Alice spent another ten minutes in the library. She was aware that there were swivelling, watching cameras in here too, and her instincts itched at the stillness.
She returned to her computer, and read as much as she could bear. She tried to make more headway into Steve's Wikipedia article before giving up: it was impossibly long, and she didn't understand half of it. Plus, each new piece of information made her head pound and her heart ache. So she searched for information on each of her loved ones in turn.
Tom: gone. Alice began to cry where she sat, and read enough on his Wikipedia article to make her heart crack and swell with pride.
Bucky: not gone. This sent her into another fit of hyperventilation. His article was horrifying, each new detail making nausea rise in her gut. Bucky and Steve, both fallen just weeks after she went missing. And then… HYDRA. Dead, not dead, dead. They'd done despicable things.
Alice couldn't make herself keep reading, so she scrolled down to the bottom and saw that he was… alive. Safe.
I don't even know if I can believe anything I'm reading. She felt utterly overwhelmed: her body ached, her mind reeled, and her heart felt like fragments of shattered glass in her chest, cutting into her with each movement. She couldn't process information, couldn't think.
So she looked up Peggy quickly (another blow to her heart like a boot stomping on the glass fragments), Otto (no surprises, just a twist of her guts at the sight of his photograph), and then she was done. Her only instinct was to get out.
Alice shut everything down and ran. She needed distance and solitude. Even in her overwhelmed state, however, a thought lodged itself in her mind: maybe I'm not alone after all.
Four hours later, when the sun had set, a handful of Avengers arrived at New York Grand Central Library. The library was still open, though fairly quiet, so they didn't cause too much of a stir when they marched up the steps and approached the library desk.
They were lucky they'd gotten the lead, really. Since news of Alice going on the run had hit the public, they'd had an influx of called-in leads, including one from a slightly skeptical librarian. F.R.I.D.A.Y. had reviewed the library footage, and concluded that there was a 65% chance that the woman on the footage was Alice - it was hard to tell, since no angle ever seemed to catch the woman's face and her hair was hidden in a beanie, so F.R.I.D.A.Y. was going off approximate height and body type.
They'd been following up other leads at the time, but when F.R.I.D.A.Y. brought the footage to their attention and had them watch it… Steve knew. He couldn't see her face, but he was 100% certain that the woman casually striding into the library was Alice. The others hadn't been totally convinced by his certainty, but agreed to follow it up.
As Steve, Bucky, Sam, Nat, Tony and Wanda approached the librarian's desk, each of them looking dead on their feet, the two librarians manning the desk did double takes.
"Which one of you is Ms Ellington?" asked Sam politely, though his smile was rather strained. They'd been running all over the city.
The librarian on the right raised her hand, eyes wide. "Is this about that report we called in?" she asked. She glanced at the other librarian, as if for help. "But we… I mean I said I wasn't sure, really, and it seems kind of farfetched-"
"You called about this woman, correct?" Tony interrupted, holding up his phone to show them the library CCTV footage from a few hours ago. A woman in a light jacket, scarf, and beanie walked up to the librarian's desk, had a short conversation, then went to sit at a computer.
The librarian leaned forward. "Yeah, that's her. Really, I only called in to cover our bases, she sort of matched the description and she left pretty quickly but I wouldn't say I recognized her-"
"It's her," Steve said, and both librarians stared at him.
Sam cleared his throat. "Anyway, did any behaviour stand out to you? How did she seem?"
"Fine," Ms Ellington said. "Really the only thing that stuck out to me was how fast she ran out of here, but other than that she was… calm. Normal."
"As per her training," Natasha muttered under her breath, and Steve repressed the urge to fidget.
"I mean, really?" said the other librarian, looking around at them all. "Alice Moser? in the library?"
"Yeah," added the other one. "I mean, she… she asked to use the internet! She used the computer! How did she-"
"Right," Tony cut in. "Which computer did she use?" He checked the footage still playing out on her screen - Alice was in the far corner of the footage, her back to the camera. He looked up and pointed. "That one?"
"That's right, 6D."
Bucky fidgeted. "Any way to know what she looked up?"
"Yeah, give me a sec," Tony said. He cleared the CCTV footage from his phone and then began tapping away, working so fast that Steve couldn't make sense of it. "Just have to isolate the IP address..."
While Tony leaned on the librarian's desk and worked on his phone, Sam rolled his eyes, strode over to the computer, opened the browser and hit history.
"Got it," he called, and Tony looked crestfallen. Sam's eyebrows rose. "Oh boy."
They all hurried over, leaving the stunned librarians behind, and crowded around the computer. For a few moments they just stood in silence, reading the record of google searches and wikipedia pages that had been visited four hours ago.
"So it was definitely her. And she must know you're alive, then," Sam said in a soft, almost awed voice.
"And me!" Bucky exclaimed, pointing a metal finger at the screen. "Look, she went on my Wikipedia page."
"This is weird," Wanda muttered.
Steve stared at the first few searches. Where am I? When am I? Who won the war? A few minutes later: Who is Alice Moser?
The other musicians had been confused, but they knew themselves. Steve's fingers clenched on the back of the chair. What's going on in your head, Alice?
As he stared silently at the screen, the others began wondering aloud at the content of Alice's search history.
"Where would she go from here?" Natasha asked.
"She'd try to find Steve," Bucky said.
Sam hummed. "Keep in mind, this has to be a lot of information for her to absorb," he said reasonably. "From the footage it looks like she left in a hurry. We don't know what she's thinking, or what she believes. What's her instinct, when she's panicked?"
Everyone looked to Steve. He didn't take his eyes off the screen. He saw Tom's Wikipedia page on the list. "She… she closes off. She'd get all the facts then bide her time, figure out the best move. She's patient. She doesn't like making rash decisions."
"And I never know what she'll end up doing," Bucky added with a hint of annoyance.
Natasha sighed and ran a hand through her hair. "Then… unless we get another lead…" she looked up, out to the doors of the library and the darkened streets beyond. "I think the ball's in Alice's court."
Alice found a safehouse in Brooklyn and went to ground. She'd scoped around for a few hours until she found an apartment with its lights off, its letterbox stuffed full of letters, and dust on the doorhandle. She broke in through a back window and after quickly checking out the place (there was no CCTV, and she was pretty sure the family had gone on holiday), she collapsed onto the sofa and fell asleep, utterly exhausted.
She woke up the next morning somehow in even more pain than the day before: a nasty black and blue bruise had bloomed on the side of her chest, and she was forced to limp around on her wounded knee. Not that she went very far - she left the house only to steal food from the local outdoor market. For the most part she sat in her safe house with the lights off, and thought.
She still could not wrap her mind around the how and why, but she knew that she had suffered an enormous loss. In the safety of darkness she grieved for Tom, and Otto, and Peggy, and all the others she had lost through circumstance or time. She cried over Steve and Bucky too - she wasn't really sure that she believed what she'd read yesterday. It was too heartrending and yet too good to be true at the same time.
Alice realized that she'd found herself in a place of deep trauma; worse than when she'd been near catatonic in Vienna after the death of her parents, worse than when she'd had to cut ties with Steve, Bucky, and Tom in Germany, worse even than when she'd been running for her life in Berlin after finding Otto's broken and lifeless body. So she didn't make a plan, and didn't force herself to think about what came next. She sat eating stolen bread and sipping from a comfortingly familiar glass bottle of Coke, allowing herself to heal and process.
Steve and the others looked everywhere they could think of: Brooklyn Bridge Park, Alice's old apartment building (though it had been refurbished, and Tom's family had sold the tailor shop years ago), both of their old schools, the library, the alleyways they'd haunted as kids, the docks. They found no sign of her, and though more and more leads kept pouring in, they were getting less plausible. They'd had no realistic sighting of her since Grand Central Library.
Steve got recognized less nowadays, thanks to the beard and the civilian clothes, but when people recognized him on his search they looked at him with such pity that it made his skin crawl. The whole world knew that Alice was missing, again, and they were all looking to him to find her. Steve didn't mind that so much since he was going to find her, but he couldn't stand the pitying, expectant looks.
But despite his search, the world had begun to cautiously celebrate. Most of the information about Bragi had come out, and though people were still shocked and adjusting to the knowledge that an extraterrestrial being had been abducting musicians for centuries, the sudden return of the eclectic bunch was exciting: like a hidden time capsule. The historical community was over the moon.
The musicians themselves (the off-worlders had gone with the Guardians, Thor, and Carol yesterday to be resituated) had been set up with accommodation in Wakanda for now under the protection of the Avengers, with a rotation of doctors, historians, linguists, therapists, and agents. Steve felt for them. He'd been in almost exactly their position. But he'd only traveled seventy years - many of the musicians had come from much more distant eras. Many of them were forced to learn a new language to express themselves.
But Steve didn't really spare more than a few thoughts for them. Out of forty three musicians they'd rescued from Bragi, there was only one who consumed his every waking moment.
Bucky stuck by his side, silent and steady, his face determined. Sam, too, though he was usually the one to convince them to stop to eat and sleep.
Steve didn't sleep.
Blog post by Amaya Reyes, December 2 2023:
ALICE, COME HOME
We've all heard the news by now: Alice Moser is not only alive, but she is in New York City. She appeared in Times Square along with forty two other musicians, who we've learned were abducted by a rogue Asgardian over the course of our history.
Yes, I've received an influx of news and questions about this, but this isn't about me.
Alice Moser is alive and out there somewhere. The Avengers are looking for her.
Put yourself in Alice's shoes for a moment, if you can: you wake up nearly eighty years from now, in an unrecognizable future. You've just been plucked out of one of the most dangerous times and places in history. You're confused, you're grieving: you think that everyone you love and everyone who loves you is dead.
But for Alice, that isn't completely true. Not only does she have surviving family and friends, but she needs to know that the world is safe for her now. The last thing she knew, we were in the middle of one of the bloodiest wars of human history. I have studied Alice for years, and I know she has the skills to stay hidden, even in an unfamiliar place. She has survival instincts rarely seen in most people. If I had to guess, I'd say that she's hiding out, biding her time, trying to understand.
So I'm asking you now to put out the word: Steve Rogers is alive. Bucky Barnes is alive. The war is over.
Alice, wherever you are - you can come home.
The next day, Alice felt well enough to emerge from her safehouse again. She was determined to avoid the places she was familiar with, too afraid to see how much they had changed. She had returned once before in 1942, six years after leaving, and she'd been startled then at how much everything had changed. She wasn't sure what changes eighty years would bring.
She went to a different store to steal food, and forced herself to sit in the sunshine awhile before scurrying back to her hidey hole. She sat on a bench a couple of blocks down from her apartment building, devouring a packaged sandwich she'd stolen, watching a teenaged baseball team practice in the park across the road. She kept her hat (a cap she'd found in a lost and found basket) tipped low over her face.
As she watched the teenage boys toss baseballs back and forth, and a fresh breeze blew down the street, Alice drew in a long breath. Her heart raced wherever she confronted her thoughts head-on, but she forced herself to focus for a moment.
Life here is… peaceful, she thought. Kids played in the park, families walked down the street, the sun shone. She swallowed her mouthful. Maybe I should think about reaching out. To who, she wasn't sure. The police? A government building? She wasn't sure if she ought to be as terrified as she felt. It was hard to switch off the instincts that urged her to run, hide.
And if Steve really is alive… Alice's heart fluttered almost painfully, and she allowed her thoughts to skid away from that particular idea. She couldn't allow herself to believe what she'd read, because if it wasn't true… she wasn't sure her heart could take it. Still, there were only a handful of people who knew that she and Steve had gotten married, and for it to now be public knowledge...
She contemplated her next actions as she strode back to her safe house, her jacket bulky with all the stolen food she'd stuffed inside it.
She was almost back to the apartment building when she saw her name, and stopped in her tracks.
In the second story window of a block of apartments across the road, someone had hung up a large cardboard sign.
ALICE, COME HOME, it read. Alice blinked at the block letters for a while, then hurried on. But as if seeing the sign had unlocked some new awareness, she saw the words twice more before she got back. One of the signs had a drawing of Steve's shield under it. Alice's heart raced. She didn't know what this meant, or if it was even for her. She still didn't really believe that Steve was alive. Could it be that this was all some elaborate trick?
Perhaps I hit my head in the fall, and this is all a hallucination.
Just as Alice arrived back to her apartment, her skin prickling as if there were a thousand eyes on her, she spotted a newspaper in a trash can on the pavement. Her face looked back at her from the front page.
Wide eyed, Alice shoved open the door and fled inside.
Steve sat at his dining room table, his knee bouncing as he ate a sandwich he couldn't taste. Sam, Bucky, and Nat sat at the other chairs, working as they ate. Sam had forced them into another break for food and they'd gone back to Steve's place in Brooklyn, since it was closest.
The mood in Steve's apartment was quiet and tired. It had been two days since Alice appeared in Times Square.
Bucky sat in the seat beside Steve, his sandwich held aloft in his metal hand and his phone in the other hand, as he looked over a map of New York City. On the other side of the table Nat had tilted her phone away from Steve, so he knew she was probably checking morgue and emergency room reports, or following up on her theory that Alice might have left the city. Sam watched Steve with a concerned furrow in his brow.
Steve, meanwhile, was contemplating making an appearance on TV. It would get his face out there and hopefully Alice would see it. But he wasn't sure if it would work: he'd been paranoid for almost a week after he woke up in the future, suspicious that it was all a HYDRA trick. He felt grateful for Amaya's Alice, Come Home movement, which had swept across the city, but he wasn't sure that would work either. Where was home, for Alice?
He chewed his sandwich. They had 24/7 coverage set up around Alice's old apartment building, as well as Steve's old building, with F.R.I.D.A.Y. analyzing each person who so much as walked past.
Steve scratched his beard, contemplating a shower before they set off again, and gazed out the window. For a moment he just stared blankly, but then he noticed a faint haze in the distance. He rubbed his eyes. But then he realized that the faint haze was darkening into a plume of smoke. He was pretty sure it was coming from Queens.
"Guys…" he said, rising out of his chair, but at the same moment all of their phones started ringing with F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s alert call. Sam was first to hit the green active button on his screen, which normally led to a debrief from the AI, but instead Tony picked up:
"- got multiple attacks in the city!" Tony's tense, slightly crackly voice rang out from Sam's phone.
"What?" Sam asked, scrambling to his feet.
"It's the Infinity Cult, we've got four - no, five separate attacks across New York. I'm looking at a ship full of aliens in Midtown but there's also reports from Queens, the Bronx, Jersey, and, yep, just had another one in from Brooklyn. They must be coordinating their attacks, looks like they're going after civilians and infrastructure."
"They must know all the Avengers are in NYC," Nat said as her fingers flew across her phone. "They've turned their focus to us, and they're trying to draw us out."
"Suit up," Tony urged, and Steve realized that the faint rushing noise in the background of the call was wind shear - he was in the Iron Man armor already. "Even if this is some kind of trap, we've got to get out there. Wanda and the kid are in Queens already, Bruce and Hope are booking it to the Bronx, Clint's going with Strange to Jersey, and I'm tackling Midtown with Vision. We're short staffed with the rest of those assholes off in space, so please tell me you guys are in Brooklyn."
"We are," said Nat as she rose out of her chair and went to the duffle bag she'd brought with her. "I just sent an order to deploy my agents, so they can provide backup wherever needed."
"Alright, I gotta" - a tinny explosion boomed through Sam's phone speakers - "I gotta go!"
What had been a relatively calm meal turned into scrambling, hunting for uniforms and tugging them on in Steve's dining room. Steve strode to his hallway closet, where his uniform lay packed away in a box with Mjolnir on top of it, but Natasha held out a hand.
"You're retired, Steve. You don't have to be a part of this, I know you want to get back on the search."
In the corner, Bucky loaded his rifle.
Steve met Nat's surprisingly calm green eyes. "No way I'm letting you guys head into a fight with no backup. Besides, you and I both know that this must be the Infinity Cult's big attack, the one you've been waiting for - we put a stop to this and end them for good, then we can get back to the search in peace."
Natasha hesitated a moment, reading his gaze, before she gave him a sharp nod and turned to zip up the back of her uniform.
Steve drew in a steadying breath, then headed for his closet.
Alice was sitting in the darkness of the apartment, her hands covering her face, when she heard a blast outside. She flinched, thinking of bombs and air raids, and when her initial instinct to flee ebbed she ran to open the window and look up and down the street.
A black pillar of smoke rose out of Brooklyn Heights. Alice's brow furrowed, and a moment later she saw some kind of metallic vehicle whizzing through the air, raining down blasts of white light on the sandstone buildings blocks away. She could just make out the shape of some kind of being piloting the vehicle. The aircraft swerved, roaring in the direction of Alice's building, and she heard screams as the teenage baseball team up the road scattered and ran for cover. The glowing projectiles lobbed down from the aircraft hit the ground with bone-shaking explosions, and in the distance the distinctive rattle of gunfire rang out.
Alice's mind spun for a moment as she watched devastation unfurl around her, before her fingers clenched on the windowsill and a calmness fell over her features.
This wasn't a situation that required spies, or singers. This was a situation that called for soldiers.
The Infinity Cult attack team in Brooklyn had descended on the built-up Borough Hall area, blasting everything in sight with photon cannons that Steve was pretty sure came from the Kree empire, though he was hardly an expert. The team themselves were a mix of creatures from across the galaxy: three dozen aliens, some humanoid, some completely, well, alien. As Steve and the others sprinted up the street toward them, he spotted a short alien with gravelly orange skin wielding a scythe, an identical pair of pale-skinned creatures that looked a bit like overlarge monkeys, and a group of aliens marching like a Roman phalanx, mostly humanoid apart from the hard ridges on their cheekbones and their glowing eyes.
They had two aircraft: a large speeder that soared over Brooklyn, raining down explosives, and a smaller drone-like craft that appeared to target body heat.
The rampaging cultists snarled when Steve and the others showed up, and screamed at them for being fate-meddlers and traitors. The good thing was that their appearance stopped the cultists from shooting at everything and anyone else. The bad news was that all their firepower was suddenly focused on the Avengers.
Steve slipped into the fight as if he'd never left it. The moment the cultists' attention turned to him and his team he hurled Mjolnir, sending the phalanx scattering, then without breaking his stride ran forward to drive his boot into the knee of a huge metallic-looking alien, who roared and swung a fist down at Steve. He rolled, keeping up his momentum, and kicked the creature's other knee.
Civilians screamed and took off running, using the sudden shift in focus to get clear. Steve and the others didn't have enough people to manage the civilian evacuation - they barely had enough people to manage the fight, four against almost forty was pushing it - so Steve hoped local law enforcement had had training for alien invasions. Smoke poured onto the street from the damage the Infinity Cult sect had already done, obscuring visibility and making Steve's throat itch. The aliens didn't seem bothered. Steve could barely hear his own fast breaths over the ricocheting explosions and scorching firepower ripping through the air, and the roars of the aliens.
A tall, grey skinned alien that reminded Steve of Ebony Maw snared Natasha in one long arm and used the other hand to flick the safety off some kind of grenade. "Die with me, and seal the balance!" he shrieked in an awful voice.
Steve vaulted over a shattered bollard and dove at the pair of them, yanking Natasha free and sending them tumbling across the pavement. Steve's stomach lurched as the grenade-like device let out a high-pitched beeping, much too close -
Sam dropped down from the sky, shield raised, just as the alien's explosive went off with a blinding flash. Steve felt the heat and noise of it wash over him, but when he squinted one eye open he saw from the scorch marks across Sam's shield that he'd protected them from the worst of it. The tall grey alien lay blackened and lifeless on the pavement.
"Scatter!" Natasha cried, rolling to her feet. "We're too much of a target!"
"Thanks Sam," Steve panted as he pushed upright and followed Natasha's instructions.
Moments later the shield whirled past Steve and he grabbed it on instinct, using it to batter one of the pale monkey-like creatures aside before flinging it up when he felt Sam's shadow fall over him. Steve and Sam traded off the shield, tossing it from the sky to the street, shearing through alien limbs and deflecting blasts.
They had to keep moving, since the cultists had made their way into the buildings surrounding the streets, using the cover to fire down at the small group of Avengers. They were in a bad spot - outnumbered and surrounded with the element of surprise against them. Steve worked with Mjolnir to chip away the cultists' advantage, hurling it at them and occasionally (when he felt it was safe - visibility was awful) bringing down bolts of lightning.
From the comms, Steve couldn't really tell how the other battles were going. He heard shouts and grunts over the shared line, the occasional called-out instruction and warning, but they were all too involved to give much of an update. Sirens blared all around them as the city and its emergency services reeled, trying to keep up. The Infinity Cult had unleashed all their forces to divide and conquer the Avengers. And it was kind of working. They hadn't been prepared for an attack.
A massive metal fist materialised out of the smoke and smashed Steve in the face, laying him flat on his back with a grunt. He felt blood trickle out from under the edge of his cowl. The lumbering, metallic alien let out a jeering laugh. Steve opened his palm, and three seconds later Mjolnir flew into his hand. The metallic alien's eyes widened a moment before Steve hurled the hammer at his chest, sending him flying back. The ground shuddered with the violence of another explosion.
"Damn," Natasha cursed on comms. "Sam, you have to try to pin down that speeder - see if you can lure it to my location, I've stolen one of their photon cannons."
"Working on it. Just - one - second!"
Steve heard a metallic whir and spun to catch the shield as it ricocheted out of the sky, using his momentum to slam the Vibranium disc into the head of a lavender-skinned alien with pointed ears. He jumped, spun, and threw the shield at another group of cultists which had coalesced. But one of them looked up as he threw and fired a blast at the shield, sending it skittering away down a sidestreet. Sam was too distracted in the air to magnetically recall it, and Steve had another weapon closer at hand. Mjolnir zipped back into his grip.
The smoke clogged thick in the air now, like early morning fog. Steve couldn't see further than ten feet. He heard footsteps and spun to see Bucky dart past with his gun raised, blood trickling from his lip.
Steve turned just in time to duck another devastating punch as the metallic alien lurched once more out of the smoke toward him. He swung Mjolnir and it cracked through the huge creature's stone helmet, finally dropping him like a sack of bricks. Three more cultists swarmed forward. Steve turned, managing his space, and sensed another figure approaching out of the corner of his eye, moving surely and purposefully through the smoke. He held up his bare arm to fend off one of the oncoming cultists, wincing as their glowing club cracked against his arm and jarred his whole body, at the same time swivelling to get eyes on the approaching figure. He smashed the first cultist with Mjolnir, sent the second flying with a kick to the chest, crumpled the third with a headbutt, turned - and froze where he stood.
Alice appeared out of the smoke like a vision. She held an aluminum baseball bat that glinted in the firelight, and the Vibranium shield was mounted on her left forearm. She wore civilian clothing: jeans, a hooded jacket, and sneakers. Her hair fell in wisps around her face, framing her ice-cold eyes.
Black smoke swirled around Steve and photon blasts went scorching by his head, but he couldn't move a muscle.
The spell broke when Alice's eyes tracked over to him, and without a change in her expression she cocked her arm and hurled the shield toward him. He fumbled it, having to glance down to keep it from clattering to the ground, and when he looked up again Alice had gripped her baseball bat in two hands, wound up, and smashed it into the head of one of the Xandarian cultists. The cultist's scarlet eyes rolled up in his head before he sagged to the ground, semi-conscious.
"Moser is on the field!" Natasha called into the comms, and having someone else confirm what he was seeing spurred Steve into action.
He launched back into the fight, moving faster than ever before: striking, weaving, disabling, fighting his way toward Alice. Mjolnir flickered around him, trailing sparks. He, Bucky, and Natasha coalesced around Alice, slamming cultists away from her as Sam offered cover from the skies.
Alice didn't throw herself headlong into the fight. She used the smoke to keep herself hidden, edging around the fighting before she darted in, whirling with her baseball bat when the cultists least expected it, then dodging away again. If she was surprised to see Steve, Bucky, and the others there, she did not show it on her face.
Her main focus seemed to be the civilians. The third time she approached a cultist only to have them blasted away by gunfire or Mjolnir before she got close, she changed tactics, hunting out the civilians hiding under cars and in building eaves and directing them down the side street she'd emerged from, shouting instructions at them. The baseball bat never left her hand.
Steve was nearly twice impaled by one of the cultist's scythes, because he'd completely lost his focus. Almost the entirety of his attention was fixed on Alice: where she was, who she was fighting, what she was doing. He knew the others had focused on her too - Sam rocketed back and forth overhead, Bucky had found a vantage point on top of a truck and was picking off anything that got within ten feet of her, and Natasha made a bright, noisy distraction at the other end of the street as she brought down the alien speeder in a flaming wreck. Together they dispatched the cultists with brutal efficiency. Questions poured in over the comms from the others about Natasha's announcement that Alice had appeared, but none of them had time to answer.
The rest of the fight seemed to take hours. Sweat rolled down the back of Steve's neck and terror prickled across his skin, compounded by a sense that he was totally out of control. But in truth, the battle only lasted probably another minute and a half.
The last three cultists in a last ditch effort dove for their weapons stash, reaching for the highest-grade explosives. Steve wound up Mjolnir like he'd seen Thor do and sent it flying one last time, knocking the cultists away from the box. Natasha dropped down and jammed her Widows Bites into one of their necks, and Sam swooped over and dispatched the other two with a couple of well-placed shots.
And then stillness. Sirens wailed around them and smoke still billowed, but the bodies of the Infinity Cult aliens were still on the ground, and no more firepower rent the air.
"We're clear," Nat panted, setting her hands on her knees.
Steve whirled. He'd lost track of Alice in the final few seconds of the fight, and for a terrified second he thought she'd run again.
But then the smoke eddied in the breeze and there she stood: bat in hand, her chest heaving as she looked around at the carnage. And then her eyes fell on him.
They stood thirty yards apart, staring at each other.
The world seemed to go quiet. Steve knew ambulances and fire trucks and police cars were screaming through the city and that the other fights were still wrapping up over the comms, but he didn't hear any of it. He only stared at Alice, watching her. It felt unreal and impossible for her to just be standing there after she'd been gone so long; color in her cheeks and her green eyes darting over his face.
Finally, Alice spoke:
"It's really you, Steve?" Her voice was hopeful, but also wary.
Steve nearly broke his cowl with how fast he tore it off his head. He stared back at her with mussed hair and wide eyes. "It's me." His mouth opened and closed. "Alice-"
And then they were moving, each of them breaking into a run toward each other and their feet pounding on the ground until they collided - Steve swept Alice right off her feet, his arms wrapped around her and his face pressed against hers. Alice's arms wound around him, first gripping tight, then sliding up, up, until she cupped his face with both hands and leaned back a little to stare at him. Steve held her tight, trying to convince himself she was real. He stared at her, at the strands of fine pale hair stuck to her sweaty forehead, her wide green eyes, the sweep of her cheekbones and the way her mouth opened and closed. Her palms were warm on his skin.
"I can hardly believe it," she murmured.
"It's me, it's me," he repeated in a thunderstruck tone, hardly sure what he was saying, but then her eyes glinted and she swooped in to cut him off with a kiss.
Steve had been turning on the spot, slowing the momentum of their crash into one another, but when her lips pressed against his he finally stilled, holding her probably too tight to be comfortable as his eyes closed and he lost himself wholly to the kiss. Alice's fingers curled around the edges of his bearded jaw and to the back of his head, holding him close.
Steve kissed her clumsily at first, overwhelmed, before the familiar breathless slide of her lips had him pressing closer, more urgently, trying to pour every ounce of love and grief and relief into the kiss where he was sure words would fail him. He felt Alice's heart thundering under his palms and was sure his lungs were about to give out, reminding him of their very first kiss. I'd kiss you if you had shark's teeth.
The memory tugged at his heart and he slowed the intensity, sliding one hand up Alice's back and slowly, slowly pulling away. He opened his eyes to see her staring at him in disbelief, tears in her eyes. Her breath fanned over his lips.
"Steve," she whispered, his name barely audible on her lips. Her feet were yet to touch the ground.
"I know," he murmured back. "Alice." He treasured her name, treasured the way the sound of it in his voice made her eyes gleam.
"Hey, troublemaker," came a shaky voice from a few feet away. Alice's eyes widened and she whirled, Steve setting her down and trying to control his breathing.
Bucky stood a few feet away with his gun in one hand, watching the pair of them with bright eyes. Alice squeezed Steve's wrist and then darted forward to throw her arms around the metal-armed soldier.
"Bucky," she said croakily, and Steve realized that she was shaking. Bucky dropped his gun and wrapped his arms around Alice, his eyes squeezed shut.
"It's good to have you back, Al," he said quietly.
Steve stood dumbly a few feet away, still staring. He was afraid that if he closed his eyes even to blink, Alice would vanish again. Moments later Alice and Bucky broke apart and her eyes were back on him again, just as wide and disbelieving as before. Steve knew he looked different - the beard wasn't half of it, there was the new uniform and the haircut and the years.
Steve opened and closed his mouth a few times, overwhelmed, and then let out a shaky laugh that surprised him. Alice's mouth tugged up in a smile, too, and she gravitated towards him. They reached out and fumbled for each other's hands, gripping tight. Steve laughed again, staring at her, and then realized that tears had begun to spill down his cheeks.
Alice's smile became small and sad, and she reached up to cup his face with one hand, swiping her thumb over the tears. Steve couldn't speak, couldn't move, could only stand there staring down at the love of his life as she pressed her warm hand to his face, wiping away his tears.
"I hate to break up the moment," Bucky said, still sounding wrecked. "But we should get out of public."
Steve looked up, vision blurry, to see emergency services and civilians encroaching back onto the former battlefield, half of them wielding cellphones. Right. Steve had completely forgotten where they were.
Sam dropped down to the road with a whine of engines, beaming from ear to ear as his wings folded up into his wing pack. Alice stared at him. "You guys go, Nat called in a car two streets over - we'll clear up here."
Steve met Sam's eyes, double checking - and Sam just gave him a nod, still grinning.
Steve glanced down and met Alice's eyes. "Coming?" he asked softly.
"With you?" Her shaky expression turned into a smile, and she took his hand. "Anywhere."
!
Reviews
Maryana (from Chapter 1): Yay you went back and found it all! I have indeed been planning this all from the beginning so it's very gratifying to share all the secrets with you guys :) I do like the 'mad connoisseur' title though ;)
Guest: Here's your reunion, hope you liked it! And thank you for your wonderful words about last chapter - Alice is almost too good at running and hiding haha, she caused a few problems for the Avengers. And hopefully this chapter answered some of your questions about her finding out about Tom/Bucky. Enjoy the reread, let me know if you spot Bragi's words/poems that I peppered throughout ;)
Guest: She doesn't know about the statue in Brooklyn.. yet ;)
AceCookie: Haha do you still hate me? I have a feeling you might've liked this chapter ;)
Teaanddoctorwho: YOU'RE CRYING. I can just tell. I loved that breakdown you wrote of their characters haha, you're so right about pre and post war Bucky. Also yes, managing to run and hide in a completely different world is very on brand for Alice. She doesn't get found until she wants to get found.
GuestPrime: I have indeed been busy, and I'm glad you've been enjoying it! This is definitely an 'everyone lives' kind of AU, because I am soft. And yes, Bragi has been there all along ;) Interesting you picked up on his words/poems! You're right, he wasn't evil - he certainly did evil things though.
Alice is indeed back! Peggy would be proud of her top notch hiding skills haha. Thank you so much for your kind review x
Sprout: Here's your reunion! I hope it was worth the wait :) I'm so glad you liked last chapter! Have a wonderful week x
Guest: I'm so glad you're loving it! Thank you for going back for a reread, it's very gratifying haha. Kudos to you for picking out those little details of Alice noticing funny things while she was singing ;) And yes, this is an 'everyone lives' AU, mostly because I'm soft and didn't want to kill more people. Alice is indeed back. How did your theories about the reunion hold up?
Wolf: Haha I can't say I've ever put a fidget spinner on my forehead but that does sound fun. Here's your reunion!
Daisy: It's only been 78 years, I don't see what the issue is ;) You made it though! What did you think of this chapter!
Captain Loki: She's back! As you can see she's now given up running ;) She may still drive Steve crazy though haha. Thank you so much, I'm over the moon to finally share this chapter and I just love all the love and support you have for the story :)