Chapter 5

Maria Hill came back in the morning to see Steve again, just as a couple of agents were walking out, having measured him for new clothing and taken his photograph for a security badge he was told everyone in the building had to wear.

"How are you doing?" Hill asked.

"Fine."

"I'm... not sure what to call you," she suddenly confessed. "Captain Rogers? Cap? Steve?"

He shrugged a little. "Any of that."

"Which do you prefer?" she pressed.

Steve was quiet for a long moment. Going by his rank was probably best for keeping things professional, and he'd figured out since joining the Army that he wasn't so nervous around women when things were kept professional. But the plain truth was, he had never felt less like a captain in his life. He wasn't a leader here. He was just a patient, and everyone who came into the room looked at him with pity, not with hope. "Steve," he said finally.

"Steve," she repeated. "You're welcome to call me Maria."

He nodded.

"Dr. Stacey says you're having trouble sleeping," she said.

She paused expectantly, but Steve said nothing.

"Is there anything we can get you to help?" Hill asked.

"No," he said softly.

"The nurses said you aren't eating much," she continued.

He shrugged. What was there to say? It was what it was.

"Maybe what we have isn't familiar to you?" Hill guessed. "I mean, this is New York City. We can probably find you just about anything you can think of."

"I'm fine. Thank you."

Hill didn't really look satisfied with his answer, and Steve knew he'd have to forestall her before she kept up this line of inquiry, so he asked the first question that popped into his head. "Is Gabe working tonight?"

Hill frowned. "Who's Gabe?"

"The janitor. He came into my room last night."

"I'm not sure," Hill said, looking puzzled by the question. She opened her mouth to say something more, but then a nurse poked her head through the door. "We're ready to start the CT scan."

The next several hours were filled with the tedious process of being scanned in a claustrophobic tube, and waiting, getting his blood drawn, and waiting, having his strength and reflexes and eyesight tested, and waiting, and then enduring a long debate amongst the medical team about whether or not he needed to be given all the new vaccines that had been developed since he had been gone, given his already-enhanced immune system. It was like the first few days after his transformation, when all the researchers had been fixated on trying to duplicate the serum, and hardly acknowledged him as anything more than a lab rat to draw samples from. By the end of it, Steve was thoroughly demoralized. Finally, they took him back to his hospital room.

His room wasn't empty. Gabe the janitor was sitting in there, parked in a chair and watching television. He stood up as Steve walked in. "Hey, man," he said. Behind Steve, the nurse closed the door, leaving the two of them alone.

Gabe wasn't wearing his coveralls this time, but jeans and a T-shirt. Steve eyed him, confused.

"Game's about to start," Gabe said, gesturing to the television, which was blaring a commercial about Coca-Cola. So that was still around, then. Nice to know at least one thing hadn't changed. "Game 3 of the playoffs, Cardinals versus Rangers. Wish the Dodgers had made it this year, but it should be a good game anyway. You wanna watch?"

Steve creased his brow. "Don't you have to work?"

"Not today," Gabe said. "It's Steve, right? I'm not supposed to ask your last name, so don't tell me. Everything's all hush-hush 'Mission: Impossible' around here. Did you see how many dudes they have standing guard in this section?" He chuckled in disbelief. "But they said I should come and hang with you."

"Did they... assign you to be my friend?" Steve asked in some disbelief.

"You tell me!" Gabe said, throwing up his hands expressively. "They told me they'd pay me double time to come in here and sit on my can and watch a baseball game with you. I couldn't really see the downside of that, so... here I am." He grinned jauntily.

Steve was quiet for a moment, letting that sink in. Gabe gave him a sideways look. "What are you thinkin', man?"

"I think they're not paying you enough," Steve said.

Gabe shook his head vigorously. "Hey, I'm just glad I still have a job. I got called in on my day off by that lady... Director Fury's right-hand man, you know the one? She takes me into her office and starts grilling me about what we talked about last night. I thought I was about to get the axe. And then she's like, no man, you gotta go back and talk baseball with him again." He shrugged. "I guess when you work for spooks, you might as well expect the unexpected, right?"

"I guess."

Steve stood there for a moment, and then, resigned to the situation, he pulled over another chair in front of the television and sat in it. It wasn't as though he had anything better to do.

Watching the game was both pain and pleasure. It felt familiar, immersing himself in the traditions of the game he'd loved since he was a child, yet none of it was really quite the same. He got his first shock when he realized from something the commentators said that the Dodgers weren't in Brooklyn anymore, but Los Angeles. Why? Steve had to bite his lip to keep from asking Gabe. Gabe had obviously not been told who he was, and he would find the question strange. Steve had to stop himself from asking a lot of questions. Some of the rules of baseball seemed to have changed. Even the commercials sometimes puzzled him. Thankfully, Gabe was a talker and he volunteered a lot of information without even realizing how helpful he was being. By the time Gabe left at the end of the game, Steve realized that despite the strangeness of the situation, the last couple of hours had been almost pleasant.

But it was only a temporary reprieve. When night came, Steve once again found himself lying on a bed in a dark room with a dull knot of anxiety in his stomach, totally unable to sleep. Again, a nurse pressed a sleeping pill on him, and this time he relented and took it, but as he'd suspected, it didn't do any good. He spent the whole night staring at the walls, trying not to think, and when morning finally came, he felt so agitated he wished he could crawl right out of his skin.

They brought him breakfast. He stared at his plate for a long time, knowing the nurses wanted him to eat, wanting to please them, but finally he pushed it away, untouched.

Hill came to see him not long after and asked him once again if she could get him anything to make him more comfortable. She seemed disappointed when he said no, but what was he supposed to say? I want to go home?

"What would help you sleep?" Hill asked.

"I can go days without sleep if I need to," Steve said.

"If you need to," Hill repeated, frowning. "But-" She was quiet for a moment, and then suddenly she dropped the subject. She was more perceptive than some of the others, Steve was starting to realize. She knew when to back off.

An agent poked his head through the door. "Agent Hill? Fury wants to see you right away."

Fury was hacked off, Hill could see at a glance. He stood there with folded arms and fixed his eye on her.

"How is Rogers?" he asked tersely.

"Not good," Hill admitted. "Still not eating or sleeping. Barely talking."

That was clearly not what Fury wanted to hear. He started striding down the corridor without looking back, expecting her to follow.

"So how did the Council take the news?" Hill asked, a little breathless. Fury was walking so fast that she had to trot to keep up with him.

"They asked more questions about the bomb on Schmidt's plane than they did about Captain America," Fury said irritably.

"Are you telling me they didn't even recognize what a valuable tool just fell in our laps?" Hill said in some disbelief.

"We have an international agency filled with thousands of highly skilled operatives equipped with the best tech money can buy," Fury said. "How much of a difference can one man make, super soldier or not? That's what they said. That's what they think."

"Well, when the one man is Captain America-"

"They have a point," Fury said. "As much as I hate to admit it. We have the world's only stable super soldier... except he isn't exactly stable right now, is he?"

"He's in shock. He needs time," Hill said.

"Time we may not have. If we needed him for something - something like the Destroyer showing up in New Mexico, for example - he'd get flummoxed just trying to open the debriefing files on a laptop." Fury stopped in the middle of the lobby and flung his arms out for emphasis. "The man doesn't know how to use an ATM. He doesn't know how to get through airport security. He's probably never heard the word 'internet.' As it stands, he is totally unable to function in our world, and the Council knows it."

"So we teach him," Hill said, just as an agent in a dark suit approached them.

"Excuse me, Director," the agent said. "Agent Redman sent this. He said you wanted it right away." He handed a small box to Fury and then walked away.

Fury opened the box. Inside it was a compass. Fury took it out and turned it over in his hands. The initials S.R. were scratched onto the back. He popped open the lid, and Hill moved around to look, too. The compass was spinning, apparently still functional. There was a black-and-white photograph glued into the lid.

"A woman? The plot thickens," Hill said. She squinted at the photo. "She looks a little familiar..."

Fury silently pointed at the portraits hanging in the lobby, featuring the three S.H.I.E.L.D. founders.

"Peggy Carter?" Hill said in surprise, looking back and forth between the photos. "I suppose he would have known her. Still, that's a little... personal, carrying around her photo like that." She glanced at Fury. "She retired back home to England, didn't she? Has anyone notified her that we found Rogers?"

"The Council doesn't want this publicized outside the walls of S.H.I.E.L.D. just yet," Fury said, "but I think we can make an exception for our former director, don't you?" He snapped the compass shut and put it back in the box.

"I'll call her," Hill asked.

"No. Get Agent 13 on the phone," Fury said. "She's posted at the Triskelion. Tell I need her here in New York as soon as possible." He handed the compass to Hill. "You give this back to him. I'd like to know what his reaction is."

Hill was apologetic when she came back into the room. She was holding a little box, turning it over and over in her hands.

"I'm sorry about the interruption," she said, coming to sit by Steve on the bed. "Things are a little crazy around here right now."

"I brought this for you," she added, holding out the box.

Steve took it and opened it, wondering if Hill had found some other museum artifact from the war that she thought would cheer him up, but to his shock, his eyes fell on his own compass. A whole jolt shot through his body before he could stop it. He hadn't lost it. Somehow they had found it for him. He ached to open it right away and make sure the photo was still intact, but Hill was watching him, and a nurse had just walked into the room, too. Quickly, he snapped the box shut and set it on the table by the bed, pointedly not looking at it.

"Thank you," he said carefully.

"You're welcome," she said.

Steve realized he wouldn't be able to look at the compass properly anytime soon, not with the continual stream of people going in and out of his room all day, disturbing his privacy. But he also couldn't bear to spend one more moment sitting here with nothing to do, not with the box hovering in his peripheral vision, taunting him.

"I do want something," he said with sudden certainty, and Hill looked at him hopefully. Even the nurse paused in what she was doing with some machine to look over at him. "I want to go for a run."

"A run?" Hill looked skeptical. "I'm not sure that's such a good idea. You woke up from a coma a few days ago."

"Already had a run," Steve said matter-of-factly. "It didn't hurt me." He noticed that the nurse immediately looked nervous, as if she was afraid he was going to push someone through a wall again and run away right now. For a group of people who had supposedly read all about him in the history books, they really didn't know much about him, Steve realized.

"I can ask Dr. Stacey," the nurse put in, in a tone that suggested she was only humoring him. But Hill unexpectedly came to his defense.

"If he feels up to it, then he should," Hill said. "Maybe it would help him sleep tonight."

That turned out to be the persuasive argument. Dr. Stacey checked him over, flipped through his charts, and finally admitted that she couldn't see any reason why he couldn't try, if he felt up to it.

They took him through the corridors to a gymnasium. There were agents there lifting weights, practicing hand-to-hand combat on the mats, and jogging around an upper level track that circled the spacious room. Immediately it reminded Steve of the old days at Camp Lehigh, training for the Army, although everything here was much cleaner and nicer. He vaguely wondered where S.H.I.E.L.D. got the resources to build a headquarters like this, all gleaming surfaces and decked out with tech that would have made Howard Stark salivate. Supposedly they were no longer at war, which meant no more war bonds. Yet Hill had told him there were more S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities besides this one, including a much larger headquarters in Washington, D.C. Apparently someone had deep pockets.

First they had him run a few laps at a slow jog and then stop to get his vitals checked. Everything was fine, so they let him go again.

This time he took off at a faster clip, wanting to test whether he had lost any strength with everything that had happened to him. He moved to the inside track and began to pass up the other runners. So far, he felt good. The wind of his passage blew back his hair and it felt satisfying, even better than he had hoped, to finally be on the move instead of sitting around getting tested and questioned all day. Hill and Dr. Stacey and a few other agents were watching him carefully each time he went past, but no one called out for him to slow down.

He went a little faster, his heart beating faster to go along with his pace, but he felt no strain. His movement was smooth yet powerful. The shoes they'd given him were the best he'd ever had, the soles conforming so perfectly against his feet, and yet springy, almost launching him forward with every step. He could run like this all day.

He kicked it into high gear, putting everything he had into it, his long strides eating up the distance in great gulps. He was fairly sailing past the other runners, and he heard several gasps and exclamations as he went past. He took several laps at full speed like that. It felt good. It felt amazing. As good as the day after his transformation, when Peggy had taken him outside for speed trials, before they had sent her away overseas and left him behind to become a performing monkey for Senator Brandt. He finished another lap, noticing that the other runners had gotten off the track and were now gathered in a bunch, watching him fly past with wide eyes.

But in his mind's eye it was Peggy who was shooting him a sly look and saying yet again, "Let's see if you can do it faster this time, Steve."

He had, every time.

Steve ran his heart out. He ran and ran, for miles and miles, until his head was clear and he was good and ready to stop. By the time he did, everyone in the gym had stopped what they were doing to watch.

He pulled up to a stop, breathing quickly but not painfully. How many times had he wished for a blessing like that, after years of asthmatically wheezing his way through even moderate exercise? Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself for wishing, even for a moment, that his transformation hadn't happened. Dr. Erskine had done so much for him. He should be grateful, even in the face of this... unexpected side effect. He was grateful.

"How do you feel?" Hill asked.

"Better," he admitted.

"You look better," she said a small smile.

Sharon Carter gave her name to Director Fury's assistant and tried not to show her nervousness as she waited to be seen. She'd been hoping all year for a transfer to Special Service, and she thought she'd been making inroads in putting herself in the good graces of Agent Li, yet so far she'd been shut out. Could Fury be notifying her that she had finally made the cut? But why bring her to New York to give her the news? Li himself could have done that, and his office was only three floors away from hers in the Triskelion.

She didn't have long to wait. Within minutes she was called into Fury's office. He told her to sit down, and then looked at her seriously across the desk.

"What do you know about Steven Rogers?"

For a moment, Sharon pulled a blank. Steven Rogers? Was there an agent at the Triskelion named Rogers? She didn't think... Then, suddenly, the name rang a distant bell.

"Steven Rogers, as in Captain America?" she said, puzzled.

Fury gazed at her levelly. "That's right."

Thrown off guard, Sharon wasn't sure what to say. She'd assumed Fury had some kind of special assignment for her, and now he was quizzing her about history? "I guess I know what everyone else knows about him," she said at last. "He was Captain America. I've been to the Smithsonian exhibit. I've read the accounts."

"But you know someone who knew him personally," Fury said pointedly.

Sharon felt a flush of irritation. Fury knew she didn't like to talk about that. Hadn't he granted her request to keep her surname out of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s files? Hadn't he promised that that information would be strictly limited to the two of them? As it was, she already feared Fury had only hired her because of the family connection. And she didn't want to skate by on that. She wanted to earn what she got on her own merits. Why was he bringing it up now?

"I don't know her as well as you might think," Sharon said. "She moved home to England when I was little. My family was only able to visit a handful of times." She had made those times count, it was true. Aunt Peggy was, without question, her personal hero, and as a result Sharon had joined S.H.I.E.L.D. against even the wishes of her own mother.

"The fact remains, you've seen Peggy Carter in settings that I haven't," Fury said. "Did she ever share anything about Rogers with you? Anything that might not have ended up published in her memoirs, for example?"

Knowing Fury's stubbornness, Sharon resigned herself to having this discussion. She shook her head slowly. "Not really. I think they were good friends as well as colleagues. Aunt Peggy gets a little emotional sometimes when she talks about him."

"What did she say about him?"

"The same thing everyone else says," Sharon said. "That he was a good man. That he fought like he had nothing to lose. That he was a natural leader, and that even the people who gave him orders had a tendency to follow his lead. Aunt Peggy used to say there was no better compliment to him than that. She kept a picture of him in her office, from before his experiment."

"From before?" Fury gaze bored into her. "You're sure?"

"It isn't hard to tell the difference."

Fury tapped his finger on his desk for a moment. "She's still married?" he asked.

"Yes. To my great-uncle Grant. I've never met him. He travelled a lot for his work, so he was never there when my family visited. I know both their children, though. Aunt Sarah and Uncle Mike."

Fury nodded thoughtfully, and seemed to come to a decision. He slapped a file down on the desk and pushed it toward her. "This is Level 6, Agent 13. This file doesn't get discussed with anyone but me or Hill." He stood up. "I'll be in the next room. When you're done reading it, let me know, and we'll talk some more."

By the time Fury came back into the room, Sharon's head was reeling.

"Well?" Fury said as he sat down. "What do you think?"

"It's... unbelievable, sir," Sharon said, glancing down at the photos again. "To get him back after all these years?" She shook her head in wonderment. "I guess he's going to be one of our best assets now, isn't he?"

"That's the hope," Fury said. "How do you think your aunt is going to react when she hears the news?"

"Great-aunt," Sharon corrected automatically. "I don't know, Fury. Happy that he's okay, I guess... but sad, too, that she didn't find him sooner. She and Howard Stark looked for a long time."

"I'll expect to get the full report from you," Fury said.

Sharon glanced up in surprise. "Sir? You want me to tell her?"

"I think this news would be better coming from a family member," Fury said. "And it would be better delivered in person. Hill has your plane ticket ready to go. You leave for England in a few hours."

Sharon opened her mouth, but Fury was already halfway out of the room.

TO BE CONTINUED

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