Hey, lol I'm quitting my job for a new one soon so I'll have time off in a little bit. I might be updating more then if time allows. If not, enjoy this sort of long chapter and expect drama next time. Thanks for being patient!

IDon'tOwnMarvel

Natasha shoved me to the floor behind a marble barrier, and dropped herself on top of me right as that horribly familiar boom enveloped the room with its wave of heat. I gasped, tensing and covering myself under the Agent while she did the same, covering both our heads. Glass rained across the room with the groan and shrieking of steel bending added to the chaos of people's screams. I took a breath and then another after the wave passed.

Is Happy here? I opened my eyes when the sting of smokey air hit my nose and burned down my throat.

I rolled over to cough, covering my ears as Natasha got off me.

"Happy?" I wheezed out, looking around through the hacking coughs before getting pulled to my feet by Natasha.

"He's not here." She redirected my panicked searching for the man on the ground by grabbing my chin. "Stop."

"I saw him." I insisted, looking back to the floor and blinking my eyes through the tears from the smoke.

I had seen him. He had a cut on his…leg. I blinked again and looked up at her before getting angry with myself and the open box.

"Fucking Mandarin." I squeezed my eyes shut then and tried to will that box back together. It wasn't listening and all I could hear was the fishbowl sounds of Happy's echoing voice in my head. "SHUT UP! SHUT UP!"

Natasha grabbed my arm again and started pulling me along with the wash of guilt running down my spine.

"I'm here, I swear." I said to her, trying to simultaneously shove memories back into my box with tears rolling down my cheeks. "Stop crying, you bitch."

"Sit." She ordered, pushing me down outside the room. "Stay here."

Okay, fine. I huffed in defeat after the box melted on the ground. I don't have to pay attention to it. What I need to pay attention to is all the people I endangered and possibly killed today. There's no room for being a bitch in an emergency.

I was on my feet in a moment and marching back towards the door that people were streaming out of. "Fine! FUCK YOU!"

T'Chaka gave me a funny look that I just then noticed and stopped briefly to address.

"I'm sorry." I held out a hand and sniffled with tears still falling. "Not you."

I didn't have time to think about what him being alive might mean for the future and instead marched back into the room that smelled of burning plastic. The bomb was early too. T'Chaka didn't have a chance to even start his speech, nor did anyone have a moment to sit down before it went off. But, again, as I tried not to cough on a man and helped him to his feet, the future stuff had to wait. Right now I needed to clean up my mess and pray to god that the lady laying motionless with glass protruding from her face wasn't actually dead.

T'Challa stooped to check her pulse from her place several yards away before shaking his head back at Natasha. I felt sick with my uncontrolled crying starting to get in the way. I smelled burning flesh, but with the quickly emptying room- I could tell it wasn't from here. I was smelling the Chinese Theater back in Malibu. I was smelling my own skin melting on my back, and with that, feeling a phantom sting down the back of my shoulders. Turns out, mixing traumatic moments can be disorienting. At one point, someone looked like they had the exact same injury as Happy, but he was walking fine and the blood disappeared when I looked back at him leaving the room.

One thing was for sure- I needed to get grounded as soon as possible after this. It was a whole lot harder to help people when I couldn't even count them. The blinding headache certainly didn't help either.

T'Challa approached me in the hall after everyone was out of the room and EMT's were buzzing around.

"It was early." I took a step back in fear, running into Natasha before she caught my shoulders from behind. "I know I should've called off the meeting- I'm sorry. I didn't expect it to go off so soon! It wasn't supposed to be until later."

"Relax," Natasha squeezed my shoulders gently while I was sure she was pissed too. "Now we know his plan is similar. He's not mad."

"Thank you." He nodded at me, much to my own shock. "For not allowing my father to be in the crossfire."

"Someone died." I squeaked out, fully leaning away from him and on Natasha with my head throbbing still.

"Did you make the bomb?" He challenged, getting a quick shake of the head from me. "Then we blame the man or woman who did. Tell me about Zemo. What was his goal here?"

"I don't-" I sputtered, running against all my morals in terms of the future, "I really don't know! He was using Bucky last time. He wanted Bucky to turn all 'winter soldier' on people. I think that might come up? Maybe he doesn't know that Tony knows already? I don't know, sir, I swear. I gotta get my notebook or something-"

"Alright," Natasha wrapped a hand over my mouth. "Take some breaths. We need to get back to the quinjet before you start telling everyone their fate."

"Mhffmakfhoayy." I replied, my words muffled from her hand before she moved it to get me walking. "Is King T'Chaka okay?"

Said man was doing just fine as we walked by him and T'Challa stopped to stand with his father.

"Oh, that's…something." I whispered just loud enough that I thought only Natasha could hear.

T'Challa narrowed his eyes at me though when I said it. I was rounding the corner with Nat before he could ask questions or give me more scary looks.

As soon as I sat down in the jet, I covered my ears and entered my headspace again to try constructing boxes for the memories. Things needed to be shoved aside into my pile before I could continue with this adventure. Therapy might be a good choice after all this though. Maybe Sam could recommend someone for me. Someone that wouldn't mind listening to my rant about Thanos without locking me in a psychiatric ward.

"Are you two alright?" Rhodey asked, waiting outside the quinjet after we landed. "I heard there was a bomb."

"We're fine." Natasha pulled me back to my feet with some makeshift boxes luckily holding strong in my head. "Come on."

I hung my head on the way in, not able to look at anyone. Steve came and sat with me while I got checked for a concussion or any sort of head trauma too. He let me sit in silence though. I was just grateful for the moment to feel like a terrible person while I tried to defend my choice with logic. Someone died though and many others were hurt today, so logic didn't stand much of a chance against the guilt that wracked my gut.

Then…something came up.

I looked up for the first time in a while, sitting on the table in the infirmary with a doctor looking at the back of my head.

My voice came out as barely a whisper. "What's that?"

"What's what?" Steve asked back.

I tried to focus on the memory, not fully sure if it was a real memory in the first place. My eyes shut for a moment while I grasped at the memory of my earth. The ground looked torn down the middle with my past self peering down to see black and purple boils churning up the earth. Then, just like that, it slipped away through my fingers as I tried to imagine it again.

"Lincoln?"

I glanced back at Steve briefly before shaking my head. "Nothing. I'm just thinking."

What was that?

Tony saw Lincoln go back to her room, but didn't stop to check on her. There wasn't a whole lot he could imagine saying after what happened. People in crisis were never really in his area of expertise. And, according to the super secret Agent that went with her, the bomb had gone off far sooner than Lincoln had anticipated. That wouldn't matter to Lincoln, of course, as she'd be very quick to just slap the blame right on herself. And, again, that wasn't really something he was sure he wanted to comfort her in.

Some Prince of Wakanda called at one point too, asking if Lincoln was healthy after the bomb. Tony just found that amusing though. Lincoln could be in the middle of a very important job, but she never failed to leave an impression. Though, he supposed it would be hard not to when she knew the future and past of many people Tony wasn't even familiar with. If Wakanda wasn't such a poor country, Tony could see the connection coming in handy too. It wasn't like befriending country leaders could be much of a negative thing.

She stayed in her room through the evening with no going to bother her. Steve stood outside her door briefly before seemingly making a different choice and then walking away. Tony assumed that everyone had silently agreed to give her space on this one. He just dropped off her box of chosen family photos outside of her room on his way by the next morning. The lack of motion from the room bothered him a bit too. It bothered him enough to find an excuse to check on her.

He wandered down the hall on the ground floor towards the elevator to get her something from the kitchen. She hadn't come out to eat, so he picked it as a good enough excuse to bother her. He didn't quite make it to the elevator though due to the shouting down the hall catching his attention.

Tony frowned and let himself into the meeting room. "No one invited me?"

Steve, who looked uncharacteristically pissed off, snapped back at him with his glare firm on a politician. "Ross is putting Lincoln on house arrest."

Tony noticed then the quiet symphony of fuming people and decided to not blow up with them. "Why?"

"She's dangerous, Tony, and now she's a terrorist." Ross crossed his arms at the group, probably repeating a statement that had been said already by him in that room.

"She's not a terrorist!" Pietro shouted back, "She was in the conference room the whole time!"

"She withheld lifesaving information for one." Ross jabbed a finger at the screen, showing a photo of what looked like a blurry photo of her outside with her hood up. "And regardless of what Ms. Romanoff thinks she saw, that is photo proof of her planting the bomb."

"Are you calling me lair?" Natasha scoffed, "She wasn't even in Vienna when that photo was taken. We have time stamps putting her in the air at that time."

"How do you know that's not another trick of hers?" Ross asked back, looking around at the room like he knew what he was talking about. "I don't. Neither does the rest of the world. She and others in this room have powers of unimaginable magnitude. If not a single person in this room can explain the full capacity of her abilities, you can't tell the rest of the world that that's not her."

Tony narrowed his eyes at the man, trying to remember the last time Lincoln locked herself up without so much as attempting to get some attention.

Then it hit him- "You already took her."

Ross paused before he answered, looking around the room as the others gave him challenging looks. "She's on her way to a remote facility-"

"You already took her!?" Steve shouted, unintentionally making Wanda flinch. "She's a kid!"

"She is responsible for the deaths of four chairmen and countless injuries!" Ross slammed his hands down on the table. "She is a weapon of mass destruction and she just proved that she is not to be trusted with the information in her head or her own abilities."

"She's more trustworthy than anyone in this room." Wanda got up, taking a step away from the table and then turning to leave with Pietro on her tail.

"This is ridiculous." Sam scoffed back. "She's saved hundreds of lives."

"And yet her death count is already a confirmed fifteen." Ross glared back. "How many more have to die because of her before the world starts knocking on your door for keeping her around?"

Tony knew this was bullshit from the start. If he could guess, the Secretary had been waiting for the moment when he could finally lock Lincoln up just for existing. And if he wanted to consider more villainous routes, Ross wanted to know what she knew just as much as everyone else. Though, Tony didn't need to do a whole lot of thinking when it came to figuring out how she got on the security tapes planting a bomb. Thanks to her spoilers, he knew exactly who to track down.

If he could get to Zemo first, he could determine the secret that was hopefully not meant for him, and take it to his grave. Then, with Zemo, they'd have to let Lincoln go.

Easy peasy. Tony sighed to himself, sitting down in his lab with a cup of fresh coffee. Just another day of dragging Lincoln back.

I didn't particularly enjoy following the armed agents along the backside of the facility, but it wasn't like I was gonna cause more problems by fighting them. They were just doing their job after all. Not to mention, my morals were being questioned again, so with internal guilt came complacency and I wasn't going to fight them over something I momentarily agreed with. Maybe I did deserve it. Maybe I was taking things too far by not calling the meeting off.

Then, as they put me in a chopper and flew me out over the ocean with a muzzle and full-coverage hand cuffs on me, I started to wonder about the permanency of this situation. Someone would come for me eventually, right? But under what circumstances? Was I to be released by the government? Broken out illegally? That was going to drastically change how I went about my business on this earth.

You know, if I…wanted to keep going about my business changing all these things.

At least it's not Bucky. I compromised mentally, I don't have trigger words, so if Zemo shows up somehow, I won't go batshit and start killing people.

There was one part of the process when we landed in the ocean on a raft that I strongly disliked.

Just like a hug. I cringed, holding out my arms for them to put the straight jacket on. I'm not trapped. It's just a big hug. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.

I yelped in panic and flinched away when a collar was clamped around my neck in the middle of them tightening the jacket around me. "Hey!"

A jerk of electricity shot through my throat and made me gasp and almost fall over. I coughed with tears starting in my eyes from the unexpected blow.

"What am I, a dog?" I choked out, getting straightened back up by a guard.

They shocked me again with a short 'shut up' as they pushed me forwards towards an open room with a lot of cells. I was getting Deja Vu from the movie as I looked around before they could push me forwards into a cell of my own. I evened out my breathing with the straight jacket, sitting down on the floor with my back to a corner and my legs criss-crossed. I wasn't necessarily claustrophobic, but not having my arms was still stressful enough to get my nerves all worked up.

No problem, I closed my eyes in the corner and took even breaths to focus. There's a couple boxes that I've been meaning to refurbish. I've got the time now before I might have to break up some fights.

I was relaxed for a good while. Time was hard to keep track of in my head, especially when I was hard at work or hiding from something, so I couldn't say how long it was. I think I might've fallen asleep though after a little bit because I was blinking my eyes open and grimacing to the feeling of someone pulling me to my feet.

"Wake up!"

I shifted my arms to try and use them to support me, only to be bluntly reminded of the jacket tethering my arms across my chest. Two guards led me with a hand on either arm down back out of the room of cells. There were two guards up front and two behind as well, making me feel a bit special since they clearly saw me as a decent threat. Ross being afraid of me was really all I needed to know to make my day a little better.

I wonder when that whole business with Peter Parker is supposed to go down. I frowned a little to myself as they sat me down in a classic interrogation room with a metal chair and table. Do I even need to get involved much with that plot?

I'm gonna be honest, the aura of this room sort of unsettled me. There were rumors back on my earth that Ross had allowed physical force to be used when interrogating Sam when he was here. At the time of the rumors, I chalked the fake black eye up to a movie mistake that they just sorta left in to make him look more beat up, but now that I was actually sitting in the room with them, I was starting to wonder if I dismissed the idea too quickly. We were…overseas after all. Guantanamo Bay was made to allow physical abuse and the inhuman treatment of terrorists. Who's to say this isn't the enhanced human version of that?

My blood ran cold as I weighed the severity of my situation. To get out of here, I couldn't guarantee that no one would get hurt. Sure, if I really wanted to, I might be able to melt through the locks on the straight jacket and my collar and force my way out. But…where would I go? I was in a room with people that had full leisure of my wellbeing with nothing but the hope that they didn't want to kick some nineteen year old's ass based on improbable theories of attempted terrorism.

And these are the good guys, right? They wouldn't hurt me…for information.

I slouched forwards in the seat. I'm fucked.

"Where are you from?" A voice asked over the speaker, being unmistakably Ross.

I closed my eyes and tried to meditate myself back to my headspace. I didn't make it very far before a hard fist connected with my face and I felt my cheek and jaw shoot up in pain. My focus turned back to my breathing as I tried to shove away from my body. The guard stepped away as they asked another question and I took that time to make a mental run for it. I was in my room before another fist connected with my face. The room shook from the hit too, but I held fast onto my safe space and refused to give in to any pain.

They only hit me twice more while I constructed a new box contently and set it off to the sides with the other as the guards practically picked me up to drag me back to my cell. As soon as I was dropped off, I came back and blinked away the pain, flexing my jaw and moving it around. As sore as it was, I could tell the blows were made skillfully just for pain and had not broken or fractured anything in my face. If I was grateful for anything, it was that they cared enough to not break my face. The heat pulsating and swelling below my left eye was no fun though and made even blinking a bit painful.

"Rude," I whispered, knowing that they could hear me. "Hydra hit harder than that."

I gave it a minute over the silence before daring to get up and pace around. I touched both sides of the padded cell multiple times before sitting back down to think. My eyes fell on my legs as I decided to test something then, and I watched as a spark of purple shocked from my waist to the floor. A smile reached my face at that and I stomped, making more sparks crackle around the foot.

Finally, something to do.

I stomped again with a soft giggle before bouncing on both my feet and leaving little electricity scorch marks on the padded floor. It wasn't unlike those mats one would use in gym class, except that it was white. Well, now it was partially scorched, but I'd call it interior decorating. Someone's gotta make this house a home.

Vents flipped on above my head when I did it again and the room cooled a little. I opened and shut my mouth to ask what smelled like bubble gum, but the dizziness hit too fast and I was out before my head even hit the floor.

I was up some time later again with a killer headache. I had time to just doze quietly against a wall with my legs put in some sort of canvas and belt binding too. That's what I get for entertaining myself, I guess. It was a good thing that no one bothered me right away too because I was a little bitter about that.

There was the thump of a chair being moved and placed with quiet chatter outside the cell while I stayed in my place, staring into space.

"Hello, Lincoln."

I didn't look up. Though, the voice was familiar enough that I made a rough assumption of who was sitting outside my cell. What I didn't know is why he flew all the way out here, risking that I'd out him the moment he showed up. Nor did I know why he was visiting me.

"My name is Dr. Brussard." Zemo started easily while I kept my eyes on the wall and pretended that I didn't know him. "I have been sent by the United Nations to evaluate you."

Sure, Dr. Brussard. I rolled my eyes to myself.

"I'm not here to judge you." He continued over my silence, "I've only come to ask a few questions. Do you know what can happen in the future?"

My mouth remained shut.

"I can't help you if you don't talk to me."

I turned my head to look at him finally, feeling like a vegetable but unable to stop the small smile that reached my face when I saw him. "Hey."

He smiled back a little. "Hello."

"What do you want with me?" I asked, narrowing my eyes slightly at him.

"Just a few answers are needed-"

"And is this…" I interrupted, tilting my head a little at him. "Dr. Brussard asking? Or someone else?"

He used his stylus on his iPad, probably being ready to mute the mic in the room if he didn't already. "You know me?"

"There's no electrical grid that powers this place." I pointed out then, knowing that his statement would have blown his cover. "It has it's own energy source…so you aren't planning on busting me out. Unless you have another master plan. Can you fly a helicopter?"

"Why would you not tell them my name immediately?" He questioned, ignoring mine. "You had an opportunity."

"I know you have a plan." I explained, "I'm just not quite sure what it is yet since you haven't fixated on Bucky. Plus, I hate Ross, so…"

"Ah," He nodded along, standing up again after shutting down his tablet. "You will be helping me destroy them. Perhaps my alternate self had other- foiled- plans. I don't believe it will turn out the same here."

"You are quoting every villain ever." I deadpanned, "You sound cocky."

"Not everything is as perceived in movies, Lincoln." He stopped in front of the glass to stare back at me curiously. "In my story, the Avengers are the enemy."

"Well, I won't help you." I rolled my eyes at him. "Don't tell them, but I do actually care about them a whole lot."

"And you believe they care for you?"

I hesitated and shut my mouth. Sure, bite at my insecurities. I mean, logically, yes- they do care about me. Speaking from insecurities though- they might just want what's in my head.

"I will see you soon." He looked between my eyes carefully. "At the Syberian Hydra facility. It would be better if you brought your friends. I'd like to watch as you melt the skin and meat off their bones. You'll become everything everyone fears."

"What if I don't come?" I challenged back, ignoring the pang of worry in my chest. "Like, I just stick around here."

"You'll come." Zemo smiled a little confidently with an alarm going off somewhere outside the room. "Sergeant Barnes has made quite a bit of progress in his recovery. It would be a shame to lose it all with a few words."

The lights flicked out then and I blinked, staring hard at the place he had once stood. The mental image of him sprinting away with his short legs made me snort a little with red flashing lights picking up in the room next. Sure enough, with the flashing lights and blaring alarm, I could see that he no longer stood outside the glass.

I sat up with my legs still bound, looking around and feeling like someone was staring.

Flash.

A black figure appeared outside the cell, standing still and staring back.

Alright, I closed my eyes and focused with the sound of metal on glass. I guess we're doing this the illegal way.