Note: So. Here we are. If I hold onto this any longer, I'm going to keep doubting myself, so the best solution to that is to just post it and move on. Despite that, I am still so happy to be at this point in the fic, and pleased to introduce you to parts of this story which have been floating around in my mind since the beginning.

I obviously don't touch on everything in this chapter, but as things progress, I hope that the world building can become fuller and richer for you, dear readers. :) Toni's a bit of a mess here, but hopefully it's within the limits I've already developed for her as an anxious and neurotic character. Next chapter, though? Bring on the calm, collected, and fucking awesome Toni Stark, Iron Man. (I'm so SO excited, omg.)

Thank you Annaelle, my beloved, for the beta. You always make time for me, and I love you so much.

And thank you, readers, for the fucking AMAZING response you gave me last chapter. I just... god. You're all incredible, and honour me so much. I actually teared up at it all, many times. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

One moment she could breathe, the next she couldn't.

It was like being plunged into that cursed basin of water in the cave, cold and dark and filled with her blood and bile, choking off the involuntary gasps and screams that were shredding her throat apart.

It was over in a flash—but the relief was only temporary, as the pain which had consumed her was replaced by an absence. An empty space in her mind—no, a gap, a hole torn in her psyche, her mind was ripping to pieces—

And then that too was over, only to be replaced by the feeling of flames licking at her skin, clothing be damned, offering no protection from the heat that was consuming her, the flames that were searing her flesh.

This torment lingered.

Toni sobbed as she pulled desperately at the buttons and clasps and ties on her clothes, her mind focused solely on getting everything off, as much as she could, instinct guiding her movements as her mind screamed bloody murder.

Agony seared through her heart.

Toni only had the strength to whimper and clutch at her chest, and she started to fall forward with no ability to stop herself from impacting with the flo—

Her body lurched to a halt, and metal clanged against metal as her hands weakly clawed at her heart, and Toni froze, breaths puffing in and out from between her barely parted lips.

The pain was gone as suddenly as it had appeared—but certainly not as long as it had lasted, fuck no—and Toni's mind kicked into high gear, despite feeling as if it were being overwhelmed by everything and nothing all at once. Adrenaline; nature's miracle drug.

Toni blinked away her initial shock at everything going on around her, and tried to take stock of what she knew, no matter how little it made sense. She focused every ounce of her brain power on changing the tide of her thoughts, and those thoughts—and the looming, background shock she knew she was in—fought as if they were a raging river. She didn't want to focus, she didn't want to think, she didn't want to acknowledge what she feared, suspected, knew—

For the first time in a long time, Toni didn't want to think.

She didn't want to.

Please, please, please—

But she had to.

So Toni breathed deep, and focused. Focused on what she didn't want to—but had to—know.

One. She had been in a huge amount of pain. She no longer was, and only her memories provided proof of said fact; not even her heart hurt.

Two. Toni was in her suit. Somehow. She could feel every familiar line and curve as it pressed against her bare skin, which led her to—

Three. She must've stripped off the bulk of her clothes when she'd felt like she was on fire, though she could feel her ankle holster digging deep into her skin where it was in the way of her suit and its ability to fit seamlessly with her usually undersuit-clad body.

Four. It must have answered the call of the severe distress she'd been in, when her heart rate had been racing, and her watch must have picked it up… which meant—

Five. She must be in her Malibu workshop. She hoped.

No.

Hope was the wrong word. She was hoping for something entirely different, something half a world and decades away, but that… that was looking increasingly like it was out of her reach.

Toni felt panic rising through her.

She'd been ripped away from the men she was coming to love in a way that far exceeded the love she'd felt for them as a child, a teen, even as a young adult. She had been ripped away from the men who had been, even though they'd never met, the foundation of her life. The men who had offered her solace in the loneliness of her life, surrounded by those who wanted to take, take, take from the neglected and rebellious Stark heiress. She'd been taken from Steve, from Bucky, from people she was coming to love more than she ever had before, who were—just maybe—coming to love her in return. She'd been taken before she was ready, before—

"—detecting tachycardia well past safety margins as laid out by Dr. Cho. Initiating emergency—"

"No!" Toni gasped out, her voice rough and harsh and dry as goddamn Death Valley. She swallowed hard, licked her lips, and suddenly, desperately, hated the silence that surrounded her in this workshop.

"No. No, Jarvis, no, baby boy, I'm fi— I'll be okay. Just give me a couple minutes," she rasped.

Slowly, after another minute or two or five of sitting hunched over, sprawled on the floor of what was, yes, her Malibu workshop—against everything she'd known to be true these last two weeks—Toni pulled herself to her feet.

Once she was standing on her own power, she dismissed the suit back to its dock, letting it fly away piece by piece. Within moments she was down to her underwear, but she stumbled over to the sectional couch in the corner of the shop and wrapped herself in the well-loved and well-lived quilt Anna Jarvis had made for her—out of her husband's old gardening shirts and Toni's baby blankets—as a childhood gift.

She wasn't quite in shock—maybe—but once she was situated, once she was starting to warm up, Toni poked her head out from the folds of the blanket along with one hand to manipulate the hologram JARVIS had already so helpfully laid out right in front of her without needing to be asked.

"Time and date," Toni queried first as she zeroed in on the data that had already been uploaded from her repulsor watch.

"4:50am, July 8th, 2011," came the succinct reply. "Miss, may I—"

"Did a package arrive for me anytime in the last few hours, and did I open it only for there to be a flash of bright green and blue light?" Toni interrupted.

"Not even twenty minutes ago, Miss. You opened it by your main workbench and moments later you appeared on the other side of the shop, dressed completely differently."

Toni groaned, letting her head fall forward to hang between her shoulders.

"Miss?"

"So I wasn't gone that long. Not really," she muttered to herself. "A flash in the pan for this time, and yet I've literally aged two weeks."

Toni grumbled, then ordered, "J, baby boy, do a scan of me, check for any differences to the last upload and account for the time delay you're aware of, and then do a compare and contrast between yourself and the internal chronometer and save file on my gauntlet watch." She poked a few spots on the holographic interface. "There, I just overrode the manual lock I put on it last week. Uh, which you'll see what I mean in a moment."

She had a goddamn migraine already, but she needed to see for herself. Needed to know she wasn't crazy, despite the very real and physical and tangible evidence lying on the shop floor nearby in the shape and form of a pile of World War II era clothes, backpack, and recently-crafted (for 1940, that is) weapons.

While JARVIS was processing the data, she got shakily to her feet and began to pace. She needed something to do with her hands—so much better than actively thinking—so she dropped the blanket on the couch and started to take stock of her body. She had plenty of aches and pains, including the hot burn of her day's old bullet graze. It was as taken care of as it could be, though, so Toni's hands and eyes took stock of her arc reactor.

It was alright. Not great, but alright.

She'd need to get someone to help her swap it out, just as soon as she made a new arc reactor at least. She'd sort of used up her last spare arc reactor a few months ago and had never gotten around to fabricating another.

Shit.

Toni snatched her fingers away from where they'd wandered to the back of her neck while she'd been berating herself. She knew she wouldn't be able to feel anything, even if it were there—which it wasn't, she knew, deep in her soul, even without looking—but she didn't even want to think about it, let alone purposefully remind herself by touching the spot where her soulmark should be.

Where her soulmark used to be.

Before she could give in to the spiral looming ahead of her, JARVIS interrupted.

"I am detecting changes in your physiology, Miss. I am… distressed to admit that I cannot determine a logical answer as to why." JARVIS even managed to sound concerned, and that, combined with the sound of his voice piping through the speakers in her workshop, in her home, instead of from out of the small, though powerful, speaker on her watch, threatened to choke her up with tears.

She blinked away the desire to cry, swallowing thickly before replying, "Welcome to the first known time traveller, J." Her voice was a little shaky, but she was rather proud of the smile she gave him.

All else aside, she was happy to be here with him again—not just the baby version of him she'd had with her when she'd been swept back in time, but all of him, Stark satellite servers and all—despite feeling like she'd been hit by a semi truck and then backed over again. Mentally at least. Physically she felt… fine.

"I would have happily debated the point with you, Miss, if it were not for the watch's internal chronometer telling me different." If an Artificial Intelligence could sound incredulous, it would be her baby. He sure sounded it right now, and it made a small smile ghost over her lips. The first honest one she'd had since arriving back.

Since arriving back home.

It was really only just starting to sink in. She felt more off kilter than she had when she'd originally been sent back in time. Sent back by—

"Those fucks!" The words burst past her lips as she remembered what exactly had happened before she'd ended up back here. They had fucked with her, fucked with them, had tried to manufacture a soul bond—which, no, she didn't believe; she believed now with all her heart that she and Steve and Bucky would've been soulmates in this life or any other. In the past, in the future, in an alternate universe, even—they were meant for each other.

It had only taken two magical beings playing at Norse mythology and being yanked out of the figurative arms of her soulmates for her to realize it.

Toni didn't know if she should laugh or cry, and spent long minutes breathing deeply as JARVIS continued to go through the data on his servers and the internet at large, comparing it to the possible differences that would appear on her watch's storage.

Breathing. She could do breathing. That, she was good at.

It was probably the longest she'd gone without her mind racing, but Toni was exhausted. Her brain, amazing as it was, could only handle so much, and she was near to its limits. Limits she'd only ever achieved in the weeks before she'd 'agreed' to make the Ten Rings' weapons for them.

As the adrenaline started to drain out of her body, finally, she could feel herself sliding headfirst towards a crash.

But she couldn't do that. Not yet. She'd have time for that later.

Finally, with a long, heavy blink of her eyes, she knew where she needed to start.

It would be heartbreaking, but she needed to know what had happened to her soulmates.

No.

No, it was already heartbreaking, because she knew they'd be dead. There was no chance that they were anything but. She could feel the chasm where they had been, both in her mind and deep in her soul—and her heart—and that was answer enough as to what had happened to them.

It was too much to ask, apparently, for Loki and that Amora woman to have sent them into the future with her. Too much for the universe to grant her. All out of cosmic luck. Karma still biting her on the ass. Yep.

Life. fucking. sucked.

Toni shoved the feelings threatening to swamp her back into the box in her head she saved for Congressional hearings, and finally focused her eyes on the screens before her.

She needed to know.

"Okay, J, let's…" She paused, and then made a judgment call. "No, never mind, I already know they're dead," she said dully, eyes prickling, "so can you show me all the historical changes that do not make any mention of Captain Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America, or of James Buchanan Barnes? That may exclude most of the S.S.R. archive and events, as well as those of the Howling Commandos."

JARVIS didn't ask why she was excluding them—Toni wasn't sure if she was glad for that or not—but instead started throwing screen after screen up around her, until Toni was buried in a veritable sea of digital blue.

"I'm almost scared to see what's changed, but it can't be much if I'm here with you, huh J?" Toni murmured as she reached out to bring the first of the many screens closer to where she was standing, nearly naked, in the middle of her shop.

"Initial data comparison suggests it is… good, Miss," he replied. "At least, I believe it to be. I must admit that my processors have not been able to account for every aspect of the changes from these mere few data points to start from, not yet, and if we wish a fuller understanding of all the changes made, we must work from your own memories, as well."

"Okay, okay," Toni laughed just a little at the enthusiasm of her A.I. "I get it, you're eager to determine which time travel theory is correct, if any, and so am I, but I'm pretty sure we're not going to be able to understand it even then."

Her smile ghosted back over her lips as she turned her eyes to the info sprawling across her workshop in the comforting, homely, lovely, friendly glow of digital blue.

She would get through this and then… then she could fall apart. Then she could break.

No sooner.

An hour later, Toni's mind was reeling.

The differences between her original timeline and this one were small but amazingly momentous the further forward in time she read.

The Butterfly Effect, in action.

So few things had changed, so many things were the same… and yet not.

The Battle of the Bulge had taken place earlier than she knew it had in her timeline. Earlier by three weeks—and it wasn't even called the Battle of the Bulge anymore, either. The initial, huge push by the Germans into Allied territory had never occurred, because the Allies had been warned and had instead launched their own offensive into German territory. No longer hampered by the blinding snowstorms that had plagued the original incursion and made it possible for the Germans to sneak so many troops into position, the Americans had banded together with the Polish, Canadian, and Belgian armies in the region, along with the S.S.R. and the Heathers' main bodies of troops. They'd pushed the Germans back until their lines broke in early December.

Then they'd regrouped and started pushing ever steadily towards Berlin. Any division that could be spared, that wasn't needed to hold the line elsewhere, started pushing towards the heart of Nazi Germany.

That small change, of a battle being over a month earlier than it would have otherwise been, had changed things.

The first of those changes had been the Allies and the Soviets arriving at Berlin nigh-simultaneously.

Sure, Hitler had still committed suicide in that dumb bunker that got covered up by a kiddie park and apartments without a plaque in sight, but the combined might of the Allies and Soviets had minimized the damage and death considerably, and Berlin had walked out of the war… well, still pretty destroyed, but at least it hadn't been divvied up between two world powers.

Oh they'd wanted to do it anyway, but neither side was as bloodthirsty for it as they'd been before, and Germany had slowly settled back into being its own, complete nation before a decade and a half was up.

Sure, the Pacific Theater had still happened almost exactly the same—the hard-on the U.S. had for the atomic bomb would've made it nearly impossible to change their minds—and the Cold War had still occurred, but it had been… diminished.

Was it the lack of a divided Berlin, the lack of the physical manifestation of their differences in the Berlin Wall, which had made the Cold War that much better for both sides? Or was it the fact that they'd fought together at the end, there in the streets of Berlin and all across the rest of Germany as they chased the Nazis—and Hydra—out? Was it the camaraderie of the moment, the feeling of being brothers and sisters in arms? Of toppling a vicious, evil empire together? Only to then have their differences shoved back in each other's faces, capitalism versus communism, East vs West, old world versus new?

Ugh, history. Not her strong suit. She'd never be able to answer that question with just this cursory look, but JARVIS was already happily crunching away at all the socio-cultural questions, as deeply fascinated as Toni had ever seen him.

Toni at least understood the implications of the arms race that had still occurred. It had been lessened to a degree, but from what Toni could tell, they'd still hit all the scientific and technological advancements on time, and were maybe even ahead on some, she was astounded to see.

Amazing what you can accomplish when the Space Race was more like a Space Relay.

Because—and she'd checked this five fucking times—the two superpowers had worked together to get to the goddamn moon and beyond. What the fuck.

Sure, they'd been at odds for every single year since, just the same as she was used to, but just… less, and space was considered sacrosanct. Even if they were fighting over other things, apparently that was something neither fucked with.

Which was awesome.

One thing that was less awesome—more like awful—was what she'd discovered when she'd first started looking into the S.S.R. and its affiliates, which included her father.

There had been no easy way for JARVIS to tell her or to show her that her parents had been murdered.

Oh, they had still died in a car accident on December 16th, 1991. Yes, her father had been driving, yes, he'd still been drinking—at least according to the private results of the autopsy. What was different, however, set her entire world to shaking. The foundation of her adulthood was set on one less pillar now, because what if… what if they had been murdered in her time as well? What if the only difference was that they had found evidence in this timeline, and Toni had gone her entire life believing that her father's alcoholism had taken he and her mother away from her before their time?

What if?

That way lay madness, but it wasn't like she could close Pandora's Box, now that she'd opened it.

She spent long minutes just staring at the photo of her mother, much the same as she had done in person as a teen, when she'd demanded to see their bodies. But this time she could see the clear imprint of long fingers in the crushing bruise wrapped around her mother's throat. Her mom had fought back, refused to go down easily, and neither had her father.

And yet they'd died all the same.

There'd been no leads, but plenty of evidence had been left behind, including five gouges ripped deep into the metal running the length of the vehicle, as well as boot prints and the tire tracks of a lone motorcycle.

A stamp near the top of each page declared the case cold.

She felt anger spark in her, bright and hot, but tamped it down, letting her breath out in a long, shaking exhale.

"I am sorry, Miss," JARVIS said gently, at so low a volume that she barely would've heard him if not for the utter silence of her workshop.

"I know, J, I know," she replied quietly. "Nothing I can do about it right now, but you can bet that I'll be back to look at this. I will find who did this, but I just… it can wait." The words tasted bitter in her mouth.

From there she moved on to the rest of the Howling Commandos and the S.S.R. as a whole. The S.S.R. had followed the same course as it had before, almost exactly, and had become S.H.I.E.L.D. with the help of her father and Peggy both, yet again.

Their lives had tracked similarly from what she could tell—including Samantha Schofield's, she was so glad to see—except for one very large exception.

Peggy and Dugan had found their third, and held on tight. A man named Daniel Sousa, she learned. Toni felt her anger seep away at least a little—not fully, but she could sure as fuck compartmentalize; she was good at ignoring her problems—as her eyes roamed the personnel file in front of her.

All three were still alive, and she took a small amount of pleasure in the fact she'd be able to meet the man listed alongside Dugan and Peggy as Toni's godparents.

And then she could no longer avoid it.

She had looked through everything else except for that which explicitly cross-indexed with Steve and Bucky.

She took a deep breath, letting her eyes flutter shut as she tried to center herself, tried to ground herself in reality and sanity and wakefulness before diving into the grief that was doubtless waiting for her in the compressed file before her.

But before she could open her eyes and tap that blue ball of data open, JARVIS spoke up.

"There is something I believe you should hear first, Miss, before looking at anything else. If I may?" came JARVIS's gentle voice.

Toni was silent for a long, breathless moment before she answered, eyes still closed, hands lifting up to tap at her arc reactor in a helpless display of anxiety, "Yes."

The room was immediately filled with the sound of Steve's voice, tinny and scratchy in that way everything from the '40s was, yet Toni nearly sobbed when she heard it, all the same.

"I have somethin' to say, alright." Steve's Brooklyn was creeping in, but his words were still clipped and short. "She's our soulmate, and we want to find her. She was taken right before our very eyes, behind enemy lines, yes, so we know there's not a great chance, we get that, and I know you're just doing your job, but you don't need to point it out to me one more time. I heard you the first four times."

A strange voice cut in, and Toni recognized the cadence of a reporter immediately—no matter the decade, they all sounded the same. "Yes, but you just said that you and Sergeant Barnes here are… soulmates." They hesitated awkwardly before needlessly clarifying, "As in partners."

"And?" That was Bucky's voice, and Toni couldn't help but let out a little laugh—while ignoring how much of a sob it was—at how much he sounded like he just didn't give a shit.

The reporter was clearly off balance. "Yes, but—"

Steve sighed as he interrupted, "Look, we are beyond caring at this point. They're not going to blue ticket either of us, even if they dared touch me, which they don't, and I don't care if the rest of the world hears. That's sort of the whole point of us talking to you. We want to find her, or at least for her to know we're looking for her—Toni, why wouldn't we, doll? You mean so much to us. And—"

It was as if Steve had reached through the decades and punched Toni right in the gut. Her breath rushed out of her in a gasp, and white noise filled her ears. She knew she was missing more words, but she just… fuck, she needed to get ahold of herself. With great effort, Toni refocused again in time to catch the rest.

Bucky was speaking, at this point. "—we want the world to know. She taught us somethin' important before she went missing, and it was that there's a better, brighter future ahead of us all. That we jus' hurt ourselves more by hidin' our feelings, by hiding our love, and that we can change the world if we just try. Which we're obviously doing with the war, but these problems won't just go away once we've gotten ridda the bad guys of the day."

"We," Steve interrupted impatiently, "just want to get the word out. Please," he added after a pause. "Can you do that for us? We asked you because we respect your work, and believe you could be a strong ally, and we'll be happy to answer as many of your other questions as we can, just… please."

A pause. "What can I do to help?" The reporter sounded like they honestly meant it.

Sighing with relief, Bucky picked up where Steve had left off earlier. "Her name is Antonia, she's our soulmate, our third, and we want her back. We'll tear apart the whole world if we hafta—"

"Turn it off, J," Toni said, heart in her throat.

The memory of Bucky and Steve's voices rang in her ears, filling the silence of the workshop around her.

The emptiness in the back of her mind pressed on her more than ever. She had been doing a damn good job of ignoring it, ignoring the emotional pain of it, until she'd heard their voices. Then, it was like the floodgates had opened, and Toni was drowning in memories.

Or she would've been, if JARVIS hadn't started speaking, obviously recognizing her distress. Toni latched onto his voice, onto the safety of him even when the words he was speaking were painful in and of themselves—she just knew they would be, but she needed to hear, needed to know, needed to see for herself what had happened to them.

She focused on breathing, focused on listening, focused on not falling apart.

"In the wake of that interview, the news spread like wildfire across the world, Miss. You would be proud of them, I imagine, as they helped to spark a conversation that apparently, according to the discrepancy between your watch's drive and my database, wouldn't have come in earnest for another couple of decades. It was not their primary aim, no, though there would be no word of you in the wake of your disappearance, as you have already surmised, but it was an aim, it seems. As with everything to do with Captain America and the Howling Commandos, this too has been picked apart, but it is my conclusion that it brought nothing but positive change. The advancement of same-sex civil rights has been linked back to this moment as clearly as to Stonewall, and the national discourse on polyamorous rights appears to be far ahead of your past timeline."

A bittersweet smile unfurled across Toni's lips. "Good," she whispered. She was so proud of them, so very proud. They had taken her words to heart, taken their many conversations as hope for the future, and decided to take their status and use it for the betterment of all, even if their primary motivation had been to… "To find me. J, they tried to find me?" She still couldn't open her eyes, both afraid and hopeful that this was all a dream.

"Yes, Miss. They did. They all did, including your father, it appears."

Toni inhaled sharply, surprised, and then laughed. She laughed, and laughed, until her sides started to hurt and tears were trailing down her cheeks. She laughed until a hysterical edge started to creep in and she was sure she was about to burst into tears at a moment's notice.

Earth's greatest defender, at your service.

Classy.

But, well, it wasn't every day that you realized your father in all likelihood named you after yourself.

"Okay, okay," she panted, still laughing but letting it trail off, and ignoring the tears that were tracking down her cheeks with increasing frequency. "I'm good, I'm good," she repeated to herself, over and over like a mantra. As if just saying it often enough would make it true.

She wasn't okay. Fuck no.

There was no good reason for her to be okay. Everything was different, and for the first time in her life Toni found herself unsure of the future. She was off balance, didn't know where she stood, and had just been wrenched from what amounted to one reality to another. She had just been finding her stride in 1944, had just been getting somewhere with the boys, only to find her head spinning yet again. She had just found out who had sent her back, only for them to come by again, now that they were fucking bored with her life, apparently, and to decide just like that to whisk her away once more.

A large part of her hadn't wanted to leave, she was just now realizing.

She needed to know more, though, and she was only delaying the inevitable.

Toni just needed to pull the goddamn trigger.

"What happened? How did they die?" she asked into the sudden silence made all the more looming for lack of her hysterics.

"I'm afraid to say it appears to have occurred in a similar manner in both timelines, Miss," JARVIS said quietly, and Toni's shoulders slumped.

She hadn't been able to save them after all. Bucky had still been lost in the Alps, and Steve had still gone down with the Valkyrie.

She hadn't been able to save two of those who mattered most to her. Two she had vowed to save.

She'd failed.

JARVIS continued after a moment of letting her absorb the information, "The only differences are the dates, and minor discrepancies in the locations and events leading up to their deaths, which do not amount to much. I have available the audio of Captain Rogers—"

"No," Toni whispered. "No, I can't. Not yet."

"Very well, Miss. I will keep the rest set aside and compile more for you for another time, then. It will be on your private server."

"Thank you," she replied by rote, before descending into silence once more. JARVIS was giving her space, she knew that, but she couldn't even drum up the ability to be grateful.

She was numb, so numb, and she wasn't even sure how she ended up on the floor—she just had, from one moment to the next, or from one hour to the next, she wasn't even sure. She didn't know what time it was, didn't know how she felt or what to think or what to do. She wasn't even aware that she'd put her head between her knees until she felt wetness pooling against her legs from tears she hadn't even been aware she was crying.

Pulling back just enough so that she could breathe, Toni froze when she caught sight of a flash of black ink out of the corner of her eye. Slowly, heart thundering in her ears, Toni pulled her foot closer, and with a gasp she realized what it was.

A soulmark.

Another soulmark.

There, written around her ankle, was another soulmark.

July 12th, 2011. 11:02am. 60°58'22.1"N 41°13'59.4"W

Four days from now.

Toni blinked, and stared. And stared. And stared.

"JARVIS…?" she finally queried, voice strained but hopeful—so very hopeful. She tamped down the fear that had initially rushed through her, the anger at the thought that Fate would so cruelly grant her someone else, someone other than the men who were hers, telling herself that no, no, she recognized those numbers.

She had seen them over and over throughout her life. They were—

"The coordinates are just off the shore of Greenland, Miss; on the ice shelf," JARVIS immediately replied, as if knowing exactly what she'd been asking.

"Is that…?" she trailed off, not quite able to say it.

"It matches the approximate location of Captain Rogers' last broadcast," he confirmed.

She gulped down the emotions that were trying to escape her throat and through the tears which had started to pour down her cheeks, but knew she was fighting a losing battle. "J… I think you should get me Pepper and Rhodey now. Please." A pause. "And start manufacturing the cold weather armor—Mark VIII, right?"

"IX in this timeline, Miss."

"Right," she replied softly. "That."

Note: The MCU timeline is wonky enough already without me screwing with it, so bear with me if you note anything out of place, especially between my first chapter and the following. There are a few things I'm changing to fit with the Collider Dot Com MCU timeline, as it looks more accurate than anything else I've seen. To that end, I'm changing the time Toni originally goes back from 2009 to 2011 instead. Thank you for your patience with me!