AN *pokes head in* So yeah I suppose I should just leave this here... It's not beta-ed because I figure you all have waited long enough... those of you that are still here that is... so I apologize if I'm a bit rusty but I'm getting my head back in the game.

So yeah this chapter picks up right where chapter 1 left off...

Hope you enjoy!

*runs away*


The battle was won, half of midtown was in shambles as a result, but they had won. And as the newly formed Avengers stood over a defeated Loki, there was just one thing left to do. At least that's what Captain America believed. However, if his past experiences had taught him nothing, it was that he should have known better than to assume anything.

"Lady Jane?!"

Steve looked over his shoulder, following Thor's line of sight, to see the elevator door open and a small woman barrel out of it, heading directly towards them. It was only a moment, a few seconds at most, but it was this distraction along with the split second of inattention of his teammates, which gave the trickster his window of opportunity. Before anyone had a chance to react, the seemingly incapacitated Loki was on his feet and had grabbed the woman to use as a human shield.

"This must be the dear Jane Foster," Loki spat, pulling her close. "The woman who changed my brother so."

"Release her Loki!" Thor commanded, Mjölnir twitching in his hand.

"Don't you remember? I did make promises to pay this one a visit." He let out a barking laugh as he ran the back of his fingers down her cheek. "And in the end, she came right to me."

As the Asgardian siblings exchanged words, the super soldier quickly went through their options. Unfortunately, none of readily available ones were currently very promising. The hostage was moving too much to give any of them a clean shot, and frankly none of their traditional firearms had yet to prove effective against the so called God of Mischief, and none of their more nontraditional weaponry could be used and still ensure the woman's safety.

Steve could feel the change in the air, the hair on the back of his neck standing at attention as Loki started building his magic. He knew something was about to happen, but he just didn't know what, until he saw the air in front of him begin to swirl. He knew time was of the essence as he saw another variable come into play in the form of a young woman, creep out of the elevator wielding a statue of some kind.

A quick exchange of glances with Tony told Steve that the billionaire saw her too, and Stark quickly began trading barbs with Loki to keep his attention focused on them and not the girl sneaking up behind him.

"I don't think you want to do that Loki," Tony said, taking a half step forward.

"Really? Because I think it's a marvelous idea."

Steve couldn't get a good look at her face, obscured as it was by the hood she had pulled over her head and her long brunette hair, but her identity wasn't of the utmost import right now. What was important was that she might be the only one to provide the distraction they desperately needed at the moment and he turned his full attention back to the woman his teammate had called Jane, waiting for his moment to strike.

"I don't think I need to remind you that we have the Tesseract now and there is nowhere in the universe that you can hide where we won't find you," Tony replied.

"Maybe," Loki shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. "But the universe is a big place, and just think of all the fun we can have until-"

And the moment Steve was waiting for was heralded by the most unusual of war cry of "Hey AssButt!" and that sickening hollow thud that came when a blunt object came in contact with someone's, in this case a Norse deity's, skull.

In that moment, time both speed up and slowed down as Steve launched into action. He quickly grabbed Jane as Thor went after his brother, but there was no one able to get to the mystery woman before she was knocked backwards into the Loki's portal. Bright lights and sparks shot from it, the colors swirling faster for just a moment before it began to disappear right before their eyes.

"NO!" Jane wailed, struggling to be released from Steve's grasp as the portal closed up, leaving no lasting trace of its existence.

Steve looked up from where he was shielding Jane's body to see Thor gripping Loki by his lapels and giving him a mighty shake.

"What did you do with the Lady Darcy!" Thor bellowed at his brother.

Darcy! Steve's mind shouted. Intellectually, he knew that his Darcy wasn't the only person to ever lay claim to the name. However uncommon it was in his time didn't mean it wasn't more common now. But just hearing the name spoken out loud was a knife to his heart.

Loki laughed loud and hard as Thor continued to shake him roughly until he unexpectedly lost consciousness, the magic entailed in creating the portal sapping the last of his energy reserves.

With a snarl of disgust, Thor dropped his brother's body like it was trash. "Do you have a facility secure enough to hold him while we do what we can to recover the Lady Darcy?" the God of Thunder asked Tony. "He has tapped out his magical reserves and it will take time to replenish. He will be easier to contain for the immediate future."

"I have the Bad Baby vault," Tony offered. "Stark Tower is so new that I haven't actually moved anything into there yet."

"The what?" Natasha asked incredulously.

"It's something my Dad started to keep all the dangerous things he invented that he–" Tony cut himself off before he finished explaining. "You know what, it doesn't matter. What is important is that I didn't name it, and it exists." He turned to Thor, "Is he's going to be unconscious for a while?"

"It is most probable, yes. Why?" Thor asked in return.

"Excellent, because I'm still starving," the billionaire answered. "So I vote we lock him away and then go get some grub. It's not like we're going to be able to do anything about getting whatshername—"

"Darcy," Steve corrected.

Tony quirked an eyebrow in the Captain's direction but kept speaking "—back before then anyways."

Everyone glanced at each other, waiting for someone to protest Tony's logic, but even Jane who wanted to demand that they start work on getting her friend back immediately, saw there was little they could do until the Trickster woke up.

"Awesome, it's shawarma time."

xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

Almost two weeks after what the press had already dubbed the Battle of New York, nearly 200 feet below the street where Stark Tower resided, deeper than any subway on the island, Loki was not enjoying his incarceration. He sat on a metal chair, chained to the floor with cuffs provided by Thor to inhibit any of the magical tricks that he might be able to conjure as his strength returned. Across the table from him sat Thor, who looked every inch the crowned Prince of Asgard and not a very happy one at that.

"I'm going to ask you again brother," Thor said, his face carved from stone. "Where is the Lady Darcy? And do not lie to me."

"That's the beauty of it brother," Loki replied amusement practically seeping from his pores. "I don't know."

"You opened that portal with the intention of kidnapping Lady Jane, where were you planning on taking her?"

"That hardly matters anymore. Your little human woman is upstairs right now trying to figure out how to use the Tesseract to send us home, is she not?"

This was not the first time they'd gone in circles, but Thor was not deterred. He was confident that it was only a matter of time before he or the Black Widow got the information they seek. "Then where did that portal send Darcy!?"

"And I told you I don't know!"

"It was your portal!"

"Oh my dear dear stupid brother. You really should have paid more attention to Mother's lessons on magic. But no, you were more interested in being outside grunting and smashing things like an animal. Absolutely no patience for the intricacies of more refined pursuits."

"You are trying that patience now Loki," Thor said though grit teeth. "Tell me what I want to know, and I may speak to Father on your behalf."

Loki didn't believe that to be true for a minute. He knew from the moment his plot failed that he would be at the All Fathers mercy. But quite frankly he was bored sitting in this concrete cell for days on end, the daily 'interrogations' his only break from the monotony.

"Opening the portal is only half the work," he paused and leaned forward as if ready to reveal all the secrets of the universe. "Then you have to step through it."

Thor slapped an open palm on the metal table, the resounding noise reverberating through the room. "SPEAK PLAINLY."

Loki was unimpressed by Thor's ire. "You think too small brother. Unbefitting a future King. A portal is not a road, it's not the Bifrost with a specific destination set each time you travel through it," Loki began explaining to Thor as if he was speaking to a child. "A portal is the vehicle. Depending on the strength and knowledge of the creator it can take you anywhere, bypassing any of the conventionally known modes of travel between the realms. A true master of the magics," he paused to let Thor know he was talking about himself, "isn't even limited to the worlds as we know them today. A master can create a portal that he could take to other dimensions or even through time itself."

Thor felt a stone form in the pit of his stomach. The fact that these powers existed in the universe and were completely unknown to him, and that his troubled brother possessed the skills to manipulate them did not sit well with him. He could already see the potential ramifications to the nine realms if they were abused.

Loki could see the turmoil in his brother's eyes and delighted in it, spurning him to keep speaking. "But a ship is nothing without its captain. It's the intent of the traveler that determines the destination. So you see, I had no control over where your little human pet ended up."

When Thor did not readily respond, Loki continued to try to get a rise from Odin's favorite son, it being the most fun he'd had in weeks. "Remember when we were young and Midgard was our playground," he continued conversationally. "The humans worshiped us as Gods. Those were the good old days. Your woman would have made me a most lovely thrall. I had a delightful little dimension all picked out for us, she would have come through remembering nothing of you, knowing only a life of complete service to me."

Thor ignored Loki's baiting of what his plans had been for him and Jane. He knew she was safely ensconced upstairs with his new brothers in arms the Man of Iron and the Hulk. He needed to focus on Darcy.

"And what if the one traveling through the portal doesn't know how to control it?" Thor asked knowing he wasn't going to like the answer.

Loki sighed, exuding boredom, feeling that they had more than covered the topic. "How does a novice rider control a runaway stallion?" he posited in return. "You hold on tight and hope for best, maybe you get lucky and you don't break your neck when you get bucked off."

Thor pushed his chair back from the table, the metal screeching as it scraped across the concrete floors.

"What, that's it?" Loki called at Thor's retreating back. "I give you what you want and you leave. The man you call Fury at least offered me a magazine."

Not looking back or deigning to respond to his brother's parting words, Thor left Loki's cell and was greeted by Natasha and Clint, both of whom had been watching through the closed circuit video.

"What do you think?" Natasha asked as the three of them made the long elevator ride back towards the surface.

"I believe that for once Loki is telling the truth," Thor admitted. "And if he is our troubles are only just beginning."

"Because that means Darcy could be anywhere, at any time, in any realm, in any dimension," Natasha said finishing Thor's thought.

"That's not just looking for a needle in a haystack," Clint added, scratching at the back of his neck. "That's looking for a grain of sand in the ocean that may or may not be on an earth in a parallel universe."

"Indeed," Thor agreed darkly.

xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

Steve felt like he was out of place. No, he knew he was out of place.

Half of his team spent their time either helping with or watching the daily interrogations of Loki. In the beginning he had tried to help with the prisoner, but cross-examinations had never been in his skill set. During the war he had been the on the front line, kick down doors and knock heads together kind of soldier, leaving the interrogations to Colonel Phillips and Agent Carter. And since Loki was hardly the type to be intimidated by him standing menacingly in the corner, he had no problem leaving that up to Natasha and the other professionals. That and it still hurt his heart to hear Darcy's name thrown around so easily. So he quickly learned to stay out of the sub-basement.

Meanwhile, the science half of the group was working with the cube to try to send Thor and Loki home to Asgard, and the infernal glowing blue box off the planet for good. And while Steve knew he was intelligent, the hard science that was happening between Bruce, Tony, Dr. Foster, and Dr. Selvig in the labs was over his head, so unless they needed help moving something heavy, he stayed out of their way as well.

He had taken to setting himself up in the kitchen for a large portion of the day, it was common enough ground with regular foot traffic from both halves of the team. That way he was able to keep tabs on how both projects were progressing without being overly involved in either one. Which is why he was currently sitting at the breakfast bar, a sketchbook and a tin of drawing pencils in hand.

He had been shocked when he found his old sketchbook at the bottom of the box of his personal effects from the war that had somehow made it into storage at SHIELD for the last 70 years. He assumed he had Peggy to thank for that, but he didn't know for sure. The spine was becoming brittle and the edges of the pages were beginning to yellow, but that didn't matter to him. The fact that Darcy had once held it in her hands made it all the more precious to him.

Reaching into his pocket he pulled out his other most treasured possession, the golden compass that he never went anywhere without. And though he had taken the picture from it and put it where he could see it as he crashed the plane into the water, every day he was grateful that he had tucked the compass back into his uniform, so that it was still on him when they found him in the ice. Thumbing it open, he reread the inscription he'd long since committed to memory.

They say that home is where the heart is.

Don't get lost bringing mine back to me.

He couldn't help but sigh deeply, if only she could have known that he was the one who'd be forever lost without her.

Hearing approaching footsteps, Steve clicked the gold case shut as Jane walked into the kitchen and immediately began rummaging through the cabinets. The astrophysicist had confided in him last week that her assistant always had to nag at her to eat, so she set an alarm on her watch to go off every five hours so she could at least remember to snack on something. Jane said that she didn't want her to be disappointed in her when she got back if she didn't take proper care of herself while she was gone. Steve wasn't sure if it was a display of confidence that they would be able to rescue the girl, or a way to hold onto hope. Either way, he didn't ask.

"Good afternoon, Dr. Foster," he greeted amiably, as he slipped the compass back into his pocket and picked up his pencil. "How's it going in the lab?"

"Afternoon Captain," Jane said, as she pulled a bag of wasabi peas out of the pantry and started snacking. "There's good news and bad news."

"I could stand some good news," he prompted as he began to fix a mistake on the sketch of Darcy he was working on.

"The good news is that I think we just about have the Einstein-Rosen Bridge figured out. Using the Tesseract to power it we will be able to create a temporary means to get Thor and Loki back to Asgard. And once the Tesseract is there they should be able to repair the Bifrost permanently."

"That is good news," Steve agreed. As far as he was concerned the sooner the Tesseract was gone, the better. "What's the bad news?"

"Agents Romanoff and Barton just came upstairs with Thor," Jane said, pausing as she tossed another handful of peas in her mouth. "Loki finally decided to talk."

"Shouldn't that also be good news?" Steve quirked an eyebrow in confusion.

"It should have been, except for what he said," Jane replied with a frown, licking the green powder off her fingers. "We thought the hard part would be getting Darcy back from wherever Loki sent her. Turns out that's the easy part since finding her is going to be virtually impossible since not even Loki has any idea where she ended up."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Steve said sincerely, for as much as he had been staying out of it, he knew how much her friend meant to her. "Are we sure that Loki was telling the truth when he said he didn't know where she was?"

Jane sighed as she crossed over to the bar where Steve was sitting. "Thor seemed pretty confident and Agent Romanoff agreed. Our only hope is that we're going to be able to use the trace readings from—" She cut herself off when she looked over Steve's shoulder. "Hey, that's really good. It looks exactly like her. Did you see a picture of her?"

"Don't need one. I could never forget her face," Steve said mournfully as he shaded what he called her 'I have a secret' smile.

"What are you talking about?" Jane asked completely confused.

"She was the love of my life," he admitted for the first time aloud in this century.

"Huh?" it was an inelegant noise the completely described how she was feeling.

"We never made it public," Steve sighed, figuring he might as well explain since she'd already seen the drawing, there didn't seem to be much of a purpose in keeping it a secret anymore. "But we were together, before I went into the ice."

"I'm so confused. Who were you with?" Jane asked, sure she had to be missing something.

"Darcy Lewis," he tapped the sketchbook for emphasis, flipping through a couple of pages to show her all the different drawings he had of his girl. "You don't have to look so shocked," Steve said a little bit insulted at Jane's agog expression. "I knew she was a movie star and completely out of my league, but she never seemed to think so." Jane just continued to stare at him. "Also I'm Captain America, some people are impressed by that."

Jane blinked slowly once, then twice, and a third time before she spoke. "Darcy is my assistant."

"I know your assistant is named Darcy," Steve knew that all too well, he had to suppress a wince every time someone said her name, the cold fist that encircled his heart tightened every time he heard it. "I don't know what that has to do with it."

"No, you don't understand, didn't you see her go into the portal?" Jane questioned, finally thinking to pull her phone out of her back pocket.

"Just for a split second, I was a little busy saving you," Steve said brusquely, he was annoyed that he wasn't understanding what Jane was all worked up about.

"Darcy Lewis," she shoved a picture of her and her friend in his face. "Is my assistant."

Steve snatched the phone out of her hand, he would apologize later, but manners were currently last on his long list of concerns. Because there on the three inch screen was Darcy, his Darcy! She was dressed like he had never seen her before, since in all the time he had known her, she was never nothing less than impeccable even in the middle of a warzone. But even in an oversized sweater over a band t-shirt like the ones Tony seemed partial to, wearing a paper crown that declared her the Burger King on her head, it was unmistakably Darcy.

"Darcy is your assistant," he said in a whisper. "Darcy is your assistant!" He jumped to his feet and took off at a dead sprint down the hall, running up the stairs taking them three at a time, feeling hope for the first time since he woke up in this century.

"I know where Darcy is!" Steve shouted barreling into the lab where the rest of the Avengers were still discussing their options after their new information from Loki.

"What?" Selvig asked looking up from the simulation he was running.

"How?" Clint questioned incredulously, since they had literally just gotten done telling the others that is was going to be essentially impossible to figure out where the portal sent her.

"Where?" It was Bruce who actually thought to ask the most important question.

"In the ladies' powder room at Croydon Airport in South London on February 8th 1944, most likely between 11 and 11:30 am," he said knowing that she had a 12 o clock flight and that she always liked to leave using the facilities till the last minute before boarding.

"Okay, hold up. I'm going to take it upon myself to say what we're all thinking," Tony announced. "That that answer is disturbingly specific."

"Jane's assistant is Darcy Lewis!" Steve exclaimed, as if that answered everything. He knew he wasn't making sense to them, but in his excitement he couldn't get his brain to slow down enough to explain properly. "We have to get her back."

"Yeah, we know that Cap, we're working on it," Natasha said slowly, looking a little concerned at Steve's manic reaction, especially since prior to now, he hadn't really shown much personal interest in trying to get what happened out of Loki.

"She's my Darcy," Steve stressed, he slapped the sketch book on the lab counter, already open to a picture of Darcy with victory rolls.

"Darcy is in the past with Steve," Jane explained breathlessly as she entered the lab, finally catching up with the super solider. "They were together and apparently she was an actress?" she added as if those were the pertinent details.

"I knew there was something vaguely familiar about her when I saw her come off the elevator!" Tony exclaimed clapping his hands together. "My Dad had all her movies!" He shrugged, when everyone looked at him, "Had a shit ton of memorabilia of hers too. I always kinda assumed he had an affair with her or something and she actually got to him."

Steve shook his head, "They were just friends, good friends, but it never went beyond that. Well, Howard did try to seduce her the first time they met apparently, but she shot him down which I don't think he was used to and I think that's why they became so close," he explained far more animated then they had ever seen him before. "The second time Darcy and I met was actually when we ran into each other at Howard's presentation at the world's fair."

Nobody said anything as they all took a long moment to process this new information.

"How did I not know my best friend was a dead ringer for a 1930s and 40s movie star that she happened to share the same name with?" Jane was the first to ask.

"Jane darling, you don't even own a TV," Erik reminded her of her complete lack of interest in pop culture recent or classic.

"I wonder why this didn't red flag when we ran backgrounds of all of you in New Mexico last year," Clint mused, since he had been on that team.

"Because there are lots of names that repeat through history," Natasha reasoned sensibly. "And because even SHIELD doesn't spend it's time monitoring for potential time travelers. It's like psychics, they're not supposed to exist."

"The way things have been around here lately maybe they should start," Bruce joked dryly.

"That doesn't matter," Steve said impatiently, shutting down the sidebar conversations. Everything else could be figured out later, but right now they were just distractions from what was really important. "What matters is that we got her back, we just have to figure out how we did it."

"I think you've got your tenses confused there, Capcicle," Tony said idly, flipping through Steve's sketchbook, Clint curiously looking over his shoulder.

"No, I don't," Steve replied quickly. "Darcy was supposed to get on a 12 pm flight to go back to New York on the same day I went into the ice. She never got on that plane. I spoke to Peggy Carter a couple weeks ago, and she said that the SSR thought Hydra got to her because of our relationship, but no, it was us! She disappeared because we brought her back to 2012!"

"Your reasoning is sound," Thor said thinking it over. "From what Loki has described it is possible that you are the last she laid sights on before being pulled into the portal. If her thoughts were with you, the magic could have brought her into your life."

"Yes, so how do we go get her?" Steve asked the Asgardian anxiously.

"That I do not know, but as you say, we shall endeavor to find the way we must have already employed to retrieve her from the past." Thor reassured his teammate.

"All this time travel talk is already giving me a heada- whoa," Clint whistled lowly when Tony flipped over a piece of loose leaf hotel stationary that slid out of the sketch book from where it had spent the last seventy years hidden between the pages. It was the drawing Steve did of Darcy while she was sleeping the last night they were together.

As soon as Steve glanced over to see what had tripped Clint up, he knew exactly what they were looking at. In his mind it was only a few weeks ago that he had arrived back at the barracks after spending the night with Darcy, and had quickly tucked the drawing inside the sketchbook that he buried at the bottom of his foot locker for safe keeping, before running off to join the meeting about how they were going to take down Hydra once and for all. Snatching both the drawing and the sketchbook from Tony's hands, he glowered at the two of them, but he knew it was his own fault for handing the book over in the first place. Regardless, some things weren't meant for anyone else's eyes.

"You know," Tony said casually, his eyes dancing mischievously, "with your whole wholesome, apple pie, Boy Scout image thing you've got going on, I just assumed you came to the future a 94 year old virgin. Good on you Cap, way to play against type."

"I don't really think that's anyone business," Steve said blushing just like the wholesome kid Tony was accusing him of being. "And I think everyone has a very skewed perception of what people were like in the 40s," he muttered.

Jane came to Steve's rescue and brought the conversation back around to its original topic, since she was just as anxious as Steve was to get her best friend back. "Okay, but now that we know where she is, how do we go get her?" she asked directing her question at Thor.

The Asgardian took a moment to contemplate his lady's question. "Before we learned what kind of portal she went through I had assumed it would be as easy as repairing the Bifrost, asking Heimdall to sight her, and then going to rescue her," Thor began, more thinking aloud than answering Jane's question. "Today we learned it would not be as simple as even Heimdall cannot see and the Bifrost does not connect through time and other dimensions. The Captain has solved the half the problem, but that still leaves us with the second. I am confident that Loki is capable of retrieving her, but frankly I do not trust him to do so."

There were assorted noises of agreements from the others in the room.

"However, I do not have a ready answer as to who else could. The practice of these sorts of magics are not condoned on Asgard or in any of the Nine Realms. Playing with the fabric of time is dangerous enough, but that reality itself was manipulated and the universe changed to give her a place and a history in the past makes the power extremely treacherous."

"Are you saying we can't bring her back?" Jane asked sparing a glance at Steve who looked like he might throw up.

"Not at all, my dear Jane," Thor quickly assured her. "As the good Captain said, our future selves must find a way, and as long as we proceed cautiously and don't disrupt the time line in which we currently reside, I see no reason as to why we cannot do the same."

"Then what do we need to do?" Bruce asked.

"I need you to finish your work with the tesseract so you can send me and Loki home."

"And then what?" Selvig questioned.

"I must speak with the one who taught Loki what he knows and pray that she can provide guidance," Thor said. "I need have counsel with my mother."

Jane looked at her fellow scientists, determination written all over her features. "You heard the man. Let's get to work."


A/N We're getting closer to the end. Only one more chapter til the end of this story! meep!

Anyone catch the Agent Carter and Agents of Shield references?

Hope you liked it!