A Promise of Hope

Half a dozen monoliths stood in a park in San Francisco.

They were going to be new statues, but the sculptor had been dusted, and people of the city had torn off the protective tarps and used the plan blocks of stone underneath as markers for the Disappeared. Those rocks were covered with names—in pen, in Sharpie, in fading marker, even just scratched into the surface by knives and screwdrivers—and there was no rhyme or reason to it, no alphabetical order or regularity, just names. Hundreds and hundreds of names.

Scott was searching. Hank and Hope had given him the rundown in that warehouse, as quickly as they could in ten minutes, and even before they got done talking Scott was frantic to check on his family. It had been a nightmare to get to Cassie's house—the roads were totally wrecked at this point—and the place looked dilapidated from the outside, with grass halfway up to his knees and mildew climbing up the walls.

It looked totally abandoned.

That is, until Paxton came home.

Scott had been delighted to see him! Now that was an odd feeling. But after coming out of the quantum tunnel to a world turned rump-over-teakettle, even just one familiar face was a welcome sight. So after Paxton had gotten done pointing a gun at him and yelling about trespassing and old habits and why he kept the door locked and how hard it would be to replace that window, he'd finally calmed down enough to say Cassie and Maggie were...

Well. Scott didn't want to believe that just yet. That's why he was here.

Hank and Hope had come along. It wasn't altogether clear why. They just wandered around the plaza or sat on nearby benches as Scott buzzed around the blocks of stone like a hummingbird.

And then, he found the two names he least wanted to see.

Scott sank to his knees. Already the sun had set, and the trees cast long, black shadows over the plaza. The lines on the stone were growing faint in the darkness, but, unfortunately, Scott could still read them.

Maggie Paxton, they said.

And worse:

Cassie Lang

Scott leaned forward until his forehead knocked against the stone.

"Peanut," he whispered, and his face twisted into a grimace.

I'm so sorry.

Someone warm came to his side and put an arm over his back and a head on his shoulder. It was Hope. Hank stood nearby, his shadow long and dark like the trees, solemn and silent with his hands in his pockets.

They'd showed him, earlier, where they'd written the name of Janet.

And Scott cried. He sat there on the ground with his head against the rock, and he shook like the leaves hanging on the nearby trees. The red twilight faded, and the last few stragglers left the park, leaving them three alone in the darkness.

After a long while, Scott lifted his head. His face was wet, his teeth were bare, and as he sucked a sharp breath through them in a wheeze, those began teeth grit in his jaw.

No, he decided.

No.

I refuse.

It was a ring of the doorbell.

"Sergeant Barnes," said JARVIS' clear voice in the ceiling, "we...appear to have a visitor."

Bucky got out of his seat and came to look at the camera readout, and what he saw on that blue screen made his eyes widen.

"Is this thing on? Can anyone hear me?" A disheveled-looking man hopped outside of an ugly brown van, waving frantically at the camera. "Hey! It's me, Ant-Man! You know, from Germany? Can anyone open the door?"

Wanda came to Bucky's side. "I thought he was gone," she said, his voice soft with surprise.

"So did I," said Bucky.

"C'mon, nothing?" Scott's arms dropped to his sides and slapped his thighs. "We came all this way from San Fran! It's taken weeks! The roads are awful, and I'm so sick of this stupid van. I've got an idea! We can fix it! Can anyone hear me?"

"Let him in," said Bucky, and he took off running for the front door.

It was the sound of a fist pounding on the door of 177A Bleeker Street.

"Strange!" Probably the whole neighborhood could hear Bucky hollering, but he didn't care. He switched to his metal arm to make the banging louder. "Strange, come on, open up!"

The door suddenly swung away under Bucky's fist. He nearly hit someone in the head, but a tan hand stopped him.

There was a small man in a brown robe, looking very calm and unhurried.

"One knock would do," said Wong.

Bucky gulped dumbly like a fish for a moment. "Hi," he finally said. "Sorry. I need to talk to—"

A swish of cloth and quiet footsteps, and Dr. Strange emerged from a door further down the hall. He stopped, staring at his visitor with an extraordinary expression.

"Strange!" Bucky pushed past Wong and stumbled into the Sanctum. "Strange, this is gonna sound crazy, but you gotta listen to m—"

Dr. Strange strode right past him, tapping his wrists together. "Get your bike."

Bucky's heels skidded on the floor. "What?"

A wide turn of Dr. Strange's hands, and a sparkling ring of gold appeared on the curb near Bucky's motorcycle. "We're going back."

"You're kicking me out already? You haven't even heard what—!"

"No, but I can see it." Dr. Strange stood in the doorway. One twisted hand was uplifted, holding the portal open—trembling, as it usually did—but the sorcerer turned and looked dead-on at Bucky, with almost a light in his eye. "Something's changed, hasn't it?"

For a moment, Bucky couldn't find his words.

Finally, he said, "Scott Lang came back."

Dr. Strange's angular face morphed into a very deliberate smile.

"Good."

It was a portal opening in Shuri's lab, right as she was about to fall asleep over her holograms.

"Nani yuko...?" Shuri rubbed her eyes and sat up blearily. "Doctor?"

"Wake up, Shuri." The voice was kind, even if the words weren't. Dr. Strange gestured to the awestruck man standing beside him. "This is Scott Lang. You might know him as Ant-Man, if you've watched the news in America."

Shuri got up, her limbs dragging, and stood in front of them with her arms crossed. "I am familiar." She turned to Scott. "I thought you disappeared."

"I did," he said. "Well, kinda. Not exactly. Not the same way everybody else did, at least. I was trapped. And how I came back—where I was—I think I have an idea to fix all of it." His brain seemed to be going faster than his words could keep up, but what he said next woke Shuri up like a splash of ice-cold water. "To turn back time."

Shuri's eyes were wide. Was this real? She looked at Dr. Strange for help.

He didn't look like he was joking. "Have you been studying my books?"

"Yes," she said weakly.

"Good." He turned and left with a swoop of his red cloak. "You'll need it."

"No."

"But—"

"I know what you're going to say," interrupted Erik Selvig. "The answer is no."

Bucky groaned. "Selvig, come on. We got a chance to set it all right again. We need the best brains in the world on this thing."

"You had them," snapped Erik. "A.R.E.S. was the best."

Bucky turned away, trying not to let his frustration show.

"The best brains you could've ever hoped for—me, Cho, whatever was left of S.H.I.E.L.D.—we could've prepared you to take on the jaws of hell, and then you people," said Erik, shaking a finger at him, "mucked it all up."

Bucky looked dead at him. Pity and anger wrestled each other in his head.

"Y'know how hard the media came after us, after the Accords?" Erik said quietly. "Do you have any idea how hard it was to get work? I tried every single university all across the southwest, and they all turned me down. You know what they said? 'Collaborationist'. With the Avengers! Because you people went and made felons of yourselves!"

"I didn't have any control of—" Bucky growled. He was losing his temper now. "I didn't ask to get framed for bombing Vienna!"

"Well, I didn't ask to get 'accessory' on my rap sheet!"

"Hey!" shouted Jane Foster. When both the men looked her way, she shot them a withering glare of weariness and annoyance. "Stop it."

Erik turned away and crossed his arms.

"Erik," she said softly.

He grimaced, not meeting her eye.

Jane put her hand on his shoulder. "What if we can get them back?"

Erik scowled. It was almost as if he didn't want to hope.

"What about Darcy?" Jane whispered, like it hurt her to think about it, "What about...him?"

Erik's defenses were slowly breaking down. Still, when he lifted his head, the look he gave Bucky was 90% a death glare.

Bucky sighed. He could see that Erik wasn't likely to budge. "If you say no," he began slowly, "I'll just leave. We'll find some way to get it done. But if you change your mind..." There was a tiny bit of humor in it, despite the situation. "It's a long way from New Mexico to New York."

Erik firmly refused to laugh, but the gears were turning in his head.

Bucky waved over his shoulder at the gold-rimmed portal, where Dr. Strange was standing beside it. "We could make it easy for ya."

Jane looked very hard at Erik. Erik heaved a sigh.

It was five little words, spoken gruffly, but in surrender.

"Let me pack a bag."

It was the sound of the brightest minds left in the world rattling in and out of Tony's old lab.

Erik sat in a swivel chair, massaging his forehead. "Even if we could find a safe way to go subatomic, we still haven't figured out the teleportation component."

Peter Parker, who'd eagerly come back to the HQ as soon as he heard about the plan, tipped his head sideways like a puppy. "You don't need teleporting in a time machine."

"Ah, yes you do." Erik stood up and grabbed a pencil off the desk. "The earth," he said, spinning the eraser of the pencil around his fist, "revolves around the sun. If the earth is here in its orbit when you leave and here—" he moved the pencil to the opposite side of his fist "—in the time you're going to and you don't move..." He moved the pencil back to the starting position and stared at it. "Yeah, congratulations, you've jettisoned yourself into space."

"Oh." Peter sat up straighter. "But if we have to worry about that, we have to worry about rotation! The earth spins. You could end up in like…China. Or the middle of the ocean." His voice dropped to a mutter. "Probably the middle of the ocean."

"There's the height difference too," Jane spoke up. "The earth's surface is uneven. If you're too high or too low, you could end up in the stratosphere or," she said, wrinkling her nose, "inside the earth's crust."

"How do we know we're not gonna spawn inside a wall or something?!" cried Peter.

Shuri had her chin in her fist. "It would require extremely precise coordinates..."

"Yeah, that's just the thing." Erik growled. "What coordinates? What system are we working with?"

Peter seemed confused. "Latitude and longitude?" he asked, like it was obvious.

"Lat and long only work on the earth's surface, because we have fixed points of reference." Erik gestured around an imaginary sphere with the pencil. "There's absolute north, absolute south, the equator, Greenwich...we can use those as Point Zero and count from that. There's no Point Zero in space!"

"The...earth...?" Peter tried.

"The earth is moving," said Erik.

"The sun."

"The sun is moving. Our arm of the galaxy is moving. Everything in the universe is moving and expanding. You'd need some sort of a universal fixed reference point..."

"You mean you'd have to chart the entire universe just to go back in time a few years and get some rocks?" cried Peter.

"Yes!" said a very infuriated Erik.

"How?!"

"That's the problem!"

Bucky, who'd been watching from the edge of the room, muttered to himself, "Well, I'm gonna go forward in time and get a beer. In like...two minutes."

When he came back with the chilled bottle in his hand, Shuri was pacing the lab, her hands steepled around her nose.

"Is there any way to create a system where the machine itself acts as Point Zero?" she asked no one in particular.

Erik twiddled the pencil, trying to follow along with her. "The machine..."

"Yes."

"Acts as a reference," he said slowly, "when you're going back in time to a point where the machine didn't exist yet to be that reference?"

Shuri grimaced. "The location of the machine? At the exact nanosecond it sends us back, it finds its position and calculates where we are supposed to land relative to that..."

"In that case, you could calculate the distance relative to the position of anything. But on what system?"

Shuri put her face in her hands and growled.

Erik seemed just as frustrated, running his hand over the top of his balding head. "This is why distances in space are always calculated relative to something else. You can never nail down an exact location. Everything is just hanging in a big void."

Bucky peered at the ceiling lights through the brown glass of the bottle. "If I can calculate the distance of the beer relative to my face..."

Peter was hanging upside down off a swivel chair. "Wait, wait. We know the speed the earth revolves around the sun, and we know the path of orbit. If those stay constant, we could probably calculate where the earth would be if we move back in time."

"I assume by 'constant' you mean 'predictable and replicable', because the earth doesn't always travel at the same speed." Erik twirled his finger in the air. "Elliptical orbit. Moves faster when it's closer to the sun."

"Right, okay," said Peter. "So if you can calculate the gravitational effects of the sun based on its distance from the earth..."

"That'll get us somewhere in the ballpark," said Erik, "but we need more precision than that. Just a fraction of a mile is the difference between standing on solid ground and falling from a fatal height in the air. We don't have wide margins for error here."

Bucky spun the bottle in a lazy circle. "If the beer revolves around my head at a constant rate, how long until it's empty?"

"What if," suggested Jane, "instead of pinpointing exactly where you want to land, the system makes little corrections as it goes? Sends you back in time first, then gets you close to Earth, then to the right country, then to the right city, then to solid ground?"

Shuri frowned in thought. "That...could work..."

Erik put his hand on his chin. "It would make extractions difficult if we have to get them out of there fast."

"How are we even gonna build something that can do that?" Peter slumped over the back of the swivel chair. "Has anybody ever made a teleporting machine? I mean, apart from, like...Asgard."

There was a single beat of silence. Erik's pencil dropped to the floor.

"Asgard!" roared Erik.

Bucky choked on his last sip of beer.

"What are we doing, trying to reinvent the wheel?!" Erik's head whipped toward Bucky. "Hey!"

Bucky sat up a little straighter.

"You got New Asgard on speed dial or something?"

Bucky blinked stupidly. His head still felt fuzzy. "Uh, yeah." He leaned out of his chair. "Just...hang on a second."

It was a hunk of scrap metal delivered with a clunk on the lab floor.

"This is all we were able to salvage from the wreckage of the Statesman," said Heimdall.

"All that work, gone to rust," grumbled Loki. "But perhaps it may still be of use."

Peter popped his head up. "Will it be enough to make a teleporter?"

"It will be difficult without the Stone, and my powers are nearly spent." Heimdall's golden eyes gleamed with hard light. "But it will, because it must."

It was at that moment that Erik rounded the corner with a legal pad in his hand and a pencil in his teeth. He looked up, saw the visitors—and stopped in his tracks, staring right at Loki.

Loki stared back.

Erik's pencil snapped in his hand.

Loki pressed his lips into a little line.

Bucky sighed. They'd been over this song and dance before. "Let's just finish the time machine before you kill each other, a'right?"

Erik was still glaring swords and daggers into Loki, but he pointedly didn't address him. "Barnes," he said out the side of his mouth, "don't make me regret this."

Bucky flipped a lazy salute. "Duly noted, Selvig."

It was a tall machine, slowly taking shape in the Quinjet hangar in Combat.

Bucky had come with cold drinks and sandwiches for everyone working on the machine, but at the moment, all he could do was look up in awe. The round platform was nearly the size of a compact car, and the chandelier of mirrors hanging over it reflected the daylight outside like a cluster of dewdrops. The sound of ratcheting, whirring, and rapid technical conversation echoed around the hangar.

Scott was bent with his head inside an open panel near Bucky's feet, and he flipped his hand in the air. "Hey, uh, pass me that wrench, would'ja?"

Bucky looked down. Scott seemed to be holding down some kind of wiring in a complicated mechanism. His tools were scattered everywhere, and the wrench he needed sat on the other side of the toolbox, just out of reach.

"Don't got any hands," Bucky said—which was true enough—but he nudged the wrench with his toe and managed to kick it over to Scott.

"That works." Scott picked it up. "Thanks."

"No problem."

Bucky left him one of the sandwiches and went on a slow walk around the machine. In one corner, Shuri and Heimdall talked in rapid whispers over a set of schematics. In another, Erik and Hank were locked in some kind of benign argument over the control panel they were building. In another, Loki and Dr. Strange worked together on the platform, the yellow glow of Loki's magic blending with the golden lines and runes of Dr. Strange's sorcery.

Up above, Peter hung from the ceiling on a string of webbing, fastening another mirror on the cluster. "Ooh!" He caught sight of Bucky and lengthened the string of webbing, dropping like a spider until he was hanging right over Bucky's head. "Did you bring food?"

"Yep." Bucky held up one of the sandwiches, wrapped in paper. "There ya go."

"Sick!" Peter snatched it up and immediately opened the paper. "I'm starving."

"Hey!" snapped Shuri. "No crumbs on the machine!"

"I'm being careful!" Peter hollered back with his mouth half-full, which didn't exactly help his cause.

"No! Eat somewhere else!"

Bucky was already handing sandwiches to Erik and Hank at this point, but couldn't help but laugh.

It was a pencil, plucked off the floor in the corner.

The moment the Smart Ones finished the machine, everything was a flurry of tests. Scott was selected to be the guinea pig; mostly because he was the one most familiar with the whole shrinking-and-embiggening thing, and also because he volunteered.

They sent him back an hour, then brought him back to the present. When that successfully didn't kill him, they sent him back a month. Then a year. For science's sake, they also sent him back ten minutes, which resulted in two of him being in the lab at the same time and also aware of each other, and by the time they brought him back to the present he'd nearly thrown up in his helmet from the dissonance, and both he and the technicians operating the board at the time were hit with the mother of all migraines and had to take a breather.

Scott was still in bed feeling like crap the next day, but the Smart Ones—particularly Shuri and Hank—wanted to do one more test.

Specifically, to see if they could bring an object from the past into the present.

The idea was simple. The same Infinity Stones that caused the Disappearance should have the power to reverse it. Assuming the Stones still had power when they were pulled into the present—which wasn't certain, but that was for a different test—they could be used to set it all right.

But first, they had to make sure that bringing an object from the past didn't absolutely break space-time.

Bucky volunteered to go. It was pretty clear that time travel was strenuous on the body—Exhibit A, a still very unhappy Scott—but hey, he was a super soldier. Knockoff serum or not, he could take it.

"Bring back something very small," said Shuri as he stood on the platform, surrounded by all the bystanders that had come to see him off. "Something that will not be missed. We don't want to cause an incident."

"Got it." Bucky flipped down his visor.

The helmet felt tiny and claustrophobic. He could feel his pulse speeding up.

"Okay," said Hank's voice in the headset as the machine began to whir, "sending you off in three, two..."

Bucky didn't hear the 'one'. Suddenly, it felt like the floor dropped out from under him, and his heart slammed up into his throat. The room blew up huge, and the platform rushed up to meet him, and fissures appeared in the flat surface like spiderwebs, and he fell into a seam between the atoms of glass and metal.

Then, everything was a maze of endless tunnels of light and antimatter. Bucky's helmet rattled around his head, and he grit his teeth and shut his eyes. He was yanked around through space, dragged head over heels down one tunnel and then another. He could hear Hank and Shuri talking on his headset, guiding him to his destination, but he couldn't pay attention.

God, this feels like every roller-coaster on Coney Island at once, but worse.

"Okay, we've found some solid ground!" called Shuri's crackling voice. "Come out now!"

Blindly, Bucky fumbled for the controller on his wrist and slammed the button.

There was a woosh like wind, and then, with no momentum at all, he was standing upright on some soft carpet.

Bucky flipped up the helmet and blinked, dragging in a slow, deep breath and letting it out. The air was cool and fresh. Slowly, as the nausea in his gut began to die down, he realized where he was.

It was his room.

Honestly, it looked...pretty normal. The window was open. Sunlight streamed through, and a soft breeze buffeted the curtains. There was birdsong in the air, and clouds drifting through the blue sky.

But as he looked closer, he noticed small differences. There was a blue shirt on Steve's bed. The record player was spinning, softly playing some old lilting music. He couldn't hear the lowing of cows or the clucking of chickens, and when he looked out the window, there was no fishing trawler out on the Hudson.

Instead—and when he saw it, his eyes blew up wide—a tiny blue blur sped along the bank.

Laughter in the hallway outside the door made his heart jump into his throat.

That was Steve's laugh.

Oh god, he thought, as pressure nudged at the backs of his eyes. Oh god, oh god, oh god.

He hadn't heard that voice for over a year. He thought he never would again. He sounds so happy and safe and real and ALIVE and—

Panic slammed into him like a truck. He's gonna see me.

His head whipped around the room. The easel stood in the corner nearby, carrying a half-finished color pencil sketch. He snatched up one of the pencils that had fallen on the floor, dove into the closet, and shut the door after him.

He pressed his back to the wall and sank down, in the dark, in the little room that smelled like coats and shoes. The bedroom door opened, and the laughter came with it.

"Shaddap, Buck!" hollered an oh-so familiar voice. "Leave it alone!"

"I'm jus' sayin'," Bucky heard his own voice yell from the hall, "if ya set yer mind to it—"

"I don' wanna, and that's it!"

Bucky covered his mouth and bit the inside of his cheek hard. Hot tears pricked at his eyes.

"Go pick on Pietro or somethin'," Steve called into the hall. "I gotta finish this thing."

"Aw, fine, ya wet blanket."

"Wet blanket yerself!" The door shut, and Steve laughed, low and happy and soft.

Bucky held his breath and didn't move a muscle.

Footsteps paced by the closet door, then paused, and then tread around in small circles. Bucky heard the shuffle of bed-clothes, and then Steve hummed in thought.

"Buck!" he yelled. "Have you seen my 903?"

"Nah!" came the distant yell back. "I didn't take it."

"Well, I don't know who else it'd be!"

"Can'cha use another one?"

"No!" Then he muttered, "Nuts, where did I put it...?"

Soft footsteps in the carpet approached the closet door.

Oh god. Bucky jolted. I stayed too long. Twisting knobs and hitting buttons, he calibrated the device on his wrist. The faceplate shut, and the floor fell out from under him, just as he heard Steve's hand hit the doorknob of the closet door.

Woosh, woosh, woosh, tunnels and light and nausea, and when he was finally done being yanked around by vertigo he found himself standing upright on the platform in the lab, surrounded by half a dozen wide-eyed faces.

Peter asked the question they all seemed to be thinking.

"Did it work?"

Bucky looked down and opened his hand.

There in his palm lay a little blue pencil.

"Yeah," he said softly. "Yeah, it worked."

"If we bring all the Stones together in this time, we'll have the power we need to undo the Snap," said Dr. Strange in one of their late-night Team Meetings. "But it's dangerous. Their power, combined, is too much for any one mortal to endure alone. They consumed Thanos."

Sam sat nearby with his arms crossed. "And made that black hole on the pineapple planet."

"So we could bring 'em all back," Bucky said quietly, "but if we mess up, we could kill everyone who's left."

The room was silent. That fact seemed to weigh heavy in the air.

"Well, we...we gotta try, right?" Scott asked weakly.

Bucky shook his head. "I want 'em back more than anything," he rasped, "but I don't...I don't think that's our call to make."

Dr. Strange was oddly quiet.

Bucky lifted his head. "Strange. How many sorcerers you got left?"

"Between every Sanctum in the world," he answered, "less than a hundred and fifty."

"You guys have those portal rings." Bucky twirled his finger in the air. "You can travel faster than any of us possibly could. If you can spare anybody, have 'em go..."

To the leaders? To the cities? To the highly populated areas? No, he couldn't just limit it to that. The voice of the most important man in New York City was no less valuable than the voices of a tribesman in the African wilderness.

"Have 'em go everywhere," he finally decided. "All over the planet, everywhere they can possibly reach. And ask the world..."

He lifted his head.

"Ask them if they're willing to try."

Dr. Strange lifted his chin slightly, and his face spoke solemn approval.

Bucky leaned back, crossing his arms. "We'll get the Guardians to go to every planet they can reach. Maybe they can bring back word for us." He gave a little huff of a laugh. "We've got a time machine; long as nothin' happens to it, we can go back to the past whenever we want. This time next year...I wanna know what the world says."

Dr. Strange nodded, slow and deliberate like a bow. "You'll know it."

Winter passed, bitterly cold. Spring came, then summer. Then, near the cusp of autumn, when the cows' heavier coats began to grow in and the forest around the HQ turned red, the answers began to come.

"From those we asked, " Wong reported, as he stood with a large book open in his arms, "there are a few who would like things to remain the way they are. I do not doubt there are many more who share that sentiment; the thieves, and the pirates, and the other criminals would certainly wish for no change."

Bucky frowned, but said nothing.

"Our answers are in no way the voice of the entire universe," said Wong. "We could not get so far in just one year. But of those we asked, the great majority—from all over our earth, and from the many planets we could reach—speak as if with one voice.

"'We would rather risk it all'," he intoned gravely, "'than live without those we love.'"

Bucky rested his head on his clasped hands. Gratitude and the weight of responsibility crashed over him like an ocean wave.

"The people have spoken, Sergeant Barnes," said Wong. "Their trust is now in you."

Bucky lifted his head and hid his chin behind his intertwined fingers.

It was an answer from the people of the universe.

"I won't let them down."

Bucky stood in the former Quinjet hangar, staring upwards. The room was dark and quiet; his own breathing sounded loud, echoing off the concrete and glass walls.

This machine was massive. The cluster of mirrors reflected the moon and starlight a thousand times over. It seemed so eerie—like the hulking skeleton of a great dead thing—without the humming motors, the bright lights, and the inevitable technical chatter that surrounded it in the daytime.

The flap of cloth announced that Bucky wasn't alone.

"You should sleep," said Dr. Strange. His feet landed softly on the floor behind Bucky. "We'll all need clear heads tomorrow."

Tomorrow. It still blew Bucky away. Tomorrow, they had a chance to fix it all—or break space-time forever. Tomorrow would be the most important day in the timeline up to that point, and Dr. Strange treated it with the same nonchalance as a doctor's appointment.

"When you had the Stone..." Bucky didn't speak loudly, but his voice echoed around the hangar. He didn't look over his shoulder. "You could see every future."

Dr. Strange was quiet, but he didn't deny it.

"Do you know..." Bucky turned. He wasn't sure if he wanted to hear this answer or not.

"Do you know if this will work?"

Dr. Strange stepped up to his side, gazing up at the machine in his dignified way. "I saw countless futures where it did." He frowned. "And I saw countless more where it didn't." He shook his head. "I wouldn't be able to tell you which path lies before us."

Bucky snorted. "Because if you told me, it might change the outcome, or some nonsense like that?"

"No," said Dr. Strange. "Because I don't know which one it is."

That got Bucky to shut up.

Seeing the future really isn't all it's cracked up to be, huh?

After a long pause, Dr. Strange spoke. "There was never a guarantee." He turned to Bucky. "Only a promise."

Bucky turned his head, and to his surprise, he saw a little smile on the Sorcerer's thin lips.

"Only a promise of hope."

Bucky smiled back.

It was a knock on the door, a machine, a pencil. It was the sound of the greatest minds in the world buzzing in a room. It was the wild, stupid, hare-brained choice to believe that maybe, despite all odds, they could make this work, and they could heal the world again.

It was a promise of hope.

A/N: Hey, look! A chapter that I almost got out on time!

Shuri's Wakandan is Swahili, at the mercy of Google Translate, and it's the first two words of the phrase "who is there"?

All the discussions about the space component of a time machine are the result of discussions with Raina, Tessera, and my dad. Can't really credit any single one of them, since they've all helped brainstorm this bit. (Bucky's interjections about beer are specifically courtesy of my dad. You're welcome.)

It kinda bothered me in Endgame that the Avengers just decided to undo the Snap without even taking a vote from the world. Like, it's been five years. What if people had gotten remarried? What if they'd had children? Sure, bringing everyone back was probably the right call, but the Avengers acting without the will of the people just reinforced the feeling I got through the whole movie that they are now nigh-omnipotent gods who are concerned only with their own affairs and care little for the plight of the common man.

Anyway, I get to write Steve again! It's been a heckin' long time! I've missed Bucky's Brooklyn accent.