A/N: Just to let everyone know, I've finally decided on the pairings I'm going to have in this fic ( Loki/Tony and Steve/Bucky, which honestly won't be actively happening for a while, but I don't want to blindside anyone when they eventually show up way down the line) and I've updated the tags accordingly. I'm sorry to anyone who wasted their time reading to this point if the romantic relationships I've chosen are a deal breaker for you. Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think!

Coulson had been extremely resistant to the idea that it had only taken a handful grainy satellite images over the course of a few of hours for Tony to pinpoint the mass that he knew had to be Steve's ship, but after Tony reminded him that he knew where to look because someone else had found the ship years before from Tony's perspective, and after seeing from the pictures how large the ship in the ice would have to be he rolled his eyes and called Fury.

The likely consensus was that Tony had secretly been looking for much longer than he said and had found the ship before he had even told them the story. It didn't matter though, Tony thought. They would start believing him once Thor arrived in New Mexico and confirmed the existence of magic. Until then, they were all resigned to playing along.

Thankfully, after Coulson's short conversation with Fury, they were granted access to a quinjet to go and check the sat images out and, pending a productive find, a small team to dig up the rest of the ship.

Tony gratefully accepted the quinjet, but he fought hard to nix the dig team. After he reminded everyone that they needed to keep news of this as far away from HYDRA as possible, which would therefor mean keeping SHIELD out of it, Fury agreed that the extraction of Cap could be handled by just Tony, Clint, and Coulson, and he allowed Tony to hire an unaffiliated team of his own made up of a few scientist from different divisions to help thaw Steve out without killing him. Tony had each of them sign a gag before they even accepted the job.

He also put in a rush order of medical equipment and a few things that would help them to safely defrost Steve to be delivered to a building that he bought in upstate New York. It was only a few miles away from the place where he had built the compound in 2015. It had been serving as a warehouse with limited office space before he had acquired it so hopefully his design team would be able to quickly convert it into a lab for him to work on carefully melting Frosty the Capsicle.

Once they were in the air, Tony called Pepper and had her get in touch with Helen Cho. He wasn't entirely sure how they had managed to regulate Cap's temperature the first time around, but he knew Cho would be able to figure it out. Pepper was upset that he had run off to dig in the Arctic for an old war hero without warning her he wouldn't be into the office that day, especially after his latest conference fiasco, but promised she would have Cho and the rest of the team he had hired waiting at his new building whenever they finished digging Steve up.

"So, if we do find him, and he's miraculously still alive, how exactly are we supposed to move him without accidently melting him the wrong way?" Coulson asked halfway into the flight. He looked alarmed as if the idea hadn't occurred to him until that moment. Clint gazed curiously over his shoulder from the pilot's seat.

"That's why I insisted that we wait an extra hour for the delivery guys to install this baby into the quinjet." Tony said, slapping the large object he had beside him. "This is a walk-in freezer. I figure we'll cut most of the ice around Cap's body to get him out, and then we can tie him down and store him in here until we can get him to the lab to properly thaw him out."

Coulson blinked. "Don't we need specialized equipment for that? Won't he? Won't he need to breathe or something?"

"I don't see why we would. A freezer is a freezer. As for breathing, he's been frozen solid for the last 65 years. He definitely hasn't been breathing during that. I'm sure he can withstand a four-hour flight in a freezer." Tony laughed at Coulson's mildly horrified expression. "Just try not to over think it agent. I promise Steve won't die."

The trip passed quickly as it could, considering that they were coming from California, and soon enough they were landing in the Arctic. Tony donned his new suit trying not to long too hard for the nanobot one that he had lost. He would get there eventually. He just needed some time to reinvent the technology.

Exiting the jet Tony was happy enough to find that although it wasn't quite as close to the surface as it would be a couple of years from then, Steve's ship was still slightly visible to the naked eye so long as you knew to look for it.

It didn't take long to cut a hole in the roof with a laser and run a rope down for the two men without Iron Man suits to enter; Tony, of course, just flew. Coulson clearly didn't want to get his hopes up about this ship actually being the one Captain America had crashed. He searched the room they dropped into cautiously until Tony spotted what they were looking for.

"Look," Tony said, turning his suit's floodlights on to better illuminate the area. Cap's shield was visible under a small layer of ice.

"Holy shit. You actually found him. How the fuck did you manage this?" Clint exclaimed running a gloved hand over the ice-covered shield.

"I'm telling you. I really am from the future. Finding something is a lot easier when you know where to look for it." Tony shrugged using the laser on his wrist to melt the shield free.

"He's here." Coulson said in awe. He was staring at a corner a few feet away. "He's actually here."

"Don't start crying yet Coulson. We still need to dig him out." Tony quipped walking up behind him. As he got closer he could make out what Coulson had already spotted. The barest hint of Steve's face and uniform could be seen through the ice. Tony felt his stomach twist slightly at the sight of his friend so still. He knew Steve was alive, simply because he had been the last time he was found, but his frozen form under the ice did nothing to give that away.

"Jarvis, can you scan the ice? Let me know what I'm working with? Wouldn't want to cut something off by accident."

"Certainly sir." Jarvis replied as the scan appeared in Tony's helmet display. "It looks as though Captain Rogers is lying completely flat with his arms crossed over his chest. So long as you cut around him in a three-foot diameter you should avoid maiming him with the laser."

Tony did his best to push away the images that crossed his mind at hearing that. Steve was laying down with his arms crossed instead of sitting upright in his chair or laying awkwardly from being thrown. That meant he hadn't been frozen upon impact. He had to have consciously chosen to lay down like that. He hadn't even tried to escape the ship. He had just laid himself down and waited to die. Why? Tony sighed and shook the thought away. He guessed he could always ask Steve later, he thought, starting up the laser.

It took Tony about an hour of cutting to free Steve from the larger chunk of ice that had settled around him. He could have done it much quicker, but he was afraid that too much heat from the laser could negatively affect Steve's temperature, so he took it slow. While he was busy doing that, Coulson and Clint spent their time digging the shield the rest of the way out of the ice with lasers of their own.

The task of loading Steve's frozen body out of the ship and into the quinjet was difficult only because at this point he was a literal Capsicle and therefore awkward to carry and easy to break. He wasn't heavy to Tony because the suit did all of the hard work for him, but it wasn't easy to maneuver both of them through the small hole they had cut in the top of the ship. It didn't help that both Coulson and Clint followed closely behind Tony and made aborted 'Hup, watch it!' exclamations every two feet. Though, it was likely that Clint's exclamations were mostly to poke fun at Coulson's genuine concerns. By the time Tony had them both inside the jet and Cap tied down inside the freezer, he was exhausted from the constant fear that he was going to accidentally knock into something and chip something off of Steve or drop him and watch him shatter.

All in all they were loaded up and ready for takeoff not even two full hours after they had first arrived. Tony trusted the new lab would be ready to receive them as soon as they got there. 10 hours wasn't much time to work with when it came to collecting all the materials and then putting them all together into a working medical lab, but with the kind of money Tony typically paid, things tended to go at much quicker speeds.

Still, Tony was a little worried they may actually beat Cho to New York. He hoped they didn't. He didn't feel comfortable starting on the thawing process without her, but he was already getting antsy at having to keep his friend in an airtight freezer. He was both regretting laughing at Coulson's earlier concerns and rolling his eyes at his own irrational fears. This was going to be a long flight.

Cho did manage to beat them to the new medical lab, but only by about 10 minutes. Just long enough to put her things away and watch in apparent interest as a small team of workers helped them unload their frozen war hero onto a stretcher. Tony and Coulson had made sure to wrap a blanket tightly around him before they landed to obscure him from any prying eyes. The less people who found out they had found him the better.

The suit had gotten stuffy during the flight, so Tony had taken it off to sit more comfortably around the 20-minute marker. He was grateful not to have to transport the Captain on his own again, if only because he knew it would just end up being a repeat of the nerves he had felt the last time.

The workers had managed to complete the medical lab and were now putting the finishing touches on the rest of the building. He would have to remember to tip them for the rush job. "Dr. Cho. We've never been formally introduced, but I've read a lot of your work. Please tell me you can defrost this American flavored popsicle in a way that won't kill him." Tony begged as soon as the workers had shifted the Captain, blanket included, onto a table in the middle of the room.

He waited until the team had left the room and it was just him, Clint, and Cho, as Coulson had stepped away for a moment to call Agent Fury and update him on their successful retrieval mission and to request permission for him and Clint to stay with Tony until the Captain either woke or was declared deceased. Once they were alone he unwrapped the blanket so that she could see for herself what they were dealing with.

"Oh! Oh, my God. Is that… Captain America?" Cho rushed to the side of the table to get a better look.

"I guess now would be an awkward time to check whether or not you had a chance to sign the gag-order that Pepper sent." Tony said, belatedly remembering that was something he was supposed to do.

Cho blinked at him owlishly for a moment before she nodded. "Yep. It's on the counter, over there." She pointed absently at the far side of the room. "I guess this explains all of the industrial sized electric heaters I saw in the room next to us."

In the end, defrosting Steve wasn't nearly as complicated as Tony had feared. Cho had said that just like with a frog, the key would be making sure it didn't happen too fast. She had been a hard sale from the beginning that even with defrosting him as carefully as they could that the Captain would actually manage to still be alive, but after the first few hours, Tony could tell she wanted to hope.

It took a total of 3 full days for Cho and the medical team Tony had hired for her to safely melt the ice down. The med team assumed the Captain was dead and they were only being so attentive in the melting process to make sure they didn't damage the body as it was sure the president would want to give him a televised funeral, but once they got the ice down well enough for Cho to attach a heart monitor to him and the results showed a very slow heartbeat, they freaked out and began treating him more like an extremely hypothermic patient rather than a recovered lost artifact.

Once the ice was completely gone, the next 48 hours were spent slowly bringing Steve's temperature back to a normal level using a combination of electric blankets and heating pads. If Tony had had the time, he might have invented something to hurry the process along, but he had been busy over the last few days actually managing Stark Industries.

He was in the process of promoting Pepper to COO but it would take her a few weeks to go through the necessary level of training she would need to transfer to that position without gaining too much feedback from the board. Tony would have promoted her all the way to CEO again, but he had actually regretted that the last time once he had realized he wasn't dying.

Pepper was a wonderful businesswoman, and after her original promotion she had done a great job of listening to Tony most of the time when it came to most of the scientific directions he wanted the company to go in, but when it came to other things she could be a bit hardheaded.

He personally never would have chosen to come so close to working with Aldrich Killian without thoroughly investigating his company, and when he had tried to raise those concerns with her she had treated him like a jealous boyfriend (likely because they had just broken up after a short unsuccessful attempt at dating each other had proven to both of them that sometimes friendships should just stay friendships, no matter how flirtatious they became) rather than the owner of the company she was controlling. Which was frustrating, but from her viewpoint wasn't really an overstep as Tony had given her complete control of the company's choices when he had named her the CEO.

That was something he couldn't afford to let happen again. Not with the way the next few years were going to go. There were choices Tony needed to be in charge of making and he couldn't have her doubting his decision-making skills in a way that would affect the company. He still knew he was terrible at managing the daily minutia of the company all by himself though, and she had already been doing the job for years, so finally giving her the title of COO was only fair. She would get to do all of the things she was good at and was already doing with a significant pay increase and far more respect in the meetings she had already been running behind the scenes for years. And she wouldn't feel like she needed to take out Tony's trash anymore.

She would likely still nag him about the little things, but once it was literally his job to tell her what he wanted the company to do and her job to make it happen, maybe she would ease off some on treating him like an irresponsible child. Her nagging had mostly originated from Tony treating her like she was supposed to make things happen but then never giving her the full authority to do it, so hopefully once she had the authority to actually do the things he was expecting her to do, she wouldn't be so frazzled and short tempered all the time.

He hadn't understood all of this the first time around, but eventually after years of hearing Tony complain to the others, Natasha had finally explained things from the point of view of someone who had been Tony's assistant for a short time and had been trained by Pepper while she was moving to her new position.

According to Natasha, her training had comprised of how to get Tony to do his job when he really wanted someone else to do it, and how to gently remind him that you weren't allowed to do everything for him. She had apparently been very afraid that the board would somehow veto her promotion, and that Tony would be left to take back the position and Nat would be left to care for Tony by herself.

Tony was grateful for the insight, but he had wished she hadn't waited so many years to give it to him. 2019 was far too late for him to do anything about it, especially after the Snap. Or so he had thought. Regardless, he had been very busy over the last five days and hadn't had a chance to really think about Steve, much less visit him.

Time travel was weird. Because sometimes, you were sure you knew everything about a person, and then you traveled through time and you realized you had barely scratched the surface. Tony had thought he had understood that when he had gone back to 1970 and accidentally ran into Howard who was, at the time, eagerly awaiting Tony's birth, but in all honesty that one time could have been an outlier.

The fact wasn't fully driven home until he had finally managed to tear himself away from his phone calls and paperwork long enough to go visit Steve on the fifth day and, after being greeted only by his friends' unconscious body, had gotten bored enough to go through his things.

Once the team had gotten the ice off, they had changed him out of his suit and into plain scrubs, but they had left his outfit and personal effects on a table across from Steve's bed as per Tony's request. The way SHIELD had taken all of his personal items, aside from his dog tags, and given them directly to the Smithsonian before he had even woken up the last time had been completely dehumanizing and Tony wanted to make sure that shit didn't happen again.

After watching Steve lay unconscious in a bed for about five minutes, and hearing from a nurse that he wasn't expected to wake up until the next day at least, Tony had felt a little sad and had subsequently sought out something to distract himself with.

He was only trying to check out the uniform. Howard had told him countless times that Steve had had a hand in designing it himself and Tony wanted a better idea of what Cap was looking for when it came to suit design style, because he was going to need one in the future and God knows SHIELD never did him any favors with any of the versions they'd made him.

When he picked up the uniform, which was surprisingly a two-piece pants and jacket combo, two things fell out of the jacket.

The first were dog tags. Tony picked them up quickly, covertly glancing around to make sure he was alone and no one had seen him snooping. As he was laying them back on the table, the light caught them in just the right way, and Tony noticed.

One of the tags belonged to Steve, but the other one… rather than listing Steve's name and information, this tag read JAMES B. BARNES 32557038 T41 42 R. BARNES STOCKTON RD SHELBYVILLE IN P.

Tony froze with the tag in his hand. Surely this didn't mean what he thought it meant. The tag was turned around the opposite of the way Steve's tag was facing so that the writing would be against Steve's chest and wouldn't be visible to others while he was wearing it, but that didn't have to mean what it looked like.

Tony shook himself and finished returning the tags to the table. The other thing that had fallen out was Steve's famous compass. The one the entire world knew contained a picture of the Captain's best girl, Peggy Carter.

The compass had rolled a bit when Tony dropped it, so it took him a second to locate where it had ended up underneath the table. Knowing his curiosity wouldn't allow him to think about anything else until he settled the ridiculous suspicions the tags had garnered in him; Tony relented and opened the compass.

"Well, fuck." Tony said aloud to himself. The picture was of Barnes. No wonder Steve had been so put out that time Tony had almost killed Winterfresh. Tony had been attacking Steve's war husband without even knowing. God, he felt like such a heel. It made perfect sense now why Steve would have chosen Bucky over the rest of his team. They were in love.

A/N: It took me a little longer than I expected to get this chapter out. My miniature dachshund had a much needed surgery a few days back and things have been very stressful. She had tumors in and around a lot of her mammary glands and so the Veterinarian decided to do a full radical mastectomy. He removed all of her mammary glands on her right side, and once she's healed he'll have to remove them on the left. It's very extensive for such a little dog, (she's only 10 pounds) plus she's already 12 years old, so she's basically a senior citizen. I wish someone had told us that the reason you're supposed to spay and neuter your pets is in defense of hormonal cancers. My mom and I had no idea, and had fully believed it was only to prevent unwanted pregnancies. We've had Magrathea since birth (her mother Schnitzel was my first personal dog as a child, and her father belonged to my ex-stepdad) and we've never socialized her around any male dogs, so we assumed it was fine not to get her fixed. We were, apparently, very wrong. Around 70% of mammary cancer diagnosed in female dogs are in dogs who were not spayed before their third heat cycle.

Anyway, I hope the chapter was to your liking, and that I didn't miss too many typos.