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Steve isn't in a good place. He never is nowadays. Technology blurs around him, new laws surround him, social change drowns him and he seems completely alone in it. Everyone has their demons, sure, Natasha gets terrified at the sign of emotion, Tony can't talk about his father, Bruce is always on the edge of danger and Clint has deep seated abandonment issues. And they all survive life.
So why can't he?
Maybe, Steve muses, it's because he's from a generation of problem sharers. Not in the way that things like depression and homosexuality were talked about, but more like everything was freer. He could talk to Bucky and his mom about anything (Sarah Rogers endured many of Steve's oblivously infatuated rants about Bucky), without feeling ashamed about it.
But here, in this new century, millennium, time, all problems were shrunk to nothing, and even mentioning them was a taboo subject.
Steve supposed objectively that his depression wasn't silly or exaggerated, that him feeling weighted down by the alien technology and society that surrounded him wasn't idiotic or insignificant.
But he couldn't help feeling like it was.
No one in the Tower talked about their problems. Nat went on a training spree, Clint hid in the vents, Bruce hid doing yoga and Tony invented a new machine.
And what did Steve do?
He slept.
That's how he got himself here, laid in bed, stuck comatose at 3am thinking about his "failure".
There were times like this, after the fall, when all he could seem to do is lay in bed and shut out the world, lie oblivious even to those around him. Let his own thoughts drown him.
And since the Potomac, the gaps between these times have been few and far between.
It seems like all he does is wade through life, dragged back by the constant immersion of fatigue all around him, the few times that he actually spends up just ticking down to the days spent in bed, surrounded by his own sweat and grime and sadness.
He wasn't just sad, he thinks.
He's not just sad in the way that you cry and you feel blue.
It's like a frustration felt at himself, aimed at everything he is, everything he's done, anger for all the shit that has happened to the people he loves, loved. Isolation in the way that no one else is muddling through this circus show of an era, losing all sense of themselves.
Emptiness in the way that he only feels alive when he's out there fighting, and sometimes he doesn't even know if he's on the right side.
He doesn't even care.
Sun is breaking now, he can feel it straining against his clenched eyelids, and he knows the routine he'll go through now.
Natasha will knock on his floor and ask him if he wants coffee and he will deny, citing a need for a run.
He will go for the run, because the internet told him that running increased the release of endorphins and serotonin, and he will still feel equally as bad, except now he will feel guilty for the present, where Sam lives a tumultuous life thanks to him, and Tony fears the shadow of his dad coming back.
He will come back, consume half his fridge out of binge eating habit, shower and go to bed.
He will then get up at dinner to have dinner with them all, fake a smile and act like the Captain is a-ok, and then go back to bed.
And repeat.
As the door opened to the sound of a certain red head, he knew he would only be able to survive a few more of these pitiful excuses for a life.
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Steve is in a worse place now.
He thinks that Nat has already figured it out, Bruce will soon follow and then it's just a matter of Clint sneaking his way into overhearing them discuss it.
He knows that Sam already knows.
He knows that because as he's sat here, on a bench in the middle of Central Park, in the middle of winter, with frost chasing his hands and snow covering his thinly-clothed body, all he can see is the ghost of pity clouding Sam's eyes when he looked at him. As little as that should matter to him, it feels like a knife in the gut, or a panic-induced cage around his heart. Because now somebody knows.
He doesn't know how long he has been sat on rotting, dank wood, looking out over a murky pond, his temperature dipping lower and lower despite his raised metabolism.
He doesn't know because that doesn't matter.
Sam knows, he's known for a while and that's terrifying. The realisation struck him when they had lunch, half-eaten pasta left as the ever-exhausting topic of finding bucky was scoured over, still fruitlessly.
And that is scary past the fact that someone has recognised his pain, but because they know why he feels like this.
It's Bucky.
Sam knows now that all this is because of Bucky, because of long-forgotten feelings and the memory of the man that held Steve's heart.
Hearts can be easily broken or forgotten, but Steve has only ever loved two people, given his heart to two people: Peggy, and Bucky.
And now Sam knows. Knows that before the Potomac, the Washington D.C. fight, that Steve was just a shell; a man putting on a mask to give a nation he doesn't even know morale he doesn't even own.
And now, as icy flakes and a cold breeze start to edge up his body and freeze his very core, Sam knows that the real Steve was brought out of the ice the day that he first saw the Winter Soldier, and that the real Steven Rogers wasn't the all-perfect Captain America, but a man.
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Steve doesn't even know what he is anymore.
After the infamous "Central Park Freeze", aptly named by Pepper as one of the biggest PR scandals to come out of the nation's hero, he has been poked and prodded by doctors and psychiatrists and the media, all wanting to know why he fell asleep on a bench in a rarely visited area of the park in -16 degree weather and didn't wake up for two weeks.
Everyone is to be treating him like he's made of actual shards of glass, with Bruce barely even smiling around him, just cautious eyes and worried gestures, Pepper trying not to get involved, Sam giving him all the wrong advice, Tony being overly abrasive, as if purposely insensitive remarks will make up for everyone else's fucking pussyfooting.
The only people who seem to get him are Natasha and Clint, his newfound 'besties', which is why he is currently sat with them, Natasha resting her head on his calves, her body positioned on the floor, her back against the sofa. Clint, with Steve's head on his lap, attempting to braid his lengthened sandy strands, humming occasionally, a non-committal response to whatever they were watching on tv, warmth emitting from the both of them and surrounding the bland apartment he lived in. And he was sat, situated in the middle of this new routine, watching a television series he didn't actually protest to.
Which, ironically, was Midsomer Murders.
You may ask me what was ironic about Steve watching (and vaguely enjoying) a show set in England, revolving around an older gentlemen solving weird countryside murders and joking with his deputy, both with domestic softness, but you may have to reread the aforementioned statement.
Because here he was, not entirely happy, not entirely depressed and despairing, sat with two of the world's greatest spies, and undoubtably the greatest superheroes, watching a show about village murder with weird comedic value.
And he was, for some extent of the word, content.
Surprisingly, today was a good day. He had those now. And whilst the nation all tiptoed around him or shoved their accusations in his face, whilst the psychiatrists told him he had too many mental disorders to count, whilst he still sometimes looked in the mirror and wanted to be surrounded in ice, back to a time when he thought he would be reunited with his loves in whatever afterlife there was, whilst he still looked for Bucky, now with the help of the demanding spy and her long-suffering archer,
sometimes he didn't mind the warmth that seeped into his bones.