He was trapped. Trapped inside a plane that carried enough explosives to delete every trace of his home and with no way of stopping what was about to happen.

Except… Steve looked at the controls, all of the blinking lights and the levers he knew nothing about, but would have to figure out in the next few minutes, as he sat down in the seat and took in the sight in front of him, the clouds keeping him from looking at the sea below. Even though he had no way to know for sure, Steve was certain that the ocean would be dark, cold, with waves crashing into everything that was unlucky enough to be caught down there, with the intent of attacking it until the only thing that was left was the memories others had of it.

Steve could crash the plane. He could make sure the bombs would never reach the coast. But he had to act quickly, and not only because the plane was cutting through the air at an incredible speed. Steve had to force himself to do it while he still had the courage.

Ignoring Peggy's voice and how nice it would be to give in and let her guide him, telling him that there was another way although they both knew that was not the case, Steve slipped into the pilots seat and tried his best to fasten the belt until he realised the ridiculousness of his actions considering what he was about to do. So he let go, and the end of the belt that had been intended to protect the pilot hit the side of the seat with a hollow, metallic sound, though it was barely audible over the creaking sound of the plane tilting forward and the blood that echoed in his ears when Steve pushed against something that looked like it had been meant to keep the plane upright.

It worked. In only a few seconds, Steve broke through the barrier of clouds, and now, he could see that he had been wrong. There was no water. There was only an endless expanse of ice, glittering in the sun as the sight grew in front of him, until the only thing he could see was the blindingly white light reflected by the ice.

Would it work? What if something happened and the bombs exploded inside the plane? In that case, Steve would have succeeded in getting them away from Brooklyn, but though he had managed to convince himself that he was in the middle of nowhere, with nowhere near him he would put in danger, the truth was that he could never guarantee that this was the safest thing to do.

Perhaps he should have listened to Peggy and let her find Howard. Maybe he could figure something out. Perhaps everything would have ended differently if he had done that. Steve would never get a chance to know, for the next second, the tip of the plane hit the ice, and the entire cabin shook as the plane continued through the layer. The water level closed above him and Steve saw that there had never been any need to worry about the plane lying on top of the ice. It had never been enough to stop the machine, not with all of the force behind it, and when Steve craned his neck, he could see that the ice had been nothing more than a thin sheet of frozen water.

But even that soon disappeared from view as the metal coffin continued its path into the sea, taking both the bombs and Steve with it.

He supposed he should be happy. After all, he had succeeded; he had forced the airplane to crash. But as the light slowly disappeared and he heard the horrifying, shrill sound of the plane struggling against the pressure of the water, all that was left for him was panic. Deep, blind panic as he realised that this was it, no one would come to save him the way Bucky had done when they had been children.

Bucky.

The name alone was enough to make Steve sit up a bit straighter in the seat. Bucky had fallen from the train, and Steve had lost him the moment he had been too scared to follow after him, instead clinging to the side of the train as his best friend disappeared. At least this—the icy water around him and the fact that he could see how the walls were beginning to cave inwards, struggling to keep the sea out—meant that they would get another chance to see each other.

Behind him, Steve heard the sound of bolts flying out of the walls as it finally became too much and water started pouring into the cabin at an alarming rate, barely giving Steve time to fully realise what was happening before the water had crept up to his ankles. It did not take a long time before it had moved past his boots, seeping into the fabric of his uniform, turning blue into a shade that was closer to black.

It hurt.

It hurt more than anything Steve had ever felt before, more than that time his lungs had been about to give out and he had spent a week in bed, Bucky sitting next to him and trying to talk him through the pain as Steve coughed in an attempt to force more air into his lungs. It hurt so badly that Steve could barely think. The thick material of his uniform, meant to look heroic, did not provide him with any warmth, quite the opposite, in fact, as it trapped the water even closer to his body.

He panicked. Steve was not proud of it, he was Captain America, he had been chosen for his heart, he was supposed to greet death with a smile, but as the water continued to cut into him with ice-cold knives, the only thing he could do was to panic.

The realisation that this really was the end for him, that even if Howard came up with a way to figure out his coordinates, he would never be able to get to him in time, came and went, Steve's mind too clouded by sheer terror to notice anything.

But in the end not even the serum was enough to make Steve able to fight his way through the water and over to the door, not with his own temperature falling rapidly as his movements grew more and more uncoordinated and desperate.

Maybe it was the icy water that killed him. Perhaps it was the lack of air as the water finally filled the cabin. Steve didn't know, but as the darkness finally let him rest, he hoped for the former.

He lived. Steve didn't know how or why, but somehow, his body had been able to survive the crash and to last through the decades he spent in the ice. He woke up in a room he had never seen before to find people lying to him, telling him that he had somehow travelled back in time. No, not back in time, as Steve soon realised when he noted the date mentioned on the radio and fled the room, thinking about how he had found Bucky with HYDRA, only to find himself standing in the middle of a busy street he could not recognise, with loud colours and bright lights everywhere around him.

Really, a part of him that Steve wanted to dismiss so badly it hurt already knew what had happened even before the man he would later come to know as Fury appeared to tell him that the reason why the city did not look the way it had done just a few weeks ago was because more than a mere couple of weeks had passed.

Almost seventy years. That was the amount of time Fury told him he had missed while his body had been asleep inside the cockpit of that plane, the ice around him having supposedly caught the Valkyrie only a few metres after it had broken through the sea level, keeping him safe through all of those years he had spent there.

He had woken up in another century.

Steve had not wanted to believe it, but when he looked around him and was met with the sight of a city that was so unlike anything he had ever known no matter where he looked, he had to admit that it was the truth. It was simply not possible for someone to fake it, not with the scale involved.

He wanted out. After seventy years, his old life was all but gone. Peggy. Bucky. Howard. Steve knew no one in this new world, and although it was lonely, it was also what made him able to be just another person in the crowd. As long as he made sure to stay away from the tiny store at the corner that sold a few cups with Captain America's face on, Steve was fairly certain no one would ever recognise him. And even if the rest of the world was still a mystery to him, the apartment S.H.I.E.L.D. had somehow managed to secure for him was at the very least slightly familiar, with creaky floorboards, thin walls, and a window he could not close no matter how hard he tried. The last thing was the only part of the apartment that bothered him. He couldn't close the window, and although he knew it was silly—he was not trapped in the Valkyrie anymore—Steve still woke up in the middle of the night, pulse rushing in his ears as the cold had momentarily brought him back to a sinking plane.

But that was not all. Somehow, even though Steve had seen first-hand the power hidden inside the Tesseract, S.H.I.E.L.D. had lost the cube. They mentioned someone named Loki.

And although Steve would much rather have stayed in his apartment, content to just be Steve Rogers for the rest of his life, they had needed Captain America, and Steve had not been able to say no, not when other people could be at risk. So he had gone with them onto the Helicarrier.

There, he had met Tony, just Tony, as he had said when Steve had asked about the last name, vaguely remembering hearing about Howard having married and named his son Anthony. But from the way Tony had quickly shut down any chance of Steve asking about what had happened to his friends during those seventy years, and how he stepped away from him when Steve had shot him a confused look, it was clear that Tony did not like his father, did not like Howard.

It was strange. From what Steve could remember, he could not figure out a reason why someone could feel nothing but contempt for Howard the way Tony so clearly did from the way he refused to even say his name.

And then he realised. The articles, all of the headlines, the details and pictures showing how Howard's son was nothing like his father, egoistical and self-absorbed, and it all became clear. Tony and Howard were polar opposites; of course they would not like each other. It was a theory that Tony quickly confirmed, unable to realise the gravity of the situation they were in and constantly having a quip ready no matter how tense the situation was.

The world was at stake, so Steve could not allow his own personal feelings to cloud his judgement, but the more time he spent together with Tony—or Iron Man as he seemed to be called while inside the suit—the more certain Steve became that the moment the mission that had forced them together was over, he would be more than happy to leave them all behind and move on with his life, and that the best thing about it would be that he would then not have to be forced to talk with Tony for another second.

And yet, despite how sure Steve had been about his initial judgement, small cracks slowly started to show, and his theory about his teammate fell apart little by little.

Yes, Steve would still insist that the quips were hardly appropriate given the situation, but Tony had figured out how to keep the Helicarrier in the air, keeping it from crashing into the ocean the way Steve had done so many years ago though it felt more like a couple of months to him. Howard had been a good man, but there were times where Steve caught himself wondering how much one man could have changed during those seventy years. The world looked nothing like he remembered, so how could Steve know if Howard had still been the Howard he had known?

And then came the Chitauri, pouring through a hole in the sky above New York. They had tried to stop them, but their little team, the Avengers, had simply not been enough. They were only six and there were hundreds if not thousands of monsters passing through the portal. Somehow they managed to fight back, and even if Steve had wanted to, he would not have been able to deny that they would never have been able to last for so long had Tony not been there. But just as they thought that they might have won and Steve was about to give Natasha the order to close the portal, he heard Tony's voice in his ear, as clear as if he had been standing right next to him, sharply objecting to the idea, saying that there was a nuclear missile headed towards New York.

Steve's stomach dropped when he looked up to see that a missile was indeed flying through the air, only a few minutes away from all of the civilians they had thought would be safe underground. In just a few seconds, it would explode, and everything Steve had done back in that plane had been for nothing, because, in the end, it had not been enough to stop the destruction.

But he was wrong, and the next moment, Iron Man had caught up with the missile, guiding it towards the portal rather than the city below, and just like Steve had pulled the plane down, out of the sky, Tony was headed upwards, flying directly towards the hole in space with the missile.

It all happened so quickly Steve barely had any time to realise what it meant before both Tony and the missile had disappeared, but even then, Steve knew that the missile was still more dangerous than any of the foes that still surrounded them, and that when it would explode, the blast would continue through the portal and down to destroy the city.

They had to close the portal.

Steve knew what was necessary to save the city, but he could still feel how he hesitated to reach up to activate the earpiece and contact Natasha again. Tony was still up there, and if they closed the portal, there would not be any ice ready to catch Tony and carry him safely into the future. It would be the end for him.

It was a sacrifice they had all been prepared to bring the moment they accepted the invitation to join the Avengers Initiative, and although the last couple of days had shown Steve that Tony would be the first to order him to close the portal—he had willingly flown into the unknown with the missile, Tony was not dumb, he knew the risks, he had to, Steve would not be able to continue after what he would have to do if there was even the slightest chance that Tony had not understood—it did not feel right to make that decision for him.

So Steve waited, stubbornly clinging to the hope that Tony would come flying back out of the portal any second now. But the seconds continued to pass and Tony was still nowhere to be seen.

They were running out of time, and though Steve could not say exactly when the bomb would go off, he was sure that the moment Tony had warned him about was only a few seconds away.

So he gave the order and saw how the bright, blue light at the top of the tower flashed when Natasha used the sceptre to deactivate the portal.

The rift in space started to heal, slowly closing in, but Steve could still see how to colour of it changed, no longer purple but rather a bright orange as the explosion fought to make its way into their world before the barrier closed in front of it, and Steve could not do anything but hope that his reluctance to take the responsibility for the decision had not already doomed New York but mostly, he just wished that there had not been a missile at all and that he had been able to wait to make sure that Tony could come back through the portal again.

Something tiny, so small that Steve would not have spotted it had it not been for how intensely he had been staring at the sky, hoping and praying for the best, feel from the sky.

The miracle he had not deserved but Tony had earned a hundred times, Steve realised when he recognised the gleam of the sun hitting the red and golden suit around Tony. He must have made it through moments before the portal had closed for good.

For a moment, the worries left. With Tony there, Steve was sure that they could figure out what to do. But the relief passed as quickly as it had arrived when Tony continued to fall, not slowing down for even a moment, and suddenly, seeing Tony fall from the sky felt too much like seeing Bucky losing his grip on the metal railing on the train and the Valkyrie tipping beneath him as he forced it into the sea to remove the threat of the bombs.

But unlike how Steve had not been able to catch Bucky and how he had refused to tell Peggy the coordinates to let her catch him, the Hulk jumped through the air and caught the suit before hitting the building across from them, sliding down and placing their teammate on the ground.

They reacted instinctively, Steve running alongside Thor to get over to the rest of the group.

Tony still lay motionless on the ground where the Hulk had placed him, and Steve could only hope that the lack of response to having barely survived a trip to outer space was due to the suit having somehow lost power and not… something else.

It felt like a pound of stones settled in his stomach when Thor reached out to turn Tony around, pulling the golden metal plate that had covered his face off. The metal hit the ground a few metres away from them, and Steve knew that if Tony could have seen them, he would have been furious about how they treated the stunning piece of technology. But Tony could not see anything right then, as he continued to stay completely still, eyes closed.

Although he knew that it was useless given how the suit would have made sure to drown out any sounds of a heartbeat, Steve still leant in and listened. And maybe—or perhaps that was just wishful thinking—he heard a gentle whirring noise coming from the blue circle at the front of the suit. Had Tony not once said that it was to make sure nothing bad would happen to his heart? Steve couldn't remember. He was almost completely certain that he had read something about the circle in one of the files S.H.I.E.L.D. had handed to him—an ARC Reactor, it might have been called an ARC Reactor—but other than noting that it was one of Tony's weak spots, Steve could not recall what the file had said. But still, for it to continue to be functioning that had to mean that Tony would make it, wouldn't it?

The Hulk let out a roar and Steve wished that he could do the same and did not have to maintain the façade of the perfect Captain America, the man who always has a plan. Right then, he would have given anything to let himself cry and move closer to one of his teammates

But Tony jerked at the sound, eyes opening in an instant as he searched for the source, only calming down when he noticed them standing above him, and the fact that he would be okay, he had survived, they could figure out the rest later, was more than what Steve could have dared to hope for just seconds before.

"What just happened?" Tony asked, having a comment ready the way he always seemed to have, looking first at Steve before letting his gaze travel over to Thor. "Please tell me nobody kissed me."

The quip was such a typical Tony-thing to do, annoying, inappropriate given everything that had just happened, and exactly what they had all needed to hear. The muscles around Steve's mouth twitched slightly, forming the smallest smile, as he let out a sigh of relief.

"We won."

And when Tony mirrored his response, sighing before visibly relaxing and lowering his head back down to rest on the ground before he—as Steve had almost expected—continued with his storm of witty comments, Steve knew that although the rest of the world might just have won in the fight against the Chitauri, they had won more than that alone.

Over the last couple of days they had grown to become a team. A small and fragile team, with members who could still fight with each other and would most likely continued to do that for the rest of their lives, but a team nonetheless.

When he had first woken up, he had been alone. But now, Steve might have found a family.