One crack in the shell of the globe, and the clock of his life starts to tick again.
One heartbeat away from a crash landing can be an endless stretch of time, when the whole point is that his heart has not really been beating.
He turns and he turns and he turns, and someone says Times Square, but it is impossible to understand what any of this means. Here, now. It isn't now. It's all too bright, too loud, none of the sounds he knows and once breathed (or didn't breathe, depending on the asthma).
If he stays still, not moving a memory or a muscle, maybe he can hold back the future.
If he stays still.
.
Lives and hearts both come in parts. You could split a heart into four chambers, four quarters, like a dollar, like the century he's known too long.
He finds that there are still old churches in New York, because it's a city that holds onto everything. They are classed as historical monuments, with their solemn altars and iridescent windows. He remembers, but he cannot decide if it is a mercy, that the incense and the organs are the same.
He finds so many more faces and lives, never enough to hide him completely.
.
"Are you Steve Rogers? Can I have a selfie?"
Easier, these days, to have a selfie than a self.
.
By the time Bucky drags him out of the river, he's already dead—in a way. The man with the shield, when nobody believes in S.H.I.E.L.D. anymore.
And nobody should.
.
"You know, Rogers," Nat says, when their paths cross in a search where paths are always crossing and tangling together, "You're not doing yourself any favors, holding onto the past that tightly."
He says, "You're probably right."
.
For a man who belongs in a cemetery, his jaw is as stubborn as ever. For a man who won't sign an agreement, he thinks an awful lot about the weight of a name.
.
So. When did it go wrong? When did distrust return to itself, when did Steve Rogers become a wanted man instead of a man who was always wanting something more?
He was under the ice when Hydra returned to power. He was under the ice when the Winter Soldier shed blood. He was under the ice when the world moved on without him.
(Howard is dead, he never knew Maria, Peggy is dead, the last of the Howling Commandos doesn't even know his own wife, Alzheimer's does that to you, life does that to you, why is life so much like death when time passes?)
But choice is everything, and in everything, and Steve has certainly made his choices. He's lied, yes. He's punched his way out of boxed-in rooms and boxed-in futures, and he has promised himself that that is fair.
Bucky is back under ice. Tony doesn't call.
Two years later, the world ends anyway.
.
Sometimes, Steve thinks, pride is just another word for standing very still.