Steve Rogers looked at the boxes on the floor of his new Brooklyn apartment and wondered how he could have accumulate so many things in the few short weeks he had been thawed after being frozen for 70 years. A lot of it was a new "civilian" wardrobe with shirts, pants, jackets, a suit or two and of course jeans. There was also a new laptop, towels, sheets, groceries and other items too numerous to mention. He didn't know where to start.
He had his body poked by S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors and having his head examined by S.H.I.E.L.D psychiatrists and undergoing every physical and strength test known he had been proclaimed "perfect" by all the doctors.
The "cultural acclimatization" had been a breeze. Learning to use a computer, reviewing 70 years of history and navigating around a brand New York City had been easy. Then S.H.I.E.L.D had deemed him "safe " to live on his own despite S.H.I.E.L.D selecting and paying for his one bedroom walk up a few blocks from his old neighborhood.
Two hours later most of the things were in their proper places and only an old, battered footlocker remained besides a new, much smaller box. The footlocker was the one he had used throughout the war and he wondered who had saved it.
He walked over to the footlocker. It was secured with a rusted padlock on an old rusted hasp. After a second or two wondering if there was a key. He grabbed the padlock and gave a good pull and it flew off the broken hasp. He knelt down before it, opened the lid and saw things that he hadn't seen in almost three quarters of a century. Packed inside were his uniforms, carefully folded just like he had left them. They were clean but more than a bit dusty and there was also a small box with his captain's bars and ribbons.
There were no other personal items in the footlocker except for his sketch pad which was located in the bottom. He slowly flipped the pages and memories came flooding back.
After a while he laid the sketch pad down and on top of the pile of uniforms and opened the other box. Nestled in tissue paper was his pocket watch. He opened it slowly and found that it had been cleaned and had been recently wound as it was running and the time was correct.
He reverently looked into the top of the watch. Yes, her picture was still there. The picture was brown and crinkled with age and time had made Peggy's features indistinct but he remembered her as if it was yesterday. To him it was. A tear slowly made its way down his face.
His cell phone rang. He snapped the watch shut, put it in his jacket pocket and answered the phone.