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Steve knew what he had to do. The right thing. The only thing to do, now that he knew. So he indulged in one last thing just for himself, that dance he had promised Peggy, and then he went to work on the mission that had always been the most important to him. He had always felt that they were incredibly lucky, to have come through so much, and survived to live on, scars and all. Now he found out exactly how true that was. How very badly the odds were stacked against them. So very many things that could have gone wrong, could have led to utter disaster, in so many different ways.
The first one was easy. It was a world very much like his own. He intercepted Bucky two blocks from the place he had first fought him as the Winter Soldier, helped him build on that fragment of memory, find his own footing in the future. It only took three months for Bucky to recover enough that they could get the trigger words out of his head and set him up to tear down Hydra. He said he’d contact his own Steve when he was done. Steve was pretty sure they would meet sooner than Bucky expected.
It got harder from there. He visited timelines where Bucky had died falling from the train. Where he fell, instead. Where Project Rebirth hadn’t worked, or he hadn’t been chosen for it, and Bucky had never been rescued from Azzano. Where Bucky died on that table before he could be rescued. Where Bucky was never experimented on at all. Where he died early in the war. Where he died when they tried to make in into the Winter Soldier. Where Steve died as a child, from pneumonia or asthma or tuberculosis or a fight in a back alley. Where Steve and Bucky never met as kids. Where Zola built a nuclear bomb instead of experimenting with the Serum. That was the first timeline where he had to give up, to admit that one man could only do so much, and it nearly broke him. But there were also some where things went better. Where Schmidt had never found the Tesseract, or Zola had never worked for him. There were a lot of timelines where he caught Bucky before he fell from the train, and watching those gave him a respite he never thought he would have. Sometimes one or both of them died on one of the missions with the Commandos. Some worlds took years of his time, carefully setting things right without becoming a major part of the world’s history. Sometimes he had to locate himself in the ice, because he wasn’t going to leave a Bucky alone if there was any way he could help it. Several times, they had both fallen from the train, and in those, between the two of them they had walked out of the ravine. In some of them, they went down in the plane together. He didn’t mind that. It wasn’t about sparing either of them the suffering that came their way. His only goal was to save Bucky. At whatever point in the timeline he could manage it. If possible, if there was a Steve available, he would make sure they got together. Whatever happened after that was up to them. But he believed that as long as they were together, there was nothing they couldn’t overcome.
Sometimes both of them were Snapped. Those were hard worlds. On the other hand, it was a rare timeline where Steve and Tony had split as seriously as they had in his own timeline. In most cases, either he had come clean about Tony’s parents immediately instead of putting it off, or Tony found out by himself. Given time to think, and knowledge of how the Winter Soldier was made, Tony always calmed down before he did anything irrevocable. It made Steve burn with grief every time he saw how easily their own disaster could have been avoided. But every time he found one, he treasured even more the rare cases where everything had already worked out as well as it could, without his intervention.
There were, theoretically, an infinite number of things that could have happened, but that wasn’t what he actually found. Some timelines did turn on seemingly inconsequential things, if not actually the flap of a butterfly’s wings, but mostly it was only the significant events that diverged. And the timelines themselves seemed to have a kind of personality. Some of them resisted change every step of the way, while others snapped into place easily, as if they were glad to have a happier ending.
No matter how tempting it was, he didn’t tell anyone about the future.
He learned a lot along the way. How much could change from the smallest things. How very few timelines were as successful as his own. The best way to introduce himself, both to Bucky, and to himself, (by doing it wrong too many times), and the hardest part, every single time, how to say goodbye. A thousand goodbyes, none of them as wrenching as the first. No matter how many Buckys he saved, he could never forget that to do it, he had had to leave his own Bucky behind.
He lost track of how long it was. Even with an eidetic memory, it just wasn’t possible to add up the hours, days, weeks, when there was no calendar in common. But there came a day when he knew that even though he had not done as much as he wanted to - there would always be more worlds - he had done as much as he could. He had matured, learned to accomplish more with words than punches, but he had, inevitably, grown old. It was time, at long last, to go home. To rest.