Chapter Text
The first time it happens, it’s two a.m., and Steve can’t sleep.
It’s been four weeks since he woke up in this century; one week since the Chitauri attack. Since then, he’s moved into Stark—now Avengers—Tower, made exactly zero friends, found exactly zero new hobbies, and gotten maybe two nights of solid, uninterrupted sleep.
He envies those two nights—right after the Chitauri attack—where he was so exhausted that the ghosts of the past didn’t haunt him.
An idea pops into his head. If exhaustion knocked him out before…
There has to be a gym in the Tower; Steve was sure Stark mentioned it during the ‘official unofficial billionaire house tour’. There is also a robot that will take him anywhere he wishes.
“JARVIS,” Steve says slowly, sitting up in bed, “is anyone in the gym now?”
“No, Captain,” he replies smoothly. “The other residents are asleep, or trying to sleep. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No. Thank you, JARVIS.”
“Of course, Captain.”
So Steve takes the elevator to the gym and lines up a few punching bags. After a moment, he realizes he left his tape in his room; there’s probably some laying around the gym, but Steve decides to forego it entirely.
He justifies the decision by telling himself that, in a real fight, he wouldn’t have time to wrap his knuckles.
(He knows that’s not why, but there’s a burning under his skin, and in the 30s, bloody fights always settled him. Granted, in the 30s, he also had—
—don’t go there don’t think about that.)
At first, he punches at a steady rhythm; carefully maintains his form. Still under the guise of extra practice.
But after a few minutes, Steve starts letting himself really hit, mixing kicks and right hooks in a fluid dance. There’s a pleasant sting in his knuckles and a sheen of sweat on his brow. The only sound in the gym is the melodic thud, thud, thud of his fists and a metallic creak as the bag swings in the air.
Eventually, the pain in his hands goes from a little sting to a real, slicing sharpness. He keeps punching.
After one particularly brutal roundhouse, the bag splits and sand spills on the gym floor, pooling like blood.
”Captain Rogers,” JARVIS says, “your hands appear injured. Perhaps you should rest.”
”I’m fine, JARVIS,” Steve snaps.
It comes out sharper than the AI probably deserves.
JARVIS stays silent after that.
Steve goes to grab a new bag. When he looks down, he finds that there’s blood dripping from his knuckles; trailing down his wrists, splattering on the floor, painting the sandbag. The wounds are deep, and Steve thinks he’s fractured a finger or two.
But they’ll heal. They always do; he can already feel the pinpricks of muscle stitching under his skin. And the noise in his brain has lessened somewhat, like it seeped out with the red.
After going through one more bag, Steve feels calm enough to attempt sleeping again; but he’ll need to clean up here, first. Steve vaguely remembers that there’s a locker room off the right wall and goes there.
The locker room is, like much of the Tower, overly lavish. The place is lit by chandeliers, and the restrooms have full doors and locks, not stalls; and the showers have a million and a half settings. The entire thing is sparklingly clean; Steve almost feels bad dripping blood and sweat on it.
He grabs a roll of paper towels and ends up using the whole thing.
He doesn’t bother to bandage his hands.
When Steve gets back to his apartment, he finds it’s already sunrise. Light hits the dust in the air, coating it in gold.
Before the serum, Steve wouldn’t have been able to pick out that detail. Glasses were expensive and he got by fine without them; he just needed Bucky or Sarah’s help reading far away. Now, his sight is hawklike, perfect.
Steve sleeps.
The second time is two weeks later, two days after a battle.
It was an easy fight, mostly. Killer robots in Queens, released by some wannabe dictator.
Steve himself was on search-and-rescue—there wasn’t much he could do to the robots with brute strength, so instead, he lifted buildings off the injured while Stark figured out how to disable their protocols. They didn’t need his help.
And there was a little girl. Couldn’t have been older than twelve; steel-blue eyes, brown hair. She looked like Becca.
Steve failed. He didn’t get there in time, and he watched as her apartment collapsed around her.
He couldn’t help, and they didn’t need his help.
This time, Steve doesn’t kid himself; he knows why he’s in the gym.
He lines up the bags and starts punching. No tape.
It’s the middle of the day, but Stark is doing something with the press, Widow and Hawkeye are at SHIELD, Thor is off-planet, and Bruce is at some sort of science convention. Steve is alone, at least for a few hours.
He keeps trying to shove down the grief, the anger; but it roars back up. It feels like fighting the ocean tide: useless, impossible; the water always seeps into the sand eventually.
The first kick says alone. The second says failure. The third says unwanted.
They taunt him, remind him that he will never be enough in this century. He couldn’t save that little girl. He couldn’t even save his best friend. The Avengers don’t need him in their battles. Why would he ever have a place here? He’s a man out of time; he doesn’t belong in this century with technology he doesn’t understand and people who don’t care about Steve, who only care about Captain America, what he can do for them as a persona; no longer a human. And what he even can do is lackluster at best.
The rest of the hits sound like names. Monty, Dernier, Dum Dum, Morita, Jones…
Bucky. Peggy.
There’ll all buried in the fucking ground. Or, in Bucky’s case, a snowy ravine.
Why should Steve have been the one to survive, to this time with no polio and gay marriage and vaccinations and so much waste that the word reuse is now replace? It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair. Steve tried his best (his best wasn’t enough, it never will be). Why is his penance living alone in a time they’d love.
Especially Bucky. The jerk loved science; the man would be over the moon to see what’s happened nowadays…
”Fuck,” Steve mutters as he hits the bag. Then, again; he screams it this time: “FUCK!”
Sand, sweat, and blood stew together on the floor beneath Steve’s feet.
He steps away from the bag, chest heaving.
Abruptly, he realizes he’s crying; tears leaving salty trails down his cheeks. He tries to bat them away and only succeeds in getting blood all over his face.
”Captain Rogers—“ JARVIS starts to say something.
”Don’t.”
Steve cleans up the gym and leaves.
The third time, he doesn’t even head to the gym.
It’s right after an Avengers PR interview: another reminder that Steve Rogers isn’t important, only the Captain. His questions were related to his adjustment to the future; he gave the answers they wanted to hear.
What’s your favorite thing about the future? Health’s a lot better. (He was advised against saying ‘equality’, as certain groups might take that the wrong way.)
Found anyone to date? Not yet. (Bucky is dead—he never was an option anyway; and Captain America can’t be anything besides straight—and Peggy lived a whole life without me.)
It felt like someone else’s words in his voice. Puppet to a master; possessed to the ghost.
Steve Rogers has stopped feeling like anything but a mumbling in his head. His mouth is a vessel for the utterings of those who control his body now.
His relationship with the team is professional; they’re coworkers—Captain America can’t let them see the cracks in his walls. They only care insofar as he’s able to lead them.
The public. Well. They don’t care about Steve either.
He needs something to get the guilt and anger out, but JARVIS reported that Stark is in the gym, presumably testing a new suit.
…There’a a perfectly good knife in his closet. He usually keeps it in his boots; just in case.
The feelings always drain with the blood.
Steve grabs the knife out of his closet and heads to the bathroom—easiest room to clean, and JARVIS doesn’t monitor in there.
He starts to cut a stripe along his wrist, then stops. Someone will notice it there.
Thigh it is.
Just below his hip, Steve digs the blade into his skin and watches as red wells up beneath the knife’s silver. It burns. It burns so nicely. It brings him back to the here and now.
He must be human. Humans bleed red.
Then the shallow wound stitches itself up far too fast, and Steve is reminded that he’s not quite human; isn’t allowed to be. So he cuts another line, deeper; and one more below that.
They look like candy cane stripes decorating his leg. At that thought, Steve laughs out loud—it’s sharp, a little mean. Steve doesn’t like the sound, but there’s a certain satisfaction in letting it out.
These days, Steve doesn’t like much about himself—he hardly exists enough to like or dislike, though. Captain America, on the other hand, he hates; loathes with his whole being, really.
Did Steve Rogers ever exist? It’s starting to feel like something he made up. There’s only one person left who could prove his existence, and Steve hasn’t gone to see her.
Because he’s a coward. And he’s scared she won’t recognize him, or won’t want to see him, and Steve is scared for his own reaction—the past is like a bear, and meeting Peggy is poking that bear with a stick.
The last time he let himself think about the past, he spent an hour cleaning blood out of the gym floor.
Steve is a coward and not really real and not really human, not anymore, and he needs some way to deal with the pain that entails, so he slices a fourth line down his leg.
The euphoria hits again. He’s allowed to go insane for just a minute, alone in his bathroom, blood spilling onto the floor. Steve Rogers is real; the proof is right there. His pain is showing. It hurts and it’s rainbows and confetti and the stripes of the American flag.
He looks into the mirror. There is tension in his jaw, from holding back both a grimace and a smile. His eyes are tired.
Steve is about to start cleaning up when he realizes that he’s still bleeding. The serum couldn’t heal fast enough—he’s outrun it. He’s outrun it. The burning feeling is still there.
The pain is Steve’s and only his. There’s almost a source of pride, in the fact that this is something for himself; it’s a dirty secret the team would only try to stop.
People don’t like seeing Captain America as anything but ideal. If they tried to understand, it’d be to soothe their own guilt; not to help Steve. Nobody cares about Steve. His only importance is his job—there’s a need for a Captain America. And look what a great fucking job he’s done of that.
They could find a new Captain America, if they needed to. There were so many patriotic people in this country with such an understanding of his ideas.
Steve sits on the floor, back leaned against the wall, and watches the wounds heal themselves. He gets caught up in it, and when he checks his watch, it’s been an hour since he came in here.
Jesus, he should do this in his bathroom more often. No JARVIS, less cleanup; allowed to go as deep as he wants.
Steve takes to wearing jeans every day; pants if he’s exercising. Eventually, he wears long sleeves, too. Black Widow raises an eyebrow at the change but doesn’t say anything.
He’s handling it all. He’s found a way to manage the mental pain; and with the serum, the physical pain isn’t a bother. He can bear the weight of duty, spend a little time feeling crushed, then go back to doing everything well. He even starts being friendlier with his team—he’s less worried about them seeing his pain, now that he can keep it in check. It’s all fine. It’s just fine. Steve Rogers can live in the blood pouring from his skin.
It’s fine.
Six months after waking from the ice, Steve has had enough.
Nobody needs him. They don’t want him, either. They’ll find a replacement Cap and move on.
He hasn’t lost his faith in people, per se…
…just that he belongs among them.
He takes the knife and plunges it into his chest.
He wakes in a hospital bed with the concerned face of Bruce Banner peering down at him.