Chapter Text
Prelude
- Hurt by Nine Inch Nails, arranged by 2Cellos, 2011.
Captain America is all about sacrifice. Property of the US Army, sure. Steve signed that contract. He’s willing to make sacrifices. He just didn’t think it would be like this.
They need to make sure he’s okay, with scans and samples and tests of his reflexes, his memory. The ice could have affected his brain, they say. They kept him in a medically induced coma for a few days, to let his body heal. They keep him in the medical wing for practically a full twenty-four hours after he wakes. They tell him he should do talk therapy, because apparently that’s a thing people do without shame in the future. Steve doesn’t quite believe that. He thinks maybe they’re trying to trick him into giving something away.
He’s fine.
He’s just fine, he keeps telling them so.
They don’t seem fine, to be honest. The medical technicians, the doctors, even the headshrink… He sees the way they look at him, like he’s the second goddamn coming. Hero worship. Even the ones who don’t gawp, he can hear the way their hearts stutter in surprise when they see him, he can smell the nervous sweat on them.
They're intimidated by him. They don't know him.
Of course they don't know him. Everyone who knew him before Captain America is probably dead now.
He’s never hated the serum more.
The world could still use a man like you, Cap. There’s a place here for you, Fury had said. It keeps echoing through his brain. The more he sees...
There’s a place for him here, sure, but he’s got a feeling that it’s for the dancing monkey, not the kid who draws it.
1
I raise my flags, dye my clothes
It's a revolution, I suppose
We'll paint it red to fit right in, whoa
I'm breaking in, shaping up, checking out on the prison bus
This is it, the apocalypse, whoa
- Radioactive by Imagine Dragons, 2012.
“Look, there’s a facility upstate. A cabin. The Retreat. If you need to take some time, we can--”
“Sir?”
Steve looks up from the folders in his lap, but it’s Fury the agent is talking to, not him.
“Yes?” Fury says.
The agent looks… a little uncomfortable. “She’s… Not taking no for an answer.”
Fury sighs. “Of course she isn’t. Patch her through.”
Steve looks from the agent to Fury and back, confused, but not sure how to ask. “Yes sir,” says the agent, before leaving. Fury levels his gaze at Steve. “She’s going to want to talk to you,” he says frankly.
“Who?” Steve says.
Then the phone on Fury’s desk rings, and he answers it. “Hello Director.”
Director? Steve thought that Fury was the director…
And then he hears her, from the other end of the line -- and it is her, he’d know her voice anywhere, he knows it even now, with the weight of years cracking it. “Is he there?” she says, and something must show on his face, because Fury is staring at him with his one good eye in a way that is terribly, terribly knowing.
“Yeah, he’s here.”
“Put him on at once, Nicholas.”
Fury has a weary, but fond look on his face. He holds out the slim, cordless phone, so alien to everything Steve knows. “You want to talk to her?”
Steve stares at him, eyes wide. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to --
“Yeah, you do. You can have the room. Long as you need. No cameras in here.” He holds out the phone.
Steve takes it. It feels like it’s going to snap in his hands, it’s so small and thin. He waits until Fury is out of the office. The door closes behind him. Steve takes a breath, puts the phone to his ear. “Hello?” His voice sounds strange, echoing back at him.
“Steven?” she says, like it’s being punched out of her.
“Peggy,” he says, and his voice is immediately thick. “Peggy,” he says again, and he can feel his veneer of fine on the verge of shattering. Like cracks in a thin sheet of ice over a deep, dark pool. He was just talking to her on the radio, just yesterday, just seventy fucking years ago, Jesus--
“Good God, it really is you. It’s all over Twitter, apparently. Maggie sent me pictures, and I knew at once, I knew.”
Steve shakes his head, blinking fast. “Twitter?”
“Oh darling,” she says, and she sounds like herself, almost. Like herself after shouting her way through a firefight, maybe, or when she’s just woken up after a quick nap in the field. Rough, and tired, but herself. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m… Yeah.”
“Steven. You’re a terrible liar, dear.”
He lets out a shaky breath and bows his head. “It’s.” There are no words. He looks up. The back of Fury’s office is glass. The view is so strange. It’s the heart of New York. His hometown, his home. He doesn’t recognize it. “It’s…”
“Steve.” She sounds a little weepy herself. “Steve, you know I’d be there for you if I could, but I don’t know... I don’t think I should you know. I’ve... It’s been a long time, darling.”
He thinks about seeing her, and he reels. She’s old. She’s an old woman. She’ll be wrinkled, and fragile, and--
“Steven?” she’s saying. “Dear heart, take a deep breath for me, please. You’re alright, you know. You’re alright. Just breathe for me. Can you do that?”
He does as she asks, and realizes that he’s been breathing hard and fast and now he’s light headed. He has to focus to get the breath to come normally. It’s almost like having asthma again. It’s strangely familiar, in a way nothing else is. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I’m--”
“Don’t apologize. What have they told you so far?” she asks, and her businesslike tone does more than anything to pull him out of it. Report, soldier. “What are they saying, are you alright? Any side effects?”
“Not that they can find. They’ve been doing tests nearly non-stop since I woke up. Since they found me, probably. Looks like the serum still works just fine. Maybe too fine.” He pushes his hair off his forehead. “Seventy years as an icicle and I’m fit as a damn fiddle.”
“Erskine knew what he was doing.”
“Did he?” Steve says, suddenly bitter, suddenly angry. “Because he never said--” He cuts himself off. “I was never supposed to see 1941. It’s 2011. Peggy. It’s 2011.”
“Believe me, dear, I am aware. I came the long way around.”
He smiles at that, but he can’t laugh. Her dry humor, he remembers it from just a few days ago, her red, red lips curving on a wicked smile. Her lips on his. She’s old now. Seventy years, God. It keeps hitting him. It never stops hitting him.
“We looked for you, you know. Howard and I.”
“Is Howard--”
“No. Twenty years ago now. He has a son. Tony.”
“Frankly I’m surprised he only has one,” Steve quips back, with an edge of hysteria. It's hardly the time for a joke but what else can he do? What else could he ever do?
“Point,” she says, with a smile audible in her voice.
Howard’s son is probably older than he is now. He’s only 27. Jesus.
“Are they trying to get you back to work?” She sounds serious. Concerned.
He thinks about what Fury said. The world hasn’t changed all that much. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Soldier’s work. He feels the weight of it on him.
“Yeah,” he says, in answer to her question. “They are. Not right away, but… yeah.”
“Do you want that?”
“I want to go home,” he says, before he can stop himself. The words are so small, and so huge.
“Oh Steve,” she says, like he’s breaking her heart.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Don’t apologize,” she says again. “Never apologize, darling.”
He takes a breath and lets it out, shuddery. “I’ve been thinking, trying to… I’m here now, I need a plan, but I don’t… I don’t know what to do.”
There’s a long silence from her end. “If I were still the director of SHIELD, I would say whatever I thought would get you back in the fight. They’re going to want you on their side. And they’re going to want you badly.”
Steve frowns. There’s something underneath, something she’s not saying. “But?” he prompts.
She sucks a breath in through her teeth. It sounds staticky, over the phone. “But I’m not the Director of SHIELD anymore. I’m just an old woman who cares for you. You’ve given enough, Steven. So here’s what I say: take your time. Figure out what you want,” she says, her voice very proper and prim. “In brief? Fuck them.”
Steve laughs for the first time since Bucky died.
He takes Fury up on the offered cabin.
It’s a mistake.
He’s not totally sure who built this place -- it’s stronger than it looks, so he guesses they were superpowered. He knows that they kept trying to recreate the serum. He knows that they never succeeded, completely. He lingers over that word. Completely. It haunts him.
Whatever sorry bastard built this place clearly wanted peace and quiet. It’s gentle, all rustic softness and solitude. He doesn’t even know where the nearest neighbor is. They must be miles and miles away. Whoever built this place wanted to be left alone. They’re so far from civilization that he can see every star in the sky.
He hates looking. The spread of the night sky above him makes him nauseous with fresh grief. After the first night, as soon as the sun sets, he goes inside. He doesn’t want to see the stars. Well. He doesn’t want to see them alone.
He runs in the morning, after breakfast. Just runs and runs until his lungs burn like he’s back at Lehigh. There’s no one here to give him a second look when he runs faster than any human should. That’s worth something.
After that, he comes back to the cabin and goes through the next delivery from SHIELD. There are a lot of things to be taken care of. He’s alive again, so of course there’s paperwork. Bringing someone back from the dead apparently involves a lot of it. When he’s not doing that, he spends the days reading briefings. SHIELD has given him lots of briefings: the wars that happened in the wake of his war, the dangers that the world faces. Iron Man (Tony Goddamn Stark, of course it is, of course) , and the Hulk, and what really happened in New Mexico…
At night, he lies awake in the dark and listens to the silence. He doesn’t sleep. It seems that he doesn’t really need it, after all. Sometimes he closes his eyes, but the quiet presses in around him so hard it feels like he’s choking, feels like there’s ice crushing him and--
When it gets to be too much, usually around 3 or 4 am, he gets up and gives Peggy a call. She never pesters him about the fact that he clearly hasn’t slept. It’s morning where she is. She just drinks her tea and listens to him ranting about nuclear weapons, about neocolonialism, about terrorists and--
“That’s not all there is in the world, Steven,” she says, near the end of his first hellish month in the future. She sounds angry. “We put a man on the goddamn moon, you know. We’ve all but eliminated polio, they can cure scarlet fever in five days.”
“And that’s great, but -- ”
“Steven,” she says, sharp. “You are being manipulated. They want you in the fight. They’re trying to scare you into fighting for them.”
“Aren’t they right, though?” Steve says, and he sounds tired. He feels so tired. God he wishes he could sleep. “There’s still danger in the world.”
“There are miracles too,” Peggy says. “Steven, I know you. You shouldn’t be…” she seems to struggle for the word. “Stop looking for something to fight against. Find something to fight for. And for God’s sake, don’t try to do it alone.”
He doesn’t have an answer to that. He is so lonely he can’t stand it, but at the same time, he feels like…
Like he couldn’t bear to let other people -- strangers -- step into the empty places around him. Places where other people stood, only a few short weeks ago. He wants to hold on to them, the memory of them, as long as he can. The people who knew him, who really knew him. Knew Steve Rogers, not Captain America.
He rubs his face.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was never supposed to be like this.
“What?” Peggy says, clearly hearing something in his silence.
He drops his hand from his face and curls it around his coffee. “Nothing.” He doesn’t know that he could stand to say it aloud.
Peggy sighs, crackly down the phone line. “Steven. I called in half a dozen favors and dusted off several files of blackmail material to ensure that this line would not be bugged. You can say whatever it is that you’re thinking.”
“No I can’t.”
“Yes you can,” she insists.
He turns the coffee mug around and around, careful not to squeeze too hard. He’s already broken two or three. God does he miss the tin mugs they had in the army. If he bent them out of shape he could just bend them back.
“I just…” He swallows. “I didn’t really have a plan. For after the war.” He stops, lets out half a laugh. “Man With A Plan. What a fucking joke. I didn’t want to… get my own hopes up, I guess. I thought I’d have time. To… figure something out. And I think I know what I wanted, even if I have no idea how I would have--”
“Steven,” she starts, a reassurance that he doesn’t want to hear.
“Let me finish,” he says, a bit sharp. He takes a breath, slow, and makes himself be less… just less. “I thought, an apartment. In Brooklyn, because, well. It’s home and… I don’t know anywhere else, really. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. But I thought. Home, and then… The Howlies could visit, if we…”
If we all made it, he doesn’t have to say. They didn’t. He didn’t. He swallows.
“And I thought, maybe…” He squeezes his eyes shut and tries, just for a minute to ignore the banshee wailing in his head it’s too late, you’re too late, too fucking late-- “I thought,” he says, firmly, “if you had wanted… I know you didn’t need me around messing things up, but I…” He trails off, holds his breath. He’s so awful at this, he thinks miserably. Stop dancing around the thing, Rogers. “I would’ve wanted you to be there. Or. To be where you were, maybe. If... you would’ve wanted that...” he finishes, limping across the finish line of this terrible fucking confession.
She takes a breath, lets it out. “Well. It’s like that, is it?” She says it lightly, coolly, like it means nothing, like he didn’t just suggest that maybe he’d have liked to marry her someday. “Your timing is atrocious, as usual. And you’re quite right. I didn’t need you around.” Her voice turns gentle. “But oh, darling, I wanted you around. We all did, you know. You were so dearly missed, Steven.”
He knows. He aches with it. It squeezes tight around his throat, stops up any words he might have wanted to say, but he can’t cry. He hasn’t, since he woke up, since the initial shock passed. Sometimes he thinks the ice froze more than his body. Some childish part of himself, some piece of his soul, maybe, still hasn’t thawed. Maybe it died.
“You can still have it, you know. Home,” she says. “Brooklyn’s still there, and you’re still here.”
He shakes his head, violently, but she’s not here. She can’t see him. He has to say it. He sighs, shaky. “Home. Home is people, Peggy.”
“Darling,” she says, like he’s breaking her heart -- breaking her heart again. Breaking her heart all over again.
Abruptly, he can’t keep talking about this. He feels sick just from what they’ve said so far. “I should go,” he says. “I should let you go.”
“Steve…” She sighs, sounding like she wants to say more, but giving in. “Alright, dear heart. Alright.”
Once they’ve rung off, he goes for his morning run.
After a few miles, he gets his second wind. His body buzzes with it; a rush of something the doctors say is like superconcentrated adrenaline mixed with speed and steroids. They thought about trying to synthesize it, one of the techs had babbled, dazed and confused in the presence of a living legend. But it turns out that Steve’s home-grown epinephrine is so potent it would kill an elephant.
He keeps going through the runner’s high. By the time he’s run a full marathon, he’s starting to flag. He pushes, keeps pushing. He runs until his lungs burn with it, until he can’t keep going.
Finally, he staggers to a halt. He stops there, by the shore of the lake, puts his hands on his shaking knees, and stares at the place where the water meets the land, at the stones under his feet, the silt, the solidity of the world.
It’s inexorable. It’s so unrelentingly real. He lives here, and he can’t change that. He can’t run away from it.
He drops to his knees, dips his hands into the lake, and cups water over his head. It’s blessedly cool on his overheated skin. He rocks back, sitting on his heels, and looks up at the clear sky. It’s silent, except for the lapping waves.
It’s so quiet.
It’s too fucking quiet here.
He can’t stay.
He doesn’t call Peggy for advice, and she doesn’t call him to push. He leaves the Retreat and goes back to New York. Where else is he supposed to go?
When Fury asks, gently, if Steve wants to return to work, to come back as Captain America, if he’s ready to let the world know that he’s back, Steve shakes his head.
“No. I need more time,” he says, and grimaces, braced for--
But there’s no one to look at him, lift a brow, and say “Ya need more time? Seriously?” And then roll his eyes at the people around them and say: “Can ya believe this joker? He says he needs more time. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this fuckin' schmuck.”
There’s no one to say it, and no one to hear it and laugh.
Fury just gives a somber little nod. It’s not like he can refuse. Steve was on mission when the plane went down, which technically means that he’s just gotten back from the longest goddamn tour of duty that anyone has ever been on, ever.
They set him up with an apartment. Inside the apartment is a phone -- one of the slim, alien, cordless ones. When he picks it up, he finds a card tucked underneath.
This one isn’t bugged either, darling. And your mobile is clear.
But he doesn’t call her.
They set him up with a bank account. The government owes him backpay like you wouldn’t believe, and every company that ever used his face owes him a cut, so he’s…
He’s got more money than he likes to think about. It makes him feel vaguely ill. On the one hand, he’d always dreamed of having enough money, of not having to worry about it, but now that he has it…
He’d rather give it away. His financial advisor (he has a financial advisor) tells him that he shouldn’t do anything rash. His SHIELD therapist says the same thing. When she can twist his arm into actually going to his appointments.
“How are you doing, Steve?” she asks him. Every time.
“Fine,” he says. Every time.
They don’t pay her enough.
She always gives him a little plastic cup of water when he came in, and he keeps staring at it, running his finger around the curled down edge of the rim.
Everything’s in plastic now. They had plastic back in his day -- he can still picture the cracked casing of the bakelite radio, the one he kept having to fix all through ‘39. According to something called Wikipedia, mass-produced plastic didn’t really get rolling until after the war. And now there’s plastic everywhere, the smell of it strange, leaching its flavor into the food, the drinks. That was what had driven him to look it up on his phone. Why does all my food taste like chemicals?
Steve doesn’t mind, really, and he wouldn’t waste perfectly good food just because it tasted a little plasticky.
But it had said on Wikipedia that a plastic bottle takes 400 years to degrade, and he’d felt a chill rocket down his spine. After all, isn’t he just another product of wartime innovation? How long it will take him to degrade?
“Steve?”
Steve looks up. The therapist is watching him, brows raised. He missed something. “Sorry,” he says. “What did you say?”
The therapist -- Dr. Hartman, he reminds himself -- folds her hands in front of her and regards him with kind, brown eyes. “I asked how your day was going.”
“It’s fine, ma’am,” he tells her. He even smiles.
She’s not buying it.
They really don’t pay her enough.
He gets a computer and learns how to use it.
But.
Well. Once he’s got the hang of it, it’s like a black hole, sucking him in, and the next thing he knows, he’s Googling the Barnes family, just to see, he just wants to see --
But all the Barneses that he knew are dead.
Winnie died first, and that leaves him hot and cold with shock. He can’t even imagine George without her. Big, gentle George who was so quiet, and so sad. Winnie was his rock, and he had to go on without her, for almost five years.
He finds out that there are Proctors still living in New York, still living in Brooklyn. Rebecca’s children, and their children. He’s terrified to run into them. Just the thought of it knocks him sideways. Would they look like her? Would they look like him? Or would he pass them by without even recognizing them, without somehow sensing it -- a piece of him still breathing and walking around Brooklyn.
But he can’t ask, can’t reach out to the Procters because Rebecca died in April -- April 2011. He missed her by months. He could have talked to her, could have had time with her, could have spoken to a Barnes -- a real Barnes, one of the ones who knew him, knew them both --
He keeps looking. He can’t seem to stop himself.
Susan and Jeanie never had kids -- Susan was too busy with all her causes, right up until the day she died: still fighting at 78 years old. She never saw the Twin Towers come down, and that’s a small mercy, Steve thinks.
After Susan died, Jeanie moved to Massachusetts with her partner, Elizabeth --
Her partner.
Jeanie and Liz met working at the factory together, making bombs while he was getting himself blown up. They lived long enough to see the laws change. They got married.
There’s quite a bit about them, because Jeanie became as outspoken as Susan in her old age. There’s footage. A video on YouTube, from a Pride March in 2009. Pride, as in gay pride. And Jeanie’s there, Jeanie, looking old, so old. Older than Winnie, older than --
“Prop 8, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Laramie… My brother didn’t die for this shit,” Jeanie says. She’s holding the mic, not letting them take it away, and there’s fire in her blue eyes. There’s a ferocity in her she didn’t have when she was younger, and there’s a woman - - Elizabeth, her partner, her wife - - standing behind her, wearing a shirt with a pink triangle on it. A pink triangle. “ Captain America didn’t die for this shit,” Jeanie says, and there’s no hesitation, no wavering even though her voice is reedy with age. “If you think he would’ve been proud of our country right now, you didn’t know Steve Rogers.”
“You think Captain Rogers would’ve supported gay rights?”
“Steve was like a brother to me, and he was a little shit, but he wasn’t an asshole.”
Elizabeth snorts out a laugh behind her, covering her face with wrinkly, age-spotted hands. Jeanie elbows her, like they’re kids, and that’s Jeanie, that’s pure Jean Barnes, elbowing her friend not to give away the joke.
“Listen,” Jeanie continues. “You think it was an accident that Steve ran the first integrated unit in the US Army? Steve believed in America, where it doesn’t matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love. Everyone deserves a fair shake, everyone deserves equal treatment under the law. That’s the America that Steve Rogers believed in. That’s the America that my brothers gave their lives for.”
Steve slams the laptop shut and pushes it away.
Jeanie and Liz share a plot in Greenwood. Steve won’t visit. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. His whole body shakes with the desire to talk to her, because -- because --
But she died years before he came out of the ice. And that’s all there is to say about it. They’re gone. He missed them.
He doesn’t leave his apartment for three days after that, can’t even face the world. He thinks about calling Peggy, but he doesn't. He thinks about ways he could maybe speed up that whole plastic-taking-400-years-to-degrade thing. He thinks about telling his therapist about thinking about that. He won’t. He might tell a priest though, if he can ever find the will to actually go to Church.
He picks himself up. He always does.
He can’t find a Church that does the service in Latin, and hearing it in English makes him feel like he’s sitting next to himself instead of sitting in his own body.
Instead, he joins a gym, one where they give him the keys so he can pummel heavy bags all night instead of sleeping. He’ll bring his own, he explains, because he tends to break them. The owner doesn’t say anything about it. Doesn’t recognize him either, but that doesn’t surprise Steve. It’s New York, so even if they did recognize him, they wouldn’t say anything.
But people mostly don’t recognize him. He gets that, because Captain America is either heroic or smiling. Steve doesn’t look very heroic in his plaid shirts and khaki pants. And he doesn’t smile so much anymore.
In May, eight months after waking up into this living nightmare, Steve finally requests the dossiers from SHIELD. His team.
There’s paper files, and footage, too. He plugs in the hard drive and clicks through to the clips. Newsreels. They’re terrible. They look so.
Old.
He turns off the footage and goes through the files.
Dernier was the first to go, after the war. He was the oldest of them, but he died young; a car crash when he was just 57.
And then there was Howard -- not technically a Howlie, but still a friend. Another car crash. Steve supposes that shouldn’t surprise him, but it strikes him as odd. It’s a hell of a coincidence.
Jones went home a hero, married his sweetheart, and started making noise. Somewhere along the line, easygoing Gabe Jones caught fire. After the war, he ran for office, he fought the laws, he worked with Martin Luther King Jr and survived two assassination attempts before dying at the ripe old age of 87, as a final fuck you to everyone who ever told him he couldn’t.
Monty kept on working -- his files are heavily redacted. Steve could maybe press for details, but the important bit is there at the end of the file. James Montgomery Falsworth eventually retired to the Caribbean and died in his sleep a few years later.
Morita went for the quiet life, which is funny to Steve, because Morita was always such a spitfire, so unlike Gabe. But when he was done working for the SSR -- for SHIELD -- Jim Morita moved to New York, had a family, lived a long time. There’s Moritas still living in New York too -- one of them just became Principal at some fancy high school in Midtown.
Dum Dum, improbably, outlived all the others. He ran the team after Steve went into the ice, and Falsworth got tapped to be an agent for MI-13. Dugan never had a family of his own; he was married to his work. And his funeral was flooded with well-wishers, with all the guys he trained and all their kids and…
Steve’s seen pictures of his own funeral. The pomp. The fucking circumstance. He hated it. He’s glad he wasn’t there, he’d have been mortified.
He should have had a funeral like Dum Dum’s.
Steve puts away the files. He needs air. He needs to get out. He needs to hit the goddamn heavy bag until he can’t anymore.
You here with a mission, sir?
I am.
Trying to get me back in the world?
Trying to save it.
Steve says: “You should’ve left it in the ocean.” He thinks you should’ve left me in the ice.
Agent Romanoff says: “There was quite the buzz around here, finding you...” and not much else of consequence. That’s deliberate, he knows. She watches him, and there's something in her eyes. Like she’s measuring him to some standard. Like he might be useful to her, later. Peggy had looked at him like that, once upon a time. It had made him want to stand a little straighter, go a little farther, a little faster.
Now, he just wants to get this over with.
Thor says: “He’s adopted,” and it’s almost comical, except Steve had seen Thor’s face when he grabbed Loki, when they brought him in. When they locked him up. Steve never had a brother, but he thinks about what it would’ve been like if one of the Howlies had lost it and started killing for fun. He knows enough to know that the line between war and murder is so thin that you can’t always tell when you’ve crossed it.
Bruce says: “Steve.” And Steve looks at him, because it’s been months since anyone other than Peggy or his fucking therapist called him Steve. Bruce is the only other guy here who got the serum -- or at least, some version of it. There’s an understanding there. “Tell me none of this smells a little funky to you?”
And Bruce is right, of course.
Tony says: “everything special about you came out of a bottle,” and Steve hears: right, cuz you got nothing to prove like it’s a punch under the gut. And Steve, being Steve, thinks about saying:
And everything special about you came from your father -- do you want to speculate about why those StarkTech repulsors sound exactly like a Hydra Tesseract gun? You think Fury started all this? Howard never could leave well enough alone and you're just like your daddy, aren't you?
So no one realizes that he’s actually showing some restraint (not a lot, but some) when he says “Put on the suit.” He may have beaten Hydra seventy years ago, but it’s like he can feel them all around, and he just wants to hit something.
Barton says: “I can,” when Steve asks if Natasha can fly one of those jets. He says it with a kind of deliberate steadiness. He’s not asking for anything, he’s not asking to prove himself, he’s just offering. Steve looks to Natasha. Her nod is slow, deliberate, so he can’t misinterpret. It’s enough for Steve. He looks back to Barton. “You got a suit?” he asks.
Banner says: “I’m always angry,” and Steve tells the Hulk: “Smash,” because he gets it. Oh boy, does he get it.
Thor gives him a hand up and says: “You ready for another bout?”
They’re going to lose, eventually, and he knows it. They both know it. Even Thor can’t keep fighting forever. They’re both bleeding from the gut, and maybe Thor can shrug that off, and maybe Steve can push through it for now, but they are so outnumbered. They are so outmatched.
Steve’s been outmatched before. It never stopped him then.
“What, you getting sleepy?” he says.
Steve says: “We won.” And he can’t believe it. This mess of a team, this time bomb. They did it, somehow.
“Alright. Hey. Alright. Good job, guys,” Tony says, one iron-clad arm moving in the saddest fist-pump known to man. “Let's just not come in tomorrow. Let's just take a day. Have you ever tried shawarma?” he asks the Hulk. “There's a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don't know what it is, but I wanna try it.”
“We’re not finished yet,” says Thor.
If it’s all the same to you,
I’ll have that drink.
The first thing Steve does, once Loki is in custody, is call Peggy.
“Still alive I see?” is her tart greeting.
“Well,” he says, and glances behind him, to check that he's alone on this balcony. Or what remains of it. “You know me. I’m like a bad penny.”
“Really Steven. Do you only call when there’s an apocalypse now? Could you be more dramatic?”
Steve decides not to tell her that he's standing on the edge of the balcony, wind-whipped and looking down over the smoke and rubble littering his city. He's seen the posters for those Batman movies. He knows what he looks like.
“Are you alright, dear heart?” she asks.
“I'm fine, Pegs,” he says. His whole back is one giant bruise, there’s a sizable burn on his stomach, and he’s pretty sure he cracked a few ribs, but nothing too serious. “Bit sore. Nothing that won't heal.” He eases himself down with a groan, sits at the edge of the balcony and stares.
“That... isn't really what I meant, darling.”
She knows him too well. He hangs his head and sighs. Then he lifts his head again, looks out across the city. “I never wanted to see a battlefield here,” he admits, quietly. “I mean. I saw London, Paris, I know that no city is immune but still...”
“I'm so sorry,” Peggy says gently. “I know how painful it is. New York is your home.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, about that. What I was saying, the last time we talked--”
“Are you about to indirectly propose to me again, Steven?” she says, lightly.
“Margaret Carter, when I finally get the balls to actually propose to you, I promise you will know about it,” Steve says, in his best You Can Trust Me, I'm Captain America voice.
She laughs. “Well. I look forward to it. But what were you saying?”
“I was saying, about home. I've been -- ever since I woke up, I've been trying to get home, you know?” He says. “Trying to find some way to hold on, to go back, somehow. But I…”
“Home is people, you said.”
He swallows. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah it is.”
“I know what you mean,” she says. “You know -- or, well, I suppose you don't, actually, but my husband… he was a good man. You would've liked him, I think.”
“No, I wouldn't have,” he says, teasing.
“Mmm,” she says, just a touch skeptical. “I think you would have, actually. But when he died -- oh, I thought that was it, you know? I thought -- two great loves. That’s certainly more than my fair share. I was so sure that I was done, and so sure that I was too old to love again.”
“You're not as old as me,” he says.
“Hush when your elders are talking,” she scolds him. “I'm an old woman rambling about her life. Least you can do is let me finish.”
He smiles. “Yes ma'am.”
“So. There I was, wrong side of sixty, a widow, and trying to run an intelligence agency, to boot. Living alone in New York, thinking about moving to DC. And an old friend called up out of the blue. Says if I was looking for a place to stay...” Peggy takes a breath in, and says, very deliberately: “So I moved in with her. And when I retired back to England, she came too. Turns out you’re never too old, darling.”
It hits him in stages; what this means. What she's telling him. “Oh. Oh.” But maybe he's reading too much into it, maybe he misunderstands-- “Your friend.”
“Her name is Angie. Say hello, Angie,” she adds, leaning back from the phone.
“Punch an alien in the face for me, Cap!” calls a tinny, woman’s voice, in a thick New York accent.
“I like the sound of her,” Steve says, laughing.
“Me too,” says Peggy, fond. “So. I've been thinking about that apartment you mentioned. After the war.”
He thinks of it: the sunny apartment, the Howlies drinking beer in his living room. Peggy there too, probably drinking whiskey. She wouldn't be the only one--
Hesitantly -- and she is so rarely hesitant about anything -- Peggy adds: “He would've been there too, wouldn’t he. He would've wanted to be there.”
And they both know who she’s talking about. “It wasn’t--” he starts to protest. He doesn’t want her to misunderstand, but…
Possibly she understands better than he does.
“We both loved you,” she says. “In our own ways. And you loved us both. Didn’t you.” It’s not a question. It’s not an accusation. He doesn’t have to answer, but he wants to. Since she asked.
Steve looks up at the city. It blurs and wobbles before him. He blinks and the tears run over his cheeks, sliding through grime and blood and ichor. “Yeah,” he says thickly. He still does. After all this time -- and yet no time at all -- he still does.
“Yes. I thought so.” Peggy sighs. “I don't know what I would've done with you, after the war. You two would've always been underfoot.”
Steve chokes out a laugh. “Yeah, we… yeah.” He swallows, thick in his throat, thinking of it. The three of them. Whatever it would’ve been. They would’ve worked out something. Steve could’ve come up with a plan. Peggy would’ve come up with plan B. Bucky would’ve found a way to make it happen. But…
“I can't go back,” he says. “Can I.”
Peggy’s voice is kind, and firm, and cracked with age. “No, darling.”
He lets out a breath and bows his head. He rubs his face with one hand. “You know…” he says, trying for light and not quite making it, “awful as all this is, he would have loved it. Aliens and spaceships. The future. New York. Aside from all the death and destruction, this was… This was Bucky's dream.” It might be the first time he’s said Bucky’s name, since…
“Home is people, Steven,” Peggy says quietly. “I know you think you're alone, dear heart, but you aren't. I swear you aren't.”
“Peggy, I--”
“Steve?”
That wasn’t Peggy’s voice. Steve swipes at his eyes and looks over. Natasha is there at the door, watching him with a studiously neutral expression. Assessing, as she always is. “We could use you in here,” she says.
“A minute,” Steve says.
She nods.
It isn’t until she’s turning her back that Steve realizes -- she called him Steve. Not Cap.
“I gotta go, Pegs,” he says.
“Alright, darling. Don’t wait until the next apocalypse to call.”
“Yes ma’am.”