This is not the Endgame

Steve met his lawyer after the day's hearing, accepting his overcoat and keeping a neutral look on his face, ignoring the press of cameras, lights, and reporters shoving recorders into his face. They walked out to the street where they could get cabs; they'd talked over their lunch break and there wasn't much to say now. He was done, thank god, and he never cared if he saw another member of Congress, either house, ever again. His appearance before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs had been difficult, as he'd expected, but the snipes at him personally, for reasons other than his actions during the Snap, Hiatus, or Unsnappening had rankled. All that most of the Senators had seemed to care about was getting their time before the cameras, grandstanding, rather than listening to what he had to tell them. He held the door of a cab for his lawyer and stepped back to wait for another one.

"Steve?" A familiar voice hailed him from behind. He turned to see Ava. His eyebrows rose.

"Ava. Didn't expect to see you here."

"Yeah, I wasn't planning on it, but I was following the hearing at work. It was getting pretty vicious. Took the afternoon off, thought you might like to see a friendly face." A cab pulled up.

"I would," he said, holding the cab door for her. "Can I take you to dinner?" She accepted, and they asked the cabbie for a recommendation; he took them to Ambar. It was crowded but not packed, and they talked about her trip down--she'd taken the midafternoon train, and she was going back on the late train. They each had salads, and Steve had mushroom flatbread as a starter--Ava tried a couple of bites--and she ordered almond-crusted chicken and he had pork tenderloin with a bacon peanut crust. Once the entrees were ordered and the waiter went away, the conversation turned.

"It was looking pretty brutal," she said. "I ran into Sarah, from group, at lunch. We talked about it, and she gave me the idea to come down for support. There were delays on the line or I'd have been here earlier. I hope you're not just being polite and would tell me if you just want to be alone."

"No, I can't tell you how nice it is to see a friendly face. I didn't actually expect it to be that bad, or I'd have asked Sam or Buck to come with me."

"I can't believe that that one Senator actually asked if the serum made you psycho."

"Like Bucky," he said, scowling at the slight toward his friend. "No, nobody's a psycho."

"I did like how you brought up the deferments he got so he wouldn't be drafted in Vietnam," she said. "And that great Thomas Paine quote about tyranny."

"From The American Crisis," he nodded. "'These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated,'" he recited from memory. "I've always liked that, and I immediately thought about that when I first found out that Bucky was called the Winter Soldier. It fits him to a T, he's no summer soldier." Steve had done his best to make sure the Senators, the press, and the people watching know that he was committed to these principles, the concepts of freedom that are so precious in the formative documents of the United States. But he'd delivered the quotation, straight-faced, when a senator wondered if Captain America was taking his character too seriously. He'd recited it, then added, "But I'm just Captain Rogers now, Senator. Sam is Captain America now, as good and dedicated a man as you'll find anywhere."

After the senators had gotten tired of questioning Steve about potential freakiness induced by the serum treatment, the pounding began about what the Avengers had and had not done at the time of the Snap, during the Hiatus, and the events leading up to the Unsnappening, and then hell had broken loose. He'd answered only what was asked, making the senators specifically state everything they wanted to know, but they had drawn out the information about what he had done, what he considered to be his own failings, why he hadn't helped more during the Hiatus, that Hawkeye had been on a vigilante killing spree across the globe, what happened to Natasha, and Tony Stark's condition for his help. The hearing had blown up, but Steve had kept his cool until one senator muttered that Natasha had gotten what she deserved when she died on Vormir. He apparently still held a grudge that she'd dumped SHIELD's secrets onto the internet.

"She was a hero, selfless," Steve shot back. "She did everything she could to atone for her actions before she joined SHIELD, she was the heart of the team, did most of the emotional heavy lifting to keep us together as long as possible, she sacrificed herself so that everybody else could be brought back, and she kept serving the greater good when most of the rest of us quit. It's a call I doubt you would have made, Senator. You probably would have pushed an aide off the cliffs. If you'd had the guts to go into space in the first place." And that had provoked both outrage and laughter, but Steve never stopped glaring at the senator. The senator blinked first, then flushed angrily.

And there was considerable uproar about the allegations made against Stark. Proof was demanded, but the initial conversation where Tony demanded the five year gap to protect his daughter had been between the two of them, but it was understood by all later, and Bruce had agreed to the condition when he did the Unsnappening. "But it's no secret that you and Stark had your differences," another senator said. "What's to keep you from putting the blame on a dead man?"

"It's true that Stark and I were never going to be friends," he said. "He was self-absorbed, thought that his money, influence, and IQ made him better than anyone else. He had dismissive or objectifying nicknames for everybody. He didn't even bother to learn basics about about his teammates. Didn't even know that Natasha didn't have any blood family left until he asked after we found out she was dead. He didn't have a lot of self-control, no capacity for self-analysis, no interest in others unless it affected him directly, he could be casually cruel, didn't see the bigger picture unless it was rubbed in his face. Didn't agree to help with the time travel until he finally realized that it affected him, that there were other people who he cared about in his limited way who'd been snapped.

"He liked to think of himself as a hero, but he wasn't, much. He liked the glory of being Iron Man, it worked with his pathology, but he was never as good at accepting the consequences of his actions, of looking beyond himself to see how other people had been affected, as he was with the adulation; he wanted to impose measures to ensure safety, but he didn't think it through very well. People would have lost their privacy, been under constant surveillance, losing their freedom in the name of something that can't be guaranteed. He supported the Sokovia Accords because he thought it would keep his hands clean, by being told where to go rather than deciding on our own, not having the capacity to see the impact on individuals other than himself. We heard from the Guardians that a planet that was substantially more advanced than ours, with ships that could create a shield around the planet, was devastated by Thanos in search of one of the Infinity stones, had been successfully attacked in the past by a Kree with a grudge and an overpowered ship. His conduct created villains that he and others have had to face. I had to work with him, I did my best with that, but it's true I didn't like him much, especially at the end. He had fascist tendencies, and I... don't. I don't like bullies, whether they're in the schoolyard, the Army, at work. In the Senate. And the stupid thing is that he didn't have to die. He could have given the stones to me or Thor, who had a better shot at surviving its use, or Captain Marvel, who was on site and actually the best choice; she's stronger than Thor or me or Banner. If he'd thought about anything other than his own glory, he'd still be alive to raise his daughter." And that produced an uproar, the elites defending one of their own. Steve shrugged.

"He thought up Ultron, which was responsible for the disaster at Sokovia. He influenced the writing of the Sokovia Accords so that his suit would be classified as a prosthesis, evading the punch of the Accords himself for the most part, and for the rest, he was violating the Accords practically before the ink was dried on the signatures. He knew he'd never be called to account for it. He called us teammates, but was fine with us having our civil rights taken away. What did he do after Bucky and I got away at Leipzig? Did he stand there watching as the others were chained up and dragged off to a black site? He never told anybody what happened to them, he never showed up to help them. He certainly never told me where they were, he would have just let them rot there. Wanda was drugged, in a shock collar, in a straitjacket on the Raft. He did nothing to help her or any of the others, who were locked up with no access to fresh air, sunlight, exercise. They were essentially in solitary confinement, which is very psychologically damaging. He didn't care that his teammates were being abused, that they were being denied their basic human rights. He showed up only to get information from Sam, and he lied to Sam, who told him that we'd gone to Siberia to prevent the other serum treated soldiers from being activated, by saying he was going as a friend.

"He had a moment there where I begged him to calm down, that Bucky hadn't had any choice in the assassination of the Starks, he was just the tool, and that was later proven in Bucky's court martial, should you bother to check. He could have cooled off then, he paused. But Tony said, "I don't care." And he tried to kill Bucky regardless. I told him that he could call me and I'd come if he needed help, but he never did. Bruce was the one who called me when Thanos's forces invaded the first time. And who knows? If Iron Man and Spiderman and the Sorcerer Supreme had stayed on Earth with the rest of us in Wakanda, maybe we could have won. Maybe that extra strength could have saved us all. But we'll never know, because he chose to go into space, and chose not to return once the Sorcerer Supreme was released. He always made it about himself, he was selfish. Tony retreated to a beautiful cabin on acreage by a lake and didn't come out much after the Snap. He didn't apparently pay attention to the people who died in the immediate aftermath, the people who died later from starvation and exposure and disease and crime, because their insulin and heart medication and blood pressure drugs and chemotherapy drugs and antibiotics ran out. The ones who committed suicide because they believed that there was nothing left for them. He had everything he needed, he had his family intact. And I used to believe that we don't trade lives, but one person versus literally countless lives, on this planet and across the universe? That's a no-brainer. Who knows? It's certainly possible that if we'd managed to roll the Snap back, his daughter still could have been born, been the same person. We'll never know.

"When he finally rejoined us, he gave me back the shield. Howard had made it out of vibranium, from the only chunk of meteor that the US government had acquired from Kenya. It had been damaged during the fighting surrounding the UN bombing, but it was pristine now, and only vibranium can polish vibranium. Where did he get it? Nobody in Wakanda would have sold him any. Thanos broke it when I was fighting him, and I had it analyzed after the battle. It turned out that it was made from a vibranium alloy. If I'd known that the shield wasn't as strong, I could have taken different precautions. And I don't know what he did with the vibranium, which technically belongs to the US government, not the Starks."

"So how does time travel really work?" one senator had asked, baffled.

"Search me. Nobody seems to really know. It's supposed to be branched time, not looped, but I don't know if that's correct either. For example, I remember the Chitauri invasion the way it happened, and I remember when we returned for the second time. But in the initial invasion, what they're calling the Chitauri invasion prime, I know that I didn't fight with myself, I certainly didn't know about Hydra in our security services at that time, or that Bucky was still alive. But I did know in the second invasion. Is time looping if I can remember both periods of time? How can someone exist in two timelines simultaneously or twice in one? And what about when I returned as an old man to give Sam the shield? I left that reality before I'd aged that much, but Sam still has the shield, and I have a few faint 'memories' from a timeline that now never happened for me. And after the Unsnappening, Clint's wife called him. Her cell phone plan was still active, where it hadn't been, he hadn't been paying the bill for five years. I don't understand how reality can branch like that, where there are two realities where things are just created out of nothing for one of them. What happens when the people who initiated the branch leave? Does the branch automatically collapse? Why would it? By that time, that time would be... populated and active. People think that it would collapse, but nobody knows for sure. Because apparently they exist at the same time in parallel. And I don't understand how people could come back from the Snap, with their memories and bodies perfectly intact. It violates the conservation of matter, at the minimum."

After more follow-up questions, where Steve was unable to explain more about time travels, he was questioned about where he'd gone after the Unsnappening. "I went to return the stones throughout time, when we'd taken them away. And... I just decided to stay in the past."

"Why, Captain Rogers?" a female Senator asked.

"During the Hiatus, I got kind of fixated on the world after the war. It seemed bright with possibility, someplace I understood better than the modern world, seemed more like 'home.'" He snorted. "Tony liked to tell me to get a life, like I should want what he had. The one time I took his advice and it blew up."

"How was that, Captain?"

"I thought that I could make a difference if I went back. Prevent Hydra from getting a foothold in SHIELD, rescue that Bucky so that those assassinations wouldn't have taken place. But it didn't work like that. SHIELD insisted that they had their 'former' Hydra assets under control. They liked the idea of having a supersoldier of their own that they could send out anonymously to service their own agenda. I hadn't figured in the racism and sexism of the time, which was really unpleasant to see and not be able to do anything about. And there was a Steve Rogers there too, in the wreck of the Valkyrie. I felt like I was betraying him by not getting him out of the ice, getting him help too, because with my return, they had no incentive to keep looking for him, to rescue him. I achieved precisely none of the goals I'd set out to accomplish back then. I used to wonder why Hydra never tried to assassinate Peggy, but I realized that they didn't because they didn't need to. She was serving their agenda by providing a place for them to flourish; a replacement might not have, at that critical moment in time. It proved to me that those in power will do anything to keep their power. That the greater good is not their ultimate goal. They think that their visions are the only ones that count, never mind that people might have real and valid reasons for not wanting to live in a surveillance state. That individual freedoms are not less than the overall stated 'security' goal.

"Freedom for security isn't a direct trade. You still never get perfect security, and you've given away your privacy, your freedoms for nothing. In the end, it's all about powerful people protecting what they have at the expense of everyone else." More than one senator scowled at the former Captain America, the Sentinel of Liberty. And he'd taken care to explain that he'd used the last of his supply of Pym particles to return. It was important to him that everybody know that there was no way to reacquire the Infinity stones. He shuddered to think of their power available to an unstable president and deeply divided Congress. Or any elite, really. It was best that they stay beyond man's grasp. Even the Avengers had been corrupted by their power. Steve knew that he had some fairly substantial character flaws, including a hot temper, sometimes unfairly high expectations for himself, and a certain willingness to bend the truth to suit his own agenda, and he knew that he should never be allowed to control any of the stones.

"Well, at least that's over," Steve said to Ava, finishing dinner. "There's going to fallout, sure, but I've done my duty, now I can get on with the rest of my life."

"How's school going, anyway?"

"Good. I really like it." The server came by and it didn't take much urging on Steve's part to get Ava to join him with dessert. He thought she was too thin, but he didn't want to be a dread mansplainer on a topic he had no business discussing. "I, uh, also have a side project."

"Oh?" Her look was brightly inquisitive.

"Uh, yeah." He immediately started questioning why he'd brought this up right now. Things were going well, and maybe it was too soon to try putting her and Bucky back into each other's paths? Damn. Well, he was committed now. "I bought your old apartment building. I'm going to fix it up--actually, work's already started. Pest control first, we were also getting rats along with the cockroaches. I've rolled back the last rent increase. If you wanted to move back, after your current lease is up, you could have your choice of apartments, pretty much. There aren't many tenants left. There will be new windows, insulation sprayed into the walls. Massively upgraded electrical, full stoves as well as a washer/dryer in each unit. Good heat." He smiled at the server who placed their desserts in front of them. "Every unit will be a little different. Salvaging good period details. Upgraded security so that nobody has to rely on gang members or drug dealers to feel safe. The plaster walls will be taken down, replaced with drywall so that tenants can hang artwork, mirrors, things like that securely. A reliable property manager. Good tenants are not always easy to find," he babbled on.

"Well, Steve..." her look was frustrated, but softened rather unwillingly. "My current lease has months left to run. I can't make a decision right now."

"Oh, right. Of course. Take your time. Come by some time, I'll show you the reno in progress." He bit his lip to stop the babble.

"Maybe after group some time." And he was smart enough to accept this and move the conversation in a different direction. Her new job.

"Well, I'm focusing on concrete right now, helping the project manager. That's where the company ultimately wants me, as a project manager." She brightened up again.

"Is that a natural outgrowth of engineering?" he asked. "Do you want to do one or the other?"

"My focus in my masters degree was concrete, looking into changes that are being made to make it stronger, more durable, more environmentally friendly--it takes a huge amount of energy to make, and processing the limestone can produce more than a ton of CO2 for every ton of concrete as it's being made. But my minor in my bachelors degree was in project management. They're both interesting to me, and since I'm not in a position to do research into concretes, ultimately I think project management will offer more challenges."

They chatted about more innocuous things; Steve paid the bill and escorted her to the train station so that she could go home. "I can't thank you enough for coming down. I underestimated how bad it would be, having to dredge all that up again. Face what I did too. A friendly face really helped." She smiled.

"We might have gotten off on the wrong foot, but getting to know you in group, at the pub has changed my mind. I was wrong, the way I acted at first."

"No, I didn't like hearing what you had to say, keeping me off Buck's doorstep, but you were right. I was glad that he had somebody looking out for him. Still, this was above the call of friendship."

"Not really, it was looking like a witch hunt, and it's easy to be an armchair quarterback, like those senators have any right to judge. They're just barely more functional than they were before the Snap. I'm glad that the rest of us know more about what happened. And I'm sure you get tired of hearing it, but I appreciate what you have done for the country, what it cost you. The least I could do is be here to let you vent." She shuddered. "Here. I brought you some reading material as distraction." She handed him a bag that she took out of her tote, rooting around in there. He could see some files stashed as well, her purse, a reusable water bottle, mittens. "I can't imagine our government with the power of the Infinity stones, so I'm glad that Thanos destroyed them in this time and that they're back where nobody can touch them." Steve leaned over to kiss her cheek, earning him an odd look, then she went inside the terminal to board the train. Steve went back to the taxi. He was going to need the hotel to dry clean his uniform; he'd been stress-sweating throughout his testimony.

He strolled into the hotel, feeling a lot calmer and less stressed out, and walked to the elevator. His lawyer popped up from a chair. "Captain Rogers, where have you been?" she asked. "I've left messages on your voicemail. Can you stay an extra day?"

"Why?" he asked, feeling oppressed from the pressure of the hearings bear down on his shoulders again. He was tired of the whole thing, the grandstanding senators, having to explain how they failed, talking about Tony Stark again, things he desperately wanted to stay safely in the past. His lawyer drew him aside.

"My office was contacted by Spiderman this morning. He saw your testimony regarding Tony Stark and he'd like to testify before Congress too, tell what he knows. And some of the senators are very interested in talking to him. I think it would be helpful for him to be seen with you in his corner. If you're willing to be. Did you know he was so young?" Now she was frowning.

"He sounded young, but I'm over a hundred, it's hard to judge sometimes. How young is 'so young'?"

"He was fifteen when you all trashed the Leipzig airport," the lawyer said disapprovingly.

"No, I did not." Shit, he thought. If he'd have known, he wouldn't have dropped the shipping container on him. He could have killed a child. He rubbed his eyes. "Yeah, I'll be there. I'll do what I can for him."

"Great. We'll meet you there. I'd like you to sit behind him when he testifies, for the optics. Afterward there might be some press."

"Right," he said, and shook her hand before going to the elevator and punching the floor for his room. He'd forgotten about the bag Ava had given him, and looked inside. Huh. Comic books? He hadn't read one since the first Captain America comic in the 40's, and read the cover blurb on the first one: "In an alchemical ritual gone wrong, Edward Elric lost his arm and his leg, and his brother Alphonse became nothing but a soul in a suit of armor. Equipped with mechanical "auto-mail" limbs, Edward becomes a state alchemist, seeking the one thing that can restore his and his brother's bodies...the legendary Philosopher's Stone. Alchemy: the mystical power to alter the natural world, somewhere between magic, art, and science..." Huh. He wandered down the hall, still reading the cover, looking at the art, until he reached his door and pulled out the card key.

He tossed the overcoat and bookbag on the bed, taking off his uniform--his dress uniform from the 40's, Fury had given it to him when he'd been defrosted, specially tailored, and with all his ribbons. Perfect, down to the last stitch. He pulled on a long-sleeved t-shirt, a hoody, and sweats and called down for instructions to get his uniform dry-cleaned, planning on hitting the gym before bed. The light was blinking, indicating a message, which he attended to after being assured that somebody would be right up. He quickly stripped off the insignia and decorations, looking in the pockets, before sliding everything into the bag he found and handing it off and checking that voicemail.

"Steve," Sam's voice said. "Barnes and I are here for moral support. We're in rooms 314 and 315. Call when you get in, since you're not answering your phone." Steve cursed and grabbed his key card, trotting out the door.