This is not the Endgame

"There was another funny feeling, and all of a sudden I'm heading back into battle against the same goons we left, just not in Wakanda anymore. This guy, Dr Strange, calls himself the Sorcerer Supreme, gives us a heads up and then does something really weird and opens portals, and that's how we got from Wakanda to the old Avengers facility. And let me tell you, there was some really weird things going on there," Bucky said, reliving the memory. "Outer space people and ships. Then apparently Tony Stark gets a hold of the Infinity stones and snaps his fingers, then the invaders dust. There's a funeral for him--but not for Natasha, she died getting hold of one of those stones, they never even bothered with a headstone somewhere--that we all have to attend, then Steve says he'll return the Infinity stones back to where we got them, or else they'll screw up the timeline, and there are at least two conflicting rationales for how all the time travel works, and none of it really makes good sense, so I'm sorry, I can't explain it. Nobody really can, apparently. And Steve tells me that he's not coming back. That he's tired, he wants to retire in a world that makes sense to him, have a life. And that's what he does. When the time for his return in this time passes, there's consternation, then Steve, who's aged and almost at the end of his life, shows up and gives Sam his shield. It was broken by Thanos in the fight, but this one is whole and perfect. Tells him to be Cap. Won't say what happened." Bucky shook his head. "Then we got on with our lives. I gather information for the Avengers. Sam is Cap, doing a great job. The Avengers aren't much, compared to what they were before the Snap, but they're still out there, doing their best. I finally feel like I have my feet under me again, I'm learning how to live again, then this happens. I have no idea what Younger!Steve is doing here or why." Ava sat and processed this. It took awhile. "As for the rest of it... I'm going to have to talk to Steve. Find out what's going on." He shook his head. "Sam probably already knows; he was a lot closer to Steve than he is to me." He fell silent; what peace he had came from her gently stroking fingers and compassion. "I'm both glad to see him and ready to punch his face in. I want to both welcome him back and turn my back on him like he did on me."

"Well, if you punch his face in, I know where there's a good urgent care for your hand, which will be a mess, it's just a couple streets over," she said pacifically, and Bucky emitted a horrible sound, a choked cross between a chuckle and a snort, and she started to laugh, and he joined in.

"I guess it'll work out or it won't. He was my oldest friend, but balanced against that is the fact that he just up and vanished. And it wasn't always easy or fun to be his friend, back then, he was like a dark raincloud in need of a leash, focused on what other people thought of him, fighting when he didn't need to, feeling undervalued and underappreciated. Which he was, but not by me. I was always hauling him out of scrapes, people asked me why I let him hang around, tried to make me feel stupid for it. But he was my brother." She nodded. "It's hard, though. I understand the allure of the past, but it's not something I'd ever want to go back to. I've changed so much, it would also look like a foreign place. The people I knew then, all gone. The bones of the city are similar, even if the skin isn't the same. It's haunting, sometimes. But there is a lot of good in this time. There's just so much potential sometimes. And prostheses are so good. On the other hand, while the clothing is more comfortable, it used to be so much more stylish. People are less dependent on their tech than they were before the Snap, but you can see that as the supply chain stabilizes, you're going to see tables of people out for a meal staring at their smartphones again rather than talking to each other. And honestly, while it's great that everybody can be who they are, I don't understand the spectrum of sexuality very well, or all the variations. It's disorienting. But although it's still not always safe to be anything but straight heterosexual, it's nice that people can find accepting communities. It's just a lot to take in. Civil rights and women's rights have come a long way. And there's actually good mental health care." Ava snorted.

"There are still a lot of people, mostly people who are religious and conservative, who believe that women need to be in the home, having babies. They think that I'm not a real woman because I'm not married and fulfilling my biological purpose, which is to be subservient to my uterus and my husband. In high school, a teacher told my sister that it was ok if she didn't understand the math, once she got married, her husband would take care of all that. It's so stupid, it was pre-calculus, not addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, fractions. And if she did get married, the man might be terrible with math too, it's not a sex-linked characteristic. It's so frustrating. Just today some rando on the street told me to smile, it would make me pretty. Like I cared. I was trying to get back to work on time, thinking about a project we're working on. Men still feel entitled to women's bodies and their labor, physical and emotional. Rapists still get light sentences because judges worry about what a jail sentence will do to their future. They never ask what it's done to the rapist's victim. Like it's all about the rapist, not getting justice for the person who was actually wronged."

"It has gotten better," Bucky offered, and she nodded.

"But there's still so far to go. And I'm impatient with waiting for true equality."

"Men probably worry that if women get more power, they'll be treated like they treat women," he ventured.

"Not gonna lie, it's not an unappealing prospect," she admitted. "I'd love for those men to have to work a full-time job where they don't make as much money as a woman, then go home and take care of the house and the kids while the women get to put up their feet, be bombarded with media messages that you have to look flawless, have token men in roles that focus on the exciting lives and adventures of women, have to do full frontal for their roles so that the female gaze is satisfied and the women get to keep their clothes on. Let women run the country and make the laws and procedures." Bucky's flesh hand came up to cover the hand that was on his metal shoulder.

"Do you want a family, children?"

"I don't know. I used to, but I don't know any more whether it's because I really wanted them for myself or because it's expected. But I'm still reeling from things since the Snap. I went from the child of a comfortable middle-class family, in college, looking forward to a bright future, to parentless and homeless in less than two years. The bank foreclosed on my parent's house. NYU closed their dorms because people were squatting in them, they were getting unsafe and they worried about liability. Then a bunch of us tried to get an apartment together, but occupancy limits were strictly enforced--banks and landlords wanted money because half the people who could pay were gone and they had a massive number of assets that they couldn't sell--and we were evicted. I lived by the river for several months until I risked moving into that storage unit, which is when I got the idea of picking up furniture in abandoned houses, because I was miserable sleeping on the concrete pad. No temperature control, running water, sanitation. It was scary by the river, but there was a camp that was all women, and that did provide some protection. If I'd been caught living in the storage unit, they'd have kicked me and all the stuff out. My sister went to her dream job, I didn't resent her for it. People come and go. Security seems like it can be taken away in an instant. I thought about flying down to North Carolina for my graduation ceremony in December, but I can't get the thought of my former boyfriend tumbling through the sky. Can't do it. And who's to say that these Infinity things can't be reassembled to make another Snap?"

"It's as safe as they could make it," Bucky said gently, reaching up to cup her cheek. "Nothing's guaranteed, but unless someone knew exactly where each one is at a particular time, there's no retrieving them all again. And time travel is dependent on something called Pym particles, the knowledge of how to make them is with one man who's not sure he wants to make any more of them, or the use of the Time stone, which is under guard of the sorcerers. But I understand. It's really hard to take stability for granted anymore." His hand left her cheek. "I expected that I would settle down when I found the right woman, have a couple of kids. Come home from work to hear about everybody's day, have social activities with my wife, holidays with my sister and her family, an average life." He sighed. "My sister's gone, she never married. I never saw her again after I shipped out. I don't know what I could do for a job, or who would even hire me. I can't imagine being able to persuade a woman to marry me, after all I've done. I'm stained from all those assassinations, everything I did, that happened to me. Let alone agree to have sex with me."

"Well, we've talked about having sex, I'm looking forward to it," she remarked, and he started. "But I think we might need to allow a period of adjustment to new knowledge and people before we go to bed together. It's a shame, because I want to know what you feel like inside me." His eyes popped open and his dick jumped at her words. Then subsided.

"One thing I haven't told you yet is that the antidepressants I'm on have affected my sex drive," he said quietly. "I can't always get it up."

"Penis in vagina sex is only one act," she said after a moment of consideration. "There's a lot of other ways we can have fun." He lay there, feeling grateful, relieved that he'd come clean and she wasn't rejecting him, and wonder that she was so confident, so willing to help him explore without making him feel like even less of a man than he viewed himself. "I'm kind of thinking..." she said slowly. "I'm thinking that even though both of us are damaged in different ways, it doesn't mean that we can never be happy again. That things won't make sense again. That we won't feel dislocated forever. That we can't make our way forward from where we are now. We don't have to stay broken forever. We can put ourselves together, find a new normal. I need to figure out how to trust again. You need to forgive yourself." Their eyes locked and they spent a few moments rolling this around in their minds.

"Slog through the bad to get to the good again," he said, and she nodded. He sat up, bringing his feet down, then putting his good arm around her and bringing her in, swinging her legs over his lap to cuddle into each other. They stayed like that, just breathing together, for a long time.

***

"Steve called and asked if I'd meet him for a talk." Bucky told her a couple of days later. "I'm going. I want to know what happened to my oldest friend and if he's still in there, somewhere. But I wanted to ask if you'd go with me. You wouldn't have to sit at the table with him, Sam said you weren't really taken with him, we agreed to meet at a busy restaurant. Just knowing that you were there, ready to help, would be a huge relief."

"Like a support animal?" she asked, amused, and his lips quirked up.

"Kinda," he agreed amiably. "It's on Saturday, at one, so the restaurant will be busy but not hectic."

"I'll bring a book."

"I'll buy your lunch," he said, then shook his head as she tried to argue. "Nope, non-negotiable. You do me this favor, you should actually get more than a diner lunch."

"Well, afterward we could always come back here and make out for awhile," she said, and they grinned at each other. So it was set.

Saturday, they walked to the garage. To Ava's surprise, the Harley was gone. "I gave it back," Bucky muttered. "He only gave it to me in the first place because he wasn't going to need it anymore." And Steve had been a little irritated, Bucky thought, that this was pretty much all that was left. But he'd run away, said it was for good, what did he expect? Bucky had also kept Steve's bank accounts untouched, promptly signed those over too. In the parking space formerly occupied by the black Harley-Davidson was a willow green and cream Indian Chief Vintage. It was retro and low to the ground, and looked like a lot more fun. The seats and saddle bags were a brown that almost matched the highlights in Bucky's hair.

"I like it," Ava said, touching the handlebars. "The color is... friendly. Warm, like you." Bucky snorted; she was probably the only person in the universe who would call him warm and mean it. But he was pleased that she liked it. "And the rear seat is a little lower. I really like that."

"I thought you might, doll," he murmured, and gave her a helmet from the lockers, getting on his new bike and holding his hand out for her stability as she got on behind him. They drove to the diner in silence; they could have walked, but it was still nice out and he wanted to ride his new purchase, share it with her before the weather got nasty. Luck was with them and there was a parking spot right in front of the diner. Bucky looked around and saw Sam and Steve sitting together, and walked with Ava to a booth nearby but not too close, telling the waitress that he'd be paying the tab. She put a battered paperback called "The Copper Crown" on the table and turned to the menu after kissing him for luck. Pleasantly surprised and frankly complacent, he turned to the table. The tables around this one were empty.

"Sam," he said, nodding at the other man and putting his hand on his shoulder. "Steve." Sam looked between them.

"I think I'll ask your girlfriend if I can sit with her," Sam said.

"Her name's Ava," Bucky said, feeling warm and tingly at the thought of somebody thinking he was good enough to attract a woman like her. The woman in question had been watching and apparently guessed what was going on; Steve and Bucky watched as she smiled at Sam. The problem with the booth is that only one side could observe the other table; she stood to allow Sam to slide in on her side. Bucky almost laughed; if there was trouble, she wanted to be the first one over. She shared her menu as well, and both tables ordered before anything serious was said.

"What did you want to say, Steve?" Bucky asked. He felt weary, and since he and Ava had talked, eager to get past this.

"I told you why I wanted to leave," the blond man said quietly, toying with his coffee cup. Coffee had found its way back onto neighborhood grocery stores within the past few months, but it was still expensive and every drop was a treat. "I wanted to tell you why I came back." Bucky nodded. Steve sighed.

"It was a mistake from the beginning, actually. The SSR got me a fake ID, so that I wouldn't be Steve Rogers. For a month or so, it wasn't too bad. But over time I realized that nobody was going to help me get the Steve who was in the ice there out, or rescue that Bucky. They wanted inside information on history as it unspooled here, but they were more interested in seeing how to use events to the benefit of the SSR--and their agenda was not necessarily the greater good but an increase in their power and reach. I wanted to move on from being a super soldier, but Peggy and Howard and Philips were constantly urging me to just do this one thing. Philips pretty much told me that the price for getting me resettled in that time was my putting on the suit for them. So to speak; they didn't want Captain America, they wanted a new, unknown, and untraceable supersoldier. Who would follow the orders he was given without arguing. The supersoldier that Philips wanted in the first place. The threat was there that they would revoke my identity if I didn't comply. It took a couple of years before I was thoroughly disenchanted. Peggy and I argued a lot, about a lot of different things, including the role of former Nazi and Hydra scientists in the SSR. She insisted that now they knew the threat, they could prevent it, that the scientists they recruited were on board with their goals, but it never seemed like they were working to prevent Hydra. They treated it like a future problem, not like the problem that was taking root even then. Letting Nazi scientists go free so that we could access their sometimes immoral research was not why I tried to enlist at every place I could get to. And I wanted no part of recruiting Zola. But Peggy was ambitious, I knew that always, but what I didn't know was how far she would go to justify the ends she wanted to achieve.

"So there I was, kind of a kept man, or looking at it from another perspective, a lab experiment on a leash. There was no leaving the supersoldier behind me; Philips told me bluntly that the research that had gone into making the serum was too expensive not to use the final product. I didn't get to go back to school or try something new, have a peaceful life like I thought I would. My showing up had also hurt a guy named Sousa, Daniel Sousa. Good man. He was a vet too, recon before he lost his leg. He'd started a relationship with Peggy, but when I showed up she dropped him like a hot potato." Steve frowned, then looked up and forced a smile as the waitress deposited their lunch. They ate a few bites. Bucky enjoyed it much more than Steve seemed to. "And she got a lot of capital out of bringing me into the organization." He dipped a fry into the supplied quantity of ketchup. "We fought a lot, she didn't understand where I was coming from, why I wouldn't buy in. But it was never about geopolitical conflicts for me, it was always about doing the right thing. And I couldn't get her to understand that."

Bucky nodded and ate his chicken sandwich. Steve had always been an idealist, seeing the world in black and white. Peggy liked the grays, working in the shadows. Ambition had looked good on her, but what Steve was talking about went way past ambition.

"Turned out I didn't feel any more at home back then, either. The post war world was booming, it seemed like there was a place for everybody. Aside from the vets, some of whom were really struggling after what they'd seen and done, but there wasn't any help for them. And me. I wasn't even supposed to be there. And don't ask me why the shield is still here after I already left and I'm not going back. I can't, even if I wanted to; there aren't any more particles, I was careful about that. And I don't understand how I was able to return/will return/whatever if the timeline branched when I went back. I don't understand the time travel thing at all. From what Strange said, it sounded like he'd done time loops when he confronted.... some weird thing in space once, but Banner and Stark insisted it branched..." He sighed and finished his sandwich. "You were right. I'd changed too much to go home and have the normalcy that was my heart's dream back then. And Peggy... One thing that they wanted to know was whether the serum would affect any kids I had. They were nice enough about it, made me give them a sample in a paper cup, but they just weren't sure. Genetic analysis wasn't nearly sophisticated enough, and they didn't have a baseline for comparison before I took the serum. Peg stopped pushing to get married and have kids at that point; they'd have been put under a microscope too, they might have eventually been conscripted if the effects of the serum could be transmitted to children, and no matter how ambitious she was for herself and what I could accomplish for the SSR, she didn't want that for her kids.

"I don't know what will happen to that timeline without me in it, if it collapses like Banner thinks, because he doesn't know everything. I put a letter in her briefcase the morning I left. Told her exactly why I wasn't staying. I'd planned it carefully so that she didn't know I wanted to go back here or had the means to do so, because I don't believe I'd have been permitted to do so. They would have confiscated the technology, and who knows if I'd be allowed to live freely in that world? Somehow I don't think so. But I wasn't going to play kissy-face with the fucking Nazis then, and I let Peg off the hook in this timeline. I never held her to account for running SHIELD the way she did, not rooting out Hydra, promoting the philosophy that the ends justify the means. There were serious problems that she helped to create and foster, and I never talked to her about it; she had Alzheimer's, it's not like she was all there anyway when I caught up with her in the end." He sighed. Bucky looked over to see Ava and Sam chatting, both of them keeping an eye on this table. He smiled slightly at her and got a smile in return.

"I don't care what it looks like anymore," Steve said, then paused to order milkshakes for each of them. Bucky thought that sounded like a really good idea, and had shakes sent over for Ava and Sam too. They were being really good sports. "I'm so tired of trying to be what other people think that I should be. I just want to be me. So I'm not going back to the Avengers. I eventually got back pay when I was thawed out of the wreck of the Valkyrie, I got it in today's dollars." Bucky smiled; he had too. He'd also gotten a particularly high rate of interest as well in compensation for the violations of his civil rights with that incident when he'd been accused of bombing the UN and they'd tried to have him killed; he'd made $78 a month during the war; he'd probably make a little more than $3000 a month today, if he was still a sergeant. He'd made a will listing Natasha as his beneficiary; the probate of her estate had been left until after the Unsnappening and he'd just been given back the money. "I'm seeing a vocational counselor at one of the community colleges, taking tests, doing research. Identifying possible careers, what it will take for me to reenter the job force. What about you, Buck? You going to keep collecting intelligence? If you wanted, I could give you the name of the counselor I'm working with." Bucky spooned some of the shake that was too thick to suck through a straw into his mouth. It was delicious, and he smiled, grateful for the changes in his life that allowed him this simple pleasure. Another time he'd bring Ava back here and they could share one.

"I'm working for awhile, til I figure what to do. I'm going to want to find a regular job, not hazardous. One maybe where I can see myself going home to somebody." His eyes slid to Ava. Steve smiled.

"She's your girl?"

"She's her own woman," Bucky corrected him. "But I think we're building something together." They talked a little about what Bucky understood about her work and circumstances, the threat of rent increases that would price her out of her apartment unless she got a better job. Nothing personal; she should have control over her information.

"She's pretty," Steve said. "And pretty fierce. Protective." He nodded. "I like to see that for you. I just don't want it for myself. I told Stark and Thor once that the guy who wanted the home and family went into the ice and somebody else came out. I just didn't realize then what all that meant. I don't think I wanted to. I wasn't ready, which was why I kept putting off dating after my situation in this time stabilized. It wasn't that shared life experience was so important in the end; I don't have that with Sam, didn't have that with Natasha, but those two were still critical to me. Found family. And you're back, you're free. I had a second chance with my best friend, but I threw it away for something that turned out to be fool's gold. I'm really sorry, Buck. I know I hurt you. I regret it every day."

"That's fair," Bucky said judiciously. Steve smiled at him.

"There's stuff about Peggy, things I don't want to discuss here." Bucky nodded.

"Let's go for a walk. Tell Ava and Sam, he'll walk her home." And this was what happened. Ava tried to tell Sam he didn't need to see her home, it was broad daylight, but he'd been having fun talking with her and she gave in. The two groups parted ways at the door. In the end, Bucky and Steve took their motorcycles and went to Central Park, where they walked until they found some grass that was unoccupied, away from others, and sat down. Bucky lay back; the ground was cold, but the autumn sun was comforting and warm.