Summary: Memories were so often thought of with nostalgia and perfection, hindsight being both twenty/twenty and seen through rose colored glasses. Steve Rogers was normally a no nonsense type of man, but in this instance, he decided that it was better to maintain the illusion than to break it.
Disclaimer: Not mine
Rose Colored Glasses
The pages were smooth, thin between his fingers as he carefully picked each of them up and studied them briefly, just enough to see what he needed to know, and set them to the side.
Dugan, deceased.
Morita, deceased.
Dernier, deceased.
Jones, deceased.
Falsworth, deceased.
Carter, retired.
Steve paused, his fingers lightly gripping the single page that listed Peggy's status and current whereabouts. There was a phone number at the bottom of the paper that caught his eye. His head turned, almost of its own accord, to stare at the telephone sitting by his bedside.
It wouldn't take much effort. Muscles bunching in his thighs as he stood, three measured steps to the table, one hand outstretched to dial the set of numbers that could connect him to his past and ground him, but something made him pause. His brain went into overdrive, in much the same way that it used to, during the war.
How old were the briefs? Had she passed on already? Or worse, was she addlepated, like his grandfather, who couldn't even recognize his own daughter when she'd visited him in the hospital? Would it simply be better to keep the memory of how he thought of her intact, to remember her through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia that tinted everything to perfection?
As a young boy, he'd picked his mother flowers once from the garden at the very end of the street. Bucky had laughed at him when he'd told his friend his plans, but he'd helped Steve anyway. They'd gathered all kinds, none of which they knew the names of, but Steve had thought that they were pretty. He'd presented his mother with the pilfered bouquet, small dirt clods falling to the kitchen floor, and the happiness on her face was worth triggering his asthma.
As a child, so terribly naive, he'd wanted his mother to keep that joy with her, and so he'd picked one of the violet colored flowers from the vase and pressed it carefully between the pages of their Bible, hoping to preserve it. It stayed there for months, long after the other blooms had withered and died, stayed until it was winter and grey and Steve felt that his mother needed to smile. He'd pulled the blossom from the book with some disappointment.
The flower was faded, its vibrant purple color now tinged with brown. The petals were thin and brittle, fragile, even in his mother's delicate hands. She had smiled softly, and thanked him, but he was unhappy. She'd cupped his small cheek tenderly, whispering, "Oh, Steve, some things just don't last. You can try to preserve them, to revisit them again later, but you'll find that the image in your mind was much more beautiful than the one that you see later."
His mother was very wise, Steve decided in that split second. Tearing his eyes away from the telephone, he took one last look at Peggy's picture, so like the image he'd carried with him in his compass for those few short years, and decided that this was how he wanted to remember her.
They would never make their date. He would never get that dance. She would never know that he'd survived, that he was stuck in a New York that he didn't know, so very out of place. And she would live in his memory as that beautiful twenty three year old for the rest of his life. She deserved nothing less.
He set the brief gently aside.
Fin.