Archive of Our Own ^beta

Everyone always said the same thing when they referred to his time (almost seventy years, an entire lifetime) trapped in the ice:

You've been asleep.

And Steve is, for the most part, content to let them think that. It's much easier than admitting the truth, even if he's not always sure he didn’t spend at least some of that time asleep.

But the truth of the matter is Steve spent most of it awake.

He could remember the crash, the plane hitting the snow and ice hard enough to knock him out of the pilot's seat. He remembered hitting his head and blacking out for what could have been a second or a minute or longer, and when he shook himself back to awareness the world around him was white.

Steve wasn't sure just how long he looked for a way out, for an exit from the plane, but the cold kept creeping into his bones and he would have to stop and rest. He suspected that he slept during those times, and he was never sure just how long he slept, because he couldn't see the sun for all the snow and ice surrounding him. It didn't matter though, because there was no way out. Every time he got a door open, it either led to another part of the plane that he didn't know existed (or that he had forgotten about while sleeping, because there was nothing to stimulate his mind here in the white and shadows) or he was met with a wall of ice.

He tried using the radio to call for help a couple of times, but it had been busted in the crash. For all he knew, it might have been passed off as someone messing around after a while, if the signal even got through the ice above him. Hell, he hadn't known how much time had passed until Colonel Fury told him.

The last time he had tried the radio, there was as usual only static. The cold was making him tremble again, reminding him uncomfortably of all the times he'd spent ill as a child. Steve had cut off the radio for the final time and slipped through the plane, headed for the small area he'd set aside for rest, and purposely settled in to sleep.

The next thing he had known, he was waking up to the sound of a game he'd watched what felt like a little over a year ago on the radio and a woman bearing a passing resemblance to Peggy claiming that he was in a New York recovery room.

So Steve allowed everyone to think he'd actually been asleep in the ice for a full lifetime. It really didn't matter in the long run, so long as he could try and move forward.

Then there had come Loki and the Chitauri and the invasion that could have, but didn't, wipe out the city. It had left no time for rest, no time for dwelling too much on the life that he'd left behind in 1943 and the people who he wished so desperately to talk to. It would be nice to see Peggy, to know that she had made it back from the war safely, to tell her about how cold it was for all those years he had spent under the ice.

But he had been able to forget, for just a little while. The Avengers had helped, just by being there to deal with the fallout of the invasion and giving him something else to focus on for even a short amount of time.

Today, however, was going to be a rough one.

The team had gone their separate ways months ago, and Steve had made his way to Brooklyn just to see how many of the places he'd known in his youth were still around. The answer was not a lot, but it was still a bit more familiar than the rest of the world he was living in. SHIELD had set him up with an expense account when he'd first awakened in the modern world, and apparently Tony Stark had decided to drop a several thousand dollars into it on a whim, because he was able to find a decent apartment without even making a dent in the funds.

Steve had settled into his new life fairly well, only experiencing a few nights where sleep refused to come without the accompaniment of dreams about snow and ice, and he checked in with SHIELD frequently to see how the rest of the team was doing. He was a bit surprised to learn that they'd migrated to Stark Tower one by one, and that Tony had designed individual suite-style apartments for them on their own floors during the repairs to the building; the only thing he had yet to replace with the Stark sign, leaving only the A to stare out over Manhattan.

He gave some thought to doing likewise, leaving Brooklyn and rejoining the team on the island, but he couldn't talk himself into it as yet. He didn't like the idea of giving up his independence no matter how nice it might be to have his newfound friends all around him.

So for a few weeks now he'd managed in fits and starts to talk himself into and out of heading to what was starting to be known in the city as Avengers Tower. As the weather grew colder, the idea of heading to Manhattan grew more appealing, yet he was unable to fully commit to it every time. Steve convinced himself that it was because he didn't want to pack up all the belongings that he'd slowly acquired, even though he wasn't really that attached to anything except for his motorcycle (which he'd got from Bruce right before heading for Brooklyn) and the Captain America trading cards that had been Phil Coulson's.

And then, two weeks into November, the weather reports called for the first major snowfall of the season.

Even just the thought of being snowed into his apartment, no matter how comfortable it was, didn't appeal to Steve at all. He put the cards in his wallet, paid the final month's rent on his apartment and told the landlord that he could keep all the furnishings, hopped on his bike, and didn't stop until he pulled into the underground parking lot beneath Avengers Tower.

He may continue to let everyone think he'd spent nearly seventy years asleep under the ice, but he felt better just knowing that there were people around who he might someday feel comfortable confiding in with the truth of that time.

But he was just as pissed off as everyone else when Fury finally admitted that he may have stretched the truth about Coulson's death. Still, Phil was more pissed off than any of them when he found out what the director had done to his nearly-mint collection.