May, 1967
In which James and Michelle learn some classified information.
"Hey, Dad, is it alright if I go over to Phil's after dinner?" James asked, pulling some plates down from the cupboard to set the table. "We were going to play some basketball."
"Um," his dad replied, scratching hesitantly at the back of his neck, which James thought was weird. Stuff like that was usually fine, but if not, he would have gotten a simple 'no' with a reason why. "Not tonight," he continued. He and Mom exchanged a quick look. "We need to talk to you guys about something."
"Okay," James said slowly. "Is something wrong?" Whatever it was, it sounded serious. Had somebody died? No, they probably would have told them right away if that had happened. But maybe someone was sick—did Dad have cancer? Or maybe…Was Mom going to Vietnam for S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff?
"No, nothing's wrong," Dad said.
"Are we in trouble?" Michelle wondered, setting down the last of the silverware and dropping into her usual seat.
"No," Mom replied. She smiled a little. "It's nothing bad, we promise. Your father does tend to deliver news rather dramatically."
"That wasn't dramatic!" he protested, setting a casserole dish down in the middle of the table. "I just said we needed to talk about something."
"Yeah, but you said it in 'the voice'," Michelle pointed out. "We've gotta at least be moving or something."
Dad sighed, and Mom chuckled and kissed his cheek before sitting down. "You do have a 'voice', darling," she said, and although James still didn't know what was going on, them acting so normal about it at least made him feel better. "I don't think you do it on purpose," she continued. "It's an occupational hazard."
"Why does being an art teacher mean you have 'the voice'?" James wondered.
Dad sighed. "Can we stop calling it that?" Michelle giggled and Dad shook his head. "I'm sorry if I freaked you guys out. I wasn't trying to do it on purpose."
"So, what's up, then?" James asked, dishing himself some green beans before passing the bowl along.
"Well, since your mom so kindly gave me an opening…She wasn't referring to my teaching job," he said.
"You don't have another job," Michelle said around a mouthful of chicken.
"Don't talk with your mouth full," Dad said. "And it's true, I don't now. But I used to."
"You mean in the Army?" James asked. He knew his dad had fought in World War Two—he'd been a Captain—but aside from the fact that that was where he and Mom had met and lots of stories about his friends and Uncle Bucky, James didn't actually know a lot about what his dad had actually done during the war.
"The Army and…what I did after that," he said.
Michelle's eyes went wide and she hurriedly swallowed the rest of her chicken. "Is this where we find out what happened between 1945 and 1948?" she asked excitedly.
"Huh?" James said.
"Oh, come on," she said, rolling her eyes. "Mom and Dad met in the war, and the war ended in 1945. But! They didn't get married until 1948. Mom's talked some about what she did in the S.S.R. in there, but Dad has never said a single thing about what he did for those three years. It's super-mysterious. I'm right, aren't I?" she finished, looking at their parents expectantly.
"You are," Mom agreed, looking impressed.
James supposed he hadn't given their parents' relationship before the two of them were born much thought, but he realized Michelle was right. He looked over at his dad interestedly. "Were you on some kind of top-secret mission or something?"
"He couldn't tell us if he was," Michelle pointed out.
"He's telling us now," James retorted.
"Yeah, but it could be anything," she argued. "And something, like, not expected. If he'd been captured, or just working or something, he could have told us that much."
That was true, and now that it had hit him, James really wanted to know.
"Was there, like, some kind of Star Trek situation going on? Were you off with space aliens or something?" Michelle asked. It was far-fetched, but anything Dad kept secret for this long would have had to be. "Ooh! Were you on the moon?"
"Or was there a plane crash or something and you were stranded on an island?" James suggested. Probably a little more plausible than space aliens.
"Maybe he was in a coma," Michelle mused.
"Or he got hurt and got amnesia or something and married some other lady before he remembered about Mom? Maybe we have a secret half-brother somewhere!" James said.
Before Michelle could respond, they were interrupted by a snort of laughter from the other side of the table. Mom was using her napkin to mop up the water she had just coughed onto the table, and Dad looked like he was having a hard time keeping a straight face.
"Oh, dear," Mom said, still laughing.
"Feel free to keep going," Dad told them, still smiling. "But if you want to know what really happened…"
"Yes!" Michelle exclaimed.
"We do!" James said at the same time.
"Okay. Although, for the record, no, you don't have any half-siblings out there," he told them. He looked over at Mom with that face that Grandma used to say made him look like a sheep. "My best girl has always been my only girl," he said, and she smiled at him and leaned in to kiss him soundly.
"Get a room," Michelle muttered while James kept his eyes on his mashed potatoes.
"Well, if we did that, you wouldn't hear the rest of the story," Mom pointed out.
"Ew! Mom!" Michelle complained, and James coughed and choked on his potatoes.
Dad laughed and straightened back up. "Okay," he said. "So, this is—I know we're having some fun here, and I'm glad, but the whole top-secret comment is actually fairly accurate. What we're about to tell you guys doesn't leave this room."
"Ever," Mom emphasized.
James and Michelle looked at one another in awe, then back at their parents. "Okay," James said seriously.
"We promise," Michelle agreed.
Dad nodded. "We know we can trust you two. We just, well, we haven't brought it up before now because we wanted to make sure you were both old enough to understand." He paused, looked at Mom, then back at them. "There's not any point in dancing around the point, so I'm just going to say it. I'm Captain America."
James and Michelle sat there in stunned silence for a minute.
"Nuh uh," Michelle said at last.
"He really is," Mom said. She picked up a shoebox that had been sitting in the spare chair. "Have a look." Inside the box were newspaper clippings, postcards, and a couple of posters. They were all of Captain America, and James recognized a few of the ones where he was in the full uniform and cowl from the pages of his history textbooks. The rest of them, he'd never seen before, but they were pictures of Captain America either in uniform without the cowl or in his military dress uniform. They all bore an uncanny resemblance to his dad.
"No way," he breathed, picking up the front page of a newspaper dated 1945. The headline declared that Captain America had been declared lost at sea, and the half-page photo was of his dad in his dress uniform, looking over at someone off camera. It was undeniably him, right down to the little quirk on the side of his mouth that he did when he was smiling because he was proud of something but didn't want to make a big deal about it.
Pieces started clicking together in James's head. All Dad's stories about Uncle Bucky—James knew from history that Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes had been part of the Howling Commandos, but he hadn't realized…Dad had led the Howling Commandos. Dad was ridiculously strong—kids always thought their dad was strong, but James had seen him pick up entire pieces of furniture one-handed to vacuum under, or that time they forgot the axe when they went camping and Dad had just torn a bunch of logs in half for firewood. Dad never got sick—not even a cold, and James's brain was piecing together vaguely noticed memories over the years of cuts and scratches being gone a day later like they'd never been there. Dad was…Dad was really Captain America.
"So, there really was a plane crash, huh?" Michelle said softly, leaning over her brother's shoulder to look at the paper.
Dad nodded. "There was."
"So, where'd you go for three years, then?" James wondered. "And why doesn't anyone know you're back?" He would have imagined discovering a war hero alive, even after three years, would have been a huge deal.
"Well," Dad sighed. "The revelation that I'm Captain America was the easy part of the story. Actually, I'm a little surprised you guys are taking it so well."
Michelle shrugged. "Well, you sure look like him," she said, gesturing at the newspaper photo.
James nodded. "It makes sense," he added. "And you've never lied to us, so…" It was weird, sure, but he believed him.
Dad was smiling at him softly, and he looked a little choked up for a second. "Thanks, Little Buck," he said, his voice almost a whisper.
Mom took over. "Your father's plane crashed into the Arctic in 1945," she said. "We searched for almost a year and never found him—not even a trace of the wreckage." Her voice was a little tight, and James realized that she would have thought Dad was dead back then. Dad reached over and squeezed her hand.
"We read about the Valkyrie in school," Michelle said quietly. "I always wondered how no one could find a whole plane."
"The heat from the machine and the crash melted the ice all around where it landed," Dad said. "It sank down under the snow, but with the weather up there, it was covered up again before any of the search teams found it. You could have been standing right on top of the thing and never known it."
"How did you get out?" James wondered. Clearly he had—if he'd managed to jump out beforehand, maybe the stranded on an island theory wasn't that far-fetched.
"I didn't," Dad said. "I was in the plane when it hit the ground."
James gaped. "How did you survive?"
Dad sighed. "You know about the super-soldier serum?"
"Kind of," Michelle said.
"The quick version is," Dad said. "That it enhanced every cell in my body. It made me faster and stronger, I could see and hear better, and I healed faster. To be honest, no one is entirely sure how exactly the next part happened, but when the plane hit, it knocked me out but it didn't kill me. And the ice…Instead of freezing to death, the serum kept me alive somehow. Like…like I went into hibernation."
That was…amazing and bizarre, but another little puzzle piece clicked into place in James's head. There was very little his dad complained about, but he hated being cold. They'd always teased him about how many layers he felt it necessary to wear if he was out in the snow, and James swallowed down a sudden rush of guilt for it—if Dad had been frozen in a block of ice for three years, no wonder the cold bothered him.
"So, you were just, like, frozen for three years?" Michelle asked. "Alive?"
"No," Dad said, smiling apologetically like he knew what he was about to say was going to sound nuts. "I was frozen for sixty-seven years. It was 2012 when I woke up."
James had no idea what to say to that, and it seemed like Michelle didn't either. Dad seemed content to wait until they'd processed that, and Mom went back to her dinner.
"So," James said at last. "2012? Like…You woke up forty-five years from now?"
"I did."
"But…you're here," Michelle said.
"I am."
"That answers zero questions," Michelle pointed out, and Dad laughed.
"Okay, well, the short answer is time travel," Dad said, awfully nonchalantly for someone just throwing science fiction concepts into a regular Tuesday night dinner. "The long answer is…complicated."
"Yeah, I'll bet," James said. If not for the fact that he trusted his dad absolutely, James would have been a hell of a lot more skeptical. He was having a hard enough wrapping his brain around it as it was. "So…2012…Is time travel, like, a thing then?" Did people in the future hop back into the past for vacations and stuff?
"No," Dad said. "Time travel wasn't actually invented until 2023—"
"Wait, so you were in the future for eleven years?" Michelle interrupted.
"Yeah," Dad said, and James guessed that explained the age gap between his parents. Dad was, what, nine years older than Mom? Ten? He'd never thought about that much before either.
"Like I was saying," Dad went on. "2023. Time travel was never a widespread technology—it was invented for a particular mission, and the man who invented it…well, he died, so, no, time travel isn't and probably won't be a big thing in the future."
"A mission?" James wondered. "Are you—were you still Captain America in the future?" Dad was talking about the future like it was the past. This was already confusing.
"I was," Dad said. He sighed. "I woke up and everything I knew was gone. That was all I knew how to do."
Mom reached over and rested her hand on Dad's arm.
"So, yeah, 2012…" It took Dad a while to explain it all, through the rest of dinner, and then on into the living room with bowls of peach cobbler and cups of tea. Basically, almost as soon as Dad had woken up, there had been an alien invasion, and he and several other superhero-type people had been brought in to help. They eventually became a team, and went around saving the world. They did that on and off for six years, and then there was a guy named Thanos and a bunch of people died, then they figured out a way to stop him in 2023. It had involved time travel and magical space rocks and Dad meeting himself in the past, and it was a wild ride. James got the feeling he and Michelle were getting the abridged version, but that was alright. It was a lot to take in.
Dad also told them, a little hesitantly, about meeting Mom there in the future—she was still alive in 2012, and she was old, and James had trouble picturing his mom as an old lady. Dad went and visited her a lot until the day she died—the date of which he did not tell them, and neither of them asked. James wondered if Mom knew it.
He also told them about Hydra, who hadn't been as dead as all that after all, and Uncle Bucky being alive. What had happened to him sounded awful, and Dad made sure to stress that he was okay now. (Would be okay then?) Once Dad had found him, he'd stuck with him and worked really hard to help him get better, and it made James happy to hear that. He'd always been kind of sad about how he thought Uncle Bucky had died, but being stuck as the Winter Solider would be even worse.
"He's gonna be there in 2023," Dad said. "Eventually, I'm going to catch back up to when I left." He smiled at James and Michelle. "We're all gonna be a lot older then, but I know he would love to meet you guys."
So, he was going to have to wait until he was seventy-two, but James would get to meet the guy he'd been named for after all. That was kind of cool.
Michelle was chewing on her bottom lip thoughtfully. "I have questions," she said.
Dad chuckled. "I thought you might." He looked at her and then over at James. "Ask whatever you like."
"Okay, so, does it not mess stuff up now that you're here?" she wondered. "Is the future going to be different now?"
"I don't think so," Dad said. "I'll be honest, the science of time travel is beyond me, even though I was there while Tony and Bruce were working on it. But the gist is, no. The future is my past, and I can't change the past. I've tried—with what I know about Hydra, your mom and I have been doing what we can to try to stop them. But things have happened since I got back in 1948 that nothing I did changed. I think…" He frowned, trying to think of how to say what he wanted.
"On my way to put the stones back, I talked some with the guardian of the Time Stone. She was incredibly cryptic, but she basically confirmed what I'd already been thinking—I was always supposed to be here. Things I do now shape the future into what it was when I was there. If I hadn't come back, then the future would be different. Does that make sense?"
"I think so," Michelle said after thinking for a minute. "So, how much do you know about the future? Do you know if I'm gonna pass my math test?"
Dad laughed. "No, I don't know. You gotta remember, from '45 to 2012, I was unconscious. So, what I know about those years is just stuff I learned in history books. And it doesn't make me psychic or anything."
"Wait, so does that mean there's another one of you frozen up in the Arctic somewhere right now?" James wondered.
"Yes," Dad said.
James considered this. "And you're just leaving him there?"
"Well, it would mess up the future if I woke up too early," Dad pointed out. "More practically, the technology to unfreeze me alive doesn't exist yet. Thawing me out without the right equipment would kill me."
"Oh." And if that was the past version of his dad, and Past Dad died, either now or in the future, would that kill the Dad that was here now? James shook his head. "Time travel is weird."
"It is," Dad agreed.
"So, did you come back because the Time Lady told you you had to?" Michelle wondered.
"No," Dad said. "That was…I was already on my way back. She just confirmed it for me. I came back because…Once I realized I had the chance, I couldn't not do it." He looked over at Mom. "The thought that I could come back here and find your mom," His voice shook just a little bit as he reached down and squeezed Mom's hand. "For all those years I was in the future, I never stopped loving your mom. Coming back was…Was like coming home."
It may have been the light, but Mom's eyes looked like they were watering just a little, and she leaned forward and kissed Dad softly. James realized in that moment that though he'd been in love before, he'd never been in that kind of love, the kind his mom and dad had. He hoped he got to find it one day.
Dad smiled at Mom as he pulled out of the kiss. "I came back because I wanted to, not because I had to. And I've never made a better decision in my life."
"Did you know about us?" James wondered.
"Sort of," Dad said. "It…It was weird. I knew your mom had kids, and looking back, I realized the pictures she had were the two of you. I just never realized her kids were my kids until you two came along."
Michelle was frowning. "Wait, so, did you meet yourself? Like, when Young You went to visit Old Mom, was Old You there somewhere?"
"I never met Old Me, no," Dad said, chuckling a little. "That was a secret Mom had to keep from me so that I wouldn't mess anything up before I got to come back. And, let's be honest, it would have been incredibly weird. What if some old lady came up to you one day and said she was you when you turn 95?"
"Okay, good point," Michelle said, wrinkling her nose.
"Are you allowed to tell us things about the future?" James wondered. "I mean, I know you said you don't know everything, but…"
Dad frowned thoughtfully. "It's something I'm trying to be careful with, to be honest. You can ask, and maybe I can tell you how something turns out and maybe I can't, but I'll never tell you anything that isn't true."
James nodded. "And you decided not to be Captain America when you got back here to keep from messing things up?"
"No," Dad said. "I…" He sighed. "My war was over, and it was time for me to stop being a solider and come home. There's a lot I can still do to help people without the shield, but…" He sighed again, then he looked over at James and his sister and smiled. "I was ready for a quiet life."
James nodded, and Michelle did too. There didn't seem to be much left to say, and there was an awful lot to think over.
"So, now you know," Dad said. "Anytime you have questions about any of it, just let me know."
"Okay," Michelle said. She smiled. "I'm glad you came back and married Mom and had us."
Dad smiled and pulled her into a hug, then reached out an arm and pulled James into it to. "Me too," Dad said, hugging them tightly. "Me too. I can't imagine how my life would have gone without you in it. I love you both so much."
"I love you too, Dad," James said, hearing his sister echo him and kiss Dad on the cheek.
It felt kind of anticlimactic after all of that to go wash the dishes from dinner and then do homework, but that was what happened. His English teacher wasn't going to care that he just found out his dad was a time-travelling war hero.
"Well, that went better than I was expecting," James heard Mom say as he helped Michelle take the dessert dishes into the kitchen.
"Yeah," Dad agreed. "They took it a lot better than you did," he added, and James could hear the smile in his voice. He wondered how Mom had reacted when Dad showed up with that story after being dead for three years.
Mom laughed. "You say that as if I'd actually stabbed you," she said. Before James could figure out what to think of that, he heard music starting up in the living room. It's Been A Long, Long Time had always been Mom and Dad's song, but, wow, that hit on so many more levels now! "Dance with me?" he heard Mom say softly.
He sneaked a peak back into the living room. Mom had taken her shoes off and was standing with her head tucked against Dad's chest, one arm around him and one hand holding his. Dad was holding Mom close and resting his cheek on her hair, eyes closed. They were swaying gently to the music, and they danced to this song a lot, but realizing why they always made time for it made a knot well up in James's throat, and he swallowed it back down and turned around to go help Michelle with the dishes.
