Disclaimer: So I guess I do technically own this because the work was mine to begin with? I just don't own anything someone might have been paid for.
Steve takes some leave after the Battle of Manhattan. He calls it leave time because it's not retirement and he can't call it a vacation. He's never taken one before, but from everything Steve's gathered about them, they're supposed to be prolonged periods of relaxation doing unnecessary activities with people you like.
Well, actually, Steve has done that before. Exactly twice. For about three days at a time each. And both those times there was still the technical concern that he might get shot or blown up.
Yeah. Alright. Steve maybe has never taken a vacation.
Additionally, Steve spends all of his time... not working still, technically, working. He spends the time mostly reading and watching television trying to figure out how much things might have changed. SHIELD has apparently endless packets of information to give him and they regularly show up on his doorstep. In addition to history, modern scientific developments, and popular culture, the agency has him in three different language programs- Arabic, Korean, and Swahili.
Technically, he's supposed to be learning several other European languages, but the ones they had tried were ones that Steve already knew how to speak. Not all of them are in his file, and frankly Steve prefers to keep it that way. So much of his life is now a matter of public, or at least government, record. The scraps that aren't feel like they need to be folded away and tucked in close to his heart to keep private and just for himself.
Steve also complies with a battery of psychological tests and more than one personal screening. They don't pack him in to a padded room so Steve assumes he passes. He also assumes that either the test is very very broken, or he is absolutely obliterated.
Apparently, a lot has been learned about psychological and mental damage in combat veterans since he went under. Given how much seems to skate by them in his interviews, Steve is a little dubious about that assertion. He isn't an expert, but he know himself, and he knows that he is not okay. Not in any sense of the word.
He doesn't sleep in stretches lasting longer than three hours, and can't do it at all if he tries to sleep on a matress. Every time he drops off, his subconscious presents him with a combination of memory and imagination to twist even the good memories in to something that brings him awake wanting to scream. One of the undocumented and un-researched effects of the serum was what it had done to his brain. Not his mind, but the actual physical structure of the tissue. Howard and Peggy had done some speculating, but the only thing they'd really focused on was the suddenly picture-perfect quality of his memory and the update in his strategic thinking.
No one had thought to mention that his dreams would switch in a horrifying level of clarity.
Sometimes he doesn't bother trying to go to bed. On the days where his own breathing rasps against his ears and he can feel his heart beating in his finger tips. The days where he's scattered and itchy to do something but can't figure out what. He pushes the limit as far as possible and learns that he crashes through a hard ceiling at hour one-hundred and ninety-six. He crashes out and can't wake himself up despite the marathon of nightmares for the next ten hours after that.
Steve considers it a lesson learned and doesn't push so far again, but that doesn't change the fact that he's not sleeping.
He takes better care to listen to his body and eats and rests when it tells him too. The food tastes unremarkable despite intellectually knowing that it fresher and better than anything he could have prayed to have access to before and during the war. Steve runs, sleeps, eats, reads files, reads books, watches documentaries, watches movies, learns languages, writes down lists of things he needs to see and try, and has to think his way through apparently normal social interactions.
Steve is not fine.
Maybe he's just levels of "not fine" that don't register on the normal battery of psychological tests. That's a depressing thought. In fact, as far as diagnoses go, he thinks depression might be reasonably close after doing some reading on the subject.
Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly at all, Natasha is the first person to snap him out of it. He finds her waiting at his door one morning. "Hey Captain," she greats. "Running late this morning?" As though he's been keeping her waiting for a pre-arranged meeting.
Because his mother (and Bucky's) raised him with manners, Steve doesn't ask any of the obvious questions. The ones that sound like 'what are you doing here?', 'what do you want', 'aren't there better places for you to be right now?', and 'you do realize it's three in the morning right?'. "Agent Romanov," he says instead. "How have you been?"
"Good enough," she says lightly, eyebrows lifting a little like he's said something she doubts. "Trying to avoid the crowds on the running paths later?"
Steve shrugs. "Well you know," he says, and he knows his voice sounds flip and distant but can't make himself care. "They start to look at you funny when you've lapped them for the fourteenth time. Makes the second half of the workout awkward."
"Sure," Romanov says with a shrug. "No one likes working out with an audience. I get it. That's why I came to find you. What do you say to a little private sparring?"
She bats her eyelashes at him and is carefully inside the perimeter of his personal space. From anyone else, this would be flirting. Maybe it still is, but the difference is that Steve knows better than to think there's actually any kind of offer being made.
The other commandos, Bucky included, had thought he was hopelessly oblivious and awkward around girls. They'd been half right. He'd been awkward, but he'd never been unobservant or bad at reading people. Plus, the serum had had an odd effect on how he perceives human interactions, something about body language and chemo signals according to the most recent batch of SHIELD assessments.
The point is, he may have been a little busy with the alien invasion the last time he'd seen the two of them together, but he's got a good idea of what he'd seen between Agents Romanov and Barton. He knows that men and women can build strong platonic friendships and he knows exactly how strong friendships built in combat can be, but he also knows the expression of relief people where on their faces when someone who might have been lost to them forever is alive and well in front of them. That'd been the look on both of their faces when he had gone to collect them before the battle.
Something in it had made his heart clench in on itself and made his insides feel like they were shrinking.
Another thing that Steve had seen was just how good of a shot Clint Barton actually was, and he'd gotten a decent sense of the man's personality. He was talented, dedicated, precise, and, like all snipers, incredibly patient. Steve knows better than to cross the girlfriend of a sniper, even had he been otherwise inclined too and not decently terrified of what the girlfriend in question might do to him.
Therefore, despite her flirting and obvious looks, Steve is all too aware of the fact that Natasha Romanov isn't actually interested. That makes this a test of some sort, fishing to see what he'll do. Steve figures to hell with it.
"Sure," he says with a shrug. "This place have a gym that can take it? I'd hate to break something."
He doesn't know what that response tells her, but Natasha takes it with a grin. "Sure is," she replies. "We play hard around here. Might want to leave the shield where it is though."
Steve shrugs and gestures for her to lead the way. "I actually don't have it just now. Some tech down in the lab wanted to take a look at it and Fury okayed it so..."
He lets the words trail off and Romanov doesn't bring it back up, instead deftly redirecting the conversation towards Steve's growing proficiency in Arabic. They reach the gym and she uses a thumb scan and voice match to open the door. Steve's been doing the same thing for weeks now, but he still doesn't pretend to understand how the technology actually works.
The gym is empty which isn't surprising considering it's still only twenty minutes after three in the morning which is early even for the most eager, dedicated, time zone confused of agents. Steve drops his water bottle on to the floor near the door and takes a few minutes to stretch. Romanov pulls off her sweatshirt and does the same.
They step to the mat and Romanov looks up at him. "Now Captain," she says. "I've got one very important question for you."
"What's that Agent Romanov," he asks, stressing the 'agent' if she refuses to call him anything but Captain.
She settles in to a loose fighting stance Steve doesn't quite recognize and does the same. "Are you going to show a good time?" she asks, raising one delicate brow. "Or are you too much of a gentleman?"
Two hours and several rounds later, Steve's given her the answer.
Quite contrary to being honorable or gentlemanly, the first fighting Steve had ever learned had been the dirty kind. He'd been too small to expect to be safe fighting fair and Bucky had known that when the two of them had first started really learning how to throw punches. Steve had hated it, but he'd learned to use whatever he had handy and to apply elbows to soft tissues and knees to delicate structures with vicious efficiency.
Purists would call it dirty boxing.
For years, Bucky had forced Steve to think of it as doing what he had to to get home without getting beat.
Romanov is the one to call time and Steve allows the break, backing off and retrieving his water. He's pleased to find that sometime during the fight the worst of his tension had bled off. He's not tired- Actually no, that's a lie. He's exhausted and pretty much has been for weeks- he doesn't feel like he can go home and go to sleep, but he doesn't feel like he might crawl out of his skin anymore.
"You don't fight like I expected you too," Romanov comments, regarding him over her own water bottle. "I mean, there's footage from the war, and I saw what you did in New York, but you move more fluidly than I thought you might."
Steve doesn't know what to say to that. "Standing still and letting the other guy come at you only works when they're not trying to shoot you at the same time," he settles on.
Romanov nods. "True. Best way to make sure a gun can't go off on you is to be inside the range, or way outside of it. That's not my point though."
"And that would be?"
"That you've got strengths you're not using." Steve is in the middle of swallowing so his gesture for her to finish her thought is non-verbal. "Most fighters have to make a judgement call between speed, strength, and flexibility. One of those three has to give in favor of the other two. You have super serum. You don't have to make the trade."
Steve cocks his head at her. "And no one in the SSR managed to flag that because..."
She shrugs. "Hey, I don't know. I wasn't there. My guess is because you were in the middle of a war and had other things to do. Did they even run you through a combat assessment after giving you the serum? Or did they just chuck you in the water and let you go fishing?"
"They took a lot of blood," Steve supplies. "But an actual combat assessment got derailed by a HYDRA spy infiltrating the test and shooting the scientist in charge. I always assumed at least that much had made it in to my file. I chased down the man who shot him, and that gave us a baseline. After that I got re-routed on to the USO show and then airdropped myself in to active combat. Whatever it turned out I could do went on a list somewhere and that was it. I had crash courses in a few subjects and it all absorbed pretty damn fast, but we didn't have time to think about why. I got a crash course in tactics and officer training, but the rest of my learning was more.." he looks for the right word and feels the way his mouth curls in distaste when he finds it. "...Experiential."
Most of it had taken place in foxholes, waiting in planes or tanks, en route to the next people who would shoot at them or who they would have to shoot at. At the time, Steve had filled his rucksack with every instructional manual he could get his hands on and spent hours pouring over each despite having memorized them the first time. Learning to be a better leader, one his men actually deserved had pretty much been his first and only priority.
The Howling Commandoes had been his best teachers. HYDRA had made a habit of targeting elite branches of different allied military forces to imprison in Austria for their own attempts at the Serum, and Steve's team had been the best of the best. Jones had been multilingual and one of the Tuskegee Airmen. Bucky had been, without exaggeration, the best shot the military had seen in decades. Morita had instinctively understood more about radios than most people had ever forgotten and Dernier had talked him through some of the finer points of how you made a thing explode. Falsworth had been the one responsible for teaching Steve and the other Commandos most of the more complex combat they'd know having been an early member of what would become the SAS.
While deployed, Steve had been learning and re-learning constantly as his body and mind had recalibrated to their new operating speed. It had been an incredibly informative time. That said, even Steve has to admit that it hadn't exactly been any form of systematic.
"We'll do a real assessment now," Romanov informs him. "My guess is Fury will have you do a real stress test once the shrink officially clears you and try to set some hard limits. He doesn't like having unknown quantities in play."
Steve bites down on his knee-jerk response which is that Fury and what he's prefer can take along walk off a short pier. He's been the CO and the tactician. He knows how dangerous it is to not know what your assets, human or otherwise, are capable of. Instead, he asks "What do they think they have here that can stress test me?"
Romanov pulls her sweatshirt back on and her response comes out muffled by the fabric. "Beats me. I'm pretty sure I hold most of the records, and the ones that aren't mine are Barton's. Standard testing for new recruits involves a three year training program with set benchmarks. You do a triathlon, running in soaked clothes, open water swimming with weight belts, flight simulators, low-stakes field exercises, that kind of thing. I skipped all the training and took the tests cold. I think Barton did half the program before Coulson gave it up for a lost cause."
"Did he shoot too many things?" Steve asks, genuinely curious. His impression of Barton had been of a reserved, serious man, with a smart mouth. He had thought the agent had probably been pulled from some kind of military unit and given alternative training based on his differing weapons aptitudes. The file Steve had gotten on him had backed a lot of that assessment minus a little time spent in the circus as a teenager. He's interested in what the man had done to make Coulson and Fury give up on following protocol.
Steve doesn't like having unknowns in the field either.
"He infiltrated the ventilation system and started using it to give the administration hell," Romanov explains. "It was before I got here, but he apparently turned it in to something of a Psy Ops exercise. Messing with people's spaces and personal information just enough to get in their heads and make them doubt. It was very well done."
Somehow, Steve doesn't doubt that. He makes a mental note that Barton is evidently better at subterfuge than may have first been apparent. Come to think of it, how apparent was anyone who was skilled in subterfuge? It wasn't exactly something you advertised.
Steve holds the door open for Romanov to exit the gym ahead of him and she gives him a gracious little nod. Having read her file, Steve doesn't doubt that she's still using his every move to build a profile of him inside her head. He wonders what these little gestures of what he considers to be everyday courtesy say to her.
"My combat training put a lot of emphasis on flexibility and speed," Romanov notes, flicking her eyes over him in blatant assessment as they walk. "That, and finding maximum power in my own body. But you, you're probably just as fast, about as flexible, and with about a hundred more pounds and nine inches of height to work with. We put a little time in, and I can teach you how to really use it." They're back at Steve's door and she reaches up to pat him on the shoulder. It's the first friendly and casual contact he's had with a person since the Battle of New York ended. "Think about," she offers. "Let me know."
Steve does think about it. For about six seconds. "When do we start?"
The grin she gives him in response is possibly genuine, and possibly an affectation meant to make him feel more comfortable. Steve notes mentally that it's going to be difficult to build a personally trusting relationship between the two of them if he never gets to know which version of Romanov is real. It's a precarious position because if there's one thing that this morning has implied, it's that for some reason, Romanov does want a level of his trust lasting longer than a single battle for the fate of humanity. Maybe, if he gives it enough time, she'll drop the act.
Then again, maybe not.
"How's oh-four hundred hit you?" she asks.
"That late?" he jokes, chancing some sarcasm.
She makes a show of batting her lashes and flouncing away, addressing her parting remark over her shoulder. "Some of us still need our beauty sleep Captain."
The next day when Steve once again can barely sleep, Natasha is ready and waiting outside his door and just like that he begins an unofficial training regimen in twenty-first century combat.
He is, predictably, good at it.
Very quickly, he finds that Natasha was right about his flexibility and agility. He can't say flipping himself through the air as a part of routine combat necessarily starts as a natural instinct for him, but the logic behind being able to move as many ways as possible makes an undeniable amount of sense. SHIELD takes more blood, apparently to compare the samples from before the ice and now, and puts him through a second barrage of tests.
Steve can't say he understands what a timed sprint down a field pushing a forklift is supposed to prove, but he can't actually say he cares too much about finding out either. Maybe he is back in the world and maybe he should be embracing that instead of dwelling on how many of the people he cared about are dead and gone and never coming back. On the other hand, everyone he knew and loved and cared about is dead and gone and never coming back.
He tries to track down Peggy and learns that Howard Stark had set her up in a discreet and highly secured house in Virginia with round-the-clock private care. Natasha warns him very bluntly that going to see her might not be the best thing for him to do. Fury tells him that he better know what he's doing. Steve nearly bursts out laughing when he hears that. He hasn't known what he was doing for actual months now, since the ice at least, probably for a couple months before that actually.
Steve ignores all warnings and all caution, and requisitions a care from SHIELD to drive down to Virginia and see his best girl. Learning to drive had taken him a grand total of a single afternoon after deciding he should know how. Technically, he had learned to drive in 1942, but that had been in a standard army transport vehicle (jeep from 1942) and the rules for driving were different in a modern car not in a war zone.
The SHIELD driving assessor had had a hard time picking his jaw up off of his shoes long enough to focus on how Steve was driving, but at the end of it he's had a license. Steve had asked if he needed to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to have the license issued, and the examiner had given a nervous laugh. "Why would you want to go there?"
Steve had managed a smile and simply accepted the man's word for it that a license would arrive in the mail in the next 8-12 days since SHIELD would be expediting the process. Six days later, the plastic card bearing his picture had been pushed under his door in an official DMV envelope. His birthday and general physical description is printed on the surface next to his official SHILED personnel photo.
Gender: M
Eyes: Blue
Height: 6'-01"
Vision Restrictions: None
DOB: 07/04/1918
Organ Donor: No
The address is listed as somewhere in Brooklyn, but it's the house where Steve was born. He could check where it is if he wanted to, put Steve finds on consideration that he doesn't want to know. The Battle of Manhattan had been so chaotic and over so quickly that Steve hadn't had time to see his old neighborhood, and he thinks that that might have been for the best. The rest of the city had been so utterly changed and warped that Steve could barely recognize it, he's not sure he could take it if the buildings he'd grown up in had been equally altered.
Steve's fingers drift of their own accord over his height and vision requirements and can't help but think that they both seem wrong. Before the serum, Steve had been 5'-04" and barely able to see ten feet away without squinting. And Steve would have wanted to be an organ donor. He understands why SHIELD hasn't let that happen, his organs are probably reserved for scientific research so that whatever is left of the serum can be extracted and experimented on after he's dead. Still, as someone who might have been a valid candidate for a lung transplant once upon a time, Steve would have preferred leaving his vital organs to someone sick who could use them to survive and it grates at him that that choice has been taken away.
Steve drives to see Peggy. She sees him, realizes he's alive, pulls him in to a hug that feels both the same, and utterly unlike any hug she ever gave him before. Her eyes are the same deep brown as he remembers and her voice follows the same lilting pattern of British accent that Steve had loved before. He closes his eyes and his nose is full of the smell of lilac and verbena. It's the same perfume that she had worn during the war, dabbing a careful dot on each wrist and the sides of her neck each morning. The same perfume that, along with her bold lipstick, had been her one personal indulgence.
Peggy cries to see him there looking so much the same. Steve cries at seeing how very much she's changed. "You're late," she informs him with a sniff, dabbing at her cheeks with the kind of handkerchief considered old fashioned now, but as common place as shirt buttons when the two of them had first become adults. Then she reaches up and tries to dry his. Her hands are etched with fine wrinkles, but her skin is as cool and soft to him as they ever were.
They shake a little, and Steve reaches up to take over the job. He wipes the escaping tears away and neatly folds the square of cotton on the arm of the couch. "I know," Steve croaks out. He swallows in a desperate attempt to clear his throat and isn't entirely successful. "I'm sorry," he manages to say, not able to make himself look away from her face.
"I forgive you," Peggy declares and waves a hand to dismiss the offer of the returned handkerchief "Think nothing of it. A few tears between friends are perfectly reasonable at such a time, I would think. Now sit yourself down Steven. I still get information from the agency, but you must tell me everything. I'll just call for a little tea before we get in to it."
Steve, feeling vaguely numb and yet utterly hyperaware, lets her steer him to the sofa and watches her move out of the room. Peggy walks slowly now, but her grace and the sense of purpose to her movements is still there. As he waits for her to return, he finds he can't sit still and gets back to his feet, moving hesitantly through Peggy's space.
It's something he never had a chance to do before. He and Peggy had spent time in each others quarters, and on two memorable occasions on coinciding leave, shared a hotel room, but none of those places had ever been a real home. Neither or them had exactly been hauling around a large volume of personal effects across war torn Europe, and they definitely hadn't taken the time to unpack nine times out of ten. Personalized spaces hadn't really been a thing for anyone in an army camp. The most you could hope for was a passable illusion of uninterrupted privacy.
How Peggy chooses to make her home is something he's taken seventy years to learn.
It's both like and unlike what he had thought it might be when he had tried to picture it. In fact, it's not until Steve is looking at her home that he realizes he had had expectations. There are more personal knick-knacks around than he had thought might be present. The shelves are full of books, which he had thought would be true, but the variety and breadth of the fiction section is unexpected. Peggy had passed along copies of Shakespeare to him during the war as well as several mystery novels, but from the covers it seems she's embraced a taste for science-fiction. There's a set of cook books on a bottom shelf, and Steve isn't at all shocked to see that they are dusty with disuse.
The only photo Steve recognizes from the remainder fo the family photos is a small triptych of Peggy's parents, her younger brother, and a small whole family portrait. During the war, the set had been in a silver frame. Peggy had huffed at herself for carrying it, calling it far to frivolous and lovely a thing to be dragged around with her, but she had kept is anyway.
One of the photos shows him standing with Bucky and the rest of the Howling Commandos, another shows Howard Stark standing beside a tall man with serious expressions on both spaces. In another, Howard is holding a bundle of blankets with a wrinkled baby space poking out of the top with a terrified expression on his face. The same man from the previous photo is hovering just over Howard's shoulder looking ready to intervene should it be called for.
Another shows a full office photo in front of an old SSR sign. A second shows another, similar shot with about eighty percent of the people changed, and the sign behind them now showing the SHILED logo. One is the man in the photos with Howard, though Howard himself isn't there. Another is a man with a very square jaw and a crutch propped under each arm to compensate a missing leg. They are the two on either side of Peggy and that's what makes Steve notice them.
Also the fact that in the later photo, Peggy has her hands clasped loosely around the upper arm of the man on crutches. That man isn't looking in to the camera at all. He's looking at Peggy instead.
The sight initially makes something squirm in his stomach, and Steve crushes it relentlessly. He knows the look on the man's face and he can't blame the man for having his priorities in order. Besides, having been presumed dead for twenty years at that point somewhat obliterates his logical right to be any kind of jealous.
The repeated faces clearly age between ten and twenty years between the two shots, and the visible leap in time hit Steve lick a punch in the gut. He breathes through it. Steve has always been good at taking body blows.
Still, he finds himself stumbling back to the sofa, staring down at one of the photos with sightless eyes. The images are proof that Peggy had done exactly what he had always hoped she would do if someday he hadn't managed to make it back home. She had found friends, built a family, and lived a life of amazing accomplishment.
And he missed it.
Right along with the internet, space travel, and blue jeans.
All those things, and the life of the first and only women he had ever loved.
He looks up as Peggy walks back in to the room and hurriedly sets the photo frame on the side table. He turns to say something, anything- and then stops because Peggy is staring at him like he's given her the shock of a lifetime. "Steve?" she gasps, hand at her heart. "My god! You really are alive!" She rushes to him and pulls her in to a hug, asking her how he's here, how he's come back to her, guiding him to sit on the couch and tell her everything, telling him not to worry about a few tears between friends.
Steve's heart shatters with what must be a near audible crack.
It does that four more times before he leaves two hours later.
In that time, Peggy pours him three cups of tea and Steve forces himself to drink each one when she hands it to him. It scorches the absolute hell out of his tongue every time, but that pain is easy to bear in comparison to how his very bones feel full of acid. He leaves the scones untouched, but lets her send him out the door with a plate of them because as he's leaving, she sparks through a seemingly random moment of clarity and comments that she remembers how hungry he gets. They taste like ashes in his mouth, and for once in the last seventy years, Steve isn't in the least bit hungry.
Steve sits in the car for several long moments before he can make himself starts the engine. He wants to cry or throw himself in to the kind of fight that might get him beat absolutely bloody. He wants sit here and never move again. He wants to scream until his newly reinforced lungs give out.
Whether he decides to do that or not, Steve doesn't think he's ever felt less able to breath. It turns out, asthma has nothing on seeing the love of your life forget who you are, realize you're alive, and then think you're dead again in repeated fitz and starts for two hours. Eventually, Steve realizes that his lungs are burning this way because he had literally stopped breathing three minutes ago.
It's not a great frame of mind to be driving in. Steve drives anyway. If crashing a plane in to the arctic couldn't kill him, he doubts driving in to a guardrail will do the job.
He goes to Steve Peggy again four days later. His heart breaks again. It breaks every time. A week turns in to two, turns in to a month, turns in to three. Steve doesn't stop going.
Steve has never known how to stop loving someone once he's started.
Six months after waking up from the ice, Steve goes on his first mission. He's assigned with Natasha and a man named Brock Rumlow along with a team of SHIELD spec ops and handed a mission file. It's on paper, which Steve thinks is probably meant to be a kindness. Modern technology is not so much hard to adapt to as it is not his preference, but it does seem to keep breaking on him. The tablets are made to be mobile and easy to carry, but hat also means they're a little flimsy and Steve keeps breaking them by accident.
The mission is a hostage crisis in the Philippines.
They go, everyone lives, they leave.
The action of the mission takes five hours from start to finish. The prep time, insertion, and extraction phases combined take three days. That about matches what Steve got used to during the war. Actually executing any form of military strike is brutally fast. Letting your target figure out what you're doing is a strategic 'don't' and hitting fast was generally smarter. Doing the preparation to hit that effectively and then clearing up later takes time.
Lucky for Steve, clearing up afterwards has never quite made it in to his job description.
God but he'd like it to be sometime.
Anyway, the mission goes down in the books as a success and when he debriefs with Fury later the man tells him that unless he has any objections to the agents he worked with, they and Romanov will be his ops team for the foreseeable future. Steve can't say that any of them really rubbed him the wrong way, but he asks for the files of each team member for review anyway and spends the weekend reviewing them for strengths, weaknesses, and basic psychological character. He asks for one of the pilots to be rotated out because the files note that he's had contact with some sketchy political action groups on the internet and has two of the tactical squad changed out because their files not tendencies towards unpredictable violence.
The changes he asks for are made without complaint and Steve signs off on his new team a week later. Rumlow is slated as the leader of the main squad deferring to Romanov who in turn, reports to Steve. Steve gets the impression she's also supposed to be in charge of communicating with agency brass and Steve can't say he minds the arrangement in principle. He doesn't love being monitored and reported on, but Romanov is enough of a friend to hit the least off putting balance between subtle and honest while she goes about it.
Basically, Steve knows she's reporting on him, Natasha knows Steve knows she's reporting on him, and neither of them ever make any attempt to discuss it.
The dynamic of the team is very functional even if Steve can't say he feels very attached to it. In fact, that's a good description for how he seems to feel about most things these days. He's there in the world. He interacts with people on a regular basis and thinks it's possible he's building friendships and working dynamics with most of them. He has a lot of his daily interactions figured out even if certain things like inflation, food variety, and the way people interact with each other casually in public still hits him as absurd sometimes.
Steve manages to keep a cell phone for more than three weeks at a time and learns how to use it for calls, texts, and video chats. He figures out email and automatic bill payment and makes himself get used to going shopping at the grocery store. He looks like he's living normally, and the effort it takes is astounding.
After their third mission together, Romanov invites herself over to his SHIELD apartment carrying dinner. She slips past him when he opens the door and helps herself to the contents of his kitchen to find plates and cutlery. Steve doesn't make any move to stop her and instead follows his nose to the container holding the lo mein. Over the last few months, he's gotten used to Romanov spending a lot of time in his vicinity, and she's evidently decided that the fastest way to build trust between them is to routinely invade his personal space.
Steve has decided that he doesn't mind it. Not many people touch him these days, casually or otherwise, and he misses the basics of human contact some days. He wonders if Romanov noticed and tailored her behavior accordingly, if the taps on the elbow and hands on his shoulder are calculated to produce a particular result. it wouldn't surprise him if they were, but trying to categorize each one takes more work on a daily basis than Steve feels able to keep up with. He wonders idly how Romanov survives with her brain running that way all the time.
"Are there octopus tentacles in this?" Steve asks, examining the contents of one of the food containers.
Romanov smiles at him and waves her chopsticks. "Think of it as me expanding your culinary horizons."
Steve shrugs and takes a bite. He chews thoughtfully and swallows. He can't say the texture is his favorite thing, but it's not enough to deter him from taking a second bite. "Not bad," he judges. "Better than Depression cooking."
That gets him a raised eyebrow. "In some places, they're considered a delicacy."
"What are they normally considered here?"
"A little weird mostly."
"Huh."
Their meal continues more or less in silence and Steve is content with the quiet company. Steve is moving to refill his plate for the third time when Romanov speaks. "Do you like living here Steve?"
Steve shrugs. He lives where he lives. It's a place to sleep and store the things he owns. There are four walls, a roof, electricity, running water, and climate control. The bed has a mattress and the surfaces are clean. He's lived in worse places. He's lived in ones he liked better too.
"it's fine, he says. "Why? Am I moving?"
It's her turn to shrug. "Only if you want to. Fury wants our team to start operating out of the Triskelion as a main base. Rumlow has a place in Virginia and doesn't mind if he lives there or here in the compound. I've got a place in D.C I was thinking of settling in to. I just thought, if you wanted to make a change, this would be a good time."
Steve chews slowly as he thinks over the possibilities. He has never lived completely on his own before. Steve went from the childhood apartment he had shared with his mother, to the even smaller apartment he had split with Bucky, to the army, to SHIELD. It would be a new experience, and one he wasn't completely certain would be good for his sense of separation. On the other hand, maybe it would have the opposite effect and he'd be able to get more integrated with the rest of the world.
Plus, he can recognize the loosening of a leash when he sees it. Whatever all of the evaluations have said, Fury is no longer concerned about what he might do if left alone. SHIELD is willing to operate under the impression that Steve has no intention of running derelict of duty. Privately, Steve is very aware that that inclination is coming less from a sense of duty, and more from a keen absence of anything else to do with his skills and time.
"I could go for moving," he decides after a long pause. "Got a real estate agent I could talk to?"
As it turns out, Natasha Romanov doesn't so much have a real estate agent as she has Pepper Potts' personal phone number. Steve gives Romanov a list of his housing preferences (storage for his motorcycle, commutable distance from the Triskelion, large grocery store nearby, private landlord not a company, building not falling apart) and Romanov passes them on with several of her own additions on his behalf.
Ms. Potts gets back to him with a speed that borders on terrifying and a week after his initial conversation with Romanov, Steve is on an apartment tour. Steve dismisses the first three places he sees for being houses and not apartments. The next place is a decent enough apartment in a good location, but it's for sale and not for rent. Steve rejects it based on that alone. He has the money, but something in him recoils from the notion of that kind of permanence.
The next three places he looks at could have been stamped out of the same industrial press and bolted together using a uniform kit. Nothing is particularly wrong with any of them, but if Steve is going to bother moving out of standard military housing, he'd like to at least be able to feel the difference. The last two places are a little further away from the Triskelion and slightly older builds. Steve decides that neither of those points is necessarily a con.
Steve settles on the first of those two choices more or less on a whim.
In the future, when he knows more about the powers that actually run the universe, he'll wonder how much choice he had in things at all.
Steve tells Romanov which apartment he's decided on and she promptly asks to see pictures he doesn't have. Then she rolls her eyes and asks him what he wants to do about furniture. Most of what's in his apartment here on the SHIELD base is government standard issue and doesn't actually belong to him. Steve chooses the path of least resistance and simply lets Romanov tow him through the process of selecting furniture online and, on a memorable and prolonged trip, through a Pottery Barn. His new belongings are shipped to the apartment and assembled for him by helpful moving people and less than a month after deciding to move, he's packing his clothes and personal items in a duffle bag and taking his bike to his new home.
It turns out moving is a pretty quick process when you don't actually own things.
He is greeted at the door by his new land lady, a woman named Eloise who is probably younger than him if you go by birthdays but looks more like someone a passerby would assume is his grandmother.
"Captain Rogers I assume," she says when she opens the door.
"Yes ma'am," he replies promptly, feeling the sudden compulsion to take his hat off before remembering that he isn't wearing one and hasn't regularly for a decade even without the seventy year coma worked in. He settles for a small, respectful, dip of his head and holds out a hand to shake. "Pleased to meet you."
"Well aren't you sweet," she says, holding out her own hand to meet his. Her grip is firm, the skin cool and wrinkled like Peggy's is, the way his probably should feel. "Come along inside young man, and I'll get you your keys." She shuffles back through the door in to an entrance hall that is, while certainly a little old, is impeccably clean. The paint is slightly peeling, but the color is a pleasantly pale yellow that glows faintly in the light coming in through the windows.
The hall smells faintly of lemon cleaner, chalk dust, and Eloise's lingering perfume. Someone in one of the lower floor apartments is baking bread and there's a vague scent of coffee drifting from somewhere upstairs. He can hear the traffic outside, but it's not so loud that he want's to jump out of his skin. He hasn't seen his new apartment yet, but everything else about this building already says he'll be comfortable living here.
Eloise makes her way to the office and returns a few moments later with a key for him. "You're on the third floor young man," she tells him. "Your final paperwork is on the counter in your kitchen just bring it down and knock on my door later today. I'd normally walk up with you, but my hip has been giving me trouble this last year."
Steve frowns. "If you need help with anything..."
She waves him off. "Oh that's all right dear." She takes a few steps away and then turns. "Oh, a last thing. I remembered because of the hip. You have a neighbor across the hall. Moved in a year ago. She's a quiet little thing but she works some odd hours. A medical student you see. They work her down to the bone over there. The gentleman who had your apartment last never had any complaints."
Steve smiles at her and picks up his duffle bag, flipping the key around his little finger. "I think it'll be alright."
Eloise grins back at him and suddenly it's like Steve can see the young women she must have been before shining through. "Oh, I daresay you will. Soldiers usually manage."
Steve makes his way up the three flights of stairs pretty much on autopilot. He unlocks his apartment door, steps inside, and is immediately faced with the reality of having to unpack. Fortunately for him, not having had much to pack means he also doesn't have all that much to unpack. In fact, he should probably go and buy more things.
Mainly food.
Steve really, really, really, needs to go buy food.
With his meager boxes emptied, Steve is left with the question of what to do with the empty cardboard. He sits on his new living room floor and stares at the innocuous objects. Shoving the empty boxes under his bed or in to the closet would keep them ready to use later. Crumpling them up and taking them to the building dumpster would mean they're gone and he can't use them anymore and he's actually here to stay for a while.
Steve shakes his head at himself. A few empty cardboard boxes should not be the thing to give him an existential crisis. He decides to split the difference and carefully flattens the boxes without damaging them, tucking the disassembled remains in to the closet containing his laundry machine. He'll have to figure out how all the settings are supposed to work later.
Then he signs the paperwork and takes it down to Eloise before going out to explore the neighborhood. He'd been to D.C once in the 40s shortly after taking the serum for some pictures with a few congressmen, but he hadn't had much of a chance to see the city. Unfortunately, as soon as he hits the pavement, he's confronted with the fact that he has absolutely no idea where to go. Shrugging, he picks a direction and just starts walking.
He walks a straight line away from the apartment for about five miles and begins to work his way out and around the neighborhood. He works his way in little by little, block by block, walking in slow and repeated concentric circles. It take shim longer than he's proud of to notice that he's been unintentionally working in a one man search grid.
The impromptu reconnoissance trip gets him some worthwhile information. For one thing, the spatial mapping portion of his brain constructs a map of the ground he covers as he goes which, the survivalist portion of himself, thinks can only be a good thing. He also notes down the location of a few different grocery stores, a home improvement shop, and a second-hand bookstore he wants to check out later.
He comes across a twenty-four hour diner as he nears the apartment again and he lingers outside for a moment in the street outside. The smell of fried food, coffee grounds, and maple syrup leaks out through the swinging door and probably works better than an actual magnet to drag in hungry customers. Steve discovers while standing there that he is, in fact, a very hungry customer.
Steve steps through the door and a faint bell tinkles to indicate his arrival to the people working the evening shift. A woman behind the laminated counter greats him with a practiced smile and directs him to pick any booth he'd like. Steve likes the booth where he can have his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. The position also lets him see through windows to watch the street in two directions.
The waitress who had greeted him wanders over a few minutes after he sits to give him a menu and Steve frankly can't blame her for not putting in a hustle. It's past eight-thirty and the dinner rush is over. Her shift is probably either just starting or just ending and Steve has no doubt in his head that there are at a minimum six other places she would rather be.
She hands him a menu which Steve takes, and offers a cup of coffee, which he turns down in favor of water. He has enough trouble sleeping through the night. Adding in a stimulant can't possibly be a good plan.
He orders something that claims to be a deluxe breakfast platter and is not disappointed when twelve minutes later he's handed a plate bigger than his face loaded with bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, toast, and hash browns. It's actually enough food on a single plate that Steve won't have to get seconds to be full. It's also delivered absolutely free of comment or questioning glances and no one comes over to take the plate until he is well and truly done with it.
The tip he leaves in appreciation is probably far too high. The smile he gets from the waitress when she goes to clear the table as he's slipping out the door makes him decide it was worth it. Putting a little good in to the world can't be anything but a positive. If the best thing he does in a day is make a waitress pleased with a tip, if it's making a stranger's day better, then he's okay with that.
Steve makes his way back to the apartment building and is grateful for a moment all he can register is how grateful he is to be inside and out of the win. He doesn't think he'll ever get back around to liking the cold. Seventy years in an ice box was enough to kill that inclination.
Then, his eyes adjust.
Then, he sees the girl sitting on the stairs.
Then the cosmic forces of the world shift, two threads twist, and Steve's life changes forever.
The girl sitting on the stairs seems utterly exhausted. She has her head down and her shoulders are hunched. A messy ponytail of blonde hair hides the side of her face from his view. The low light of the lobby reveals flecks of some kind of purple material trapped amongst the strands.
Steve doesn't know why he talks to her. Maybe it's because she might be in trouble and Steve's conscience couldn't take leaving anyone in that position if he can do something about it. Maybe it's because the way she's sitting happens to be blocking the stairs. Either way, Steve steps a few feet closer, opens his mouth, and says "are you alright ma'am?"
The girl looks up and the first thing Steve thinks is thank god she's not actually crying. The second thing is I have never seen eyes that color in my life. Those eyes are a shade of blue that Steve can only say equal summer. They're summer in August and the tile at the bottom of a swimming pool. They're Mediterranean water and the ring of sky around the sun.
Black lashes flutter shut around those eyes in a blink, a second one, and she tips her head like she's considering the question. She opens her mouth, seems not to know what to say, shuts it, then shrugs. "Would you believe that my day has been completely fucking insane?"
The words take him a little aback and Steve pauses. "Umm..." he rubs his palm over the back of his neck and tries to ignore the warm flush creeping up around his ears. Eventually he says, "I don't know. Has it been?" The girl nods and her head thumps against the wall in a way that makes Steve think worrying about a conclusion might not be totally out of line. He shrugs. "Well I'd never accuse a lady of lying."
The girl cracks a smile. It's a small thing, but it seems warm and genuine and Steve thinks he'd like to see it another time. "Nice of you," she comments.
Something suddenly clicks in Steve's mind. Eloise had told him that his neighbor was a quiet sort of girl who worked odd hours and went to medical school. He might be jumping to conclusions, but there's logic to find there. He gives what he hopes is a friendly smile in return. "I'm sorry I should have introduced myself. I think I just moved in across the hall from you." He holds out his hand. "I'm Steve."
A look of stunned realization crosses the girls face and she blurts out, "I've met you before!" Steve startles and barely refrains from taking a half-step backwards. Sudden recognition is a thing he's dealt with before, and it's almost never ended well. The girl seems to realize his reaction and hurries to backtrack. "Well maybe not like met you met you. I pulled a piece of rebar out of your ribcage at a Shwarma restaurant and then I think I ate some of your chicken kebab."
The information falls in to place in Steve's mind and he relaxes the tension that had crept in to his shoulders without his noticing. He remembers the feeling of steady hands and a pinching ache in his side. He remembers gold hair with rubble in it and blood stained denim. The girl extends her hand to shake his. "We didn't get to names then. I'm Cassie."
Steve shakes the proffered hand. The pressure it returns is firm and pleasant. Her hands are warm and slightly chapped. There are a few calluses marking her fingers and palm that catch vaguely against his. "Then I suppose I owe you a thank you," he says. "I should have said it then but I guess I was pretty out of it."
The girl, Cassie, drops her hand back in to her lap. "You had an excuse," she says generously. "You had three inches of foreign metal in your side. And I was only doing my job."
Steve shakes his head. "You did plenty more than that. I remember plenty of people in the war- medics who did everything the soldiers did and did it unarmed. You went above and beyond."
Cassie's fingers twist together in her lap and she shrugs a shoulder. "I wasn't the only one."
There isn't much of anything Steve can say to that because it's true. They lapse in to a silence that, while not exactly awkward, is also not necessarily comfortable. It doesn't actually occur to Steve to ask her to move, he doesn't really care about getting to his apartment, but he's also not about to walk back out the door, so he's left standing there at the foot of the stairs.
"Oh sorry," Cassie says. She reaches up to grab the banister. "Sorry I'll-" she makes to pull herself to her feet and several facts immediately register in Steve's head.
One, Cassie's face has now twisted in pain. Two, that expression took shape the moment her weight hit her right foot. Three, that foot is clearly not going to support her weight and Cassie's body, if not her mind, has clearly caught on to that fact. Four, if she falls backwards in to the stairs, she's definitely going to get hurt. Five, Steve is definitely close enough to catch her. Six, she seems to realize that too.
One moment Steve is watching her start to fall, the next he has a warm armful of apologetic girl braced against his chest. "Sorry!" she grimaces. "I broke a couple of toes. All part of my insane day."
Steve frowns and does his best to focus on the words, not the fact that he is now having more non-violent physical contact with a human than he's had in what, according to his body, is seventy years. His brain is understandably a little bit scrambled. "Um," yeah Steve, really articulate answer. Words, words are things. "Do you break toes often?"
Not bad. Nicely on topic. Not so verbose or impressive but it still feels like a save.
"Only on insanity days," Cassie tells him.
Without thinking it through very much, Steve shifts her weight in his arms so she can brace herself more against his side than his chest. It might be slightly more dignified and it means he can keep one hand free. He gestures with his free arm. "Would you like some help on the stairs? It's on my way after all."
Something flickers behind her eyes and for a moment Steve has to wonder what he'll end up doing if she says no. It'd be impolite not to listen to her wishes, but Steve thinks he'd feel bad about leaving her here to manage on her own. He just has to decide if he'd feel worse about that or about ignoring the wishes of a neighbor he's just met.
Of course, he understands all too well why a person might not want help, why they might prefer to handle an injury on their own. God knew he'd felt that way enough time. Bucky had always been too good of a friend to let him. He'd just gone about it making every effort to avoid making Steve feel useless.
He's saved solving the dilemma because Cassie nods. "Yeah, thank you. I'll just keep borrowing your arm until we get up to our floor?"
Steve gives in to that quickly and easily, relieved to be free of the conundrum. "Sounds like a plan." He does a slow pivot around her so they're both facing the right direction and her weight will be mostly off the injured foot. He's conscious that Cassie is putting her weight on his arm, but it's a feeling of pressure and not genuine force.
They begin to climb and Steve tries to covertly provide extra lift on each step to lessen the effort. Cassie is preoccupied with watching her feet so Steve takes over the job of looking ahead of them. Their progress is slow, and Steve ponders over the fact that they'd be at their doors already if he'd just carried her. Of course, given the amount of serious consideration she apparently had to give to his offer of being a human crutch, it's very possible she'd have gritted her teeth and limped the whole way on her own rather than take the offer.
This way is longer and slower, but Steve gets to help, so this is better.
Still, he's conscious of the fact that his new neighbor must be in pain even with his help, so he offers to stop half way up to their floor.
"What?" she says, apparently startled out of thought. "Oh, no. I'm good. It's just..." she turns a little, and Steve registers the shift of her weight as she looks up at him. and then looks back at the ground in front of her as they start the next flight of stairs. "If I trip I'm not going to crash us both in to the floor, am I?"
It's phrased as something between a statement and a question and Steve feels compelled to answer it. All the same, he directs his words at the far wall rising in front of them instead of her. "Uh, no. My coordination is a little better than normal. I'm hard to knock over by accident. You would probably need to be trying."
Even then, Steve doesn't like her odds of success. His serum enhanced senses have her sketched out as being five-foot-one and just over a hundred pounds. Her grip is firm, and her pain tolerance must be fairly high, so it's entirely possible she's stronger than she looks, but even that measure can't be very high. Maybe, maybe, maybe if she managed to take him completely by surprised she could knock him down, but he'd be on his feet again before she could get very far or land a second hit.
Not party to his thoughts, the possible assailant in question just says "huh," and takes another step. "Helpful."
Steve doesn't know what to say to that. Having perfect balance and an unbeatable center of gravity combined with his reflexes is handy. It can also be utterly disconcerting. He shrugs the shoulder of his unoccupied arm, mindful that Cassie's own sense of balance may not be up to much interference, and goes for honesty without disclosure. "It can be."
Cassie doesn't speak further and Steve is both grateful at not having to make further discussion, and, deep down for reasons he's not ready to examine, a little disappointed that the conversation seems to be over. They reach Cassie's door a few minutes of hard (and for one of them painful) work later and Steve carefully helps her disengage and shift her weight on to the frame. It's only after he steps away that he feels the chill of the air conditioner push in against his side.
"Thanks again for the help," Cassie tells him, and Steve gets his first well-lit look at her face.
Pretty is his first thought, and then he feels immediately embarrassed by the assessment. For one thing, it's deeply shallow. For a second, it's utterly unexpected and knocks him off kilter far more thoroughly than any physical effort ever could. For a third, as he looks it becomes clearer and clearer that 'pretty' is far too paltry a word.
Her face is vaguely heart-shaped, wider over the cheek bones and narrowing at the chin. There's pink in her cheeks, the shadow of a dimple on one side, and the hint of freckles over a small-boned nose. It's a face that reminds Steve a little of classical portraits depicting nymphs and spirits from mythology, but less artificially perfect and therefore far more interesting. All in all, quite apart from being simply pretty, it's a compelling blend of features promising a stunning power of expression.
This is not a face that hides.
Steve jolts at the realization that he's been staring at her for several seconds without speaking which is bound to leave a less than stellar impression and scrambles to locate the place in his brain that controls the whole, words-and-speech thing. "It was nothing," he says immediately. He doesn't quite know what to do with his hands so he shoves them in to his jacket pockets. This might be where the conversation is supposed to end, but it suddenly dawns on him that it's very hard to tell and just up and leaving would definitely be rude. "I'd never leave a Dame in trouble."
Cassie's face twists and furrows in to a confused frown. This is both good news and bad news for Steve. On the one hand, it means he's said something wrong. On the other, it proves he was right in his theory about the nature of her face.
"Sorry," she says, seeming to realize immediately what expression she's made and how it might be taken. "It's just that no one says that anymore. Not that you don't have a good reason not to know that. Actually, as excuses go, your's is pretty unassailable." Then she does something that most do not, and jumps straight from pointing out his mistake to providing information. And, best of all, she doesn't make it sound like a criticism. "In this situation, 'girl' is more colloquial and 'person' is best unless you're sure the girl you're talking to isn't twitchy about feminism and the English language."
"Is that likely to happen?" Steve asks, feeling worried.
She shrugs. "Probably not with most people. But this is D.C so some people might be more politically sensitive than others."
Steve feels the tension go out of his shoulders and suddenly he just feels tired. "Sometimes it really hits me all at once how much the world has changed." The words are more for him, more so that he can simply say them out loud and have somebody hear them than they are for the sake of conversation. The answer he gets is therefore surprising simply by virtue of existing, and doubly so by its content.
A hand lightly taps against his elbow. "Hey," she says, voice as light as the touch. "If it makes you feel any better, you aren't the only one who feels that way. Six years or sixty-five, almost everyone feels like the world's changing too fast. And let me tell you, it absolutely scares us all shitless. I'm serious. Most of us operate on a low level of panic every single day because we've got a tiny voice screaming in the back of our minds that the entire world is shifting and there's nothing we can do about it. I don't know for sure because I'm not you, but at least in this situation, I think the only difference between us and you is that we've had a little bit more time to get used to it."
The words ring with all the quiet peel of a church bell in the air between them. And then, very slowly, Steve feels himself smile. "It was good to meet you- again," he tacks on. Because it's true, and it has been, and Steve thinks she should know that. Then, because what there is to say has been said, he steps backwards to his own door and extracts his new keys from his pocket. He gives her a small nod of goodnight. "Goodnight Miss Cassie."
For a moment, he worries that this too is too old fashioned a thing to say. Then, Cassie smiles at him. It's full and lovely and like the sun coming through clouds. If Steve had thought before that she was something better than pretty, this smile tips things straight over in to gorgeous.
That gut-punching expression gives him no mercy as Steve's new neighbor reaches in to her pocket, retrieves her key, and gets her door unlocked, all without looking away or granting reprieve by dimming even a little. "Goodnight Steve," she returns.
Then, tragically, wonderfully, beatifically, the smile vanishes along with the girl.
It leaves Steve feeling like he's just looked straight in to the sun.
A/N: So what did you all think? Sorry it took me so long to get back to this. I don't know if it's ever been mentioned to any of you guys, but law school is like, monstrous levels of time suck. Anyway, here's Steve's perspective of the meeting! Poor guy, still no good with girls. I really wanted to get across the fact that at his heart Steve is A. not in a good place right now. B. very lonely. and C. somewhat stunned by Cassie's mere sunshine-in-human-form existence. Let me know if you guys want me to keep going! Review for me! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox