Chapter Text
To a distant observer, the man should be gaunt, skeletal where he sits hunched over a gleaming marble countertop. He traces the tendrils of black and ash gray that streak across its white surface with a light, careful finger. The thin skin under each eye should be the color of greasepaint, ringing the then-bright blue irises dull and hollow. The man is not gaunt. Instead, he is still big. Still broad. The picture of health. Or, he would be, if not for the aching, pained way he walked. It’s as if he were calculating each step, imagining, in stark outlines, where each foot should go. He blinks slowly too, his eyes closing almost asynchronously, sometimes remaining shut for minutes at a time, his body slumping before it jerks itself awake.
Steve has not slept in the last four days. At least, he thinks it’s four days. Once enough time has passed, the hours start to blur together, each blending into the next. After spending three unsuccessful hours in bed, attempting to sleep, he finds himself sitting at the kitchen counter, picking at a half-empty bowl of dry cereal, naked except for loose, black, boxers.
He pops another bit of the food into his mouth, idly hoping that the sugar would energize him. His hand grips the side of the bowl so tightly that he anticipates the sharp sound of cracking ceramic. He shoots a look at the clock on the microwave. The blinking green lights read 02:32. It feels like a taunt.
Foolishly, Steve hoped he’d be exhausted enough to pull himself into bed and sleep, maybe for a week if he could help it. He just spent the last week fighting literal aliens, in the future. All that, while dealing with Howard’s son– Tony was a tornado unto himself and Steve was tasked with reining him in. With naivety he thought he grew out of, he thought that it would finally mean he could rest without waiting for the serum to physically force him to, shutting his body down before it started failing.
With a sigh, Steve hauls himself off of the counter and puts away the remaining cereal. He walks to the bedroom, each step painstaking and cautious. He takes care to avoid looking out the window. Right now, Steve can’t take the jarring dissonance of the disgustingly luxurious view from Stark’s building, expecting the skyline of 40s Brooklyn, yet bearing witness to towering skyscrapers drawing their jagged edges against the night sky.
Standing in the corner of his room is an easel, the drawers next to it filled with expensive art supplies. Vellum and bristol board sits in a stack next to professional-grade tubes of acrylics and oil paints. A nubby number two pencil with a half-gone eraser lies next to them, out of place in its cheapness. It’s the only thing that’s Steve’s. Behind all of it, leaning against the wall, is a canvas with a half-done sketch of a still life. One side of the image is crisply outlined, and the other still radiating shaky cilia, as if someone abandoned it halfway through.
Steve looks away from the easel too. He couldn’t bring himself to paint anything, even with access to all the supplies he used to lust for as a starving artist. Seeing all the supplies laid out innocently in his room, prepared for him as if an easel was everyday furniture, made him feel exposed. A performer on a stage, more a character than a man, whose story could be summed up in a few declarative phrases. Poor boy from Brooklyn. Asthmatic. Captain America. Artist.
He wonders which SHIELD intern was given his dossier, sent out to art stores to fulfill a beat in his character sheet. The thought floats up like a bubble, popping after a moment, and he forgets that he thought it entirely.
Despite knowing it to be futile, Steve lays on his bed, splayed out over his sheets, his arms and legs stretched out like a star. He’s on his back, staring up at the clean, white, ceiling. The bed's too soft. After months of sleeping rough, wrapped in a bedroll and – on nights where it was possible – accompanied by a campfire, the memory foam bed and artificial light is unnatural. His body sinks too deeply into its plush, feeling too much like the blood-wet mud of the trenches.
On a particularly desperate night, he wrapped himself in blankets and laid down on the floor. The artifice of it all made him want to throw up. Not even ten minutes later, he was back in bed, right where he started.
From his position, the pinpricks of light from the illuminated skyline are like teeth in a wolf’s mouth.
Steve pulls a pillow out from under his head and throws it to the ground, replacing it with his forearm. He tips his head back and lets a harsh exhale out from between clenched teeth. He sinks his teeth into his bottom lip, savoring the grounding, sharp, sting of pain and the metallic tang of watery blood. As he runs his tongue over the shallow wound, he can feel his own flesh, remade from a sickly and anemic body, knitting itself together.
The urge to laugh, to cackle like a villain from the 21st century movies Natasha showed him is overwhelming. He doesn’t actually interrupt the taut and oppressive silence, but – goddamn it – he wants to. All this magical science from Erskine, the serum powering him through the liberation of Azzano, to leading the Howlies and crashing the Valkyrie, and the thing that does him in is his own forsaken brain, unable to convince itself to sleep. No wonder he wants to laugh – he’s a comedy unto himself.
Sometimes, Steve gets himself into this cycle where he can’t convince his mind that sleep is safe – the thought of being unconscious is itself terrifying. He can’t stop anticipating the searing burn of ice, the numbness creeping from his fingertips to his core, the lethargic drowsiness lulling him to sleep for seventy long years.
Nothing about his bedroom feels like the ice. It doesn’t stop him from fearing it. That, when he wakes up, he will be dust and rubble, ground down by the rough sands of time, made new again, birthed to a new century.
So, he waits. He stares at the ceiling, sometimes at the generic art on the wall, until golden light peaks through the windows and he can justify leaving his room.
He pulls on tight exercise clothes: a white compression shirt and leggings underneath blue sweatpants. He enjoys the pressure of it, how it feels like it holds him together. Jumping twice to coax himself into a momentary, synthetic awakeness, he takes stock of his body in the full-length mirror of his bathroom. His under-eyes have finally darkened into a light, purplish bruise and his gait sways precipitously to the right if he doesn’t focus on keeping it straight. Steve notes all of this with an ironic and self-destructive joy.
If the serum hasn’t already restored him to the platonic ideal of health, he just might be able to sleep tonight.
Natasha aims a deft kick at Steve’s abdomen. Steve attempts to dodge it, sidestepping to the left but his limbs are lead and the air is sticky molasses. The kick connects and he feels the pressure down to his bones, even if he knows Nat holds back her strength during training sessions. He’s knocked off balance, tipping onto his heels and swaying for a long second before crashing unceremoniously onto the floor, flat on his ass with his knees half-bent in front of him.
Natasha lets the momentum of her kick spin her around before landing solidly on her feet. She rests her hands on a cocked hip, looking down at her opponent; from this vantage point, she towers over Steve. She bites the inside of her cheek and her lips form a thin line. The look is inquisitive, carrying a hint of unexpected confusion.
She thrusts her hand out at Steve begrudgingly, pulling him to his feet. They look at each other in silence for a moment before Natasha breaks the air.
“Rogers, what the hell was that,” she says. It’s a statement, not a question. Despite being a full head shorter than Steve, her voice is dominant and imposing.
Steve swallows and clenches his jaw. “It’s nothing. Just a bad day.”
“A ‘bad day’ gets you killed, Steve,” she replies, her voice tight as steel wire.
“Let it go, Nat.” Steve rolls his shoulders back and shifts his weight like a boxer. To stretch out the silence, he sheds the boxing wraps around his hands, unwinding them and flexing his fingers.
Steve needs her to drop the topic. His mind, foggy from days without rest, starts running in circles, drawing increasingly unlikely conclusions. If Nat finds out, she’ll tell Fury, who’ll tell medical, who’ll tell Tony and Bruce because no one else knows his physiology. It’ll mean weeks and weeks in the hospital, then testing whatever sleep meds Bruce will cook up, which will not work with his fucked up body, which means even more weeks in the hospital. Steve has spent too much of his life in a sickbed for this new body he’s puppeteering to be confined to one too. It’s not worth the sharp sterile smell and bright floodlights of a hospital room.
Nevermind that if they send him another SHIELD psychologist, they’ll just clear him for duty without fixing whatever broken thing makes him afraid of sleep. Besides, the weeks of fear go away in time, and the serum will knock him out before the deprivation kills him. His tongue is heavy sandpaper in his mouth and again, he wants to laugh – he can’t even self-destruct properly. The serum prevents it.
Natasha stays standing silent, her expression astute and all-seeing. Steve can see her running mental calculations, weighing tradeoffs and ultimately deciding to not push the issue. He’s glad for this. He knows that it was a deliberate move on Natasha’s part to even allow Steve to know that she’s aware there’s an issue. It lets Steve know that she’ll drop it.
Finished rolling up his boxing wraps, he tosses the fabric onto the padded surface of the sparring mats. Distantly, he hears it hit the ground with a quiet thud. In a deliberate motion, he raises his eyebrows challengingly at Natasha, knowing that she won’t resist a challenge – even a fake one – without good reason to. He pulls his mouth into a smile, but leaves his gaze dead-eyed and distant. The uncanniness of the expression clashes with his classically handsome features.
“Let’s have a rematch, Natasha,” he insists, walking around her in a wide circle and assuming a fighting stance. “It was just a bad day.” He dips his head. “I’ll prove it to you.”
She shakes out her hands and faces Steve, her muscles loose and ready. Immediately, she loses her calculating look, donning a blank face and readying herself to focus on the fight. “Okay, Steve.” She takes a step forward, jabbing quickly at Steve’s side, “I’ll believe you.”
The hammering in Steve’s chest calms, but his body still feels like a knife with a blunt edge, futilely trying to cut through stone. Somewhere, way deep down, he wishes he could believe himself.