Homecoming

They wake up earlier on monday than they did on friday. Steve seems restless, a little strung tight, but Bucky can’t place why. He goes for a morning run alone, Bucky can’t make himself tag along with the way Steve gets dressed with his back to him and lets him know where he’s going like it’s a statement with no question or offer behind it. Bucky isn’t a running person anyway, he tells himself, and tries not to get too hung up on Steve’s peculiar behavior as he takes a quick shower, gets dressed and goes to make breakfast before waking the kids.

Beck is already awake in his crib, the most behaved angelic kid he’s ever come across, still lying on his bed with a thick cardboard book in his hand and completely focused on the pictures in it. Bucky greets and talks to him in russian while he pulls him out, sets him on his potty and puts him into fresh nappy pants and a change of clothes afterwards, before going over to Maggie’s room with the little one on his hip. Maggie’s still half asleep but wakes easily with a few soft words, and Bucky lets her get dressed by herself while he goes downstairs with Beck.

By the time they’re settled around the dining table and halfway through breakfast, Steve comes back from his run. He comes into the kitchen shortly, saying his good mornings and making Maggie screech when he shakes off his sweat-wet hair over her shoulders, before disappearing upstairs for a shower. The unease Bucky sensed on him still hasn’t dissipated, even though he tried putting on a carefree act for their children, and the doubt only gets accentuated by the fact that he doesn’t join them for breakfast after the shower is turned off a few minutes later.

“Daddy isn’t feeling so good this morning,” Bucky tries placating when even Maggie realizes something’s wrong, and she looks as convinced by the statement as Bucky feels. It’s not a good sign that someone with a metabolism like Steve Rogers doesn’t eat after exercise.

And so, they finish breakfast alone.

Bucky takes care of the dishes alone as well, while Maggie runs upstairs to get ready, Bucky doesn’t know what for, but Steve probably does. He hopes he’ll come around again to take care of that, because if he has to stem that alone as well, he doesn’t know what’ll happen. He has no idea about the daily routines of his family - of this family, except for what he was already part of. Which, as sobering as that thought is, hasn’t been nearly as much as he thought.

Luckily for him, he gets saved from his spiraling thoughts when there’s a knock on the front door and Steve comes down the stairs together with Maggie at the same time that Bucky makes his way into the hallway. Steve’s longer hair is still damp at the roots but otherwise he’s looking much more put together, and that somehow calms Bucky down just enough to file away the weird morning as a fluke for now. Maybe they’ll have a moment to talk about it later.

“Natashenka,” Bucky breathes out, surprised, when the door opens to a very casually dressed Natalia, sleek sunglasses perched on the middle of her nose, phone and keys in one hand and a duffel bag in the other, looking up at his call of her name and smiling that half warm, half cold smile. “James,” she responds with a nod of her head, and then looks down to Maggie.

Maggie, Bucky realizes, is dressed quite similarly to Natalia. Some wide, soft looking sweatpants, a wide necked long sleeve over what looks like a black leotard, and Bucky can even see some thick, colorful wool socks disappear under the edge of the pants. There’s even a duffel bag in her hand perfectly mirroring Natalia’s, and even if Bucky didn’t immediately have some kind of grainy, half-formed flashbacks to a young Natalia from a lifetime ago, he would’ve known the ballet attire anywhere.

“Ty gatova, dorogaya?” Natalia speaks easily, smooth as always, and Maggie hops on over to her just as easily. They continue talking in hushed voices in russian, Bucky catches pieces of the weekend being exchanged, and yeah, of course, this makes sense. He loves Natalia to pieces, even if he would probably never admit that out loud, and she’s the only other person he knows to be fluent in russian, so of course she’d take to their kids like a moth to flame. It makes his heart warm knowing she’s teaching her ballet.

Natalia turns to step off of the patio deliberately, looking back to them for a goodbye, nodding once more, “We’ll be back after lunch, as always.”

“Actually, Nat, would you mind taking Beck with you as well, today? Just once,” Steve interjects, suddenly appearing next to Bucky with the little one on his hip, and Natalia looks about as perplexed as Bucky feels. It’s not a big expression by all means, it’s still Natalia after all, but Bucky feels like he can look through her quite well, for some reason. He doesn’t wanna know how.

“A sixer Heineken and Guylian chocolates next movie night, Rogers,” she agrees, cunning and immediate, taking Beck from Steve and finally making her way down the patio, Maggie trailing after her with a bounce in her step. Natalia waves the hand with the keys and phone over her shoulders, not looking back, as she rounds the corner to where her car is presumably parked. They hear Maggie’s very muted ‘goodbye!’ as well, before car doors thumping and the sound of an engine departing. It’s quiet between them for a few moments.

“So, uh, why –“

Bucky turns to where Steve stood just seconds ago, but finds the hallway empty.

Bucky doesn’t know what to do. It feels like Steve is avoiding him, and that’s a feeling he neither knows nor likes. Steve is not the person to avoid a problem, and that’s a universally known fact. Which means this is either not a problem at all or such a big problem that not even stubborn, righteous asshole Steve Rogers can deal with it like he usually does.

Both options make dread crawl over Bucky’s skin.

He spends the late morning busying himself around the first floor, thinking himself into near panic attacks and then back out of them again at least a couple of times, and cringing at himself for any and all plans on how to solve this situation by himself because they all sound stupid in his head as soon as he moves into action. He ends up standing in the middle of the kitchen, living room and sunroom more times than he would like to admit, admonishing himself for whatever he just planned to do and scrapping it again.

It doesn’t make it any better. Every time it happens, there’s another load of helplessness added onto his mind, and it makes him question himself to a degree he didn’t think possible since 2014.

He knows this man upstairs, better than anyone else he’s ever known, even himself, and yet he doesn’t know him at all. Not nearly enough to comfort him. And really, what does that make Bucky?

(An impostor.)

He remembers fights, ghosts of long dead arguments and echoes of angry, hurtful words, but none of those flashy recollections come anywhere close to how he’s feeling now. He can’t trust whatever’s left of the Bucky from seventy years ago to help him through this now, because he’s not talking to whatever’s left of the Steve from seventy years ago either, and doesn’t that make him feel naked? Stripped down bare to whatever the hell he is without his fractured past as a crutch, without this unknown future taking him by the hand and leading him forward. Just him, James Bucky Barnes, trapped in a present he doesn’t belong in. Once again.

Goddamn, what did he do to Steve? How can he undo it?

“Buck, can you please bring the laundry from the dryer up here?”

Steve’s voice resounds startlingly loud in the quiet of the lower floor, even with it being dulled down by the distance and carpets and at least two doors between them. But it helps. It’s a start. It’s a pointer on where to go from here. Bucky can work with that. And Steve sounded neutral, not angry or resigned or hurt. Bucky can also work with that. One step at a time. Do what Steve’s asked of you, and then analyze the first hand situation, facial expression, posture and mental state. It’s that simple.

It’s that simple to fall back into mission design and not need to think anymore.

His mind relaxes a little with the physical task. He walks into the laundry room under the stairs, taking the basket stored to the side, putting it in front of the dryer to empty its contents into it. The machine still blinks, signaling end, and Bucky turns it off for good measure before bending down to pick up the basket and bring it upstairs.

He counts the steps it takes for him from the laundry room to the master bedroom. Fifty-two, with eighteen being stairs. It takes his mind off of Steve, until he’s standing in front of him.

Nothing will ever be able to distract him from the presence that is Steve Rogers. Not even HYDRA’s programming achieved that, and they damn well tried their best.

“Thank you.” Steve smiles, and it’s an ugly little thing. Very unlike Steve. More like Captain America. And that dude died together with the Asset in the Potomac, so seeing him here with Bucky makes his nerve endings fizzle. Why. Why is Steve putting on an act. What does this mean.

“‘Welcome,” Bucky punches out and holds the basket out for Steve, almost mechanical. He watches for signs of hesitation or anxiety, but there’s none, except for a slight pause before Steve takes the basket from his hands. He keeps watching for anything, anything that might indicate something’s wrong that he can fix, while Steve goes over to the closet and starts folding the clothes into their respective drawers and shelves.

It’s at least cathartic to watch.

The familiar strain of muscle in Steve’s lower back and shoulders, the fluid movement of his waist and arms as he bends down or reaches up. His nape seems tense, though.

Longing is such a bittersweet feeling.

“Steve. Pal. What’s wrong?”

Bucky can’t make himself not ask. Steve’s hands falter a little where they’re folding a t-shirt, shoulders hitching up for just a second, before all tension drains out of him, even his nape. Bucky watches him bend down to pick up the basket, turn around to the bed and continue folding clothes into stacks on it instead of the closet. It’s a mundane action for what it’s worth, but Bucky realizes what it is. An offering. A peace treaty. He can look Steve in the face like this from his place in the door jamb. He’s letting him in.

“It’s,” Steve starts but then distracts himself with folding a long-sleeved bodysuit that probably belongs to Beck. Bucky lets him sort his thoughts for a few seconds, then hums in question to prompt him up again. Steve sighs, and it sounds almost defeated. “It’s just – the last day, Buck. I’m just tryna outrun the inevitable.”

There’s about a million thoughts and none at all in Bucky’s mind simultaneously, trying to not jump the gun on whatever Steve had just admitted to. Dread is once again rearing its ugly head, but this time it’s not directed at Bucky himself. And that’s distinctly worse.

“The last day?”

Steve hums in answer, but doesn’t say anything else. He sounds and looks tired, a small frown knitting his brows together and pulling down the corners of his mouth as he continues folding the children’s clothes. His expression brings up remnants of cold nights with the running oven open because their radiator was out once again, and Steve hunching over his sketchbook in the kitchen, worrying about commission deadlines. 

Bucky wants to poke further, but he doesn’t dare. He’d rather take his own confusion and presumptions than make Steve hurt. This isn’t something he can make better by softly taking the pencil out of Steve’s hand, asking him to worry about it tomorrow and come to bed with him for the night.

“Yeah,” Steve eventually says, picking up the two piles of children’s clothes and shuffling past him to put them away in the rightful place, “the last day, Buck. It’s all gonna be back to normal real soon.”

It sounds like Steve hadn’t intended for him to hear it, the way he had mumbled it to himself after he had been long past him in the hallway, but enhanced hearing was a blessing in disguise like that. Bucky hangs his head into the emptiness of the bedroom, feeling the tight urge to do something coiling in his chest, but being unable to do anything after all.

When he looks back up, he notices his tactical gear neatly laid out on the bed next to the laundry basket, as if ready to be put on for a fight. Even his forearm and thigh holsters.

Bucky leaves it lying right there.

Natalia drops off the kids in the early afternoon, just after lunch like she’d told them. Beck is tired to the bone, Natalia tells them about how she had practiced a little toddler ballet basics with him while Maggie was busy with her own lesson, so Bucky takes him from her arm and lies him down for an afternoon nap upstairs pretty much right away. He is dead asleep before Bucky even gets him halfway out of his outside clothes, so he just puts him in his crib carefully and turns the baby monitor on just in case he’ll wake up before their planned one and a half hours.

Maggie is still as chipper as how Bucky knows her, if not for a subtle haze of sluggishness and satisfaction superimposing her usual quick wit and poise. She had followed him upstairs when he went to take care of Beck, and as he steps back out into the hallway, she joins him from across the room in similarly comfy clothes as her ballet attire before. The same colorful wool socks, but different, shorter sweat pants that only go to her knees, and a blue shirt with Captain America’s shield on it. It’s sweet. Bucky’s sure that shirt was a gift from one of their god awful friends.

“Kak prashvol balet?” He asks her as they make their way back downstairs, leaving Beck’s bedroom door cracked open just a smidge, and gets an excited reiteration in russian back. He smiles to himself while he watches Maggie hop down the stairs in front of him, listening to her go on about warm up with Nat, having her lesson with her actual teacher and then doing a routine with Nat that she has taught her from back in the day, and god, she’s so sweet. He can’t believe she’s his girl.

Joining Natalia and Steve back downstairs, they’re in a silent conversation, still at the open door. Bucky doesn’t know why they decided against moving to the kitchen or the living room for the meantime, but he doesn’t question it out loud. Natalia looks up at him with an unreadable piercing gaze and a small, almost imperceptibly tight upturn of her lips that Bucky doesn’t know how he can read so easily. Steve tells Maggie she can go outside to play after she is done with her afternoon kindergarten activities, so she bounds over to Natalia easily, hugs her around her hips in goodbye and then disappears into the living room.

“Alright, I’ll see you next weekend,” Natalia announces then, clipped as always, and then turns to the door, “James, help me load up.”

Bucky doesn’t see anything to help her load up, but once again doesn’t question her riddles. Steve says his goodbyes softly as he follows her outside, to the driver’s side of her car where she turns back to him. He frowns at her, head too full of unusual occurrences this whole day so far to deduce what her expression means now, but he doesn’t actually need to. It’s well concealed pain that screams Red Room without him knowing where the voice comes from, he realizes as she pulls him into a short but tight hug, so tight that he feels her forearms dig into his neck. As quickly as it came, it’s gone again.

Her face is perfectly steeled into an amiable, blank smile when she looks back up at him.

“It was good to see you again. Be nice to your people back there though, okay?”

And that’s what it takes for it all to click.

She doesn’t mean back there in the house. She means back there, in 2018. The acceptance washes over him, dreadful and inevitable, like a cryo freeze.

Natalia gets into her car without another word, and lets him stand there as she drives off. Bucky watches after her until he can’t see her anymore on the dirt road leading off past the lake, and then turns back into the house. Steve is just now putting away their leftover lunch seeing as Natalia came right as they finished, and Bucky watches him from the doorway, hands clenching and unclenching rhythmically as he processes that they all knew. That they’re from the future and they all went through this before, in their own past. In Bucky’s present.

“Tell me what’s going to happen.”

Steve doesn’t look unfazed to the untrained eye, but luckily for him, Bucky has about a hundred years of Steve Rogers knowledge ingrained into his hippocampus and the essence of his blood. There is no way for him to miss the way his head bops in resignation, his shoulders hunched even when he’s controlling them to stand straight. Like after a back alley fight he’s lost and Bucky found him at home, nursing a shiner and a busted lip, I had ’em on the ropes, Buck, really.

“You never told me much,” Steve begins, and he sounds like he did yesterday when they were dancing, deep in thought and humorlessly light, “and honestly, I never wanted to believe you. I had you back, after five years, and I just wanted to be done with it all. Finally have the peace and quiet we deserve. Scott was in the quantum realm for five hours when he came back, so how was your experience even correlating? Five days, in a completely different timeline? It defied what we had learned about the quantum realm. It sounded impossible. Too good to be true. But you were so sure, and honest, with everything you could tell me about it. I couldn’t not believe you. Especially with the way you kept going on about the kids. Nothing could stop you from retrieving them.”

Steve laughs, and it’s a sound Bucky doesn’t want to hear. It sounds put on, defeated. He watches him close the plastic containers and store them in the fridge, a feeble attempt to put off this conversation as long as possible. Bucky wants to be able to give him that freedom, to avoid what’s hurting him, but he can’t. He feels like they’re on borrowed time, and he needs to know before it’s too late.

“Steve, please.”

Steve turns to him, then, taking a deep breath that makes his chest and shoulders lift, and there it is, the Steve Rogers from 1943, a displaced, young determination on his aged, retired face, the Captain America that had the weight of war unceremoniously dumped onto his shoulders without much choice, bearing it only for the sake of keeping his best guy safe. Bucky had hoped to never have to see that look on his face ever again.

“I don’t want to have this conversation with the children around, Buck. Can you please send Maggie outside?”

It feels like a slap to the face, the harsh reality of the situation coming down on top of him. He nods mechanically for the lack of better words to say, and goes around to the living room to do as told. Maggie looks up from her place at the coffee table where she’s sitting cross legged on the floor, smiling up at him.

“I’m almost done, papa!”

Bucky tries smiling back, tries focusing on his daughter’s excitement instead of the impending doom that lurks just across the hall in the kitchen, but it’s hard.

“That’s great, Magpie. How about we take a break for now and you get to go outside to play?”

Immediately, there’s a fire sparking up in Maggie’s eyes, and she jots down whatever task she was finishing before scrambling up and bounding past him into the hallway, all the while chanting yay, yay, yay until she’s out the door with a final, “Thank you, papa!”

Bucky watches her run off to the little playground from where he followed her into the hallway, calling out once that she be careful and always stay where they can see her. When he gets a distant ‘yes, papa’ back, he takes a deep breath, closes the front door for good measure and saunters back into the kitchen. 

Steve has abandoned the dishes and after-lunch clean up in favor of a cup of tea or coffee. He stands in front of the kettle waiting for the water to boil, two mugs on the counter in front of him. His fingernails tap against the countertop or the ceramic of the cups in a sign of distress, and it makes Bucky grimace. He sits down anyways, patiently waiting for Steve to come around, even with the incessant urgency at the back of his head reminding him that their time is somehow running out.

Steve luckily doesn’t let him wait any longer. That painful determination still on his face, he sits down with the mugs as soon as he’s done, and starts on telling him everything he knows. About the five days Bucky has with them before he’s going back to his own time, how the five days correlate to five years in his own time. About how he will find himself back in Wakanda where he died (he died in that last battle) and Dr. Stephen Strange will help them back to the second fight in New York, going from one to the other without much preparation.

And, most importantly, he tells him about how he has no clue when to expect him to go back to his own timeline. It could be now or in the evening, practically any minute. That’s why they need to be prepared as soon as possible, and that’s why Steve had laid out Bucky’s tactical gear earlier.

It’s all said with a sobering finality in Steve’s voice. Bucky doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t.

He knew what was coming, deep down, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to finally retrace the lines he has let blur since Day One.

They somehow breathe easier after Bucky comes back down, changed into the clothes he arrived in, knife holsters and forearm braces and empty rifle strap on his back. He feels out of balance, like something’s sneaking up on him and he can’t see it, and it makes him itch with the urge to turn around and scope it out. But there’s nothing. Of course, there’s nothing. It’s paranoia, it’s time running out for them, but they breathe easier with the knowledge that they both did their part to be prepared. There’s nothing more to do than wait.

Steve has finally started on the dishes from lunch. Bucky would’ve offered to help him, make Steve wash them and himself dry them off, but he doesn’t dare. He knows when Steve Rogers needs to do something by himself, and as ludicrous as this one is, by God, he won’t interfere. Steve has settled for less (and more ridiculous) than this to do by himself back in the day, and he’s not about to get snapped at. Sharpening his pencils, peeling potatoes, hell, throwing rocks at Missus Peterson’s apple tree. Sometimes you just need to let a guy brood.

It’s not brooding, Bucky knows. Steve is just occupying his mind, coping and overcoming whatever imprint the earlier conversation left on him until he can stare it straight in the face again, looking forwards and not backwards. Bucky sits down back at the table, pulling his still warm, not at all touched coffee closer, and lets himself do people watching, except it’s not people and it never will be people. He watches the line of Steve’s neck and shoulders strain, tense, move the sponge against dirty plates in habitual repetitions, and then relax more and more after every clean dish he puts onto the drying rack.

He does it ever so slowly. Dishes are usually done in a matter of minutes, especially when they share the task between each other, but Steve is taking his sweet time, controlled and savoring, like he’s letting the feeling of relaxation settle into his lungs with every breath, like he’s taking Bucky apart at the seams and joints in their bed, not wanting to miss any goddamn second of it. Like he’s experiencing something precious, something once in a lifetime.

Aw hell, Rogers, it’s just dirty dishes, get over yourself.

“Are ya doin’ the dishes or makin’ love over there, Virgin Mary?”

Bucky lifts his cup to his mouth, blowing onto the surface even though he knows it’s cold enough to drink without even needing to slurp, just because it’s something to do. He hopes he’s still good enough at Steve watching to know when he’s cooled off and warmed up again to his presence and his evermore present banter. The soft slope of Steve’s shoulders and the gentle way he holds the sponge by now have indicated that for him, at least.

“Jeez, Buck, I dunno, ain’t you the one who oughta be able to make that distinction?”

Bucky takes a sip, humming, satisfied that he’s still got it in him. His ability to read Steve like a book, that is. Sadly not Steve himself. (Jeez, Barnes, reel it in. You hopeless horndog.)

“You’d think so, but it’d be easier to ask me the difference between yiddish and german, what with your sense of rhythm ‘n all –“

Steve gasps indignantly, loud and theatrical, and finishes off the plate in his hands quickly so he can throw the dish towel at Bucky. He doesn’t hear the expected laugh at his sound of upset, but doesn’t pay it any mind, thinking Buck is still keeping himself in check with his dry, ironically serious sarcasm, blank face awaiting him until Bucky gets his last punchline in.

What he hadn’t accounted for was the fact that Bucky would be gone by the time he turns around, damp dish towel landing disruptively, unsatisfactory, half on the edge of the table and half over the backrest of the kitchen chair where he wanted to surprise him, witty retort getting stuck halfway up Steve’s throat, choking him.

“The Buck from two nights ago would like to object,” he had wanted to say, but now he wishes he would have just said, “I love you”, instead of burying the gravity of the situation underneath their stupid, senseless jokes.

“I love you, Buck. See you soon,” he thinks instead, but never says out loud again.

He finishes the rest of the dishes, the glasses and the cutlery, without the dish towel. He already despises the water stains it’ll leave when they air dry, but he can’t make himself round the table corner and retrieve it. He avoids that side of the kitchen like the plague all of a sudden. It’s straight up denial, he knows, but as long as he doesn’t move anything from there, doesn’t walk through the space Bucky had occupied, or leans into the emptiness he left behind, then it isn’t undeniable. 

He gives himself the time it takes for the plug to drain the dirty dish water out of the basin before he laughs at himself in miserable, embarrassing, angry acceptance.

He had five days to prepare himself for this, and before that even five additional years since 2023 to prepare himself for this, and it still hurts him just as bad as every other time he lost Buck right in front of his eyes. Isn’t it ironic? He’s the one to know that feeling the best, and still, it ambushes him from behind every time it happens, time and again, bashing his head in. It’s one of those things you never get used to, Steve guesses. Like war.

Yeah, loving Buck is like the war. Unyielding, unapologetic, inevitable and unchanging. Loving Buck, like the war, in Steve’s long, long overdue life, will only ever be the single thing he boils down to be.

Steve pinches his eyelids with thumb and forefinger, too stubborn to let the burning tears behind them fall. He did this to himself, he doesn’t deserve to cry about this now. He can cry all he wants when his pride crumbles in the safety of his bedroom, deep into the night later on, when he can be as childish and shameful as he wants to be, screaming and thrashing and throwing a tantrum about how unfair it is to get everything Steve Rogers has always been stripped down to set right in front of him just to pull it away again like a rug under your feet.

First, he needs to get the worst part of it over with. Maggie is a force to be reckoned with any day of the week, but as disappointing and downright scary as it is, the worst thing she has inherited from Buck was the absolute, unwavering protectiveness about blonde, blue eyed Barneses. Which doesn’t make it any easier to put a smile on and tell her about the way the line of his life once again vanished, frayed out into all its individual fibers beyond recognition. 

He tries his best anyway, thinking of calling Maggie inside from the open doorway, but deciding against it and walking out the short ways over to their playground instead. Maggie is easily walking the middle of the seesaw, tipping it from one side to the other like there’s nothing more entertaining, and only looks up from the tipping point in the middle when Steve cards his hand through her windswept, tangled hair. Her hair’s so similar to Buck’s, and she doesn’t like to take care of it either. They have so much in common it hurts, sometimes.

“Hey, daddy. Am I s’posed to go back to my worksheet? Papa didn’t tell.”

Steve huffs out a laugh, it’s a chortled, watery, ugly thing, and he can only keep himself from acting out on the emotion behind it by grabbing Maggie under the arms, pulling her against himself and carrying her slowly back to the house under the bum. She’s way too big to be carried around like this by now, her long legs and arms hanging awkwardly down his back and into the line of his feet where she refuses to snake them around his hips, her sneakers knocking into his kneecaps uncomfortably, but he doesn’t care.

“No, sweetheart, it’s fine. You can finish it if you want but you don’t need to.”

Maggie makes an unsatisfied, almost upset sound.

“Why’re you so weird then, daddy? What happened? Why are you carrying me inside?”

And yeah, that’s some valid questions. Why is he acting weird? He doesn’t have any rights to be upset or sad or grieving, because it was his own selfishness that brought this over him. He could’ve handled it better, helped Bucky understand the situation from Day One and kept each other at a distance that wouldn’t hurt either of them in the end, but instead he was a weak, weak man and blurred the line between past and future from the second he asked for that first kiss.

He really can’t blame anyone else but himself for this anguish. So he has to take it in stride.

He sets Maggie down in the hallway, right between the doors to the living room and the kitchen. That way she has a perfect view of the complete and utter emptiness of the house, no Bucky in sight anywhere. Rightfully, she asks, in a careful tone, “Where is papa?”

He kneels down in front of her.

“Maggie, baby, darling,” he starts, and his voice cracks painfully even through the effort of letting it not to, “You remember the story of how your daddy reversed the blip?”