Work Text:
Nothing SHIELD could do would ever fully encapsulate the future for Steve.
They try, with boxes of files and weeks alone to read through seventy years of history he'd missed. His personal issued laptop is full of videos and pictures, all trying to encompass an immeasurable amount of change and loss.
He reads through it all. Pages of distant, long-gone events that still affect the world. But it feels intangible. Unreal, like a blurry uncertain afterimage. Not a real, living, breathing entity.
He drifts like a ghost down grey streets he used to know and he has to wonder if he’s really there. Physically he may be, but his spirit is lost. He has no roots. Nothing to ground himself to. He’s adrift, lost in a fog he can’t see his way out of.
When Tony offers to house him in the Avengers tower, Steve doesn’t expect anything to be different. His connection to this future is shaky at best. The threads of Captain America keep him afloat, but barely.
The room Tony gives him is open and empty in the way houses seem to be built nowadays. It isn’t bare, the room furnished tastefully with simple, bland furniture. It doesn’t speak of home. It doesn’t even speak of Tony. The beige blanket over the couch probably looks the same as any other in a dozen different hotels.
Even the books on the shelf don’t say much. They’re all new, some classics he had read before and some new publications, the raving reviews on the back most likely the reason they had been picked. As though some New York Times list could tell Steve anything about the person who had selected the book.
He’s drawn to the bookshelf anyways. Books had always been a comfort to him. He had passed days sick in bed reading, sometimes listening to his mother or Bucky read aloud when his eyes failed him or the headaches became too fierce to focus.
He’d studied during the war too, packing his suitcase full of strategic books when he was sent to basic training. The other men in his barrack had laughed to see him bent over the pages in the fading light after supper but the work paid off ten-fold when he achieved Captain rank and took on his own team.
Steve lifts his hand and runs his fingers over the crisp, glossy spines on the shelf. The floor to ceiling windows beside him show a bright orange setting sun, the light reflecting and glittering off a foreign skyline.
He doesn’t focus on the frightening vastness in front of him, nor the smoke and lingering damages still visible from the recent attack. Instead he keeps his eyes on the bookshelf, scanning over the titles.
Could he do it again? Study himself into the role he’s given? The future… the present feels as thin and fragile as a mirage. A blank canvas like the white, spacious room behind him. He needs something, anything here he can hold on to—
His eyes rest on the spines of the books, the only spot of colour in the room, and he pulls one out.
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything.
Books become his first lifeline. Nothing SHIELD could do could really show the life and culture of the world he’d found himself in. But every book he reads adds a new shade of grey to the white ghosttown he walks through.
It doesn’t matter what book. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, he reads them all. Hungrily. Like a man starving. A man dying of thirst. (And drowning. Every night, in cold white ice, over and over again.)
In a way it’s easier to bury himself in books rather than face the outside world. The world of paper has a beginning, middle and end. A set plot to follow, a reason for its twists and turns. The real world is never so kind.
Some turns take him by surprise though.
“Oh hey,” Clint says one day, plopping down beside him on the common room couch. He splays out in a patch of sun like a cat, his dirty blond hair bright gold as he looks at Steve in interest.
“I’ve seen that book around,” he nods at the one in Steve’s lap. “Isn’t it new?”
Steve fights down the urge to clutch the book closer to himself, as if he’ll lose it. “I found it in my room,” he says, showing Clint the cover. It’s a simple design, but striking. A field of green and gold standing out from a white background.
“Bringing the Shovel Down,” Clint reads, before sitting back. “Do’ya like it?”
Steve blinks and looks down at the page he has marked. Clint’s question pokes right at a faint discomfort he’d been trying to ignore. The poems are well-written and the author’s voice comes through strongly, but the theme is hard to ignore.
‘Ross Gay gets down to bare-bones difficulty: love often tinged with grief, violence, and deception’, one of the reviews had said.
And Steve, whose heart has seen enough grief and violence and deception to last him a lifetime, sometimes wonders how he could possibly find the bright rays of hope and love the poet searches for.
He isn’t ready.
Steve’s lips thin and his fingers tighten on the cream white pages. “It’s good,” he tells Clint simply.
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things
It’s so slow he doesn’t notice it at first, the way the Avengers start to integrate themselves into his life. Clint comes to him a few days afterwards and hands him a book, a half-smile on his face that Steve hasn’t seen since before the Battle of New York.
“Is it good?” Steve asks, looking down at the blue-grey cover.
If anything, the smile on Clint’s face brightens. “No way,” he says, much to Steve’s surprise. “But I need a fellow reader to commiserate with. It’s so bad, but somehow the reviews are divided on this one. I need someone to rant with about this atrocity.”
The idea is so startling that Steve actually reads it that very night. And Clint is right. The book is terrible and when Steve texts him to let him know, Clint calls immediately, the two of them trading laughably badly written passages into the night.
Natasha grumbles later into the comms on a mission that Clint is no longer allowed to recommend books to Steve, because the two have yet to stop chatting about it in between bouts of fighting.
Steve laughs, and he doesn’t even realise it’s for the first time since he woke up.
Natasha pulls him away from his books for a walk a few weeks later, the breath of autumn tugging at the yellowing leaves on the trees.
“It’s my favourite season,” she tells him as they walk through a park. The air is bright and crisp, the sound of children from a nearby playground filtering through.
Steve walks with his hands in his pockets, watching the light breeze rustle the red and orange leaves above them.
“It’s beautiful,” he says after a while. Then, “Did you know I was colourblind before the serum?”
It almost feels natural to chat with Natasha. The talk of Before and After loses some of its sting as he looks over the green parkland.
“I shipped out in the fall,” his hand comes out of his pocket, unconsciously tracing the lines of the scene around him. “I always wanted to try painting it. I worked in black and white before, but now…”
He shrugs, and lets the conversation drift to something else. But later, when he comes back to his room from a trip to the gym, he finds a paint box sitting in front of his door. A smiley face in Natasha’s hand looks up at him from a bright green post-it note.
“I didn’t know you painted,” Thor says, looking over Steve’s shoulder curiously. The light is good in the common room and Steve looks out the wide windows, trying to capture the ebb and flow of the snowy skyline.
“Haven’t for a long time,” he says distractedly, eyes barely moving as he mixes his paints.
Thor doesn’t seem to mind the silence, standing next to him like a warm sentinel. Normally having someone standing behind him would set Steve on edge. But it doesn’t do that this time. Maybe it’s the pale sunlight shining through the clouds or the way the frosty blues of the sky mix on his palate but… he doesn’t mind.
“You’re like our own Bob Ross,” another voice says some time later, and Steve looks up to find Bruce watching them.
That of course leads to questions from both of what he means and that leads to an afternoon spent watching a relaxing children’s show. SHIELD would have never thought to show it to Steve, but it’s perfect.
Later, Steve paints Bruce a green happy little tree.
The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
Steve wakes up with sweat clinging to the back of his shirt, his breath tight in his chest. The bed presses down on him, as if to swallow him, and he shoves himself up. He can’t stay in his apartment, the air is too oppressive, the remnants of his nightmare hiding in the shadows.
Instead he makes his way up to the common room. His easel is still set up by the window and he walks over, the midnight city a stark contrast from his painting.
There’s a sound in the kitchen behind him and he doesn’t startle because he knew Tony was there long before the man decided to come out of the shadows. Steve looks over.
The street lights reflect off of dark bags under Tony’s eyes and Steve wonders if he looks the same.
“Decided to join the insomnia club?” Tony asks, the light tone of his voice an easy bridge for what he’s really asking.
Steve looks back towards the sleeping city. “Bed’s too soft,” he says finally. Because maybe he isn’t quite ready to talk about the nightmares. But he thinks Tony might understand.
“Well,” Tony says quietly after a while. “We certainly can’t have that.”
By the end of the week Steve has a new, firmer mattress, and, when Tony goes all out to buy him a new bed set, Steve doesn’t stop him. Instead he changes out the sterile white sheets and blankets for sky blue sheets and a spring green comforter.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
SHIELD never could have presented Steve the future properly. Their beige folders and white files only built up against the grey rubble that used to be his life. But little by little, spots of colour began to creep back in. A million, one at a time.
And when Bucky comes back, cold and grey and hurting, but ready to try to grasp the threads of life again. Steve is ready.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.