open rp post;

[thelegacy]

+ Leave me a starter, an idea, a picture, whatever you like! I'll work something out.
+ I ship pretty much whatever, but also very gen friendly.

+ Talk to me about smut first because: underage.
+ Hit me up on Plurk natalia_vdova or Discord (natalia_vdova#0150) or PM if you want to plot something.

+ Open to canonmates, crosscanon, whatever. But note his world is very Bad End

Comments

[vdova]

[ Here's the thing, about time travel: no one really knows how it works. You can sit and argue theories and quantum physics until your mouth goes dry and your voice goes hoarse, but in the end, time will do what it wants. It'll split, refract, retwine, rewind, keep marching forward, and all you can do is sit back for the ride, let time move you as it will.

Clint comes back on the platform, and in the chaos, another does too, and there's nothing to do but let it happen, let Scott and Bruce and Tony and Rhodey and Rocket all try to figure out just where the hell the kid came from, what the implication of a multiverse just might be. But it's all beyond Natasha's pay grade. She's just glad it worked, however it did, that there's a chance — miniscule, a monofiliment — that they can go back and right this wrong. That they can undo what they did.

They leave the staging area, turn off the lights, turn on the security, and go to make plans.

Natasha's always been a bit of a night owl, and that night is no exception either. She's actually making her way towards the training rooms, pointe shoes in hand, when FRIDAY's voice pops up, quiet.

Miss Romanoff, I don't wish to alarm you, but there seems to be an intruder in the staging area.

Her shoes are left in the hallway as she takes off at a run — no one should be able to get in there without any of them knowing about it. It's sealed, a room originally designed to weather the powers of Wanda Maximoff, a training hall where they could let her go all out to hone her powers, to throw dummies (and occasionally Steve) against the wall without fear of anyone getting hurt in the crossfire. It was large enough to contain the platform now, and there was only one way in and out.

She skids to a halt at the door, bracing herself against it to stop, and hesitates. No sign of forced entry — it's even still locked, so there can't possibly be any way someone's inside. She hovers her fingers over the keypad, and then presses the buttons. Whatever's happened, she needs to know. If, somehow, someone else came back — ]

—Who?

[ The door lifts open and she goes still at the sight of someone standing on the platform — and she recognizes that shield. ]

Steve?

[ But he's too young to be Steve — oh, hell. Wasn't there a movie about this? You can't meet your past self, or something? ]

[thelegacy]

-- Mom?

[The voice on the platform is young- teen years, not quite twenty, and his voice is even, but a little shaken, unsure as he looks around at the space he's ended up in, but his blue eyes keep sliding back to her once the door opens between them. Even in the low-light, ending up focused on her face, her red hair, and even if she's not in the black bodysuit, there's something that hits him hard. A gut punch of inexplicable familiarity.

He'd never met her before, not that he could remember. None of the kids that Tony had looked after had, their odd family of almost-siblings-- it was all just pictures, stories, video footage of battles that they didn't really understand, because Ultron had been the one and only threat for all of their lives.

It's pretty clear that he's as uncertain about being here as she is about his presence here. And there's that word, that name, that hangs heavy on the air, full of hope and uncertainty, recognition that probably should be impossible. He does relax his grip on the shield a little, though, sucking in a breath as he lets his body ease into something a little less defensive.

He doesn't recognize the space they're in, and it's clear that with the space-time continuum shattered that something here has gone very, very wrong. But well, when your world is a living Hell, sometimes wrong was at least a little bit right.]

Sorry, I don't really know where I am.

[vdova]

[ He calls her mom and she goes violently still, the word slicing through the air to hang in front of her, almost an epithet. The though that this isn't Steve is so distant that she can barely hear it in her own mind from the roaring of blood in her ears.

He's a statistical impossibility, they'd taken that chance from her almost three decades ago, but the impossible had already happened once today. He was up in one of the empty rooms, asleep, in fact, after spending the day with Clint.

It takes her a second to come to, to realize she has to help him, despite whatever misgivings, whatever residual guilt or anger she might feel at this, and she pushes those feelings aside, physically steps forward into the room. ]

Earth. 2023. Where did you get that shield?

[ Because it should be hanging up in Steve's locker, right now. ]

[thelegacy]

2023? Wow.

[He repeats the date after her, and there's shock there, because well. He hadn't known the time surges were this bad. The Earth part is at least reassuring. And she's here and she's alive, and that's-- he doesn't even know. His eyes are sharp for only a moment, settling fairly quickly, but it reminds him of home-- Of the base Tony had setup under the Arctic.

But the question about the shield brings his other hand up to touch the outer edge, and there's something vulnerable in the gesture. If her eyes are sharp, she might notice that it's more worn than Steve's shield. Scorched paint and chips in places. Tony had offered a new paint job, to do what he could when James had come back with it, but he didn't want to change it. It was the closest he'd get to ever touching his father.]

Ultron had it. And the shield generator Tony built me had shorted out during a fight, so I decided it was time to take it back.

[His words are careful. Honest, and with just a touch of that Rogers sass in how the words slide off his tongue. Not directly saying that it was his father's shield but trying to communicate something there, in the space between them. So he looks at her, a slight tilt to his head and it's just-- he wants to hug her, but he also doesn't want to make it awkward, when he can see that it is. So he scuffs his feet a little and there's a slight curl to broad shoulders.]

This is not where I'm supposed to be. But I think I'm okay with that.

[vdova]

[ Her eyes are sharp. She narrows them just a little when she realizes, and there's no denying that it's the same shield, just older. She resists the urge to press her lips together — he's lost, here, somewhere he doesn't technically belong, and she's not just going to leave him in the lurch. Not if he's really—

There's a lot to unpack in his statement, but while they have the time for that (probably), this isn't the place. She relaxes a little, nods towards the hall behind her, giving him a soft smile. ]

C'mon. I prefer to interrogate people in the dining room. We've got snacks in there, and cookies tend to make for loose lips.