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I ducked under the low-hanging doorframe into the attic. Dozens of boxes and crates, haphazardly labelled, still lay scattered about the dusty room, the remnants of memories Tony didn’t want to face and couldn’t throw away.
Howard’s name jumped out to me from a pile in the far corner. We had all been doing our best to help Pepper as she adjusted to life as a widow and sorted through Tony’s effects. Bruce and Peter had started sorting through his projects, though they expected cataloguing all of it would take years. Eventually, they had put that project on hiatus to finish repairing the time machine. Until now, I had mostly stayed on the sidelines of the cleanup work, instead helping with the funeral arrangements, handling press to ease the pressure on Tony’s family, trying to step back into the image of hope everyone expected from me. It didn't feel right anymore, but what else could I do? Then Pepper had found the stash from the older Stark man.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” she had admitted to me. “Tony never opened it, as far as I know, but someone should go through it. You knew him, you can decide if there’s anything that should go to a museum or get sent over to the lab for Dr. Banner and Peter to go through.”
I cracked open the first crate. Dust rose into the air in clouds as the lid revealed a tangled mass of wires and coils. I quickly replaced the lid, and pushed the whole container into a new pile. Not my area of expertise.
The next few boxes held stacks and stacks of books, some old science publications, the occasional calendar, and dozens of journals. Skimming through several briefly, I determined that they were partly inventor’s notes, partly accounts of Howard’s raunchy exploits. I made a mental note to warn Bruce not to let the kid help with those. I kept calling him a kid. Was Peter an adult now? By birthdate, perhaps, but he hadn’t lived the past five years. Across the world, billions were wrestling with similar questions… who were they after five years when they were not? It was a feeling I was intimately acquainted with.
Within the chest beside them, I found memorabilia of a more familiar nature. Sketches that would eventually result in my shield, notes on the nature of vibranium, a copy of my test results from before and after the serum, all mixed in with early hovercar diagrams and a doodle of what appeared to be a miniature, pen-shaped camera. Bittersweet memories washed over me as I set aside a record of Harry James’ “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” Towards the bottom of the box, beneath a pamphlet from the 1943 Modern Marvels of Tomorrow exhibit and a Captain America poster from a few years later, was an old leather photo album. A photograph of two clasped hands with simple rings upon their fingers, faded with age, adorned the front cover. Below it, the leather had been neatly embossed with a simple phrase: Our Wedding.
Probably Howard and Maria’s, I thought, opening the cover gently to the protests of the aged spine. On the first page, elegantly inscribed in simple cursive, was a verse and a date.
To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
May 7th, 1950
Not Howard and Maria’s, then. I turned the yellowing paper carefully. Spread across two pages bearing the caption Our Family were photos of a sparse gathering of faces I recognized with warmth. Howard Stark, raising a champagne flute with that trademark cavalier grin, presumably in toast to the newlyweds. Edwin and Anna Jarvis, glowing and lost in each other’s eyes. An older couple I recognized from photos as Harrison and Amanda Carter. My heart skipped a beat. Was this Peggy’s?
For a moment, I couldn’t bring myself to turn the page. Through my many visits to her hospice room, Peggy had never shown me photos of her wedding. When I asked about the family she had built, she pulled out photos of her children and grandchildren with shaking hands, pointing out each smiling face with pride. Even as her memory faded, she seemed to know the regret I carried at having left her for so long, and steered every conversation away from her love life. “That’s in the past,” she’d say, patting my arm. “I’ve lived my life. You haven’t yet.”
Tears ran freely down my face. With everything that had happened since the Sokovia Accords, going on the run, fighting Thanos, picking up the pieces of the world as billions were lost in the snap, I hadn’t truly had a chance to grieve her. I hesitated, fingering the yellowing paper. In the end, though, knowing she might be smiling back at me from the next page won out over the fear of further reawakening unprocessed grief.
My breath caught in my throat at the deeply familiar, warm brown eyes staring back at me as I succumbed to the need to see her face again and turned the page. Peggy was radiant in a white lace gown. Her characteristic red lipstick highlighted her beaming smile as the photographer caught her looking at the camera. Waiting for you, my love, she had written beneath the photograph. I smiled through the tears. Peggy deserved the happiness she had found. I reached for the corner to go on to the next page.
For a moment, time stood still. Our First Dance. The bride and groom on the dance floor, oblivious to everything except each other. Two faces I knew intimately, gazing into each other’s eyes across time and change and impossibility. Her arms around my neck, drawing me closer.
Peggy’s voice echoed in my ears. “Sometimes the best we can do is to start over.”
My phone rang. “Hey, Cap,” Bruce’s warm rumble greeted me as I answered it. “I think we’ve got it up and running again. You ready to fix the timeline?”
I ran my finger over the photograph one last time, and closed the album. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I am.”
“You came back.”
“I couldn’t leave my best girl. Not when she owes me a dance.”