"I gotta put her in the water."

"Please don't do this. We have time. We can work it out."

"Right now, I'm in the middle of nowhere. If I wait any longer a lot of people are gonna die. Peggy, this is my choice. Peggy?"

"I'm here."

"I'm gonna need a rain check on that dance."

"Alright. A week, next Saturday, at the Stork Club."

"You got it."

"Eight o'clock on the dot. Don't you dare be late! Understood?"

"You know, I still don't know how to dance."

"I'll show you how. Just be there."

"We'll have the band play something slow. I'd hate to step on your—"

"Steve? Steve? Steve?"

"Do we have any way of tracking his location?" Peggy shouted through her remaining tears, rounding the corner to glare at Howard. "We can't just leave him out there"

Howard looked at her pityingly. "Even with the serum, I'm not sure if he could have survived that crash."

"I don't care. What was it he said about Barnes—we owe it to him to find a body? This is Captain America. The nation's going to want to see a proper burial for their national hero, a big to-do at Arlington. I don't want to be burying an empty casket if there's any chance we can find his body."

"Fair enough," Howard said, already heading towards his lab. Peggy wanted to follow, but knew she couldn't. She was emotionally compromised, and needed to let Howard do his work.

There had to be the possibility that Steve was still alive. She needed to believe it; she wouldn't let herself even think otherwise until she saw a body, no matter what Howard or anyone else said. He had the serum to protect him—he had to be okay.

Cold. God, it was cold. He had never been this cold before, even back in Brooklyn winters, when he and Bucky had huddled together for warmth, the furnace-like heat of the other boy making up for the lack of heat produced by Steve's shoddy body. Of course, now there was no one to keep him warm, and the serum kept him running hot, so maybe the cold was, in part, mental, just a reminder of how much he missed Bucky.

He would be warmer if he got out of the water, the rational part of Steve's brain reminded him, but the part that was remembering those winters building blanket forts and drinking precious hot chocolate (when the money was there) insisted that he was dead either way, and it would all be over faster if he stayed put. Less time suffering through the cold, which was far better.

Steve hated to admit it, but, as he slowly froze, he was jealous of Bucky. They had both gone down into icy water, but at least Bucky hadn't had to just wait to die. He hadn't had to make the conscious decision to crash—sure, he had been clearly terrified as he had fallen (his scream as he fell away from the train haunted Steve's nightmares), but he hadn't been forced to watch the ground growing closer and know that he had full control over whether or not he hit it.

He wasn't sure how long he lay there slipping in and out of dreams, or if he had missed his actual death, and this was his hell for committing suicide (no matter how many people he had saved in the process; he had always been told suicide was wrong).

Hell was cold, he decided. He missed being warm. He'd walk into fire if it meant being warm. The serum would heal up any burns quickly enough, he felt, and it was worth getting burned anyway.

"Peggy!"

Peggy was neck-deep in paperwork when Howard screamed her name. She glanced up at him, surprised to see him bouncing on the balls of his feet.

"Yes?"

"I think I've found him."

She stood so quickly that her chair fell over, but Peggy couldn't bring herself to care. "Steve? You've found Steve?"

"I think so," Howard said. "It's a definite anomaly in an area that corresponds with his signal. I can't promise it's him, but there's nothing else but ice and open water in the area. It's our best bet. But—Peggy, it's been a month. There's hardly any chance he's still alive. I don't know how there would be."

"I believe in Steve," she replied simply.

"It's damn cold out here!" one of the soldiers shouted, then glanced guiltily at Peggy. "Apologies for the language, ma'am."

Peggy rolled her eyes, but didn't debate the ridiculousness of the apology. It was damn cold, too much so to be worrying over trivialities like swearing in front of a lady (not that Peggy minded in the slightest).

"We're coming up on the source of the anomaly," Howard reported, eyes fixed on the device in his hand.

There was too much snow in the air to see more than a few feet, so they didn't see the plane until they were practically on top of it. Peggy wanted nothing more than to scramble up and search for a hatch, but she knew she had to wait. With the temperatures as low as they were, there was no guarantee that she would even be able open a hatch if she found one and that there was honestly a greater chance of her hurting herself than of her helping at all. So she waited.

The soldiers found a way into the plane and were about to enter, but Howard stopped them. "Let Peggy go—alone. It's her right."

Grateful, Peggy carefully slid into the plane, fingers crossed inside her thick gloves. It felt more like a cave than a plane, with arching columns and spreading open spaces.

She could see the shattered window at the front, though her view of that was interrupted by a mass of ice crystals that she assumed covered the pilot's seat, a mass of ice crystals that she carefully made her way towards. As she got closer, she could tell that it definitely was the pilot's seat, and she caught and held a deep breath.

A flash of blue behind the seat caught her eye, and she stopped to see what it was, brushing the ice clean to see. When the blue stopped at the edge of a white line she exhaled slowly, trying to calm the butterflies dancing in her stomach. Peggy slowly wiped off more, enough to see that the white line converged into another one… She hurriedly wiped down more area, enough to the white star in the middle of the blue, then the red ring surrounding it. Steve's shield. He wouldn't have gone down without his shield. They had found him.

Heart pounding, Peggy rounded the seat. There was so much ice there, ice tinged blood red in places. She carefully wiped it clear, and Steve's face swam into view, eyes closed and lips blue. She sighed. It seemed Howard was right.

She kept watching him, even as the retrieval team joined her and carefully chiseled Captain America and his shield free of the ice.

It was Howard's turn to watch her as they loaded Steve's body into a carefully cooled section of the plane, and he didn't comment as she chose to sit beside him, still heavily bundled, instead of sitting with everyone else in the main section of the plane.

"You were so brave, love," Peggy murmured, laying a gloved hand on the ice over Steve's shoulder. "You always were, as long as I knew you, even when you were shorter than me and could barely keep up in basic. You were the first person to ever get that flag—you would have made a good commander even before the serum. Smarter than anyone else in that camp. And then you got the serum and suddenly everyone saw what I had. Or, well, no. They didn't see you, just Captain America. It made me so mad. And then you went to rescue Sergeant Barnes, and I found someone else who knew Steve Rogers. Who knew him even better than I did…the way he looked at you, Steve. God, he would have done anything for you. We didn't tell you this, but he could have gone home after you rescued him, gone back to New York with an honorable discharge due to psychological trauma. He said you needed him, that he had to stay to keep an eye on that little punk kid from Brooklyn. He loved you. I love you. I miss you—but you did what you had to. Captain America, saving the day one last time."

He was teeth-chatteringly cold, except he was too cold to move enough to have his teeth chattering. He couldn't move at all, which was concerning. Steve struggled against his own body, but the only thing he managed to do was open his eyes. Which was when he heard someone scream.

A young soldier burst into the briefing room, and everyone there turned to stare coldly at him.

"Sorry, sorry," he gasped. "But—I don't know the details—someone screamed. In the same room as Captain Rogers."

Peggy was immediately on her feet. "Are you sure? Do you know wh—"

Her question was cut off by the technician assigned to Cap-watch staggered through the doors, face white. He glanced around the room, unsure who to address. "It's Captain Rogers."

Peggy held her breath in nervousness, although she wasn't sure why. He was already dead; what was the worst that could happen?

"He's not dead."

Steve still couldn't move, although he could feel tiny droplets of water running down his skin and soaking through his clothes as the ice slowly melted. There was a lot of activity around him, activity he was fighting to see despite being unable to turn his head.

Peggy leaned over him, brown hair falling around her face. "Steve? Can you hear me?"

He tried to answer, then growled low in his throat when he realized that he couldn't move to answer.

She laughed softly. "I'll take that as a yes. We're working on defrosting you. It's not something we have any experience in, and they're really worried about frostbite, about the possibility of you losing extremities—we can't run the risk of Captain America losing fingers or hands or feet."

Antsy, Steve made another noise. He had never been good at sitting still—never had the eerie stillness of a sniper like Bucky, but now he was, quite literally, frozen in place.

Peggy laid her hand on his shoulder, or, rather, the ice over his shoulder. "We're hurrying, love."

It was several more days before Steve was completely defrosted, several days of hell. He would move whatever body parts he could in an attempt to not go crazy, but he wasn't sure how well it was working.

And then, once he was defrosted, they told him that he wasn't even allowed to be on active duty.

"Orders, Captain," the general said. "You're on medical leave and observation until the doctors are sure that you didn't sustain any lasting ill effects from your time in the ice."

"I have the serum—I'm fine!" Steve argued, but the general shook his head.

"Not my call. You either stay under observation or we can discharge you and send you back to the States. I imagine that you would prefer the former."

Reluctantly, Steve nodded. This would be further torture, but it was better than having to return to the home front and watch the war from afar. He had done his fair share of that, and had even donated himself to science to not have to be in that position. Besides, he had no one at home—he did here. The Commandos had essentially disbanded and he couldn't bring himself to call them back together, but he had the few who had stayed, and he had Peggy. The only thing he had had at home was Bucky, and he didn't have Bucky regardless of where he went. Bucky's family, Steve's second family, was still in Brooklyn, but he didn't think that he could face them after being responsible for Bucky's death.

It was far better for him to wait out his medical leave.

A few days later, he was—not regretting his decision, exactly, just going stir-crazy. He needed out of the room, and they wouldn't let him, besides marching him down to the toilets and showers, and even then he was as closely chaperoned as he would allow (which meant that the doctors waited outside the door, which was awkward as hell, but he couldn't shake them any further).

Peggy showed up every now and then, but she just seemed to regard him with a sort of vague amusement—he supposed he would do the same if their roles were switched, but it was still irritating.

"I should be out there, making a difference," he whined to her, sitting on the edge of his cot, since he had given her the only chair. "I'm fine, there's no sign of anything wrong with me. Why can't they let me go back out and do my job?"

Peggy sighed. "Because they need to be entirely sure, Steve. I know you say that there's nothing wrong, but the doctors haven't been able to either confirm or deny that as of yet. Your serum-modified genetics are screwing up the test results, or so they tell me—I'm not a scientist; I don't really understand what's all going on. All I really know for sure is that you're not allowed back in the field yet."

Steve groaned in frustration, tipping his head back as far as it would go. "They've been letting me read the reports—by the time they let me back in the field, the war's going to be over! Why can't they trust my judgement enough to let me back out, just until the war ends? It's not going to do that much damage, not really."

"I'll talk to the doctors," Peggy promised. "See what I can do."

He was thankful to her, of course, and he always would be, but there was no way that Steve could tell Peggy the real reason he needed out so desperately. They were watching him so carefully for any physical ailments, but no one thought that there was any possibility that Captain America could need a psychological evaluation.

The nightmares were crippling, and he couldn't tell anyone.

They were all the same, every night, but they never got easier to handle.

He was crashing again, but the crackling voice over the radio wasn't Peggy.

"I gotta put her in the water."

"Don't you dare go sacrificing yourself for everyone else, punk."

"Right now, I'm in the middle of nowhere. If I wait any longer a lot of people are gonna die. Buck, this is what I have to do. It's the right thing. What I was made for."

"Don't give me that bullshit, Steve. The only thing you gotta do is come home to me."

"But I am coming home to you, Buck. You fell, don't you remember? This is the only way to come home to you. I have to fall, too."

"The angel who sacrificed himself for a devil. You know what I think of that?"

Steve shook his head, even though Bucky couldn't see him. He felt that the other man knew, though. Bucky always knew.

"I think that's not you, Stevie. You always were my angel, and maybe I always sacrificed for you, but never you for me. That's how it works, you know."

Steve watched the water and ice rushing up to meet him, terrified but resigned to his fate. "Bucky, Buck, I watched you fall. I watched you die. I'm coming home to you. That's how it works, you know."

To Steve's horror, the next time Bucky spoke, his voice was completely changed. "I won't welcome you home. I'll never welcome you, not if you go through with this. Never."

Steve didn't know what it was that Peggy had done, but a day later he was back in uniform and in the field.

They had given him a new team, and they were all good at what they did, but they weren't his Commandos. Steve made jibes without even thinking about it, even during routine missions, as had been Commando tradition, just to be met with judgmental glances, to the point where he stopped talking altogether outside of mission parameters and necessary small talk. He missed having Bucky at his six, Bucky who was completely different from his usual self while in the field—the smiling, joking man he had grown up with turning into the solemn sniper with a massive grudge against anyone who even thought about hurting Steve.

They marched into Germany, into Berlin to greet the occupying Soviet army, a show of goodwill to have Captain America there, despite the rising tensions between the two sides.

And then someone decided that Captain America had to attend some of the post-war meetings, a decision that Steve could not for the life of him understand. He was a super soldier, not a politician. He had always been intelligent enough, but, at the same time, his fists had always moved faster than his mouth.

"Bucky should be here," Steve muttered to Peggy as they sat next to each other in yet another of the seemingly endless series of meetings they were being forced to attend. Bucky had been the silver-tongued one, the one who could talk anyone around to his point of view—he'd be so much better at this.

She nodded, eyes solemn. "He should be. We have a lot to thank him for."

Steve arched an eyebrow. He had a lot to thank Bucky for personally, but couldn't understand where Peggy was coming from.

"It's thanks to Sergeant Barnes that you're out here," she clarified. "If he hadn't been captured, you'd very likely still be a dancing monkey for the USO."

Steve remembered that particular sketch, and he also remembered the books of sketches of Bucky that he had left behind in Brooklyn. "It's thanks to him that I'm here at all. Without him working himself ragged to do things like pay for medicine and give me the best of everything we could afford, without him stooping to share my bed when it was dangerously cold, without him pulling me out of every back alley fight in Brooklyn, I wouldn't have even survived long enough to become Captain America."

"Captain Rogers, Agent Carter, do you have some insight into our strategy to beat the Japanese that you'd like to share?"

"It's like being in school again," Peggy whispered as they pulled apart guiltily.

Finally, finally, they let Steve free from meetings, free to go back to doing what it was he had been created to do.

He had never been in the South Pacific theater of war, but immediately wasn't fond of it. His uniform got itchy with too much sweat, a design flaw he'd have to talk to Howard about, and the oppressive heat and humidity reminded him strongly of when he hadn't had properly functional lungs.

The drawbacks took second, however, to the fact that he was no longer quarantined in a tiny room under constant observation and that he was back in the field, back in a place where he could fight bullies like he always had, a place where he didn't have nearly as much free time to sit and think and remember Bucky.

"Captain Rogers, sir."

Steve looked up to see the second-in-command of his new team standing a few feet in front of him, showing him a formal respect that the Commandos never had and never had needed too—he had been more their friend than their commanding officer by the time he went in the ice. He missed them, missed having a second-in-command that he was close to, missed being surrounded by people he could actually talk to. That was all something he had lost, but also something that he had to deal with. He had made the choice to sacrifice it.

"Yes?" he asked, getting to his feet and closing his sketchbook.

The man handed him a telegram, then saluted and quickly left.

Sighing (god, he missed his Commandos), Steve tore open the telegram.

Your presence requested in Washington. Plane arriving Sat. night at 8 on the dot. Don't be late. –Peggy.

Several hours later, Steve found himself sitting between two generals that he didn't know, waiting for whatever meeting he had been called back for to begin. Peggy had greeted him when he had gotten off the plane in D.C., but she didn't have the clearance for the meeting, so he was on his own.

One of the generals at the head of the table stood, and everyone turned to look at him. "For those of you not in the know, for the past few years we have been developing the new face of modern warfare—the atomic bomb. Early this morning Japanese time, we dropped one of our atomic bombs on the Japanese city of Hiroshima."

There was an outbreak of murmuring among the assembled men, and Steve frowned. He wasn't quite sure what the atomic bomb was, but if they had to hold a highly classified meeting just to announce its use, then it had to be big.

"Can someone explain this atomic bomb to me?" Steve asked when silence fell once more. "How is it different from simply firebombing the Japanese?"

"It is meant to maximize blast and thermal effects on the area," someone replied. "More destructive than simply firebombing, and much more likely to get the Japs to surrender sooner."

"There are also the radiation theories," someone else remarked.

"Radiation theories?"

"The bomb may give off a significant amount of radiation, although it is unlikely."

"So you dropped a new weapon on civilians without being entirely sure what it does?" Steve found himself on his feet, though he had no memory of actually standing. "I understand that we need to win the war, and I've already made the ultimate sacrifice for that. But this is—unacceptable. If you want to bomb someone, you have to know all the effects, and be prepared to deal with them. And radiation—that's hundreds of times worse than simply firebombing."

"Sit down, Captain Rogers. This is the realm of the scientist, not the soldier, even a super soldier."

Angry, Steve sat, torn on the ethical dilemma. That was something none of the scientists or doctors who had worked on him had ever realized—he didn't stand for America. He stood for what he saw as right and good. The papers all made him out to be the paragon of patriotism, but he was so much more than that.

A few days later, he heard through a chain of sources that the US had dropped another atomic bomb on Japan.

Forgetting his enhanced strength momentarily, Steve broke a cabinet in the house he was staying in until sent back to war when he heard the news. The owner of the house, a kind older lady who had lost all of her sons to the war, had to call Peggy to calm him down.

"Steve! Breaking things is not going to undo what has already been done." Peggy crossed her arms and glared at Steve, who felt as small as he had been before the serum under her angry glare.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, and spent the rest of the day fixing the broken cabinet.

It wasn't often that Steve was called to face enemy troops out of his Captain America uniform, but the generals had insisted that they needed Captain America to attend the formal Japanese surrender. They had asked him to wear the uniform, but he had refused, saying that it felt over the top and like a ploy. So, instead, he wore his dress uniform, the one he had worn that night in the tavern with Bucky.

Shit, he wasn't supposed to be thinking about Bucky.

The surrender was a lot of formal political talk, and Steve found himself zoning out more than once. It was no matter, however, since they had really only wanted him there for show, not to actually do anything.

"Now that the war is over, what do you plan to do, Captain?" someone asked Steve on the way back to Washington.

"Stay with the military," Steve replied easily. "That's what I was made for, to be their perfect soldier. I'm not sure I'm even legally allowed to leave."

The man stared at him with eyes the size of dinner plates, and Steve sighed. "That was a joke. But, in all seriousness, I am staying with them. I just have a responsibility to the best man I know, first."

This all came about because I am taking a class on the Cold War this semester, and really wanted to see Steve and Bucky throughout the time period. USA versus USSR, Captain America versus the Winter Soldier. I am planning on continuing this even after the end of the Cold War, though, up through present day, because I am a sucker for Stucky and need it desperately but I don't want Steve to know who Bucky is until after TWS, which will be included, just altered accordingly to Steve having faced the Winter Soldier before.

I'm not sure why one random paragraph is indented, but I can't fix it.

The timing on Steve's flight and the meeting and all that on the Hiroshima bombing is completely inaccurate...I tried to figure out so that it would be accurate, but time differences and whatnot are a right bitch, so I just gave up and went with something easy.

Also, I didn't tag it because I don't think it's going to come up much (if it does, I will tag it), but there will, on occasion, be period-accurate slurs used, such as the use of "Japs" in this chapter. The Japanese were widely referred to as such in the period, so I went with it.

Title comes from the song "Your Guardian Angel" by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.

Finally, a shoutout to FlyByNightGirl on AO3, since I got the idea for this while Skyping with her and she sounded just as excited about it as I was.