Chapter Text
Specific epithet
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“You know, if you want,” said Sam, “I can come with you.”*
Steve smiled and shook his head. “You’re a good man, Sam. This one’s on me, though.”*
Okay, phew. As willing as Sam had been to be Steve’s wing for the very last piece of this Escher painting of a mission, he was also more than a little relieved not to be going back in time. Steve and Tony could just rock up to a mid-century modern military base in Jersey and expect to walk right in, but Sam damn sure couldn’t.
Well. He could, right, if he disguised himself as -- like, that’s what Invisible Man was about, he knew that much, it’d been required reading at Grambling -- but he didn’t fucking want to, because there was a very good chance he wouldn’t come out on the other side alive even if he did go full Sambo.
(And he wasn’t about to go full Sambo, not even for the prettiest rocks in the -- multiverse, was the word Strange had used during his hey-we're-all-back-time-to-fight speech? Right, yeah, the multiverse.)
After that Steve went to Bucky next and gave him a weirdly long and serious hug -- but hey, no judgments here, that was the kind of thing partners did. “Don’t do anything stupid ‘til I get back,”* said Rogers like it was some kind of inside joke -- which, to be fair, it probably was.
Sam had gotten used to not being his best friend’s best friend. After all, who could compete with ninety and/or thirty years of history, depending on how you counted?
Bucky smiled a little back at Steve. “How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you.” And then his face got serious again. “Gonna miss you, buddy.”* Yeah, but wasn’t Steve only gonna be gone for like, a minute? Talk about codependent.
“It’s gonna be okay, Buck,”* said Steve, all reassuring like don’t worry i’ll put the stones where they belong and be back before you know it.
Okay, cute, bye for now, time for Steve to go so he could come back and then they could move on.
Banner was standing at the controls, looking all huge and green and self-actualized. Grieving, yeah, like the rest of them, but self-actualized. “Ready, Cap?” he asked, and Steve nodded. “Alright. We'll meet you back here, okay?”*
“You bet,”* said Steve, and took his place on the launchpad of the Definitely A Time Machine, Right?
“Going quantum,” Jolly Green Banner announced. “Three, two, one–”*
-- oh, shit. Was that what they’d done to bring them all back? Fuck, daaaamn, that looked intense.
And here came Banner’s countdown: “And returning in, five, four, three, two, one–”*
-- but no Steve.
Uh, that wasn’t part of the plan. “Where is he?”*
“I don't know,” said Banner. “He blew right by his time stamp, he should be here.”*
Blew right by his -- what the fuck did that mean, and why was Bucky walking away from the Dance Dance Quantum Leap pad like he didn’t expect -- “Well, get him back.”*
“I'm trying --”* Banner was pressing all kinds of buttons, but --
-- and, okay, look, Sam usually had better control of himself than this but right now he was a little touchy about people disappearing and not reappearing, imagine that. “Get him the hell back!”*
“ -- hey, I said I'm trying --”*
And then Bucky Motherfucking Barnes’s voice came floating over from somewhere behind him, and it was maybe the worst thing Sam had ever heard, because he knew that tone, he knew that tone, it was the tone of somebody who knew something you didn’t --
“Sam…”*
-- and how dare Bucky Barnes say his name like that, how dare he -- but -- but -- but there was someone sitting down by the water, someone Sam’s brain refused to recognize, because -- no, wait, what? No. Wait, what?
“Go ahead,”* said Bucky, and this was starting to feel like the world’s worst surprise birthday party.
Sam didn’t actually want to do what Bucky’d told him to, but that was mostly just out of orneriness and not much else, so he walked down to the edge of the water to speak to -- “Cap?”*
“Hi, Sam,”* said a very, very old version of the Steve Rogers who’d kneed Sam’s kidneys three nights out of four over the last two years with his grabby sleeping self.
Well -- the last two years, five years ago.
“So did something go wrong,” Sam ventured, or did something go right?”*
“Well, after I put the stones back, I thought, maybe I'll try some of that life Tony was telling me to get.”*
Sam felt the corner of his mouth lift into a smile. “How'd that work out for you?”*
“It was beautiful.”* Old Steve smiled too, and -- shit, were those dentures? or had Steve’s teeth always looked like that and Sam had just never noticed? Did you even need dentures if you had super serum?
“I'm happy for you. Truly.” Steve deserved it, after all -- he really did. “Only thing bumming me out is the fact I have to live in a world without Captain America.”* You were the last good thing about those colors and you know it, Rogers.
“Oh, that reminds me.” Old Steve unzipped the leather shield case at his feet, made a gesture of invitation at Sam. “Try it on.”*
What.
Zip-a-dee-doo-daaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh --
Sam looked over at Bucky, because, like -- maybe it was Bucky’s turn next? -- but Bucky only did that stupid fucking smile again like isn’t she lovely and nodded at Sam, exactly as if Sam was about to hold his and Steve’s less-than-one-minute-old firstborn fucking child in his arms.
-- zip-a-dee-ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy --
“How does it feel?”* asked Old Steve.
Well that was easy, straight from gut to mouth -- “Like it's someone else's.”*
“It isn't.”* It took Sam maybe half a second longer than it should’ve to parse that, but -- what, what, what, what, what -- oh, fuck, this was exactly like To Serve Man, this fucking swerve that Sam could’ve seen coming the whole time if he’d only just paid any fucking attention at --
-- my, oh my, what a wonderful day --
“Thank you,” Sam said, instead of fuck you. “I'll do my best.”* It was really the only promise he could make that he’d actually keep, because what the fuck?
“That's why it's yours.”* Old Steve offered Sam his hand to shake, and of course Sam couldn’t do anything but shake it, of course, because --
-- plenty of sunshine headed my way --
-- and then Sam saw the ring, and oh, thank God there was something shiny for him to fixate on. “You wanna tell me about her?”*
-- zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay --
“No,” said Old Steve, and -- fuck you, fuck you, fuck you for saying no when you know I can’t. “No, I don't think I will.”*
After that Steve went over to Bucky to have another one of their moments -- probably cooking up another plot between them, like maybe drawing up a binding marriage contract between Sam and motherfucking Ayo or some shit, as if they had every single right to dictate the course of everybody else’s lives -- never mind that everybody else should maybe have a fucking say in their own futures or that Ayo and Aneka were very happy together or just really even taking anybody’s preferences but their own into account at all.
-- Mister Bluebird’s on my shoulder --
And shit, as they walked back over to the pad for Steve to fuck right on off back to his perfect little life in the 1940s, Sam had never been more conscious of the fact that his best friend was a very old, very tired white man who had been fighting for a very, very long time -- and his other best friend, the only one who might’ve seen this bullshit coming and prevented Steve from executing on it? Was dead. Not dusted, not stuck in an alternate dimension, just -- just dead.
But here was the Uncle Fucking Remus of it all: it’d be fine if Steve wanted to opt out of this constant cycle of trauma-repress-fight-trauma and just fucking rest, he deserved it, if that were the only thing it’d be fine, but --
“I know you’ll make me proud, Sam,” said the Original Captain America.
Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck -- “Bye, Cap,” said Sam, and then Steve Rogers was just -- gone.
-- it’s the truth --
As soon as the quantum door slammed shut Sam got that thing the fuck off his arm with a quickness, zipped it right back up into its case where it belonged. “So where is he now?” he said to the Time Machine Grove at large, because what he couldn’t take was Bucky Barnes staring at him in silence like Sam was about to swoop in and solve all of Bucky’s many, many, many problems with one sweep of his Magical Negro Wand.
Yeah, no. Sam only had one Magical Negro Wand, and it was not for Bucky Barnes.
-- it’s actual --
“Our past is now Steve’s future, but it's also our past,” said Banner. “For us, what’s happened will have always happened, there’s no changing history, but he'll experience a completely different future-past. Wanna know the reason time passes differently in the quantum realm? Because there’s nobody around to observe it. Everything is possible, and all the possibilities are always happening, all at once. But as soon as you add sentience everything solidifies, because we can’t exist in eternal uncertainty. When we perceive reality, we’re actually creating it.”
-- everything is satisfactual --
“Think about it like a river. To us, sentient beings, it’s possible to conceptualize with the whole river -- all the different forks, all the tributaries and the estuaries and whatnot, and the fish and the birds and the -- frogs, I guess? I dunno, I’m not a biologist. But we can perceive it in its entirety, interact with it, dip in and out if we want, or build a dam, or… whatever else people do with rivers?”
“Float,” said Sam.
“What?” said Bucky.
“You can float rivers,” said Sam.
“What, that doesn’t make sense, you can float in a river or, or on a river, maybe, but --”
“Shut up, city boy,” said Sam. “Floating a river means getting on a boat or a raft or whatever and --”
“Ohhh,” said Bucky. “Like Huck Finn. Gonna float me down the Mississippi, country boy?”
-- ZIP-A-DEEEEEEE-DOOOOOOOOOOO-DAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH --
“I am not your Negro Jim,” said Sam. He couldn't say that to Steve, right, he couldn't be mad at Steve, but he could damn sure be mad at Bucky. “Fuck off, you talking assault rifle.”
“I am not --”
Banner cut back in before things could get physical. “The point is, each individual water molecule only goes through the river one time. Well -- not technically, right, because of the water cycle, but for the purposes of our metaphor let’s accept that either things have souls and reincarnation is a thing or that by the time the components of that exact molecule get back to that exact river they’ve each changed so much that the molecule is no longer that molecule in any meaningful way, and neither is the river. So there’s no such thing as back to the future, for example.”
Sam grinned despite himself.
“What?” said Bucky.
“It was a --” he shook his head. “Never mind. So Steve is what, floating a different fork of the time river now?”
“More or less,” said Banner. “Every sentient being creates and re-creates their own self-contained reality moment to moment. Sometimes those realities intersect, sometimes they don’t.”
“Okay, see, you said more or less and I thought I understood,” said Sam, “but then you immediately went and made it confusing again.”
Banner shrugged. “Welcome to quantum physics.”
“Either way,” said Bucky, and looked over at Sam like Sam was gonna start shuckin’ and jivin’ for the Winter Soldier’s benefit. “At least we’ve got a new Captain America in our timeline to take his place.”
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck -- “You don’t get to talk ‘til you’ve had a shave and a haircut, six bits.”
“It’s two bits.”
Fuck you. “Times’ve changed, you ancient hag. But because I have charitable love in my heart for my fellow sentient beings, I’m still gonna give you the number for my barber in New York -- that is, if you dare venture all the way into Harlem, colonizer.”
“Only Shuri gets to call me that,” said Bucky. “And I’ve been to Harlem.”
-- ZIP-A-DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-AAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY --
“‘Course you have, you fucking tourist. Here, I just texted you his number. Look him up when you get there and don’t tell him I sent you unless you plan to leave a real good tip, you hear?”
“Sure,” said Bucky. “Good to know all that ‘charitable love for your fellow sentient beings’ extends as far as making sure I get a fucking haircut.”
“It’s not for you,” said Sam. “Jamal was on the other side of the Blip. He needs the business.”
-- WONDERFUL FEELING, WONDERFUL DAY!
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