Work Text:
(1)
Steve goes to Boston first, because it’s a train ride away and he’s never been and he remembers reading somewhere, once, that Boston is lovely in the summer. It was in a guidebook he picked up after Rebirth, he thinks, or perhaps one of those online webpages Tony was always sending him with titles like
50 NATIONAL LANDMARKS YOU HAVE TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE, or
TOP 10 AMERICAN CITIES FOR GETTING DRUNK, GETTING LAID, AND GETTING EVEN MORE DRUNK, or
19 SECLUDED ISLANDS THE HIGH-STRUNG, GENETICALLY ENHANCED SUPER SOLDIER IN YOUR LIFE WILL LOVE.
(Tony was always trying to get him to take a vacation. Steve can’t imagine that this is how he wanted it to happen.)
The city must have missed the memo this year; either that or the person who wrote that particular line of advice had never, in fact, been to Boston. He spends his first three days in the city walking around and eavesdropping on various guided tours and doesn’t see a single ray of sunshine the entire time. It’s cold and windy and now and then there’s a bark of thunder that makes him start, thoughts of flying hammers and magical scepters and interdimensional portals flashing through his head before he can tell himself to pull it together, Rogers, sometimes the sky opens and it’s just rain.
(The things you forget these days, honestly.)
On his fourth day in Boston, Steve trails a tour group led by a man wearing a tri-pointed hat and old-fashioned knee breeches to the Congress Street Bridge, where the guide launches into a lengthy monologue about the dastardly British and their dastardly monarchy and their dastardly taxes. A nearby placard informs him that 250 years ago, colonists once stood in this very spot and threw hundreds of gallons of tea into the water in the name of freedom, democracy, America.
Steve walks to the railing and casts his eyes over the harbor, over the water churning around the bridge, over the stormclouds, low-lying and swollen with rain. In the distance, the tops of skyscrapers disappear into the fog: gray washed out by gray.
He feels the strangest urge to jump.
It’s not that he wants to die. The water isn’t very deep, and the bridge isn’t very high, and he would probably have to lash every brick in the city of Boston to his limbs to keep himself down, anyway.
(For what it’s worth, he thinks, the city of Boston is nothing if not abundant in bricks.)
What he really wants is to hit the water and feel that clear shock of cold — the sharpness of it, like the sear of adrenaline through his veins before a fight, the knife’s edge between alive and dead, right and wrong in a battle with Bucky at his six and moral sightlines clear as day. He wants to sink into the water and feel his body come alive, and he wants to feel the certainty of his own survival instinct driving him back up toward the air, a reason to keep living even when he isn’t sure why.
(2)
Steve makes his way West, where the humidity leeches out of the air and the cities flatten out into stretches of farmland that seem impossibly vast. During the day, he loads obscure state parks into the GPS that came with the car and hikes until his legs are sore; when dusk falls, he watches indigo streak the sky and drives toward the setting sun.
He wears old T-shirts and hiking shorts and doesn’t shave for weeks. If any of the park rangers ever recognize him, they never say anything.
(The press coverage had been the worst in the three weeks after the breakout, when he couldn’t leave his safehouse for five minutes without walking by a newspaper or a television with his face on it.
Sometimes he had thought about asking Clint if he could spend a few weeks out on his farm, just until the circus died down and he could go outside in New York City again. But it hadn’t seemed fair — not when Clint had reasons to leave the past behind that were flesh and blood and his very own. Steve didn’t have reasons like that, not anymore, so instead he had rented a car and started driving.)
Thirty minutes into a hike in central Ohio, there’s a five-meter gap in the trail where a stream slices through the forest, flanked by mossy rocks and gnarled tree roots that have grown, like all things, toward the water. The bridge arching over the stream is adorned with hundreds of metal locks, all in different sizes and colors and shapes. Steve has never seen anything like it, and he spends five minutes standing there trying to figure out if there’s some kind of a pattern, before—
“It’s a love lock bridge,” a voice behind him says.
He spins, and there’s a guy standing there: mid-30s, maybe, with a backpack strapped around his waist and a red T-shirt that says BUCKEYE NATION FOREVER on it, and it figures: Steve doesn’t know what that means, either.
“A love lock bridge,” Steve repeats, and his hand is already halfway into his pocket before he remembers that his notebook is still in the car, tossed haphazardly in the backseat along with the 10-pack of ballpoint pens that he had bought before he set out.
(He had started the list in graphite pencil, of course, like the lists he and Bucky had kept, and the lists his mother had kept before that, before the groceries got so expensive that there wasn’t any point in keeping lists anymore and she wasn’t well enough to keep them, anyway. But he had crushed hundreds of them in his first couple of weeks out of the ice — angry at world, angry at SHIELD, angry at himself — and it wasn’t long until Agent Hill had dragged him to the store. “Steve, it’s 2011 now,” she had said, gently, and even had the decency to pretend she was talking about writing instruments.)
“It’s like this,” the guy is saying: “Couples buy a lock together, carve their initials into it, and lock it to the bridge. Et voila – love that springs eternal, or at least until the weight of all that love sends the bridge down.”
“Oh,” Steve says. And then: “That’s … well, that’s mighty sweet, I suppose.”
“Sure,” he says. “That’s one adjective. Where you from, anyway, never having heard of a love lock bridge?”
“I’m from Brooklyn,” Steve says. “Enjoy your hike, sir.”
He turns around and counts out fifty steps, enough so that he’s well out of sight and he can no longer hear footsteps behind him. Then he breaks into a run and does the rest of the 8-mile loop trail in 30 minutes flat.
Later, after the sun has started to dip and the trees are casting long, dark shadows over the fields, Steve heads back to the car and pulls his notebook out of his backpack. He takes out a pen and flips to a clean sheet of paper. He starts to write:
Love lo—
And then stops, suddenly exhausted.
Over the past few years, Steve has read about world politics and scientific innovation and pop culture. He’s memorized the names of countless peace treaties, then the acts of aggression that inevitably rendered them obsolete. He’s watched something called a 3D printer spit out an honest-to-God firearm and he’s sat in cars that have driven themselves. He’s been sent Youtube videos of hundreds of cultural moments of such impressively staggering insignificance that he knows he’ll never be able to forget them.
Steve flips through page after page of movies titles, presidents, technological developments, band names. Jaws. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mean Girls. President Nixon and the Watergate scandal. CDs, the Walkman, the iPod. VHS, DVD, Blu-ray. The Beatles. Nirvana. Taylor Swift.
Most of the lines in his notebook have check marks next to them. Some of them still don’t. Steve is starting to doubt that he’ll ever catch up.
(3)
In Kansas, Steve mistakes flirtation for an attempted ambush.
He’s left the car at the motel and is walking to the closest grocery store to buy Honey Nut Cheerios — a craving he picked up while crashing at Sam’s apartment in D.C., chasing intel on the Winter Soldier — when a white SUV pulls up next to him.
He’s tense almost immediately, adrenaline coursing through his body and battle plans flooding his mind. He’s thinking about escape routes and lines of sight and whether anything in his backpack would be useful in a fight.
(He has a Swiss army knife, a metal water bottle that’s three-quarters full, and 9 ballpoint pens. Steve has done more with less.)
The surroundings are sparsely populated, which is good: there won’t be much collateral. If he can knock out the driver, even for a few minutes, he might be able to get enough of a head start to outrun them. Then again, it’s awful flat, so running might not be a good idea after all: not when they probably have guns, and he doesn’t have his — the — shield.
But when the window rolls down, he’s not greeted with the barrel of a gun or the blade of a knife or a lobbed grenade. It’s not Nick Fury, back from the dead for the umpteenth time, or Loki, eyes glowing that unnatural, iridescent blue. It’s not even HYDRA. It’s just girl looking at him, fresh-faced and earnest, with pretty blue eyes and an inquisitive twist of her lips.
“Hey,” she says. “You need a ride somewhere?”
For a second he just stands there, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her to pull out a gun, for the team of assassins to burst through the rear doors, for the whole van to explode.
Nothing happens.
Steve swallows very, very hard.
“It’s alright, ma’am,” he says. “I’m just going to the grocery store. I can walk.”
She nods, but doesn’t drive away.
“Travelling all alone, huh?” she says. “That ever get lonely?”
For a second he thinks she’s making fun of him somehow, laughing at him internally, but then he takes a closer look and there’s something else there, some heat, something in the way her eyes are pinned to his, that deliberate steadiness. His heart is racing from and he’s so tense, still, every muscle locked in and ready to go, and for a second he thinks that he should do it, that he should get in the car and take what he can get for once in his life.
But it wouldn’t be fair — to him, to her — and what if she finds out who he really is? A girl shouldn’t have to live with that on her conscience, and he shouldn’t have to turn on the television a few weeks from now and find out from Robin on Good Morning America how good or bad of a lay he was.
(He still remembers that particular conversation with Tony, in the kitchen, with everyone else sitting around pretending not listen. “Alright, Cap,” Tony had started. “We all know you’re not the blushing virgin everyone gets off on pretending you are, so listen up.”
Sometimes Steve had wished that Tony would just take his coffee and go back to the lab.
“Now that you’re all thawed out and limber and back to being a national treasure — took you long enough, by the way, it’s been lonely up here without you — it’s only a matter of time until every God-loving, patriotic woman in this country starts throwing herself at you. And, and men, too! All genders! All shapes and sizes! It’s a brave new world out there.”
“There were women before, Tony,” Steve had said, patiently. “Even in the 1940s, there were women.”
“But now they’re more — more—”
Tony made hand gestures he hadn’t really recognized, but had understood to be very obscene. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Bruce put his head into his hands.
“But! Next time you have a hot former Disney star all up in your spangles telling you how she’d love to take a closer look at Captain America’s, ahem, flag, just remember: It’s the twenty-first century now, and everyone’s looking for their fifteen minutes.”
“Alright, Tony,” Steve had said.
“People will say things. To other people. To people there.”
Tony jabbed a finger toward TV.
“About you. And your—”
He swung his arm around and waved up and down in Steve’s general direction.
Natasha looked up from her newspaper, which was, for some reason, in Dutch. “Don’t sleep with groupies, Steve,” she had said.
“Definitely no more than three in a week,” Tony had added, solemnly.)
Another car drives by, tires kicking up a trail of dirt behind it. The air shimmers faintly for a moment — all those particles, suddenly adrift — but then the dust settles and the air clears. “I don’t mind the solitude,” Steve says, firmly enough to answer her real question, and he even smiles, just to prove that he’s not lying.
“Alright,” she says. But she doesn’t drive away.
Instead, she looks at Steve with a soft, sad expression, and Steve looks back at her and starts to wish it had been an assassin, or Nick Fury, or even HYDRA that had greeted him through the window five minutes ago. Because she’s pretty — she really is — and her hair falls to her shoulders in dark brown curls that remind him of Peggy and her voice lilts with the hint of a Midwestern accent that reminds him of Clint and the color of her eyes is a dead ringer for Bucky’s and that’s just it, these days, isn’t it, everyone reminds him of someone else, someone he used to love.
“Well, good luck with your groceries,” she finally says, and he watches the curl of her hair through the rear window of the car as she drives away.
(4)
In Utah, Steve stands on a bridge beneath a frozen ski lift, two chairs low enough in the air that he could pull himself up if he wanted to. The town is empty — cleared out from a recent forest fire — and it feels like he’s wandered his way into another universe, one untouched by war and abandoned by humans, shaped only by the forces of nature and the steady march of time.
The air is almost perfectly still. Steve can hear the murmur of a distant stream as it winds its way down the mountainside. Give it a million years and that stream could carve out a canyon, Steve thinks; perhaps it already has.
There’s a single highway that stretches past empty campgrounds and overgrown meadows; through pastures dotted with yellow-eyelashed sunflowers and cliff-sides just beginning to crumble. From where he stands, it looks like he could follow the road forever, out to and over the horizon, right over the edge of the world.
(I’m with you ‘til the end of the line, Bucky had said to him, once, during a time when both of them still thought that “the end of the line” meant death and nothing worse. But now Steve is the wrong age in the wrong year, checking off lines in a notebook that don’t mean anything even after he’s memorized what they mean, and Bucky is frozen and asleep while scientists trawl through his mind to dig out triggers that other scientists trawled through his mind to plant, and Steve wonders how on God’s Earth the end of the line ended up here.)
A gentle breeze rises from the East. Somewhere in the distance, a single set of wind-chimes comes alive.
The mountains here are red like blood, red like the flag, and it’s nothing like the Alps and nothing like the Appalachians, nothing like anything he’s ever seen before. Steve hikes through a vast amphitheater filled with hundreds and hundreds of white-capped hoodoos, thrust upward toward the sky, and he wonders how many millions of years it must have taken to sculpt something like this, and how few split-seconds it would take to wipe it out.
(A disagreement between friends. A peacekeeping initiative gone wrong. An organization festering from the inside; a soldier with a metal arm wind-milling down like hellfire and what did they do, he thought, what did they do to you, dear God.)
Steve thinks of Boston, so dreary as to become spectacular, and of Ohio, where the mountains were lush with greenery and the water was clear and sweet, and of Kansas, the plains vast and calm and endless, and of Utah, where he stands now in a postcard frame with mountains red like blood and a sky so blue that it makes something inside of him twist.
Then Steve thinks that the reason these cities, these towns, these landmarks, these blue skies — the reason they all looks so fresh to him is because he hasn’t seen much of them, and the reason why he hasn’t seen much of them is because they’re never on the news, and the reason they’re never on the news is because these are quiet cities, uneventful ones, cities he hasn’t destroyed yet.
They’re lucky, Steve thinks, luckier than Harlem, luckier than Manhattan, luckier than D.C. and Sokovia and Lagos, luckier than Vienna and—
(They were just two boys from Brooklyn.)
Steve leaves Utah.
(5)
Steve finds Natasha in August, standing at the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Although it’s probably more accurate to say that she finds him. After all, Natasha’s not exactly the type of woman who allows herself to be happened upon.
She’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans; her hair, red and brassy under the afternoon sun, is longer than he remembers it. She looks relaxed — her posture casual, her outfit just the slightest bit rumpled – but her eyes are sharp and focused on each group of tourists as they walk by, and Steve can tell that she’s evaluating body language, assessing threat levels, ready to spring into action at the first sign of trouble.
They haven’t spoken since Germany, since the airport, when she’d—
But now—
Suddenly, Steve feels a rush of hot shame.
“Natasha,” he says.
One corner of her lips quirks up — almost a smile — and the expression is so familiar that for a moment Steve wonders how she hasn’t been recognized yet; how none of the thousands upon thousands of tourists walking by have looked at the woman with that half-smile and that perfectly practiced stillness and thought — that’s her, that’s the Black Widow, somebody grab her.
“It’s Natalie, right now, actually,” Natasha says.
“Yeah?” Steve says. “Found some more hapless bodyguards to take out?”
“Something like that,” Natasha says, even though they both know that it’s nothing like that.
(Steve remembers when that particular video had made the rounds — after the news sites had wrung every ounce of mileage out of the most salacious leaked files and started digging for whatever could fill another fifteen minutes of airtime. “SHIELD had video footage of you taking down Tony’s bodyguard?” Steve had said.
“SHIELD had video footage of everything,” Natasha had said, very calmly. Then she flipped the television to a nature documentary about wild jaguars with the remote Steve hadn’t even noticed her stealing out of his hands.)
Natasha tucks a strand of hair behind her left ear, eyes still scanning the crowd, and Steve thinks of how once, years ago, on an escalator in a mall full of bumbling teenagers and businessmen on their lunch breaks and – of course – highly trained Nazi operatives masquerading as government officials, she had kissed him.
He had been wearing a baseball cap and a pair of glasses that made his eyes hurt.
She had been wearing a hoodie and jeans. Natasha. In hoodie and jeans.
(Tony had made them go to a baseball game together one fall — Dodgers versus Yankees, it had been — and Natasha hadn’t even worn a hoodie and jeans to that. She had worn her usual outfit, thrown a jacket over it, and snuck past security with a Glock tucked into her waistband and knives in her shoes.
“Baseball stadiums are crowded,” she had said, catching Steve’s horrified expression. “Drunk civilians. Narrow aisles. Not enough exits. Do the math.”)
“I haven’t had any trouble in months,” Steve says.
“You haven’t been anywhere this public in months,” Natasha responds. But she turns around so that they’re facing in the same direction, arms propped up on the railing, elbow-to-elbow, almost touching.
The wind whips the hair out from behind her ears. She leaves it.
“Where to next, Steve?” Natasha asks, her voice soft, and Steve wonders what they’re pretending to be this time: Old friends? Secret lovers? Strangers enjoying the unexpected companionship?
In many ways, Steve has always been jealous of Natasha, who slips on identities with an effortless, practiced grace and sheds them just as easily. He has only ever been Steve Rogers, stubborn in his goodness, brash in his humility, naïve in his heroism, and he knows that this has very little to do with Erskine’s serum and much more to do with the fact that he has never been able to be anything or anyone else. Not when it would have spared him a fresh set of bruises in a back alley in Brooklyn, not when it could have kept him alive on a falling Helicarrier in D.C., not even when it might have saved Captain America himself.
“I was thinking maybe dinner,” he says.