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They’d moved him to a different room, near the top floor of the building. Told him there’d be better accommodations for him soon. He supposed he’d done a pretty good job of messing up their plans by not being a complete idiot and falling for their little dress-up game. Now it was one o’clock in the morning and he stared out his window at the thousand million lights of this alien city that was once his home. The people who he’d met so far hadn’t made that great of an impression, and he got the feeling a lot of higher ups were scrambling to try and rectify that. In the meantime he was under lock and key. That in itself didn’t mean that his country had fallen into evil, or at least more evil. It didn’t mean he couldn’t trust these people necessarily, he didn’t know enough. The very fact that he couldn’t trust them meant they couldn’t trust him, whether they were nominally on the side of good or not. So they gave him a nice room with a locked door and he stayed put to see where things stood.
He heard the familiar buzz-click of his door unlocking and spun around to face the potential threat.
“Hey,” a kid, maybe seventeen, said, peeking around the door, “Sorry to drop in on you so late.”
He grinned, not sounding sorry at all.
“What?” Steve said. Not particularly eloquently, but it was one o’clock in the morning and a kid, who didn’t seem to be regular Shield issue, had invaded his room.
“I heard you woke up so I wanted to visit. Sort of snuck in, though, that’s why I’m here at 1 am.”
Steve should have… he wasn’t sure what. He shouldn’t have trusted this stranger immediately, that’s for sure. But… the kid felt right somehow, like nothing had since waking up. He felt like coming home.
“What’s your name,” Steve asked?
“You can call me Will.”
That wasn’t quite an answer, Steve noticed, but he didn’t call him out on it.
“Steve,” he said. The boy knew his name already but if they were saying what they wanted to be called, Captain America was never quite a real person and he hadn’t even really deserved Captain Rogers, and he didn’t feel a need to stand on ceremony with post-midnight invaders anyway.
“Steve.” Will said, in an odd tone of voice, fond almost, “How are you holding up?”
How are you holding up. Like Steve was just… a person. A real person. Who might possibly be a bit worked up about dying and waking up seventy years in the future.
“‘Bout as well as you could expect,” Steve said.
And from there, from there somehow they were talking about everything. About Time Square and how things had changed, and the things that hadn’t. Steve had no idea how this kid could be so knowledgeable about the city now, let alone seventy years ago, but it didn’t occur to him to disbelieve him.
The next morning there was no trace of Will and he wondered if the whole thing had been a dream. It had a sort of haze of unreality about it. But he also felt lighter, more at home. Which only got better when he learned that though he’d be watched, he was allowed to go wherever he wanted in the city. He went out into the world and looked at things that had changed and a few that had stayed the same, and thought that maybe everything would be okay.