Chapter Text
Amelia’s kneeling over him, looking green. “Don’t be dead,’kay?” she says in a small voice.
He rolls over onto his side and starts coughing, hawking out the contents of his lungs. She hands him a handkerchief, clean and ironed, embroidered with flowers and smelling of roses, a sudden reminder of how people used to do things. “What happened?” he asks.
“I thought you were having a heart attack. You just started spasming and choking.”
“I… It’s the machine. It made me think I was everyone else. Everyone else in the worst moment of their life.” He spits, feeling embarrassed, and wipes his mouth on the handkerchief.
“Yes, exactly!” Farley adds, helpfully. “You give me your memories, I mix them up, all bright and shiny, and then I build a bridge… a rainbow bridge. Now, where’s Thor? I need him.”
“Can’t,” he gasps, “help you.”
“You’re not going to be tedious and make me threaten your friend, are you?”
“Hey!”
“Still can’t help you. Thor – not here.”
“How’s it hanging, Cap? We could really use your help out here – Hulk’s gone a bit… thingy.”
Steve adjusts his earpiece. “Sorry, Tony. Got some stuff to sort out.” Outside, he can hear a muffled roar and sirens starting to wail in the distance. When he looks up, Amelia’s professor is pointing a gun at her:
“Hey now,” she’s saying, as she gets off the floor, “you know me. I’ve been doing your paperwork for three years now. I thought we were friends-”
“And you’re very good at filling out grant applications, dear, good eye for detail. But now it’s time for Science!”
“About that.” Amelia was slowly, ever so slowly edging away from Steve. “You’ve met my Dad the civil servant.” There was a brief, but pointed, scuffle which ended with Farley on her knees and Amelia holding the gun. “You know he’s not that kind of civil servant.”
“You’re too late,” Farley says with slitted eyelids. “It’s running now. Send Thor to me.”
“Why?”
“I need his dreams,” she smiles happily. “I need him to dream the rainbow bridge for me.”
Steve interrupts: “Thor is in Equador right now. There’s a weather anomaly his lady was investigating…”
“Huh.” The Professor sits back hard on her heels. “Unfortunate. Oh well, it will go somewhere else then.”
“Professor…” Amelia walks over to look more closely at the machine. “What have you done?”
“I always wanted to walk among the stars,” Dr Farley says. “Einstein was a dope putting limits on the world, telling us how we’re supposed to think.” She spits. “You can’t put speed limits on the universe!”
"No... No, no, no." Amelia had plugged a miniature laptop into the machine and was typing furiously. "This should not be happening."
Steve looks at her sharply. “What’s wrong, Miss Coulson?”
“It’s the photamnesometer. There’s no way it should be able to do that. If it doesn’t slow down soon it’s going to rotate itself into an Aspernach anomaly. The prof’s got some kind of weird attachment on it which is drawing in energy – I don’t even know how to turn it off…”
“What can I do to help?”
“Just… ” she shakes her head helplessly. “Shit. I need to talk to Stark-ego. You got a phone number for him?”
As he’s fumbling in his pocket for his address book, a sudden wave of intense… feeling floods the room. “Oh!” Amelia suddenly steps back and sits down. A vivid crimson blush was spreading across her face. “Be, um, a little careful about touching the central unit.”
The room starts to shake, and he dives over Amelia as plaster rains down upon them, and he hears a heavy thump of a beam falling. When the shaking stops, he looks around him in sudden memory – he’d been here before in 1943. “Was that the Hulk?” Amelia asks, crawling out from under him.
“No. I don’t think it could be. I remember being in this room and pulling a kid out from under that beam, from that exact beam – I can even see the blood spatter. Have we gone back in time?”
“Of course not, dear. Logically impossible. Time is coming forward to us.” Dr Farley was sitting with her back against a wall, looking grey.
Steve turns to her: "Are you injured?” he asks, taking her hand.
“Heart condition," she answers. "How dreadfully inconvenient." She was gasping slightly and her pulse was thready. "I remember you, you know, from before. You blew up my lab.”
“I'm sorry?”
“Scheiße. Haven't thought in German in a long time, either. Schmidt hated you.” She sucks in a little breath then. “But I was only ever in it for the Science...”
"You're German?"
"I'm not seventy, either. We all do what we must," gasp, "to blend in."
Steve takes his jacket off and tucks it in around the old woman. "You’re a good dear. But it’s so terribly ironic,” she says. “I spent my whole life trying to solve my own paradox, and run out of time just when I've cracked it. Life's a bother like that.” She pats his hand conspiratorially. “Remember that, young man, always take your chances when you’ve got them.”
Behind him, he hears Amelia keep up a running conversation with Tony: "Leichmann Paradox," Stark's voice crackles over the phone's speaker.
“Not the Leichmann. If it were, the mnesom unit would be dopplering blue, whereas it's actually a delicate shell-like pink. Did you even look at the photo?”
“Way I see it, you've got two choices, honeybun. You could put it in a lead lined chamber and let it decompress the mneso- phtago- … crap, the whatchamacallit field over time.”
“Time we don't have-“
“Or you could just smash it.”
“I spent three years of my life building this thing!”
“You can always build it again. Heck, I always redo my prototypes. I don’t know what I want until I’ve made it go…”
“Yeah, that’s typical of an engineer. Hit it with a spanner until it looks kinda vaguely like it’s working. You ever tried designing something right the first time?”
“You want my help or not, spring onion?”
Professor Farley smiles wearily. “The energy of youth. So invigorating. If only we’d had more time back when I was twenty three, Herr Captain Rogers…”
“Don’t think about that right now,” Steve says, chafing her papery wrists. “Can you help us turn it off?”
“Whyever would I do that?” she asks slyly. “It’s Science.”
“Captain Rogers?” Amelia was looking at him solemnly. “Can you tell me what’s going on outside?”
Through the window, he can see bombers stooping low out of the clouds, lightning lancing downwards. He tells her, and she sits back for a long moment. Finally, she glances at her professor and sighs. “Hey Stark!”
“My little cabbage!”
“Can you get up into the ionosphere and set off a big booming radio pulse? Get it oscillating in sync? That should set up a buffer layer and give us a bit more time, right?”
“That’s stup-” A silence. “Yeah, that might work. On it. But get a move on at your end.”
“If you wanted Thor,” Steve asks, “why all the rest of us?”
“Power,” Farley smiles sweetly. “All those fascinating adventures of yours that they tell us about on the television. Such intense vivid memories. All power for someone who knows to use them. And I do. Thor was just the end phase, to give me the right coordinates. To Asgard, and the rainbow bridge, the shimmering path… But we’ll just go somewhere else, instead.”
“Sweetcakes, my big memory of Space the Final Frontier is asphyxiating somewhere in Chitauri local space. Your professor maybe didn't think too hard about the bridge she was trying to open.”
“Captain Rogers," Coulson's quiet voice came over his earpiece. "Can you give me a status report?”
“His status is that Spawn of Coulson's science project is about to open a gate to the bad guys’ front yard.”
“I built a really cool telescope. All this other stuff I’ve never even seen before. Don't lay that on me.”
She turns her phone off and throws it on the floor. “God dammit!”
And if there’s one thing Steve knows, in this time or the other one, it’s the sounds of someone wigging out, and not necessarily at their first battle. He lets the professor’s hands fall and kneels next to the girl. “Amelia,” he says calmly, “what did Peggy always used to say about Ginger Rogers?”
She looks up at him in surprise. “She did everything Fred Astaire did, but in high heels and backward.”
“That’s right. Now what do you need?”
Her hands are flicking over the machine, a small tool in her hand. She was moving over it, turning first one screw, then another, flinching away from each touch, as she lifted plates and wires away, but working her way into the depths of the machine. “It’s…” she scrubs her face. “I need to get at the mnesom unit and crack it, but every time I get near it, it’s like I’m you guys. I don’t remember who I am.”
“Alright. So. Peggy taught you to knit. What’s the first thing you made with her?”
“A peggy square.” She stops and giggles, only a little hysterically.
“So you have to cast on. What colour is your yarn?”
“…red.” She sniffs hugely, and he passes over his own handkerchief, plain white, but clean and smelling of the iron, for her to blow her nose on.
And then there’s a groinch and he’s clutching a grenade to his belly, thinking This is it – and I haven’t even seen the Front… When he looks up, the fallen beam is gone, and the plastered walls look new, and they’re in some kind of dormitory, with hungry eyed boys sitting up on pallets, looking at them curiously. There’s a sharp retort-
“It’s not what you think,” Amelia says distinctly, but when she lifts her hand from her side, her fingers are red.”
“Tell Schmidt I regret nothing.” Professor Farley was standing over her student, a gun held loosely in her fingers. Then it falls, and so does the professor, and Steve can’t bring himself to care about what happens to her.
The radio crackles: “What the fuck have you done with my daughter, Rogers?”
“This isn’t the time,” he says, and rips his earpiece out.
For someone who’s been shot, there were worse places it could have been, and he thinks she’ll be OK in the end. But she’s pale and shocky, and she winces when he cinches his belt tight over the holes in her, padded with her rose-and-flowers handkerchief and his own plain white one.
“What’s a mnesom unit?”
“Pink golfball in the middle,” she says, very quietly. “But we’re running out of time.”
The machine is open, exposed. Vulnerable. Captain America swallows hard and plunges his hand into its depths.
… and the stars are so incredibly bright, and he breathes out, the mist on his faceplate
… and it's time for her first kill shot, and she breathes out, long and slow, like the Soldier said, and the red blossoms on her mark’s chest and he falls in the mud. Her trainer hums under his breath as they drag the body out of sight: Da di di di dee dee
… and the mud seeps through a hole in his boot, the smell rank and moist. Peggy turns to him: “There’s been an accident”
… and there's a muddy field, and the chorus girls and roustabouts are blowing off steam to a record with a driving beat played over the loudspeakers …
Mr. What-ya-call-em what you doin’ tonight
Hope you're in the mood because I'm feeling just right
… and he's in a garage with a portable phonograph stumbling through the steps with Bucky so that his friend can impress his hot date
… and she’s in a sterile waiting room, and she’s not allowed to see her father because family don’t have security clearance
There's no chance romancin' with a blue attitude
You got to do some dancin' to get in the mood
… and they’ve cleared the courtyard of war detritus and invited the nurses along and some of the soldiers in the logistics train have made shift to form a band, and there's Peggy coming over to him in a corner with a bottle of beer teasing him about not dancing, and he's shaking his head and loving the way she smells of roses and talcum powder… and he’s on a tightrope doing his act and he fucking hates those goddamn piss-smelling clowns… and he feels the radiation burn… the salt water in his lungs… he’s leaping high over the desert, the thin clear air… the clouds are gold-yellow, blood-red, and beautiful
the trumpets scream
… and she's in a living room with an old lady who's swinging her around to the music, and the rose scented talcum powder and the sunlight in her hair… and the cave in Afghanistan is cold… and she’s kissing him and stabbing him because that’s what she does and what does love have to do with anything? Desire? Death?... and the yarn slides through his fingers… and the garrotte slides through his fingers… and the yarn slides through her fingers
… and Dr Erskine is poking him hard in the chest
In the mood - that's it I got it
… and there's wires in his chest and electricity keeping him alive
In the mood - your ear will spot it
… and there's a blade in his chest and he’s got his hands tangled in her hair, in the rain
In the mood - oh what a hot hit
… and there's butterflies in his chest and he's gasping and wheezing and he doesn't want to stop as he spins
Be alive and get the jive
You've got to learn how
… and letting Bucky lead, always leading
and the trumpet’s in a crescendo
and spinning and spinning and the smell of roses…
His hand clenches on the golfball and he squeezes, and he feels the bright pain of the shards digging into his hand, and the bright pain of memories fracturing in and of and beyond him, and he yells for all the things he’s lost, and what he’ll never get back. Professor Farley is slumped against the wall, her eyes unseeing, dead, and he curses her.
Amelia is lying on the ground next to him, pale as ice, one hand fallen as if from the machine, the other holding her phone, the tinny blare of In The Mood cycling around again. He checks that she’s breathing, and sits down with his head between his knees for long minutes. Then, because he is a soldier and has a job to do, he gets himself off the floor, picks up the girl, and starts walking down the stairs.
Halfway down, he feels her twitch and wake up, and for a moment he thinks that she’s going to vomit. She manages with a discreet burp and looks around carefully. "Oh man, this is embarrassing." Then, sleepily - "could be worse, I guess..." She tucks her head under his chin and keeps her eyes squeezed shut, like a child, and mumbles some more: "Who doesn't want to be hugged by Captain America?”
At the bottom of the stairs, Coulson is waiting for them, blood running down his face, gunsmoke floating in the air behind him: a manic grin on his face and mayhem behind him. “That’s my little girl,” he says.
***
And then there’s the outside world and Coping and directing clean up from the Hulk’s latest tantrum and the bombs and the earthquake, and he’s used to the routine. But even so, when they’re all done he lets the Avengers go home without him. The thing to do in Naples, he’s been told, is to be a tourist, and for that he’s got some time.
When he gets back to their offices in New York, there’s a cigar box waiting for him. A little battered, but whole, and the scent of old tobacco rising from it. He opens the note: “Some memories for you. Best, Amelia”, and he opens the box to find photos – a very young Coulson in a dress uniform with a terrible haircut and an older woman standing next to him holding a medal; the lady knitting; Coulson again, his face nakedly open helping her hold a baby; a little girl in a bathing suit running under a hose held by the same woman; a big anniversary photo with a frail matriarch surrounded by hordes of relatives; the old lady dancing with the girl in a living room. He traces her smile with his thumb. There’s more in the box: an old black and white poster of a kid with huge eyes and a cow lick printed with Japanese text and what looks like calligraphy in black ink on the back; a gold pendant; a poster from his show carefully folded and wrapped in tissue paper; a painted feather; a peggy square in red yarn…
He walks into the break room, and there’s Coulson, leaning back in his chair, watching the antics of his crew fighting over the last doughnut. There’s a half smile on the handler’s face, and Steve fumbles with his phone until he’s worked out how to take a photograph, and he fumbles some more until he’s worked out how to mail it. There are some memories he can stand to share as well. He’ll dig out his sketchbook later.