I pressed my locket between my fingertips. There was a dark red ruby in the center, and I ran my fingers over the edges, trying to remember it around my mother's neck.
"She wore it when you were younger," my dad told me, "But you would always try to tear it off her neck."
"I don't remember that," I said softly, turning over the locket in my hands. "Thank you."
"My little girl only turns twenty-one once," he said, my birthday bringing out the softer, not as logical and sharp side of him. "She would have wanted you to have it."
"You gave it to her?" I asked, putting it into his outstretched hands as he strung it around my neck. I stared at his messy bookshelves as he fumbled with the clasp.
"Yes," he said, his voice going quiet. "On our first wedding anniversary. She always loved rubies. It looked great with her dark hair. And yours," he added, smiling as I turned around.
I felt the weight resting above my heart, and touched it again. It was cold against my bare skin, but I knew it would warm up quickly. It was nice to hear my dad talk about my mom, a topic he usually skirted around or ignored completely.
"Thank you Dad," I said, leaning forward to hug him. He smelled like cleaning supplies and coffee, but I still inhaled deeply as he squeezed me once.
"So you'll always remember us."
"Us?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.
Before he had a chance to reply, there were three sharp raps at the door. The light from the small window made red flash in my eyes as I turned.
"I have to go," my dad said, pushing off the chair he had started to lean against. He patted my arm once more before opening the door and revealing a wild-haired Trevor.
"Your father is a genius." Trevor grinned at me.
"It worked then?" my father asked excitedly.
I knew in just a moment I would be completely forgotten, and off to the labs they'd go.
"Too bad it skipped a generation," I muttered, rolling my eyes. It was hard, sometimes, to feel important when they were off making discoveries and I puttered around until needed.
"Oh please," Trevor said, walking in a few steps until he was in front of me. "You can beat me in everything but science."
He kissed me quickly, aware of my father in the doorway, and even though he'd initiated it a blush rose in his ears. The rosy color made my stomach twist with happiness, despite my father's stern gaze. He was alarmingly good at melting my annoyance.
"Well show me, Trevor, we don't have all day," my father said, clicking his heel on the hard floor.
I wiggled my fingers at both of them, blowing Trevor a kiss just to see him blush a little more. My father's face turned into a frown before I patted my locket and mouthed 'Thank you' to him one more time.
He nodded and walked back to his desk, grabbing his green notebook. He was old-fashioned that way. He placed his hand on my shoulder, lingering for a moment. I thought he'd say something, but instead he just followed Trevor out the door, leaving me with a fading warmth in my arm.
Thinking back, he had never gotten to answer my question. To "remember us" he'd said, not her, us. I don't know if he'd had a premonition, but now they were both gone and I was with strangers—heroic strangers, but still strangers, and nothing except the locket to tie me to my past. I tucked it under the loose gray shirt I'd been given. It made a small lump in the fabric, but it comforted me to have it so close to my skin.
Sometimes I missed Trevor. His short, warm kisses. His untamed hair. The humor that cracked through his shyness.
But I had stayed for him. I'd stayed too long—even when my heart told me to get out. Even when the nightmares grew so worse I couldn't sleep at all.
And if he had really loved me at all, they would have let me leave when I had the chance.
"But why her?" Steve asked, his brow furrowed. "Memory erasing would be beneficial to them...not essential."
"It seems they just cleaning up after themselves," Fury said, pausing to look into the interrogation room. The man that had attempted to kidnap Olivia was slumped in his chair, his face bruised and swollen and his hand bandaged to the wrist.
An agent was speaking to him, calmly to begin with, but the man wasn't budging an inch. It would take heavier tactics than that, and the growing creases in the agent's face were indication he'd begun to realize it.
"It just feels like...more," Steve said, sharing a look with Natasha who was surveying the situation with a frown.
Before Fury could reply, the doors behind them slid open, revealing another agent in a suit. His nametag was askew, but he held his arms behind his back as he addressed the Director.
"Sir," he said, his tone rushed. "Miss Hawthorne wishes to speak with you."
"Bring her in."
Steve sat up in his chair as Olivia entered. The bandage on her head was reduced to a small square that was a few shades darker than her skin. She had tried to hide it with her bangs but they were out of place as her eyes darted around the room.
"I thought of something that might help..." she said, somewhat uncertainly, her eyes locking with Fury. "It may be nothing, but it's all I can think of..."
"What is it?" he prompted.
"My father always carried around a journal," she said, her voice growing more confident as she spoke. "He always wrote things down. I know he had one at the labs, but he kept one at home too."
"They'll probably have searched your home."
"It's in a place nobody knows about," she insisted. "Except me."
"What do you think is in it?"
Olivia's slight streak of confidence wavered—Steve could see it in the clouds that darkened her eyes.
"I'm not exactly sure. Experiments, findings, failures...it has to give us a clue, right? I can't make heads or tails of it, but maybe someone can."
"We can have Banner and Stark look at it," Fury said, "That's why we brought them on."
Olivia almost beamed. Steve wasn't sure if she was helping to help or helping to ease guilt, but either way she was eager to be useful. It made his chest squeeze a little. He knew what it was like to want to do something, and the satisfaction when you actually could.
"Captain?"
His attention snapped to Fury, the usual tone of authority causing his spine to straighten even farther.
"Sir?"
"Do you want to escort her?"
I suddenly wished I had kept my mouth shut, even though I knew deep down that wouldn't solve anything and I would have ended up blurting out about my father's journal at some point. But as an agent drove us on increasingly familiar streets, a balloon seemed to travel up my stomach and up to my throat where it lodged, making it hard to swallow.
Next would come the trouble breathing, and that tended to be something that I wanted to be able to do.
I tried to ignore the fact that this would be my first time home without my father being there. I tried to prepare myself in case the place was ransacked. My mind was full of unpleasant thoughts and with no one else was talking, the breathing thing grew worse.
So I did the only thing I could think of, which was to talk.
I noticed that Steve had been looking out the window the whole time. I wondered where he had lived when he was younger, and then was struck by the thought that it would look so different now. He might not even recognize it.
"So do people ask you all the time?" I asked, my voice coming out shy even to my own ears. "If it's different now? If you miss it?"
He looked surprised at first, and then an inexplicable look twisted his mouth into an almost frown.
"Not as much as you'd think." He shrugged, his shoulders hunching forward even when he finished. "Some people ignore it."
"So what's the answer?"
He paused, his blue eyes locking on mine. They were even brighter when the sun streaked in through the windows.
"Yes...but..." he trailed off. When he didn't speak for a moment, I prodded him again, hoping I wasn't pushing it too far.
"But what?"
"It seems to make me this...figure. Like I'm not even a person, because they don't know how to treat me."
"Well you are kind of unique in your position," I justified, lacing my fingers together.
"Yes but everyone thinks I'm so vulnerable because I missed out on everything," he said, anger creeping in his voice. He seemed to notice and tried to even out his tone. "But most things are the same."
I raised an eyebrow at him. Somehow I doubted that—I had never met anyone quite like Steve Rogers at least.
"Alright, things are different," he conceded, giving me the smallest of smiles. "It's strange how things can be so different and familiar at the same time. How the world just...moves on without you."
"Everyone's happy you're here now," I said, trying to give him a smile back.
A flush crept up his cheeks which in turn caused my own ears to grow warm.
"You did, you know, save the world and everything...helped a lot," I said hastily, averting my eyes.
Handsome superheroes made me tongue-tied. I could hardly blame myself.
"I guess I miss the people the most," he said, his eyes leaving mine to stare out the window again. "I miss...everything that I couldn't do." His voice grew quiet. "Everything I was meant to do."
I didn't quite know what to say. I wasn't used to having such eloquent, deep conversations with people, let alone strangers.
"You know what's funny?" I asked, my words coming out before my brain could stop them. "We now live in a time where sincerity is a personal thing. People don't go around having deep conversations with people they hardly know...at least I don't. But...it's actually pretty refreshing."
Maybe it was because he was from a different time, but this was the first conversation in a long time where I didn't feel the need to be fake. To pick and choose my words. To wonder what the other person's ulterior motive was.
"We're here," the agent in the front seat announced, reminding me that we were actually in a car and headed somewhere and not in a café trading stories. Steve was looking at me strangely and I smiled slightly at him as I took a deep breath and opened the door.
It surprised me, somehow, that it looked the same. That my absence could only be seen in the overgrown grass or empty driveway. But there it stood, our two-story brick and blue shuttered house, with the creaky front door and the hideous mailbox shaped like a squirrel that my father had insisted upon buying.
"Agent Barton's got an outside view," Steve said, snapping into soldier mode. "The agent will stay in the car. Ready to go in?"
No. "Yes."
I don't know if it's because I was hesistant to go in, but I felt the need to tie up our conversation before the moment was lost and I delved back into a world where I couldn't pretend that I didn't have a hand in something awful.
"Permission to say something cheesy, soldier?" I asked, peering up at Steve now that we were on flat ground and he was almost a foot taller than me.
"Permission granted," he said, his smile almost visible.
"That whole thing you said before?" I asked, catching my breath as I started walking to my door. "Well maybe this is what you were meant to do."
The house was definitely searched. Our dark, comfortable furniture was all out of place, the sofa tilted away from the window, the chairs scraped across the wooden floors that now had muddy footprints. But even with that disarray, the real mess was in the papers and notebooks that were sprawled across everything. It looked like the desks and tables had thrown up a Charles Dickens novel.
"Well...I'd say they've been here," Steve said flatly.
I laughed, but I was upset and it came out as more of a choke. Steve looked at me in worry and tried to redirect the conversation.
"Do you think he hid it well enough?"
"I hope so," I croaked, my stomach twisting in angry knots.
I headed straight for my father's office, stifling the urge to cry when my home had been invaded, and hoping that they hadn't destroyed anything upstairs. The office had really been a den at some point but was now lined with bookshelves and cluttered with old microscopes, vials, and paperweights I had made him in art class when I was little. His desk was big and nestled in the corner, but it was the safe behind it that I was interested in.
I guess it should have been a clue to me then, watching my father stash away his thoughts in a locked metal box, that something wasn't right. But I had always just thought he was eccentric, a little too confident in his work, suspicious of everyone around him.
Now I was wondering if he wasn't suspicious enough.
I vaguely noticed Steve following me, his footsteps surprisingly light for his size. I broke into a jog when I neared the entrance to the room.
The safe was hidden like the ones on TV, but instead of having a painting on top of it, there was a bookshelf. My uncle was pretty handy and had rigged up a sliding shelf for my father a few years ago.
My only hope was that whoever broke in hadn't tried to move it.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I looked around. It was the same as the other rooms—papers dusting the floors like snow, things thrown aside and broken, but the bookshelf seemed to be in the same place.
"It's right back here," I told Steve, walking to the shelf and positioning myself to the right side.
I pushed it forward. It was harder than I remembered, and Steve moved to help me, but it creaked to the left before he had a chance. The hinges groaned but slid as I pushed it as far as they could go.
The safe was there, and unopened. I breathed out a huge puff of air and felt my body lighten, even if just for a moment.
"It's in there," I said, patting the hard metal.
"You know the code?" Steve asked, his tone clipped as he pressed a hand to his ear.
"Yes," I said, watching him in worry as he listened to his earpiece. "Why?"
"Open it quickly," he said, his hands curling into fists. "We've got company."
This story is not dead! Woo! I hope you haven't given up on Steve-let me know. :)
P.S. I don't usually like telling people exactly what my characters look like, but I am really picturing Andrew Garfield as Trevor for some reason.