Despite its name, the Patriot Café turned out to be a bit different than the cafes and diners Steve remembered. Instead of bare tables with napkin holders to one side, it had white linen tablecloths and tables situated far enough from each other that conversations couldn't be easily overheard.
Steve approached the maître d', a silver-haired woman with a severe expression, and hoped it would be enough to say, "I'm meeting my friend Diana. Tall, dark-haired -"
"This way, please." The woman led him toward the rear of the restaurant and gestured toward a table along the far wall.
"Thank you," Steve murmured automatically, his attention caught by the woman seated at the table. He knew he was staring, drinking in the sight of someone he'd last seen in 1945 but who looked as young now as she had then, but for once couldn't find it in himself to care. His jaw worked, but no words came out. He swallowed once, twice, and finally found his voice as she rose from the table.
"Diana?"
She smiled and came around the table toward him. "It's good to be remembered after so many years."
"Years for you," Steve said and opened his arms for her. "A couple of months for me."
She came into his embrace and for a moment, the world around them faded away, and he might have been hugging her farewell outside a small town in Austria.
"How?" he asked when she finally pulled back.
"I saw the attack on the news," she answered, giving him a last squeeze before turning back to her seat.
He followed, instinctively helping her sit, and took the chair beside her, giving them both a view of the restaurant and its various entrances and exits.
"That's - not exactly what I meant," Steve said. "But it does address the other question I have, which is why?"
A waitress - no, Steve corrected himself, a server - approached before Diana could answer. He hadn't had a chance to look at the menu, so he just nodded to Diana.
"I'll have whatever she's having," he said.
"The balsamic steak salad." Diana shot him a sideways grin. "Extra steak for the gentleman, please."
"Of course," the server nodded and then was gone.
Diana took a sip of water, then met Steve's gaze.
"As I said - I saw you on the news. I wasn't certain it was you at first -" she spread her hands wide. "How could it be? I spoke with Peggy Carter after the war, and she told me about the Valkyrie. Of course I thought it was an imposter. At first."
"At first?" Steve prompted.
Diana smiled. "At first. Then I watched you fighting."
Steve felt both his eyebrows flying up at that, and Diana matched his look with a level one of her own. "How many times did we fight beside each other? That kind of skill, that kind of grace, can't be faked."
"Thanks - I think." Steve managed a grin, and she chuckled. He sobered quickly enough. "So why did you contact Bruce Wayne?"
"After I spoke with Sharon, it seemed the right thing to do."
Which, Steve thought, made perfect sense if you knew who Sharon was and what the conversation had involved. But he didn't, so he just raised an eyebrow in a wordless prompt.
"She's Peggy Carter's great-niece," Diana explained. "And she works for S.H.I.E.L.D."
"No surprise there," Steve said. "Considering S.H.I.E.L.D. is partly Peggy's creation."
"The surprise is that she'd been ordered to move in next door to you."
Steve blinked. That was the last thing he'd expected. Then what Wayne had found flashed in his mind's eye. SUSPECT PASSIVE SURVEILLANCE IN APARTMENT NEXT DOOR.
"Do you know why she was ordered to move in next door to me?" Steve asked.
"To protect you," Diana said.
Steve laughed. "Protect me from what?"
"She said she thought of it more as a guard duty," Diana answered. "Or, perhaps, backup if something were to happen."
"That makes sense, I guess," Steve murmured. "But that doesn't explain why she's spying on me."
Diana's eyebrows shot up. "Spying on you? You're certain?"
"Your friend Mr. Wayne said he thinks he found passive surveillance on me in the apartment next door."
"Oh." Diana blew out a breath, frowning. "I thought he was just feeding off my own paranoia."
"Paranoia? About what?" Steve asked.
"You." Diana met his gaze levelly. "I watched the news for days after the invasion, and you … disappeared, for lack of a better word. There was an official announcement that you'd been found, alive, and had helped defeat the aliens. That's all."
"What else should there be?" Steve asked, and Diana gave a rueful chuckle.
"Do you remember that night outside Prague?" she asked. "When I told you about my birthplace?"
"And I told you about the serum."
"You also told me about what came after - the USO tours, the celebrity."
"Manufactured celebrity," Steve corrected. "At least at first - I hadn't done anything to deserve it."
"That kind of celebrity is even more prevalent now," Diana said.
Steve got it immediately. "And someone should have made a big deal about my return. But they didn't."
"No. Which made me wonder why not - and with Sharon moving in next door to you to protect you…" Diana trailed off with a shrug as the server returned with their salads.
"Well," she said when they were alone once again. "All my instincts went on alert, and I realized that you had no one here and now who cared about you for yourself."
"Peggy," Steve began.
Diana smiled, but her eyes were sad. "She cares greatly, Steve - she always has. But she's not herself much anymore."
Steve swallowed past a sudden hard lump in his throat as he latched on to a disease he'd heard of before he'd gone to war. "Alzheimer's disease?"
"I'm so sorry," Diana whispered.
For long minutes, they ate in silence. Or, rather, Diana ate and Steve picked at his meal while he processed what Diana had told him.
It was hard to think of Peggy - fierce, vivacious Peggy - wasting away as her memories and then her body failed her.
"She's had a good life," Diana observed quietly, as though reading his thoughts. "And the disease didn't set in until just a few years ago."
"You kept in touch?" Steve asked, desperate for something, anything, to draw him out of thoughts that were turning too maudlin for his comfort.
"Sporadically," Diana said. "Less so after she married, and more so as she aged."
"She married." Steve had known intellectually that Peggy would have had a life without him, and he was glad she had. Hearing it confirmed was a punch in the gut.
"A man named Daniel Sousa," Diana said. "He was a good man - fought in the war. You even rescued him once."
"I did?" Steve frowned, trying to place the name.
"When you rescued Sergeant Barnes and the others," she said. "He was one of the wounded you brought home."
The irony of that wasn't lost on Steve, but he could be grateful that Peggy had found a good husband, even if he wished he could have been that husband.
He shook himself out of that reverie to focus on Diana once again. "So - you came here just to tell me that?"
"No," she said. "I came to help a friend."
Steve swallowed past a sudden dryness in his throat. Despite what some of the Howling Commandos had joked during the war, he and Diana had only ever been friends. He'd been in love with Peggy Carter, and she'd been grieving some lost love also named Steve.
That she would remember him, come to help him in this strange new time, was a gift he would never have expected.
"So," Diana said, breaking off whatever path his thoughts would have taken. "Tell me. How did you wake up? When? Where? I want to know everything."
WW - CA - WW
Diana listened attentively to Steve's tale of waking up in what he thought was a hospital room, then with growing horror as he described hearing a baseball game on the radio - a game he'd actually attended - and seeing a nurse in a uniform that was ever-so-slightly off.
She knew her expression showed her thoughts as Steve described breaking through a false wall, then dashing through a building and into a New York he didn't recognize. When Steve told her about his conversation with Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., Diana couldn't help snorting.
"What?" Steve asked.
"You're thinking of working with S.H.I.E.L.D.?" Diana asked, careful to keep her tone neutral.
"Yes. Why?"
"I wonder why you'd give your loyalty to an organization whose first act was to lie to you - badly."
Steve blinked at her, clearly befuddled by her observation. "You can't blame them for picking a game I'd been to - they didn't have any way to know I had."
"True," Diana admitted. "But they could have chosen a game from after the Valkyrie went down."
Steve sat back in his chair. "I hadn't thought of that."
"Or, even better, someone could have been there to simply tell you what had happened."
"Fury said they wanted to break it to me gently."
Diana looked at him curiously. "What does that mean, in this context? There's no easy way to tell someone they've been asleep for seventy years."
Steve blew out a breath. "You always had a way of making me look at things differently."
"I don't mean to upset you," Diana assured him quickly, giving in to the impulse to rest her hand on his forearm. "But that is one of the most baffling things I've ever heard of."
"I suppose it is," Steve said slowly. "But Fury offered me a job, and I'll need money. Or - I thought I did. Mr. Wayne said something about back pay and intellectual property payments."
"I think," Diana said carefully, "that you need to take some time to learn about this modern world before you make any decisions - including finding out about your back pay and such. Nobody should be rushing you into anything."
Steve regarded her steadily for long moments, long enough that she finished her salad, before saying carefully, "You think Fury's trying to manipulate me."
Diana shook her head. "I don't have enough information to know that."
Steve smiled briefly. "I didn't say you knew it, I said you think it."
Diana smiled in turn. "I do. Or I can't rule it out, which is the same thing. If Peggy were still…Peggy, I'd have more options. As it is, all I can do is be here for you."
Steve looked thoughtful. "I may know someone who can rule it out - and he's already not a fan of Nick Fury."
"Who's that?"
"Tony Stark."