Chapter Text
It was a somewhat complex maneuver, ripping the attacker’s mask off and throwing him over her shoulder, but that’s not what left Captain Carter speechless. It wasn’t the abrupt ambush that took her and Natasha by surprise that left her out of breath, either.
Captain Carter hadn’t felt out of breath in a very long time.
What she saw now, as she looked at the Winter Soldier in front of her, knocked the wind right out of her chest. For just a moment, her heart stopped. The commotion around her faded away. All she could see was him.
They told her that he was dead. Nick Fury told her that he scoured the globe looking for her for decades. She didn’t want to believe that Nick Fury was a liar, but he was a spy.
However, there were some things you just couldn’t lie about, and he was one of them.
When she first arrived here, she spent days crying on the ground next to his grave. Every week she took a trip to the cemetery and freshened up the stone slab. Every flower she placed on his headstone was one she wished she could have given him.
But there he was. She should have recognized him sooner, she thought to herself.
There was no way of telling from the outside. This man carried himself differently. His back was straight. He moved without a limp or even a hitch in his step. The skinny kid from Brooklyn had grown up, and out, as well. She could tell by the fact that he stood at her eye-level now that something had happened to him.
This wasn’t the man she knew.
Captain Carter tried to convince herself of that. This couldn’t be him. He died. He was dead, and he was gone, and this all had to be some sort of horrific nightmare.
Her logical mind immediately tried to write it off as some advanced technology. A facial projection, made specifically by Hydra to torture her. Maybe it was a neurotoxin.
When she saw him take a breath, she knew it wasn’t true. She couldn’t look away from him. The only thing in her vision was his face, now slightly obscured by scraggly, dirty blond hair that swayed in front of his eyes.
Those eyes.
She had looked into those eyes countless times.
Those blue eyes she looked into on that fateful night that she pushed that monster into the portal opened by the tesseract, and promised him that she’d be back. Now, she was back, and to her horror, he was as well.
She would have given anything to see him again.
But not like this. Not like this.
For just a moment, her persona faded. The enhanced blood that ran through her veins turned to ice. In that moment, Captain Carter, the expert combatant, fizzled away.
Peggy stood in her place, standing just yards away from the dead man she loved.
“Steve?” Peggy asked, her voice breaking as his name escaped her lips. As soon as she said his name, it opened a flood of hope in her chest. Her best friend was back. She lost him twice. The second time, she thought it was for good. She made her amends, as well as a person could. Who could really get over a man like him? Ever since arriving in this century, she had missed his presence. She missed his sense of righteousness. He always knew what to do. He always knew what was right, as well. He knew what was good because he was good.
He was her hero. She desperately needed him to still be.
His face didn’t change in expression as she called out to him. Peggy felt her heart beat faster in her chest. If it pounded any harder, she was sure that it would leap out of her chest, and run towards him and hold him, like she wanted to do.
The man in front of her looked at her with no recognition. Instead, all Peggy could see was the same determined and angry expression that the Winter Soldier wore.
“Who the hell is Steve?” He said sharply. It took her off guard. It was his voice, but it was wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. The way he formed his words, the way he spoke to her, it wasn’t the way he did.
The way Steve Rogers did.
The Winter Soldier raised his right arm, holding a gun in his hand, and looked right down the sights at her.
This wasn’t him. This couldn’t be Steve. He would never do that to her.
Captain Carter pushed Peggy aside, as well as she could. This wasn’t Steve, this was a man who was trying to kill her. She couldn’t get caught up in whatever he looked like, she was looking down the barrel of a gun.
A kick to the side of the shoulder from above sent the man spinning to the side, before sliding across the asphalt. Captain Carter turned her head to the side to see Sam Wilson land on the ground. His sneakers scraped on the road. The metal apparatus attached to his back like a knapsack shimmered in the sunlight. Captain Carter recognized the shimmering, shifting movements quickly. They were sheets of metal, designed to resemble feathers.
It only took her attention away for half a second, before she glanced back at the Winter Soldier. He stood up quickly. Captain Carter felt her joints lock up once again, as she was seized with a flood of emotions.
It was Steve’s face, that was for sure. A bit wider, and with sunken eyes and sharper cheekbones, but it was Steve.
She was trapped in a web of contradictions once again.
It couldn’t be Steve. Steve was dead. It was Steve. Steve was alive.
The light in his eyes was gone. The idealistic young man that once was there was now gone, and replaced by a long-tortured soul. Captain Carter didn’t need to look at him long to realize that.
She wanted to hold him. She wanted to ask him what was wrong, to ask him what had happened after all these years. Peggy wanted to chastise him for behaving recklessly and risking his life in a fruitless effort to find her.
That was Steve, wasn’t it? Always doing the hard thing, no matter the cost.
Steve wasn’t standing in front of her. That couldn’t be him, she repeated to herself, to no effect, still trapped in a prison of her own nostalgia.
That prison shattered as the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She instinctively ducked out of the way, just as an explosive rocketed past her ear. The explosion was nearly deafening. Captain Carter was once again thankful for her shield, which blocked at least some of the percussive blast.
As the initial burst of light faded away, Captain Carter followed the trail of the rocket. Natasha, the Black Widow, slumped against the side of a car, holding a grenade launcher in her arms. She looked injured, but if Peggy knew Natasha, she wouldn’t admit it.
A part of her felt a sudden surge of anger toward her friend. She had fired at Steve. But she couldn’t have known. There was no way of knowing that the Winter Soldier was Steve.
The only person who could have been able to tell was her. She should have been able to tell. The thought echoed in her mind.
Why couldn’t she tell? Why couldn’t she tell? Why, out of all the people in the world, couldn’t she tell it was him?
The smoke cleared. The man was gone. Peggy pulled her shield tighter to her chest.
She lost him. For the third time, she had lost him. By now, she thought she should have been used to it.
It tore her up just like the first time. The wound would never heal. Some wounds are too deep to ever truly heal.
Steve was her wound. Now, he ripped that wound open one more time.