Chapter 8

Agent Hill ushered Steve into the car waiting at the curb of Manhattan Headquarters. The clothes and personal items he had been given since awakening had been packed into a bag, along with the stack of books he had requested. Gabe was already waiting in the car with his own bag packed. A handful of agents got into a second car behind them, and the two cars pulled out into the lanes of traffic.

"Are they paying you enough for this?" Steve murmured to Gabe, so that the agents in the front seats wouldn't hear.

"You'd better believe it," Gabe whispered back, working to hide a grin. "Man, you are the best thing that ever happened to me." He stuck his fist out. Steve stared at it, puzzled.

"Fist bump, man, fist bump," Gabe said, and after another moment's hesitation, Steve bumped his fist against Gabe's. Apparently that was the right thing to do, because Gabe sat back in his seat, looking satisfied.

"So..." Gabe said they had ridden in silence for a few minutes. "Amnesia, huh?"

"Yeah," Steve said.

"How much did you lose?"

Steve stared out at the traffic moodily. "Everything."

"Must have been one heck of a blow to the head," Gabe said sympathetically. "I'm sorry, man. Any of it coming back?"

"Not so far."

After a short drive, everyone got out and loaded into a sleek military-style plane that the agents called a Quinjet, and within minutes they took off. It was a smooth, quiet ride, but the cockpit was sealed off and there were no windows in the back, so none of them could see where they were going. Hill had never mentioned the location of the Retreat, which probably wasn't an accident.

Steve was starting to realize that Nick Fury was possessed with an unusually abundant supply of paranoia. Was he afraid Steve would run again? He'd given Fury no reason to think that he would. And where did Fury think he would he run, and why? S.H.I.E.L.D. was generously providing him with what he needed to transition into this new time, and it made sense to take advantage of it. Just what was Fury so afraid of?

After several hours, they landed, and walked down the ramp into a clearing surrounded by a heavily wooded area. There was still an October chill in the air, and the deciduous trees were covered in red and orange leaves. They must not have gone south. The West, maybe? Or even Canada? Steve had never been able to travel beyond New York and New Jersey in his youth. His family couldn't afford it. His only travel had come courtesy of the Army, and it hadn't exactly been a vacation.

He settled into his room in the cabin, and his instruction began. Every day Gabe would teach him new things, assisted from time to time by the agents who also patrolled the property, did the cooking, and brought whatever supplies were needed. Steve began to learn how to use the computer. How to type. How to use a mouse. How to access the internet. How to navigate the many websites that Gabe kept insisting everyone used. It was all completely foreign to him, but he set his mind to learning as quickly as possible, although at times it was frustrating. There were other things to learn, too. Gabe showed him how to operate the television and the washing machine and the dishwasher. How to cook with a microwave. It was easier than using a stove, Steve thought, once he had figured out what buttons did what - he had never been much of a cook, and he had a feeling the microwave was going to change the way he ate for the better - but it was disappointing to discover there were some things that couldn't be cooked in it. No raw meat. No fried eggs.

And no utensils. One day the microwave started to pop and spark almost the moment Steve turned it on. He panicked, and forgot what button to push to stop it. Gabe bounded across the room and yanked the door open. The sparking stopped.

"You can't leave the spoon in," Gabe explained, pulling it out with a hot pad.

Steve embarrassed himself almost daily with mistakes like that. It was actually a blessing that Gabe thought he was brain-damaged, because he showed an almost superhuman patience with Steve's ignorance. From time to time he would ask hopefully: "Is any of this coming back to you?" and Steve would shake his head. The agents who sometimes pitched in with the teaching, however, were not always so understanding, confirming for Steve that he'd made the right choice in requesting Gabe. And that Maria Hill had ten times the gumption of your average military grunt to agree to it.

In between his lessons, he went outside with Gabe and they tossed a baseball back and forth, or he read. They brought him a newspaper every day, and he was working his way through the books Hill had sent with him. He was especially eager to read about the end of the war. After a week at the Retreat, he had only a few chapters left in that book as he read in bed one night, when there was a knock on his bedroom door.

"Hey, man," Gabe said, poking his head through the door. "Come outside and look at this!"

Pulling on his jacket, Steve followed Gabe outside. Through the trees he could just make out the lights of the guard tower and the laser fence surrounding the property, but otherwise the night was very dark. There was no moon. The air was frosty; November had arrived.

"Look," Gabe said softly, pointing up.

Steve tipped his head back and gazed at the night sky. A broad swathe of brilliant stars stretched across the entire horizon. The air here was so clear and so dark, uncontaminated by city lights, that they could even see the misty veil of the Milky Way.

"Beautiful," Gabe breathed. "I've never seen them so bright."

I have, Steve wanted to say. The stars he'd seen in the Valkyrie, projected by Schmidt's energy cube... they'd looked more real than reality. Almost as if he could have stretched up his hand and touched them. He shivered, feeling the tip of his nose going numb in the cold November air, and suddenly an odd sensation shot through his body.

The Valkyrie.

Cold. Dark. Stars shining down from the top of the plane, but they weren't beautiful. They were wrong. Shining down from where they shouldn't be. And then they'd gone out, snuffed out like a candle. In a flash, Steve saw it again, as vividly as if he were there again: his own gloved hands gripping the controls. Forcing the plane down. The icy ground below rushing up to meet him. Peggy's tearful voice... the last voice he had heard before he fell to the earth. Before he had woken up in the silence of his icy tomb.

You won't be alone, Peggy had promised him.

But he had been alone, there in the dark. He still was.

Steve became aware that his heart was thudding rapidly in his chest. His breath came out in pants, making white puffs in the dim light. Gabe, unaware of what was happening, was still gazing up at the stars, enjoying his moment of peace.

Calm down, Steve tried to tell himself. It's over. You survived. You're safe.

But he couldn't shake the images. He still felt the controls vibrating in his hands. Saw the hard ground rising up to meet him. He could almost, but not quite, remember hitting it. Suddenly horror shot through him: what if it happened again? What if anytime he got too cold, he would fall asleep, and wake up years or decades later, having lost everything all over again?

Steve knew he was panicking, knew he was being totally irrational. S.H.I.E.L.D. had sent him off with a whole stack of papers warning him about symptoms like this, although he hardly needed it; he had seen it in soldiers before, after battles. He himself had largely been spared the experience... until now.

He had to go inside, where it was warm. Now. He managed to say something to that effect to Gabe, and then he was turning to go back inside, trying but not quite succeeding to move at a dignified pace.

Gabe followed him in, shivering a little himself. "Shoulda brought a parka," he said, rubbing his hands together vigorously. "You want to make some coffee or something?" He didn't seem to notice Steve's panic. Somehow Steve managed to get out a no thank you, I'm tired, goodnight, without arousing Gabe's suspicion. Alone in his bedroom at last, he shut the door tight and kicked off his shoes. He laid down on the bed and wrapped all the blankets tight around him, but it was a long, long time before he felt warm again.

He must have fallen asleep at some point, but not for long. He dreamed of the energy cube, its hellish light washing across Schmidt's death's mask, until suddenly it wasn't Schmidt at all, but Peggy, and she was the one burning up, sucked into the pillar of light shooting up out of the plane and into the night sky, forever beyond his reach, and abruptly Steve woke up with a strangled cry, sitting bolt upright in bed, groping desperately for a shield that wasn't beside him.

He stayed awake, heart pounding and stomach churning, for the rest of the night.

In the morning, his eyes were dry and sore, and a kind of quiet despair had settled deep down in his chest. He thought he had moved past the worst of it, back in New York. He thought he was back to normal, more or less. Now he realized that he was not remotely out of the woods yet.

Despite his exhaustion, he did his best at his lesson that morning. Gabe was trying to show him how to attach files to an email. It didn't seem that complicated, but Steve was having trouble focusing, and he was feeling more than a little rebellious, too. Was this really something he'd have to know? He'd gone his whole life without knowing how to do something like this; why should he need it now? Finally, in frustration he told Gabe he had to take a break.

A run. A run had helped him, last time this happened. Steve pulled aside one of the agents and told him that he needed to go for a run, but Gabe could not see him doing it. The man nodded, understanding.

"We'll keep him in the cabin," he said. "We'll close the curtains."

Pulling on a sweatshirt, Steve went outside and began to run the dirt path that circled the property, just inside the laser fence. As before, he ran his heart out, hoping he would grow tired enough that he would be able to sleep that night. He felt okay as long as he was running; the uneven path, crossed with the occasional tree root or clump of rocks, forced him to concentrate so that he didn't trip. When he was done running, he went back in and tried to settle down to his lessons again.

Somehow he managed to get through the rest of the day. But at night, once again sleep eluded him. Hours later, with the cabin dark and silent as all the other occupants slept, he picked up his book about the war, hoping a little reading might help him relax and drift off. But when he got to the last chapter of the book, he read something that sent such a wave of shock through him that he sat bolt upright on his bed.

He leaned forward, frantically reading as fast as he could. It couldn't be... it couldn't. But there were photographs. Two entire cities, blasted to smithereens. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two hundred thousand people dead, maybe more. The historians weren't sure. A lot of the bodies were thought to be vaporized.

The Allies hadn't used the Hydra weapon Schmidt had intended for New York and Chicago and Boston, but they might as well have. The destruction was complete. The cities were nothing more than craters in the ground, littered with matchsticks. Thousands more had gotten sick in the days and weeks that followed. Steve's eyes darted all over the page, taking in the words in disbelief. Phrases like radiation poisoning and cancer and birth defects leaped out at him.

Sickened, Steve wanted to stop reading, but he was compelled to go on. By the time he reached the end of the book, someone was stirring out in the kitchen. Steve got up, feeling clumsy and dull from lack of sleep, and got ready for the day.

Another day, another bout of staring at a screen, doing typing drills, forcing himself to do it the proper way he'd been shown, rather than pecking with two fingers the way he instinctively wanted to. Suddenly, Steve stopped in the middle of the task and looked over at Gabe.

"You know about Hiroshima and Nagasaki?" he asked.

Gabe blinked at the sudden change in subject. "You mean the cities we bombed in World War II?"

Steve had been half-afraid that the incident had been so long ago for everyone else that it had already been forgotten. "Yeah."

"Yeah, I heard about it."

"Well, what did you think?"

"I don't know," Gabe said, looking uncomfortable. "I never knew what to think, when we studied it at school. I guess it was pretty awful. But..." He shrugged. "It ended the war, didn't it? That's what they said. At least the killing stopped."

Steve controlled his agitation with an effort. "Can we look this up?" he asked. "On the internet?" Maybe it wasn't as bad as the author of this particular book had made it out to be, he told himself. He'd found a couple places where his own experiences in the war had been contradicted by that book. Maybe there were more inaccuracies.

"Yeah, sure," Gabe said.

They found some websites that talked about it. But the more Steve learned about the bombings, the worse he felt. It wasn't just the number of deaths. It was the way they had died. Many had succumbed days or weeks after the explosions, not from injuries but from bizarre and gruesome symptoms. He kept thinking that it must have been like dying of mustard gas. Like his father had died. In agony. A slow, messy death.

Finally, he couldn't stand it anymore.

"I'm going for a run," he told Agent Reed tersely, and without waiting for any acknowledgment he left the cabin and started to run, trusting that Reed would keep Gabe out of sight from the windows. This wasn't going to be a casual jog.

He tore around the dirt track, trying for a speed at the utmost of his abilities, hoping it would stop him from thinking. Each time he passed the guard tower, he caught glimpses of the agents on duty leaning out the window, watching him. He was going so fast that whenever he leapt over an obstruction in the path, it felt more like flying than running. Once he jumped so high that he nearly hit a branch overhead, but he threw his fist out in plenty of time and the thick branch snapped off and embedded itself into the perimeter fence, lasers sparkling around it. The next time he passed the guard tower, one of the agents was on the phone with someone.

He ran. On and on and on, until even with his enhanced lungs, he was struggling to breathe properly. Still, he pushed on doggedly.

"Rogers! Hold up!" a voice called out, and finally, reluctantly, Steve slowed, spotting Agent Reed ahead of him on the trail.

"Director Fury wants to talk to you on video chat," Reed said when he got close enough.

Steve stood still, breathing hard. "What's that?" he asked.

"It's like a phone call, only you can see each other," Reed explained, ushering him down the path to the cabin.

The agents took him inside and parked him in front of the computer again. Gabe was escorted outside, shooting Steve a look filled with both confusion and concern. Steve pushed his hair off his forehead self-consciously and realized he was soaked in sweat.

Fury's picture was on the computer. Moving, looking at him expectantly.

"You're on," Reed said, nudging Steve. "Talk to him."

"Fury?" Steve said, looking all over the computer, trying to find the camera but not seeing anything like that.

"You're scaring the hell out of my agents, Rogers," Fury asked bluntly. "What's the problem?"

Oh, good. Directness. That he could deal with.

"The problem," Steve said, "is that my country dropped atom bombs on a couple of populated cities!"

"Damn right we did," Fury said. "Ended the war, quick and clean. Mission accomplished."

Steve was shocked by his flippancy. "Do you have any idea how many people died?"

"Yeah, and how many of your compatriots did they kill?" Fury shot back. "Hell, the Axis basically killed you. Gave it their best shot, anyway."

"They were civilians!" Steve said, voice rising. "We signed up for the risks we took! The people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't."

"Hiroshima had a military base," Fury said pointedly. "Nagasaki was a strategic port."

"That must have been a big comfort to the families who watched fire rain down on them from the sky," Steve said.

"No one celebrated their deaths," Fury said. "We were just happy the war was over."

"But we could have won without doing that," Steve objected.

"The men on the ground at the time disagreed with that assessment," Fury said.

"The man on the ground was General Eisenhower, and he said the bombings weren't necessary," Steve shot back. "He said Japan was going to surrender anyway."

"Eisenhower was overly optimistic," Fury said dismissively. "The realists won out, and it's a good thing, too."

"Eisenhower was a great man," Steve said firmly, "and if he said it wasn't necessary, then it wasn't."

"The word 'surrender' didn't even appear in the Imperial Japanese lexicon of the time!" Fury said impatiently. "Just how do you propose we should have gotten the job done without killing a bunch of people?"

Steve knew his next words would be misconstrued as arrogance, but he had to say it anyway. "I could have done it."

Fury snorted. "Well, maybe you could have. Maybe you and your Commandos could have sailed in, captured all the military leadership, and forced a surrender where no one else could. A nice little precision strike. But we didn't have you, did we? The rest of us just had to muddle on as best as we could without you. And the atom bomb was what we came up with. Howard Stark helped with that, by the way."

"I don't care what Howard Stark did. I crashed Schmidt's plane trying to stop something like this from happening!"

Fury's sigh sounded more like a growl. "Better them than us. We weren't the ones killing millions of our own civilians. We weren't the ones executing prisoners of war. If you do the math, you'll see that those atom bombs probably saved a lot more people than they killed."

Steve was horrified. "We don't trade lives!"

"You saw the concentration camps. You saw the London air raids. The Axis didn't play nice. Neither did we."

"Their poor choices can't justify ours," Steve said tightly.

"How in the hell can you be this naive after what you've seen?" Fury demanded.

Steve emphasized his next words. "It isn't naivety when you make your choices with both eyes open."

"Well, excuse me," Nick said coldly. "I only have one eye."

"You open up a can of worms like this," Steve said, waving the history book in front of the screen, "and where does it end? What's to stop it from happening again? What if other countries developed this same weapon?"

"They did," Fury said. "Practically every developed country has them now. That's what stopped it. When everyone has the weapon, no one does. If one country dared use it, everyone else would, and then there wouldn't be any prizes left to win, or people left to win it. So everyone has them and no one uses them. Things worked out just fine."

"I wouldn't exactly call that a comfort," Steve said.

"We don't invent weapons to comfort people, we invent them to scare people straight," Fury said pointedly. "Isn't that why you were invented?"

"Dr. Erskine never intended me to be a killing machine," Steve said with some heat. He dropped his book on the desk in disgust. "I guess the machines do that just fine on their own." He leaned closer to the screen. "Would you have done it, Fury? Would you have dropped the bombs? Even knowing what we know now?"

Fury fixed his intense gaze on Steve. "How long has it been since you slept, soldier?"

"Would you?" Steve persisted.

"How long has it been since you slept?" Fury asked again loudly. "You look exhausted. Agent Wilson said she saw a light under your door the last two nights, all night long."

Steve paused. "I'm... having trouble again," he finally admitted.

"You're not yourself," Fury said.

"I am. This is myself," Steve objected, but he was uncomfortably aware that Fury was probably right. He felt like he was at the edge of his control.

"You need to get your act together. Stop blowing things out of proportion. Get some sleep."

Fury ended the call, and Steve let his shoulders sag in weariness and defeat. Didn't Fury know that if he could, he would?

TO BE CONTINUED

Author's note: I'd love to hear what you think!