Chapter 2
Whatever kind of madman Scott Lang was, he could eat a great deal of food. Peggy eyed the scattered plates and dishes between herself and the man on the table in their quiet booth, wondering where in the world he put it all. He ate nearly as much as Steve post-serum, and with far more enthusiasm as he slowly savored a banana cream pie with the sort of bliss she showed for good English chocolate.
“Ahhh...ahhh man, this is the good stuff. Yeah!” He sighed heavily as he shook his head, crumpling into the aqua vinyl seat with a groan. “Man, this pie puts Marie Callendar’s to shame!”
Peggy had no idea who this Marie was, nor did she care; she was long past Lang’s theatrics. “I promised you dinner in exchange for an explanation. So far, you’ve only managed to eat me out of house and home and carry on obscenely about the pie.”
“Seriously, take a bite of this pie! You’d be obscene about it too!”
Peggy seriously doubted that. “I’ve had the pie here many times.”
“Lucky! They don’t have stuff like this in my time.” He shook his head, scooping another mouthful of yellowish custard and cream as he sagged with the pleasure of whatever the pie was doing to him. Peggy wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“It reminds me of this place over in Oakland my grandpa took me to all the time that was a kitschy diner, kind of like this. Had the best turkey open-faced sandwiches and meatloaf, and when we were all done, there was a slice of pie as big as your head, made from scratch. They just don’t make pies like they used to.” He paused, frowning, replaying his words. “I guess they don’t make pies like they do now in my time is what I’m saying.”
“And what time is that, Mr. Lang?” Her words snapped with her impatience.
“I’m from 2018.” He rattled off the number matter-of-factly, as if meeting someone from the future was a normal thing for people. “Seriously, this crust…”
Peggy snagged the plate from under his poetic waxing, setting it on the other side of the table as Lang stared at it forlornly. “Pie later, after I’ve had answers. You mean you are trying to tell me you are from 70 years in the future?”
“Yes.” Realizing he couldn’t avoid it, he set down his fork and picked up his cup of coffee. “The 21st century.”
He didn’t seem mad as he said. In fact, he seemed perfectly earnest, dark eyes begging her to believe him. She’d seen many a spy and suspect look less convincing under one of her interrogations, but none of them had sounded nearly as barking mad as this man. The future? Honestly?
“Do you expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t know how else to convince you without taking you there, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”
“How?”
“How to take you there, or how I got here?”
“Both.” She crossed her arms along the tabletop. “I assume you didn’t just blink your eyes and end up here.”
“No.” He finally owned, straightening up and leaning towards her, his voice lowering as he glanced around the practically empty coffee house. “How much do you know about quantum physics?”
“Enough to know that what they were playing at in New Mexico was dangerous enough, but beyond that, perhaps not enough to explain how you ended up 70 years in the past.” She thought of Jason Wilkes and Whitney Frost and decided not to try and explain that.
“Right, okay, so on the quantum level, you know there are atoms and things smaller than atoms, even subatomic particles. Once you get that small, things get...a little weird.”
Lang reached down and tapped the buckle of the belt on his ridiculous-looking suit, one that had raised more than a few eyebrows on their walk to the diner. Thankfully, most seemed to assume it was just fancy dress for the evening and didn’t question it.
“This here is a regulator. It allows me to expand or shrink the space between all the subatomic particles that make me up. I can use it to grow huge. Did it once, too! Did like, I don’t know, sixty-five feet, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You get that big, and then you can’t get enough oxygen, and then you are passing out in the middle of San Francisco Bay like a giant beached whale. But you can also shrink down. If you shrink small enough, you can go subatomic, become so small you enter into quantum space, and once you are there, there are all these strange things; holes between the dimensions where reality gets fuzzy, time vortices, places that will swallow you, suck you in, and deposit you in another era.”
This all sounded like madness, like something out of those silly magazines that she had seen more than a few of the SSR boys read at their desks when they should have been filing the reports she was saddled with. “And you are telling me you ended up in one by accident and somehow found the perfect time and place to find me and tell me I had to save the world?”
She had him, and Lang knew it. “Well, actually, I didn’t come here first. I went to the future first. Five years, to be exact, and that was by accident. I had no idea where I’d end up. But from there, yeah, I have a device. That’s my GPS, I guess you can call it, the way I figure out where I need to go.”
Lang reached for one of his gloves, the one that matched the ridiculous suit. Wrapped around one of them was a bit of plastic that looked more like a watch than anything else. “I set it to the date and location, and it gets me there, essentially.”
“And you meant to come here, to Manhattan, 1948?”
“New Year’s Eve, yes.” He nodded, delighted with himself. “I admit I wasn’t sure it would work myself till I saw you standing there with a gun in my face.”
“And so you’ve found me.” She saluted him briefly with her coffee cup, sipping at it as she eyed him over the rim. “So, you want to take me back with you to the future?”
This made Lang snicker for a brief moment for unexplainable reasons. He sobered at her steady glare, clearing his throat. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Here, he grimaced, sliding down into his seat as he regarded her, thoughts whizzing in his brain. Likely, the next chain in the yarn he was spinning for her as he went along, or perhaps another thread of whatever radio show he had been listening to that inspired all of this madness. She waited, fingers wrapped around her mug tapping only somewhat patiently as she waited for the next bit of ridiculousness to fall out of his mouth.
“Because we need to save it, to fix it, and I think you are the only one who can manage it.”
“Again, I ask, why?”
He sighed, hands scrubbing over his face as he tipped his head toward the ceiling. “I can tell you, but it sounds crazy.”
“Crazier than you traveling through time to end up in a garbage can?”
He seemed to concede this point. “Okay, but if I tell you this, you have to promise to listen and just accept it. Don’t get all weird, stalk away, get insulted.”
“And you presume I would?”
“Well, frankly, I might if I were you.”
“I might surprise you.” She found she often did when it came to other people and their presumptions. Still, Lang didn’t look convinced. He pushed himself up, squaring his shoulders, looking her straight in the eye.
“All right, I need you to prevent the split up of the Avengers.” He pronounced it with the sort of grave urgency one might explain an assassination plot or a bomb in a building.
“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it? What in the world is an ‘avenger’?” It sounded like some sort of horrible film serial they would show at the cinemas on Saturday mornings for children.
“The Avengers! They are a team of superheroes, Earth’s mightiest ones as a matter of fact...or they were.”
“Until they split up?”
“Yeah.” Lang picked up his mug, glaring at its depths rather than drinking it. “There was a difference of opinion about the direction. See, the Avengers are meant to be the group you call when a situation gets bad- really bad. When it’s too big for one government or army to deal with, they are the ones who put a stop to it. Individually, they are heroes who do all sorts of great things, but together, they can stop whole armies.”
Frankly, to Peggy, that sounded dangerous. “Who controls them?”
“See, that’s the rub. Up until recently, it was SHIELD, but...well, let’s just say some stuff happened, and now they are independent contractors. I don’t know how or if SHIELD is tied in anymore. They were privately funded, kept running operations, and tried to do some real good in a world where crazy things seemed to be happening all the time. But then, there was this situation with a country in Eastern Europe. Ever hear of Sokovia?”
“Small country, currently occupied by the Soviets?”
“That’s the one! The political situation has changed quite a bit over time. The Soviets left behind a political mess, and the Avengers tried to help, and well...they may have broken the country...permanently.”
“What do you mean by broken?”
Lang squirmed here, looking anywhere but at her skeptical frown. “There was an unforeseen series of events that ended up with the capital city having a giant hole carved out of it?”
This is what she got for investigating a noise rather than hailing a cab. “I don’t believe this…”
“I told you it was hard to believe! I wasn’t lying!”
“Well if you aren’t, you’re loony” She regretted that she ever listened to the man in the first place.’’
“You promised you’d listen.”
“I didn’t promise to agree to stories.”
He sighed, throwing up his hands. “You’re right, and you know, I knew you were smart, everyone says so. Of course, you wouldn’t believe this.”
“And you tried anyway?”
“Because I had to!” Here the humor and self-assuredness he’d displayed up to this point fell away and desperation rose to the fore instead. “Do you think I’d do something as insane as traveling through time to just be insulted and told I was crazy?”
Frankly, she didn’t know. A dull ache settled between her eyes that she rubbed fretfully as she thought longingly of her small apartment and a hot bath. “Let us say you aren’t mad. What in the world does a team of crazed heroes with fantastic abilities have to do with me today?”
“Because Sokovia means the world takes notice. It means that people who think they know better than anyone else how to do things try to tell the Avengers what to do. It means that they split up over it. They take sides, one is arguing that the Avengers need more control and oversight so that they can mitigate civilian casualties and prevent another Sokovia. The other side wants less control so they can do what they need to do without signing off in triplicate and going through a sub-committee hearing to just go and help people in need who are being attacked or are in danger. They couldn’t agree on it, so they split in two, everyone picking a side.”
Peggy could truly see both sides of an argument like that. A truly sticky situation indeed, if any of it were true. “And what could I possibly add to any of these arguments?”
Here Lang grimaced, hunching in on himself as he pushed his mug absently across the table. “It’s not what you can add, though I think you are brilliant and could add a lot to the argument. It’s more of what you can do to help mitigate it. In the end, it’s not just about two sides of an argument, it’s two personalities in our leadership, two guys who are larger than life, but who are so convinced they are right that they risk everything because they can’t agree. That’s where I need you, specifically, because, frankly, you are the only person in all of history who I know could talk sense to the both of them - who they would even listen to - and make them see reason.”
“And who are these men that the only possible answer to your problem is me?”
He blinked a long moment, staring at her. “Remember what I said about listening?”
“I’ve listened this far.”
He nodded, squaring his shoulders and taking a deep breath. “Tony Stark and...Steve Rogers.”
Whatever Peggy had expected to hear, that wasn’t it. “Excuse me?”
The bottom of her stomach fell out and landed somewhere at her feet as her fingers gripped the ceramic in her hands more tightly than she thought possible. Till now she’d thought this strange man with his outrageous outfit and even more wild story merely an addled stranger, mixed up in all the alcohol and revelry. Now to suggest something so cruel, he either had to be utterly insane or completely clueless.
“I know, I know, it’s crazy, but you’ve come along this far.”
She found her tongue thick, tears prickling as she struggled to string sounds into something coherent. “Steve Rogers is dead.”
“No, he’s not. He’s just...sleeping.” Lang muttered lamely, expecting some sort of reaction from her that she wasn’t giving. “Look, I told you it was crazy, but it’s true. Steve Rogers isn’t dead. He never was. He crash landed somewhere between Greenland and Canada and it took nearly 70 years to find him. They thawed him out and he was as good as new! Even got back to defending the Earth not a month later, it was amazing! He seriously hadn’t aged a day from when you knew him. It was like seeing the old newsreels come to life!”
Peggy could only stare at him mutely, her skin feeling hot and cold all at the same time. “Sleeping? In the ice?”
“Yeah! It took them forever to find the plane, I guess, and it was by accident. I know Tony’s dad tried for years, but it was some Russian trawler looking for oil and there he was.”
Steve...was alive? She could feel the telltale prickle as she tried to find her voice. He was alive, somewhere out there. He could be found! He could come home!
“Do..do you know where he’s at?” She managed to finally get words out beyond the tears that clogged her throat, her lips trembling with the effort.
Lang seemed to know instantly her implication. “No...see, yeah, no, we can’t just thaw him out now, because we need him in the future!”
“And we don’t need him now?” She needed him now. Didn’t this fool understand that? Unless, of course, this was all some sort of horrible lie and he was making it all up, a cruel joke at her broken heart’s expense.
Lang looked somewhat helpless at that. “I mean...I don’t know if you do need him now or you don’t. The world managed to survive without him for 70 years in my time and nothing exploded. But we need him in the future.”
“What, for your beloved Avengers? The ones who seem to make a habit out of destroying small, European countries?”
This argument wasn’t one he had anticipated as he panicked, running fevered fingers through his dark hair, making it stand on end. “Look, you’re right, okay, but something is coming, something...we need the Avengers in on it, we need them together, or else…”
He trailed off, eyes wide in his frantic face.
“What? You said it yourself, your government wants to restrict them because they see them as a danger.”
“Else Thanos will come and kill off half the known universe in a single snap of his fingers.”
Peggy was a bit tired of being confused by this odd fellow and was regretting playing along with this every minute that passed. “The known...universe?”
Lang only nodded, far too agitated to care about her distress. “Thanos is this alien guy, giant, purple, that’s all I got out of Tony. Basically like Hitler, only he thinks the best thing for the universe is killing half of all of it to help it thrive or something. A whacked-out, crazy idea, except he does it. The Avengers tried to stop it, but they had split up by that point, no one was talking to anyone else. Tony was off one place, Cap was off another, and all the bad guys had to do was divide and conquer. Thanos gets what he needs and boom, half the universe is gone with it. Just like that, random people standing in line for coffee, driving their cars, flying airplanes, all gone...dust...as if they never even existed.
Whether or not Peggy bought a word of it, clearly he thought it was true. The horror, grief, and hurt were real enough. He stared in between them, unseeing, the sort of thousand-yard stare of all of those who had lost someone suddenly, processing the grief of their existence just being ripped away.
“Who did you lose,” she asked, gently
He blinked at her with red-rimmed eyes as he pulled down a zipper on his suit. Reaching inside, he pulled out a device, a slim contraption made of metal and glass. He tapped the dark top and a light came on, multicolored and glowing, swiping his fingers across it as tiny images flew past a stunning color photograph of himself with a small girl. Peggy stared at the device as her brain tried to make sense of it and what it was. Howard would kill to get his hands on something like that. He stopped, tapping a finger against one of the small images. It popped up on the glass, unveiling another picture filled with tiny images. Again he swiped down with his thumb, looking through what looked like a tiny photograph, all bright and colored, like real life.
“What is that?” She couldn’t help her childish curiosity, despite everything else fantastical that had happened that evening.
Lang only looked mildly surprised at her confusion and interest. “It’s a cell phone, technically, though honestly, it’s a mini-computer I can hold in my hand.”
“A computer?” She had worked at Bletchley Park in the early days and even well into her time with the SSR and was well aware of the large, cumbersome data machines that everyone kept throwing money at. Those looked nothing like the device he was manipulating so adroitly in front of her now.
“Yeah it does a ton of things you likely never imagined a computer could do and it also makes phone calls to people, too.”
“Without wires?” This boggled her mind.
“The future is a crazy place.” He smiled sadly as he tapped on the glass. A picture enlarged on it, one of a group of smiling people in full, lifelike color at a camera. They were in a park somewhere.
“This is my family, more or less, the family I made for myself at least.” The sad longing on his face spoke to just how much he cared for them. “This was taken just a month ago, or at least a month ago for me, I guess. It was just a day in the park.”
The grief gave him pause as he sat looking at it for long, quiet moments. “The woman down there in the corner is my ex-wife, Maggie, and her husband, Jim. He’s a cop, but an alright guy. That’s Janet and Hank, they invented the suit and the technology. He was the first Ant-Man.”
“Ant-Man?” She assumed that must be his hero name, much as Steve used Captain America. Peggy had always thought Steve’s moniker sounded silly and this Hank's was worse, like something one found in a comic book.
Lang blushed. “Well, yeah, Janet said she married him for his looks, not for his skill at naming things.” He chuckled as he enlarged the photo again to zoom in on the face of the woman sitting in front of the older couple and very close to him, her chin tucked over his right shoulder, smiling softly. “That’s their daughter, Hope. She...well, she and I are a thing, I guess. We’ve sort of had our ups and downs the last few years. She’s brilliant, like her parents. I’m sort of the classic impulsive gunslinger who tends to act first and then think about it all later. But, you know, I do love her. Like, for real love her, not just because she washes my clothes and brings me my favorite pizza for dinner.”
His simple earnestness, if clumsy, was sweetly endearing, achingly so as he slid his fingers along the glass to refocus the picture on the little girl sitting in front of him. She was the same girl from the picture before, older now, somewhere between a young child and a budding woman. She had on a black cap with a stylized orange “SF” on the front, grinning up at the camera as Lang wrapped her close to him.
“Speaking of loves, this one is the love of my life! Cassie is eleven, a mile smarter than I will ever be, and way more brave. You’d like her! She wants to be a superhero someday, just like Captain America...just like me.”
He trailed off, something breaking softly as he studied his daughter's face. “I was in the quantum realm, just for a moment. I was doing a thing. We were trying to help someone. They were supposed to pull me right back out. They never answered. I waited there...I don’t know, four or five hours. When something finally pulled me out again, it was five years later. That’s how I found out what happened. They all disappeared. Hope, Hank, Janet...most of them. Cassie didn’t, though. She was alive in the future. Just her and her mom, grieving over everyone alone...”
He trailed off, looking at the glowing face of the girl in front of him. “Overnight, the whole world changed for her, for everyone, and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do to stop it. By the time the Avengers even figured out what was going on it was too late and that was that.”
The story was so fabulous, so out there, and she didn’t want to believe any of it. But there was something so heartbreakingly earnest as he spoke of his daughter, of a future growing up without her father or her family, of millions of lives snuffed out in an instant. It didn’t sound as far-fetched to her as it might have seemed.
“How did you get here and why did you ever think of it?”
“Luck. “ Lang’s smile was grim as he tapped the “phone” and the photo went away. He tucked it back inside his suit. “The reason that everything happened was because the Avengers failed. At the heart of why the Avengers failed was the fact they were broken and split up after the Sokovia Accords. But it went back even further, to when they formed up. They were this misfit bunch to begin with, sort of thrown together by an invasion and SHIELD. Cap hadn’t been awake out of the ice but a few weeks, and Stark was off showboating everywhere he could in his suit. The rest had other things they did with their lives. But the heart and soul were those two, and they never got on. Never knew why, not like I knew them well. I know Hank had a special hate on for Starks, something about Howard Stark trying to steal his technology, and Tony was an apple who didn’t fall far from the tree. But I also know Tony went through a lot before the Avengers and had a lot of really awful stuff happen to him, and that’s not stuff you get over easily. As for Cap, I don’t know if he was ever quite okay after waking up 70 years later to find everything gone. I appeared five years later in my timeline and that was a nightmare enough. I don't know how he managed.”
Peggy tried to imagine. She glanced around the tidy diner, its tile, and its booths, the kitchen on the other side where the waitress on duty and the cook chatted. It was all so real and solid and familiar. What if it were gone tomorrow? What if she were to wake up in a world where everyone she knew and everything she loved was gone in an instant, vanished with time while she lay there, helpless, unchanging? She thought of that happening to Steve, her sweet, earnest man from Brooklyn, and her heart broke.
“Anyway, at the center of it all with them both is they were guys who lost a lot of things in their life, and the more they tried to put themselves together, the more they pushed everything around them apart. Tony had to control everything because he feared someone was going to use something out of his control to destroy the world. Cap didn’t want anyone to control them because of the same thing. And in the end, they were doomed to never see eye to eye on it. So, when Thanos came calling, they were off doing their things and couldn’t come together when the world needed it and we all lost because of it.”
Everyone and everything lost.
Before she could think twice about it before she could even consider how utterly mad it all sounded, she heard herself saying “I’ll do it.”
Lang blinked at her. “What?”
“I’ll do it.” She primly sat up straighter.
“For real?” He looked as if all his dreams had come true, but didn’t believe that they possibly could have.
“I said yes.” She didn’t mean to sound so sharp, so she busied herself with snagging his forgotten cream pie slice and shoving it back at him. “After all, you came through time and space to come and find me, so here I am.”
Lang ignored the pie momentarily. “You do know that if you do this, there’s no going back. I’m working on a hope and a prayer I can even get you to the time I want to get you to.”
“Yes.” She tried to swallow against the sick feeling that rose with the thought.
“That means whatever future you might have had here and now is gone. Essentially, we are rewriting history by all of this.”
“Let’s hope I wasn’t a major part of history, shall we?”
Lang nodded, finally breaking out in a boyish smile. “All right then. So, let me finish this pie and we can get out of here.”
The future! She was considering this man’s crazy plan!
“I should get another slice,” Lang mused, nearly swallowing what was left whole. “I mean, I’ll not ever get this again.”
“You act as if they don’t have pie in your future.”
“They do, just, like I said, not like this.” He was already reaching again in his suit, pulling out coins he tossed on the table. “A quarter for pie. Gees, inflation I know is a thing, but honestly, where did those days go?”
He picked through the shiny metal as Peggy watched the scatter of coins. One quarter had rolled by her coffee mug and she picked it up with her red-lacquered nails, studying it carefully. It had the profile of George Washington on one side, but on the obverse, a print of a bear in what she assumed was a stream and the words “Alaska, 1957” printed at the top, with “2008” close to its bottom.
“Alaska?” She flipped the coin around to face him and he took it, squinting as he studied it.
“Oh, yeah, the state coins! I should keep that, Luis collects those.”
“It’s not a state, it’s a territory.”
“Not in 2018 it isn’t. Alaska has been a state since the 1950s, same with Hawai’i.”
She blinked at the bit of silver in her hand. What in the world had she gotten herself into?