Endgame Theory

Endgame theory

Okay, so something (or rather, a FEW somethings) has been grating at me since I saw the movie.

Namely:

Steve specifically being coy about who “She” was that he married

Steve staying behind without saying goodbye to anyone, and deciding to do so despite all the warnings about not fucking with the past

The fact that Loki escaped following Avengers but was still in a cell later on when Thor took the aether from Asgard

Returning the soul stone - how does that even work? Do you fling it off the cliff? Or is it more a reversal of how you got it?

And after doing some thinking, I’ve connected a few of those dots together.

So here’s a hot new take for you:

Steve didn’t marry Peggy.

Now hear me out.

What if, upon returning to the alternate timeline’s past to “replace” everything they took, Steve finds a lot more stuff out of order than he expects?

Loki is AWOL with the tesseract and needs to be found. Steve needs to track down all the HYDRA agents that were in the elevator and wipe their memory of him. He needs to make sure Gamora still meets alternate universe Peter Quill even without her father’s order to find the stones. He needs to get Thor’s hammer back to Asgard. And that’s not even counting all the little things that they may have messed up on that they didn’t notice the first time through.

He needs to solve a whole boatload of trouble behind the scenes to keep the second timeline balanced, and do all of it without being seen.

But first he needs to return the stones, and here’s where he hits the biggest snag of them all.

What if, upon returning the soul stone, he gets Natasha BACK.

Her life returned from the soul world, in exchange for the power stone.

Now there’s two of them who can work to set everything right again, but that also means that there’s two of them that need Pym particles to move around.

What if, in the end, Steve has more problems to solve than he has Pym particles to solve them with?

What if Steve only stopped by Peggy’s house to let her know he was okay and give her closure, but didn’t spend his life with her?

What if Steve instead spent years running around in the alternate timeline’s past with Natasha, making everything right, but by the time they finished sorting everything out, he only had enough particles for one of them to return…?

And Steve chose to stay there with her instead.

Steve and Natasha have been incredibly close for years at this point. He’s not going to ditch her all by herself, and he can’t risk more jumps between timelines to fetch Pym particles and come back - they’ve already blurred the two timelines enough as it is.

What if the two of them lived out their lives in peace in the alternate timeline, with the agreement that when one of them eventually passed away, the other would return to the original timeline with the last of the Pym particles and let the others know everything was okay?

What if Steve returned to the original timeline to pass of the shield after spending his whole life not with Peggy, but with Natasha?