Author's note: Thanks to Sage of Wind Dragons and Guest for your reviews! To answer a question, you will see Steve's reaction to 9/11, and soon. (I'm not sure if it happened in the MCU or not, but it happened in my story.)

Chapter 9

The weeks went by at the Retreat. Steve was getting to where he could do some things on the computer without Gabe leaning over his shoulder anymore. There were stretches where he slept normally and felt fine, tackling each new discovery in his books and the newspapers with his usual judgment and prudence. Then it would happen again: a panic attack, triggered by something that reminded him of the Valkyrie, or even for no discernible reason at all. Always followed by insomnia. The exhaustion really did made him blow everything out of proportion, and when he found out yet another thing that he had always taken for granted that had been changed or lost while he slept in the ice, it would send him into a tailspin that took days to recover from.

The November days slipped past one by one, until one day Agent Wilson cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for all of them. The next day, Fury himself unexpectedly arrived at the Retreat.

Everyone else left the cabin, leaving the two of them alone. Fury slid a stack of papers across the desk.

"What's this?" Steve asked, picking it up and turning it toward him.

"A job offer," Fury said. "Contractor for S.H.I.E.L.D. You'd be a floater, not assigned to any particular team, working whatever missions we deem best suited for your particular skill set." He scrutinized Steve with his one good eye. "I don't anticipate sending you out anytime soon. You need more time to get things sorted out."

Steve didn't bother arguing with that assessment. Fury was right, and he knew it. He turned to the next page, and lifted his eyebrows in surprise.

"Is that the amount for...?" Steve asked uncertainly, pointing at the figure at the top of the page.

"For the year," Fury said. "What, you don't like it?"

"I don't even know what I'd do with that much money," Steve said frankly.

"It isn't as much as you think," Fury said. "There's been inflation. And it doesn't matter where in New York City you live; the rent is always too damn high. That right there is enough to live on comfortably."

Steve got the sense that his idea of living comfortably was probably not the same as Fury's. His stay at Manhattan Headquarters and even the more rustic setting of the Retreat had felt like living in the lap of luxury, compared to the "accommodations" at the front, not to mention the kinds of places he and his mother had lived in, growing up.

Fury scratched his chin. "Of course, you're welcome to stay here for the time being," he added, glancing around the cabin.

"I've always lived on my own," Steve said automatically. "And everyone here... watches me."

Fury nodded. "Agent Hill can point you to a few likely places near Manhattan Headquarters. It'll be good for you to live in the city where you grew up. Familiar surroundings, and all that. We'll try to keep you as anonymous as possible, publicly speaking, for the time being. You'll have all the privacy you want until you're ready to join us."

When he had gone through the papers and Fury had explained all the fine print, Steve signed. He couldn't really think of any reason why not. He had to have a job, and what else was he going to do? What else was he fit for? At least here, they understood his... unique situation. And S.H.I.E.L.D. had belonged to Peggy. It was clear to him that this organization was her answer to the horrors of the war, her life's work to keep the world safe from anything that threatened the peace. Now, when he was ready to go back to work, there would be Peggy's portrait in the lobby watching over him. Like a guardian angel.

His heart sank in disappointment. He didn't want to put Peggy up on a pedestal, distant and serene. He wanted her here in the room with him, giving him that slightly contemptuous look she gave him whenever she thought he was being too dramatic. He wanted her to be real.

You don't always get what you want.

Steve finished signing, and Fury straightened the papers and rose to leave.

"Fury?" Steve said, and Fury turned back for a moment.

"Thank you for helping me, sir," Steve said. "For saving my life. I'll... try to be worth your trouble."

Fury smiled slightly. "I have a feeling you will be," he said, and left.

Sharon was working at her desk at the Triskelion when her supervisor came by and told her Director Fury wanted to meet with her in New York right away.

This time, she didn't bother getting her hopes up on the way there. She wanted to believe that this time it really would be a transfer to Special Service, but she suspected otherwise. It had been more than a month since her trip to Winchester. Probably Fury just wanted her to talk to Aunt Peggy again and update her on how Rogers was doing.

"Agent 13," Fury said once they were alone in his office, as he sat back and studied her. "I'm transferring you to Special Service. You'll be based here in New York, reporting directly to Agent Hill."

Sharon's heart leapt in surprise and joy. Finally! More time in the field, and less time in the office. She'd get to travel more now. She'd be assigned missions that really mattered, instead of being stuck in supporting roles. Just what she'd always dreamed of.

She took a quick calming breath. "Thank you, sir," she said primly.

"Your first assignment," Fury said, "is to surveil a potential threat. He's about to move into an apartment in Manhattan. We've secured the apartment below his as a base. You'll be supervising a small team of agents there, watching him 24/7. He'll be moving in a few days from now, which gives you time to bug his place."

Fury tapped the screen on the wall, and a S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel file popped up. Sharon stared at it, confused.

"Steve Rogers?" she said blankly.

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

"He's a potential threat?" Sharon repeated slowly, trying to reconcile Aunt Peggy's pleas to protect Rogers with this unexpected assignment.

"He's not entirely stable," Fury said. "That'll be part of your assignment. We'll need a psychological profile on him, continually updated. He's agreed to contract with us, but I'm not sending him out until I'm certain he can handle it. He's a black-and-white thinker just starting to realize that he's swimming in an ocean of gray. Captain America may have been the living embodiment of patriotism, but according to the SSR's internal files, he also had a reputation for being, shall we say, independent-minded. I need to be sure his loyalty lands on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s particular shade of gray."

Independent-minded? That was the way Aunt Peggy had always described him, too, but Sharon had never thought of it in terms of compromised loyalty. He was Captain America. He did what was right, nothing more or less.

"Hill has everything you need to get started," Fury said. "Keep close tabs on his mental state, make sure he doesn't go on the run. And Agent 13? I need you and your team to remain invisible. Rogers is protective of his privacy. He's trusting — too trusting — but he's also smart. I don't want you doing anything that could tip him off."

"Understood," Sharon said, but inside, she burned. She knew what that meant. She'd be limited to listening to mics, to watching him on camera. She wouldn't be sitting in an office anymore, but she'd sit in an apartment, day after day. Maybe follow him at a safe distance to make sure he didn't get into trouble, but there could be no interaction. All to keep an eye on someone she was only being assigned to because of who she was related to, not because she had earned it herself.

This was not the kind of assignment she'd had in mind.

When Steve got back to New York City, winter was in full swing. The streets of Manhattan were half-clogged by a snowstorm, but several S.H.I.E.L.D. agents helped him get moved into his new apartment and then left him alone to get settled.

The first few weeks, Gabe came by once a day and went with him to run errands. S.H.I.E.L.D. had given Steve a generous stipend to get him started, and Gabe helped him learn how to use a bank card in the machines that gave him money out of his account. The same card also worked to pay directly for purchases at the shops, and then Steve had to learn how to use the card in a third way, too, by putting the numbers into his computer to pay his utilities. Gabe insisted the card was a great convenience, but it didn't feel that way to Steve as he struggled to keep it all straight. He ended up just paying with cash whenever possible. It was simpler.

It was strange, too, being paid by an employer before he had done any work, and Steve didn't like it. He made up his mind that he would get well as fast as he could, so that he could go to work and earn all of this. He did not like feeling dependent.

On the day he moved in, he met the elderly woman who lived across the hall with her little dog. He got into the habit of stopping by a regular basis to ask her if there was anything she needed him to pick up, since she was not very mobile. Her name was Pearl, and she was only a decade or so younger than him. At least that was what Steve had figured, doing the math, but the more he got to know her, the more he realized that was wrong. The experiences of her youth had not been much different from his, it was true, but then... she had kept on living. She'd lived through the 1950s. The 60s. The 70s... all of it. She'd lived through everything he'd missed. She'd accepted it, been changed by it. She was sweet, and he enjoyed her company, but it didn't really feel like she was part of his generation. She was an old woman and he was a young man, no matter what his birth date said.

And so he tried to get to know the younger people in his building. People his age who he sat by on the subway or passed in the library. It was hard to get them to make eye contact. They almost always had their mobile phones in their hands with their heads down, eyes intent on the screen, or else listening to nearly invisible devices tucked into one ear, oblivious to everything around them. Even when they didn't have their phones out, they tended to look down. He managed to start conversations with a few, but it was hard to understand some of the things they said. Their conversations were liberally sprinkled with slang or jargon that he had no point of reference for. He got into the habit of covering his confusion in the moment, and then as soon as they left, he wrote down every strange word he had heard to look up later.

Some of the words he did understand, though, and he was hard-pressed not to be shocked by the vulgarities he heard so casually thrown around. At first he thought he had just chosen the wrong kind of people to talk to - it wasn't obvious who the respectable citizens were anymore, since everyone dressed so casually - but gradually he realized almost all the young people spoke that way. He tried not to judge them too harshly for it - clearly this was a new norm, and he was the one who was out of step - but despite his best efforts it did make him uncomfortable.

A few weeks after moving into his apartment, he had another panic attack, followed by a bad couple of days. He didn't dwell on it. Just push forward. They couldn't last forever. They couldn't outlast him.

Fury had said Rogers wasn't stable, that he wasn't fit for missions. But for the first few weeks of watching him, Sharon wondered just what Fury thought the problem was. Rogers seemed normal. He settled into his apartment easily enough in the beginning of December. He explored Manhattan on his own, going to the library and museums and bodegas, and he navigated the streets and subways with all the confidence of a born-and-bred New Yorker. Almost daily he went to some restaurant or another and would sit there long after he'd finished his coffee, sketching things on a notepad. He seemed quiet - definitely introverted - but he would make polite small talk with the various people he interacted with.

His place was easy to search. For a bachelor, Rogers kept things pretty neat - probably a habit established from his time in the Army — and he didn't buy very much stuff even though S.H.I.E.L.D.'s deposits were rapidly piling up in his bank account. A few clothes, a few household items, but that was it. Was it a subtle resistance to the idea of settling into a time that was not his own? Or merely a holdover of the Depression-era attitude of only buying what was strictly necessary? Sharon wasn't sure. She kept an eye on his computer usage, his library records and his purchases, and she let herself into his place whenever he went on one of his regular runs and methodically went down the checklist. Double-check that the bugs were well-hidden and still operational. Weave micro-mic fibers into the collars of his shirts, to make it easy to listen in from a distance when he spoke to people. Insert trackers in his shoes, since it was useless to try to follow him when he went on runs.

She would also go through drawers to see if she could find a pocket compass, something Fury had asked her to keep an eye out for. She never did find it, which meant that either he had hidden it well — unlikely, since he gave no indication he suspected he was being watched — or he always kept it on his person. And finally, she would flip through his notebooks and sketchbooks and take pictures of anything that stood out to her.

He didn't keep a traditional journal, but he kept multiple running lists. Lists of pop culture references he heard people make, which he looked up later on the computer. Lists of historical and current events that were mentioned in the morning newspaper or the evening news, which he read and watched faithfully every day. He looked up those things on the computer, too, or checked out books about them from the library. And he even kept a list of things he liked about living in this time: how large and nice and warm his apartment was, the foods he liked, the cleaner air, the dizzying variety of things available in the shops.

He did not keep a list of things he didn't like about living in this time... but he didn't really need to. It all came out in his sketches, Sharon's first indication that all was not entirely well with Rogers.

The first one she saw was a sketch he'd made of the people sitting around him in a restaurant. Every single one of them had their heads buried in their cell phones. And he hadn't drawn a perfect reproduction of the scene, although he obviously had the artistic skill to do so, but had instead added a subtle distortion to both the architecture of the room and the faces of the people. Their eyes were glazed; they looked like zombies from the cover of some old issue of Tales of the Weird. There was a sketch of the blight in a neighborhood not far from his, with urbanites in designer clothing strolling past the homeless veterans clutching their cardboard signs. And a sketch of his TV with an avalanche of garbage falling out of the screen.

She knew from watching the video footage of the camera in his living room that he'd had a lot of trouble finding shows on the TV that didn't bother him. She didn't think he had figured out the ratings system yet, or knew how to block certain channels. For a while he'd just jump up and turn off the TV when something objectionable popped up, but after a few weeks he seemed to have given up. He didn't try to watch anything but documentaries and the news now... and even those sometimes seemed to distress him. A documentary he'd watched about modern family trends had triggered a flurry of internet searches for divorce statistics and single parenthood that had lasted for days.

Fortunately someone at S.H.I.E.L.D. had had the foresight to put a strong filter on his internet browsers, or he'd no doubt have stumbled across far worse things on his laptop.

The more of his sketches she saw, the more she began to notice that the list he was keeping of things he liked in this time sometimes had something of a tone of desperation to it. Like he was trying to convince himself that there was something to like, but hadn't quite managed it.

It was only a couple of weeks after he moved in that he had his first episode, and finally Sharon realized what Fury was talking about. She showed up one morning to relieve Agent Jensen, who reported that Rogers had gotten up in the middle of the night and never had gone back to sleep.

"What did he do?" she asked.

"Just sat around the living room and read, mostly."

She didn't think much of it, but she watched Rogers throughout the day as usual and then left for the night. When she came back in the next morning, Agent Jensen reported that he hadn't slept at all that night, either.

A little concerned now, Sharon settled in to watch Rogers sitting at his computer. She could see him on the living room camera, as well as his computer screen mirrored onto her own laptop. There had been a front-page story about Iron Man today in the newspaper, and now Rogers was searching for the term on YouTube. It made sense that he was curious; after all, Iron Man was something like a successor to Captain America, Sharon figured.

She watched him watch Tony Stark's introduction to last year's World Expo. It had been quite a splash: fireworks, a dramatic entrance by Iron Man, a lot of scantily clad women dancing in the background. Rogers watched it all with a frown deepening between his eyebrows. Then YouTube helpfully started playing a related video. This time it was Tony Stark testifying on Capitol Hill about his armored suit, which Sharon remembered all too well, along with everyone else in America. Stark had all but given the finger to Senator Stern and the rest of the Armed Services Committee on national television. Rogers watched the whole debacle with widening eyes.

"My bond is with the people," Stark said directly to the cameras at the end, as he strolled jauntily out of the chambers, putting on his sunglasses and barely containing his glee at his own defiant performance. "And I will serve this great nation at the pleasure of myself. If there's one thing that I've proven, it's that you can always count on me... to pleasure myself."

Rogers shut down YouTube with an expression of disgust.

Later that day, after he'd done some sketching, he went out for a run. Sharon was a little surprised; after two days without sleep, he must be tired, super-soldier serum or not. But she took her chance to enter his apartment and take a look at his new sketch, keeping an eye on his tracker synced to her cell phone.

It turned out he had sketched Iron Man as a 12-inch-tall wind-up toy man wearing a suit of armor, surrounded and dwarfed by giants of men wearing tattered World War II-era Army uniforms. She didn't find it in Rogers' notebook, though, but crumpled up in the garbage. Guess he hadn't been proud of that one, although it was drawn beautifully.

He went a third night without sleep, and it was hard to see the look in his eyes the next morning: a kind of frantic fatigue, although he doggedly went about his routine like everything was normal. Sharon reported it to Maria Hill, who came over to Rogers' apartment to check on him. Hill had instructed Sharon not to listen in during her visits, although she was given a summary after Hill had consulted with a S.H.I.E.L.D. therapist and submitted a report. Symptoms: Flashbacks, insomnia, behavior avoidance. Diagnosis: Post-traumatic stress disorder. Hill had encouraged him to use his art to work through things, and to use exercise to help him sleep.

It was good advice, and Rogers followed it faithfully. But it couldn't stop his episodes from coming.

TO BE CONTINUED

Author's note: Go ahead and leave a review! I'd love to hear what you think.