17

Chapter 17Summary:

Steve's not sure whether he's in heaven or hell, when he wakes with Tony Stark sitting at his bedside.

Tony finds out what happened to Steve after he returned the stones.

Bucky gets a surprise.

Chapter Text

"We had a… what do'ya call 'em? The Funeral house fella that prepares the body?" He always got them mixed up with the fella that plans the funeral.

"Mortician." Dum-dum answered, automatically.

"Right, mortician." Bucky nodded. "Anyway the mortician was chipping way the ice and he saw one of Steve's wounds."

"So?"

"It was still bleeding."

"Which means what?" Dum-dum frowned.

"Dead men don't bleed, asshole." Bucky said and smacked Dum-dum upside the head, gently, with his flesh hand.

~~~

July 3rd 2000

Steve had stopped shivering an hour ago, which according to Sam was a good thing, when combined with his body temperature. Tony sat beside Steve's bed, he'd sent Bucky off to bed a few hours ago, the man needed his rest, especially with two young babies demanding his attention. Tony shifted the Stark-pad on his lap, letting his mind split into three observation paths.

One to watch Steve. A second to read over his latest submission to the DoD, the personnel tracker/locator beacons. While a third path listened to the music that JARVIS was piping through the room's hidden speakers and debated with himself, which he would prefer?

Steve remembering would make things a lot easier, in regard to Thanos and defeating him. But the flip side of that was the relationship between the two of them was… brittle…

However, Steve not remembering would make the Thanos issue more difficult, but Steve would be meeting him with no pre-existing prejudices. The downside to that was, there was a war coming and a Steve that remembered, already knew Tony and how to work, seamlessly, with him in the field. Without that? Would the team even be able to work together?

The part of Tony that was watching Steve, noted that his breathing rate had increased and a small frown had pulled his eyebrows down as his eyes narrowed. Tony laid aside his pad and stood up, knowing that doing so, would draw Steve's attention.

"… Tony…?" Steve whispered, almost silently.

"Hey, Steve." Tony gave him a small smile. That answered that, didn't it?

"Where are we?"

"The lake."

"Cabin?" Steve asked.

"Yeah." It had been too noisy at the main house, so Sam had suggested moving Steve to the cabin, just until he was up and about.

"This is… Is this… heaven…?"

"Nope. Sorry." Tony snorted. "It's only quiet down here, the main house is in the middle of a prank war."

"Prank war?" Steve blinked.

"Yeah. Darcy, Bucky and Clint against everyone else."

"Bucky?" Steve looked concerned. "Did he…? When did he die?"

"He didn't." Tony shook his head. "Things… are… complicated."

"How?" Steve pushed himself upright and looked around the room. "Where are we? If this isn't heaven, are we in…?"

"We're in New York state." Tony said. "Don't think it quite equates to hell, but that's only my opinion. As for the rest? Eat, drink and I'll explain what I can." He nodded to a tray with thermos of soup and some slices of soft bread.

"Right." Steve pulled the tray towards him and began to serve himself. "Talk, please."

"Thanos snapped his fingers and nothing happened." Tony said. "I snapped mine and his army dusted. He sat down and dusted, too. I hurt, I hurt everywhere. Then Peter and Pepper were there. They were talking but the pain stopped me from hearing them. Everything went black." He took a shuddering breath. "I died."

"I'm sorry…" Steve said quietly, looking down at his hands.

"I'm not. Strange said it was the only way . Something about fourteen million futures and it being the only way to win." Tony shrugged. "But that's where things changed. For me, anyway."

"How?" Steve paused with a spoon of soup halfway to his mouth.

"I woke up." Tony gave him a shaky look. "I woke up in 1991." Steve just froze. "Yeah, I thought I was dreaming. JARVIS was there, he was trying to get me to wake up and.." for the next hour, Tony explained everything to Steve. Everything. Everything they'd done. Everything they'd planned. Everything they were hoping to achieve. Everything.

"You're telling me that Buck's been your bodyguard for the last ten years?" Steve said, when Tony finally fell silent.

"Eight and a half." Tony corrected.

"But he's your bodyguard?"

"Yep." Tony nodded.

"And you trust him to do that?"

Tony looked at Steve. "Yes, I trust him, I trust him as much as I've ever trusted you."

"Huh." Steve grunted. "What now?"

"Now, you get up and get showered. We know from past history that you're mobile almost as soon as you wake, but you're still not at full strength, that's going to take a few weeks. Fifty-five years in ice is enough to slow even you down. Sam's estimating twelve to fifteen weeks before you're battle-ready."

"Battle-ready?"

"Avenger-wise, there's nothing on the horizon for the next couple of years." Tony blinked and frowned. "Unless we want to deal with 9/11."

"Today's date?"

"July 3rd 2000."

"So, 9/11's next year?" Steve had read about the attacks.

"Yep." Tony nodded.

"What do you… what do I do in the mean time?" Steve asked. "Is SHIELD expecting me?"

"No, no-one but IT and SI staff know about you, yet."

"IT and SI?"

"Iron Technologies and Stark Industries." Tony replied. "IT is me and SI is dad."

Steve blinked. "Howard?"

"Yeah, dad's still alive, so's mom." Tony knew what Steve was asking. "We're not in our original timeline, Steve."

"What makes you so sure of that?" Steve looked at Tony with an intense gaze.

"Right, every sci-fi story out there, says that we can't change our own past, that doing so changes our present and our future, to the point where we wouldn't have gone back in time. Right?" Tony waited until Steve nodded, slowly. "Also, that time travel happens in one of two ways. Type one. Like we did with the quantum realm, we inserted ourselves into a pre-existing timeline, one that already has versions of us, ones that are native to that timeline." He waited for Steve to nod again. "Or type two. Our consciousness is inserted into our younger bodies, as they were at a specific point in time. With me so far?"

"Yes…?"

"Right, so for most of us we seemed to be the second type, but…" Tony sighed. "It's not just one or the other. JARVIS and the Bleeding Edge suit that I'd made in 2022, were with me, when I woke as twenty-year-old me. So, while I was type two, JARVIS hadn't been written yet and the suits weren't even a speculative daydream."

"Ah." Steve grunted and buttered a slice of bread.

"Bucky's a type two as are everyone else, excluding Darcy."

"Darcy?" Steve frowned. "Thor's friend?"

"Darcy's a little more than that, Steve-o. She Bucky's wife." Steve went wide eyed and slack jawed. "A month after they married, there was an incident with a rogue Asgardian sorceress and Darcy was cursed. She'll live as long as Bucky, when his heart stops, so does hers. She shares part of his serum, mostly the slow aging and the rapid healing. But from what we can work out, if she'd been a type two, that would have left her twenty-odd years younger than him, forever and when you take the slow aging into account, it could be thirty-plus years before she'd be physically an adult. So, we figure that JARVIS, the suit and Darcy are type ones."

"Bucky got married?" Steve whispered.

"Married… with kids." Tony was enjoying the expressions on Steve's face. Immensely.

"Kids?!" Steve gasped.

"The twins are three months old." Tony snorted. "They're named after the Weasley twins."

"And they're Bucky's kids…" Steve groaned.

"Yep." Tony nodded.

"Oh, hell."

"Pretty much." Tony gave him a sympathetic smile.

"Where do I fit into this?"

"Right where you've always been, Cap. On the field you're the boss."

"And off the field?" Steve asked.

"That's your call." Tony said, neutrally.

"And if it were your call?"

"What you do with yourself?"

"Yes."

"If it were my call, I'd say… learn to live in the world as it is now." Tony tilted his head. "What did you do? After you went back to Peggy, what did you do? How did you live?"

"Quite easily." Steve replied. "She made a new identity for me and I stayed out of sight. Or out of the Army's sight, at least. We stayed in America, for the most part, but she went to work building SHILED and I stayed out of it. No-one recognised me, I was too old and too small."

"Small?" Tony blinked, he never expected someone to describe Steve Rogers as 'small'. "Too old?"

"Captain America was in his twenties and I was close to forty." Steve said. "I wasn't as bulked up, after five years of… peace… Five years of learning to live with regrets, I wasn't as heavy, wasn't working out to the same extreme. There wasn't a call for a super-soldier, as much as there was for someone who had survived war and devastation."

"Huh." Tony grunted.

"That was where I helped, the most. Counselling, listening." Steve shrugged. "But it meant that physically I wasn't as… heavily built, I was leaner and if I wore the right fit of clothes, I looked smaller."

"Optical illusion?"

"Peggy called it 'Visual Deception'. But yeah, pretty much."

"What did you do while she was at Shield?" Tony asked.

"Not a lot." Steve replied. "She'd had papers made up, for me, that said I was ex-Army. I turned up on her doorstep in the fall of '49. We married on the quiet, that winter, Morita was the only one that knew I was there. He was the one responsible for what I ended up doing. His brother was a cop and whenever he had a mugging or rape victim, he'd send them to me. I'd talk them through it and teach them to defend themselves." He finished the last of the soup and let the spoon rest in the bowl. "As time progressed, it went from just teaching self-defence, to working with wayward kids and after Vietnam, I started working with the odd vet, counselling wasn't the done thing, then, but if you're both working with your hands, men will talk. When the kids were little, Peg suggested moving back to England, we wanted to lessen the risk of someone looking at me and actually seeing me. We spent nearly a decade there. But eventually, we came back to America. It was home. When Peggy's health started to fail, I bought a little cottage, a few miles from her retirement home, I'd visit her most days and for the most part it was fine. But just occasionally, she would forget to keep it secret and she'd tell the nurses that I was Steve Rogers."

"Who were you? If you weren't Steve Rogers, who were you?"

"My name? Grant Barnes. But I took Peggy's name when we married, upset a few people, until she spun a tale that was mostly true but was also a twisted version of the truth. That I was an abused orphan and that the name was a painful reminder of the past."

"The truth but not in the way most people would think." Tony nodded.

"Yeah." Steve agreed then laughed. "When she died, I went along to the funeral, I quite literally sat beside myself. It was a… surreal moment."

Tony snorted as he tried to imagine it, then laughed as he imagined a younger Steve's reaction if he'd known.

"Yeah." Steve nodded, with a smirk. "I was so tempted to talk to him, but I knew I couldn't. I waited through the snap, that was hard, just letting people vanish and not doing anything."

"You would've been what? Ninety?"

"At least." Steve agreed. "I kept an eye out, kept the young ones in my area out of trouble. And a few days before the second snap, I got myself ready and after you snapped Thanos and his army away, I headed for the lake. I knew that Buck would spot me, not even Clint was as good when it came to spotting the odd-one-out. Plus, Buck had decades of looking out for me, he knew what to look for."

"That's when you gave Sam the shield?"

"Yeah. I'd talked to Buck about it. He knew I was going to try and stay with Peggy. He knew I was going to hand the shield to Sam." Steve sighed. "I don't know if anyone told you, but after the second snap…"

"People came back to the same place, they'd left? And not all of them survived it." Tony nodded. "Yeah, Buck told me."

"What do we do about him?"

"Nothing. That's already done." Tony said. "We told the DoD and they got him legally resurrected. Sorted out back pay, compensation and all the minutiae that go along with being a recovered POW. Then dad sorted the taxes and social security stuff. I hired him as a bodyguard, at least as far as the public goes, but behind closed doors, he's the one in charge of the Thanos Project. We're just waiting on the public catching up."

"They haven't? What about HYDRA?"

"Right, this is where it gets a little scratchy." Tony shrugged. "It was Russia that sent him after dad, not HYDRA, at that point HYDRA was still infiltrating Russia and hadn't taken control of the Winter Soldier Program, yet. Now the Russians know that we have him, but they also can't do anything about it without exposing themselves and they weren't going to do that. We also sent Barnes and Clint on a little hush-hush mission to delete all evidence of James Buchannan Barnes ever having been a part of the Winter Soldier Program. So, while HYDRA will find out that a hit on dad failed, they won't find out that Barnes was the one that was sent or that he was part of the program."

"Oh, thank God." Steve sighed in relief.

"He's had more of a challenge with idiots trying to kidnap me, than with the Russians or HYDRA trying to get him back."

"Kidnap? You? Why?"

"Steve, I'm the only son of a millionaire. A millionaire who's a genius. A millionaire that builds weapons for the DoD. A millionaire who's wife runs an inner-city charitable foundation. I'm also a genius in my own right. I design and sell a range of products to the DoD and to the public. I was a millionaire before I hit thirty and I'll probably make billionaire before I reach forty. I'm prime kidnap material. If only they could get passed my bodyguard…"

"Huh." Steve grunted. "Never really pictured Buck as a bodyguard, but I can see him giving anyone trying, a flat glare."

"Oh, he's pulled out the murder-strut a couple of times." Tony laughed. "Even beat one idiot into the ground when he just kept pushing. Tried… like four or five times in a month. Last time, Buck beat the stuffing out of him and dragged him to the local police station and made the idiot tell them exactly what he'd done. The guys at the Bayonne Police Station, they know who Buck is, they invite him back for Memorial Day barbeques and he's welcome to drop in anytime for coffee. And if he ever wants to give talks on being a sniper or the war or anything, they're all over that."

"That is so Bucky." Steve laughed.

"They've been after him to host a few classes for abused women, but he's not comfortable with that."

"No, he wouldn't be. His skills are… not suitable for beginners, it's kind of hard to pull it back to defensive."

"That's what he said, too." Tony agreed.

"Hmm…" Steve hummed. "I have little formal training but I did teach self defence for a number of years. I could… I could do that… Maybe?" 

"Steve, can I be honest with you? Like, brutally honest?"

Steve winced. "Go for it."

"You needed a life outside of fighting. Going back and staying with Peggy, that was good for you. You needed it. I had my lab and the company, Clint had his family and the farm, Thor had Jane and Asgard, Bruce had science, Coulson had his strange little Captain America fanboy thing going on. Hell, even Fury had the Rambeau family and Danvers. But you? You had nothing and you weren't really trying to get anything. It's a wonder you didn't burn out earlier."

"You didn't mention Nat." Steve said.

"Oh, hell, Nat? She had the weirdest family thing ever, going on. Yelena's great, got a slightly twisted sense of humour, fits in really well."

"And Bucky's got kids, you said?"

"Yeah, twins, Fred and George." Tony nodded. "Want to go meet them?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I think I do."

"Well, come on, then. Let's go invade the house, no-one's expecting you to wake until morning."

~~~

Six hours later, Bucky wandered down to the kitchen looking for some coffee, he had the next shift watching Steve, even though Sam said it would likely be morning before he woke. He stepped into the kitchen and came to a sharp halt.

Steve was sitting in the sofa in the corner, that Darcy used when one of the girls was restless, in his arms was a small bundle of pink. He was singing softly, ignoring a snoring Tony who occupied the other half of the sofa, with a second bundle of pink in his arms.

"Hey, Buck." Steve kept a sing-song voice going. "Darcy did nice work on these two."