and muttered, “I’m really starting to hate those things.”

“Were they right?” Steve asked, addressing the question to Bruce. “Was it the only way?”

“I –” Bruce began, then hesitated, biting his lip. “It’s just theoretical,” he repeated finally. “What do you think had to happen while you were there? That one consistent thing that she had to let happen.”

Steve exchanged a look with Natasha, who said, “We think that the Winter Guard and the matryoshki passed a sample of Steve’s blood on to the Soviet embassy.”

Bruce frowned. “I thought there were a lot of blood samples – I mean, back then, not now; there hasn’t been a confirmed Captain America blood sample for more than sixty years. All of the serums that anyone’s worked on for the last three-quarters of a century have come from your blood, both here and overseas. They’ve just gotten more and more degraded over time, so anyone working with on the serum is working with degraded serums derived from degraded blood samples. We know the Soviets got samples of those a couple times over the years, but it’s never really gone anywhere, has it?”

“Alexei?” Yelena said, looking at Natasha. “Did Dreykov steal that too?”

“Who?” Tony asked. “What?”

“Our father,” Yelena said. “The Red Guardian.”

“Alexei Shostakov, Soviet Union’s only successful super soldier,” Natasha said. “It’s the only serum they ever made that worked, and it was derived from a sample of Captain America’s blood that was lost for years before General Dreykov found it in the seventies.”

“Wait, you really have a dad?” Tony said. “Little sis wasn’t just saying that earlier?”

Natasha had no idea what Yelena had been saying to Tony before her arrival. “We’re not biologically related.”

“The Red Guardian’s real?” Bruce demanded. “I thought that was just a Cold War myth, like the Ant-Man –”

“Yeah, he’s real too,” Clint said.

“What?” Bruce said, baffled. “I know there’s supposed to be an Ant-Man now, but those stories go all the way back to the Cold War –”

“Different guy. You missed a lot, buddy.”

“Ant-Man?” Thor said, sounding bemused.

Sam started to explain as Bruce looked helplessly at Steve for confirmation, who nodded with a slight quirk of amusement to his lips, briefly distracted by the digression.

“Wait,” Tony said, “if your dad is the Red Guardian, and he’s real, and you’re with Rogers, does that mean that thing about women liking men who remind them of their fathers is – ow!” He shot a betrayed look at Pepper, who must have kicked him under the table.

Steve’s eyebrows climbed.

Yelena leaned over and whispered in Natasha’s ear in Russian, “I told you so,” which got another raised eyebrow from Steve. Yelena shot him a speculative look, realizing that he had understood the remark; she clearly hadn’t expected him to know Russian.

“All right,” she added in the same language, “maybe he’s at least as smart as Alexei.”

“Spasibo,” Steve said dryly in his Lithuanian-accented Russian. “Flattered to hear it.”

“God, you never lost that accent?” Bucky demanded; his Russian, the Winter Soldier’s Russian, was flawless, with a slightly old-fashioned Moscow accent to the vowels, like some of the older ex-KGB officials Natasha had known.

“Never had to use it enough to bother,” Steve said, still in Russian, blinking once; Natasha realized abruptly that he must not have ever heard Bucky speak Russian before. “And it drove Aleksey Lebedev crazy, so, you know, plus side.”

“Where does Captain America even get that accent?” Yelena demanded.

Steve shrugged. “Brooklyn.”

Yelena gave Natasha a disbelieving look; she shrugged in response.

“What the hell are you guys talking about?” Tony demanded. “Speaking in tongues and all that?”

Steve’s gaze lifted and he said in English, “They’re making fun of my accent.”

“Since when do you speak Russian?”

“Since 1931,” Steve said. “Bruce?”

Bruce blinked and visibly mentally ran back the last few minutes of conversation. “Right,” he said, licking his lips. “You think that the Sorcerer Supreme – Wong called her the Ancient One – was talking about the Soviets getting one of your blood samples, straight from, um, the source?”

“It’s the only thing we could think of,” Steve said. “The only thing with a direct connection to today that could be new from the – the original timeline.” He stumbled over the words, frowning.

“But –” Bruce hesitated before he looked at Natasha. “I thought you said you weren’t biologically related to the Red Guardian.”

“I’m not,” Natasha said. “But I don’t think without Alexei – without Alexei getting the serum – that I end up here. That either of us do,” she added, glancing at Yelena.

Yelena didn’t see anything, but her hand found Natasha’s under the cover of the table.

Bruce massaged the bridge of his nose. “Which means that Thanos did this, Thanos always did this, or – I really, really hate quantum physics, okay?” He looked at Tony.

“Not really my thing either,” Tony said. He stared suspiciously at Steve, his jaw working before he finally said, “What did Dad say about it? We saw his little Etch-a-Sketch through the magic mirror, but it didn’t exactly come with subtitles.”

Steve met his gaze, his fist clenching and unclenching on top of the table, but his voice was steady as he said, “Self-consistency. It always happened, or at least the outcome always happened, because it couldn’t happen otherwise.”

“Novikov, okay,” Bruce said, nodding. “That’s basically what he theorized, short version, time travel can’t occur in any way that would actually alter the past because it would alter the present, it has to occur in such a way that anything it does will lead to the present, which avoids any kind of paradox – wait, was Novikov even born in 1945? Are you telling me that Howard Stark came up with that first?”

“The grandfather paradox was in all the pulp magazines back in the day,” Bucky said dryly. “So I think Amazing Stories had him beat. Maybe not the science part,” he allowed.

“The grandfather paradox and Novikov’s self-consistency principle are two different things,” Rhodey said. When they looked at him, he said, “What? I went to MIT too, you know. And I didn’t skip class.”

“You skipped plenty of class, buddy, I was right there skipping it with you,” Tony said.

Steve ignored them and said, “To be fair, Howard had me and Nat standing in front of him, which made it all a little less theoretical.” He dug the ball of his thumb into the skin of his forehead. “Howard said that, um, space-time is all happening at once, it’s not linear; we just happen to experience it like that, but really everything that’s happening is happening at once. But if Natasha and I weren’t here – here in 2018 – then that creates a hole. And that was the other part of the problem, not just what would happen in 1945 if we stayed. Which is pretty much what the Sorcerer Supreme said too, just in different words.”

Bruce blinked a couple of times, exchanged a look with Tony, and said, “Okay. Uh –”

“It’s what the scholars of my people say as well,” Thor said. “Though in different words.”

Everyone blinked at him and Bruce said, “What?”

“We have the same idea,” Thor said succinctly. “But we speak of Mimameid, the great tree that passes over all the realms.”

“I thought that was Yggdrasil,” Clint said.

“That’s the World Tree,” Thor said. “Mimameid is the Cosmos Tree.”

“Okay, well, that clears it right up.”

“But they were right?” Steve asked stubbornly, ignoring them. “It had to happen? The Sorcerer Supreme, that magic – there was never any – it had to happen?”

Bruce ran his tongue against the inside of his teeth, looking like he wasn’t sure he wanted to commit himself, and then said, “Yeah. It – it had to happen, if that theory’s true. It’s just a theory, it’s not even the most common theory, but – it’s a theory that makes sense. The idea is that time travel is self-correcting, but that doesn’t meant that the universe is self-correcting, we – humans, or – you know what I mean,” he added apologetically to Thor, who waved it off as Bruce went on, “The idea is that we’re part of that, the universe, and sometimes we’re the ones who make those corrections so that we don’t…break the rest of it. It’s not spontaneous self-correction.”

“What?” Clint said, but Natasha didn’t think anyone else heard him. They were all looking at Bruce, trying to sort it through in their own heads.

Steve stared at Bruce for a long moment, then touched his fingers lightly to the nearest paper, like he needed to feel something real, something that Chester Phillips or Peggy Carter or Howard Stark had touched once upon a time, back when they had still remembered that Steve Rogers had returned from beyond an unquiet grave. “Okay,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “Okay. I trust you.”

“Steve –”

“It’s okay,” Steve said, but his eyes were closed. “I trust you. I just – I needed to know. If they all – if it – I just needed to know. That’s all.”

Bruce was starting to look alarmed. “Steve –”

Steve shoved back from the table so violently he knocked his chair over. “I need a minute,” he said, his voice thick.

This time Natasha went after him when he left the room, recognizing the expression of barely comprehending grief on his face. She followed him out into the hallway, where he stood for a few moments looking blank, then he started towards the training rooms. He didn’t look back, but he didn’t stop her either. Natasha followed him into the silent, empty range and shut the door behind her.

Steve stopped in the middle of the floor and put his head into his hands, breathing hard, but he came easily into Natasha’s arms when she put a hand on his back. He was shaking against her, a fine tremor that ran through his whole body as his knees buckled under him and he went to the floor, bringing Natasha down with him. He didn’t say anything, just held onto her like he was drowning, his tears soaking through the thin cotton of her t-shirt.

For a long time all they did was hold each other. Eventually, his voice rough, Steve said, “It was real,” like he was trying to convince himself.

“It was real,” Natasha assured him. “I was there. It was real.” She touched the backs of her knuckles gently to his cheek as he looked up at her, his eyes swollen from weeping; it was obvious that this wasn’t his first time today.

Steve sat back heavily, resting his forearms across the tops of his drawn-up knees. After a moment he wiped at his eyes again. “I don’t know what I expected,” he said wearily. “It’s not like I didn’t know what she – the Sorcerer Supreme, the Ancient One, whatever she’s called – it’s not like I didn’t know what she said. I think I just hoped –” He pressed his lips together, then shrugged helplessly. “I think I just hoped that she was wrong. Except if she had been, then we would already have known years ago; it’s not like everything about me hasn’t already been dragged out a thousand times.”

“Except for the classified parts,” Natasha reminded him. From what she had seen, the classified parts of Captain America’s life comprised about eighty percent of his time in the SSR and about half of what he had done for SHIELD and the Avengers.

“Yeah, except for those. But those aren’t really the parts that matter.” He massaged his forehead with his fingertips and added quietly, “Maybe Tony’s right. Maybe it really did make Howard crazy.”

Natasha shook her head. “He wasn’t crazy,” she said gently. “He just loved you. Everything else, that was just…him. I know enough about Howard Stark at SHIELD and SI to know that, and I don’t have Tony’s blinders about it, either.”

Steve lifted a shoulder in a shrug, his expression uncomfortable. “Yeah, maybe. I told Thor…” He let the words trail off, not bothering to finish the sentence, and Natasha didn’t try to push.

After a moment Steve wiped at his eyes again and said, “In a way it might have been easier if there wasn’t anything left. If she had just – if it was all gone, everything about us, the last three weeks, just…gone. Only it’s not. The pieces are still there, there’s just no way to put them together – no reason to put them together,” he corrected himself. “She took that. From Peggy, Howard, Phillips, all of them – she took it. It was there but they just never saw any of it. And I believe that she had to do it, that it had to be done, but –”

“But she still took it,” Natasha said softly.

He nodded silently. “And now they’re dead,” he said after a moment. “And they’ll never know.” He tried to smile and couldn’t manage it. “Do you think that makes it better or worse?”

They’re dead, Natasha thought, and then with a start, They’re dead.

They were all dead.

They had been dead for years.

The shock of realization wasn’t the same as it had been when Sam and the others had told them about Thanos’s Snap, because that was just war. A war they had lost, but still just war, and war always came with casualties, civilian and otherwise. This was the slow, inexorable march of time, passing in an eyeblink and leaving behind only memory. Howard Stark and Peggy Carter, the Howling Commandos, everyone at the SSR, hadn’t even had that, just the yawning, empty hole of Steve’s original disappearance two months earlier. But for them, that too was just war.

This wasn’t war.

Steve was watching her face. “Yeah,” he said softly.

“How do you not go mad with it?” Natasha asked him.

“Maybe I did,” Steve said, sounding almost matter-of-fact, as if it was something that he had come to terms with a long time ago. “A little, anyway.” After a moment he lifted his gaze enough to meet her eyes and added, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I didn’t actually want anyone else to know what this felt like.”

Natasha let her breath out slowly. “It’s not as though it’s your fault,” she pointed out. “And it’s not the same thing. It wasn’t my world. I was just…visiting.”

“You wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for me,” Steve pointed out.

“That doesn’t make it your fault.” She leaned forward and touched her lips lightly to his, putting one hand on each of his drawn-up knees as she did so. Steve deepened the kiss, covering her hands with his, then tipped his forehead down against hers.

“I know whose fault it is,” Steve said, still close enough to her that she could feel the warmth of his breath against her lips as he spoke. “Not mine, not yours, not even hers – the Sorcerer Supreme’s, I mean.” The corner of his mouth drew up, as if in amusement at the slight absurdity of the woman’s title. Then it was gone again. “But I still wish you didn’t know what this was like.”

Natasha laid her hand alongside his face, her thumb stroking over the sharp edge of one cheekbone, and asked, “What would you have done if I hadn’t been there?”

“I have no idea,” Steve admitted. “I’d like to say I’d have done the same things, but…I don’t know.” He turned his face away from hers, sighing. “They wanted me back, Nat, and almost all I’ve wanted for the past six years was to go back. It would have been really easy to just – to just be the guy they all wanted me to be again. In a way I’d have liked that.”

“No,” Natasha said softly. “You wouldn’t have.”

“Maybe.” He turned his head back and kissed her again. “I wish you didn’t know what this feels like, but I’m glad you were there.”

Natasha kissed him back, then said, “They still had you back. That has to mean something, no matter what happened after that.”

“Does it?”

“Yes,” Natasha said. “It always means something. And you had them back too.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his expression lightened a little. “Yeah, I did. And Bucky, too, he got to see them again. But –” He shook his head before Natasha could do more than draw in her breath to speak. “Does it bother you?”

“A little,” she said slowly, thinking about it. “I knew them. I liked them. Mostly, anyway,” she admitted, and the corner of Steve’s mouth crooked a little, knowing exactly who she meant. Natasha suspected that she would have gotten along considerably better with Peggy Carter if she hadn’t been sleeping with Steve.

She licked her lips and went on, “But I was trained – I was raised – to believe that it was always better to pass unnoticed, with no one knowing you had ever been there. General Dreykov would have given his left arm –” Or the left arms of several of his Widows, more likely, and the rest of them too. “– to be able to wipe people’s memories. Or alter them, whatever happened back there.” Natasha pressed her lips together tightly, wondering what had happened to the NKVD’s records of the operation back at Moscow Center. She had no doubt they existed, or at least that they had existed at one time. Maybe not anymore.

Her pause was significant enough that she felt Steve’s attention intensify as his pale gaze went soft, sincere and more than a little concerned. There was no point in trying to convince him that she had been thinking about anything else, so all she said was, “It makes it easier.”

Steve didn’t try to apologize for her upbringing. He didn’t say anything at all, just kissed her again, light and careful, then took her hand in his and pressed his lips to the base of her palm. Then he got to his feet, her hand still in his; Natasha let him pull her upright.

“I know who did this,” he said, sounding very tired. The weight of all the years he hadn’t lived was in his pale eyes, the weariness of all that he had borne and all he hadn’t. “So let’s go kill the son of a bitch.”

Now
April 1945

Steve is gone.

It was the first coherent thought Peggy had when she woke up to the cold damp chill of a London April. She kept her eyes shut, pressing her face down into her thin pillow as she tried to hold onto the fading shreds of a dream where Steve Rogers was still alive and well. They had captured Schmidt in Austria, maybe, or he had been able to bring the Valkyrie down safely, or he had been able to walk away from the crash – to walk away and come home.

But Peggy Carter had never been the kind of woman who could live in dreams, and eventually she rolled over to stare up at the ceiling. She had spent the night in her rented flat in Marylebone, which she was at so rarely these days that she had been a little concerned that her landlady might have let it out from under her. But it had still been there, and when she had let herself into her boarding house her Mrs. Statham had come out to check on her; Peggy only vaguely remembered sobbingly confiding to her weeks earlier that her young man had been killed in action. It was a common enough story these days and one that most people were sympathetic to.

She had been at the SSR headquarters in Whitehall since she, Colonel Phillips, and the Howling Commandos had come back from the continent, but she hadn’t been able to bear the idea of spending one more night there. Howard had still been stomping around in fury, Colonel Phillips wasn’t much better, and the Commandos had been miserable and obviously feeling useless. The whole atmosphere had been thick with frustration and grief that was still too fresh.

Steve was gone.

There was only so much staring at the ceiling she could do, and eventually Peggy forced herself to get up and get dressed. Part of her wanted to stay in bed and wallow in her misery, but she knew from the few times she had tried it – after her brother had been killed five years ago, and again immediately after Steve – that she would just get bored. Wallowing had never been the sort of thing that appealed to her.

She set water on to boil on the gas ring while she got dressed and did her makeup, wincing around a split lip and a couple of scrapes she couldn’t recall getting. The miserable combination of grief and hard work meant that her memory lately had been a mess, which certainly wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good time, let alone hers. It also made her interminably clumsy, partially because despite how exhausted both grief and hard work left her, she hadn’t been sleeping well.

There was no milk for her tea, but she found a couple of sugar cubes in a twist of waxed paper in her desk drawer, probably left behind the last time she had been here. The tea and the remnants of a packet of rather stale biscuits served for breakfast; assuming she had any appetite, she could eat something more substantial in the SSR’s canteen. Peggy couldn’t find her heavy wool coat either, probably left behind at headquarters, but the leather jacket she usually wore in the field was slung over the back of her desk chair. She put it on while eating the last biscuit, brushed crumbs off the front, and collected her pocketbook and pistol on her way out the door. It wasn’t as though anyone at the SSR would care what she was wearing, as long as she showed up with all the important bits covered.

There was just the slightest hint of spring in the air as she emerged from the boarding house. Despite the fact that the day was overcast, the occasional beam of sunlight made its way out from drifting clouds as she crossed the street and headed towards the nearest Tube station, where the usual crop of overnight shelterers had already cleared out, since the trains had begun running again an hour earlier. Peggy paid her toll and caught the Bakerloo line to Trafalgar Square, rather than change at Baker Street and take the Circle line to Westminster, which would get her closer to headquarters but not by enough to make up for the trouble. When she emerged from the station, the sun had come out properly, and she stood by the entrance looking up and down Cockspur Street, fighting back an odd sense of déjà vu. A moment later she shook her head and went down the street; it wasn’t as though she wasn’t here often enough as it was.

Part of the street nearer the square had been roped off, with a shallow crater in the pavement showing the reason why; there must have been a smash-up here last night or the previous day, though that didn’t quite explain the crater, which looked more like a grenade impact than a motor accident. Peggy veered around it, trying to force herself to enjoy the sunlight on her face. Once they got back to the front, she wasn’t likely to get much of it.

The atmosphere in the SSR put an immediate damper on any emotion she might have felt that resembled even moderate pleasure. There were two agents on duty at the front desk, one an SSR Wren and the other a stranger who made Peggy hand over her identity papers after she had already given sign and countersign.

“Do you mind telling me what all of this is about?” she asked frostily, putting her papers back in her pocketbook and grinding her teeth.

The stranger, an American in an army uniform, looked her up and down. “Lady, if you and the other little secretaries –”

“I’m the director of field operations for this division,” Peggy told him coldly. She glanced at the insignia on his collar and added, “Lieutenant.”

That checked the American for a moment. He gave her a dubious look, then shot a glance at the Wren, as though trying to judge the difference between her and Peggy. He finally said, “Then you’ll have to ask your boss, Miss Carter.”

“Agent Carter,” Peggy said.

There were more strangers down on the war room floor. Peggy looked around at them, frowning, then spotted Rose and Hana talking to one of Howard’s engineers and made her way over. “What’s happened?”

“It’s OSS Counter Espionage,” Rose said, keeping her voice low. “Because of Lorraine – Larionova,” she corrected herself. “They just showed up and started tearing everything apart.”

“Where’s Colonel Phillips?”

“In his office, yelling at the OSS officer in charge – Dooley, I think his name is.”

They both turned in the direction of Phillips’ office; the door was closed, and the replacement secretary at the desk outside dearly looked like she wished that she wasn’t there. Peggy decided that sticking her nose in wouldn’t do anyone any good and asked, “Howard?”

“In the canteen. They kicked him out of his lab.”

Peggy pursed her lips in a silent whistle; she could only imagine how Howard Stark had taken that. “I’d best go find him.”

SSR personnel were gathered in nervous little knots throughout the building, watching the OSS agents descend and occasionally intervening. Peggy had to stop to break up an incipient fight between Kim Pantcheff and a couple of swaggering Americans who were trying to commandeer all of the SSR’s cypher machines, not just the Arachne machine they had found in Lyudmila Plisetskaya’s flat. Peggy sorted them out, restrained herself from punching any of them to make her point clear, and went on her way up to the canteen, where she found Howard scribbling equations in one of his leather-bound notebooks and drawing circles on a map. There was a photograph on top of the map, out of the way of his circles; Peggy didn’t have to look closely to know whose it was. Howard’s gaze flickered to it from time to time as if to remind himself of the reason for his calculations, though Peggy doubted that he needed it. They had certainly screamed at each other enough about it over the course of the past seven weeks.

She stood watching him for a few moments, feeling anger twist in the pit of her stomach. You have no right, she thought, but even she knew that was unfair. Regardless of Howard’s feelings in any other direction, Steve Rogers had been his best friend. Howard hadn’t been his best friend, since that position had been reserved for Bucky Barnes, but they had always been close. Maybe closer than she and Steve had been, though Peggy would never admit that out loud.

Eventually Howard put his pencil down and flexed his fingers, then pulled his flask out of his waistcoat and tipped it into a coffee cup.

Peggy stepped over, took the cup out of his hand as he was lifting it, inspected the contents, and said, “You are aware that Irish coffee is supposed to have coffee in it, aren’t you?”

“Nothing in this place counts as coffee,” Howard said, flipping the edge of the map over the photograph and revealing a glossy-covered comic book that the map had been concealing. His eyes were bloodshot and he was in his shirtsleeves; Peggy doubted that he had slept at all. “Come on, give that back, I was drinking it.”

“From the smell of you, you’ve had quite enough already,” Peggy said, and downed the contents. The brandy burned going down and she blinked rapidly before she set the cup upside down on its saucer.

“Hey!”

Peggy ignored him and poured them both coffee – or chicory, rather – from the pot at the center of the table. Howard pulled the new cup protectively towards himself and said, “What’s with you?”

“What’s with me?” Peggy demanded. “I’m not the one drinking at half eight in the morning!”

Howard looked sadly at the upside down cup and said, “Well, technically you are now.”

Peggy had to give him that one. She sat down across from him and asked him the same question she had asked Rose, “What’s happened? What’s the Office of Strategic Services doing here?”

Howard scowled. “Orders from Ike for X-2 to take over the investigation into Lorraine – into Irina Larionova and her friends, since we didn’t notice we had a Red spy here for two years and then once we had a clutch of them in hand we got them all killed. Not that they’re planning to do anything about it, since the war means we have to play nice with the Reds until Hitler’s in a box.” A muscle in his jaw worked. “Five gets you ten that they bury all of it and we never see any of our own stuff again, let alone anything about Larionova or the rest.” He took a sip of his ersatz coffee and winced at the taste.

The X-2 Counter Espionage Branch was the Office of Strategic Services’ counter-intelligence division, though Peggy personally considered it to be less effective than its British counterpart in MI6. They had dealt with X-2 back in New York after the fiasco with Heinz Krüger, though as far as Peggy was concerned Krüger’s presence at Operation Rebirth had hardly been the SSR’s fault. Neither Abraham Erskine nor Howard Stark had wanted an audience there; Phillips certainly hadn’t, but Senator Brandt had insisted.

“When did they get here?”

“About an hour ago,” Howard said. His hand twitched towards the flask in his waistcoat, but at Peggy’s glare he sighed and let it go. “Teach you to go home at night, hmm?”

“Yes, I’ve certainly learned my lesson,” Peggy said crisply. She reached out and flipped back the edge of the map to reveal the photograph Howard had tried to hide. He put a hand out to stop her from picking it up, then stopped.

It was a photograph of Steve Rogers that she didn’t recognize, apparently from one of Michael Sherman’s endless propaganda photoshoots, though it lacked the polished quality most of those had; it must have been taken in between the posed shots. Steve was sitting on top of a couple (probably empty) crates, in front of a painted backdrop. He was in his uniform, not his suit, with one knee up and both hands clasped around it, his head turned a little and his lips parted as though he was speaking to someone off camera. Peggy tilted the photograph; the glare on his left hand and the shield leaning against the crates apparently came from the original lighting, not the overhead lights in the canteen. Steve’s expression was light and amused, on the verge of smiling at whoever he had been talking to – Sergeant Barnes, presumably, since he hadn’t had any photoshoots since the new year four months earlier.

Peggy thought about keeping the photograph.

She could see it in Howard’s face, too, the understanding that she was thinking about it. A muscle in his jaw twitched briefly, but he didn’t say anything, didn’t make any move to take the photograph from her. He had others, she was sure, the same way that she did; even if they hadn’t, she could have picked up any newspaper in America and cut one out.

She laid the photograph down on the table again, as gently as if she had been putting the living man to bed rather than the frozen image of the man who had died in terror and agony not quite two months earlier. Howard put his hand down over it, as though afraid that she might try to take it away from him again.

Instead Peggy picked up the comic book, which turned out to be another one of Timely Comics’ Captain America propaganda productions. She dropped it again when she saw the title, which read CAPTAIN AMERICA LIVES AGAIN! and featured Captain America fighting Nazi soldiers on top of a surfaced submarine, a sinking plane visible in the ocean behind him. There was a woman on the cover too, a redhead whom Peggy presumed was supposed to be another fictionalized version of her. “What is this?”

“Bullshit,” Howard snapped, taking the comic book and flipping it face down. “It’s bullshit. Some pipe dream that Brandt’s pet propaganda peddlers came up with to make it sound like – like –” He couldn’t say the words. After a moment he dashed the back of his hand beneath his eyes, though he hadn’t been weeping.

Peggy bit her lip and then winced as she jarred the cut she didn’t remember getting. She clenched her fists instead, breathing deeply, then pulled the map Howard had been working on towards herself and turned it around. Even though she recognized the shape of the coastlines, it took her a moment to realize what Howard’s markings meant. They were all the possible trajectories of Johann Schmidt’s plane; the circles indicated how far he might have gone, where the Valkyrie might have gone down. Where Steve might have gone down.

“I’m going to find him, Peg,” Howard said, touching the photograph again. His gaze was clear, his jaw set with determination. “I have to find him.”

Peggy just stared at him. Considering the amount of explosive that the plane had been carrying, in all likelihood there was nothing to find except a few charred bits of bone. That was what Steve Rogers had died for, after all.

“I have to bring him home,” Howard insisted, his fingers clenching a little on top of the photograph, though he was careful not to crush it. He didn’t look at it, either, his gaze fixed on hers. “I have to.”

He’s dead, Peggy thought, but she couldn’t make herself say the words out loud. Steve is dead.

“I can fix this,” Howard said, and Peggy didn’t know if he was talking to her or to himself.

“You can’t,” she said, her voice breaking on the second syllable, and Howard flinched as if she had struck him. “You can’t fix this, Howard. No one can.”