It's noisy. Very very noisy. But the noise is wrong. There are cadences that he's never heard before. The rain slick road under his feet feels wrong, even through the boots he is wearing why was he wearing boots in bed any way his mother would have turned in her grave…
There are lights. It's the middle of the day, and everywhere there are lights. On all the buildings, on structures on the streets, on the cars that are making those weird sounds and going too fast and smelling wrong. When the cars pull up in front of him and he realizes they've caught up with him he has to shut his eyes, briefly, before he turns to see the tall black man with the eyepatch who's calling him soldier and he knows that tone of voice, or his body does, far better than he knows anything else in this strange world and so he finds himself turning, stops himself from saluting, the guy is in a long black coat and the last he knew that was not a standard US Army uniform….
"You've been asleep Cap. For almost seventy years."
He looks around. There are familiar things, shoved into places he wouldn't have thought to look for them. A shopfront that looks like one he used to visit. A building he's sure he's been inside, even if it is covered with flashing billboards now. He can hear the sound of the general public, muttering to each other, asking who is this person, this crazy person standing in the middle of the street, and their accents are the same and they're speaking the same language he used his entire life, and it's these little things that make him think he's telling the truth. If someone was trying to trick him they would have made it less familiar. The cars would have been flying, people would have jet packs later when he reads the file on Tony he will have to do a lot of explaining to Fury about why he bursts into laughter or get around on moving walkways, not drive about in cars like he used to, that was just too…
Too boring.
He almost laughs.
"You gonna be ok?"
There is an echo of a voice, a beloved voice, and he realizes that he may well have been hearing that echo for seventy years.
…Ok. A week next Saturday. At the Stork Club. Don't you dare be late…
Then and only then does he remember the crash, and the wall of white and with a sickening lurch he realizes that there was this one thing, one important thing he was supposed to do and he missed it.
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah just…" he takes another look at the lights, breathes in the strange air and the sounds and feels the weight of those seventy years settle somewhere in his chest. "I had a date."