Chapter Text
69 years before the Blip.
May 10th, 1954
***
If you’re reading this, this is your last chance to maintain normalcy.
Destroy that bracelet if you want things to stay the same.
If you make it to the end of this letter, you’re going to have two options.
Option one: Go forward.
Option two: Stay where you are, forget me, and move on.*
*This means no interfering in events. Which will be EXTREMELY difficult.
***
Dear Peggy,
I wonder if I knew that that was the end, me sinking the Valkyrie in the Arctic, and nearly dying, if I would have done more.
I’m writing this letter from 2023, 79 years later. On paper, I’m 105. Biologically, according to scientists, I am around the age of 39. Waking up was-- horrible. I went down thinking I was dead, and woke up to found that everything I loved was gone.
Since waking up, I fought in a galactic invasion, got a new suit, and made some new friends in New York. I think that throwing myself into that was probably a bad decision on my behalf, but I figured doing that was better than going to therapy and actually dealing with my emotions about it. The Stork club doesn’t exist anymore, it’s a coffee shop. I think Chitauri ended up crashing into it, but the coffee was nice at least.
By the way, Howards’ son is just like his dad.
After that, I started working for SHIELD. Because you founded it. I’m so proud of you for that, building it from the ground up. Made some new friends, Sam and Natasha.
Sam’s my right hand man, and I gave him the mantle of being Captain America.
You would have liked Natasha. She was a spy, best in the world. The face mask tech in this folder was developed for her (use with caution).
Got a suit upgrade, and a motorcycle I was sad to see go flinging into some jet. Hydra was discovered to be growing within SHIELD, and........Bucky was their main assassin. After he fell from the train, he was brainwashed and placed on ice on and off for decades as the Winter Soldier.
Hopefully you understand that the whole organization had to go.
Fought another threat a year after this, except this was a robot engineered by Tony Stark, which led to.......major problems. At this point, we (the Avengers) were introduced to the Maximoff twins. Wanda has reality-altering powers and mind control, and her brother, Pietro, had super speed. Their powers came from the Mind Stone, which Hydra was using for experimentation. The twins at one point worked with Ultron, because of their resentment towards Tony Stark. That reality-altering was used to show my worst fear to my face. Which was a combination of PTSD and losing you all over again. All of the Avengers and I helped to prevent a whole city, Sokovia,from causing a mass extinction, so that was a highlight.
Sam, Natasha, Wanda and I took up taking out the rest of Hydra. This started a huge oversight scandal in the form of the Sokovia accords, with half of the team siding with no oversight (my side) and the others siding with oversight.
At this point, you died. Your niece gave a fantastic eulogy. God, I miss you.
You may be wondering what happened to Barnes. After the fall of SHIELD, he went on the run for 2 years, and no one was able to track him. He was framed for the bombing of the UN in Vienna, where leaders were meeting to sign the Sokovia Accords.
Baron Zemo, who used to live in Sokovia, used the volatility of the Accords, and the secrets about Hydra and SHIELD being public access to drive a stake through the team. Someone got paralyzed, my friends got arrested and placed in a high-security prison(I broke them out, but that’s besides the point).
Zemo also leveraged a huge secret to break up the friendship between Tony and I.
The Winter Soldier killed Howard and Maria Stark on December 16th, 1991, and I did not tell his son to protect my best friend.
Natasha, Sam and I went on the run, as we were wanted by literally every government on the planet. The fracturing of the Avengers was probably why Thanos won. Some were in space, fighting on Titan. Me and others were fighting in Wakanda. Thanos, with all six of the infinity stones, snapped half of the universe out of existence. My family crumpled before my eyes, again.
Half of the universe was dead for five years.
This story has a happy ending, and explains how this letter got to your desk.
What was left of the team decided to do a time travel heist, in order to get the stones prior to their destruction and use them to bring everyone snapped back. Pairs or small groups were sent to different time points to grab the stones and return to 2023.
Natasha gave her life for the Soul Stone. She never knew that we succeeded, and told me that she’d see me in a minute as we all stood on the platform.
Thanos caught wind of our plan, and decided to steal the stones and use them again, with the help of his alien army. At one point, I was the last one standing, hobbling towards Thanos with a hammer, busted leg and busted shield.
And then the portals opened, signifying that everyone was back from the dead, and they came to help us win the fight. The snap to bring everyone back had worked.
We won. But we lost Tony that day. He snapped Thanos and his army out of existence.
Afterwards, I was tasked with returning the stones to their points in the timeline. Bruce, the same guy who snapped everyone back, told me to take as much time as I needed. For everyone back in 2023, it felt like five seconds.
I traveled to 2014, 2013, 2011, and 1970.
And then 1944. If my watch is right, I think I dropped this letter, and the contents in it, off at your desk, around 5:30 am on September 20th.
This is your choice now.
--Steve
Peggy Carter, the first director of SHIELD, was really grateful no one was in the office yet, as her face was still puffy from crying. And no one was allowed to see her cry. But this letter had her head throbbing and she’d read it three times.
She felt the compass in her hands, somehow she hadn’t needed to pry the thing open to verify what it was. The thing wasn’t rusted shut, despite the fact, if her math was right, if Steve had it for 79 years, and sent it back to her, where it remained, with the letter itself, in her desk for another ten, the thing had remained closed for 89 years.
She’d only found the letter as SHIELD had to move offices. They were moving out to Camp Lehigh, at Howards' insistence that the Army Base would be much more secure than being in the middle of New York City. It wasn’t like the commute would change much, or that she had significant ties to keep her in the city. Brooklyn felt like home, but all the people she associated with the city were gone. Angie, gone. Jarvis was with Stark, so that was all over the place.
Sousa, gone. Dead.
She took the lack of attachment as a sign to push herself more into the job, getting a doctorate, earning a reputation as being ruthless with a perfect manicure. Becoming Director of SHIELD, as she knew the covert operations like the back of her hand, Howard was always preoccupied with a new invention or a new woman. Or insisting that she hire former Hydra operatives to keep an eye on them and utilize their intelligence to develop more technology.
The letter to formally sign off on the transfer only had her signature blank, and without it, it wouldn’t move. With the letter she got from Steve, she was never going to sign it.
But then there was that damn clause. She couldn’t interfere with events. So did she have to grit her teeth and sign it? Or....was there a loophole?
If she signed that letter, everything that she was going to accomplish, everything that she had already accomplished was going to be meaningless. Barnes was going to become the Winter Soldier as Hydra grew within SHIELD. That specifically made her nauseous. She couldn’t let that happen, but at the same time, she couldn’t order a task operation to rescue him without raising a major alarm.
She couldn’t tell Stark that Steve was alive and they could get him out of that damn plane at this second. Did they even have the technology to defrost him and not cause brain damage?
The only choice was to move forward.
It was early enough in the morning that not many people were in the office. She slid the compass and the letter back into the envelope, put the envelope in her purse, and headed to the restroom.
Once in the stall, she pulled out the bracelet, securing it to her wrist. The thing chirped to life, lighting up with an electronic screen, which looked.....interactive? There wasn’t a keyboard, the screen looked about the size of a watch face, so.....she assumed that she was supposed to tap on the date on the screen. Howard would have lost his mind over this. Unfortunately for him, he’d never know. When she got to the future, she’d need time to process....all of it. Get acclimated. There was no users manual with acclimating post-time travel, so she assumed she’d need.....months? Years?
09-20-2016, she inputted, trying to keep as calm as possible when about to time travel.
“Shit,” she muttered. There’s no way to backspace. That wasn’t the right year. Steve had said 2023.
The thing lit up brighter than the ceiling lights, and she had no idea how it was powered. She was going into the complete unknown with a light-up bracelet.
She shrugged, thought for a moment she was going to see her brother again, and vanished from 1954.