"You know about me?"
Steve's eyes narrowed, the wrinkles around them deepening as he connected the dots. The masked figure wasn't just some rogue sorcerer or a dimension-hopping Asgardian. He knew things—specific, painful things—that only someone who had walked through time could know.
"It seems you're a traveler from the future," Steve said, his voice steady but carrying a hint of warning. "Then you should understand the risks. If you arbitrarily change the course of history, you don't just fix a pothole; you risk collapsing the entire road. One mistake we made—just one—almost brought disaster to the entire Multiverse. I certainly don't want that to happen a second time."
Rosen knew exactly what "mistake" Steve was referring to. It wasn't the "Time Heist" itself, but the chaotic aftermath where a version of Thanos from 2014 had followed them back to the future. If the Avengers had failed in that final battle, two separate timelines would have been annihilated: the one they were fighting for, and the one Thanos had abandoned to conquer.
This was why Old Man Steve had spent decades sitting on his hands. He believed that his presence in this timeline was a paradox that had to be handled with surgical precision. He had lived his life as a ghost, hiding in plain sight as "Grant," Peggy Carter's mysterious husband who never appeared in the official records.
To Steve, this wasn't selfishness. It was discipline. He had accepted a life of obscurity to ensure the universe didn't unravel.
"But it could also be better," Rosen countered, stepping closer, the purple light of the Death Mask reflecting in his eyes. "In your timeline, you eliminated the 2014 Thanos. That entire reality was saved from the Snap because of your 'mistake.' Wasn't that a good thing?"
Steve shook his head, looking at Rosen with a pitying expression usually reserved for reckless recruits. "You're working backward from the result. You see the victory, so you assume the risk was worth it. But what if we had failed? Child, the most terrifying thing isn't knowing what will happen—it's not knowing what you might break by trying to fix it."
The word "child" stung, but Rosen couldn't argue the math. Biologically, the man in front of him was over a hundred years old. Rosen, even counting his two lives, hadn't hit fifty.
"My thoughts are exactly the opposite," Rosen said, his voice hardening. "I think knowing a tragedy is coming and lacking the courage to stop it... that is the most sorrowful thing a 'hero' can do."
Steve paused, his shears hovering over a rosebush. For a moment, Rosen expected a lecture, a sermon on responsibility. Instead, the old soldier just shrugged.
"Everyone has their own convictions. Only by walking the path will you know if you have regrets."
He went back to pruning. He was ignoring him.
The dismissal lit a fire in Rosen's gut. "No regrets? Haha. Don't you want to know what happened to your teammates after you left? Don't you care about the mess you left behind?"
"What does knowing matter?" Steve said without looking up. "Everyone walks their own path."
"Wow," Rosen scoffed. "'We may be imperfect, but we're the most reliable.' That was your line, wasn't it? A grand statement. But when your friends were drowning, where was the reliable Captain America?"
Steve's hands didn't stop moving, but his shoulders tensed.
Rosen pressed the attack. "Take Wanda. She sacrificed everything for the world. Her brother, her parents, her freedom. And in the end? She had to watch her lover get disassembled into scrap metal by a government agency. She broke, Steve. She fell into darkness because no one was there to catch her."
Steve flinched. The shears snipped a perfectly good rosebud by accident.
"And Sharon," Rosen continued, his voice dripping with venom. "Your niece-in-law. The girl who risked her career to get your shield back. You tricked her into a kiss, used her connections, and then bailed. Now? She's on the run. She's living in the shadows, trading secrets just to survive because the 'hero' she trusted abandoned her."
Steve finally stopped. He slowly placed the shears on a wooden bench and turned to face Rosen. His expression wasn't angry; it was profoundly sad.
"If your goal is to humiliate me, to make me regret my choices... then you've won," Steve said quietly. "I failed them. I know that. But telling me now doesn't change the past. Do you expect these old bones to pick up a shield and fight another war?"
He looked so tired. Not just physically, but spiritually exhausted. It took the wind out of Rosen's sails.
"Humiliation? You're overthinking it," Rosen said, stepping back. "You're not worth a special trip. I was just passing by. Verifying something."
"Then I think you've verified it," Steve sighed. "I have nothing for you here. Please leave."
"I'm going to change everything," Rosen declared, his voice ringing with conviction. "I'm going to fix the things you were too afraid to touch."
Steve looked at him, a strange, unreadable emotion in his eyes. "...I wish you success."
"Aren't you going to try and stop me?"
"This isn't my timeline," Steve said, shaking his head. "If you break something, that's the responsibility of this timeline's Steve Rogers. I'm just an old man waiting for the end."
"Is that so?" Rosen smirked beneath the mask. "Well, I'm going to start by changing him. Let's see if you can still sit still when your younger self starts making different choices."
With that, Rosen triggered Blink. He vanished from the garden, leaving nothing but a swirl of displaced air.
Steve stood alone in the garden for a long moment. A faint, almost imperceptible smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"Just as you said... maybe it won't be a bad thing," he whispered to the empty lawn.
Deep down, he had always wondered if there was a better way. Maybe this masked stranger, arrogant as he was, could give the younger Steve the happy ending he never quite felt he deserved.
"Grant? Who are you talking to?"
The back door opened, and Peggy Carter stepped out, leaning heavily on Sharon's arm. Her voice trembled slightly, but her eyes were bright.
"Grant" was Steve's middle name—a secret kept between him, his mother, Bucky, and Peggy. To the world, Steve Rogers was dead or missing. To the neighbors, he was just Grant, the quiet gardener.
"Nothing, Peg," Steve said, turning to her with a gentle smile that erased the weariness from his face. "Just getting old. Tend to talk to myself these days."
His gaze drifted to Sharon. She was smiling at him, completely unaware that the "Uncle Grant" she had known for years was the very idol she aspired to be. She didn't know he was Captain America. She didn't know about the kiss, or the betrayal, or the dark path her future self might walk.
A flicker of unease passed through Steve's eyes.
"I failed her once," he thought. "Maybe this time... maybe the kid in the mask is right."