#dirigibleplumbing

I considered keeping the POV to one specific character but then I couldn't figure out who, because no one character is present for all the events in the story -- the 616 guys don't get there until partway through, so it can't be one of them, but if I have one of the Noir characters narrate the whole thing, it'll be hard to make it a convincing CW fixit because they won't be privy to enough information about Civil War. (I was going to say "it's not like 616 Steve and Tony are going to have a screaming fight about Civil War in front of other people" but then I remembered that they have canonically done this more than once, so, uh, they actually would. But I still don't think that would be the best way to go here.)

Then I thought about alternating POV by scene, so that if something happened that would be best narrated by a particular character, they could take the POV for that scene. And that has the advantage, obviously, of making sure that the most suitable character would be narrating each scene. But it also has some disadvantages. One is that making sure each character has what feels like a fair amount of POV would be a big mess with four possible narrators, and I know people who write, like, epic fantasy doorstops don't seem to mind doing this, but there's a reason I don't write epic fantasy doorstops. I didn't want to sit there color-coding scenes by narrator -- I can totally do this in Scrivener and I did it for Slipping Off The Page and Devil In Us All, actually -- but I just... didn't want to. It's a lot of work with a lot of narrators. The other disadvantage is that switching POV character frequently is both jarring and difficult. Whose head are we in now? Does the reader know? Are we really clear? Does it feel like this character? Whoops, new scene, time to establish POV all over again.

Then I realized I was thinking too hard and the answer was right in front of me. Just take whoever shows up next!

Chapter 1: This has to be either Noir Tony or Noir Steve. I went with Noir Steve because I knew I needed Tony later. At the end of the chapter, 616 Tony falls out of the sky.

Chapter 2: 616 Tony has just gotten here. He is fucked-up and grief-stricken and misses Steve and he can sit here and compare Noir Steve to his Steve who by the way is Dead. And at the end of the chapter, he brings 616 Steve back to life!

Chapter 3: 616 Steve! This way, 616 Steve and Tony can get over their Civil War issues and one of them is the POV character which is great because you really do kind of want that from one of them rather than the Noir people.

Chapter 4: Noir Tony is the only one left. He's been here all along, yes, but I figured that the big villain showdown was a big enough difference from the rest of the plot that no one would mind me switching. Also, the villain is Baron Zemo, and Noir Tony is definitely the guy who knows the most about Noir Zemo and I wouldn't really have wanted that confrontation from anyone else's head.

Epilogue: A little scene from everyone as they all live happily ever after!

This means that I don't need to juggle narrators for every single scene, everyone gets their own chapter and no one feels slighted, and also it means that I only really have to establish POV really firmly at the beginning of every chapter, which might not be noticeable but it was definitely a conscious choice.

Chapter 1 is Noir Steve, and because he's the first narrator I don't really have to put in a lot to distinguish him because as far as the reader knows he's the only one:

Wide-eyed, Bucky's staring at him like Steve's said he's gotten Glenn Miller and his Army Air Force Band to come play for them—which, Steve thinks, would probably be more likely than what he has actually managed to arrange, because there are celebrities and then there are celebrities, and Tony Stark is the latter.

"You're pulling my leg, right?" Bucky asks. His voice has gone high, cracking with excitement, and even though he's eighteen now and the Invaders' sniper, someone who's seen more than anyone his age should, suddenly he seems very, very young, like the excited kid he'd been when the Army had assigned him to Steve. "Tony Stark? Really? Tony Stark, who used to be in Marvels magazine? Not some other fella?"

"Tony Stark from Marvels," Steve confirms, and Bucky whistles in admiration. "No joke, Buck, I swear. You meet a lot of interesting people when you're Captain America."

But at any rate, we're clearly in the 40s, and the narrator here is clearly military, and in fact because Glenn Miller is alive you know it's before 1944. Anyway, this is obviously a WWII Steve, right? The slang! The diction! You can tell!

Chapter 2 is 616 Tony, and he is a very different experience, because he is modern and he has Extremis in his head:

With a single thought, Tony mutes the Extremis error message that whispers in his ears. His satellite network is gone. There are no satellites. It's 1943. It's four years before transistors. Fourteen years before Sputnik. And thirty-two years before Tony should have been born.

Here we have a modern guy who has a computer in his head, he is knowledgeable enough to have a bunch of dates of modern inventions memorized, and just in case you didn't know this was 616 Tony Stark he is already mourning the fact that he doesn't have his transistors. You know how he loves his transistors.

In addition to being able to refer to events of 616 canon that he experiences, Tony uses a bunch of metaphors and similes in his head that mostly involve technology that the Noir people don't have and that even 616 Steve wouldn't be calling by these names:

Ice curls around Tony's heart. The image feels like it's seared into his vision, leaving traces of itself everywhere he looks, like burn-in on a bad CRT—Steve bleeding out on the steps, over and over and over. "I don't want to talk about him."

Of the four narrators in this story, only one of them is going to use the word "CRT" to describe a television and you know who it is.

Chapter 3 is 616 Steve, and he knows all the things 616 Steve knows, and also he's super angry at Tony:

Six months? He's been gone for six months? And look what it's done to Tony, he thinks, but no, he doesn't care, he can't care about him. He can't forgive Tony for what he did. Tony picked accountability over liberty. He hunted down everyone who didn't agree with him. He threw his friends, their friends, in a prison in the Negative Zone. He's probably been running a police state for superheroes. Steve can't just brush it off. He can't smile and shake his hand and offer easy platitudes.

"Well, I'm still alive," Steve points out, a little more roughly than he has to. "Just unstuck in time."

This is an extremely Steve-centric summary of Civil War. It is very unflattering to Tony and it is full of rage. This definitely not how anyone else is going to describe that arc.

Steve is really angry. He's angry and he's mean.

Tony snorts in derision. "Captain America is disappointed in Captain America. This is a new low, isn't it?"

"Shut up," Steve says, because he has really had enough. Couldn't he have come back to life somewhere nice? Maybe with his actual friends?

Tony studies him in the moonlight for long seconds.

"I came to you with my hand extended," Tony says, very quietly. He bites his lip. "I wanted to talk. You could have stopped this. We could have come to an agreement. None of this had to happen. And you reached for my hand, and you stuck an EMP in my palm, and then you tried to kill me. So don't you dare say this is all on me. Don't you fucking put that on me. I didn't do this alone."

"No," Steve says, "but you sure tried your best, didn't you, Director?"

616 Steve is not usually this mean, no, but this is a Steve who Tony last saw alive in The Confession, and I would like you all to remember that half of The Confession involved Steve telling Tony he thought he (Tony) was sick, unwell, and had powers he didn't understand, and yelling at him about his feelings. Like, this is that guy and he just woke up and he is pissed.

Chapter 4 is Noir Tony!

This is going to make one hell of a story someday.

Tony just hopes he'll be alive to tell it.

This is a Tony who does exciting things and (crucially) tells stories about them, and that's Noir Tony. That's not any other Tony.

"Hey, Iron Man!" he calls out, and Stark turns his head. "You said you could talk to machines?"

Stark must see where he's going with this, because he shakes his head. It's a huge movement in the suit. His stare is impassive and disconcerting; Tony can't see his eyes behind the shining eyeslits. "Not guns. Gunpowder's chemical. My powers are electrical. I can talk to computers. Which mostly don't exist yet. So I'm. Uh. Mostly useless."

"Tony!" Rogers snaps, in reproach, and Tony wonders what the hell happened where he came from to make Stark think he's no better than dirt.

"Electrical?" he repeats, just as the green beam fires again. It's closer this time. "So you could switch that ray gun off?" He'll bet anything there's electricity powering it. Why wouldn't aliens have electricity? "You could buy us some time and cut the power for this whole damn place at the generator?"

His diction is a little more like Steve's (either of them) but he's clearly a Tony Stark, and he does tactics like Tony Stark but his conception of technology is of course from the 40s and he conceptualizes Skrull plasma weaponry as "alien ray guns," which, I mean, fair.

Also he doesn't really get why 616 Tony has poor self-esteem and that means he's definitely not 616 Tony.

So that's how I did this one.