Lost in (1940s) New York

by Team Damon

Faced with a mysterious Infinity Stone, Tony Stark has two choices: do the thing, or play it safe and don't do the thing. Of course, being Tony Stark, he does the thing, and there are consequences, and some of them are nothing short of amazing. Fun with time travel oneshot, based on characters and story from Life After Death. Bucky/OC

A/N: Aaaand the latest of my very long, sometimes very random, oneshots! :) This idea came about out of nowhere, but I think it was a very delayed reaction/inspiration from watching the episode of OUAT where Emma and Hook go back in time and she's gotta, ah, "distract" his younger self. It got me thinking about time travel and things and I was like "mannn I wish I could do something like that for my story" but, it wouldn't really fit the overall theme of LAD. But then I thought of a way to make it plausible enough to write a crack-y oneshot for the idea of Summer time traveling, and now here we are lol. In terms of LAD, I don't think any of what you're about to read actually happens there. Just consider this a fun little "What if?" and a break from all the angst currently going on over there lol. And if you're not a reader of that story, then all you need to know is this is a story where Bucky's girlfriend accidentally time travels to the 40s and meets his younger self. Fun all around lol.

My huge thanks to midnightwings96 for encouraging my weird ideas and always being incredibly helpful and, with this story specifically, helping me when I was stuck at a certain point. She is the the best, and I love all of you, and I'm gonna shut up now :D

It was a day like any other day. Summer woke up, took a shower, fixed her hair, and then dressed for work, thinking that nothing was out of the ordinary and nothing remarkable would happen. Next she would take the elevator up to the floor that she worked on, spend eight hours doing whatever was required of her, and then come back to the thirty-sixth floor, kick off her heels, make dinner for herself, her kid, her boyfriend, and the rest of the super-friends. Then she would spend a few hours doing whatever, be it playing a game with David or working her way down her list of movies that Bucky needed to catch up on, and after that, she would put David to bed. Then Bucky would put her to bed, or more accurately, throw her on it (gently, of course) and make her forget her own name.

All things considered, she didn't mind the predictability in the least. Routine was hardly a bad or boring thing when the routine was totally freakin' awesome.

However, her first clue that something odd might be up came when she left her room, ready for work, and walked out into the shared little living space that connected all of the rooms on the Avenger's floor. David was sitting next to Bucky at the table, who looked mostly bored, and Sam was yawning into his coffee while Natasha watched Steve and Tony argue and bicker in front of the table.

None of this was strange, of course, but it was what Steve and Tony were arguing about that sounded weird.

"This is a bad idea. You have no idea what you might be messing with," Steve said gravely, arms crossed.

"That's kind of why I have to mess with it," Tony retorted. "I didn't ask for this thing to fall into my lap, but now that it has -"

"Now that it has, you need to let somebody more qualified deal with it."

Tony raised his eyebrows. "More qualified? Excuse me? Who's the genius in this room? Besides, who do you think is more qualified? Thor?"

"Actually, yes," Steve replied. "The Tesseract didn't belong here any more than this thing does, and Thor was right to take it with him. We should give it to him and let them deal with it on Asgard."

"Don't think so, Cap," Tony shrugged. "Tesseract was a different story. Besides, I'm not sure that I want Asgard hoarding all these things. Why shouldn't we get a piece of the action?"

As Steve's face began to redden with the magnitude of his undying frustration with the maddening billionaire currently smirking at him, Summer stepped over to where Bucky and her son sat and asked quietly, "What did I miss?"

Bucky rolled his eyes, leaning his jaw on his fist and muttering, "Twenty minutes of the same damn argument they have over everything."

"I heard the word Tesseract," she said. "Is something creepy happening?"

Bucky shrugged. "Something about some magic glowing orange rock."

The fatigue with which Bucky said this belied the sentiments of a man who was too young to be as old as he was and who had simply seen too much weird crap in his life to even care about how strange a "magic orange glowing rock" was.

Before she could reply, Tony stepped around Steve and started strutting towards the elevator. "Whatever. I'll be in my lab if anyone needs me. By the way, Cap, maybe you should have a drink or two and learn to loosen up. Oh wait - you can't get drunk. Never mind."

Then he flashed a smile and continued on his way, and Steve rolled his eyes and let his crossed arms fall to his side in an exasperated gesture.

"Well," Summer said to Bucky, "hopefully we're not all gonna die now." Then she gave him a quick kiss and said, "Gotta go."

He nodded, straightening up in his seat some and pulling her back for a brief second kiss before asking quietly, "When's your break today?"

"I don't know, probably around 12:30," she replied. "Why?"

His eyes dropped from hers, trailing quickly but thoroughly over her white blouse, top two buttons undone, and then her black pencil skirt that ended just above her knees before his gaze snapped back up and he said innocently, "We should have lunch."

"Lunch?" she asked with a suspicious half-smile.

"Yeah," he replied, mirroring her smile.

She rolled her eyes, still smiling. "I get the feeling that we wouldn't actually be doing much eating."

She didn't know how he did it, but he managed to turn his smile into a distinctly dirty grin as he said, "Well, maybe you wouldn't..."

She started laughing then, cheeks blushing no matter how used to remarks like that from him that she was. "Man, I walked right into that one. But watch your mouth. My kid is right next to you."

"I'm only talking about lunch," he replied innocently. "Where's your mind going?"

She rolled her eyes and gave him one more kiss. "You're fooling nobody. But okay, I'll see you when I get my break. Meet you here?"

He nodded. "Yeah. Let me know what you're in the mood for."

She gave him another pointed look as his grin returned. "Oh my gosh. You literally can't stop yourself, can you?"

"I just need to know," he shrugged. "I'd hate for you to have to go back to work still... hungry."

She widened her eyes a little bit and said, "How far can you seriously take this lunch analogy?"

"I don't know. But I'm already hungry."

Raising her eyebrow again, she replied quietly, "You could always grab a snack alone, you know."

He nodded, then grimaced slightly and said, "It's not as fun if you're not watching."

Across the table, Sam slapped the table with his palm and half-exclaimed, "Oh my God. Get a room or move it to text messages, guys. Seriously. I don't want to know what he does while you watch. Especially not before my coffee's even kicked in."

"Sorry," Summer said, now blushing even more and smiling sheepishly as she finally extricated herself from Bucky's arm around her. "Yeah. I gotta go anyway. I'm almost late now. Come on, David."

Bucky shot her one more slightly mischievous smile that she shook her head at but smiled back to anyway, just as she took David's hand and headed to the elevators to drop him off at the daycare downstairs. It took awhile for the blush to wear off, but she didn't mind, because now she was already counting the minutes until her shift was half over and it was break time.

Just another ordinary day, indeed. But she never did quite make it to that very promising lunch.

---

A little bit after the clock struck noon, Tony stood in his lab near the very top of the tower, staring at the little orange gem shining brightly as it hung suspended in midair amid all of his best tech. Unfortunately, even Tony's beyond-state-of-the-art, not-supposed-to-even-exist-yet technology couldn't read a single thing about the stone, aside from the fact that its energy levels were off the charts. As in off of charts that didn't even exist.

SHIELD had much better luck when they were studying the Tesseract, he knew that much. He crossed his arms, squinting as he looked at the stone and then said, "I'm gonna poke it."

Next to him, Bruce Banner sighed quietly and said, "I would advise against poking it. We don't even know what it does."

"Exactly," Tony replied. "That's the problem. Maybe we can't figure this thing out until we actually know what it does. We could be going about studying it all wrong."

"Still," Bruce said, taking off his glasses and peering at the thing as well. "What if you open a wormhole or... send a huge blast of radiation over the whole city. It's not worth it. We should just let it sit here and keep running tests. Eventually we'll figure it out."

Tony nodded, still staring at the stone. "Yeah. You're right. Maybe I poke things too much."

"Probably," Bruce agreed, slipping his glasses back on and turning back to one of their screens now that he was satisfied that Tony wasn't going to poke it.

Unfortunately, Tony poked it anyway.

And when he did, with a long, thin instrument that had been in his pocket, the stone turned over once, then did nothing. He watched it carefully, waiting for something to happen, one of the many displays or monitors to start beeping, but all he got was a whole lot of nothing.

"Huh," he said, tilting his head. "Maybe it's a dud."

Just then, the stone suddenly glowed and sent out a shockwave of orange energy from its core. Before Tony could utter so much as a single curse word or Bruce could ask why in the world did he go ahead and poke it, they both disappeared into thin air. And they weren't the only ones.

---

Summer was standing in the elevator, alone, fishing through her purse for her phone to let Bucky know that she was officially on her break and on her way down. She smiled without even realizing as she typed out the quick text, biting her lip in anticipation of the next forty-five minutes and moving her thumb to hit the "send" button. Then, after she tossed the phone back into her pocket, she heard a faint rumbling sound that made her eyes snap up and look around her.

Then everything turned orange, and she fell. The elevator floor underneath her feet was gone, and it all happened so fast that she didn't even manage to properly scream as she hurtled through the orange-hued atmosphere. It felt like being sucked into the world's biggest vacuum cleaner and then being shot out of a cannon within the same breath.

But, fortunately, when she hit the ground, she didn't go splat or even really get hurt at all. She did, however, land squarely on her butt in what appeared to be a busy sidewalk, and she almost got stepped on by several people who then yelled at her rather rudely before going on their way.

Scrambling to her feet, bewildered and terrified and so dizzy she thought she was either going to die or already had died, she muttered apologies in the middle of hyperventilating and stood up. Then she looked around her and very nearly went into cardiac arrest.

She was still in New York all right, but it wasn't her New York. The streets were lined with the sort of cars that she only saw at vintage car shops, and all of the women on the street wore old-fashioned dresses, most of them wearing their hair curled and pinned. The men looked different too, in hats and suits that looked sort of something from old gangster movies.

The buildings were different. The one that she lived and worked in wasn't there. The air was cleaner. There were two little boys dressed in shabby clothes and suspenders and hats, playing right next to the street like that was even a thing.

Her jaw was on the ground and she was smack dab in the middle of the most epic panic attack of her life.

Holy crap. I either just time travelled or somebody put bath salts in my coffee.

Just as she was about to completely lose it and pass out, she turned around and immediately collided with someone who was the perfect height for their face to smack directly into her boobs. She was so gone that the collision knocked both her and the other person to the ground, and she let out a pained and surprised "oomph" after having hit the pavement a second time in just a handful of minutes.

"I'm so sorry, ma'am - are you okay? I'm sorry."

Blinking and trying to focus on the bizarrely familiar voice she'd just heard, she pushed off of her elbows and looked at the person that had smacked into her, and that was when she really thought she might lose it.

"Steve?!"

The tiny man in front of her certainly looked like Steve and sounded like Steve, just a much shorter and skinner version of himself, and that only confused her for a second before she realized that duh, of course he was shorter and skinnier, because she had just fallen through time and was now apparently in 1940s New York.

Meanwhile, Steve's face was the picture of confusion. "I... do I know you?"

She stopped breathing for a minute and just let her mouth hang open. He didn't know her, not yet, but now she had just called him by his name and oh God space and time was going to rip apart and it was going to be all her fault.

"No," she shook her head, both of them still on the ground for some reason. "No, you just look like someone I know whose name is Steve."

His eyebrows lifted. "Really?"

She was such a bad liar. She nodded anyway.

And his face had been right in her boobs. She was in the 40s and had smacked Steve's younger, smaller self with her boobs.

But it was just the beginning of her ordeal. Her heart stopped beating for a split second when she heard an unmistakable voice said from behind her, "Geez, Steve, I walk away for five minutes and you're sprawled out in the middle of the sidewalk. What'd you do this time?"

This was not happening.

The first thing she saw was his shoe, on her left side and between herself and Steve, and then she saw his legs as he came to a stop. The brown-olive color of his pants was more than enough confirmation of who he was. She didn't even need to see the rest of the uniform or his face to know.

I am going to actually die.

"Nothing, just didn't see where I was going and knocked into this lady," Steve said, taking the offered hand and getting up to his feet.

Summer stayed where she was, on the pavement, and she was prepared to stay there for the rest of her life, or at least until she got zapped back to the future.

"Oh," the other voice said, and then suddenly there was a hand reaching down towards her. "Hi there."

She didn't look up at his face. She did look up enough to see most of the rest of the uniform and recognize the fact that he was offering her his left hand, which was definitely not the metal one that she was used to.

"Need a hand?"

Oh, that voice. It took everything in her to take his hand instead of curling into a ball and rolling across the street and hopefully eventually into a ditch somewhere like she wanted to.

He helped to pull her to her feet, and she managed to croak out a half-coherent "Thank you" as she tried not to be preoccupied with how his hand felt gently gripping hers.

"Yeah, no problem. You okay? Are you hurt?"

She shook her head, straightening out her clothes and trying to remain steady on her feet despite how her legs felt like noodles and her knees were shaking. "Yeah, I'm... I'm fine, thank y -"

That was when she did it. She made the mistake of looking at his face, in his eyes, and her words fell dead in her slightly-agape mouth.

He looked the same, and yet incredibly different. Younger, lighter, unburdened by the horrors that awaited in his not-so-distant future. He was everything she had imagined his younger self to be, and it was evident through just those few seconds of staring at him how very right she had been.

"You sure you're okay?"

She smiled then, suddenly holding giggles back as the bizarreness of it all finally hit her. "I... well, honestly, I'm not sure if I'm okay, because I'm... well, I'm kinda... lost, and..."

She trailed off because while Steve was looking at her with a mixture of confusion and concern, Bucky was looking at her shoes.

Maybe, on second thought, he wasn't completely different.

He had been paying full attention to her words, however, and he proved this by looking back up at her and saying, "You're lost?"

Her eyes met his, and she tried to swallow but her mouth was suddenly very dry. "Yeah. Extremely lost."

"Where are you from?" Steve asked, while Bucky resumed his visual examination. He was subtle about it, and she got the feeling that it was equal parts checking out and genuine confusion because she was dressed very differently from the other girls of this time.

"Um... Virginia," she said, immediately regretting the answer.

"Virginia?" Bucky repeated, back to looking her in the eyes as a smile briefly crossed his face. "That's pretty far."

"Well... I mean, that's where I'm from, but I'm not, like... I didn't come from there now," she half-stuttered, cringing at every word.

"Oh," Steve said. "Right. Well..."

Shifting awkwardly on her feet, she told herself to just say nice meeting them and then bolt before something horrible happened and she accidentally altered the course of history forever - she'd seen enough sci-fi to know the risks of time travel - but then she looked at Bucky again and was rooted to the spot when he glanced at Steve before smiling at her and saying, "Well, this is my friend Steve, and you can call me Bucky. If there's any way we can help you -"

Oh God. "No, no, that's okay. You probably can't help me. I'll just... I'll figure it out."

"... That might not be the best idea," Bucky said, and she was screaming internally. "You're not in the safest town in the world, and, well... how about you just let us get you somewhere safe. You got a friend you can call? Family?"

Her panic was rising up again. In her head she screamed that no, she had diddly squat to call because she was currently forty years behind her actual birth year and the only people she knew were standing right in fricking front of her.

Except, that wasn't entirely true. Her grandmother was alive. But she was in Poland, so not much help, and even if she had been stateside, it's not like she could have gone and asked her for help.

Plus, where was David? Had he gotten sucked into... whatever this was? Was he in the past or future too? If he was...

She needed to get back. She had no idea how, but she needed to get home, and while neither man in front of her could really help her there, she did need to get her bearings, and she was in no position to turn down help.

"Okay," she finally nodded. "Thank you,"

Then Bucky flashed her a charming smile, and she was pretty sure that was now goo oozing down the sidewalk. But it got worse.

"No problem," he replied, again looking her over and pausing at her heels before looking back up. That was when the charming smile became a fully flirty one, and he asked, "You got a name, doll?"

And just like that, she was done for. The time travel, the panic, the weirdness, and the utterly unexpectedness of 1940s Army-uniform-clad Bucky Barnes and his almost instantaneous flirting converged on her brain, leaving her with no other choice but to literally faint.

He caught her before she could hit the ground, and he looked at Steve in confusion. "Think she hit her head or something?"

"I don't think she did," Steve shrugged. "She's kind of..."

"Yeah," Bucky agreed, knowing what he meant without having to hear the words "strange" or "possibly a nut" spoken out loud. Either way, he scooped her up into his arms, and after settling her against him, he asked Steve, "Do you see her shoes? And her clothes? Where did she come from?"

Steve shrugged before suggesting, "... New Jersey, maybe?"

"Maybe," Bucky said absently. "Well, let's take her to the park and get her to wake up. First time I've ever made a dame faint."

Falling into step beside him and trying to avoid the pointed long high heels on Summer's feet that were swinging near him, Steve scoffed. "I doubt it was you, Bucky. Maybe she's sick or something."

"I'm gonna stick to my theory," Bucky replied. Then, as he walked, he looked down at her and then to her shoes and couldn't help but remark, "Look at those things."

"Yeah, they look dangerous," Steve replied.

Bucky grinned. "Yeah they do."

---

When she came to, she hoped against hope that she was waking up back in reality, back in her own time and no longer stranded in a long-past decade. But, as fate would have it, she woke up instead to Bucky's friendly smile hovering over her as she laid on a park bench.

"There she is," he said as she blinked and looked around. She immediately tried to sit up, and then his hand was at her shoulder. "Hey, hey, easy - don't go fainting on me again."

She groaned and nodded, letting him slowly help her into a sitting position. She couldn't believe that she had actually literally fainted into his arms, but in her defense, this was the younger and less tortured version of the man that she was madly in love with, and he was in full Army uniform, and he had called her doll. "Thanks."

"Yeah, no problem," he assured her, moving to sit next to her. Steve was standing nearby, hands in the pockets of his slightly too-big pants as he watched Bucky ask her, "When was the last time you had something to eat?"

She suddenly realized that it was now well past lunchtime, and she was indeed starving. Maybe the lack of food had been another contributing factor to the embarrassing fainting. "It's been awhile, so that's probably why I fainted. Sorry."

He chuckled, and the smile on his face made her want to claw her own eyes out. "Don't be sorry. Though I am still waiting to get your name."

She suddenly froze, knowing it was probably a big no-no to give him her real name, so in the course of about two seconds, she raced though a bunch of random names in her head before remembering that she needed an old sounding one and blurted, "May."

It just so happened to be May 1st, but that was just a coincidence, of course.

"May," he smiled, and just the sound of her very fake name on his lips made her shiver like a moron. "All right. Nice to meet you, May. Now let's go get you something to eat before you try to scare us again."

She nodded, telling herself to just stop freaking out and act as normal as possible. She glanced at Steve, who gave her a small but friendly smile, and she decided then that he was the most precious thing she had ever seen in her life. It was surreal to see Steve Rogers shorter than her, without all of the bulk and the strength that everybody associated with him in her time, but his eyes were the same and so was his smile. There was little doubt that the same was true of his heart.

She stood up after Bucky did, and when she swayed slightly with one more wave of dizziness, he reached out for her immediately. The stars in her eyes cleared and she felt his hands on her shoulders as he said, "Easy, easy. You okay?"

She nodded, feeling her cheeks start to burn and praying that she couldn't see it. He could, though, of course, and when his eyes darted to her traitorous cheeks, she knew that she was in for a hell of an afternoon.

"Come on," he gestured towards the street, thankfully not remarking on how flushed she was. "Follow us."

And she did. When they led her to a diner not far from the park, she stupidly expected a 50s style diner with checkered floors and girls in big skirts with socks sharing milkshakes with their leather-clad boyfriends, but then she remembered that this was 1940s New York and not Grease.

As if even that made any sense in the first place.

The diner was small, modest and clean and indeed a throwback with little red stools that lined the front counter and matching red tables throughout the rest of the space. They probably came here often, because the girl at the counter smiled and greeted them as they made their way to a table in a corner that was currently empty.

And in a moment that she would remember forever, they both tried pull out her chair for her before laughing with each other. Bucky, however, let Steve do the honors, and she wondered why she found that as endearing as she did as she sat down in the chair.

It might get really hard pretending that she didn't know either of them during the course of this meal, but she took a deep breath and prepared to lie more in the next hour than she ever had in her entire life.

Then Bucky settled into his own seat and took his hat off, and she stifled a whimper and made it sound like a cough.

The girl from the counter made her way over before the inevitable questions from them could start. She was young, maybe a few years younger than Summer, and she had golden blonde curls pinned at the sides and red lips that smacked as she chewed on a piece of gum and asked, "How are you boys doing today?"

"Hungry," Bucky replied with a flash of his smile to her, and when the girl giggled in reply, Summer instantly had the urge to vomit.

"Just like always," the girl said airily. "Will it be the usual?"

Bucky nodded, then gestured to Summer and said, "She might need a minute, though."

She then noticed Summer for the first time, smiling brightly at her and still chewing on her gum. "Okay! Take your time."

Summer didn't miss the look that the girl gave her, which was the same sort of confused look she was getting used to, though she didn't think that her clothes were really that weird. Then again, Miss Bubbly Diner Girl looked like she actually belonged in this era, noticeably pointy bra under her dress and everything, and Summer tried to ignore the fact that just her own boobs were enough to make her stick out like a sore thumb. Especially in her current form-fitting white blouse. Not to mention her skirt sat way too low on her hips and her high heels were way too high.

She ended up ordering the first thing she saw on the menu, some traditional burger thing, not caring what she ate so long as it was something. Then, after taking their orders, the girl leaned over to grab the menus, and Summer tried not to scratch the blonde's eyes out at the transparent way that she tried to give Bucky a view under the collar of her dress. He didn't look though, because he was staring somewhat deadpan at Steve the whole time, and she didn't understand why until the girl was gone.

Bucky suddenly burst out laughing quietly, and Steve did as well, and Summer stared at them both, wondering what in the world was so funny about that.

"Sorry about that," Bucky said, containing his laughter and leaning slightly closer to her as his tone grew quieter. "That girl... I took her out once about two years ago, and ever since, that's how she acts whenever we come here."

"Oh." Well, that made sense. She tried to wonder what all "taking out" entailed and if he'd slept with her, and then she mentally slapped herself for wondering because he was not her boyfriend and he could sleep with whoever he wanted.

Well, he was her boyfriend, but he wasn't.

"Yeah. So tell us about yourself, May."

She nearly choked on a sip of water. Time to panic again.

"Oh, well, um... there's not really much to tell."

"Seems like there might be," Bucky replied. "We know you're from Virginia, but how did you get here?"

For someone who was exceptionally bad at lying, this was basically her worst nightmare. "I... well, I ended up here by accident. In New York, I mean."

"You take the wrong train or something?" Steve asked.

That worked. God bless Steve. "Yeah! Yeah. That's what happened."

"Oh, well that's simple then," Bucky shrugged. "We'll get you on the next train home. Where is home?"

She opened her mouth but said nothing, having no idea how to answer that and really not wanting to get on a train somewhere random and far away.

"Jersey?" he asked.

She shook her head. "No." Then she paused and asked, "Why'd you think that?"

He shrugged, then smiled a little sheepishly and said, "Well, it's not every day we run into a woman dressed like you on the street. I don't know how they dress down there, but I thought maybe..."

... Was she supposed to be offended now? She genuinely didn't know. "Oh. Well, no. Not New Jersey. I came here from, uh..."

The future, where I was supposed to spend my lunch break banging the crap out of your future self, but now instead I'm eating actual lunch with your old self from like seventy years ago and honestly I might have a full psychotic break any minute.

"... Pennsylvania. From a friend's farm." She cringed. Clint's farm was not a good addition to her made up story.

"You live on a farm?" Steve asked in disbelief. Bucky looked equally confused.

"No. I was just staying there for awhile."

A brief pause, and then Bucky asked, "Well, I take it there's no husband, then."

She blinked. "Uh... no."

"Parents?"

She shook her head. "It's really just me."

His expression became genuinely one of feeling for her. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked."

She shrugged. "It's okay. I probably seem like a huge weirdo, so..."

"A what?" Steve asked.

She froze again. Did they say weirdo in the 40s? Probably not. "A... um... weird person."

That was when their food came. Summer again fought the urge to hurl as the diner girl made a fuss over asking Bucky if he needed anything else and how she was just around the corner if he did, while Steve and herself were mostly ignored.

She decided then that he had probably totally banged her. The girl had all the signs of one who'd had their world turned upside down and mind blown repeatedly for a night and now desperately wanted a repeat performance.

Or maybe Summer was just irrationally jealous and needed to focus on eating her damn sandwich.

"Okay, so, May," Bucky said after a few moments spent stuffing their faces, and it took her a moment to remember that she was May. "After we're done here, if you want, we can take you down to the train station and figure out when you can head home."

She nodded, though inside that thought made her want to scream. She had no idea how to truly get home, but leaving New York and the only two people that she knew in it seemed like an absolutely horrendous idea. Not that they knew that she knew them. "Okay."

Bucky nodded. "Good." He gestured to her plate. "Feeling better now?"

She nodded. "I do. And I'm still really sorry about the fainting thing."

He chuckled, shaking his head. "It's no big deal. It's not how I prefer to sweep a woman off her feet, but..." He shrugged in a "what are you gonna do" sort of gesture.

She swallowed down a mouthful of food and grabbed her water glass, and then when he glanced up into her eyes, flirty smile back on his face, she felt her cheeks flare up all over again and she dropped the glass right into her lap like a bumbling idiot. Ice-cold water drenched her skirt and the bottom part of her shirt, and Bucky and Steve watched with bewildered wide eyes as she gasped and half jumped out of her seat, very cold and very wet.

Of course, a big fuss ensued, and even diner girl intervened, getting her a clean towel from the back while Steve and Bucky floundered and acted like she was dying because her clothes were now cold and wet. Steve ended up giving her his jacket - which was big on him but snug on her - and by the time they finally calmed down about it, she wanted to crawl under a rock and just wait for death to come and take her away, sparing her further humiliation.

She had to give Bucky credit, though. Not once did she catch him looking at her chest through her wet shirt, and she almost smiled when he visibly relaxed once she had Steve's jacket on, no longer having to focus so hard on keeping his eyes above her neck.

Clearly, his parents had taught him well.

Then she had a sudden, jarring thought. His parents were alive. His sister, too. She was excited for all of two seconds before she remembered that she was a stranger to him and there was just about zero chance of meeting them.

But she didn't have too long to be bummed out, because soon Bucky was jumping up to jog to the counter and pay their bill. She reached for her purse, ready to absolutely not let him pay for her food (the Army paid even worse now than they did in the future, after all), but then she remembered that she currently had only plastic bank cards in her wallet.

So, not only was she stranded in the wrong decade and currently wearing wet clothes, but she was also completely broke.

Fan-fracking-tastic.

Much more of this, and she'd stop substituting the F word and start screaming the real thing at the top of her lungs. But before she could do that, the bill was paid, and she and Steve were following Bucky out the door.

Back out on the sidewalk and instantly colder now that the outside air had hit her clothes, Bucky replaced his hat on his head and said, "Well... I was going to suggest the train station next, but I'm guessing you'd rather change first."

Ever-present panic started to bubble up within, but rather than say something bizarre and only half-true, she decided to just blurt out the truth. "Yeah, but the thing is, I just realized that I kind of... have no money. I mean, I do, but it's not with me. That's why I didn't pay for my food in there, because trust me, I would have, but -"

Bucky held up a hand to shush her and said, "Hey, it's okay. Calm down. It's not worth crying over."

She blinked. Crying? Was she crying?

She blinked a few more times and felt moisture gathering on her lashes. Dammit. She was actually starting to cry.

Ugh.

"Besides, I wouldn't have let you pay anyway," he grinned. "My mother would be highly disappointed in me. But look, I can take you by my place and find you something there to wear. How's that?"

She had literally no answer to that question. All of this had been weird and amazing and bizarre enough, but now he was taking her to his place?

"Okay," she managed to reply, though she wondered what he could even have at his apartment that would fit her.

"Okay. And Steve will come with us, in case you're worried." When she appeared confused, he clarified with a smile, "I'm not a creep."

Oh. Right. Maybe she needed to not come off as inherently trusting of random men she ran into on the street, even if they weren't exactly random but had no way of knowing that themselves.

Get it together, Summer, she told herself as she began following the two men down the street. Just keep it together long enough to get back home and not screw up history or accidentally kill yourself or someone else, and definitely don't jump his bones even though he looks like actual candy in that uniform. Whatever you do, do not do that.

---

His apartment was on the third floor of a modest building in Brooklyn, and Summer did her best to hide how utterly fascinated she was at seeing it. It was a small apartment, two rooms linked by one bathroom. The front room was a living room combined with a small kitchen area, furnished with some shabby but not horrible-looking furniture and appliances. It looked like the type of place that a soldier might keep before shipping out.

"I'll be right back," Bucky told her as soon as she had walked inside, and that left her standing in the middle of the living room with Steve.

She glanced at him and smiled, and he smiled back, and she just couldn't get used to having to actually look down to see him. "I'm still sorry about earlier, on the sidewalk, running into you."

He shrugged. "It's okay. I've had a lot worse, trust me."

She smiled and nodded, but inside, the thought of someone actually bullying this man and beating him up - like she had heard happened a lot from the (future) man himself - it was just unimaginable. Who would want to hurt him?

Then Bucky was back in the room, dark blue fabric draped over his arm as he said, "I think this should fit you. It might not be perfect, but... at least it's dry, right?"

Then he handed her a dress, and when she took it, she couldn't help but ask, "You have a lot of women's dresses laying around?"

She expected a grin and some playful remark in reply, but instead, his expression became slightly pained for one fleeting moment before he shook it off. "Just that one, actually."

And that was when she realized whose dress she was likely holding. She looked down at it, suddenly feeling like she was the world's most unwelcome intruder and like she could not possibly wear a dress that had in all likelihood belonged to Vivian, the woman that Bucky had loved in his first life.

Where was she now? Where they in one of their "off" stages, like Bucky's flirting and lending of her dress seemed to imply? Or were they -

"Bathroom's right over there. As soon as you're ready we'll head down to the train station."

She nodded quickly, pulling her thoughts back together and then taking refuge in the bathroom. The space was small and messy, but it actually looked a lot like the bathroom of his current self. He tended to keep his bedroom organized and clean, but in the bathroom, combs and shaving supplies and toothpaste tubes would end up everywhere, and such was the case here. It made her smile.

After peeling off her wet clothes and hanging them over the side of the bathtub to dry, she picked the dress back up and eyed it warily one more time before deciding to just get it over with and get it on.

It was a little tight, but not overly so, just enough to make her suspect that Vivian was more petite than she was. It had short sleeves and a skirt that flared out higher in the waist that she was used to, and the bottom hit just past her knees. The neckline had a very narrow, conservative slit that kept her mostly covered aside from just the very smallest peek of cleavage.

It was just so weird wearing it that she could barely enjoy getting to dress up in period-appropriate clothes. Wherever Vivian was, she wished that she could find her and apologize and ask if she happened to know anybody who happened to own a DeLorean. Not that those existed right now anyway.

After poking at her hair and stalling as long as she could, she finally opened the bathroom door and walked out to the main room. Bucky and Steve were both sitting on the couch now, and when they heard her footsteps, they both looked at her but only Bucky looked slightly like the wind had been knocked out of him - and not in a good way, either.

He and Vivian must be off, she decided, and there was probably some memory associated with the dress that had come back as soon as she had stepped out. She immediately wished that she had just suffered with her wet clothes, but then Bucky forced a smile on his face and stood up.

"Thought it would fit."

She nodded, forcing her own smile as well. "Yeah. It's little tight, but..."

"Makes sense. The person who left it here isn't... well, she's... different from you."

... You mean she's tiny and thin and I'm tall with bowling balls on my chest. "Probably shorter. I'm kinda tall. Especially in my shoes."

Now the slight pinch left his features as he grinned lightly in turn and said, "I've noticed."

She couldn't help but smile back, and before she could blush, Steve helpfully piped up. "So, train station now?"

"Yeah," Bucky agreed, not looking away from Summer until Steve nodded and walked past him to the door.

She kept her eyes down as she followed his "ladies first" gesture, the slight woozy feeling starting to return as she moved past him and happened to inhale at just the right moment.

He still smelled the same. A little different but with the same distinct scent that she associated with him. She was so used to that comforting scent and being all but wrapped up in it that she had to close her eyes for a moment and remind herself, once again, to stay on track.

Which was hopefully a track back to the future and not a train to Pennsylvania.

---

Luck may not have been on her side that day, but fate did give her break. The train station was closed.

She breathed a sigh of relief while trying to appear very disappointed on the outside.

"Well, rats," Bucky said, hands on his hips as they stood outside the station. "Looks like you're stuck here til tomorrow."

Thank God in Heaven. "Yeah... darn," she managed to say, trying to sound convincing.

Bucky let out a long sigh, turning first to Steve and then back to her. "And you don't know anybody here in the city?" She shook her head. "And you don't have any money with you?" She shook her head again, and he nodded, then looked at Steve again.

She watched them curiously. It seemed almost like they were having a silent conversation spoken just through their expressions.

"Well," Bucky finally said, turning back to her, "you don't have to take me up on this, but if you want, you can stay at my place tonight. Then in the morning, we'll get you on the first train out."

Sweet mother of Mary. "I... uh... yeah, I mean, I don't really have any other options, so... only if you don't mind, though, because -"

He waved a hand dismissively. "Not at all. Now I just gotta figure out what to do with you for the rest of the day."

Suddenly a thrill shot through her at the realization that she was literally going to spend all day with these two men. It was in the afternoon now, so a good chunk of the day was left, and she was no closer to figuring out how to get back home or how to navigate through the past without messing something up.

Then again, of all the years and all the places that she could have gotten dumped in, fate or whatever decided to drop her here. Andthat had to mean something, right?

Maybe she needed to just go with it and see what happened. Besides, she had always wished that she could have met Bucky back before the war and HYDRA had warped his entire existence.

So, in a way, though it was terrifying and weird and creepy that this had happened at all and she was very concerned about how the heck she was gonna get home, it was also nothing short of amazing.

"Well," she said quietly, "I've never seen New York before." It wasn't technically a lie - she had never seen this New York. "If you two don't mind, maybe you could... show me around?"

She asked this with a smile, and Bucky raised his eyebrows and turned to Steve. "Hey, not a bad idea. What do you say, pal? Wanna show this girl everything this place has to offer?"

Steve shrugged. "I've got no other plans."

"All right," Bucky said cheerfully, grinning at Summer gently gesturing for her to follow him with a light touch to her back. "Hope you like dancing."

She gulped and smiled despite the fact that she was screaming inside. Oh no. Oh God. Why did I have to decide to "go with it" and open my big fat mouth. I am so entirely and utterly screwed.

Her chances of surviving this "incident" were steadily dropping lower and lower.

---

They did indeed show her the city. She felt like she was in a city-sized museum, examining relics of a time past and observing a previous generation in its natural habitat. She tried not to think about the horrors happening overseas or the fact that she was currently alive at the same time as Hitler, because that was just entirely too creepy and her own family's history made it all the worse.

So instead, she let Bucky and Steve act as her personal tour guides, though Steve stayed quiet more often than not. Bucky, however, was pretty animated as he described the different buildings and told her anecdotes along the way, like how a candy shop was one that he used to take his sister to when she was little, or how another park they passed always had the best 4th of July display in the whole city every year.

It was hard not to stare at him the entire time instead of what he was pointing out to her, because he was so happy and unburdened that it was just staggering. Not that he was all fluff and airiness, because he was still a soldier and men who signed up to probably die fighting Nazis had a certain gravity to them no matter what. He was just different, and yet the same in so many ways, and it was dizzying.

So dizzying, in fact, that when they passed a theater and woman with red hair and green eyes walked out of it just as they approached the building, she didn't even recognize her as the woman she had seen in old videos and pictures. In fact, she didn't think anything of it until the woman looked their way and stopped at the very same moment that Bucky stopped in his tracks as well.

"Bucky," the woman said, visibly surprised, looking at all three of them before settling back on Bucky. "Hi."

He nodded. "Hi, Viv."

And then a proverbial ton of bricks fell on Summer's head.

... Could this get any more ridiculous?

"I didn't expect to see you around here," Vivian said, pulling a fur-lined coat closer around herself as she forced a smile on her face. Summer tried not to stare, but the woman was even more stunning in real life than she was in her photos and old movies. Well, movies that technically didn't even exist yet because she was still a number of years away from achieving fame.

Bucky nodded. "Yeah, we were in the neighborhood. You rehearsing today?"

"Yes," she smiled. "Just got done a few minutes ago."

Then her gaze shifted to Summer, and she froze a little, hoping to God that Vivian didn't notice that she was wearing her dress. She was still wearing Steve's jacket, so hopefully that would conceal it enough.

"This is May," Bucky said, noticing the awkwardness. "We just met her today. She's in town by accident and we're trying to help her home."

"Oh," Vivian said, and Summer could see how she relaxed slightly. She then smiled at her and said, "Hi."

Summer waved like an idiot. "Hello."

Then they all stood there silently, the awkwardness roughly the consistency of a giant Jello cup, and one glance Bucky's way saw his jaw slightly clenched and Steve glancing up at him as if in concern.

"Well, I won't keep you, then," Vivian said, again pulling on her coat and then smiling politely to Summer. "It was nice meeting you."

"You too," Summer smiled back. Then she watched the other woman again glance at Bucky, who smiled tightly in response, and Vivian smiled back a little sadly before heading on her way down the street, the way that they had come.

Summer blinked a few times, trying to process what had just happened. She glanced at Bucky, and while he had no way of knowing this, she could read the look on his face perfectly. He obviously hadn't been expecting running into Vivian, and their last split must have indeed been rather unpleasant, judging by the few seconds it took for him to shake it off.

"Sorry about that," he said for no real reason, looking at Steve first and then Summer. "I, uh... I'm gonna go grab a drink in this drugstore up here."

And then, within a few minutes, she was standing alone with Steve on the sidewalk, trying to figure out what the normal way to act would be. What would she do if she didn't already know both of them and wasn't still in shock from meeting the woman Bucky had loved before her?

"Is he... okay?"

Steve looked up, seemingly surprised that she had spoken to him. He'd been doing that all day, now that she thought of it. "Yeah. He's okay. She, uh... long story there."

Summer nodded, already knowing said long story, of course. "Makes sense. She's gorgeous."

Steve nodded, saying nothing and avoiding looking at her, and she stifled the sudden urge to grab him and squeeze him in a giant hug. He'd think she was absolutely psychotic and wouldn't understand that seeing him like this, tiny and lacking confidence and so quiet was just so completely different from what she was used to, and he was simply too good for the world and needed to be protected and -

A low whistle from in front of her interrupted her thoughts and brought her attention to a random guy on the sidewalk who was slowly walking by with a wolfish smile.

"Well, hello there miss," the guy said, brushing back some mildly stringy light brown hair from his eyes. "Aren't you a sight for sore eyes."

She stared at the guy for a moment before laughing. Was he serious?

Apparently he was. Just as Bucky walked out of the store, the guy stepped a little closer and said, "I ain't seen a dame as pretty as you for a week."

"Just a week?" she replied, and he mistook her flippant attitude for something else as he continued to walk closer, and when he did, the rather pungent smell of alcohol on him made her hand reach into her purse for her handy dandy taser, just in case.

"Hey, why don't you back off," Steve unexpectedly barked at the guy, and suddenly he was standing in between them and Summer was staring at him in surprise. The other guy was an entire head taller and decently broader.

Behind her, she heard a sigh from Bucky and an exasperated call of "Steve..."

Meanwhile, the guy laughed at Steve. "What, are you gonna make me?"

"Maybe," Steve said, not a trace of fear anywhere to be seen.

This was the very embodiment of every story she had ever heard about younger Steve getting into fights he had zero hope of winning.

"How about you try?"

"How about you show the lady some respect?" Steve shot back.

At that point, the drunk idiot raised his fist, but before he could do anything with it, Bucky grabbed Steve to pull him out of the line of fire, and at the very same moment, Summer tasered the guy.

He hit the ground as a shaking, babbling mess of a man, and then he was unconscious. Having not gotten to use her taser in a long time, Summer almost kind of enjoyed it, especially since the jerk had been about to beat up someone she had just been mentally swearing to protect at all costs.

It was only when she looked over and saw both Bucky and Steve with their mouths hanging open that she realized how she might have just screwed up a little bit, using a taser in the middle of this particular decade.

"What the hell is that?" Bucky asked, staring at the taser in her hand.

"Uh..."

Crap.

"This is... a... well, it's a new weapon they make for self-defense. It shocks people." She glanced over to the guy on the ground. "Which is kind of... obvious, but..."

When they continued to mostly just stare in silence, she said to Steve, "Thank you for that, though. You didn't have to stand up for me."

"... I don't like people like that," he replied, still looking at the guy every few seconds as if to check that he was still alive.

She nodded her understanding, then put the taser back into her purse. After, she looked up at them again, and this time, rather than bewilderment or confusion, she saw something else on Bucky's face. It looked like surprise, confusion, and a little bit of admiration, judging by the slowly growing grin he was sending her way.

She grinned back, adjusting her purse on her shoulder and feeling pretty good about herself at the moment, even though she had just used a very modern weapon in front of them.

Oh well. Stuff happens, she reasoned. And it was hard to regret anything that made Bucky smile at her like that.

---

It turned out that Bucky was nothing short of fascinated by the taser, and he didn't shut up about it, not even after she had been fed one more time and was now being walked to her doom. And by doom she meant a dance club that she was pretty sure that she was unprepared for.

The sun in the sky was gone as she walked next to Bucky down the street and somewhat nervously watched him examine her taser with his own eyes and hands. "Where'd you say you got this again?"

"Uh... a friend who's an... inventor," she said. "That's a prototype. He's letting me test it out."

Bucky gave her a side-look and said, "So you're friends with farmers and inventors who let you test out their stuff."

She smiled and shrugged a little. "... Yep."

"You know, I get the feeling nothing's ever boring with you," Bucky remarked, and as much as she wanted to make a suggestive and tongue-in-cheek comment back, she figured that she shouldn't and just kept her mouth shut as he handed the thing back to her. "Well, here. God help the guy who ever hassles you."

She smiled and put the taser back in her purse, trying not to squeak when her fingers brushed those of his left hand in the process. It discombobulated enough for her to the babble, "Yeah, you should see me with a riding crop."

As soon as the words left her mouth, she immediately froze in horror and then turned an embarrassing shade of red as she looked over at the two men. Steve looked just about the same as she did, just more confused, and Bucky looked the same for all of a split second before his maddening grin returned. She wanted to die.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, why can't you just shut the f-

"Was that an invitation, or..."

... Idiot dumb moron with the brain power of a... wait, what?

She looked at him and began floundering for words, not to mention air, and she had no clue how the heck to even answer that. Should she go with it? What was the harm? Would unabashedly flirting with his younger self really be that potentially destructive to the time-space whatever?

"Relax," he chuckled, apparently noticing her inner panic. "I'm just joking with you."

"Oh. Okay," she laughed uneasily, suddenly disappointed. But maybe he noticed that, too, because he gave her that look again before turning his eyes back forward, grin lingering on his face.

Ugh. Flirting had never been her strong suit, but this was ridiculous.

"All right. Here we are."

Snapping out of her thoughts, she came to a stop and indeed found them at the entrance of the club that marked the end of the grand tour of New York. She glanced over at Steve as Bucky got the door, seeing a sort of resigned misery on his face, but before she could think on it too much, she was being ushered inside and stepping right into the middle of the old videos she had once watched when she was first learning how to swing dance with him.

The place was full of people already, and seeing an actual band at the forefront was a far cry from the typical modern-day DJ (not that she ever went to those clubs anyway). There were men in military uniforms and some not, and all of the women were in dresses, some in hats, none of them with hair as long or free-flowing as hers. Some were dancing, some were sitting at little tables and drinking, laughing, and smoking, and she stared at everything as Bucky led her and Steve to a table all the way in the corner, seemingly tucked away from most of the others. She wasn't sure why until she noticed that this particular corner was free of the smoke that was heavy in the other parts of the building. He was looking out for Steve, as always.

This time around, Bucky was the one to pull out her chair, and to make matters worse, he also happened to help pull Steve's jacket off of her shoulders. She knew he was just being nice, but the brush of his fingers against her shoulders made her have to fight blushing all over again, and her face had been on fire so much already today that she felt like Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider.

Taking a deep breath after having sat down, she looked up in surprise when rather than sit down, Bucky asked them both what drinks they wanted.

"Usual," Steve shrugged.

She paused for a moment, wondering if drinking while time traveling was really a good idea.

Then she quickly decided that drinking while time traveling was actually the best idea ever.

"Wine, maybe?" Bucky guessed.

At first she was going to say yes, but then she thought for a moment and instead replied, "Actually, whiskey." She paused. "A big one."

He looked at her with surprise for roughly the hundredth time that day, which was the reaction she had been going for. "Really?"

She smiled and raised an eyebrow. "Is that surprising?"

"No," he shrugged. "Well... maybe. But all right."

Then he walked off, smiling at her as he went, and she kept smiling as she watched him walk away. Then she caught Steve looking at her and quickly tried to look not like she was head over heels in love with a guy she had just met. It wasn't easy.

Then she tried to start a conversation. "So, do you two come here a lot?"

He glanced around before nodding. "Yeah. Well, he comes more than I do. But he drags me here all the time."

"He has to drag you? Not a fan of dancing, I guess?" she asked.

He shrugged a little, looking down for a moment as he replied quietly, "No, that's not it. I just... I'm busy a lot."

Seeing through him, she nodded and said, "Well, I hope it's that and not that girls are jerks to you because you're small."

The way that his face fell a bit and the way that he tried to immediately brush it off tugged painfully at her heartstrings. "Well, it's... I'm used to it."

She was prepared to be quite offended on his behalf. What he was implying was absolutely ridiculous. Yes, he was small and the skinniest guy in just about every room he walked into, but so what? He was still Steve, and even on a superficial level, he wasn't exactly off-putting. His face was still perfectly adorable. How had no girl danced with him yet? Were they all idiots? Did they just not notice him among all of his normal-sized peers?

It must have really messed with his head to go from being perpetually ignored to suddenly seen as a specimen of all things desirable literally overnight. What a bunch of fakes there were in the world, regardless of the decade.

"Well, I'm sure your chance will come," she said. "And you seem like a really nice guy, so it's their loss."

He looked up at her and looked surprised. "Oh, well... thanks, but..."

"No, I'm serious," she said, just as Bucky returned with their drinks. As he set them down on the table - his was identical to hers but Steve's was something clear, maybe gin or something - she added, "And maybe you should just ask them to dance anyway. Do you ask them?"

He paused for a moment, glancing at Bucky as he sat down and then replying, "Well, sometimes, but..."

"He doesn't," Bucky interjected. "I always tell him the same thing, but he's too shy for his own good."

"I asked Mary," Steve argued.

"Steve, that was five months ago," Bucky pointed out.

Summer looked at both of them and then had a great idea. "Well, maybe you just need practice. Why don't you practice on me? Go ahead, ask me to dance."

Steve looked horrified. Bucky grinned. "That's a great idea. Go on, Steve, it's easy."

Steve adjusted the tie under his neck and muttered, "I really don't think -"

"Just once," she assured him. "I mean, you don't have to, but -"

"Yes he does," Bucky said, drink in hand as he looked at Steve and said, "If you can go and pick fights with guys twice your size then you can ask a girl to dance."

"It's very different," Steve replied. "But fine."

Summer smiled then, reaching for her drink and taking care not to drop it in her lap this time as she took her first sip. She noticed Bucky glancing her way as she did this, so she took a bigger sip than she normally would have and instantly regretted it. Holding back the world's biggest wince at the hole now burned in her throat, she set the glass down and then turned her attention back to Steve.

He straightened his shoulders slightly and looked up in her eyes, then away, and then back again before sighing and muttering, "Hi. Would you like to dance?"

Before she could say a word, Bucky said, "Oh come on! You can do better than that. You walk into fights thinking you're six feet tall or something. You gotta do the same when you're talking to a girl."

Steve sighed and started fiddling with his drink. "Yeah, yeah, I know. That's what you always say."

"Because it's true. Here, watch what I do."

Summer then nearly choked on her latest sip of the whiskey when Bucky's chair was suddenly a bit closer to hers, and she realized that he was going to demonstrate on her when he then leaned casually against the table and shot her a friendly but distinctly flirty grin.

Oh God.

"Hi," he said with a faint nod.

"... Hi," she replied quietly.

"I'm Bucky. What's your name?"

She genuinely forgot her fake name for a second before replying, "May."

"May," he repeated softly, still grinning as he reached out his hand, as if for a handshake. Well, that was odd, but maybe that's what they used to do, so she reached out and let him take her hand anyway.

Instead of a handshake, he turned her hand over and ran his thumb down over her knuckles before bringing her hand to his lips. He didn't take his eyes off of her as he kissed her hand softly, and she knew that her mouth was hanging slightly open and she was blushing bright enough to light the whole room, and at the moment, she couldn't have cared less.

Then he grinned as he drew his lips away and asked with a faint jerk of his head towards the dance floor, "Wanna dance?"

Unable to speak, she nodded a little too enthusiastically. He smiled and then turned back to Steve, still holding her hand. "See?"

Steve rolled his eyes. "You know I can't do that."

"Says who?" Bucky asked, and Summer was pretty sure she was gonna hyperventilate if he didn't let go of her hand soon.

"Says... me," Steve replied with a shrug. "That's just you, but I'm not -"

"You could be," Bucky argued. "Besides, what have you got to lose?"

When Steve failed to come up with an answer for that, Bucky added, "Exactly." Then he turned back to Summer and gave her a small smile that she returned, though inside she was screaming because he was still holding her hand.

"So," he said, "do you wanna -"

Whatever he was going to say was cut off by a sudden rush of people coming their way, a guy and two girls were all laughing and happily exclaiming his name like they were old friends and had just spotted him in the crowd.

His hand left hers, and rather than be relieved like she should have been, she instead wanted to throw her glass at the head of the giggly girl currently pulling on his arm to get him to stand up and presumably dance with her.

And a moment later, that was exactly what he did. He had looked at her a bit apologetically before disappearing, and she had smiled like it was no big deal, and it wasn't, of course. She had just really wanted him to finish his sentence.

She kept drinking, the liquor going down easier the closer she got to the bottom of the glass, and she tried her best to make small talk with Steve while Bucky took turns dancing with the two girls. She had never seen him dance with anyone but her, at least not in person, and it wasn't helping her to not have irrational feelings of unjustifiable jealousy. Before she knew it, her drink was gone, and she sighed, sitting back and hoping to God that nobody else asked her to dance.

Luckily, they stayed away, and then when Bucky came back to the table, he came back with one of the girls. She was a little shorter than Summer and her hair was a light brown, shoulder-length and curled, not as terrible looking as a very petty part of Summer wanted to think. She didn't sit down though, and when Bucky took his seat again, he looked up at her and said, "Hey, Jeanie, why don't you dance with Steve here while I finish my drink?"

Steve looked up like a deer in headlights, but before he could say or do anything awkward in response, "Jeanie" saved him the trouble by looking at him with poorly veiled disinterest and then saying, "Oh... well, I would, but gosh, I'm afraid I'd step on him."

Instantly pissed off, Summer was ready to tell the girl off, especially after Steve's face fell in embarrassment. But she wasn't the only one offended by the comment.

"Yeah, never mind," Bucky replied. "You're a lousy dancer anyway. He can do a lot better."

He then causally took a sip of his drink, and the girl looked at him in shock and then anger before stomping away. Steve wasn't as thrilled by Bucky's retort as Summer was, though.

"You didn't have to say that," Steve muttered, still embarrassed.

"The hell I didn't," Bucky replied. "Besides, I don't like her anyway. No love lost there."

"Yeah, but I don't know why you keep trying. You know nobody's gonna say yes."

Summer decided that she'd had enough of this. She abruptly pushed her chair back noisily and then stood up, marching over to Steve and standing there until he and Bucky both looked at her in confusion.

"Dance with me."

Steve's eyes widened. "What?"

"Dance with me," she repeated.

He blinked. "Uh... I..."

Before he could protest, she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him up to his feet. It was very easy to do - she was pretty sure she had about fifty pounds on him. When she realized that he'd be staring at her boobs the entire time, she let go of his hand and then braced herself on the table with one hand while the other slipped off her high heels. Then she shoved them into Bucky's hands, trying not to smile at the open-mouthed surprise on his face. Then she turned back to Steve, grabbed his hand again, and then physically dragged him to the dance floor as he looked back and shared one more look of utter panic with Bucky.

Bucky merely smiled at his friend and then looked down at the pair of shoes he was holding. He lifted one up and examined the platform base of the shoe and then the thin, almost sharp, very high heel of it, wondering aloud, "How the hell does she walk in these things?"

Meanwhile, Summer took Steve to an open pocket amid the other dancers, and when she came to a stop, she turned around and took his other hand as well as she smiled at the bewildered and extremely nervous look on his face.

"Have you really never danced before?" He shook his head. "Okay. I didn't dance for most of my life either, but once you get used to it, it's a lot of fun."

Next to them, a guy tossed his girl over his shoulder, and Steve looked at them and said, "I'm not gonna be able to do that."

"You don't have to," she insisted. "I'm just gonna show you the easy stuff. But you're gonna have to get like a lot closer."

He blushed a little but nodded anyway, and once he got close enough, she got to do something she never would have thought was possible - teach Steve Rogers how to dance.

He stared at his feet a lot at first and acted like this was the first time in his life that a woman's hands had ever been physically anywhere on his person, but other than that, he followed her examples well. She had to duck down a little bit and go slow when she had him spin her the first time, and his movements were completely unsure and awkward in a charming way. Still, after a few minutes, he managed to loosen up enough for her to be confident that he wasn't completely miserable.

"See?" she said loudly enough for him to hear over the music. "It's fun!"

"I guess it's not so bad," he replied, smiling a little.

The only near-mishap came when she told him to dip her, and she accidentally leaned too much of her weight on his thin arms. He almost tipped over right with her, but she sprang up and righted herself before he could get another faceful of her chest, and to her relief, they both laughed about it.

After that, she danced with him for a few more minutes before a familiar face appeared behind them. Steve came to a stop then, and with the hand that wasn't holding her shoes, Bucky gave Steve's shoulder a clap and he said, "I knew you had it in you, pal."

Steve rolled his eyes a little, letting go of Summer and looking a little relieved that it was over now. "Yeah, well, you make it look easier than it really is."

"I try," Bucky shrugged. Then Steve said something about being thirsty, thanked Summer for her help, and they shared a smile before he headed back towards their table.

Then Bucky turned to Summer and gave her a look that she couldn't quite read, at least until he glanced at her shoes and then raised them up a few inches towards her. "Want these back now?"

"Yeah, thank you." She reached for the shoes, but then he unexpectedly knelt down in front of her right in the middle of the dance floor. One of his hands went to her ankle and lifted her foot gently while the other eased her shoe back on, and she felt like all the air had gone from the room. She looked around nervously, and she saw a few couples looking her way, plus one "Jeanie" who looked rather disgruntled about it all.

Then she looked down and caught Bucky looking up at her just as he began slipping the second shoe on to her other foot. She still couldn't breathe, and it wasn't just because she had seen him in this same position before numerous times, albeit usually more naked and his hair being grasped tightly between her fingers while his face was much closer. Not that that particular thought was very helpful at the moment.

Then, once her shoes were secure on her feet, he stood up and said in a tone more sincere than she had expected, "Thank you for doing that."

She blinked. What had she done again? Oh right, she danced with Steve. "Oh yeah. No problem."

He nodded lightly, and she didn't miss he brief glance to her lips before he asked, "Do I get a turn now?"

As if she could ever possibly say no to him.

She nodded, not fully trusting herself to speak, and just in time, the band switched to a new song. It was more exuberant than the last one, and when she saw the grin that crossed his lips as he took her hand in his, she had a feeling she was about to get a workout.

And she was very right.

Where Steve had been every bit the inexperienced beginner, Bucky moved with all of the ease and the confidence that she fully expected of him. He danced differently than his future self did, and she noticed it in the way that he would pick her up and toss her around. He was just a little bit less careful, a little less controlled, and she knew it was because this version of him didn't have to worry about accidentally breaking any of her bones or leaving bruises on her from a simple touch.

She wasn't drunk, not even tipsy, but the alcohol in her system made her feel even warmer than she already did as he danced her around the floor. He would grin at her and spin her effortlessly out before drawing her back in, give her no warning before he would flip her and help her land back on her feet, and when she kept up with his every step, he remarked over the music, "You're good at this."

"I had a good teacher," she replied, and she got a kick out of knowing that he had no way of knowing that she was actually referring to him.

"I'll say," he said right before his arm went around her waist and he flipped her again.

By the time that a slower song had replaced the previous faster ones, her heart was racing and she was out of breath, neither of which were helped by the way he then held her close and slowly swayed with her to the music. His hand resting above the small of her back, she tried to remain as calm as possible when his gaze met hers and he said, "You know, I've spent the whole day with you, but I barely know anything about you. What do you do for a living?"

She could handle these kinds of questions. They were safe. "I'm an assistant. For a pretty big company."

"Assistant?" he repeated. She nodded. "All right. Is that what you want to do?"

She smiled a little and shrugged. "It's good for now. But I'm a writer."

"Ah," he said, face lighting up with slight intrigue. "Okay. Interesting. What do you write?"

Oh, if you only knew. "Things."

He raised an eyebrow. "Things? What kind of things?"

"Fiction... things," she replied. "Stories. About people."

He chuckled. "Well, that narrows it down."

She laughed back slightly nervously. "Yeah. I don't have as much time for it as I'd like to, though."

He nodded. "Yeah, I can understand the feeling. Anything else I need to know about you?"

She shrugged again and then smiled. "I don't know. I'm not all that interesting."

"Really? Because I was gonna ask about that thing with the riding crop..."

She laughed and squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head as he grinned at her reaction. "Okay, actually, there is something you should know about me. I never know when to shut up and sometimes I say things that make me want to crawl under a rock and die."

"I think it's great," he replied. "A lot of these dames... women," he corrected himself, "they try to play these games and act a certain way to reel you in. Honesty's better."

She felt a slight sense of guilt then, since she had been lying to him all day, but then again, her circumstances were very special. "I agree. I just prefer to keep my foot out of my mouth."

He smiled and nodded. "Speaking of your feet... how are you still standing?"

"I'm actually used to being on my feet all day in these things," she said. "It's not too bad. And I like how they look."

He slowly turned her then, twirling her almost lazily as his eyes dropped to her shoes and back up to her eyes again as he pulled her back in. "Me too."

"Glad to have your approval."

Oh God I'm actually flirting on purpose now. Stop stop stop!

He grinned. "I hope I have yours too, 'cause I don't wanna get on the wrong side of that laser of yours."

"Taser," she said with a smile. Then, pushing it a little further, she asked, "Do you plan on doing something that might make me get it out?"

"Well that's the thing," he replied. "I gotta know beforehand what my risks are. If I'm gonna get electrocuted, it better be damn well worth it."

"That makes sense," she said. "But I don't think I'd electrocute a guy who's been helping me all day and just wore me out dancing with me."

He smiled, and there was something definitely mischievous about it. He was also a little closer now, and it was incredibly hard not to stare at his lips. "I'm not worn out. Takes a little more than just dancing to do that."

She warned herself to stop, but there was no stopping this train. "Like what?"

He looked up briefly in false contemplation, then said, "Well, I've always been better at showing than telling."

Filthy-minded bastard. She saw how his eyes then moved down to her lips and how he licked his own before meeting her gaze again.

Was he still moving closer, or was she just imagining that if she barely moved her lips would be on his?

"I like telling," she half-stammered. "Because. You know. Writer."

He nodded, still swaying slowly with her. "So tell me something."

"What?"

"Anything."

She almost laughed. "What?"

"You're the writer," he grinned. "What's going through your head right now?"

Everything about this was so unfair, because while she knew better than to actually answer that question, she was physically incapable of not word-vomiting out a response.

"Your jawline."

His eyebrows furrowed immediately. "My jawline?"

"It's... really strong," she said, trying not to cringe. "I like... jaws."

Ugh.

"Yeah?" he tilted his head slightly. "What else do you like?"

"Eyes. You have good ones there, too."

He probably thinks you're the worst writer ever.

He smiled softly. "Yours are beautiful."

She was melting like the wicked witch, screaming and smoking inside and everything.

"They... get the job done."

Oh how smooth. Idiot.

But he appeared to find her incompetency nothing short of adorable. "Your lips too," he added, looking down at them again. "I bet they get the job done, too."

She would have giggled at all the possible innuendos if she wasn't so busy dying slowly and painfully. "I... uh..." She swallowed. "Yeah, I haven't had any complaints."

The hand not on her back let go of her own to brush some of her hair behind her ear as he smiled at her half-baked response. His fingers tickled along her cheek in the process. "You're blushing."

She couldn't reply this time, because her ability to speak was temporarily disabled. She couldn't think with him touching her like that, let alone looking at her the way that he was, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do at that moment was to close the minuscule space between them and kiss him.

And, to her own shock, that was what she did. They were already so close, and his lips were like a magnet calling out to hers. He was safe and comfortable and yet new and different, but also the same in so many ways, and how much could she take before she gave in?

Her eyes closed without her permission and then she leaned in that little tiny bit, brain going offline and giving her the green light to press her lips to his. It was soft, small kiss, but firm and not timid, and for the first time that day she felt like she was home and safe and not in a dangerous, terrifying situation that was completely beyond her control.

Then it all fell apart the minute she felt his lips move against hers. Her eyes shot open and she sprang backwards, eyes wide as reality came crashing back down and she all but exclaimed, "Oh my God, I am so sorry! Holy crap, I'm sorry."

But while she felt embarrassment burning in her cheeks and pounding in her ears, Bucky merely shook his head and replied quietly, "I'm not."

She paused and blinked a few times, her hands on his shoulders and one of his still near her face, now lingering slightly in her hair. They had stopped moving the minute her lips had touched his. "But... I just met you today, and I swear I don't normally going around kissing guys I just met."

"Your secret's safe with me," he smirked.

She opened her mouth and yet could produce no words, all of them twisted and tangled in her throat and disintegrating the longer he stared at her.

"I wanted to kiss you but I didn't want you to think I was trying to take advantage of you," he added.

She knew he'd never do that. Unless she asked him to. But then it wasn't technically taking advantage in the first place.

"... I still want to," he admitted. Then his hand left her hair to cup her face and he asked barely above a whisper, "Can I?"

She nodded so fast she was surprised her neck didn't snap. He wasted no time then, his lips descending upon hers and his hand angling her head slightly. It felt like her heart had stopped and shocked itself back to life all within the same second, and he kissed her so perfectly, softly and gently but increasingly more deeply as the moment lingered. It was familiar but also not, because he was kissing her in a way that was experimental but no less mind-blowing for it.

When he came up for air, she opened her eyes and whimpered at the loss. She couldn't help it - the kiss was a lot, but it wasn't nearly enough. His grin returned at her reaction, and his hand moved comfortingly through her hair as he asked, "Are you ready to leave?"

If that meant what she thought it meant... oh boy.

She nodded anyway, and rather quickly. "Yes."

He nodded, grin still fully intact as his hand suddenly gripped hers, and then he was leading her away from the now mostly-empty dance floor back to their table. Everything was now officially a blur, which had nothing to do with the whiskey she'd drank, and she had to hold in a giggle at the overly cheerful way that he asked Steve if he was ready to call it a night.

Steve looked from Bucky to Summer in a slightly amused and entirely knowing way, and then in another moment, they were all back out on the street. The cool night air didn't do much to soothe the heat now pulsing in her body nor the panic simmering under the surface.

... What was she doing? Was it wrong? Would it mess something up? Would Bucky - her Bucky back home, not this one - be mad at her for deciding to spend her time making out with and possibly doing more with his old self? Or would he just metaphorically high five himself?

She shouldn't have to worry about things like this. This was why time travel wasn't supposed to exist. It put people in bizarre dilemmas that really weren't dilemmas at all because who was she kidding, she was putty in his hands and if he wanted it, this was happening.

They stopped at Steve's place first, and before he went inside, he bade Bucky goodnight and then gave Summer an awkward smile.

"...Thanks for the, uh... dance," he said, and she smiled brightly in reply.

"You're welcome! You were good. Keep practicing."

"I'll try," he said in a way that implied he was certain he wouldn't have the chance to. "Good luck getting back home. I'll see you off tomorrow, too."

"Thank you," she smiled. "It was nice meeting you!"

He nodded. "You too." Then he glanced at them both, and she was sure that he and Bucky shared a subtle exchange in the form of a look before Steve said goodnight and then headed inside.

She still couldn't believe that she had met and danced with the younger Steve. She also couldn't believe that his heart in the future was every bit as pure as it had seemed here.

But she could marvel over all of that later. For now, Bucky, hand on her lower back was guiding her back to the sidewalk. "I'm just a couple blocks up."

She remembered. His hand fell back to his side, and as they walked, a silence hung between them. It wasn't awkward, but she wished he would say or do something so that she would stop thinking and freaking herself out.

"Are you cold?"

She shook her head at the question, which he asked halfway back to his apartment. She had given Steve his jacket back, so she probably should have been cold, but she definitely was not.

"Tired?"

She shook her head again, then smiled. "You know, I was, but now I'm suddenly not."

A street light hit his face just right for her to see how he grinned at that. "Good."

Oh man.

Once they got to his place, she followed him up the stairs, ignoring the ache in her feet (those shoes had more than worn out their welcome) and standing behind him as he unlocked his front door. She clutched her purse in her hands, suddenly extremely nervous.

He opened the door and reached inside to flip on a lamp that stood next to the doorway, then motioned for her to walk inside first. She hurried through the door, and as he followed her inside, the first thing she did was take off her shoes and sigh at the relief of carpet under her feet instead of high heels. He closed the door and locked it again as she turned back around.

"That is so much bett- oh!"

He was right there, in her space, his hands already going to her hips and his lips an inch from hers as he murmured, "I'm sorry. It just took so damn long to get home."

It actually took no more than fifteen minutes, but she couldn't argue because he was kissing her again, and in a way that he hadn't at the club. That kiss had been all slow, careful testing of the waters and teasing what really kissing him could be like. This, on the other hand, was all hunger and desire, and it hit her like a tidal wave.

Her purse dropped to the floor and her hands went to his hair the minute he flung his hat to the couch, and she kissed back to match his desperation shamelessly. When her back hit a wall, she only then noticed that he had been steadily walking her backwards, and he broke away to half-pant, "If this is too fast, stop me."

She shook her head. "It's not."

"Are you sure, because I can sleep on the couch and you can have my bed and I'll act like this never happened if you want."

She grabbed him by his half-loosened tie and said, "That is the last thing I want." Then she pulled him close with the fabric and kissed him, and his hands on her hips tightened gently as her tongue slid with his. The mildly surprised groan that her lips muffled sent a shiver down her spine, and after she spent another moment or two kissing him in ways she knew he loved, he broke away panting heavier.

"Damn," he breathed, one of his hands moving up and moving her hair behind her ear. "You're good."

She smiled and then bit her lip to keep from gasping as he bent his head and began kissing her neck. Suddenly she realized something amazing - she had a huge advantage. He knew next to nothing about her, but she knew everything about him and what he liked and how he liked it. Of course, there could be some variations considering how different this version of him was, but she doubted there was really too drastic of a difference.

She could utterly blow his mind, and he would never even see it coming.

Time travel had its benefits, clearly.

"Bucky," she nearly whined as his lips kissed and nipped at her neck, and she gave his hair a gentle tug that succeeded in making him stop and raise his head back up to look at her.

"May."

She wished that he could call her by her real name, but she wasn't gonna push her luck. Instead, she bit her lip at the way he was looking at her like he wanted to devour her, and she asked, "Are you gonna take me to bed?"

An incoherent groaning sound was her only answer before he picked her up and then carried her down the very short hallway into his room. He groped blindly for the light as she kissed him again, and when the room finally illuminated, she broke away and managed to get her feet back on the ground.

She turned her back to him and quickly scanned over the small space. His bed was fairly large and took up most of the room, and what wasn't taken up by it was mostly books and a handful of framed pictures on top of a small dresser. But she only registered half of this, because he had moved her hair over her shoulder and was kissing along the back of her neck and letting one hand roam up and down her side while the other worked on getting his tie off.

She turned and kissed him when she couldn't wait anymore, her hands joining his in helping him get the layers off. His shoes were out in the living room with his coat, and soon his tie was joined on the floor by his button-down shirt (was it against regulation to throw his uniform around like this?), and her hands went greedily to his belt while he got the white t-shirt underneath off and down on the floor as well. She got distracted from her task then, for reasons that he wouldn't possibly understand and she couldn't possibly express. She had seen his left hand plenty by now, but now she was looking at him as he had once been - whole and without a trace of metal forged to his skin.

Where there was scarring and a deadly strong arm in his future, for now there was nothing but warm, unmarred skin and an arm identical to his right one.

She loved his metal arm, for many reasons. She had to love it for both of them when he hated it, when he wished he could be rid of it and saw it as a constant reminder of the hell he'd been through. But she loved his arm like this, too. She loved every part of him, real and artificial, past and present, and it hurt to not be able to tell him any of this.

Instead she touched his shoulder, trying not to be too obvious about how she was staring at it and his arm, and eventually she let herself notice the other differences. He was softer and not the serum-enhanced bulk that she was used to, more fit and lean than pure muscle, what she would expect from a soldier.

The dog tags around his neck were the very same ones he wore in the future, ever since she had suggested he wear them to remind himself of who he was underneath everything he had endured.

His fingers tipping up her chin prevented her from fully memorizing him. The searing kiss he laid on her lips more than made up for it.

Then both of his hands were behind her, one on the small of her back while the other found the zipper at the top of her dress so quickly and pulled it down so easily that she knew this wasn't his first time taking it off someone. But she stopped thinking about it when his hands then roamed down the now-exposed skin of her back, just before he moaned softly into their kiss and then quickly walked her to the bed.

He threw her on the bed more roughly than she was used to, so a surprised noise left her lips when her back hit the mattress. But she didn't mind it, and the grin on her face told him as much as he crawled over her and kissed her once more. His fingers worked on peeling the dress off of her shoulders and down her body, and after she helped get it down her legs and finally on the floor, she froze when she opened her eyes and saw how he was staring down at her after having broken their kiss.

Her first thought was that something was wrong. His eyebrows were furrowed and his eyes moved slowly from her bra down to her underwear, and she looked down at herself with sudden concern. She thought she actually looked pretty good. She was wearing one of her relatively few matching sets - luckily - and they were black and lacy with small dark blue detailing.

... Maybe his older self didn't like black or something?

"Bucky?" she asked quietly, moving up slightly on her elbows.

He blinked but didn't look up. "You... this..."

Her brows moved steadily up her forehead. "What?"

He finally managed to get a coherent sentence out of his agape mouth. "I've never seen anything like this before."

... Oh. She could have slapped herself for not figuring that out on her own. Of course he'd be bewildered by the modern magic of a revealing push-up bra and low cut panties that covered basically the bare minimum of what was needed to pass as underwear and still be comfortable.

Now hiding a smile, she waited for him to regain the ability to look somewhere else as she asked, "Do you like it?"

"Do I..." he trailed off, taking a few more seconds to stare at her breasts in particular before finally tearing his eyes away and looking at her face.

Then he cursed roughly and kissed her harder than he had all night. She took pride in having already driven him crazy by just taking off her dress.

But he hadn't seen anything yet.

Now able to feel his need for her prominently against her hip, she let her fingers tangle in his hair as his mouth trailed kisses down to her chest. She knew he'd be there for awhile and she didn't mind in the slightest, pulling her arms out of the straps of the bra when he impatiently yanked them down, and instead of getting the whole thing off, he just pushed it down. Then his mouth immediately set to her skin and he moaned low in his throat, like he'd been starving and now had a feast waiting in front of him.

So far, she noted before she lost her ability to think again, he was shaping up to be almost no different at all from his future self, but the night was young.

Being very used to being touched by one warm hand and one nearly freezing hand, two equally warm hands kneading and squeezing with the added touch of an even hotter mouth was different in a way that made her head spin. She missed the coldness of his metal hand and the contrast of it. but he didn't leave her wanting for anything. He had her squirming and writhing by the time his head popped back up, and he moved slowly back to her lips as he noted, "You're loud."

She bit her lip, having barely realized her own vocalness. "... Sorry?"

He shook his head, then bent down to kiss her. "I love it."

Then he kissed her into oblivion, and in the process, she finally managed to get his pants off and with the rest of their clothes on the floor. Once that was done, he let her roll them over, but she only had a handful of seconds with him on his back at her mercy before his new - old? - obsession with her breasts had him sitting up and palming and kissing them like he simply had no other choice if he wanted to breathe.

It was tough to "blow his mind" when he was all over her like that and so enthusiastic about it that she was powerless to want to stop him, and not to mention it felt so good that she had to grind down against him to work off some of the tension. Still, she thought she was still in control and aware of what to expect from him, at least until he nipped at her almost hard enough to count as a bite and made her cry out in equal amounts of surprise and unexpected pleasure.

She also half-accidentally yanked his hair in the process, and that made his mouth pop off her breast and a rough groan leave his lips as he looked at her with eyes so dark with arousal that she had to gulp.

"Do that again," he said, just as rough as his groan from a breath before.

Her stomach fluttered almost violently, and she bit her lip as she gave his hair another tug. His head went back a little bit, and his eyes fluttered shut but then opened as he then urged her, "Come on, pull it."

Well, dammit. She hadn't expected this.

Taking his instruction for what it was worth, she pulled on his hair much harder, and the way that he moaned as his head snapped back nearly did her in right then. However, she had enough functioning mental capacity to take the opportunity to kiss his neck, still grasping his hair tightly and running her lips along the places she knew to be the most sensitive. When she suckled gently just under his ear, he gave a satisfying moan in response that became even better when she yanked on his hair again. She felt him twitch against her that time.

Then he was cursing again and tossing her back down on the bed, briefly plundering her mouth before mumbling between kisses to her lips, throat, anywhere he could reach. She caught the words "perfect" and "beautiful" amid a few much more colorful ones, and she wondered if this was the sort of stuff he babbled about when his future self would start growling into her ear in Russian in the middle of things like this.

There were a lot of other similarities as well, like how more than once while kissing her neck he'd graze her hair with his nose, and she was pretty sure that he had made a remark about the scent of it when he had been panting against her ear. It was hard to tell though, especially when he was biting where her neck met her shoulder and his left hand was squeezing and caressing down her body and oh God that hand was slipping between her legs and...

He grinned at the unintelligible sounds that left her lips, and then he leaned in and nipped at her earlobe as he said, "My neighbors are gonna hate me tonight."

She giggled at that, and the airy sound turned into a moan that she unintentionally emphasized with the bite of her nails into his back. When he groaned in response, her eyes opened and she stuttered, "Sorry, I didn't mean to-"

He silenced her with a kiss, then said, "I like it. Scratch me all you want."

This was unfair. She wanted to blow his mind and instead he was utterly melting hers because apparently his younger, less damaged self had a thing for roughness and damn she wasn't prepared for this.

In the midst of all of this, she wasn't entirely sure when or how she had ended up on her stomach or when her hands had begun clutching at the sheets like they were her anchor, but that was where she was and he was kissing down her back and leaving little bites in his wake. Each one made her jump a little, and when she'd jerk and unknowingly grind her hips down against the bed, which would make him chuckle into his kisses and her mentally curse his name.

And all of that became immeasurably worse once his mouth was gone and all of a sudden his hand gripped her hair, grasping it firmly and pulling until she was up and on her knees with her back pressed to his front. He was careful about everything he did but he certainly wasn't held back by his future fear of hurting her, and his distinctly rougher way of handling her was making her head spin.

One arm wrapped around her stomach while his other hand pulled her hair again, this time to pull her head against his shoulder so he could kiss her mind-numbingly deeply. Then the hand on her stomach slipped lower, and it was when his previous teasing resumed that she broke away for air only to moan and let her head roll back on his shoulder.

Then she heard his voice in her ear. "I wonder if you're blushing everywhere like I think you are."

Her usual self-censorship then flew out the window along with her ability to give a crap, and at her half-whined, half-gasped very filthy word, Bucky grinned with pride in himself and lust for her as kissed her cheek and marveled, "You've got a dirty mouth, dollface."

She would have died quite sufficiently over just that term being spoken smoothly into her ear, but then he went and drove the nail into her coffin by quickly and unexpectedly slapping her ass. It was firm but also gentle and if she squeaked and then moaned like she absolutely loved it, then it was probably because she absolutely loved it.

"Oh, you like that, huh?"

She could hear the grin on his face, and then when he did it again, she gasped and bit her lip to try not to moan, but it didn't really work. Then she wrestled free of his grip and turned around to face him, and it was hard not to slap the smug, lusty, lip-biting look off of his face. But instead of slapping him, she grabbed his face and kissed him, then managed to get him down on his back.

His head hit his pillow with a laugh, and she braced herself on his chest, unable to help but to smile with him. Her hair was all over the place, and his hands helpfully went to it and gathered it all over one of her shoulders as she kissed him, and she was just about to burst if something substantial didn't happen soon.

Since he apparently had a thing for biting, she gave his bottom lip a bite of her own as she drew away, and his eyes opened and met hers as a low purring sound left his throat. She grinned a little bit and he did the same, shaking his head a little before he said, "You aren't what I expected. At all."

For some reason - maybe it was her advantage - she felt more confident than usual in this situation and was thus able to reply, "I haven't even gotten started yet, Sergeant."

In the future, he despised that title. But now, it made his grin widen. "Got some more dirty words waiting in that mouth of yours?"

She licked her lips and smiled, deciding to really be daring. Why not? Might as well leave an impression. "I've got better plans for my mouth, actually."

His eyebrows shot up in surprise, and there was no mistaking the twitch beneath her or the way he briefly bit his lip in response. "Sweet girl like you?"

She nodded, kissing the corner of his mouth, then his jaw, then his neck as she moved steadily lower. "I've been told I'm very good with it."

She kissed the base of his throat, then moved down along his collarbone and snuck a few kisses to his left shoulder as he chuckled and kept his fingers busy running through her hair and keeping it out of her face. "Funny... girls tell me the same thing."

She glanced up at him from his chest, wanting to giggle over the fact that she was one of those girls but he didn't know it yet, but instead she paused when he raised an eyebrow and looked at her in a way that she could only describe as unbearably dirty.

"How about something a little... different?"

Her eyes widened a little bit, only because he had surprised her so many times tonight already that she now had just about no clue what to expect from him. "Like what?"

He tipped up his chin a little and said, "Turn around."

She paused. She was essentially laying on top of him, halfway through her journey down his chest when she had stopped, so she was slightly confused. "Turn... around?"

He grinned at her confusion. "Only one way to find out who's got the most talented tongue."

Like a spinning wheel loading on a computer that didn't exist yet, it took Summer's brain a few seconds to grasp what he was suggesting. When she finally got it, her mouth fell open and she said, "Oh! You mean a... uh... at the same time."

... Because of course that's what this jerk would want to do on his first night sleeping with a woman he'd just met that day. Never mind that she couldn't remember if this was something they'd even done yet in the future.

Oh wait, she quickly recalled. Never mind. Yes we have. Duh.

"Is it too much?"

She shook her head very quickly. "No! I mean, no."

"Good," he said, sitting up and pulling her into his lap and immediately reaching for her underwear, "and by the way, I should have taken this little thing off of you a long time ago. I mean... look at this," he said, fingertips sliding along the lace waistband on her hip, marveling at the tininess of it. "It's so... flimsy. Like if I just grabbed it like this it would just... snap."

And snap it did. He didn't mean to do it, though, so he laughed and then looked up at her a little sheepishly as he lifted up the ruined scrap of fabric now between his fingers. "Sorry?"

"I liked those," she said, looking at the lace with a genuinely sad expression. She really had liked those, and they were part of a matching set!

"I'll... buy you new ones," he said, shrugging a little. "Or... I can just make it up to you."

Playing along, she sighed and said, "They were pretty expensive."

"Then let me start paying you back." He gave her thigh a squeeze and gently said, "Turn around."

Gulp. Had he been an actual stranger, she never would have done this, nor anything else she'd done that night, but because he wasn't and because this was awesome, she turned herself around in his lap and then closed her eyes as he kissed the side of her neck. His hands moved up from her hips to gently grope her one more time, and with one last kiss under her ear, he drew away and his hands fell to her hips. Then he laid back down behind her, and with a few last-minute nervous flutters in her belly, she turned her head and looked over her shoulder at him.

It was impossible to remain nervous thanks to the way that he smirked at her and did a come-hither gesture with his hand. "Come here, beautiful."

There was nothing else she could do but obey, and decide that all this timey-wimey-ness wasn't so bad after all.

---

Their "competition" ended in something of a tie, if such a thing was possible. After that, she discovered in the course of the night that she was actually too skilled in what he liked for her own good, because multiple times he had to tell her to stop or slow down because, in his words, "Gosh, May, I ain't Superman," which had almost made her squeal with inner glee and pride. She did, however, take care after that to remember the fact that he wasn't serum-enhanced and couldn't go like the Energizer Bunny, like he could in the future.

She also discovered that he wasn't kidding about the biting and scratching and hair-pulling stuff. It all drove him utterly crazy, and she was pretty sure that she'd have bruises of her own to compete with the red lines down his back the next morning. He never hurt her, but he tossed her around with ease and held her a little too tightly sometimes, and far from complaining, she simply urged him on and asked for even more.

And when it all finally came to an end, much later than when they had began, they were collapsed and tangled messes on top of the sheets rather than under them. Her hair was wrecked, his lips were swollen and his cheeks as flushed as hers were on a regular basis, and the only sound in the whole apartment for awhile was the sound of two very worn out people trying to catch their breaths.

She was on her back, staring at the ceiling, and he was half on his side facing her, awake but with his eyes closed. As reality slowly returned to her, she wondered what exactly was supposed to happen now. She'd never had a one night stand before, and back in the future, she had known Bucky for months before he'd even slipped a hand fully under her shirt. She knew nothing of the protocol for these things, so she stayed where she was and said nothing despite the fact that she kind of really wanted to crawl back into his arms and fall asleep there.

A low, exhausted chuckle next to her forced her mind to stop racing, and she turned her head to find his eyes open and fixed sleepily on hers as he grinned stupidly and said, "Wow."

She smiled and couldn't even fault his lack of eloquence. She had no words of her own to describe any of the last... hour? Two hours? What time was it?

"You... you're... wow." This time he chuckled at his own words and shook his head slightly. "I mean... it's almost like you knew what I'd like and then did it all exactly right."

She almost burst into a fit of nervous giggles. Instead, she tried to play it off and shrugged, "I... Well, I guess I could just... read you really well."

"Guess so." Then his smile shrunk a little and he asked, "Why are you all the way over there?"

"Oh, I just thought..."

"Thought what?"

She smiled. "I don't know. I've never done this before. Slept with someone I just met, I mean."

"I'm not gonna kick you out now or make you sleep all the way over there," he said, tiredly getting himself to a half-sitting position and pulling the covers back. After he then pulled them up over them both, he laid back down and held out his arm to her in a silent invitation. She curled up to him so fast and in such relief that she was pretty sure she should be embarrassed, but she just wasn't.

Now back in his arms, she let out a deep sigh and then held back a smile when he lifted her chin up and gave her a soft kiss. Since he had raved over her, she felt it was necessary to do the same, so when he drew away, she said, "You, uh... you were right about being good with your mouth. And your... other things."

A laugh bubbled out of his chest, and he smiled down fondly at her as she blushed and his fingers ran through her hair. "You're something else, you know that?"

She smiled, then felt a slight pang in her chest when he then asked, "Are you sure you gotta head home tomorrow? I could show you more of the city. Get to know you better. Maybe... get you to curse some more."

She smiled, then exhaled and shook her head slightly. "I really need to get home."

He might have been disappointed by that answer, but he understood, and the look on his face told her as much. "Okay."

Then she paused, her fingertips on his chest and head resting on his left shoulder, and she let herself admit, "I wish I could know you better, too."

She wished she could spend a week here, meet his family, get to know him and who he had been and his old life on a level that one day just couldn't allow. But she supposed that she couldn't complain, since doing this at all should have been impossible and she would take it for the gift that it was.

Assuming, of course, that she wouldn't end up stranded here, because that would be bad.

"I'm probably gonna be shipping out soon anyway," he said quietly, watching as his fingertips playing with hers on his chest.

And that sentence made her think of everything she had tried hard not to all day, which was the horrors that awaited this man in his not-so-far-away future. It was more than just the arm, even more than the war, as horrific as that was on its own. And seeing him like this now, before any of it, the man he was before he walked into a war and fell into pure hell not once but twice and then didn't escape it until seventy years later... it was horrible and she needed to stop thinking about it because she was going to cry and there was no possible way that she could make up a plausible excuse for it.

So, she swallowed down her feelings as best as she could and looked up at him. "Well... maybe I'll run into you again someday."

"Technically you ran into Steve," he pointed out with a grin. "But you did faint into my arms."

She smiled. "Okay, true. But can we just forget about that one?"

He shook his head. "I don't think I could ever forget today even if I tried."

And suddenly she was about to cry all over again. If all of this was real and not just the world's longest and most elaborate hallucination, and she had altered his personal history, then he would forget her and this entire day. He'd forget his own name and everything that made him who he was. Even literally traveling back in time, there was nothing she could do to change that.

"I won't either," she finally replied, looking down and adjusting her head so that he couldn't see her eyes, just in case she couldn't hold back the waterworks.

All was quiet for a few moments, at least until he replied, "You'd better not."

She giggled, he chuckled, and she felt him kiss her hair before he shifted a little bit and then, in the quiet of the next few minutes, drifted off to sleep.

As tired as she was, she knew she couldn't fall asleep with him quite yet. When his breathing had been even for a few moments, she craned her neck and looked up at him. A sad smile formed on her lips and her heart stirred at the peaceful innocence written on his sleeping face. She didn't let herself think about what that innocence would soon be warped into, nor what he'd suffer in the process, because she wouldn't be able to hold the tears back this time.

He had thought that he was jumping into bed with a pretty stranger who liked to talk about riding crops and had taught his best friend how to dance. If only he had known that she was actually the love of his life who would have changed history without a second thought and lost her future with him if it meant sparing him the pain and the horrors he had to endure to get there.

But that wasn't the opportunity she had been given. And before she could let herself relax enough to fall asleep with him, she had to check something first.

Carefully extricating herself from his arms without waking him, she then half-rolled off the bed but caught herself on the way down. She was sore already, and after her day of walking and night of dancing and, well, things, walking wasn't the easiest thing in the world, but she managed to tiptoe into the next room and grab her purse from the floor.

When she came back, she slid back into the bed, under the sheets, then checked and made sure that Bucky was still asleep before she pulled her phone out. Of course, there was no reception, because cell towers were a good 40-50 years away from existence. But the rest of the phone worked, and it told her that it was almost four in the morning.

Damn.

She tried to see if by some miracle the Internet would work, so that she could email the Avengers and yell in all caps that she was stuck in the past and to send help, but it didn't work. That left her with zero ideas on what might help her get back to the present.

Back to square one, she sighed and started checking other random things on her phone just in case, eventually ending up on her pictures. There was a lot there because she sucked with downloading them until they got into the quadruple digits, and the newest one was a picture that she had taken without the knowledge of either of its subjects. It was of Bucky and David, sitting at the table everybody ate on back home, and Bucky was helping him color a picture with a red crayon, both of them looking quite serious about the matter.

She stared at the picture for a moment, hoping against hope that she'd get back home to them soon. If they were still in the future and not zapped somewhere like she had been, she could only imagine how worried and panicked they both were at her disappearance.

Then the man next to her stirred a little, and she quickly reduced the photo and looked at him cautiously. He didn't open his eyes, but he rolled over on his side, towards her, and the next thing she knew, he was pulling her back into his arms and falling still once she was comfortably nestled with her back to his chest. She smiled to herself, looking back at him and then back to the phone still in her hands, which was when she had a sudden idea.

There was no harm in taking a souvenir of her day here, right? She had been good, lied like a trooper, and yeah, she had slept with the younger version of her current boyfriend, but so what? At least she hadn't done it to get pregnant like in that one movie about a time traveller's wife. Right?

... Regardless of her ethical questions, it didn't change what she wanted to do. She unlocked the phone and then went to her camera, and then, she held the phone up and took a picture of herself and the man sleeping with her in his arms.

After, she pulled the phone back down and examined the picture. She wasn't smiling big or making a silly face in it, like most of her pictures, but instead she looked dead tired and maybe a little more emotional than she had realized. But she wasn't who was she looking at.

She stared at the picture for a little bit and quietly tried to wrap her head around the day that she'd had, but when her eyes started to finally close, she locked the phone and leaned forward to toss it back into her purse. Then she settled back into Bucky's arms and closed her eyes, letting sleep take over and give her a break from the weirdness of time travel and from the slight worry in the back of her head that her Bucky might not be entirely happy that she had slept with this Bucky.

... Or perhaps they would just bro-fist it and call it a day?

Her last thought before drifting off to sleep was how weird it would be if both versions of him somehow ended up in the same time period, which led to dreams she would never repeat aloud to anyone.

She had hoped that she would fall asleep and wake up back home, but instead, she awoke very much in the same place. For five minutes, anyway.

---

Bucky was still sound asleep when the light steaming in from his only bedroom window woke her up. She panicked for about five seconds where she couldn't remember where she was, but then it all came rushing back to her, and she began panicking for an entirely different reason.

She was still here. And that meant she was no closer to finding her way home, and had to deal with whether to let Bucky take her to the train station or maybe take him up on his offer to show her around the city some more.

She didn't think that she had slept for more than five hours, but she slid out of bed and made her way out of the room silently. She went to his bathroom, spent a few moments there and gathered up her clothes that she had left there to dry the day before, and then put them back on. After that, she glanced in the mirror, checked the visible parts of her for marks - surprisingly, her neck was all clear - and then stole his comb to try to bring some semblance of order to her hair.

After that, she went out to the living room and retrieved her shoes from where she had left them on the floor. Then she made her way back to the bedroom, and after carefully sitting down on the side of the bed so as to not wake him, she began to wonder what the heck her next move should be.

She looked over her shoulder at him, taking her time and taking the sight of him in. He slept so much more soundly here than he did in the future. She was used to him waking at the smallest sound and almost always before her, and yet here he was, snoozing away as if without a care in the world.

She smiled to herself and reached her hand forward, gently brushing a few stray locks of hair away from his eye, and he didn't even stir. Then she drew her hand back and sighed, turning away and looking down at her lap as confusion and worry clouded her happier feelings.

Maybe, she thought, she hadn't been the only one zapped back in time. Maybe somebody else was here too. Maybe she just needed to find them, and then she'd be a little bit closer to finding her way home. It was a longshot, but it was better than taking a random train to Pennsylvania for no reason.

So, she decided to stay and take advantage of Bucky's offer. It couldn't hurt. She just needed to get better at lying and figure out a good reason to give him for her change of heart.

She leaned forward then, one hand going to her purse to dig around for her Chapstick - she really needed it after the workout she'd given her lips the night before - and the other hand slipping on one of her shoes. In the middle of contemplating how best to lie her way out of this mess, she heard a faint, rumbling boom noise, and she immediately froze. She'd heard that sound before. She'd heard it just before -

There was no other warning before everything suddenly flashed orange and she was falling again. She dropped her other shoe but managed to hang on to her purse, and rather than land in the middle of a busy sidewalk, she landed back where she had begun this weird, bittersweet journey - Tony Stark's elevator.

She stumbled against the wall and then fell gracelessly to the floor, gasping for air and looking around with wide eyes. Heart racing, she grabbed her purse and grabbed her phone, hitting the button with shaky fingers and getting a shock when she saw that she had full cell reception. It also said that it was the same day and time as yesterday, when all of this had started.

... Had she really been sent back home that fast and out of nowhere? And was it even possible for to be back here now, even after she had spent an entire day in the past?

Then, the elevator came to a halt, and when the doors opened, Steve was standing there.

He started to walk in obliviously before he stopped and stared at her in confusion.

"... Summer?"

Still collapsed on the floor against the wall, she blurted out in relief, "You're big!"

His eyes widened. "Are you okay?"

Scrambling to her feet, which wasn't easy to do on shaking legs and only one high heeled shoe, Summer smiled and nodded. "Yes! I'm okay! I'm home!"

Then, she confused him even more by grabbing him and hugging him in sheer relief. He returned the embrace awkwardly only because he had no idea what the hell was going on, and his eyes widened even more when she pulled back and said with sudden panic, "Oh my God, get in here, I need to tell you something."

She then yanked him inside the elevator and hit the "door close" button, and then, looking slightly crazed, she turned to look at him and said, "I don't know how, but I went back in time yesterday although I think it's still technically today, and I met you and Bucky when you were tiny and we went dancing and I kind of slept with him. Did I mess history up? Oh God."

Steve looked at her like he was genuinely terrified for her mental state at first, but then his expression became more serious and he blinked slowly, "Did you just say you went back in time?"

She nodded. "Yeah. And I spent a whole day there and there was this big flash of orange and -"

"Orange?" he repeated, expression growing darker.

"Yep."

He then sighed and stepped forward, hit one of the floor combinations, and muttered, "Dammit, Tony."

Next thing she knew, the doors were opening behind her and she was following Steve into Tony's lab. But before Steve could start yelling at anybody, they were both briefly stunned by the sight of both Tony Stark and Bruce Banner laying on the floor, in various stages of painful groaning.

Tony had some serious cuts on his face and arms, and his clothes were shredded in more places than they were not. Bruce, on the other hand, was wearing some strange robe-type clothing, like he was an extra from a period movie.

But, since neither of them were dead, Steve marched right up to them and demanded, "What the hell did you do, Tony?"

"A 'welcome back' wouldn't have killed you, you know," Tony said, wincing as he sat up and took a look around the lab. "How long were we gone?"

"You tell me," Steve replied. "It's May 1st, about 12:30."

Tony stared at him for a moment and then furrowed his brows. "But that's what time it was when I poked it."

"Which I told you not to do," Bruce pointed out, sitting up as well.

"Poked it?" Steve repeated. "Poked what?!"

"The Infinity Stone. Duh." Then Tony glanced at Summer and asked, "What's she doing in my lab?"

"I, uh... went back in time, too."

"Really? Where to?" Tony asked.

She cleared her throat and glanced at Steve before replying, "The, uh... 40s."

Bruce looked around at everybody before sighing, "Dark Ages."

Then everybody looked at Tony, waiting for an answer. He gestured to his clothes and said, "All I have to say is that I never want to watch Jurassic Park again."

"What were you thinking?" Steve asked, still in disbelief over the whole poking thing.

"Calm down, Gramps. Look - everybody's fine, we all made it back. And since we all got sent back to the same moment we left, then it looks like the stone maybe just..."

"... Reset?" Bruce guessed. "Is that even possible?"

"I think the realm of possibility just became obsolete," Tony replied.

"Wait."

When all three heads turned her way, Summer tried to shove down her embarrassment at what she was about to ask and forced the words out. "Um... so, if it 'reset', does that mean that everything that happened... doesn't count? Like it never even really happened?"

"Hard to say," Bruce replied. "Would we even know if we changed something?"

She wasn't sure how to feel about this. Testing the theory, Summer turned to Steve and asked, "Do you remember dancing with a girl named May who happened to look exactly like me? Blue dress? Back when you were small?"

He furrowed his brows. "What?"

She sighed impatiently. "Did a girl named May ever ask you to dance and teach you the basic steps and stuff?"

"Nobody ever danced with me," he replied.

"Really? And you don't remember running into the girl on the street and smacking right into her boobs? Well, my boobs?"

Tony snickered, still sitting on the floor, and Steve's mouth fell open a little as he shook his head. "Uh... no?"

She couldn't believe it. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, all of yesterday had never even happened. She didn't know whether to be relieved or kind of seriously depressed.

Then, her phone in her purse buzzed, and she snapped out of her daze long enough to grab it and read a new text from Bucky. I'm waiting.

Oh, right. They had a lunch-time rendezvous planned, and she was about five minutes late for it now.

"I, uh... gotta go," she said, clutching the phone and letting her mind race as she headed back towards the elevator.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Steve asked, genuinely concerned.

She stopped briefly and shook her head. "Not really, but I'll figure it out."

He nodded, though he didn't look very convinced. "Try to get some rest. These stones weren't made for humans to use."

"Clearly," she agreed, and she smiled at him as she stepped inside the elevator. "By the way, you were adorable when you were small, and girls were idiots to overlook you."

He appeared as if he had little idea what to say to this, but then he gave her a surprised smile and said, "Thanks."

She smiled back, and then the elevator door closed.

Now she just had to figure out what to do next.

First, though she was quite sure now that he had been safe all along, Summer checked on David in the daycare downstairs. He was oblivious to anything out of the ordinary occurring, and with that blessed relief, she focused then on getting back upstairs and figuring out how to tell Bucky what had happened.

Then again, maybe she could wait a little bit. Give her own mind some time to process it all before she threw the whole weird thing at Bucky and hoped for the best.

She decided to act as normal as possible for the time being, but she found out fairly soon after having gotten to Bucky's door and knocked on it that normal just wasn't in the cards for her.

He opened the door, already shirtless and wearing just a pair of dark jeans and a lazy smirk as he leaned against the doorframe. "You're late."

She opened her mouth and tried to speak, but she just couldn't. Going from being wrapped up in his older self to now standing in front of the man that she knew and had fallen in love with ages ago was bizarre and left her on the verge of nervous, possibly slightly insane, giggles.

He looked down at her feet and then looked up at her in confusion. "Why are you only wearing one shoe?"

Because I left it behind like some kind of Cinderella crap with your younger self, and oh yeah, I left my underwear with him too.

"I... uh... lost the other one?"

He furrowed his brows, but then he eased off the doorframe and stepped aside so she could enter. "Well... more importantly, why are you still standing there?"

Telling herself to get it together and act normal, just like she had all throughout the day before, she walked inside and then turned towards him as he shut the door and locked it. She kicked her one shoe off and then he advanced on her, kissing her with all of the hunger of a man who had been looking forward to this all day and had been kept waiting until now. The contrast was back, the hot and cold of his hands on her face and then on her body, roaming and wasting no time in yanking her skirt up as he plundered her mouth - after all, she needed to get back to work soon and now wasn't the time for slow.

As they kissed, he quickly moved her towards the bed, and he gently eased her down on it as her mind continued to race despite the very effective distraction that he was. He managed to get her skirt up high enough to run his hand along her hips, and when he felt her lack of underwear, he smiled against her lips and said, "I love it when you come prepared."

She tried to smile back, but it was no use - he could tell that something was off with her, and when his amused grin shrunk a little, he asked her quietly, "You okay?"

She nodded. "Yeah. I'm fine."

"You sure?"

She nodded again, then pulled him back down to her and kissed him herself, doing her best to make her mind shut off and convince him that she really was okay. She seemed to be succeeding, and he seemed sufficiently distracted while he got her shirt unbuttoned and off of her. Next came her skirt, but that was when he paused and she opened her eyes to find him staring at her left hip.

"How did you get this?"

She looked down, unsure of what he was talking about, and that was when she noticed a pretty decently sized bruise on her hip. She hadn't seen it or even felt it until then, though. "Oh, I, uh... must have hit my desk or something."

He furrowed his brows and looked up at her and asked quietly, "You sure I didn't do it?"

Well, technically... "No! Don't worry about it."

He seemed unconvinced, but he let her pull him back down again and distract him before he thought on it for too long. If nothing else, she did know how to distract him very effectively.

By the time that he had kissed his way down her body and was back to being thoroughly invested in making her "lunch break" the best that it could be, she breathed a sigh of relief and thought that she was home free. She was, however, still contemplating how to tell him what she needed to say and only half in the moment, and because of that, it took her a moment to notice when he had suddenly stopped kissing a trail up her inner thigh.

She looked down. He was staring again. She followed his gaze and felt every single alarm bell in her head go off at the sight of something she had forgotten about, a mark left by his older self's mouth right at the very top of her inner thigh.

"I know I didn't do that."

You are so busted. She gulped and then smiled nervously when he looked up at her, his eyes not exactly accusing but more extremely confused and highly concerned.

"Are you gonna start explaining?"

Heart pounding, her smile faded and she had no idea how to even go about explaining this but now she was well and truly caught and there was nothing to do but blurt out the truth in an epically long run-on sentence.

"Tony poked the Infinity Stone and it was a time thingy and I got sent back in time to the 40s and I met you and you took me dancing and I met Steve too but you were in your Army uniform and really hot and we were flirting and then I kissed you and then you took me to your apartment and we had sex all night and it was amazing and oh my God are you mad at me?"

He stared at her in overwhelming confusion and did nothing but stare and let his mouth slowly open as she watched and waited on pins and needles for his reaction.

"Are you mad?" she asked. "Oh God, you're mad, aren't you."

"... Can you say all of that again?" he asked quietly. "And slower?"

She took a breath and tried to be relieved. He wasn't angry - yet - so that was good. "Okay. The orange glowy thing is like a time stone... thingy. Tony poked it and me and him and Bruce got sent back in time. It was only us though so I guess it must have only affected that floor and the elevator I was on passed it just in time. Anyway, I went back to the 40s and I met you and spent the day with you and Steve and we banged. Me and you, I mean. Not Steve. And it was awesome. And weird. But awesome. And after I woke up and got dressed I got sent back."

He didn't looked any less confused than he did a moment ago. "... When?"

"Well I was on my way down here once I got my break, and then it happened, and I spent a whole day there, but when I came back it was like no time had passed and they said that the stone must have, like, reset itself or something. So now it's like none of it ever happened." Then she swallowed and said, "Except I guess there's still some, uh... evidence, obviously..."

A long moment passed where he said nothing, brows knit tightly together as he stared at her and tried to process what he'd just heard. It was in these moments that she became more nervous than she had possibly ever been before in her life.

"You're mad," she deducted. "I'm sorry. It's just that it was you but it wasn't you and I just..."

He shook his head then, slowly easing off of her and sitting next to her on the bed as she sat up as well.

"I'm not mad," he finally said. "But I'm confused."

"Me too," she said with wide eyes. "It's super weird. Especially because now it's like it didn't happen. I thought I was gonna do something and accidentally screw up history."

Then, a thoughtful look on his still-puzzled face, he turned to her and asked, "How did we meet?"

Immensely relieved that he wasn't angry and apparently didn't perceive her actions as a very weird form of semi-cheating, she then told him the story of her day spent in the past. She left out certain parts, like meeting Vivian, because she didn't want to overwhelm him any more than she already had. She told him about the happy stuff, the flirting, the dancing, the kiss that she had half-accidentally initiated, and then when she got to the other stuff, she blushed a whole lot and stammered even more. He listened intently, sometimes smiling a little when she'd say something funny but mostly just watching her face and hand gestures and taking in every word she said.

"... And then, we, um..." she cleared her throat and avoided eye contact as she shrugged, "You... well, for a guy who was sleeping with a girl he'd just met, you sure had some... interesting ideas."

"... Like?"

She paused and felt her face heating up as she muttered, "You know that song from the 80s, 'Summer of 69'?" He shook his head. Of course he didn't know that song. She sighed and said, "Well, that song title is... fitting. Because, you know. My name, and..."

Only a few seconds passed before he started laughing. She then turned and looked at him, narrowing her eyes playfully as he had a good chuckle over it. At his reaction to all of this, she then couldn't help but ask, "You're really not mad, though? I mean, it was you but it also kind of wasn't because of... everything, but -"

He shook his head. "No, I'm not mad. It's strange but I guess I can't really... object." Then he was quiet for a moment, thoughtful again as he asked quietly, "How different was I?"

"Well... you slept more soundly," she replied. "Like a rock, actually. You were just... lighter, I guess. Your arm took some getting used to."

There was a slight pinch in his face then, and he stared down at his lap and his hands that were laying in it.

"But you were the same in so many ways," she assured him. "You're more you than you think. That's why it was so easy to be with you. You weren't a stranger. You were still the same guy I love. Just younger and..."

"Whole," he said, wincing a little as soon as he uttered the word. "And better."

She widened her eyes and decided that this had to be nipped in the bud. "Hey, don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say that and it's not true, at all. I wouldn't change anything about who you are now. Except maybe what you're doing right now, because you should know by now that I don't wish you were different or that you had your arm or anything else."

"That was before you knew me back then," he replied.

"But do I look like I want to go back and trade you for him?" she asked. "The whole time I was there, all I could think about was getting home to you. As nice as you were back then - and you were, trust me, you were amazing - I didn't belong there. I'm glad it happened and I got to meet the old you, but like I said, I wouldn't change a thing about you now."

To her relief, the tender way that he looked at her told her that he believed her. She smiled and placed her hand over his left one, curling her fingers around the metal that she really had missed, and she said, "And... I might have taken a picture of us while you were sleeping. Would you want to see?"

Surprised by this, he nodded, and she quickly slipped off the bed to grab her purse. When she came back with her phone in hand, she pulled up the photo and handed him the phone.

He took the phone from her and, for a few minutes, simply stared at the picture. She watched his eyes dart around between different points of the picture, but mostly he stared at the younger, peacefully sleeping, version of himself, arm thrown across the woman he was drawn to regardless of the century.

The first thing that he said was a quiet "Wow."

"I know," she replied softly.

When he handed the phone back to her, she looked at the picture for a moment and said, "I'm glad I took this, since you won't get the memory of it now. It's kind of unfair. You seemed to really enjoy yourself."

"I'm sure I did," he smiled back.

She chuckled, and then after locking her phone and putting it on the table next to his bed, she turned back to him and, to help lighten the mood, said, "Actually, maybe there is one thing I'd change about you now."

"What's that?" he asked, knowing by her tone that she was going to say something silly or funny.

"You called me dollface. It was awesome. I died a little inside."

He chuckled again, and she was happy to see the smile back on his face. "I guess I could do that now."

She nodded. "Yeah. By the way, I had no idea you used to be so into getting your hair pulled. You asked me to pull it really hard. And scratch you. And you bit me a lot. I was basically dead."

His eyebrows rose a little. "Really?"

She nodded. "So if you ever, you know, want to do some of that now... or just try it... maybe you wouldn't like it as much now, but..."

"I like it when you pull my hair," he said quietly. "You just don't do it that much."

"I don't want to hurt you," she shrugged. After all, he'd suffered enough pain in his lifetime.

"It doesn't hurt," he said with a faint grin. Then he looked down at her still mostly-very-naked form, and the heaviness from a few moments before became something else that she was much more used to as he then reached his hand out to her hip and said, "Come here."

She happily complied, getting up and moving into his lap, straddling his thighs and holding on to his shoulders as his hand moved over her bruised hip along with his eyes.

"He should have been more careful with you," he said, and she merely shook her head and kissed him.

"It was amazing," she assured him. "Bruises aren't always a bad thing, you know."

He made a noncommittal noise in reply, his hands running up her sides and then back down to pull her closer against him as they kissed more. Her fingers slid up and into his hair, and at its current state of being due for a cut, there was just enough to grasp, and, if he wanted her to, pull on.

"So," he said between kisses moving from her mouth to her jaw, towards her neck, her hips moving slowly into his lap, "who's better, me or... him?"

Eyes closing at the sensations of his wandering lips and wandering hands, she said, "You know it's kinda weird how you're saying 'him' to refer to yourself. And for the record, you're both amazing and I'm not gonna choose. And actually... some of the, uh... techniques were pretty much the same, so..."

"Hm," he said, raising his head back up and grinning at the blush on her cheeks. "Still, I think I ought to... outdo myself."

She glanced at the clock next to his bed and said, "Well, my break is almost up, so..."

"Tony sent you back in time," he interrupted her, "and could have killed you. Least he can do is give you the rest of the day off."

"But I'd have to..."

His finger against her lips silenced her, and she watched his lips curl up in a smirk as he said, "Hush, dollface."

Oh, that little bastard. Now having no hope at all of resisting him - as if she'd ever had one to begin with - he dropped his finger and kissed her deeply, arm wrapping around her to press her as closely as he physically could to himself as her grip in his hair tightened. In the midst of kissing like the sun may not rise the next day, she gave his hair a gentle tug, just to see what it would do, and in response, he murmured between kisses, "Harder."

Shivering, she did as he said, but not hard enough to hurt, and that time, he moaned softly and then placed her on her back beneath him. When he broke away for air, she smiled up at him and said, "See? Told you you're not that different."

Then he surprised her by smiling softly down at her and leaning forward, kissing her lips far more gently than she expected. As he pulled away, he looked into her eyes and whispered, "Thank you."

And then, as she smiled and he smiled back at her, she decided that this little misadventure couldn't have possibly turned out better, and maybe horrible things didn't always result from Tony Stark poking at Infinity Stones.