Agent 13

by Snoot37

This story is my take on how Agent 13/Sharon Carter should have been portrayed in the movies, had the writers stuck to their original plans and scripts that gave her the main female role in the CA movies rather than piecemealing it off on other female characters. This fic revisits the movies, as well as portrays some original storyline to fill in the gaps, all the way up to Endgame

12. Chapter 12

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here it is all, the final chapter! I hope you have enjoyed this story! More stories to come, I'm sure!

Chapter 12

Sharon stood staring at the makeshift platform in the middle of the woods surrounded by tents and temporary buildings, and ignored the surprise stares of the few Avengers assembled around the platform. Steve had just disappeared from the platform in a flash, wearing some sort of suit. Her mouth stood hanging open. He had really pushed the button. He had looked right at her, and then pushed the button.

She stood there, unsure of what to say, do or think. Bucky had turned to look at her, and his sympathetic and shocked look was almost unbearable. She dropped her head, staring at her feet, feeling her chest constrict. He was gone. Just like that. He was gone. She stood there stunned. She wasn't sure what she had been expecting, nor had she really been sure what she was going to say. But to not even have gotten the chance to say something, she wasn't sure how to feel about that.

Bucky had turned and saw her standing there, and his mouth dropped open, and then closed again. She saw Sam and Bruce at the control panel, waiting the stated amount of time in which to give Steve to complete the mission, and then return back to the moment he left, having not paid too much attention to her arrival just yet. With a sharp pain in her heart, she slowly walked over to Bucky who turned to face her.

"He's gone," she said simply. It wasn't a question

"Yes," Barnes said simply.

"He's not coming back, is he?" she asked.

Barnes's eyes shone with unshed tears. "No."

He reached out with his right arm, his real arm, and put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder while she dropped her head, feeling the tears sting her eyes. She was too late. She had wanted to talk to him, but she was too late. Over to her right, she could hear Sam and Bruce raising their voices. They had pushed the button to bring Steve back, and the machine had not worked, apparently.

"What happened?" asked Sam. "Get him back!"

"Not sure," said Bruce in confusion, pressing the button again. Again, no response.

Both Sharon and Bucky hung their heads, each heaving a sigh, knowing for sure that nothing could be done. They heard Bruce powering up the machine again, and pushing the button one final time. Neither Sharon nor Bucky expected anything different to happen this final time. But then, to their surprise, the machine whirled to life, rumbled, and there was a blinding flash. Then, to Sharon's disbelieving eyes, she could see the unmistakable form of Steve standing on the platform, clad in some sort of suit and mask that looked a lot like Scott Lang's Ant-Man outfit. He was holding his shield and what looked like a case of some kind and a paper bag. Where has he been? What happened? Everyone stood and stared at him in silence, nobody knowing what had happened.

Bucky gasped in shock, and then moved up beside her, and she could see that he was staring at Steve in disbelief, as if he was looking at a holo projection. Clearly Bucky had expected some other outcome, had not expected to see Steve standing on the platform as Bruce and Sam apparently had expected. Steve hit a button on his wrist and the suit retracted into itself, leaving him standing in a jumpsuit, staring around the platform, his eyes resting on Sharon. Her eyes locked with his, and she could not read his expression, perhaps for the first time since meeting him. It was disconcerting. Then he looked at Bucky, shrugged, and looked away, took off some sort of device on his wrist, and purposely stomped down the stairs towards Bruce. He handed Bruce the device.

"Destroy that," he said. "Destroy all of them, and never let me near another one again. Understand?"

Shocked, Bruce only nodded. Sam stepped up to Steve's side.

"What happened? We tried getting you back and the first couple of tries didn't work. And where did all that come from?" asked Sam.

Steve shifted everything to one hand and patted Sam on the shoulder. "I'll tell you everything, I promise. But not right now." He expected Sam to argue, but maybe something in his voice told Sam that now was not the time. Sam nodded and stepped back, heading over to Bruce who was powering down the machine.

Steve turned and looked where Bucky and Sharon were standing. Bucky recovered first.

"Welcome back buddy," he said, almost as if he thought he might be dreaming.

Steve nodded. "I'll need to talk to you too," he said. "I owe you a massive apology, a beer and probably doing your laundry for the next year. At the minimum."

Bucky quirked a half smile and raised an eyebrow. "You're an asshole, man, you know that right?"

Steve walked over and gave Bucky a hug, but stepped back and sighed. "Yeah, I am. We'll add a few rounds in the ring where I let you kick my ass thoroughly to that list."

Bucky snorted, clapped Steve on the shoulder, and turned to head towards the shelter structure, calling over his shoulder, "You don't need to *let* me do anything, I'll kick your ass honestly."

Steve huffed a bit at Bucky's retreating back.

Then he looked at Sharon.

Sharon said nothing. She only stood there and stared at him, reading his face and his eyes, and then, she dropped her head and shook it, turned, and slowly walked away. She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn't hold her up if she tried that. She simply walked towards the lake where there was a bench, and sat on it, dropping her face into her hands. Steve felt a cold fear, but he shoved it down. He was going to have to face the music. Sharon must know something about what he had done, or she had suspected. He figured Bucky had been the one to call her, tell her what he was going to do. He was going to owe a lot of explanations to a lot of people. But he had to start at the most important one. Sharon.

Quietly, he followed her to the bench, out of earshot of the others who still stood staring after him in confusion. He came around to the side of the bench and set everything down, and looked down at her, her face still in her hands, refusing to look at him. Steve looked at her, taking her in, telling himself mentally that she really was there, and feeling a very strange sense of disorientation. His brain was having a hard time wrapping around everything he had experienced, including time travel, and the people he had encountered for the better part of his adult life. Everything seemed to flash in front of him as he stared down at Sharon, and he was having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that it had all really happened.

He had read or heard somewhere once that every 10 years or so, the average person becomes a different person than the one they were before. It was simply about stages of development, even though you are, technically, the same person you always were. But the life you live between the ages of birth and 10 years old is a different kind of life the new one you live between 11 and 20. The sort of adult you are in your 20s is a different kind of adult from the one you become in your 30s. The change is often gradual and subtle, rarely overnight, but also more profound. And then, one day, you look back on your life and wonder what became of the best friend who was the most important person in your world at the age of seven, the girl you had a crush on at 14 who you were certain you could not live without if she didn't marry you when you both grew up, you wondered about that friend in your early 20s who did every crazy or stupid thing with you, whom you now no longer know where he is or even if he remembered you. You might think about the people you worked with, even briefly at that summer job in college, and wonder where they all went when you stopped working there. You remember the next-door neighbor who had a baby when you were 25 and you brought over some diapers and dinner one night, and suddenly realize that the baby must now be 13 years old. Depending on the world events that might have determined how your life played out, whether there was a war or an economic crash, or a natural disaster in the community where you live, you might find yourself facing obstacles and emotions and trauma that others do not. All of these things serve to make you a different person every so often than the one you envisioned yourself becoming. When Steve was a child, during the Depression, the most important people in his life for his mother and Bucky.

Then, the war started, and he entered young adulthood as a patriotic idealist determined to defend the country. The most important people in his life then, seeing as how both of his parents were gone by then, were Bucky again and the Commandos, and Peggy. It was a time in his life where he still knew what he wanted, was still absolutely certain that everything he was doing was for the best, that his sacrifices and hardships and pain were all worth it to ensure that the Nazis were squelched forever. It was the last time he had truly known who he was, had been comfortable with that fact, even as the Project has changed his body, but not his soul, as Dr. Erskine has wanted. Until the moment he crashed the Valkyrie bomber into the ice, he had known with clarity the dimensions of his life and where he fit into it. He had come of age in the time and world in which he inhabited, and he understood it. And although he was never comfortable with women the way Bucky was, what he had with Peggy had been uplifting and soul inspiring, though somewhat ethereal enough to be almost not real.

And then, everything turned on its head. He had suffered the trauma of knowing he was encased in ice and unable to escape the few times he had managed to regain consciousness. He had awoken to find himself 70 years later in a society he barely understood, rife with technology but profoundly different socially than the one that had formed him as a young man. There were still wars to fight, and he was a soldier, so he had fought them. He had made new friends, these kids, some of them the descendants of the friends he had known, and come to love and care for them as much as he had their predecessors. But he had not been able to keep them safe, had argued with them over principle, had watched helplessly as they died in battle, knowing the sacrifice they were making just as the soldiers on the battlefield of World War II had known. Then they had battled Thanos, the greatest threat the world had ever seen, the universe had ever seen, and he had stood shoulder to shoulder with people from other worlds, good people just like his earthbound friends who wanted nothing more than to protect those they loved, their homes in their world, and they had all look to him to lead. He had been forced to live with the guilt and the horror when they lost the first time, five years of disassociating himself from his emotions and effort to keep from feeling the pain of his major failure. So deep was that pain, that even though there was eventual victory against Thanos, it had not been enough to erase the five years of guilt and loneliness he had felt at his failure to protect them, to protect Sharon. He had, once again, become a new person, different from the one Peggy had known, different from the one that Sharon had first known.

As he stood looking down at the slender woman in front of him sitting on the bench, seemingly unable to process her own disorientation, strange waves of emotion came over him. Like her aunt, the first woman he had loved, she was bold, brash, beautiful and frighteningly intelligent. No matter what hardship was thrown at her, emotional or physical, she met it head on with her chin raised and her eyes flashing her challenge at life itself. Like her aunt, she had tried to remain professional, tried to keep him at a distance, but as it would turn out, had the misfortune of falling in love with him, and he knew there was a very good chance he had not deserved either of them. Peggy had been the emotional support he had needed during the war when he led the Commandos after Hydra, and had suffered losing Bucky. He had loved her for it, he put her on a pedestal in his mind, an ideal woman without any flaws that he could see, although he knew now that Peggy had never been anything more than human, and had quite a few flaws he had never been able to see, based on what he learned through Sharon and through history. A constant disappointment to her parents for failing to become the proper British woman they thought she should be, followed by the loss of her brother and the breakup of her first engagement to Fred Wells, Peggy and adopted the attitude that attachments and emotions rendered you vulnerable, and were best avoided. It was an unfortunate frame of mind that Sharon would inherit decades later. It was a side of her that Steve had never seen.

It had left Peggy with difficulty forming deep friendships and relationships, and caused her relationship with her two children to suffer tremendously, leading to lengthy separations and points when she would go for a long time without seeing or speaking to her grandchildren. Peggy had not been the perfect angel he had built up in his mind, especially when he had broken down and disassociated himself from his current reality by retreating into a fabricated past one in his imagination that revolved around her. She had pulled the blinders from his eyes, made him see her as she truly was, someone who had evolved beyond the friend he had known so long ago, and forced him to relive the moments in which he had come to know Sharon, by getting him to tell her about how they had met, the missions they had going on, even the pain of their break ups during their own again and off-again relationship. By being made to recount his experiences with Sharon, he had also found himself reliving the emotions associated with them, emotions he had tried to bury and forget about.

Peggy may have had her own flaws, but she had been wise, wise enough to understand that the man in front of her was no longer the man she had fallen in love with, but someone at a different point in his life, who belonged with the people of that time. He had not realized until he had cried in Peggy's arms that there was never going to be a time when he could go home to her. It would be like a 40-year-old man attempting to go back to the apartment he had shared with his college buddies and relive that life from that point forward. It would never have worked, because that man would have had experiences that shaped him that his friends had not shared, would be at a different point developmentally and emotionally than his friends. Steve had realized at that moment that he was like a 45-year-old man who had just lost his wife and children in a car accident seeking to go back to his college days with his carefree buddies as a way of escaping. Only it wouldn't have worked, because that man would never have been able to forget. And neither would Steve.

He had been running away from the pain of losing Sharon, and now she was here. She was really here. He moved and knelt down in front of her, his arms resting on either side of her knees and his eyes drank her in. He wasn't sure he knew how to grovel, but he was certainly going to try.

"Sharon?" he croaked out, still scarcely believing that he was speaking her name to her.

She looked up at him, her eyes looking with his, and Steve realized he was no longer breathing. She was really here. Here. She was alive. He was suddenly struck with the realization that this must be how Peggy had felt when he had walked into her nursing home, alive as could be, and not looking a day older than the last time she had seen him. But the difference was, he knew now, was that Peggy had not been in love with him any longer at that time, not like he knew he was now deeply in love with this woman in front of him. This woman who was looking at him like a wary caged animal who was used to being hurt and was expecting to be hurt one more time. Steve felt as if he was drowning in her troubled blue eyes that was staring at him with measure of disbelief of her own. Then she gave him one of her sad, slightly sardonic smiles.

"So," she said, "how was Peggy? You're lucky she didn't shoot you, you know."

Steve blinked. He had been preparing a speech in his head confessing everything he had just done, knowing that he couldn't have any other interaction with her until he had done so, for the sake of his own conscience, and here she was, and one sentence letting him know that she already knew what he had done.

Steve blinked one more time. "So, Bucky called you I guess?"

"No," she said shaking her head.

Steve was confused. "He was the only one who knew what I had planned, and just last night," he said. "How did you know to come here? How did you know I went to see Peggy?"

"I would love to tell you that it's because I know you so well," said Sharon, "and despite that, I would have probably guessed. But no. But he didn't tell me. Peggy did."

She reached into her jacket and pulled out a faded, yellow, envelope. On the face of it, her name was scrawled on it, along with a date that Steve recognized as Sharon's birthdate, and it was written in Peggy's handwriting.

"What is that?" he asked quietly.

"When she… when she died," Sharon said sadly, "she left behind several things for all of us, and this was in the folder of things she left for me. Edwin gave it to me when I went to go visit them in London after we came to the safe house."

She handed him the envelope and he looked at her puzzled. "Do you want me to read it?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, pressing the envelope into his hand. He stood up and sat beside her on the bench, opened the envelope and pulled out the sheaves of yellow paper. He began to read.

' My dearest Sharon,

It's a strange thing for me to be writing this letter to you on this day, the day you were born, for as I write this, you are just but an infant, only a few hours old. And yet, this letter is meant for you to read when you're an adult, and so that is how I must speak to you in writing. I know that by the time you're meant to read this letter, I will be gone from the world, and you will experience a great deal of emotional and physical hardship. You will face challenges that most people would find insurmountable, and I know I won't be there to help you, which I regret. There is a great deal that I wish I could tell you, warn you somehow, if anything to spare you the pain I know you will have coming. But, I have lived my life pretending that the experience that brought me to the knowledge I must now give you had all been a dream, for the purpose of not changing anything throughout history. In fact, I've done such a good job of blocking out this knowledge that I must confess, that I had almost forgotten your name or that you would someday appear in my life. It was not until this morning when your uncle Daniel and I came to visit your parents in the hospital, and your father placed you in my arms and told me your name was Sharon that the memory came crashing back, and I knew I would have to write this letter.

I'm sure by the time you read it, you will come to understand that the two of us will love the same man but at different times in his life. I would love him in a time of his life when he must learn specific things about himself, and I will be a part of his past. But you will be a part of his future. I will not need to rehash in this letter all the things you will experience, the things you will suffer, the things you will overcome. You already know what they all are. I am writing this letter to tell you of a specific time with Steve Rogers that the two of us will have to work together to make sure he goes where he needs to be. At some point during the time you will know him, an alien force with technology, even magic, that we do not understand will invade this planet and cause the disappearance of over half of the people on it. This will include you, indeed my children and our entire family. I don't know where you will go, I don't know if you will be conscious of it, but I do know that at least five years will pass before action is taken that will bring you back. And you will be brought back. There will be a terrible battle, and the evil force will be defeated. Steve and all those who fight alongside him will be victorious. And they will bring everyone back. But this will not mean that the fight is over. For you, it will only be starting.

Whatever Steve and your Avenger friends will do all involved time travel. I don't know exactly what they will do, or how the devices they use will work, but they will utilize the quantum realm to travel through time to defeat this enemy. When this is done and Steve set everything back to rights again, he will time travel one more time in attempt to come back to the 1940s, back to me. He will seek me out, and will take no small amount of convincing on his part to convince me that it was really him, but I noticed immediately how very different he was. He wasn't just older, Sharon, and it was not just his looks, but his whole demeanor. Everything about him is different. He was no longer the man I had fallen in love with, but a stranger to me.

As he talked and explained what had happened and what he had done, how he had not mentioned to anyone in the future that he intended to go onto the past and stay permanently, except for Bucky who is also apparently alive during that time, and he went on to explain other things as well, I was horrified. Horrified at the thought that he would even think to do what he had done. These are not the actions of the Steve Rogers I had known, and I came to a conclusion fairly quickly, that he had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. The more I dug, the more I understood that he had gone off his rocker because of you. Losing you in this calamity been too much for him.

As you will grow up in a time much distant from the one in which I have lived, I know that you will know that survivors of war and other traumatic events often experience a type of disconnect, dissociation from reality, in which they create a world in their own heads that is safe and secure, and they will desperately seek to make this real in their own lives. In his mind, the last time he felt safe, the last time he felt complete and stable before losing you was with the time he had spent with me. But he had not considered how I had moved on, how I had begun my relationship with Daniel, and how I myself was not the person he remembered and hoped could save him. He was like a man who had not just lost a friend, but a wife. He was a grieving man who had been overwhelmed by his grief and broken by it. At first, when I tried to get him to mention you, he began to hyperventilate, almost as if he were panicking, though he tried to hide it.

It was and then I realized how much he loved you, for losing you had caused this reaction in him, that even the mention of your name or thought of you caused the grief to overwhelm him so badly that he could not handle it. The ironic thing is, you were not dead any longer when he told me all this. In fact, you had come at just the moment he was set to return to the past, he had seen you, and then run from you anyway. This was likely because he did not understand himself how badly he had been hurt, and the very sight of you was enough to make him panic. And that is very reason why I sent him back.

I took a desperate chance, probably a foolish one, and confronting him and making him tell me all about you, how are you had met and your time together, making him relive those experiences and feel the emotions I know he must've felt. Perhaps it was irresponsible of me, but my gamble paid off, and he broke through the walls he had constructed. He cried for you, and I knew that he knew that he would never be happy in the 1940s without you. Your connection with him runs too deep. So I sent him back. I gave him what he needed, and I watched him push the button and disappear and a flash of light.

The thing is, my niece, I don't know where he went after that. It's entirely possible that I failed, that he did not in fact go back to you in the future but instead went to another past timeline with another version of me that did not ask as many questions. Perhaps he stayed there instead of coming back to you as I hoped he would. I don't know if he doesn't indeed return to you, or if he ran from us both. I only know that at the moment he leaves to travel back in time, you must be there. I don't know the exact date on the exact location, only that it was about a month after the great battle in which they defeat the alien. You will probably have to do some of your own research to make sure you are in the right place at the right time. But you must be there. He must see your face, or he will not be motivated to come back where he belongs. Truthfully, I almost feel bad sending him back to you. If he does return to you, you have a great deal of work cut out for you. He needs help that neither one of us can give him, someone educated in how to handle trauma. I don't know if things will work out for the two of you in the long run, but based on what I've heard, the potential is there, and I hope it does. I hope you are happy, that he takes care of you and you him. I would say only to not be afraid, don't pull away from him, believe in him. At the very least, be his friend, even if it doesn't work out. But don't let him be alone. Remember always that I love you both, and to take care of each other, and occasionally think of me sometime.

Love, aunt Peggy.'

Steve had not realized he was crying until he went to fold the letter and saw a tear drop from his face onto the pages. He folded Peggy's letter to Sharon back into the envelope and handed it to her. How could he have done this? How could he have hurt them both so much? Had he been so blind?

"She was always smarter than me," he said gruffly. Sharon smiled.

"Not without her flaws, but she was usually wiser than everyone around her," said Sharon.

"I imagine that got irritating," said Steve trying to keep it light but knowing he was failing.

Sharon just smiled sadly and looked away.

"When did you read that letter?" he asked.

"Maybe about a month after Ed gave it to me," she admitted.

He frowned. "So you knew what I was going to do, even back at the safe house?"

"Yeah."

"So," he asked hesitantly, "that's why you were so closed off? What you were so afraid of? Why didn't you say anything to me? We could have talked it out. Is that why you walked out?"

She shrugged, and nodded. "She said in her letter that she didn't know where you went after you disappeared. You could've gone to another timeline, you could've gone anywhere. And you could have come back. But the long and short of it is this, I knew you were going to leave. Her letter warned me, that some point, you were going to turn your back and walk away permanently. Or at least what you thought was going to be permanent. You pushed that button, even when you saw my face. Me standing there wasn't enough to keep you here. She even said so in the letter. You only came back because she talked to you into it, because she made you realize that even if you didn't think you belong with me, you thought you belong to somewhere else. But she had to make you realize that you would never be happy in the 1940s. Not anymore. And even then, when she saw you leave, even she didn't know if you had completely accepted what she had told you, she didn't know where you went. The fact is, neither one of us knew if you would come back here or not. And I have to tell you, that hurt. A lot. I was trying to…well, avoid the hurt I guess. Not that it worked."

"Sharon," he said gently, starting to realize just what he had done to her, while also lamenting their missed chances.

"I've been back for a month, and not a word from you," she said softly, not angry, but more sad. "Once I realized that it had truly happened just as her letter had said, that it was five years later, and that you had suffered some sort of mental breakdown in the process, I knew I had to try and find you. As much as I tried to push you away to keep from getting hurt back at the safe house, it didn't mean I didn't care about you or what happened to you. I had no idea if you were in any kind of danger. It took forever to find you, and even then I wasn't sure I was going to make it on time. I still can't believe I got here just now as I did. And watching you standing on that platform and push the button made me realize that despite years of effort of trying to keep you at an arms distance, it didn't work. I fell in love with you. I love you. But that's never been enough, has it? I left you, and you left me. We never talk because neither of us know how. We try to stay apart, thinking it's the best thing for the other. And yet, here we are."

Steve knew he should say something, but he couldn't speak because of the apple sized lump in his throat. So she continued.

"The only person in my life who has never left me behind in some way has been Aunt Peggy," she said. "When my father was killed in action when I was 7, I heard my mother say that it was senseless. He was well past the point where he could have retired from the military, but he stayed in. He was only a short time away from honorable discharge, he could've taken it at any time. But he still chose to go back into the field, and he wasn't in Iraq for three weeks when a roadside bomb got him. He chose the military over us, and left me fatherless. And my mother couldn't handle the grief. There was so much she wanted to do with her life that she was not able to do with a kid in tow. So as soon as I was more or less independent and not in need of constant supervision, she was off on her aid missions with the Peace Corps, and when she's back in the country, she's working with charity groups. She never had much time for me. Then Uncle Dan died of lung cancer, and the various men I've dated have either been profound disappointments or Hydra agents. The friends that I had when I was younger moved off into their own lives, even S.H.I.E.L.D. that had become my entire life, when it fractured, and reformed under Phil Coulson, I never got a phone call to come back and join them. I wasn't wanted at the CIA, and there's really not a place that I belong now. I thought, maybe with you, maybe I could be a priority to someone, not an afterthought. But seeing you push that button made me realize how wrong I was. I shouldn't have run from you. I ended up causing the very thing I was afraid of, losing you."

Now the tears were streaming out of his eyes, but he forced himself not to look away, to look her in the eye and face her. He still couldn't believe she was here, her eyes locked with his, her familiar and somehow comforting face that had been haunting the edges of his dreams for so long now staring back at him, not an imagination, not a vision, but human and vulnerable. Some things she had tried to hide behind Agent 13, but here in front of him instead was Sharon Carter. And he loved her. It was not the idealistic love he had for Peggy that he knew he always would have, nor the brotherly or fatherly love he felt for the Avengers, but the kind of love that is imprinted on your soul, that sneaks up on you quietly when you realize that the person you are friends with is also someone you couldn't imagine being without. The person that is a cornerstone in your life, though not the entirety of it, who you see with all of their flaws and minor irritations and love anyway. Sharon was by no means perfect. Quite the contrary, there was a lot wrong with her. He wasn't sure Peggy did her any favors raising her the way she had been raised, preparing her for the intelligence world maybe before she was old enough or mature enough to fully comprehend what it would mean, making the choice to become a closed off agent when she still had much to learn about life itself. She had attempted to walk away her humanity in the name of professionalism, and her experiences as a child of being left behind so many times made her hesitant to trust or love someone, or let them love her. Coupled with his own issues, which were tremendous, not the least of which included PTSD and disorientation from living in two different time periods, all the events that had befallen the Avengers and the battle with Thanos, and it was nothing short of a miracle that he and she were capable of human feeling and love at all.

And yet, as he again knelt in front of her, his arms on either side of her knees leaning on the bench, still shaking from the quantum field exposure as he had travel through time in attempt to get away from her, as he looked at her, he wondered how he had ever thought that he could completely turn away and walk away from her. The five years he had spent believing that she was dead and there was never any way to turn it back, it had been some of the most agonizing years of his life, even as he had carefully buried those feelings and not acknowledge them because they were too painful. And now here she was in front of him. Alive and in front of him. He had the strangest feeling in his chest, almost like the sensation of being able to breathe again after an asthma attack. He was almost giddy with oxygen overload, not realizing that he had even been breathing so shallow.

"Sharon," he said gently, "I don't need to explain to you what an idiot I've been. We've both made some pretty terrible mistakes, but I think I win the cake for this one. I can't believe what I just did. And you're right, it took Peggy convincing me to come back, although part of me would like to think I would have realized it on my own after enough time spent in the 1940s and discovering I didn't fit in. From her own words in that letter of yours, I know now that she would probably not have been happy with the man I had become. Daniel was who she was meant to be with at that point in her life. I was selfish and shortsighted to not even consider it. I saw the pictures of them on their wedding day on the wall back at the house. I didn't want to believe how happy she looked when I pushed that button. I didn't want to remember it. I didn't want to remember her kids or grandkids or you, because it would mean facing the one thing that I was most afraid of: myself. I didn't want to believe that she might not have been happy with me the way I was so sure I might have been with her if I had never crashed that plane. I wanted to believe that you would move on with your life and find someone better than me. Someone who could be what you needed. And who knows, maybe you still will. Maybe it's not meant to be me, but I can't tell you how much I hope it is. It's too much to hope for that you would give me another chance, after everything we've been through, after what I've done. I can only tell you this, I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for hurting you the way I have. For having the courage to face Thanos and lead an entire galaxy of heroes against him, but being too afraid to face what I feel for you. I love you, Sharon, I have for a long time and I always will. If someone else other than me would make you happy, then I would want that for you, though I doubt there will ever be anyone else for me. But that's OK. I'm at the point now where it's enough for me to know that you are alive in the world, a part of it, and that I could still see you even if just as a friend. But I hope to hell that's not the only thing I'll ever be to you. I'm so so sorry."

"Steve," she started, her voice quavering.

"I need help, Sharon," he said. "I know that. There's something seriously wrong with me and I can't fix it alone. Coming from my generation, that's not an easy thing for me to say. I know you know that. I don't think I'm at a part of my life right now where I can be anything that you need or deserve. But I know I'm going to work like hell to become that person."

"Steve," she said, taking his face in her hands and bringing her for head down to touch his," you 'are' that person. It's what I've always denied to myself, because I knew one day you would leave, and maybe not come back. But you are what I need. You always have been. Maybe I knew it even as a kid listening to Peggy's stories about you, but I was listening to stories about the man who would someday be my other half, even though I could not know that at the time. Of course, we all thought you were dead. And if you can't believe I'm sitting here in front of you, back after the Snap, I can't believe you're here in front me, back from pushing that button. I just can't believe that you chose to come back to me, that you chose me. When you were so ready to choose her, or another life. I guess it will take a while before we stop being jumpy around each other, so sure the other one is going to leave. It hasn't worked out for us in the past, maybe because neither one of us was at a point where we were ready. But I love you, and I always will. Even if you decide to leave again, there won't be anyone else for me but you. I'm sorry. For everything. I'm a mess too. Some poor shrink is going to make a career out of analyzing us."

He drew himself up and carefully wrapped his arms around her, not sure if she would let him, but was relieved when she wrapped her arms around him and nestled her head under his chin, and it still amazed him home perfectly she fit against him. As if she were made for him.

"I will never leave you again, I swear," he said, "unless you tell me to go. I don't think either of us is under the delusion that it will be easy, the immediate future is going to involve a lot of rebuilding, a society in upheaval, there's a lot to recover from, physically and emotionally. Life after the Snap was pure hell, not for me alone but for everyone. And with Tony and Natasha gone, there's going to be a lot of grieving. But I think if you're with me, I might be able to weather it better this time."

"You weren't the only one who's going to have to start going to see a shrink," she said with a short laugh. "I'm not laboring under any delusions that I'm stable myself, especially after coming back after five years. I'm going to have to be helping my family adjust, and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself, or what you're going to do, so yeah, counseling might not be a bad idea. I suspect that going into social work and psychology is going to be a lucrative business for the next decade or so."

He laughed a short laugh of his own, and then bent down to kiss her. This time, she responded immediately, no hesitation. It was soft and gentle, passionate and slightly arousing, but meant to comfort, not incite. They whispered "I love you's" against each other's lips, and Steve could still barely believe that he was here and kissing Sharon when only a few hours ago he had been so sure the Peggy was the one who should have been here with him like this. He had no doubt that wherever Peggy's consciousness was right now, she was probably laughing her ass off. Or smiling in relief. He had promised her in person, so he sent a silent thought to her now, promising that whatever happened, he would take care of her niece. Because despite Sharon's tough Agent 13 exterior, he knew now that she had a core of softness and kindness, a vulnerable core that she never let anyone see that could still be hurt. And he had shot multiple arrows straight into it. It was up to him now to make sure she healed from his actions, as he accepted and forgave her for hers. They held each other for a long time, maybe even an hour, and it wasn't until the sounds of the voices of the other Avengers over at the platform reached Steve's ears that he realized he still had a few more things to check off his checklist.

000

They walked back to the other Avengers at the platform, and he handed Sam the shield.

"You risked creating an alternate timeline to go back for a shield?" Sam said with a half smirk. "You know there's probably a couple of replicas of it in Tony's garage somewhere, right?"

"Probably," Steve agreed, "but this one was made by Howard Stark. There's a certain symbolic connection to it. And as of right now, it's yours."

"What?" asked Sam in surprise as the other Avengers gathered around, also looking surprised, although Bucky did not. So Steve told them everything. Everything he had done, and Sharon stood beside him with a hand on his back lending her strength. They all stared at him in shock, and not a little bit of anger, as he knew right about then Wanda was wondering how come she could not use quantum travel to go back and find another version of Vision, as the Guardians had done with Gomorrah, or how they couldn't somehow go and retrieve Natasha or Tony. But Steve drove home the point that he had realized, that Peggy had helped him realize, and that was that there was no truly altering the past, there was no going home, and that from this point forward, they had to live their lives, and he believed it was part of a grand master plan by a divine overseer. He knew not everyone shared his belief, but he had to believe that everything he had been through had been for a reason. And that the death of their friends, the Snap and the Decimation and those who were brought back, it was all part of a plan that had to play out the way it had.

"So after everything you now know," he said, "you also now know that I am no longer fit for command. If anyone of you had done what I just did, I'd have had you removed from the team. I deserve no less. I have done what I have set out to do as Captain America. And now it's time for me to retire and recover from everything. As I am emotionally compromised, I hereby remove myself from command and give leadership of the Avengers to Lieutenant Sam Wilson. That is, if you except, Sam?"

Sam hefted the shield, holding it in his right hand, and looked at Steve. "It feels like it belongs to someone else."

"There's no one better to hold it," said Bucky.

Steve smiled. He was relieved to know that his oldest friend did not seem to mind not being given the shield himself. But James Barnes had always been pragmatic. He knew well enough that his own experiences as the Winter Soldier, as a programmed assassin for the KGB, and everything he himself had been through, it would keep from him that certain quality of patriotism and goodness that would be needed to hold a shield. But Sam, Sam had those qualities. He was a natural leader, and it showed. Steve only smiled at Sam who looked around at the other Avengers, as if looking for their approval. They all smiled and nodded. So he turned to Steve and, looked at him seriously.

"I relieve you, sir," he said with a salute.

Steve saluted back. "I am relieved."

Everyone smiled, and a few chuckled. And then Sam looked at Sharon. "Welcome back, Agent Carter. I seem to have a new role here, and my first order of business seems to be filling up now open intelligence officer spot. You know we lost Natasha? I know your skills are comparable with hers. If nobody objects, I hope you consider joining the Avengers as an official member. We could definitely use you."

If someone had poured a bucket of the green Nickelodeon slime over her head, Sharon could not have looked more surprised. Steve almost laughed at the expression on her face. As she had mentioned before, she had never much been considered by those who should've considered her. To be offered a spot on the Avengers, it was a move of inclusion that she had never experienced before. It took her a minute to find her voice, look at Steve who smiled and nodded, and she looked back and told Sam that she would accept. Everyone cheered and Wanda hugged her, and Bucky gave her a small fist bump. Steve felt a sense of relief that he didn't know he needed. The Avengers would be OK. They had suffered traumatizing and devastating losses, they would grieve Tony and Natasha for a long time, but with new and stable leadership, and Sharon having a place to be that was best for her, Steve felt as if perhaps this was one of the reasons he had been supposed to come back.

In the months that would follow, Steve would be reminded of this. He would begin counseling sessions with a Wakandan counselor, as with Sharon, over video chat, and he should not have been surprised as he was to find that it helped tremendously. It would be years before either of them was fully able to move beyond their issues and the trauma, but they managed as best as they could. Sharon fit into the Avengers perfectly, as Steve knew she would, and even though there was much to be done politically with regards to the jurisdiction in the Avengers would now have, and he worried about her anytime they went out, he knew that she was doing what she was born to do, and he could see how it made her happy. They did their best to form a new relationship with her family, her cousins who were struggling with being gone for five years and rebuilding their lives, and even though they didn't visit as often as Steve would have liked, Peggy's family became his own, especially for holidays and vacations when he wasn't with the Avengers. He stayed on as a consultant, working with Sam and Bucky on logistics, but learning who Steve Rogers was independent of the shield. He started taking art classes at the University of New York, and began an art therapy program for veterans and people suffering from the after affects of the Snap and Decimation. He ran a website where he hosted videos of himself and other experts talking about the best way to cope with trauma, and it was therapeutic for him and gave him a new place in the mind of society. It would end up being a worthy retirement, one that would make him happy, and allowed him to rebuild his relationship with Sharon.

After talking with Bruce for a bit to confirm that all the time stones had been put back in place, he watched as the big green man smashed his fist on all of the time travel devices, permanently disabling them, and making plans with Peter Parker to dismantle the platform and do away with time travel permanently. As an alcoholic recovering from the disease must remove himself from the temptation by avoiding all alcohol, even cold medicine, Steve knew that his best bet for recovery was to remove himself from the temptation of ever going back in time again. He led Sharon over to a table, and put the paper bag down in front of her.

"What is that?" she asked, sitting down and looking in the paper bag, pulling out the wrapped items. "Cheeseburgers?"

"I told Peggy about your cheeseburger...thing. How are you were on some sort of focused quest to find the most perfect cheeseburger in America and had never quite managed it. She said her friend Angie who worked at a local diner made these. She ran to get them and give them to me before I came back."

Sharon frowned. "Huh. She never mentioned any Angie to me. I wonder why. I guess there's a lot about her none of us will ever know. Stuff that just didn't get mentioned or may have faded from her memory over the decades."

"I guess so," Steve agreed, taking a bite of the hamburger that was no longer warm, but thankfully wasn't cold. Sensation exploded in his mouth. It was absolutely delicious! He looked over at Sharon who had also taken a bite and her own eyes at gone wide. She drew the burger back and looked at it, then took another large bite.

"This is it!" she said. "This is the most perfect burger! And I can't even tell you why it is. Where did this come from? Did she mention the name of the diner?"

"She didn't," Steve admitted sheepishly. "I only know that her friend Angie made it, and the diner was close enough for her to run to from her house in 1948 and make it back in about 45 minutes. I wish I knew more. And I'm afraid her friend Angie is probably no longer with us."

Sharon shook her head sadly. "Probably not. And that just figures, the most perfect cheeseburger in America was made over 80 years ago by someone who is probably long dead in her grave."

"Things tasted different back then," he admitted. "Not as sweet, not processed. Maybe that's what it is. And I'd like to think of this as a parting gift. One last thing to remember them all by."

"That it is," she said with a smile. They finished their burgers in silence, and held hands back to the temporary structure where they would begin their lives for the future.

That night, they lay in each other's arms, content for the first time in a long time. They did not have sex, it would actually be a couple of weeks before they would reach that point of trust again, for the relationship was not rebuilt overnight. For that moment, though, it was enough to be able to hold each other, to feel the other one breathing, and know that they were near. They would start off slowly, once again dating, re-learning how to be around each other as friends and not just lovers. The physical part came later, and when it did, it was finally uninhibited, finally nothing was held back. They were no longer Captain America and Agent 13, but simply Steve and Sharon. And it was finally, for both of them, the most perfect point in time.

The End.

0000000000000000000000000000000

"The core aspect of PTSD is avoidance, and people suffering from PTSD will go to any extent to ignore triggers or to get out of a triggering situation," Herringa says. Rather than digging into the symptoms to find the root cause, people with PTSD often spend much of their time trying to escape or avoid them. Reminders of past trauma can be so painful, he says, that "the patient doesn't want to admit to even having triggers in some cases, for fear of having to talk about it more."

"The title is reinforced in the denouement of the novel in which Webber realises: "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." (Ellipses in original.)"

"Nostalgia is a fond memory ("Absence makes the heart grow fonder") arising out of an absent person's inability to perceive changes that take place over time on things one remembers as static and permanent. Attempting to relive youthful memories is doomed to failure. This sentiment is closely mirrored in the final pages of Marcel Proust's novel Swann's Way, the first installment of his lengthy work In Search of Lost Time. "

Playlist

"Moon River" -Frank Sinatra

"Alone" -Celine Dion

"Show me Heaven" -Tina Arena

"Stand By You" -Rachel Platten

"Shut up and Drive" - Rhianna

"BOOM" - X-Ambassadors

"I didn't want to need you" – Heart

"Change of Heart" – Cyndi Lauper

"Nobody wants to be lonely" -(Duet) Ricky Martin, Christina Aguilera

"I don't have the heart" - James Ingram

"When you come back to me again" - Garth Brooks

"The Search is Over" - Survivor

"Thank you for loving me" - Bon Jovi

"I can wait forever" - Air Supply