A/N- Thank you for all your wonderful reviews! I try to reply to as many of them as I can but I don't always have the time. I just want you all to know know grateful I am to you so thank you. Updates to this fic will be slower from now on as I am now back into lectures at uni. I'll try my best, though! Also, this story will all be from Steve's POV but I may do a companion piece from Tony's. Please let me know what you think!
Disclaimer- I own nothing related to the Marvel universe.
He couldn't keep track of the time that passed. There was no light, just a blur of faces and voices and pain that seemed to come in waves, and he didn't try to make sense of the grey cage he was being kept in.
His mind was blissfully empty and for the first time since waking in the future he found he could sleep without being disturbed by nightmares so he slept and slept and ignored the voices that urged him to wake up.
He didn't want to wake up.
Those few moments he did spend awake were full of pain and confusion and he'd decided that he didn't want to hurt anymore. He had already suffered so much and all he wanted to do was sleep.
It had been so long since he had been able to find refuge in sleep.
No one had been able to sleep properly during the war, there was always the fear of enemy attack or air raids or the worry over friends and loved ones, and Steve had found that his men slept better with someone to watch over them at night.
Bucky had been a fitful sleeper and would squirm and kick and steal the blanket they shared when all they could afford was a thin mattress on the floor of the room they rented because Steve's ill health took up so much of their wages.
The orphanage had been crammed full of parentless and unwanted boys who saw Steve as an easy target and took great pleasure in tormenting him and goading him into fights. On the nights he was well enough to return to his bunk in the boy's dormitory, he had had to sleep with one eye open.
Life with his mother had been hard. He had spent so much of his early childhood desperately ill and many nights were lost to fevered delirium where the only constant was his mother's worried face. She had had to work a lot to make up for all the medicine he needed and he had spent more nights than he could count waiting for her to come home because he had been too scared to sleep in the bed that they shared alone. Then she had gotten ill and he had spent his nights nursing her and fearing that if he fell asleep she'd be gone when he woke up.
No, it had been too long and Steve wanted to sleep.
The voices were persistent, though, and dogged every second that he was awake. He found it harder to ignore them as the pain receded and his mind cleared and he mourned the hours of empty bliss.
Natasha was with him the first time he became fully aware.
She was curled into the chair next to his bed with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a tablet resting on her knees. He watched her slide her fingers across the smooth service as he willed sleep to come and claim him once again.
"On a scale of one to ten, ten being the higher end of the scale, how awake are you feeling?" She asked without looking up.
He blinked and shifted on the bed and offered her a number, "seven?"
She quirked an eyebrow at him and put the tablet down on the bedside cabinet before moving to stand over him, "are you in any pain?"
"A little." He said as his head seemed to erupt in pain at her words, as if it had been reminded and was doing its best to make up for its lapse.
"That's to be expected." She told him and she leaned over and pressed a button over his head. "The doctor will come and give you something to help."
"Thank you." He said and he scrunched his eyes closed to fight off the pain that the faint light from overhead brought, "where are we?"
"The infirmary on the helicarrier." She informed him. "You were badly injured and Stark thought that you'd get better care here than in New York."
"Oh." He said and he was overcome with misery as memory of Tony's words in the car rose fresh in his mind. "Oh."
"Cap?" She asked.
But then the doctor was there and he was distracted by an intense light being shone in his eyes and requests to move various body parts and questions about what he could remember.
The truth was that there was very little after what Tony had said that he could remember and he told the doctor this.
He wondered if there had been another attack on New York, another fight against people who were determined to do evil, and he had been injured. His mind immediately went to the rest of his team and he scanned Natasha for any sign of injury.
He wasn't prepared for what she was about to say.
"From what we can work out and what Stark has told us, you had a breakdown."
His insides seemed to freeze at Natasha's flat words, "what?"
"We're not quite sure what triggered it but it was a massive break from reality. You jumped out of Stark's car, hit your head and then ran through New York for half an hour before we found you." Her voice was softer this time, as if she was trying to calm his mounting distress, but it did nothing to soothe him. "You got hit by a car. The driver had been speeding and-."
"Is he okay?" Steve cut her off, guilt bubbling in the pit of his stomach and his chest began to tighten because he could have hurt someone and he had no memory of it.
"She was fine, a little shaken up but she was okay." Natasha told him. "But we were more worried about you. It was obvious that you had a serious head injury and Bruce thought it was best that you be taken to the nearest hospital instead of the helicarrier but then there was an… incident and Stark brought you here."
"Oh, God." He whispered because he could hear the Hulk's roar and feel the force of his hit.
"When you arrived on the helicarrier you were placed into my care." The doctor told him but Steve was barely listening. "You had a cracked skull and a major brain haemorrhage as well as a crushed rib cage and two punctured lungs. We very nearly lost you and I think if it hadn't been for the serum then we would have. As it is, you're making as good of a recovery as we could have hoped for."
"I did something." He said because Bruce didn't just lose control. "Did I hurt Bruce?"
Natasha suddenly looked apologetic, "it was an oversight on our part. You were out of it when we loaded you into the ambulance and we thought you'd stay that way until the hospital but you didn't. You tried to get free and Bruce was in the way. The other guy stepped in before you could hurt him."
"Good." Steve said and he screwed his hands up in the white sheets of the bed as his head continued to pound, "what's going to happen now?"
"We're going to have to keep you here for a while longer and continue to monitor your condition as well as run more tests to determine if there is anything that we've missed. Head injuries are very complex matters and even with your advanced healing there's going to be some residual effects." The doctor told him.
"Okay."
The doctor pursed his lips and Steve felt suddenly terrified, "there is also going to be a thorough psychological evaluation so we-."
"You think I'm crazy?" He cut him off and his heart thundered in time with his head.
He had seen men snap under the pressures of war and he knew what happened to them.
He had heard the stories about the asylums and the horrible things that happened there and he didn't want that to happen to him.
"Steve." Natasha put a hand on his arm and he flinched away from the contact. "We want you to get better but we can't ignore what happened."
"I-." He snapped his mouth shut and buried his head in his hands. "My head hurts. Can you- can you leave? I want to sleep."
"Of course." The doctor said. "I'm going to put something in your IV, it'll numb the pain for a while and help you sleep. Call one of the nurses if you need anything else."
Steve murmured his thanks and refused to look in Natasha's direction when she lingered by the bed after the doctor had left.
"Do you want me to leave, too?" She asked.
He rolled onto his side and ignored the pull of the wires that were connected to his arm, "please."
There was a long moment of silence in which the pain started to fade and his grip on the sheets loosened.
"We're here if you need us." She said and then she left.
His eyes burned and a sob caught in his throat but he refused to cry.
Because he might need his team but they didn't need him.
They thought he was crazy.
They were going to lock him up and curse the day SHIELD found him in the ice.
He jammed his fist in his mouth and stifled the sounds that threatened to escape.
He wouldn't cry.
He wouldn't.
Crying would only prove them right and he couldn't do that.
Captain America wasn't crazy.
Captain America was good and strong and he didn't cry or let any emotion but the want to do what was right affect him. Everyone knew that, right?
Right?
He hadn't let the pain of the twenty-first century affect him.
Captain America had stayed strong and fought and led and done everything that they had expected of him.
Wasn't that enough?
But then he realised and his heart stopped.
Natasha had called him Steve. Not Cap or Captain but Steve.
Steve.
And that was where the problem was.
Steve Rogers.
Because Steve hadn't adjusted like Captain America had. He clung to the past and mourned the life and the people he had lost. He was the one who suffered through the nightmares of falling and bombs and ice and death. He was the one…
He was the one that was weak.
He was the one that was crazy.
And they all knew.
They were going to lock him up.
Captain America was no good when Steve Rogers was defect.
Not that Captain America was any good anyway because Tony had already worked that out and the others wouldn't be too far behind.
Captain America had no place in this time.
He had no place on the Avengers and maybe this was the excuse that they had been waiting for.
Maybe they had known that Steve wasn't strong enough.
Maybe they had just been waiting for it all to become too much and for him to crack and now he had they had their excuse.
He was going to be locked away and they were going to wait for him to die and then they were going to cut his body into pieces and discover the secret of the serum and make a million men who were better than him and everyone would be happy because they should have been doing that months ago when they had hoped to have found a corpse but found Steve instead.
And maybe he should let them take him.
Maybe he should sit in a cell and wait to die.
But the quiet and the time that being locked away would leave him with…
The poisonous thoughts that would invade his brain and the nightmares he wouldn't be able to escape from…
They'd be too much.
They had been too much when he'd had the Avengers and the general monotony of everyday life to distract himself with.
They were too much now.
He didn't want to spend the rest of his life fighting and losing against them.
They were too cruel and he was so tired.
He wanted to go home.
The future was cold and full of people he didn't understand.
He didn't want to be cold anymore.
He didn't want to be alone.
He pulled the needles from his arm and peeled the sticky pads from his skin and crept from his room and the eerily quiet infirmary.
The hallway beyond it was empty and the lights had been dimmed and he didn't think anything of it but tried to stick to the shadows and get to his destination as quickly as possible.
He knew what he had to do.
He ignored the way that his body trembled with fatigue and his knees seemed ready to give way with every step. He ignored the pain in his head that had grown to an excruciating level and the dull ache in his lungs that made it hard to breathe.
He ignored it all because he knew it'd be over soon and he'd be allowed to sleep forever.
There'd be no more pain and there'd be no more cold.
Just…
Home.
And he was so close, so, so close, but the final door was locked and his hands were too clumsy and stiff to pry it open.
Still, he tried.
He tried and he tried until his vision wavered and his knees buckled and he had nothing more to give.
He couldn't hold back his sobs this time.
He had failed.
"I don't know what you're crying about." A voice suddenly said but Steve was too tired and miserable to react. "It's too dark for any good views and we're up too high for you to be able to breathe out there for long anyway."
"Go away." Steve ground out as his breath hitched and the world greyed.
"No, I think I'm going to hang around for this." And suddenly Tony Stark was sliding down the wall to sit on the floor next to him. "Blackmail for when you're back to your normal ass-hat self and need knocking down a peg or two."
"Please." Steve begged because he didn't want anyone to see him like this and definitely not him. Because Tony already knew. He knew that Steve was weak and worthless and he was going to go running back to Fury and the rest of the team and make them see it, too. "Please, I just want to be… alone. Please."
"Yeah… No. I'm not going to do that. Can you imagine the crap I'd get? I'd never hear the end of it especially considering the pure level of evil they unleashed in order to get me to babysit your sorry ass in the first place. Nope. I'm just going to sit here and watch you a cry because I'm an asshole like that."
"Why?" Steve asked because he really didn't understand.
Why was Tony here?
Why was Steve here?
He had died seventy years ago.
"Like I said, I'm an asshole. I'd have thought you'd be an expert on that considering your own status as one."
Steve let himself drift and he finally slumped all the way down onto the cold metal floor. The pain in his head seemed to reach a crescendo when it landed with a dull thud but he ignored it.
It didn't matter anymore.
He had failed and they were going to lock him up and he was never going to be able to go home.
"What no comeback? I feel like I should let you off due to the fact that you had major brain surgery not five days ago but I'm not going to. You're Captain America, you're supposed to bounce back."
And he just missed everyone so much.
Why had he had to leave them all behind?
Or had they left him?
They had been the ones to continue living while he had stopped.
With ice and water and pain he had stopped.
How had anyone ever expected him to continue on living after that?
It wasn't possible.
He had died.
He was dead.
"Are you even listening to me, Spangles?"
Had someone been speaking? He couldn't remember.
He felt sick.
Nausea bubbled and festered in the pit of his stomach and he choked on the bile that rose in his throat.
"What are you doing? You're not going to be sick, are you? Because, I really don't think I'm qualified to handle that kind of thing and you might not have figured this out yet but I'm really not big on the whole bedside manner kind of thing. And, yes, it still counts even though you're not actually in a bed. It's a figure of speech. Hell, if it was literal then- oh, okay. You just go ahead and throw up everywhere. Nice. Really nice."
He let warm hands move him away from the watery vomit he hadn't been able to keep down and he found his head being cushioned in a soft lap and calloused fingers ran patterns on his overly sensitive skull.
He could feel sleep coming for him.
"I doubt you've noticed yet but you've got no hair. They had to shave it off before they operated. It doesn't look bad, though, you can totally rock the skinhead look. Not so sure about the beard. Facial hair is my thing. You might want to shave."
He let the darkness take him.