Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prelude

- Hurt by Nine Inch Nails, arranged by 2Cellos, 2011.

Captain America is all about sacrifice. Property of the US Army, sure. Steve signed that contract. He’s willing to make sacrifices. He just didn’t think it would be like this.

They need to make sure he’s okay, with scans and samples and tests of his reflexes, his memory. The ice could have affected his brain, they say. They kept him in a medically induced coma for a few days, to let his body heal. They keep him in the medical wing for practically a full twenty-four hours after he wakes. They tell him he should do talk therapy, because apparently that’s a thing people do without shame in the future. Steve doesn’t quite believe that. He thinks maybe they’re trying to trick him into giving something away.

He’s fine.

He’s just fine, he keeps telling them so.

They don’t seem fine, to be honest. The medical technicians, the doctors, even the headshrink… He sees the way they look at him, like he’s the second goddamn coming. Hero worship. Even the ones who don’t gawp, he can hear the way their hearts stutter in surprise when they see him, he can smell the nervous sweat on them. 

They're intimidated by him. They don't know him. 

Of course they don't know him. Everyone who knew him before Captain America is probably dead now.

He’s never hated the serum more.

The world could still use a man like you, Cap. There’s a place here for you, Fury had said. It keeps echoing through his brain. The more he sees...

There’s a place for him here, sure, but he’s got a feeling that it’s for the dancing monkey, not the kid who draws it.

1

I raise my flags, dye my clothes
It's a revolution, I suppose
We'll paint it red to fit right in, whoa
I'm breaking in, shaping up, checking out on the prison bus
This is it, the apocalypse, whoa

- Radioactive by Imagine Dragons, 2012.

“Look, there’s a facility upstate. A cabin. The Retreat. If you need to take some time, we can--”

“Sir?”

Steve looks up from the folders in his lap, but it’s Fury the agent is talking to, not him.

“Yes?” Fury says.

The agent looks… a little uncomfortable. “She’s… Not taking no for an answer.”

Fury sighs. “Of course she isn’t. Patch her through.”

Steve looks from the agent to Fury and back, confused, but not sure how to ask. “Yes sir,” says the agent, before leaving. Fury levels his gaze at Steve. “She’s going to want to talk to you,” he says frankly.

“Who?” Steve says.

Then the phone on Fury’s desk rings, and he answers it. “Hello Director.”

Director? Steve thought that Fury was the director…

And then he hears her, from the other end of the line -- and it is her, he’d know her voice anywhere, he knows it even now, with the weight of years cracking it. “Is he there?” she says, and something must show on his face, because Fury is staring at him with his one good eye in a way that is terribly, terribly knowing.

“Yeah, he’s here.”

“Put him on at once, Nicholas.”

Fury has a weary, but fond look on his face. He holds out the slim, cordless phone, so alien to everything Steve knows. “You want to talk to her?”

Steve stares at him, eyes wide. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to --

“Yeah, you do. You can have the room. Long as you need. No cameras in here.” He holds out the phone.

Steve takes it. It feels like it’s going to snap in his hands, it’s so small and thin. He waits until Fury is out of the office. The door closes behind him. Steve takes a breath, puts the phone to his ear. “Hello?” His voice sounds strange, echoing back at him.

“Steven?” she says, like it’s being punched out of her.

“Peggy,” he says, and his voice is immediately thick. “Peggy,” he says again, and he can feel his veneer of fine on the verge of shattering. Like cracks in a thin sheet of ice over a deep, dark pool. He was just talking to her on the radio, just yesterday, just seventy fucking years ago, Jesus--

“Good God, it really is you. It’s all over Twitter, apparently. Maggie sent me pictures, and I knew at once, I knew.”

Steve shakes his head, blinking fast. “Twitter?”

“Oh darling,” she says, and she sounds like herself, almost. Like herself after shouting her way through a firefight, maybe, or when she’s just woken up after a quick nap in the field. Rough, and tired, but herself. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m… Yeah.”

“Steven. You’re a terrible liar, dear.”

He lets out a shaky breath and bows his head. “It’s.” There are no words. He looks up. The back of Fury’s office is glass. The view is so strange. It’s the heart of New York. His hometown, his home. He doesn’t recognize it. “It’s…”

“Steve.” She sounds a little weepy herself. “Steve, you know I’d be there for you if I could, but I don’t know... I don’t think I should you know. I’ve... It’s been a long time, darling.”

He thinks about seeing her, and he reels. She’s old. She’s an old woman. She’ll be wrinkled, and fragile, and--

“Steven?” she’s saying. “Dear heart, take a deep breath for me, please. You’re alright, you know. You’re alright. Just breathe for me. Can you do that?”

He does as she asks, and realizes that he’s been breathing hard and fast and now he’s light headed. He has to focus to get the breath to come normally. It’s almost like having asthma again. It’s strangely familiar, in a way nothing else is. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I’m--”

“Don’t apologize. What have they told you so far?” she asks, and her businesslike tone does more than anything to pull him out of it. Report, soldier. “What are they saying, are you alright? Any side effects?”

“Not that they can find. They’ve been doing tests nearly non-stop since I woke up. Since they found me, probably. Looks like the serum still works just fine. Maybe too fine.” He pushes his hair off his forehead. “Seventy years as an icicle and I’m fit as a damn fiddle.”

“Erskine knew what he was doing.”

“Did he?” Steve says, suddenly bitter, suddenly angry. “Because he never said--” He cuts himself off. “I was never supposed to see 1941. It’s 2011. Peggy. It’s 2011.”

“Believe me, dear, I am aware. I came the long way around.”

He smiles at that, but he can’t laugh. Her dry humor, he remembers it from just a few days ago, her red, red lips curving on a wicked smile. Her lips on his. She’s old now. Seventy years, God. It keeps hitting him. It never stops hitting him.

“We looked for you, you know. Howard and I.”

“Is Howard--”

“No. Twenty years ago now. He has a son. Tony.”

“Frankly I’m surprised he only has one,” Steve quips back, with an edge of hysteria. It's hardly the time for a joke but what else can he do? What else could he ever do?

“Point,” she says, with a smile audible in her voice.

Howard’s son is probably older than he is now. He’s only 27. Jesus.

“Are they trying to get you back to work?” She sounds serious. Concerned.

He thinks about what Fury said. The world hasn’t changed all that much. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Soldier’s work. He feels the weight of it on him.

“Yeah,” he says, in answer to her question. “They are. Not right away, but… yeah.”

“Do you want that?”

“I want to go home,” he says, before he can stop himself. The words are so small, and so huge.

“Oh Steve,” she says, like he’s breaking her heart.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Don’t apologize,” she says again. “Never apologize, darling.”

He takes a breath and lets it out, shuddery. “I’ve been thinking, trying to… I’m here now, I need a plan, but I don’t… I don’t know what to do.”

There’s a long silence from her end. “If I were still the director of SHIELD, I would say whatever I thought would get you back in the fight. They’re going to want you on their side. And they’re going to want you badly.”

Steve frowns. There’s something underneath, something she’s not saying. “But?” he prompts.

She sucks a breath in through her teeth. It sounds staticky, over the phone. “But I’m not the Director of SHIELD anymore. I’m just an old woman who cares for you. You’ve given enough, Steven. So here’s what I say: take your time. Figure out what you want,” she says, her voice very proper and prim. “In brief? Fuck them.”

Steve laughs for the first time since Bucky died.

He takes Fury up on the offered cabin.

It’s a mistake.

He’s not totally sure who built this place -- it’s stronger than it looks, so he guesses they were superpowered. He knows that they kept trying to recreate the serum. He knows that they never succeeded, completely. He lingers over that word. Completely. It haunts him.

Whatever sorry bastard built this place clearly wanted peace and quiet. It’s gentle, all rustic softness and solitude. He doesn’t even know where the nearest neighbor is. They must be miles and miles away. Whoever built this place wanted to be left alone. They’re so far from civilization that he can see every star in the sky.

He hates looking. The spread of the night sky above him makes him nauseous with fresh grief. After the first night, as soon as the sun sets, he goes inside. He doesn’t want to see the stars. Well. He doesn’t want to see them alone.

He runs in the morning, after breakfast. Just runs and runs until his lungs burn like he’s back at Lehigh. There’s no one here to give him a second look when he runs faster than any human should. That’s worth something.

After that, he comes back to the cabin and goes through the next delivery from SHIELD. There are a lot of things to be taken care of. He’s alive again, so of course there’s paperwork. Bringing someone back from the dead apparently involves a lot of it. When he’s not doing that, he spends the days reading briefings. SHIELD has given him lots of briefings: the wars that happened in the wake of his war, the dangers that the world faces. Iron Man (Tony Goddamn Stark, of course it is, of course) , and the Hulk, and what really happened in New Mexico…

At night, he lies awake in the dark and listens to the silence. He doesn’t sleep. It seems that he doesn’t really need it, after all. Sometimes he closes his eyes, but the quiet presses in around him so hard it feels like he’s choking, feels like there’s ice crushing him and--

When it gets to be too much, usually around 3 or 4 am, he gets up and gives Peggy a call. She never pesters him about the fact that he clearly hasn’t slept. It’s morning where she is. She just drinks her tea and listens to him ranting about nuclear weapons, about neocolonialism, about terrorists and--

“That’s not all there is in the world, Steven,” she says, near the end of his first hellish month in the future. She sounds angry. “We put a man on the goddamn moon, you know. We’ve all but eliminated polio, they can cure scarlet fever in five days.”

“And that’s great, but -- ”

“Steven,” she says, sharp. “You are being manipulated. They want you in the fight. They’re trying to scare you into fighting for them.”

“Aren’t they right, though?” Steve says, and he sounds tired. He feels so tired. God he wishes he could sleep. “There’s still danger in the world.”

“There are miracles too,” Peggy says. “Steven, I know you. You shouldn’t be…” she seems to struggle for the word. “Stop looking for something to fight against. Find something to fight for. And for God’s sake, don’t try to do it alone.”

He doesn’t have an answer to that. He is so lonely he can’t stand it, but at the same time, he feels like…

Like he couldn’t bear to let other people -- strangers -- step into the empty places around him. Places where other people stood, only a few short weeks ago. He wants to hold on to them, the memory of them, as long as he can. The people who knew him, who really knew him. Knew Steve Rogers, not Captain America.

He rubs his face.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was never supposed to be like this.

“What?” Peggy says, clearly hearing something in his silence.

He drops his hand from his face and curls it around his coffee. “Nothing.” He doesn’t know that he could stand to say it aloud.

Peggy sighs, crackly down the phone line. “Steven. I called in half a dozen favors and dusted off several files of blackmail material to ensure that this line would not be bugged. You can say whatever it is that you’re thinking.”

“No I can’t.”

“Yes you can,” she insists.

He turns the coffee mug around and around, careful not to squeeze too hard. He’s already broken two or three. God does he miss the tin mugs they had in the army. If he bent them out of shape he could just bend them back.

“I just…” He swallows. “I didn’t really have a plan. For after the war.” He stops, lets out half a laugh. “Man With A Plan. What a fucking joke. I didn’t want to… get my own hopes up, I guess. I thought I’d have time. To… figure something out. And I think I know what I wanted, even if I have no idea how I would have--”

“Steven,” she starts, a reassurance that he doesn’t want to hear.

“Let me finish,” he says, a bit sharp. He takes a breath, slow, and makes himself be less… just less. “I thought, an apartment. In Brooklyn, because, well. It’s home and… I don’t know anywhere else, really. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. But I thought. Home, and then… The Howlies could visit, if we…”

If we all made it, he doesn’t have to say. They didn’t. He didn’t. He swallows.

“And I thought, maybe…” He squeezes his eyes shut and tries, just for a minute to ignore the banshee wailing in his head it’s too late, you’re too late, too fucking late-- “I thought,” he says, firmly, “if you had wanted… I know you didn’t need me around messing things up, but I…” He trails off, holds his breath. He’s so awful at this, he thinks miserably. Stop dancing around the thing, Rogers. “I would’ve wanted you to be there. Or. To be where you were, maybe. If... you would’ve wanted that...” he finishes, limping across the finish line of this terrible fucking confession.

She takes a breath, lets it out. “Well. It’s like that, is it?” She says it lightly, coolly, like it means nothing, like he didn’t just suggest that maybe he’d have liked to marry her someday. “Your timing is atrocious, as usual. And you’re quite right. I didn’t need you around.” Her voice turns gentle. “But oh, darling, I wanted you around. We all did, you know. You were so dearly missed, Steven.”

He knows. He aches with it. It squeezes tight around his throat, stops up any words he might have wanted to say, but he can’t cry. He hasn’t, since he woke up, since the initial shock passed. Sometimes he thinks the ice froze more than his body. Some childish part of himself, some piece of his soul, maybe, still hasn’t thawed. Maybe it died.

“You can still have it, you know. Home,” she says. “Brooklyn’s still there, and you’re still here.”

He shakes his head, violently, but she’s not here. She can’t see him. He has to say it. He sighs, shaky. “Home. Home is people, Peggy.”

“Darling,” she says, like he’s breaking her heart -- breaking her heart again. Breaking her heart all over again.

Abruptly, he can’t keep talking about this. He feels sick just from what they’ve said so far.  “I should go,” he says. “I should let you go.”

“Steve…” She sighs, sounding like she wants to say more, but giving in. “Alright, dear heart. Alright.”

Once they’ve rung off, he goes for his morning run.

After a few miles, he gets his second wind. His body buzzes with it; a rush of something the doctors say is like superconcentrated adrenaline mixed with speed and steroids. They thought about trying to synthesize it, one of the techs had babbled, dazed and confused in the presence of a living legend. But it turns out that Steve’s home-grown epinephrine is so potent it would kill an elephant.

He keeps going through the runner’s high. By the time he’s run a full marathon, he’s starting to flag. He pushes, keeps pushing. He runs until his lungs burn with it, until he can’t keep going.

Finally, he staggers to a halt. He stops there, by the shore of the lake, puts his hands on his shaking knees, and stares at the place where the water meets the land, at the stones under his feet, the silt, the solidity of the world.

It’s inexorable. It’s so unrelentingly real. He lives here, and he can’t change that. He can’t run away from it.

He drops to his knees, dips his hands into the lake, and cups water over his head. It’s blessedly cool on his overheated skin. He rocks back, sitting on his heels, and looks up at the clear sky. It’s silent, except for the lapping waves.

It’s so quiet.

It’s too fucking quiet here.

He can’t stay.

He doesn’t call Peggy for advice, and she doesn’t call him to push. He leaves the Retreat and goes back to New York. Where else is he supposed to go?

When Fury asks, gently, if Steve wants to return to work, to come back as Captain America, if he’s ready to let the world know that he’s back, Steve shakes his head.

“No. I need more time,” he says, and grimaces, braced for--

But there’s no one to look at him, lift a brow, and say “Ya need more time? Seriously?” And then roll his eyes at the people around them and say: “Can ya believe this joker? He says he needs more time. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this fuckin' schmuck.”

There’s no one to say it, and no one to hear it and laugh.

Fury just gives a somber little nod. It’s not like he can refuse. Steve was on mission when the plane went down, which technically means that he’s just gotten back from the longest goddamn tour of duty that anyone has ever been on, ever.

They set him up with an apartment. Inside the apartment is a phone -- one of the slim, alien, cordless ones. When he picks it up, he finds a card tucked underneath.

This one isn’t bugged either, darling. And your mobile is clear.

But he doesn’t call her.

They set him up with a bank account. The government owes him backpay like you wouldn’t believe, and every company that ever used his face owes him a cut, so he’s…

He’s got more money than he likes to think about. It makes him feel vaguely ill. On the one hand, he’d always dreamed of having enough money, of not having to worry about it, but now that he has it…

He’d rather give it away. His financial advisor (he has a financial advisor) tells him that he shouldn’t do anything rash. His SHIELD therapist says the same thing. When she can twist his arm into actually going to his appointments.

“How are you doing, Steve?” she asks him. Every time.

“Fine,” he says. Every time.

They don’t pay her enough.

She always gives him a little plastic cup of water when he came in, and he keeps staring at it, running his finger around the curled down edge of the rim.

Everything’s in plastic now. They had plastic back in his day -- he can still picture the cracked casing of the bakelite radio, the one he kept having to fix all through ‘39. According to something called Wikipedia, mass-produced plastic didn’t really get rolling until after the war. And now there’s plastic everywhere, the smell of it strange, leaching its flavor into the food, the drinks. That was what had driven him to look it up on his phone. Why does all my food taste like chemicals?

Steve doesn’t mind, really, and he wouldn’t waste perfectly good food just because it tasted a little plasticky.

But it had said on Wikipedia that a plastic bottle takes 400 years to degrade, and he’d felt a chill rocket down his spine. After all, isn’t he just another product of wartime innovation? How long it will take him to degrade?

“Steve?”

Steve looks up. The therapist is watching him, brows raised. He missed something. “Sorry,” he says. “What did you say?”

The therapist -- Dr. Hartman, he reminds himself -- folds her hands in front of her and regards him with kind, brown eyes. “I asked how your day was going.”

“It’s fine, ma’am,” he tells her. He even smiles.

She’s not buying it.

They really don’t pay her enough.

He gets a computer and learns how to use it.

But.

Well. Once he’s got the hang of it, it’s like a black hole, sucking him in, and the next thing he knows, he’s Googling the Barnes family, just to see, he just wants to see --

But all the Barneses that he knew are dead.

Winnie died first, and that leaves him hot and cold with shock. He can’t even imagine George without her. Big, gentle George who was so quiet, and so sad. Winnie was his rock, and he had to go on without her, for almost five years.

He finds out that there are Proctors still living in New York, still living in Brooklyn. Rebecca’s children, and their children. He’s terrified to run into them. Just the thought of it knocks him sideways. Would they look like her? Would they look like him? Or would he pass them by without even recognizing them, without somehow sensing it -- a piece of him still breathing and walking around Brooklyn.

But he can’t ask, can’t reach out to the Procters because Rebecca died in April -- April 2011. He missed her by months. He could have talked to her, could have had time with her, could have spoken to a Barnes -- a real Barnes, one of the ones who knew him, knew them both --

He keeps looking. He can’t seem to stop himself.

Susan and Jeanie never had kids -- Susan was too busy with all her causes, right up until the day she died: still fighting at 78 years old. She never saw the Twin Towers come down, and that’s a small mercy, Steve thinks.

After Susan died, Jeanie moved to Massachusetts with her partner, Elizabeth --

Her partner.

Jeanie and Liz met working at the factory together, making bombs while he was getting himself blown up. They lived long enough to see the laws change. They got married.

There’s quite a bit about them, because Jeanie became as outspoken as Susan in her old age. There’s footage. A video on YouTube, from a Pride March in 2009. Pride, as in gay pride. And Jeanie’s there, Jeanie, looking old, so old. Older than Winnie, older than --

“Prop 8, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Laramie… My brother didn’t die for this shit,” Jeanie says. She’s holding the mic, not letting them take it away, and there’s fire in her blue eyes. There’s a ferocity in her she didn’t have when she was younger, and there’s a woman - - Elizabeth, her partner, her wife - - standing behind her, wearing a shirt with a pink triangle on it. A pink triangle. “ Captain America didn’t die for this shit,” Jeanie says, and there’s no hesitation, no wavering even though her voice is reedy with age. “If you think he would’ve been proud of our country right now, you didn’t know Steve Rogers.”

“You think Captain Rogers would’ve supported gay rights?”

“Steve was like a brother to me, and he was a little shit, but he wasn’t an asshole.”

Elizabeth snorts out a laugh behind her, covering her face with wrinkly, age-spotted hands. Jeanie elbows her, like they’re kids, and that’s Jeanie, that’s pure Jean Barnes, elbowing her friend not to give away the joke.

“Listen,” Jeanie continues. “You think it was an accident that Steve ran the first integrated unit in the US Army? Steve believed in America, where it doesn’t matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love. Everyone deserves a fair shake, everyone deserves equal treatment under the law. That’s the America that Steve Rogers believed in. That’s the America that my brothers gave their lives for.”

Steve slams the laptop shut and pushes it away.

Jeanie and Liz share a plot in Greenwood. Steve won’t visit. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. His whole body shakes with the desire to talk to her, because -- because --

But she died years before he came out of the ice. And that’s all there is to say about it. They’re gone. He missed them.

He doesn’t leave his apartment for three days after that, can’t even face the world. He thinks about calling Peggy, but he doesn't. He thinks about ways he could maybe speed up that whole plastic-taking-400-years-to-degrade thing. He thinks about telling his therapist about thinking about that. He won’t. He might tell a priest though, if he can ever find the will to actually go to Church.

He picks himself up. He always does.

He can’t find a Church that does the service in Latin, and hearing it in English makes him feel like he’s sitting next to himself instead of sitting in his own body.

Instead, he joins a gym, one where they give him the keys so he can pummel heavy bags all night instead of sleeping. He’ll bring his own, he explains, because he tends to break them. The owner doesn’t say anything about it. Doesn’t recognize him either, but that doesn’t surprise Steve. It’s New York, so even if they did recognize him, they wouldn’t say anything.

But people mostly don’t recognize him. He gets that, because Captain America is either heroic or smiling. Steve doesn’t look very heroic in his plaid shirts and khaki pants. And he doesn’t smile so much anymore.

In May, eight months after waking up into this living nightmare, Steve finally requests the dossiers from SHIELD. His team.

There’s paper files, and footage, too. He plugs in the hard drive and clicks through to the clips. Newsreels. They’re terrible. They look so.

Old.

He turns off the footage and goes through the files.

Dernier was the first to go, after the war. He was the oldest of them, but he died young; a car crash when he was just 57.

And then there was Howard -- not technically a Howlie, but still a friend. Another car crash. Steve supposes that shouldn’t surprise him, but it strikes him as odd. It’s a hell of a coincidence.

Jones went home a hero, married his sweetheart, and started making noise. Somewhere along the line, easygoing Gabe Jones caught fire. After the war, he ran for office, he fought the laws, he worked with Martin Luther King Jr and survived two assassination attempts before dying at the ripe old age of 87, as a final fuck you to everyone who ever told him he couldn’t.

Monty kept on working -- his files are heavily redacted. Steve could maybe press for details, but the important bit is there at the end of the file. James Montgomery Falsworth eventually retired to the Caribbean and died in his sleep a few years later.

Morita went for the quiet life, which is funny to Steve, because Morita was always such a spitfire, so unlike Gabe. But when he was done working for the SSR -- for SHIELD -- Jim Morita moved to New York, had a family, lived a long time. There’s Moritas still living in New York too -- one of them just became Principal at some fancy high school in Midtown.

Dum Dum, improbably, outlived all the others. He ran the team after Steve went into the ice, and Falsworth got tapped to be an agent for MI-13. Dugan never had a family of his own; he was married to his work. And his funeral was flooded with well-wishers, with all the guys he trained and all their kids and…

Steve’s seen pictures of his own funeral. The pomp. The fucking circumstance. He hated it. He’s glad he wasn’t there, he’d have been mortified.

He should have had a funeral like Dum Dum’s.

Steve puts away the files. He needs air. He needs to get out. He needs to hit the goddamn heavy bag until he can’t anymore.

You here with a mission, sir?

I am.

Trying to get me back in the world?

Trying to save it.

Steve says: “You should’ve left it in the ocean.” He thinks you should’ve left me in the ice.

Agent Romanoff says: “There was quite the buzz around here, finding you...” and not much else of consequence. That’s deliberate, he knows. She watches him, and there's something in her eyes. Like she’s measuring him to some standard. Like he might be useful to her, later. Peggy had looked at him like that, once upon a time. It had made him want to stand a little straighter, go a little farther, a little faster.

Now, he just wants to get this over with.

Thor says: “He’s adopted,” and it’s almost comical, except Steve had seen Thor’s face when he grabbed Loki, when they brought him in. When they locked him up. Steve never had a brother, but he thinks about what it would’ve been like if one of the Howlies had lost it and started killing for fun. He knows enough to know that the line between war and murder is so thin that you can’t always tell when you’ve crossed it.

Bruce says: “Steve.” And Steve looks at him, because it’s been months since anyone other than Peggy or his fucking therapist called him Steve. Bruce is the only other guy here who got the serum -- or at least, some version of it. There’s an understanding there. “Tell me none of this smells a little funky to you?”

And Bruce is right, of course.

Tony says: “everything special about you came out of a bottle,” and Steve hears: right, cuz you got nothing to prove like it’s a punch under the gut. And Steve, being Steve, thinks about saying:

And everything special about you came from your father -- do you want to speculate about why those StarkTech repulsors sound exactly like a Hydra Tesseract gun? You think Fury started all this? Howard never could leave well enough alone and you're just like your daddy, aren't you?

So no one realizes that he’s actually showing some restraint (not a lot, but some) when he says “Put on the suit.” He may have beaten Hydra seventy years ago, but it’s like he can feel them all around, and he just wants to hit something.

Barton says: “I can,” when Steve asks if Natasha can fly one of those jets. He says it with a kind of deliberate steadiness. He’s not asking for anything, he’s not asking to prove himself, he’s just offering. Steve looks to Natasha. Her nod is slow, deliberate, so he can’t misinterpret. It’s enough for Steve. He looks back to Barton. “You got a suit?” he asks.

Banner says: “I’m always angry,” and Steve tells the Hulk: “Smash,” because he gets it. Oh boy, does he get it.

Thor gives him a hand up and says: “You ready for another bout?”

They’re going to lose, eventually, and he knows it. They both know it. Even Thor can’t keep fighting forever. They’re both bleeding from the gut, and maybe Thor can shrug that off, and maybe Steve can push through it for now, but they are so outnumbered. They are so outmatched.

Steve’s been outmatched before. It never stopped him then.

“What, you getting sleepy?” he says.

Steve says: “We won.” And he can’t believe it. This mess of a team, this time bomb. They did it, somehow.

“Alright. Hey. Alright. Good job, guys,” Tony says, one iron-clad arm moving in the saddest fist-pump known to man. “Let's just not come in tomorrow. Let's just take a day. Have you ever tried shawarma?” he asks the Hulk. “There's a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don't know what it is, but I wanna try it.”

“We’re not finished yet,” says Thor.

If it’s all the same to you,
I’ll have that drink.

The first thing Steve does, once Loki is in custody, is call Peggy.

“Still alive I see?” is her tart greeting.

“Well,” he says, and glances behind him, to check that he's alone on this balcony. Or what remains of it. “You know me. I’m like a bad penny.”

“Really Steven. Do you only call when there’s an apocalypse now? Could you be more dramatic?”

Steve decides not to tell her that he's standing on the edge of the balcony, wind-whipped and looking down over the smoke and rubble littering his city. He's seen the posters for those Batman movies. He knows what he looks like.

“Are you alright, dear heart?” she asks.

“I'm fine, Pegs,” he says. His whole back is one giant bruise, there’s a sizable burn on his stomach, and he’s pretty sure he cracked a few ribs, but nothing too serious. “Bit sore. Nothing that won't heal.” He eases himself down with a groan, sits at the edge of the balcony and stares.

“That... isn't really what I meant, darling.”

She knows him too well. He hangs his head and sighs. Then he lifts his head again, looks out across the city. “I never wanted to see a battlefield here,” he admits, quietly. “I mean. I saw London, Paris, I know that no city is immune but still...”

“I'm so sorry,” Peggy says gently. “I know how painful it is. New York is your home.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, about that. What I was saying, the last time we talked--”

“Are you about to indirectly propose to me again, Steven?” she says, lightly.

“Margaret Carter, when I finally get the balls to actually propose to you, I promise you will know about it,” Steve says, in his best You Can Trust Me, I'm Captain America voice.

She laughs. “Well. I look forward to it. But what were you saying?”

“I was saying, about home. I've been -- ever since I woke up, I've been trying to get home, you know?” He says. “Trying to find some way to hold on, to go back, somehow. But I…”

“Home is people, you said.”

He swallows. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah it is.”

“I know what you mean,” she says. “You know -- or, well, I suppose you don't, actually, but my husband… he was a good man. You would've liked him, I think.”

“No, I wouldn't have,” he says, teasing.

“Mmm,” she says, just a touch skeptical. “I think you would have, actually. But when he died -- oh, I thought that was it, you know? I thought -- two great loves. That’s certainly more than my fair share. I was so sure that I was done, and so sure that I was too old to love again.”

“You're not as old as me,” he says.

“Hush when your elders are talking,” she scolds him. “I'm an old woman rambling about her life. Least you can do is let me finish.”

He smiles. “Yes ma'am.”

“So. There I was, wrong side of sixty, a widow, and trying to run an intelligence agency, to boot. Living alone in New York, thinking about moving to DC. And an old friend called up out of the blue. Says if I was looking for a place to stay...” Peggy takes a breath in, and says, very deliberately: “So I moved in with her. And when I retired back to England, she came too. Turns out you’re never too old, darling.”

It hits him in stages; what this means. What she's telling him. “Oh. Oh.” But maybe he's reading too much into it, maybe he misunderstands-- “Your friend.”

“Her name is Angie. Say hello, Angie,” she adds, leaning back from the phone.

“Punch an alien in the face for me, Cap!” calls a tinny, woman’s voice, in a thick New York accent.

“I like the sound of her,” Steve says, laughing.

“Me too,” says Peggy, fond. “So. I've been thinking about that apartment you mentioned. After the war.”

He thinks of it: the sunny apartment, the Howlies drinking beer in his living room. Peggy there too, probably drinking whiskey. She wouldn't be the only one--

Hesitantly -- and she is so rarely hesitant about anything -- Peggy adds: “He would've been there too, wouldn’t he. He would've wanted to be there.”

And they both know who she’s talking about. “It wasn’t--” he starts to protest. He doesn’t want her to misunderstand, but…

Possibly she understands better than he does.

“We both loved you,” she says. “In our own ways. And you loved us both. Didn’t you.” It’s not a question. It’s not an accusation. He doesn’t have to answer, but he wants to. Since she asked.

Steve looks up at the city. It blurs and wobbles before him. He blinks and the tears run over his cheeks, sliding through grime and blood and ichor. “Yeah,” he says thickly. He still does. After all this time -- and yet no time at all -- he still does.

“Yes. I thought so.” Peggy sighs. “I don't know what I would've done with you, after the war. You two would've always been underfoot.”

Steve chokes out a laugh. “Yeah, we… yeah.” He swallows, thick in his throat, thinking of it. The three of them. Whatever it would’ve been. They would’ve worked out something. Steve could’ve come up with a plan. Peggy would’ve come up with plan B. Bucky would’ve found a way to make it happen. But…

“I can't go back,” he says. “Can I.”

Peggy’s voice is kind, and firm, and cracked with age. “No, darling.”

He lets out a breath and bows his head. He rubs his face with one hand. “You know…” he says, trying for light and not quite making it, “awful as all this is, he would have loved it. Aliens and spaceships. The future. New York. Aside from all the death and destruction, this was… This was Bucky's dream.” It might be the first time he’s said Bucky’s name, since…

“Home is people, Steven,” Peggy says quietly. “I know you think you're alone, dear heart, but you aren't. I swear you aren't.”

“Peggy, I--”

“Steve?”

That wasn’t Peggy’s voice. Steve swipes at his eyes and looks over. Natasha is there at the door, watching him with a studiously neutral expression. Assessing, as she always is. “We could use you in here,” she says.

“A minute,” Steve says.

She nods.

It isn’t until she’s turning her back that Steve realizes -- she called him Steve. Not Cap.

“I gotta go, Pegs,” he says.

“Alright, darling. Don’t wait until the next apocalypse to call.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Chapter Text

2

(Ho!) So show me family
(Hey!) All the blood that I would bleed
(Ho!) I don't know where I belong
(Hey!) I don't know where I went wrong
(Ho!) But I can write a song
(Hey!)
I belong with you, you belong with me, you're my sweetheart
I belong with you, you belong with me, you're my sweet

- Ho Hey by The Lumineers, 2012

Loki is lying in the middle of what had been Tony’s living room, immobilized by the hammer on his chest, staring at nothing at all. Surrendering. Again. But it doesn’t feel like before. His face is blank in a way that it hadn’t been, back in Stuttgart. His hands shake very slightly, where they’re resting on his stomach. Steve is reminded of an animal, run to ground. He looks exhausted. Whatever fire was driving him has burned out.

Looking at him, you could almost think he was human. But Steve can hear his unnatural alien heart, can smell that strange storm-smell on Loki’s skin. Thor smells like a thunderstorm, the possibility of lightning, but Loki smells like the evening before a cold snap. He smells like the Eastern Front, to Steve. Ice and snow. Frostbite.

So Steve isn’t fooled. He keeps his shield up as Thor puts the cuffs on him, and pulls something else from under his cloak.

Steve doesn't quite understand what he’s seeing, but Loki clearly recognizes it at once. There’s white all around the green iris. His lips go thin. He swallows. “A gift from Father?” he says, scornful.

“From Mother,” Thor says.

Loki looks like he's been slapped.

“Father's idea was. More permanent,” Thor says.

Loki swallows. He lifts his chin, but not in defiance. He’s baring his throat. Thor kneels down and fits the strange curved metal over the bottom of Loki’s face, and Steve realizes what it is:

A muzzle.

It comes to life as soon as it touches skin, and clamps over Loki’s jaw. Arms snap around behind his head and Thor reaches back to brush away stray hair that got caught in the mechanism. Loki closes his eyes.

Thor leans back, lifts the hammer off of Loki’s chest.

Tony tsks. “Didn’t even get that drink.”

“Stark,” Steve says, warning, but his eyes are on Thor’s face. The big blonde is looking at his brother with agony. Loki gives nothing back; only blankness.

“Hey! I was promised Shawarma. Let’s get Jareth here in a secure cell and get going.”

“He’s a god, not a goblin king,” Natasha mutters, nonsensically. Steve makes a mental note to add it to his list.

“He’s an asshole is what he is,” Clint says, viciously.

Steve lowers his shield, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the threat. Thor puts a hand on Loki’s shoulder and helps him get to his feet. Only Steve hears him say “I am truly sorry for this, brother.”

Loki’s answering stare is blank with defeat.

They’re leaving the shawarma place, walking through the rubble. They’re heading for Bed Stuy, for a building that is apparently owned by Clint and, unlike Stark Tower, is not currently half-demolished. Natasha says: “If we survive the Chitauri only to die at the hands of the tracksuit mafia, Barton, I swear to god--”

She reminds him of Peggy.

“No way, they backed off years ago,” Clint says. “We’ll be totally fine, and I talked to Barney, we won’t even have to double bunk it, because the top floor is empty right now.”

Steve wants to ask why -- it seems suspicious that a whole floor would be empty. But then… after what happened today, there are all kinds of reasons why residents might be gone.

“You are most generous,” Thor says, very seriously. He claps Clint on the back so hard that Clint staggers forward. Thor is almost cheerful now, in a subdued way that Steve suspects doesn’t come naturally to him.

Steve isn’t sure if Thor staying with them for their sakes, to keep a protective eye on his new mortal friends, or if he’s staying with them for his own sake, because he can’t stand to be alone right now.

Either way, Steve has the strangest moment of dizzy vertigo, and he can’t blame it on being hungry anymore. But he swears he can briefly see Dugan superimposed over Thor, laughing his big belly laugh and full to the brim of strength and jollity and gentleness, despite everything he’d been through. Dugan had lost his girl back home just a few weeks before Azzano, and he’d lost most of his friends in the battle or in the camps. But Dugan had always been kind, underneath all his gruffness and bravado.

“I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this,” Tony says, in that rapid-fire way of his. “Like I genuinely cannot believe it. I’m crashing at Barton’s Crime Hotel for Bums.”

“Heyyyy,” Barton says. “I’m not a bum. I have a home. You all though.”

“I have seven homes. Six now, I guess. No -- Seven if you count the boat. I sleep there sometimes.” Sometimes he’s so much like Howard it hurts. Most of the time, though…

“So stay in one of them, then. I’m not the crazy one here. You’re the guy crashing at the Crime Hotel of a recently brainwashed assassin who brings a bow and arrows to a lasergun fight,” Clint points out.

“Yeah, and you survived -- heck, in a team-effort kind of way, you won the lasergun fight, which I think makes you the scariest motherfucker here,” Tony shoots back. “It would actually be crazy for me to stay with anyone else.”

And it’s like he can see Bucky there, in front of him, in both of them.  There’s an echo of Bucky in Tony, who looks like Howard, but stands and sounds like Bucky-before-the-war, the swaggering confidence of him, the steel-trap mind. And there’s something of Sergeant Barnes in Clint’s stance; a sniper’s stillness, a marksman’s focus.

Steve is walking with ghosts.

“You alright, Steve?” says Dr. Banner. He says it -- ‘Steve.’ just like he had back on the helicarrier. Steve glances over. There's something about Banner. They connect in a weird, unspoken way -- they're both serum survivors, he supposes. Members of a very exclusive club.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah. Tired, that’s all.”

“Don’t worry, Cap. We’ll set an alarm for you,” Tony says. “We won’t let you sleep for seventy years again.”

“Gee golly thanks,” Steve says, in just the bone dry way he would have if it were Bucky teasing him. And then he has to look away so Tony won’t see the pained expression on his face.

Tony is gasping in mock shock. “Captain Sassypants, hel-lo.”

Steve gives him a look. “Steve’s fine when we’re not, you know.” He waves a hand. “Avenging.”

Tony shudders all over. “Oh god, an American Icon just asked me to call him Steve. I feel… wholesome. How awful.”

That , though. That is 100% Tony Stark. Steve rolls his eyes heavenward and prays for patience.

That night, in Clint’s beat-up apartment building, Steve finally sleeps. Really sleeps, deep and true, for the first time since the ice. He thanks God that he doesn’t dream.

While they’re all having makeshift breakfasts in one of the kitchens, Tony pulls Steve aside and says “Hey, have they warned you about paparazzi?”

Steve just stares at him.

“It’s gonna be Ug. Ly,” Clint mutters over the top of the coffee carafe.

Steve frowns. “Is this a future thing?”

“Yeah, it’s a future thing,” Bruce says. “A horrible, horrible future thing.”

“They had muckrakers in the forties, didn’t they? It’s kind of like that,” Natasha says. She’s got her feet in Clint’s lap again. She holds out a hand and makes grabby fingers, like a baby reaching for a bottle. Clint hands over the carafe and she drinks out of it. “They’ve got our faces now, no hiding this,” she adds. Clint squeezes her ankle in a reassuring kind of way. She doesn’t look stressed out, but with her, who can tell.

“They already had my face, didn’t they?” Steve says. “I mean. I know SHIELD covered it up, but I came running out into the middle of Times Square. It was all over... Twitter.” he dredges the name from his memory.

Tony snorts into his coffee (which is in a mug.)

“Yeah, this is gonna be a different thing,” Bruce tells him. “That was like, a viral thing. ‘Oh look at this Captain America lookalike drunk in Times Square, the police had to bring him in.’ Now, though. They’ve seen you in the suit. Fighting aliens. It’s gonna be… different.”

At that point, Thor comes in, yawning hugely and wearing what must pass for underwear in Asgard. Clint covers his eyes and screams like a girl. Tony mimes fainting dead away. Natasha makes a boredly appreciative sound and Bruce says: “oh geeze, um, wow, um.” Steve has to drag his eyes away and swallow because. Well. Bruce isn’t wrong. When he looks up, Natasha is watching him from the corner of her eye. She winks. He feels the back of his neck going warm and looks down at his coffee.

Steve changes into his civvies and heads back to his apartment. All he wants right now is to put on a record, close his eyes, and maybe pretend that it’s 1940 for a few minutes.  He’ll go help with cleanup later. But first...

And then he rounds the corner. There’s a mass of people in front of his apartment. A goddamn swarm, loitering around, blocking the bottom of the steps, chattering to each other and smoking. For a moment, he just freezes.

They spot him.

And suddenly it’s the forties alright. It's nineteen-fucking-forty-fucking-four and he’s in no man's land with the Howlies, bombs going off and the eerie rapid lightning flashes of shells and gunfire, explosions and actual fucking lightning making everything happen in fits and spurts and he just needs to get to cover, needs to find a goddamn foxhole, needs to get his shield up. He can taste mud and fear in his mouth. And he has to actually wrench himself back to the present.

While he was frozen, they’ve come in and surrounded him, shoving mics and cameras and phones all in his face, and this is--

He can feel his heart pounding in his chest.

His eyes fix on the door. He narrows his focus. Tunes out the noise, the lights.

He just wades through them, hands shoved deep in his pockets to keep from hitting someone. He doesn’t look at the people around him, and when they get in his way, he just keeps walking, implacable, the sheer bulk of him pushing them aside.

He gets to the stoop, and there’s one paparazzo with his cameraphone raised right in Steve’s fucking face. It flashes, and he winces, because the color is just the same as the Tesseract weapons and--

Before he can stop himself, he grabs the phone and crushes it into a mangled mess of electronics and glass.

The guy looks at his empty hand, at the sparking ruins in Steve’s hand. “What the fuck, man?” the paparazzo says, shocked.

“Bill me for it,” Steve says through gritted teeth. He steps to one side and jerks his head. The paparazzo scurries out of the way, rejoining his fellows. They’re all staring at him now. A few flashes are still going, and he thinks that a few of the phones are still recording, but.

They’re all staring at his hand. It’s still clenched around the ruined phone. He looks over and is somewhat surprised to see that blood is dripping out of his palm onto the concrete steps.

“God damn it,” he mutters under his breath. He drops the phone into the trashcan by the stoop, and yeah, there’s bits of phone glass digging into his palm, but it’s not so bad that he can’t get his key in the lock and get into his apartment.

He presses his back against the door, feeling like he just ran a fucking marathon.

It only takes five minutes for his guilt to overwhelm his panic. He’s Captain America now, not some punk who smashes phones because they caught him on a bad day.

By the time he’s done cleaning the glass out of his hand, he’s feeling steady enough to go out and face them again. He manages a stern but genuine apology, with phrases like “I am heartily sorry” and “Of course I’ll pay for any damage” and “I understand that you’re all just doing your jobs, I really do, but…” And here, he ends the little speech with a line that will be immortalized on YouTube, made into gifs on the internet, and plastered across posters around the country, “maybe don’t startle a guy who’s been fighting aliens all day.” He gives a self-deprecating little smile. “He might overreact.”

There’s a momentary pause and then they all start shouting questions.

“Excuse me,” he says firmly, and starts wading through them again. They part before him now, which… well that’s fine, he guesses.

“Cap, where are you going?” one of them calls out, loud enough to be heard over the din.

He turns back, baffled. “There’s clean up to do,” he says. “I’m not just gonna sit around.”

And actually, a couple of the photographers decide to put down their cameras and join him.

Steve’s been hauling rubble and using his super senses to listen for the heartbeats of those trapped for about eight hours when Tony calls.

“What?” Steve says, stepping away from the remains of an office building and the still smoldering rubble of a… flying space whale.

“You know there’s like… emergency services and stuff.”

“Where I come from, people lend a hand if they can,” Steve says. “Maybe that’s not how you do things in the future.” But he knows for a fact that Iron Man has been flying around picking up rubble and lasering through girders.

“Those of us who live here call it the present,” Tony says drily. “When you get a minute, we need to talk media strategy.”

“Is now really the time for that?” Steve asks.

“There’s more than one kind of cleanup, you know,” Tony tells him. “I’ll send a car to get you. We’ll have Pho.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Steve tells him.

“Just get in the car when it turns up, Gramps.”

They meet at another Stark Industries property to talk about the fallout. Pho turns out to be soup, basically. It’s pretty good, and there’s enough of it to satisfy even him and Thor, so that’s something.

The meeting is run by Pepper Potts, who introduces herself as: “CEO of Stark Industries, and Tony Stark’s handler.”

“She’s not my handler!” Tony protests. “She’s the light of my life.” He looks exhausted. He probably shouldn’t have been helping with cleanup, after almost dying the day before, but…

“He’s the bane of my existence,” Pepper says, but she’s standing awfully close to him, and her fingers settle on the back of his neck as she keeps talking. Tony looks up her, and…

Yeah. She is the light of his life, even Steve can see that.

The meeting is mostly PR stuff. Pepper runs it exactly the way Phillips used to run strategy meetings. She’s sending Tony to work on a project upstate, because “Everyone thinks Tony is a saint and a martyr right now. It would be a shame to ruin that by letting him open his mouth.”

Thor is going back to Asgard with Loki, obviously, following an agreement from the State Department to an extraplanetary extradition (because how does one say no to a literal god who’s lived for thousands of years?)

Clint has “things to do, places to be,” and they’re all agreed that he deserves a break. “And the best lawyer money can buy,” Pepper adds, pulling out a business card and handing it over. Clint looks at it with thin lips. It’s the only reference anyone makes to the fact that Clint had, technically, committed several acts of treason.

They’re not going to say anything about it, but it’s only a matter of time before the media gets their grubby hands on that, and they won’t be so kind.

And that’s why Natasha and Pepper are going to be loosed upon the media like hellfire and retribution. Steve’s seen a few clips from Fox News, so he’s pretty sure he knows what to expect and... Natasha and Pepper are going to wipe the floor with them.

“Cap?” Pepper says, turning to him next.

Steve had been more or less zoning out. Waiting for orders and bracing himself, internally. The Star-Spangled Circuit was swimming vaguely in the back of his mind. He blinks his attention to Pepper. “Yes, ma’am?”

She smiles warmly at him. “What would you like to do?”

“What do you need me to do?” he asks immediately.

Everyone is quiet while she contemplates him. Her lips are pursed, thoughtful. “Look, Steve -- may I call you Steve?”

“Of course,” he says.

“Okay, Steve. I could manage you, tell you what to do, put together a schedule, and you’d charm the pants off everyone in America in no time flat, but.” She smiles. “I think it would be better for everyone concerned if we didn’t do that. And I think you’ve served enough. What do you want to do?”

Steve considers this. He doesn’t want to go back to that apartment. New York is painful to look at, even more so now that half of it is in ruins because of them. Everything he knew, here and everywhere else, is gone. The war is over, and his home is a strange place he doesn’t know anymore.

Maybe he should think about changing that.

The rest of the team, the Avengers, they’re staring at him. Clint looks carefully blank. Tony looks studiously expectant, one brow raised. Pepper is smiling kindly, and so is Thor. Bruce and Natasha though, both look like maybe they understand, like maybe they are sympathetic because they get it.

Steve rubs his chin. “I honestly don’t know,” he admits. “Bucky--” he stops at the sudden cavern of loss that has opened up in front of him. “Bucky and I said that when the war was over, we were gonna get out of the city, go somewhere warm and dry for a change. Travel. See the Grand Canyon, or something.”

“War’s over now,” Pepper says quietly.

“Believe me, I’m aware.”

“Road trip,” Tony says, snapping his fingers. “Like that guy who hiked all the National Parks. Something like that. Have you ever even left the city, except to go to the front? I mean, you’re Captain America, but have you ever actually seen America?”

“It’s been a while,” Steve says, bone dry. “I hear things have changed. Maybe I should check it out for myself.”

Pepper is grinning. “See. I knew that whatever you came up with would be better than anything I could dream of.”

So Steve spends the next six months on the road. Just him, his motorcycle, and the most wonderful of modern inventions: the interstate highway system. He stays at cheap motels, and lets his beard grow in. He doesn’t hide who he is, but he mostly visits places that are too small to have a strong media presence. Mostly it’s kids with cell phones, shaking with excitement and asking if it’s okay to take a selfie. He doesn’t mind that as much as he thought he would. Every once in awhile the paparazzi will catch up with him, but it never takes him long to lose them. It’s not like it’s harder than losing a Hydra patrol.

There’s a lot of press revolving around the Battle of New York, and what the Avengers did, some of it good, a lot of it bad. Steve feels a little guilty about leaving them hanging, but Pepper keeps insisting that he should do this, if this is what he wants.

A few weeks later, he’s in a diner having the most amazing BLT he’s ever had in his life when he looks up and sees Natasha on the screen, smiling like she’s eating someone alive. “Excuse me, miss?” He says to the young woman behind the counter.

She looks up, automatically reaching for the pen behind her ear.

“Could you turn that up, please?” He asks, nodding to the TV.

She glances over her shoulder at the screen, and then nods. “Oh yeah, of course.” She points a remote and the volume comes up.

“Well if you’d like to opt out of the program, Bill, I’ll be happy to let the aliens destroy your home,” Natasha says, her smoky voice deliberately sweet and polite.

The host’s eyebrows go up. “Is that a threat, Miss Romanoff?”

The Black Widow smiles. Slowly. “I’m just trying to accommodate your concerns about us.”

The waitress is leaning against the counter. She lets out a low whistle. “Damn.”

Steve is smiling to himself. “I’ll say.”

Maybe they don’t need him after all. Natasha’s got it covered, for now at least. Maybe later, when he’s ready…

At an overlook in New Mexico, staring out across a rugged wilderness, Steve tries to do some sketching. It’s a new sketchbook, just something he picked up from a shop along the way, and a handful of yellow pencils. He can afford nicer things, but he feels self conscious buying them. This isn’t his job anymore.

He starts with a couple of sketches of what he’s looking at: scrub-covered foothills and tumbles of rocks. The clouds gathering on the horizon. Ravens circling overhead.

Then he tries to sketch things he remembers.

It does not go well.

From a hotel in Arizona, he calls Peggy again.

“Steven,” she says, sounding pleased. It's been too long since he called. “How’s your trip going?”

“Pretty well.  How are you?”

“Well as can be expected.” She tells him about her garden. When he closes his eyes, he can picture it. He can picture her in it. He’s trying to get used to the idea of her being old, trying to picture her grey-haired, wizened, like Jeanie had been in that Youtube video…

“Steven?”

He’s been quiet, he realizes. What had she been saying? Had she asked him a question? “Sorry,” he says.

“It’s no trouble, dear. What are you thinking about?”

He pauses, tries to think how to phrase it. “Bucky’s sister,” he says.

“Rebecca?”

“Jean.”

“Ah. Are we talking about that now, dearest?” she says it knowingly, and of course she would have known exactly who Jean was, what kind of life she lived.

Who she married.

Steve is sitting with his back against the headboard. He’s got the phone on speaker, sitting next to him. It’s easier to pretend he’s just talking to her, like that. He pulls his knees up and wraps his arms around them. He digs his fingers into the thin material of his pajama bottoms. “All that orientation they gave me. Computers and cell phones and fancy new cars. There was so much for me to catch up on, I guess it slipped through the cracks? I mean… I think they did about five seconds? Just a list of words I shouldn’t use anymore because they were considered offensive now.” He sighs, shakes his head. “They warned me about the price of coffee, but no one thought to mention…”

“...Gay marriage?”

“Bisexuality.” He lets out a shuddering breath, sucks in another. His knees are pulled in almost to his chin, every part of him instinctively bracing for… what? A punch? Abuse? From who? From Peggy? Ridiculous. He makes his hands relax.

“It’s like they didn’t want you to be happy,” Peggy says, exasperated.

“I’m sure they did their best,” Steve says loyally. “They couldn’t have known that… that I…”

“It's awfully hard for you to talk about, isn't it,” she says. It isn't a question.

“It wasn’t something anyone talked about. I never told anyone,” Steve blurts.

“No?”

“No. Well, a priest, but that doesn’t count. And I told a couple of liberated German prisoners at Birkenau, kind of accidentally?”

A long pause. “Steven,” she says, sounding almost awed.

“I know.”

“Darling. You are a walking, talking disaster .”

“I know ,” Steve groans.

She laughs at him. It's hoarse, and soft. He loves it. No one laughs at him to his face anymore. They laugh behind his back, he's sure, but not to his face. No one knows him well enough.

The laughter fades away. He knows what's coming; the next question. He knows, and he tenses in anticipation, and sure enough--

“You never told anyone? Not even Barnes?” She asks softly.

And there it is. Dagger to the heart. Because the answer is no. It's no .

“I rather thought not. That’s… I’m so sorry. I know you loved him.”

“Peggy,” he starts -- though, what can he say? “You know it doesn't change how I felt about you, I woulda--”

“I am not now, nor have I ever been blind,” Peggy says, with a smile in her voice. “And frankly Steven, the way you used to look at me was embarrassing.”

Steve can imagine it: hearts in his eyes and a stupid smile on his face. He was always such shit at hiding anything that wasn’t pain.

“It was all terribly flattering, and I loved every second, but you know…” she sighs. “You used to reach for him without looking. And he knew which way you were going before you moved. I’d never seen anything like it. I wouldn’t want to compete with that.”

“I would never have asked you to,” Steve says. “It wasn’t like that, between me and him. He wasn’t like that.”

She is silent, in a very careful, deliberate way.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing,” she says.

“It’s not nothing.” He has a sick feeling in his guts, like maybe he knows what she’s thinking.

“It doesn’t matter now,” She says. “You know…” She sighs, heavily. “That apartment you were telling me about, after the war.”

He closes his eyes and lets it swim up in his mind, a frozen moment in his imagination, something that never happened. He’s sitting there, looking through from the kitchen to where the Howlies and Peggy are listening to the ballgame in the living room. All of them whole and young and smiling. It’s 1946, maybe. “Yeah?”

“It wouldn’t have worked, you know,” she says, blunt and unforgiving.

His eyes snap open, staring at the ceiling. There’s a stain at the corner of one of the tiles. “What?”

“You didn’t live through the fifties, so you don’t know. But I did. It wasn’t...” She clears her throat. “If I’d married you, my career at SHIELD would’ve been over before it even began. So I wouldn’t have married you,” she says it frankly. “And you… darling, I wouldn’t have minded sharing you with Barnes--” Steve’s face goes suddenly hot and he gapes like a fish “--but you wouldn’t have felt right about it, I don’t think. I would never have asked you to choose, but you’d have chosen him, in the end. You always did. And that’s fine, don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t. But then you two would’ve been caught out, and the scandal of it would’ve ruined you both.”

“Peggy--” he starts, wildly hurt by her frank tearing down of his dreams.

“I’m just saying, dear heart. The apartment in Brooklyn -- it’s a fantasy. It wouldn’t have played out like that.”

“We coulda--”

“And thank God it didn’t,” she barrels on. “Thank God you skipped all that. Thank God you woke up in this day and age. I know it feels like a fate worse than death, but darling, trust me, it isn’t. It might have been a mercy, in the end.”

“It doesn’t feel like a mercy,” he says, thickly.

“Mercy rarely does.” She sighs.

“Peggy,” Steve starts. He tries to think how to say this. “That life… the apartment in Brooklyn. I didn’t think it would be... I wouldn’t have expected it to be a perfect life. No one gets a perfect life.” He swallows. “But it woulda been my life.”

“Oh,” Peggy says, suddenly sounding winded. “Steve--”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Steve says, desperate to not talk about this all of a sudden. It’s still too tender, still too open a wound.

Her sigh is audibly exasperated. “Alright,” she says. “Tell me what you’re planning to do tomorrow.”

His plan for the next day is to hike down into the Grand Canyon.

He’s pretty sure he’s supposed to sign up with a tour or something, but he’s not going to do that. If someone catches him he’ll just pay the fine. He’s not particularly worried that the wildlife will get him or anything.

It’s beautiful out here. The canyon is bigger, has more colors in it, more depth than he realized. And the sky -- he’s never seen so much sky before. The air out here is clearer, and he can see farther. All those jagged stones, the lines and layers, the carven cliff edges. He read all about the canyon on the way here. Patient water carving away centuries of layered rock, digging into the past. He’s walking through history, through rocks that make him look like a toddler. It puts him in his place. It makes him feel young again. It makes him feel like he can breathe.

He’s got a backpack, a bedroll, a pop up tent that hopefully won’t be anything like the canvas monstrosities he fought with during the war. He’s also got his StarkTech phone (“Because iPods are for chumps, Steve.”) loaded with music courtesy of Tony .

He sets up the tent and builds a little campfire as the sun goes down. He puts the headphones on -- they’re big ones that cover his ears and make it sound like the band is right there inside his skull. It’s a random assortment of what Tony deemed to be Important. Steve doesn’t really know what to think of most of it.

He pulls out the sketchbook. He flips past his warm up sketches from New Mexico. He swallows, thick in his throat. It had been his first real attempt at art since he woke up, aside from ballpoint sketches of the new New York, trying to orient himself in the future.

He'd tried to draw Brooklyn. His Brooklyn. Their Brooklyn. But his memories of Brooklyn were fuzzy. Unclear and hazy the way all his pre serum memories had been, and his sketches reflected that; uncertain lines, bits scratched out and drawn over, blank spaces of things he had forgotten.

His war sketches are crystal clear. Crumpled shapes, the exact way a body splays when there's no one inside it anymore. The trenches, full of huddled, miserable soldiers. The smoking ruins of a bombed out neighborhood in London. Paris; full of Nazi flags and barricades. Two skeletal humans sitting side by side under a tree at Birkenau. There was a beauty to the war, a brutal, savage, monstrous beauty, yes, but that was honest, at least. To Steve's mind, there was always beauty in honesty.

Steve flips past those sketches. He opens to a new page and tries to clear his head, tries to let the dry, crystalline air blow off the dust on his soul. He tries to let himself be empty except for the music.

Music was always more Bucky’s thing than Steve’s, and as the songs change and change and change again, Steve finds himself sketching out a familiar profile. Strange ethereal guitar fills his head, and an equally strange voice echord in his skull.

I’m not here, this isn’t happening, the singer says. I’m not here, I’m not here.

And he knows (he's known for a while now, deep down) what he needs to do. He needs to say goodbye to Bucky, needs to figure out how to let go. Bucky had always wanted to come here. Steve is trying, because he needs to let go of all his regrets, or they will swallow him whole.

Seems like he’s mostly regrets these days. He’s not sure what will be left if he lets them go.

In a little while, I’ll be gone, the singer says, voice like the wailing of widows, the morning after a battle. The moment’s already passed. Yeah, it’s gone.

He lets the sketch of Bucky’s face stare up at the stars, and wonders what might have been.

But -- it’s like he said. It doesn’t matter now.

When he hikes back out of the canyon and starts getting signal again, his phone pings. There’s the usual check in from Nick, reminding him that whenever he’s ready to come back, there’s a place for him at SHIELD. There’s also a missed call from Pepper. He straps his backpack onto the back of his bike, stands with one hand on his hip, looking out at the glorious sunrise, and calls her back.

“Steve!” She says, sounding pleased.

“Hope it’s not too early to call,” he says at once, “but I saw I’d missed one from you so…”

“Oh it’s fine, it’s not an emergency or anything, I just… thought you should know. We’ve been fielding some calls for you. Most of it goes in the round up emails--” Most of that was garbage, Steve’s been scrolling through them, giving cursory glances. It’s requests for interviews that he doesn’t want to give, messages from people who want his support for this cause or that fundraiser. “But there was something… it’s a little personal, I thought I should talk to you directly. So, the Smithsonian wants to do an exhibit on you, you saw that?”

Steve sighs, exhausted by the very thought of it. “Yes ma’am, I did.”

“Well. Turns out they’ve been reaching out to people, collectors, and libraries, and museums, anyone who might be willing to loan or sell or donate.”

“Donate what?” he asks, baffled.

“Oh, um. Steve Rogers artifacts.”

He lets out a bark of laughter, loud and echoing in the still morning desert air. He can't help thinking of his bare bones apartment, his mostly empty foot locker. He'd never had all that much. “Okay. I guess I wish them luck with that?”

“Well, this is where it gets… interesting. They reached out to next of kin.”

Steve’s brow furrows. “I didn’t have any next of kin. I left everything to.”

He stops.

He feels cold all over. A frigid, ghostly hand grabs the back of his neck.

“Yes,” Pepper says. “And he left everything to his family, and… well.”

“Yeah,” he says, faintly. “God, it would be... Judith, right? Or-- she had a brother, didn’t she?”

“Scott, but it seems like Judith got all the… stuff. She married an Alexander Gillespie and had three children. She’s retired now, still living in Brooklyn. Her youngest daughter, Danielle Gillespie, teaches history at CUNY, Brooklyn College. The Smithsonian reached out to her and Judith, and she… well, she reached back, looking for you.”

“Looking for me?” Steve says.

“Yes,” Pepper says, a bit quietly. “The Smithsonian wanted to know if there was anything they’d be willing to loan. Judith said, and I quote: ‘it isn’t mine to put on loan, I’m just looking after it for Uncle Steve.’”

Steve has to sit. The dirt is fine. He can sit in the dirt. Pepper is still talking.

“That was when Dr. Gillespie -- Danielle, that is -- reached out, asking if there was any way to contact you. I can forward you the email, if you want?”

Steve puts a shaking hand over his mouth. “God,” he says, feeling winded. “I hadn’t thought...”

“Steve, are you okay?” She sounds worried. “Steve?”

“Fine,” he croaks. They’re all dead, and it hits him again. Becca, Susan, Jeanie, Ma and Pa, they’re all dead, but -- Little Judith. No one had really thought she would live long, she was so small, so sickly.

No one had thought that about him either, though, and look at him now.

“Yeah, fine,” he says again, firmly this time. “Forward me the email. Please.”

Chapter Text

3

But if you close your eyes
Does it almost feel like
Nothing changed at all?
And if you close your eyes
Does it almost feel like
You've been here before?

- Pompeii by Bastille, 2013

It happens in stages.

Steve starts emailing with Dr. Danielle Gillespie, cautiously at first, to see what she wants. She’s polite, and enthusiastic, and sharp as a whip. Even through the veil of the internet, he likes her. He’d like to meet her, he thinks. But he needs time to think about it, first.

So he goes back to New York. He stays at the Tower, like Tony wants, even though Tony is in Malibu most of the time.

He gets back on the publicity horse, in a manner of speaking. He does some videos for schools, talks to the people at the Smithsonian, like he's supposed to. He makes an effort.

He starts acting like Captain America. It’s what he was made for, after all. He was so fucking eager for the opportunity, he can’t take it back now, just because things didn’t turn out the way he thought.

Maybe, if he keeps acting like Captain America, he’ll have another magical transformation. Maybe if he wears the suit enough, it’ll start to fit. Pa Barnes had said, once: “Sometimes all you can do is step into a role and be patient while it molds itself around you.”

So he does the damn interviews. He makes the stupid appearances. He waits for things to start falling into place.

It happens slowly.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, I’m Terry Gross.

(Soundbite: THE STAR-SPANGLED MAN WITH A PLAN)

GROSS: It’s been seventy years since the US Army created the world’s first super-soldier. But before the serum, before the war, before Captain America, there was Steven Grant Rogers, a poor orphan from Brooklyn. Now, the Smithsonian is opening a new exhibit, at the National Air and Space Museum. The subject of that exhibit? He’s here in the studio with me. Captain Rogers, can I just say it is an honor to meet you.

ROGERS: Thanks, Terry. It’s an honor to be here. I really enjoy the show.

GROSS: So, before we talk about the exhibit, I know you get a lot of questions about New York, about what happened there, and the Avengers, and so on, but what I really want to ask you about is what happened after New York.

ROGERS: Well. That was something that I needed, to be honest. Some time off.

GROSS: If anyone has earned it --

ROGERS: Ah geeze --

GROSS: I mean, are you or are you not the longest serving American soldier?

ROGERS: I think I brought new meaning to the term “sleeping on the job.”

GROSS: You save the world, twice, you get to take a month or two off. It was all over Twitter, did you know? #Capsighting was trending off and on the whole time.

ROGERS: Yeah. Like I was Bigfoot or something. It was pretty funny. I’m just a guy on vacation, though, you know? I never really got to do much traveling, back in the day. I was on the bond circuit, but it wasn't like… I didn't get to see much. So I decided to take some time. Drove out west. Saw the… the Grand Canyon. Put things into perspective. I needed to get myself acquainted with the present.

She meets him at the coffee shop off campus, after the morning rush, so they’re less likely to be spotted. Steve wears a baseball cap and sunglasses and he’s pretty sure that the barista works it out, but she doesn’t say anything, just gets him the drip coffee he asks for.

Dani comes in a few minutes later, and she’s… it nearly knocks him over right there. He almost forgets to stand up to wave her over -- not that there’s anyone else in here, but...

She’s got blue-and-green-tipped hair hanging down past her shoulders, and warm brown eyes, but when she smiles, it hits him like a punch to the gut and…

She’s got a box in her arms.

“Oh wow, hi,” she says, coming over. She’s still got the accent, not as thick as Bucky’s was, and her voice is softer, higher, but, God. “Captain, it’s an honor.”

“Please, ma’am, call me Steve,” he says, holding his hands out for the box, almost automatically, just thinking that she shouldn’t have to carry it, she’s a lady .

She blinks a couple of times, and then hands it over. “Um. Thanks, Steve. Call me Dani.”

“It’s, um,” he says, stammering slightly. “Pleasure to…” He shakes his head. “Sorry. You look so much like Rebecca.” She does, but that’s not the ghost he’s seeing.

She blinks at him, smiles, and blushes, which is something that Bucky never used to do. “Thanks. Here,” she jerks a thumb at the coffee bar. “I need tea, let me just…” he wants to offer to pay, somehow, but she’s already off to talk to the barista to place her order. Steve watches her go, still feeling floored by it all. He can’t stop looking at her long hair, dark and dyed at the tips. Blue and green, like the ocean. Mermaid hair.

He wrenches his eyes away from her, and sits back down. He puts the box on the table and stares at it. It’s just a box, a file box, heavy duty, with handles. But there’s an inscription on the side, in black Sharpie.

SGR + JBB

Feeling a little hysterical, he thinks of trees, of sweethearts carving their initials in the bark. But he also can’t help staring. The box is so tiny. Is that really all of it?

Dani comes back with a teapot and cup on a little tray. “Okay, now I can function. I still can’t quite believe this is happening.”

“Me neither,” he says, with a lopsided smile.

“Grandma used to tell me so many stories,” she says in a rush. “About you, about Uncle Buck, about the War and the Depression -- it’s why I decided to study history.”

“I, er, I read some of your articles, actually,” he confesses. “They were really good. Really informative. I missed the fifties, so I didn’t really get McCarthyism, you know?”

“Forget McCarthyism, you missed I Love Lucy,” she says in a rush. “That’s the real tragedy here, Cap.”

“ Steve ,” he says, almost pleading.

“Steve,” she says, the blush coming back again. “Okay, okay, Steve.”

His eyes are drawn back to the box, unable to look away.

“The army took a lot of stuff,” she says. “The equipment, the uniform, that was all--”

“Government Issue,” he says. Like me. Like Buck.

“Yeah. And there’s more in Ma’s attic. The foot lockers, that stuff. That’s all yours too, as far as we’re concerned, but this... Grandma Bex put this together, she said it was the important stuff. She gave it to me because I was the historian.”

Steve stares at it. “You know it’s yours, by right,” he points out. “All of it. I don’t want to just… you grew up with this stuff, this is--”

“You grew up with this stuff. It’s your stuff.”

“That’s not just my stuff in there.” He can’t take his eyes off the inscription.

She bites her lip. “No.” She takes a sip of her tea.

He drags his attention up to her face. “I can’t just take--”

“Grandma Bex was very particular that the stuff not be separated,” Dani says.

Steve swallows, feeling an unexpected hollowness in his chest. “I should at least pay you or something,” he says, and then grimaces, because maybe that’s rude.

“I’m sorry,” she says, accent turning thicker. “Are you for real right now? You wanna pay me for giving you back your stuff? What kinda outfit do you think I’m running?”

Steve ducks his head and smiles. “Sorry.”

“Look. Steve. I didn’t sell it to pay off my student loans, I’m not gonna take money from you, no matter how hard you try.” She smiles, a little slyly. “But. I’ve got a couple of requests.”

Steve blinks. “Yeah, anything.”

“They’re requests, Steve. You can say no,” she emphasizes.

“Just ask,” he says, smiling half a smile and hearing his voice going more New York the longer they talk.

“First off. Ma wants to meet you. Again, I mean. You two have met before, kind of. And I should warn you, she’s probably going to invite you to Thanksgiving. She’s pretty aggressive about mothering everyone she meets.”

Steve is floored. But he thinks about Mrs. Barnes, who wanted to give him a ride to the cemetery, who always gave him extra helpings of whatever he could stomach. Apparently it runs in the family. “I…”

“Just think about it. It’s months away. The other thing is, well. The college would kill me if I didn’t ask, but we’ve got this little newspaper, and…”

GROSS: This Smithsonian exhibit, it’s kind of your big return to public life. You went pretty quiet after New York, for a good while there. You weren’t giving interviews. But then…

ROGERS: (Laughing)

GROSS: Then, completely out of the blue, you come back into the public eye with an exclusive interview for a --

ROGERS: (Laughing) A college newspaper, yeah. The Brooklyn College Excelsior.

GROSS: Yes. An interesting choice. May I read from this?

ROGERS: Yeah, of course.

GROSS: It's an excellent article, and at the end, the writer asked: “This is your first official interview since the Battle of Manhattan, and I have to ask: why us?” And you said: “Three reasons. Firstly: A friend put in a good word for you. Second of all: I liked the name. Excelsior, that's just great. But the main thing? I'm trying to reacquaint myself with America. If I really want to do that, I need to talk to the people, not their publicists.”

ROGERS: That's right.

GROSS: The people, not their publicists. That's a great line, and I have to ask, did your publicist suggest that?

ROGERS: (laughs) I work with the Avengers press team, of course, but I don't actually have a publicist. Probably for the best. I had a manager, back in the day. He hated me. Said I was completely unmanageable. Kept doing things like abandoning tours to go fight Nazis. So no, no publicist. I'm making it up as I go.

GROSS: So this is really just you.

ROGERS: Don't really know how to be anyone else.

Back at the Tower, he gets into the elevator without running into Tony, which is always his deepest fear here at the Tower.  Waiting for the elevator to deliver him to his floor, he feels a little lurch of dread when it stops halfway up, at one of the lab floors.

But it’s not Tony -- it’s Rhodes. The man freezes in the act of stepping into the elevator, eyes going wide as saucers just for a moment before he visibly decides to play it cool.

“Captain,” Rhodes says, nodding before he steps into the elevator.

“Colonel,” Steve returns. “Which floor?”

“Lobby, please.”

“You’ll have to ride up to my floor first, sorry,” Steve says as he hits the button.

“Man, I do not care. I could not stay in that lab a minute longer. I don’t know what Tony’s working on, but if I hear more about it, I will gouge my own eyes out. Something something, artificial intelligence, something something programming language… I have a degree in electrical engineering, you know? I can take apart a fighter jet and put it back together. But that kid makes me feel like I’m playing with linkin logs, Jesus.” Rhodes glances over at Steve and coughs a little, like he realizes he’s rambling. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I didn’t realize Tony was here,” Steve says, would-be-casual. “How’s he doing?” It’s no secret that Tony really should be in therapy and isn’t.

Rhodes looks at him sidelong. “Fine. Well. Fine as he ever is.”

Steve kind of wishes that the elevators played music still. He doesn't actually know if that would be better, but it would be different.

“Must be weird for you,” Rhodes says.

“Which bit? Actually, no, never mind. The answer is yes,” Steve says, quick as a whip.

Rhodes snorts loudly, unable to suppress his laugh. “No, I mean. He looks like his dad. I’ve seen pictures. He looks like Howard Stark, and that’s got to be strange. For you”

Steve clears his throat and looks down. “He’s older.”

Rhodes stares. Steve can feel it. He looks up and yeah, there’s Rhodes, staring. “Excuse me?” Rhodes says.

Steve smiles blithely. “Tony’s older than Howard was when I knew him and, to be honest, he’s not as much like his dad as he thinks.”

“No?”

“Oh, on the surface, yeah. The whole…” He waves a hand, a flamboyant curl that emcompasses the showmanship, the bravado. “That got me too, at first, but...” He puts the hand back on his box, curls his fingers around it. He lifts and lowers one shoulder. “Howard was… he had to make himself care about things. About people. I don’t think he was always like that, but by the time I met him… He was an ideas man. He dreamed big. People are small, so… Yeah, he had to make himself care.”

“And that’s different from Tony?” Rhodes asks. He’s got a tone in his voice now, something guarded.

Steve knows when he’s being tested. He doesn’t look up. “Tony’s got to make himself not care about things. It’s different. He reminds me of... Someone else, actually.” Steve swallows, and tightens his grip on the box.

The elevator slows and the doors swish open. Steve gives Rhodes an awkward smile.

“You should tell him that, sometime,” Rhodes says. “It’d do him good.”

Steve gives Rhodes a speculative sort of look. There’s a fond, weary sort of smile on his face. Another James, tiredly looking out for a kid who can’t not pick a fight to save his goddamn life.

Ghosts, Steve thinks. Ghosts every-fucking where.

“I wouldn’t say it right,” Steve says simply.

Rhodey smiles a little sadly and nods, like he understands, and Steve makes a swift, tactical retreat to his apartment.

His apartment in Avengers Tower is actually not awful. Steve strongly suspects Pepper’s influence in the tasteful, modest decor. Nothing in here is antique, but it’s not obviously modern either. It’s… timeless. Homey. Comfortable and solid. Real in a way things so frequently aren’t , for Steve in this day and age.

He puts the box down on the coffee table. For a minute he just stares down at it. He knows what’s likely to be in there. The stuff he didn’t take in his foot locker. Probably some of the books and comics they shared. Maybe some photos. Possibly some of their papers -- birth certificates, that kind of thing. Their childhoods, their teenage years, their early adulthood, all tumbled together in a cardboard box. Nothing of the war, like their lives stopped in 1942.

This box -- it’s not him. Opening the box won’t bring him back. But in the same way, opening the box won’t make him any more dead than he already is. He’s already at peace, Steve tries to convince himself. And maybe this will bring him some goddamn peace.

He opens the box.

Hours later, Steve really, really wishes he could get drunk still. Booze didn’t work, but at least this apartment was soundproof, and JARVIS has privacy settings, and despite the serum and the ice and every other fucking thing, he can still goddamn cry. So by god he’ll do exactly that. He put on one of their old records, because apparently he loves suffering, and god help him, tucked away at the bottom was some of Bucky’s fucking cologne so now Steve’s been crying long enough to feel hungover without any of the benefits of having been drunk.

Fuck his goddamn life.

The contents of the box are scattered across the coffee table: the things he expected (his sketchbooks, Bucky’s best brogues, their letters to the Barneses) and a few things he didn’t. He’s shocked by how much he forgot. He’d forgotten about his mom's wedding band. He’d forgotten about Bucky’s engineering textbooks. It had all been so ordinary then. It hadn’t needed remembering. Now they’re artifacts. But Becca (dear Becca, Bucky’s practical-minded and brilliant sister) had been right. This is the stuff that matters. The stuff that was too important to go with them to war.

He hangs his head. Didn’t he spend six months driving cross country to get the fuck over this? Didn’t he hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon trying to let it go?

His phone rings and he swears. It’s Natasha, and he can’t just ignore it. He blows his nose and answers. “Rogers,” he says, hoping he doesn’t sound too hoarse and stuffed up.

The momentary hesitation on the other end tells him that he has not succeeded, and that Natasha, spy that she is, knows exactly what he spent the last few hours doing.

“Hey old man,” she says, apparently deciding to be merciful and say nothing. He kind of loves her for that. “Listen, Fury’s being nice about your little vacation but I’m going to be honest, we could really use you around here.”

“You calling me in?” Steve asks.

“It’s not an apocalypse scenario or anything, but I’d like to head it off at the pass. What d’you say, Rogers. Come to DC? Help me knock some heads?”

Steve looks at the box, the scattered contents, and...

“How soon can I start?”

GROSS: Let’s talk about the exhibit. Not many people get to go to a museum exhibit about themselves.

ROGERS: Yeah, I asked if they wanted me in it. You know, as an artifact.

GROSS: It can’t be easy, being a man out of time.

ROGERS: It was hard at first. It was always going to be hard, though. We didn't call it PTSD in my day, but everyone knew that veterans had a hard time coming back from war. And coming back after everything that happened? Yeah it was hard. It still is hard, some days. There's a lot that I miss, a lot that I missed out on.

But I'm also incredibly lucky, and I'm really grateful. I think people idealize the forties. Greatest generation and all that stuff. But the advancements that we've made in the last seventy years -- we landed on the moon, my God do you know how amazing that is? And no more polio, holy cow.

GROSS: You feel like you're getting the hang of modern life, then?

ROGERS: I’m working on a list. Very Important Things You Missed.

GROSS: What’s on it?

ROGERS: Uhhhh right now? The Moon Landing. I Love Lucy.

GROSS: Comprehensive!

Steve can't start right away, because the next day, he gets a phonecall from Peggy, and she's so distraught she hardly sounds like herself.

Angie died in her sleep.

“We're in our nineties, it's hardly unexpected,” Peggy says, harsh and obviously furious with herself, with the world, perhaps with Angie too. “But oh, god, I wasn't-- wasn't prepared for--”

“Do you want me to be there?” Steve says. “I don’t want you to be alone, but… Anything for you, Peggy. Anything.”

And she bursts into tears.

So, as it happens, the first time Steve sees Peggy in this century is at a funeral. He'd been so terrified of how it would hurt, seeing her elderly and frail. But in the end it’s just a little sacrifice, because she needs him there, needs his support, and pain is always easier to bear when someone else needs his help.

So it's almost a month before Steve manages to get to DC. He meets Natasha at the Triskelion. He assumed he was going to have some kind of orientation. Get an ID badge and a company email address, whatever was involved in getting a job here in the future.

And then she… takes him to the gym. She hands him a bundle of clothes. “Training starts now. You want to warm up?”

“Um,” he says, looking down at the bundle. It looks like workout gear. She’s already wearing hers: leggings and a loose top, her hair pulled back, her hands taped up.

She turns her head. “What?”

He doesn't know how to say that this seems unnecessary without sounding terribly conceited. “Is this a test?” he asks.

“I assume everything is a test,” she says. “It's how I was raised.”

He knows a little about how she was raised. He's read her file -- as much as he was allowed to read, anyway.

“That's not an answer.”

“When was the last time you trained? I’m not talking about your basic stuff -- running, weightlifting, the punching bag -- I mean really trained, for combat?” she asks.

He makes a face. “1945 wasn't all that long ago for some of us,” he says, a little irritated about it. “I’m not outta shape.”

“Mmm. I can see that.” Natasha eyes him up and down. Slowly. “So 1945 was the last time you got any real combat training. When was the first time you got any real combat training?” she asks sweetly.

He opens his mouth to answer. Then closes his mouth with a snap.

“Yeah that's what I thought,” she says. “I’ve seen you fight. You use your fists like someone who got plucked out of a barroom brawl and then airlifted straight to a warzone.”

Which is pretty much exactly what happened.

“They gave me super steroids first,” Steve deadpans.

“Yeah, cuz that makes it better,” Natasha drawls.

“Hey, we did the best we could,” Steve says. “There wasn’t a lot of time for -- we were fighting Nazis.”

“Was it six months? Three months?”

Steve scratches the back of his neck. “More like. Six weeks all told, I think?”

Natasha says something lowly, in Russian. “Go change. And then…” She points to the mat in front of her. “Put up our shut up, Rogers.”

Less than a minute after he meets her on the mat, he's lying on his back with the wind knocked out of him, and a redheaded gremlin grinning down at him, feet planted firmly on either side of his waist.

“You punch like a boxer,” she tells him. It sounds like an insult.

Steve rockets back to 1943.

“Who taught you to throw a punch?” Peggy had asked. And he’d said: “A friend back home.” Steve had looked down at himself: skinny chest, thin arms, bird-boned. “A boxer, I’m guessing? Big fellow? Strong?” she’d said, sounding like she was rolling her eyes. “Yeah, he was.” And the past tense of it had slipped out, made him wince. “Is.” Because that was before the serum, before everything, back when Bucky was just at the front, not already…

If Natasha notices that it takes him a beat too long to reply, she doesn't say anything about it. “You've been getting by on super strength and a glorified vibranium ping pong ball. Haven’t you.” She offers him a hand up.

He takes it. “I'm also a tactical genius. And I have an eidetic memory.” He gives her a calculating look. “That thing you do. The…”

“Clint calls them the Thighs of Betrayal,” she says coolly.

“You learn that in the Red Room?”

She cocks her head. With her hair pulled back, she looks -- not younger, but strangely ageless. An unnatural, deathless creature.

Like you? says a traitorous part of his brain.

She regards him for a minute, then says: “I was five years old at the time. Our instructor was a big guy. Like you, kind of. Mean left hook,” she adds, in a flat voice. “Showed us how to take down someone twice our size.”

He nods. “Yeah…” He remembers -- Peggy, teaching him a few tricks, back before the serum. “If you use your weight right, you can fight like you’re a hundred pounds heavier than you are.”

“We can’t all make ourselves bigger,” she says. “But you can always fight faster and smarter.”

That catches Steve off-guard. “Yeah,” he says, slowly. “I had a -- a friend, who used to say something similar.” Bucky, shaking his head and saying: Come on pal. Bullies are big and slow, but they ain’t always stupid. So what have you gotta be? “Faster and smarter.” Steve licks his bottom lip, and he can’t help the smile on his face. He’s getting that rush, like he’s about to do something stupid and clever all at the same time. “Now… I'm just wondering what 220 pounds of supersoldier could take down, if he used the same techniques.”

Her grin is terrifying.

By the time they’re done for the day, she’s glistening with sweat and even he’s breathing hard. But Steve thinks he’s getting the hang of it -- spinning, and pulling, and learning to throw his body the way he throws the shield. It’s gymnastic, acrobatic, and… to be honest, he loves it. It feels natural to him in a way that the Marquess of Queensbury Rules never did.

“You’re not really big are you,” Natasha says.

He gives her A Look.

“Not up here, I mean,” she adds, tapping the side of her own head.

“Maybe not,” Steve admits. He pushes his hair off his forehead. “You know, it’s only been, uh…” he thinks back, does the math. “Five years, I guess?” he says. “You’d think I’d be used to it, but uh…” he looks down at his hands and starts picking apart the tape. “I guess it’s harder to change the stuff in your head.”

“You’re gonna be so good at this,” he hears her say. And then her fingers are in his hair, a quick shuffle through his tousled bangs. He rears back a little, surprised. He can’t remember the last time someone ruffled his goddamn hair, but Natasha Romanoff sure did just now, like he’s her kid brother or something. She’s grinning at him. “You should get a haircut,” she adds. “You might be cute under there, it’s hard to tell.”

GROSS: I guess the advances in medicine would be amazing to you. You were a pretty sickly kid, right? Do you mind telling us more about that?

ROGERS: Pretty sickly, yeah, that’s… one way of putting it. I was 4F, you know. The Army wouldn’t even take me for cannon fodder, back then. The serum had its work cut out. I had asthma, scoliosis, a heart murmur, stomach ulcers, pernicious anemia… oh, and I was partially deaf, had astigmatism, and I was colorblind.

GROSS: …

ROGERS: Yeah. I was… well, nowadays you would probably say disabled. Back then? I was a dead man walking. There were no inhalers, and I could barely afford asthma cigarettes most of the time. Yes, those were a thing. Heart surgery and antibiotics were dangerously experimental. There was nothing that could help. I wasn't supposed to make it to 25.

GROSS: And look at you now.

ROGERS: I’ll be 95 in July.

GROSS: Congratulations.

ROGERS: Thanks. I should say, if you’re interested in seeing me in all my pre-serum glory: 5’3”, hundred pounds soaking wet, list of ailments as long as my leg… The Smithsonian’s Captain America Exhibit will be opening at the National Air and Space Museum later this month.

He gets a haircut.

He turns down the apartment that SHIELD offers him and finds his own instead. He can make it on his own. He’s got to. Also: he really does want to get acquainted with the present, and that’s just not gonna happen if he’s living in a locked-down bubble.

The apartment is in Dupont Circle. He likes the neighborhood, and he likes his neighbors. There’s a nurse who lives on his hall, Kate. She smiles shyly at him every once in awhile. She’s pretty -- there’s something about her that appeals to him, in a way he has trouble putting his finger on. But even after all this time, he’s still got no idea how to talk to women. How to talk to anyone, if he’s honest. At least, not in a way that’s likely to lead to a date.

There are two more young women who share the apartment directly above his; Alice and Grace. Kate’s about his age. Alice and Grace are a bit younger, fresh out of college. He thinks they might be sisters at first, but then he wonders if they’re girlfriends. It turns out they really are just roommates. Grace is blonde, with her hair shaved on the sides, and goes jogging in the evenings with an inhaler tucked into her sports bra. Alice is brunette, and technically has three jobs: She works retail almost full time, and does online mentoring, and she’s just signed with a literary agent. She wants to be the next JK Rowling, whoever he is.

Steve knows all this mostly because their living room is directly above his, and he can hear a lot of what they say. He feels a little weird about it, but he’s not going to wear noise-canceling headphones all the time, and he can’t help having super-hearing. Also? The longer he listens, the more at home he feels.

He gets a bit lost sometimes, in the future, the strangeness of it. People are always on their… devices. The ones that never stop looking like science fiction to him. Literally everything is at your fingertips all the time, so much so that everyone seems to just expect instant gratification. And there are so many choices now. Dozens of different kinds of everything : clothes, and lifestyles, and freaking butter. He stares at an entire wall of cereal and thinks about the days he went hungry because they’d run out of canned beans, and that was all he could afford that week.

It’s easy to see all that, and be really put off. Disgusted, even, the same way he can’t help being disgusted by the decadence of literally everything that Tony Stark touches.

But underneath all those choices, and all the technological miracles, and the weird fast way that people live their lives nowadays, there’s another truth bleeding down through Steve’s ceiling in the evening, when he’s reading.

These kids… they graduated into one of the worst economic recessions since the Depression. They were teenagers when those planes hit the Twin Towers. They both know people who ended up going to Afghanistan or Iraq.

One day, at the grocery store, he sees Grace standing in front of a display of salsa. She’s holding one  that’s in a fancy bottle, made of sundried tomatoes and something else. She sighs, and puts it back, and picks up a jar of the store brand instead, even though it’s only a few bucks cheaper. Alice goes to the coffee shop on her days off. She buys plain coffee to drink while she works on her laptop, and gets a punch on her reward card, and once she has ten punches, she buys a large caramel frappe with extra whip, because that’s what she really wants, but she feels guilty if she pays for it.

He learns that they send each other funny memes all the time because memes are free, and they don’t always feel like they have enough money to go to the movies or something. Grace has a good job as a video editor, but she’s still paying off her student loans. She pays every month about what Steve earned in a whole year, back in the day. Alice got through school without going into debt, but she got cancer while she was still in college. She’s been cancer free for a couple years now, but she’s still on her parents’ health insurance plan. If the ACA ever goes away, she won’t be able to get health insurance on her own. She has a pre-existing condition.  

He knows what that feels like.

One day, he’s headed home with an armful of groceries, comes up the stairs, and sees Alice kissing on another girl. The girl is much taller than Alice (Alice and Grace are both tiny ) and has curled down to wrap her arms around Alice, who’s up on her tip-toes, pulling her girl down by the back of her neck.

They all notice each other at the exact same time.

The two women jump apart as though scalded.

Alice says: “Ohmygod, Steve, um, hi, um--”

The tall girl’s eyes go wide. Wider. “Oh my fucking god,” and then claps her hand over her mouth, like she just realized that she said fuck in front of Captain Goddamn America .

By this point, Steve is used to being the third man in this kind of comedy routine. Though, he’s pretty sure this is the first time his appearance has interrupted… something like this.

He bites his lip, trying not to smile. “Hi, Alice. Nice evening.”

“Yeah.” Alice is having trouble talking through the hysterical giggle fighting to escape. “Um. This is Olivia, she’s a -- she’s my girlfriend.”

“I see that,” he says.

“It’s an -- nice to meet you -- um,” Olivia stammers. “I’m. I was just going, so. Um. Goodnight.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Alice says, and takes her hand.

Steve walks to his apartment, smiling to himself. It takes him a moment to get his door unlocked, and he’s just letting himself in when he hears Alice coming back. He pauses, and then Alice comes around the corner, walking fast and red as a beet.

“Hey, Alice,” Steve says as she goes past.

She stops, turns, and looks like she’s bracing herself for. Something.

He smiles. “You’re happy?”

She swallows, and smiles, and nods. “Deliriously.”

He shifts his groceries, and raises a hand, palm out. Hawkeye showed him this.

She stares for a moment, and then, with a dawning grin, high fives him.

“If she hurts you, Captain America will be very disappointed in her.”

“Ohmygod,” Alice says, by now laughing so hard that she can barely breathe. “Um. Thanks?”

He winks and closes his apartment door behind him.  

Maybe he should ask Alice for advice about Kate.

He starts wearing the noise-canceling headphones, after that. Some things he doesn't want to risk overhearing.

GROSS: You know, we do have to talk about New York, though I’m sure you’re sick of questions about that.

ROGERS: (laughs) Yeah, people ask me like I know. I'm just the guy on the ground. One minute they tell me I'm fighting some maniac with a face like melted lipstick, the next minute there's flying space whales on Fifth Avenue. I'm just a senior citizen with a metal frisbee. Me and Hawkeye, we're looking at each other going: this is nuts right? What the hell are we doing here? But, you know. If that's where I'm needed, that's where I go.

GROSS: You make it sound like you’re a super-janitor.

ROGERS: That’s kind of what it feels like sometimes. I mean: “Come on. Who made this mess? Geeze.”

Steve’s in New York, for work, and… he feels like he can’t not talk to Tony. He's heading back to DC soon -- he promised Peggy he'd help her move into the care facility she and her nieces and nephews picked out. She told him to tell Tony hello from her, but he's…

He’s not sure what to say. He doesn’t really have a reason to visit. Doesn’t really have an excuse either way. But there’s something inside him telling him he should, so…

“JARVIS, hi,” Steve says as he steps into the elevator. “Is Tony in?”

“It’s good to see you, Captain Rogers. Mister Stark is in the garage. Shall I take you there?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The elevator swoops down, and when the doors open, Steve almost cringes back from the noise . It’s music -- rap maybe, or hip-hop, he’s not sure. There’s so many different kinds of music now, and they’re all right there in your face all the time. It’s probably not bad, he’s just not used to it yet. There’s a beat, heavy and industrial sounding, thumping bass, and a sound like chains, like the docks. And voices chanting over each other, almost the kind of call-and-reply games that he used to hear on the street. It takes him a minute to sort out the words and then he sighs heavily.

The singer chants: B-R-O! O-K! L-Y-N, come again! And underneath that, a woman saying, over and over again, Brooklyn, we go hard, we go hard! Brooklyn we go hard, we go hard!

“I guess JARVIS told you I was coming,” he says drily.

Tony is forearm deep in a car that looks like a spaceship to Steve. “Cap, what a surprise. Get me the thing.” He jerks his chin at the toolbox beside him.

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Steve says, starting to walk over anyway.

“The thing! The -- Nevermind. Dum-E, get me the thing. You know which one.”

The robot has rolled over to do as Tony bids, and fumbles the tool in question twice before Steve gets over there and takes it from the robot’s clumsy claw to hand it to Tony. Tony snatches it out of his grasp with his black-smeared fingers and suddenly Steve’s grateful -- intensely grateful -- for the loud thumping music, the man shouting Boom Bye Bye like Buju I'm crucial / I'm a Brooklyn boy I may take some getting use to. Because if it was just him and a dark-haired guy half-buried in an engine block, Steve could end up having some kind of breakdown.

“I know what a torque wrench is, you know,” Steve says conversationally. He leans back against another car, slides himself up to sit on the hood. “They had been invented back in my day. I had a good teacher.”

Tony’s dark eyes glance up at him, brows coming down. He looks… angry. Hurt, maybe. “If you tell me that my dad--”

“What?” Steve starts, confused for a split second.

“Because I had to learn how to take a car apart from Peggy, so I really don’t want to hear about--”

“No,” Steve says. “Christ,” he mumbles, rubbing a hand over his face. He’d forgotten the way Tony’s mind was always skipping eight tracks ahead, the way Steve always felt like he was playing catchup. And Tony’s so touchy about... certain things. “Not Howard,” Steve says. “Howard was… I didn’t know Howard all that well, really. We didn’t get much time to talk. But I… Had a friend who worked at a garage for a few years. Car repair, that kinda thing. So I know what a torque wrench is. Not everything is--”

“About me?” Tony says.

Steve sighs heavily, and bows his head.

“Or about you?” Tony adds, and Steve can feel that he’s being pointed at.

“Tony,” Steve says tiredly. “I’m just… could we not?”

“I’m just wondering why you’re here, Capsicle.”

“I was in town. I wanted to say hi.”

“Regretting that yet?”

Steve lifts his head and gives Tony a look. “Seems like you want me to.”

Tony sighs, puts aside the torque wrench, and waves a hand, just as the singer says With big ass dreams and a sick death wish / Probably like the -- and it cuts off into silence. Tony grabs a rag and starts wiping his hands. “I’m supposed to be doing a press. Thing. I don’t know. But Bruce had a bad morning, so I’m…” he shrugs.

“Is he okay?” Steve says, looking up.

“He’s fine, he’s on his floor, his floor’s fine, he designed it, I built it, so he’s fine, but it’s… it’s whatever. The Big Guy isn’t fond of me. Really isn’t fond of New York.” He throws the rag towards a bin. Before it reaches the bin, it sails neatly through a holographic ring, and a dinger goes off. TEN POINTS appears in cheerful letters, briefly, and then vanishes even before the rag lands with a sad thump among the other filthy rags. "Pepper’s doing a thing. A Europe thing. Conference thing. Thor’s wherever. You and Natasha are whatever. Rhodey’s doing something for the Pentagon, poor bastard. Clint could be around, he’s a spy, but if he is around, he’s not saying so.”

“Hawkeye is not currently in the building,” JARVIS interjects. “Unfortunately his precise whereabouts at this time are classified.”

“There you go,” Tony says.

Steve plays catch up for a few beats. Again. “I didn’t come here to check in on the team, Tony.”

“Good, cuz they’re not here, you know. Even though you all have floors and stuff, none of you are here. So.”

“I really did come here to say hi.”

Tony narrows his eyes at Steve. “... Hi,” he says, at long last.

Steve feels his mouth twitching at the corner.

“Oh my god, shut up,” Tony says.

“I didn’t say anything,” Steve says.

Tony snatches up the torque wrench and points it threateningly. “You were never this much of an asshole in Dad’s stories.” Then he tosses the wrench aside. It lands with a clatter next to the other tools.

Steve remains unimpressed. “Trust me on this, pal. The stories never geddit right.”

“Oh my god.” Tony’s eyes have lit up. “Oh my god. How much booze do I have to pour down your throat to get the full newsie out of you?”

“What’re you talkin--” And then Steve hears it -- his vowels flattening out, his words losing clarity. His accent slipping. “... about,” he finishes, remembering his speech training too late.

“Je-sus,” Tony says, pointing an accusing finger. “You really are from Brooklyn, aren’t you?”

Steve can’t help it -- it smells like a garage in here, and Tony reminds him so much of… Well. It doesn’t matter. “Alright, Manhattan, calm down. It ain’t like you didn’t know.”

But it’s clear from his face that Tony didn’t know, not really. He knew Captain America, Howard Stark’s greatest creation, the one that he could never replicate. The one that Tony was always competing against. He didn’t know that there was a person under there. Just a kid from Brooklyn.

Tony’s eyes narrow further. Steve makes himself hold the gaze, and tries not to be Captain America. It’s hard, sometimes, not to hold up that persona like a shield, to keep everyone at bay, just a little. Just to get some room to breathe. But he owes Tony more than that. Tony deserves better than that.

“They never do get the story right, do they,” Tony allows. “Alright. Fine. Grab me the five-eighths, willya?”

Steve does.

ROGERS: You know, I want to go back a second. All that stuff about polio, the moon landing… it's amazing, the advancements we've made, but you know what really sold me on the future?

GROSS: What?

ROGERS: Things like desegregation, marriage equality, equal rights... We've got a long way to go, as a people. The prison system is a mess, riddled with institutionalized racism. Women make, what? 78 cents on the dollar? But you know what else? I was there in the forties, I know what misogyny looks like, I drank from whites only water fountains, I didn't know any better. And, seventy years is a long time to be asleep, but it’s not that long when you’re talking about societal shifts like what we’ve seen. What we’ve accomplished. It's like that great twentieth century sage said. Whoa-oh, we're halfway there.

GROSS: Living on a prayer, huh Captain?

ROGERS: That's exactly right, Terry.

GROSS: You just told me that you’re a pro-marriage equality feminist in favor of prison reform on national public radio and then you quoted Bon Jovi. You really don't have a publicist, do you.

ROGERS: This is probably a bad time to mention that I voted for Norman Thomas in ‘36.

“You don’t need a publicist.”

“You sure about that?” Steve looks doubtfully at his phone, where a wide range of news outlets seem to be suggesting otherwise. Geeze. A guy votes for the Socialist one time... “I know a few people who disagree with you.”

“Those people are wrong,” Black Widow says. They’re in Brooklyn, at a diner that Steve knows -- knew back in the day, at any rate. Across the street, the scientist they’re shadowing (for security reasons) is having a meeting. They’re both in civilian clothes, Steve wearing a hat and chunky glasses, Natasha looking almost harmless. She’s drinking a milkshake so good it’s practically a religious experience. Steve’s already had two. “Pepper agrees with me,” she adds, sing-song.

“Most of the Avengers PR team doesn’t,” Steve mutters, imitating her tone.

“Look, I live in the real world, where nothing is simple, and morality is a matter of opinion and circumstance, and always, always secondary to practical concerns.”

Steve lowers his phone and frowns at her.

“Don’t even start with that look. I’m immune to your disapproval.” She takes a pointed sip of milkshake.

He just frowns harder. “That’s not the real world, Natasha. Right and wrong do actually exist.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I keep saying it because it’s true.”

“I don’t mean that as a criticism, Steven. I mean it as a directive. You keep saying that. A publicist would try to censor you, to silence you. I don’t think that’s what we need, here in the real world.”

Steve can feel a blush coming on, and the sparkle in her eyes confirms that it’s already making an appearance. He looks down. “SHIELD wants me to have a publicist.”

“SHIELD wants you to have a handler.”

“You’re not my handler?”

“Rogers, no one has handled you since 1945.”

Steve laughs. “Well, Peggy’s moving to DC, maybe you guys can bring her back in.”

“I’ve read your file, Rogers. Peggy wasn’t your handler. If anything, she made you worse.”

Steve laughs. “Yeah, you got me. She definitely did. Bucky had--” He has to pause, unexpectedly. It still surprises him, after all this time. The loss is a sinkhole in his chest, even now. And he keeps tripping on it. “Had his work cut out for him. Always did.”

Natasha is watching him. He can feel it. He can feel how knowing it is, and he does not want to talk about this, he is not ready to talk about this, even now.

“Yeah. He did.” She says it in a tone that means this part of the conversation is going nowhere. He’s intensely grateful for it. (Too grateful to wonder why.) “Target’s on the move, let’s go,” she adds.

They settle up and head out, following the scientist at a discreet distance. They’re pretty sure someone’s going to try and kidnap her -- they want to catch that someone. Shouldn’t be hard.

“So what are you doing after this?” Natasha asks. “Professor Amanat is a Brooklyn girl, you know. You might like her.”

“Actually, I’ve got plans,” Steve says. “It is Thanksgiving. I’ve got a family dinner to get to.”

GROSS: So what's next for you?

ROGERS: Well, I'm living in DC these days, and I think I'll stick around for a while.

GROSS: You think you might be ready to settle down? You ever thought about retiring?

ROGERS: No way. My ma used to say that I had no quit in me. A lot has changed. Like, a lot. But that? That hasn’t changed one bit.

GROSS: Well, sir, I have to say I'm glad to hear that.

He adjusts. It takes time. His friends help. Natasha starts trying to set him up with literally everyone in the office, which is fine, he guesses. Tony occasionally texts him with something to add to his list of  Very Important Things I Missed. The Berlin Wall going up, he texts, out of nowhere. The Berlin Wall coming down, Bruce texts, literally two seconds later. They must be working on something together. Steve Jobs, Rhodey texts. No matter what Tony says, Apple is important. Steve Jobs is important. He notices Kate bringing home takeaway from a Thai place -- it smells delicious. He adds it to the list. Alice adds “Star Wars. No, Star Trek , you’ll like that better. Actually -- do both.” Olivia tells him to add a band called Nirvana to the list.

And then, one morning, he's shaving, studying his own face in the mirror and doesn't even flinch when his phone buzzes. He glances down, sees it's from Nat, and hums to himself. Nat’s due back from an away mission. She’s been texting him from Singapore, and it’s probably some incomprehensible Indonesian meme, because she really enjoys fucking with him. Or she'll send him the number for some random SHIELD employee she thinks he'd get along with. Maybe he should tell her that she doesn't have to limit his dating pool to pretty ladies. He's surprised she didn't guess that. Maybe she has, but she wants him to tell her, wants him to trust her, to--

He stops. He sets the razor down and looks himself in the eye. He'd just been thinking about how the tiny supercomputer he carries in his pocket just got a message from his friend on the other side of the world. That friend is a woman, the undisputed top of her profession, a hero. And he's contemplating telling her that he’s interested in men too, because who the fuck cares about that in this day and age? His boss is black. There's robots on Mars and footprints on the moon.

He's finally made it to the future.

Chapter Text

4

Inside down and upside out and you can feel it
Don't stop, can't stop, it's like an airplane going down
I wish I had said the things you thought that I had said
Gravity's just a habit that you're pretty sure you can't break

- Upside Down & Inside Out by OK GO, 2014.

We’ll have the band play something slow. I’d hate to step on your--

His head cracks hard on the console. He whites out for a minute, just drifting and barely conscious. He thinks that’s it, but then, suddenly, he’s awake again.

“...toes,” he says, quietly, slightly slurred.

The front windshield is smashed in, and ice has come through it in a great white avalanche all around him. It’s dark, almost cave-dark blackness, save for a few flickering lights that won’t last long. He pushes back, stumbles to his feet, out of the chair.

“Oh. Shit,” he says, panic rising as he realizes what he’s done.

He’d expected -- death on impact, static on the line, just… blackness. Maybe. Maybe Bucky. Maybe his Ma, but… He’s trapped. Under the ice. In the middle of nowhere.

It’s not going to be fast. It’s not going to be quick or easy. Nothing ever is but…

“No, no, no, no, no,” he says, panicking openly because he knows no one can hear him. He’s completely alone. He’s going to die alone. In the cold. God, he always knew that the cold would kill him one of these winters but…

“Come on, not like this,” he says, to the empty plane, like he can will a Hydra goon into existence, someone to shoot him, mercifully, in the head.

The empty plane just groans in reply, a groan that shakes the whole cabin, a groan that he feels in his bones. The eerie creak and snap of ice. A lurch down that almost knocks him off his feet.

And then the water.

The cold is so fierce, he can feel his muscles seizing up, even his diaphragm, his ribs, his lungs. This is shock, he thinks. He’s felt it before, at Normandy, in the Alps, but never quite like this. Never this physical, or this overpowering. It steals the strength from him. All his power, all his determination, all his conviction is meaningless in the face of it. His body is beyond his control (again.) He fights, and fights, struggling to just-- just fucking get up, just get out of the water, come on--

But the red, white, and blue clings to him, waterlogged, and drags him down, all his senses muffled. Everything is so heavy around him. 

The first breath of icy water hurts even more than the serum had.

Steve bolts up, choking, gagging on nothing. He’s tangled in sheets, lying on a thin blanket folded on the floor next to his bed, exactly where he went to sleep last night. But now the floor is ice-fucking-cold underneath him and he's full-body shuddering. He has to sprint to the bathroom. He half expects to throw up icy brine, but it’s just bile. He chokes, spits. He rests his forehead on the cool porcelain.

Mary, mother of god, that one still gets him. Half the time it’s foxholes in the Black Forest, the other half of the time it’s goddamn Birkenau. But the ice…

He shivers, can’t stop shivering. He drags a towel around his shoulders but it doesn’t help. He stares at the blank wall of the bathroom. It’s silent in here, but it’s like he can feel the ice creaking and groaning in his back teeth, that eerie snapping boom and echoing squeal.

He shivers harder.

“C’mon Rogers,” he hisses to himself. He can’t let it get ahead of him, not today, not after he’s come this far. He spent months in New York doing this and not much else, feeling like he was drowning. If he lets it get ahead of him again-- “C’mon, c’mon. Ass in the air, feet on the floor. You get up. You’re a Rogers, you get up and keep going anyway.”

He gets up.

He brushes his teeth, puts on his dark track pants, that underarmor shirt that he paid way too much for (and therefore can’t stop wearing even though it is definitely too small) and his running shoes.

He knows, from experience, that he won’t be the only one out there, running from bad dreams at 5 am. Hell, the other day it was 3 am. This is progress.

In fact, as he’s heading out in his running gear, he bumps into Upstairs Neighbor Grace. She’s dressed for work, clutching a ceramic mug of coffee. She must have an early shoot to get to. He holds the door for her as she leaves the apartment building, making for her car. She yawns hugely and makes a face as he starts to stretch. “Ugh. Seriously?” she says. She is not a morning person.

“Gotta keep moving forward.”

“Okay, Rocky,” she grumbles.

“Huh?”

“Add it to the list, Cap. Rocky. Rocky Two, while you’re at it.” And then she gets in the car. “Enjoy your training montage.”

He obediently jots down Rocky (Rocky II?) though he’s not sure what help it’ll be. Maybe if he googles “training montage” along with the titles, it’ll make sense. Then he finishes stretching and starts his run. He thinks he’ll go by the reflecting pool today.

The city is quiet and the sky behind the Washington Monument is just starting to turn pink and purple when he passes the guy on the bridge. “On your left,” he warns.

He wouldn’t think twice about it, but as he’s coming around a curve a few meters ahead, he glances back and sees an incredulous gap-toothed smile leveled in his direction. Who the fuck does this asshole think he is? says the smile.

Something long dormant comes awake with a lurch. There’s a feeling in Steve’s chest, like a cackle, bottled up for later. Grinning, he puts on an extra burst of super speed and pulls up his mental map of DC.

Once, the Howlies had tried to prank him by taking his clothes while he was scrubbing off in the river. He’d swallowed the tattered remains of his modesty, put on his Stage Face (since it was the only cover left to him) and lectured them all for twenty minutes. Stark naked. Dum Dum had cracked first, begging for mercy and throwing Steve’s clothes at him. For punishment, Steve had said they’d all run laps until Steve got tired. I would never ask my men to do something I wouldn’t do myself. I’m Captain America. It had only taken three laps for Bucky to start trying to trip him.

Steve goes… slightly out of his way to make sure to pass Gap-Toothed Jogger again, in front of the Jefferson Memorial this time. “On your left.”

He’s rewarded with an exasperated: “Uh huh. On my left. Got it.”

Something about the guy’s tone reminds Steve of that… that meme that Natasha texted to him a few weeks ago, when she saw his interview with that Fox News reporter. Someone had recorded the interview, slowly zooming in on Steve’s stony, vicious smile, while a soft acoustic guitar played, and someone sang what the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch?

Steve’s smile widens.

Don’t say it. Don’t you say it!

On your left.

COME ON!

Alright Rogers, Steve thinks to himself as he sees The Jogger With The Gap-Toothed Smile staggering to a stop, leaning hard against a tree. You can do this. One social interaction with a non-coworker. Just don’t be weird about it.

In retrospect, it is probably too late to not be weird about it.

Okay, Steve thinks, as he strolls over to where Gap-Toothed Jogger is now sinking down with his back against the tree. Don’t get your hopes up. Maybe he’s not as funny as the Smile suggests. Maybe you really pissed him off with that last pass. Maybe he doesn’t want to chat with a national icon. Just… whatever it is, be cool about it.

As he gets closer, he realizes that he needs to come up with something to say. Crap, crap, crap. But it’s too late to abort the mission now. Alright just… say whatever. Say--

“Need a medic?”

Rogers, you god damn wierdo.

Any time you wanna stop by the VA,
make me look awesome in front of
the girl at the front desk, just let me
know.

I'll keep it in mind.

Okay.

Hey, fellas. Either one of you know
where the Smithsonian is? I'm here
to pick up a fossil.

“Don’t gimme that,” Steve says.

Nat’s smoky voice is amused. “Give you what?”

“That look.”

“He’s cute, you should ask him out,” Nat says.

“He’s straight,” Steve says lightly. “He was really nice about it, though. Let me down easy.”

Her face splits, delighted. Gleeful. And yeah, he thinks he was right the other day, when he thought that she probably already knew, and wanted him to trust her enough to tell her. “Ohhh are we admitting this now? Should I start finding cute little twinks--”

“Nope. Don’t even go there.” Steve doesn’t need Natasha trying to set him up with guys at work. He knows what a twink is, and kind of wishes he didn’t. He really doesn’t need Nat setting him up with guys who look like he did five years ago.

Nat laughs at him. Steve loves that she laughs at him. “So were you actually flirting or were you doing that thing where you try to act casual and ruin it by looking like the last puppy in the shelter?”

“I can flirt,” Steve says.

“Science tells us that it is hypothetically possible, yet all evidence shows--”

“You should be nicer to senior citizens.”

“You should let me help you get laid.”

“I don’t need to get laid.”

Natasha cackles the rest of the way to the Triskelion. She’s still cackling, with her eyes, when the quinjet goes up.

Okay. That one's on me.

You're damn right.

“I was having such a good day,” Steve complains quietly. Nat is sulking on the other side of the quinjet. Well -- she’s doing Nat’s version of sulking. The expression is not unlike a cat that has just knocked something off a shelf, and is about to knock something else off the same shelf, while making aggressive eye contact.

Steve wouldn’t talk about this with just anyone, but this -- this is Rumlow. Brock’s an alright guy, cynical in the way everyone is these days, but he’s always had Steve’s back. They’re pretty much equal ranks, and he doesn’t talk to Steve like a fossil or a living legend.

“C’mon, Cap,” Rumlow says. “You know she was just following orders.”

Steve looks at Rumlow and waits for realization to hit.

Rumlow winces. “Okay yeah, I hear how that sounds now.” He clears his throat.

Steve goes back to glaring down at the shield resting on his lap. He’s scrubbing the stealth paint off, revealing the shiny crimson from under the matte blue-grey.

“But look, Cap,” Rumlow says, “you can be mad at her for following orders or you can be mad at Fury for giving them--”

“I can do both those things,” Steve mutters. “I’ve been mad since 1926, I’m a pro at this point.”

Rumlow laughs. “I just mean -- you don’t even know what it was all about… Do you?”

Steve looks up. There’s something in Rumlow’s tone, questioning, but… well. Steve isn’t the only one who got put at risk by Nat’s little side mission. And Steve’s supposed to be in charge here.

“Nobody tells me anything,” Steve says, with a small, bitter smile. It’s not strictly speaking professional , this conversation. Not the sort of chat two soldiers should be having about their commanding officers. But Steve’s not really a soldier.

“But Fury trusts you,” Rumlow says, placating.

“Does he, now.” Steve glances over at Natasha, who has now tipped her head back and is pretending to nap. Vaguely, it occurs to him that Rumlow’s statement doesn’t really follow, but it does get Steve thinking. Trust is what made the Howlies such an effective unit. If he can’t trust Fury, if he can’t trust Nat, then who can he trust?

SHIELD takes the world as it is,
not as we'd like it to be. It's
getting damn near past time
for you to get with that program,
Cap.

Don't hold your breath.

Steve’s so angry that he’s already on his bike before he realizes that Fury never even fucking told him what Nat’s mission was really about.

Christ, he hates fighting with them, it always throws him off his game.

He hates it because he likes Natasha -- she’s become his closest friend here in the future, a strange combination of older and younger sibling, commander and subordinate all rolled into one. They’re partners. They make a good team. He hates it when their priorities don’t line up, don’t fit together. He hates when something happens to make them butt heads.

And Fury -- he admires Fury. He can see, written all over that scarred, forbidding face, all the hardship he’s powered through to get where he is. He admires that Fury can still believe in heroes, can still care about good and evil, can still care about people. Because he does care -- he cares about Natasha, about Steve, even.

So Steve hates fighting with them, because he likes them, and he knows that they’re trying their best, that he’s probably the one being an asshole.

It feels like he’s fighting all the time, but he doesn’t know who. Like he’s fighting shadows, lost in the mire of it all. He feels like he’s a gear out of sync with the rest of the machine. He can’t tell if the machine is broken, or if it’s him.

Maybe he should just leave. He can quit this job, can’t he? Would they let him keep his shield, if he did?

Does he really want to keep the shield?

The thought is so huge it brings him up short.

He’s overreacting, maybe. He needs a plan, but he doesn’t even know where to start with all this.

Any halfway decent plan starts with good intel, he remembers Peggy telling him once.

And that gives him an idea. He turns the motorcycle, and heads for Independence Avenue.

Like most of his ideas, it’s terrible.

First there’s the museum, which he was morbidly curious about.

The first part is mostly science -- it is the National Air and Space Museum, after all. They’ve done a good job making the exhibit interesting for the kids, and he’s glad about that, but for him…

He’s looking at pictures of the way he used to be, and it’s like looking in a funhouse mirror. Or like he is a funhouse mirror, looking out at the person he’s supposed to be. He likes being strong, and healthy, but sometimes his outlines still feel all stretched and distorted.

It’s. Not a fun feeling.

He moves on.

In the original designs, they’d had him standing alone, holding the shield, that whole main room of the exhibit just about him, all “his” victories as Captain America. He’d said: “It wasn’t really like that. None of it belonged to me alone. I wasn’t really Captain America until I had the Howlies. I was part of a team.”

So. There they are. The mannequins dressed in the old uniforms. Each one unique, but coordinated. A unit. Battle-tested , the narrator says. And there’s war in this room. His old motorcycle, their weapons, their greatest victories plotted out on the walls, some of their setbacks and defeats. It’s all simplified, but he’d made sure that they got the tactical essence of it right. That had actually been fun, that part. Correcting the maps, explaining the tricks they used, the tricks Hydra used...

They had asked, cautiously, if there was anything in particular he was fighting for. Any one.

He still has the compass, but he was not gonna let them borrow that. “I know what you’re asking,” he’d said. “They always cast her as my sweetheart back home or something. But it wasn’t like that. She’s not a sideline to an exhibit about Captain America. She should have her own exhibit.” He’s glad that they respected that, that they left her out of it except as an expert, someone who was there, someone who can speak about what happened because she knows what happened.

But he’d also said: “I was fighting because it was the right thing to do. If I was fighting for anyone in particular, I was fighting for my friends. For Bucky, maybe. He had my back, I had his. Or... I should have.”

So he supposes he should have expected this: to turn and see Bucky staring back at him from the darkness, right at the heart of things, a great slab of glass, his face pale and floating in front of him like a ghost. He looks haunted. Of course he does -- this picture was taken after Azzano. But Steve hadn’t been used to that expression back then, and seeing it grainy and flat doesn’t make it any easier to look at now.

He stares at the video. And that’s Bucky; the Bucky he knew. The smile, the laugh. He can’t remember what they were laughing about. He has a perfect fucking memory, but he can’t remember what they were laughing about.

He can’t remember the last time he laughed like that, either.

He suddenly can’t stay here a minute longer. He’s suddenly desperate to find someone, anyone, who remembers him. Really remembers.

But Peggy forgets him, like she sometimes does now. She started going downhill after Angie's death. She’s still herself more often than not, but she couldn't stay in her cottage in Winchester alone. She’s got family here. Grandkids, a niece. Steve hasn’t met them all, but they’re nice. Good people. Of course they are. They’re excited that she has someone from her past to talk to, because sometimes she forgets she’s in the present. And he’s happy to do it, he is. Even when she forgets him. He’d do all this and more for her, if she’d let him.

But it still hurts every time.

Sometimes the best we can do is to start over, she'd said.

It feels strangely like a command, like the voice of god or fate pushing him in the right direction, but… Well. Peggy Carter is a hero, but Steve knows too well that heroes aren’t always right.

He wishes there was someone he could talk to -- an outsider, someone unbiased, someone who could look in and say: “Oh there’s your problem.” He thinks of that therapist he’d had, early on. Everyone says it’s supposed to help, but it hadn’t done much for him. Maybe he should try again. SHIELD has counselors, but… that’s not what he’d call an unbiased outsider.

Then… it occurs to him that he knows a counselor. Kind of.

You thinking about getting out?

No. I don't know. To be honest,
I don't know what I would do with
myself if I did.

Ultimate fighting? It's just a great
idea off the top of my head. But
seriously, you could do whatever
you want to do.

What makes you happy?

I don't  know.

Sam has a smile on his face that matches the one on Steve’s. And Steve feels an incredible wave of relief that someone else gets it. That smile says “yeah, been there, done that, got the shitty t-shirt.”

“Do you know?” Steve says, suddenly needing to ask. “What makes you happy, I mean. I don’t expect you to be able to…” He waves a hand at himself, vaguely.

“I get it,” Sam says. “And, yeah, I do. Now, at least. Took a while to work it out.”

“How?” Steve asks.

“I…” The smile turns wry. “I went home. Stayed with my ma for a while. Harlem.”

Of course he’s from New York, Steve thinks. That explains why they fell into step so easily. The accent’s a little off, but it makes sense.

“Did that help? Going home?”

“Yeah,” Sam says frankly. “It wasn't easy -- I wasn't really the same guy anymore, you know? But it was good to connect with who I was back then. Before. The place was familiar, and there were people there who could remind me what I liked.” He shrugs. “Sometimes, that’s what you need. Someone to remind you.”

Steve can feel that he’s still smiling, and that it’s still the terrible one. Natasha has seen it. She calls it his ‘I’m so fucked’ smile.

He sees the realization hit Sam in stages, like he’d forgotten for a second that Steve’s basically an alien from another planet. His expression falls. He looks a bit like Steve just kicked his puppy. “Going home, talking to people, I guess that’s…”

“Not really an option,” Steve says, still smiling. I’m so, so fucked.

“Aw man. Aw, dude, that’s.” Sam sighs, drops his head, puts his hands on his hips. He looks up. “Steve,” he says, like it’s a tragedy. “Can I give you a hug, man? You can say no, but… If I were you, I would want a hug.”

Steve blinks. People don’t usually ask. Either he’s untouchable, or he’s public property. “Uh. Sure.”

Sam is good at hugs, Steve thinks, when he’s wrapped up in it. Steve’s a big guy these days, and he has to hunch into it a bit, but Sam somehow still feels like being wrapped up in the nicest, warmest blanket he’s ever owned. It might be weird, since he had been thinking that Sam had a real nice smile (and real nice shoulders) just earlier that day. But the fact is, Steve is starved enough for friendship that he doesn’t really feel bereft that this nice straight boy wants to give him friendly hugs. He doesn’t quite understand why people talk about “the friendzone” like it’s some level of hell.

The hug lasts just long enough for Steve to feel something in his shoulders un-knot, but not so long that he starts to feel uncomfortable.

Sam pulls back, holds Steve by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and meets his gaze. “Listen. I know I’m just some guy that you lapped like twenty times this morning, because you’re an asshole.”

Steve laughs, and feels his smile turn into something a little more real.

“But seriously, man… It is an actual national goddamn tragedy that you are sad,” Sam says, very earnestly. “For all our sakes, but most especially for your sake? You gotta figure out what makes you happy.”

So it was all a pretty terrible idea, in retrospect, he thinks as he heads up to his apartment. He still doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. He doesn’t know what’s right, just that everything feels wrong.

It’s late. He can hear music. Alice and Grace must still be awake upstairs, but he’s kind of not paying attention.

The thing that gets him, about Peggy, about that exhibit, is that it’s like he’s not even there, sometimes. There wasn’t any of him in that museum. No mention of the black eyes and scraped knees, all the fights he’d been too stupid to walk away from. They talk about how sickly he was, but that’s not the same as hearing him coughing up a lung, or watching him bite his lip to keep from crying about how much it hurts. They never saw him on the days when he just didn’t have the energy to get up, but he did anyway. And they talk about the war, but no one knows the smell of it; mud and blood and cordite.

And Peggy…

Sometimes Steve feels like one of his own sketches. He is at the mercy of a cruel artist: slowly erasing all the parts of him that don’t fit the picture.

There’s someone in the hall, talking on their phone. It’s Kate. And suddenly, he wants nothing more than to feel like someone sees him, actually sees him.

Who else knows about your wife?

“Never thought that you would be
Standing here so close to me…”

Just...my friends.

“There’s so much I feel that I should say…”

Is that what we are?

That's up to you.

BANG

BANG

BANG

“Kiss me once and kiss me twice and kiss me once again,
It’s been a long, long, time…”

He catches the shield.

He catches it.

And across the whole rooftop, the shooter meets Steve's gaze, and holds it. He’s got some kind of mask over his mouth, like a muzzle, and great smears of black all around his eyes, like Rumlow did on that one sniper mission they had together. It was supposed to cut back on glare. Christ, has this maniac been lying in wait all day? His eyes are lasered in on Steve, glaring over the red-white-and-blue surface of the shield. Steve can still hear metal on metal ringing in his ears, like a struck bell.

The shooter pulls the shield back with his shiny arm. Steve hears gears whirring, servos whining and a mechanical buzz. That isn’t part of the suit, he realizes. That’s his arm. His arm is metal.

And then Steve has to catch the shield -- the force of it slides him back a few inches, and leaves bruises on his palms that almost immediately start to ache as they heal. He stares at it, stunned. No one has ever thrown the shield back at him like that. No one is strong enough.

When he looks up, the shooter is gone.

He was fast. Strong. Had a metal arm.

Sometimes, on a mission, it’s like being a bullet, fired from a gun. The Lemurian Star had been like that. It’s full speed ahead from the word go until suddenly, you slam into your target and stop. Other missions are more… Hurry up and wait. The war was like that. It was always hurry up and wait, with the emphasis on wait. Steve had been bad at that part. Bucky was the one who was good at waiting.

And this mission--whatever the fuck it is? This mission is hurry up and wait.

One minute he’s throwing himself out of an elevator, hoping to god that he’s right about being able to survive the landing, hoping to god that Howard was right about how the shield could theoretically replace a parachute, if used correctly.

The next minute he’s wearing a borrowed hoodie, on a bus heading for the hospital, and he’s got nothing to do but wait until he gets where he’s going.

It’s not the first time he’s been on the run, it’s just the first time he’s been on the run from his own people. Jesus.

With all due respect, If SHIELD
is conducting a manhunt for
Captain America, we deserve
to know why.

Because he lied to us.

Steve’s not a very good liar, so when Natasha asks him about the kiss, he tells a half truth. I’m ninety-five, I’m not dead.

He mostly believes that part.

And he’s definitely been kissed since 1945. People do weird things when you’re Captain America and you’ve just saved them from certain death.

She doesn’t need to know that.

She probably already knows that.

When he asks her to be a friend, she laughs, soft, and vanishing into blankness. “Well there’s a chance you might be in the wrong business, Rogers,” she says.

It’s the most honest thing she’s said to him in a while, which makes him smile, even though…

He knows now, for sure, that she’s lying to him. Not just the general lying that she always does, but something specific. She’s hiding something. Something important. Like on the Lemurian Star, when she had her own mission, and she didn’t tell him. Maybe she’s got her own mission now -- something she’s not telling him.

And he thinks…

That might be okay, actually. She’ll tell him as soon as he needs to know. She wants to do the right thing, he knows she does, despite her cynicism. She’s got red in her ledger, after all. And she’s very determined to wipe it out.

He trusts that, even when he doesn’t trust her.

HYDRA created a world so chaotic that
humanity is finally ready to sacrifice
its freedom to gain its security. Once
the purification process is complete,
HYDRA's new world order will arise.
We won, Captain.  Your death amounts
to the same as your life; a zero sum.

They take their borrowed -- borrowed, dammit -- car back to Virginia in mostly stony silence. Natasha is nursing a concussion, probably. Steve is nursing a different kind of wound.

Zero sum, zero sum, zero sum, echoes around his head.

Somewhere in Steve’s phone is a meme that Natasha sent him. It’s a picture of his face, looking very Noble and Disappointed and Captain America-y, and underneath it says I didn’t die for my country for this. Steve had spent entirely too long trying to figure out how to edit photos, and eventually sent back the same picture, with I didn’t die for my country for this underneath. Nat had retaliated with his face photoshopped onto some woman’s body. Surprise, Bitch. I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me.

They’d managed to continue escalating the meme hostilities for a while after that. It felt good to joke about it, but here’s the thing:

Steve really had thought that he died for something, that he traded his life to make the world a better place. He thought it would be worth it, in the end. He thought it meant something.

It makes him fucking sick to think that--

But. At least he knows who the enemy is now. He can focus on that. Hydra is here, and if there’s one thing Captain America is good for, it’s fighting Hydra. At least he knows who he’s up against.

“Steve.” Natasha’s hoarse voice is even rougher than usual.

He glances in the rearview. She’s still curled in the back seat, looking oddly young. “You okay?” he asks.

She makes a face, like she cannot believe the bullshit that her body is putting her through. Steve recognizes the look. He remembers it. “Been better. You okay?”

“Been worse,” he says.

“We need to regroup. We need a safe place. Allies.”

“Yeah I figured,” he says. “I know a guy.”

“Is he a nonagenarian?” she snarks.

“It’s worse than that, I’m afraid. He’s air force.”

There’s a momentary pause. “Rogers,” she says, flatly. “Please tell me you are not talking about who I think you’re talking about.”

Steve does a hilarious double take. “How do you know who I’m thinking about?”

“Steven, I’m a spy, and I’m trying to get you laid, do you really think I didn’t check up on Cute Jogger Boy?”

I’m sorry about this. We
need a place to lay low.

Everyone we know
is trying to kill us.

Not everyone.

“What’s going on?” he asks her, and he can see the moment that she decides not to tell him the whole truth. He’s not a good liar, but he’s not blind either.

But, she does tell him something true. I guess I just traded in the KGB for Hydra, and he recognizes how close to her that little revelation is. He knows that she’s giving him a piece of her truth, like it’s a gift. She’s being generous. She’s trusting him.

“There’s a chance you might be in the wrong business,” he says, and she looks at him like she can’t quite believe he’s real.

And when she asks him if he trusts her to save his life, he doesn’t lie. He’s no good at it anyway.

I would now. And I'm always honest.

He’s got a kind of clarity now. He knows what’s right, and what’s wrong. He knows what his choices are, he just has to make them. He’s back on solid ground. He knows it’s only going to last as long as the mission lasts, but for now… For now things are simple. He just has to tackle what’s in front of him.

When what’s in front of him is a problem of munitions (Sam needs his wings) he and Natasha treat it like a milk run. Fort Meade is a walk in the park compared to some of the places they’ve broken into.

“Okay so I’ve got a question.”

Steve regrets everything. Steve’s got the wingpack slung over one shoulder as they trek back to the car (a different borrowed car this time. Nat insists that they change cars regularly.) “Is this about my love life?”

“No, this is about your lack of love life.”

“I have a love life,” Steve says.

“You don’t have to,” Natasha points out. “Not everyone does.”

Steve looks over at her, and shuffles through his mental filing cabinet of Future Era Gender and Sexuality Terms. “You think I’m… asexual?”

“It would be fine if you were,” Natasha says, expression bland. She’s got her hands in her pockets. They might be walking back from the grocery store, not from breaking into a secure government facility. Well. “Secure.”

“I’m not ace,” Steve tells her. He frowns. “I don’t think I’m ace.”

“I thought I’d ask, but… I don’t think so either. I saw the way you looked at Flyboy back there.”

“Natasha.”

“And the way you looked at that not-a-nurse who lived across the hall.”

“Natasha.”

“I’m just saying. It would be okay if you were.”

“Well I’m not,” Steve says.

“Can I still ask my question?”

“Can I stop you?”

“So you and Carter--”

“I knew you knew who she was.”

“She founded SHIELD, Steven, of course I know who she is, I was trying to get you to open up. Subtly.”

“It wasn’t that subtle,” Steve grumbles.

“Anyway. You and Carter, I knew about. What about you and Barnes.”

“Natasha.” He can hear how his voice has changed. He’s gone full Captain America. “That’s enough.”

They walk on in silence. Steve feels like the air temperature has dropped ten degrees at least.

He hates fighting with Natasha. He hates it but he --

He can’t talk about this right now. He needs to focus.

They get back to the car. Steve puts Sam’s wings in the trunk, and the slams the door closed. His mind is already on the next move. Sam’s been tailing Sitwell, since Sitwell doesn’t know his face. Sam will call them, and they’ll all meet up and Steve will finally get some fucking answers--

“Steve,” Natasha says.

Steve looks at her over the top of the car. She looks… young, again. She doesn’t often look young. Something about this mission though. Maybe it’s losing Fury. Maybe it’s this Winter Soldier guy. Natasha would’ve been in her early twenties when he shot her. Practically a kid herself. “What?” Steve asks, trying to convey that he’s not really angry with her. He’s just angry.

“I’m sorry,” she says, brows furrowed and serious.

He gives one short nod. “It’s fine,” he says, and actually means it.

Her shoulders settle. Then, she smirks. “But you really should think about calling--”

Steve sighs heavily. “They should’ve left me in the ice.”

Mission focus is important, and Natasha gets that, so she doesn’t ask about his dead friends anymore. She was just feeling out where the edges were. Well, she found them. Now she knows where not to push. He needs to be able to focus on what’s in front of him.

And when what’s in front of him is a little piece of shit that needs to have things put into perspective, he lets Natasha kick him off the roof for Sam to catch. (It’s like old times. He was the symbol, wasn’t supposed to get his hands dirty. He had Bucky for that.)

Is this little display meant to insinuate
that you're gonna throw me off the roof?
Because it's really not your style, Rogers.

You're right. It's not. It's hers.

“Where are you taking me?” Sitwell asks from the backseat. “I’m assuming there’s a plan?”

Man with a plan, Bucky had griped, once, while they were on the line and Steve was putting forward his idea for how to break through the German defenses. Steve’s Highly Comprehensive Stratagem had boiled down to ‘I’ll smash them all really hard with my patriotic frisbee.’ It had been a long day. Man with a plan my left asscheek. Man with not a single solitary fucking clue, more like.

“If you’re expecting me to cooperate, you’re going to have to trust me a little .”

Sitwell came along suspiciously quietly, and Steve would be worried, except that Sitwell is all but clinging to them, like they’re his last hope for survival. He doesn’t trust Sitwell, but he trusts Sitwell’s fear. The guy reeks of it, rank and rancid, and it’s only gotten worse since they got in the car. Scared as Sitwell was of being thrown off the roof of a building, he’s more scared of Pierce.

Or whoever Pierce is going to send. Steve wonders, bitterly, if it’s going to be Rumlow or Rollins.

“You seem nervous, Jasper,” Natasha says. She’s checking her phone, bored, like maybe she’s wondering about the time.

“Hydra doesn’t like leaks.”

Insight's launching in sixteen hours,
we're cutting it a little bit close here.

I know. We'll use him to bypass the DNA
scans and access the Helicarriers directly.

What?! Are you crazy? That is
a terrible, terrible idea--

Hydra doesn’t send Rumlow or Rollins.

Oh shit, Steve thinks. He’s trying to keep track of the knife, and he’s taking hits from an arm that feels like a crowbar smashing into his ribs, and his grip on the shield is all wrong but there’s no time to fix it. He feels clumsy and outmatched for the first time this century. This guy is better than me. If Steve’s going to beat him, he’s going to need to get seriously fucking lucky.

And he’s never had the best luck.

Bucky?

Who the hell is Bucky?

Steve doesn’t fight when they push him to his knees. He was going down anyway. He doesn’t fight when they put a gun to the back of his head. He doesn’t fight when Rumlow locks him into a set of heavy cuffs that cover his entire forearms. He doesn’t fight when they load him into the back of the van.

Sam and Nat must be taking their cues from him, because they don’t fight either. Steve doesn’t know how to tell them that he just had all the fight ripped out of his body and they might as well be taking their cues from a piece of roadkill because that’s about the level he’s functioning at. It’s an apt metaphor. He feels flattened, everything in him broken and bloody and bruised.

“Steve?” Sam is saying, as he’s shoved into the back of the van, too. “Steve, man, you hit?”

Steve swallows, and shakes his head. He’s staring at the heavy metal wrapped around his arms. They were prepared for this. Prepared to take in someone with super strength. How long has SHIELD been prepared to take in Captain America?

But maybe these weren’t built for him.

“I am,” Natasha says. “Hit, I mean. Just. If anyone was wondering.” She lets her head fall back against the wall of the van and takes steadying breaths. The van starts up, pulls away.

“Yeah I can see that,” Sam says, sounding concerned. “I’m just wondering why the hell Captain Fight Me here was all set to let them take the shot. Steve, man, you sure you ain’t hit? Concussion?”

Steve closes his eyes. “I’m fine, Sam,” he lies.

“You recognized him,” Natasha says, pained.

“Recognized the Soldier?” Sam says.

Steve’s stomach is swooping, sick and roiling as it was when the plane was going down, down, down… He feels numb -- like the ice all over again. Cold enough to kill and weighing on his every limb. This guy’s alive!

Joke’s on them.

“I did,” Steve says. “I knew him.”

“Hold up. Knew him? Him as in Grand Theft Steering Wheel, him?”

“It was Bucky.”

The words send a ripple of silence rolling through the van. Of course, their masked and helmeted guards say nothing. These guards. SHIELD. Fucking Hydra. These--

Steve clenches his fists, flexes his arms, but the cuffs hold. And that’s when he’s sure. Because they never tested these cuffs on him, but they must have tested them on someone.

“Bucky…” Sam hesitates, and Steve doesn’t look up, but he can feel Sam and Nat exchanging a look. “...Like Sergeant Barnes, Bucky? Your Bucky?”

Steve closes his eyes.

Bucky Barnes is alive. And Bucky had looked at Steve, had looked through him, and not seen him. Hadn’t known him. Steve opens his eyes, and looks down at his useless hands. At this point, what the hell is supposed to surprise him?

Ah. That thing was squeezing my brain.

…

Who’s this guy?

Maria Hill is in the prison transport with them? Sure, why not.

She’ll want to see him first.

Nick Fury is still alive? Of course he is. Because who the fuck stays dead anymore? At least Fury remembers their faces and his own damn name.

We have to assume everyone aboard
those carriers is HYDRA. We need to get
past them, insert the server blades, and
maybe, just maybe, we can salvage what's
left...

They have a plan to take out the helicarriers? At least someone does, because Steve’s in no fit state to plan diddly squat right now.

The only thing he knows is that he's going to burn it. Burn it all. Right to the ground.

We're not salvaging anything. We're
not just taking down the carriers, Nick,
we're taking down SHIELD.

SHIELD had nothing to do with it.

You gave me this mission, this is how it ends.

“Steve,” Natasha calls. She’s supposed to be getting ready to play her part, dressed up as a member of the World Security Council, but instead she’s chasing after him, struggling to keep pace with him, pale and shaking and-- “Steve, I need to talk to you.”

And--

--She’s looking at him with frank assessment, the first time she saw him, on the old Helicarrier, like she’s comparing him to someone else and--

--“Our instructor was a big guy,” she’s saying, months ago, when he started working for SHIELD. “Like you, kind of. Mean left hook,” she added, and--

--When he said “What’s going on?” And watched her decide to not tell him the whole truth, and--

He understands. He stops, rocks back on his heels like she’s hit him. He turns to look at her, and she swallows. His disappointment must be showing, and as much as she protests otherwise, she’s not immune. “You knew,” he accuses.

She nods. He takes another step back from her, another blow, another wedge driving between them. She flinches.

“Back before… before I joined SHIELD. The people I used to work for… The people who trained me. He was… He trained us. The Widows. I didn't know who he was. He was just the Soldier. I didn't put it together until they pulled you out of the Arctic.”

“Put it together?” He’s shaking with it, the sick feeling of rage, of betrayal, it’s all through him, filling him to the brim. “Put what together, Natasha?” He says, challenging her to say it.

She meets his gaze. She’s not afraid of him, and she’s not gonna back down. “That it was Barnes.”

His fist clenches. His shoulder tenses and he’s never wanted to hit her, but he does right now. He lets out a breath through his nose. He won’t. He won’t hit his friend, he won’t do that. “And Fury?”

“I didn't tell him,” she says. “I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t know what they’d do to him if they knew -- Everything he did as the Soldier? It would be easier, less…” Her lip curls. “...awkward, for them, if he just disappeared.”

He lets out a sharp hiss of breath through his bared teeth. It’s not a laugh, but it’s not anything else either. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Her eyes are burning bright and clear in her pale, washed out face. “You said you trusted me to save your life. I was trying.” He gets the feeling that this is Natasha, unveiled. Natasha without a cover. Burning hot and fierce, as dedicated as a zealot and twice as intense. She looks a little unhinged, but then… aren’t they all? “You’d have pulled your punches if you knew who was under the mask, and he wouldn’t have. He can’t.”

He points in her face, cutting her off. “You should have told me,” he says. And yeah, he’s aware that he probably looks as intense and unhinged as she does, in this moment. “You had no right, Natasha, no right to make that call. You had no right to keep him from me,” he says, fist against his own chest now, thump.

She tips her head to one side in stony silence, and he hears what he said, like someone else is saying it. You had no right to keep him from me. Like he has ownership, like he’s the one who has the right to be possessive, instead of Natasha.

Fuck it. She didn’t. She doesn’t.

She bares her teeth at him, a mockery of a smile. “It’s not all about you, Captain,” she sneers. “I made him a promise, once. And I made that promise first.”

Steve stares at her. “What promise?”

“That I wouldn't hesitate, if they sent him after me. He asked me to kill him before he killed me.” She lifts her chin, unashamed of her choices and daring him to judge her. “I owe you, but I owe him more, Steve, so don’t even try to -- he practically raised me. He’s my -- he’s family. He put himself between me and handlers, and even when he didn’t know me, he tried to--” She’s breathing hard, shaking a little. “ I owe him,” she says again. “I owe him everything.”

It hits Steve in the solar plexus. A hard blow. It knocks the air out of him. His arms fall, limp, to his sides. “You met him.”

Her brows furrow, just slightly, a microexpression of confusion that even she can’t control. “Yeah, I just said.”

“No, I mean, you met him.” The words are a lifeline to him, one that he clings to. “You met… You met Bucky, he’s still in there, underneath.”

She rolls her eyes, exhaustion written all over her pale face. “He doesn’t know who he is, Steve, he doesn’t remember, they wiped his memory. Every time.”

“But he’s there , he wants out, he--”

“Will you listen,” she shouts, and he stops. He listens. She takes a breath in and lets it out, visibly calming herself. She looks so, so tired. “Mishka-- he--” she flinches, takes another steadying breath, and starts again. “He’s the Soldier. The Soldier, Steve. Not Bucky Barnes.”

“How would you know?” Steve says.

“For fuck’s sake, Steve--” She closes her eyes, shakes her head. “Bucky Barnes was a hero, the Soldier is just a weapon. A killer.”

Steve laughs, loud and harsh and bitter. “You think heroes never kill? Natasha. We were all killers. We were all weapons. You should know that.”

For the first time, Natasha looks uncertain. Her brows pull together. She looks young again. Steve wonders how old she was when Bucky put himself between her and the people trying to hurt her. He wonders how often it happened.

“He’s in there,” Steve says, more certain than ever.

“Steve, you don’t know that,” she insists. “You can't know that.”

“I’m the only one who can know that.” He doesn't realize that he's shouting until he notices his voice bouncing back at him off the concrete walls, filling the silence between them. He swallows. “I’m the only one alive who knows him, and he--”

Steve cuts himself off.

The pity in her eyes is unbearable. He’s not like this -- he’s never like this; shouting and unhinged. He doesn’t do this. He didn’t even shout when his mother died, for Christ’s sake but it’s--

It’s Bucky. Things were always different when it came to Bucky.

“I’m getting him out, Natasha,” he says, quieter this time. In control again.  “I’m getting him back.”

“Even when you had nothing, you had him,” Natasha says. “Right?”

Steve swallows. He can hear church bells in his head. A memory. The first time he lost everything. “Something tells me you know the feeling,” he says.

There’s no expression on her face, which is a tell in and of itself. “Okay,” she says, gently. “Okay. If anyone can, you can.”

He swallows. He turns on his heel and walks away. He needs air. He needs a minute. He needs to get his head on straight.

Look, whoever he used to be, the guy
he is now, I don't think he's the kind
you save. He's the kind you stop.

I don't know if I can do that.

Well, he might not give you a choice.
He doesn't know you.

He will. Gear up, it's time.

The uniform from the Smithsonian is an early version, a little brighter than the one he ended up wearing in the field. Steve remembers, with a pang. Bucky had vetoed this version, rubbed the material between his fingers and said No fucking way, Stark. If you’re going to have him wearing a target, at least give him armor that’s worth a damn.

So Steve puts it on, and tries to focus, and tries not to hope that Bucky will just throw his guns down and bellow “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WEARING, PAL?” when he sees Steve in this uniform. It feels too lightweight, and the snaps are in all the wrong places. He has to get Sam to buckle the one in the back. That was something else Howard fixed for him, on the final version of the uniform. His field uniform from the war-- he could get that on all by himself in thirty seconds flat, with bullets whizzing by overhead. It’s the same boots, though. The same gloves. Steve feels a strange vertigo, putting them on again, like he’s slipping into the past.

He snaps the clasp on the utility built, double-checks that the targeting blade is secure and looks up to find Sam holding out the helmet, that damn white A gleaming out among the blue. Steve swallows.

Captain Asshole, is what you are. Put your goddamn helmet on, ya mook.

Steve takes the helmet, and pulls it on, snaps the clip under his ear.

It’s time.

I know I'm asking a lot, but the price of freedom is high,
it always has been, and it's a price I'm willing to pay.
And if I'm the only one, then so be it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not.

“Please don’t make me do this,” he begs. He doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t--

He never gets what he wants.

Natasha was wrong. The Soldier is definitely Bucky Barnes, and now that Steve knows that, he has an advantage. And he’s grimly determined to use it.

He needs to keep the fight in close quarters -- they’re more evenly matched in hand to hand.

Don’t forget: there’s always another knife.

Bucky’s left handed, but he shoots with his right hand, so if Steve can disable his shooting arm--

The other arm is a problem, but, well. Steve learned how to get someone in a headlock by roughhousing with Bucky.

And Bucky never pulled his punches with Steve, so that hasn’t changed.

The bullet in his gut is still, somehow, a surprise.

Fire now.

But, Steve--

Do it! Do it now!

He saved the world. Again. He brought down Hydra. Again. Hopefully, this time, it’ll fucking stick. But now that he’s gotten that part out of the way, he can do something for himself. Or rather, for Bucky.

For Bucky, for himself, it’s all the same. It’s what he should have done seventy fucking years ago. It’s what he should have done every second of every day of his life.

He jumps down and feels pain ricochet through his whole body, from every place where he’s bleeding, every broken bone, every bruise. He curls an arm around his guts. He staggers over to the fallen beam and sees his friend there, trapped, watching his approach with mindless, abject terror. He looks like a wild animal, panicked. Uncomprehending. Unrecognizing.

It doesn’t matter. Steve is not leaving Bucky behind.

Not again.

Not ever again.

He drops to his knees, grabs the big metal beam, and heaves.

Then finish it. Cause I'm with you to the end of the line.

Steve goes down like the Helicarrier, like SHIELD. The big unwieldy mass of him crashing into the water, boom.

The red, white, and blue clings to him, waterlogged, and drags him down, all his senses muffled, and everything is so heavy around him.

The first breath of icy water hurts even more than the serum had.

Chapter Text

5

Trouble passes and beauty remains
And though I know this could turn tragic
It's alright, it's alright, 'cause I am willing to take more hurt if it's from you
Oh baby
I'll take the pain from you

- Beauty Remains by Paloma Faith, 2014.

“I come up hard baby, I'm gettin' down…”

Steve wakes up. He’s in a hospital. And for a few blissful seconds, he doesn't know how. Who could put him in the hospital, after all? He glances down at himself, at his stomach, where he can feel stitches, bandaging, and a strange itching sensation, but on the inside. His intestines putting themselves back in order, probably.

Then, he remembers. He remembers everything. A small, hurt sound wants to escape him, but he’s had a lot of practice keeping that kind of stuff in.

He turns his head. Sam is there, reading something. He’s got a few scrapes of his own, a few bruises, but all in all, he looks better than Steve. It’s not that Steve is disappointed to see him, but…

For a delirious split second, he’d hoped… He’d thought maybe…

But no. This isn’t 1937, and he can’t just expect Bucky to be sitting at his sickbed, waiting for him to wake. He’s lucky to have Sam. To be honest, Sam probably deserves better.

“There's only three things that for sure: taxes, death and trouble…”

Trouble. No shit.

It’s all coming back to him, with the same painful clarity he remembers everything now. All the time before the serum is softer in his memory, the colors off and faded, slightly blurred and softened by the fragilities of his old body, but now?

He can recall the bullet in his gut with perfect clarity, the breathless pain of it, the slow burning that spread and spread. He knows now (and he always will know) exactly what it feels like to have that metal fist slamming into his face, over and over, as unyielding as a crowbar. He already knew that the first breath of water feels like fire. He's not exactly pleased to have gotten a refresher course.

He swallows.

“On your left.”

Sam looks over, he can see it in the corner of his eye. “This I know, baby…” says the singer. It’s a nice song, Steve thinks. Smooth and jazzy. Something that Bucky would probably like. Would probably have liked, back in the day. Who knew what he liked now.

Steve pushes on the bed, trying to sit up.

That’s… a mistake.

“Hey man,” Sam says softly, reaching out to push Steve back down. It… doesn’t take much effort. “Maybe take it easy for, like, five seconds?”

Steve wants to say something, maybe ask a question. What comes out sounds like: “Gnnugh.”

“You’re in DC still. They found you on the riverbank, a ways upstream from your shield, which is by your bed. You have… I mean I’d have to check the list if you want a full inventory of where you got stabbed and shot and hit,” Sam says, dry and disapproving. “But the main concern was the gut wound. By all accounts that should’ve killed you.”

“The water would’ve killed me first,” Steve mumbles.

“The water may yet kill you, dude. The Potomac isn’t a good place to go swimming with open wounds, you know what I’m saying? You’ve been fighting off half a dozen infections, and the doctors say your body’s spitting out the antibiotics they give you, so I hope that healing factor of yours--”

“I’ll be fine,” Steve says. He’s scratching his stomach. “Did they use stitches? Inside me?”

“Dude.”

“It’s itchy,” Steve complains.

"Dude. That’s nasty.” Steve pouts at him, and Sam frowns. “Don’t itch that, you’re gonna mess up their work.”

Steve sighs and lets his hand drop. His face is starting to itch too, like now that he’s not in immediate danger of dying from putrid wounds and infection, the serum has decided to start working on less vital things. He knows from experience that if his stitches aren’t the absorbable kind, his body is going to start pushing them out. Rejecting anything that isn’t Genuine Bona Fide Steve Rogers Material.

Sam is watching him.

“I’ll be fine,” he repeats. He looks down at his toes, covered by the blankets. “Did they find… I mean… was there any sign of...”

“No. No sign of any cyborg assassins or long-lost war heroes. Sorry, man.”

Steve swallows. “Yeah. That… makes sense. He’d want to run.”

“Right back to Hydra?”

“No,” Steve answers. “No, he remembers now. He remembered me.” Steve looks over at Sam, meets his gaze.

“He remembered you,” Sam repeats, skeptical. “Dude, unless the last thing you said to him was something very unkind, I really doubt--”

“He didn’t at first,” Steve says. “We fought, yeah, but… I didn’t pull myself outta the water.” Steve swallows. He didn’t. He remembers that. It was like the plane all over again. He was gonna let the water have him.

Sam’s eyes narrow. Like maybe he knows that. “You and I are gonna have a talk about that,” he warns. “But right now? You need rest.”

Steve blinks at him. “I’ll be--”

“Man, shut up and rest.”

Steve sets his jaw, pugnaciously determined to resist, just like he used to. He can almost hear Bucky in his head. Jesus Christ, Stevie, will you just take it easy? His eyes roam over Sam, who is now apparently ignoring him. He looks tired. Steve wonders how long he’s been sitting there, waiting for Steve to wake, or if it hasn’t even been that long and he’s just tired because of the hellishly long day they’ve had. All that flying, the hard landings, they can’t be easy on a body.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Sam looks up, mildly surprised. Which makes Steve feel like shit all over again. He was so wrapped up in his own drama, he didn’t stop to think.

“Better than you.”

“No, I mean…” He blinks, shakes his head. “I know you said you were good to fly, to get back in. I’m askin’... You okay?” It can’t have been easy. Steve wonders if Sam had been back in the air since Riley.

Sam blinks at him, and his expression softens. “Yeah, Steve. Yeah, I’m okay. Well…” He cocks his head to one side. Steve thinks it’s a bird-like gesture. Steve thinks Sam would probably smack him for thinking that. “For a given definition of okay, yeah. I think you know something about that.”

Steve lets out a breath that's almost a laugh. “Uh. Yeah.”

“Get some rest, Steve.” Sam leans back and lifts his book. “We can figure the rest out later.”

Steve doesn’t know how. And he doesn’t think he can rest, not with Bucky still out there. But he closes his eyes and pretends to, for a little while.

“I come up hard baby, but now I'm fine
I'm checkin' trouble sugar
Movin' down the line…”

He comes out of the hospital less than a week later and full to the brim with determination. He spent the last 12 hours of his stay with a laptop, combing through the Hydra files, but there’s nothing on Bucky. He texts Natasha.

I need everything you have on him.

Hello to you too. Glad to hear you’re alive, she texts back, along with a string of emojis that indicate either relief or murderous intent. Perhaps both.

Sorry, he texts back, in his deliberate way. He adds a single :/ emoji. He can imagine her throwing back her head and laughing.

Let's pay our respects to the dearly departed ;) she says.

He works out what she means.

You're going after him?

You don't have to come with me.

I know. When do we start?

Steve’s apartment is still kind of full of bullet holes, so Sam offers him a place to stay. While Sam’s out at the VA, Steve spreads the file out on the coffee table and really, really wishes that alcohol still affected him. He takes a breath in. He lets it out slowly. He starts going through the file.

He starts with the kill list.

He's barely halfway through before he knows he has to burn it. 

He gets to Dernier’s name. And the note that Bucky's-- Bucky's handler had left. Test results: Partial success. They'd made Bucky kill his friend, to test his memory, his ability to follow orders, his brainwashing. That was hard enough to swallow. It made Steve want to scream.

He's almost unsurprised when he gets to Howard’s name. To Maria’s. He thinks of Tony, bent over an engine block, with Jay-Z thumping in the background, the vulnerable back of his neck, his shoulders under the filthy tank top.

It doesn’t even occur to him until it’s a pile of ashes in Sam’s fireplace that this isn’t something Captain America would do. This isn’t right. The people on that list deserve justice, their families deserve answers. Tony would trust Captain America to tell him the truth. But Tony isn’t very rational about his parents. Of course he isn’t. He might hear reason, but he might not.

And Steve Rogers won’t risk Bucky Barnes.

He makes sure the list is completely burned to ash, and then goes back to the file.

Later, Steve is standing with his back to the coffee table, staring at a hole in the wall. Sam’s wall. It’s a hole roughly the size of Steve’s fist, and he’s wondering if he can somehow fix it before Sam gets back when looks up to find Sam staring at him from the doorway. He has his arms folded, looking at Steve with a gaze of intense, speculative concern.

Steve has… no idea what his face is doing right now. The tears wouldn’t come, the way you can’t catch a breath when the sea is battering at you. Over. And over. And over. Wave after wave. Shellshock, he thinks. Maybe just plain old shock.

“Dude,” Sam says, eloquent in his brevity.

“Sorry,” Steve says, reflexively. “I can fix that,” he adds, waving vaguely at the hole in the wall. He's not like this, Jesus, he's not supposed to be-- “God, sorry, I’m--”

Sam is right there, all of a sudden. He puts his hands on Steve’s shoulders and pushes him back, gently. Steve goes, lets Sam direct him, is vaguely aware of Sam steering him to the couch, sitting him down on it. The file is still there, staring up at him. He swallows. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, but then Sam is putting his hands around something warm. Tea. When did Sam make tea?

“Sam, I--” Steve starts, thinking about what a terrible guest he is.

“Boy, don't you even start with me,” Sam says. “Drink your tea.”

Obediently, Steve sips it. It’s sweeter than he normally likes, but that feels good right now.

“Alright man.” Sam closes the folder, pushes it to one side, and sits on the coffee table in front of Steve. “Talk to me.”

“I was looking for tactical insight,” Steve reports. “There’s a… if we can get a sense of how he operates, maybe we can work out a way to track him. But this is all…” He waves a hand at the folder. “I’m having trouble making heads or tails of it. I can’t ask you to--”

“Steve, stop,” Sam says. “Of course I’ll look at the file. But what I need you to do, right now, is tell me how you’re doing, because you look worse now than you did in the hospital, man.”

Steve opens his mouth, closes it. He doesn’t know where to start.

“It’s okay, take your time. Just tell me whatever is going through that thick skull of yours.”

Steve blinks rapidly. “Back in the war, they used to send Bucky into places I couldn’t go. I was wearing the flag, you know? They wanted to keep me all shiny and clean.” He swallows, feeling as sick now as he had at the time. But he’d let it happen, hadn’t he? He’d let them make Bucky do all of that. “So they’d send him in. To... Clear the way. He was trained as a sniper, but. He did a lot of... knifework. Dirty work.”

“I guess that’s what Hydra was after,” Sam says, when Steve can’t go on. “Someone to do their dirty work.”

Steve swallows. “Bucky got the draft,” he says. He’s not meeting Sam’s eye. He can’t. He’s staring into the too-sweet, too-milky tea. “Nobody ever talks about that, but… He didn’t enlist, he had to drop out of school and then he got the draft. He never wanted to fight, that was always me. I was the one who--” Steve stops abruptly. He takes a gulp of tea.

“You were the one who?”

“I was the one who got him in trouble. He’d come tearin’ in and save my skinny punk ass from whatever…” Steve has to put the cup down so he can drag a hand over his face. “Jesus. It ain’t like he was a pacifist or anythin’ but… he hated it. He always hated it, and--” He picks up the file suddenly, shakes it violently. “Everything in here -- there were nearly forty missions, dozens of targets, hundreds of people-- collateral damage, and he-- he didn’t-- he wouldn’t--” He throws the file down and some of the pages slip out, that damn photo of Bucky in the ice, looking like a corpse.

“I get it,” Sam says quietly. “He didn’t choose this. Didn’t choose any of this.”

Steve nods, looks up at Sam. And now -- now, at last -- his vision starts to swim. His eyes start to burn.

Sam spreads his arms. “Come here.”

Steve leans into the hug. He sure as shit needs it right now. He finds himself holding onto Sam’s jacket, burying his face in Sam’s shoulder. Sam’s hand rubs his back, like his Ma used to do when he was sick.

“It’s not his fault,” Sam says quietly, seriously. “That’s what you’re telling me, right? That none of this is his fault?”

Steve nods frantically, tries to say yes, but can’t get his voice to work. It just comes out strangled.

“It’s not your fault either, right? You know that, don’t you, Steve?”

Steve can’t nod to that. Tears are dripping off his nose now; hurt, shocked, guilty tears. He couldn’t stop them if he tried.

“Man, you gotta trust me on this one. If he didn’t have any choice, neither did you. You didn’t know. You couldn’t have stopped it.”

Steve makes an angry, choked sound, like a hurt animal. “It should’ve been me, it should’ve been--”

“No, man, don’t even go there. You did your best.”

“Not fucking good enough--”

“You did your best," Sam repeats. “Bucky did too. Would you tell him he didn’t do good enough?”

Steve jerks back from the hug, horrified. “God, no, of course I wouldn’t, I--”

“I’m just asking that you treat yourself with the same kindness, okay?” Sam says. “I know it’s hard, man. I know. Just. Try to.”

Steve swipes at his face, at the tears there. His jaw clenches, unclenches. He swallows. “I hate this. Being… helpless. I hate it.”

Sam is smiling a weary little smile. “Man, Captain America just cried on my actual shoulder. I get that you hate this.” Steve stiffens for a split second, wondering if Sam has been expecting him to be the hero, rather than the man. Then Sam squeezes Steve’s shoulder and says: “No one likes watching a friend suffer.”

Steve can feel his face scrunching up. “I'm not really... Cap is just...” He's never found a way to say this that doesn't make him sound like a damn lunatic. “I think you’re stuck with Steve Rogers for the foreseeable future.”

Sam looks taken aback. Then, strangely, he looks a little watery around the eyes. “Man, can you be a little less good for like five seconds? Seriously. You’re breaking my damn heart. Shit, man.”

“Sorry.”

“Jesus Christ, don’t be sorry--”

Steve gets another hug, so he figures it’s okay.

Sam reads the file while Steve hovers and frets. Sam’s expression gets grimmer and grimmer. “Listen, Steve,” he says, as soon as he’s done and he closes up the file. “I don’t know what you’re hoping is going to happen here, but I think you need to get someone else to do this.”

“No,” Steve says, immediately.

“Listen to me, man, the shit that’s in here... People don’t come back from that easy, if they come back at all. If you can find him, if he even wants to come in -- even in the very best case scenario, you’re asking for a world of hurt.”

“He’d do it for me,” Steve says simply.

Sam is just shaking his head. “This kind of abuse--” he taps his finger on the closed file “--it’d be bad enough if they'd kept him prisoner, tortured him, but this? They convinced him it was the right thing to do.”

“I know,” Steve says again.

“You don’t know,” Sam says. “Hell, I don’t know. What we’re looking at here? It’s not unheard of, but gaslighting someone on this scale? For this amount of time? With this kind of body count?” Sam shakes his head. “You got no idea what you’re dealing with.”

“So give me an idea.” Steve hopes he sounds steady, like he does on mission. He's trying but this... this isn't just another mission.

Sam blows out a long breath. “If you find him. Bottom line you’re looking at some serious goddamn PTSD. The same kinda nightmares you and I have, but, you know. Worse. And probably sometimes while he’s awake. You’re looking at some weird ass unhealthy coping mechanisms. Dissociation, self-harm, aggression. Paranoia, on a scale that you and I cannot even comprehend. He’s spent the last seventy years in someone else’s fantasy world, you gotta know he’s wondering what’s real. If he can even handle reality. Sometimes people don’t want to wake up from this kinda dream. He might still think that Hydra was right. Denial is a real possibility here.”

Steve swallows, feeling sick. “Okay.”

“Is it? Because man, just reading the file pretty well destroyed you. And I’m not just thinking about you here, I’m thinking about him. You going to be able to respect that what he wants might not be what you want? If you find him, and he doesn’t want anything to do with you, are you gonna be able to walk away?”

Steve would go pale if he wasn’t already white as a sheet, but he swallows and clenches his jaw. Allow him the dignity of his choice. “If I can’t, I’m no better than they are,” Steve says. “It’s the least I can do.”

“And if you find him, but he’s chosen to fight for the other side, are you going to be able to stop him?”

“If I have to.”

“That’s what I’m saying, dude, you don’t have to. You can let someone else take this bullet.”

“Sam. He’d do it for me,” Steve repeats. He doesn’t know how else to make it clear. A lot of things between him and Buck are complicated, and always were. But this? This isn’t complicated. He can’t not do this.

Sam sighs, dropping his head, but Steve can recognize when he’s won an argument through sheer pigheadedness. It’s how he wins most things, even now. “Alright, fine, but… I still think we gotta bring someone else in on this, man. Natasha’s in the wind, and we are not spies. We need help.”

Kate -- Sharon, rather -- comes by while Sam is out at the VA. She looks hesitant. “Hi neighbor,” she says quietly.

He smiles. He hates that she lied to him, yeah, but… She had his back when it mattered. So maybe, like Natasha, he doesn’t need to know everything to trust her. He wishes he'd said that to Natasha before she left for Europe. He hopes she knows he's not really mad at her for keeping her secrets. “Hi Sharon. Thanks for coming.”

She steps in, taking off her coat. “It’s the least I can do, come on. And hey, Alice and Grace wanted me to check up on you.”

“Oh yeah?” Steve says, suddenly feeling a little prickly about it. “They’re not Hydra?”

Sharon looks over sharply, and then her brow does something complicated. Confusion, and then understanding, and a pained wince. “They weren’t SHIELD, either,” she tells him. “They just like you.”

He blinks. He’d just assumed. But no, Alice and Grace really are just civilians. Just his neighbors. Geeze. He puts a hand over his face. “Sorry,” he says.

“Don’t apologize. In your position, I’d be a little paranoid, too.”

He blows out a breath. “You have no idea.”

“What is it you wanted to ask me?” she says, folding her arms.

“You’d better sit down,” he says, gesturing to a chair. “I’d like your advice on -- I’d like your help, to be honest.”

She holds up a hand. “Before you tell me anything, you should know that I’ve applied for a position at the CIA. And I think they’re going to hire me. So if you’re going to ask me to come with you on whatever crazy vengeance road trip you and Wilson are probably planning--”

“No, no,” Steve says. “I can’t ask that of anyone. I just want you to take a look at something, get your opinion. If you can. I… It’s confidential, so. Can you…”

“I haven’t agreed to anything with them yet. Your secrets are safe from the CIA, Steve.”

“They’re not my secrets, that’s the whole…” He waves at the chair again, and this time she sits. He takes a seat across from her, and then picks up the file that’s lying closed on the table. “This is… The Winter Soldier. The guy who came after me. I need to find him.”

“Before he finds you? Steve, near as we can tell, he’s killed everyone they’ve ever sent him after. Anyone else, I’d say you were a dead man walking.”

Dead man walking. That’s funny. Steve can’t help letting out a bark of laughter. “If he wanted me dead, I’d be dead by now. But I need to find him.”

“Every three-letter acronym in the world is looking for him right now.”

“I need to find him first,” Steve says. “He’s not what they think. It’s… Just read the file.”

He hands it to her. She flips open to that first page and her eyes go wide as saucers, instantly recognizing. “He's…” Her eyes track back and forth, but they're not focused on the file. She's figuring it out, he can tell. Peggy used to do that, he remembers; like she was reading the answers out of the air. “Oh. Azzano, and the factory. They never figured out what Zola was doing,” she says. She must have done her reading, he thinks. When they assigned her to him. “And then…” She tips her head to one side, the realization coming to her.“But they never found the body, so--”

“Someone did,” Steve says bitterly. “Russians. Our allies. But Hydra was already worming into their ranks. Ours too. Operation Paperclip.”

“But this wasn’t in the data dump,” she says. “The name. Barnes's ID. None of this was in the computers--”

Steve points at the file, that battered, aged folder, marked with scratches and stains. “Not everything got digitized.” He hesitates. Part of him is unwilling to share this, even though Natasha had as good as said that he could trust Sharon, he still… This is Bucky. This is all the worst things they did to Bucky. But... he needs her help. “Keep reading.”

She sets the file down and starts flipping through. He watches her read, watches her expression go horrified, just like his had done, just like Sam’s had done. The Chair, the Tank, the conditioning. Training. Torture. She keeps reading, flipping back and forth through the notes. A line appears between her brows, and she frowns in concentration. She looks focused, intent like a hawk that's spotted a mouse.

And then, at last, she looks up. “Well. This changes things.”

“Tell me about it,” Steve says drily.

She looks back down at the open file in her lap. “You’re looking for my take on where he’s likely to go, how he probably plans to operate, given his training.”

“Yeah, if you can--”

“I can do that,” she says. “I can put together something for you in a couple of days. A profile, what you can probably expect from him. But Steve…” She bites her lip.

“What?” He prompts.

“Two things. One you’re gonna like, one you’re… not gonna like.”

“Fire away.”

“Get a lawyer for him. Like. Yesterday. Bernie Rosenthal, if you can. This is going to get out, and when it does, people are gonna be baying for his blood. You want to be prepared for that. There’s gonna be a trial, public outcry, a media frenzy. You don’t want him caught with his pants down.”

Steve’s eyes widen. He hadn’t thought of that, but Jesus. She’s right.  “Bernie Rosenthal,” he repeats.

Sharon nods. “She’s the best. She represented Hawkeye after New York. He can get you in touch.”

Steve’s eyes must be like saucers now.

“But this is gonna be bigger than that. Much bigger.” She takes a breath. “And. Hear me out on this, but…” She holds up the folder. “You should make this public. Maybe not all of it, but…”

“No,” Steve says. He’s on his feet. When did that happen. “No way.”

“Steve, listen--”

“No goddamn way,” Steve says, voice loud in his own ears. “After everything that’s happened to him, he deserves some privacy, I’m not gonna be the one to--”

“Steve,” Sharon says, and there’s an edge of alarm in her voice, of genuine fear.

He remembers, suddenly, that he’s not a sixteen year old kid anymore, he’s not 5’3” and 95 pounds, yelling just to be heard. He’s a giant. He’s a goddamn super soldier and he could break Sharon over his knee and he’s been shouting at her.

Christ.

“Shit,” he says, quieter. “Shit, sorry, I--”

“It’s okay,” she says. “I can see that he -- that this is a… a sensitive subject for you.”

He sits, sheepish and ashamed, hunching his shoulders in. “Yeah,” he says weakly.

“But just. Hear me out. You have to make this public. Talk with a lawyer about it first, obviously, but it’s the right thing to do.” She frowns a little, like she’s surprised he didn’t know that.

But there’s always been a huge Bucky-shaped loophole in his sense of right and wrong. He sets his jaw. “I don’t care that--”

“Steve,” she says, cutting him off. “The sooner you get this out there, the sooner people can start coming to terms with it. The longer you have to build a case for him in the media. You can get out there, defend him, be his advocate. You can start doing that tomorrow, and the Avengers can do the same.”

He hadn’t thought of that. He’s not sure he can. How could he look Tony in the eye and ask--

“And even if you didn’t want to do that, getting his name and face out there can only make it easier to find him. I mean, that’s two solid reasons right there, but Steve. Much as I’m sure you don’t want to think it, he could be a danger to those around him. He’s still the greatest assassin the world has ever known.”

“He’s the longest-serving POW the world has ever known,” Steve says hotly.

“That too, but Hydra made him a weapon, a weapon that operates in the shadows. They damn near blew his cover sending him after Nick and you in broad daylight, but… Take away the shadows and he loses value to them. Steve, this is just good tactical sense. You need to do this. Sooner rather than later.”

She’s right but... His shoulders slump. “People are going to see him as a traitor, when that’s not who he is. It’s not. He didn’t have a choice.”

Sharon looks sympathetic. She kind of looks like she wants to give him a hug, but she doesn’t offer, and to be honest, he’s relieved. Sam and Nat, they’re friends. Sharon is different. He wants to treat her right, be respectful, and he hasn’t really been doing that.

“You should talk to a lawyer,” she repeats. “But if you make this public, you have a chance to tell your side of the story. Make people see him the way you see him.”

Steve rubs his hand across his mouth. The way he sees Bucky. Bucky is, and always has been, his hero. The kind of man he wishes he could be. That’s fine. He’s been in love with the man for the better part of a century, which is… not not fine, but that’s not something he wants to put out in the world, not until he’s found Buck, and the courage to say something to him about it. But none of that is the real problem.

“That sounds good,” Steve says, “but the truth is, I see him like drowning people see a life raft, so. I think if I let people see that, they’ll realize I’m not exactly an impartial observer.” He tries to smile. He knows full well that it’s the I’m so fucked smile, because, well.

Sharon winces a little, a kind of half-grimace. “Steve. I don’t think that anyone would mistake you for an impartial observer where Barnes is concerned.”

He is so, so fucked.

He gets a text from an unlisted number.

Ideal Federal Savings Bank.  - Ezekiel

He should’ve known that Fury would still have his fingers in all the pies over here. Steve Googles the address and doesn’t take the shield, opting for low-key.

It’s late enough that the bank is closed when he gets there, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of trouble. Steve stares at it from across the street and wonders what it is that he’s supposed to be seeing.

“Hey.”

Steve stiffens, recognizing the voice at once. But honestly. He didn’t know what he’d expected. “Doesn’t anyone stay dead anymore?”

Phil Coulson smiles that mild, soft smile of his. He looks tired as hell, but that doesn’t stop him smiling. “That’s funny. Come on. We’ve got a few minutes before the authorities arrive.”

Coulson leads him around the back of the building. “What are you up to these days?” he asks. “Besides resurrection and breaking into banks.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting it, but it looks like I’ll be trying to rebuild SHIELD into something you’d be proud of,” Coulson says quietly.

“What.”

“Come on,” Coulson says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “You’ll want to see this.”

Steve still has a lot of thoughts about that -- rebuilding SHIELD? After everything they’ve gone through in the last few weeks?

But then he notices that there’s a door back there that’s ripped clean off its hinges. Steve feels like he’s being pulled forward. He doesn’t have a gun, doesn’t have the shield, but that doesn’t matter one damn bit because he needs to see--

But he can't be stupid about this. He glances back at Coulson.

“It’s clear,” Coulson reports.

They go down together, down into the bank, into a vault of disused deposit boxes. It’s a mess of scattered, broken things. Shattered computer screens stare blackly back at him. The floor is peppered with bits of glass, abandoned tools and scalpels and papers. And...

And…

The Chair is in pieces, but Steve recognizes it from pictures in the file. The seat is torn in half, the metal wings twisted into a broken pretzel shape. Cords have been ripped out of it, torn apart. Steve steps closer and sees the imprint of a hand, clear as day in the shattered remains of the heavy metal restraints. They're broken open. He fits his fingers over where Bucky’s had been.

“No casualties,” Coulson reports.

Steve looks up. There’s no blood on the floor, he realizes.

“He didn’t kill anyone, just destroyed the tech. Beyond salvaging, so Hydra just abandoned it. They’re doing a lot of that just now. Rats. Ship. Sinking. Well, more or less.” His expression darkens.

Steve takes his hand off the imprint of Bucky’s. “He’s not Hydra’s anymore.”

“Yeah. I think we all know the feeling.”

Steve looks back at Coulson. The agent -- is he director now? Fury’s chosen replacement? Steve thinks so, somehow. Coulson’s on his phone, frowning slightly. “We can’t stay here, the feds will be on the way by now, and you have a trail to pick up.”

“Coulson.” Phil looks up from his phone. Steve nods to him. “If anyone can bring SHIELD back right, it’s you.”

Phil’s eyes widen, and it’s like Steve can see some of the weight on his shoulders easing. He desperately, pathetically wishes there were someone who could do the same for him. 

Chapter Text

6

Why were you digging?
What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me
From the earth?

- Like Real People Do

by Andrew Hozier-Byrne, 2014.

Steve’s head is a 24/7 wail of he’s out there, he’s alive, I gotta find him, gotta see him, but it turns out that you can’t inflict that on other people. Not if you want to keep them as friends, anyway. And boy does he want to keep Sam as a friend. Sam keeps him sane, keeps him grounded, keeps him from going off the deep end and running through the streets in a desperate, frantic rage.

Desperate, frantic rage won’t get him what he needs right now. People tend to think of Cap as a Panzer made out of Grade A American Beef,  fueled by righteous fury and patriotism and they’re -- not totally wrong. But they ain’t totally right either.

The thing is that Steve spent as much time in intelligence briefings as he had in the field. He’d spent more time mapping out transport routes and interception points than actually intercepting transports. But that stuff doesn’t make it into the newsreels because it was, in a word, boring. Checking shipping invoices, comparing records of what was ordered, what arrived, what was stored, what was used. Steve’s eidetic memory is as good for this work as it is for mapping out a battlefield.

Sam asks if he can help, and Steve asks to use the coffee maker and also for Sam to pick up some things from Home Depot. Sam drops off the requested materials before heading out to the VA. Steve repairs the wall he put his fist through and drinks his weight in coffee while he trolls through the Hydra/SHIELD data dump.

This time, when Sam comes back to the house, he finds that his drywall has been repaired, and Captain America has turned his living room floor into a murderboard. Steve has been caught in the act of moving the couch back to make more space for a series of aerial photographs labeled OPERATION PAPERCLIP BLACK SITES?

“Dude.” Sam says. “Why not use the wall?”

Steve is holding the couch -- as in holding the couch, his fingers tucked under the back, balancing the entire weight of it on his hip. He guiltily sets it down, half on top of his Crazy Person Floor of Madness. “I didn’t want to damage the paint or nothing,” he says.

Sam’s eyebrows shoot up, and his gaze creeps briefly heavenward. “Okay. You get something outta all this?”

Steve hops over the couch and moves the coffee table (hefting it out of the way with one hand) to show a printout about a SHIELD office in California. The office hadn’t been active since the early nineties, but from the late forties on it had been a hub of coordination between the highly adversarial Russian and American branches of Hydra. Predating computers, abandoned before the big push to go digital. A good bet they could find some paper records that didn’t make it into the Hydra/SHIELD data dump.

“How do you feel about California?”

They decide to drive instead of flying -- flexibility and anonymity is going to be more important than speed. And they're carrying a fair amount of materiel. Getting the shield through airport security is a real bitch, and Steve refuses to play the Cap card, or take the Quinjet Tony offered, so roadtrip it is. Steve’s pretty familiar with the interstate highway system by now, but it’s different with Sam in the car.

Sam has music on his phone, and a lot of opinions about what is and is not worth listening to. Sam has a lot of opinions about diners, also, and introduces Steve to Tex Mex while they’re driving through the Southwest on their way to California. Steve overhears a lot of conversations between Sam and Momma Wilson, who sounds like a hell of a lady. They stop at some very strange tourist attractions.

It doesn’t stop the Bucky Klaxon, but it does give Steve a little space to breathe. Sometimes, Sam grudgingly agrees to sleep in the backseat while Steve drives them through the night. Times like that, the klaxon almost overtakes him. The constant, low-level panic is better than coffee when it comes to keeping him awake, and at least when he’s driving, he’s not staring at the ceiling of a shitty motel, counting the spots and replaying every memory of Bucky he can recall.

By the time they reach California, Steve is deep in an email chain with Bernie Rosenthal, who is sharp and doesn’t take any bullshit from anyone, least of all him. Steve will admit to having stars in his eyes about her, just a little. Sharon is firmly ensconced at the CIA. Steve’s happy for her, she seems glad to be back at work. He suspects that, like him, she can’t really stand to be without a mission. He’s always admired that. And Nat is halfway through a very quiet but extremely impactful rampage across Europe.

The old SHIELD office in California is the first big location they’re hitting. Ideally, Nat would be with them for this, but Steve didn’t want to risk tipping off anyone who might be listening in on their communications. And he’s pretty sure that he and Sam can handle this on their own.

Peggy had been here in the forties, and on her good days, she hooks him into rambling hours-long phone conversations about her life here, about the men she worked with and the women she met and the original Jarvis. Steve can almost close his eyes and imagine himself there with her, like he’s a ghost haunting her through the past.

He takes a savage pleasure in cleaning Hydra out of this place, which had (however briefly) been Peggy’s home.

And then they find what’s under the goddamn office.

It was bad enough to find an operating theater. It was worse to find the dusty filing cabinets full of carefully documented “procedures” and “test subjects.”

And now this.

Steve can’t look away from it. He can’t unlock his fists, clenched around the files like they’re a cliff’s edge. His eyes are fixed on a photo of a flayed open back, shiny metal visible where it’s being grafted -- grafted directly to his ribs, wired into his spine. Bucky’s spine. Bucky laid out on his stomach while doctors -- “doctors” --

Someone tugs the file out of his hands.

Steve’s head snaps up. There’s a ringing in his ears, like he just took a lead pipe to the back of his skull. Who the fuck--

Sam. It’s Sam. He's speaking, lips moving, just a flash of that gap in his teeth. Pay attention.

“--on man, you with me?”

Steve stares at him. “Am I…”

“What year is it?”

Steve scowls, hackles instantly up. “2014,” he says, a little grumpily. “I know where I am, Sam, I’m not fuckin--”

“That’s cool man, I’m just checking. You looked a little spaced out there. And then you dropped the F-bomb--”

“This ain’t fuckin -- Sesame Street. I’m allowed to swear,” Steve says.

“Yeah you are, but like… you don’t usually, so forgive me for thinking this might be a lot for you.”

Steve pinches the bridge of his nose, anger still boiling helplessly inside him. “I’m not the one who--”

“Don’t start that with me, man. It ain’t a competition.”

Steve tenses all over, helpless rage building and building and --

Sam puts a hand on Steve’s shoulder, tugs, grips the back of his neck and squeezes.

Steve sags. Sam’s hand is cool against the back of Steve’s neck and Steve feels hot all over and cold in his guts. Sam squeezes. Steve realizes that his chest is heaving and takes a slower, deliberate breath.

“Sorry,” he says.

“All is forgiven, dude,” Sam says. “Let’s get outta here, yeah? Got what we came for, so call in the authorities.”

Steve nods. He holds out one hand for the files, which are now tucked under Sam’s arm.

“Nah,” Sam says. “I’m keeping these, alright? I’ll look after them for ya. I’ll look through them, I want to know if there’s anything medically important, and then I’ll send them along to Nat and Stark, yeah?”

“Sam,” Steve says. “You don't have to do--”

“I’m sorry, do you have a medical degree?”

“Do you?” Steve says, stubborn as a box of rocks.

“Man I’ve got more medical training than than y’all had medicine back in the Stone Age.”

Steve opens his mouth to protest, but Sam won’t let him.

“Steve,” and his face is somber now, no more joking. “I’m serious, okay? I got this. Let me take this hit for you, alright?”

Steve stares at him again. He can’t remember the last time someone offered to take a hit for him.

No, he can.

It’s just that it was 1945; three years and seven decades ago.

He swallows, and drags one huge paw down over his face. He nods. “Alright,” he says. “Yes. Alright. Thanks, Sam.”

If it were Bucky, he'd pull Steve in, hook an arm around his shoulders, knock their heads together a little. But it's Sam, so Steve gets pulled into a hug instead.

“Here’s the deal,” Sam says, without breaking the hug. “We’re gonna get outta here, buy a gallon of ice cream and a bottle of Jack, and tonight is the night I make you watch everything ever made by Studio Ghibli.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Steve says. “And I can’t get drunk.”

“I know you can’t. And that is a crime against God and Nature, but the Jack is for me, man.”

Steve pulls out of the hug with a sigh. He looks down at his feet. In the corner of his eyes, he can see the files still tucked firmly under Sam’s arm. “Alright. Let’s call in the cavalry.”

“Cavalry. And then self-care.”

Steve makes a face. “Every time you call it that, I think of something else,” he mutters, as they head back out the way they came, leaving the horrific lab behind.

Sam holds open the elevator door and cocks his head. “You do?”

Steve sighs resignedly. He’s got his back to Sam, punching the buttons to get them out of this hellhole, but Sam’s going to see in a moment, because when Steve blushes it’s a whole body event, and it starts on the back of his neck.

“Oh hell no,” Sam cries. “Absolutely not, you are not ruining this for me with your white man dick, self-care is important for my mental health--”

Steve starts laughing. “Yeah, mine too, pal.”

“Noooo!” Sam wails, as the elevator doors finally slide closed, blocking out the nightmarish lab.

Sam goes through the files, his face stony. Steve emails an abbreviated mission report to Nat, and Bernie. He CCs Stark too, feeling guilty.  A few hours later, Sam is closing up the file and reaching for the Jack when something bangs against the front door. Steve picks up his shield. Sam puts down the Jack and picks up his Glock.

Steve glances back, making sure that Sam’s ready to provide cover fire if needed, then answers the door, keeping his shield behind it, ready to slam it closed, ready to block the bullets if someone tries to shoot them through--

He stops.

There’s a tiny red and black... metal bird? Carrying a… box?

“Open the door, Capsicle,” says…

“Tony?” Steve says, pulling the motel door open a little wider.

“Home delivery,” says Tony’s voice, from the… metal bird.

“Tony, what the--”

“Is that a drone?” Sam says, peering around Steve.

“Please, this is so much more than a drone,” says Tony, as the… drone or whatever it is, dodges around them both and lands on the bed with its box. “Care package for ya, Cap. Falcon. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got a date to get to. Enjoy. Condolences. Hasta la vista, babies.”

And with that, the drone goes dark and drops onto the bed with a quiet thump.

Steve and Sam look at each other. Sam shrugs. “You know him better than me.”

“I don’t think anyone knows Tony Stark,” Steve mutters. He carefully flips open the clasps on the box and throws back the lid. “Well. I think this one’s for you,” Steve says, pulling out the wingpack inside.

“Oh,” Sam groans, taking the new, Stark-made chestpiece and shoulder armor. “Oh baby.”

“You need a moment there, Airman?” Steve says.

“I need like a year, this is beautiful,” Sam says, turning the wingpack over, pulling out the rest of the equipment in the box. “And hey, he didn’t forget you after all,” Sam adds, pulling out a small package underneath Sam’s new equipment.

Steve takes it. It’s wrapped in brown paper and string, which he’s pretty sure is Tony’s idea of a joke. Still, he unwraps the paper, revealing a metal box about the size of a lunchpail. Steve opens the snaps and lifts the lid.

Inside, nestled in foam casing, is a set of sealed test tubes. Two dozen at least. There’s a folded note resting on top. Steve opens it.

Aunt Peggy said you might need something like this. I don’t recommend having more than one at a time, and that’s me talking. I do recommend a mixer. Sorry about the taste. - T

Wary now, Steve pulls one of the tiny test tubes out and twists off the lid.

“Whoa!” Sam says, jerking his head back as the fumes of what can only be super-alcohol fill the room.

Just the smell of it makes Steve’s eyes water.

“Oh my god, is that what I think it is?” Sam’s covering his nose now.

One way to find out, Steve thinks, and takes a swig straight from the tube.

When he’s done coughing, Sam looks like he’s ready to either bust out laughing or call an ambulance.

“It’s definitely alcohol,” Steve says, voice husky.

“Yeah I could smell that, man. Did Iron Man just poison you?”

Steve looks at the little tube, still half-full of clear liquid. He tries not to think about Bucky’s kill list. “Hopefully in a fun way.” Steve tips the tube, watching the liquid sparkling inside. “He wasn’t wrong about it needing a mixer…”

“Oh my god, am I about to get wasted with Captain America?”

“Captain America doesn’t drink,” Steve says. “But Steve Rogers?” Steve raises the little test tube in a toast. “He’s an Irish Catholic.”

Forty-five minutes later, the buzz is really starting to hit Steve, and Sam’s looking like someone cut all his strings, head lolling back on the sofa. “Can I ask you something, man?” Sam says, slurring only a little.

“Can’t stop ya, can I?” Steve says back.

“Nnnnnope.”

“Hang on.” Steve cracks the top off a bottle of coke, takes a swig, then fumbles the seal off the next shot of super alcohol and pours half of it into the bottle. He swirls it in one hand, mixing the alcohol into the coke. “Okay, go.”

“So…” Sam stops for a moment, then starts again. “So this is a story about me, but this is a question about you,” he says. “Because…. M’your friend. And friends… friends share things. It’s a two-way street. I’m not your therapist.”

“My therapist was Hydra,” Steve says, conversationally.

“Jesus god,” Sam groans.

“Mmm.” Steve takes another swig of his now much-bitier coke. “You were saying?”

“Yeah.” Sam licks his lips. “So. Me’n Riley.”

“Oh,” Steve says. And for all Sam’s talk about healthy coping mechanisms, about how important it is to talk, Sam never talks about Riley.

“He was an idiot, yeah?” Sam says. His big brown eyes are fixed on the ceiling. “This… dumbass white boy, born’n’raised in Virginia. Told the wildest stories, oh my god. Used to say shit, like…” And briefly, Sam’s voice changes, adopts a heavier drawl, “‘Bless your heart’ and stuff, you know?”

“That where you picked it up from?” Steve asks, nudging Sam with his toe. “New York boy like you.”

Sam grins, big white smile, and the gap in his teeth. “Hell yeah, man. You fly a hundred missions with a dude, you’ll pick up some of his mannerisms.”

“That why you came back to Virginia, after?”

Sam takes a breath. “Yeah. Promised him I’d look after his ma. She was sick. She was always real sick. Stayed with her while she was around. And then, when she died...” Sam takes a swig. “I didn’t leave.”

Steve contemplates Sam, the sprawl of his legs and arms, his head tipped back. Then, Sam rolls his head, loose on his neck, to look at Steve. “You gonna ask, man?” Sam says.

“I don’t want to be rude,” Steve says.

“It ain’t rude. You can ask.”

“You and him. Were you… Did you…?”

“Nah,” Sam says. “A lot of people thought that, and we joked about it sometimes, but we weren’t. He really was my wingman. And I was his. We were friends. He was my brother, you know.”

Steve nods seriously. His eyes slide away from Sam, thinking. “Yeah.”

“So,” Sam says, in a leading sort of way.

“You’re wondering about me and Bucky,” Steve says, resigned to it, and maybe lightheaded enough to actually answer that kind of question.

“It’s just a question, man. You don’t have to answer. I’m askin’ about you and Bucky. Cuz, I’m pretty sure people make assumptions. And I don’t wanna be that guy. So I’m asking, and I’m telling you… Whatever you say it was, whatever you say it is, I will believe you. Get it?”

Steve swallows, eyes prickling traitorously. People do make assumptions. And they don’t ask, because they don’t expect him to answer, or they expect him to lie, or they think he’ll tell them something they don’t want to hear.

He takes another swig from the bottle, swallows down the burning mix of over-sweet soda and super-alcohol, and tells the naked truth:

“Everyone loved Bucky,” Steve says. He smiles thinly at the surprise that answer draws out of Sam. “Golden boy doesn’t really cover it, you know? Everyone in the neighborhood, everyone who so much as laid eyes on him… he was…” Steve swallows, thinking of Bucky’s smile, Bucky in that uniform, Bucky dancing, Bucky leaning on the counter, charming the girl behind it… “Nobody even saw me. But he did. And outta all the people he coulda chosen, he wanted to be best friends with me. Me.”

Steve looks up, and sees Sam’s brow all furrowed, trying to work through this, trying to understand. It’s almost funny, and Steve giggles a little. He’s gotta explain, he remembers. People know, but they don’t know.

“You gotta remember that I didn’t look like this back then,” he reports, matter of fact, trying to keep his tone even and cheerful, even as Sam’s confusion slowly… changes. “I had no money, no father, no people. Plenty of folk wouldn’t hire me, wouldn’t rent to me. They thought I was a burden on society.” He swallows, and decides not to go into the fact that he’d been one of those people. “They’d say it to my face too, and call it honesty.” He looks at Sam and finds that Sam’s expression is pretty carefully schooled, despite his drunken state. Steve’s grateful for it. He can’t stand pity. He smiles. “I’d say it was a less enlightened time, but uhhhh.” He waves a hand, nearly spilling coke and superbooze on the couch. “Hydra and all.”

“Steve…” Sam blows out a long breath. “Shit man.”

“C’mon, it wasn’t so bad,” Steve says, flapping a hand. “It was the 30s. Plenty of people had less than me,” Steve says. “I had Bucky, I was lucky to have him. So I took what I could get and I… Didn’t push.”

Sam immediately makes a skeptical face, all scrunched up and comically disbelieving. “You didn’t push?”

Steve groans. “Yeah, okay, I pushed about a lot of things, but not about… that.”

Sam’s brows go up. “That, huh?”

Steve sighs impatiently. “Listen, it wasn’t -- ya got all this… this vocabulary here in the future, ya talk about things, and that’s great, don’t get me wrong. But it ain’t gonna make me any more comfortable with… everything.”

“Vocabulary?” Sam says, and he sounds so gentle. Steve hates it.

“The whole rainbow spectrum. All the different things, names, all the nuance. LGBTQ-whatever.” He’s not comfortable with this. He’s never going to be comfortable with this. He feels like a bug under a microscope. The sensation of being examined -- it’s all too familiar to him. “I’m glad for people who got to grow up with it, but... When I was coming up, it was a little simpler.” He holds up his index finger. One. “Normal.” He raises his second finger. Two. “Not normal.” And then points at himself. Raises his brows. “Geddit?”

“I get it, I get it,” Sam assures him, all repentant now. “I’m sorry man, I didn’t mean to be a dick about it. It’s just…” He sighs. “You know, for a guy as fucking earnest as you are, sometimes it can be a trick and a half to get you to actually talk about shit.”

“Thanks,” Steve says, deadpan.

Sam chuckles, but his smile fades pretty quick. “So. You never told him?”

“Nah,” Steve says, like it doesn’t matter. Like he isn’t choking on it. “It wasn’t important. And then there was the war, and I thought maybe--” His throat is closing up. That’s. That’s definitely a thing that’s happening. He swallows. Not asthma, he knows. This is something worse. He tries to clear his throat. “Maybe after. But uh.”

“Steve,” Sam says, and there’s a hand on his shoulder.

“There was no after. I ran out of time,” Steve says. “I waited too long, and then it was too late, and he was--”

--falling away, screaming and he never stopped reaching for Steve, never stopped--

Steve really does spill coke and superbooze this time, when Sam pulls him in for a fierce hug. His chin bumps Sam’s shoulder, and Sam just hangs on to him, fist in his shirt, bottle of whiskey bumping against Steve’s back. “It’s okay, man,” Sam says. “It’s not too late. You got time now. He just needs to figure himself out. But you two… It’s not the thirties anymore. No matter what happens, Steve, you ain’t alone in this.”

Steve doesn’t know how to tell Sam that he’s not really right about that. He’s got even less now than he did in 1936. It’s too huge to talk about. Too huge to feel. He lost everything. And just when he was starting to find his footing…

“Don’t do this, man, c’mon,” Sam says, like he can feel Steve spiraling. “Don’t be the sad drunk, that’s my job.”

Steve huffs. He rests his forehead on Sam’s shoulder.

“That’s it,” Sam says, mindless, rubbing Steve’s back. “You okay?”

“No,” Steve says plaintively.

Sam winces, squeezes Steve a little tighter.

“But…” Steve sighs. “I got time,” he says, repeating it like a mantra.

“Yeah, man. And you ain’t alone.”

“And I’m not alone,” Steve mumbles. “Jesus.” Embarrassment washes over him, the old shame of letting people see him as weak. He didn’t learn that from being Captain America, he learned it long before. The training runs deep. “I’m sorry Sam, I didn’t mean to put this on you--”

Sam makes a sound like a wrong buzzer, EEERRRHHH, and Steve jumps, then laughs. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay, I get it.”

“Seriously, man. People were there for me when I lost Riley. I’m just paying it forward, you know?”

Steve pulls back from the hug at last and looks Sam in the face. Then, he nods, and looks down at his big hands resting in his lap.

“I know it ain’t exactly the same,” Sam says, sounding a little self conscious. “What me and Riley had -- it ain’t what you and Bucky had, is it. Y’all got that…” he waves a hand in the air, a little uncoordinated. “Tragic love story. That is some Notebook level white folk nonsense.”

Steve looks up sharply, because he of all people knows when someone is using humor to deflect. “Just because you didn’t want to sleep with him doesn’t mean it didn’t matter, Sam,” Steve says, because it’s true and Sam needs to know that. “Losing your best friend like that… It’s the worst thing that can happen.”

Something complicated crosses Sam’s face. Surprise, and then relief, but all of it too vulnerable to look at. Steve looks away. Sam rubs his forehead and gives a self-deprecating laugh. “You and me have had too much to drink. As the medic in this unit, I am officially prescribing painkillers, lots of water, and sleep.”

“Thought you were gonna make me watch…” Steve scrunches his nose. “Jibble Studios?”

Sam gasps. “Fuck! Studio Ghibli! Yeah, c’mon, let’s…”

Twenty minutes later, Steve’s nose is about twelve inches from the TV screen. He’s staring in unabashed wonder as Sophie Hatter transforms from a teenager to an old woman. Sam is snoring before the end, so he doesn’t see the tears standing out in Steve’s eyes as Howl turns back into himself, as Sophie finds herself de-aged, but not unchanged.

Not that he’s over-identifying with children’s cartoon characters. It’s just because the animation is so beautiful.

When the movie is over, Steve makes sure that Sam gets tucked into bed on his side. Sam doesn’t even wake up, just kinda mumbles into his pillow and then starts snoring again. Steve falls into his bed and thinks about how fucking glad he is to have Sam on his side.

Steve wakes up with his first hangover this century and a tiny assassin perched at the foot of his bed. As in, somehow literally balanced on the footboard like some kind of ginger-headed bird of ill omen.

“Holy shit--” Steve says, then clutches at his skull when the words echo painfully around his tender brain.

“Good Morning Steven,” Natasha says. She's not even trying to keep her voice down. “I think you and I should have a talk.”

Steve drags a hand over his face. “Jesus Christ. Can it wait until I’ve had coffee?”

“Yes.”

And then she produces a cup of coffee, without losing her balance, like she’s a fucking conjurer.

The effects of coffee on Steve are entirely psychosomatic, but after years and years of throwing the shield and somehow catching the shield, he’s learned not to think too hard about things that work. After a few sips he can open his eyes fully, look around the room, and observe: “So did you scare Sam away or…”

“Seemed like he needed to go off and lick some emotional wounds. Said he was going for a run, and to let you sleep because you needed it.” She cocks her head.

“So… you thought that now was a good time to have a talk?”

“If the jar’s already loosened, might as well take advantage.”

“More like kick a man when he’s down,” Steve mutters to his coffee.

“That too.” She blinks, and he’s reminded eerily of a cat, watching him, face unreadable. “I didn’t expect you two to start finding bases so quickly,” she says. “You and Wilson are better at this spy shit than I thought you would be.”

“I am the world’s leading expert on hunting Hydra, and SHIELD was built from the ground up by two of my closest friends so I’ve got a kind of...” Steve trails off, and frowns slightly. His muzzy brain is ticking slowly into gear. “Wait.”

“So I thought I had more time,” she says, in that same emotionless robot voice. “To sort through some things in Europe before you’d need whatever I could give you.”

“Natasha, you don’t have to apologize,” he says.

“I’m not apologizing, I’m just explaining.”

“You don’t have to explain either, you don’t owe me that.”

“I do,” she says, matter-of-fact. “And anyway, sending you into this with only half the intel… that’s just bad tactics.”

He finds himself smiling at that, despite the steady ache in his head. It’s receding now. “You could’ve just sent me a report,” he says, because he has a feeling she would’ve much rather done that. “You didn’t have to come in person.”

She looks a bit sour. “If there aren’t written records, I’m not going to go and make some. I’m not an idiot.”

“Like me?”

“Like you,” Natasha agrees. “You caffeinated enough to deal with this now?” She asks, with a dry little twist like she knows the caffeine doesn’t actually do anything for him.

“Yeah, go,” Steve says, sitting up a little straighter. His head is still aching a bit, but he knows what this is about. He knows what’s coming. “You said you met him when you were a kid?”

“Five or so, if the birthdate Zola gave was right,” she says, matter-of-factly.

Christ. She didn’t even know for sure.

“I’d been with the Red Room for a couple of years by then, after they found I was compatible with the program and took me away from my parents. There were twenty eight of us at first, but only five survived the treatments.”

“Treatments?” Steve feels sick.

She purses her lips. “Well. Can’t be sure, but I think it was a serum-derivative. Something from samples obtained from the Soldier.”

“A serum--”

She talks over him. “I can’t be sure, and it’s not in any of the files. I’d rather keep that under my hat if you don’t mind, so--”

“Oh my god, Nat--” he starts.

“Steve, do you want a sitrep or not?” she says, sharply.

Steve closes his mouth.

She holds for just a moment, until she’s sure he won’t interrupt her again. She’s not wearing shoes, her bare toes curled against the padded footboard. They’re bent, and a little crooked in places. Dancer’s toes.

“They sent the five of us to Siberia to train with him. He was always under guard. They had trigger words, to control him, but those were already starting to lose effectiveness by the time I knew him. They’d just acquired the Chair. They were testing it. He would forget us, get our names mixed up, or lose track of where he was. But he never forgot how to fight, how to kill.”

Steve has to physically bite back the urge to say something about that.

Nat gives him a look, like she can tell. “Once we were cleared for missions, they made us all field command. We got the… user manual, if you will.” Steve lets out a harsh breath, feeling gut punched, but Nat doesn’t hesitate. “There was a hard reset. An off-switch, of sorts. Say Sputnik, and he’d drop. But if he’s half the operative he was, he’ll have deactivated that by now. There were other trigger words, but it doesn’t look like the Americans had them. Possibly they’d become useless by the time the sale went through.”

The sale. The sale. Jesus.

“He was always a little erratic -- prone to odd malfunctions, and he needed to be wiped every three days or so, to keep him compliant. But he could speak over 30 languages, blend into virtually any crowd. Drop him out of a plane in the middle of Kazakhstan and he could find his way back to base in under seventy two hours. Drop him into the middle of an embassy and he could kill everyone inside in less than an hour without triggering a single alarm. When he was working, he was a one-man army.”

“He always was,” Steve says, quietly.

She doesn’t hit him for interrupting her, so he guesses she must be done. He’s sure of it when she hops off the footboard and splays her legs out, leaning back and relaxing (as much as she ever relaxes.)

“We called him Mishka,” she says softly. “He taught me how to throw a punch.”

“Me too,” Steve says.

“I’ve known him for twenty-five years, but I never knew him, you know?”

Steve swallows. “Well. I’ve known him for 84.” She shoots him a glare, and he just smiles and adds: “Or 18, depending how you count it. You might know him better than I do, these days.”

“You going to ask if I fucked him?” She says, and he spills hot coffee over his hands. He should’ve known better than to think this was going to be an easy conversation, to let himself get eased into a false sense of security like that. When has Natasha ever let him off easy?

“Jesus, Natasha, no.”

She gives him a flat look. “Because you’re not wondering?”

“Because it’s none of my business, and because it doesn’t matter.”

“I hear it’s something humans like you are interested in.”

Steve looks at her, and he wants to ask what she means by that. But it had been uncomfortable enough when she asked if he was ace, he doesn’t want to do that to her right back. “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling.”

She blinks at him, face momentarily confused.

“You’re human too, Natasha.”

Her expression closes off. “I killed my first man when I was nine.”

“They made you do it. It wasn’t your fault.”

“If you believe that, you’re even more naive than I thought.”

“I don’t believe it,” Steve says. “I know. ”

He can’t read her expression now -- it’s hard at the best of times, but this feels like -- it feels like she’s holding herself back. She’s so still, and so blank. He’s seen her intensity; at Sam’s when they were lying low, and after, in Fury’s bunker at the dam. He’s seen how ferocious she is, underneath. How full of feeling. But she doesn’t say anything now.

“Natasha -- you’re not responsible for what the Red Room made you do. And Bucky isn’t responsible for what Hydra made him do.”

“Because we were just following orders?” Natasha says. “I would’ve thought that excuse didn’t really fly with you.”

“You didn’t choose to trust them,” Steve says. “You didn’t choose to follow them. It’s different.”

She looks unconvinced. “I chose to follow them every day for years. It’s my ledger, Rogers. I decide what goes in it.”

“Natasha--”

“Him, though,” she says, turning the conversation harshly away from herself.

Steve swallows, and knows immediately who she’s talking about.

“He didn’t get any choices. But you know that.” She narrows her eyes, watching him closely. “You read his kill list.”

Steve swallows. “Yeah, I… I burned it.”

Her eyes widen slightly. “That’s… not like you.”

Steve rakes his fingers through his hair. “Guess you don’t know me so well as you think.”

“You know who he killed,” she says, voice carefully neutral.

“Yeah,” Steve says.

“You didn’t tell Tony?”

Steve feels like he’s in confession again, but he knows there’s no penance big enough for this betrayal, because there’s no contrition. Given the choice again, he’d make exactly the same decision. “No.”

“He’ll be furious if he finds out.”

“He can’t find out. It would kill him, and… He wouldn’t understand. All he’d see is the guy who killed his parents when Bucky didn't --” Steve drags a hand over his face. “Christ, there was a fucking Howlie on that list. They made him kill Jacques. You know what it said in the file?”

“Test results: Partial success,” she says. Because of course she read it. Of course she remembers.

“Yeah. Tells me everything I need to know about -- about how much control he had.” Steve can picture it: another car crash, before the one that orphaned Tony. Dernier, who’d always been so cheerful, teaching Bucky dirty French words to expand his repertoire. Was it quick? Did he know who was killing him?

“Dernier, Howard… they were your friends too. You have every right to be mad about it.” She’s staring at him intently, like this is also a test. I assume everything is a test, she told him once. It's how I was raised.

“I’m not mad,” Steve says, aghast, and then stumbles, because, well. That’s a fucking lie. “I’m furious, but I’m not mad at Bucky.”

“You’d better not be,” she says, suddenly belligerent about it. “The whole time I knew him, he never had more than a few days of consecutive memories to his name. He was a blank slate. For all intents and purposes? He was a child.”

“So were you,” he says. He feels like he’s out of his depth here. It feels like Natasha is trying to have three conversations with him, and none of them are the conversation they’re having right now. “Natasha. I’m not mad at you either.”

He suspects that someone who didn’t know her would miss it, and that anyone who didn’t have enhanced sight would barely be able to detect the way her bottom lip trembles at that. “Shut up, Rogers,” she says, gruff.

“Natasha,” he starts.

“Will you just--”

“I was mad at first, but I’m not now,” Steve barrels on. “I was surprised, I was hurt, but I shouldn’t have shouted at you, back on Insight Day. I know you keep secrets, it’s okay. I trust you to tell me what I need to know when I--”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Natasha tries talking over him.

He doesn’t let her. “--when I need to  know it. You’re one of my best friends, I know you were--”

“This isn’t about me--”

“--just trying to protect me, I don’t blame--”

“It isn’t about you either, you idiot,” Natasha snaps.

“--Either of you,” Steve finishes.

They glare at each other, each as stubborn as the other.

“If you hurt him, I will kill you,” Natasha says. “And I don’t want to do that. So don’t hurt him.”

“I would never--”

“You would never mean to,” she corrects. “But you’re an awful lot to handle, Steve Rogers,” she says. “Intense doesn’t really cover it.”

“If you’re going to tell me to lay off and stop looking for him--”

“I’m not an idiot, I know I might as well tell the sun to stop rising,” Natasha says. “I’m just saying… tread carefully.”

“I’m not… great at that,” Steve admits.

“No,” Natasha drawls. “I never would have guessed.”

“I never had to with Bucky,” Steve says. “He never wanted the kid glove treatment, never gave it to me neither, even when he probably woulda been right to, ya know?”

Natasha looks at him strangely. “Less kid gloves, more… you ever walked through a minefield, Rogers?”

Steve thinks back to D-Day, when his team’s beach had been littered with anti-tank mines and Czech Hedgehogs because the engineers had ended up on the wrong beach. Unable to go forward, unable to go back, Steve’s creative solution had been to throw the huge, metal ‘hedgehogs’ at the anti-tank mines until the beach was clear of both.

“Kind of?” Steve says.

Natasha narrows her eyes in suspicion. “Well. More like that. So. Tread carefully,” she says again, with emphasis.

Steve winces, remembering his thought process in Normandy: just blow the fuckers, he'd figured. Blast our way through.

He has a feeling that's not the approach Natasha has in mind.

She's staring at him, not guarded anymore, no careful neutrality or frank assessment or veiled suspicion. There's that fire in her eyes. She owes Steve a debt, she'd said. She owes Bucky more, he knows. That makes two of them, he supposes.

“The last thing I want to do is hurt him,” he says.

“It's not just him I'm worried about. I mean: you hurt him, you don't wake up the next morning,” she reiterates, like she's stating water is wet, the sky is blue, “but this stuff? It can swallow you whole. If he's going down, I don't want to lose you too.”

Going down. Steve thinks of ravines, of planes, of helicarriers over the Potomac, of the silence around him, and how much he sometimes longs for--

“What do you mean by that?” he asks, maybe a little too quickly. He and Sam still haven't had that conversation, and Steve was really hoping to avoid the topic indefinitely.

“I mean maybe it starts with you keeping secrets from Tony, but where's it going to end?” Nat says. She isn't gentle about it, isn't soft, just blunt. “I’m not saying you need to tell Stark, I don’t think you should, but.  Don't lose yourself trying to bring him back.”

Steve stares at her. “I think. I'm going to need your help. With all of that.”

Natasha smirks. “Oh, I know you're going to need my help with all of that.” She steals the coffee from his hands and slugs down the rest of it. “Oh, and for the record, I didn’t.”

It’s such a non-sequitur, Steve can’t even follow.  He just stares at her, watching as she drinks the cold, bitter dregs of his coffee with every sign of enjoyment. “Didn’t what?”

“Sleep with him.” She cocks her head and stares, eerily still. Not hiding anything anymore, just herself again; that fire in her eyes uncovered and unrestrained. “It seemed like he was waiting for someone else.”

Chapter Text

7

Time doesn't love you anymore
But I'm still knocking at your door
Honey, we can run forever, if forever's what's in store
Oh, time to take me home

- Time By Mikky Ekko, 2015.

Three weeks into their manhunt, in the middle of the night, Steve sits bolt upright in a bed in Mexico and oh.

He remembers what they were laughing about.

It was in ‘44, coming back from liberating a little town in France. They finally make it back to base and there’s a camera crew lying in wait for them, more sinister than any Hydra goon squad.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Bucky mutters, and turns himself to one side, like he doesn’t want to be seen.

“C’mon Buck, doncha wanna be on camera? Give ‘em that Hollywood smile,” Steve says. He’s starving in a way that still feels weird to him. The hollowness inside is familiar, but it’s amped up; that super serum coming with a super metabolism and a super appetite. The mission had taken longer than expected, and they’d run low on rations, so Steve’s memory is a little unclear, a little dizzy with fatigue and hunger.

“I’d rather not, pal. Not at my fuckin’ best here, am I,” Bucky mutters. He reeks. They all reek. But it doesn’t help that Bucky’s wearing two layers even without his blue jacket. It’s summer still, but there's a breeze, and Bucky seems to get cold more easily these days. He’s nearly as hungry as Steve, these days, but it’s harder for him to get the extra rations. Steve always tries to share.

“Well. Camera can’t smell you. And they'll do your face. Ain't so bad.”

Bucky stares at him. “They'll what?”

“Do your face. Makeup and stuff. You’ll look prettier than a dame once they’re done. These Hollywood types, they know what they’re doing. And trust me, they cannot be stopped.”

He’s right, there’s a guy already pointing to them, shouting instructions to “stand by that wall, please, Captain. You too, Sergeant.” Obediently, they stand and wait for the team to get set up. Steve’s never comfortable with this, but he’s used to it. Bucky just looks uncomfortable, like he wants to crawl under a rock somewhere, or maybe hide behind Steve, for once.

“I'm just wondering how the fuck you would know,” Bucky mutters.

Steve smiles his shit-eating-est grin. “Ain't ya heard? I'm Captain America. There’s movies and everything.” He notices the camera crew angling for a shot and smiles automatically, the big, heroic Captain Charmer Smile.

It’s easier to joke about with Bucky there. While he was in LA, actually there on set and all, he'd hated it; the humiliation of it, the frustration. He'd been stuck making pictures while Bucky was on the line. It was easier to see the humor once he was on the line too.

Bucky is staring at him, ignoring the camera. And Steve realizes that he never told Bucky about LA, about being in the pictures before. “You were in pictures? You, the kid who got cast as a sheep in the Nativity play because he couldn't learn his lines?”

Steve tries not to crack up, tries not to let the Captain America smile slip. “Excuse you, my sheep performance was astonishing.”

“Yeah, astonishingly bad.” Bucky turns away from Steve and looks at the camera. Sneaking a sidelong glance, Steve can see him doing his Sergeant Barnes face. What the fuck are you looking at? says the face. There ain't so many pictures of Sergeant Barnes in the paper, for precisely this reason. He always looks like he’s telling everyone to keep walking, because they didn’t see nothing.

“I can learn my lines,” Steve says. His smile slips into something a little more like himself, a little more like Brooklyn in summer, like playground games, and roommate pranks. “‘Every bond you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guy’s gun!’” he recites.

Bucky tries to keep a straight face, but he’s never had much luck doing that when Steve goes all Chorus Girl on him. “You jerk,” he says, and makes the mistake of glancing at Steve. And then he’s laughing harder, crow’s feet deepening as the giggles shake his shoulders. “What the fuck,” he says, ducking his head in a futile attempt to hide the smile.

And for a minute, they’re just two kids in church, laughing when they ain’t supposed to be, and unable to stop.

In a motel bed in Mexico City, Steve pulls his knees up and puts his head down and just… breathes. He wants to cradle the memory in his hands, wants to hold it to his chest like a baby bird. This thing that he’s just gotten back, fragile and precious and…

But he’s remembered this for a reason, his mind giving him something he needs to know. In the war, Bucky had looked at the world like he wanted the world to look the other way. He had never looked at Steve like that. Steve was the only one who was really allowed to see Bucky, but now…

Steve’s looked everywhere he can think of, a few places he’d never thought he’d have to look, and Bucky isn’t there. There’s no evidence that Hydra has recovered their Asset, and there haven’t been any sightings of the Winter Soldier anywhere.

Steve wonders if this is what it feels like, when Bucky Barnes doesn’t want you to see him.

He’s still in Mexico City with Sam and Natasha when Bernie emails him and says him he really needs to come back to New York. They can’t afford to wait any longer to reveal the Winter Soldier’s identity. He wishes, so badly, that he could say that they’re making progress, that he can’t come to New York because they’ve almost caught up with Bucky, that they’re so close…

But they’re not close. They haven’t got a single fucking lead on the Winter Soldier. Which means that Steve has to stop stalling, has to stop all this. He needs to go back, needs to get the ball rolling on a press conference, needs to figure out what they can release, and what is too sensitive to release at this time.

So Sam gets to visit his momma in Harlem while Steve is in interminable meetings in Avengers Tower.

We could talk to the CIA without making all this public, they say. We don’t have to get the press involved.

Except they do, because Sharon was right, they can’t sit on this. If they push Bucky back into the shadows, it’ll just be that much easier for Hydra to disappear him all over again.

We can have someone else do the announcement , they say.

Except, it has to be him. No one else has sufficient public goodwill to burn. Steve would burn all his public goodwill to do right by Bucky.

We need to set a date, they say, and then they’re all looking to him, and he…

“I need more time,” he says. “I need… Sorry, I just… We’ll pick this up tomorrow.”

And for the first time in a long ass while, Steven Grant Rogers runs away from a fight.

“Uncle Steve!” she says, picking up after two rings.

“Hi Judith,” he says, a smile creeping onto his face. She’s always so happy to hear from him, and she calls him uncle but she talks to him like he’s one of her children.

“My creepy twitter gossip feeds tell me you’re in the city. Don’t suppose you’re going to make it out to my neck of the woods?”

“I was just going to ask if I could come over and talk to you. If you’re busy, I can--”

“Not at all! Come on over.”

“Thanks,” he says, relieved.

There’s an uncertainty in her voice. “Is this about…”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah, it is.”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, I’ll see you soon.”

The Not-Barneses had taken the news about their long lost uncle surprisingly well, if you didn’t know them. Steve did know them, so he wasn’t surprised at all. He’d spent the last two Thanksgivings with them, so he was maybe the only one who wasn’t surprised when the first question they asked was “is he okay?” not “is he going to kill us?” As a family, they’d refused the offered security detail, because they didn’t want Bucky to feel like he couldn’t approach them, if he wanted to. Steve had insisted on increased security at the grandkids’ schools, but he respected the Not-Barneses wishes. He loved them for it, in fact.

So Judith already knows what this is all about. When he arrives at her brownstone, she starts making tea, and he flutters around her, like an oversized and particularly useless moth. He tries to remember where she keeps the mugs, the sugar, but she’s “Just making tea, Steven, I’m not quite senile and decrepit yet.”

She fusses him into a chair, and he holds the tea she made for him between his knees, watching the darker color leaching into the water from the tea bag. The light from the window is spilling across his shoulders.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” Judith prompts.

“There’s going to be an announcement, soon. A press conference. About Bucky.”

Judith nods. Everyone who knows the truth, knows that this was coming. It makes sense.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Steve says, because that much is absolutely true. “He could be dangerous, and people should know. And, if everyone knows who he is, and what happened, then it’ll be that much easier for us to find him, and keep him safe from Hydra. I know it’s the right thing. I know.”

“So why don’t you do it?” Judith asks gently.

Steve swallows. “I can’t ask his permission. I know that this will help us find him, bring him in safely. They tell me that this is the best way to protect him, but…” He looks up at her, willing her to understand. He can’t lose Bucky again, and everyone keeps telling him not to push, but at the same time they’re all pushing him to do this, when he knows it’s the last thing Bucky wants. “How am I supposed to tell everyone that Bucky’s alive, let the whole world see what happened to him, when he can’t even bear to look at me? I don’t know what he wants, and I can’t ask. I don’t want to do anything that might push him away further. I don’t want to hurt him, when he’s already been hurt so--”

Steve cuts himself off. He sucks in a sharp breath. “And what if I mess it up? What if he doesn’t want this, and he can’t forgive me for it? Doesn’t he deserve privacy? Maybe he deserves to live a quiet life somewhere, far away from… this.” From me, he thinks. “I mean… People are going to go nuts. The press is going to be all over this, and the thought of anyone judging him for--”

“Steve, son,” she says, as blunt and kind as the Barneses always were. “As the kids say today? Fuck that noise. You do whatever you gotta do to bring him home safe. Figure out the rest later.”

And then she holds up a plate full of cookies. He takes one. “What’re you asking me for anyway?” she says, kindly enough.

“I can’t ask him,” Steve says. “You’re… you’re the closest thing he has to family.”

Judith Buchanan smiles, very sadly. “Steve. You’re the closest thing he has to family. So bring him home.”

And well, when she says it like that, it’s all so simple.

Lights like Tesseract guns, the snap and pop like distant mortar fire, like machine guns three streets over, like the helicarrier going down, down --

“Captain Rogers! How do you feel, knowing that Bucky Barnes is still out there, that Hydra captured him?”

Steve’s eyes snap open, and for a moment, he loses his grasp on the present. He forgets that these guys are reporters, not the fucking enemy. It’s over almost as soon as it begins, leaves him hot and cold with rage. He thins his lips and fixes the reporter with a frosty stare, the kind of look that usually sends people into shame-spirals.

“How the hell do you think I feel?” He says, stiffly.

The reporter doesn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed. He opens his mouth to say something else, and it’s going to be awful, Steve knows, feels himself wanting to flinch away from it already and--

“That’s all we have time for right now,” Pepper says, coming in from the side, her tone crisp and authoritative. “Thank you for your time.”

Her hand tucks through his arm, like he’s the one supporting her, but she’s towing him like a damn tugboat. As soon as they get backstage, she gives up the pretense and steers him by his shoulders, pushing him down in a chair. She holds out a hand to one side, snaps her fingers. A water bottle appears in it, offered by one of the countless Stark Industries interns.

She offers it to Steve.

Steve stares at it for a moment, then takes it, slow and careful, because he knows from experience that if he isn’t exquisitely cautious, the thing will fucking explode and drench him when his fist clamps down on it.

The water is heavenly; perfectly cool and refreshing in his parched throat.

“Tell me where you are,” she says, businesslike.

“Avengers Tower Press Room. It’s 2014.” he says, not even bothering to protest. He looks up, sees the sympathy on her face, and looks away quickly. “How did you know?” he asks, because he’s gotten very good at fronting, and he needs to know what gave him away. It’s important. Captain America doesn’t have shellshock, or battle fatigue, or PTSD, or whatever they decide to call it next.

“I know what it looks like on Tony,” she says simply. Her hand flutters a little, then settles on his shoulder. She squeezes, and he closes his eyes. Her hands are warm -- unnaturally so, even now. “I know what it feels like. On me,” she adds, carefully.

He looks up again. Pepper is always in control of herself, but even more so now, he knows. She has to be, she has no choice anymore. He knows how exhausting that is, and feels his own shoulders slump.

Guilt washes over him. They still haven’t released the full kill list. They can’t, because Steve destroyed it. But Steve knows whose names are on it.

Steve knows, and here he is, accepting support from the people he’s wronged most in the world. Well -- aside from Bucky.

Steve bows his head.

The tips start coming in almost at once. The Winter Soldier is in Australia, in Japan, in Germany. In a village in Austria, not far from where he fell. Everyone and their brother has seen a dead WWII hero going to the library or whatever.

Steve tries not to think about it, because thinking about it isn’t his job right now. The CIA is fielding all calls, and he has to do what they tell him to do, or he will lose their goodwill and he--

Hates this.

He fucking hates this, and keeps slinking around the Tower all sneaky-like, trying to find someone willing to hack into the CIA tip line for him. Nat threatens to drug his coffee and put him back on ice until he’s needed, so Sam orders him to meet at Central Park to go jogging, and Steve agrees to it.

Sam stretches while Steve runs a couple of really alarmingly fast laps around the reservoir. Then, out of politeness, he slows down to run at sane human speeds with Sam, even though it makes Sam sigh in exasperation, like, a lot.

They’re passing through the shade of the willows by the Harlem Meer when Steve’s phone buzzes and starts to ring. Sharon has the dubious honor of liaising between the Avengers and the CIA, so Steve had asked Nat to help him give her a special ringtone, so he knows when she calls, because when she calls, that means that they have a lead on Bucky.

He should have known better than to let Nat set the ringtone. I’ll follow you until you love me! His phone belts out. He scrambles to dig it out of his back pocket, and drops it. Sam is already cackling. Promise I’ll be kind but I won’t stop until that boy is mine! It takes a few more lines of electronic-sounding pop music before he manages to get the phone open and against his ear. Chase you down until you love--

“Rogers,” he answers, and flaps a hand to get Sam to shut up shut up shut up.

“Hey Steve.” It’s Sharon of course. “We got a lead on Barnes. You still in New York?”

Steve goes still, so still he thinks he maybe stops breathing. He thinks maybe his heart stops beating. “Yeah,” he says.

“Alright, I’m going to send you a location. Can you get in and check it out?”

“Yes,” Steve answers immediately. “Who am I coordinating with?”

“They’re letting the Avengers take first stab at bringing him in, so whoever you think you need. You’re calling the shots, Captain.”

“Can we get a quinjet?” Steve asks, because all old SHIELD property is still in flux, a bit. No one quite knows where it’s supposed to go.

“You… you won’t need one,” Sharon says. “Steve… he’s in the city.”

Steve feels sick. He must go pale, because Sam is watching him like a hawk and suddenly folds his arms, brows furrowing.

“Where?” Steve says, all business, even though his stomach is twisting like a basket of snakes.

When the address arrives, it takes every ounce of Steve’s self control to not just run, flat out, the five miles to Fulton Street.

Maria and Nat infiltrate the Starbucks below the vacant office block while Sam circles overhead with Steve in his stealth uniform, clipped to Sam’s front in what Tony has dubbed “The Cap-poose.”

“We’re in position,” Nat reports. “No sign of Barnes. Maria is covering the exits, I can evac civilians if we need.”

“I’m going in,” Steve says, and Sam drops into a controlled dive. When they’re low enough, Steve unclips himself and lands at a run, gravel crunching under his boots. He goes over the edge of the roof and lands lightly on the fire escape. He hops from level to level, ignoring the steps completely.

He stops outside the third floor, the unoccupied office block. He presses his back to the wall and listens. No sound within. Doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he’s hiding, maybe he’s--

Steve carefully slips the window open and steps through, shield first.

There’s a sleeping bag laid out by the window. There’s a small box, like a foot locker, standing open. He can see rumpled clothes, an old laptop. A phone. Things that could be tracked or traced.

“He’s not here,” Steve says, knowing it in his bones. He looks up and sees a hole in the wall, the size of a fist. He runs his fingers lightly along the ragged, broken drywall. He imagines: a metal fist. “But he was.”

He looks around the room for some kind of inspiration, but all he can think is that Bucky was here. Practically under Steve’s nose. Practically on top of the apartment they’d shared for seven years, a lifetime ago.

Steve wants to put his fist through the wall. “Looks like we’re a bust, but let me clear the floor,” he says.

He pushes down the formless rage burbling up in his chest. He has work to do. He’s needed.

Just -- not by Bucky, apparently.

They interview the people who had contact with him, and Steve helps, because his presence tends to make Ordinary Civilians very cooperative. Which is how he finds himself sitting down with a young woman called Alex, who has narrow hips, a deep, smoky voice, and a set of piercings that make Lillian from Accounting look conservative and restrained.

“Alexandra, isn’t it?” Steve asks, in his gentlest Captain America voice. He uses the name she gave them. Not the one on her driver's license. He offers her a cup of coffee.

“Alex is fine,” she says, taking the coffee. Her gaze is sharp, intelligent. She is not awed by him, and he can tell that this won’t be as easy as some of the other interviews he’s done. “So I guess he really was James Barnes, huh.”

Steve hesitates only for a moment, then sits back. “I hope so,” he says, because honesty is a strength, not a weakness, and he knows how to use it to advantage.

“And you want me to snitch on him,” she says.

“I want to help him,” Steve says. “You used to sit with him sometimes, in the coffee shop. We saw on the surveillance footage.”

“Yeah,” she says, and there’s a set to her jaw that reminds Steve of himself , six years ago, before the serum. Stubborn and untrusting and defiant. “He didn’t talk much. That’s why we sat together. I was studying. He said he was doing research.”

Steve realizes he’s chewing his bottom lip and stops. He looks down at the set of questions Nat gave him. He ignores them. “Did he seem… is he okay?” He can’t possibly help how raw he sounds when he asks. He sets his own jaw.

Alex looks him over, sizing him up in a way people don’t, usually. Like she’s deciding whether to trust him. “He was sleeping rough, but good at hiding it. I only know for sure because I noticed he was carrying his toothbrush with him everywhere.” She shrugs. “I know how it works.”

Steve swallows. “But he seemed…” Steve thinks of the files, the fucking Chair, the Tank. “Stable?”

Alex takes another sip of coffee. “He seemed tired, but okay. He was never chatty or anything. But every once in awhile I’d get a look at what he was doing on his laptop -- when I was getting a coffee, or when he asked me to keep an eye on his stuff while he went to the bathroom. Half the time it was trauma recovery support, half the time it was like…” She sighs, makes a wry face. “WWII history. He told me he was writing a book, the one time I asked. Real smooth about it too, I didn’t suspect a thing. He was, uh. Well. Looking at his own Wikipedia page, actually. I didn’t even recognize him. He had that whole… hobo chic thing going on. S’a good look on him.” She scratches the back of her neck. “Seemed like he had some shit going on, but maybe he was coping okay.”

Steve lets out a long, slow breath. “Okay.” He picks up the questions Nat gave him. “Okay, I have a few more questions, if you don’t mind…”

For a long time, while the interviews are wrapping up, Steve just sits on a bench in the hall and stares a hole through the wall across from him. The conclusion they're coming to is that the Winter Soldier has just been quietly living his life, minding his business. Stable. Homeless, maybe, but getting by. Not obviously in trouble, not apparently under Hydra control.

He's fine. He's just fine.

Steve... isn't.

His hands are clasped between his knees, fingers intertwined. He digs his thumb into the opposite palm, rubbing absently. It’s an old habit, old enough that he can’t be sure if he picked it up from Bucky or vice versa. They both used to do it. A nervous tic. Stress reaction.

He’s not mad at Bucky. He’s not.

Not about the murdering, that wasn’t his fault. There’s no question in Steve’s head about that, not at all. Bucky is innocent of wrongdoing, the whole seventy years, all of it. Bernie Rosenthal agrees with him, and so do twenty-four expert witnesses.

So Steve isn’t mad.

About that.

The thing is that he could never have imagined a Bucky who simply… didn’t want him around. It might have taken years on Bucky’s part to convince Steve that they really were friends, but since, probably 1937 or so, Steve had learned to just take it for granted. Bucky and Steve. Two parts of one unit. In each other's pockets. The captain and his sergeant.

But Bucky had been here. In New York. Just blocks away. He could’ve reached out to Steve in any number of ways, it would’ve been so easy, and he hadn’t. Christ.

Steve feels like he’s losing his mind. Everything inside him is going into a tailspin, turning over and over so fast it makes him feel nauseous.

He just wants to know what he did wrong. He's done so many things wrong, but whatever it is that’s keeping Bucky away, he'll apologize. He'll do whatever Bucky needs him to do to make it right. He'll beg, if that's what it takes. He's got no pride left. He just can't be alone in this anymore. He doesn't know how much more he can take.

It’s a nightmare. It’s his worst nightmare. Worse than the old childhood nightmare about his mother pulling her face off. Worse than the unembellished memory of being trapped under the ice. Worse even than his old wartime nightmare of Bucky looking through him, not recognizing him.

Seems like all his worst nightmares have a nasty habit of coming true.

Luckily, Steve knows exactly what to do about nightmares. As soon as the interviews are done, he changes into his running gear and heads for the jogging trails in Central Park.

For a long, long time, there’s just the thud of his feet against the pavement. The impacts reverberate through his body, in his bones. The buzz of his grief is dulled by the rush he gets from this -- the physical rush from his serum-enhanced endorphins, and the psychological rush of being able to do this, when for so many years he could barely make it up the three flights to his and Bucky’s rat trap. If he runs fast enough, far enough. If he just keeps running…

Ever since he came out of the ice, he’s been trying to shake off this… this thing on his back.

It feels like, if he loses momentum, it’ll swallow him whole.

The sun is just starting to come up when he finds the path ahead obstructed by Sam. There’s no one else in this part of the park right now. Even the city that never sleeps has its quiet moments, before the morning rush, before the sunrise.

Steve thinks about dodging around Sam, just keeping his gaze straight ahead and continuing to sprint at a blistering pace around Central Park until someone with a camera finds him and he runs all the way back to the Tower.

But Sam’s just there, in the middle of the jogging trail, arms crossed and brows furrowed, looking as sleep mussed as he ever gets (which is to say, he looks as shining and perfect as he always does, but his shirt is maybe a little wrinkled.) And it’s Sam, so.

Steve slows from his full on pelt, to a normal human run, to a jog, to a staggering halt. His legs feel like jelly. He hasn’t been counting his laps, but he left for his run as soon as they’d finished up the interviews, and that was sometime last night... and now it’s morning.

Steve pants, braces his hands on his knees and tries to catch his breath. The burn of his overworked muscles is starting to rise to a scream, now that he’s stopped.

“...Dude,” Sam says. His voice is too soft, too gentle. And that’s just--

Nope.

Steve straightens up, twists and starts like he’s going to keep going, like he’s going to move around Sam and get back on the trail. Sam’s arm shoots out and his palm presses flat against Steve’s chest.

“Nuh-uh, man, no way. Come on. You’re done.”

“I’ll just do a cool-down lap, Sam, I’m--”

“You’re done,” Sam says. “Get in the fucking car or I will call Stark and have him airlift your ass outta here.”

“Sam, please,” Steve says, desperation crawling up his throat. “I can’t go back to--” he can’t be at the Tower right now. He can’t. “Tony will be all--”

“I ain’t taking you back to that madhouse,” Sam says. “Come on, man, who do you think I am?”

Sam doesn't stay at the Tower when he's in New York. He stays with his Mom sometimes, up in Harlem. But at the moment he's apartment sitting for his sister while she's at Disneyland with her family. So Sam takes him there and makes him gulp down three bottles of water and a handful of protein bars until his hands are shaking less and Steve…

Steve doesn't fight it. He feels raw, run to ground, cornered like an animal.

Is this rock bottom? he wonders. He wonders how many more times he can think that. Is this rock bottom? Is this? Is this?

“Steve,” Sam says quietly. He sits across from Steve at the table, his fingers curled around a cup of coffee. “Maybe you should--”

“No,”Steve says, before Sam can say: “take a break.”

“This ain't healthy man. I'm worried.”

“I just needed to stretch my legs.”

“You stretched your legs for twelve hours.  What was that? Ten marathons back to back? More than that? I know you're a Supersoldier, but you ain't the goddamn Flash.”

“I'm--”

“Try to tell me you're fine again. I fucking dare you.”

Steve's hands are shaking. He presses them flat against the table. “I'm…”

Sam just raises his brows and waits.

Steve takes in a shaky breath. He lets it out. “I'm not doing too hot, Sam,” Steve whispers to his hands. The dark wood makes his skin look ghostly by comparison. “I ain't been… I ain't sleeping real well since I got back.”

“Back from DC or…”

“Back from the ice,” Steve admits.

Sam lets out a breath. “Okay,” he says, sounding almost relieved. “We can get you some help for that. A doctor -- not fucking Hydra this time, your friend Stark can vet someone and see--”

Steve groans loudly and drops his forehead onto the table. “I can't--” he can't take help from Tony like that. He can't.

“Steve, what you can't do is keep going like this. This is killing you.”

Steve swallows, throat thick. He can remember Bucky holding him by the shoulders in 1937, eyes so wide and so earnest and so scared. This place is killing you, he'd said, desperate to get Steve to move out of his unheated room and into an apartment. Their apartment. Their home, for so many years.

Steve presses his forehead against the cool wood.

“Is this…” Sam's voice is full of tension. “Is it like the Valkyrie? In your head? Like the helicarrier?”

Steve wants to shrivel up into a tiny ball and blow away. He shakes his head, forehead brushing against the cool wood.

“Steve--”

Sam doesn't believe him. Steve lifts his head, doesn't meet Sam's eye. He reaches for the stillness in his core, the calm that lets him get through a battle without panicking. It’s hard to get a hold of right now. “It ain't like that,” he reports. “I can't--” he takes in a breath. “I left him alone. Before. Not just him. Peggy, everyone. I left them to clean up my mess. I won't do that again.”

“Your… the war? That wasn’t your mess, Steve.”

“You know what I mean,” Steve says. “I shoulda been there. And I wasn’t.”

“That wasn't your fault,” Sam says.

“Yeah, it was. It is,” Steve says, firm and flat, brooking no argument. “Look. I don’t know if I coulda reached him on the train, but I know I coulda tried to land the Valkyrie. I coulda tried to bail. I coulda-- I coulda tried, and I didn’t.” He sucks in a breath. He looks up at Sam. “Maybe, if I’d been alive, it wouldn't have been seventy years for him. Maybe Hydra woulda never have gotten a foothold in SHIELD.” He bares his teeth. “But I’ll never know now. I couldn't fix it , ‘cause I wasn't there.”

Sam gives him an assessing look. “That what's keeping you from trying again?”

Steve shakes his head. “I'm not. It's not.” He doesn't know how to talk about this. He doesn't have the words. There's no goddamn vocabulary for this. Not for him. “I wasn't trying, but I -- it doesn't matter. It's different. This time.”

“Different how?” Sam asks.

Steve stands up, sharp enough that the chair wobbles. He starts pacing. Tight circles in the space between the dining table and the back of the sofa, the family room. He rakes his fingers through his hair, slightly stiff now with dried sweat.

“Come on man, talk to me. What was it like, the last time?”

“It was--” Steve keeps pacing, probably faster than a normal human would, but he can't hold back. Not right now. He needs words, but he doesn’t have them. “--heavy,” he says, almost a whisper. “Here,” he says, fist to his chest. “Here,” he adds, waving vaguely at his head, his shoulders. “Like… going down. Sinking. Too much too carry. I wasn't trying anything, Sam, I just…” he didn't fight it. He wasn't attempting anything, he was just giving in.

He doesn't look at Sam, but he can hear the man swallow. “Yeah,” he says, like he knows the feeling. “So how's this different?”

“It's different,” Steve says, dangerously quiet, “because I've never been this angry.”

He’s not sure that Sam fully understands the magnitude of that statement, but he can’t explain. Even when he was 95 pounds of impoverished ill-health, watching Nazis march through Madison Square Garden, he wasn’t this angry. Trouble is if he says that, out loud, he doesn’t know what else is going to come out of his mouth. He presses his lips tight and breathes through it, the rising tidal wave of--

“You angry enough to try something this time?” Sam asks, sounding stern.

Steve won’t answer that. He turns, starts another circuit. Pacing, pacing.

Sam sighs, the like trying to get blood from a fucking stone sigh. “Who’re you angry with, Steve?”

“Myself,” Steve says, at once. “Hydra.” He stops. He has his back to Sam, staring down at Sam’s sister’s carpet. It’s beige, and he kind of hates it, and he tries to focus on that, to answer the question with some modicum of calm, some measure of control. “Bucky,” he admits, back to a near-whisper.

Don’t ask me more, he thinks. Please don’t ask me to explain. He can’t -- he can’t talk about this. Something terrible is building inside him, something too huge to hold. It’s bigger than anger or sadness or guilt, it’s just a nameless feeling. It hurts. It all hurts, and nothing hurts more than this: Bucky, hiding from him. Bucky, leaving him behind. Bucky, abandoning him.

“You got every right to be mad at him,” Sam says.

“No, I don’t,” Steve says immediately. The guilt is thick enough to choke on.

“Yeah you do.” Sam insists. He sounds angry now, really angry, and Steve turns and finds that yeah -- Sam is furious. He looks like he wants to punch someone. “This… this is hard to watch, man,” Sam says, waving at Steve’s… everything.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, wretched.

“Don’t. Be. Sorry.” Steve knows that Sam's rage isn't pointed at him, but instead is on his behalf, but that doesn't stop him flinching. “Shit, Steve…” Sam looks suspended between fury and fear. “Look. I'm sorry. I know you love the guy, but this is… This is some shitty-ass behavior on his part.”

“Oh, Jesus, Sam, don’t--” He can’t stand this, can’t stand any of it--

“No, man, don’t ask me to forgive him. If he knows you half as well as you say he does, he’s gotta know what this is doing to you. I don’t owe shit to the asshole who treats my friend like this.”

Steve, embarrassingly, feels tears creeping up the back of his throat. He breathes deep, tries to just -- it’s like any other kind of pain. If he can breathe through it, maybe he can get on top of it, but Sam’s still talking.

“I’m sorry, I know I’m probably not supposed to talk like this, but I ain’t your therapist, you’re my friend, and he’s hurting you and I just -- I’m so fucking mad at him.”

Steve swallows. He swallows again, but he can’t -- He wants to tell Sam not to be angry at Bucky. He can't stand anyone being angry at Bucky. He wants to tell Sam thank you, for taking Steve's side. God, he's so glad to have someone in his corner. And he feels so fucking guilty for thinking that -- thinking he needs someone in his corner against Bucky. And who's in Buck's corner? Is he all alone out there? Does he know who Steve is? Does he know himself? Will he ever trust Steve again? Will Steve ever even see him again, or is going to be stuck in this in-between space forever, knowing that Buck’s alive, but never allowed to--

His hands are starting to shake again. He looks down, turns away, hunches his shoulders. He’s consumed with the need to hide but he can’t -- there’s nowhere for him to go, nowhere to hide from this.

“You don’t deserve this, Steve, you don’t deserve this shit, any of it.”

“F-fuck,” Steve says, pressing the heels of his hands hard against his eyes, like he can keep the tears at bay if he just pushes hard enough. “Oh god, oh god--”

He can count on one hand the number of times he’s cried since he came out of the ice, and suddenly he has the completely irrational feeling that those were just tremors, just the earthquakes before an eruption. And it’s not just everything he lost in the ice, it’s all the years before, his whole fucking life. Growing up with his death already hanging over him, and with Bucky always there and just out of reach, and losing, and losing, and losing.

It’s building inside him. How does he stop this? He presses his fists hard against his sternum, trying to hold it in somehow. “I’m sorry, I just-- I just--”

Sam’s hand lays flat against his back, rubs up and down his spine, and that’s-- that’s--

That’s what does it.

“I want to go home,” Steve hears himself saying. “I want to go home, I--”

“Oh Jesus,” Sam grabs him, pulls him in, and Steve doesn’t know when he went down, but he’s on his knees now, his face pressed into Sam’s shoulder, with Sam’s arms around him. Sam’s hand pressed against the side of his head. Sam’s rocking him like a fucking child, like a goddamn baby, he can’t--

He just can’t anymore.

It’s like the serum, pushing out shrapnel. There’s no stopping it, no keeping it in. All his years of swallowing the pain, of pushing it down and back and down and back and--

It doesn’t even sound human, on the way out. Choking sobs and low, pained keening. A wavering cry that goes on and on and on. The sound a dog might make in the grips of a nightmare.

Some distant part of himself is so, so fucking humiliated by this, by all of it. But he can’t stop, can’t even uncurl. Grief has him by the throat, and it won’t let him go, won’t even let him catch his breath. Pain, he thinks, doesn’t ever really go away. Even if your body won’t keep the scars, the pain stays inside you somewhere. Building and building. A grim little collection of sharp things.

Like a glass jar full of nails, knocked off a shelf. It hits the ground. It shatters. Jagged broken pieces and bits of metal, all jumbled together, useless for anything other than hurting yourself. You'll never sort them out again. You’ll never be able to piece it back together. The best thing to do is throw it all away and move on.

This, he thinks. This is rock bottom.

God, he hopes it is.

Eventually, it passes, as all things do.

But. It takes a while.

“Alright, Man With a Plan,” Sam says. “Let’s talk strategies going forward.”

Steve curls his fingers around the too-hot, too-sweet tea. He leans over it, elbows pressing into the kitchen table. He blinks slowly at it. His eyes are sandpapery, every drag of the lids feeling itchy and sticky. He nods. He’s so, so tired.

“You gonna say it, man?” Sam sounds a little stuffed up. Sam’s a good guy, he wasn’t gonna let Steve bawl his eyes out all alone.

Steve sighs. “I need help,” he intones.

“Damn straight. You don’t have to do this alone, right?”

“Right,” Steve says, without any inflection. He just feels drained. Completely wrung out. Every ounce of feeling twisted and beaten out of him.

“Will you let Tony find you someone? Or, well… realistically, Pepper, probably.”

Steve winces. But he nods.

“You gonna take a break from this?”

Steve makes a small, wounded sound. “Sam, don’t--”

“Seriously, man?”

“I can’t just--” Steve runs a hand through his hair, again. His face is now as salty as the rest of him. Christ, he’s disgusting. “I’ll just go crazier. Please don’t make me stop. Please.”

“Unbelievable,” Sam mutters. “Okay. Okay, fine, but you are going nowhere without me, man. If you start getting up to any hinky shit, I’m pulling the plug. And I really will get Iron Man to airlift you to the nearest care facility, I swear to Christ.”

“What are you, my ma?” Steve grumbles.

Sam rolls his eyes so loudly that there are probably satellites in orbit picking it up. “No, but since you’ve got all the self-preservation instincts of a stoned lemming I’m gonna go ahead and pick up some of the slack here if that’s okay with you.”

“Fine,” Steve says, sinking even lower in his chair. “Whatever.”

“You know, I coulda sworn my friend Steve was here a minute ago, but now there’s just you: a middle schooler from the year 2003.”

“Your friend Steve seems like an asshole,” Steve says. “You could probably do better, you know.”

“Yeah but I’ve already got, like, three lifetimes’ worth of blackmail material on him. He owes me so much you got no idea.”

Steve narrows his itchy, swollen eyes at Sam. “I take it back. You and Steve deserve each other. You can both be assholes together.”

“Now that’s the Steve I know.”

In the end, it’s Clint, not Tony or Pepper. Steve suspects Nat’s influence. She’s been… avoiding is a strong word, but she’s been circling at a distance. Watching, like she knows something is going on, and she’s knows it’s something she can’t help with.

But one day, while they’re unloading from the Quinjet after taking out yet another rogue Hydra scientist, Clint sidles up to Steve and slips a business card into his palm. “Not SHIELD, not Stark Industries either,” Clint says. “She’s good.”

Steve looks at the card in his hand. It’s dog-eared and coffee stained, like everything that Clint touches. Dr. Anna Kapplebaum. Steve looks up, feeling irrationally self-conscious, even though the others are hitting the showers already, nowhere close enough to overhear. “You trust her? With your life?”

The faintest smile twitches at the corner of Clint’s mouth. “Oh, I trust her with more than that.” He tips his head to one side. “I used to be a bit of a hot mess.”

“Barton, you fight aliens with a bow and arrows. You’re still a hot mess.”

“You shoulda known me before.” Clint taps the card in Steve’s hand with one fingernail. “She’s good. She helped Nat too.”

Steve looks up and finds Nat, watching from doorway to the locker room. She nods, once, and vanishes. Steve supposes that the best he can do is give it a shot.

It only takes a few sessions for Steve to trust her too. Dr. Kapplebaum is a brisk, no-nonsense old lady with a soft German accent and a string of numbers tattooed on her inner wrist. So. He’s pretty confident she’s not Hydra.

She reminds him a little of Judith, or Grandma Hubbard, back home. He suspects that her gruff combination of high philosophy, sarcasm, and blunt pragmatism isn't the kind of stuff they teach in psychology school these days, but he responds to it in a way he never responded to all that touchy feely hands on stuff his old therapist went in for.

When he says “I just thought, if I could trade my life for something worthwhile--” she pins him to the floor with her gimlet eyes and says: “Excuse you. Are we putting price tags on human life now? What can I get for mine? Swap it out for a Mercedes, do you think?”

“I didn’t mean--”

“What did you mean, then?”

She lets him stew with that for long minutes before nudging the plate of cookies closer to him. “Life has value. Even yours, believe it or not. But that doesn’t make it currency. You cannot make a purchase with human life.”

He’s a soldier, so he’s not sure he agrees with that, but still. It sticks with him. It lodges in the back of his brain and festers, a little.

Some things change. Some things don’t.

Steve still drops everything for Avengers Assemble calls, and for Winter Soldier Manhunt leads. He still works twice as hard as a person should. But he doesn’t skip meals, and he doesn’t run all night, even if he can. He wears the proverbial helmet as well as the literal one. He uses the goddamned parachutes.

It feels so anticlimactic, somehow. This new life of talking to his therapist, of learning, haltingly, to actually take care of himself. It happens slowly, like it did before. He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it keeps not dropping.

It's an infinitely softer landing than he expected.

A few sessions later, when he finally confesses, for the third time since coming out of the ice, that he just wants to go home, the grim understanding in her wizened face is almost too much to bear. She rubs her thumb across the numbers on her inner wrist and says:

“When there is no home to go back to, you have to make a new one.”

“Okay, but--” He bites his bottom lip, thinking how to phrase it. “Home is people,” he says. “What do you do if…” Face up to it, Rogers. No point pussyfooting around. “If home doesn’t want you anymore? How do you… How am I supposed to…”

Dr. Kapplebaum is already shaking her head. “No, Steven. Home isn’t people. Home is one person.” She leans in, taps the middle of his chest. “This person. Home isn’t around you. Home is inside you. You make that into home, what’s inside you, and you find an outside to match the inside. Or make one. Yes?”

Steve thinks he understands what she’s getting at, but… “How?”

She makes an almost comical pouting face and shrugs. “That depends on you. What does home mean to you? Where do you feel most comfortable? I mean in the here and now, not the home of times past.”

Steve swallows and looks away. The thing is -- he knows that his ideas of home are built on his memories of Brooklyn. Brooklyn before the war. His mom's place. The Barnes place. His and Bucky's place.

But his memories of those places, they're more feelings than concrete. His memories from before the serum will never be as clear as his memories after the serum. His memories of Steve Rogers are muddled by illness and uncertainty, his frail body, his all-too-human mind. As a consequence, all his fractured ideas of home, that idyllic post-war apartment he dreamed of, it was built on corrupted data. Bad intel. That's why it never would've worked, like Peggy told him.

His regret must show, because Dr. Kapplebaum pats his hand. Not like a doctor at all, really. Like a grandmother he never had. “We don’t make pie with last year’s apples, Steven. Not if there are fresher to be had.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, and almost smiles.

“So, instead of thinking about what you’ve lost. Let’s talk about what you have, in the here and now. ja?”

“Yeah,” Steve says.

Thanksgiving comes, and goes. So does Christmas. So does New Year’s. Steve stops setting imaginary deadlines. Maybe he’ll be home by my birthday, maybe we’ll spend Halloween together next year. He stops. He focuses on what he has. In the here and the now.

The one year anniversary comes up, and he’s bracing himself for the moment when it hits hard that Bucky’s been back for a whole year, that it’s been a year since he’s heard Bucky’s voice (again.)

But Steve is surprisingly okay, and Sam’s the one who doesn’t wear all his armor when they’re checking out a Hydra research facility outside of Alice Springs. It should’ve been a milk run, yeah, but it’s not like Sam to be underprepared for this shit. There was an automated defense system that they didn’t know about. Sam gets burned pretty bad, because, well, it’s like he said. He isn’t as fast as Steve. And Steve rushes him to Dr. Cho, commandeering a Quinjet without hesitation, this time.

Something about the whole set up tickles in the back of Steve’s brain. Maybe it was the rocky, desert terrain they trekked through, and maybe it was the way the defense system was RPG-based.

He looks up Sam’s file. On a hunch.

This time, Steve is by Sam’s bed, and Sam’s the one coming to. Dr. Cho has been working on some kind of weird 3d printer for skin, but it’s not quite ready yet, so Sam’s stuck healing the burns on his side the old fashioned way.

“Aw man,” Sam says. He always feels self-conscious when Steve commandeers Avengers resources to help them out. He keeps saying he’s not an Avenger. Steve politely disagrees with that. But that’s not the fight they’re going to have now.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Steve asks, right off the bat.

Sam rubs his eyes. “Tell you what?”

Steve starts ticking items off on his fingers. “You invited a couple of fugitives into your home, got back in the air to bring down a squid Nazi conspiracy, got your wings ripped off, fell right out of the sky, and almost crushed by a crashing helicarrier.” Steve lets his hands drop, folds his arms over his chest. “And all that started because you were running laps around the National Mall with Captain America, three years to the day after Riley died.”

“Oh,” Sam says. “That.”

“Uh yeah,” Steve says. “That.”

Sam shrugs one shoulder. “What? You think I invite America’s Most Wanted into my condo because I’m a very stable and emotionally healthy man? We all got shit, Steve.”

“You’re a goddamn hypocrite, you know that?” Steve says. There’s no real heat in it, of course, but he feels awful for not realizing earlier. When Sam described Steve's self-destructive behaviors, he was speaking from personal experience, and maybe if Steve had been a little more observant...

“You’re a pain in my ass,” Sam says cheerfully enough.

“I called your mom,” Steve warns.

Sam groans. “You asshole, Rogers.”

“I’m damn lucky it wasn’t a condolence call,” Steve says, a little sternness creeping into his voice, and Sam looks away, fidgeting with the corner of his blanket. “Listen, Sam. This thing goes both ways, right?”

Sam won’t meet his eyes.

Steve doesn’t let up. “You’re my friend too. And some asshole told me that’s a two way street.”

“Who told you that? I hate him already,” Sam grumbles.

“So here’s what we’re gonna do. Dr. Cho wouldn’t let me bring you a bottle of Jack, but I got Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro, and in a week we’re flying back to New York and your mom says she’s making that pie you like so much.”

Sam’s mouth twitches. “Captain’s orders?”

“You’re damn right, Captain’s orders.”

He talks to Kapplebaum about it, when they’re back in New York. “He really, really wanted to be on mission that week. I didn't know why, at the time. I thought he was doing it for my sake, but now…” Steve smiles and shrugs a shoulder. “I mean I guess it’s good to know I’m not alone, right? And I know it’s probably not healthy, but I get it.”

“You know I worked with Clint Barton, ja?” Kapplebaum says.

“Yeah."

“Without breaking doctor-patient confidentiality, I would just say: Healthy looks different on different people, at different stages in their lives.” Steve thinks of an apartment in Bed-Stuy, and Clint drinking coffee straight from the carafe. Steve has seen him shovel pizza in his mouth and claim it’s a vegetable, really. And still, Clint is, in some ways, the most grounded of all of them. He smiles like he knows something the rest of them don’t. And Natasha, of all people, goes to him for advice before anyone else. “Healthy is not a result,” Dr. Kapplebaum is saying. “It’s a strategy. It’s a way forward, whatever that looks like.”

Steve nods, thoughtful.

It’s been a year. He really should figure out his own way forward, with what he’s got in the here and now. And maybe that doesn’t include Bucky. Maybe it never will. He can’t keep trying to lean on someone who isn’t there. Not when he’s got people who need to lean on him.

Sam is back on his feet soon enough, and Steve feels all the steadier knowing, for sure this time, that it really does go both ways. If Sam trips up, Steve will be there to help him, and if Steve starts spiraling again, Sam will be there to set him right.

They get back to work.

They’re in South Africa, following up a cold lead on Bucky, when the call comes to assemble in Sokovia. Steve is all set to say no, because he’s pretty sure they don’t actually need him for this one. Tony and the Iron Legion could probably handle it all on their own.

But then they say “Hydra.” They say “scepter.” They say “possible test subjects.”

And Sam, in an Airbnb in Johannesburg, says: “Go, man. We were all set to wrap up here anyway. I got this.”

Steve hesitates only a moment longer, then grabs his go bag, which is always, always packed. “I’ll see you at the Tower?”

Sam’s brow furrows. “Which…” then the wrinkles smooth away and his eyes widen. “Oh that tower. The Tower.”

Steve smiles. “I’ll make an Avenger of you yet, Sam Wilson.”

Coda

- Aftermath by Caravan Palace, 2015.

Well, it's time for me to tap out.
Maybe I should take a page out
of Barton's book and build Pepper
a farm, hope nobody blows it up.

The simple life.

You'll get there one day.

I don't know. Family, stability. The
guy who wanted all that went in
the ice seventy-five years ago. I
think someone else came out.

You alright?

I'm home.

“Captain! Captain Rogers--”

Steve stops and turns. They’re in the living quarters -- he was just heading down to the communal kitchen, actually. He’s out of popcorn, and Sam’s supposed to bring the Jack, but Steve always makes the popcorn. He lifts a brow. “We’re not in the training room. Not on a mission. You can call me Steve, Wanda.”

“Steve,” she says, looking a little freaked out by it, a little uncomfortable. “I just wanted to -- I never got the the chance to. Apologize. For. What I made you see.”

Steve lifts his chin a little, and turns to face her head on. He folds his arms. “It’s okay. You saved the world, I’ll cut you some slack.”

“They weren’t real, you know. The visions.”

“I know a guy with an Infinity Stone in his head who might disagree with you.”

Is she. Blushing? That’s interesting. “I just mean… I know what you saw, and I’m… I’m sorry.”

Steve shifts a little, very deliberately not slipping into an unconscious battle stance. “It’s really fine, Wanda. I don’t blame you,” he says, eager to head this conversation off at the pass before it gets too far into territory he’s not really ready to discuss. “Look, uh, Sam and I are going to watch Spirited Away. You’re welcome to join.”

“Oh.” Wanda nods, a little shyly. “Thank you, Capt-- Steve.”

“You’re very welcome. Just one rule: You can’t make fun of my popcorn.”

“Why would I make fun of your popcorn?”

“I make it on the stove.”

Wanda tries not to smile. She’s an okay kid, really. “How old fashioned of you.”

“I learned how to make it that way on YouTube,” Steve says, with dignity. “I am very modern.”

“I’m sorry. How hipster of you, then.”

“Thin ice, Maximoff. No laughing at the popcorn.”

Wanda raises her hands in mock surrender, mimes zipping her mouth shut. Steve nods, smirking, and starts off towards the kitchen again. Wanda trots after him. “Is Agent Romanoff joining us?” she asks. “Or is she still brooding about Dr. Banner?”

“Not sure, but don’t let her hear you say that.”

“I don’t understand her,” Wanda confesses as they come into the kitchen.

“I don’t think anyone understands Natasha.”

“She doesn’t even want him, not like that, you know?”

“No I don’t think she does,” Steve says gently. Christ, Maximoff is young. He forgets that, sometimes. “But I do think she wants to cuddle the shit out of him, and for her that’s probably more embarrassing.” He gives her a look over his shoulder as he starts pulling down the ingredients for popcorn. “You shouldn’t talk about her behind her back. She will find out, and then make your life a living hell.”

Wanda nods and rests her chin on her hands.

Steve turns on the stovetop, starts heating the oil.

“It’s hard sometimes,” Wanda confesses. “I’ve been in everyone’s head, but only one person was ever in my head. You know?”

Steve swallows, and feels, very vividly, the sensation of an arm, heavy around his shoulders. His head knocking against someone else’s. “Yeah, I do,” he says. Steve glances over at her, while the oil starts to sizzle. They’re all like this, one way or another. All of them, missing bits. All of them with holes in their lives. He adds the popcorn kernels and turns to face her. “Are you okay?”

She doesn’t move her head, but she lifts her eyes to his face. “Are you?” she asks.

Steve stiffens.

“I know you think you’re going to be at war forever,” she continues. Steve feels a chill go down his spine. She barrels on. “I know you think you’ve changed too much to come back. But that’s not true. All the people you saw, in that dream--”

“Wanda,” Steve cuts her off. “We don’t have to talk about this.”

“Maybe you don’t. Maybe I do.”

Steve sighs. She wants to know that he’s okay, that the things she made him see aren’t eating at him the way they ate at Tony. She feels guilty, and she’s scared, and alone. He knows the feeling.

“It’s not the people I saw in the dream,” Steve confesses. He winces when he thinks of Peggy. “Well. Not just them. It’s... it’s who I didn’t see that worries me.”

The smiles, the laughter, the terror of the battlefield underlying what should’ve been a victory celebration. Searching the crowd. Looking for him. He should’ve been on the dance floor. Or maybe by the bar. Or maybe--

Steve shakes his head, and smiles. Kind of.

“Oh,” Wanda says, putting it together. “Your friend, the one who--”

“Yeah.” Steve swallows, as the popcorn starts to bang against the lid of the pan. It always sounds like gunfire to him. He thinks it always has. He’s so afraid that it always will. “If I’m at war forever, that’s fine. I can do that. But him? He never wanted this. I just hate thinking that they took that away from him too.”

“People change, Steve,” Wanda says. “Trust me, I know. If he changed once, he can change again. And so can you.”

Steve looks over at her. She is so young, and so certain. It’s infectious, her belief that... But if she can see in his head, then it isn’t belief, is it? She doesn’t have to have faith, she knows. And for the first time in a long while, he feels more than just calm determination, more than the centered feeling he’s fought so hard to regain.

He feels… hope.