Okay, this has been on the backburner for a while, but I decided with some prompting from FormerlyIR to go ahead and get it out there. A Post-Endgame life of Steve and Peggy, heavy on the domestic fluff, and low on drama, as told in a series of snippets and one-shots. I have several already written, so I will be posting those in chronological order, then I'll keep posting new ones as they occur to me.

(I started writing this soon after Endgame, at which point we didn't know exactly the year Steve went back to, so I went with 1948. By the time it became established that it was 1949, I had too much written and it would mess the flow of it up to change it. So, Steve went back to 1948.)

Thanks to the fabulous Ninjagidget for the beta-ing!


Chapter One: In which our story begins with Old Steve by the lake...


Present Day

Steve shook Sam's hand, knowing that his friend was more than capable of carrying the weight of the shield he was passing on to him, and he smiled to himself as he saw the curious spark catch in his eye as he caught sight of Steve's ring.

"You gonna tell me about her?" Sam asked.

"No," Steve said with a smile. "No, I don't think I will…" He would soon. But not yet. Sam chuckled and shook his head and Steve knew he didn't take offense.

Sam did offer him a hand to help him up to his feet—Steve had gotten used to moving around slower than he used to, but he did realize how odd this had to be for his friends, who'd seen him young and in the prime of life not more than a couple of minutes ago. (Although, he was still incredibly spry for a man his age, which was either one hundred and twelve or one hundred and eighty. It depended which way you counted.)

Steve hugged Sam warmly—he'd missed him these past several decades—then they walked over to where Bruce and Bucky were waiting. Bruce was making a valiant but futile attempt to hide his surprise. Bucky was smiling warmly, and though his hug was cautious, as if he wasn't sure how tight he could hold him without breaking something, it was joyful.

"I'm a senior citizen, I'm not dead," Steve said, hugging him back with all the strength that hadn't diminished as much as it looked like it should have. It had been a beautiful, blissful, glorious life, but he hadn't seen his best friend in seventy-five years and he'd really missed him.

Bucky grunted as Steve's hug squeezed some of the air out of his lungs, then laughed and gave him a real hug. "Welcome back, punk," he said.

Steve assured a still-speechless Bruce that the years he'd gained had been by his choice, and not any flaw in Bruce's operations, and he promised to explain better later. He owed the same to Clint and Wanda, Rhodey, Scott, T'Challa and Okoye, but he would do it later. It was too much to throw at them all right now, on the day of the funeral.

A little later, he headed for the parking lot with Bucky. "I figure people are gonna be breaking up soon," Steve said, nodding in the direction of several of the cabins that dotted Tony's property. He and Bucky had been staying in one of them since the battle, until what had been last night for Bucky and seventy-five years ago for Steve. And, having been dead for the past five years, once he left, Bucky wasn't really going to have anywhere to go. "You need a place to stay for a while?"

Bucky smiled. "If you've got room."

"I've got a guest room and dinner in the crock pot."

Bucky laughed. "Well then, count me in. Where do you even live now, anyway?"

"I got an apartment in Brooklyn," Steve said. He and Peggy had lived happily in the same house since 1954, but it had been too full of her memory for him to live on there alone after she died. He'd sold the place and gotten an apartment in the neighborhood that used to be his home—it was smaller and easier for him to keep up on his own, though he made sure to have enough room for the friends he would be seeing again one day.

"How are we supposed to get to Brooklyn from here?" Bucky asked. Steve pulled a key fob out of his pocket and hit 'unlock', eliciting a beep from one of the cars in the parking lot, and Bucky laughed again. "You finally got a car."

"I was getting too old for a motorcycle," Steve said with a smirk.

They headed for Brooklyn and Steve's apartment. Bucky brought along what meager belongings he'd managed to put together since coming back to life and deposited them on the bigger of the two beds in the guest room before coming to the kitchen to help Steve set the table.

"I'm guessing the other bed's for Sam?" he asked.

Steve nodded. He'd offered to give Sam a ride in too, but even though Steve could tell he'd thrown him for a bit of a loop by coming back seventy-five years older than he should have been and then giving him the shield, he was still in full-on counselor mode after the funeral and said he'd join them in a few days, after he made sure everyone was doing alright. Steve had smiled at that. Just the kind of thing the Captain should be doing.

"Yeah," he told Bucky. "If he snores, though, the couch folds out into a pretty comfy bed."

Bucky laughed. "Speaking of Sam," he started. He reached over and tapped the ring on Steve's finger. "Don't think he's the only one that noticed that."

Steve smiled.

"You're gonna tell me about it, right?" Bucky asked.

Steve smiled wider. He had no intention of keeping his life from Sam, or any of his other friends. But Bucky was the only one of them who'd known Peggy. He'd watched her and Steve fall in love and known how much they meant to each other. He'd been the only one who really knew just how hard Steve had tried to move on and let her go, and just how miserably he'd failed at that. He'd known that Steve had been wondering about going back before he even verbalized it, and he'd encouraged him to go and selflessly given him his blessing. They would all know, one day. But Bucky deserved to know first.

"Of course," Steve said, sitting down at the table. "I made a little miscalculation going back to a new time, and it was 1948 when I landed instead of 1945," Steve said, casting his mind back to the day he'd found her. "Seeing as I was so late and all, she didn't think it was really me, so when I knocked on her door, she greeted me with a letter opener to the throat…"


Cue fade to black...

The actual reunion scene is not included in this story, because I wrote it earlier. If you haven't read it, you might want to check out my "It's Been A Long, Long Time"...