Well, there's not a movie fandom for the Avengers yet, but there totally should be, so this is going into Thor for the moment even though it's mostly about Captain America/Steve Rogers...and, knowing me, I'm probably going to add more. Enjoy!

He'd never seen buildings like those. They were massive and towering. So much bigger than the Empire State, and he had thought that was the most amazing building he would ever see. They were beautiful buildings…and they were burning. Tears ran down his face as he watched the first building fall.

"Did you skip ahead?" a voice asked from behind him.

Steve quickly wiped the tears from his face and saw the bespectacled girl he'd only barely noticed the previous day. She came fully into the room and continued, "You must have skipped ahead. You were on History Channel's weekly showing of Hitler Sunday just yesterday."

"I don't sleep much," he muttered, folding his arms across his chest and refusing to look at her.

She smirked. "Well, I guess a seventy year nap would do that to you."

Steve shifted in his seat, but still did not look up at her. He was focused on the people running in the streets of Manhattan covered in dust and ash and debris.

"What's Woodstock?" she asked suddenly.

"Excuse me?" he replied, looking at her for the first time.

"If you didn't skip ahead you should know what Woodstock is," she told him matter-of-factly. "But maybe you weren't paying attention to the social history. Describe the causes of the Vietnam conflict."


"Who's the Ayatollah Khomeni?"

He just blinked.

"Fidel Castro? Mikhail Gorbachev? Richard Nixon? J.F.K? Any of those names ringing any bells?"

He looked at the floor.

"What about Osama bin Laden?"

He finally looked up and met her eyes. She was looking at him with the utmost kindness.

"He did that," Steve answered quietly, glancing back up at the television screen. "Not by himself, obviously, but he's the one responsible."

She looked up at the screen for a few moments before looking back at him and saying, "Since you already skipped about sixty years, you might want to skip through the next ten."


She leaned down to be eye level with him from where he sat in his chair. Her kindly smile turned into something more akin to a smirk as she said, "We got the mother-fucker."

A strange mixture of relief, pride, and curiosity rolled over him. He didn't even notice the girl—whose name he hadn't bothered to ask—was already gone. He looked back up at the old/new report and decided that it was all the past now. Now was all that really mattered. He suddenly wished he knew that girl's name.