so bad guys can't see me bleed

•tape twenty-eight•

Five years later

"I went into the ice in '45 right after I met the love of my life," Cap says to the people sitting around in a circle with him. "Woke up 70 years later." He raises his brows and shrugs. "But you gotta move on. Gotta move on." He pauses, then puts his hand up like he's holding something. "The world is in our hands. It's left to us, guys. And we gotta do something with it. Otherwise, Thanos should've killed all of us." He hits his hands on the arms of his chair. "All right. I'll see you all some other time."

Everyone in the circle gets up and talk to each other as they say bye to Cap and leave the room.

I walk out of the shadows of one of the doorways and start slow clapping. Cap looks up at me and stands up. We meet in the middle of the circle and I cross my arms.

"Bravo, Captain."

"I thought you said you would never come to one of these," he says to me.

I shrug. "Well, I thought I'd come and see what you do with it. So, whatever you said that last bit, I'll take with a grain of salt. But now I have to go and get some coffee before I pass out from lack of sleep."

I go to walk away, but Cap stops me, turning to look at me. "Bucky would've wanted you to move on."

"Yeah, well, sucks for him," I say.

"Cher, I know that your relationship was kind of weird at the beginning—"

"Every great love story starts with a murder—at least an attempted one."

"Okay, that's not really what I meant, but I know how much he cared about you. He loved you, Cher."

"So did I," I tell him. "And it sucks to lose what you once had. Something that you couldn't have controlled. Something that you loved. And something that disappeared in front of your eyes. Something without closure."

"Cher, you're one of my best friends. You're family now. And that means I know you and Bucky better than basically anyone. He would want you to be happy."

"We don't always get what we want, Cap."

—

"Okay, go on," Nat says to Scott when I walk in the room.

He nods. "Okay, okay, so, five years ago, right before Thanos, I was in a place called the quantum realm. The quantum realm is like its own microscopic universe. To get in there you have to be incredibly small. Hope. She's my, um—She-she was my—She was-she was supposed to pull me out. And then Thanos happened, and I got stuck in there."

"I'm sorry," Nat says, "that must have been a very long five years."

"Yeah, but that's just it," Scott says. "It wasn't. For me, it was five hours. See, the rules of the quantum realm aren't like they are up here. Everything is unpredictable. Is that anybody's sandwich?" He walks over to the desk and picks it up. "I'm starving."

"Scott, what are you talking about?" Cap asks.

"So," Scott says, turning around with the sandwich in his mouth, "what I'm saying is, time works differently in the quantum realm. The only problem is right now we don't have a way to navigate it." He starts pacing. "But what if we did? I can't stop thinking about it. What if we could somehow control the chaos, and we could navigate it? What if there was a way that we could enter the quantum realm at a certain point in time but then exit the quantum realm at another point in time?"

Okay, pause here.

You cannot tell me that he doesn't look like that guy from Clueless.

It's been bugging me ever since I met him.