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It’s harder than he’d thought it would be, coming back.
It isn’t as if he made the decision lightly, or on a whim. The what-if of it had trailed its way through his mind the more they discussed time travel, growing even stronger when he’d seen that picture on Peggy’s desk, but in the days before the funerals, he’d truly started to think of it as a plan, something he could make happen. For Peggy and for the world, yes, the answers he’d gained from Bruce seeming to indicate that it was likely that he could make an alternate timeline, one where they burned Hydra at the roots before it got a chance to permeate so deeply that history and legacies were tied to it. For Peggy, all those years that she’d told him about, wondering and holding out hope, wishing that they could have had a life together.
But it is a choice he is making that is, just for once, for himself too.
And so he put aside the half-formed ideas of trying to trust that he might be able to communicate everything via note to Peggy or Howard - the true danger Zola posed, the coordinates where they might find Steve Rogers beneath the ice - and went into this new, regained, unforeseen life with eyes open.
It is still harder than he had realized it would be.
There are the logistics, of course, coming quickly on the heels of the breathless reunion: does he want to be Steve Rogers here, again and still with all that would mean, openly known and likely questioned, or does he want to try to pass beneath the radar, using a false name and past to stay free from overt scrutiny and manipulation and yet always wondering whether someone might realize? What can his place be in Peggy’s life? How much can he change about the events of the last decade, which pieces, so they can try to remake the world without breaking it?
The grief is with him, too, the scabs sometimes broken open by the pain and the missing. He’ll think of something he wishes he’d told Sam, or will do something foolish and half expect to hear a throaty, teasing remark from Nat, or will turn to Howard with Tony’s name nearly out of his mouth (the irony of that not lost on him). They were his family and, from their choice or his, it will be a long while before he sees any of them again.
There is guilt with the grief too, for all that he left behind, for everything left undone in that other life. He does not believe in immutable fate, but he wonders if there is good that he was meant to do there that will now go undone, people he was meant to help or tasks that should have been his to shoulder. He questions whether it is more self-absorbed to assume that he is some sort of cosmic linchpin, that no one else will be able to step into his place, or to have done what he did and simply gone to find his own chance at happiness.
He did think that it would be somewhat smoother, doing things this way around. He’d managed to adapt to the twenty-first century, after all. It had seemed as this learning curve would be reasonable, adapting back to only a few years past his native time. But he is an inch out of step with everyone else, unfamiliar with events or references which loom large at this moment but which he knows aren’t significant enough to be notable decades from now. He has instincts now for the technology he’d once been overwhelmed by and even avoided - his hands reach for his phone more than he ever realized, and it’s strange not to have instant access to the weather report or knowledge of what might be happening anywhere around the world. And more than anything, it is difficult to live as the only one who understands half the things in his head, the only one who knows the day Stalin will die or when the first person will step onto the moon, the only one who would be able to hear the word internet and comprehend its full meaning, the only one who has met a sentient tree or contemplated whether he needs to get a Norse god a Christmas present or had to stand by and survive the erasure of half the universe. Even when he tries to explain to Bucky or Peggy, there is so much, so many pieces that they have no experience with or context for. There’s a loneliness to that, parenthetical to that which he’d felt even after all those years in the future: no one to completely understand him, no one who can be the other half of ten years of his memories, to say this was your life and it happened.
He is finding, too, that even as strong as his memories are, they have not been perfect. He had blurred, somehow, the sharpness of people’s bigotry, how unashamed they are, how unaware or unchecked by even the barest of social pressures. With all that he had recognized in the twenty-first century as progress still to be made, it was harder to remember that his own time was the one they were progressing from, and that it was so terribly behind.
And then there is Peggy.
There are so many things that he had not imagined in his daydreams during the war of a life together or that they had not spoken of when he knew her fading, the two of them wondering what they might have had but knowing that it was far too late for any of it. It isn’t that he had forgotten that she had stubbornness and recklessness to match his own, but he had remembered it as standing her ground in the face of those looking to hold her back, not pushing back against his every argument, nick-of-time rescues rather than putting herself squarely in the latest crosshairs. He hadn’t had a chance to know what it was to be left waiting for word of her, to spend days without her because there were other things which came first, even to discover the small and constant frustrations of living with her.
He still doesn’t regret any of it.
Because regardless of whether people think of him as seeing the world in black and white, he is not afraid of life’s complexities. He knows right, and he can handle difficult things.
So, yes, there are questions to answer, logistics to arrange, the burdens of new and changed responsibilities. And yes, taking on this life means sometimes making choices that prioritize mitigation over perfection. But he has practiced these things for long years, never intended in any of his planning to come back that he would simply retire to leisure in the shadows when there was still work to be done in this time, in this world that they are making anew. Perhaps there are things which he could have done there and then, but there are things that only he can do here and now. Even when the differences are incremental or intangible, they are worth it. It is the exchange he has made, being lonely in his knowledge of how things were or might have been, threaded with the relief and quiet pride that no one else will have to bear parts of that reality.
There were, of course, parts of that reality which allowed him to carve out something bearable, people who he battled and laughed and argued beside. He misses them. Some were already gone farther than he could ever reach, their sacrifice not something they would want erased or undermined. Some, he knows, will miss him as he is missing them, and yet will be able to stand on their own too, taking over the fight there as he has taken on this one. There is sorrow to his memories of them, a jagged edge because he is the sole keeper of that life, no one here to reflect with him. But there is joy at having known them, joy in knowing that when he speaks to them again, they will find happiness in his happiness, that those who knew him so well will appreciate all it took for him to gain that, to make himself choose to reach for it.
And then there is Peggy, and the life that they build together. Because all the flaws and messiness and challenges are reminders that what they have, that all this time, minutes to days to years, is real. They are no longer living with the idealized versions of each other or those known from snatched moments during a war - familiar, yes, and loved, hopeful and yearning for the depth of their future which they never got to live together. Instead, they have to contend with the realities of that future: that they can both be as stubborn and reckless as each other, that time together might not appear unless they make certain to find it, that what they have is beautiful but what they want will take work and commitment and compromise, that starting with the fundamental belief in each other’s strength and integrity is as strong a foundation as they might get.
The effort and the learning are worth it, make it more worth it. Every time they have to come together and talk through some argument, it is a lucky, near-missed thing. Every time he realizes again that Peggy never remembers to write the things that they’ve finished on the shopping list and that when he says something has broken she always insists on examining it herself before agreeing that it is, every time Peggy holds up his socks from the basket of fresh laundry and asks through gritted teeth why he seems unable to take the extra half second to straighten them out so they actually get clean instead of going through the wash all balled up, it is something that they never had before, something that they might never have gotten but for some particles and a suit and Steve's choice. It is so clear that these things are real - dreams lack the frustration, but they lack the truth and clarity of that joy too.
This life, their life, is so far beyond dreaming.
Those difficult things alone he would take, even without knowing what songs she hums - or attempts - in the shower, even without having the chance to talk with her about whatever is on his mind, even without the wedding and the children and hearing her laughter, wide and fearless, beneath the summer’s sky and getting to care for her when the flu dares strike her down come winter, even without each time they have been able to dance…Those things alone he would take, but there is such beauty in all the rest.
It’s harder than he’d thought it would be, coming back. He is still glad that he made the choice, glad he had the choice to make. And he would make it again, would make it again, would make it again, because yes, it was difficult, and yes, it was all worth it.