In the Still of the Night

Chapter 17: She'll Always Remember

They found themselves in an awkward silence once they were on the outskirts of the city and safe from danger as far as Steve could see. Steve drove carefully, still a little paranoid of being followed and made a few detours if a car was following behind them for too long. Vera, on the other hand, was anxious and wanted nothing more than to get out of the car. While she knew they were on their way to a safe house, she still felt nervous about unexpectedly running into HYDRA and getting shot at again.

But I'll stay safe as long as Steve's here...she told herself resolutely. Nothing truly bad can happen to me, he promised he'd watch out for me.

And yet the terrifying thought of "what if something happens while Steve's not around?" or, even worse, "what if something happens to make Steve not be around?" popped into her head, and then all the possibilities of what could happen to Steve to make him not be around swam in her brain...And thus, she was back to square one with her anxiety.

Steve felt a little surer about the safety of their destination, although he could sense that Vera was antsy. He certainly didn't blame her, though; it was now twice in the span of a few months that she was taken to an unfamiliar location against her will. He felt bad for her, but all he cared about now was getting her to safety. To alleviate the tension (and ungodly silence) between them, Steve said, "When we get to the safe house, you can call your mom and explain to her what happened to her house. I can get you an untraceable phone in case HYDRA's tapping into the wires."

Vera considered this and nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, I would really hate for my mom to walk in through the front door and see bullet holes in her walls with no explanation. That might make her a little unsettled."

"Good thing she doesn't live in a bad neighborhood," Steve joked, and he saw Vera smile a little. Her smile faltered, though, as she leaned back against her seat and sighed.

"I hope she'll be able to get her house fixed," she said mournfully. "The windows are shattered, the living room's a mess..."

"Hey, don't worry about it," Steve said. "I can take care of getting her house repaired."

"Oh, no, you don't have to –"

"I don't mind –"

"No but you shouldn't –"

"Vera, it's fine. I'm an Avenger. Tony Stark is one too. I'm sure he wouldn't mind throwing a little money my way to help out with something like that. He does that."

Vera sighed. "Steve, don't feel like you're obligated to 'make things right' with me, or –"

"I'm not," Steve interjected truthfully. "I just don't want your mom to worry, that's all."

Vera opened her mouth as if to say something, but then closed it and sunk back into her seat. Then she mumbled, "You're impossible, Steve."

Steve gave her an annoyed look. "Why?"

She glanced quickly at him. "No, I didn't mean it like that, I meant...It's like...it's impossible for someone like you to exist. You're too nice and too helpful and just...I don't know, you're too good of a person. You're an impossible human being."

Steve raised an eyebrow, his eyes still staying focused on the road ahead of them. "And is that a bad thing?"

"No, not at all. You just..." Vera looked down sheepishly. "You just make the rest of us look like bad people."

"You're not a bad person, Vera."

Vera softly scoffed. "Do you know that for sure? There are a lot of things you don't know about me..."

Steve thought back to the night he was in the interrogation room with Vera at the SHIELD headquarters, and privately he agreed she was right.

"Well, then, there are ways to remedy that," he told her, and Vera was the one who now raised an eyebrow.

"Such as?"

"Tell me something about yourself," Steve goaded. He nearly smiled to himself when he remembered an instance very similar to this with Natasha – driving in a stolen car away from crazy HYDRA soldiers that were after them while asking each other questions about their lives. Oh, the irony that is my life, he thought.

Vera remained silent for a moment, thinking. "Well, what do you want to know about me? What are you looking for, little quirky habits that I have or the deep, dark secrets?"

"I know a lot of your quirky habits," divulged Steve with a twinkle in his eye that made Vera feel a little tingly (despite herself). "But I think there are some deep, dark secrets of yours that I don't know."

"Again, such as?"

"Like who Joseph Hockett was."

Vera froze. Her entire body absolutely stiffened at the mention of that name. She had certainly not been expecting that...She swallowed.

"You remember Coulson talking about him in the interrogation room?" she questioned, and Steve gave a solemn nod.

"From what I heard back then, it seemed he was important to you," explained Steve. "Coulson mentioned something about an incident that happened?"

And there it was: Steve asking the one question she had feared him asking ever since they started dating. She was afraid of telling him – or anyone, for that matter – about her past because it was just a mess and brought about painful memories.

And yet, she told herself, if she wanted to be able to move on from it she's got to be okay with talking about it. And Steve definitely wasn't one to judge, so what would be the harm in telling him?

Vera took a deep breath before speaking, which Steve noticed. "Joseph Hockett was an Agent of SHIELD that got killed a few years ago. We had gone to school together at NYU and we both joined SHIELD at the same time. And...more than that...Joey Hockett had been my fiancé."

Steve felt the wind knock out of him a bit at that last statement. She had been engaged before? And she never told him about it until now? He wanted to ask more questions, but he just let her tell her story.

"When Joey and I first met at college," she continued heavily, "we wanted to do different things with our lives. I was a history major specializing in the World War II era and I wanted to be a museum curator. He was a communications major and wanted to go into marketing or something. I don't think he was sure back then. But after we met, we fell in love, and we thought we should go into similar fields so we could study and work together. However, we were both too stubborn to give up our interests so as a compromise we decided to work at SHIELD: I went into the Sci-Tech division as an archivist and SHIELD history consultant, and he joined the Communications division as a data analyzer. We worked together blissfully and our plan worked well.

"Well, that's what we had done at first. But then he got it into his head that he wanted to go into Ops so he signed up for basic training. I guess he was a natural at it because a few months later he got assigned to the tactical team training group. But then..."

She glanced sideways at Steve, feeling a little guilty because of what she was about to say.

"Then...the Battle of New York happened and a lot of things changed at SHIELD. Homeland security suddenly became a lot more important so they trained up a ton of people in Ops, and they trained them quicker too. Quicker than they should have. One day..." Vera swallowed hard, feeling a lump in her throat. "One day...Joey and his training group were doing a training exercise at an external location. A field training sort of thing. They were practicing storming a building and shooting at the people inside. The targets were some of the trainees in new, state-of-the-art armor that Sci-Tech had just developed. But something went wrong with the armor. It didn't work."

Vera brushed impatiently at the tears forming in the corner of her eye. "Joey had been shot by his colleagues. They were just doing what they had been told. No one knew the armor was defective until he and five others had been shot. All by their team members. Joey died along with four others. There was only one agent who had survived. I think he works at a desk job in headquarters now.

"They brought me into the hospital with great secrecy; I had no idea why I had been summoned there. They just wanted me to I.D. the body because I was his only emergency contact listed. They told me what had happened after I I.D.'d his body. I had no idea..."

Vera took a deep breath. Her voice was shaking now. "The training exercise had happened on Monday morning. He had proposed to me on Friday night, during one of our dates." It was impossible to hold back her tears now. "I had only been engaged to him for three days before he was killed."

Steve remained silent throughout her entire story, but little by little he felt his heart break for her. He knew exactly what losing the love of your life felt like, but in a different way than she did. But the pain was still the same.

After taking a brief moment to compose herself, Vera continued, "I got compensation and a formal apology from SHIELD, and I left quietly two days later. I had too many bad memories from SHIELD for me to stay there; plus I was angry with the way they handled everything and if they had cared a bit more about protocol then Joey probably would still be alive..."

Vera couldn't go on any further. She told her story, and that was that. Internally, she actually felt relieved; it was nice, for once, to tell her story to someone that she actually trusted. Yes, she and Steve had been apart for a while and there was still some rebuilding to do, but informing him of this grisly part of her past made her feel like she could really, truly, finally open up to him now.

In Steve's mind, he was digesting all that she had just told him, and he was secretly a bit relieved too. Finally, some things about her made sense: why she was afraid to tell too much about her past, why she had been so against SHIELD, why she got nervous about their relationship at times...and he accepted her despite all of these things. Steve started to feel a little hopeful that maybe they could salvage their relationship and give it another go. If, however, she could accept him for his past, too.

"I'm sorry that happened to you," he said after a lengthy silence. Vera nodded in acceptance.

"Yeah, well," she exhaled, looking wistfully out the window at the scenery that passed them, "it's all in the past now. Literally. After I left I guess SHIELD erased everything about me and Joey, like we never existed."

"Hm," Steve replied, miffed that SHIELD would do something like that (even back then).

Vera gave Steve a small smile. "Well, tragedy befalls the best of us, even when we've given the universe no real reason to hate us. That's just the way things are."

"I know," Steve replied. "And I mean, I really do know. I lost someone too."

Vera looked at him questioningly. "You did?"

"Yeah," he nodded slowly. "Peggy Carter."

Vera's eyes went round. "Peggy Carter...the founder of SHIELD...I knew she had a deeper connection to Captain America than just a military one! Looks like Alice owes me twenty bucks!" She then glanced over at Steve, mumbled an apology, and let him continue.

"It's alright," he said, amused. "Everybody in the world seemed to know we had feelings for each other even before we did, it seemed. But we didn't really get to see those feelings come to fruition because I crashed that HYDRA plane into the ice..."

"Had she been there when you crashed the plane?"

Steve nodded slowly, staring out at the open road. "I got to talk to her on the radio before I went down. That was the last time I talked to her back when she was still...Peggy. I mean, she's still alive now and I've gone to see her several times, but she's a different Peggy now compared to back then. And she lived a life that I was never a part of, so I can't live a life that has her in it, either."

Steve briefly looked over at Vera and saw that she was staring back at him with sad eyes. "That's just the way things are," he echoed, and Vera nodded sadly in agreement.

There was a silence before Vera smirked and said lightly, "You know, we have such similar experiences with losing the people we loved, it's almost like we're meant to be."

Steve looked over at her. He knew she was joking but he had dead seriousness in his eyes. "Maybe we are meant to be."

Vera opened her mouth to say something, but, like she had done before, she closed it without saying anything.

But she smiled a little to herself, because she was touched by what he said.

And, though she wouldn't admit it, she really, really, wanted to believe him.

A/N: You know, when I first started writing this story I told myself that I wasn't going to let myself go too long without updating. Well...easier said than done. I'm sure my fellow fic writers know all about that.

Anyway, I don't blame you if you forgot about this story or gave up on it, but I'm not going to give up on it! I promise you I'll keep writing it, but I can't promise you that updates will be frequent or steady. So just please wait patiently for the next chapter and I'll post it as soon as I can.

Thanks for all the WONDERFUL reviews I've gotten so far! You all are so kind. :)

-PenPaperParadise