SUMMARY
"Six infinity stones. Six points in time and space where they need to return to. One quantum suit. One enchanted hammer. One Steve Rogers. One goal. One last mission."
With the most important person in his life gone, and the world moving forward, Steve Rogers has little left to live for. Nothing lies ahead for him in this new world, except for one last mission. The fight of his life is over, but does that mean his life is over too? Or will he get a second chance with the woman he had come to love? The universe works in mysterious ways, and sometimes - just sometimes- it is kind.
My name is Steve Rogers, and I have a mission.
It's been a fortnight since the mad titan Thanos was defeated, he and his armies turned to ash before our very eyes. We won.
But we also lost, lost far too many. For me, it was two people.
The first was a man named Tony Stark. He was a genius, truly, but a stubborn genius. Once he had a goal, he was laser-focused on that goal. I suppose that was the catalyst for all this. He was the one who gave us the key to time travel, he was the one who helped me steal the sceptre and the Tesseract from the past, he was the one who fought tooth and nail against Thanos and won. He was the bravest of us all. The reason why any of us are still here today.
Using all six infinity stones to snap Thanos and his hordes out of existence came at a price. When the dust cleared, I saw the aftermath. I thought Banner had looked bad after he had used it, with his right arm disfigured and burned black, cracks of skin running all the way up to his neck. Tony though… Tony looked like he had been through hell. His entire right side had been damaged, his armour weathered and dulled from the intense feedback of the stones in his gauntlet. I moved in closer to check on him and realised suddenly why it was so quiet. He wasn't talking. I forced my tired legs to move, ignoring the burning pain of their overexertion from the past few hours of battle. I zeroed in on him. He wasn't breathing. It took me a second to connect the dots, whether it was because of confusion or denial, I couldn't tell. It didn't matter. Tony Stark, the Earth's greatest defender, was dead.
I had never imagined that a funeral for Tony would be a quiet, understated, personal ceremony. I always assumed that him being a Stark, he would have wanted a monument, or a party - something loud, outrageous, controversial. Shows how much I really knew about him. Instead, I had found myself surrounded by all people he had touched in his life, all the heroes he had inspired or supported over the years. All of us watched in silence as Pepper, the newly widowed mother of one, sent a single reef across the surface of the lake, baring the last piece of her late husband, his first ever arc reactor. It was nothing I had expected it to be, and at the same time, I knew it couldn't have been anything else.
At least Tony got a funeral. Natasha hadn't even gotten that. She had died on Vormir, in order to get the soul stone. I hadn't even been there to say goodbye.
Someday… someday I may even come to terms with that.
I haven't time to mourn yet, too much to do, so little time to do it. That might be a blessing in disguise. if I were to start, I couldn't say for sure if I'd ever stop. I wouldn't trust myself not to just sit in a corner somewhere and stop living.
Even thinking about Natasha makes my heart ache in ways that I never knew it could. Hearing the news of her death was like having a piece of my heart ripped out. Someone who had been with me every step of the way, someone I had taken for granted, was gone. My friend, my partner… maybe even something more if I had had the time. If I had the courage, more like. You would think, after Peggy, that I would have known not to have waited. I guess, after everything that had happened, it was never the right time. As if there was ever going to be a 'right time'. Our line of work was never going to hand us this sort of thing. Wrong business, Rogers.
What I wouldn't give to have just a little bit more time with her, to tell her how I felt about her, about how much I am going to miss her and how I desperately need her, more than I ever dared to tell her, more than I ever realised.
She was my rock. More than any other of my teammates, she was the one who showed me how to function in this new world I had found myself thrust into. I relied on her, in a way so specific and so vital to my very being that no longer having her there felt like I was falling. I still feel like I'm falling. Falling through time, from moment to moment. What is there to do in this world now? Thanos is gone, the universe is restored, the world is at peace. I'm ready to move on but without her? I'm not sure I can. Bucky and Sam are my best friends, my brothers, but Nat… she was, as I'm beginning to realise, my everything. Every name I could come up with, she was it. Friend, sister, girlfriend, wife, ally, teammate. We never put a name to it, because we knew, deep down, what it was. It was those quiet moments when I'd find her at her wits-end, trying to hold it all together, and our eyes would lock, and she would slowly unwind. I was the only one of the team who could always make her smile. Except maybe Clint - god, I can only imagine how he felt about all of this.
As far he was concerned, he was done with it all. He had quit the game entirely, chosen to live with his family, his wife and kids, have picnics on the grass beside their remote farmhouse. I once thought I no longer wanted that life, tried to convince myself that the man that wanted a family was gone. He was never gone, I now know that all too well. He just never thought he'd have the chance again. That part of me had begun to resurface whilst on the run from the Sokovia Accords, all those years ago, when Nat and I governed our little group of renegades across the world, fighting the good fight in the shadows. Our own secret avengers, with us two at the helm. It felt almost like family. With her by my side, it felt like home.
And now it's all gone. I have no place to call home. No reason to carry on.
But I have a mission, and right now that fact is pulling me through.
Six infinity stones. Six points in time and space where they need to return to. One quantum suit, geared up and ready to go. One enchanted hammer. One Steve Rogers. One goal. One last mission.
I pick up the case carrying the most powerful relics in the universe in one hand and Mjolnir in the other. I hear Bruce calling out the launch, second by second. I steady myself on the platform, clenching my fists as the helmet folds itself over my head. I look around at my two best friends, who look on with slight anxiety. They think they're hiding it so well, but I can always tell. Bucky, he's somewhat easy to tell. I've been seeing his worried face grow up throughout my childhood. Sam's poker face, as he probably likes to call it, is what he thinks is a passive expression, but it's contorted in an unconscious way. To his credit, few would be able to tell that he wasn't perfectly cool, but I could. I've been getting better at reading faces recently, something else I owe to Nat. How I wish that I could see her face beside them both, decorated with that little smirk that would make her eyes shine, the mischief behind them that would drive me crazy. Never again.
The countdown ended. The world around me fell away, replaced with the luminescent insanity of the Quantum Realm. First stop: New York, 2012.