Steve didn't mind being alone; honest to God, he didn't. The quiet did him plenty of favours after long nights in which sleep evaded him as though he were a parasite. Waking from nightmares would leave his apartment suffocating him, and so he'd throw on a new shirt and the first-grasped sweatpants and run. Thirteen miles, twenty miles, a hundred and fifty nine miles, a million miles. He'd run however many miles it took to rid their anguished cries from his mind- to forget the telltale click that land-mines made when stepped on.
But he'd never forget. He'd just block it out for a few hours.
It was 4:35pm on a Sunday afternoon and the skies overhead were hazed and blue, speckled with burning clouds. The air was decalescent and dry.
Three days ago, Steve had returned from Belgorod, Russia, and Fury'd had the gall to congratulate him on a successful mission.
If the director noticed the way his knuckles whitened as they clenched to fists against his thighs, he opted not to comment on it.
Steve was beginning to wonder was 'successful' meant; if the times had truly changed so much in his 70 frozen years. Success, to him, was not losing three of the ten agents he'd brought on his mission. It was not watching them die, helpless for the explosion was beyond his control, and seeing Bucky in their desperate faces.
When he forgot how to breathe, he almost cost the remainder of his team.
He hoped they'd not felt it, but he'd seen their eyes, and he was damn sure that he wouldn't /forget/ their eyes even long after he failed to recall their faces. Steve supposed, as he stirred a few drops of milk into his coffee, that the worst part was the fact he had never even known their names, because it was a lot harder to mourn people you'd never known.
He looked up, fingers tap tap tapping against the rim of the saucer, coffee-beans scorching the back of his throat with a bitter flame, and spied an old couple sitting by the window. To the left, he heard a young girl giggling, and his empty baby-blues landed upon a young family. Behind him were two working adults on a first date, nervous as schoolchildren and failing at small talk because all they really wanted to do was grab at one another's hands, and that was all Steve really wanted them to do, also.
Outside the window to his right, a poor man stopped to scratch behind the ear of a stray cat.
With a heavy sigh, Steve realised that while he didn't mind being alone, he didn't fancy being lonely.