Author's note: Thank you for taking the time to read! If you like this, you may like my story "The Third Life of Steve Rogers," which takes place after returns to 1945 and reunites with Peggy to live the life he lost. It fits with this story like a puzzle piece.

Chapter 3

Steve Rogers slowly opened his eyes.

He stared up at a ceiling fan, perplexed, with the faint chatter from a radio filling his ears. There was something he was supposed to be doing. Steve struggled to remember. He was supposed to meet someone, somewhere. Who or where, he couldn't quite remember, but he felt the urgency of it.

Cautiously, he sat up and swung his feet off the bed and onto the floor. He was fully dressed, right down to his shoes, but not in his uniform. Someone had brought him here, cared for him, changed his clothing. They'd found him on the plane and taken him to... a hospital room? He gazed around the room, noting the white and green walls, the neatly made bed, the white roses in a vase on the dresser. Everything was clean and pleasant, and more spacious than most hospitals he'd been in. He had the room to himself.

A car horn honked in the distance, and he turned to see a window by the bed, with a bar of sunshine streaming in. Through it he could see a tall brownstone building. He was in a city? Not some makeshift medical tent complex cobbled together amid the chaos of the front?

He must be in a hospital. But there was no odor of antiseptic hanging heavy in the air, and he couldn't hear the bustle of nurses and gurneys out in the hallway that he expected. Suddenly alert, he focused on the tabletop radio across the room from him. The announcer had just said something about the Dodgers. The Dodgers? With a start, Steve realized he must be back in America. He wondered at that, and looked down at his body. No bandages of any kind, and he felt fine, albeit a little stiff. Why would they bring him all the way home, when the fighting was overseas? He was obviously fit to go back to the front.

Something wasn't right. He wasn't sure what it was, but his instincts were jangling, warning him about something. And he remembered the thought he'd had before drifting back to sleep: that maybe the SSR wouldn't be the first to find him. He had to find out where he was, and fast.

The door opened. A young woman came in, a pretty one with dark wavy hair, dressed in a white button-up shirt and tie over an olive-green skirt. She looked at Steve and her whole face beamed when she saw he was awake. "Good morning," she said, and then glanced at her watch, "or should I say afternoon?"

Her voice was low and pleasant, and her accent was American. That was good as far as it went, though it was no guarantee. He'd met too many spies in the field to feel secure about a detail like that.

"Where am I?" he asked her.

"You're in a recovery room in New York City," she responded promptly.

The view outside the window and the baseball game being broadcast through the radio certainly seemed to bear that out, and yet...

"The Phillies have managed to tie up at 4-4," the radio announcer said. "But the Dodgers have three men on. Pearson beaned Reiser in Philadelphia last month. Wouldn't the youngster like a hit here to return the favor? Pete leans in. Here's the pitch. Swung on. A line to the right. And it gets past Rizzo! Three runs will score. Reiser heads to third. Durocher's going to wave him in. Here comes the relay, but they won't get him. The Dodgers take the lead, 8-4!"

A cold chill ran through Steve's body. Reiser wasn't playing for the Dodgers anymore. He'd joined the Army as soon as the war broke out.

Steve flicked his eyes back over to the girl suspiciously. "Where am I, really?"

The girl gave him a puzzled smile. "I'm afraid I don't understand," she said.

"The game," Steve said levelly. "It's from May, 1941. I know, 'cause I was there."

The girl said nothing, but her eyes widened ever so slightly and the smile faded from her lips. She'd been caught, and she knew it. Was she really the best Hydra could come up with? She was an even worse liar than he was.

Steve got to his feet. "I'm gonna ask you again," he said low, moving slowly toward her. "Where am I?"

"Captain Rogers-" she said, looking nervous.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

The door burst open again, and two men dressed in black combat gear rushed in. That put paid to any further attempts at conversation. Without hesitation, Steve grabbed them both by the shirt and threw them across the room. To his shock, they didn't crash up against the wall, though. They sailed right through, leaving a 6-foot-wide gaping hole in the side of the building. Steve stood stock still in surprise for a moment. The men should be plummeting to the ground far below, but through the hole he could clearly see both of them lying on a shiny black floor, surrounded by chunks of broken plaster. Beside him, the girl squeaked and backed away from him, but he didn't care about her. In two steps he had crossed the room and vaulted through the hole in the wall.

He was in another room, dark and spacious and mostly empty. At a glance he saw that the brownstone building outside his window was nothing more than a 15-foot-tall photograph. The "sun" was a spotlight. It was fake. The whole thing was fake. Like a movie set.

He ran. The men on the floor were too stunned to immediately follow. Steve heard the girl behind him shout: "Captain Rogers, wait!" He ignored her and burst through a pair of double doors.

The exit took him out into a wide corridor of glass and stone, filled with men in suits. They seemed as surprised to see him as he was to see them. Further down the hall, more men in black combat gear ran toward him through the crowd. Steve ran the other way, into a lobby, shoving aside a suited man who got in his way. Over the intercom he heard a coded alert, but it didn't matter. They couldn't stop him. In moments he was out of the building and into the street, running with all the speed he could muster between two lanes of traffic. The buildings on either side were a blur, but he caught a glimpse of an American flag in his peripheral vision. Was he really in America after all? Who were those people back there?

It didn't matter. They definitely weren't friends of his. He ran like the wind, aided by the shoes they'd put on him. Only a block later he found himself in a wide plaza, filled with people... and then, without ever deciding to do so, he slowed to a halt, staring.

Where... was... he?

He was surrounded by movie screens. Huge ones, several stories high, covering the sides of every building in sight. Lights and colors and words flashed at him from all directions. It was... was it? Times Square? He'd been here dozens of times, delighted by the giant neon billboards that lit up the New York nights. But these advertisements were moving pictures, just like in a theater, and the images were crystal clear and brightly colored, like nothing he'd ever seen before.

Steve slowly turned around in a circle, staring and staring. His mind couldn't wrap around what he was seeing. Yes, that building there was, without a doubt, One Times Square. And yet it didn't look exactly like it should, and many of the buildings surrounding it were totally unfamiliar. Even the people in the plaza were dressed strangely.

It must be another deception. It had to be. But to create something on this scale... an entire section of New York City had been altered. How could they have completed so many new skyscrapers in the two years he'd been gone? They towered so high that their tops disappeared into the fog. And even the cars on the street were different. Several black cars were pulling up to a stop right by him; they were incredibly sleek and shiny. He'd never seen anything like them, not even at Howard Stark's world expo.

"At ease, soldier!"

Steve instinctively turned toward the authoritative voice that rang out over the din of traffic. A tall black man with an eyepatch strapped at a rakish angle across his bald head was standing several feet away, gazing at him levelly. He was dressed all in black. Behind him, more men in combat gear spilled out of the sleek black cars and began to push back the people who were crowding around, wondering what all the commotion was about.

Steve was so bewildered that for the moment, he didn't care about the fact that he was being surrounded. If he had to get out later, he could. Right now all he wanted was answers.

"Look, I'm sorry about that little show back there," the man said, coming closer, "but we didn't know what your mental state might be. We thought it best to break it to you slowly."

"Break what?" Steve demanded, controlling his agitation with an effort.

The man looked at him seriously. "You've been asleep, Cap. For almost 70 years."

Steve stared at the man for a long moment, and realized that against all reason, he believed him. He didn't know why, but he did. Maybe it was because of the evidence all around him: it all fit. Or maybe it was because of the man himself. Unlike the girl in the hospital room, there was nothing about him that was calculated to lull a man into a sense of security. He was big and imposing, dressed in a long black jacket with a gun strapped not-so-discretely to his thigh. He had an air about him that made Steve think he was the kind who could take a bullet or three and keep right on coming. He was not the kind to orchestrate something this bizarre for a sick joke.

Seventy years...

How was he still alive?

Steve felt the impossibility of it, and that was all he seemed able to feel. Somewhere deep inside he understood that his whole world had just crashed in on him, that while he slept in the cold darkness of the Valkyrie the world must have spun on without him, that everything and everyone he knew must be irrevocably gone... but his emotions seemed to be locked down deep inside his chest, and all he could do was gaze at them with a detached curiosity, the way he'd somehow been able to distance himself from the sight of the bloody, torn bodies strewn across the beaches of Normandy.

Only yesterday he had been talking to Peggy.

A week next Saturday, at the Stork Club. Eight o'clock on the dot. Don't you dare be late.

Realization dawned. That was what had been nagging at him since the moment he woke up in the dummy hospital room. It was Peggy he was supposed to meet with. He'd made a promise to her.

He had never shown up. He'd stood her up, the woman of his dreams. He had broken her heart.

He'd done it seventy years ago.

Nothing would have stopped me, some part of him seemed to be pleading in the depths of his soul, as though Peggy could hear him somehow. Nothing!

How many lives had he saved, bringing down that plane? And had they been worth a price that dear? His shoulders heaved, from suppressed emotion more than from his desperate sprint through the streets. Please, God, tell me they were.

"You gonna be okay?" the man asked, scrutinizing him with his one good eye.

"Yeah," Steve answered automatically. What other answer could there be? "Yeah. I just... I had a date."

More people were joining the crowd forming around the impromptu barrier the men in black suits had created around Steve with their cars, many of them pointing and staring, trying to figure out what was going on. The man put his hand on Steve's arm, guiding him toward one of the cars. "We should finish this conversation somewhere else," he said.

There was a part of him that wanted to resist, that wanted to run again, but then... where would he run? To whom?

"Who are you?" Steve asked, almost not caring anymore.

"Colonel Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D.," the man with the eyepatch said. "You would have known us as the Strategic Scientific Reserve."

Numbly, he allowed himself to be ushered into the back of a car that was, in fact, emblazoned with a logo of an eagle reminiscent of the SSR logo. Fury got in beside him and they started driving back the way Steve had run.

The inside of the car looked like something straight out of a pulp fiction magazine, all glowing dials and displays, with a movie screen mounted right into the dashboard that showed a moving map of the streets. The men in the front seats glanced back at him curiously, and Steve forced himself to tear his eyes away from the instrumentation and stare out the window instead, working to accept the strangeness of what he was seeing. I'm in the future, he told himself, testing out the feel of the words. This is real. This is happening. I'm in the future.

"What year is it?" he asked without turning to look at Fury.

"2011."

"Two thousand..." he whispered, trailing off.

This is real. This is happening. I'm in the future.

"How am I still alive?" he asked.

"To be honest with you... we're not really sure," Fury said. "My docs say it was suspended animation. Something to do with Dr. Erskine's formula, the cold..." He shrugged. "I don't know."

Steve turned to look at him. "Did we win the war?" he asked.

Fury smiled. "Hell, yes. Unconditional surrender. Taking down Hydra was a big part of that."

A profound sense of gratitude managed to penetrate his shock. If that was true, then it had all been worth it. He and Peggy had vowed not to stop until Hydra was destroyed, whatever it took. She must have faced the end of their task alone, but she had respected his choice. She must have understood.

But if the war was over...

"Now what?" Steve murmured. He hadn't meant to speak it out loud, but he did. After so many years of thinking of nothing but how to get to the war, and then of nothing but how to win it, he could hardly remember what life was like before. He'd been reshaped by Dr. Erskine with no other purpose in mind than to fight a war. How would he live without one?

Fury laughed humorlessly. "The world hasn't changed all that much. We may not be at war, but it's the same now as it's always been in the course of human history: there are good people, and there are bad ones. And the good ones still have to stop the bad ones. There's a lot of work to be done; a soldier's work. The world can still use a man like you, Cap."

They pulled up to the curb, and a balding man in a suit opened the door for him. He fixed Steve with a strangely intent look and opened his mouth to say something, but Fury barked "Not now," and the balding man meekly kept his silence. Steve was taken back into the lobby he had just escaped from. Inside there were a lot of men and women standing around, looking at him warily.

"Stand down Code 13," Fury said loudly, and a woman hastened to repeat the order over the intercom. Reluctantly the uniformed men began to disperse.

Steve looked around the room. There was another massive bird logo on the wall, ringed by the words "Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division." Below it were three framed portraits, and suddenly Steve stiffened in recognition: was that Howard Stark? It was, although his moustache was gray. And beside his portrait was...

He gazed open-mouthed up at the painting, thunderstruck. It was Peggy... but not as he had known her. She, too, was much older, with silver threading her hair, arranged in loose curls instead of the usual perfect rolls and waves.

It was like looking at a stranger with a face that was nevertheless inexplicably familiar. It was Peggy, but not-Peggy.

"This way," Fury said, taking his arm. "Dr. Stacey wants to see you. I don't think she was planning to let you go for a jog 5 minutes after waking up from a coma. Consider yourself warned. She's probably going to cluck over you like a mother hen."

Steve permitted himself to be led away, tearing his eyes away from the portrait, but his mind was reeling. He felt a powerful urge to look at his compass, as if to reassure himself that Peggy as he had known her really had existed. As he followed Fury down a corridor, Steve surreptitiously patted his pants pockets, hoping to feel that reassuring lump. It wasn't there. Where had it gone? In a pocket of his uniform? But they had changed his clothes. No, it wasn't in his uniform, he remembered. He'd taken it out as the plane was going down. With a start, he realized that after that hard of an impact with the surface, the compass could have bounced anywhere. It could be gone forever, right along with the little picture nestled in the lid that he'd clipped out of a newspaper.

This simple fact hit him with the force of a physical blow, and he barely noticed as he was taken into a hospital room - not the fake one he'd escaped from, but another one, this one filled with unfamiliar equipment, all beeping and blinking lights - and doctors and nurses bustled around him, checking his vitals and holding whispered conversations with Fury, who finally strode out of the room and left Steve alone with the medical team.

"You've got to be kidding me."

Coulson stood in the middle of the corridor gazing at Fury, disbelief etched on his features.

"You heard me," Fury said. "I need you in Boston, now. Our team there that was trying to reverse-engineer debris from the Destroyer? They had an accident this morning, tinkering around with the thing. Injured two technicians. I need someone competent overseeing operations there to make sure they find a safe way to turn it into something useful."

"Something hand-held, I know," Coulson said. "I read the Council's directive. But-"

"Then you know Phase 2 is our top priority."

"I know, but... it can't wait one day?" Coulson asked, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the medical wing.

"Captain America isn't going anywhere," Fury said flatly. "You'll meet him soon enough. Your Quinjet is waiting."

Coulson sighed, his shoulders sagging in defeat. "Okay, boss."

TO BE CONTINUED

Author's note: What do you think so far? Is everything making sense, and what has captured your interest? Take a moment and leave a review!