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“Blow the bridge.”
“Blow the bridge?” Steve repeated. “What bridge?”
“The bridge. In the alps, with the train, and the-” Tony made a pew pew noise, then raised his hand and let it fall, mimicking a scream. “The fall.”
“That’s not funny,” Steve scowled.
“I didn’t mean it to be funny.” There was a thump as the legs of Tony’s chair hit the floor from where he’d been leaning back in it. “We were all talking about what we would do if we could go back in time and fix something, and I’m saying your thing should be to just blow the bridge instead of trying to capture Zola.”
“He’s got a point,” Natasha said. “No bridge, no train. No train, no Zola. No Zola, no Hydra, and James would never have been captured.”
“But without Zola we wouldn’t have stopped Schmidt in time,” Steve argued. “And his bombing campaign would have taken out the entire East Coast.” He shook his head. “No, I would go back and rescue Bucky before they turned him into the Winter Soldier.”
“Save the Bucky, save the world?” Tony got up and emptied the coffee pot into his mug and started putting on a fresh pot. “How about you, platypus?”
“I still say we go back and kill Thanos,” Rhodey said. “Easier than having to do this crazy-ass time heist.”
Everyone around the table booed and Scott threw a balled up receipt at him. “Before we started we all agreed that the ‘kill Hitler’ ideas didn’t count,” Tony said as the pot started to burble. “You gotta pick something else.”
“Mine’s easy,” Scott said. He picked a snow pea out of his lo mein and added it carefully to the stack on a nearby napkin. “I’d fix it so I never got sent to prison. And then I’d leave myself a note about Hank Pym, so I would like, still get to be Ant Man.”
“Wait, you’ve been to prison?” Rhodey said. “Where did we get this guy come from, again?”
“I’d go back and make sure I stole the power stone from Quill fair and square,” Rocket said, crossing his arms over his skinny chest. “Instead of gettin’ all tangled up with Gamora and going to prison. I’ve lost a lot of money ‘cause of that guy.”
“I’d kill Thanos,” Nebula said, her quiet but intense voice somehow cutting across the friendly banter. “Years ago. When he first took me from my family.” She looked around the room challengingly but everyone just nodded.
“Wait,” Rhodey protested. “How come she gets to kill Thanos and I don’t?”
“Because it’s personal,” Tony said as he reached over and grabbed Rhodey’s box of fried rice. “That’s the whole thing, it has to be personal, otherwise it will just be people one-upping each other about how well they know history. Like, Genghis Khan killed a lot more people than Hitler, but that’s not the point. Bruce?”
“Well,” Bruce said thoughtfully, digging into a quart of Ben & Jerry’s with a serving spoon, “for the first time in a long time, I’m actually happy with the person I am right now. So I think instead of stopping myself from experimenting with gamma rays in the first place I would teach myself how to make peace with the Other Guy a lot sooner. How about you, Thor?”
When Thor was silent, everyone looked over at his chair. “I think he’s asleep,” Nat said, and she reached over to grab the half-empty beer out of his hand before he spilled it.
“Huh, what?” Thor jerked awake and pulled the beer closer. “What is it? What did I miss?”
“If you could go back in time and change something in your life, what would you do?” Tony asked. “Also, there’s plenty of leftovers if you want more.” Between Bruce and Thor, leftovers rarely made it into the fridge, but at least Thor had gotten better about asking first instead of having an extremely liberal concept of the word ‘dibs.’
“Easy,” Thor grunted, reaching for a spring roll. “I’d save my brother.”
The whole room was silent for a while, before Nat said, “Which time?”
“The first time. Before he ever fell to Thanos. There was a moment, when we were hanging off the edge of the Bifrost, where I think I could have…” He trailed off, staring at the spring roll like he was seeing something else. “But instead, it was all ‘I’ve seen worlds you cannot comprehend’ and ‘I will rule Midgard like a God,’ he said in a squeaky voice like he was imitating Loki. He ate half of the spring roll in one bite, almost angrily.
“No mind control,” Clint said. “I like that.”
“But also no Battle of New York,” Natasha pointed out. “Fury would never have formed the Avengers. We never would have met.”
“I’m telling you, just leave yourself a note,” Scott insisted. “That’s not against the rules, right? ‘PS, Captain America’s a cool guy, look him up sometime, invest in Google’, that kind of thing.”
“So who’s left?” Tony said, looking around the table. “Rhodey, I still don’t think you’ve picked anything,” he added, poking Rhodey in the ribs with his chopsticks.
“Neither have you,” Rhodey said, smacking the chopsticks away. “Neither have Nat and Clint.”
“Nat’s easy, too,” Clint said. He leaned back in his chair to reach the pot of hot coffee and topped off his mug. “We’ve had this conversation before. She’d defect earlier. Leave the Red Room and bring as many people with her as she could.”
Nat leaned against him and put her head on his shoulder affectionately. “Clint used to go between ‘making it so he’d never met me’ and ‘making it so he’d never met Fury,’ depending on who had stressed him out the most that week.” She lifted her head to look at him, narrowing her eyes as if trying to read his mind. “Now….I don’t know. Maybe save that kid in Sokovia, that really hit him hard.”
“Good guess. If I can’t pick Thanos, that’s a good one. I think it’s just you guys, now,” Clint said, gesturing at Tony and Rhodey with his mug. “What would you do?”
“There, ah,” Tony cleared his throat. “There was this guy I was imprisoned with, in Afghanistan,” he said. “His name was-”
“Ho Yinsen,” Rhodey finished for him. “You’d go back and save his life.”
“Yeah. He was a good guy. He should have lived, not…”
“If you were going to say, ‘not me,’ I’m going to smack you,” Rhodey said. “But worse, I’m going to tell my momma you said that.”
“No, I was going to say, ‘not died in a cave like that,’” Tony said virtuously, pretending not to notice Rhodey’s narrow-eyed stare. “Anyway, it’s your turn.”
“Mine’s not going to be as big as y’alls, cause all of you have made some bad damn decisions in your life,” Rhodey declared. “If I could go back in time, I would punch my flight instructor right in the dick - with the War Machine suit - because he was a racist asshole that almost got me kicked from the force.”
“Well, if dick-punching is on the table, I want to change mine,” Rocket said. “Wait, no. I would just add a dick-punch to mine.”