67.
?
?
Steve wakes up, something he didn't expect to happen.
He remembers a wall of white, Steve, I love you, and then blackness.
Slowly, he manages to lift his head. His vision is spinning, he can feel blood running down his face from his forehead where there's a massive amount of pain, making his head throb. He's slumped against the control panel where he'd been thrown forward in the impact with the ice. The knobs and buttons and monitors are digging painfully into his chest. He tries to move, but his entire body is pained, so much so that he can barely move. He screams out, cries out, the sobs that wrack his frame causing him excruciating pain.
He's freezing. There's snow and ice everywhere inside where it burst through the smashed window and filled the cockpit. Steve's covered in it, everything's just white. He's cold to his core, his entire body shaking violently.
It takes him a while, but Steve manages to pull himself off the panel, landing hard and weak on the ground. He drags himself away from the control panel, leaving a thick trail of blood along with him. He feels like he's bleeding from everywhere, there's blood over everything, covering the snow and ice around him. He stops on the ground behind the pilot's chair to catch his breath and give his body a break from the pain of moving.
The shield's been thrown a little way, wedged up against the vessel the Tesseract had been stored in. Next to it is the compass where it landed on the ground. Steve reaches out and picks it up with a violently shaking hand, flicking open the compass. Isabel's face still smiles up at him, undamaged even though the glass inside has been smashed. Steve manages to smile back at her.
He drags himself a little way more beside his shield, because he always feels stronger and safer when he's got his shield and lets himself fall weakly onto his back. He lifts his arm to hold the compass up to his face so he can look at Isabel. He wants the last thing he sees to be her, and not the white or the snow or the blood or the Valkyrie.
He stares at her a while, waiting for death to come, and eventually the blackness hanging on the edge of his vision starts to take over. He's weak, his breathing gets shallower, his body gets colder, the blood loss gets heavier. He feels so sick, feels so weak and unwell, and he knows he's dying. It's a familiar sensation, death. He and death go way back. This feeling is almost more familiar than being big, or being strong, or being respected. Death is like an old friend, and with how much pain he's in, Steve almost welcomes it. He'd welcome death with open arms if he knew there wasn't someone waiting for him, someone he was leaving behind.
He smiles one last time at her – the curve of her cheek, the sparkle in her eyes, the shine of her hair, the flutter of her lashes, the brightness of her smile – and lets the blackness take over, the image of Isabel burnt onto the backs of his eyelids.