Archive of Our Own

Steve wakes.

His alarm clock, normally the clanging noise that his old clock back in Brooklyn used to make though with the slight rough edge that he’s found comes with digital recordings these days, has been replaced with Tony Stark’s voice.

WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHINE WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHINE WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHINE WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHI…

Jesus.

Steve shoves his face into his too-soft pillow and sighs deeply, his hand reaching out and slapping the offending clock so hard he hears the plastic crack and snap. When he looks up, the face of the screen has split nearly in half.

Fuck.

Tony’s going to be insufferable about this, Steve just knows it; the man delights in irritating Steve over his tendency to accidentally destroy things, and unless he wants to shell out for a new alarm clock, which he doesn’t want to do, it probably means Tony’s going to have to fix the alarm clock.

Again.

(It’s not that Steve can’t afford a new clock, it’s just that… well, Steve has had enough of new things. He’s incredibly tired of how temporary everything feels.)

Oh well. Given his lovely new alarm tone, Tony’s already been screwing with it, so he can just go ahead and fix the screen while he’s changing the sound back because Steve sure as hell isn’t waking to that shrill voice more than once. He’s scheduled some time with Tony today anyway to talk about lingering integrity issues with his shield, so he’ll just throw the clock on the pile.

It’s Sunday - the one day he doesn’t go running with Sam in the morning because Sam’s VA meetings in Harlem start earlier than the ones he runs in the other boroughs during the week - so his alarm doesn’t go off until 8:30, practically midmorning for him normally. There’s still a rhythm to his wake up routine though, a repetition that the SHIELD-mandated therapist told him would be soothing and would help with the sleep issues he developed after he first came out of the ice.

He still sees the therapist even now that SHIELD is lying in ruins at the bottom of the Potomac. Dr. Nunez has a private practice in Manhattan and does freelance consulting for the FBI now, and Steve had breathed an intense sigh of relief when Nunez had been cleared of HYDRA affiliation. The fact that he had been unwittingly working for HYDRA for so long was violation enough; the idea of the woman he’d been divulging his most personal feelings to for the past four years being a part of that? Too much betrayal, even for him.

Interestingly enough, it feels better seeing Nunez now than it did before - less like it’s him acquiescing to SHIELD’s demands and more like it’s a choice, something he does of his own free will and for himself. He knows that technically he could probably afford to see Nunez on his own dime if he wanted, especially now that he’s not paying rent or many out of pocket expenses living with Tony, but she just smiles when he asks her about billing and tells him that there are some things you do because it’s simply the right thing.

So he gets up. Showers. Shaves. Dresses. Makes eggs and three heaping bowls of porridge with the fruit salad he went out to the store to buy, even though Stark has most of his groceries delivered to the tower. Other than his daily runs, he has to make excuses to leave the tower, which he’s finding it harder and harder to do as it feels more and more like his world is closing in on him.

Nunez asked him at his last meeting if he was feeling depressed, and seemed concerned when the only response that felt truthful was, I can’t tell anymore.

After breakfast, Steve snatches the clock off his dresser and his shield by the bed before he heads down to the suite of labs that take up a complex consisting of four open floors. There are a number of self-contained labs for Jane and Bruce to use, a few that Tony keeps supplies in, and one that is available to Stark Industries top researchers. All the “hives” as Tony calls them, are connected through the central hub, which is a giant four-story greenhouse that supports a weird jungle-like greenspace.

Today… something is off. There’s too many people, their gaits quicker than normal - some jog down the halls, up and down the twisting staircases that rise the four stories, barking orders into cellphones and walkie talkies.

Darcy pops out from one of the supply rooms and nearly slams into him. She looks a bit tired, like she didn’t sleep well - or at all - and she’s got a pencil jammed up in her hair to keep the messy looking bun in place.

“Steven,” Darcy says, her body a little closer to his than normal given that she nearly ran into him and hasn’t yet adjusted for it. She reaches out to wrap her hand around his forearm and squeeze. Steve met Darcy two years ago, shortly after he was released from the hospital and before his pilgrimage with Sam to find Bucky. Tony had quickly closed ranks after SHIELD had blown up in such a spectacular fashion, sweeping in trusted SHIELD staff for the Avengers Initiative - including Maria - and people who were important to members of their team. That had meant Jane and Darcy had been pulled in as well, mostly by Tony’s promises to Jane to fund her research - unrestricted - for a further five years.

Steve loves Jane and Darcy - especially Darcy, who always has a smile on her face and a kind word for him when he feels like his world is falling apart at the seams. She deals with a lot of heavy stuff - has faced danger like most of them - but she seems oddly unaffected by it in a way the rest of them only wish they could be.

Smiling, Darcy takes the alarm clock from his hand and runs a thumb over the cracked screen. “Again?” she asks lightly, to which he shrugs. “He’s going to be insufferable, you know that right?”

“And this is different than normal how?”

That provokes a sharp bark of laughter from Darcy. “Touché. More insufferable than normal, I guess.”

This time when she reaches for his arm, she uses it to drag him down the corridor and into the biomechanics lab that Banner typically works out of when he’s in town. “You won’t believe this shit, Steve,” she tells him, thumbing to the shatterproof glass wall to their left.

“What’s going on?” Steve asks, peering into the observation room. There’s a huge mass on the examining table next to Banner and Jane, who are talking to several white-coated men and women gathered in the room with them. Whatever it is, it’s clearly not human - it looks more beast-like than anything else - but Steve doesn’t recognize it as any animal he’s ever seen. Its skin looks almost metallic, sharp barbs lining what looks like tentacles lined across its torso, and its jaw seems hinged open in a permanent scream.

Frankly, it makes all the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Despite his penchant for terrible ideas, he’s always had an excellent barometer for danger - he’s just never been particularly good at not wading into it. Steve’s a stubborn man and he can own that.

This… whatever this is, makes him want to drag Jane and Bruce from the room and push them all outside the blast doors.

Darcy cringes. “Souvenir from Clint and Natasha’s mission. Apparently it fell out of the sky in Bucharest,” she says, peering through the glass. “Don’t worry, they’re pretty sure it’s dead.”

Turning back to look at him, she yawns a bit, not bothering to hide her gaping mouth behind a hand, which makes Steve smile a bit for the first time today. “You know, I asked Clint to bring me back something, but I was thinking more like a keychain or booze from the duty free section of the airport.” She sighs. “Those two are worse than cats. Oh here master, I’ve brought you a present! A half-digested dead mouse! I am so great, right? Pet me, validate me, now I’m going to go vomit on your rug and brush you off with casual disinterest.”

“Am I calling you master now?” Clint asks, slinking from around the corner and wiggling his eyebrows. “Postscript: you can pet me anytime.”

Darcy shoots him a flat, unimpressed look before rolling her eyes and turning away. “You wish, Garfield.” She’s looking through the glass again, and her face looks so infinitely disgusted that Steve almost finds it a bit endearing. “Oh my god, it’s oozing. Clint, stop fucking bringing back shit that oozes, okay? I’m serious.”

Clint laughs. “Plus, I only threw up on your rug that once. However, I would like to remind you that you were the one that bought the jager shots.” Clint leans against the glass near Darcy. “What the hell are they doing with that thing, anyway?”

Darcy shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m with the astrophysicist. You’re the ones playing Steve Irwin with this… oozing thing.”

Steve makes a mental note to search Steve Irwin on his laptop when he gets back to his apartment.

Bruce exits the examination room and is stopped in the doorway by a blonde woman whose face Steve can’t see because of the angle of her body. But she looks familiar, and when she shifts enough that he can see her ear and partial profile, he knows immediately who she is. She motions for Banner to follow her and turns toward the group of them.

There’s a quick second where her stride catches as she notices him, her mouth twitching into a definite frown before schooling itself neutral again. Even without the smile he got used to seeing over the course of a year in DC, she really is quite beautiful.

(He really did like Kate. Yet another thing that no longer exists.)

“Agent thirteen,” Steve says roughly.

“Neighbour,” Sharon replies just as roughly, and it’s that moment that Steve realizes she knows that Steve personally requested that she not be the CIA liaison to the Avengers Initiative. He suspects Tony has something to do with this because he’s an infinite pain in Steve’s ass, but most likely the CIA refused to give in to his request. Since SHIELD, they’ve been less and less willing to give any domestic paramilitary groups (their words) latitude, even the Avengers.

So Sharon it is.

(He tries not to find it laughable that they’re using a former SHIELD agent to monitor the last dregs of the legacy of SHIELD not tainted by Hydra, but in some ways, he gets it. Steve may resent the way Sharon conned her way into his life, but he also knows what it’s like to have orders and to follow them, and his quarrel is with Fury for ordering her to lie to him, less with her for carrying out those orders. Besides, he’s seen the debrief reports on what happened in the control room before the helicarriers were launched, got his hands on the footage too, after. Captain’s orders.)

Darcy’s eyebrows raise and she smiles at Sharon. “Ooh, I like her,” she says in a stage whisper to Clint, who grins smugly.

Sharon smiles, then catches herself when she looks back at Steve, flattening her mouth like she’s embarrassed for the slip. “Are we going to get the show on the road? I’ve got three Langley deputy directors up my ass for sit-reps, and I’d like to be able to report more than, it’s really ugly and lying on a metal slab, to them if that’s okay.”

Banner sighs. “We’re just waiting for Tony, who said he’d be here like a half-hour ago, so...”

It happens in a split second.

Out of the corner of Steve’s eye, one of the thing’s tentacles twitches. Just a fine little tremor, barely noticeable to most, but to Steve, it’s as jarring as a thunderclap. The next second, the thing is off the table and climbing one of the walls like a spider, its open mouth letting out a dull roar that reminds Steve of rotor blades.

“Jesus fucking CHRIST!” Clint yells, jerking back from the glass and reaching for the bow strapped his to back. Sharon, Bruce and Darcy follow suit, moving away from the partition between rooms, Darcy letting out a quiet scream she muffles with her hand.

Then the scientists disappear behind the blur of the thing’s body. Even through the thick cut of the glass between them, Steve and the rest of them can hear the thick crunch of bodies being mangled, the horrific sound of their bloody screams.

Steve’s heart clenches in his chest when Darcy goes flying toward the glass.

“JANE!” Darcy is screaming over and over, blindly moving closer to the glass even though Steve can already tell that Jane is dead, that the three other scientists that had been standing around her are all dead. Clint moves faster than he does, grabbing her around the waist and hauling her back. He’s calling her name in between her screaming, trying to calm her against him, but she’s struggling to get to her friend, and in the split second between Steve’s panic and his attempt to formulate a plan, he feels desperately sorry for Darcy.

Then the thing lets out an ear-shattering roar, its mouth glowing a fluorescent blue, and the impenetrable, shatterproof glass-plastic panel between them starts to shake, little spiderwebs appearing in it.

It pauses for a flicker of a second, its soulless eyes staring straight at Steve, unblinking.

“Oh my god,” Sharon says before the thing turns and charges the transparent wall between them. The cracks stretch out farther.

“GET OUT!” Steve yells, grabbing Sharon and Bruce by the arm and shoving them in the direction of the blast doors, hoping that Clint has enough sense to drag Darcy in that direction as well.

One more charge and whatever was holding the pane to the wall gives out, the integrity of the material destroyed under the power of the thing. Steve instinctively puts himself between the beast rolling through the shattered remnants of the wall and his teammates behind him. The creature is weirdly graceful, quiet and sleek as it moves with a speed that chills Steve’s bones.

“STEVE!” he hears Sharon yell somewhere behind him, but his focus is entirely on the wall of black, metallic flesh closing in on him.

Steve manages to catch the thing under the jaw with his shield as it pins him down, the edge of indestructible metal biting into the pitch black meat of its neck. It opens up, pumping out a strange, glowing liquid that looks like blood all over Steve’s face and neck. It burns at Steve’s skin like lava, spreading through his body in a way that reminds him of the serum, how it felt like his entire body was no longer his own, the pain owning his bones and blood.

In the distance, someone screams.

It takes Steve a second to realize it’s his own voice.

[RESET 1]

Steve wakes up in bed.

WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHINE WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHINE WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHINE WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHI…

Steve shoves his face into his too-soft pillow and sighs deeply. He hates dreams like this - the vivid dreams that feel less like they’re dreams and more like Steve is reliving a memory. Like his body, the serum changed his dreams as well. When Steve had been younger, his dreams had always been fleeting, forgotten moments after waking like they had barely existed at all. Half the time, Steve didn’t dream at all.

After the serum, his dreams became vivid in the most peculiar way. After, he never forgot them, seared into his head as if he had lived them like any other memory.

Tony’s irritating voice finally becomes too much for him, so he reaches over and slaps his hand down on the clock. He hears the harsh sound of plastic snapping, and when he turns over, 8:32 is bisected by a jagged crack.

He stares at the illuminated face of the clock and thinks, What a weird goddamn morning.

Breakfast is eggs and two bowls of porridge, and he contemplates eating the fruit salad he bought the day before, but decides against it and saves it for an afternoon snack. Steve feels oddly full given he’s eaten less than he normally does in the morning, so instead of going for another helping of porridge, he dumps his dishes into the sink, grabs his clock and shield and heads down to Tony’s lab.

The odd feeling continues as he makes his way down the halls filled with harried, stressed-out looking people, until Darcy pops out from one of the supply rooms and nearly slams into him. She looks a bit tired and she’s got a pencil sticking out of her bun, but even tired and frazzled, Darcy looks lovely.

“Steven,” Darcy says, her body a little closer to his than normal given that she nearly ran into him and hasn’t yet adjusted for it. She reaches out to wrap her hand around his forearm and squeeze. Looking down at the broken clock in his hands, she smiles and says, “Again? You know he’s going to be insufferabl--”

She stops as her eyes blink up to his face, concern replacing the amusement. “Steve? What’s wrong?”

Steve… has no idea what is going on. Coincidence is one thing - this is something else entirely. “I… I’m just dealing with a serious sense of deja vu here,” he explains.

To that, Darcy smiles again. “Well, yes, Steve. You’ve broken your clock about twenty times. You really should just let Jarvis start making your wake-up calls before you put your fist straight through your bedside table.” Her voice is filled with a teasing tone that makes it sound like she’d actually like to witness it.

Steve isn’t sure how to explain to her that it’s more than that - so much more than that.

“Ooh, I know something that will blow your mind!” she says, grabbing his arm and dragging him toward the biomechanics lab. “Clint and Natasha got back to the tower in the middle of the night and, like the weird alley cats they are, they brought back some dead… thing.”

When he sees the black mass resting on the metal table in the middle of the observation room, Jane and Bruce chatting quietly with the same scientists he saw die in his dream, his entire body freezes.

“Gross, right?” Darcy says beside him.

“Get them out!” Steve yells, his voice loud enough that Darcy flinches and Bruce and Jane look toward him from the observation room.

The thing wakes up.

[RESET 2]

Steve wakes up in bed.

WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHINE WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHINE WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHINE WAKE UP CAPTAIN SUNSHI…

Steve starts to shake and yells for JARVIS.

“Yes sir?” the AI asks, to which Steve answers, “Everyone out of the biomechanics observation lab! Protocol Delta41779!”

The klaxons start going off outside his room; they echo eerily down the empty space of the hall.

By the time he makes it down to the lab level, he can hear the screaming from the elevator.

[RESET 42]

“I don’t understand!” Tony says, his voice filled with the sort of blasé irritation that he usually reserves for Fury. “What the hell do you mean you’ve lived this already?”

This is the twenty-sixth time Steve has tried to explain to Tony what’s going on. Each time gets a little bit easier because he can anticipate what Tony is going to question and what Tony is going to accept.

Most of the time, Tony demands proof. Mostly to be irritating, Steve thinks.

“You’re going to tell me that you’ve got better things to do, that you dragged yourself out of bed with Pepper - in her Iron Man pajamas you might add - so you could hear me show the signs of early onset dementia. Also, you’re holding one finger up behind your back, and yes, Tony, that’s extremely rude.”

Tony’s eyes bulge, then narrow back to normal; he turns to Bruce and shrugs. “You believe this story?”

“Yes,” Bruce says grimly.

[RESET 72]

Bruce turns from the microscope, first to Tony, who nods with a seriousness that Steve has never seen from the man. “It’s changed you.”

“What do you mean?”

Taking off his glasses, Bruce scratches at the bridge of his nose. “I spent years studying your blood, Steve. Years trying to break down what the serum did to your body. Whatever this thing’s blood did to you, it’s changed the fundamental makeup of your cells.”

Tony looks uncharacteristically serious. He keeps tapping the arc reactor on his chest nervously, and the sound is driving Steve insane.

“Whatever’s happening, your death is triggering some sort of time disturbance. To be honest, Steve,” Bruce says, his voice weary, “this really isn’t my area of speciality. I understand the biology of it, but this is more than that. From what I can see, Jane might be more help with the symptoms than I am.”

Bruce opens a comm only to hear screaming on the other end.

[RESET 73]

Jane takes one look at the panel that Bruce has run at Steve’s request this time and purses her lips. “Your blood cells contain red matter,” she says matter of factly, but she follows it with an almost breathless tone as she speaks seemingly to herself. “I don't even understand how this is possible.”

“What the hell is red matter?’ Steve asks.

The look of wonder on Jane’s face is both puzzling and frightening at the same time. “It’s… Steve, it’s been purely theoretical until this point. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

This is really not filling Steve with confidence. “What is it doing to me?”

“I don’t know. I mean, theoretically, red matter, when catalyzed, creates disturbances in energy fields. But it seems stable enough here, which is curious.” She frowns. “But the bigger problem is what do we do with that thing downstairs? I mean, if killing you resets the day, what happens if we kill whatever the hell that thing is?”

Tony and Bruce turn to look at one another with wide eyes. Steve hasn’t even thought about that.

The klaxons begin to blare.

[RESET 415]

Steve stops bothering with Tony, who can’t help and becomes nothing more than further collateral damage. After resetting about thirty times trying to figure out what the hell the creature’s blood has done to him, he’s given up hope of reversing it or understanding the strange power it’s given him. Jane’s come the closest to giving him answers, but the short period of time between when Steve wakes and when the thing does makes for a learning curve too steep for Jane or Bruce to overcome.

Instead, Steve turns to learning from his mistakes.

He doesn’t sound the alarm from his bedroom and doesn’t order an evacuation of the building.

From what Steve can tell, whatever the thing is (Bruce has called it a mimic for some reason, which makes Steve suspicious that it is not the first time they have seen something like this before), it’s not only alive the entire time, but conscious as well. Sounding the alarm too early sets the mimic off before Steve can get to the lab. Trying to evacuate the lab once he’s there sets the mimic off before Steve can clear the rooms.

The worst scenarios are the ones where he’s forced to watch them die over and over. He never wants to see the glassy, vacant look in Bruce’s eyes ever again, hear Darcy’s frenzied screams for Jane, watch Clint try to protect Darcy and fail.

But the absolute worst are the ones where one of them dies trying to save him. Near the hundredth reset, something changes where no matter what the scenario, if Steve is down in the lab when the mimic wakes, Sharon tries to put herself between it and Steve.

Day after day she’s done it, stepped in front of his body when the thing charges at him, shoving him out of the way while she discharges her weapon, the bullets finding their target every time, but making no difference. Every time. He doesn’t understand it at first, until the time he drags her underneath one of the desks, three puncture wounds near her left kidney making quick work of bleeding her out. He leans down to hear her over the sound of the sirens and the mimic tearing through the guts of the lab, and she brushes her lips over the corner of his mouth and apologizes, smiling sadly as she grips his hand.

And every time since, every time he pulls her body half-dead from the battle, she’s done the same.

Steve’s died with her blood on his hands so many times that he’s started waking with the phantom of it still there, the thick, tacky warmth of it lingering on his skin. Sometimes he wakes with the weight of her body in his arms and the bloody taste of her lips on his and has to will himself to get out of bed.

To live it all over again.

[RESET 923]

There’s blood on Steve’s hands again. Some of it’s Clint’s, but most of it’s Sharon’s. She’s got terrible shrapnel wounds from the explosion the mimic caused burrowing through the wall - and through the gas lines to the lab - but she’s also got a nasty slice running right across her torso, deep enough that it’s shredded her dress shirt. He can see the white bra she’s got underneath start to go red from the blood, and even though he know it’s fruitless, that in a few minutes he’ll wake up and his alarm will be going off and he’ll have two hours to figure out a new path to take, he presses down on the wound, desperate to keep more of her blood inside of her.

She’s already talking - “Steve, I …” - when he lays a kiss on her.

The look of shock on her face is beautiful, the way it always is when he kisses her first. When he closes his eyes, he can feel the pads of her fingers brush along his jaw. They move with a wet slickness that lets him know she’s left trails of her blood on his face.

A shiver runs through her body - maybe pleasure, but most likely pain, Steve thinks helplessly - and her hands drop to claw into the soft material of his shirt. “You should--” she starts to say before the blood loss starts stealing her words away. The part of her that is a soldier first is trying to tell him that he needs to leave her; she has said it to him now dozens of times. Each time, he ignores it.

“Please-”

Instead, Steve holds her as a shadow closes in on them because it’s already too late, and he knows it.

[RESET 2171]

Of course, it is a piece of Tony’s tech that saves the day.

(Though fair credit should be given to Jane, whose equations derived from her work on the bifrost helped Tony develop his… ugh, Steve can’t really remember the name of it. It was a lot of syllables, and Tony had bitched and complained that it was very expensive the six times Steve had taken it without permission from his workshop. Steve tries to remind himself that Tony doesn’t remember that this thing literally guts Tony twenty-six times, and if armed with that memory, Tony would build him a dozen and tell him to go play. Instead, he tells Tony to stow it, and tries to figure out a way to lure the damn thing close enough to shove it through the portal Tony’s device opens.)

Steve watches in quiet, thankful relief when the mimic is sucked through into the darkness, nothing but a swamp of black space on the other end. It clings to the edges for a flickering moment, an angry, desperate roar emitting from its ever-open mouth, and Steve would smile, would relish the moment if he weren’t bleeding so profusely, his hand pressing the wound in his lower abdomen closed.

Suddenly, there are small, pale hands pressing at his, pressing down, trying to keep more of his blood inside of his body.

Don’t die, he orders himself before the darkness comes for him too.

--

When he wakes up, there is no alarm clock going off. He cannot hear Tony’s voice.

When Steve wakes, he is staring at the familiar tiled ceiling of Stark’s medical floor. His body aches in the most peculiar way, like it’s not quite healing itself the way he’s used to. The air smells and tastes sterile inside his mouth. Steve’s always hated this place.

He can feel the stitches in his abdomen and the swollen landscape of his face and winces, sliding his jaw back and forth, trying to unlock the angry, injured muscles.

Sharon’s in the small chair just beside his bed, next to the IV pump that makes a light whoosh noise every few seconds, loud in the near-silent room. Steve’s been in plenty of hospital rooms in his life, but he’s never been in one this quiet. Even Stark’s medical floor is usually louder than this.

So when he moves an inch and his sheets pull against his body, Sharon immediately looks up from the book resting in her lap. “Hey,” she says, reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ears.

He feels incredibly guilty. This time, he’d kissed Sharon before the mimic had even woken up, dragging her into the hall and pressing her up against the wall, breathlessly ordering her to stay the hell out of the lab, an order she ultimately disregarded. Steve had just wanted to kiss her without the blood, without having to watch her die.

He’d figured at the time that he ran about a 100% chance of a reset anyway. Not like she’d remember it when he woke yet again to Stark’s irritating voice.

(It had been remarkably selfish and not something Steve was - or is - particularly proud of. She didn’t remember the times she had kissed him first, or the times where she had allowed him to kiss her. He hadn’t sought her permission, so it had felt more like a theft, even though she had let him kiss her, Sharon’s fingers tight in the fabric of his shirt as she sighed a bit into his mouth.)

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, sitting up a bit more on the inclined bed, getting a better look at her. “About before. It was presumptuous. I’m sorry.”

The look Sharon shoots him is somewhere between amused and calculating; there’s an edge of a smile in the corner of her lips. It reminds him of the times he used to run into her in the middle of the night at the small twenty-four hour convenience store around the corner from their apartment building. Then he remembers her talking about her late shift at the hospital, about how he had called her Kate, and the smile she used to give him when he’d walk her home, right up to her door, because you never could be too careful at night.

He banishes the thoughts immediately.

“Why?” she asks with a shrug. “I’m not.”

The smile falters a bit as she takes a deep breath. “I just… I guess I don’t understand it?”

There’s a look on her face that betrays her thoughts. He’s never been anything other than brusque with her since DC, and last that she knew, he’d been doing his darndest to keep her from Stark Tower. It’s easy for him to understand how that could be misconstrued as dislike; what bothers Steve is that his actions regarding her have always been driven from a place completely opposite to that. Steve’s never been good at liking people, always messing up along the way, his tongue as tangled as his thoughts. But he’s trying. He’s trying.

“I’m not going to pretend that I’m happy you lied to me, Sharon, but I’m through being angry about it,” he tells her and means it. It’s been so many days of watching her die - of watching her die trying to save him - and he’s tired. “I know my battle here is with Fury, I just wish we had met under different circumstances.”

She nods, closing her book and pushing it into her bag. For a brief second, Steve is worried that she’s going to leave, and is flustered by the feeling of regret. He’ll regret letting her leave, because he knows she won’t come back. But there’s a part of him that just won’t let him open his mouth, won’t let him put himself back out there.

Instead of leaving, Sharon leans back against the chair and taps the toe of her boots against the floor nervously.

“Steve,” Sharon says, “you want to grab a cup of coffee with me?”

His answer is reflexive and immediate.

“Yeah.”

--

Coffee turns into dinner. Dinner turns into more dinners, lunch dates that spread out across afternoons, and her leading him around the bases by the hand.

Steve tries to be respectful, to take things slow. He’s no blushing virgin (Sally Payne - the only girl that looked twice at him before the serum - helped take care of that, followed by a few more experienced girls on the USO tour who were kind, patient, and willing), but he’s also not the kind to rush into bed with a woman. He enjoys sex as much as any other man, but he also treats it - and the women he has it with - with a healthy respect.

The formality of dating is a thing of the past apparently, and while he enjoys making plans, setting dates and taking Sharon out, the nights he enjoys the most are the ones where he ends up knocking at her door unexpectedly - just because he wants to. Those nights they stay in, him sketching quietly beside her on the couch while she watches televisions shows he neither cares for nor watches.

(One day you will appreciate the brilliance of Man vs. Wild, she sighs before she switches over to How It’s Made. There’s only so many times I’m willing to watch kayaks being made, okay?)

Steve knows she’s a bit frustrated, but she doesn’t push.

But then one night she says, “I’ve got a cabin upstate,” as he’s sliding his arms up under her shirt and around her bare hips, his mouth just a shade north of numb from all the kissing they’ve been doing inside the doorway of her apartment. “Up near Lake George. Want to head up there tomorrow? Thought we could use some down time.”

He's not a stupid man. He knows exactly what she's saying, what she’s asking for. And he can't think of a single reason why he doesn’t want to.

So he says, “Yes,” and smiles into her mouth when she won’t stop kissing him.

--

Shockingly, Sharon turns out to be more like Kate than Steve expects. In some ways, it is a strange relief to realize that the woman he’d been living beside and getting to know for nearly a year hadn’t been a complete lie. The record collection that had been in her apartment in DC turns out to be her own, and she listens to them at a volume level that would probably allow Clint to hear it clear as day without his hearing aids in. She’s a classic rock girl, she tells him, but she’s got a lot of strange rock from the 80s in there as well. “Gotta give love to the hair bands too, Steve,” she tells him. (He has to look up hair bands later that night and is slightly horrified by what he finds.)

He hates almost every television show she enjoys, but watches them anyway because she’s usually thoughtful enough to switch to something he’ll enjoy afterwards. She can eat an entire box of oreos in an evening, but scrapes all the icing off; she adds Sriracha sauce to everything she eats, and snores when she drinks too much before she sleeps.

But she’s cautious in her affection, which surprises Steve a bit given how bold she is - both as Kate and as Sharon.

It takes a while, but by the fourth month, Sharon starts leaving bits of herself in his apartment. There’s a purple toothbrush in a cup beside his, and when Steve gets his laundry back from the service, he finds her favourite Sarah Lawrence sweater and a pair of her socks folded in with his clothes.

He smiles as he shoves her things into a drawer. Steve’s been leaving clothes and things (razor, toothbrush, aftershave) in her apartment for weeks already, mostly because he usually stays at her place and occasionally needs socks and sweats because the heat in her building is complete shit, and even though he runs hot, he sometimes feels like his toes are going to fall off. But also because it feels nice to belong to someone enough to occupy space in their life in this way.

Sharon doesn’t seem to mind. She shoves his razor and aftershave in her medicine cabinet beside her body lotion and tampons, empties out one of her drawers for him to keep some clothes in. But she’s never left anything at his place; she rarely stays in the tower, and when she does, she always brings a small overnight bag with the essentials, which makes him feel oddly uncomfortable. He mentions it once - you know you can keep a change of clothes here, to which she smiles a brittle little smile and says, I know.

But it happens. Slowly. In the same way she waited patiently for him, he does the same for her. Steve knows there was someone before him, someone that hurt her. She doesn’t talk about it and he doesn’t ask her to. There are parts of him that wonder how healthy secrets are for people like them, but he knows he carries his own ghosts, his own secrets… old and new.

Soon enough, there’s a couple pairs of panties and some boxers she typically wears as pajama bottoms in the drawer as well, then a curling iron hidden under his sink next to a bottle of leave-in conditioner. The toothbrush appears last.

He likes seeing these things on the nights she doesn’t stay at his place and he doesn’t stay at hers, the little momentos that remind him that while she’s gone, she’s still around. It used to be the same thing with Bucky’s stuff back when they were sharing an apartment in Brooklyn, how the sight of Bucky’s jacket hanging by the door or the boots he’d leave by the spare closet near the bathroom would be a comfort while Bucky was out on the docks, making barely enough to cover their rent.

(Sometimes he’ll pull out some of her clothes and drape them over the back of the chair near the vanity he never uses, like she’s actually here, just washing up in the bathroom. He always puts them back, embarrassed, before she actually comes to stay over.)

[RESET 2172]

Five months after the mimic is sucked out into the abyss of space, the Avengers are finally called out to deal with a situation in a small hamlet in Maine, and Steve takes a fucking spear to the chest. He thinks the Hulk is carrying him when he finally blacks out, the pain and blood loss stealing his consciousness.

When Steve opens his eyes, he’s in Sharon’s apartment, and he recognizes where he is immediately. When.

It’s Saturday, the morning still early enough that the sky is dark, lit only by the moon. There’s still a scarf tied to the headboard, and if he takes a look at Sharon’s wrists, he knows he’ll see a faint line of red that will take a few days to heal.

He’s lost a little over a week. He’s reset.

He’s reset.

Air can’t reach his lungs, his chest so tight that it hurts. Steve curls in on himself, then explodes, ripping back the sheets, suddenly claustrophobic of walls that don’t exist.

“Steve?” Sharon mumbles sleepily before snapping awake at the violence of his movements. “Steve?” she asks again, this time more urgent as Steve twists in the sheets.

Oh god, oh god, please please, no.

“Steve, talk to me!” Sharon begs, following him off the bed when he falls out of it, landing hard on his knees. His bones ache with the impact. She reaches out and grabs his face, trying to steady him even though it feels like he’s falling apart, like no hands can keep him bolted to the ground. “STEVE!”

(He’d really thought that ridding them of the mimic would strip him of whatever the hell this is.

Denial is a cruel mistress.)

[RESET 3425]

The strength is still there. Steve can still move with the speed and agility that he’s always had since the serum.

That being said, the ease with which injuries take him down is making him extremely nervous. Back on the helicarrier with Bucky, he had taken three bullets - including a gut shot - and nearly drowned, and yet he had only spent four days in the hospital. These days, a light wind can send him resetting. Cuts and bruises don’t heal the same way either - they linger on his skin in a way they haven’t since 1943.

Steve is careful when he shares his secret with others. Jane and Bruce are the only ones he’s confided in since they destroyed the mimic. Usually he only gets a few days use out of it anyway, his resets stealing their memories away, forcing Steve to start over.

This time, Jane finally tries to draw some conclusions. “We still don’t really understand what the serum did to you, Steve,” she tells him. “And, frankly, we don’t really know what the hell red matter does to human cells either. I mean, technically, I’m not even sure how your body is hosting the red matter without it ripping your cells apart. Probably something to do with the serum. Or the blood of that thing.”

“Okay,” Steve says. Jane doesn’t have much of a bedside manner, but Steve finds it oddly comforting. She’s a straight shooter, whereas Bruce tends to cushion everything, like he’s trying to protect Steve from the truth. “So what do we know?”

Jane looks at Bruce and shrugs. “Whatever this thing was - whatever its powers were - there would have been some sort of logic to it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It wants you to die,” Bruce says. “The red matter. Looking at it from a logical perspective, the power to reset time as a learning mechanism would require…. well, death. I think the red matter is inhibiting your regenerative capabilities.”

“Oh.”

Suddenly it begins to make sense. The decreased appetite, the way the nicks from his razor in the morning don’t heal instantly the way they did in the past. How Sharon can leave marks on his neck, little bruises bitten into his skin.

“I wish we could tell you more,” Jane says, patting his shoulder, her thumb digging gently into the muscle there. “Give us some time, okay?”

Six days later, he dies taking a punch from Thor during a training session and resets a month.

[RESET 5339]

“I know,” Steve tells her solemnly. “I’ve known for a while.”

Sharon looks confused and more than a little shocked, though she’s been clearly suspicious during the meal given his behaviour. He hates El Trattatoria. Hates their food, hates their decor, hates the shitty music he has to listen to every time Sharon brings him here to tell him who her aunt is.

The first time Sharon told him in this restaurant, it had felt like his heart was being ripped in two. That first time, he’d stood up and walked out of the restaurant and didn’t speak to her for nearly three and a half weeks.

(It hadn’t been his proudest moment ever, but Nunez tells him to own his anger and pain, to allow himself to feel the things he tries to push down because it makes him feel out of control. You don’t always need to be in control, she tells him, but she doesn’t understand the fine edge that keeps him from tumbling off the side of the cliff he feels like he’s constantly standing on.)

Sharon’s told him now five times. Steve keeps expecting that it will hurt less, that the next time she nervously spills her secrets over lukewarm ravioli and expensive wine, it will feel less like a betrayal on both their parts. But it doesn’t. It still weighs on him that she is Peggy’s kin, that he’s falling for the niece of the woman he spent months imagining marrying after the war, daydreamed stupid futures of that were never meant to be. Worse, it hurts because he’s slowly come to realize how much he loves Sharon, that this isn’t a casual flirtation.

He tries to convince himself that it’s not a betrayal, that if Peggy were still alive, she’d want him to be happy, to find someone who makes him happy, her niece or not. He had never once begrudged Peggy the life she had lived after him; he had been happy she had found a man that had loved her and treated her right, that had cherished her the way she had deserved. There isn’t a moment that he doesn’t wish it had been him, but he had never wished a life of mourning for Peggy, and is profoundly glad she had the rich, happy life she did.

Steve wants to be angry at Sharon for her secrets. He wants to be angry at himself for being willing to forgive her, for wanting things with her that he feels that he shouldn’t want.

But the simple fact is that each time he resets after Sharon’s told him, he ends up back in the cabin with her, waking up from the nap they'd taken after the ride up to the lake on his bike, his hand on her thigh and her body tucked up against his side. And he’s chosen to take, chosen to wake her up by sliding his body over hers, by sliding the button of her jeans open and pulling the zipper down slowly as she blinks the sleep out of her eyes.

That memory keeps him here.

“I’m sorry,” Sharon say, looking remorseful. She always looks remorseful, and each time, she divulges a few weeks later that this is one of the least proud moments of her life, that she regrets not telling Steve sooner. “I don’t know how you found out, but you deserved to hear it from me.”

I did, he thinks.

[RESET 5991]

“Steve?” she asks sleepily, brushing the hair back from her eyes as she wakes. One hand reaches up to touch Steve’s jaw as he moves over her. Sometimes he forgets how small she is, thinner and narrower than he is by far, but not weaker. That he never forgets. As much as he’d like to forget sometimes, the thought lingering on the back of his tongue (a little bitter, but also sweet), Sharon is a Carter. He’s never known a Carter to be anything other than strong.

She moans when he licks at her neck, her hips bumping into his when he bites down gently, getting a better taste of her skin.

This is the eighth time he’s slept with her for the first time, but it never feels like deja vu. Each time is different: the way she responds to him, the things she whispers to him when he gets his hand into her panties, the length of time it takes her to come on his fingers.

Here he learns too. Touching her knees, his fingers pressed up against the thin, soft skin beneath, will make her wet. She prefers it a bit rougher than Steve is used to, likes to feel the weight behind a touch, to be pressed down into the mattress. She’s not afraid of his strength and pushes him not to be afraid of it either.

(Once, the third or fourth time he’d woken up to the dying sun outside her cabin and her warm sleepy body next to his, he’d pinned her wrists down onto the bed so roughly she had let out a startled gasp. He had backed off instantly, mortified, until she grabbed the scruff of his neck and hauled him down to kiss her, breathing into his mouth that she wanted him to do it again.)

Sharon likes to talk during sex: she likes it when Steve tells her what he wants to do to her, seems to enjoy telling him how good he makes her feel. She gasps and moans and begs him to talk to her. Steve indulges her if only because this is something he enjoys as well.

There’s a scar down low on her hip, crossing over her abdomen, that she’s sensitive about. It’s silvery and so fine that it barely looks like anything at all, just the ghost of violence pressed along her skin. He tries to kiss it once and she pushes him away, shys her body away whenever he tries to touch or look at it.

Sharon’s not much for being held normally, but she craves it after sex. She lets him wrap his body around hers, slide a leg between her knees high enough that he can feel the wet mess still left between her thighs.

He catalogues these things.

(This time, Sharon lets her hand run through Steve’s sweaty hair and whispers, I love you, into the rise of his shoulder when she thinks he’s fallen asleep.

He realizes as sleep begins to tug at him that he may have just been sleeping the last seven times. He wonders what else he’s missed as he’s been waiting to wake.)

[RESET 6169]

He catches her in his bedroom, staring out the window.

Sharon’s been different lately. Distant. She still sleeps in his bed, lets him hold her after she comes, wakes sprawled across his body in the morning. But there’s something missing, something different. Like she’s struggling to find the right response instead of simply reacting.

She’d been part of a mission in Caracas that had gone south pretty badly, a few agents killed, a few wounded - Sharon amongst them. She had seemed fine at first - hard on herself for her perceived failings, her inability to keep the mission on track even though it had been far outside of anyone’s abilities - but in the months since, under the watch of the CIA-mandated therapist, Steve has found Sharon changing. Quieter. Confused. Not at all the woman he’s come to know.

(Enough that Steve’s put out quiet enquiries to find out about this Dr. Faustus that Sharon’s been seeing.)

Even now, she doesn’t stir when he walks up behind her. Getting the drop on Sharon Carter is near impossible.

“Sharon?”

The trance doesn’t break until Steve touches her, his fingers curling round the cup of her elbow.

“Sweetheart?” he says, and normally Sharon would give him a sharp, but amused look at the endearment, but instead she just smiles insecurely.

“Sorry.”

Steve can’t help the worry that wiggles underneath his skin. He keeps his hand on her elbow, pressing into the flesh there gently. “What’s going on?”

This smile is more genuine, though it doesn’t really reach her eyes. He misses those smiles, the kind she’d give him answering the door when he’d come over unannounced and ask if he could spend the evening sketching on her couch while she watched some show about pawn shops.

“Nothing,” she says, leaning up to kiss the hinge of his jaw. Her fingers follow her mouth as she traces his face. “Nothing at all.”

[RESET 7002]

Sharon goes missing on a Tuesday, shortly after Steve learns more about the identity of the CIA mandated psychiatrist she’s been seeing for the past six months, the same man who’s been busy trying to infiltrate Stark Industries - and by extension, the Avengers Initiative.

Steve spends the better part of a week searching for her, sleeping at her apartment for the few hours he rests between working leads and pressing the goddamn CIA for answers they refuse to give. This time, the clothes on her chair and her make-up scattered across her dresser gives him no comfort, only reminding him of her absence.

Steve’s no fool; he knows he’s walking into a trap when he gets her call near midnight on the sixth day she’s been gone. Even if the fear of death didn’t now only carry the implication of lost time and memories, he would still walk into that lobby. He would still walk to her, even though he can see the gun in her hand.

For a split second before the bullets hit his chest, Steve can see Peggy lifting that gun and firing at his shield, a sepia-tone memory quickly overwritten by the technicolour violence of now.

There are footsteps as she approaches. He can hear them echo off the walls from where he’s sprawled out on the floor.

“Well done, my dear,” Dr. Faustus says, his hand wrapped over the bone of her shoulder, like a father complimenting an obedient child. He nods to the men near the door, motioning for them to leave as he takes the gun from Sharon’s hand. “Now look upon your good work. You’ve earned it.”

For a second, Steve is terrified that Faustus will hurt Sharon in front of him. He can’t watch her die again; he’d rather end himself now than be forced to watch her bleed out again. But Faustus doesn’t move to hurt her, instead turning to walk to the door.

There is nothing but a blank slate for the first few moments after Faustus pulls away from Sharon, her eyes dull and cruel, observing but no longer absorbing.

But then she blinks rapidly, clearing her eyes. The look of devastation on her face when she sees his wounds - when she realizes what she’s done - feels like he’s been shot all over again.

“Oh fuck,” she cries, her mouth dropping open in horror. “Oh no. No no no.”

Everything about this is wrong. “Sharon,” he says shakily, the taste of blood overwhelming in his mouth. She’s hit a lung. Steve is shocked that he’s still alive; these days, it takes far less to send him into a reset. His body is fighting for him this time, trying to stay with her. “It’s okay.”

“Oh god. Please, Steve. I’m so sorry. Oh god,” she hiccups hysterically, dragging his shoulders up closer to her body, nearly cradling his large frame within her own. “Please don’t go. Please. Steve. Steve?”

The only thing he can think of as death pulls at him is how her voice sounds just like Peggy’s when he hit the cold line of the Atlantic.

[RESET 7003]

When Steve wakes, he is staring at the familiar tiled ceiling of Stark’s medical floor.

He instantly knows the point he’s reset to.

(Chronologically, it would be two years, but he’s re-lived so many portions of that period, he’s frankly not sure how much time he’s lost between the two points.)

He can feel the stitches in his abdomen and the swollen landscape of his face and winces, sliding his jaw back and forth, trying to unlock the angry, injured muscles.

Sharon’s sitting beside him, her face calm and nothing like the anguished woman he’d just closed his eyes on. She smiles at him gently with the careful trepidation he remembers at the beginning of their relationship, and his heart breaks in two.

This time, when she asks him out for coffee, he says, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The flicker of emotion across her face that he’s come to recognize over the years (YEARS, he reminds himself. YEARS.) as embarrassment tinged with sadness makes his hands grip the sides of his bed. The truth is that he wants to say yes, he wants to tell her, yes, yes, I want to go to coffee with you, I want to wake up to your clothes draped over my chair, your body lotion on my bathroom counter, your toothbrush in my cup, but instead he says, “I want to Sharon. Believe me. But I can’t.”

He’s through being an albatross for the Carter women. They deserve better.

She smiles at him again, but this time it’s a wounded one. “But still friends?”

He gives his own bleeding smile. “Friends.”

[RESET 8934]

He’s so lonely.

[RESET 9354]

“What?” Jane asks. She’s leaning back against her workstation, compulsively twisting a finger in her hair. It reminds Steve of the way he’s seen Darcy twist her hair absently in the lab.

“I don’t know,” Steve explains. “It’s not always the same. If I reset more than a few days, things can change. People’s reactions a day or two after the reset are different than if I reset a week. Or more. They don’t always say or do the same thing. Even presented with the same situations… sometimes the outcome is different.”

“Hmm,” Jane says poking at Steve’s arm with the capped end of a pen. “Like an observer impacting the phenomena he or she is observing simply by virtue of being there, maybe you having a prior knowledge of what transpires alters the outcome of any given scenario. Or maybe… our decisions aren’t as set as we think they are.” Jane snorts. “I don’t know - I hated philosophy. Took it first year, then never again.”

Steve huffs a laugh, then turns serious again. “I don’t understand why I keep losing different amounts of time. Sometimes I reset a day, sometimes a month. I can’t find a rhyme or a reason to it, Jane.”

Jane drops down into her chair. She looks incredibly tired; Darcy’s been on vacation for the last week, sneaking off with Clint to some island down in the Caribbean where she had claimed that she would not remove her ass from a deck chair for a full week unless retrieving yet another drink served in a coconut. Darcy’s absence subsequently means Jane doesn’t eat or sleep particularly well, which leads most people to avoid Jane’s lab until Darcy returns.

Steve no longer has that luxury. (And, to be fair, he doesn’t mind Jane when she’s frazzled. Like most of the geniuses he’s known, her eccentricities are part of her charm.)

“That’s more difficult,” Jane says. “I’m not sure how you’re controlling it or if it can be controlled at all. Red matter responds to energy, so theoretically the larger the source to feed off of, the larger the anomaly.”

“What does that mean?”

“Layman’s terms? When you die, the red matter is feeding off the energy your body is releasing. Well, more accurately, no longer using. And,” she cringes a bit, “one could make the argument that the emotional state you’re in factors into that.”

That shocks him. “You mean I’ll jump back farther if I’m upset when I die?”

Jane shrugs. “Not just sadness. Joy, too. Fear. Any sort of heightened emotional response. But honestly, Steve, it’s just a theory, and it’s not something I can test. Even if you brought back the results with you when you reset, I wouldn’t be able to run the data properly. I wish I could give you more definitive answers, Steve. I’m sorry. I’ll keep trying, you know I will.”

Steve nods.

When he stands up to leave, Jane rests a hand on his forearm. “Have you told someone about this, Steve?”

Sometimes Steve can forget this side of Jane, the side that comes out when she’s not solving for an equation, that cares about people in a quiet, profound way. He rests his hand over hers and give a weak smile because it’s all he can muster at this point. “I told you, didn’t I?”

He tells Jane because experience has taught him that she can keep her secrets.

Jane smiles like Natasha sometimes, like she can see right through him. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

Three days later, Steve dies falling down the stairs in the lab and resets six weeks. Across the table at breakfast, Steve has to remind himself that this Jane, the one smiling as she eats a bowl of cheerios, has no recollection of what he can do.

[RESET 9877]

Nunez adjusts the pad sitting on her lap. “Steve, I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me. This is the one place where you can be.”

Steve still talks to Nunez about things: his ever-present guilt over Bucky, his inability to form meaningful relationships with people outside of work, his lingering anger over the betrayal of SHIELD. But he doesn’t talk about his resets. He’s never told her what he can do.

There’s something frightening about time that is inconsequential. It’s scarcity and irreversibility is what gives it value, what gives weight and importance to decisions. He’s honestly not sure how Nunez would react if he told her how many times he’s died only to wake again to a different day. Jane approaches it with a scientific curiosity that outweighs any type of fear she might have, and Steve, frankly, can’t bring himself to burden another with this kind of knowledge.

It’s been a year and a half by his count since Sharon shot him. For a while, he tried marking the days in a calendar, waking from each reset and pulling out the small, white calendar with a flock of birds on the cover. Inside, red Xs mark the days he’s lived once, purple for days lived twice, blue for thrice...

Eventually, he runs out of colours. Eventually, he can’t remember which days he’s marked. Eventually, he forgets to bother to count.

(“I am,” he lies.)

[RESET 10258]

“What about Emma? From Procurement. She’s cute, right?”

“Natasha. Jesus, enough.”

Steve is trying to enjoy his breakfast, but as per usual, Natasha is up to her matchmaking games. She’s been on edge since she got back from Antkara, a bundle of nerves instead of the cool and collected woman she typically is. This restlessness usually manifests itself in strange ways, from matchmaking to climbing into the rafters with Barton to crashing Finance’s weekly card game and taking them all to the cleaners even though half of them know how to count cards.

(She doesn’t remember that she’s already asked him about Emma nearly a half-dozen times before. He actually does ask Emma out the fourth time Natasha brings her up, in part because he’s eager to have Natasha off his ass for more than a few days and in part because she seems nice enough and Steve likes her a bit. But mostly he does because the loneliness has turned overwhelming again.

He takes her out to the Vietnamese restaurant near where his old apartment building in Brooklyn used to be, long since torn down. After, they take a detour through Prospect Park. Steve is profoundly grateful she’s a talker; she spends most of their long walk talking without pause about moving to New York City, how her brother actually works for Stark Industries out in Los Angeles, about her new little niece, born blind and cute as a button. He can tell that it’s nervous rambling, that she’s talking to fill the space because he’s been so painfully quiet on their date, and for a moment he feels bad, but then she smiles bright and open at him. Letting his arm fall loose around the rise of her hip feels natural, like he’s any other man taking his girl for a walk through the park.

He doesn’t have sex with her that night, but he accepts her invitation to come up to her place for a nightcap.

“Can I...” Steve starts to ask once the whiskey has been drunk, and her cheeks start to blaze bright red. “Oh, no. I mean, not that. Just. Um, sleep?”

Suddenly the thought of sleeping alone tonight is all but unbearable to him.

“Sleep?” She looks desperately confused, but shrugs with a shy smile and leads him down the hall to her room, telling him to take off his shoes before she climbs into her bed and shimmies over to make room for him.

The mortification of his request doesn’t fully hit him until he wakes up in the morning wrapped around her. She stirs as he moves through the room, collecting his shoes and jacket, placing a small, embarrassed kiss on her cheek, with a, “Thanks,” mumbled against the soft skin there.

No need to make excuses anyway: two days later, he resets two weeks.)

“What?” Natasha says, shoving a forkful of eggs into her mouth. She has a plate of food in front of her that even Steve would struggle to finish: a giant mound of scrambled eggs, six sausages, six strips of bacon, three slices of fried tomato, a side of hashbrowns and four pieces of toast.

“Just stop, okay?” Steve says, pushing away his plate. “No more girls, no more set ups.”

He expects a fight, so when Natasha shrugs and says, “Okay,” he actually has to take a moment to make sure he heard her correctly. He looks at her like he doesn’t believe a word she’s saying and she shrugs, taking a bite of her toast and reaching for his orange juice to take a sip.

When she finishes, she forks two of her sausages and one of her fried tomato slices and dumps it on his plate, then pushes it back in front of Steve. “You’re getting too skinny.”

Clint plops down beside him with a bowl of granola, yogurt and berries, and takes a look at Natasha’s plate. “God,” he says, lifting a spoonful of granola to his mouth. “What the fuck are you eating, Tasha? How is your blood not a solid at this point? I don’t even want to know what your cholesterol count is.”

Natasha grins around a mouthful of toast and reaches for a slice of bacon.

[RESET 13649]

Natasha partners with Steve on a mission in Portland that turns out to be far more serious than their mission briefing implies. There’s no intel that indicates the AIM splinter group has nuclear capability.

Steve resets the day eight hundred times before Natasha manages to remove the trigger key in time.

It is the first time that Steve resets himself.

[RESET 15773]

How Steve manages to be corralled into being a groomsman for Clint’s wedding, he’ll never know. It’s rushed, mostly because Darcy says she is not, “Fucking dealing with my mother complaining about how I was already showing every time she breaks out the photos at Christmas.” But if there’s anyone that knows how to throw a decent shindig with split-second turnaround, it’s Stark’s team of ninja-like assistants. They all wear pencil skirts, high heels and barely tolerate Tony, instead pledging allegiance to Pepper.

Steve ends up in a decently expensive tux, which unfortunately has, like all the other groomsmen’s tuxes, a purple bowtie as per Clint’s request. After fifteen minutes of fumbling, Natasha takes pity and helps him tie it, taking a moment afterward to fix his twisted cufflinks.

“There,” she says when she finishes, tapping him on the wrist, and the smile he gives her afterward is so brittle that it feels like his entire face is going to crack.

It’s a relatively intimate affair, even though Stark goes a little overboard on the extravagance. Watching Darcy and Clint up on the altar is a weirdly bittersweet moment for Steve; he remembers the selfless way Clint had died over and over trying to protect Darcy from the mimic, though she only remembers the last time when he had taken a piece of rebar into his side shielding her from an explosion.

He grins at the way Clint’s voice wavers and the small, fond smile that Darcy volleys in return.

The reception is held at Stark’s East Hampton retreat, a gargantuan monstrosity that on the surface seems like it’s too much house for any one man. Inside though, it’s surprisingly cozy and one of the few places Steve has been that feels like Tony outside of his workshop.

For the party, Stark’s built a dancefloor that juts out onto the beach, lit by strung lanterns. The decor is all in muted white and blues, but the light from the lanterns turns everything golden in the pitch black evening anyway.

“Come on, Rogers,” Natasha says, appearing out of nowhere. He’s been hiding out near the bar at the side of the house even though he’s not drinking anything. “You owe me a dance.”

The band is decent enough and have finally segued into some slower songs that Steve feels more comfortable tackling, but he hesitates anyway. “Not much of a dancer.”

Natasha cocks an eyebrow and holds out a hand. She’s wearing one of the most beautiful dresses Steve has seen on a woman, a blazing red number that plunges at the neck and the back, a lot of skin offsetting the delicate fabric. “We’ll clutch and sway then.” Her grin grows wicked. “Or you could always let me lead.”

Steve can’t help but smile in return. “Don’t you always?”

They end up swaying through a couple songs while friends mill around them. Darcy and Clint stay on the dancefloor, wrapped around one another while Pepper does her best to wrangle an increasingly drunk Stark, who flip-flops between murmured declarations of love and decidedly inappropriate touching that makes Steve both uncomfortable and irritated on Pepper’s behalf.

These days, he thinks mostly about moments like this - the moments he’s living through for the first time. But then his thoughts steer darker, his mind wandering into how it will feel to live them over again, how the pieces could fit together differently the second, third, tenth time around.

(Maybe next time, Clint will cry. Maybe Bruce will forget the rings or Darcy will make a run for it, pregnant or not.)

“Hmm,” Natasha hums, lifting her hand from his shoulder to brush against his temple. “I can hear you thinking from here, Steve.”

The hand he has spread over her back slips a bit, half his palm resting on skin and half on the soft fabric of her dress. “Not thinking about much, truthfully.”

Lying, Steve has found, is becoming second hat for him. He’s never cruel or undisciplined with it, though. Before, he’d believed that truth was always the right path, pain and repercussions aside. Now? He’s not so sure.

“Do I have to worry about you?” Natasha asks, and the playful tone from earlier is gone, replaced with the tone she gets when she’s aiming at light, but hitting serious instead. She is only transparent when she chooses to be.

“Of course not.”

Natasha presses herself up onto her toes so her mouth can brush against his ear.

“I don’t believe you.”

[RESET 17785]

Steve,

The new shrink they’ve hooked me up with here is a real piece of work. Can’t say I like him much. He’s got this weird mustache that reminds me of Dugan. He also loves to hear himself talk… like Dugan. All he needs is a damn bowler.

I’m enjoying the new house in Italy a bit more than the last one. It’s right on the coast, so I can hear the water at night. It’s great. Italy ain’t a half-bad place when it’s not full of Nazis. There’s a town a couple of miles away that has decent sangria, though my babysitters seem a little itchy when I drink, so I try to do it in front of them. A lot.

It also has a lot of beautiful women. Jesus, Steve. If there’s one thing I love about the future, it’s the short skirts. If only Sister Celeste could see the shit girls wear today. She would have blown her habit right off.

Anyway, I got your last package. Thanks for the Babe Ruths. I do love Italy, but their candy is crap. Way too much of it is coffee flavored. Fucking gross. Next time, can you send me some Almond Joys? And some licorice?

Went on a field trip a few weeks ago. Got to visit the Uffizi after hours. Made me think of you. You ever visit? I’ve never seen so many fucking paintings of a naked baby in my life.

I keep remembering things, only I can’t tell if it’s an actual memory or something… else. Did I ever shove you off the Clark Street Pier?

Bucky

--

Natasha peers at the pile of letters sitting neatly on Steve’s desk, tied together with twine. Even when she’s off duty like this, relaxing on his couch in loose sweats instead of her black catsuit, Natasha is always calculating, and he can feel her eyes on him when she says, “Why don’t you go visit him?”

Bringing Bucky home had been one of the hardest things Steve had ever done. What had followed - giving Bucky up to the doctors and specialists who had urged space for him to recover - had been nearly as hard. They write though, lots of letters and the occasional phone call where Bucky barely speaks, instead urging Steve to talk for hours until his throat grows raw with use. “Why don’t you?”

Her smile is sly. “Not the same thing and you know it.”

They both own different pieces of the same man, the man Natasha knew as a teacher and Steve knew as a friend. That they both knew as more. Somewhere, in a dusty archive in DC and an abandoned bunker in Novgorod, there are intel reports on them, ancient logs that detail Bucky Barnes, The Winter Soldier, and his attachments. That talk about his predilections and weaknesses, about a blond man and a redheaded woman, both of whom shared his bed.

“Tell me about him?”

Natasha is not a woman who trades secrets, nor a woman predisposed to sharing with others. But strangely, Steve has found she is often willing to give in to Steve’s requests with little resistance, even when they tread into territory that he knows makes her uneasy.

Natasha curls up next to him on the couch, pushing her legs over his. “He took me on my first real mission. I had just turned twelve.” Her voice is flat, a carefully schooled neutrality. Not happy, but not sad, either. Most of the the things Natasha shares with him about her time before SHIELD come out this way, like a recitation of facts, rather than memories given through a prism of emotion. It’s her way of protecting herself; he’s come to understand that her confessions are part of her penance, the same as her work with SHIELD had been and her work with the Avengers has become. She never lies or softens the crimes she has committed.

“I killed a Russian bureaucrat and his entire family. They wouldn’t have let a man like James in the door, but a young girl, lost and alone? They didn’t hesitate to let me walk right in.” She licks her lips and stares out the windows in his apartment. “I wasn’t scared, but after, I shook so badly I could barely hold the knife. It was the adrenaline, you know? And I remember he took my hand and held it, didn’t chastise me for my weakness. It was strange, not like the man who had trained me at all.”

The childhood, for lack of a better word, that the Red Room had inflicted on Natasha makes Steve furious, gets under his skin in a way most things don’t anymore. Torturing children, corrupting them? There is no greater crime.

He’s always seen Natasha as far less culpable for her crimes than she does. Once given a real choice, she chose the right path. That counts for something.

“He was the one that told me that,” she says, a bit of a non-sequitur. She does this sometimes, her confessions given without context to place them. “That love is for children. Love is for children, Natalia, but there is never love for children of the Red Room.” She tends to get a bit morose when she’s been drinking. “I was seventeen and I had told him some stupid, stupid things.”

“Like what?”

She smiles and shrugs, bringing the glass of vodka up to her lips.

--

Bucky,

Yes, you definitely threw me off the Clark Street Pier. Then had to jump off to save me from drowning because I was an even worse swimmer than you thought. Jerk.

I can’t believe you remember Sister Celeste. Lord above, she hated your guts. Remember when she caught you feeling up Margot Pogue in that broom closet at St. Michael’s? I thought she was going to tear your ear right off pulling you down the hallway like that.

Enjoy the Almond Joys, buddy.

Steve

[RESET 19622]

His hands are shaking. The trembling is so bad that Steve can barely take off his gauntlets. Eventually he loses his temper, ripping at them instead of removing them, the dreadful quiet of his apartment filled with the sound of tearing seams.

(God, he’s reset the last three days nearly six hundred times. Tony kept getting pulled into the rotors of the fallen helicopter, snapping them like toothpicks. Nine times out of ten, the pieces of the rotors ended up either decapitating or spearing through Steve.)

He keeps waiting for the moment the resets won’t feel like waking from a terrible nightmare, where they won’t hurt, where there won’t be phantom pain when he opens his eyes, his brain remembering the death that his body doesn’t.

Steve doesn’t hear Natasha enter his apartment, though no one ever really hears Natasha unless she wishes to be heard. Instead, he feels a quiet hand rest on his shoulder, the shock making him practically levitate off his couch.

“Shh,” she says, squeezing the tense muscle she finds there. She presses in with her thumb like she’s trying to give a lazy massage, and Steve lets his head loll forward, his neck suddenly unable to hold the weight.

In the time it takes to blink, Natasha has pivoted around the couch. She crouches down in front of him, her hands finding his kneecaps this time. It feels weirdly intimate, even through the layer of his suit. Natasha is still wearing her own suit, the vee of the front dipping a bit lower than normal thanks to the rough tear in the material. There’s an angry splatter of blood on the pale, pretty skin stretched across her chest, and he wonders if it belongs to her or to one of the many men she dispatched alongside him.

Steve wants to touch it, to see if it’s still wet, to spread it across her skin.

“Are you okay?”

Steve shakes his head, finally honest - both with Natasha and with himself.

“What do you want, Steve?” Natasha asks carefully, her fingers closing to squeeze his knees, just the edge of her blunt nails digging in. “What do you want me to be?”

It takes him back instantly to that ride they took in the stolen truck to New Jersey all those years ago. That time, when she had asked, it had been so easy to answer. He had known himself so much better then, and he had given the unselfish answer, the answer he knew was closer to what they both needed, though not really truthful. He’s never met another woman like Natasha, this strange contradiction of give and take - of nurture and destroy. He knows that she’s spent an entire lifetime being whatever someone else needed, and in that truck cab, before he had learned the truth about SHIELD - about himself - he had chosen the answer in the no man’s land between the truth and what they needed.

This time, he’s not so sure he can be as selfless. So he just shrugs, lets his eyes shift down to that soft place on a woman’s neck that he’s always loved to let his mouth wander over when he’s in bed with her.

This only seems to spur Natasha on, her fingers growing harder and more demanding on the rough bone of his knees. “What do you need me to be?”

When Steve reaches down for her, she meets him halfway, opening her mouth under the press of his.

(The blood on her skin is still tacky. It spreads onto the front of his uniform, the white stripes staining blood red.)

[RESET 20112]

The sound of his bedroom window opening makes Steve’s head snap up in alarm, his pencil ceasing the soft curve it was following in his notebook (the bridge of Bucky’s nose, traced from memory). He’s on the sixth floor and unlike the first building he lived in after DC, there’s no fire escape. This means it’s either a tactical unit or Natasha.

“Natasha?” Steve asks, because between the tactical unit and Natasha, only Natasha could have gotten this far undetected. He’s answered with a low grunt and the sound of her boots scraping on the floor.

She does this sometimes. Natasha’s got a place in the city somewhere - he’s never been, doesn’t know the address, doesn’t think anyone does - but after a solo mission, she gets like this. Restless. Maybe lonely, or as close to it as Natasha lets herself get. More times than he can count, Steve’s gone to sleep alone and woken up to Natasha’s light snoring (she only ever snores the first night back, like her body can’t fight the need for deep sleep any longer) next to him on the bed.

“How the hell did you get up here?” Steve asks.

“Drainpipe.” The loud echo of a zipper being pulled fills his apartment.

“I’ve got a front door, you know.” Even if she didn’t have her own key, he knows she’d be able to pick his lock in thirty seconds flat. One handed.

“Where’s the fun in that?” she says, appearing in the doorway with a lazy half-smirk, and normally the words would be filled with her razor-sharp innuendo, the kind that gets caught somewhere between a threat and a come-on, but she just sounds tired tonight.

He watches rapt as she peels her catsuit off, revealing a plain black sports bra and panties that look more like a pair of shorts. He’s seen her in less, but each time she shares this with him - her body, this quiet, strange intimacy - it feels like the first time. Like a gift he isn’t quite sure he deserves.

He’d worried at the start, briefly, that whatever they were doing together would ruin this - would ruin the friendship, their working relationship. So far, though, it’s felt like nothing more than an extension of what they had before. They still fight together, still disagree, bickering fiercely over comms about tactics and taking chances. She doesn’t treat him any differently now that they’ve taken to sleeping with one another, and he strives to follow her example, making sure to extend to her the same respect and professionalism that seems effortless on her part. But Steve can find her eyes during briefings and tell from a single blink just how badly they’re going to break his headboard, of the sounds she’s going to be able to wrench from him once they emerge on the other side of whatever shitshow Fury’s sending them into this time.

Steve can’t see his bed from the chair he’s currently camped in, but he hears the springs of his mattress whine when Natasha drops down onto the bed hard with a groan. He smiles and turns his attention back to the sketch, spending another half-hour finishing off Bucky’s nose and shading the jaw.

When he gets into bed later, shuffling beside her under the covers, she smells like smoke and napalm. It’s strangely comforting, though the scent memory brings nothing but violence to mind. It smells like her. Like Peggy had smelled of lemon and tea leaves, Sharon of leather and peaches.

She’s got one of his t-shirts on, but he can see a dark stain on the shoulder that looks black in the dark. The smell of it, though, gives it away. Blood. When he touches his hand to her shoulder, he can feel the telltale rise of bandaging below the shirt.

“Natasha,” he whispers against her cheek, and she groans, flicking away his hand.

“Machete. It’s fine. Go to sleep.” She curls into him, a few quiet minutes passing before he can hear the light edge of snoring coming from her warm body.

Steve wakes a few times in the night - his sleep has always been complete shit, both before and after the serum - and each time he finds Natasha flopped out over him, her legs tangled with his. It seems counterintuitive to Steve that a woman like Natasha sleeps the way she does. She’s always felt like a blade to Steve, like the sharp edge of something just waiting to dig itself into your flesh. But the Natasha he’s come to know reminds him that there’s the flat edge too, the sleek, beautiful expanse of something that hides behind its most threatening feature.

(From the way people spoke of her before Steve met her, he thought she’d be cold. Cruel perhaps. Since then, he’s learned that there’s a distance she keeps herself at with many, many people, but once her trust has been earned, she’s viciously loyal and shockingly warm. A caretaker.)

By the time morning comes, he finds his bed empty. It’s so early it’s still mostly dark outside, just the edge of navy heralding the coming sun. Natasha's side of the bed is still a bit warm, but barely. When he wanders into the kitchen, he finds her sitting on his kitchen counter, coffee in one hand and her phone in the other.

The first thing he does is reach for the neckline of his shirt, pulling it wide enough that he can see her collarbone and the fleshy part of her left shoulder. The bloodstain on the shirt has dried, but the bandage beneath is pristine white, clearly changed this morning. She lifts an eyebrow in challenge and he shrugs in reply. Natasha’s never been one to appreciate meddling, but her indifference to field injuries drives Steve absolutely insane.

“Fulrum moved the sitrep meeting up to eight,” she says, sipping from the mug that Darcy brought back from her honeymoon for Steve that has VENICE IS FOR LOVERS printed in large purple block letters on it. She’s scrolling through an email on her phone with the other hand, groaning as she reads. “I think they’re sending us back to Grenada again.”

His chest tightens. Natasha doesn't remember it, but they died nearly a hundred times in Grenada; he doesn’t care to visit the island ever again.

Steve steals the mug from her hand, taking a sip with a grimace. He forgets she takes her coffee black and thick as tar. He takes another sip anyway, desperate for the caffeine. (An odd quirk that of all the things his body does react to, caffeine seems to be the strongest.)

She drops her phone on the counter, and grabs both of his hands, stealing the coffee back with the right and trapping his right hand with her left. Slowly, she brings his hand down between her legs, bumping it into the soft skin of her inner thighs.

“Mmm,” she says with an almost flat tone, taking another sip of coffee and peering at him over the lip of the cup as she drinks from it, her eyes narrow. “One for the road?”

He knows what she’s looking for when she’s in a mood like this: a quick and dirty orgasm. No teasing, no dragging it out. So there’s little preamble before he pushes his hand right down into her panties, two fingers sliding up inside her, his thumb pressed up against her clit rough enough that she lets out a loud moan, the coffee inside her mug sloshing dangerously against the sides.

By the time he’s out of the shower, she’s already gone.

[RESET 20389]

Her eyes are going glassy. They’re so glassy he’d think she’s on the verge of tears if he didn’t know better. Natasha is afraid of nothing. Death the least of all things.

“It’s okay,” Natasha says, her voice strong even though he can see the fight leaving her body. He’s got her pressed up into his chest, the bullet wounds letting her blood drain out onto his suit, soaking him. “It’s okay, Steve.”

Once, Steve had found death shocking. Violent. A wrenching of people from him in the most traumatic fashion imaginable. It had always been like that cold day, watching Bucky fall screaming into that mountainous chasm - something loud and shocking and cruel. But now, on the other side of so much death, it has come to shock him how quiet death actually is when it takes you, how quiet it is in the body, no matter how violent the external cause. He’s seen his friends die thousands of times, and it’s almost always like this.

Quiet eyes. Their hands on him growing slack. Chests falling and forgetting to rise again. A pulse that flattens into nothingness.

This time he doesn’t let go. He grabs onto Natasha’s hand that is slowly slipping off his gauntlet and threads her lifeless fingers through his.

Steve registers the sound of a gunshot before his own vision grows black.

[RESET 20390]

“Wakey wakey!” he hears a loud, obnoxious voice crow. He recognizes it immediately, the tone of voice Clint gets when he’s bored and needing to be entertained.

Steve’s heart starts pumping hard, the beat not right at all. It feels like the organ is bouncing around in his chest, it’s beat arrhythmic and aching to give up. He slaps at his chest, trying to get the muscle to calm and settle as he sits up and leans his arms against the tops of his thighs, letting them take the weight of his body.

“Rogers?” God, that voice makes his heart ache in a totally different way. Natasha slips out of the cockpit behind Clint. “You okay?”

“What day is it?” he asks roughly. His voice sounds broken and feels even worse, like he’s swallowed a bucket of razor blades and chased it with a hundred cigarettes.

“What?”

“The day.”

“Thursday, Cap,” Clint says with an amused grin. “Wow, quite a nap you took there, buddy.”

“Year?”

Natasha and Clint look at each quickly, the way spies do. Just a quick brush of eyes towards one another, slight enough to be missed unless you’re really looking. He doesn’t like or appreciate the look they are giving each other on his behalf - it’s a mingle of concern and confusion, like he’s losing his mind.

“Um, 2015?” Clint supplies.

Two years this time. Probably two and a half if this is the day he thinks it is. The day they flew to Belize to meet with a contact of Fury’s. It had been just before Thanksgiving, and the first time they met the contact, a loathsome little man named Yerrevi, he’d shot Clint in the jaw before trying to turn the gun on Natasha.

He looks over to Natasha, who is staring back at him with a worried expression on her face, the kind she used to get when she was busy trying to set him up on dates with women he had little to no interest in. The kind she had when she knew even better than he did just how broken he’d been.

It’s at this point that Steve realizes that Natasha doesn’t remember a thing. Doesn’t remember dancing with him at Clint’s wedding, getting a little tipsy and passing out with him on the deck with the small dinghies that Darcy and Clint had both refused to get into, even though the photographer that Stark had helped hire kept pleading with them.

She doesn’t remember sleeping with him that first time on his couch, riding him a little hard, a little rough, a little of exactly what he needed. Doesn’t remember taking his hand and sliding it between their bodies to show him how she wanted his fingers on her clit to finish her off. Doesn’t remember coming to him all the times after, letting him find comfort in her body. In her hands and her mouth, in the words he’s pretty sure she said only because she knew he needed to hear them.

Natasha doesn’t remember any of the time they spent together.

“Steve?” he hears Clint say behind him as he leans over and retches out whatever is left in his stomach.

--

Steve arranges a flight to Italy the next day.

[RESET 25448]

Waking up on the plane is disorienting. Steve doesn’t take many flights on airlines (most of his time airborne is spent in military jets or one of Stark’s planes), so it only takes him a few seconds to realize where and when he is. There’s a stewardess that seems a bit sweet on him that gives him a can of coke and a few IBUprofen when he complains quietly to himself of a headache. She swings by an hour or two before they land to give him another pillow that she’s wrangled from first class, which he takes with a polite thank you that makes her blush straight down to her collarbone.

Steve speaks just enough Italian now to get the taxi driver to take him outside of the city limits of Naples, near the coast. Where Bucky’s spent the last six months living.

It’s warm in Italy, a lot warmer than it is in New York City right now. Everything is warmer, golden. He could grow to like it here.

(He has grown to like it here.)

Bucky’s waiting by the front door of the house, his hip leaning against the door frame, just like last time. This part never changes. Bucky’s hip is always there, jean-clad and pressed to the doorframe painted a thick, blood red.

“Steve,” Bucky says, a smug little grin plastered on his face. “Well looky here. Finally bringin’ your ugly mug around.”

Everything inside of Steve’s chest seizes up tight. It doesn’t matter how many times he relives this: seeing Bucky’s face like this is a revelation every time. That sensation inside of him never weakens, never lessens in its intensity. It only grows.

So Steve strides up and shoves Bucky right up into the doorjam, presses Bucky’s back into it hard. There’s a momentary second of pure shock that spreads across Bucky’s face, the edge of something that could be fear, but isn’t. Instead it melts into something beautifully fond and perfect as Steve follows Bucky’s body, pressing into him enough to build a pleasant pressure before Steve kisses him.

(Steve’s not stupid. He knows the house is being watched by security, but finds that he does not care. They all find out eventually, and Steve will never be sorry or embarrassed for what Bucky is to him. This is what time has taught him: never be sorry for who you love. Even for those whom you have loved but who do not remember it.)

They finally make it to a bed. Bucky’s bed. The bed he’s laid in for so many days, fat and lazy with the pleasure Bucky gives. It smells and feels exactly the same. Steve spreads his fingers across the the sheets and wonders if the mattress will learn his shape as easily as last time, but lets the thought die in his head as Bucky undoes his pants and roughly starts tugging them down his legs.

Later, Bucky cards his fingers through Steve’s hair the same way he’d done it when they were teenagers, sitting bedside with Steve through another round of pneumonia or bronchitis or whatever Steve’s body decided to throw at him that month. Steve’s body is sore from the sex; he hasn’t been with a man since Bucky fell in the mountains, and no matter how many times he’s done this with Bucky in Italy, like death, his body does not remember the things his mind does.

Steve feels stretched and sore and fucked and perfect. He stinks of sex, Bucky’s come slipping out of him and his own growing tacky on his thighs, but he can’t bring himself to move or shower, doesn’t want to stop smelling like this ever.

When Steve tilts his head up to look at where Bucky’s sitting up against the headboard, Bucky grins down at him, running his thumb over Steve’s eyebrow.

“How’d you know this was just what I’d been waiting for?”

You told me, Steve thinks. After a week of awkward touches, trying to figure out just what Bucky remembered about the two of them, what this version of Bucky would allow, Steve sleeping in the guest room, he’d finally made his move, and in the sticky afterglow, Bucky had said, You shoulda just laid one on me right at the door. Been waiting a long time for you, Steve.

--

The sun, Steve finds, suits Bucky.

Steve knows it’s unfair to compare the man Bucky is now with the man he knew before the ice, but the comparisons come, bidden or not. In this timeline, it’s been nearly two and a half years since Steve tracked Bucky down to a small house outside Elmira, New York. It had been the house Bucky’s father had been born in, the house Bucky retreated to most summers his parents could afford to send him out of the city to visit his grandparents.

He had walked in on that man sitting on the floor of the bedroom, a shade of what Bucky had once been, shards of memory stuck in his brain like flesh wounds that refused to heal.

This man - the man standing next to him with a Heineken in one hand and a lemon gelato in the other - has swung like a pendulum back to the Bucky unblighted by war and time. But there are pieces of him still missing, a shadow that creeps across his skin that reminds Steve that he wasn’t able to save Bucky from falling, from the fate that waited for him at the bottom of that chasm.

So they sit on the patio of the small cafe, drinking beer and eating too much gelato, watching the hoards of people walk down the beach. Fat businessmen in too-tight speedos and women in large-brimmed hats speaking loud Italian at near light-speed.

And when they go home (Bucky’s home, Steve reminds himself, for Steve no longer has a home other than where Bucky chooses to lay his head), Bucky will push him up against the wall just inside the door of the house, beside the small bench and table, the row of brass hooks holding up leather jackets and umbrellas. Bucky will go to his knees for Steve, mouth pliant and willing and warm. It will feel like the most natural thing in the world, coming for Bucky, letting Bucky drag him upstairs and push him down in their bed, fuck him face down in the bedspread that smells like lemons and their sweat, make Steve beg for it because Bucky likes to hear the sound.

But for now Bucky watches the gaggle of girls in tiny bath suits go strolling down the beach and turns to wink at Steve, carefree for the first time in a thousand years.

--

Steve doesn’t let Bucky smoke in bed. It’s one of the few carryovers from their lives before the fall and the crash, before the ice.

Bucky sits on the balcony outside their bedroom instead, his back against the doorjam and the cherry of the cigarette bright in the warm, stale night. His boxers are hung low on his hips, the bones of them spread like wings above the waistband. Steve can’t take his eyes off of them, his fingers twitching to touch their raised line.

“You up?” Bucky asks quietly, turning back to face into the room. The moon bathes his face in a sliver of light, the ridge of his nose and mouth lit from behind in a way that makes him seem younger and more innocent than the harsh light of day does.

“Yeah.”

Steve ambles over to Bucky, hitching up his own boxers before dropping down across from Bucky, tangling their legs together. Back in the day, he hated the smell of smoke, the taste of it on Bucky’s mouth when he kissed him. Now, the smell of it alone is enough to get him halfway to hard, the sense memory so entangled with Bucky that they are almost inextricable from one another.

Steve leans over and plucks the cigarette from between Bucky’s fingers. He looks at it critically for a brief second before he brings it to his mouth and inhales. It’s godawful, harsh in his lungs, and he can feel his body fighting against the smoke like a violent intruder. He doesn’t cough, but it’s a near thing as his lungs revolt.

“Well, that’s new,” Bucky says curiously before leaning over and snatching it back, bringing it back up to his own mouth and taking a long drag off it.

“Get your own, Rogers,” he says roughly, but keeps his hand resting over Steve’s kneecap, squeezing his blunt fingernails into the skin.

It reminds him of someone who no longer exists. A ghost of the living.

--

The call always comes near the end of summer, Tony’s voice desperate on the other end. They need him to come back, they need him home.

Steve’s lived through the paths where he doesn’t go back, where he’s selfish and apologizes to Tony before hanging up on him. Death comes for Steve and Bucky down those paths just as sure as it does when Steve chooses to go back. He gets a few more weeks with Bucky before the reset comes (sometimes he loses days, sometimes weeks, a few times months), but too many people - too many friends - pay the price of his indulgence.

So, when he gets the call, Steve goes.

Once, Steve tries leaving Bucky behind, a letter on the low table near his front door because Steve’s not found a single scenario where a conscious Bucky lets Steve leave without him. Bucky steals a goddamn plane and flies it to New York City that time, an FBI greeting party waiting for him on the tarmac of JFK for his troubles.

No matter what path Steve takes, it ends up in the same place. Here. Boston. Half the city on fire, the other half falling into the ocean. In the distance, Steve can hear the roar of Tony’s suit, but the two of them are alone in the rubble of what was once a hospital.

Bucky’s body is spread across Steve’s lap. He can tell the wound in Bucky’s gut is fatal. It always is. Always.

“I shouldn’t have dragged you into this,” Steve says, his voice like shattered glass. “I can’t save you, I can’t figure out a way to fucking save you!”

Bucky just looks confused, reaches up to brush at Steve’s cheeks. He hadn’t even realized he was crying. “Was always better at saving your ass, Rogers.”

Bucky dies with a smile on his face. It takes a few moments for Steve to realize that he’s not blinking anymore, that the rise and fall of his chest - once ragged with pain - has stopped. Everything is so fucking still and quiet, even with the ground rumbling, that Steve can’t help the feral, uncontrolled scream he lets out.

There’s the sound of a train in the distance, that eerily repetitive chug that haunts him every moment of his life.

When the truck comes flying toward the two of them, Steve doesn’t even pretend to try and move out of the way.

[RESET 25449]

It’s cold. It’s so, so cold.

Everything is ice.

--

Steve sleeps, cradled in the cruel chill of the Atlantic.

--

Steve wakes up to the sound of the baseball game playing in the background. The light is wrong enough that it doesn’t even come close to passing as natural, and the medicinal smell wafting through a window that leads to nowhere is enough to let him know where he’s woken up.

He’s never gone back this far before. His entire body aches with the age that his skin and bones hide.

“Don’t bother,” he tells the girl when she steps inside the room, holding up his hand as she tries to speak. “You can tell whoever’s playing this recording to stop. Sloppy damn work, picking a game I was at a good year and a half before the war.”

The girl seems genuinely shocked, her mouth open.

“I know what’s going on,” he tells her seriously. “Get Fury in here right goddamn now.”

She reaches up and presses her finger against the piece in her ear as she says, “Rogers wants to see the Director.” She takes her hand away from her ear. “I’m sorry, Captain. We just wanted to make your transition as smooth as possible.”

“Try not lying to me. That helps.” The girl looks genuinely scared of him, which makes Steve feel like complete and utter shit (he’s never liked scaring anyone, frankly, but there’s something about putting that kind of look on a woman’s face that deeply unsettles him), but he feels like he’s been through hell and back, and his patience is non-existent at this point.

When Fury walks in, Steve squares his shoulders and lets every bit of his anger fill his frame. There came a time when he and Fury were close enough that he might have considered the man a friend, if Fury allowed himself such things. Now? Steve reminds himself of the bullshit Fury carried out behind Steve’s back, from Project Insight to Sharon’s protection detail.

It’s scary how easily the anger comes.

“I know what you’re doing with the Tesseract.”

Fury’s eye goes wide.

[RESET 26703]

He meets Darcy earlier this time. Shortly before the Battle of Manhattan, Darcy and Jane are taken into protective custody in Norway (though as far as they know, it’s simply a research opportunity for Jane). Steve figures he owes Jane for all the help she doesn’t know she’s given him, so he convinces Fury to let him escort Jane and Darcy to the military compound just outside of Tromsø.

(He doesn’t tell Fury that the first time they fly Jane and Darcy out to Norway, the plane crashes. Most likely Hydra, but they have no proof of it. This time, Steve oversees their trip personally, taking one of Stark’s planes rather than the SHIELD 747 they had been flying on the first time.)

“This is the worst!” Darcy whines on the plane, flopping back into her seat. “I don’t even like Norway! It’s fjords and rocks. Do I look like the type of girl that enjoys glaciers? NO. Plus, they don’t even have hot, available royalty for me to marry.”

“Oh my god,” Jane says, rolling her eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with Norway. And monarchies are an antiquated and, frankly, ridiculous institution.”

“Queen Darcy,” Darcy murmurs dreamily, her eyes narrowing when Jane snorts. “What? I would be benevolent and loved by all! They would name fjords after me. Mighty, mighty fjords.”

It’s quiet for a few, blissful seconds before Darcy leans over to Jane and says, “Fjords are those river-y things, right?”

The soldier sitting beside Steve finally cracks and lets out a bark of laughter. Darcy trains an eye on him, but her lips are curving up just a bit when she says, “Hey, what are you laughing at, champ?”

“Nothing. Nothing, ma’am,” Sgt. Patel replies, trying to train his face to neutral and failing quite miserably.

Darcy’s eyes drift over to Steve. He tries to remember that this version of Darcy doesn’t remember him at all, hasn’t sat with him and watched episodes of I Love Lucy, lent him books on Pollock and Kandinsky because she secretly loves abstract expressionism. This Darcy doesn’t know him. This Darcy isn’t his friend.

(She could be, he reminds himself.)

“What’s up with the outfit?” Darcy asks, nodding toward the uniform; he hadn’t wanted to wear the suit on the flight, but he had timed out and ended up climbing on the plane with what he had worn to Fury’s sit-rep meeting. “Not that I don’t like a man in a little colour, but it’s a bit fourth of July and it’s only May, you know?”

Steve knows Fury wants to keep his resurrection under wraps, but Steve is through lying to people if he isn’t forced to. When he tells her who he is, tells her the entire story including the delightful defrosting (for the second time, though he doesn’t tell her that part), she and Jane turn to look at each other with wide, surprised eyes.

“Jesus, I dressed up as him for Halloween when I was thirteen. Also, see?” she says, pointing at Steve. “Yet another reason to hate glaciers.”

Steve laughs and finds he barely recognizes the sound.

[RESET 28660]

For a while, Steve had thought it a gift. Stuck in that observation room with the people he cared about most, watching them die over and over, but getting the chance to save them. That was the gift, though it came with a price. (God, so steep and cruel a price.) It had scared him, not knowing what it was, what was making him live the day over and over.

Now it scares him even more.

(He never knows how much he’s going to lose, how much time will be eaten by the reset, the memories that only he will keep. How much will be stolen from him.)

On one hand, Steve can fix all his mistakes, the choices that lead to suffering for those he cares about. On the other, he must relive all of his nightmares. He’s learned that there are some things that he’ll never be able to change, no matter how hard he tries. The root of some paths lie deep enough in time that Steve can’t touch them.

This reset is harder than any other. No one knows him. Not Natasha or Tony, Darcy or Bruce, Jane or Clint. It’s strange how their bonds grow the same way they did the first time, though less bumpy. Steve knows the space to give Natasha, the tolerance to extend to Tony no matter how difficult. He knows the trust he can place in them, the weight he can place on their shoulders to carry.

No matter what path Steve takes, the battle of Manhattan is unavoidable. Without his regenerative abilities, he resets so many times he quickly loses count. He barely goes back a day most times, waking up on the helicarrier with just a few hours before the portal opens over Manhattan. Some days he loses friends (a few times Stark doesn’t make it back out of the portal before Natasha closes it, Clint takes a dive off a building without someone there to catch him). It had been hard enough back when they’d been new allies, but now he’s lived through endless days with them, seen their fierce loyalty, seen the men and women they are beneath what they carry onto the battlefield with them. This time he’s not fighting the Battle of Manhattan with fellow soldiers, he’s fighting with friends.

Steve doesn’t stop until he works through a path where they all survive.

After, Steve spends the better part of a year and a half working with Fury to rid SHIELD of Hydra. It’s shocking how easily Fury believes Steve when he tells him about SHIELD, though at first he refuses to believe Pierce plays a part in it, only accepting the truth when Steve and Natasha sneak onto a ship launching the first of the Insight satellites and bring back an algorithm.

(Zola goes in what is carefully constructed to look like an electrical fire. That…thing is the first that Steve destroys.)

There are times Fury puts his foot down, demands Steve explain how the hell he knows all this, but Steve hasn’t told a soul about what he can do since he confided in Jane and Bruce back when he was with Sharon.

Sharon. This time he meets her as Sharon and not Kate, and even though it’s been so long since he’s touched her, his hand itches to reach out and brush the hair out of her face in the same way that used to make her smile. He schools himself, keeps her at a professional distance, but can’t help but catalogue all the things that made him care for her. That makes him care for her still.

(Because deep down, while the people he loves may not remember him the way they once did, he remembers them. Remembers living moments with them over and over and learning how the parts of them he loved never truly changed.)

They play nice with Pierce while Steve, Sharon, and Natasha try to suss out where Pierce is hiding Bucky’s cryochamber. Steve recruits Sam into the fold shortly before they take down Pierce, and watches, both with happiness and heartbreak, as Sharon begins to show an interest in Sam.

SHIELD, in the end, is gutted, but still stands. Part of Steve wants to see it destroyed, burned to ashes the way it was the first time he lived through it, but there’s some joy in seeing the entity that Peggy built survive its infection. It’s smaller, weakened, but its purpose is just as important.

They find Bucky in Atlanta, still frozen. It takes the better part of two days to bring him out of his coma, and Steve stays the entire time, sleeps in the lab, upright in a chair near the chamber as it slowly relinquishes its hold on his friend.

This Bucky is just as broken as the last, and when the SHIELD team of PsyOps specialists recommend the same thing they did the last time Steve recovered Bucky, tens of thousands of resets ago, Steve agrees.

The hardest thing Steve has ever done in his life is let Bucky go, and this is the second time he’s done it. The most selfish Steve has ever been has been with Bucky, even though he’d sacrifice everything for him. There’s a part of Steve that wants to climb into the plane with Bucky, to go to Italy and spend the rest of his days trying to bring back the man he lost on that train, but Bucky will never feel free from his self-imposed obligation to protect Steve. Steve knows that Bucky will follow him to the ends of the earth, the same way that Steve would follow Bucky.

But Steve can’t save him. In this time and this place, all Steve brings Bucky is death. There’s no reset that can change it, no path that can fix what is already broken, that broke when Bucky fell into that frozen chasm.

So Steve watches as SHIELD bundles Bucky onto a plane. “I’ll write you,” Steve says. “When you’re better. I promise.” Bucky stares back at him with empty eyes, not understanding, simply absorbing. He touches Bucky’s finger, and the man twitches as if the touch was a spark, but doesn’t pull his hand away.

When Steve climbs off the plane, Natasha is waiting on the tarmac, a small black bag beside her feet.

“I don’t like not knowing things.”

Steve laughs. Some things don’t change.

(He had called her the night before and told her, “Love is for children, but there is never love for the children of the Red Room.” She hadn’t gasped, but he could hear her breathing on the other end of the line as loud as a shotgun. “He needs you.”)

Natasha looks visibly disturbed. “One day, Rogers,” she tells him. “One day you’ll owe me an explanation for all this.”

Steve doesn’t know why he does it, but he lifts his hand and cups the proud line of her jaw. The shock is that she allows him to do it. This Natasha, who doesn’t know he’s touched and tasted her before, who knows Steve as nothing more than a friend. She is not one who likes to be touched by others without permission, and he knows that in her mind, this kind of trespass would likely result in a broken bone or two.

Instead, he feels her jaw clench under his hand. “An explanation.”

“I promise,” Steve says, and watches as she hauls her bag over her shoulder and climbs onto the plane.

Six months and a little over a thousand resets later, he writes Bucky a letter.

[RESET 34255]

For a while, there’s no one.

Steve wakes, eats, sleeps, wakes, eats, fights, dies, resets, and wakes.

The night the thing that cursed him falls from the sky in Bucharest, Steve waits with his eyes trained on the stars. Each reset, each time he waits on the night it should fall, nothing comes but morning.

So he keeps going.

Sam proposes to Sharon, which is something Steve gets to live through three times. He tries not to be bitter, but feels like he fails at it. Still, Sharon looks happy in a way he hasn’t seen in a long time, and Sam is a good man. A good friend. He loves them both enough to let go, and so he does.

There’s a few letters from Bucky, a couple calls from Natasha in the middle of the night where she seems cautious, but happy. Tells him that Bucky’s been asking after him, which makes his heart ache.

Steve moves into Stark Tower again in the fall, not because he wants to, but because the loneliness of his apartment turns overwhelming. At least in the tower he runs into people, the hundreds of people that Stark employs to keep the tower running. Darcy and Jane move in a few months after he does at Thor’s behest. Jane shares a floor with Thor, while Darcy’s suite is on floor forty-three beside Clint’s.

The second suite on Steve’s floor remains empty, a placeholder for Natasha, should she return. But Steve knows better. Natasha isn’t coming back in the same way that Bucky isn’t either.

Once, Steve thought it a gift. A chance to reset, a chance to save people.

Steve forgot to save himself.

[RESET 35568]

“Coffee… you know, hot bean water?” Darcy says, gesturing wildly with her hands. She’s cornered him by the elevators, a satchel tossed over one shoulder and her body blocking his only avenue of retreat. “Come on, you have to like coffee, everyone likes coffee.” She taps the button for the elevator about fifteen times in a row, then growls.

“That doesn’t make it come any faster,” Steve says, to which Darcy rolls her eyes and taps the button another twenty times.

“Whatever,” she says, leaning back against the wall, pushing the button one more time with extra relish. “Anyway, come share some bean water with me. And if bean water isn’t your thing, I know a place that makes a mean leaf water.” She smiles. “Pepper gets some sort of Chai tea milky concoction that doesn’t totally suck. It’s super sweet - I bet you’d like it. Oh and the baked goods! So much pie, so much danish, so much goodness. I need to warn you: I’m half-Jewish - it’s in my nature to want to get you really fat.”

Steve wasn’t born a fool; a few of them have been whispering about his lack of extracurricular activities (as Tony put it, loud enough that Steve could hear it clear across the lab, because Tony does exactly nothing subtlely), and while he knows their hearts are in the right place, he can’t help but feel incredibly put out by it all. Darcy’s not the type of girl to do anything she doesn’t particularly want to do, but she’s also got a kind heart, and he’s tired of feeling like everyone’s pet project, a lost puppy from the past.

He’s sick of pity. He’s sick of the looks. He wants to be left to lick his wounds. Most of all, he’s just tired of things - people, memories, choices - being stolen from him. Sometimes it feels like it’s not worth possessing them at all.

Steve shakes his head. “Listen, I appreciate the invitation, but I’m okay.” He tries to work up a passable smile, but feels like it misses the mark, as rough as metal grinding against asphalt.

“Steve.”

“Darcy.”

“Come on,” Darcy says cheerfully enough that it brushes against the edge of fakeness. “Just a coffee to get you out of this building. This amount of Stark exposure without a break? Lethal, dude. And as a rule of thumb, I take no as an answer very poorly. Very.”

“Then maybe you’re best served by giving up while you’re ahead,” Steve replies petulantly. The moment the words come out of his mouth he regrets them. It all comes out a lot meaner than he means it to sound, and if there’s one thing that Steve isn’t, it’s mean. Especially to someone like Darcy.

She clearly catches the tone and the meaning behind it because there’s a momentary flash of hurt on her face that slides into something a bit angry. “What the hell, Steve?” she asks, yanking the strap of her bag higher up on her shoulder as it starts to slide down. “That was kind of shitty.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says apologetically. Left his goddamn manners in the Atlantic this time. “You’re right.”

Darcy lets out a heavy sigh and that anger morphs back into hurt. Maybe sadness. She slumps back against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest. “What’s going on with you? I don’t want to be pushy, I’m only trying to help.”

Steve shrugs, feeling himself start to shut down. He never used to be like this, shutting down instead of meeting things head-on, but he can’t explain. Doesn’t want to explain. Days like this make him feel like he’s crawling out of his skin. “I don’t need help, Darcy.”

“Ever heard that saying, no man’s an island? Well you’re not fucking Fiji, Steve. Everyone needs help, especially the people who claim not to need it. It took Tony destroying half of downtown Los Angeles to admit that he needed it. Let us not learn from that example, okay?”

There’s a part of him that wants to lean on her, that’s been aching to lean on her or Natasha or Bucky or Sharon or Bruce or Jane. Anyone. But he’s had the rug pulled out from under him too many times, enough times to know that sometimes it’s just better not to step on it in the first place. So he shrugs and says, “Really. I’m fine.”

“One day,” she says, her voice resigned, but kind. She’s looking at him like she can see right through him, through the flesh and the bone and the blood. “One day you’re going to have to let somebody in, Steve.”

--

The next morning, when Steve goes up to the fifty-third floor, up to the comfy armchair in the Northeast corner that he sits in every morning after his run to sketch and watch the city, he finds a cup of coffee with a half-scribbled note pinned underneath the base of the paper cup.

If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain…

[RESET 38632]

It takes about two years and three thousand lives. Or what passes for them.

[RESET 38633]

“Coffee… you know, hot bean water?” Darcy says, and this time she presses at the button so fast her finger starts to blur. “Come on, you have to like coffee, everyone likes coffee.”

He’s been through this enough times now to know that if he says no, she’ll press and prod until she’s sure he won’t change his mind. He knows that if he says no, he’ll find a cup of coffee on the small table near his armchair everyday, something stuck underneath it. A note. A book she thinks he’ll enjoy. A ticket to the Matisse exhibit at MoMA. A photograph she picked up from the flea market she frequents in Queens. A half-filled out crossword puzzle she wants him to finish.

He knows that if he says no, if he pushes her away, she’ll still be a friend. And he knows that if he says no, he’ll spend another two years wondering what it would be like for her to be more.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” The surprise in her voice almost makes him laugh, like somewhere deep inside, she remembers all the times they’ve had this conversation, all the time he’s said no.

“Yeah, okay. Coffee. Bean water.”

The toothy grin she gives him in return lights up her entire face. “Awesome. I knew you’d come around to my thinking!”

She taps the elevator button about twelve more times, grinning the entire time.

“That doesn’t increase the speed of the elevator to your location, Miss Lewis,” JARVIS says above their heads as she taps it another handful of times, but the doors slide open.

“Ha!” Darcy says, dragging Steve into the car. She taps her temple and winks. “I’m a genius.”

Steve’s forgotten how energetic Darcy can be when she’s happy. She’s like a little ball of energy pinging off the walls.

“Ground floor, Jam Master J. Por favor!”

“Si, Senorita Lewis.”

Darcy lifts an eyebrow. “Should I get worried that Tony’s computer is getting quite sassy with me as of late? I’m getting a real 2001: A Space Odyssey feeling. No killing me, okay Jarvito?”

“YES, DARCY,” Jarvis says drolly in a flat, American accent.

Darcy starts laughing so hard she falls into Steve, her warm body curving around his as she chortles into his shoulder.

[RESET 39004]

He kisses her for the first time at that Matisse exhibit.

This time she doesn’t leave him a single ticket under his coffee cup, this time he doesn’t go to the exhibit alone, milling silently between couples and families enjoying the pieces together, feeling lost. This time she surprises him with a pair of tickets as their standing Sunday not-date (on this, she was very clear) even though he knows she doesn’t really care much for Matisse.

She does that a lot, he’s noticed - does things she knows he’ll enjoy even though he’s pretty sure they’re not the type of things she’d typically do if left the choice. It makes him feel important in a way he’s not sure he wants to parse. He’s also not sure if it’s a bit selfish, but he can’t bring himself to stop it.

They’re standing in front of Woman with a Hat when he looks down on her, her face tilted toward the painting, lost in thought, and he just can’t. He just can’t not kiss her.

So he says, “Hey, Darcy?” and when she looks up at him in question, he leans down and presses his mouth to hers, chasing the taste of her when her lips part in surprise. It’s pretty chaste as far as kisses go (they are in public - at a museum and in front of Matisse, he does have some respect), but the look of shock on her face as he pulls back is so beautiful that it rocks into his gut, making him want to take further liberties.

(It’s been so long since he’s touched someone else like this, allowed himself to want. It feels overwhelming in the strangest way.)

“Um,” she says, her cheek blazing bright crimson as she turns back to the painting, but he catches her sneaking a look up at him out of the corner of her eye.

[RESET 40188]

Their first kiss is something he doesn’t change. It’s a comfort, like being able to return to a happy memory and relive it over and over. Every time, she buys those tickets and he kisses her in front of Woman with a Hat. Sometimes he lets his hand stray to her hip or the slope of her jaw, but he never takes it further than a kiss.

(Once, they’re caught by a security guard who gives a short cough as a warning, and that time, Darcy isn’t the only one that blushes.)

The aftermath is always the same too: she avoids him. She spends the following week ducking into doorways when she sees him coming, leaving Jane’s lab early enough that she can miss his daily trek up from the gym around 4:30. The tension puts Steve on edge every time, even though he’s relatively sure of the probable outcome.

Because each time, she comes to pick him up on Sunday morning for their standing not-date, the air between them awkward and charged until he apologizes and offers a truce. The truth is that he’ll take her in his life any way he can get her, but he’s been down this path enough times to know what’s lingering beneath both of their skins.

Though she never tells him why she hides the week after Matisse, he knows that when he apologizes, her entire body goes stiff in a way that he recognizes instantly from his own swaths of insecurities over the endless years, the kind of awkwardness that blooms in the light of wanting something seemingly outside of your reach.

So he touches that soft skin behind her ear, the place she’s told him (later, a post-sex confession) that her mother used to stroke as a child to calm her in the years of nightmares following the death of her father. Steve touches her and tells her it’s okay because he thinks she needs to hear it.

They never make it out of his apartment.

Instead, they kiss until his mouth aches, until he he can feel how ramped up he’s gotten her without taking off a single piece of her clothing. After the first few minutes, she gets a bit bolder, a bit greedier, taking instead of letting Steve lead.

The nervousness bubbles back to the surface once she gets him down onto the couch though, her boldness abandoning her after he’s shed his shirt and his fingers slip under hers. Dragging them along her hips, he’s careful to avoid the slight concave valley above them, an area he knows is ticklish.

“Darcy?” he asks, because even though they’ve done this before, that he knows she’s willing, that she wants it as badly as he does, he reminds himself that this time could be divergent, that she could make a different choice. And Steve will never take something that Darcy isn’t willing to give.

She’s sitting astride his lap, her knees bracketing her hips and her eyes, a bit unfocused, are aimed at his mouth. Cupping her torso with his palms and squeezing lightly, he repeats, “Darcy?”

It still takes another moment before she snaps out of her haze, her pupils contracting slightly. “Ugh, shut up brain,” she whines, then winces and rolls her eyes up to the ceiling like she didn’t mean to say it out loud. She drops her warm forehead to his bare shoulder and lets out a pained sigh.

“You okay?”

“Nope,” she says quietly, following it quickly with, “yep,” and then a hoarse laugh, her ribcage shaking under his palms.

“Can I?” He tugs on her shirt a bit, making his intentions clear.

Darcy nods, and Steve gets to enjoy the full body shiver that follows his hands as he peels her shirt up and off. The pained moan she lets out when Steve’s lips brush over the upper curve of her breast makes Steve’s entire body burn with want.

[RESET 42758]

Steve crashes into consciousness, the weight of the rubble that killed him still sitting on his chest. He can barely breathe, his brain forgetting how to tell his lungs to expand and contract. The sheets catch around his body as he begins to struggle. There’s someone else caught with him, an indignant grunt that turns high pitched when he feels his elbow connect with soft flesh.

Finally free, he rips the sheets clean off the bed, dumping them on the floor. Beside him, Darcy is clad in a t-shirt, her bare legs flailing against the soft mattress as she tries to get her bearings. He looks at her for a second to reassure himself that she’s still alive, that she’s here in his bed, and the body that he just watched get crushed beneath a ton of concrete beside him is gone. Not her.

He sits up, spreading his bent knees so he can heave his body between them, ducking down to find his breath.

“Jesus! Steve?” Darcy cries, the bed dipping under her weight as she moves closer to him. He can feel her hand running over his bare back, the cold sweat helping it move smoothly over his skin. “Whoa, whoa, Steve, what the hell? What’s wrong? Are you okay? Talk to me! Come on Steve, breathe. Breathe.”

She’s talking a mile a minute, the way she does when she’s genuinely scared, which, if Steve were in his right mind, would make him feel guilty. Darcy doesn’t remember it, but this isn’t the first time he’s woken her like this.

Steve tries to focus on his breathing. In and out. In and out.

Eventually his body starts to comply with his mind, his pulse still racing, but slowing from the painful jackhammering it was when he first woke. His lungs fill and empty without conscious thought forcing them to.

“Hey. Hey...” Darcy murmurs quietly after a minute, her fingers carding into the short hair at the back of his head, blunt nails scraping across his scalp in a way she knows he finds soothing. “Steve?” The hand shifts until it’s over his ear, stroking the shell of it gently before slipping behind, pressing at the tender skin there the way he’s done to her so many times. “Nightmare?”

He shakes his head, and tries to speak, but all that comes out is a broken sob.

Darcy sits down beside him, wrapping her body around his so her chest is pressing into his right arm, her left leg curled around his back. She holds on tight, letting the pressure calm him as she rocks back and forth ever so slightly.

Darcy kisses his shoulder. “Talk to me, Steve.”

[RESET 43573]

They’re on their first coffee date again. Not-date, he reminds himself. Not. Date.

Darcy’s pouring cream into her coffee - so much cream - when she looks up and catches him staring at her.

He wonders, briefly, what Darcy would say if she knew that he knows exactly what the skin over her collarbone tastes like, what she sounds like when she’s on the edge of coming, that he’s watched her eat breakfast in his tiny kitchen in nothing but one of his shirts, half-unbuttoned and covering very little. That he’s seen the birthmark on the inside of her thigh she’s weirdly self-conscious about, that he’s put his mouth over it more times than he can count.

Steve wants to touch her, wants to lean over and kiss her cheek, whisper the things floating in his mind, the things he’d like to do to her in the privacy of his apartment. But he can’t. There’s a natural progression to these things, an order. It’s not fair to skip these things, to rob her of the memories he’s already stolen from her so many times, so he lives them out again. Because she deserves it.

So he says, “Sugar?” and smiles as she takes the packets from his hand.

[RESET 43998]

She’s silent long enough for Steve to start to feel really uncomfortable. About halfway through his explanation, she turns her head enough so she can look out the windows, out onto the city. Now, she’s just really quiet. For anyone else, it would be disconcerting enough, but for someone like Darcy, someone who fills all the silent space with noise, who always has something to say, it’s downright eerie.

“You think I’m crazy.”

Darcy takes a deep breath and turns to face him, her eyes bright, but not happy. “No, I think paying six dollars for a coffee at Starbucks and the fact that UGGs are still a thing is crazy.” She takes his hand and threads her fingers through his, squeezing his palm. Steve feels like a drowning man finding the surface of the water. A little glimmer of hope, a well-needed respite from the fight. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Steve.”

“Lying then?” He fills his voice with a light humour to try and hide the fact that he’s baiting her a bit, which is a shit move, but it’s a reassurance he desperately needs.

A rough laugh is his answer. “Steve, when have you ever told a goddamn lie?”

More than you think. “Once or twice.”

She shakes her head and rolls her eyes, then reaches and clasps her other hand over his, sandwiching his hand with hers. “How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t know,” he tells her. “A while. I lost track.”

She nods grimly, continuing to run her thumb over his hand until she freezes for a brief second, her thumb falling into the divot between the knuckles of his index and middle finger. Her face drops as though she’s been struck, and the look of sadness on her face is near unbearable for Steve. “How many times have you told me this, Steve?”

(Eight. It is the eighth time.)

[RESET 44227]

“You can’t tell anyone, Darcy.” He mumbles it into the soft skin of her belly, his body cradled between her legs.

It’s not fair to force her to carry his secret, but he can’t lie to her. He’s tired of being alone with this; now that he knows what it’s like to be with someone who knows his secret, he doesn’t want go back to that isolation.

“Why?”

This is harder to explain to her, how the knowledge of what he can do changes people.

(But mostly, he doesn’t want to end up as a SHIELD science experiment, yet another reason to be a walking curiosity. What’s the point of people knowing if it serves no purpose other than to further alienate him, to unsettle those who don’t deserve it?)

“I’ve seen what happens when people know.” He doesn’t tell her that she’s only one of a handful of people who have ever known what he is capable of, and that she’s the first he’s told simply because he wanted her to know, rather than needing answers from her. It’s selfish. “Just… trust me, okay?”

“Okay.” She runs her thumb along the side of his face. “You have to make me a promise though,” she says seriously, all the normal teasing stripped clear of her voice.

“Anything.”

Her hand slips into his hair, gently prodding his head until he turns it to look up at her properly, their eyes meeting. “You tell me. If I ever don’t remember, you find me and you tell me. I don’t ever want you to lie to me about this, I don’t want you keeping this to yourself because you’ve gotten it into your noble little head that it’s something that you need to carry alone.”

His fingers tighten on her thighs. “Okay.”

Fisting his hair now, she gives it a light tug. It feel so good, just the edge of pain prickling into the pleasure. This feels like too heavy a conversation given how hard he is; she’s wet, too, rubbing off a bit on his abdomen with little jerks of her hips that feel too sharp and uncontrolled to be conscious. Steve loves that he can get her this way, so needy that her body can’t help but seek his out for relief.

“I’m serious, Steve.”

It wasn’t a false promise, which makes him wonder if he’s being selfish again, that if the better thing - the noble thing - is to refuse to burden her with this. Perhaps there will never be enough absolution for the sins he has committed against the willing. “I was too,” he says. “I promise.”

“Good.”

“Good,” he echos, brushing his lips against her belly in a sloppy kiss. Letting his mouth trail down, he nudges her knees apart even farther, getting comfortable between her legs. Making sure she’s comfortable. Sometimes it seems like he can spend hours between her legs like this, and while it’s always good for him, he knows that unless he gets her prepped, lets her find a bend to her knee and neck that feels good, it can get uncomfortable for her.

So he gives her a moment, gets her to drape one knee over his shoulder and scoot down enough that she’s happy, feeling loose and relaxed.

“Steve,” she warns breathlessly. He looks up at her as he spreads her open with his thumbs, keeps the eye contact that he knows drives her absolutely insane when he’s going down on her.

He hums, spending a moment running a thumb over her, feeling how wet she is for him.

“Oh shit,” she whispers roughly, closing her eyes and fisting the sheets beside her when he leans down and presses his tongue over her cunt.

[RESET 45306]

“Aw, yeah!” Darcy screams as Kuroda rounds second base, heading for third. Yankee Stadium is roaring loud enough that Steve can barely hear Darcy beside him, even though she’s practically half-draped on him in her attempt to gloat at Steve’s misery.

“I feel like you’re rooting for the Yankees just to screw with me,” he whines, shoving a handful of popcorn into his mouth before reaching for the hot dog that Darcy brought him. When she left for the concession stands, the Yankees had been down two runs. In the ten minutes she was gone, goddamn Sabathia came out of nowhere and tied it up. Now they’re ahead.

“Would I do that?” Darcy says with a grin, dropping down into the seat beside Steve. “And the answer to that is yes. I don’t give a rats ass about baseball. I don’t even know who they’re playing!”

“The Braves.”

“Oh, Cleveland.”

Steve lets out an exasperated sigh. “Atlanta.”

Darcy bites her lips like she’s holding back a smile; the way the corners of her mouth drag up gives her away. “And you knew that,” Steve says.

“You are so easy, Steve.”

“Shut up.”

“Oh Steve, what do they hit the ball with again? Is it a paddle?” Darcy asks in a high-pitched, clueless voice, and Steve leans over to kiss her, mostly to shut her up.

By the eighth inning, Darcy looks painfully bored. They’re on their second hot dogs (Steve goes this time, claiming Darcy’s absence as bad luck for the Braves), and the game is moving at a snail’s pace. She grins at him lecherously as he slides past the family at the end of their row that, thankfully, hasn’t recognized him with his baseball cap on.

“Steven,” Darcy says, affecting the weird accent that usually signals she’s gearing up to yank his chain. He hands her one of the hot dogs and sits beside her, throwing an arm over her shoulder. “Have I ever told you that you have an ass that just won’t quit?”

Steve barks out a laugh. “Yes, actually.”

“Really?” Darcy says, amused, her head tilting and eyes turning up toward the clear, blue sky as if she’s searching her memory.

“Yeah, at your wedding.” He says it without thinking, then immediately regrets it.

“At my what?” she gasps in shock.

Steve doesn’t offer up many memories from the past versions of Darcy, and surprisingly, Darcy doesn’t press for information either, which is so incredibly out of character for her that for a while, he suspects she doesn’t actually believe him. But she explains to him once (though she doesn’t remember it now) that she’s afraid that knowing things about the choices she’s made or the lives she’s lived will somehow narrow this life. That she trusts him to make sure she doesn’t repeat any particularly awful mistakes, and the rest can be dependant solely on her terrible decision-making skills.

(Darcy will never stop being a bit of a mystery to Steve. Just when he thinks he’s got her figured out, she throws him a metaphorical curveball.)

He often wonders if it’s weird to think of them as versions of her. They’re all her, all Darcy. The same beautiful face, the same loud, shameless laugh, the same fierce loyalty and strength. There’s no real difference to who she is, merely what she has done.

Too late now. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“To be fair, you were pretty pregnant at the time,” Steve says, wiping a bit of mustard from the corner of his mouth. “And in a wedding dress you hated.”

Darcy jaw drops, which isn’t particularly pleasant given that she’s got a giant mouthful of chewed hot dog in it.

“I was what?” Darcy cries in horror. “Oh my god, was my mother still alive or did the news that I was a knocked up bride kill her?”

Steve laughs. “No, she was there.” Steve isn’t sure if this conversation could get any weirder; it’s strange to think of Darcy with Clint now. It’s strange to have a conversation with the girl you’re a bit head-over-heels about regarding her past decision to marry your teammate. To have his kid, to whom you were a godfather.

Taking another bite of the hot dog, Darcy mumbles, her mouth half full, “Well, I doubt Mom would give a shit about me being knocked up and such if it was your super kid. Like, patriotic duty, etc etc.”

“You weren’t marrying me.”

Darcy freezes.

“Wait, wait…” Darcy’s voice is low and careful, like she’s traversing a field full of landmines while putting together the pieces of a slightly horrifying puzzle. “So the guy I was marrying… the kid was…”

“Clint’s.”

Darcy chokes so hard Steve has to pound on her back a bit to dislodge the stuck hot dog.

“OH MY FUCKING GOD.”

The mother of the family down the end of the row turns to shoot them a dirty look, but Darcy is too busy laughing like a complete lunatic, tears streaming down her cheeks to pay any notice, leaving Steve to grimace apologetically.

The next day, Clint spends most of the morning attempting to shoot upside down. Even Steve has to admit that Clint looks entirely ridiculous hanging upside down from the rafters in the shooting gallery.

Clint lets out a high pitched hoot when he nails one of the bullseyes, doing a weird sort of full-body shake.

Darcy sets her jaw and stares at Steve.

“Did I have some sort of head injury?”

[RESET 45788]

“Coffee… you know, hot bean water?” Darcy says, her finger holding the button down until Jarvis informs her that he will redirect the elevator away from her floor until she releases it. “Come on, you have to like coffee, everyone likes coffee.”

Steve sighs.

[RESET 46521]

“You ever wish you could go back?” Darcy asks one night. He’s half-asleep when she speaks, the drowsiness beckoning him closer to it.

“Wha?” he asks rather inelegantly.

“All the way back,” she says, running her finger over his collarbone softly. “Back to the 40s. Maybe not take the serum. Stop Bucky from joining the army. Dodge the draft, go on the lam.” She yawns, shoving her face into the side of his chest.

“Nah,” Steve says. He’s never regretted taking the serum or joining the war, though he wishes he’d been able to spare Bucky from his experiences in the army before joining the Howling Commandos. There was a time, once, where Steve had wondered how different their lives would have been - Steve, Bucky, Peggy, Howard - had he been able to stop Bucky from falling from the train, been able to rid the world of Hydra before it sunk its teeth into SHIELD. But Bucky fell, Steve froze, Howard died, and Peggy grew old without him. “Then I’d’ve never met you.”

Darcy tucks herself closer into his side, growing quiet again. When she looks up at him, her face is unreadable; there’s a smile, but it’s not the careless type that she wears all the time, the kind that can light up a room.

“Liar,” she says, but the word is free of malice.

[RESET 47085]

They get married on a particularly cold day in the fall.

(“At least I’m not knocked up this time!” Darcy crows as Steve slings an arm around her waist. She tells him this all twelve times.)

(Clint is a groomsman. He brings a girl named Bobbi to the wedding who looks remarkably displeased with Clint’s purple bowtie. All twelve times.)

[RESET 48793]

The day Steve puts his one year old son to bed and wakes up a few weeks before he kisses Darcy for the first time at the Matisse exhibit is one of the worst of his entire life.

He never tells Darcy about their son, but he spends the better part of three weeks sketching him from memory. Thousands of little sketches of Will’s face, the roundness of his nose, his thin lips. The row of razor sharp baby teeth that had seemingly grown in overnight that Darcy had affectionately taken to calling his chompers.

He sketches, filling nearly eight sketchbooks until a reset robs him of those, too.

[RESET 52145]

Darcy dies on a Tuesday in September. It’s strange - almost unsettling - to watch her die this way. There’s no violence, no attacker to protect her from. Simply her own body giving up.

It starts in her lungs, metastasizes to her thyroid. By the time they find it, there’s nothing they can do but wait and make the most of the time she has left.

She’s in her favourite chair near the windows looking over the backyard - the garden that she’s never touched and the cluster of giant oaks at the back that made her fall in love with the house even though half the drywall needed to be replaced and the kitchen was falling apart. It had old bones, she told him. Old bones and old trees. A house with a soul.

Outside, their daughters are playing with Jane and Thor. Thor has Eleanore tossed over one shoulder, making her scream and giggle loudly, which prompts the most genuine smile Steve’s seen on her in weeks.

“Promise you won’t reset,” Darcy says, her voice cracking a bit as she watches Thor pretend to take a mortal hit, falling before Ellie who then climbs on his back in triumph as her sister and Jane watch. He knows Darcy’s thinking about what he told her about Bucky, about all the times he self-reset, killed himself to go back, to change a path that he couldn’t live with. “I don’t want to think of them without you.”

(He’s never really thought of what happens when he resets, if the people he once knew cease to exist, like writing over a tape, or if he just disappears back to whatever arbitrary point his body decides to send him to, the people that he cares about forced to live on without him. He’s not sure which idea is worse.)

They had girls this time. Two of them, little clones of Darcy. He’s reset countless times since they were born, but never enough to lose them. It is something he is both profoundly grateful for and something that frightens him nearly every day. At some point, his luck is going to run out.

“Don’t,” Steve says, kneeling down in front of her, his hands resting on her thighs covered by the thick blankets she’s always wrapped in now that she’s having trouble staying warm, no matter how high he runs the thermostat. “Don’t think about that.”

Darcy unwraps the blanket enough to loose an arm, bringing her hand up to touch the skin under his eye, running her finger over the apple of his cheek. He knows he doesn’t show the time the way she does, that he still looks as young as he did when they first met, while Darcy looks the thirty-three years she is. It could be the serum or whatever’s causing the resets; Steve often wonders if he’ll ever age, if he’ll ever get grey hair or start to feel the ache and pains of time’s war on the body.

“I think there’s a lot you haven’t told me,” she says, smiling again at the joyful screams of their daughters from outside and Thor’s might roar. “But you can tell me next time.”

“Darcy.”

“I’m not scared,” Darcy tells him, threading their fingers together. “I’m not. I know you always wondered why this… this thing you can do never scared me and this is why. When you’re old and grey, and the girls are grown, you come find me again.”

Steve shakes his head. “I don’t want to do this without you.”

“You’ll be fine. Raising girls is easy. Just remember: no tattoos, you’re going to want to threaten the boyfriends or girlfriends but don’t, and for god’s sake, keep them away from Stark’s son. Eight years old and that kid’s already trouble.” She laughs, but it’s sad. “Seriously though, you’re gonna be great.”

He doesn’t even realize that he’s crying until she unfurls her fingers and starts rubbing at his wet cheeks. “Jesus,” she says, her voice sounding wrecked. “Don’t cry, Steve. Don’t cry, okay?”

She tugs him in, cradling him in her lap with her arms wrapped around his shoulders. She rocks lightly, the soothing back and forth she knows never fails to calm him, but today, not even she can quiet the discontent in his mind. This is so unfair to her, he thinks. She shouldn’t be the one comforting him.

“I wish I had more time with the girls. When you find me again, you’ll get to tell me all about them,” she whispers to him, brushing a gentle kiss against his jaw.

This is the farthest Steve has ever gone into the future. He’s never lived past this year before. Everything is new. Everything is frightening. He’s so used to knowing that he feels adrift without memories of past lives to guide him. He doesn’t want this future without her, but he no longer has a choice.

She sighs softly. “It can be a gift, Steve. If you let it. It’s never goodbye, right?”

--

Bucky and Natasha fly in from Rome for the funeral.

Steve insists they stay at the house even though Bucky makes a lot of noise about not being an imposition and staying at a hotel. The truth is that the house feels empty without Darcy in it, reminding Steve of his apartment after the ice, after he thought he had lost everything. This is worse than his apartment ever was: this house is filled with the ghosts of his memories of her.

He still has his girls though. He may not have Darcy’s voice bellowing down the hall at him asking him where he put the damn vacuum cleaner or asking him tersely why he thought giving Eleanore a chocolate bar an hour before bed was a brilliant plan, but he’s got two girls with her eyes and bright smile.

Having Bucky back in his personal orbit helps more than Steve thought possible, too. Though he’d been happy - really, truly happy - before Darcy left him, there’s always been a piece of him missing with Bucky so far away. Bucky’s presence makes Steve feel like a bit of home is still with him, like no matter how far down this path Steve wanders, there’s something anchoring him back to the man he was.

But even now, standing in the kitchen Steve had remodelled the year before Ellie was born, drinking beers in silence with Bucky, everything still feels deeply unsettled, like unmatched puzzle pieces forced together. When Steve finishes his beer, he tosses the bottle in the sink, careful not to break it, and grabs another from the fridge. He cracks the top off on the countertop and feels his heart begin to ache when he remembers how Darcy used to get on him about leaving marks from the bottlecaps in the wood counter. Steve downs a gulp of the beer like somehow he can get drunk out of sheer will alone.

“I’m really sorry, Steve,” Bucky finally says. He’d been quiet at the funeral, giving Steve space as people paid their condolences; it had been all but unbearable, but Steve had held it together for the girls. Though the mourners had been sincere in their earnest platitudes, there’s no words that can ease pain like the kind Steve feels weighing him down. “I was really fond of her. She was such a good egg. Never knew what she saw in your stubborn ass.”

The look on Bucky’s face is fond.

“Me neither.”

The kitchen is quiet again, just the sounds of the summer dying outside, the last of the crickets in the low bushes near the edge of the property. The girls are asleep upstairs, and Steve can hear the low hum of the fan in Eleanore’s room wafting down the stairs.

“I don’t know how to do this without her,” Steve blurts out suddenly. “I miss her so fucking much already. I wake up and she’s not beside me and I just can’t fucking breathe.”

It’s been a struggle every day. Walking down the stairs in the morning, he thinks about how easy it would be to let his body drop and crash down the steep staircase. On his bike, there’s a moment before he brakes that he wonders how far he’d go back if he hit the gas instead. But he made a promise.

He made a promise.

Bucky squeezes Steve’s arm, but gives him space, doesn’t try to crowd him or soothe him the way Darcy used to. It brings its own peace to Steve.

“I know,” Bucky says. “I’m not going to spew some contrite shit about how it gets easier, or how you’ll miss her less. It doesn’t and it won’t. You’ll just find reasons to keep going on. And there’s two of ‘em upstairs right now.”

Steve nods, rubbing viciously at the tear tracks on his cheeks, taking a deep breath to calm his racing heart.

It’s felt like a whirlwind few days, like time has both decelerated to an unbearable slowness, yet sped up in a way that leaves Steve breathless, unable to find solid footing. For the first time since Bucky arrived, Steve is able to take a moment to really look at him, more than just the constituent parts that make up the man and instead really see Bucky. He looks… settled. Like he’s comfortable in his own skin, moreso than he looked the last time Steve saw him just after Christmas. Bucky’s recovery has been measured in degrees and years, so slow that only now is Steve really starting to see just how far he’s come.

“You look good,” Steve says. “You happy?”

Bucky pauses for a moment like he’s contemplating telling the truth or lying for Steve’s sake. In the end, they both know that Steve’s always drawn comfort in Bucky’s happiness, even in periods of his own misery. “Yeah,” Bucky says. “Took a while to get here, and some days are worse than others, but I’m good.”

(This, Steve remembers, is why he let Bucky go. To see him like this. To allow Bucky his own future, his own happiness not tied to Steve.)

“We’ve been thinking about moving back,” Bucky says eventually, accepting the fresh beer that Steve hands him and watching as Steve dumps the empty into the sink that is quickly getting cluttered with bottles. “To the States.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Nat hates the new European Chief to a degree where I think she’s seriously considering violence as a mediation method, and honestly…” Bucky drifts off, peeling the label off his beer methodically. “I like Italy, but it just doesn’t feel like home, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“Figure I could help out with the girls too, if you needed it,” Bucky says, averting his eyes downward, something he only ever does when he either feels self-conscious or is bracing himself for rejection. “You never were good with the pretty dames,” he continues with a quiet laugh, taking a sip of his beer and, after a minute, finally looking up at Steve.

“I’d like that,” Steve says, the darkness lifting if only for a brief moment.

--

Two weeks after the funeral, Tony calls him from the tower.

Steve leaves the kids with Bucky, who’s been crashing in his guest room for the last week and a half after Natasha and Clint get pulled onto a weird SOS call in Romania. Technically that’s more of Bucky’s backyard, but he’s been glued to Steve’s side for most of the last two weeks, quickly nixing Fury’s request that he join Nat and Clint. Bucky’s also been a soft touch for the girls since he arrived, and now that they’ve taken to calling him Uncle Bucky, Steve isn’t sure he’s going to be able to separate them. Linny, his youngest, is particularly gone on Bucky, following him around the house and climbing into his lap at every opportunity.

The tower is buzzing with life by the time Steve arrives, SHIELD agents bustling alongside Stark’s employees. It takes Steve twenty minutes to make it to Bruce’s lab, the route packed with officers not looking where they’re going as they speedwalk down the halls, phones glued to their hands and ears.

In the observation room, a familiar black mass lies prone on the table.

“Clint and Natasha brought it back from Bucharest,” Tony says, appearing out of nowhere beside him, tinkering with a handheld device. “I need to start laying some serious ground rules about bringing livestock back from missions. No cats, dogs, or weird oozing tentacle monsters allowed in the tower.”

Steve feels frozen to the spot, his body starting to shake uncontrollably.

“Steve?” Tony asks, his voice filled with an uncharacteristic concern. “Jesus, Steve, what’s wrong?”

The mimic on the table opens its eyes.

[RESET 52146]

Steve wakes.

“Rise and shine, sweetheart,” Bucky says wiggling his eyebrows playfully. “Christ, you slept like a rock last night.”

He can taste the air of the Alps in his mouth, feel the rough texture of his army-issue sheets sliding across his skin. The lumpy, uncomfortable rise of his roll spread underneath him.

Bucky’s wearing his favourite jacket. He looks young - young in a way that Steve could once barely remember in the depths of his mind, before that memory was sanded away by thousands of new memories overwriting one another.

“Carter just sent word,” Bucky says, dropping down beside him on the cot. Steve reaches out and touches the perfect, unblemished skin of his left arm and marvels at the softness of it. It’s been so long since he has felt Bucky’s skin. “They’ve found Zola.”

Steve feels all the blood in his body turn to ice.

“Time to go rob a train, buddy.”