Chapter Text
It was strange and impossible. And it was also the truth. Steve should have known better than to deny the conflation of these two qualities, considering how often they were one in the same in this new world he had found himself in. After everything he’d lived to see, he’d thought there was nothing left to surprise him.
Though this, this, was the old world. That was what was so bizarre about it. Out of everywhere he had ever expected (or failed to expect) to find himself, this was not even on the list.
It was Bucky, of course, who had to be the first to point it out.
“Steve…” he began slowly, with a rising pitch of dread. “This looks just like…”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “I know.”
And as proof to the fact that they were exactly where they thought they were, it was not difficult to find a newspaper. Bucky picked one out of the city trashcan.
“1937,” he read. And he rose his head and looked around. Looked at Steve. “Brooklyn, New York.”
“What the hell is going on?” asked Tony, from where he stood with the others. “What are you two going off about? Where have we landed?”
“Where we always seem to land when we play around with multiverse travel,” said Natasha boredly. “Another goddamn universe.”
“There have been stranger ones,” said Sam, which was true.
“But this one,” said Bucky. He turned around and brandished the newspaper at them all. “This one’s running about ninety years behind schedule.”
And, with that, the team understood. And they turned to Steve and Bucky to lead the way, because what were they but experts in this particular field?
The first step was getting out of the street, where they were all starting to get funny (and less-than-funny) looks. They found an alleyway and climbed a busted fence and ended up in some kind of dumping yard—safe, for now. They could plan here.
“Tony,” said Steve. “We’re all gonna need the right clothing if we want to blend in for a while.”
Tony raised an eyebrow in challenge. “So? Why’s that my job?”
“Because you’re a white man,” said Bucky. “Gotta assume it’s safest for you to wander alone.”
“And you two?” he asked disparagingly.
“We don’t know about this world yet,” said Steve. “It doesn’t seem so different than the one we came from. Nonzero chance we’ll be recognized if we risk drawing attention to ourselves.”
“Whatever,” Tony said, and went off with a much more eager Clint to find them some clothes. In less than an hour they’d come back with pants and belts and button-downs and overcoats, and two dresses for Wanda and Natasha.
“What now?” asked Nat, once she and Wanda had come back from changing.
“Uh,” said Steve. “I guess—”
“Let’s just get this over with, Steve,” said Bucky. “We know who we need to find.”
So they split off, just the two of them, to track themselves down.
Their old apartment was right where it had been in their own universe, and looked as it always had. Except, of course, for the plant soaking up sunlight on the windowsill, and the housewife dawdling around inside.
“Guess we don’t live here,” said Steve. “Should we try my old place?” It was the nearest option.
That apartment was easily found, and—once they were sure of its current emptiness—easily entered. The lock was already half-broken (though Bucky was careful not to break it any worse while he picked) and once they creaked the door open Steve was hit by a wave of nostalgia so overpowering it nearly doubled him over. Yes, yes—he (or some version of him) had lived here. There was his mother’s apron hanging by the stove. There was the floral armchair in the corner, with a book (The Hobbit) face-down and open on the seat. There was that same familiar spill of light washing in between the blinds and spreading yellow as egg yolk across the kitchen table. And there, across the room, was the door to his childhood bedroom, resting halfway open. Steve glimpsed his bed inside, and some artwork he’d drawn all of a century ago pasted clumsily along the opposite wall.
“Oh, shit,” said Bucky. “Wow.” He turned to Steve. “You alright?”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “Of course I am.” He did not, frankly, have any clue at all as to what he was currently feeling. He could solve that mystery later. “This is it, then.”
“Yeah,” said Bucky. He extended a hand and rested it gently on Steve’s nearest shoulder. “Should we wait here?”
“Do you… do you think I never moved out?” asked Steve. “If it’s 1937 my mom should have just died. We got our place not a month afterwards. Maybe this version of me stayed here?”
“Then where the fuck am I?” asked Buck.
“Maybe you moved in?” suggested Steve. “You did love The Hobbit.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not an animal,” said Bucky. He gestured towards the armchair. “Wouldn’t catch me leaving it open like that. Gonna break the goddamn spine.”
Steve, half-smiling, looked towards the end table to see if there was any loose paper they could use as a makeshift bookmark and put Bucky’s misery to an end. But it was then in which he saw it—a brown picture frame, the interior blocked from his viewpoint by a candle in its way. There was a small wooden cross hanging from its corner.
When Steve moved the candle, it was to find himself staring at… well, himself. Maybe seventeen years old, sheepish, smiling at the camera.
“Aw,” said Buck. “I remember that picture.”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “It used to hang on the fridge.”
“Maybe in our world.”
“Yeah,” said Steve, but he felt the gears turning in his brain, and he felt strange. The framed photo, and then the candle, and then the cross. All positioned neatly and rather deliberately on the end table by his mother’s armchair, such that the book had had to be left on the seat. It was so little, it was so nothing. But the devil was in the details, and Steve had the bad habit of picking up patterns no one else wanted him to see.
“Buck,” said Steve. “I think this is a shrine.”
And once they had confirmed that, assumptions had to be shifted, and of course plans had to change. It was not ideal; in many ways it was the last thing Steve would ever have wanted to do. He had to assume, with the continued existence of this apartment, that his mother (in this world) was alive. And to drag her into this, into the dangers and the horrors and the complications of his life… it made him sick to think about. Maybe he wouldn’t even have done it, if it weren’t for Bucky. Bucky seemed dead-set on this plan as their only decent course of action.
“You know her,” he said. “She knows you. If she sees you, she’ll help you. She’ll at least help us orient ourselves here, find out what we’re dealing with.”
“I was almost eighteen in that picture,” said Steve. “I must have just died.”
“It’ll be a miracle for her, to see you again.”
“It’ll be the cruelest thing I could ever do to her,” said Steve. “To have me just to lose me again. I can’t do it.”
“Stevie, buddy,” said Buck. “Stop being an idiot. You know her.”
“But—”
“What do you think she would tell you if she were here? That woman was a saint, and she loved you. She would want you to be honest with her. She would want to know the truth. She would want to help.”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “Yeah, I know.”
And somehow they found themselves outside the hospital where she worked. Steve had always hated that hospital, and found himself miserably reluctant to go inside. It was a danger here, but still Bucky took the risk to grab his hand and give it a squeeze. Steve squeezed back, successfully reassured, and they dropped each other and walked through the front doors.
Steve was especially nervous about being recognized in here, considering he’d spent so much time in this space as a child and knew many of the doctors and nurses by name. But in the first room they entered was a stack of medical masks left on an unmanned rolling cart of nurse supplies, so they grabbed one each and that about solved that problem. And finding Sarah Rogers was barely any more difficult; they walked a hallway and heard the gentle lilt of her voice carrying around the corner at its end.
“Deborah, she’s dying,” Sarah was saying, clearly in midst a very heated conversation. “It doesn’t matter what he says. We’ve got to admit her.”
“She doesn’t have the money,” the other (Deborah?) was saying. “There’s a hospital for black-folk just across the way. Someone will help her there.”
“My God,” said Sarah. “We’re all the same flesh and blood, Deb. I cannot stand that man and that horrible drivel he spouts in the name of business. He’d sooner let a black man die than lift a finger to help him.”
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I know how you feel about the issue. Frankly, I don’t disagree with you, but these are the rules, aren’t they?”
“Oh, to hell with these rules,” said Sarah. “Just do me the tiniest favor and turn a blind eye for me, won’t you? Won’t make you do a thing more.”
And the other woman gave a long-suffering sigh, but it appeared Sarah had won the argument, for Deborah came walking grimly down the corridor in which they eavesdropped, and Steve and Bucky pressed to the wall to let her pass.
Sarah walked the other direction, and they decided to wait until after the workday to accost her—it was clear her hands were rather full at the moment, and they didn’t want the distraction of their existence to result in some poor woman’s death. So they waited outside by the back exit, which Steve knew his mother preferred, until exactly 6:07, when poor Sarah stumbled exhausted out of the hospital, leading a black woman by the arm.
“Call me if you need me,” she was saying. “But if you take the pills as I told you the infection should go away on its own. I’ll get you the second prescription as soon as I can get my hands on it.”
“Thank you, thank you,” the other woman was saying, and they exchanged goodbyes, and then it was just Sarah, sighing, stretching her back, beginning her long trek home.
Steve had to muster every ounce of strength in himself to tear away from the shadows, and to call to her from behind: “Excuse me, Ma’am?”
Sarah’s steps halted, and she turned back to look at him. He could see all at once and immediately that she was afraid of him.
And, well, of course she was! How could she not be? He was a large man in a dark alley, he was still masked and unknown, she was alone and vulnerable and female and all too used to the harassment this tended to bring upon her.
“Um, yes?” she said tentatively. She was far too polite for her own good; they shared this fault.
Steve wasted no time in pulling down his mask. He, reluctantly, took a few steps closer, so that the light of the nearest streetlamp would wash upon his features. “Sarah Rogers?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said again. She looked less fearful now. She looked more concerned, maybe even confused. There must have been some flash of recognition there, then. Her brain was churning through its filing systems, trying to find the place where he fit.
Well, he may as well help her through it. It wasn’t her fault; the Steve that she’d known had been quite a bit smaller. Sometimes even Steve had trouble recognizing himself in the mirror.
“Um,” said Steve, and he swallowed, and clenched his fists, and let them loosen. “Mom. It’s me.”
And he saw it in her face—the exact moment that she saw in him her lost son.