Author's note: Thank you to Kallie49, Peacockgirl and silverstardust for your kind reviews!

Chapter 2

When Wanda had left, Steve went back to the lake house and changed into dry clothes. Inside, it was quiet. Pepper, Happy and Morgan were still out on the boat. He wandered into the living room, not knowing what to do with himself. He got a book from the bookshelf, flipped through it without seeing the pages, and put it back.

Something was very wrong.

Ever since he could remember, Steve had always had an unshakable conviction of what was right and what was wrong. And he had always followed where that inner voice led him, even at great personal cost. Even when the task seemed impossible. This voice had never failed to lead him to the right path.

And now it was prompting him to destroy someone's life.

What if he did go back? He would have enough Pym Particles and to spare. Once the work was done, it would be as simple as typing in the new coordinates into his Quantum Suit. He could go back to before Peggy met her husband. She would never know any difference. Even her husband would never know any difference. He would probably go on to have a happy life anyway, whoever he was. It wouldn't change all that much, in the grand scheme of things.

Steve knew he was only justifying his desires, that what he was contemplating was dangerous, for more reasons than one - and yet, without making a conscious decision to do so, he crossed over to the shelf where the housing unit for his nanoparticle suit rested, and slid it over his hand. The screen lit up in response.

The coordinates were already programmed in, all five of them. Vormir, 2014. Morag, 2014. Asgard, 2013. New Jersey, 1970. New York City, 2012.

With furrowed brow, his fingers moving as if in a dream, he entered in a sixth coordinate, just to see how it felt.

New Jersey, 1945.

The numbers shone up at him, small and clear, mocking him.

You can't change the past.

But Doctor Strange had. He had alluded to a major change he had once made in a timeline, reversing time to undo the destruction of the Hong Kong Sanctum. Somehow he had done it without creating any paradoxes or hideous alternate futures. If he could do it...

Steve couldn't believe he was even thinking of this. He couldn't believe he was thinking of himself. He had always put others before himself, like Wanda said. That was the right thing to do. Never before had his inner voice told him to do the wrong thing, and it was hard not to feel betrayed that it was failing him now.

The compulsion to listen to it was nearly irresistible.

Quickly, he erased the last coordinate from the spacetime GPS. But it didn't make him feel any better. It would be all too easy to put it back in. With growing horror, Steve realized that as things currently stood, he could not trust himself to step onto the platform and enter the Quantum Tunnel again tomorrow. There was a very real chance he was not going to do the right thing.

Peggy's husband was a real person, he told himself firmly. He had a name, he had a life. You can't take that away from him.

But he wanted to. Words could not express how much he wanted to.

How could he stop himself? Steve's mind raced, trying to come up with something. He knew nothing about Peggy's husband. It was all too easy to betray a stranger. Maybe... maybe if he knew more, he wouldn't be able to bring himself to do it.

"Friday?" he said.

Tony's user interface responded promptly. "How can I help you, Captain Rogers?"

Steve opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again. His heart pounded unnaturally loud in his ears. He had avoided this so carefully over the years. That time he had gone to visit Peggy as she lay in her bed, weak and old, he had seen the family photo on her dresser, and it hadn't been easy to hide from her the pain it brought him. It was a relief to him that he hadn't had to face her grown children in person. It was a nurse who had greeted him at the door. He'd been careful to speak to no one but Sharon at the funeral, and no one else there had approached him. Almost as if they had sensed his desperate need for privacy.

Still, the photo was seared into his memory. Two children, a boy and a girl, of similar ages, sitting together on a couch by Peggy. From the 1950s, he had guessed, by their clothing and their hairstyles. He wished he could forget their faces. He should be happy that Peggy had found happiness and built a family of her own. Instead he was hurt. In his worst moments, he was angry. And guilty. Yes, guilty.

He thought he had made a noble choice, crashing that plane into the ocean, but maybe he had really been selfish. It was Peggy who had paid the price, Peggy who had to stay behind and grieve. He thought of an interview she had once given, the one he had seen playing in the Captain America exhibit of the Smithsonian. The interviewer had asked her about the 97th Division, which had been trapped by a blizzard behind enemy lines in Stalingrad, and was ultimately rescued by Captain America in January 1945.

Peggy had spoken movingly of how she had later married one of the soldiers Steve had liberated there. "Even after he died, Steve was still changing my life," she said. The unshed tears in her eyes had felt like an accusation. He had wanted to be the one to change her life. But not like that.

Not like that.

"Captain Rogers?" Friday prompted him.

"I want..." Steve took a deep breath. "I want to know everything you have on Peggy Carter's husband."

"Accessing," Friday coolly responded. Multiple screens filled with names and dates began to pop up on the display table. "Peggy Carter's husband, Grant Edward Buchanan, was born on May 30, 1918 in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Lincoln High School there, graduating in 1936. His military service began in 1942, where he rose to the rank of first lieutenant, serving in the European theater and earning a Distinguished Service Medal for his service in Volgograd. He returned to America in 1945 at the conclusion of World War II, and married Peggy Carter in 1946 in Wheaton, New Jersey."

Steve flinched. So soon? Only a year after he had gone under the ice. He'd have thought... he'd have hoped... that Peggy would grieve for him for longer. Instantly he felt a pang of remorse at the thought. How could he wish her more pain instead of less?

Friday was still talking, summarizing Buchanan's life, but he cut her off, feeling an urgency to rip off the bandage all at once. "Let me see a picture of him."

Friday paused for a moment. "No photographs are available."

Steve raised his eyebrows. "What?"

"There are no photographs on record for Grant Edward Buchanan."

Steve frowned. "He must have military records, at least."

"There are documents pertaining to his service, but none with photographs."

Steve's frown deepened. "A driver's license? Passport?"

"Negative."

Steve thought for a long moment. "What about social media? Didn't he join MyPlace or something, once it came along?"

"You must be thinking of MySpace," Friday said, and there was a definite hint of amusement in her voice. Sometimes it was uncanny how much of Tony Stark's personality shone through his creations, and Steve felt a fresh stab of grief at the thought even as Friday added: "But there are no social media accounts in his name."

Steve stared out the window for a minute. "This can't be right. I've seen family photos..." Although, now that he thought about it, the other photos in Peggy's room he'd caught glimpses of... Had any of them actually had a man in them? For the first time, he wished he had taken a good look at them.

"I guess the guy was camera-shy," he said out loud. Some people cherished their privacy - Steve considered himself one of them - although in this day and age it seemed like everyone threw privacy considerations out the window with both hands. There were cameras everywhere, in businesses and on streets and in everyone's pocket. How had Peggy's husband managed to live a whole life in the technological age without being photographed?

Just then he had a strange thought. Could Buchanan have worked for S.H.I.E.L.D.? As a spy? Maybe that's how he had met Peggy. It would explain the secrecy. There could have been a team dedicated to scrubbing away any traces of him.

He was tempted to call Nick Fury and ask. But he knew if he brought Fury in on this, the director would start poking and prodding and sticking his nose in Steve's business. And calling Maria Hill would have the same result as calling Fury himself. If only Natasha were still here...

Steve sat down on a chair, buried his face in his hands and took a deep breath. He couldn't let himself think about Nat now, or he'd spiral down again. The first few days after the battle had been a haze of grief and he couldn't afford to go back there right now. There was a job to do. Steve rubbed his eyes and forced himself to focus on the task at hand. He had to solve this mystery and make Buchanan real, or he wouldn't trust himself to set foot on that platform tomorrow.

The front door opened, and instinctively Steve waved his hand across the holographic display to whisk the information on Buchanan out of sight. Morgan came bursting in, holding the hem of her shirt rolled up as if there was something inside. Pepper and Happy were right behind her.

"I caught a frog!" Morgan announced cheerfully, running over to Steve and opening up the folds of her shirt to show him. Instantly the frog leaped out and landed splay-legged on the floor. Morgan shrieked and danced away from it, and then edged forward, clearly torn by her desire to catch the frog again and her nervousness about its unpredictable behavior. Quickly, Steve scooped up the frog and held it cupped in his hands.

"Got it," he said. Morgan grinned at him.

"Morgan, go find a box for it, quick," Pepper said, shooing the girl toward the garage. "Don't make Steve sit there holding the slimy thing." Happy went to help her.

"I used to hunt frogs at my cousin's house as a kid," Steve said, peering between his fingers at the frog inside, strangely relieved by the interruption to his investigation. "They don't bother me."

"Well, I told her ten times to put it back in the water," Pepper said, sitting down and sighing. "But the weather's starting to change, and she didn't want it to freeze to death in the lake."

"Frogs don't freeze to death in the winter," Steve said.

Pepper frowned. "Really? I thought they laid their eggs and then died."

Steve nodded. "They hibernate in the mud. They can even get partially frozen - they stop breathing, their heart stops beating - but in the spring they warm up again and come back to life."

Pepper nodded absent-mindedly, clearly not giving Steve her full attention anymore. She had a tendency to drift in and out of conversations lately, particularly when Morgan wasn't around. She could talk and smile and put on a show of normalcy for her daughter, but at other times she was distant and silent. Steve couldn't exactly blame her. He knew something of the loss she was feeling. Like half your soul was missing.

Morgan came running back into the room, clutching a shoebox, followed by Happy. Carefully Steve tipped the frog into the box and closed the lid. Happy helped Morgan poke some holes into the box and then sent her to wash her hands and put her pajamas on. Morgan was sleeping in Pepper's room, and Steve was staying in Morgan's room because Happy was already in the guest room. Steve had intended to find his own place right away, but Pepper had pressed him to stay at least until the Stones had been returned, insisting repeatedly that she didn't mind sharing a bed with her daughter. It was clear that she didn't want to sleep alone, although she hadn't come out and said that, and so Steve had agreed to stay a while. It was better to have more people around to guard the Stones, anyway, just in case.

And, if Steve had to admit it, he didn't really want to be alone right now, either.

He knew if would be easier for Happy and Pepper to get Morgan to bed if he wasn't around to distract her, so he said goodnight to everyone and shut himself up in the bedroom. He stood still for a moment, looking around at the toys and books without really seeing them. He was tired, mentally and physically, yet he couldn't stop thinking about Peggy's husband. If only he had access to more information than what Friday could give him.

After a few minutes' thought, it finally hit him. There was another former S.H.I.E.L.D. employee in his social circle now. And even better, it was someone who had known Peggy personally. With renewed energy, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed up his newest contact.

"Hello?" a man's voice answered promptly.

"Hank Pym? Steve Rogers."

"Oh, yes. Captain Rogers." Steve hadn't spent much time with Hank Pym, but the scientist had quickly made a good impression on him. The man was quietly competent and more than willing to help them complete this last mission, despite not knowing anyone in the group except Scott Lang.

"I've completed four vials of Pym Particles," Dr. Pym said, "and if you give me another 12 hours I can give you another four. I thought it would be best to send extras, in case something goes wrong again." Dr. Pym had taken it in surprisingly good humor when Steve had apologized to him for stealing Pym Particles from him in the 1970s. "I'm just relieved it wasn't Howard Stark, like I suspected at the time," Pym had said with a gravelly chuckle. "I'd have slept a lot better that night knowing my work was in the hands of Captain America instead." Steve had refrained from mentioning that Howard's son had also used some of the stolen particles to return to the present day. No point in poking a hornet's nest, when what was done was already done.

"That's good to hear, Dr. Pym," Steve said. "Listen, I wanted to ask you a question. You knew Peggy Carter back in the day, didn't you?"

"I left S.H.I.E.L.D. in 1988," Pym said. "And good riddance. But before that, yes, I knew Peggy Carter."

"You knew her well?"

"Well enough. We worked closely together for a number of years. She and my wife, Janet, got along well."

Steve took a deep breath. "Then you must have known her husband, Grant Buchanan."

There was a short pause. "No, I don't believe I ever met him."

Steve took a gamble. "But he worked at S.H.I.E.L.D., didn't he?"

"Not that I know of. Peggy never mentioned it. Janet?"

Steve heard a woman's voice in the background: "I think she said he was an artist. He must have been eccentric, or maybe a bit of a loner. He never came to any of the agency receptions, at least not the ones we attended. Peggy always said he preferred staying home."

"Why do you ask?" Hank Pym asked.

"Just curious," Steve said quickly. "Call me when you finish making the particles, all right? Dr. Banner finished building the quantum tunnel today, and the sooner we get the Stones where they belong, the better."

"Sure thing."

Disappointed, Steve ended the call and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He had really hoped Hank Pym could give him something useful. Well, there was one other thing to try, although it was a long shot. Peggy had told the Smithsonian interviewer that her husband was among the soldiers Captain America and the Howling Commandoes had rescued from the blizzard siege at Volgograd. Steve himself had no memory of meeting any Lieutenant Buchanan, but then his interactions had been mostly confined to the battalion's commanding officer. He hadn't had a chance to talk to the men.

"Friday, show me the photos of Captain America with the survivors of Volgograd, the ones they used for all those..." Steve paused to control the distaste in his voice. "...those propaganda reels."

Multiple photos popped up in the holographic display, all in black and white. There he was in many of them, in the old spangled uniform, flanked by Bucky and various other Howling Commandoes, with crowds of cheering men on all sides. Steve studied the photos for a few minutes and realized that no one had ever attempted to caption them with the names of all those soldiers. Maybe Buchanan was here, just not labeled.

"Friday, run facial recognition on everyone in these photos," he said, "and cross-reference them with the names and records of the men known to have survived this campaign. Let me know if you find any anomalies."

That seemed like a tall order, but in less than a minute Friday responded. "All individuals in the photos are identified and accounted for, Captain Rogers. None of them correspond to Buchanan."

Steve was growing more confused by the minute.

Even as he reached for his kimoyo beads and slipped them on his wrist, he wondered why he was being so tenacious about this. Did it really matter that Peggy's husband was so elusive? The important thing was that he had made her happy. He had given her a family. Steve had no right to even think about going back to 1945 to take it all away, just because he saw Peggy in 1970 and lost his head for a minute.

His shoulders sagged. Who was he kidding? Lost his head for a minute? He lost his head every time he saw or heard anything that reminded him of Peggy, and the 12 years he had spent apart from her hadn't dulled his reactions in the slightest. The first time Wanda had laid eyes on him and probed him for weakness, she had instantly identified his connection with Peggy as his point of greatest vulnerability. He couldn't get on a plane without looking at her photo in his compass. He couldn't see Clint with his wife or Tony with his without thinking of Peggy. He couldn't look at Morgan without thinking of what should have been. The reality was, he was not going to be able to drop this investigation until he had a satisfactory answer.

It took Bucky a minute to answer his call on the kimoyo beads, but finally his holographic head and torso rose up from Steve's palm.

"Is this it?" Bucky asked. "Gearing up to go?"

"Not quite," Steve said. "We're still waiting for Pym Particles. Listen, I wanted to talk to you about the day we liberated the 97th Battalion at Volgograd."

Bucky snorted. "Steve, sometimes you really are an old man. Are you seriously calling me up to trade war stories right now? Do you realize it's the middle of the night here in Wakanda?"

"Do you remember it?" Steve repeated patiently.

"It was the last mission we did together that didn't end in my so-called death. Yeah, I remember it. What about it?"

"Do you remember meeting an Army lieutenant by the name of Grant Edward Buchanan?"

Bucky thought for a moment. "Not really. Why, who was he?"

"You ID'd all the men and sent the list of survivors to Command, didn't you?"

Bucky exhaled explosively. "Steve, there were hundreds of our boys there. Yeah, I wrote down their names and read them into a radio receiver, but that was 70 years ago. I don't remember any of them."

"Bucky, this is important."

"Why? Who was he?"

Steve sighed. "Peggy married him. After the war."

"Oh." Bucky was quiet for a moment. "Grant Edward Buchanan? It isn't really ringing a bell. Although," he added slowly, "you'd think I'd remember a guy who shared a name with me. Have you looked at those old photos? Maybe he's in one of them."

"I tried that," Steve said. "I can't find any proof that he was there at all. The only evidence is his Distinguished Service certificate that lists that campaign."

Bucky made a sound of disgust. "Maybe he wasn't there. Maybe he was one of those heels who steals valor."

"Peggy couldn't have fallen in love with a man like that," Steve said quickly.

"Maybe she didn't know."

"She wasn't stupid," Steve shot back. "She founded an intelligence agency, remember?"

A short silence fell.

"He's a ghost," Steve murmured, pinching the bridge of his nose. "It's like he doesn't even exist."

"Steve, is there a point to this?" Bucky said, not ungently. "Or are you torturing yourself over Peggy just for the fun of it?"

Steve sighed. "I have to go."

"Hold up, Steve, wait-" Bucky said.

"I'll talk to you later."

Steve deactivated the beads. It was late, he was frustrated and tired, and tomorrow was going to be a long day. He really needed to stop chasing ghosts, and go to sleep. Slowly, he undressed, lay down on the bed, and waited for his swirling thoughts to begin to settle. He stared at the stuffed animals Morgan had lined up along the shelves for a while, and then reached up to switch off the lamp. Darkness flooded the room.

"A ghost," he murmured. "Peggy married a ghost." Slowly, his eyes closed, and he drifted off to sleep.

Some hours later, his eyes opened.

He was instantly wide awake, although the house was still dark and silent. Steve permitted himself a moment of regret that he wouldn't get a good night's rest tonight, but insomnia had become an old friend of his over the years, and he knew there was no point to staying in bed. So he got up and quietly slipped out the door and padded into the living room. He sat on the couch and ran his hands through his hair, smoothing it down. The doors to Pepper's room and the guest room were closed. Everything was quiet.

He sat there for a while, letting his thoughts take their natural course. He was still unsettled by the strange gaps in Buchanan's records. He couldn't stop thinking about the fact that here was a man only a few months older than him, born and raised in the same borough of New York City, who crossed paths with him in Volgograd, and finally met the love of his life and married her, and yet Steve could not find any concrete traces of him. Was he a S.H.I.E.L.D. spy? Had he really stolen valor? Both? Neither?

Steve got up and went to stand by the holographic display table. "Friday?" he murmured as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake anyone up.

"You should be sleeping, Captain." Friday kept her voice down, too.

"I slept for 66 years, I've had my fill of it," Steve said grimly. "Friday, I have to know. Is there any evidence at all to believe that Lieutenant Buchanan's war service was a falsehood?"

"Analyzing."

Steve paced the floor in his bare feet, waiting. Before long, Friday responded quietly.

"Here's something. The handwriting on Buchanan's certificate of valor matches the groom's signature on the marriage license."

Steve blinked, stunned. "You mean... it's forged?"

He sat limply in a chair. So Bucky had been right? Buchanan had created his own certificate of valor. He'd lied about his service in the war. And somehow Peggy had been ignorant of that fact.

"It gets stranger, Captain," Friday added. "It's the same handwriting on his birth certificate, too."

Steve struggled to keep up. "He wrote his own birth certificate? Are you sure?"

The documents popped up on the holographic display. "Handwriting analysis indicates an 82 percent chance all three documents were written by the same person, although it looks like there was some attempt to disguise it. Oh, and look. His application for GI benefits. Same handwriting again."

Steve stood hastily and waved his hands to zoom in on a line from each of the documents, thinking to compare them for himself. But he had only looked at one of the lines of cursive before he felt the blood drain from his face.

"What...?" he hissed.

Steve leaned on the table to steady himself, his head feeling so light it seemed to be disconnected from his body.

"It's my handwriting," Steve said breathlessly. "It's mine..."

His eyes drifted up to the date at the corner of the GI benefits application. November 5, 1945. He had gone under the ice in March of that year. On November 5, he had been as good as dead. And while he was asleep, buried under a metric ton of Arctic ice, he had apparently been in New Jersey forging documents for Peggy's husband at the exact same time.

I'm going crazy, he thought, and as if in confirmation he could feel his hands and feet going strangely numb. They were afraid I'd be unbalanced, waking up after 66 years of sleeping under the ice, but it took this many years for my mind to finally snap.

"I have a sample of your handwriting, Captain Rogers," Friday said helpfully, pulling up a holographic photo of his signature scrawled across a Captain America trading card. "I can confirm. It's a match."

And then, stilling the trembling that had swept through his body, Steve saw the whole picture in a sudden flash of insight. Grant Edward Buchanan really was a ghost. He didn't exist at all, except as a creation of Steve's. A creation he had apparently not created yet... but would sometime in his future.

As if from a long distance away, he was hearing Bruce's explanation again: "You can't change the past. If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future. Your former present becomes the past, which can't now be changed by your future." Steve hadn't fully understood it before, simply accepting it on the faith he had in Bruce's brilliant mind, but now it all made sense. His future was in the past. It always had been. He just didn't know it until this moment. And this life he had lived in the future as an Avenger, a man out of time... it was about to become his past. And nothing he could do in his future could possibly undo what he'd already done in his past, even if he had apparently lived his life backwards from the rest of the world.

The lake house was dark and silent, and its occupants slept on, but for Steve the sun was breaking through the clouds, throwing a dazzling light into his eyes. The world's past was his future.

1945...

"I was there," he said out loud. He ran his hand through his hair in amazement. "The whole time... I was there!"

TO BE CONTINUED

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