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dreadnought-dear-captain · 5 years

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‘Til the End of the Line (or Not) OR: See? We TOLD You “No Homo.” Love, Markus and McFeely

*****WARNING: 99.9% SALT!! Contains spoilers for Avengers Endgame!!****

I guess this is part two of my personal processing of Endgame. @pitchforkcentral86 was not satisfied by my timey-wimey Endgame post, which centered on Steve’s choice to go back in time to be with Peggy and the implications of that choice. She remarked that yeah, it’s great that Steve might not be a total piece of crap, Pym particles, yada yada, whatever, but it still didn’t make her feel any less despair over this ending.

The source of her agony: Steve and Bucky’s relationship and its utter lack of satisfying resolution. So I shall address that now, because I think I feel worse about that than anything, and I can’t explain it away with Pym particles.

Anyone who has any investment at all in the relationship between Bucky and Steve — whether you are a Stucky person or whether you view them as platonic but deeply connected best friends — has probably had to spend the last two movies scraping around the floor, searching for crumbs, signs, any hints that these two people care about each other. We have been begging the Russos, the screenwriters Markus and McFeely, anyone who would listen, for anything to suggest that they are even on the barest of speaking terms, let alone that they have the intensity of relationship that the MCU spent 3+ movies explicitly convincing us that they have. I’ll even come out and say that although I ship Stucky in fandom and fic hardcore, I am not an MCU canon Stucky person per se. I’m 100% fine if the MCU wants to treat this as a deep, fraternal friendship. In fact, I see some benefits to this interpretation. How wonderful if men could love each other so deeply and have it NOT be sexual or romantic. But I’m also 100% fine with people interpreting this as romantic love, and there were times throughout this franchise where the actors, various parties in production, and Marvel itself has been agnostic on the subject, if not encouraging of gay interpretations of their relationship. Let it be what you want, fans have been told. Or just flat out post a pic of Steve and Bucky on #National Boyfriend Day like Civil War comic writer Mark Millar. Sure. At times, it almost felt safe to ship them. As soon as Civil War drew to a close, however, it started becoming... inconvenient for Bucky and Steve to be together. Steve needs to go to the Raft. Bucky needs to go into cryo. Steve needs to become Nomad and go secret avenging. Bucky needs to do his Vibranium Brain Magic (TM)/goat herding complex PTSD recovery program. Side note: Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) is my provisional diagnosis based on virtually nothing, because Bucky’s character has gotten so little substantive screen time that we can only guess at his psychological state, save what can be conveyed through glistening eyes and woobieface and “... but I did it.” Wow. Bowl me over, you really got me right in the McFeelys. Though +1000 to SebStan for working what he got to work with to the max. That motherfucker can act. We know for certain approximately jack shit about Bucky’s internal experience post-Winter Soldier. And so, like pretty much everything with Bucky and this friendship/ship arc, I will just guess at what is actually wrong with him. But after 70 years as a POW being tortured and possibly gaslit and definitely brainwashed, that is almost the textbook recipe for complex PTSD, so imma go with that. Returning to this distance. Now, it first appears to be largely logistical in nature. Steve is over here, Bucky is over there. Golly, just too busy to hang these days. All this secret avenging without you. And when we pine — pine — for the meaningful reunion of these two in IW, instead we got a “Hey brah, how's it hanging?” “You know, old and traumatized lol” exchange and a “let’s make sure our dicks don’t touch” back-slappy hug that lasted two seconds. This is without any hint as to whether these two have seen each other yet after Bucky’s de-thawing, leaving us to wonder whether this is really the big reunion we have been waiting for.

(If we had audio, the sound would be 70% slapping.)

I’m going to pause here, because for many of us, this was devastating. After all, we were left with this shot of Steve as Bucky made the choice to go into cryo, a choice that seemed only somewhat justifiable on the vague grounds of “I can’t trust my own mind.” (Me either, pal.)

Ugh.

Perhaps this was also an avoidance strategy — easier to go back on ice than deal with the emotional fallout of what just happened. And who could blame him? He is probably still relearning how to cope effectively with things after his entire coping system was destroyed by his time with Hydra. But Steve was clearly disappointed or, at the very least, saddened by this. He gets something back just to lose it again. Enter distance. He leaves and goes avenging. Emotionally, perhaps this move to cryo created distance as well. Their relationship was on such fragile ground at this point, mostly an artifact from the ‘40s, and their chance to deepen it was taken away by the writers because Bucky wanted to go on ice for reasons and Steve needed to do Steve things. And so when IW rolled around, oh, did we want them to have a substantive reunion. But alas, we did not get that. We saw equally substantive exchanges between Bucky and Sam or Rocket and far more substantive exchanges between Steve and pretty much anyone else. And then we got the ultimate separation — (fake) death. Again. A traumatic, unplanned loss that costs another five years from their timeline, all before they even got the chance to properly re-establish a friendship. Again, I’m going off of what we actually see portrayed, not off of what we assume or would like to see. We have absolutely no idea how much Steve and Bucky interacted in Wakanda. But Steve busted Sam out of the Raft quite early, early enough that he still had a messed up face from the time Tony went in (unless he was getting beatings on the reg, which is possible). So if he was hanging with Sam since before Bucky went on ice, and Sam just visited Wakanda for the first time in IW, either Steve was borrowing the Quinjet to secretly visit Wakanda on his own to hang with Bucky, or he hadn’t been back to Wakanda since he left the first time.

Regarding Steve visiting Wakanda between CW and IW — I found this bullshit from Markus and McFeely on the subject of whether Steve and Bucky met or talked prior to IW. The writers could not even agree about their own characters, with one saying that Steve and his crew probably visited Wakanda and hung out with Bucky and the other saying, eh, the two of them “maybe Skyped.” As to the former, this is not at all supported by the narrative or by logic. Infinity War is clearly Sam’s first time in Wakanda, with all that drama about “zomg you’re gonna hit those trees, bro!” as they are flying into the city. And why would Steve leave his team alone and vulnerable, probably taking the Quinjet, their only form of reliable and safe transportation, so he could go visit Bucky alone? He’s not there for a booty call, y’all, because these guys have barely even rekindled their friendship. Moreover, the other secret avengers know how important Bucky is to Steve. This isn’t a secret. There would be no reason to go alone and no reason for T’Challa to forbid Nat, Sam, and Wanda from coming to Wakanda. So it makes no sense that Steve has visited Wakanda prior to IW, and thus, that would make IW their first meeting, which is… utter and heartbreaking garbage. But at least they had motherfucking SKYPE. MAYBE. Fuck. You. Very. Much.

So, in the face of this shit reunion and Bucky’s subsequent dusting, some of us kindled hope for the upcoming Endgame. Perhaps we would get flashbacks. We knew there would be flashbacks or time travel because we saw stuff in the trailers and sneak peeks from the set. So maybe there would be something there to account for the utter lack of attention to their relationship in Infinity War. Again, this was the mere request that Markus and McFeely and the directors acknowledge wholeheartedly what they have been building for these characters since the beginning of their time in the MCU. This was not even strictly about Stucky. This was about doing justice for these characters as humans. But there were no flashbacks. Who knows what happened in Wakanda. We will have to fill in the blanks on our own. Not a single comment could be spared to even signal whether the IW Wakanda scene was their first time seeing each other since cryo. “How’s that new arm treating you?” or “God, it’s been so long”/deep emotion would be all it would have taken to not keep us wondering one way or the other. This suggests a lack of consideration to the fans of these characters and this relationship — which, again, Markus and McFeely slaved to get us to pour our hearts into. So… Endgame. What was that? Bucky and Steve didn’t stand next to each other at Tony’s funeral. Okay. Bucky is not an A-list Avenger. He did kill Tony’s parents. Awkward. Bucky was comforted by Sam, his… guy he sat behind in the Volkswagen in Civil War and fought next to in IW, and he needed comfort apparently (?) because he… killed Martha and Howard Stark (??), which was sweet, and much more spontaneous affection than we’ve seen from Steve in an age, but what the actual fuck??? Was that Mickey Mouse standing behind the Iron Man 3 kid wearing a “Falcon and Winter Soldier” miniseries t-shirt?

And that ending. This was maybe the one implied nugget of friendship between them visible with an electron microscope. They obviously had at least one deep conversation about Steve deviating from the plan to go have a life, and they obviously had a discussion about who would succeed him as Cap. My dreams of Bucky Cap were dashed into dust, but as @pitchforkcentral86 said, it would have been cruel to give it to Bucky. Bucky would possibly have taken it if Steve kicked the bucket in EG, but it makes the most sense to be passed along in a planned way to Sam. So maybe they had at least one good conversation. Way, way off camera. Bucky said he would miss him. Recycled TFA line. Thank God it was not involving the words “jerk” and “punk.” Glistening woobie eyes. Steve leaving to go be with the one person who can make him feel like a whole human being, apparently, because there is nothing and nobody tethering him to this time in history anymore.

Whoa— wait— WHAT??? These are the moments where I literally double check the credits for the Cap movies to make sure that it says “Markus and McFeely.” Then I check the latest Avengers movies to make sure they also say “Markus and McFeely.” And they ALL DO!! The same two men painstakingly crafted the story of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, two men who — let’s be literal in the narrative here, for the sake of making a conservative argument — are best friends from childhood. They hammered on this story HARD, making sure that their relationship was so strong that by the time 2016 rolled around, the depth and intensity of their friendship and Steve’s commitment to it would tear the Avengers apart. And along the way, something else happened.

When you put two people in relationship like this, you have to know that there will be consequences. People will grow very emotionally invested in their relationship, because that is exactly what the writers were asking the audience to do. These dudes did their job, all right! And then something else happened, quite easily, even though these things will also happen under much harsher conditions: Stucky. Winter Soldier alone probably launched a hundred thousand ships for these two — gay, gay ships, so very gay, the glitteriest, gayest of cruise liners — from a hundred thousand ports around the globe. This ship has permeated pop culture even outside the fandom (some dumb gross man jokes from Screen Junkies within, but the Stucky shenanigans start at around 3:15).

And perhaps that’s when Markus and McFeely realized what a monster they created, one that would clash in ugly ways with their forthcoming (heterosexual) narrative, — their endgame for Steve. And so what did they do? Overcorrect. Wildly. Pull the plug. Bucky and Steve can’t fall out as friends completely, but what’s the next best thing? Give them almost zero screen time together, lest anyone be tempted to think they have a serious relationship — and again, I’m just talking friendship at this point, let alone anything else. Make their lines devoid of substance. Keep us wondering about the nature of their dynamic. Did the distance grow too great? Is Bucky not able to reconnect with anyone? Is Steve too busy? Too salty?? Who knows! These are possibilities, but none are explained. Then just poof Bucky off the face of the earth for 5 years to create existential distance. And in the meantime, ensure that Bucky is shown as not even a passing thought for Steve Rogers. Ensure that his name is never once uttered by Steve until he is about to leave him to go be with Peggy — oh except when, in a real dick move, when he emotionally whumps his past self with the news that Bucky is alive for the sole purpose of getting out of a stranglehold. At the same time, ensure that Steve is seen becoming single-mindedly fixated on Peggy Carter, and make sure the audience — including all those pesky Stucky shippers — knows that he considers her the “love of his life.” Ensure we see the compass with increasing frequency and with maximum longing. Insert Steve finding the absurd photograph of himself on the Director of SHIELD’s desk, facing the door for any junior colleague to see her pining over him like a schoolgirl long after he died, which is just about the least Peggy Carter thing I can ever imagine (and these people created and wrote for the Agent Carter TV series!!!).

Then give us our first openly gay person in the MCU. And drop him in the same scene that you confirm once and for all that Peggy Carter is the love of Steve Rogers’ life. Have Steve be so fucking cool with it that he makes us proud and relieved that he’s not a homophobe. Whew! Only… it makes us feel kind of gross, and maybe we can’t quite figure out why at first. But maybe it’s because it feels personal, like a concession, like the writers and director knew exactly what they were doing to a lot of people who feel a very specific way about Steve’s sexuality and about his relationship with Bucky Barnes. It feels like a tone deaf nod to the fandom. Sorry, guys. No homo. We really did try to warn you with the whole Sharon Carter thing. (Sharon Carter, in an act of gross and misogynistic misuse, remains one of the most criminally mistreated characters in the entire MCU, arguably serving almost entirely as a “no homo” device before being completely discarded, never to be heard from again.)

Which got me thinking — was this move to distance Steve and Bucky so abruptly a reactive move? The divide between Steve and Bucky that happens in IW and EG feels so cold and inorganic. It does not feel at all driven by the natural arc of the characters as established by the creators themselves. It feels rushed and confusing, like it just needed to happen for plot convenience (though not even clearly that), and once again, we are left trying to figure out what the fuck is actually going on.

Part of that is probably needing to lay the groundwork for Steve’s feelings of alienation, which lead him to his ultimate choice to go back in time. He can’t feel too connected to Bucky or he won’t want to go back to be with Peggy. But could part of this also possibly be a reaction to how strongly Stucky was adopted by the public? Did Markus and McFeely realize how much more strongly we love the idea of Steve and Bucky — as friends or lovers, who cares? — rather than Steve and Peggy, which was probably their ending for Steve all along? Did they realize their terrible mistake of bringing them so close, endearing them to us so much, and then realize “OH SHIT,” and then slam on the brakes? Is that why IW and EG felt like absolute shit for their relationship, even for those who are not total endgame Stucky people?

Okay, but what if their friendship just ran its course? Friendships do that, even really deep ones. These two have had a huge chronological and experiential rift that never was really healed (thanks to our dear writers). Steve saved Bucky’s life thrice but they never really reconnected. Presumably. As far as we know in the narrative we are given by the writers. Okay. Let’s say you need to get Steve back with Peggy and for Bucky to become pals with Sam instead because contracts and actors. Whatever. Fine. But if you are going to play the “our friendship has come and gone” card, you need to fully PLAY IT. You can’t make it some vague option that might be true because we can’t figure out what the hell is going on. They need to have an actual conversation. For fuck’s sake, if we have time to fuck around with Korg and Miek on the couch and time to have Banner take selfies with kids and do stupid time gags and a bunch of other little shit, there is enough time to have a brief conversation somewhere to imply that “things have changed” or “people change” or something to imply that the writers were even thinking about the course of Bucky and Steve’s relationship as more than just a platform to launch Steve back to Peggy and launch Bucky toward Sam for their spinoff series.

There was just no depth. How can they give us three movies composed almost entirely of Mariana Trench levels of depth between these two men and then give us virtually nothing in IW and then next to nothing in EG to “round out” their entire storyline? The shape of the emotional momentum in this relationship is so wonky and dissatisfying, and the lack of comment on the dissolution of their friendship in the narrative, the fact that it isn’t even being acknowledged, is one of the worst parts. This relationship died without being honored or even attended to at the most basic level, after being told that it is perhaps the most important relationship in Steve and Bucky’s lifetimes and being shown evidence of that fact.

Moreover, let’s get real — calling Peggy the love of Steve’s life should do nothing to diminish his friendship with Bucky Barnes. That’s not how love works. You don’t just get one person. You can have a best friend — hell, you can have two best friends — and a woman you love. (And even moreover, you don’t have to leap back through time to find closeness just because you can. But that’s another matter with Steve’s character that I will address in a future speculative character analysis on Steve in an effort to explain how he got to this point, because I have a super depressing head canon about it involving traumatic grief and loss.)

But just like comic book science, perhaps there are comic book rules about love and affinity. You only get one person, and Steve gets Peggy. And apparently Bucky gets Sam. Because contracts. But as I said before, I would have been okay if they had a dissolution of their friendship because that was the course of their friendship. Just tell us what is happening. Have the decency to respect your characters by giving their relationship a true arc, whatever it is. You can’t just recycle a TFA line and call it an arc. That is not an arc. Markus and McFeely goddamn know better and we know they know better, because we just saw a beautiful relationship arc closing with Tony and Pepper and, on a smaller scale, with Tony and Peter fucking Parker.

By the way, the small in-person and symbolic interactions between Tony and Peter in EG? Those are what high quality, emotionally salient, brief interactions between people who care about each other look like.

1. Tony’s picture of Peter in his kitchen: He can see from where he does his dishes. He looks at it meaningfully and thoughtfully before making a major plot-essential decision that risks his way of life.

2. Tony and Peter’s reunion hug: It starts off with some humor and classic Peter rambling. Becomes a full-ass, real hug. Nobody slaps the other’s back. Peter remarks, very sincerely, “oh, this is nice.” <3

3. Tony’s death scene: Peter is visibly and truly wrecked. Tony looks at him in a heartfelt way. Words are unnecessary. It is perfect.

Bonus IW moment, because it is one of the most moving images I have seen in the MCU: Tony has Peter’s ashes in his goddamn mouth, eyes closed. Defeated.

Jesus Christ. Don’t tell me Markus and McFeely don’t know how to write characters and brief, powerful interactions, even when the characters are not together. They most certainly are very, very capable of this.

So why did we get the lifeless, quippy drivel and lame physical contact they gave Bucky and Steve in IW and EG? Which, regarding their last convo, was Bucky spilling his guts and Steve being like “Yeah brah, you’ll be fine, don’t be a fucking idiot while I’m off being happy with the only person in the universe who can make me complete #surprisesoulmates.” Bucky offers his quippy mandatory TFA callback retort so that the audience remembers that these two once gave an actual fuck about each other at one point in the narrative. Cue slappy-back-no-dick-touch hug. And please don’t tell me that this is just how men from the ‘40s hug. I would buy that for TFA, but after everything they’ve been through in Winter Soldier and Civil War? I am not buying it.

**Slap-slap**

So we get a Steve Rogers who exits the MCU permanently by making a contentious, questionable final choice with questionable implications that take a graduate degree and/or a hive mind to questionably figure out (or else I’m just a fucking idiot and I’m the only one who needed those things). And we also get the profoundly dissatisfying demise of a relationship that we invested a tremendous amount of emotional energy in because that is what the screenwriters and directors asked us to do.

I am not writing this as a diehard Stucky shipper. I love Stucky, don’t get me wrong. It’s all I read and write in fandom. And I can certainly buy a world (at least, in Caps 1-3) where canon Steve’s love for Bucky is the gay kind and vice versa. Sure. But I am writing this as a person who loves good characters and good story, and this is such a hard fail that even if I had no emotional investment in these two characters, I would wonder what Markus and McFeely had against Steve and Bucky that they let their garden succumb to drought while they tended so considerately to Tony and Peter and Tony and Pepper and Steve and Natasha and Steve and a dead woman and Thor and Bruce and Thor and fucking Rocket, pretty much all of whom (with the exception of Tony and Pepper) have had so much less at stake, so much less time invested, and so much less of a reason for the audience to give a fuck.

But more importantly, I am writing this as a lover of Steve and Bucky, two people who have a well-established, rock-solid, indisputable human relationship that deserves so much more than what it got, especially given all of the unspeakable suffering these men have experienced separately and as a byproduct of their separation. Canonically. This is not made up fandom shippery superimposed upon Markus and McFeely’s precious creation. This is the truth of these two men as determined by the hands of the creators who also neglected them into nothingness, which is arguably a fate far worse than one or both of them dying an actual, final death.

I am left feeling disappointed and betrayed as a fan, wishing, as others have confided in me, that I was more of a Tony person and had been all along. Because then I would be walking away from this still grief-stricken, but at least it would be for the right reasons.

I will leave you with this, arguably one of the last in-character moments for Bucky and Steve in the MCU.

#avengers endgame #salt #endgame spoilers #avengers spoilers #meta

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davetheshady · 5 years

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how time travel works in the MCU

endgame spoilers!

SO i’ve been seeing a lot of people expressing confusion about wtf was going on in endgame, and since this is, like, my jam, allow me to illustrate the MCU’s apparent theory of time travel. (this isn’t officially confirmed or anything (ETA: it kind of is!) – just me elaborating on what other fans have said as well, which appears to be internally consistent in the movie.)

Avengers: Endgame uses a different mechanism than most time travel media (which Rhodey and Scott helpfully list for us, lol): it is impossible to change the past of your personal timeline in the MCU.

(fig. 1: a blurry and not-to-scale timeline for the MCU with data points for 1970, 2012, 2013, 2014, and Endgame)

their “time travel” is more like “time and dimension travel”: as soon as they use the quantum realm to go to an earlier date, it splits off* an identical parallel universe (or leg of the trousers of time). we simultaneously have canon and officially-licensed canon-divergence AUs. time travelers can never affect their own pasts; they can only change things in an AU for another version of themselves.

* or maybe this universe which was completely identical up to the point where they are visiting time travelers always existed and they just arrived, who knows ~wibbley wobbley~

(fig. 2: equally blurry and not-to-scale timelines plural: the MCU timeline and four AU timelines, splitting off from 1970, 2012, 2013, and 2014.)

note: i’m just guessing about the number of relevant AU timelines, because I’ve only seen the movie once. the avengers’ initial plan has teams going to NYC in 2012 during The Avengers, to Asgard in 2013 during Thor 2: Electric Boogaloo, and to the planets Morag and Vormir (sp?) in 2014 during Guardians of the Galaxy. Team 2012 messes up and tries again by going to New Jersey in 1970.

hence the Ancient One’s concern about Bruce taking the time stone: up to that point, things were on track to proceed exactly like the MCU timeline. now that’s off the table. if bruce doesn’t return the time stone, the events of doctor strange can’t happen and dormammu will destroy this 2012!AU timeline. the MCU timeline will be unaffected, but it still sucks for everyone in the 2012!AU. (i don’t think it’s necessary in each AU for events to go EXACTLY like the MCU timeline, but considering the MCU timeline consists of our heroes defeating challenges and saving the world/galaxy by the skin of their teeth, not changing too much is a good idea.)

however! there are definite changes keeping these AUs separate from the MCU timeline. 2012!AU Steve has been told by a suspicious double that Bucky is alive, and will probably get Hail HYDRA’d by Strike. it’s entirely possible that events in 2013!Asgard will happen completely differently due to Frigga’s knowledge of shit going down. And 2014!AU Thanos hops on over to the MCU timeline and attacks, ultimately resulting in the 2014!AU losing him, his followers, and Gamora.

essentially, we now know there are multiple copies of all the characters, but not clones or evil-bearded-mirror counterparts, because they share the same experiences... up to a certain point. 2014!AU Gamora is in the MCU timeline now, but she doesn’t have any of MCU Gamora’s experiences from the time of GotG to her death in Infinity War. However, she and MCU Nebula would still share their horrible childhood. If 2012!AU Loki pops up in the MCU timeline, he and MCU Thor would have had the same interactions all the way through The Avengers. (I personally find this delightful, because it’s a time travel crossover between canon-divergence AUs complete with character doubles and that’s like... all of my favorite things together.)

as for MCU Steve: he was hanging out in one of the AUs with Peggy (with whom he would have shared exactly the same version of the past in the 40s) for a whole bunch of decades. the movie vaguely implies that this really did happen in the MCU timeline by having him appear on a park bench instead of using their quantum realm tech, but this would require:

steve ‘civil war’ rogers just chilling for decades as Bucky runs around as the Winter Soldier and HYDRA infiltrates SHIELD, not to mention refraining from weighing in on countless other issues he cares deeply about

peggy ‘fight me’ carter, AN INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVE, not noticing her husband’s extreme lack of chill re 1. and cottoning on

us to forget literally the whole rest of the movie

so this, frankly, is nonsense. also, the obvious place to meet up with peggy was in his trip to 1970, but unless someone on her street had an old-ass car, they’re definitely dancing together in the 40s/50s; this means he didn’t just go back and stay, but went back to the 1970 AU, dropped off the tesseract and stole more of hank pym’s research, and then made yet another trip to the 40s/50s.

using this AU theory, MCU Steve was only present in the MCU timeline as a Capsicle between the 40s and the 2010s and you don’t have to worry about the canonicity of Agents of Carter. Endgame-era MCU Steve went to a 1940s AU, where he and Peggy almost certainly made beautiful Nazi punching as they cleared HYDRA out of SHIELD. stuff like that would make events unspool differently than Steve was familiar with from the MCU timeline, making his knowledge of his future less and less relevant, so he wouldn’t have too much of an advantage. (as a side note, I think there’s a practical aspect to him hanging around: it means he has plenty of time to observe the consequences of the MCU Avengers interfering and make sure there’s no, like, universal catastrophes. hell yeah longitudinal studies of scientific data.)

we already know from 2014!AU Thanos’ appearance in the MCU timeline that you don’t need to use the MCU portal to hop between timelines [ETA: whoops, i misremembered that part.] Steve knew where he was returning to, so between his MCU tech and everything he potentially could have stolen from hank pym over the years (or, you know, everything he was given by 1940!AU hank and janet van dyne, whom he could have just worked with) he had the ability to stroll back to the MCU timeline for the very end of endgame in a sufficiently dramatic fashion to troll everyone. or maybe he DID use that portal, but was the size of an ant just to be a dick. steve rogers: man out of time.

[ETA: as per this post: bruce DID detect him in the portal, so he definitely quantum leaped back instead of taking the slow path.]

[ETA: as per the Russos themselves: “If Cap were to go back into the past and live there, he would create a branched reality. The question then becomes, how is he back in this reality to give the shield away?” source )

anyway, unlike other kinds of time travel, AU theory lacks issues like erasing your own personal history or stepping on bugs and causing fascism. but i think it DOES have some serious consequences:

- if you visit/create an AU, the people from the AU can now come and dick around in YOUR timeline (c.f. 2014!AU Thanos and the entire end of the movie). they got rid of 2014!AU Thanos, but that leaves at least three other Thanoi who they HAVEN’T defeated, plus multiple versions of every other baddie they’ve ever fought.

- having so many similar-but-not-identical timelines clustered together might have bad long-term consequences on reality, like events bleeding through

- HOW are these AUs created and/or maintained? if there’s a finite amount of energy for them, connecting to too many might cause some to collapse

- headaches

it’s possible we will see some negative consequences in future MCU movies, if only to eliminate “time travel through the quantum realm” as a solution to every single one of their problems.

(@autumn-drifts also pointed out that the MCU Avengers are doing all their time travel shenanigans after the MCU infinity stones have been destroyed, so potentially the time stone (and maybe others) play a role in PREVENTING time travel, which is why we haven’t seen it before.)

(ETA: the energy from the infinity stones Thanos destroyed had to go SOMEWHERE; maybe that’s what creates the AUs?)

speaking of the time stone: this maaaaaay have a completely different set of rules. it’s possible that using it also spawns a whole bunch of AUs, which is why the Ancient One chewed out Dr Strange about playing with it. (do you want 20 different AUs whose only difference is Dr Strange’s fucked-up apple in the magic library? because this is how you get 20 different AUs whose only difference is Dr Strange’s fucked-up apple in the magic library.)

but it’s also possible the time stone is the only thing that have an effect on your personal timeline. i don’t think we ever see it used to jump directly from one point of time to another, so who knows if it CAN. but it can definitely rewind (MCU Thanos undoing Wanda’s decision to kill Vision and stealing the mind stone in Infinity War) and/or create time loops (the end of Doctor Strange).

(fig. 3: blurry timeline of the MCU showing a whole bunch of loops in Doctor Strange from his trap, labelled “Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain”, and a single loop in Infinity War labelled “Wanda kills Vision” and “Thanos unkills Vision”)

i’ve drawn them as loops because those events definitely happen, so they’re part of a timeline that everyone(?) experiences, but they all circle back to one particular point from whence only one line of events continues. you don’t have a million different versions of Dr Strange getting creatively killed by Dormammu, you have one Dr Strange getting creatively killed by Dormammu a million times; both he and Dormammu remember all of them.

one final observation: we still haven’t seen proper time travel forward through time. we know from Infinity War that the time stone can let you look at all the potential futures and use that knowledge to aim in your chosen direction, but it can’t show you “the” future. (and as to whether that’s looking at events playing forward then rewinding back to the save point, or just scoping out all the relevant AUs, I have no idea.) Scott technically skips five years forward from the snappening to Endgame, but he was pulled there by a rat activating the tech during Endgame, as opposed to him selecting a point five years in the future and choosing to go there. (we also don’t know when Steve left his 1940!AU timeline, but he was returning to the point in the MCU immediately after he left, not going farther forward than he had already been.) so it will be interesting to see how/if time travel into THE FUTURE! happens and what delightful problems it can cause.

in conclusion:

#endgame spoilers #the avengers: endgame #time travel #wibbley wobbley timey wimey #mcu #the avengers: infinity war #doctor strange #guardians of the galaxy #long post

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castielgurl · 5 years

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What Is And What Should Never Be

fan art by:sam_cotter_art kj apa as James Rogers

Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff live their life in a completely different than the main timeline. After Thanos thing happen everyone decides to live in separate ways. The Avengers had tried so hard to bring back everyone from the snap but they fail. Everyone in this universe had moved on and built a new world. Steve finally asked Natasha to enjoy their life together. Natasha and Steve only had each other. They decide to get married and have a son name, James. Their son brings joy and happiness in their lives after chaos and disaster. Despite toughness and the hardest time, they raise James to be an Avenger and a good young man. After 20 years, James found out his parents were missing and it happens to a lot of people in their world. The universe James lives in had been erased and gone because someone has changed the past. James and his friends travel back to a specific timeline to investigate why it happens. James found that the universe is completely different, his parents never married. His father goes back to the 40s to live his life with Peggy Carter and his mother died after sacrifice herself to get the infinity stone. How James going reunite his parents and tell them to believe they are made for each other?

Falcon and everyone continue to lead the new Avengers. Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, Dr. Strange, Spiderman, Winter Soldier, Ant-man, the wasp is part of the new Avengers. One day in the avenger’s facility, the group of unknown people coming to face them. They all wearing a suit, and tech armor which similar to what Iron Man made. They look like a group of superheroes. At first, they fight each other because they did not know who they are and what intention of coming there. Before one of the women tell them to stop fighting and said they did not come to make chaos. They introduce themselves as the Avengers which are cause more confusing. How can they be another Avengers that they did not know about? They explained it they are the Avengers from the 20 years after the future. Is causes shocking revealing, one of the women claims as Scott Lang daughter, Cassie she tells a secret about her father which confirms she is indeed his daughter. In her timeline, Scott is missing and pronounce as death. The emotional reunion between daughter and father happen

They tell their story and why and how they come back to the past. They said they come to find out why their parents suddenly disappear and included many people lost their families. Like their existence are erased. Cassie, James, and Morgan Stark who apparently Tony Stark daughter the only member team has survived. Morgan invented a time portal and travel back to their current universe. They found the cause someone has changed the event in the past and created an alternate timeline. Where in that timeline some of their families did not exist including themselves. In simple explanations, if the parents did not exist their children are automatically erased. The Avengers finally understand why they come, but they did not know how they going to help them. After the discussion one of them is a young man who had fair skin, muscular about six foot asking where are the Avengers Iron Man, Hawkeye, Hulk, Captain America, Black Widow, and Thor. The Avengers explained to them where they are and they were shocked to hear Iron Man died, and Captain America going to travel time and never come back to stay in the 40s. The young man asking where is Black Widow? All of them look sad to reveal what happened to her. Wanda finally tells him she died because she sacrifices herself to get a soul stone. The young man could not believe what he heard, he looks sad and angry his emotions change suddenly. He asks why Captain America let her die, and what did he do during that? They explained to him and he looks very angry suddenly he hit the table and it breaks into pieces. Falcon asking why he very angry and what was Natasha connection to him? He said she was his mother.

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James Rogers Story (Future year, 2043) James was born in the suburbs of Brooklyn. When he was a baby he had various diseases. Asthma, heart failure, kidney failure he got it all. He spent his baby years at the hospital. His father always regretted that James's illness was inherited from him. When he was a baby, he doesn`t have enough nutrients, skinny and pale skin. His development is slower than other babies. His body weight is also twice as low as other babies. His parents spend time to commute to the hospital every day. There was a night when he was six months old; he suddenly stopped breathing that causing panic from his parents. At one point the doctor said he would not live long. But his parents never give up. His parents love him wholeheartedly and give him the opportunity to grow like other normal children. James only knew that his parents were superheroes when he was five. Some people have told him he is the son of Captain America and the Black Widow. At first, he did not understand how big it meant being their child. While in school his friends talk about the superhero. At that time James realized he was a disappointment. He should be a strong, wise spawn just like his parents. Because of that James is depressed, shy and he avoiding being friends with other children. But his mother often raises his spirits, giving him advice and told him that he is different and special. His father never stops telling him he knew how this world worked and as long mom and dad love him, it doesn`t matter what people said.

At the moment, the world in the improvement phase. His parents told them they lost many loved ones. They show him a photo, they claim as their friends and family that they had lost. His parents told an alien named Thanos was eliminate half of the world's population. James could not imagine how the world was before Thanos. He grew up in a sad world. He lives in moderation but he is grateful that he still has his parents. He had met some of his parent’s friends. The man named Clint, Rodney, Bruce had visited his house. He never met Tony and Thor until he was 12 years old.

The more James grew up he became a normal teenager. The disease he had suddenly disappeared. He didn`t realize he had super serum. When he was a sick child, he had lifted a three-seat sofa to find his favorite toy car under the couch. He was only three years old. He thought it was just a coincidence. At the age of teenage years, he enjoyed sports and began to learn self-defense from his parents. He is getting better, his body becomes healthier, and the girls start chasing him. He was red-haired, bright-skinned, blue-eyed, thin lips, and a handsome face. He brilliant at school, do well in the sport even become a leader in the baseball team. Even so in his heart, he is still a child that was sick, skinny and has an anxiety issue. He began to pay attention to the most in need. Because of his childhood experience makes James sensitive human, kind hearted, considerate and, love animals.

James joined the Avengers when he was 18 years old. He began to realize this is what he wanted to do in his life. He wants to help others in need. He's just like the other Avengers kids. He obtained inspiration from his parents. Despite being denied at first, Natasha finally willingly let James make his own choice. He is acquainted with Monica, Cassie, Morgan, Harley, Thorun, and Francis. They eventually become close friends his avenger's friend is his second family. In his young age, James became the leader of Avengers like his father. His suit and shield were created by Morgan Stark.

His parents are the person he loves the most in his life. They take care of him until he grows up to become an amazing man and a hero. Steve and Natasha are everything for James. He is still close to his parents even though he becomes an adult. When he returned home in January 2043, he found his parents absent from home. He tried to contact them but could not be reached. While he was looking for his parents James heard panic screams from his neighbors. He saw his neighbor disappeared before his eyes and became dust. He ran to a neighborhood friend and found many other people who were also the victims. He panicked and while check on his smartphone there are catastrophic event happens in the world. Billions have been missing with no reason.

James contacted another Avengers, Morgan, and Cassie successfully make contact with him. They both asked to meet at the Avengers headquarters. Morgan finds her father missing and Cassie loses his mother and stepfather. While the other Avengers were confirmed missing, they are also among others who missing massively. James now knew the fate of his parents

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Avengers HQ 2025 (Current Time) When the Avengers heard the story of James Rogers they didn`t believe what they heard.

Rodney asked how did they come here. James explains that they have Cosmic Strings technology that allows them to travel elsewhere. They have seen that one of the universes has eliminated the entire timeline. And that timeline is where young avengers live. Now, something has happened in another timeline that disturbed their timeline that it become the reason people vanished.

They come to fix the original timeline and bring back their friends and many others. But they are not sure how and why it happened. They need to know what is happening in this universe. They let the current Avengers tell what happened in this universe.

They find that many other things different from their world. In their world, Tony still alive raises his children and his family with Pepper. Thor was married to a woman and also his friend named Sif who had a daughter named Thorun. Clint was recovering from the loss of his entire family and he also met another woman named Bobbi and married and had a Francis as their child. Dr. Hulk lives alone to study and open his own hospital. And Natasha and Steve are married and James is their child. And most The Avengers they found here should have died after Thanos in 2018.

"Here Steve and Natasha are just friends and partners, they are no more than friends," Bucky explains though in the heart he is also uncertain if they are just friends. They spent a lot of time together maybe they are maybe they not.

"Wait a minute, Captain America and Black Widow, anyone? This news should be the hottest story in the tabloids." Scott was also surprised by James's story. But he also did not know them both very closely.

"But Steve and Natasha never married in this universe then how James still alive? He never exists in this universe." Hope finally breaking the biggest question.

"You are right. We still don`t know how that happens. We probably will find an answer soon." Morgan agrees with Hope. She felt weird as well.

"They are my parents, they love each other, not because I am their child, I know how close their relationship is, they are very happy together." James was upset with them. He knows his parents very well.

"So we all live in a very different world all this time, Everything stand on their own " Carol speaks

"My parents told them they had failed to reverse the snap after Thanos did in 2018. In this universe, they succeeded, but the problem is it affected our world. Many of you should not be here.” James said

"If we save our parents, it means we will be safe our lives and everything will come back like before. Save my dad from the dead, then unite James's parents" Morgan gave the idea

"But your father was dead two years ago and Natasha died in Vormir, and Steve chose to live in the 40s," Sam told the truth.

"But we can go back to the past, and I can save my dad. James can go to that place before his mother makes that sacrifice." Morgan said

"I don`t think you understand, Natasha was dead and cannot be reversed, it's not an exchangeable process, that's what I heard from Clint Barton," Wanda recalled the conversation with Clint

"Are you sure? Who can confirm it, you just believe in his words?" James still doesn`t believe it

"Well I don`t know, why don`t you go there and ask the guard for the stone itself? Besides Steve also said that he managed to return all the stones in his original place so that the original timeline would not be interrupted, otherwise he would take Natasha home." Sam a little bit annoys.

"My dad will not do that; he'll definitely find a way to save my mother." James insisted. He knows his stubborn attitude and never gives up.

"Maybe your father loves your mom, but this is the other Steve, this Steve is different, He who has never forgotten his first love, and he will definitely take the opportunity if he can go back in time to live with his first lover,” said Bucky

"If you go back to the past, the reality in the world will change, it will benefit your universe, but not in our reality. I am sorry what happens to your parents, but you should not interfere with the time." Dr. Strange said

"We all live in our own universe, without interruption, why are we suddenly colliding with each other? Why is this happening after a while? There's something going on, why now?" Cassie speaks \

They all being silent.

"How do you know the disruption comes from our universe?" T`Challa asked

"The cause of cosmic accidents has been detected in this universe," Morgan explained

"What do you mean?" Carol asked again

"We ask a few people who know about these things, but we don`t know how and who does it, that's why we came here" James answered

"Who is the best person to ask about time travel?” Morgan asking because everything seems confusing

"Maybe you can ask Dr. Banner” Scott remember he was the one who builds the quantum tunnel two years ago

#Steve Rogers #natasha romanoff #Romanogers #romanogersweek #steve x natasha #james rogers #capwidow #Avengers #avengers endgame

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elrondsscribe · 5 years

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ENDGAME SPOILERS and Peggy Carter.

SERIOUSLY. ENDGAME SPOILERS BELOW. DO NOT WATCH IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN ALL OF ENDGAME. (Also spoilers for both seasons of Agent Carter, as if anyone cares about that lil’ show.)

Thesis statement: I’m not sold on Steve/Peggy as told in Endgame.

QUICK PRELIMINARY NOTE: All of what I’m going to say pertains to these characters strictly as their characters have been set up by the MCU films. I’m not familiar with the comics, and therefore all the different comics storylines for the characters don’t factor into my understanding of these people.

Let me begin by saying that I have no personal stake in the movie-canonization of Stucky. I know that probably makes me a bad queer MCU fan, but I can’t help it. I say this because I’ve observed that some of the hate toward Endgame centers around “I didn’t get my Stucky ending! Cowardly, homophobe-pandering Marvel!” and while I both like shipping Stucky in fanfic and sympathize with where the Stucky-stans coming from, I just don’t share the sentiment.

Let me also say that I like Steggy, with caveats. What do I mean by that? I mean that I loved and appreciated their relationship in CA:TFA, but don’t think that a marriage between them would have worked. I feel about Steggy the same way I feel about Romanogers: I see both pairs as great lifelong friends, and absolutely kickass working partners, but not necessarily as happy domestic partnerships. While Nat’s entire personal code is different from Steve’s, Peggy is too like Steve in her combination of mastery and stubbornness. So, while I do ship Steggy, I do not necessarily ship Steggy-as-Endgame.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, I like Peggy Carter herself; I consider myself something of a Peggy Carter fan. And the reason I’m so neutral on Steggy-as-Endgame is precisely because I like and respect Peggy. See, some of the Peggy stans around here dislike Steggy-as-Endgame because it robs Peggy of narrative agency. See, in the original timeline, Peggy eventually had a husband - who wasn’t Steve. I know that there weren’t a lot of people who watched Agent Carter, but I did, and Season 1 ended with . . . well, with Peggy closing the door on the romance-with-Steve chapter of her life.

We even got a hint of who her eventual husband might have been in Season 2. (You dozen other people who watched the show: Remember Daniel Sousa?)

And Steggy-as-Endgame snatches all of this away from her.

I say all this because I’ve seen an accusation that people who don’t like Steggy-as-Endgame simply resent and disrespect Peggy for ‘breaking up my Stucky ship,’ which is manifestly not the case.

And okay: this next point adds another layer of Nuance (ugh), but think about the long-term emotional implications of this version of Steve going back in time and living with Peggy. Either he would try to hide his extra decade of 21st century life from her, which she’d see through, or he might try to tell her about it, which she probably wouldn’t believe, both of which would lead to eventual distance and even estrangement. And either way, a Steve with all the experiences and memories of time-traveled-Steve would himself be too changed to easily return to the same emotional rapport with Peggy that he had before going under the ice - again, I imagine eventual estrangement or at best a growing distance.

In other words, as emotionally riveting as that last Steggy dance scene was in the film, and as blissfully as CGI-old-Steve may have said “It was beautiful” about his life with Peggy . . . I just don’t see Steggy-as-Endgame ending happily.

Now I do realize that one of Endgame’s most prominent themes was that of ‘we don’t move on.’ I realize that the long-term confirmation of Steggy was an important motif within this theme (on my second viewing of Endgame, I noticed the near-constant cinematic attention that the film kept drawing to Steggy). However, I don’t necessarily think that, for the characters of Peggy and Steve, this version of their story was the best outcome for them. In short, I think that the characters of both Peggy and Steve were sacrificed on the altar of the ‘we don’t move on’ theme that drove Endgame.

Now I’ve mentioned Bucky before, but I do also want to say that, as Steve’s friend, I’m not sure why Messrs. Markus and McFeely saw fit to keep him separated from Steve. If Steve was going to return to the ‘40s, why would Bucky not return with him? The Steve-Bucky friendship was one of the most hyped-up motifs of the MCU - by previous Russo films! (”I’m with you to the end of the line - oh wait, I’m actually not!”) Why couldn’t they decently finish off one of their own themes?

And yeah, okay, you can argue that Bucky going back to the ‘40s creates a plot-hole because ‘Bucky-in-secret-HYDRA-captivity and post-torture-time-traveled Bucky in the same decades!’ but that sort of applies to Steve too - like, how did time-traveled-Steve explain to Peggy, and the rest of the world, how he got off that doomed plane??

To clarify: I loved almost everything else about Endgame. The “oh-so-cringe feminist moments,” the going-out-with-a-bang end of Tony’s hero arc, the incredible journey of Nebula in particular, the emotional highs of the Great Battle, the Avengers-passing-the-torch motif - I’m not kidding, I really loved most of the film. I just didn’t love the way that Peggy and Steve (and Bucky) got sacrificed for Overall Movie Theme-ing (theming?).

And I feel like that’s subpar theme-ing.

#endgame spoilers #agent carter spoilers #peggy carter #steve rogers #bucky barnes #steggy #stucky #canonized ships #daniel sousa

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fanfictiongreenirises · 5 years

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everyone’s so up in arms about Steve’s ending that I have to add to the bonfire. note: I love Steve and I love Peggy and I was a very big Stucky and Steggy shipper for a long time even after Civil War came out.

Facts:

- We don’t know exactly what the relationship status was between Steve and Peggy. We only saw that they had one kiss, and had made plans for a single date. That’s it. He knew Peggy over the course of a couple years, maybe less.

- In contrast to that, Steve in the 21st century has so much going for him. Hell, the Russo brothers spent an entire movie getting him to face and move on from his past (CA:TWS). Now, he’s an integral part of so many things. He has friends and family. He’s part of the community - he took over Sam’s job in the VA as well as he could during the five years Sam was dusted, and in the short scene we get from this, we can see that Steve’s very much engaged and interested in the lives of the people in the group. He’s making an effort like we’ve never really seen him make, if not for himself then for the good of others because of a feeling of guilt that he didn’t defeat Thanos, perhaps.

- In assuming that A:IW takes place in 2018, Steve has spent twelve years in the 21st century by now. He’s been around the team for over a decade. Regardless of the life he’s built here, it’s more than what’s waiting for him at the end of the war, because the only thing there for him is Peggy. Bucky isn’t there anymore. What exactly does he think he’s going back to?

- Steve Rogers isn’t a man who can sit around while there’s injustice that he can stop. It would drive him mad to do that. There’s no way he would be content to plant himself in a post WWII setting (or even during the war) and not meddle in things that happened between then and when we see him at the end of the movie. One of these things is Bucky.

- Bucky is being actively tortured and brainwashed, and you think that Steve “I’m with you till the end of the line” “even when I had nothing I had Bucky” Rogers could leave Bucky there? Hell no. Not only that, but SHIELD being infiltrated by Hydra - the entire weight of TWS is lost because of this ending. One of the main things Steve worked through in that movie was that his sacrifice meant nothing, that he hadn’t managed to end Hydra and that it was still very much prominent and more powerful than ever.

- Peggy had a life. She didn’t mourn Steve until the day she died. She went out and created SHIELD and had enough family that she had a niece. She was highly respected and well known, judging by the number of people at her funeral.

Conclusions:

- It basically wipes away any and all character growth Steve had regarding moving on and settling in this time and place. It makes no sense that after twelve years (think of what you were doing a decade ago and how much your life has changed in that time, okay) he’d still be as ready to go back and live in the 40s as he was when he first came out of the ice. What do all the arcs he’s gotten between the end of CA:TFA and A:IW even mean in the face of that?

- It implies that Steve doesn’t care about the timeline or any of the problems - global or personal - that occur that he knows about and can fix. He knows what’s happening to Bucky. Are you telling me he wouldn’t try to fix that and rescue Bucky? All for the sake of his own happy ending? That’s not the Steve Rogers I know.

- A major point that I keep seeing is the argument that this had already happened and was always going to happen, but Marvel disregarded that in favour of a really weird “the past is the future self’s future” explanation, which makes little sense to me, because that may be true, but it’s everyone else’s present, and their presence in the past will have butterfly effects. Steve essentially created a separate timeline where he goes back to the past and the future will change accordingly.

- The fact that they basically used Peggy as a source of angst and manpain is also very obvious in this movie, and it’s now even more obvious in the past movies of the Russos if you look back on it. Peggy’s only really been present twice: first when Steve’s visiting her and she forgets him and remembers all over again, and second when she dies in CA:CW and is essentially fridged to kickstart the emotional plot of the movie. In this movie, they reduce her to this obtainable figure who represents something that Steve appears to want - a retired normal life with the person he loves. She has no real purpose in any of the Russos’ films other than that.

What I’m mad about is that they took Peggy and Steve’s character development and basically shoved it all in the trash.

#steve rogers #a4 spoilers #avengers endgame #ae spoilers #avengers spoilers #spoilers #a4

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miss-musings · 5 years

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Explaining Cap’s last two scenes in Endgame

DO NOT READ THIS UNLESS YOU’VE SEEN ENDGAME. SERIOUSLY! I HAD THIS PART OF THE MOVIE SPOILED FOR ME, SO DO NOT READ BELOW THE JUMP OR SKIP THE REST OF THE POST UNLESS YOU’VE SEEN IT. PERIOD. THANKS!

So, like many people, I had a problem with Captain America’s final adventure in Endgame. The emotional beat of it wasn’t what bothered me; it was the temporal reasoning. How could Old Cap be on the bench with everyone post-Endgame even though he went back in time and lived a life with Peggy and it wouldn’t be the same timeline???

The movie goes out of its way to explain how time travel works in this universe, versus other time-travel-related movies. And let me summarize it for you.

Basically, in movies and TV shows, there are generally three main ways that the mechanics of time travel work.

1. There’s a causal loop. Whatever happened in the past has always happened, and anyone from the future trying to interfere with the past doesn’t work, because it’s what’s always happened. Think of the original Terminator movie.

2. There’s a single timeline and traveling back creates a ‘ripple effect’ on it. If you travel back to the past and change *anything*, it will cause a ‘butterfly effect’ on the future, and the future you came from will no longer exist. Now you will be traveling back to a different, effected future. Think of the Back to the Future franchise, or how Barry used time travel in episode 2x17 of The Flash.

3. There’s basically a multiverse of various timelines, and you when you travel back in time, you’re only changing the course of events for another timeline, not your own. Think of Future Trunks and Cell in Dragonball Z or Future Janeway in the series finale of Star Trek: Voyager.

Now, #3 is how Endgame does its time travel, essentially. This makes sense, as its the one that involves or creates the least amount of paradox. Banner/Hulk explains that no matter what they do in ‘the past’ (read separate timelines) they cannot change what’s already happened in their own past. Instead, anything that changes (like Loki stealing the Tesseract or 2014′s Thanos finding out about the Infinity Stones early), creates alternate timelines which are then like their own little universe.

Ok. So, let’s define terminology then.

Let’s say the main universe, the one where Infinity War happened and then Thanos destroyed the Infinity Stones is Universe A. And, let’s say that any alternate timeline(s) that were created by the team’s meddling (Loki escaping, Thanos coming to Universe A, etc.) are collectively Universe B. Don’t know whether it’d be the same timeline or separate ones, but I don’t think it really matters, because we’re just going to be focusing on Cap and his time-travel adventure.

So, Cap from Universe A travels back to Universe B and puts the stones back where and when they were taken from. Then, he travels back to the 40s to spend the rest of his life with Universe B’s Peggy.

Now, again, this doesn’t have any effect on Universe A. This isn’t like Back to the Future. Universe A’s Peggy mourned Steve, helped start SHIELD, married another guy, had kids, etc. We don’t know what Universe B’s Peggy did, other than dance with Steve in that final shot.

A lot of people are upset because it means that Cap let everything in the MCU happen -- Hydra, Infinity War, etc. He didn’t save Bucky. Blah, blah, blah.

NO. Because here’s what *I* think happened.

Again, this is just conjecture.

So. It’s been a while since I watched Captain America: The First Avenger. But, I believe Cap was like 25 or so when he was frozen at the end. That means when he was thawed out in 2011, he was still 25 (biologically). So, we know that Endgame takes place in 2023, as they say it’s been five years since Infinity War, which canonically happened in 2018. So, let’s say Cap is about 35-40 during Endgame.

Granted, I don’t know how the Super Soldier serum works on his aging/metabolism, but let’s say that he ages at the same rate as a normal person.

Now, then at the end of Endgame after he puts the Infinity Stones back, he travels back to the 40s and lives out the rest of his life with Peggy -- in Universe B. Except that means that, if Cap was 35-40 when he arrived in Universe B’s mid-40s and then lived until 2023, he would be 113-118 years old on that bench. Not impossible, but he definitely didn’t look like a 113 year old. (Again, I’m assuming he ages normally with the serum). He looked more like he was in his 80s.

And, plus, it doesn’t make sense with how the timelines work in this movie anyway. Even if Cap really lived to be 113 years old in 2023, he wouldn’t be sitting on that bench, because as we discussed, he would be in a completely different universe (Universe B).

Here’s what I think happened.

Our Cap (of Universe A) went back and lived his life with Peggy in Universe B. Maybe he couldn’t really be open about the fact that he was Captain America/Steve Rogers, as his Universe B self is still frozen and would have to be thawed out before Universe B’s 2012 attack on New York takes place. Maybe he does what he can to stop Hydra or defend people or whatever. That seems very Cap. Anyway. So, maybe about the time that Universe B’s 1990s roll around, he’s gotten older and realizes that he’s at the end of his life. He and Peggy have lived together happily for 40+ years and -- plus -- Universe B’s SHIELD is probably going to find his Universe B counterpart in the ice within the next few years.

So -- this is my hypothesis -- once it reaches the 1990s (or whenever) in Universe B, Cap gets back in his little time travel suit one more time and goes back to Universe A post-Endgame. Maybe he gets back a little bit before they send his younger self back to Universe B with the hammer and the stones. Or maybe he makes his original time stamp. He just doesn’t land in the spot they expect. Either way, he’s sitting on the bench, waiting to talk to Sam.

That’s the only way this makes sense -- Cap would’ve had to travel back to Universe A from living the his life with Peggy in Universe B. He likely kept the suit and maybe one of the Pym Particles to do exactly that (or he had Universe B’s Pym make him some). Plus, we saw that the Avengers were able to pop back and forth between their own universe (Universe A) and the one or multiple alternate timelines they created with their meddling somewhat freely. There was no ripple effect on Universe/Timeline A.

The time travel HAS to work this way in the MCU, because otherwise, with 2014’s Thanos being killed in 2023, that means that Infinity War wouldn’t have happened, and thus all the events of Endgame wouldn’t have happened either. See. Paradox?

This would allow Cap to live his life in Universe B doing whatever he wanted -- stopping Hydra, helping Peggy start SHIELD, saving Bucky, etc. -- WITHOUT it impacting Universe A. Because, again, as we discussed, that’s now how time travel works in this movie.

We just have to make the assumption that Old Steve traveled back to Universe A at some point, off screen, and is sitting there on the bench, waiting to talk to Sam at the end of the movie.

Boom. Problem solved, and all your little headcanons about Steve being a badass in Universe B can still be valid.

#steve rogers #endgame #avengers endgame #captain america #mcu #marvel #marvel cinematic universe #peggy carter #avengers #avengers 4 #the avengers #avengers spoilers #endgame spoilers #avengers endgame spoilers #spoilers

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unrequitedloveisabitch · 5 years

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ENDGAME RAMBLE + HEADCANONS (SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY)

There’s AT LEAST three different timelines now. The main one, which is the one that we saw. The 2012 one, where a lot of shit got changed because they went back (but IS NOT the past for our current timeline anymore). And the 1950′s one, where I’m assuming Steve went back to, which also NOT the past for our current timeline ANYMORE.

They are all separate and do not interfere with each other! They mention as much in the movie when they say that time doesn’t work like it does in any other movie we’ve seen in Hollywood. Going back in time and changing things only causes alternate timelines. It does NOT change the present. EVER.

Knowing all of that, the ending was very confusing. How did Steve appear on the bench all of a sudden? The past can’t change the future, they say that, so he created an alternate timeline. Okay. So when Steve poofed back to his original timeline, from his alternate one, why was he just sitting on the bench instead of in the machine thingy?? And why didn’t they make it more clear that was what he’d done? That he’d poofed? The way they shot it, it almost made it seem like he was supposed to have affected their future by going into the past. But no. That’s not what happened at all.

ALSO. Everyone’s talking about how he and Bucky hardly said anyhting to each other. And I agree!!! It was bullshit! But what they did say was very telling. Bucky says “I’m gonna miss you, buddy,” right before Steve leaves. To me, that says that Steve and Bucky have already talked this over thoroughly. Bucky knew Steve was gonna come back old and give Sam the shield, that’s what that whole scene was about, and that’s why Bucky couldn’t bear to approach old Steve.

Now we’re getting into headcanon territory. I am a hardcore stucky shipper, okay, so I’m gonna touch on the stucky a bit.

I say Steve went back to the 40′s, not the 70′s, or any other time. Because if he went later, Peggy would still be mourning him, and Bucky would have gone through years of torture. I say he went back to right after he went down into the ice. He re-united with Peggy, he rescued Bucky before he could be tortured. Maybe the three of them lived happily ever after together. That’s what I like to think, anyway.

BUT. No matter what time he went back to, the problem remains that there’s two of him now. One that’s frozen in the ice, destined to awaken later, and him. Unless he prevents the other him from being found??

Okay. The shield scene at the end. This is one of the main reasons I think that Steve and Bucky already had a long talk prior to Steve leaving. It’s bullshit that we didn’t get to see it, but I’m pretty sure it happened. Steve reappears, an old man, and Bucky isn’t even surprised. He doesn’t go to him. All he does is look at Sam and tell him to go. Why?? Because he already knew what Steve was gonna do. They had already talked about it. Steve probably tried to give Bucky the shield, tried to convince him to be Captain America, but Bucky isn’t ready to take that on yet. He’s not in the right place, he’s not confident in hismelf, he doesn’t believe he can do it, no matter what Steve says. So Steve decides to pass the mantle to Sam, and probably tells Bucky to look out for him. Steve knows that Sam will help Bucky continue his recovery (that was his job before he became Falcon, after all) and get him in the right place. He knows that when it’s time, Sam will hand the shield over to Bucky. That’s why Sam says “it feels like it’s someone else’s” when he lifts it, but Bucky has used it multiple times with comfort and ease and has never made such a comment.

At first, I was like: Why did they even bring Steve back? Clearly he and Bucky already talked about this. Bucky could have this scene, where he says he knows Steve isn’t coming back, but he left his shield, and wants Sam to have it and become Cap, yadda yada, etc. But then I was like, YES. Bucky wouldn’t take it, so Steve had to give it to Sam. That’s why-- I hope-- they didn’t give Bucky that scene. And I’m hoping all of this happens in ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’.

Other than that, holy shit, the movie did Sebastian Stan so dirty. He got like 2 seconds of screen time. No on-screen reunion with Steve. Regurgitated the same lines he always says. I was extremely disappointed by everything but his sexy black outfit. HOW COULD WE NOT EVEN GET A SCENE OF SAM AND BUCKY FLANKING STEVE????? COME ON!!!! “On your left,” Sam says in the com, then “On your right,” Bucky replies, and the two of them step out on either side of Steve. COME ON!!!!! THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN ICONIC!!!

Okay, I’m done.

#avengers #endgame #sebastian stan #bucky barnes #stucky

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kitkatt0430 · 5 years

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A not so happily ever after time travel story in the MCU:

So Steve goes back in time and we’re supposed to believe that Peggy welcomes this version of Steve back with open arms. That he gets to pal around with Howard and they’re happy and have a wonderful timeline and Steve eventually comes back to the original timeline to pass on the shield to Sam to kick off the Sam and Bucky show. (I would hope it’s alternate timelines so that Sharon Carter did not kiss a young version of her uncle - grand uncle? - in Civil War.)

But...

Steve arrives in the past wearing clothes that are clearly not from the 40s. And he also has that time travel-proof clothing hidden away, which is based on the Ant Man suit and that’s not invented until... I think the 70s? He’s got a slightly different haircut. He’s aged, even if the serum slows that process, he’s still visibly older now than he was in WWII. His manner of speaking has changed, too. He’s used to future slang now, doesn’t use the word ‘dame’ much if at all. It was a habit he got out of that he’d have to get back into and that’s not easy.

Peggy and Howard are both very intelligent people. They’re going to get over the ‘Steve’s alive how wonderful’ euphoria very quickly and start asking questions. They’re going to catch Steve in a lie. In a lot of lies. They’re going to want to know who this impostor is.

So Steve tells them he’s from the future and that he needs to keep history relatively the same to keep it from fracturing into a separate timeline. Howard is quick to point out that if Steve were actually worried about ‘protecting the timeline’ he’d have led with the time travel and asked for help creating an assumed identity so that Howard would keep looking for the Steve in the ice. Because of course Howard stopped looking when he thought Steve was somehow, miraculously alive. And Steve is somehow, miraculously alive... just frozen in the arctic and now Howard is furious and doubles down on finding his friend, the real Steve, and shuts out future Steve pretty hard.

Peggy is devastated too. Because this future Steve? Is not her Steve. He’s keeping secrets, planning to let terrible things happen just so that he can have the happy ending he thinks he deserves to be rewarded with. Peggy Carter is not a prize to be won. She didn’t end her engagement to a good man to join the wartime SSR just to become Steve’s dream wife with a nice house, white picket fence...

So this Steve is there when Howard is accused of treason and neither Peggy nor Howard go to him for help. Why would they? Neither of them trust him. But maybe Howard actually tells Peggy about the vial of Steve’s blood this time. Or maybe she already knows about it because Howard compared future Steve’s blood to the blood in the vial and told Peggy so they’d know time traveling Steve was the real deal.

They even use Steve as misdirection. All the rest of the SSR is looking at Steve, expecting Howard’ll go to his war time best buddy for help, especially since Steve is insisting that Howard is a good man and he’d never betray the United States to their enemies. And then all comes to a head with the Black Widow and Peggy talks Howard back down and Steve makes the mistake of comparing the proto-Black Widow to Bucky.

And that’s when they learn that Bucky is still alive. Captive in Russia and being systematically tortured and turned into what will become the Winter Soldier. And they’re furious. The Howling Commandos get rallied, the SSR under its new leadership of Jack Thompson recognizes the good PR it’ll be for the slowly dying agency to rescue James “Bucky” Barnes. And all resources are put towards locating Bucky and extracting him.

Which leaves Sousa understaffed to deal with the events that follow out of finding the frozen woman in the lake. Steve, of course, doesn’t know about any of the events involving Whitney Frost, so he’s no help at all. It’s Peggy who saves the day again, who gets herself temporarily reassigned to the LA office to escape Steve’s longing looks that make her skin crawl.

In LA, Peggy regains her self confidence, which she didn’t even realize was slowly flagging away with Steve constantly there, constantly expecting her to forgive him, to move on with him while the younger version of him sleeps in the ice somewhere. Howard is still trying to drag answers out of Steve, slowly narrowing down where the ‘real’ Steve is located and also future events they should watch out for.

Arnim Zola and his ilk are largely weeded out of the SSR before it ever becomes SHIELD. Hydra has to rebrand itself in order to survive without SHIELD’s unwitting protection.

Peggy and Sousa realize they’re falling for each other and it ends Sousa’s engagement and makes things very complicated for Peggy because... shortly after Whitney Frost is dealt with, Jack Thompson is murdered, Bucky is located, and Howard has finally found the remains of the plane Steve went down in. Meaning that there are now going to be two versions of Steve Rogers pining for Peggy and she most emphatically does not want to deal with that.

Time traveler Steve has given up preserving the timeline at this point and will settle for the ‘past’ version of him having a happy ending and then he’ll go back to his timeline to enjoy the knowledge that, somewhere, somewhen, there’s a version of himself that got to marry Peggy Carter.

Except past Steve? Is more interested in rescuing Bucky than in pursuing anything with Peggy. In fact, ‘past’ Steve encourages Peggy to pursue things with Sousa if that’s what makes her happy. He doesn’t understand how that other him lost sight of things so badly, but all he’s ever wanted for Peggy was for her to have a life that makes her happy.

Imagine past Steve and future Steve at complete odds over what Steve’s life should be like. Future Steve wondering how he could’ve ever been so niave. Past Steve wondering how he could’ve become so selfish.

By the time the seventies roll around and future Steve can steal more Pym particles for time travel, he’s determined to try again, to get it right this time. Past Steve and Bucky are quietly in a relationship, Peggy is running SHIELD and married to Sousa, and Howard has better support than Obadiah Stane so he’s a better husband to Maria and father to their child, who may or may not be Tony Stark. Though Howard does get to explain to the very paranoid Hank Pym that a time traveling, pain-in-the-ass version of Steve stole the Pym particles, not Howard. (Which goes over like a lead balloon.)

So future Steve returns to the original timeline, then heads back in time again to try again. As long as he still looks relatively young, he can try as many times as he wants now.

Steve Rogers, so obsessed with the past that he never truly lets himself live in the present, grows old never getting what he wants. Because he doesn’t know what he really wants any more. When he passes on the shield to Sam, it’s because he finally gave up. Lived a quiet life apart from Peggy and Howard and anyone else who knew Steve Rogers. Changed his name, faked his records, married a woman he liked well enough, had children, and lived in anonymity, telling himself that McCarthy-ism and the Red Scare and Vietnam and the war in Iraq weren’t his problem. Hydra wasn’t his problem anymore. And so he lives through the same timeline - the original timeline - twice. Lives through the Snap twice.

In other timelines there are versions of Steve Rogers who learns to be happy. Just not this one.

#MCU #steve rogers #time travel #multiple steve rogers #I was not impressed with how Endgame turned Peggy back into Steve's reward for being a 'good' hero #so... yeah

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lionofstone · 5 years

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im going to tag this as well but just in case: this post contains endgame spoilers!

okay so in my opinion tony’s ending was everything that it needed to be; his established character is that he can’t stop so the only way he would ever be able to move on from being iron man is... dying. it strikes a perfect balance between tragedy and contentment. his final interactions with peter and pepper are also....so good

that said i actually hate steve’s ending so much!!! for a variety of reasons:

1) it doesn’t make sense... they established early in the film that anything related to time travel creates a new timeline that’s entirely separate from the one which the film takes place in (which is why loki escaping with the tesseract doesn’t effect it’s place in the 70s, and how nebula can kill her past self without ceasing to exist) so if steve went back to the 40s, he wouldn’t then age into the same future that he left from, but to an entirely different one

2) it’s not fair to peggy-- steve has met her a few times since coming to the ‘future’ and knows that she has a husband and a family and lived a long, good life, so him going to her and taking that away (however oblivious she may end up being to that fact) just doesn’t feel right to me. also, a large part of the reason that she founded SHIELD was because of steve’s death, so him returning there and negating that could literally effect the entire world as we know it lmao

3) it just doesn’t seem in character imo. while i definitely support him wanting to live his life and find happiness, doing it by completely abandoning his friends just. doesn’t feel good to me. and yeah, okay, i get that we’re supposed to think his convo with bucky was bucky giving him the go ahead but that doesn’t mean i agree to that interpretation of the characters! steve going back in time to live out a life with peggy while knowing where bucky is and what he’s going through at that time? Sounds fake!

anyway all this to say that i recognise that the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid ash decision, i’ve elected to ignore it. instead, in my head forever, steve went, had a dance with peggy-- not a life, a dance-- wherein he got to find some semblance of closure and recognises his need to find love and life and happiness. he comes back, has his bittersweet conversation with sam, saying, “i cannot be captain america anymore, but i know that you can” and retires quietly somewhere he can still help-- maybe he runs a support group for veterans, or volunteers with kids, or helps people come to grips with their powers-- but he doesn’t have the unending pressure of being a superhero. roll credits!

#ljs life #endgame #endgame spoilers #avengers endgame #avengers endgame spoilers #mcu #i didn't realise i was so passionate ab this until right now #honestly tho aside from this i actually really enjoyed the movie!!#well. they kinda screwed over thors character but that's another post #i didn't even mind his depression in new asgard i just didn't like him peacing out on his people after everything that they went through #even if they wanted him to join the guardians they could've done it like...#'hey now that we've double our population i'm gonna head out with this space guys to look for a bigger and more permanent home'#bc the whole point of ragnorak was getting thor ready to be king #honestly the movie needed like 3 changes and i would've loved it!#again all this is personal opinion lmao #don't come for me if you disagree please and thanks i am but a simple writing/aesthetic blog who occasionally watches superhero movies

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hellsbells91 · 5 years

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Avengers: Endgame, a day later

What an absolute ride. My brain hurts though. It’s a lot to unpack and this post/review/scrutinisation turned into a bit of a mini-essay.

Spoilers are all below the cut and they are detailed spoilers for the whole film, just to warn everyone:

An emotional rollercoaster that despite us knowing that time travel would be involved still had its moments that kept me guessing as to what could happen, or how it could happen. I still felt the joy and intrigue during the ‘time-heist’ and a moment of piercing dread when Thanos picked up the fully-loaded infinity gauntlet for the second time.

I also loved how Endgame took the time to be immensely fun. Of course it had bleak moments, depressing moments, angry moments, but damn did it make me laugh. Korg, Frigga, OG Hulk, Loki... their presence, however short-lived or ultimately unfulfilling, was like a soothing balm for the soul and reminded us why we fell in love with these guys the first time around. How much charisma and charm can Tom Hiddleston fit into about a minute of screen time of Loki, also without speaking for most of it? A lot. He is on form as always and I’m glad for it.

Infinity War was of a much darker tone, I feel, and I very much enjoy the parts of Endgame that made me feel like we were in the original Avengers again (I mean aside from the actual time travel portions), recapturing some of that joy and excitement and most importantly hope that was a constant comforting presence in the first title.

The emotional beats with Clint and his family, Scott and Cassie and Tony and Morgan (and Howard) also in particular gave the film much needed time to breathe after Infinity War’s ‘GO GO GO crank everything to 11!’ pace, and were for me at least among the most heartfelt moments.

I actually don’t have too much to say about Thor and Bruce, honestly. They were entertaining, I liked them, it was a bit of a shame we didn’t get more of Hulk and that Thor was made to be the butt of a joke for most of the film, but they both got pretty satisfying conclusions at least. I hope Thor shaves and gets a haircut though, I’m not digging the Volstagg look on him.

One sticking point for me was that Thor doesn’t even say Loki’s name once, not even to joke about him in the past or even glance at him in his cell on Asgard and this did slightly annoy me throughout the film, but I’m not overly torn up about it. Maybe they didn’t want to overdo the fact that in most of his films, Thor is grieving for Loki one way or another - we get it, he misses his brother. In the overall very long list of ways in which Loki’s character has gotten shafted in the MCU, this is one of the lesser things.

At least Thor got to say goodbye to Frigga this time, and I couldn’t help but also be lifted (just as Thor was) by her words, As I mentioned before, this was one of those times during the film that I got to be filled with hope.

The supporting cast were also great, and I’m kinda happy that they didn’t give Captain Marvel a bigger role, along with a decent excuse for her not being there most of the time. I was worried that being a new character with an upcoming franchise, she would be made to outshine the others in Endgame and they didn’t do that. Keeping most of the focus on the original six made Endgame more of a satisfying conclusion to their stories, with just hints of what will happen now for everyone else. Point to Marvel.

Onto fatalities:

So let’s start with the big one, Tony Stark. Iron Man was the first MCU film I watched and he’s been my favourite character (aside Loki) throughout the series. The world is a slightly duller place without him, but whilst it was undeniably upsetting and many tears were shed in the cinema and now while I’m writing this, it didn’t have the sour taste that Loki’s demise left me with.

Because if you’re going to have to go, you might as well save the entire universe in the process.

As we passed over all the characters standing at Tony’s funeral, I was sad, but not enraged. I was struck with this sense of ‘none of them would be here without Tony’ and it left me feeling just bittersweet about the whole thing. And after a few minutes when Happy asks Morgan if she’s okay and she says she is, I know that the characters, and myself, and everyone else will be too.

Of course we will be.

What a wonderful, hopeful ending.

I was pretty satisfied with Natasha’s end also, to be honest. I didn’t always love her presence in past films, but I can appreciate that her story in the MCU has been all about trying to do what she thinks is right, even if it sometimes means going against allies. Her sacrifice is an act of love, and hope. It’s not done out of guilt, she’s not trying to make up for past mistakes, it’s not framed as punishment - she’s just doing what she can to ensure that everyone else, especially Clint, has the chance to carry on - just like Tony does. So, like Tony, I’m more bittersweet about it than angry.

Loki on the other hand died brutally and needlessly - that whole opening scene in Infinity War caused so much controversy on how odd, cryptic, out of character and poorly edited it was that a lot of people straight up assumed that there just had to be more going on, there’s no way such accomplished filmmakers could be so sloppy! But like the other inconsistencies in Infinity War, Endgame offers no answers other than yep, the filmmakers really are that sloppy.

So with the major deaths out of the way, onto some bad stuff. This film is excellent to watch don’t get me wrong, just don’t start thinking about the time travel implications for more than 5 minutes. Because whilst the film takes the time to establish its own (confusing) set of rules for time travel, it then proceeds to play pretty fast and loose with those same rules.

Yes I’m going to complain about the timey-wimey stuff.

It’s a shame that the film that takes such care in adding in so many references to the past films, would take such liberties in other areas. I joked with my friend that i’d need a diagram to work it out so that it makes sense, and that has not changed so if anyone here can explain it, please let me know because I’m not a scientist, time travel or sci-fi expert and I can’t wrap my head around it.

By the logic that Gamora is alive in the 2023 present and her death has been effectively erased, so must Loki’s, Heimdal’s and the other Asgardians’ deaths be erased. Gamora cannot simultaneously be sacrificed for the soul stone but not exist in the timeline that led her there. Despite the film telling us the past can’t be changed, it seems that past versions of characters can change their own future, but then also have that alternate future have no bearing on the original timeline.

Using that logic Natasha and Tony could simply be brought in from an earlier time. No one ever need die again because they can just be brought forward from the past without consequence to the current timeline. Maybe this will come up in the future again, maybe we’ll learn that taking people out of their timelines has severe personal consequences as they start to remember multiple lives and states of being, a bit like Nebula, which would then give a solid enough reason as to why people shouldn’t just be brought back and could inform the plot of Gamora’s new existence in GOTG3, along with Loki’s TV series next year.

It still wouldn’t explain how Steve manages to pull this off without any consequences to himself and the fact that he lives in parallel to another Steve Rogers, but it would be something I guess? Even so, by going back to what appears to be the 40s/50s and staying there, Steve has also changed Peggy’s timeline (that’s one of those rules broken), and it would be a bit too dark for Marvel to link up Peggy’s eventual alzheimer’s with the fact that she has effectively led two separate lives, one with Steve and one with her husband and children - unless they’re gonna tell us that Peggy left her husband to be with Steve?? And are you telling me that Steve would sit back and not tell Peggy about HYDRA? Or help to free Bucky sooner?

Also Steve must have re-infected Jane with the Aether. Nice one Steve. And this putting the stones back where they came from would have also meant having to avoid the time-heist troupe, lest they see Steve again and figure out they must have won.

Idk I’m thinking about this too much.

The Thanos who is killed at the end of Endgame (... ha) is the Thanos from 2014. He leaves his original timeline and doesn’t return (unlike the Infinity stones) so how is any of what he did between 2014 and 2018 possible? Is the film trying to tell me that Thanos can jump from 2014 to 2023 and be killed but somehow also exist up until he is killed by Thor one month after the snap in 2018?

The film tells us the past can’t be changed when clearly it can. Or is it that the past can be changed but it won’t affect the present?

BUT HOW?

Have multiple timelines been created or not? It’s suggested that by returning the stones, the new timeline that was created by removing them in the first place would no longer exist, reverting everything back to how it was. In Loki’s case, as much as it pains me to say it, as soon as Tony and Steve go back to 1970 for the Tesseract, the alternate timeline Loki made by taking it in 2012 would be essentially overwritten, reverting everything back to how it was before.

There’s a whole lot of maybe’s and what if’s circling around and I hate padding this post with ‘lol idk what’s going on’ but I went into Endgame expecting some answers but ended up just getting more questions.

Apparently the upcoming TV shows have close ties to Endgame, and how cool would it be to see a Loki series in which his 2012 tesseract-wielding-self grapples with knowledge of his own future and plans accordingly until he catches up to the present day?? Watching as this powerful agent of chaos takes a steaming dump on time itself by refusing to stay dead or be erased from existence.

Something tells me though *cough*Marvel’s track record with Loki*cough* that this route will not be taken.

GOTG3 will at least, hopefully, help towards sorting out this time travel mess.

So, ultimately, is Avengers: Endgame a satisfying conclusion to the series? Kinda. Just don’t try to sort out the timelines. There’s more to come yet for a good while, and maybe (there’s that maybe again) we’ll still get the answers we seek.

....

Bonus: I’m reaching higher than the moon here but until told otherwise, the ‘clink clink’ noise at the end is totally Loki getting his handcuffs removed.

#a4 spoilers #endgame spoilers #avengers: endgame #Avengers #MCU #Tony Stark #Loki #steve rogers

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aziraphalesangel · 5 years

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If Cap does go back it creates a separate timeline since you can't change the past/present of something that was already established. Or if he does go back he may not even be her husband since in TWS she says Steve saves her husband. I'm not even sure why Steve didn't say the woman is Peggy???

well... we assume they were married because steve was wearing a wedding ring when he was talking to sam and also based on the dance scene with steve and peggy at the very end. and it has to be the same timeline because steve didn't come back through the quantum tunnel, he was sitting on the bench.

so now i’m picturing old steve hiding behind a tree waiting for his past self to go back in time before going over to sit down. lmao he’s still dramatic af

peggy did marry already, we know this because of tws, and I think also agent carter (but don’t quote me because I’m not finished that yet). this is why a lot of people were frustrated with steve going back; peggy got married, had children. what happens to them now?

a previous anon mentioned that in 1970, when steve would have returned the tesseract, peggy was already a widow, so... it could be that that’s when he meets up with her again... so to speak. we don’t actually know if he went back to the ‘40s... I don’t think

the thing with the timeline... the past is still the same really... steve going back doesn't alter the past (apparently??) it’s just his future... that happens to be in the past. idk the time travel all made sense until this point. but it must be the same timeline because old steve doesn't time travel back

#marvel #steve rogers #peggy carter #endgame #endgame spoilers #a4 #anon #ask

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dtissagirl · 5 years

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I fought the war but the war won

Warning: all the spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.

OF COURSE I have no doubt Natasha would sacrifice herself for the world in a heartbeat.

And between her and Clint, it's obvious her thinking is he can have a future with his ~family~, and she's obviously been insanely isolated these last five years, and filled with regret, and sacrificing herself for her found family [and saving the universe in the process] is worth it for her.

But my problem is I don't acknowledge the existence of Clint's family because that's a dumbass story idea from the worst movie ever GO AWAY LINDA CARDELLINI.

And watching Nat and Clint back together made my heart ache because those two belong together -- romantically if you prefer it so, but mainly together as in partners that work insanely well together in a fictional narrative. They have had this lived-in chemistry from the first Avengers, and I didn't realize how much I had missed it until this movie.

[Fuck Joss Whedon with a cactus forever.]

[Someone make me that Black Widow movie and show me Budapest. I DESERVE IT.]

...

And then the scene with all the dudes in the lake angry-mourning Nat looks REALLY REALLY BAD because the only thing that emotionally rings out of that scene is HOLY SHIT THEY FUCKING KILLED THE ONLY WOMAN OH MY GOD PLEASE END ALL MEN WRITING SUPERHERO STORIES BECAUSE THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW HORRIBLE THE OPTICS ARE WHEN THEY FUCKING KILL THE ONLY ORIGINAL WOMAN AVENGER IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE MOVIE THAT'S SUPPOSED TO CELEBRATE THEIR LEGACY. HOLY FUCK.

...

Holy motherfucking shitballs what they did to Thor was a supreme case of extreme fatphobia. So fucking embarrassing. And they could have done the exact same depression/PTSD shit without a fat suit. Fatness is NOT a character flaw, and for this movie to think it's okay to portray it as such, and for most people in the audience to not even realize how horrible this is... well, that's the fatphobic world we live in everyday wherein thin people don't realize how fucking horrible they are about fatness ALL THE TIME. Ugh.

And hey, I think Hemsworth is a comedic genius at this point, and I'm super glad Hollywood at large has realized he can run circles of funny and comic timing around everybody else [THANKS, GHOSTBUSTERS!], but the fat suit soured it forever in this movie.

...

Look, I know at this point Goop is a hazardous danger to women's health at large, and call me a hypocrite for separating actor and character this particular time when I usually don't, but I love and adore and cherish Pepper Potts with all my heart.

SHE is the reason I'm so connected to the MCU. My hook wasn't any of the superheroes, it was Pepper in the first Iron Man movie. She's the glue that has made me engage with this universe so deeply for the last ten years. All the fanart, all the fic, all the fanworks ever I've created or consumed in the last decade, it has been all about how much I adore Pepper.

And to see her in the Rescue armor in the final battle, I just. I wasn't expecting it. I hadn't even thought it was ever gonna happen, but THIS was the true culmination of the past ten years for me. From now on, I can say it without a doubt every single time someone asks me who's my favorite Avenger. It's Pepper Potts.

[I also kept thinking about my friend S. She would have been so fucking ecstatic about this. It hit me right in the face when Pepper showed up in battle -- I so dearly wish S were here to see this.]

...

Okay, so, disclaimer: I don't have a horse in the Steve Rogers 'shipping infinity wars. I crack 'ship Steve with Maria Hill forever and ever because they would make the prettiest babies on the planet and I don't even like babies. The only part of Ultron that I acknowledge is Maria wearing Steve's jacket at the party. It's the ONLY thing that happened in that movie, NOTHING ELSE DID.

And I don't even blame Steve in any of this mess, to be honest.

The problem here is structural. The narrative went OUT OF THIS WAY to establish HOW time-travel works in this universe. They even got all gloat-y about how every movie ever made was wrong about the ~quantum physics~ of it. They even had bald Tilda Swinton MAKE A POWER POINT PRESENTATION about the rules of time travel.

They set up ONE very specific rule -- changing the past doesn't alter one's own future, it creates a separate timeline of events. O-kay. Pretty simple rule.

...And then Old!Cap who looks scarily like Joe Biden broke that one rule.

Because he did. He went back in time and put all the stones in their proper place in the timeline[1]... and *after that* he went back to the 40s to live happily ever after with Peggy[2], THUS ***CHANGING THE PAST*** and *****CREATING AN ALTERNATE TIMELINE*****.

So there's no. fucking. possible. way. he could have grown old in the original timeline.

And like. They could have fixed that by having Joe Biden Old!Cap legit come back IN THE TIME TRAVEL SUIT IN THE QUANTUM PLATFORM. THAT WOULD HAVE FIXED THIS PROBLEM. But they didn't, so they broke their own story.

And the consequence of this fuck up is... Steve a horrible person. [And even writing that makes me sad because he isn't? He wouldn't ever?] But by breaking their story and their own time-travel rules, it fucks up Steve so badly I wanna cry. So what, he lived a whole life in this same timeline, and did nothing to change anything? Did he marry the future DIRECTOR OF SHIELD and never told her about Hydra? About Bucky? Did he open a newspaper one day and read that Howard and Maria Stark died in a car accident and went, oops? Did he pretend he was sick when his wife told him she was going to the funeral of her lifelong friend?

Do you see how badly it looks? It's bad. The Steve I know and love doesn't deserve this. Please go punch the Russos in the face, Cap.

Notes:

[1] HOW did Steve even put the stones in jewel form back in their proper places in the timeline when they stole the Tesseract in cube form, the mind stone with the scepter, the whatever stone that was they got from Star Lord that was inside an orb... HOW do you even put the soul stone back, like, does Cap go to Vormir and goes, oh hey, RED SKULL MY OLD BUDDY, MY OLE TIME FELLA, here's your soul stone back? Does he get Natasha back for the stone? Isn't it a soul for a soul? Does it work in reverse too?

[2] Hey, so if Steve lived happily ever after with Peggy in this timeline did he erase her future kids? This is Barry Allen levels of fuckupdness, Steve. Gah. And also -- I would pay actual monies to watch time-traveler Steve explain to Peggy that after he went to her funeral he kissed her niece. This is why I 'ship Steve with Maria Hill, man. No complications. Only pretty.

Also: STEVE ROGERS ERASED THE ENTIRETY OF THE AGENT CARTER TV SHOW. That's pretty unforgivable, man. They even had TV show Jarvis right there in this movie driving Tony's dad around in the 70s to make THIS BETRAYAL hurt more.

...

Four hours after I watched the movie I remembered Tony died and started ugly crying again. I'm glad he had those five years of a good life, I'm so glad he had a kid -- that kid, so obviously HIS kid it hurt, I'm so glad Pepper and Rhodey and Peter were there with him in his last moments. I'm glad he got the proper hero death. It still hurts like a son of a bitch.

...

Professor Hulk is a forever delight and he and I need to become besties so we can talk about quantum physics and eat hulkish amounts of breakfast foods every day.

...

I find Thanos to be a complete bore, so every time he sat and started monologuing I stopped paying attention because I DESERVE TO NOT have to listen to giant purple incels pretending they ~know best~ about anything.

But I did appreciate that there was a difference in tone. This was 2014 Thanos, before he went full on cray cray with the monologuing, so he spoke less [bless], and he went full nihilist I AM GOING TO DESTROY THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE instead of only half of it ~for balance~ or whatever. Because Infinity Wars tried to make it like Thanos wanting to kill 50% of the universe had some sort of ~logic~ behind it, and that was way too close to ~both sides~ shit, and, no, son. Him wanting to destroy EVERYTHING put him in the right proper category of batshit crazy bananapants deranged, and that's where he should have been ALL ALONG, no ~he has a point~ arguments ever valid, he doesn't, he never did, shut the fuck up.

...

I actually really really enjoyed the pacing of this movie. Granted, I'm not stupid and I took a muscle relaxant beforehand so that I could sit still for one hundred and eighty two fucking minutes, but I honestly didn't feel it drag at all at any time [and I felt all the other Avengers movies drag at some point or another].

I appreciated it so much that the set up for the final battle took waaaaay longer than the final battle. [I know people go ga-ga for battle scenes, but eh. I prefer my superheroes as pretty people who talk really fast, and battles make them stop talking.]

My favorite sequence was the revisiting of the previous movies. I loved every single piece of it, and I know in my heart that I'm gonna rewatch those sequences over and over and over again for the rest of forever. THE CAP 2 ELEVATOR SCENE REENACTMENT BUT NOT REALLY OH MY GOD THAT WAS GLORIOUS.

Also Loki stealing the Tesseract [again!] was aces. Sure it was to set up extra time-travel shenanigans, but still. Loki and the Tesseract belong together. Please let this be the premise of the Disney+ series.

...

Even though battle sequences aren't really my thing, I would like to express my DEEP ABIDING LOVE for the part when all the women got together to help Peter move the Big Glove of Kitsch towards the van. My packed theater clapped so hard. I cried.

...

HOW DOES PETER PARKER GO BACK TO SCHOOL FIVE YEARS LATER AND HIS BUDDY IS STILL THERE DID HIS BUDDY FLUNK HIGH SCHOOL FIVE YEARS IN A ROW? WHAT?

...

Also Cap and the Hammer, the actual true love story of this movie. Thor's little "I knew it". I knew it too, buddy.

...

I'm gonna need Marvel to release the behind the scenes footage of the filming of Tony's funeral. I hope the cast had an actual party right there, all somberly dressed in black and everything.

...

After a full season of 22 episodes of television in a movie screen, this was a pretty great finale. Congrats on making the most expensive tv show of all time, Marvel. Excelsior!

#mcu #marvel cinematic universe #avengers #avengers endgame #endgame #movie #spoilers

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green-eyeddragonfanfiction · 6 years

Text

War of Attrition: Chapter 11

Pairing: Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier x Reader Summary: Best friends with Steve Rogers, renowned Howling Commando, and married to one James Buchanan Barnes, your life wasn’t perfect, but it was as close as it could possibly be in the middle of World War II. Then you fell from a train in the Alps, and everything changed. You spent nearly 70 years as a tool of Hydra alongside your beloved, though your past with him was more often than not forgotten. You continue to search through old SSR files for the information you lead, growing more attached to the people in the base than you’re sure is healthy. It’s only a matter of time until you find what you need, but will it be what you wanted? Warnings: Swearing (always), mentions of torture, blood, death Word Count: ~6,327 A/N: I’m sorry

Masterlist // Book One // Book Two

Previous Chapter // Next Chapter

There was a long pause, then, “Understood, Misses Barnes. We’ll prioritize non-lethal weaponry and use normal guns only if everything else fails.”

You crossed your arms and glared down at the speaker. “I suggest you don’t fail, then.”

Fitz grinned tentatively you and Mack gave you an appraising stare. When Coulson spoke up again, his voice gentler than before. “We’ll try our best, Misses Barnes.”

After all the commotion had died down and the call with Coulson’s team ended, you went back down into Vault B. Sitting idly never worked for you, not when you were waiting on something important. You realized the antsy feeling in your gut was a familiar one. It reminded you of all the times you stayed back from a fight with Steve, Bucky, and the guys to run communications and logistics. Every second of it sucked, never knowing if they’d all come back in one piece or not.

Movement in the doorway caught your eye.

Fitz stood there, body half-covered by the wall. “They, uh... They’re back and-”

“Gill?” you asked tersely.

“Alive,” Fitz confirmed.

Tension you’d been accumulating since the call went out an hour or so ago finally left your body and you released a long, relieved sigh. “Good. That’s good.”

“We- We don’t know if- if he’ll be-”

“Brainwashed when he wakes up?” you asked, crossing your arms across your chest. Fitz nodded slowly. “The best way to keep your people safe is to secure him until you’re sure of his mental state. Until you find away to get the brainwashing out of his head you’ll have to be careful, for your sakes as well as his own. Just... don’t treat him like an animal or some sort of subhuman. He deserves better than that. He’s the victim.”

“Like you?” Fitz asked quietly and earnestly, gaze calculating even if his brain wasn’t working at the same level it used to.

You let out a long sigh. “I’m not innocent, Fitz. I’m not talking about the things Hydra made me do, either. I created weapons. Designed them to be just a little more deadly than the opponents, just a bit more efficient to construct. I could have created a weapon from the designs in my head at Azzano that could have ended the war in a week, but I didn’t.”

“Why not?” Fitz asked quietly, picking at some of the peeling paint on the door jamb.

You scowled. “For the same reason I think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mistakes. Catastrophic loss of human life? The murder of civilians? I hate that the world somehow managed to accept that. Weapons that destructive don’t discriminate. Even if they did, who should decide who lives and who dies? So, you only kill all the enemy soldiers. What about the ones who joined up just to protect their family? The ones that joined because they had nowhere else to go? Nothing else they could do? The ones that cried every night while they thought about the people they killed and the friends and loved ones they lost? Should we create an algorithm like Zola and Hydra? No thank you. No, I wouldn’t be party to something so heinous. Didn’t stop me from creating guns with Stark that would get thousands of people killed, though, and reaping the profits.”

You lost yourself in your thoughts for a minute and looked up. You were halfway to apologizing when you realized he probably understood better than anyone else in this base what it was like to lose yourself in your own head.

You sighed. “But that kid? The genius who has trouble making friends and looks up to you? He made a few shitty decisions, sure, but he didn’t deserve to have his brain scrambled. If he hasn’t already, he’s going to eventually remember that he killed a lot of SHIELD agents in The Fall. He’s going to be seriously messed up, so I hope you have a damn good therapist on your staff. Or twelve.”

Fitz mulled that all over a minute, his gaze slightly unfocused. “Have you... have you had any- any luck?” he asked finally, eyes sliding back to you.

You grimaced and motion to the sizeable pile to your right. Four boxes. All thoroughly searched, no likely leads. “No, not yet. There’s a lot here, though, that never made it to the digital era. Things Hydra never knew about because it all stayed buried down here.”

“Is- is it dangerous that... that you’re-”

“Looking at all of this?” you asked, single eyebrow raised. He nodded quickly and you blew out a small sigh. “Honestly? I’m not sure. My memory is good but not perfect, especially not after all the deep fry treatments courtesy of the KGB and Hydra. I’d never give any of this information over willingly but...” your voice trailed off and you bit your lip, not wanting to say anymore.

“But they have- have the- the-” he made a frustrated noise, “-backups. In your brain,” he gritted out.

You gave him a long, sad stare in lieu of answering directly. You didn’t want to admit that there were backups to your brainwashing to SHIELD. Didn’t want that information to exist anywhere, not even in Fitz’s brilliant little head. “There’s a reason why I try not to fight Hydra in person. It’s too risky,” you said, as close as you’d get to admitting the truth.

You could tell from the look in Fitz’s eyes, though, that he understood.

You stayed away from Gill’s room when they brought him in. Apparently he’d come out of the brainwashing slowly without someone from Hydra there to command him. They even strapped him up to some crazy lie detector chair to make sure he was completely free of compulsion. He’d be monitored closely but they treated him like a person, which was all you could ask.

When Coulson had asked for your input on what they should do with him, you’d simply leveled him with a flat stare and asked, “Perhaps you should ask him what he wants instead? Last I checked you deemed him capable of free speech. I’d still veto any suicidal or homicidal trains of thought, though,” you said dryly.

The more time you spent on the base, the closer you got to Fitz. Even Mack warmed up to you a bit, though you caught him staring at you closely more than a few times. May ghosted you like a shadow whenever she wasn’t on mission. Morse, a very tall and imposing but personable blond, seemed to take watch whenever May wasn’t there (you hoped the woman was sleeping. You weren’t sure if May ever slept, but you felt like she needed it with the amount of shit Coulson’s team put her through). You got along with Simmons like a house on fire once she realized you weren’t going to kill her on sight. Her and Fitz were having issues at the moment so you spent time with them separately, quietly watching the way they looked at each other from across the room when they thought the other wasn’t looking.

It wasn’t until a few weeks after your first day on sight that you finally found a lead.

After the fall of Schmidt and Zola, most of Hydra’s assets had gone to the next most senior man in the organization. When Peggy seized the facility with Morita and Dugan all those years ago they’d taken everything on the base, a veritable plethora of occult and science goodies that made your skin crawl to read about. The SSR had taken all the files on the base along with any other evidence such as video reels and pictures and anything that wasn’t downright dangerous. Those files, added to the SSR ones, painted a very gruesome, well-documented picture.

Werner Reinhardt stared up at you in sepia, his beady gaze cold and calculating even through 70 years worth of photo deterioration. His name rang with a sort of familiarity in the back of your mind and it took you a second to realize why. The snake of a man had been mentioned in reports back in the 40′s. Peggy’s team had been after him while you and the guys chased down Schmidt and Zola.

Among the list of data in the files were mentions of a biological sample. It was timestamped before the Winter Soldier mission in Japan but after the fall from the train. The timeline was right. The files made mentions of it every few pages.

BSAM003: Extracted from BSAM002 and stored for further study.

BSAM003: Cells tested against variety of conditions. Results inconclusive.

BSAM003: Samples show cell regeneration similar to BSAM001. Further careful study recommended: Dwindling quantities of BSAM003 remains.

BSAM003: Unrefined reproduction of the enhancements of BSAM002 achieved from tests run on BSAM003. BSAM001 enhancements unreplicable. Original sample consumed by final tests. Cloned samples of BSAM003 lack the original’s genetic modifiers. Cloned BSAM003 tissue disposed of. BSAM002 possibly necessary for successful genetic mutation. Unrefined serum sample to be coded as IS-003 in further reports. Obergruppenführer Reinhardt notified of progress.

You turned over the last page and stared at the small pocket in the back. It was tied up with string and, if the other files were anything to go by, there were going to be some horrendous photos stuffed in there. The Hydra scientists were almost gleeful in the task of thoroughly cataloguing their experiments.

You untied the stiff, time-eaten string that kept the pocket secure and slid the photos out. You nearly blacked out when you saw the first one.

It was you. It didn’t show your face, but it was you. A picture of you on a cold metal table. Your legs were missing below the knee and every gash and scar on the body in the picture were ones you knew intimately. You knew that if the photographers had flipped you over there would have been a single long gash from your right shoulder to your left hip. If they zoomed in on your right hand there’d be a small circular spot from when you got a nasty infected bug bite as a kid.

What horrified you the most was that your stomach had been sliced open in the picture. It was a clean medical cut, not like the other jagged ones from the fall. One of the scientists was holding up a little sign, “BSAM002.”

The next photos were of “BSAM003.”

You set the photos down.

You wanted to stop looking, but you couldn’t.

It was tiny. Maybe four inches (ten centimeters) long. The scale showed it weighed no more than an ounce (28 grams). It was misshapen but unmistakably-

Unmistakably human.

A racking sob ripped through your throat.

Biological Sample: American003. To be stored for further study, was the note scribbled in German on the sign in the picture.

Zola, for all his duplicity and evil, had been telling you the truth.

You cried. You cried until you eyes were red and puffy and your tear ducts ran dry. You cried until your throat was so raw it hurt to swallow. You cried until your cheeks and nose were red from how many times you’d wiped at them.

After what could have minutes, hours, the entire evening, you moved beyond the gentle shaking of your shoulders. You finally had your answer. An answer that would eat away at your soul for as long as you lived.

The only problem was that it raised another question. What did they do with the serum they created? You hadn’t seen any mention of IS-003 in any of the pictures or in any other files yet. You couldn’t rest until you knew what had become of it. It was quite possibly the only thing that remained of your baby. You wouldn’t tolerate the possibility of it being in Hydra’s possession.

You were so engrossed in searching through the files for any mention of BSAM003 or IS-003 that you didn’t realize, at first, that you had company.

Mack, Hunter, Simmons, and May stood in the doorway. Hunter, Mack, and Simmons were all frozen, but May was looking at you with... pity? Was she capable of feeling pity? You’d spent over two weeks around the woman and you still weren’t sure.

Mack was the first one to step forward, his bulky frame somehow squeezing between May and Hunter. “What’s up, Footloose?” he asked softly, stopping just a few feet away from you. You supposed you had to look like hell if he was talking to you like that. You didn’t miss the way May and Hunter’s hands slid to their guns, ready for you to blow up or have a mental break.

You couldn't speak yet. Your throat was worn raw. Instead, you slid a single photo across the desk towards him, your lips mashed into a straight line. If you started crying again you weren’t sure you’d be able to stop any time soon.

Mack picked it up, took one look at it, and swore under his breath. Wordlessly, you shoved the photo of you- cut open on the table- to him. He didn’t even pick that one up. He took one glance at it and looked away.

He placed the first photo down and your eyes followed it. It was like you weren’t in the room, not really. Your mind was retreating in on itself in an attempt to preserve what little sanity you’d manage to scrounge up over the last few months.

You didn’t see Mack come around the desk. You didn’t even register his presence until his huge arms wrapped around you, pulling you tightly to his huge chest. He didn’t say anything, but then, what could he? “I’m sorry Nazis cut your dead body open, stole your unborn child, then brought you back to life like some sort of Frakenstein’s monster”? “I’m sorry the US government let them”?

You could just barely see over his huge shoulder. May had walked forward with Simmons and they were staring at the photos splayed out over the desk. May’s face was tight, shock and fury showing only in the way her eyes wrinkled just so. Simmon’s face was much easier to read. You vaguely registered her muttered horror, talking about the inhumanity of it all from a scientist’s point of view. Hunter was glancing over both of their shoulders. He turned white as a sheet and pointed to you.

“I’m getting you a beer, mate,” he said, already turning on his heel to scuttle out of the room.

“Whiskey. Or vodka,” you croaked after him.

Mack loosened his grip enough so that he could look down at you. “You want to go back to your car? Or into one of our guest rooms? The non-prison kind, that is. I can have Fitz get one set up for you. Or you can hang out in the lab with him. We need to... Well, we need to search the files and you’re more than welcome to take this one with you but-”

You shook your head slowly. Your head was still swimming from the sudden roller coaster of emotions followed by crying out 80% of your body’s moisture. “No, I can’t stop looking yet. They- They made something out of- of the tissues and- and I need to find out what they did with it.”

Hunter returned promptly with a huge bottle of vodka. It was the cheap stuff, but you didn’t care. You took the shot glass from his outstretched hand and knocked back four shots in one go. You didn’t even flinch even though it burned like hot coals down your sore throat.

“Woah! Hey hey hey, I know this is shitty but-” Hunter began, but you cut him off.

“I don’t get drunk easily. I have a bastardized version of the super soldier serum. Doesn’t do much in the way of increasing strength, but it keeps me young and in peak normal human condition with little upkeep on my part. It’s nice until I want to drink away my problems and I have to down an entire aisle of a liquor store to do it,” you croaked, throat now burning from the vodka and the crying.

“You’re supposed to save important information like that then sweep us all under the rug in a drinking contest,” Hunter jabbed good-naturedly, not quite able to pull a smile on his face.

You gave him a weak half-smile that was more of a grimace. “Who or what are you looking for? If it’s around the mid or late 40′s there’s a chance I’ve read about it. Might get you out of my hair faster if I can point you in the right direction,” you said with just a hair too much fondness for them to take it as an insult.

They shared a quick look then shrugged. If they were letting you into their secret information vault they might as well get some use out of it, it seemed.

Simmons gave you a small smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “We’re after information on an artifact one of our enemies is attempting to utilize. The only issue is that we don’t know a lot about it. It was seized from a Hydra facility in Austria in 1945 by Agent Margaret Carter and a small, elite task force. Not a lot of mentions of the Red Skull, but quite a few of one of his lieutenants, Werner Reinhardt.”

You stared at her for a long moment, convinced your ears had just played tricks on you. “Did... you say Werner Reinhardt?” you breathed.

Simmons frowned. “Yes? Why, have you heard of him?”

You slumped back into your chair, a short laugh leaving your lips. “Today just keeps getting better and better...” you muttered, confusing the other four people in the room. You let out a huge sigh and grabbed the vodka bottle by its short neck and down about a fourth of it. Simmons was wincing, Mack’s eyebrows were up as high as they could go, and Hunter was caught between looking impressed and scared. May had a single brow raised, though you couldn’t begin to guess what she was thinking.

“Yeah, I knew ‘im. Not personally, of course. He wouldn’t have lived through that encounter, even without all...” you motioned to your legs and hands, “this. Me and the guys stuck to Zola and Schmidt. They were the biggest targets. Once we got them, the rest would crumble. Or, at least, that was the idea. You can see how well that all worked,” you said bitterly. “Reinhardt was one of Schmidt’s commanders. High up, to be taken down if the opportunity presented itself, but not someone we went out of our way for, not with Zola and Schmidt still on the board. Peggy and her SSR team were in charge of keeping track of people at his level. I read about him in quite a few status reports. Like Schmidt, he was obsessed with the occult. Artifacts of power. Overcoming the limitations of mortality, of humanity. All that crap. Left quite a gruesome trail in his wake, but Peggy’s people managed to keep him more or less on the run.” You took a breath, a mockery of a smile tilting up the corner of your lips. “What made me laugh, though, is that I’m interested in him, too. Already went through his files and everything.” You pulled said file from the box and flipped it open, sharing its contents with the rest of the class. “Complete bio, psych eval, and even a picture of the slimy bastard.”

The four of them crowded around the table, but it was Simmons who spoke first. “Wait, no...” she murmured, gazing at the picture in confusion.

“Yeah, name’s right beneath it,” Hunter said, flicking the picture with the back of his middle finger.

“No,” Simmons insisted. “That’s Daniel Whitehall.”

“What, you mean it looks like him?” Mack asked.

“No, I mean it’s the same man! I’ve stared Whitehall in the face,” she argued.

“You’re joking,” Hunter said, staring at Simmons in confusion.

“Can’t be. He’d be old as hell now,” Mack argued.

You coughed not-so-subtly into your hand and Mack glanced at you, then tilted his head. “Alright, point taken. I just find the chances of another one of you century-old young people existing to be slim.”

“I would have agreed with you before ‘alien’ became a word we use daily,” Simmons countered. She turned her gaze on May, who was staring stoically at the folder. “May, I know I’m right.”

“I know I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s still as young and evil as I remember him, but somehow I am,” you mused.

She huffed and pulled out her tablet and began tapping away at its surface.

“Bobbi was dead on,” Simmons said, flicking through the files. “He did have a personal connection to Red Skull.”

You groaned and held up a hand. “Jesus, stop calling him that. His name was Johann Schmidt. He was an evil bastard with a fucked up face, but I’m sick and tired of this whole Voldemort vs. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named bullshit.”

The four of them looked at you in surprise. “You’ve read Harry Potter?” Hunter asked, file forgotten in his hands for the moment.

You rolled your eyes. “Listened to the audio book. Don’t have time to read when I spend all day writing code or working with my hands.”

“Huh,” Hunter huffed, returning his attention to the task at hand. “What is this guy, Asgardian?”

“It’s like he stopped the clock,” Simmons said quietly.

“Or turned it back,” May said, turning the tablet around so they could see the picture on the screen. It was a photo of Reinhardt, old and wrinkled, looking at them from underneath bushy overgrown eyebrows.

“Where’s that photo from?” Hunter asked, staring at the photo in surprise.

May gave them all a dubious look. “An old SHIELD prison called The Rat.”

“Lovely name,” you remarked dryly.

“How long was he kept there?” Mack asked, staring down at the tablet in May’s hands.

“For life,” she whispered, confusion clear on her face as she looked at the rest of them.

When you knocked on the door to Coulson’s office a few days later, he glanced up at you then back at the screen on the wall across from him, as though he’d been expecting you. “Come in, please, Misses Barnes.”

You stepped inside and were unsurprised when May followed you in. He was the director of SHIELD after all. The last time a Director was put in a Winter Soldier’s path he’d ended up bleeding out from three slugs to the chest (not that that had actually ended up killing him, the stubborn bastard).

You supposed it was better than having your limbs impaled and your entrails ripped out, though. Secretaries always got the short end of the stick, it seemed.

“I’m not going to ask to go with your team,” you stated. You couldn’t go and fight Whitehall. Not when there was even the remotest possibility that he knew the words.

“Good, because I wasn’t planning on letting you join us,” he said not unkindly.

“I know you’re after Reinhardt-Whitehall for different reasons than me. Something about aliens?” you asked, eyebrow raised.

Coulson smiled that secret smile of his and nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Different aliens than the ones that invaded New York a few years back?” you wondered, frowning.

“Different aliens,” Coulson confirmed with a nod.

You sighed heavily. “I really miss the days when the weirdest things in the world were blue laser guns, Stark’s floating car, and Steve,” you griped.

“And when you were never a brainwashed assassin,” Coulson added.

“And when I was never a brainwashed assassin,” you agreed passionately.

“I assume you came here for a reason, though. Other than to reminisce about the 1940′s?” he prompted gently.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to reminisce about the 1940′s? I built about a third of the things in this office myself. Or, at the very least, I designed them,” you said with a smirk.

“Depends, can you fix an original walkie-talkie wristwatch?”

“I s’pose that depends on how bad you broke it,” you countered.

“I set it to explode so I and Agent Skye wouldn’t die trapped in my office on The Bus,” he said, completely straight-faced.

“I’m sure it’ll buff right out,” you said just as dryly. Coulson smiled at that and the two of you stood there for a moment while you gathered your thoughts. “I’m sure May or one of your other agents has informed you of what I found.” You pressed on before he could say something that would either do nothing or dredge up all the emotions you’d buried for the time being. “I want to know when you take him out or bring him in. I highly suggest you put a bullet in his head, along with the waste of space you have trapped in a cage in Vault D, but it’s ultimately your decision. I just need him out of the way so I can gain access to all of his information without risking running into him.”

Coulson eyed you as he leaned back in his chair. “Because you’re worried he can re-trigger your brainwashing.”

You paused for a moment, staring the man down. “I respect you, Coulson. I’m going to say this once, in the nicest voice I can: Do not try and bring me in.”

Coulson smiled at you. “Wouldn’t dream of it. I know that car of yours packs more firepower than the quinjet and the bus combined.”

“Did Mack ever get under its hood?” you asked curiously.

Coulson’s grin widened a bit at that. “No, he could never get it open. It zapped him every time he tried. Not enough to hurt him permanently, of course. Just enough to sting.”

“I set it to taze mode. Figured you wouldn’t be too happy with me if your employee shocked himself to death trying to get into the Batmobile.”

“You call it the Batmobile?” Coulson asked, eyebrow raised.

You shrugged. “Who doesn’t love Batman?”

“You’re best friends with Captain America!” Coulson argued.

You shrugged lazily. “Was best friends. I’m not exactly returning his calls right now. Besides, the three of us rode motorcycles everywhere. Could you imagine trying to drive a car through a forest in Germany? Nightmare, that would have been. So I named it after the most well-known high-tech car I could think of. Batman reruns were on in the background, so... Batmobile.”

Coulson looked incredulously over your shoulder at May, who raised a single perfectly manicured eyebrow, refusing to take a side in this argument. He sobered after a second, though, and fixed his attention back on you. “If I refuse do we still get the information you promised us?”

“Yes,” you said without hesitation. The SSR files had shown you everything you’d asked for. Now it was a matter of finding out what happened to IS-003 and your crusade could finally end. You’d pick up another cross, though. Probably start wiping Hydra off the map, but closure was so close you could almost taste it. “Any information I have on Hydra is yours. If you agree, anything I learn after this will go straight to you, too. That includes information Reinhardt-Whitehall has squirreled away. If I find anything to... to reverse their brainwashing, you’ll be the second to know.”

“Second?” Coulson asked, confused.

You gave him a small smile. “Mister Barnes,” you said simply.

Coulson nodded at that. “Understood. We have a deal, Misses Barnes,” he said, sticking his hand out for you to shake.

You raised an eyebrow at it, then pointed to your own golden-wired hand. “You sure that’s such a good idea, Coulson?” you asked sardonically. “Built in joy-buzzer... that can kill an elephant.”

Instead of answering he continued to hold his hand out for you to take, looking at you expectantly.

You groaned and took his hand in yours. “You’re stupid. That was monumentally stupid,” you complained, even as you shook his hand then dropped it.

“I agree,” May said behind you, though you were thankful her anger was directed at Coulson and not you.

“Some advice?” you said, regarding him from your spot in front of his desk.

“Shoot.” He winced. “Poor choice of words. Go ahead, please.”

“Delete any record of me being here. Burn my lanyard the moment I drive through that front door. Purge the video recordings. Make sure none of your agents mention me. We both know Hydra’s still out there. We know what I mean to them. For the sake of me and your people, pretend I was never here.”

Coulson nodded. “Already taking care of it.”

You nodded. “And...” you took a deep breath. “If you need me, you know where to find me. If I move, I’ll be sure to get a message to you somehow.” He gave you a single nod of acknowledgement. “Now, I... I have something important to do. Thank you for your time and cooperation, Coulson,” you said, pulling a nondescript USB from your back pocket. You placed it on top of the papers on his desk and headed to the door, stopping before you passed May. “Oh, by the way, I’m taking some of the pictures with me. I left copies for your files, but I’m commandeering the originals.”

“I understand. Stay safe, Misses Barnes,” he said quietly. If you weren’t mistaken, there was a note of concern in his voice. Whether it was for you or the people around you was unclear.

You gave May a nod which she returned and you nearly smiled. That was the May equivalent of another person’s exuberant, loud goodbye.

When you made it to the garage Fitz and Mack were waiting by your car. Word traveled fast on the base, it seemed.

“Hey, Mack. Fitz. You got that transceiver patch down under six minutes yet?” you asked the blond by way of greeting.

They both turned to look at you. The blond shifted nervously. “Seven minutes thirty-two seconds,” he said anxiously.

You sent him a bracing smile. “You’ll get it. If I can fix highly-advanced cybernetic limbs without having any conscious idea of what I’m doing, you can patch a transceiver from muscle memory.”

“You can really do that?” Mack asked, eyeing your nano-skin covered legs.

You nodded. “I helped design them originally. Hydra tricked me into it. I always was better at designing things than their engineers. I made them so it’s an intuitive design for me. Even when I couldn’t remember my own name or what year it was, I could repair them. I’ve fixed Bucky’s arm and my leg more times than I can count... mostly because I can’t remember everything,” you said, taking a stab at darker humor. It earned you weak smiles, but you’d take it. “Point is, you can handle it. Coulson wouldn’t put you on it unless he believed you could.”

Fitz nodded. “I- I think I can do it.”

“Oi! Where do you think you’re getting off to without saying goodbye?” said a familiar voice from somewhere around the door that led deeper into the base.

You turned to see Hunter walking with a purpose towards the three of you, brown paper bag clutched tightly in hand. A quick backscatter scan revealed it to be a bottle of booze. Vodka, if you weren’t mistaken.

“Vodka. The good kind this time?” you asked with a smirk.

“What’s the point of getting the good, expensive stuff if it takes three bottles for you to even get a buzz going? Might as well just buy it in bulk, cheap,” Hunter groused.

“I like the taste,” you said, taking the bag from him with a grateful smile.

Hunter made a disgusted face. “You really did live in Russia for most of your life, didn’t you?”

You pulled the bottle half out of the bag and gave it an appreciative once over, then shot Hunter a wink. “Da.” It was the good stuff.

“Before you go, can I get a peek under the hood?” Mack asked, his eyes sliding over the Batmobile longingly.

“Sure,” you agreed easily. Mack hardly believed his luck. The three of them followed you to the front of the car and you placed your hand on the hood, smiling as it easily popped open at your touch. It was designed to open only to your specific hand print scan coupled with a specific electrical current.

All three of them took two huge steps back when they spotted the huge turret-defense guns sitting idly just under the hood. They shot a variation of the Stark’s repulsor blasts.

Mack stared at them for a second, then, “The engine’s in the back, isn’t it?”

You gave him a mockingly apologetic smile. “The engine’s in the back,” you confirmed.

“That’s cold,” Mack said as you closed the hood. He looked a little bit like a kicked puppy. A huge, muscular puppy. It almost reminded you of Steve.

“That’s the brand,” you sing-songed as you walked over to the driver’s side.

You were taken by surprise when Fitz wrapped his arms around you in a tight hug. It was slightly less of a surprise when Mack joined him. You had to nearly bite back a laugh when Mack reeled Hunter in with one of his big hands.

“No, I don’t do- Gah- Why are- Fine, aaaand we’re hugging now,” Hunter mumbled obstinately, his face close to yours, an amused smile dancing on his lips when he realized he wasn’t getting out of the group hug.

“Thank you,” you said quietly, earnest smile on your lips.

“Dunno what you’re talkin’ abou’,” Fitz muttered.

But you were sure he did. They were treating you like a person. A human being with feelings. And emotions.

“Yeah, jus’ don’t tell your husband about this, alrigh’? I fancy myself a tough man but I don’t want to be on Mister Barnes’ shit list,” Hunter half-griped, half pleaded.

You smiled as the group hug broke apart. “I dunno. I think he’d like you. All of you.” You suddenly had the urge to hang around longer, but they had a mission soon and you... you had a mission of your own.

“Alfred, run a system check. Eliminate foreign devices.”

“At once, madam,” came a synthesized British voice from the car.

There was a quiet zapping sound and a piece of metal flew a few feet into the air then landed on the ground with a smack.

“One such device found. It has been removed with prejudice,” your AI, Alfred, informed you.

You turned to smile at Mack, who shrugged helplessly, sheepish smile on his face. “Director’s orders. Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

You smiled at the three of them as the wing doors swung upwards. All three of them ducked in unison to get a peek inside as you slid in. Hunter let out a low whistle, Mack nodded his head in appreciation, and Fitz’s eyes were darting around, trying to take in as much as possible. His jaw was hanging ever so slightly slack.

The doors lowered back down slowly but you were already rolling down the window. You pointed to Mack and beckoned him forward. He gave you a confused stare but acquiesced and leaned down so his head was right next to yours.

You leaned forward until your mouth was right next to his ear and your voice was so quiet you knew no one else would be able to hear.

“You should tell them about the other SHIELD. If I’m being completely honest, I’ve dug pretty deep into any possible dirty laundry on both sides. I know how Hydra works. You’re both squeaky clean. If you’re not careful you’ll end up fighting each other and not the real enemy. And, no, I didn’t tell anyone else about this.”

When you leaned back Mack’s face was hard as stone, not that you’d been expecting anything different.

“Take care, Mack,” you said, flipping your car into gear. “You too Fitz, Hunter. Tell Simmons, Skye, Triplett and Bobbi goodbye for me, alright?” you said, throwing them a brilliant smile over Mack’s shoulder. Mack straightened after a second, eyeing you like he had the first week you’d been on the base.

The big door at the other end of the huge hangar area opened and you sped off towards it, hair flying in the breeze before you rolled up your window and sped out of the SHIELD facility, not glancing back.

Beside you on the passenger sat a folder full of pictures and intel. On the front were seven characters.

BSAM003.

You sighed and focused on the road, avoiding any and all cop cars that Alfred warned you about.

“Get me Bucky’s location, Alfred,” you said, heart heavy now that you’d left the base. The people there had been a small reprieve for the near-solitude you suffered.

“At once, Misses Barnes,” Alfred’s voice said through the speakers. A moment later his voice rang out, loud and clear. “Mister Barnes is currently residing in Puerto Rico.”

“Huh. I was expecting Bulgaria or something. How fast can I buy a boat that can accommodate the Batmobile?” you asked the AI, already getting on the closest freeway headed southeast towards the coast.

“It has been done, Misses Barnes,” Alfred informed you. I’ve changed your route so you’ll arrive in Miami at the marina where your new boat awaits. Estimated time of arrival: Four hours.”

“You’re a peach, Alfred,” you said, already gunning the engine to speed down the freeway.

“Always a pleasure to assist you, ma’am,” the AI said quietly.

You smiled and patted the dash affectionately. “Let’s go see the lord of the house, shall we?”

“I can hardly contain my excitement,” was Alfred’s dry, almost sarcastic response. Maybe you should have lightened up on the snark when you created him.

Next Chapter

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