From there, Steve began to account to Bucky the events that had transpired since he had gone back in time. Returning the stones had definitely been a trial, especially given that most of them were in secure locations that required a good deal of sneaking around. Returning the stone on Asgard had been the most difficult one, since it required returning to a liquid state and injecting it back into Jane Foster when she wasn't looking. The most emotionally wrenching return had been to the soul stone on Vormir, as it had meant and countering the Red Skull and throwing the stone at him, halfway hoping that it would mean Natasha would be returned. But she wasn't. And he had looked over the cliff hoping to have a chance to retrieve her body, but she had vanished. The Skull had taunted him, and it had taken everything Steve had to walk away back to his mission of returning stones and then returning to Peggy.
Finally, after several days, with much exhaustion and several near misses, he had finally returned all of the stones to the correct point in time where they belonged, and had set the date he had settled upon in 1946 to return to Peggy. He had returned to Brooklyn, New York in the 1940s as he felt they gave him a better chance of blending in. It had taken several weeks to locate Peggy, and then again more time to approach her in such a way that she would accept, given that she thought he was dead and gone. Naturally, her first instinct had been that she was the subject of a Hydra trick, for she had not believed it was him at first. Actually, she had pulled a gun on him, then fought him. But eventually, she came to understand that he was truly who he said he was, and had been overwhelmed at his return.
She had remarked that he was obviously older than the last time she had seen him, and he had wrestled a bit with himself about how much to tell her. Finally, he reasoned that he could not completely keep her from the truth and admitted he had been traveling through time. He told her that he had been to the future, into the 21st-century, and pleaded with her not to ask too many questions, for there was much that he could not tell her. He told her that something terrible would happen in the future, that it would require time travel to fix, and that the problem had indeed been dealt with, but if he told her too much, altered too much of the timeline, then those events would not come to pass, and that he had then used the time travel mechanism to come back to her. She had struggled quite a bit with this revelation, but eventually had come to terms with it and accepted his decision.
The first year back in the 1940s had been the hardest for him. His experiences had changed him, aged him, and he was not quite the same man she had known. On top of all that, she had changed as well. She had had her own experiences, had aged in her own way, and although she was still the same Peggy, he noticed some differences in her as well. She had begun a relationship with Daniel Sousa back in California which she eventually ended, and which had caused a great deal of hurt to Daniel, who eventually went back to his previous fiancé Violet. It took some time to mend that relationship, and they never told Daniel who Steve actually was, though sometimes Steve suspected that the other man had his own suspicions. Eventually, after Steve and Peggy had married, and Daniel and Violet had married, they had begun to mend fences, but when Peggy moved back to the East Coast to found S.H.I.E.L.D. with Howard Stark, it was regrettable but they lost most contact with the Sousas. It was the first time Steve had lamented that the Internet and email were not yet a regular thing, for it sure made it easier to stay in touch in situations like these. Instead, Daniel and his wife had rolled out of their lives and they had never really reconnected. It would end up being one of the first of many things that Steve would come to realize Peggy would give up for him.
They also had to re-learn each other. It was during those first few years that Steve came to truly understand how very little he had known Peggy. He had thought they had spent enough time together to know each other as soulmates, someone he couldn't live without. But when he returned to her, having lived an entire decade in the 21st-century, and she having started to live her life with the SSR, independent of her identity from him, he began to really see how little he had known her. Their time spent together in the war had been intense, but it had not been the full picture of what each other were to the other. He had known that Peggy had a temper, hell the woman shot at him simply for kissing another woman that time, but he had not known how she had struggled with her temper and impulse control until he saw her fighting to keep reeled in as she worked with many sexist men in her industry. Although she had made a name for herself in the SSR, and had earned some grudging respect from her male colleagues, that did not extend beyond the department and other high-ranking males with whom she often had to work.
He realized that he had never before seen her cry, or exhibit any sort of sadness even during the war until Daniel called to let them know that their friend Edwin Jarvis had died of an unexpected heart attack. Steve had never met the man, he had remained in California managing Stark's properties there, but the grief that crushed Peggy down into a chair and rocked her body with sobs had surprised him. Clearly this had been someone important, someone she had counted as a friend, and aspect of her life that Steve had absolutely no knowledge of, but was now causing her immense grief. It actually scared him a bit to be reminded that this was a part of her life that he would not be a part of, and that he could not spare her from this pain. It was again and a reminder that there was much he did not know about her.
He knew that he had changed significantly as well. He was a lot more tolerant of things that would have been scandalous in the 1940s, and the first time he had dropped a couple of "damn" and "hells" in conversation had actually shocked her. When her friend Angie had called to tell them that another girl they had known in the boarding house where they had lived had come up pregnant out of wedlock, Steve simply shrugged off the information even though it was obvious that Peggy and Angie were quite upset for their friend. Steve also had to relearn how to live in a culture that he realized he had left behind over a decade ago in his life. He had been told several times by the psychiatrists at S.H.I.E.L.D. before it had fallen that he was likely experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder and other forms of illness that might be in need of counseling, and had offered to set him up with counselors. He had even run a support group for survivors of the Decimation, having learned to accept counseling and mental health as simply a part of overall health. But in the 1940s, and the decades that would follow, it was still a taboo or stigma subject, and he never quite garnered up the courage to seek help for what he knew were certain disorders brought on by his experiences. He also had to relearn how to respond in public when he witnessed outward sexism or racial discrimination, endemic in the culture which he had never noticed before, but after a decade in the 21st-century now found seemed to be everywhere. When he had first awoken from the ice, he had to get used to a lot of things, namely the way the food tasted, as things were produced differently in the 21st-century. He had to go through a period of that when he returned to the 1940s, experiencing a certain amount of disorientation in not having remembered that the food tasted different, or the way things were spoken, or just simple ways that things were done. Ironically, he was once again a man out of time.
He found that he was quite irritated with himself during this adjustment phase, and was grateful that Peggy had the patience of a saint with him, for he was often grumpy and cranky for no reason that he could discern. He never thought he would miss something like a cell phone, the ease at which communication flew around between himself and the people he cared about, and although he had brought his phone from the future, had even shown it to Peggy with the pictures of his friends on it to convince her that he had truly come from the future, it was useless if there were no others like it to ease communication. He frequently became frustrated with simple things like that, or stupid things like the way cars were made and driven, or how easy it was or was not to find an item that he wanted or needed for something. The only person he could talk to about it was Peggy, and there was only so much she could tell her without altering the timeline. So he held much of his frustration inside, and his anxiety about the future he kept to himself.
They were married a year after he returned, and it was the happiest day of his life, even though the only ones in attendance were Howard Stark and the surviving Commandos. Daniel and his wife had respectfully bowed out, which Steve suspected had a little more to do with the man's personal hurt over losing Peggy than any work he had to do as claimed. Steve found he actually felt bad about causing the rift between Peggy and Daniel, but managed to bury it deep down and focus on his own happiness, for he had dreamed about this day for a long time. During the first few years in the 21st-century, he had thought of Peggy almost every day, although it was eased up a bit by visiting her in the nursing home. He had reasoned to himself that thinking about her as often as he did simply proved that she was his soulmate, the one he was supposed to be with, and that justified in his mind all the actions he had taken to return. But he found himself, somewhat guiltily an uncomfortably, thinking about Sharon. In the first few years in the 21st-century, he had thought about Peggy every day, but as time had gone on, especially after she had passed away and he had begun his relationship with Sharon, he found that he had thought of her less often. Not that he had ceased loving her, but that perhaps he was moving on with his life, something he had actually felt guilty about. Now that he was here with Peggy, he found himself thinking about Sharon. He remembered their last phone call the night before he had left. He played it over and over and his mind, hearing the hurt in her voice, but the understanding. She had known all along that this was what he was going to do. And that was why she had not allowed herself to get too close. She had known he was going to leave her. He found that understanding hurt far worse than he expected it to.
But as it was with Peggy in the 21st-century, as time went on and daily life began to take a routine, he found himself thinking less and less of Sharon, even forcing himself to not think of her. What was done was done. This was eased a bit by the birth of their first child, a boy that Peggy named after Edwin Jarvis. Their daughter Lily follow two years later, and despite his initial anxiety over being a father, Steve found that being a stay at home dad was actually exactly what he needed. He was able to completely immerse himself into caring for the children as a means of not thinking about his past or the impending future.
That had been another thing that Peggy had been obliged to come to terms with concerning him and the way he had changed. This was the mid-1950s at this point, and the thought of a man staying home to take care of the children while his wife worked was so outrageous that even their closest friends and neighbors could barely contain their shock. He had explained several times to Peggy that in the 21st-century, it was not uncommon for a man to be a stay at home dad while his wife worked. But that he understood that in their time, it was considered weird, so they figured the best thing to do was to lay low about it. Peggy had not really even advocated at work that she had gotten married, had not changed her name, and it was only when her children were born that some of her coworkers were even aware that she was married. Or they assumed that she was, for why else would she be pregnant? It was still astounding to her when Steve suggested that he take her last name, and explained it as an effort to hide his true identity, which she accepted. But he didn't think she ever got used to having him sign documents as "S. G. Carter" instead of "Steve Rogers" or the fact that their children carried the last name "Carter." Steve had to admit, a certain part of him that had been brought up in patriarchal culture wished that his children had his last name, but understood why carrying the Carter name was best. He knew that other parents never quite got over the fact that he brought their son to baseball practice, or he dropped off and picked up their daughter from Girl Scouts when it was usually the other mothers doing such things. He simply told everyone that he worked from home, and that logistically it made the most sense for him to be doing these things, though he frequently had to bite his tongue when the other mothers suggested that Peggy was neglecting her children by working, or the not so good-natured comments from the other fathers about who wore the pants in their family. It took frequent reminding to himself, and occasionally to Peggy, that the culture would eventually change, that what they were doing would not be out of the ordinary in only a couple of decades, and to just brush it off.
For the most part, Peggy was able to, and the children did when they were quite young, but it began to cause problems when the children became teens. Ed frequently got into fights with other boys who would disparage his father for staying home with the kids while his mother worked, and frequent explanations to him did not do much to soothe his hurt feelings over the bullying. More than once, Lily came home crying when someone had made a smart ass remark about her mother neglecting her children, and had even found herself suspended for throwing a punch at another girl who had disparaged Peggy. Steve and Peggy had opted not to ground her over that, for she was Peggy's daughter after all and seemed to have her mother's temper. But Steve had not considered how the unusual dynamics of their family for the 1950s and 60s could potentially cause problems for his children. This was not to say that it was all bad. Like other families, they took vacations together, and both children were involved in scouting, which meant that Steve could lend quite a bit of expertise to campouts and other outdoor survival activities. For a while they owned a camper and did the quinsentential American vacation thing by driving around the country seeing historic locations and staying in the camper. These were relatively happy years for Steve, in which he could immerse himself in his family and slowly begin to forget about the 21st-century, the Avengers, and Sharon. But in 1961, things begin to change.
Peggy came home from work one day talking about a high profile assassination that was being kept out of the news, and with a sinking feeling in his stomach, Steve suddenly remembered the date and the person, from the files that the digitized intelligence of Armin Zola had once shown him in the bunker. The assassination had been the work of the Winter Soldier. Bucky. It was jarring to him now that he was realizing it, that he had nearly completely forgotten about his best friend in the entire world, that Bucky was in fact still alive, and had not only committed this assassination but others, and would commit other crimes in the future, that he was being frozen and re-awakened over and over again, tortured into committing these crimes throughout history. Not only that, he realized, but in the coming years, the Avengers would be born and would be growing up to become the people he suddenly remembered with full force. The first would be Tony in the 1970s, followed by Bruce and Clint, the Natasha, and then Sharon. During all this time, he was going to have to force himself not to interfere with Bucky, or even Natasha, whom he knew would be raised in a hellish environment in a Russian orphanage, brutally trained to become a soulless assassin throughout most of the 1980s and 90s, and if things were supposed to pan out to where Thanos would lose in this timeline, ensuring the survival of his children, he was going to have to make sure to allow this to happen and not interfere.
Peggy had seen the look on his face, and had pointedly asked him if he knew anything about the assassination. He told her truthfully that it had been in his repertoire of information, but that he had honestly completely forgotten about it until she had come home that day and told him about it.
"Do you know who did it?" she asked.
Steve had hesitated before answering. "Yes, but I can't tell you who."
"Steve! This man was an important head of state! We need to know who did this. If you know..."
"I still wouldn't tell you," he said standing up. "Peggy, I know we didn't talk much about this when I first came back, but there is a lot that is going to happen that I can't say anything about. If I tell you anything, and you do something that alters the events in history as I know they have played out before I came back, then you will alter the timeline and we won't be in the timeline where the event I can't tell you about is rectified. If you change anything, we will be in a timeline where we lose. I'm not making this decision lightly. But a whole lot of people are going to die and stay dead if I alter the timeline in any way."
She had stared at him in anger and shock. It had not fully registered before then that Steve would have prior knowledge of devastating events, loss of life, that he was not going to be able to warn her about or allow her to interfere with. She had seen his strange device that he had called a cellular phone, seen the pictures, games and music, and had marveled at the technology, had more or less accepted his explanation that he had travel through time, but until that very moment, she had not realized what it would mean, that he would have to sit down through some of the most atrocious events in history that still had not happened, but that he knew he would.
"Peggy," he said, "I try not to ask you for too much concerning what's happened to me, but I'm asking you to trust me. I need you to trust my judgment on this."
She was hurt and angry, and folded her arms. "I won't stop investigating this," she said evenly. "If I find out who it was, I will arrest him."
"I know," said Steve sadly. "But you won't find him. I can only tell you that he will eventually be found, but not for a long time, and not by you. This is not to say that you shouldn't keep looking, a lot of information you will find will be useful in the future, but I can't tell you any more than that."
Now she was honestly angry at him. She had turned, cursing and had stormed off. It had been their first really serious fight. Steve had been devastated, and this marked the first time he truly questioned the wisdom of having gone back in time. He loved Peggy, and he loved his family, would not trade them for anything, but was this truly worth it? Then he remembered what Sharon had told him on the phone the night before he had left. That they were going to be a lot of hurt feelings, and there were still a lot of questionably moral things he was going to have to do, including with her. But that if these things were not done, then the Avengers would not be poised to defeat Thanos. Half the life in the universe would be lost permanently. Perhaps it was at that moment that Steve had formulated what he and Sharon would let her come to call The Plan. The plan of action, the careful crafting of history and events through actions and lack of actions that would poise the Avengers for their face-off with the terrible titan. Peggy eventually cooled down enough to come to terms with the situation, but Steve wasn't entirely sure if she ever completely forgave him, especially over the years when other things happened that Sharon had specifically mentioned, such as the Kennedy assassination and the murder of the Israeli athletes, the Beirut barracks bombings and many other things that, when they watched on the news, Peggy would turn to him to gauge his reaction, and understand from the lack of shock and the sadness in his eyes, that he had known about long before they had happened, that he had been forced to sit down and allow. It was something he might have sought comfort from her over, but was honestly afraid to bring up given how she felt about these events and his decision to sit them out. Peggy was not one to sit out injustice and evil, and although he knew that she understood his decision, it was not a choice she would have made personally, even if it meant altering the timeline. He had once told Tony Stark that he was not the person who could just sit down and let bad things happen, and had known Peggy had been the same way, and yet here he was doing exactly that.
Other things happened during this time as well. His children became teenagers and they all spent less time together. The family vacations ground to a halt, and his children began to grow up and become their own people. He had always marveled in awe at their personalities which exhibited themselves strongly from early ages. His son Edwin resembled him the most, and like Steve himself, was rather straightforward and no nonsense, and although he had a sense of humor, it often had to be drawn out of him. Nobody was quite sure where Lily's personality came from, however. She strongly resembled her mother, but unlike either of her parents or her brother, she was rather right-brained and unfocused and unorganized. Sometimes she drove Peggy crazy, for it seemed that the two of them were constantly butting heads over the dilapidated state of Lily's room, the fact that she waited until the morning homework was due to actually do it, and preferred to pursue artistic endeavors rather than practical ones. She was happy-go-lucky and boisterous, sometimes to the point of irritating the rest of the family, though nobody would change her personality at all for something different. In some cases, Lily was the one who brought Steve most comfort, for she often could sense when her father was melancholy over the secret burden he bore, and would often try and draw him out of his funky by tearing through the room dressed as Wonder Woman to enact a quick 30 second comedy play for him, or bring him a picture she had drawn. Where Edwin had a few close friends that he remained close to through most of his childhood, Lily had a network of friends of varying intensity and was always the social butterfly. While Steve often went to head with Edwin over various matters that Edwin felt needed negotiating, like curfew or certain classes to take, Steve often found himself somewhat mystified by his daughter who seemed incapable of taking anything too seriously and often served as the family referee. Edwin, like Steve, was serious and dedicated, and briefly entertained the idea of joining the Army, though ultimately decided against it, for which Steve had to admit he was relieved. The Vietnam War was winding down, but far too many young men had already been lost to it, and Steve wasn't sure he could add burying his son to the list of trials he was going to have to endure. Also, it would mean, without a doubt, that he was in the wrong timeline, for both of Peggy's grown children had been alive when he had gone back in time.
As they became teenagers, they began to drift apart from their parents, and often Steve would discover that his growing children were involved in things he had no idea of because they were not mentioned, from clubs to class projects that he only heard about later on. They were both good students and did not give any trouble in school, so he rarely had to speak with teachers about the sort of people that his children were, but it saddened both him and Peggy to see the normal process of separation began to happen in their late teens. This was also the end of the 1960s, when the various social movements of the time swept Lily up into a righteous indignation of injustices, but seem to irritate Edwin, as was more down to earth. There were often arguments over social and political matters that Steve felt the need to occasionally break up to keep peace in the house. Another factor that influenced the relationship between Steve and Peggy and their children had much to do with the fact that Peggy was a rather unorthodox mother. Edwin and Lily had had to deal with a certain amount of bullying and lots of shock from their peers and their peers' parents, over the fact that their mother worked while their father was the more involved parent. Although they all loved each other, Steve knew there was a certain amount of resentment from his children over the fact that Peggy had been so different from other mothers, and that the nature of her work often took her away for days, occasionally weeks on end. The sort of work that the SSR, which had become S.H.I.E.L.D., did often involve Peggy being unable to tell them what she was doing and where she was going, having to leave in the middle of the night, sometimes right before school talent shows or birthday parties, and her work was not the sort of thing she could hand off to someone else if she did not feel like coming in that day.
It was unfortunate, but their now almost grown children felt the resentment deep enough to allow themselves to pull away from both Steve and Peggy as they grew into adults. Both ended up going away to college, and Steve felt the pang of empty nest syndrome perhaps a little more strongly than Peggy did, although she missed the children as well. It was simply perhaps that Peggy had work to throw herself into, and with the kids grown and off to college, Steve had to find a new focus in his life. This was also about the time that another event happen that jarred Steve into remembering the future that was waiting for him.
One Saturday afternoon in the mid-1960s, there was a knock at the door and when Steve opened it, a young man in his early 20s stood on the other side. He introduced himself as Harrison Carter, and that he was looking for his aunt who had been his father's sister. Peggy had been overwhelmed and overjoyed to meet the son of her deceased brother Michael who had died in World War II. She had not known that her brother had left behind a nephew, and apparently neither had her brother. Harrison went on to explain that his mother had been involved with his father before he had shipped out to the war, and had known very little about Michael Carter's family. They had tried off and on to locate the Carters over the years, but the mess that was Britain after the Second World War made record finding somewhat difficult. Harrison had decided to take the search back up again a year prior, after his mother had died of cancer leaving him without any family to speak of. He had graduated from school and had taken a gap year to locate his father's family and work a bit. Peggy convinced the young man to stay in America and got him enrolled in the local university. When he graduated, he opted to join the military and would later become a career military officer. Harrison became an intermittent figure in their family, showing up for holidays and sending the occasional postcard, but when Steve had first laid eyes on the young man, he had been jolted to his core. Peggy claimed that Harrison resembled her brother Michael, and a glance at the few photos Peggy had of her brother confirmed this. There was a similarity in Harrison's face to Peggy's, but it was his eyes that caught Steve's attention. The structure, the color, how they rested in his face above rounded cheekbones. They were Sharon's eyes. In that moment, he knew he was looking at the man who would someday father Sharon. Most of the time, Steve was able to cast this thought aside and not behave any differently towards Harrison, Harry as Peggy started calling him. And it helped that the younger man was often gone at school or later on deployment. But upon meeting him and getting to know him, Steve was faced with something else he had not allowed himself to think about. Sharon had told him that her father had died on deployment when she was seven. Knowing that Sharon would be born in 1986, this meant that Steve had an approximate idea of when Harry would die. On top of that, he also knew when Howard and Maria, as well as Peggy, would depart from the world, and those dates were approaching. And to keep the timeline intact, he must say and do nothing
