Chapter One


I'll always be near you wherever you are each night

In every prayer,

If you call I'll hear you, no matter how far,

Just close your eyes and I'll be there.

—"I'll Walk Alone," 1944


She dreamed of him.

Cold. Painfreezingcold. Utter and complete aloneness.

The dreams were vague, indistinct, agonizing. Peggy woke shivering in the dark night after night to lie awake, staring up at the ceiling of her room or the canvas of her tent, the only barrier between her and the pitiless sky.

Steve Rogers was dead. He had died with her kiss on his lips, doing what he always did: giving his all for those he loved.

Steve was dead.

And yet Peggy couldn't stop dreaming.


A light.

There was a light out there in the cold and darkness.

Peggy stood, braced against an unseen wind. She knew without looking that somewhere at her back sprawled the wreck of the Valkyrie. That if she turned and sought a way into the massive bulk, she would find at its heart a single beloved man, dead and alone.

She couldn't bear it.

Yet there was that light…

Peggy braced her feet and waved her arms and screamed into the wind. She screamed until her throat was raw, until the whipping wind turned her hair to icicles that battered her cheeks, screamed until she could barely distinguish her voice from the howling wind.

"Over here!" she shrieked. "Over here, over here, over here…!"

She woke up at her desk with a strangled sob, to find one of the stenographers shaking her.

"Wake up," the girl kept insisting, an oddly incongruous note of hysterical joy in her voice. And then, "Did you hear? The war's over! It's over!"

The tears on Peggy's cheeks didn't matter then, because everybody was crying and laughing in a tumult of emotion that swept everything before it. The war that had taken their youth, their hopes, their dreams—it was finally, finally over.

She only realized much later that the frozen dreams stopped that night.

Peggy never dreamed about being cold again.


Author's Note: Title from the song "I'll Walk Alone" by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, 1944. It is absolutely one of my favorite Steggy songs ever. Listen to the version sung by Martha Tilton on YouTube.