Sunshadow

Time travelling with an assassin

"Absolutely not." Bucky shut it down before anyone could really suggest it properly.

"He is the best at this stuff! He would be able to destroy them!" Yelena stated. Wait, when had she got here?

"No. We are not disturbing his retirement." Well, technically he wasn't in retirement yet.

"For heavens sake, Bucky, we've been through this before. You tell us not to do something, we do it, it works, you get angry, REPEAT." Nova walked back in. It had been longer than they thought. She didn't even know what they were discussing, she was just rallying back on an earlier discussion.

Basically, during the flight they had been arguing about whether Bucky should be more open minded and Nova was currently backing it up with that.

"Fine," he said. "Fine! You do whatever you want, just tell Steve I tried to stop you." He sat down in one of the armchairs that were dotted around the place.

"Steve?" Rosa asked excitedly. Pepper ran in after her, panting. The tour had obviously been fast paced and was now over.

At this Bucky sat up, looking over to Kiki.

"Rosa and I knew Steve. He helped us, and became quite a good friend to me, when he wasn't being Captain America. Captain America was an asshole, but Steve Rogers was a kind man who gave me money to feed Rosa, and looked after her when I was on missions that he didn't ask about. He helped a lot." She explained to him quietly.

"I know that, but I didn't know he knew Rosa too." She nodded, sinking into the armchair next to him.

"So, we are gonna go get Steve then?"

☾

The smoke had not been seen properly by anyone. Whenever it heard footsteps, it could duck into the walls and hide in the dark. It was a shadow, moving through the dark corridors. Some saw a shape out of the corner of their eye, but dismissed it as a hallucination from being underground for so long.

The shadow moved on from the soldiers it had seen. It could have killed them, but not yet. That would come later. For now, it would just drift down the long passageways, reporting the layout back to its mistress.

☾

"Okay, that should do it." Shuri said, two hours later. They had called her in from Wakanda to set up the time machine and bring back Steve. "You all know the theory of change in time, yes? Oh, for anyone who doesn't, if you change anything you create a new, parallel universe from whenever the change was made. It doesn't erase what happened, just changes it for the others. Got it?"

"So we have to put Steve back exactly where he was before otherwise it will splinter even more and create even more different worlds." Shuri nodded at Bucky's simplified statement, opening her mouth to add something, but thinking better of it and nodding again.

"Who is going to go, then?" Pepper asked. She seemed to want to get this over with, and Kiki couldn't blame her. Last time they had used this, her husband had died.

"I nominate Bucky," Clint pointed at him. "I am not doing that time travel shit again." Last time he had done it, Nat had died.

"How about Bucky and Kiki?" Sol suggested, giving a sideways look to Kiki. She rolled her eyes and glared back.

"Fine with me."

"I don't want to do it, so yeah."

"Sure."

"Don't see why not."

Nova handed her one of the white suits left over from when the Avengers went to go collect the infinity stones. "Buckle up."

"Let's go get this bitch."