Chapter Text
When he opened his eyes, he swore he was still in Wakanda, there were trees everywhere, grass on the ground around him, and flowers spouting out from the ground. If it wasn’t for the tall buildings in the background that looked a little too much like New York, he would have just gone about his day and went in search of his friends. Except the memory of his body crumbling in front of Steve had felt so real. He no longer had the gun he carried, it didn’t belong to him and he knew this was somehow connected but he couldn’t shake the feeling of everything falling apart.
The battle was fresh in his mind, everyone running towards a single goal, to save humanity. He wasn’t sure if they were able to save anything, he couldn’t even save himself if he had turned to ash. He wasn’t sure where he stood, everything looked so different and yet so much of it looked the same. New York, even with all of the vegetation was still New York, in at the center of it all stood a tower with a big gleaming A on it. He’d seen it on the news before, when he had been on the run two years ago, but now it felt like a beacon. A way to something normal.
“You can’t stand here and wait for everything to fix itself,” he said to no one but himself, he wanted to make sure that he could hear something, since it was so eerily quiet around him.
Moving forward he noticed the small stores, cafés that were open, with people inside, many of them asleep like he had been. When they woke up, they would realize that they weren’t home, where ever home was. They were all lost here, where ever here was, some weird idealist land that was both home and not home. He wondered if everything still worked the same way that had before they had all ended up where they were. If the coffee shops would still sell coffee, if he would be able to go to the supermarket and buy some plums.
He didn’t know who had survived the battle, he didn’t know if he had friends in this world, so he walked, the shining A in the distance, it wasn’t his home, but it was the home of the Avengers and in some ways, he had hoped that it would mean that someone he knew would be there waiting for him. But when he walked in through the front doors the lobby was empty, not a soul was in the building. He went to the elevator bank and pressed the button for the top floor and was surprised when it started moving.
When he reached the top, he looked out and saw a common area, the remnants of where people would have been, or where they could have been. Walking to the windows he looked out to see the wide expanse of a city he had once in another time, called home. There were still memories in his mind that were out of reach, even with Shuri helping him it was still a lot of work to get them to surface once again. The ones that had were the good memories, because the bad ones never really went away, the ones that made him feel like he had nothing but blood on his hands.
Now as he looked out all he saw was a world that wasn’t his, and he couldn’t help but feel as lost as he had been when he had been on the run. He had once again been ripped away from the world he knew and thrown into one that was unfamiliar.