A/N Hopefully I can pull off a good scene or two here.

"Back so soon?"

"I can feel them."

"I need Mjolnir."

"Won't be a minute."

Steve waited at the edge of a pond, watching a man cry.

Clint Barton's dearest friend in all the world had just sacrificed herself for the good of the universe, and he'd rather it had been him. Steve knew how wrong that feeling was, but it would be some time before Barton did. If she was his dearest friend he was hers, and more so. She hadn't sacrificed herself just for the universe, but for him, and his family, which was her family, and she got what she paid for. Immediately after Banner brought everyone back, Barton's phone had started ringing, probably his family wondering where he was and what had happened. They'd been on a picnic when they were dusted.

Steve stared down at the surface of the little pool, reflecting. What must the world have looked like to them when they came back? The picnic table, the farm. Barton had fled, but Nat had taken care of the farm for him, a job that had somehow expanded into taking care of the world. For everyone lost.

For those not lost, for that matter. She had him to help out on that score, not that he could do much for the world. The occasional PSA, but keeping the lights on and the relief flowing was different from healing souls. He remembered running out into the middle of Times Square, after the ice, but he was only one man. He'd tried to put that to good use offering whatever he had to offer to those who remained. Small groups. Multiply that confusion, that awareness of being out of place, by trillions.

Nat had stepped up. She led the Avengers, the Avengers led the rest of the world (mostly), and Earth had reached out even to the rest of the universe as best it could. Captain Marvel, and a talking raccoon. And then Scott Lang showed up.

It could have been undone completely, but Tony refused to allow that, and Steve backed him on that. The pain and suffering of the survivors he'd counseled, the new lives they had built, or in Tony's case created, were just as valid as the lives lost. There would be more suffering as billions came back to a world that had started to shrink for the lack of them, but there would be joy as well. Looking at Barton now, Steve tried to imagine how Lang's daughter must have looked, seeing him on her doorstep.

Balance. A life for a life.

A good trade, but not the best trade. As a soldier Steve preferred to weigh every enemy life he had to take against an untold number of civilians. Hard to do in wartime, where he mostly balanced those lives against the lives of his own men, simply because they were his own men. They fought the same fight, even if they didn't serve the same cause. For some, their lives against a Nazi's was pretty much an even trade, but Steve had their backs just the same. One life for five, ten. The ones who stayed with him over the course of his battles became his brothers, serving the same cause, knowing the real enemy. An enemy with a very distinctive face.

Battling Hydra made it easier, the monsters and the heroes so much easier to see, the battle so much easier, in some ways, to fight. Balance. The Red Skull, product of a flawed version of the same serum that had made Steve, his own equal and opposite in many ways, made his enemy more visible even as he made it more difficult to destroy. Steve had lost track, over time, but he doubted his total would equal the entirety of the Eastern Seaboard of the US. That had seemed a pretty big deal to him at the time.

Nat beat that record all hollow, for sheer numbers, and when it comes to lives, souls of infinite and equal value, numbers are what matter.

And now, here they were, a long way from Buda-Pest. The space stone inside the tesseract had consumed the Skull, sent him someplace else. Here, according to Barton; Cap recognized the description even if no one else did. In the absence of its powerful leader, Hydra had degenerated into a swarm of rats, creeping into power they could not manage to win. Steve wondered what the Red Skull would think of such followers, even if they succeeded where he'd failed.

Not that they had succeeded, in the end, and that told Steve all he needed to know.

He looked around, scanning the rather featureless landscape for his old enemy. No red-faced ghosts had yet appeared, so Steve had begun to doubt one would. But if it did, would it remember him?

Movement drew his eye, and sound, the sound of Clint Barton struggling to his feet and wading out of the pond. For a second Steve wondered where the ship was, had to wonder if Nebula's messages had reached here, but Barton hadn't mentioned them when they all returned the first time. The possibility that the Nebula who'd come back with them was a double wasn't something he was likely to keep to himself. Not after this.

If the ship was shrunk and in his pocket, it didn't matter. Barton kept walking until Cap could no longer see him, and he could no longer see the pond Cap waited next to. After that, whatever happened, happened. As it had. As it must.

Steve moved, coming out into the open. His time suit, a bright white, was already retracted so he wouldn't be the most visible thing for miles. So he got his feet wet stepping into the water, walking out to the spot where Barton had lain. Like Barton, Steve held out a gloved hand, to see the golden gem Nat had bought for them glowing in it. Strange. The other stones were supposed to wreak havoc when held. Rocket had told him about the power stone, and he'd seen what happened to the Skull. Even Thanos had used a gauntlet to shield himself from their effects.

Yet this stone didn't appear to be doing anything. Then Steve looked past his own hand, at his reflection in the water, and saw his scrawny former self, looking past his upside-down hand back at Steve. The kid from Brooklyn.

No way was Steve just going to drop it. He knelt, the action disrupting the image in the water. The stone between his fingers, he lowered it beneath the surface. He couldn't feel any bottom, but the stone's glow was quickly lost, and Steve, like Barton, was forced to let go.

The water turned red. The light changed, still the same twilight but now from all around him, and Steve looked up reflexively. The landscape, the clouds, the sun, the shadows of mountains, had all gone, under a red sky. The horizon was more golden, oddly, the water beneath Steve absorbing the quality of the light where they touched. Steve looked down again. He knelt on the surface of the water, it and him completely still, his hand no longer under the surface. It was still water, though, leaving little wakes when he moved his fingers across the surface.

There were no depths, not even a reflection of height. His own reflection was also not there. Steve rose, standing on the water like a...flooded floor, unhappy with any other imagery. He scanned the horizon, side to side, automatically. He checked his six.

He saw a structure behind him, like but not like many structures he'd seen over the years. Not ruins. Incomplete, it looked like a gate, a structure, with no walls. A memory of an outline. Someone stood within it, a human figure. Steve walked toward it. Them. Her.

He recognized her even from the back, her stance, her hair. She was dressed in white, flowing white, her red hair long and lustrous against it. "Natasha." The water absorbed the sound as it did the light, stripping his word down to the barest bone.

She turned, her gaze upon him tranquil, as he'd never seen it in the office, or in the field. "You did it."

Steve thought she would know, hoped she would, somehow. This was the Soul gem, how could it not know about the return of so many souls to the universe? "Yes." It was a bit of a letdown not to be the one to tell her, but a consolation to her it from her lips.

Her unsmiling lips, her peace marred by neither joy nor sorrow. "Now you can begin."

"What?" asked Steve, as darkness surrounded her, but the world threw his question back in his face. A wall of black stone rose where she had stood, and the wind blew his word away. He stood on the surface of the pond, its water frozen into ice as darkness fell, and it started to snow. The shadows were solidifying, harsh cliffs rising above him.

Steve felt no need to rise to that challenge. He knew what was up there already. Like Barton before him, he turned and walked away.

One shadow remained at the top of the cliff, invoked by the presence of the stone that it guarded. It felt the presence of a soul in need. But that soul was walking away from the stone and so the shadow gave it no further thought.

"Three down, three to go," said Steve, when he appeared back in the Ancient One's kitchen.

"Four down," corrected the Ancient One, "But even so your task is less than half done. By the time you finish returning the Reality stone and that hammer, the Mind gem should be ready for you. Assuming you can return that properly, I will be able to receive the Time stone from you. Only then will your task be complete."

Steve entered the coordinates for the next stage of his mission, and removed five hundred milliseconds from the destination. He entered quantum space holding firmly to the hammer. The presence of Thor on their journey might have gotten him and Rocket into Asgard, but Steve had no such guide. He did have the hammer, though, and at the moment Steve was aiming for, Thor should be summoning his hammer.

In addition, the enchantment on Mjolnir gave him the power of Thor, and that power enabled him to hold the Reality stone safely. Once he got the stone off his hands he could leave the hammer anywhere and just walk away.

Steve emerged from the quantum realm and fell to the floor, sliding across it as Mjolnir tried to obey its master's summons. Before he went too far that summons stopped, and Steve knew that soon Thor and Rocket would be gone. According to Rocket, he'd found Jane Foster, the woman who was hosting the Reality stone in its liquid form, in a wing not far from here. According to him, she was 'resting'.

Steve found her unconscious on a small item of furniture he didn't know the name of, looking like she'd been dragged there by a dwarf. He took the time to lift her onto the couch-thing and arrange her more comfortably, fix the pillow, and cover her with a blanket Rocket might not have seen and certainly hadn't bothered to spread over her.

He draped her arm so that her hand dipped over the edge and hung toward the floor. Beneath her hand he set the stone, and with Mjolnir he smashed it, backing away hurriedly. The remains of the shattered stone melted, rising up into the air toward Jane's hand. Steve nodded and turned away.

Thor's mother was staring at him. At the hammer. At him again. "And you are?"

Captain America nodded politely. "Steve Rogers, ma'am. Thor's comrade in the Avengers."

Fortunately he didn't have to explain what the Avengers were. "His companions in Midgard," she said. "He described them to us, when he returned with Loki. An archer, a troll, and the like, but only one did he describe as a noble warrior. I assume that was you."

"I don't...um.."

She put her hand on the hammer. "You don't have to. I am Freya."

Steve let her hand push the hammer toward the floor, and he let the handle slip through his fingers until he held it only by the strap. He only had to lean over slightly to set it on the floor.

Freya looked up and down the hall, then leaned in close. "Do you mind if I...?"

"I won't tell," said Steve, equally quietly.

She gripped the handle and tugged, but the hammer stayed on the floor. "Oh, troll dung. I'm his mother!"

"A word of advice?" said Steve. She nodded. "If you're trying to lift it to prove you're worthy, you're not worthy."

"But I'm his mother."

"Yes," said Steve. "You are."

From the chamber behind him, Jane Foster made a distressed sound. Suddenly the hammer was aloft, but Steve wasn't holding it.

"You see?" he said.

Freya looked over his shoulder, but Jane was sleeping, distressed in a dream. She hefted the hammer experimentally, then put it down again. "I thought it would be heavier."

"Try catching it sometime." Steve flexed his hand. "Ouch."

"I think not," said Freya. "I expect I have not much longer to live. Hefting the hammer is enough."

Steve looked unhappy. "Are you sick?" Do Asgardians get sick?

Freya looked calm, as Natasha had. "No, but my son let slip a secret from the future, a future where he missed me, and fears unworthiness, yet he only begins to contest with his friend Volstagg for girth."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be, Steve Rogers. We are both warriors." Then she smiled, "And I have a gift for you, one warrior to another. To replace what you have returned." She help up a hand, and a small block of metal appeared in it. "If that first warrior happens to be a witch, and a mother, so much the better. Thank you for companioning my son." She held out her hand.

Steve took the block. It was surprisingly heavy. "It was, is, my great honor."

"So polite." Suddenly Jane screamed again, and Freya grew serious. "Off with you." She moved around Steve as he stepped away from the door. "Jane, dear, what is it?"

Steve stepped into an alcove, tucking his gift into a pocket of his suit, as Jane yelled, "A rat! A giant furry rat!"

Steve took his smile with him into the quantum realm.

A/N 2 I hope my visions of these meetings are worthy of the subject matter. Please tell me what you think of them.

I'm sure there are some who would have wished for some kind of confrontation between Steve and the Red Skull, but the timing was bad. The Skull wouldn't have been there until after the stone was returned, and Steve would have no reason to stay. Thor's little slip of the tongue was small, but said much to a clever woman.