Of Home Near

Now
May 2018

Steve’s dead.

It was the first thought Bucky had upon waking, the same way it had been for the past twenty-four days. Almost a century of cheating death and it had finally caught up, because the house always, always won, even when Steve had been playing with loaded dice.

Bucky pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes without bothering to open them, wincing a little as the vibranium of his left hand dug into the tender skin. Even after two years in Wakanda, vibranium still made him think of Steve’s shield first, which made him think of Steve, which led him in an endless little spiral of misery, because Steve was dead.

Wait.

Bucky stopped with the heels of his hands still digging into his eye sockets and ran back through his memory of the events of the past thirty-six hours. His damaged memory was fairly shaky at the best of times, though recent events tended to be mostly reliable. He had had to learn to pick through everything carefully, turning over the pieces he was uncertain of and comparing them against each other, weighing the likelihood of each option. Not that that last was particularly helpful when it came to Steve, where it sometimes seemed like the less likely something was the more likely it was to be true.

Steve’s okay, Bucky thought, but he mentally held that up against his memory of seeing Steve and Romanoff vanish in Wakanda, weighing them against each other. The one he knew was true; he had talked about it with Sam and Thor and Rhodes. He had been there when Sam and Rhodes had broken the news to both Barton and Yelena. That one was true.

He wasn’t sure about the other.

Frustrated, Bucky sat up and pulled his knees up, resting his elbows on top of them as he scratched at his hairline. His hair was cropped short; he remembered doing that. It was cut neatly, too, the way he couldn’t do himself; who here had done that for him?

Steve.

No.

Yes.

No. Sam had been there; Bucky could place the sound of his voice alongside the feel of the clippers. He had been talking about what had happened to Wanda Maximoff and the Vision. But he had already told that story; Bucky had been there when he had told Barton. If Steve had come back, then Sam would have been the one to tell him about the fate of his teammates.

If Steve had come back.

Bucky scrubbed his hands back through his cropped hair, scratching furiously at his scalp as he tried to sort it all through and failed. Alone in the dark, it felt worse now than it usually did, which was bad enough at the best of times. After a moment, he stumbled upright and went over to fumble for the light switch in the hope that changing that one thing would bring a little more clarity. Light helped sometimes.

The bedroom itself was large but impersonal, more like an expensive hotel room than anything else. The effect was ruined by the fact that Bucky had dragged the sheets and a couple of pillows off the bed onto the floor, but he couldn’t sleep in that bed. He stood with one hand on the light switch, looking around at the spare room and trying to get everything straight in his head.

There was a photograph lying on top of the dresser.

Bucky took his hand off the light switch and went over to pick it up. He recognized it immediately, with the faint sense of relief that always came from being able to actually put two and two together for a change. It was a photograph of two teenage boys standing in front of the Cyclone at Coney Island, though Steve could easily have passed for twelve rather than sixteen, small and fair and heavily freckled from the sun, with a black eye and a rather queasy expression. Bucky barely glanced at the boy next to him; even though he remembered the day and his mother and sisters standing to one side while the photographer had taken the picture, it still felt like it had happened to someone else.

Where had he gotten the picture?

Part of him said, Steve gave it to you last night. He had four; the others were of his pa and Mrs. Rogers. The other part said, Steve’s dead.

If Steve was dead, then where had he gotten the photograph? He knew all of the old photographs of Steve from before the war; there had never been more than half a dozen and all of them were in either a museum or the National Archives.

The photograph didn’t look seventy years old – well, eighty-four now – though it was creased from being folded into someone’s wallet. Bucky turned it over, where his mother’s handwriting still read James & Steve, Coney Island, 3 August 1934. He swallowed back a lump in his throat and laid the photograph gently down on the dresser again. The letter Steve had written to his mother back in 1945 had been in the Smithsonian. Winnifred Barnes had only received it after Steve himself had been reported dead.

There was an empty grave in the cemetery at their old church in Brooklyn – two empty graves, since one was Steve’s; the Barnes family had paid for it. Most of Bucky’s family was in the same churchyard. He had an empty grave in Arlington, too, not far from Steve’s. Nobody seemed to have any idea what to do with them.

If Steve’s here, then he’s here, he told himself, a sentence that made more sense when he didn’t think about saying it out loud. Steve would be upstairs in the main residential wing of the compound, instead of down here in the guestrooms. Bucky knew where Steve’s room was; he had gone up there after he and the shattered remains of the Avengers had limped back to the compound. He’d slept on the floor those first few nights, until it had felt too much like sleeping in Steve’s tomb and he had let Sam half-heartedly bully him into this room.

Suddenly determined, Bucky found a clean shirt and a pair of track pants – the last thing he wanted was to wander around in his boxers and scare any of the jumpy, heavily-armed superheroes who lived in the compound, including the man who already wanted him dead. He slipped out of his room and padded barefoot down the silent hallway, his head cocked a little as he tracked the breathing of the other occupants of the wing. His enhanced hearing wasn’t quite on Steve’s level – his enhanced anything wasn’t on Steve’s level, though he came close on a few points – but it was good enough to know who was here and if they were sleeping soundly or not.

No one was sleeping soundly.

But none of them woke up at the sound of his passage, either; Bucky would have been surprised if they had. He was quiet on his feet; he had been even before – before. He passed out of the guest wing and climbed the stairs to the second story, steeling himself before he turned down a corridor whose closed doors were all marked with symbols – some fit of whimsy from Stark, he guessed.

There was no sound of breathing coming from behind the door marked with a shield, and Bucky felt a lump in his throat. He pushed the door open anyway, just in case he had been mistaken, and stood looking at an empty room.

For a long moment all he wanted to do was scream.

Then, even in the dim light, he realized that the room wasn’t exactly as he had seen it last. The open sketchbook on top of the desk had been closed, and there were clothes thrown over the foot of the neatly-made bed. The open door to the ensuite bathroom was at a different angle than it had been, and Bucky could smell the faint, lingering scent of Steve’s aftershave.

Romanoff, he remembered suddenly. He came back with Romanoff. He married her.

The door marked with the Red Room’s hourglass symbol was just opposite Steve’s. Bucky crossed the hallway before he could start thinking about it too hard and nerve himself out of it, putting his hand on the doorknob and pushing the door open.

Almost at the same moment there was a pair of thumps in bad unison, one heavier and one lighter. There was a flash of metal and the sound of a gun cocking before Steve said, “Bucky?”

He straightened up from one side of the bed, his new shield on one arm and a knife in his other hand – he must have grabbed for both the moment he had heard the door open and rolled out of bed. Natasha Romanoff was on the other side of the bed, crouched on the floor with a pistol pointed directly at Bucky’s head.

The room smelled like sex, like Steve and Romanoff together, and Bucky felt a faint flush of heat in the pit of his belly that he shoved away as soon as he was aware of it. Natasha Romanoff was a beautiful woman; there was just the little fact that she scared the shit out of him. And Steve was Steve.

“Buck?” Steve said again, sounding bewildered. He set the knife down on the nightstand and turned on the lamp as Bucky stared at him, his heart pounding in his throat. He was wearing underwear and nothing else, his dog tags hanging around his neck and the bullet wound on his shoulder puckered with new scar tissue. “You okay?”

“Sorry,” Bucky managed. “I thought –” Under the circumstances, I thought you were dead and I panicked didn’t exactly make him sound particularly sane, though it wasn’t as if anyone here was under any particular illusions about that. He cleared his throat and tried to make his voice light as he said, “How do you two not shoot each other?”

“He doesn’t barge into my room in the middle of the night,” Romanoff said, straightening upright. She put the pistol aside and turned on the other lamp, frowning at him. Somewhat to his relief, she was in a tank top and underwear, though the former revealed the bullet scar on her left shoulder; Bucky glanced at it and winced. He actually did remember that.

A little understanding touched Steve’s face as he glanced past Bucky towards the open door of his own room on the other side of the hallway. He slid the straps of the shield off his arm and leaned it against the nightstand, saying, “Let me put some clothes on.”

Bucky flushed. “You don’t need to –”

“I’m awake anyway.” He grinned at Romanoff and added, “Don’t shoot me when I come back.”

“Ha ha,” she said dryly, sitting back down on the side of the bed and making the pistol vanish back to wherever it had been hidden before she pulled it on Bucky.

“Sorry,” Bucky apologized to her, and she waved it off.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve been there. Shut the door, will you?”

He obeyed as he followed Steve back across the hall to his room, standing back as Steve found a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt. “She didn’t even give you a drawer? Or haven’t you decided who’s moving in with who yet?”

Steve gave him a dry look as he pulled the shirt on. “We live in the same house.”

“I’m just saying.”

Steve snorted and said, “Come on, let’s go downstairs.”

They ended up in the otherwise empty kitchen, Bucky perching on one of the mismatched stools at the island while Steve got himself a glass of water. “Does it ever freak you out?” he asked eventually.

Steve turned back towards him. “Does what freak me out?”

“Sleeping with Romanoff,” Bucky said, and saw a faint wrinkle form between Steve’s brows. He knew that he had said the wrong thing as the corners of Steve’s mouth turned downwards and added hastily in clumsy explanation, “She’s gorgeous and I know you’re crazy about her – and she’s your kind of crazy –”

“Thanks,” Steve said, his voice very dry.

“ – but she’s still…” He let the words trail off as Steve’s frown deepened. “I’m not saying this right.”

Steve cocked his head to one side and took a drink of water, suddenly wary in a way that Bucky hadn’t seen in a long time, not since the bad old days before the war. After a moment where they just stared at each other, Steve’s shoulders painfully tense, Bucky realized that he must have heard this question a lot at the SSR. He took a breath, hoping that the next thing he said didn’t make this worse, and said, “She’s not the first Black Widow I’ve met. Or even the first matryoshka.”

Steve shrugged. He didn’t ask how or when or if the Red Room’s dolls had walked away from their encounter with the Winter Soldier, which Bucky appreciated. He just said, “I’ve met others too.” He cocked an eyebrow at Bucky and added, “They all asked that question.”

“Sorry,” Bucky apologized.

“It’s okay.”

Bucky bit his lip, wondering what he could say in response to that, and finally offered, “She’s better for you than Carter would have been, I think.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment or an insult?”

“I’m not sure,” Bucky said, realized that Steve might not find that funny right now, and added, “Compliment.”

Steve shrugged again. “What’s going on?” he asked, changing the subject.

Bucky shrugged back, tracing the joints on his metal hand with one finger. After a moment he admitted, “I have trouble sometimes. Especially when it’s the middle of the night. Or when it’s something –” He hesitated, then finished, “Something I want.”

Steve set the empty glass aside and came around the side of the island to sit beside him, putting a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “I’m here,” he said. “I wasn’t dead before, I just…wasn’t here.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Well – turnabout’s fair play, I guess.”

Steve frowned at him, and Bucky explained, “You thought I was dead.”

“That’s different.”

Bucky thought about it and then said, “Not really.”

Steve shrugged, uncomfortable, but allowed, “Maybe.” He let go of Bucky and dropped both elbows to the countertop, yawning into one hand. The wedding ring on his left hand flashed as he did so and Bucky tried not to stare, still struck by how strange it was to see it there. He wondered how long it had taken Steve to get used to wearing it.

Steve saw him looking and covered it with his right hand, self-conscious under the attention.

“Sorry,” Bucky said again. After a moment he nodded at the chain peaking out from under Steve’s shirt collar. “You’re wearing your tags now?”

Steve hooked a finger under the chain and pulled it off over his head, passing them to Bucky. He rubbed his thumb over the debossed lettering and said, “Oh, they finally got the right religion; it only took them, what, three tries? Four? God bless the United States Army.”

“Third time’s the charm, I guess,” Steve said, the corner of his mouth crooking upwards. “Or fourth, I guess, if you count the ones that the Army issued me six years ago when I came out of the ice; they’re upstairs somewhere. Fifth if you want to include the ones SHIELD did up for their stage show, which were the wrong ones, by the way. They issued the ones the Army was using back in ’41, with my address in Brooklyn on it – well, your mom’s address. Right religion, though.”

“Right, you’ve never actually been demobbed,” Bucky said. It was one of the lesser-known pieces of Captain America trivia; Steve couldn’t be discharged, either honorably or dishonorably. It had gotten dragged up in the aftermath of the disaster with the Sokovia Accords, but Steve’s unique situation was ironclad and the government lawyers had apparently decided in the wake of the election that it wasn’t worth pursuing when no one could find Steve himself.

He handed the dog tags back to Steve, who turned them over in his own hands, frowning at the little slips of metal before he put them back on, tucking the tags beneath his shirt. After a moment, he asked, “If we’re talking about religion – have you talked to a priest?”

Bucky shrugged, looking away. “Yeah, that one’ll go over well. ‘Bless me, Father, for I’ve committed a shocking amount of mass murder –’”

He could feel Steve’s reproachful stare. “It wasn’t your fault. Maybe you need to hear that from someone who isn’t me.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the one who signed me up for a congressional investigation, so I guess someone else will be the judge of that.”

Steve swallowed. “Buck…”

Bucky put his hands together and cracked the knuckles of his right hand, the sound shockingly loud in the empty room. After a moment, he admitted, “I don’t even know how I’d start to explain any of this to a priest. And don’t,” he added, despite the fact that Steve hadn’t even opened his mouth again. “Don’t say it.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t need to, I know what you were thinking,” Bucky told him meaningfully. After a moment, he said, “Maybe later; they’re probably busy right now, what with you know, the apocalypse.”

Steve grimaced.

“And don’t tell me you know a guy, I won’t believe you.” He knew better than to ask if Steve had talked to a priest; apart from his confirmation, Christmas, Easter, and Sarah Rogers’ funeral the only times Steve had gone to church had been with the Barnes family. It had worried Bucky’s ma no end.

“I won’t bother,” Steve said with a sigh. He leaned an elbow on the counter and rested his cheek in the palm of his hand, frowning at Bucky. Bucky frowned back at him, but all Steve said was, “I missed you back there.”

“Now that would really have been hard to explain.”

“Not any harder than me and Nat,” Steve said reasonably.

Bucky bit back his automatic response of then why didn’t you explain it before you had to and said instead, “If I’d been there you probably wouldn’t have hooked up with Romanoff.”

Steve opened his mouth to protest, thought about it, and then shut it again, wincing.

“Stupid about women and men,” Bucky said with satisfaction.

“Hey, leave Howard out of this,” Steve protested.

Bucky eyed him. “I didn’t even bring him up this time.”

“You were thinking about him.”

“I try not to,” Bucky said, more pointedly than he intended, and Steve winced again.

“Sorry.”

Bucky looked aside, then said, “Assuming Nebula and Rocket did what they said they were going to, we’re going to go kill a guy tomorrow.”

Steve raised his eyebrows at the change in subject. “That’s the plan.”

“So you should probably go back to sleep.”

Steve’s eyebrows stayed up. “What are you planning to do?”

Bucky had no intention of letting Steve know he had been sleeping on the floor. “Same thing, only without the company.”

Steve frowned at him, but it wasn’t as though there was any kind of an argument he could make to that. After a moment he slid off the stool, yawning into his fist again before he put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “I’m here,” he said. “That’s not changing.”

That’s not really up to us, Bucky thought, but he knew better than to say as much. Instead, he just said, “Tell Romanoff I’m sorry for waking her up.” Then he frowned. “Unless she’s going by Rogers now.”

“We haven’t talked about it.” Steve frowned warily back at him before he finally said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

He left Bucky at the foot of the stairs. Bucky listened to the sound of his steps, then went back to his own room and tugged the mess of sheets into something resembling order, but couldn’t get back to sleep for what felt like a long time. When sleep finally did come, he was still thinking about Wakanda, about that awful flash of blue-green energy and the glitter of golden metal.

Natasha was still only half-asleep when Steve came back, which was why she didn’t even bother to put her hand on her holdout pistol when the door opened. He undressed quietly and slid into bed beside her; Natasha turned to face him and he put a hand automatically on her hip, his callused fingers familiar against her bare skin.

“Is he okay?”

Steve nodded, his expression troubled in the dim light. “He says he’s sorry for waking you up.”

Natasha shrugged; she had had worse wakeups. For one, she hadn’t actually had to shoot him. She had had nightmares about waking up to the Winter Soldier coming to finish the job after the disaster in Ukraine ten years ago, which had been one of her last Red Room operations as well as the op that had brought her to SHIELD’s attention, since Fury had sent Clint to retrieve the same nuclear engineer Dreykov had wanted liberated from Iran. Bucky had probably come closer to getting shot than both he and Steve realized.

She didn’t know for sure, since most of Department X’s and the Red Room’s records were either missing or destroyed, but it was almost certain that she hadn’t been the first Black Widow he had encountered. She might have been the first one to walk away with a pulse; she wasn’t about to ask Bucky to confirm. Natasha was fairly certain that the Winter Soldier had thought that she was dead after he had pulled her nuclear engineer out from under her bleeding body to finish the job by shooting him several times through the head.

Except he must have known that she was still alive; like Steve, he would have been able to hear her heartbeat. She hadn’t been his target, so he hadn’t bothered killing her. That decision had been left up to Dreykov.

Remembering that poor dead Widow in Budapest, Natasha supposed that the only reason she hadn’t died then was because Dreykov hadn’t had his technology perfected yet. It was the sort of thing that she tried not to think about; he and Melina had only been a few years away from it.

“Nat?” Steve said quietly, raising a hand to stroke the backs of his knuckles across her cheek.

Natasha leaned into his touch, closing her eyes briefly. She had never really believed that she would have him; sometimes she still didn’t.

Then she looked at him again, studying his clear blue eyes in the moonlight filtering in through the slatted blinds, and said, “He doesn’t like that you’re with me, does he?”

“What? No.” Steve frowned at her, genuine consternation showing on his handsome face before he corrected himself. “Not no like –”

“He’s afraid of me,” Natasha said; she had seen it enough before back at SHIELD. Among the other Avengers, only Clint had seen what she had been like before her defection. But if anyone else here apart from Yelena knew what the Black Widows were like, really like, then it was the Winter Soldier.

“He’s not,” Steve insisted stubbornly, though his gaze twitched briefly sideways. After a moment, he added, “Bucky likes you. He just – it’s the middle of the night, no one’s thinking straight. It’s just a surprise, it’s not like with – with Peggy.” He stuttered briefly over the other woman’s name, biting his lip.

Natasha was almost certain that whatever Bucky Barnes’ complex feelings about Steve were – and she suspected he wasn’t always sure himself – he didn’t want to fuck Steve, so it wasn’t exactly a fair comparison. There was nothing to be gained from pushing him, either. He already knew; either Bucky Barnes had told him outright or Steve had figured it out on his own.

Sounding defensive, Steve added, “Your sister doesn’t like me.”

Natasha grinned wryly at him. “Yelena thinks you’re boring, that’s different.”

Steve stared at her. “She thinks I’m boring?”

“Start ripping the heads off killer robots in front of her and maybe she’ll change her mind.”

“I’d rather not have to deal with killer robots again at all.”

Natasha personally thought that the Avengers would be lucky if killer robots were the worst thing they had to deal with in the near future. “With a manpower shortage some idiot in Homeland Security is probably planning to boot up the Iron Legion again.”

“No one will go for it after Ultron,” Steve protested.

“Ultron was three years and two presidents ago and not in the United States, which means no one in the U.S. government remembers he existed,” Natasha said cynically. “No one even remembers Sokovia as anything other than the name of the Accords.”

Steve grimaced, but didn’t argue with her.

“Five gets you ten that we’re fighting killer robots within the next year,” Natasha concluded.

“I won’t take that bet,” Steve groaned. “You’ll win.”

“I’m willing to bet something other than money,” Natasha said. She also liked the commitment that they would still be in alive in a year to pay up.

Steve traced the curve of her hip, toying with the hem of her tank top and the band of her underwear. “Like what?”

“I’m sure I can think of something.” To prove it, Natasha leaned forward to kiss him. While he was distracted by that, she rolled them over so that she was on top of him. Steve’s hands came up to brace her hips as Natasha drew back, a little breathless. “But you’d have to lay a bet too.”

“You have any ideas?”

“A few.” Natasha kissed him again, then pulled her tank top off over her head. “You’ll have to prove you can deliver, though.”

“Of course,” Steve said, helping her get her underwear off, then his own. He caught her mouth in another hard kiss and added gravely, “Want me to prove I’m not boring while I’m at it?”

“You don’t need to convince me,” Natasha said. “But don’t let me stop you.”

When Steve and Natasha got downstairs the next morning, it was to the discovery that Wong had returned. He was standing by the round table in the secondary conference room they had been in last night; Rocket’s alien holoprojector was still sitting at its center, currently powered down and almost hidden behind the stack of books Wong had presumably brought with him. He looked up from his conversation with Bruce and Carol as Steve and Natasha detoured from their path to the kitchen to join them.

“What’s going on?” Steve asked. He and Natasha had been introduced to Wong the night they had arrived, but the sorcerer had left before they had had a chance to talk at all.

Several of the books were open on the table and Steve cocked his head to study them. They all seemed to be written in either a language he didn’t know or a script he couldn’t read at a quick glance, but the hand-drawn illustrations of the Infinity Stones were clear enough.

Wong’s nod of greeting was brisk. “We’ve been searching the libraries at Kamar-Taj for information about the Infinity Stones since Strange and the Time Stone were taken,” he said. “When the culling began, we had other things to concern ourselves with, but since two nights ago –” He gestured at the books and finished, “– we resumed our search.”

Steve dragged his gaze away from a sketch of the Tesseract and said, “Find anything?”

“Perhaps,” Wong said. “What did the Ancient One say to you back there – back then? In 1945?”

“The Ancient One?” Natasha asked, frowning.

“The Sorcerer Supreme – the woman in yellow,” Wong clarified.

It probably wasn’t worth asking if she had an actual name. Steve frowned and shot a look at Bruce, who shrugged in response. “What she said about the timeline?” That was something he had no interest in revisiting, not any time soon and preferably not ever. If he started thinking about it again he was going to start screaming.

“About the Stones.”

Those Steve was willing to talk about, since they were at least immediately relevant to his present circumstances, though he realized as he thought about that the Stones and the timeline were connected. Or that the Sorcerer Supreme had presented them that way, anyway. As he was thinking about it, frowning, Natasha said, “She said that they created the flow of time – or, um, what we experience as the flow of time, anyway.”

Wong nodded encouragingly.

Natasha looked at Steve rather than go on, since she knew that he would remember the Sorcerer Supreme’s exact words. Steve licked his lips and said, “She said that the Space Stone, out of all the Infinity Stones, could transfer its energy elsewhere, which is why she could use the energy from Hydra’s weapons in conjunction with the Time Stone to send us back, even though the Tesseract was at the bottom of the ocean back then. She wasn’t worried about the Tesseract, though, because what was worrying her was that there was no trace of the Time Stone up here – in 2018, I mean. We thought it was just that Thanos took it, but she said that didn’t matter, that the Infinity Stones exist both inside and outside of time and inside and outside of the multiverse. All Infinity Stones are one Infinity Stone; all Time Stones are one Time Stone. But there was no Time Stone here.”

“What about the others?” Bruce asked. “The Tesseract, the Mind Stone – Power –”

Steve shook his head. “She said she couldn’t tell because she didn’t have any connection to them, just the Time Stone.” He looked down at the drawing of the Tesseract again, frowning.

“Though she was wrong about at least one thing,” Natasha said slowly. “She said that only the Tesseract could transfer its energy elsewhere, but Wanda and Pietro got their enhancements from exposure to the Mind Stone back when it was still part of Loki’s scepter. I don’t know the details, Hydra wiped the files, but – it did something to them.”

“Pietro?” Carol asked. “I heard about Wanda Maximoff –”

“Her twin brother,” Bruce explained. “He – what happened to him? I was, um, busy –”

“He was killed by Ultron at Novi Grad,” Steve said bluntly. “He was enhanced, but not like Wanda – speed, mostly, but changes to the musculature and other physiology too so that he could physically handle it.”

“Ultron?” Carol said.

“Killer robot, dead now, not important,” Bruce said, clearly eager not to get into the weeds about who was responsible for Ultron. “Though, actually, the Mind Stone formed the basis for his neural network too, he just didn’t actually have it…”

“Why are you asking?” Natasha said to Wong.

“I was hoping she’d told you more than she’d told me,” he admitted. “There’s no way to track an Infinity Stone, so I can’t track the Time Stone’s location –”

Natasha, Steve, and Bruce all looked at him in consternation. “What do you mean there’s no way to track an Infinity Stone?” Bruce said. “We’ve done it before – on Earth, at least, I don’t think the method we used would work in space.”

Wong and Carol both stared at him. “What do you mean?” Carol asked.

“I don’t know about the others, but the Tesseract – the Space Stone –”

“I’m familiar.”

“– emits a gamma radiation signature,” Bruce said. “When Loki – Thor’s brother – stole it from SHIELD six years ago, Fury brought me in to track it. And it worked; we found it. I mean, some other stuff happened too, but tracking the gamma signature worked fine. I just don’t think we can do that out there.” He gestured vaguely upwards.

“Do we need to?” Steve asked, a little confused by the fact they were having this conversation at all. “I thought Rocket and Nebula found the place last night.” He looked at Wong and asked, “They told you about that, right?”

He nodded. “All that tells us is that Thanos used the Stones four – five – days ago, but it doesn’t tell us what he used them for. Everything we know about the Infinity Stones says that they form a foundation of the universe, of reality. It shouldn’t be possible to destroy one, but Bruce tells me that Wanda Maximoff was able to destroy the Mind Stone.”

Steve had heard this story from Sam and Bucky already, but he glanced at Bruce anyway. Bruce said, “It was after Thanos sent you two away. It was like – like the whole world shook. Only it wasn’t enough, because Thanos had the Time Stone, so he could undo it. It didn’t mean anything in the end.” His mouth worked silently, like he was thinking about saying something else, but he held his tongue at the last minute.

“Neither of them should have been able to do that,” Wong said. “It goes against everything we thought we knew about the Infinity Stones, which means that what we know – what we think we know – about the Infinity Stones may not be true.”

“Like what?” Natasha asked.

Wong opened his mouth to respond, hesitated, and finally said, “Everything.”

“Not everything,” Carol said. “We’re still missing half of all living things.” Her mouth went tight, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. Steve felt a little frisson of familiar energy crawling along his skin and leaned back on one heel, wary; he had been informed that she had some kind of enhancement, but not what it was. What he felt now was almost identical to the way he had felt around Wanda and Pietro Maximoff.

Her gaze flickered towards him at the motion and she frowned. “What?”

“Which Stone was it?” Steve asked her.

“What?” she repeated.

“That gave you your –” He flicked his fingers, not sure how else to describe it.

Carol’s eyes narrowed, but all she said was, “The Tesseract. How did you know?”

“I’ve had run-ins with the damn thing before,” Steve said. “Enough that Thor said I’d probably always be sensitive to anything related to the Stones – I could always tell with Wanda and her brother, Vision –” He shook his head, since at the moment it didn’t seem relevant. “I guess it doesn’t matter right now.” He looked back at Wong. “So – what do we know? Or think, I guess?”

It was Bruce who answered. “Carol had an idea and when Wong got here, we put it to him, but –”

“What idea?” Natasha asked.

Carol blew her cheeks out, looking surprisingly young, and said, “Well, if the Stones could destroy half of all life in the universe, then maybe they can bring it back too.”

The jolt of energy that went through Steve at the words was like getting stabbed. He felt suddenly breathless, his heart racing, dizzy with shock and hope. From Natasha’s sharp gasp, she had had a similar reaction. “You think that would work?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

“I think it’s worth a try,” Carol said. “I mean, if it doesn’t, then we’re not any worse off than we are now.” She set her jaw and admitted, “My best friend, she’s in the hospital – her daughter was – I think we have to try.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but,’” Natasha said.

“But there was that energy surge,” Bruce said. “There’s no way to know what Thanos did, but we know that one Stone, or energy derived from one Stone, at least, was able to destroy another.” He glanced at Carol. “Do you think you could do it?”

“Destroy an Infinity Stone?” she said doubtfully. She pursed her lips, thinking, as the other four occupants of the room stared at her. Wong looked badly taken aback when she said slowly, “I don’t know for sure without trying, but I’d be willing to try. After we get everyone back. Don’t take this the wrong way, though, but why would I want to?”

“Well, having those things out there doesn’t seem like it’s ever done anyone any good,” Bruce said reasonably.

“I’d be dead if Strange hadn’t used the Time Stone when Kaecilius summoned Dormammu,” Wong said.

“Vision did help when Ultron tried to destroy the world,” Natasha pointed out.

“Okay, I’ll take that part back,” Bruce said hastily. “But otherwise they mostly seem to do more harm than good and maybe we don’t need to have them around.” He looked at Steve, who shrugged; his experience with Infinity Stones mostly consisted of nearly being killed by them.

“What about the energy surge Rocket picked up?” Steve asked. “Thanos could have been doing anything with the Stones.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said slowly. “That’s what worries me.” He took a deep breath, then went on, “Nebula said that he was completely obsessed with getting the Stones for this one thing, right? Killing half the universe. He didn’t want the Stones for anything else.”

“Right,” Steve said.

“What if he had the same idea that Carol did?” Bruce said, looking like it hurt him even to think about it. “But he didn’t want it to happen. To – to be able to happen.”

They all stared at him, horror on everyone’s faces. Steve forced himself to say it, since no one else was speaking. “You think he used the Stones to destroy the Stones. That that’s why the Sorcerer Supreme said there was no Time Stone up here.”

Bruce swallowed. “I think there’s a chance.”

Steve sank down into the nearest chair and put his head in his hands, his mind racing. To get the situation clear in his own head, he said, “So you think that it might be possible to use the Stones to undo the – the Snap –” It was as good a name as any. “– and that Thanos also came to the same conclusion, so he used the Stones to destroy themselves.”

“That’s – yeah, that’s about it,” Bruce said uncomfortably. “I don’t know if it’s even possible, I don’t know enough about the Stones, and I don’t know much about Thanos either –”

He flicked a glance at Carol, who said, “I’ve only ever heard rumors about him before. We’ve never crossed paths.” She hesitated, then admitted, “I wasn’t sure he was real, or I’d have done something about him.”

They all eyed her, clearly wondering how seriously to take the words. Carol looked back at them calmly, her gaze daring them to question the statement.

Steve shrugged and looked over at Wong. “What do you think?”

The sorcerer hesitated. Finally, he admitted, “From everything we know, it shouldn’t be possible – but nothing Thanos did should have been possible either. The Stones…” He let the words hang between in the air before he concluded grimly, “I don’t know if it’s likely, but I think it’s possible.”

“Great.” Steve rubbed his hands over his face, half-wishing he was back in 1945 so that this would be Colonel Phillips’ problem to deal with. Except that as much as he liked and respected Colonel Phillips – certainly more than he either liked or respected Secretary Ross – he knew that at the end of the day it would have been him in the field making one decision or another. And Phillips would never have believed any of this anyway. He had the feeling that Ross barely believed it, though unlike Steve he had presumably seen the results in person. Steve had just seen YouTube videos and the recordings from Rhodey’s and Sam’s HUDs.

When he glanced up again, everyone else in the room was staring at him, waiting for his response. Steve rubbed at his face again, then straightened up. “Have any of you talked about this to anyone else?”

Headshakes all around from everyone but Natasha, who just watched him steadily. Since she had heard about this theory at the same time as Steve, he wasn’t expecting her to respond.

Steve took a deep breath, then said, “Don’t tell anyone else.”

Bruce nodded immediately, used to taking orders from Steve even if Steve suspected he still wanted to hit him in the face over Natasha, while Wong grimaced but nodded agreement after a moment of hesitation.

Carol frowned. “Why?”

Steve sighed, wanting more than anything else to go back to bed and spend a few more hours rolling around with Natasha, and said, “Because we’re going on a kill mission and I don’t want anyone distracted because they’ve got their hopes up.”

“You’re not worried about getting distracted because you’ve got your hopes up?” she challenged.

“I got that burned out of me in 1943,” Steve said flatly.

Carol eyed him thoughtfully, as if trying to decide whether or not he was serious, then shrugged. “But if the Stones are there –”

“Then we can talk about it once we’ve got them,” Steve said. “Not before.”

She stared hard at him for a long moment before she finally said, “Okay.”

Steve dipped his chin in acknowledgment and looked back at Wong. “Are you coming with us?”

“Yes,” the sorcerer said gruffly. “If the Time Stone is there, then it’s the responsibility of my order to retrieve it and protect it. If it’s not…if it’s not, I still owe it to Strange to be there.”

Steve stood up to clap him on the shoulder. “We’ll be glad to have you,” he said.

Wong nodded gravely back.

Steve glanced around at the other occupants of the room, hoping no one else had anything they wanted to say to him so he could get breakfast before they had to embark on their murder mission, and was dismayed when Bruce said abruptly, “Steve –”

Natasha gave Bruce an equally dismayed look. Steve knew from Sam that they had gone off together the previous day to have what had been, presumably, a very awkward conversation; he had honestly been hoping that he would be left out of it. He liked Bruce and he thought – he hoped – that they were still friends, but he also knew that there was a very good chance that that friendship had gone out the window the moment that he and Natasha had come back with rings on their hands. Whatever happened next wasn’t up to him.

“Yeah,” he said, jerking his head at the door; they might as well have something that resembled privacy for this.

Carol looked at them curiously; Wong’s expression suggested he had strong suspicions about what this was about. Natasha glared at them both and Steve shrugged back helplessly. It wasn’t as though he was going to tell Bruce no, not when they were about to go into an op; the last thing he wanted was one of his teammates brooding about it. Especially when he had no idea how the Hulk was taking the situation; that was a surprise he really didn’t want. At least he had known Peggy well enough to be confident that she wasn’t going to shoot either him or Natasha in the back no matter how angry she was. The face, maybe, but not the back. Steve didn’t think Bruce would do either, but it was always difficult to predict how the Hulk would react – the more so now, given how the past two years had apparently gone.

Natasha grabbed Bruce’s arm as he moved towards the door, whispering urgently to him. Steve turned his head aside, forcing himself not to listen in with the usual twist of effort; after spending most of his life partially deaf he was used to having to strain to hear anything. It always took him a moment to remind himself not only that he didn’t have to do so anymore, but that if he did, he would hear a lot of things that both he and everyone else would prefer that he didn’t hear.

“Did you ever meet her?” he asked Wong. “The Sorcerer Supreme, I mean. She might have been a little before your time –”

“She was older than all of us here put together except Thor,” Wong said. “And to be honest, I’m not sure she wasn’t older than him, too. She spent centuries training the members of my order, guiding us, forging the sanctums…” He let the words trail off, frowning.

“What happened?”

“One of our own betrayed the teachings of our order. He turned on her, on us. She died.” His voice was gruff, though Steve heard the pain lingering beneath it.

“Did you tell her?” Steve asked, curious. “When you spoke with her –”

Wong frowned at him. “Did you tell your friends what was coming?”

“Some,” Steve admitted. “But not the most important things. And she said she was going to take the memories from them anyway, everything we did, everything we said –” He felt a muscle in his jaw work, bitter.

“The Runes of Kof-Kol,” Wong said, nodding. “It’s a dangerous spell.” Steve must have grimaced, because the sorcerer smiled wryly. “You don’t approve?”

“I didn’t know magic was real until a couple of days ago,” Steve pointed out.

“We get that a lot.”

“Yeah, I bet.” Steve turned his head as Natasha came up on his other side. Bruce was standing by the door, looking even more awkward than he had before.

Steve raised his eyebrows at Natasha, a silent question; in response, she reached up, curved one hand around the back of his skull, and pulled him down into a kiss. Steve automatically put one hand on her waist, startled by the suddenness of it, but didn’t hesitate in returning the kiss. When Natasha finally pulled back, she was breathing hard, her cheeks a little flushed.

“I love you,” she said, meeting his gaze steadily. “I’m marrying you.”

Steve couldn’t think of a decent response that wasn’t some variation of I didn’t think you weren’t. He kissed the knuckles of her left hand instead, hoping that he wasn’t blushing as fiercely as he thought he was.

Bruce wouldn’t look him in the eye as they went out of the room, hesitated in the hallway, and then went into the main conference room, which still had all of the SSR files scattered around but which was otherwise empty. Steve shoved aside a stack of seventy-year-old file folders from the SSR’s Washington office and leaned against the table.

Bruce touched the nearest sheet of yellowing paper absently, not looking at it. “The last time Nat did that to me, she pushed me off a cliff,” he said.

“I know,” Steve said, which made Bruce look at him sharply. He supposed that Bruce hadn’t been aware that Natasha had told hm that story, though it wasn’t common knowledge amongst the Avengers.

Bruce twisted his fingers together, looking away. “I’m not going to do anything,” he said, and when Steve didn’t say anything, added hastily, “And neither is the other guy, he’s not – he doesn’t –”

“Bruce, it’s fine,” Steve said tiredly. “I’m not –” He realized abruptly that I’m not worried might not be taken the way he wanted it to and said instead, “It’s fine.”

“Right,” Bruce said, tugging at the hem of one sleeve. Steve was pretty sure that the clothes were his own, transported from the tower to the compound in someone’s fit of optimism three years earlier, rather than borrowed from someone else. “I already – I just got an earful from Nat.”

Steve tilted his head in something that wasn’t quite a shrug, not entirely certain what kind of reaction was expected or appropriate here.

Bruce took a deep breath. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he began.

“Okay,” Steve said when he didn’t go on. When he kept hesitating, Steve rubbed his fingers over his forehead and added, “Just say it, whatever it is, I’m not going to throw a fit.”

“Right,” Bruce said again. “When did you and Natasha, um – I mean, it doesn’t matter, I just –”

It clearly mattered if he was asking at all, but Steve didn’t say as much. Bruce hadn’t been back long enough before Thanos had sent Steve and Natasha to 1945 to get a gauge on their relationship. If Bruce was asking him, then there was probably a good reason that Natasha hadn’t told him, but at the moment Steve couldn’t think of what it might be and he had the feeling that being cagy about it would make this worse. “Twenty-five days ago.”

He watched Bruce do the mental calculations, then blink and demand, “What – when – when you two were back in 1945?”

Steve nodded.

“I thought –”

“I can guess what you thought,” Steve said, crossing his arms over his chest. Bruce’s gaze flickered to his wedding ring and Steve closed his hand into a fist against the inside of his elbow so that the pale gold wasn’t visible.

“Rhodey said she helped you during that whole thing in Germany.”

Steve raised his eyebrows, not willing to take the bait. “So did Sam and Bucky, and Scott, and Clint, and Wanda. And T’Challa.”

“That’s not what I meant –”

“I know what you meant,” Steve said, feeling ungenerous. “We didn’t start sleeping together until a long time after the Ultron debacle. Nat was messed up by the whole thing; she wouldn’t have done that. Neither would I.” And unlike Bucky or Sam, Bruce didn’t know that Steve had been in love with Natasha for years. Steve wasn’t about to enlighten him, since that would definitely make this situation worse.

Bruce bit his lip, clearly aware that he had said the wrong thing. He took one deep breath, then another; Steve watched his face, trying not to be too obvious about the fact that he was looking for the tiny shifts of musculature that preceded the Hulk’s appearance. He didn’t think the Hulk was about to make himself known, but he didn’t want to be taken by surprise, either.

“I know that,” Bruce said abruptly. “I do know that, I just – I needed to hear you say it, I guess.”

Steve unfolded his arms to dig his thumb into the skin between his brows, feeling exhausted despite the fact that he had just gotten up. Bucky being afraid of Natasha and Tony being furious about Howard were more than enough to deal with, as far as he was concerned. Also, there was the alien warlord in possession of six Infinity Stones, not to mention the deal that Steve had just cut with the President of the United States. That wasn’t even counting the half an apocalypse that he had missed while he’d been stuck in 1945.

“Nat and I never actually – it was never really going to go anywhere,” Bruce said. “We never did anything.”

“I don’t actually care,” Steve said, which probably wasn’t the most politic thing he could have said. He sighed, rubbed at his forehead again, and said, “Bruce, I really don’t care as long as it’s not going to be a problem in the field, and if it is, tell me now; I’m worried enough about Tony as it is.”

Bruce stared at him, taken aback at his bluntness. After a moment he said, “It’s not going to be a problem.”

“Okay,” Steve said, then let his breath out slowly and scrubbed both hands over his face. “Sorry. That didn’t come out right.” Though he was tired of people from Aleksey Lebedev on down thinking that he should care.

“No, it’s – I shouldn’t have said anything. I know Nat and I know you and –” Bruce made a helpless gesture. “It’s just…been a while. And Betty and I never really – actually, the same thing sort of happened then too, except I jumped, she didn’t…” He let the words trail off, clearly not wanting to say it again.

Betty Ross was his ex-girlfriend – ex-fiancée, maybe, Steve wasn’t sure, since Bruce never talked about her. All Steve knew was that she was Secretary Ross’s daughter and a significant part of the tension between the two men. “Did she –” He hesitated, not sure how to ask the question.

Bruce’s shoulders slumped in relief. “Yeah. Yeah. The secretary told me. But I haven’t talked to her in ten years.”

Steve wondered if well, maybe you should would be taken badly under the circumstances and decided he didn’t want to risk it. “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said again, and then repeated, “Sorry. Um – if I go out there, is Nat going to kill me for cornering you?”

“I think that’s just a risk you’re going to need to take,” Steve said dryly, which startled a laugh out of him.

“I walked right into that one.” Bruce took a deep breath, then said, “I’m glad you’re not dead. And – congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Steve said. “I’m glad you’re not dead either. We missed you the past couple years.”

“Well, don’t take the wrong way, but I’m glad I missed some of it,” Bruce admitted. “Having me around probably would have made things worse.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Steve said. “They were plenty bad as it was.”

He stayed in the conference room after Bruce had gone, leaning against the table and trying to make himself go out into the kitchen – at the very least he wanted breakfast, though he’d lost his appetite. He could tell without making any effort to actually listen in that most of the other occupants of the compound were up now.

Steve truly didn’t care about Bruce’s largely non-existent history with Natasha. He had been there himself to see what had happened – or rather, what hadn’t happened – and if it had gone anywhere, then he would have been happy for both of them. It hadn’t and Natasha didn’t seem to care either; as far as Steve was concerned, that was that. From his admittedly biased perspective, Peggy had had much more reason to consider his relationship with Natasha any of her business and Steve had had more than enough of that back in 1945.

What Steve did care about right now was the Infinity Stones. He didn’t know enough about them to know whether Carol’s suggestion was possible; from what she, Wong, and Bruce had said, it had seemed likely enough, but that could mean anything. Plenty of things seemed possible but weren’t.

He could believe, very easily, that Thanos would destroy the Stones rather than risk the chance that anyone else might get them. He wasn’t sure that he believed that Thanos had only had the one goal – he didn’t know enough about the man to make a reasonable estimate – but he wasn’t Steve’s first fanatic, just the most ambitious one. The safest place for him to be was six feet under.

Eventually Steve got up and went back out into the kitchen, where he found the rest of the Avengers discussing the only real topic they had currently, now that time travel and quantum physics had been exhausted, the Snap was not only too depressing but had presumably been talked to death over the past three weeks, and Steve and Natasha’s relationship was a sensitive subject best left to cornering each of them individually. Steve was deeply hopeful that everyone was done with that but had the feeling that a few of them were at least professional enough to wait until after the Thanos op.

Sam was standing by the coffee machine, which as usual when the compound had a full complement was being pushed to its extremities. As Steve was getting himself coffee, Sam looked hard at his expression and said, “You okay, man?” His gaze flickered to Bruce, which Steve took to mean that everyone knew about their little talk.

“Fine.” Steve dumped sugar into his coffee and changed the subject. “Did Rocket and Nebula get their ship fixed?”

The two aliens weren’t in the kitchen, though Steve hadn’t been back long enough to know if that was significant or not.

Sam nodded. “According to them, it’s not pretty, but it will get us there and back.”

“Good enough.”

Sam frowned at him as Steve sipped at his coffee. “Are you okay?” he asked again.

Steve frowned back. “Don’t I look okay?”

“You look angry,” Sam said.

“I’m not angry.” He thought about it briefly and then clarified, “I’m just tired.”

“We’re going to get this guy, Steve,” Sam told him, his voice serious.

“And then what?” Steve asked him. “It’s not going to be over. This isn’t like Loki and the Chitauri; we’re not going to pack him up and come back to sweep up the rubble. It’ll be like Ultron if it’s like anything, only worse.”

“Not everything’s like something else,” Sam pointed out. “Some of it’s just…itself. Pretty sure this is one of those things.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Yeah, you’re right.” He drank the rest of his coffee, then started to rummage through the cupboards. Sam took away the cereal box he pulled out.

“Why are you eating like a ten-year-old when we gotta go fight an insane alien warlord in a couple of hours?”

“I just got back from three weeks of rationing and three days of being drugged and chained up on a bombed-out warehouse floor,” Steve protested.

“Dude,” Sam said, and then, “Chained up?”

“Yeah, by a bunch of Soviet spetsnaz guys who were under strict orders to bring me back to Moscow in one piece.”

“I thought you got shot.”

“They didn’t shoot the arm off, so it still counts as one piece.”

“I thought drugs didn’t work on you?”

“They had some stuff they stole from Howard, but it wasn’t working well.”

They both looked over as Tony said, “What about the Stones?”

His voice rang out clearly in one of those odd moments of stillness that happened whenever several conversations were going on at once, making everyone in the kitchen look at him. Bruce, Wong, and Carol all tensed, clearly wondering if Tony had guessed the same thing that they had. Steve, watching his expression, suspected the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. It wouldn’t have to Steve.

“I’ll take them.” Thor, standing in the entrance to the kitchen, sounded weary beyond words. “There are many hidden places among the Nine Realms and no others now live who know where they are. I’ll take them and hide them away and guard them.”

“Hiding places can be found,” Tony said sharply.

“There are some that cannot be reached save by the Bifrost or the Convergence,” Thor said. “There is no more Bifrost save that made by Stormbreaker and it will be five thousand years to the next Convergence. When it comes, I will be there too.”

Wong and Carol looked like they were both about to protest, but Thor’s grim expression apparently convinced them to leave it until later. Then everyone looked at Steve, since returning from the dead presumably made decisions like that his problem. Since historically the alternative had been that otherwise Tony was left to make the decisions, Steve said, “You sure about this, Thor?”

Thor nodded. “I’m certain.”

Steve swallowed. “Okay.”

He managed not to look at Carol or Wong as he said it, but the words felt bitter in his mouth. He must have sounded sincere enough, since no one questioned it and even Thor just nodded again, meeting Steve’s gaze briefly from across the room.

Steve felt Natasha’s gaze flicker towards him; a moment later she threaded her way through the crowd to join him and Sam, Yelena trailing after her and Bucky trailing warily after her, like he didn’t love having two Widows in striking distance of Steve. Sam gave him a dry look, rolling his eyes, and Steve shrugged back, seizing the opportunity to take the cereal box back from him.

“Is that a good idea?” Natasha asked.

Steve shrugged and looked at Sam. “How much does Ross know about the Stones?”

“Just that they exist. Why?”

“You really think Ross will let us hand them off to someone else once he knows that we have them back on Earth? Or that the president will?”

They all stared at him in various degrees of horrified understanding; Sam shook his head in disgust and looked away, while Yelena muttered something in Russian and Bucky grimaced. A muscle worked in Natasha’s jaw. None of them argued as Steve said, “I’d rather Thor have the Stones than run the risk that the U.S. government gets them.”

“Tell me about it,” Sam muttered.

“Fury thought the same thing about the Tesseract,” Natasha reminded Steve.

“I know.” No one had realized that the scepter was an Infinity Stone until it was too late, largely because at the time no one except Thor had known what Infinity Stones were. Even Thor had still thought they were a myth at the time.

Natasha met Steve’s eyes, a silent question in them. He tilted his head back at her, not quite a shrug. Until they knew for sure that the Stones were gone, they had to act like they were still around, with everything that entailed, both good and bad.

They’d only had half an apocalypse so far, after all. If there was one thing that Steve had learned over the past six years, it was that things could always get worse.