Disclaimer: Not mine, making no money, etc. Title is from Explosions in the Sky.
After four years of searching, they find his ship in the ice—the roof torn in half and missing one Captain Steve Rogers.
your hand in mine
prologue
"Holy shit," Howard Stark says in a tone as close to reverence as Peggy can ever recall hearing from him.
Her breath is a billow of white steam as she exhales, admitting privately that she would be wont to disagree with his reaction to the scene in front of them.
The plane is half submerged in the blinding white ice, the tail end jutting straight into the air like a diving whale. The outer metal still gleams in the sunlight despite four years of abandonment and Peggy's gloved fingers tighten an imperceptible fraction.
"Well, then," she says briskly, pleased that her voice remains steady, "are you going to stand and gawk all day, Howard?"
He snaps out of his reverie at once. "Boys!" he calls out to the team behind them, "Let's go rescue Captain America." The group immediately begins to bustle around the downed plane, chipping away at the ice with mechanical precision.
It takes exactly five hours and forty-seven minutes to extract the plane from its ice fortress. Peggy can't help but count the time as it slips past, her eyes fixed on the slow revelation. She shouldn't hope—the SSR's team of scientists had given approximations of theories on how Erksine's serum would react to long term freezing, but in the end, no one had been able to offer a firm answer on whether their mission was search and rescue or search and recover.
She, Howard, and Bucky speak only in terms of the former. Every year since Steve's plane went down, they request summer leave; "Ice melts, even in the Arctic," Howard insists. Colonel Phillips simply looks over the wide expansion of his desk at the three of them and Peggy knows he thinks they are doomed to find only remains—if they are able to find anything at all.
"Careful!" she hears Howard berate his men as they work to slowly lower the plane into horizontal position, the nose sliding free up out of the ice.
The glinting of torn metal catches her eye and, trying to keep a firm hold on her slowly rising panic, Peggy shouts, "Howard!" Before she can quite catch up with her feet, they have carried her over to where Howard is barking instructions to his team.
"I see it," he says grimly when she reaches him.
The roof over the pilot cabin is ripped down the middle, the steel jagged and sharp as though a goliath had torn it asunder.
Her heart drops down to her feet as she looks down into the interior of the plane.
The pilot's seat is empty.
…
tbc.