Chapter Text
Suddenly, Diana sees again.
Or rather, she is again, though she has no idea how or why.
Something is different. That, she registers immediately.
For one, she’s not in pain. Last she remembers, her bones were aching and her head was pounding and there were multiple cuts and grazes throughout her body. Now she feels just fine, like a clean slate. Her skin is free of wounds.
When she sits up, she finds that her surroundings have also changed.
She’s still in Wakanda, but it’s not the Wakanda she last remembers seeing. Gone are the battling armies and the war-torn landscape soaked in blue and red blood. It’s cooler than it was then too, and more windy.
Thanos is nowhere to be seen, and neither are his armies or the energy of his stones.
Diana also can’t see Rogers, or Nat, or Thor, or Rhodey.
What she can see is other figures rising slowly beside her, groggily finding their own bearings.
She spots Sam and Wanda and Bucky, and the tree from the battle. Nakia and T’Challa appear from the shrubbery to her right.
They all look just as confused and disoriented as she must, though they all also look healthy.
Slowly, Diana rises, not quite trusting her body to hold her. It does.
The birds chirp loudly around them, and a breeze rustles through the trees. The atmosphere is strangely peaceful considering what they last encountered here.
Through the leaves, Diana spots that there are other figures appearing on the fields too. Wakandan soldiers, seemingly just as startled as they are, materializing out of thin air.
It’s Sam that first interrupts the confused serenity.
“What the fuck?”
Diana can’t even begin to answer his question, because frankly she’s asking herself the same thing.
“Where is everyone?”, Wanda asks.
“I am Groot.”
They all stare at the tree for a moment, Groot, apparently, but don’t entirely know how that’s currently relevant. He looks down a little dejectedly.
T’Challa notices the Wakandan soldiers gathering on the field and frowns. With a look that’s determined and confused and somehow still calming, he steps away from the Avengers and toward his people. Nakia stays by his side.
Groot begins to wander around the edges of the clearing, seemingly looking for something.
Diana watches him, realizing that while they’re all lost and scared, he’s practically alone. They don’t even speak his language. He’s probably searching for the humanoid racoon he arrived with.
“Am I tripping or were we turning into dust last time we were here?” Sam’s exclamation would almost be funny if it weren’t for their dire situation.
Because he’s right. Last Diana figures any of them remember, they were turning into dust . Which is insane, and terrifying.
“Thanos succeeded,” she concludes. They all turn to her. “His goal was to wipe out half the universe. We must have been part of the wiped half.”
Wanda lets out a quick breath and leans her head on her hand. Sam swears quietly.
“Do you think everyone else is okay? The ones that stayed?”, Bucky suddenly speaks up. He seems strangely unnerved at his own circumstance, but Diana guesses it’s all perspective.
“Someone must have gotten us back, it has to have been them,” she says. She adds, “I’m sure Rogers is fine,” because that must have been his question.
Some of the tension seeps out of Bucky’s shoulders. He still looks anxious of course, but he’s minutely calmed, and if Diana wasn’t so anxious herself she would just about coo at the fact that his sole worry is Rogers.
Sam looks less pacified. “Well, where are they?”
Diana looks for a comforting answer, but finds none. “I don’t know.”
And then Wanda breaks her silence. “He’s really gone. He didn’t come back with the rest of us.”
Diana’s heart breaks for her, and she tires to think of something, anything comforting to say, but comes up empty.
The tense and sorrowful silence is interrupted by a relieved cheer from the field, and they turn to watch Shuri and T’Challa embrace.
Their hug is an island of hope in a land of uncertainty.
How long has it been?
Diana doesn't think it could have been more than a few days, a week or two at most, but something in her gut suggests differently. She doesn’t know Wakanda well at all, of course, but the city looked more vibrant last time, and the grass was not this high.
And Sam’s question echoes in her mind. Where are the others?
It must have been them who brought them back. It has to have been.
But what did they have to do to reverse everything? Why aren’t they here to welcome them back?
Sam steps forward and lays an arm around a shaking Wanda. She leans into him heavily.
Bucky musters the two of them with sad eyes, but doesn't seem able to offer any comfort himself. He rakes a hand through his hair.
Groot sits down on the ground, looking unbelievably child-like given that he looks like a tree.
A silence engulfs them again. Wanda’s grief and the chirping of the birds above them are the only sounds in the clearing. The breeze carries other confused voices and some relieved laughter to them from the field.
A loud shout rings over the landscape as some figures emerge from the surrounding villages. The voices are happy, so happy, and sound utterly disbelieving.
Diana doesn’t understand Xhosa well, and even her enhanced hearing can’t make out what’s being said, but nothing about the interactions she watches from afar, nothing about the cries she’s hearing, support that they were gone for a week.
Gods.
She looks back to the others, who are already exchanging daunted looks.
“How long were we gone?”, Bucky asks.
None of them know the answer.
“I mean it can’t have been too long, right?” Sam looks at them like he’s hoping they can’t provide any counter evidence.
“It seems it might have been.”
“I- What the fuck?”
It’s Bucky who asks this time. Diana still doesn't have an answer.
Suddenly, so suddenly that Groot jumps about three feet into the air, a circle of orange sparks materializes in the clearing before them.
Two like it appear in the fields.
Diana steps toward where Bucky, Sam, and Wanda are standing and watches as Groot gets up and joins them.
The last time a portal opened here, Thanos stepped through it.
They all tense, hands grasping at their weapons of choice. Diana steps in front.
But the figure that steps through it this time is far less imposing than Thanos was.
It’s a stout Asian man, round-faced and friendly looking, but with a grimly determined expression. They stare for a moment while he musters the lot of them.
“Is this all of you?”, he asks.
They frown, not quite sure how to answer the question and if they can trust this stranger. Diana gestures vaguely to the field in response.
The man seems satisfied enough with the answer and then steps forward. “Welcome back,” he tells them. “We’ve got another fight to win. Come with me.”
He seems to think that this is enough explanation and turns back to the portal, but they don’t follow. They don’t even know who this man is.
Sam says as much.
The man turns back to them with a huff. “I don’t have time to explain all of it. I’m Master Wong, sorcerer of the New York sanctum and protector of our reality. Thanos succeeded then, but the Avengers brought us back. They’re fighting him again, and they need back up.”
He turns again, but Diana interrupts him.
“So they’re okay?”
“They’re alive.”
Diana looks behind her, exchanging looks with the others. They’re not sure they can trust this stranger, but what other option do they have?
With one last questioning look, it’s Bucky that steps forward first.
He swallows. “Well then let’s go.”
And so they follow the stranger through the portal.
Diana’s not sure what she was expecting on the other end, but it wasn’t this.
The landscape they step into is so war-torn and mangled that it’s unrecognizable. They could be anywhere.
The sky is dark with dust and smoke, and most of the light illuminating the scene stems from the fire of what must have been explosions. Thanos’ army blocks out any light from the sky, moving slowly and menacingly upon the emerging fighters from the charcoal skies.
Between them and the orange glow of the circles, Diana searches for their own armies, but instead finds Thor on the ground to her right and Tony slowly rising from the rubble to her left. She can’t immediately see any others.
Only Rogers stands upright between them all, swaying slightly and with a broken shield on his arm. Diana’s breath stutters.
“Of fucking course,” Bucky swears from beside her.
Sam comes flying through a portal above them, wings spread wide like an angel coming down upon the abysmal scene. “On your left,” the com crackles.
Rogers’ shoulders tense, and then he turns around.
His face, beyond the fact that it’s dirty and beaten and bruised, is nothing short of euphoric.
His eyes scan those coming in, softening with each friend he recognizes, and when his eyes land on Bucky, they stay for a moment. For two.
He smiles the most exhausted and elated smile Diana has ever seen, and tightens the shield on his arm.
With his free hand, he reaches for seemingly nothing, but a second later, Mjolnir flies to him.
Diana can’t say she’s surprised, but she is taken aback for a moment, exchanges a startled look with Wanda.
The coms in the ears of those emerging are no longer entirely compatible with the ones in those that stayed, but they still automatically tune into the same frequency, so that the words come through with a static distance.
She still hears Rogers loud and clear when he turns back to the dark looming armies, and shifts into a familiar fighting stance.
“Avengers,” he grits, “assemble.”
They do.
Four hours later, Tony Stark is dead.
Diana stands in the dusty air, where she was fighting aliens just a moment ago. The pieces of dust fall around them like a dark antithesis of snow. Natasha’s gun is still in her hand from when they had swapped weapons not two minutes ago.
Pepper kisses Stark’s cheek and cries. The Parker kid heaves.
Nat drops down on one knee, and the rest follow. T’Challa, Carol, Quill. The threatening-looking blue alien, and Thor’s friend. Scott, Rogers, Sam.
She drops down as well.
Diana can’t say she knew Stark that well, in the end. Mostly, she knew was loud and liked showing off and making jokes at other people’s expense. She knew he was a genius.
It’s not until he’s dying that she realizes he was her friend, in his own way.
When a tear wells up in her eye, she lets it fall.
The moment seems to stretch on forever. It’s as though a blanket of grief has settled over the exhausted group like a blanket, sinking into the deep cracks the battle had created.
How does one move on from this moment?
They’ve fought the fight of their lives, tooth and nail, and they’ve won.
But at what cost?
A few of the kneeling figures gradually begin to collapse, sitting down on the upturned dirt heavily. They swallow, cry, heave, or just stare.
The humanoid raccoon settles on Groot with a tired happiness and turns its face into the wood.
Natasha stumbles over to where Sam is sitting on the earth and sets herself down half on top of him. He only startles for a short moment before he puts his arms around her and pulls her close. He presses a long kiss to her temple while tears streak her face.
Diana reaches out for a shell-shocked Wanda and grasps her hand.
Rogers is shaking. He’s still knelt in the dirt, teary-eyed and tired.
He hasn’t moved for too long, and Diana is about to reach out to him, but Bucky beats her to it.
He rises from where he was kneeling and walks cautiously toward his best friend. Softly, he lays a hand on the shaking shoulder and says something Diana can’t catch.
At that, Rogers crumbles. He falls to the ground, half onto Bucky, grasping at him with desperate hands. Sobs rock his shoulders.
Bucky wraps himself around Rogers and grips him tight. He’s running a hand through Rogers’ hair and uttering words into the side of his head.
Bucky shoots Diana a shaken look over Rogers’ shoulder.
It’s been more than a week.
“Five fuckin’ years.”
Sam sighs and leans back on his armchair, staring incredulously as though this isn’t the thousandth time he’s heard and said it in the past few days.
Natasha grasps his hand and leans on his shoulder.
(It seems five years were enough perspective for her to stop dancing around it. She’d kissed Sam as soon as she stopped crying, right there on the battlefield surrounded by dust and dozens of other superheroes.
He, to no one's surprise, was more than on board with it.)
In the whirlwind of a post-battle haze -- the injured, the clean up, the grief -- this is the first semi-peaceful moment Diana has had with the bunch since it all.
They’re in Rogers’ living room, the same Brownstone Diana visited him all those years ago. It hasn’t been lived in much in the past few years, but now there’s scattered mugs on every cabinet and blankets over the couches.
Rogers and Bucky are under one of them, so entangled that Diana can’t quite tell where one ends and the other begins.
Wanda is curled up in one of the armchairs, a coffee cup warming her hands. Diana sits across from her.
The stray cat that has come to live in the Brownstone during Rogers’ absence is stretched out on the carpet between them. Bucky wants to keep her, and Diana suspects Rogers’ will let him.
They all watch as she turns onto her belly in a lazy stretch. Sounds of a reawakened New York filter in through the open window.
“What did we miss?”, Wanda interrupts the silence. “Anything good?”
Steve huffs into Bucky’s chest. “No.”
“Well,” Natasha smirks, “there was a pretty good Lorde album. Super depressing, of course, but pretty good.”
Wanda snorts a little laugh into her coffee.
Natasha pauses, and sighs. “But, yeah. Otherwise, absolutely nothing good.”
The white cat jumps off the coffee table and sniffs at the gray of some day old tea. It curls up on the stained tablecloth.
“There were food shortages, lots.” Nat starts, because it needs to be said. “Looting in every store. General lawlessness, especially in the beginning when everyone was just scared shitless and pointing fingers. Suicide rates went through the roof. There were little civil wars all over the place. Here, Brazil, Italy, China, Pakistan, India, Poland, Egypt, the UK.”
“Don’t forget France,” Rogers quips, face still half in Bucky’s shirt.
“Oh, right. France was really brutal. It was almost three years, too.”
“Fuck,” Diana breathes.
Wanda lets out a long breath. Sam swears.
Bucky sits up a little with Rogers still on top of him. “I wanna hear the Lorde album.”
A small laugh ripples through the room, and Nat gets up to connect to the speaker.
They all gather around a quantum-travel platform two weeks later. Bruce is there to oversee the science, and the rest of them -- Nat, Sam, Wanda, Bucky, and Diana -- are all there to see Rogers off on his mission. He should only be gone for five seconds to them, but his mission is sure not to be short or easy to him.
It's a job that sucks, but needs to be done, so of course he was the first to volunteer to do it.
He never did know how to give up a fight.
He’s told them fifty times that it’s completely unnecessary for them all to have come, but he still gives them all a tight hug before he steps on.
Diana hears Natasha deliver her usual line to Rogers, somewhere between a flirty quip and a joke and threat and declaration of love.
Sam tells him not to fuck it up.
Wanda just hugs him close for an extra beat or two.
When Rogers steps up to Diana, she doesn’t quite know what to tell him. It’s just another mission, a composition he’s worked with before. He should be back in five seconds. But somehow, it feels a little bigger.
She settles for pulling his large frame to herself and giving him a tight squeeze.
“Last mission?”, she whispers, just for him to hear.
Rogers tenses for just a second. “Maybe.”
She just smiles at him as she pulls back.
The words Bucky and Rogers exchange sound like an echo from the past, like things they’ve said before. And, given their penchant for one liners and shared memories, it probably is.
Rogers gives them all one last smile of fondness and determination, and gives Bruce a quick hug before he steps up to the platform.
“You ready, Cap?”, Bruce asks.
“As I’ll ever be.”
And then Rogers is gone.
Bruce begins a countdown, and Diana swallows.
Five.
Bucky lets out a shuddering breath beside her. She’s worried about Rogers too, of course, but she can’t imagine Bucky’s plight.
Four.
He’s heaving now, and Diana starts to reach out her hand to calm him.
Three.
But then he’s turning, angling himself toward the woods and away from Diana and the others, away from the platform. Diana frowns.
Two.
Diana averts her gaze away from the platform and to Bucky, but he’s already beginning to walk away. What is he doing?
One.
She takes a step away as well, holds an arm out to make a grab for Bucky’s hand. The flesh one, of course. No one but Rogers gets away with touching the metal one.
And then she’s expecting the whirr of the machine behind her, but it doesn’t happen. She hears how the others begin to argue and feels anxiety gnaw at her bones, but she’s focused on Bucky.
“Hey,” she starts. She catches his hand, but he shakes her off and increases his pace. “Where are you going?”
He turns back incrementally then, and she sees that he’s close to crying. “Does it matter?”, he asks.
Diana frowns, is about to open her mouth again, but then the machine starts whirring loudly behind her and cuts her off.
“What the fuck ?”, someone exclaims, and Diana feels her blood run cold.
It’s been 105 years, but Diana would know that voice anywhere. That doesn’t mean she lets herself believe it.
She’s still looking at Bucky, with her back to the platform and a view of the woods around them, but she watches the emotions pass over Bucky’s face; Surprise, confusion, incredulity. A touch of joy, bright beneath the layers of muddle.
“Son of a gun,” he breathes, an echo of Rogers all those years ago, the day Diana first met him.
Steeling herself for whatever she may find behind her, Diana turns. The simple action takes a herculean effort.
And when her eyes find her target, she sees that next to Rogers, on the stark white platform, is Steve Trevor.
He’s in his big jacket from 1918, ratty and brown and so incredibly warm. His gorgeous face is screwed up with something between anger and confusion as he glares at Rogers and then surveys the area around them. He’s breathing heavily.
Then, his eyes find hers.
His bewilderment is graced with a smile, and Diana thinks her legs might give out.
“Diana?”
She lets out a shaky, watery breath.
“Steve.”
His smile widens, and then before she even realizes it, Diana is moving toward him. She leaps onto the platform smoothly, easily, and then suddenly she’s holding him and he’s holding her and nothing feels real.
There’s a whole number of questions being asked around her, but she couldn’t care less about that right then.
Rogers explains himself to the others. He’d stolen a few more Pym particles from the S.H.I.E.L.D base in the 70s and decided to make another trip for Diana’s sake. She had told him about Steve, and he couldn’t let the opportunity go to waste.
There’s never been any doubt in Diana’s mind that Steve Rogers is a brave and loving and incredible man, but now she knows it, feels it so deeply that she doesn’t know what to do with all her gratitude.
But that’s a problem for later.
Now, she clutches at Steve with the full breadth of her desperation, hands fisting in his jacket and in the hair at the nape of his neck. She fears that if she lets go now he’ll disappear again, so she tightens her grip on his garment until she thinks it might rip. He smells like sweat and dirt and engine fuel and every single one of Diana’s dreams since 1918. Her face is wet, she doesn't know when she started crying.
“Hey,” he says softly, and Diana lets out a sob. He holds her just a bit tighter.
“I love you,” she tells him, muffled in the collar of his coat. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.”
She can feel the confusion radiating off of Steve, but he just presses a kiss to her hair. “I love you, too.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t say it back,” she heaves. “I’m so fucking sorry. And I shouldn’t have let you get on that plane. I shouldn’t have fought with you about Veld. It wasn’t your fault. And-”
“Diana.” Steve interrupts her, softly but purposefully. “It’s okay. I’ve already forgiven you. And I’m okay, right?”
Diana swallows. She chokes back another sob.
Steve pulls back then, just enough to see Diana’s face. He strokes a thumb over her tear-streaked cheeks, almost absent mindedly.
“Did I-” He starts, but cuts himself off.
He just looks at Diana with thinking, narrowed eyes for a moment, and Diana knows he must be figuring out what happened. He must deduce that without Rogers there to pull him out, he would have been dead, and that in a way, that had already happened. He swallows, but his eyes remain warm.
“How long has it been?”
Diana looks up at him, at his blue eyes and familiar smile. There’s not really a way to break it to him easily, so she strokes a thumb over the curve of his cheek and answers. “A hundred and five years. Or a hundred, depending on how you count.”
He lets out a long breath.
In the whirlwind of her emotions, Diana doesn’t notice the goings on about twelve feet behind her.
Bucky does, of course, not that he quite lets himself believe it. He can’t even believe Steve came back.
He was certain that he wouldn’t, that he would stay in the 40s with Carter, with the gorgeous spitfire of a woman that was everything he deserved.
But he’s here, in 2025, alive and breathing and the most beautiful thing Bucky has ever seen. He has his shield back, what must be the original. And he’s brought a guest, Diana’s love as it seems, but Bucky doesn’t have any mental capacity left to process that when he’s still wrapping his head around the first bit.
Steve watches the embracing pair on the platform for a long moment, a smile on his face, and then he turns, looks directly at Bucky. His eyes brighten.
Bucky watches as Steve steps off of the platform where Sam comes to meet him. Instead of greeting him with the hug Bucky would expect, he almost offhandedly shoves his shield at him.
“Sam, can you take this for a moment?”, he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer as Sam takes it with a startled sound. He’s still looking at Bucky.
And then he’s walking toward him, quickly, determinedly, and Bucky shoots him a confused frown.
For some reason, this only makes Steve’s smile widen, and then he’s right in front of Bucky and he’s grabbing Bucky’s face and pressing his mouth to his.
And if Bucky’s brain was short-circuiting before, it’s nothing compared to what it’s doing now.
He doesn’t know what’s happening, where up and down is. All he knows is the long fingers in his hair and the familiar scent enveloping him and the softness of Steve’s lips on his own.
In a haze, he places his hands on the curve of Steve’s waist and presses closer, tries to let muscle memory take over.
He might be dreaming, but he sure as hell is going to enjoy what he’s given.
Bucky may be biased, Steve is a phenomenal kisser. He’s kissing Bucky with great determination, but no force at all. His kiss is warm and all-encompassing, but soft.
It feels simultaneously like floating through the clouds and coming home. Ecstasy and groundedness all in one.
Steve pulls back after either five seconds or five hours, and when Bucky reluctantly opens his eyes, he’s met with the most warm and beautiful look he’s ever been on the receiving end of. He, on the other hand, can’t seem to tell his eyes to be anything but stunned.
Steve leans down, presses one, two, three more little kisses to Bucky’s lips because apparently that’s something he does now. He brushes his nose against Bucky’s.
And because it’s the only thought Bucky’s brain can produce, he opens his mouth in a whisper. “You came back.”
Steve pulls away a bit further then, a frown on his face, and Bucky sees how red he is, how gorgeously flustered. His hands fall down to grasp at Bucky’s as he looks at Bucky incredulously. “What? Of course I came back. Wasn’t my first rodeo.”
“No, I-” Bucky feels increasingly wrongfooted under Steve’s gaze, and then begins to realize how stupid he’s been. How could he let his insecurities question Steve’s loyalty? “This is stupid, I guess, but I thought you were going to stay with Carter.”
Steve lets out an incredulous laugh. “What? Buck-”
“It’s stupid, I know.”
“ So stupid,” Steve affirms. “Sure, Peggy’s great, but what am I gonna do in the fuckin’ 40s? Live without you?”
Bucky huffs out a little laugh and then looks away as he feels his eyes well up.
“C’mon Buck,” Steve laments, and Bucky looks back at him. “ ‘Til the end of the line, remember? You’re it for me.”
And because Bucky thinks he might burst if he keeps it inside for another second, he grins and tells Steve the only thing he’s been sure of since he was fourteen. “I love you. I’m in love with you.”
Steve grins back widely, eyes bright beneath a thin sheen of tears. “I love you, too.”
Bucky pulls Steve back in, kisses that stupid grin off his face, and thinks that if he had to do all of that again, that century straight from hell, he would do it in a heartbeat as long as he ended up back here.
Twelve feet away, Diana looks up as the voices around them suddenly whoop at an entirely new volume level.
Arms still tightly around Steve, she turns her head to where she can see Bruce staring.
There, in the clearing where Diana had left Bucky, Rogers is now standing with his large hands clutching at either side of Bucky’s face, kissing him full on the mouth. Bucky lifts his arms to grip at Rogers’ waist and back and reciprocates enthusiastically.
Diana can’t help the startled laugh that escapes her, and the whoop she lets out herself.
She turns back to Steve with a grin.
Gods .
He’s here.
And he’s bright and he’s strong and he’s beautiful and he’s hers.
She kisses him, and it feels like coming home.
Steve’s lips are warm and soft and familiar, moving against hers like she’s something delicate, something to be treated with utmost care.
Her hand tightens on his collar the other curls around his jaw.
His ocean eyes shine down at her when they pull back.
“I love you,” she tells him again, because she never wants to go another minute without telling him.
“I love you, too.”
She’s about to open her mouth again when a call from behind them cuts through the clearing.
Sam is shouting at Rogers and Bucky, something about getting a room, which- is fair. Wanda can’t seem to stop laughing.
When she turns back to Steve, the look on his face is two parts overwhelmed, four parts confused, and ten parts happy. He huffs out a dazed laugh. “ What is going on?”
Diana smiles up at him, steals another kiss from his lips, because she can do that now. “It’s a very long story.”
Steve just gazes at her for a moment. His eyes twinkle, shining in the autumn sun of the woods, and they’re just the right shade of blue. “Do we have time?”
“We do.”