Sorry about this one guys. I just love my cliffhangers. I hoped you're enjoying the story, leave a review telling me what you think happens next! Also, see if you can find what great 90s movie I reference in this chapter.
"Are you sure about this?" Bucky held the flashlight towards the hieroglyphs Roddy was examining.
"Yes." Roddy said confidently. "Whatever is happening happened because of something we did in this tomb. Which means I missed something the first time we were down here."
"Two years from now. When you and I and Steve and your sister and some guy named Sam were here the first time, in the future." Bucky crinkled his eyebrows.
"Thats, ya. Ya I don't know what else to tell you." Roddy paused for a moment to gauge Bucky's reaction. They had been over this multiple times since sneaking out of Romania, Bucky seemed to need constant reminders.
"And I thought Hydra fucked up my brain." Bucky snorted at his own morbid joke. "Can you see what you missed?"
Roddy turned back to his work. "Maybe, it's an obscure dialect but I'm seeing something about a curse."
Roddy started to read the inscription out loud to the best of his ability. The ancient language clumsily rolled off his tongue and he wondered what the consequences of a mispronunciation would be. He paused when he came to the last symbol, for some reason he couldn't pin down exactly what it stood for even though it was symbol he'd seen countless times. A brain fart, that's what Sean had called these moments. The symbol was some kind of bird, a stork. "Aemeniphus!"
The word clicked in his brain at the same time he and Bucky were blinded by a white light. Rather than look away, something told Roddy he needed to be looking towards the light. As he did, a figure started to emerge. A small woman with dark skin and dark hair approached them dressed in a white robe. She started to speak and Roddy realized she was speaking the dialect he had just been reading. Next to him, Bucky swore and reached for the handgun hidden underneath his shirt. The weapon was thrown out of his hands and he was pinned to the wall behind him by some unseen force.
It dawned on Roddy exactly who the woman was, as impossible as it seemed. "Nefertiti?"
I heard them first. The Howling Commandos were not quiet when they invaded the SSR headquarters in London where Peggy Carter had convinced her superiors to let me stay. I was sitting with one of the secretaries learning how to use morse code machine she worked on when we both were interrupted by the distinctive shouts of Dugan and Dernier. My eyes immediately darted to the group of men making their way through the headquarters.
Juniper, Morita, Falsworth, Jones, Dernier, Sawyer, Pinkerton, and Dugan. I mentally ticked off the Commandos as if I was doing a head count on a field trip. Missing? Barnes and Rogers. Peggy ordered the men to clean up for a debriefing before making her way over to me. In our brief couple of days together the agent and I had become, well not friends, but allies of some kind. I liked to think that she saw a kindred spirit in me, a woman doing things women weren't supposed to be doing in this time. Initially, things had been rocky. Peggy had handcuffed me almost as soon as we were on board Howard Stark's plane towards London. She interrogated me, not falling for Steve's cover story for one second. It was only the reassurance that Captain America trusted me - and wasn't as dumb as he liked to pretend - that eventually lead to her accepting my presence.
"Where are the Captain and Bucky?" I asked earnestly, terrified of the answer.
"Sergeant Barnes -" Peggy began slowly then composed herself. "I've just been talking to Steve, he's in what was left of that pub across the street."
Carter didn't say if that meant I should go to him, but she didn't say not to. I found Steve sitting alone wearing his dress uniform with multiple empty glasses in front of him. "I bet you'd give just about anything for some of that Asgardian mead you told me about."
Steve let out a puff of air at my comment and pulled back the chair next to him. The pub had been destroyed in the blitz, but members of the SSR had continued to use it as a kind of informal meeting up point. I sat next to Steve and put my hand on his forearm. "So you weren't able to stop him?"
"I did actually." Steve's voice sounded hollow and his eyes were becoming bloodshot. "I stopped him from getting separated from me, which stopped the side of the freight car coming off. But when we got towards the end, just when I though I had saved him-"
His voice caught and Steve leaned over with his face in his hands. I leaned towards him and rubbed his back, trying to comfort him the best I could while he looked more broken than ever.
"I had to watch him fall again." He said quietly.
"But you were able to change something." I took his larger hands in mine. "Maybe now you can go find him, you can still save him from Hydra."
"I can't, Lucy." Steve's tired voice turned angry. "I have to lead the attack against Red Skull's base and get him to lose the tesseract and - Jesus I have to live all of this all over again!"
I was about to respond but a blinding light hit both of us. Steve immediately had the table thrown on its side, sending the glasses crashing to floor. He instinctively covered me with his body and his shield.
"Guy, guys, it's ok."
Steve slowly unfurled his body from mine. We both peered over the top of the table incredulously looking at my brother standing in a bombed out pub. He wasn't alone either, there was a woman with him, the same one I had seen at the coffee shop in DC.
"Roddy, what? How?" I couldn't even finish a sentence as I stood up and brushed the debris off of my wool skirt.
"I'll explain later." The urgency in my brother's voice was apparent. "C'mon, let's go home."
"You can take us back?" Steve was scowling at the situation.
"Yes." Roddy said exasperatedly. "I've already got Bucky and Sam, you guys were the furthest away. Let's. Go."
The air around us started to feel heavy, like we were somehow being compressed. The woman next to Roddy said something in a language I didn't recognize.
"Just a minute." I pulled Steve by his bicep slightly away from my brother.
"Lucy! We have to go!" Roddy yelled over, reaching his hand out to me.
"Just give me a goddam minute Rodger!" I yelled back and turned to Steve.
"Lucy, what are you-" Steve started to ask me a question.
"Stay." I told him. "Do what you have to with the Red Skull, don't crash that damn plane, and go find Bucky. Then marry Peggy and have a bunch of kids and just live the life you were supposed to have."
"Lucy..." Steve looked devastated as he said my name. "I can't."
"You can." I nodded my head and smiled through my tears. "You have a second chance, take it."
"And when aliens invade New York?" Steve held my gaze. "When the world needs Captain America?"
"Someone else will stand up. You've done enough, just stay here for yourself."
I could hear Roddy yelling my name and was vaguely aware of him running towards me as the air continued to press in on us. My eyes never left Steve's though. This was the right choice for him. Love sometimes meant letting go, right?
