A/N I recently saw Avengers Endgame for the second time, and found myself wondering how the time travel parts of the story could be reconciled. It isn't immediately obvious. Could Cap have lived quietly with Agent Carter, knowing Hydra was slowly taking over SHIELD? Even if I could imagine the answer to that to be 'yes', there are other, more difficult problems to deal with. He doesn't get the mind gem until after stealing it from Hydra and battling his earlier self. Loki gets away with the tesseract. Returning the mind gem to the exact moment he got it won't undo either of those events, or their consequences.
Et cetera.
It took me a little while, and some help from my son (Hi, Jim!), to come up with the logic behind this story, and a little longer to get up the desire to write it. I write to discover the plot, so having it already there took away a large part of my motivation. If I'm lucky I'll trip over something I missed the first time around, but if not, I'll still have Captain America.
Irony. He was swimming in it.
He was Steve Rogers, Captain America, a man out of his own time, frozen in ice until he was thawed out just in time to see the woman he loved die. At least she didn't die alone. He'd left her to live alone, victim of a broken promise. Now he was the one going into the past, to keep another man's promise.
He'd crashed his plane (really a stolen Hydra plane) in order to keep the tesseract (really one of the six infinity gems, in what looked like a crystal cube) out of the hands of Hydra. Now he was going back to deliver another of the infinity stones into those very same hands.
Irony.
Natasha had died to save trillions, and now he was returning the stone so Thanos could get it and kill those same trillions. Wouldn't bring Nat back, though.
Irony. Time travel's just...full of it.
Fortunately there wasn't much time travel left in the universe. The travel part, yes, that would always be there, but the entry points, the navigation? Those were harder to come by, and more dangerous to use. Columbus sailing across an uncharted ocean with bad maps had been safer. When Thanos came through the big portal his ship destroyed it, and Thanos himself destroyed the little portal that Scott had been trapped in. Which left one, a one-man prototype in a remote lab (really Tony Stark's basement), which had been left untouched by the destruction of the Avengers' compound.
Now it was standing in the woods. By a lake. Which at least made more sense than building a time machine into a DeLorean. They'd been bitten by their own technology too often lately. Plus the Powers That Be had descended on the compound during the Avengers' moment of weakness, and no way were they going to let General Ross near an ultimate weapon. Either of them.
Bruce Banner handled the silver case with surprising delicacy for such large fingers. Five years of life as a smart Hulk had taught him control. "Remember," he said, opening the case to reveal the six gems inside. He'd had custody ever since the battle, with the least faith in Ross and no desire to ever use the stones. Again.
Now Banner was handing that responsibility to the one man in the universe he trusted not to be tempted to use the stones even the first time, and he was dotting each I, crossing each T. "You gotta return the stones to the exact moment you got them or you're gonna open up a whole lot of nasty alternative realities." Dr. Strange's boss, the Ancient One, had said so. It was Strange's plan that had saved the universe, and the Ancient One's faith in Strange that had led her to surrender the last gem. For Banner it was an article of what little faith he had left.
Steve had heard it all several times already, but he didn't say anything. The promise he was keeping was Banner's, given to the Ancient One in exchange for the stone. All those nasty alternative realities would be on Banner's head if he failed. Steve knew that Banner would prefer to be the one to return the gems, but with one arm crippled indefinitely he couldn't do it. Not to mention that he tended to stand out in a crowd, even more than Captain America did. "Don't worry, Bruce," said Steve with his usual firmness, if not more so. He shut the case and took custody, ready to do what he had to do. "Clip all the branches." No failures allowed.
Bruce didn't look worried. He didn't look happy, either, or confident. Just sad. "You know, I tried," he said, and Steve knew exactly what he'd tried. He'd have done the same. "When I had the gauntlet, the stones, I really tried to bring her back." He stared at the case, holding the only thing left of Natasha Romanoff. "I miss her, man."
They both did. They'd both loved Nat in their own ways, and neither of those loves had ever come to anything. She'd sacrificed them both a long time before she'd sacrificed herself to get the Soul Gem. Only Clint Barton could claim more, and he'd retired back to his farm with his family right after the funeral, first and fastest of all of them. For good, this time. Steve didn't expect to ever see him again. "Me, too." Really it was little enough to say, and who else could say it, and who else could he say it to? Thor had gone as well, out to make amends for his long years of self-pity, Also strangely reluctant to return to, or even think about, his past, leaving Steve and Bruce to handle the clean-up more or less on their own. To soldier on.
Steve was good at that. He walked to the waiting portal apparatus, remembering how they'd all walked to a much bigger one just days before, all together. Now that portal was destroyed, and only this prototype remained. When he was done it too would be destroyed. Clip all the branches. Clip even the possibility of branches.
Sam was there, of course. Sam was always there. The best wingman he'd ever had. "You know if you want, I could come with you." Sam had missed a lot of what had happened to him, to all of them, dusted backed in Wakanda. When they'd all come back, he'd been the first man through the portal they'd opened up to bring their armies against Thanos and his legions. The first man at Steve's back, like always, but he'd always regretted not being there those missing years.
Steve shook his head regretfully. "You're a good man, Sam. This one's on me, though." They had no suit built for Sam, and they were pretty snug fits.
Another reason not to take Sam waited just behind him. Bucky Barnes would have wanted to go with them, and this mission was already too big. Steve gave him the straight line. "Don't do anything stupid 'til I get back."
Bucky smiled, that old smile. The one he'd had before...all of this, and gave him the punchline. "How can I? You're taking all the stupid with you." Good old Bucky. The two men shared a hug, not something they'd grown up doing but they'd gotten used to it. Bucky stepped back and said, "Gonna miss you, buddy."
Steve took that in stride. Bucky always did know more than he let on. "It's gonna be okay, Buck."
Nothing more needed to be said after that, so Captain America said nothing, turning instead to step up onto the platform marking the base point for his time-travel GPS device. Pausing to activate the armor, he turned again to look at Banner for his cues, picking up Mjolnir casually. Vindicated and victorious in battle, Thor had been surprisingly relieved, when they all realized Steve could return the hammer for him. It fit his hand well, a worthy replacement for his shattered shield. He gave Banner a nod.
"How long is this gonna take?" asked Sam, nervously.
Banner, busy with the controls, missed it. "For him? As long as he needs. For us, five seconds." He scanned all the readouts, making sure all of his controls were properly synched with the onboard computer in Steve's suit. "Ready Cap? Alright, we'll meet you back here, okay?"
As if he could meet them anywhere else. "You bet."
Banner made himself busy, flipping the switches in the required sequence, one-handed. "Going quantum," he said loudly, unnecessarily. "Three, two, one."
Steve vanished from the platform.
A/N 2 So I got lucky. A lot of other things occurred to me as I was writing, which is one of the things I like most about writing and the main reason I do it. When I was writing it I figured out for myself that Bucky probably knew Steve wasn't planning to come back. Later I saw others had similar ideas, and there may even be a deleted scene with that possibility mentioned. I haven't watched that disk, though, so I left my version the way it was.
This chapter is something of a prologue to the story I have in mind. The rest of these chapters will almost certainly be longer, and more original work on my part, which means they'll also take longer to produce. I can rewrite a story pretty quickly but creating it is a lot harder. I hope those of you who read this will let me know what you think.