95.

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"The big fella sets,Pearsonpitches … a curve ball, high and outside, for ball one. So, the Dodgers are tied, 4-4."

Steve wakes up slowly, blinking his eyes against the dim light of the room. He feels a faint breeze coming from the open window, the curtains fluttering in the breeze, but it lacks the smell of fresh air, and it makes him frown. He looks around the room a little, a familiar landscape. He's lying on a cot, the mattress comfortable under him, lying on top of the covers. A ceiling fan turns lazily above him. A radiator sits on the wall to his right, a chair and vanity at the end of the bed. The walls are white and green, the floor grey, light and airy and just wrong.

"And the crowd well knows that with one swing of his bat,this fella'scapable of making it a brand-new game again. Just an absolutely gorgeous day here at Ebbets Field. The Phillies have managed to tie it up at 4-4. But the Dodgers have three men on."

Steve sits up slowly, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. He feels a little faint, his head a little dizzy, but he pushes through.

"Pearson beaned Reiser in Philadelphia last month. Wouldn't the youngster like a hit here to return the favour. Pete leans in, here's the pitch. Swung on–"

Steve blocks out the sound of cars and honking in the streets below and tunes his attention into the radio on the vanity, the commentator drawling the results of a baseball game. A familiar baseball game. Steve starts to breathe a little faster when he recognises the game; May twenty-fifth, nineteen-forty-one. He attended that game.

"–a liner to right, and it gets pastRizzo. Three runs will score. Reiser heads to 's gonna wave him in. Here comes the relay but they won't get Reiserwith an inside-the-park grand slam. Oh, my goodness! The crowd is going absolutely wild here at… The Dodgers take the lead here, eight to four. Ohhhhh, Doctor! Everyone is on their feet. What a game we have here today, folks. What a game, indeed!"

Steve closes his eyes, seeing flashes. He's at the game, small again with his artistic hand shoved into a larger foam one, navy blue for the Dodgers. He stands, cheering and yelling and whopping along with the crowd as the Dodgers win the game, a flash of blue and white filling the stadium in a wave as the Dodgers supporters stand and cheer. The Phillies fans stay seated or head for the exit. Steve turns and Bucky's saying something excitedly to him, his eyes sparkling with the adrenaline rush. Steve can't hear him though, over the crowds and roars of people around him. Bucky's on his deaf side anyway. On Steve's other side, Isabel is clapping along, though she's thoroughly confused as to what's happening since she never understood the game, but she's smiling at Steve's excitement.

Isabel… she would have been here when he woke up. She wouldn't have left him here alone. The last thing he remembers is saying goodbye to her over the radio, zooming straight for the wall of white. The hairs on his arm rise. Something isn't right.

The door clicks open and Steve's eyes snap to it, expecting Isabel to walk in. Instead, an unfamiliar brunette woman walks in, closing the door behind her with a smile.

"Good morning," she says, but Steve doesn't answer. "Or should I say afternoon," she corrects herself, looking down at the watch on her wrist. She comes to a stop at the end of the bed, clasping her hands in front of her.

"Where am I?" Steve asks, his voice a little husky and a little threatening.

She doesn't bat an eyelid, smiling at the Captain. "You're in a recovery room in New York City."

Steve looks at her a moment, his eyes flicking down to her outfit. Her shirt is all wrong, not fitted at all like the women wear them. Her tie is too short, it wouldn't pass army regulation standards. The skirt and the belt, they aren't army regulation. The skirt's brown, not khaki, and it isn't flowing enough, it's too straight. And her undergarments… Steve really wasn't looking, but he can see them through her shirt. They're ill-fitting, and Steve may not know a lot about them, but he knows women would never be caught dead with undergarments that didn't fit properly.

Steve's eyes only linger on her for not even a second before they flick back up to her face. He looks back out the window, at the world outside, then at the radio again, listening for a second longer.

"Where am I, really?" He asks again, looking at her with a dangerous expression.

She looks a little worried for a moment, but lets it slide with a huffed laugh. "I'm afraid I don't understand."

"The game," Steve says evenly, cutting to the chase. "It's from May nineteen-forty-one. I know, 'cause I was there." Suddenly, the woman's eyes widen, her mouth opening and closing as she searches for the right words. Her mouth clamps shut into a fine line as Steve slowly rises from the bed. "Now I'm going to ask you again," Steve says, slowly walking toward her with steady, intimidating steps. "Where am I?"

The woman presses a button on a small black stick she holds in her hand, the light turning red.

"Captain Rogers–" she says carefully.

"Who are you?" Steve yells.

Suddenly, the door to the room opens and two men enter, wearing dark suits and caps, holding guns in their hands. Steve immediately backs away from the woman, his eyes darting between the men.

"Captain, stand down!" One of them yells, coming toward him with his gun raised.

Two seconds later, Steve throws both of them into the wall, surprised when they fall straight through, leaving a massive hole in the thin plaster. Steve quickly leaps through the hole, looking around with a racing heart as he finds himself in a larger grey room, the hospital room he'd woken up in just a stage. A large image of the New York buildings out on the street sits outside the fake hospital room window, all of it an illusion.

"Captain Rogers, wait!" He hears the woman yell out to him, but Steve doesn't stop to listen.

He sprints for the main doors, throwing them open. He's with Hydra, he has to be, there's no other explanation. He's been captured and they're trying to make him think he's okay, trying to trick him that he's safe long enough to wipe his memories, if they haven't already. The Red Skull is going to walk toward him at any time now–

Steve runs through the hallways, bursting into a main lobby, bustling with people. Over a voice on an intercom he hears the woman from the fake hospital room say, "All agents, code thirteen. I repeat, all agents, code thirteen." The group of men to Steve's right turn to him and immediately make chase. Steve takes off running away from them, easily outrunning them. He pushes one out the way when he gets a little too close, sprinting for the exit.

He emerges out the doors onto the road, sprinting straight into the middle of it and looking around. The men and women on the sidewalk, they're wearing strange clothing. The buildings look odd, taller and made of different materials than the brick Steve knows. The cars look even stranger, smooth edges and bright colours, sleek and compact. Steve doesn't stop to look. He takes off down the wet road, running as fast as his legs and bare feet can take him. He has to get away, has to get out of the strange city. He doesn't recognise it, not at all.

He runs and runs and finds himself at a familiar intersection of roads, except that's the only part that he recognises. The buildings are covered almost entirely by large posters and massive screens that project images, all of them in colour. It's a flurry of lights and colours and names Steve doesn't even remotely recognise, and he finds himself slowing to a stop, looking around with an open mouth. The sky above is foggy, the main building of Times Square stretching upward into the thick smoke. No one stops to look at him, too busy getting somewhere or taking photos with small devices they hold in their hands. It's loud, honking and blasting, music playing somewhere in the distance. Steve is entirely overwhelmed.

He hears a trio of cars pull up and stop behind him and turns toward them. They're big, sleek and black, like nothing he's ever seen before. The doors open and men in suits jump out, holding a gun to Steve.

"At ease, soldier," he hears a rough voice say behind him.

Steve spins around, coming face to face with an African-American man with a black patch over one eye, wearing an odd black coat. Steve freezes and the man walks toward him, not the least bit intimidated by the fuming and terrified and confused super-soldier in front of him. He stops a few feet from Steve. Steve looks at him in confusion and hurt, breathing heavily. He doesn't even try to escape, he's surrounded on all sides with guns trained on him from every angle.

"Who are you?" Steve asks, in a fighting stance.

"Colonel Nick Fury, director of Shield. You would have known it as the Strategic Scientific Reserve," the man tells him easily.

"Where am I?" Steve asks, frowning even further. Nothing's making any sense.

"Forty-sixth and Broadway," Fury says, looking around. "Look, I'm sorry about that little show back there. We didn't know what your mental state might be in, so we thought it would best to break it to you slowly," the man continues, sympathy lacing his tone.

"Break what?" Steve asks, impatient, frustrated and honestly terrified.

"You've been asleep, Cap," Fury tells him. "For almost seventy years."

Steve looks at the man a moment, before his eyes flick back around at the Times Square around them. It doesn't make sense, but it also does, and Steve finds himself believing the man he's never met before. He crashed the plane into the ice, and somehow it preserved him for seventy years.

"How am I alive?" Steve asks.

Fury shakes his head, shrugging a shoulder. "Well to be honest with you, we don't really know." Fury sighs then. "The docs say it was suspended animation. It could be Doctor Erskine's formula," Steve takes a deep breathe at that, "the extreme cold. They dunno."

"Well what about the war? Did we win?"

"Hell yes, unconditional surrender. Taking down Hydra was a big part of that. But the world hasn't changed all that much, there's still a lot of work to be done. Soldier's work. The world can still use a man like you, Cap." Fury holds out a hand. Steve looks at it for a second before shaking it, his grasp tight. "There's a place here for you."

Steve opens his mouth to say something, though exactly what, he doesn't know. He shakes his head at himself, the other man watching patiently as Steve comes to terms with this new information.

"You sure you're alright? You gonna be okay?" Fury asks easily as Steve turns away from him, looking up Broadway.

"Yeah," Steve says, though he isn't sure he means it.

It's at that moment that he realizes many, if not all, of his old friends are very likely dead, including Isabel. He feels his throat get a little tight, a heavy feeling on his chest. His eyes sting, threatening to prick with tears.

"Yeah, I just…"

He pauses again, imagining Isabel sitting alone in a booth at the deserted Stork Club on that fateful Saturday night, crying over a bottle of whiskey the way he had when he'd lost Bucky. She's sitting with her face in her hands, tears soaking her face and making her mascara run. "Steve," she's crying, sobs racking her tiny frame.

"I made a promise."

Nick Fury, as he introduces himself, convinces Steve to get into the car with him to take him back to the headquarters.

"There's a lot you need to catch up on, Captain. I'm here to help you," he says sincerely once they're in the warmth of the leather seated vehicle and driving through the New York streets, away from the prying eyes of those in Times Square.

Steve doesn't say much the entire car ride, just staring out at the foreign world outside.

When they reach the building Steve had escapes from, he follows Fury through the hallways of the headquarters, past the room he burst out of, the room they'd set up for him to wake up in just visible, the wall torn to shreds. Fury leads him into a spacious office and shuts the door, ushering Steve into one of the seats. Steve looks around, not recognising anything. There's a desk in the middle of the room, a large screen sitting on it with a slim typewriter-like keypad in front of it. There's another screen on the wall behind the director's chair, but this one doesn't have a key pad for it. There's also one of those devices on the desk, the same one people in Times Square were taking pictures with. Steve has no idea what it is.

"I'm sorry about that, Captain, I truly am," Fury tells him, sitting in the leather chair behind his desk. "Our intentions were not to deceive you, merely to make you more comfortable as you adjusted to the information."

"Shouldn't have picked a game I went to, then," Steve manages, a little sourly.

"I'll have my research department look into it," Fury promises, a hint of humour in his tone. "You must have a lot of questions."

"I don't even know what to ask," Steve says sincerely, running a hand over his face and sitting back further in the chair, hoping to sink into it.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

Steve sighs. "A wall of white. Putting the plane down into the ice. It hurt like a bitch, I hit the control panel hard. Woke up a while later lying across the control panel, and water was gushing in. The plane was charred, must have blown up with me inside."

"You were awake after the impact?" Fury asks, surprised.

"Yes," Steve says quietly. "I… I crawled down off the panel, could hardly move I was in so much pain. I had already resigned myself that I would die in that plane, so I just crawled away from the control panel. Laid down on the cold metal floor and put my shield over me so I wouldn't lose it. The water was pouring in, and I was about to be submerged. It was… so cold. Last thing I remember was pulling the compass out and taking one last look at the image inside." Steve says this all with teary eyes, but he refuses to cry. He keeps his voice steely.

"Well, the history books are all wrong, then," Fury tells him.

"History books? Uh–" Steve doesn't even know what to say. The concept of him being in a history book is just so alien. "What date is it?" He asks instead.

"…Twenty-eleven."

"Two-thousand and eleven," Steve breathes. "It's been nearly seventy years."

"Yes, Cap. A lot has happened."

"Isabel… she must be ninety-something by now. Ninety-one?" Steve thinks aloud. Theif she's alivegoes unsaid.

Fury is silent for a moment, looking at Steve with eyebrows furrowed. "Cap, there's something else you need to know."

Steve looks up at that, frowning at Fury. He hesitates to ask. "What is it?"

"It ain't pretty, Cap."

"Isabel, is she…" He can't make himself say it. He can't bring himself to think that she… Fury's lack of answer, his sympathetic expression is answer enough. "Did she… Did she have a-a good life? Did she find someone else?

"That's the thing, Cap. She… She didn't exactly have a life… In 1946, she-"

"She died?" Steve whispers, feeling his heart shatter in his chest it's pumping so hard.

"She disappeared."

Steve's eyes widen slightly but he says nothing, and so Fury continues.

"For a few weeks after you crashed the plane, she assisted Stark on the search party for the Valkyrie. They found the Tesseract, but not the plane, and when they returned to port to restock, she left and went home to Brooklyn. Reports say she wasn't given much of a choice; I think Stark and Carter had a say in it. From what her parents reported, she was struggling with it all, went through a few real rough patches before she started to somewhat come out the other side. Agent Carter was eventually sent to New York to work for the Strategic Scientific Reserve, long before she started up SHIELD. We're talking nineteen-forty-six. Carter lived with Miss Barnes for a while. They both got caught up in some issues with Howard Stark, where some of his deadliest inventions were stolen and used by a group called Leviathan, similar to Hydra. Agent Carter worked hard to take them down, but according to reports, one of the Soviet spies heard word of Barnes' existence and a few days later, Barnes disappeared. Carter returned to the apartment and found it empty and trashed. A missing person's report was filed and Carter herself worked for years to find her, but there was no trace of Barnes at all left. No one's seen her since."

Steve is speechless, staring at Fury. He feels his eyes prick with tears. "I…" He trails off, gulping down the lump in his throat.

"I'm sorry, Cap."

"Who'd the spy work for?" Steve asks quietly, forcing the words out around the lump in his throat.

"They were never sure. Could have been Hydra, could have been Leviathan, could have been anyone, really," Fury says apologetically.

"Who would have taken her? W-why?"

"She knew a lot of things that she probably shouldn't have," Fury admits. "What she knew from your work with the SSR, what Carter told her; all of that probably would have seen the end of SHIELD before it even began. At least, that's what Carter always assumed was the reason why she was taken. Agent Carter and SHIELD always had their suspicions that it was some remaining arm of Hydra still trying to do what the rest failed. Who else would have known the ability Sergeant Barnes had from his time with Hydra? By the end of the war, we thought we found all of Hydra, but constantly we were proved wrong. Hydra has been popping up in small groups around the world until the nineteen-eighties. But if Isabel had really been taken for her knowledge, surely, they would have used it against us by now to rise back up as a dominant organisation? The fact that they haven't, and we haven't heard from them in thirty years begs the differ. Perhaps they just took her for who she was. Dating you, working with the Commandos... She was a prime target. Carter never tracked down Madame Hydra, they never found her. Carter always thought it was her but there was no way to prove it or find her."

"That's a lot of unknowns, sir," Steve replies quietly, digesting it all.

Fury shrugs. "World's not such a black and white place anymore as it was in your time, Cap."

"Never was very black and white to begin with..." Steve pauses and gulps loudly. "I... I crashed the Valkyrie so that Hydra would be put to a stop."

"Yeah Cap, you did," Fury says carefully. "But, unfortunately at that point Hydra was still stronger than anticipated. Carter found another base after your crash and found more until well into the eighties. There hasn't been any more since. Not that we've found. Enough so, that we can say they're gone for good. But if you'd stuck around to fight beyond World War II, you likely would have been fighting Hydra your whole life."

Steve doesn't seem to be listening, staring off out the window behind Fury's head at the streets of New York outside. "I crashed for no reason."

Fury hesitates at that, before running a hand over his single working eye. "You stopped Schmidt from blowing up the entirety of the United States, plus every other country in the world. It wasn't for nothing," he reasons.

"Feels like it was. I left my home and my family for no reason..." Steve trails off. "I left Isabel..." He says more quietly.

"I really don't know what to tell you, Cap. I'm sorry."

"We were going to get married," Steve whispers. He looks back at Fury, a far away look in his eye. "That was my promise. A claddagh and a promise we would be wed. And then I left her alone."

Fury doesn't say anything for a long time. He stares at Steve, sadly. That had not been written into the history books. "Did anyone know about that?" He asks quietly.

"No. They didn't. It was on my last night in London, before the raid. We were alone."

"She never told anyone," Fury notes.

Steve is silent for a long, long time.

"You keep saying what SHIELD thought, but they wouldn't have done an investigation, right? The police would have? Trying to find her?" Steve inquires, his mind whirling.

Fury hesitates again. "As I said, Carter and Stark thought it was Hydra. They thought they'd wiped them off the map, but maybe a few of their loyal agents stuck around to finish off the job. The investigators assigned to the case didn't agree. They thought it had something to do with your popularity, that some deranged fan had taken her, or even that Barnes had made herself disappear. They argued she wasn't in a fit state of mind. They still searched every lead, and Carter did her own searches on the side. The case went cold pretty quick, but the Barnes family made them keep searching. They closed the case sometime in the sixties. Police looked for her for twenty years without a solid lead, but Agent Carter never really stopped looking, chasing any lead she came across while she was working for SHIELD. They were always dead ends."

Steve can't even comprehend what Fury is saying. The idea that Isabel would make herself disappear is pure blasphemy. Isabel may have been distraught and destroyed by what happened, but she certainly wouldn't have ended her own life. Even without Steve and Bucky, she had too much to live for to give everything up.

"Please…" Steve says through his tears. "Please look into it further. I… I need to know."

"I'll put a team on it, Cap, but I can't make any promises. It's been a long time now."

Steve puts his head in his hands, leaning his elbows on the table. It is so much to take in.

"I wish she'd had a life. I wish she'd found someone else. I should never have dragged her into all of this."

"I don't think you're to blame, Cap," Fury reassures.

Steve looks up and sighs. If only he could believe that himself. "Have you got eyes out for Hydra?" Steve asks.

"Always," Fury reassures.

"I want in. If you get a lead, I want in."

Fury smiles slightly at Steve's enthusiasm. "We'll discuss that once you're settled."

Steve takes a deep, steadying breath, preparing himself for more inevitable pain. "What about the Commandos? Are any of them alive?"

"Not many," Fury admits. "And they're very old now. All these files are for you. It has their names and numbers, family contacts. You should see them, if you're up to it. I'd dare say they missed you and their families would probably be honoured to meet you. They've been brought up on stories of the Howling Commandos."

"I will," Steve promises. "W-what about Isabel and Bucky's family? The Barnes'? Are any of them…?"

Fury looks at his notes. "I believe that the youngest Barnes daughter–"

"Becca."

"Yes, Rebecca, I believe she is alive. She was hard to track as she married and changed her name, but she is alive. She lives in Brooklyn."

"What about Robert?" Steve asks.

Fury pauses. Steve frowns. "I'll keep digging, Cap, and I'll get back to you."