Out of Time ★ [1] ✔

The Truth Hurts. Really

In the modern days, a lot of life revolved around the photos you took. They told stories. They opened doors into the past. They spoke more words than you do.

Imagine your entire life on show. Imagine the photos you've taken in your lifetime displayed on screens around you. Got it? Fabulous. Now for the hard part: imagine my life on show. You'd be standing there for ages looking at every single photograph. There were so many, one more shocking than the last.

And then everyone turned to me. I got a variety of looks: shock, suspicion, confusion, curiosity. But I didn't care about them. There was only one I cared about, and he looked at me in a mixture of confusion and disappointment.

I was tongue-tied. It felt like the room was collapsing in on me. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. I wanted to get out of there.

When I regained my senses, there was only one thing I could think of doing.

I glared at Fury with a single question in mind. "You've been spying on me?"

"You showed up in my office out of thin air four years ago demanding I put together a team to protect the world," Fury defended. "What was I supposed to do?"

Tony frowned. "Wait, you wanted us to be put together?"

I didn't know what to say. I just stared at the photos before me: there I was trapped in the South Tower during 9/11. I watched as JFK was shot, and I was there at his funeral in 1963. I sat in a lifeboat watching the Titanic sink into the Atlantic. I led the march with the Suffragettes in 1909. I stormed the streets with thousands on the day of the Stock Market Crash in 1929. I sat in the theatre as John Wilks Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in 1868.

And there I was: standing with the SSR with Agent Peggy Carter on my left and the famed Captain America on my right.

Everything I'd hidden for ages was on display for all to see. And I hadn't aged a day in any of them. 

I felt vulnerable. I wanted to run. And I could. I could've simply stepped outside and through a portal to my Hall of Time. I could pick a period to hide out in. Any period.