1. Insomnia

Dear Bucky,

Here's the good news first: we won the war. The bad news: neither of us were around to see it. The worst news: it's 2012 and I am very much alive and very much lost in this place that is New York and isn't. I'm not sure who I am anymore or why anyone would need me around as anything other than an old relic of a time long past. Or, more accurately, a scientific anomaly.

I did something stupid. I took on Schmidt. I won, but it was too late and I had to put his Valkyrie craft into the Arctic. I was positive it was the end for me, but I felt oddly at peace with it. It was the end of my line. Take Hydra's death plane into the ocean? Check. Die? Check. Give the Allies a fighting chance against the Nazis? Check and mate.

I thought I had it figured out, but that's the thing I should have realized. Every time I think I know what I'm doing, and have things sorted, something goes wrong. I wanted to fight in the war; I thought that's what I was made for. I thought there was no way we could lose. I thought the end of the line would be much, much further along.

New York was big in our time, but it seems even bigger. It could be because when we were younger, Brooklyn was our world. We knew there was a much bigger city out there, and an entire state, an entire country, but Brooklyn was all contained, like a snowglobe. I remember when you went to bootcamp there was this weird knowledge that you were still in America, but it was so far away. I traveled across the US in a tour bus in 42-43, and the New York of today still feels bigger than even that.

There are lights everywhere, competing with each other, the way the Yankees and the Red Sox used to. I can't see the night sky. I can't sleep. Also, apparently the Red Sox finally won a world series. This is not the world I remember. Perhaps I'm still asleep and this is a bright nightmare. If I close my eyes, maybe then I'll wake up.

But I do close my eyes and I see things: the blue flash of Hydra weaponry, the red of Peggy's dress and her lips, the red of Schmidt's skull. I see the white and gray of the mountains and sky that day you fell. I think about sleeping and realize I slept for seventy years. I spend my days and my nights in a gym with no windows, just mindlessly hitting heavy bags. Remember when the bags used to weigh more than I did? Remember the first time I punched one, and it barely moved? You joked that a breeze must have gone through the gym. I wasn't much better on the speed bag, but then again, you have to be able to reach it, right?

I've broken half a dozen heavy bags so far, but SHIELD keeps replacing them, no questions asked. I asked about the SSR, and apparently they became SHIELD at some point while I was in the ice. In our day it was Peggy, Stark, and Phillips and some funding from Senator Brandt. Now it's an entire department of its own. It's sort of part of the government, but they don't really answer to the government. It's complicated. Politics were simpler seventy years ago. Or maybe they were still complicated, but it just feels worse now because I'm trying so hard to get used to everything else.

I asked around, and it seems Phillips died a few years after World War 2 ended. Yeah, they're calling it World War 2, and the one before that, right before we were born, is World War 1. Apparently SHIELD is around to prevent World War 3, or so they say. I'm not too sure what's going on with Peggy; to tell the truth, I'm afraid to look her up. I don't want to find out she died, but if she's alive, I'm not sure I want to see her. I might want to remember her the way we were. I might want her to remember me… who am I kidding? I look almost exactly the same. It's eerie. Stark died in a car accident about twenty years ago, but they say his son is almost just like him. And of course you… we both know the answer to that one.

Everyone I knew and cared about is gone. Even my home is gone. I took a drive out to Brooklyn the other day. Or rather, was driven out, by a SHIELD agent who didn't talk much. I want to tell them it's as weird for me to be alive as it is for them. I didn't get out. I just watched out the window, looking for something familiar. The last time I'd driven through Brooklyn was the day everything changed for me. You'd think a guy would remember that, but the images in my memory didn't match up at all with what I was seeing. Even Coney Island has changed. The only thing recognizable about that is the fact it's on the ocean.

I'm completely out of my element here, Buck. I don't know how to even begin living again. I don't know how to get back out into the world, not when I don't even recognize it. SHIELD set me up with an apartment and everything, but I spend my days and nights down here at this gym, slamming my fists into punching bags and writing letters to dead people. Neither activity yields any answers, but I don't suppose the questions I have lend themselves toward being answered.

Someday I'm going to have to get out there and start living again. Today I think I'll just hit things and hope for the best.

Out of Time (get it? My jokes are still terrible),

Steve