He was awake. He was lying down, in a bed, in total darkness. No alarms, no voices. A bird called somewhere, but that was all. Rogers shifted and lay still again. It hadn't been a dream that had woken him. He'd woken on his own. That was nice. It wasn't dark in here, or not that he knew about anyway. He was blind. He rolled on to his side and curled his head forwards. He was going to have to get used to this. This was life now, total darkness, being led everywhere. He didn't know that yet. He didn't know he was beyond help. If it had been tears yesterday making his eyes wet, they'd said that was a good sign. Experimentally, he tried to move his closed eyes, to see if they were wet. But something was holding them. His eyelids wouldn't move properly, there was something on them. It wasn't water today, whatever this was was half way solid. They didn't hurt though. Rogers sat up. His head span, so he went no further. He didn't feel right. He couldn't exactly say what, but all of him felt… strange, as though it wasn't quite working properly. He shivered. He wasn't cold. His head had settled, so he pulled the pillow up behind him and shuffled back to lean against the headboard. He leant forwards and put his head in his hands. He didn't like being left alone this much, but he felt awkward in anyone's company, he didn't really know how to behave anymore. The only person likely to come in here was Grogan, spending time with her hadn't got any easier since yesterday. He sighed. He wanted to like Grogan, she hadn't meant any harm, she seemed a nice girl from what he could tell, which wasn't much. She'd just overstepped a mark yesterday and she had taken no for an answer.

String under the bed. He should do that. Tentatively, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Rogers stood up and grimaced at once. It felt like a plug had been pulled inside his head. He dropped to his knees quickly and let himself fall to all fours. He felt blood rush back in to his head. He shivered. He crawled forwards and found the string. He was alright. He would be alright. He placed the fourth knot just below the other three. Four days of treatment, plus the three days before he'd woken up. He was a week on from the injury, and still nobody knew if he would ever see again. He put the string back. That wasn't under his control. He knelt up again, grasping the edge of the bed to stop himself swaying, then leant against it, hands clasped, head bowed. He had no idea what to pray.

"God, show me how to pray." He said quietly. He knelt there for what felt like a good few minutes before he started to pray properly. He felt like he didn't have a lot to thank God for right now, but a part of him still knew that wasn't fair. He'd not been abandoned as useless, though there was a good chance that that was what he was, he wasn't in pain as such, he had shelter, food and water… He had a lot more than some people.

Rogers got up again slowly. He still felt pretty bad, he would have started moving around, but he didn't feel like he'd make it ten paces right now. He sat back down on the bed, breathing harder than he should have been, shivering. Why though? He wasn't cold, he wasn't scared. His chances of working it out on his own weren't great, there wasn't much point in trying. Should he try to remember the fight? Maybe he'd be able to now, and-

"Captain?" Grogan knocked.

"Come in." The door opened, but didn't close.

"Are you OK?"

"Why do you ask?"

"You didn't come to the door, you're sitting down and you're pale. You're not right, are you?"

"Apart from the eyes?" She didn't answer for a second. He shook his head. "I feel like I did yesterday." She closed the door.

"Stay there." Rogers heard her walk over, then felt her hand on his wrist, looking for his pulse, then her hand appeared in the corner of his mouth. "I did tell them you needed more fluids, but…" She tailed off. "Same issue." One hand stayed on his jawline, the other went back to his hand. "Oh, hold on."

"What?"

"Your hand's much colder than your head. There's nothing else, is there?"

"Does it feel colder in here to you?"

"Why?" He drew a breath slowly.

"I keep shivering." He heard her draw breath.

"OK, I'm going to get water, and a doctor. This might be nothing or it might be bad." The door opened and closed again. He drew his knees up. This was not in his hands. God knew what he was doing. He had to trust in that. He didn't wait long before Grogan came back, Ryman with her. Ryman started doing exactly what Grogan had just done, with bigger, rougher hands.

"You've been dizzy since you woke up?"

"Every time I move."

"Tachycardic, vasoconstricted," Ryman muttered, apparently to himself. He ran a hand along the underside of Rogers's jaw on each side. "OK, that's something. It's not the meningitis back." He stepped back. "I don't know. I don't know what this is, I am pretty sure it isn't going to do you serious harm any time soon, so I'm inclined to leave it for now, it's half eleven and I want some sleep. I'm not mad at you for waking me up, just I'll be happy to get back to bed."

"Can he still have food and water?"

"Oh yes, definitely the water, but only eat if you want to. Go and get a pink tube, stick two drops of EDTA in it and a yellow tube." The door opened and closed.

"Here." Ryman's voice. Rogers turned his head, was that what he was supposed to do? "Water." Ah. He held a hand out. Ryman put the cup in it. Rogers drank. "You need that." Was that a question or a statement? He nodded. A shiver ran up his back. Ryman took the cup and refilled it.

"Do you have any idea yet how likely I am to…" He couldn't finish the question.

"I'm sorry, Captain. Really, I am, I know this must be hard for you, but we just don't know. Your eyes are trying to repair themselves, we knew that at the outset, we just don't know what kind of a job they'll do." Rogers dropped his head. "I couldn't have given you worse than that, could I?" Rogers sighed.

"I guess it's still better than knowing I'm going to be blind forever." Ryman took the empty cup and refilled it again. After a long pause, Grogan came back in. She and Ryman drew blood from him silently, then the door opened and closed again.

"Do you want food?" Grogan asked. Rogers nodded. "OK. Two minutes."

She came back, but this time she stayed with him while he ate, re-telling what she remembered from what the dozen or so concussed men had told her about what had happened to them in 2011 in New Mexico. She could see that it was making him laugh, he knew what joined up these concussed ramblings about a lion-man and a 'guy out of Braveheart'.

"You still won't tell me what the hell actually happened in there?"

"Not until you show me your clearance."

"No fair. Even if I put my clearance papers right under your nose, you wouldn't…" She stopped abruptly.

"Well fix that, show me you're clearance level four or over and I'll tell you what you're allowed to know." He'd set that up hoping she'd walk in to it.

"So even within people who are allowed to know there are levels?"

"Yes. It wouldn't be SHIELD if it wasn't over complicated and paranoid. You must have seen other stuff than that."

"Probably nothing else you'll find as funny, nothing else I've found as funny. For all that SHIELD's agents run around with some of the most powerful forces we know about, we still mostly see sprained ankles and coughs. It's the exception rather than the rule when we get, oh, hang on. You might get this one quicker than I did. I joined SHIELD in late 2010, and when you join SHIELD, people mess with you, they see what they can make you believe. I was told a load of stupid stuff to start with, like a lab blowing up and making a whole town go psycho, and an alien transporting a woman to another dimension and getting her pregnant then sending her back so she gave birth to him here,"

"What?"

"I know. I still can't believe I bought that one. Anyway, after a few months, I started to wise up a bit, then one day, a senior nurse came in and said they'd found an aircraft sunk in the arctic, frozen solid, bodies on board and they were trying to revive one of them and I was like 'yeah, right, pull the other one'." Rogers nodded and smiled.

"I think I know where this is going."

"Yeah, then she said 'no really, there's a major war hero there frozen solid, but alive, they're trying to revive him'. I just laughed at her and repeated some of the crazy stuff she'd told me before, then she was like 'no, seriously, we've got Captain America alive'. And I thought this was so funny, like a guy from seventy years ago that my dad used to collect cards of when he was about ten, then two days later an official memo went out saying you had been retrieved and were alive enough to be comatose. I've never read anything that seemed so happy about that." Rogers smirked.

"It's a step up from dead."

"Yeah, I guess. If you can come back from that…" She tailed off. "I guess you can come back from anything." There was a bang on the door. Rogers jumped.

"Nurse Grogan?" Doctor Michael's voice.

"Yeah?"

Grogan left him alone again, sitting in the dark, feeling better, but not well. He'd done the string, he started to train but couldn't go on for long, he lost his breath quickly and his head started spinning. Rogers hadn't been given water to wash today, he could smell himself, and he didn't smell normal. He smelt of sweat, but not the sweat he worked up by running or fighting, he smelt ill. Was the chemical weapon coming back, was it going to kill him anyway? The thought scared him, but not as much as it might have. If it was die or live blind, there wasn't a lot in it. He had no reason to fear death, he believed Jesus would raise him, he honestly did, but something in him rebelled against the idea of letting go, of giving up. The same thing that had pulled him back from the ice. The doctors would probably drug him enough that dying wouldn't actually hurt, but he'd probably be able to feel his body giving up, so much later than it should have done. Any normal human would have been killed by the freezing. He should have died then, but his body had refused to give up, it had kept him alive to see everyone he'd ever cared about dead or dying slowly. If it was time for him to go, who was he to argue?

Grogan came back for him later on and led him away for treatment. He was steady enough on his feet by then. There was something up between Ryman and the other doctors, they were hiding something in their voices, they knew more than they were letting on.

"You've given us quite a puzzle, Captain." Ryman said when he asked if they knew why he was suddenly sick. "It's not the meningitis, you're talking sense to us and you're not in pain, and you don't have the white cell spike, but something's messed with you, hopefully by the time you wake up, we'll have the answer." It wasn't that simple. Rogers knew it even as he let them put him out. They knew something, something important that they didn't want to tell him.

Beyond the perimeter fence, something moved closer in the half-dark, unseen.

Reviews welcome, and two questions:
What was the concussion epidemic involving a blond brute in 2011?
What's unseen in the dark?