99.

Brooklyn, New York City

November 27th, 2011

Steve left Becca's house the days before with the promise that he would do his best to come to terms with the loss of his old life, and he's left with the box of all their old possessions in hand. He'd carried it through the streets to his apartment as though it were the most fragile thing he'd ever held, and when he'd got it inside, he'd sighed with relief because it was all safe.

He put everything where he thought it best fit, but he kept a lot of it in the box so it wouldn't get ruined, and it put it at the top of the wardrobe like Becca suggested.

Steve's ma didn't raise a liar, and so he does as Becca asked and tries to come to terms with his old life that's now gone forever. Steve sits at the desk in the living room, the laptop Shield gave him open on the desk. He's staring at the first frame of the video, which shows a newspaper clipping from nineteen-forty-two pronouncing "War in Europe". Steve presses the space bar and the clip begins.

"War! With the forces of darkness pressing in from the East," the voice over says as a video of Adolf Hitler commanding his army appears, "from the West, America heeds the call to fight for freedom!" The video switches to footage of American troops stepping off the boats in London, dressed neatly in their dress blues to report for duty. One man salutes the camera. It switches then to American soldiers in uniform, running through barbed wire and trenches, guns at the ready and helmets securely fastened around their chins.

"And at the front of the fight, shoulder to shoulder with our battling boys is Captain America!" The man continues in true advertisement style. Steve himself is in the footage now, running down the ramp of an amphibious tank. It switches to footage of him walking through a town of rubble, his cowl over his eyes and his shield strapped over his arm. Allied soldiers run along beside him in a flurry of activity. "Cap is a product of old fashion values and ground-breaking new science!"

The film shows Steve in his dress-blues at one of the ceremonies he was made to attend, and Isabel is standing next to him, her hair done up in neat curls, wearing one of her best dresses. Even in black and white, it's clear her lips are painted red. They'd been standing facing into the sun that day, so they're both squinting, Isabel's hand up to cover her eyes. Steve looks a little uncomfortable standing up on the podium, but he looks to his left at Isabel, who's laughing and smiling excitedly, and his worried frown slips into a smiley grin.

"Captain America is the name every Nazi fears!" There's footage of Steve fighting against a Hydra agent who's wielding one of their blast ray-guns. Steve runs at him and blocks the blasts with his shield, the blue energy flying off into the distance. Most of the footage in the video was filmed by Steve when he was on the USO Tour before he ever fought, most of it for propaganda. But this video must have been made well into their fight with Hydra, because Steve recognises the footage from the field. It's footage of them actually in battle that one of the other Commandos must have filmed at one point. It's shaky and a little blurry but its raw footage. Steve watches as his onscreen-self bashes the shield into the Hydra soldier and sends him flying away amidst the smoking remains of the factory.

"Adolf's secret weapons are no match for our man. When tough times turn tougher, when hope's on the ropes, he is the man to knock the Axis off their axis."

There's more footage of Steve riding his motorcycle across a bridge (staged), of Steve speaking with an army general in a war room in front of a full-wall map of the world (staged). And then the clip flips to a video of Steve, cowl off, surrounded by his Commandos and other soldiers who joined them on a mission. And Steve's laughing at something Dugan said about needing a smoke after that, and Steve nods.

"He's out there fighting for the land that we love, and he won't stop until–"

Steve closes the video and the screen returns to black, and he can see his reflection in the blackness and he almost doesn't recognise himself. He stares at his reflection for a moment before he closes the laptop and pushes it away from him on the desk.

He opens the drawer of the desk, his hand hovering hesitantly over the dossier files sitting inside. Fury gave the files to him when he first woke up nearly six months ago, but he hasn't found himself able to open them yet. They've sat in the drawer and taunted him with their knowledge. But he thinks he's finally ready to open them. He thinks he's finally ready to face the reality of what's left of his past.

Steve takes the folders out and puts them on the desk. He stares at them a moment before sliding the top one toward him, opening it. A photograph of Jim Morita stares at him, along with Morita's information and credentials, a big red 'deceased' stamped across the file. Steve puts it to the side, picks up Falsworth's, and the same ugly word is stamped across the front of his too, the 'd' covering Monty's face as he stares up at Steve in front of the horrible grey background they'd had to stand before for their army photographs.

But Jim and Monty's photographs are more recent – they're in colour, to begin with, but the men are significantly older than when Steve had fought with them. Steve would guess they're around sixty in the photographs. They were probably their last identification photographs before they retired from Shield.

The next file is Bucky's. The photo is in black and white. Steve remembers when it was taken. Bucky didn't mind having his photo taken, he never did. It was one of the first time's Steve had ever seen Bucky wear a uniform correctly, and that was because Bucky was allowed to wear his Howling Commandos' navy jacket with the logo on the shoulder, and he'd beamed with pride. He spent half an hour gelling his hair in the bathroom mirror with a towel wrapped around his waist, and Steve remembers having to pound on the door to try to get Bucky to hurry up. "Last time I checked, I was the main attraction, and the main attraction needs at least some mirror time," Steve had joked through the door. It had opened a second later to a smirking Bucky. "Yeah, yeah, keep telling yourself that."

'Deceased' is written across Bucky's file, and it says when and where he died. Austrian Alps, February 1 1945. Steve gulps, grits his teeth against the memories, and slides Bucky's file to the side.

The next is of Howard Stark, and it says he is deceased as well. It says that he was married to a Maria, who died on the same date as Howard had. Steve wonders how it happened. And it says that Tony Stark is his son and living heir, and Tony's file is next, the billionaire giving Steve a smug smile even in his Shield identification photograph. It says that Tony wears the Iron Man suit as his powers, an impenetrable armor protection with flight capabilities and something called an ARC reactor embedded into his chest cavity that powers his suit and his pacemaker. Steve frowns. He'd googled Stark and read about what happened to Tony back in 2008, and it makes him cringe. He's still yet to meet Stark, but he thinks he has a respect for the man without even meeting him. He thinks he can look past his playboy behavior and ego to the man below it all, just as he did with Howard.

Steve puts the file down but pauses when he sees the edge of the next. He scratches his chin and then balls his fist in front of his mouth, staring a hole into the paper where he can just see the top of her head and her date of birth.

He finally moves the rest of Tony's file away and he can see all of Isabel's file, and it isn't any easier to digest. Isabel stares up at him in black and white, a small smile on her red lips. But she looks uncertain, almost worried, a small line between her slightly furrowed brows. Steve thinks he might be imagining it, but he remembers that time in their lives. They'd barely done many missions together at that point. Isabel had just returned from the mission where Phillips threw her in as a field medic to help the significantly underpowered Commandos. She hadn't been comfortable with the fighting yet, if he could go as far to say she was ever comfortable. She hadn't gotten used to it yet.

But still, she'd posed for her photograph the same day she was recruited by the Army and the Strategic Scientific Reserve, and she'd hung her newly acquired dog tags around her neck, and she'd retrieved her uniform from the base nearby and she'd been ready to go. Steve smiles.

But Isabel's file is a little more complicated than anyone else's. It doesn't say that she's dead. It doesn't say that she went missing in action. It says 'missing persons', with some vague information about the extensiveness of the case to find her and the eventual say the case was ruled cold and unsolvable. Steve frowns then. He still hasn't heard anything from Fury about it, even though Fury promised to look into it. Honestly, Steve doubts he has the time. And, Steve doubts he'd ever be able to find anything. Knowing Peggy, she would have scoured the Earth looking for Isabel. If she couldn't her, no one can.

Speaking of, Peggy's file is the next, and Steve's frown deepens. A colour photograph of Peggy, brown curls and piercing brown eyes, smiles right at Steve's soul, and she doesn't look all that much older than Steve remembers her, though she'd be in her forties. Steve knows this was when she was busy running Shield and setting up the company out of the beginnings provided by the Strategic Scientific Reserve. It lists Peggy as inactive and retired, but certainly not deceased. And below her name is a current address in Washington DC and a phone number. Steve stares at it a long time, and then at the landline phone on the table by the front door.

After a few minutes of deliberation, Steve gets up and picks up the phone and dials the number. It rings a few times, lazy and loud in his ear, and then the line clicks, there's a shuffle, and a female voice comes through. Not the female voice Steve was expecting.

"Good afternoon, you've called the 'New Beginnings Retirement Center' Alzheimers Department, this is Angela speaking. How can I be of assistance?"

Steve flounders for a second at her words, and then slams the phone back down onto its dock, cutting off the call. He just stands there, processing that, and then runs a hand over his face. He doesn't know what Alzheimers is, but he knows what a retirement center is, and it seems to be the thing that makes it all seem real, too real.

Steve goes to his room and sits on the edge of his bed, head in his hands hanging low to fend off the nauseous feeling deep in his stomach. He squeezes his eyes shut against the overwhelming tears that threaten to spill, calms his breathing, makes his brain think logically. He knows that Peggy is ninety. He knows that she's old and maybe sick. He's lucky that she's alive.

He goes to his laptop once he feels better and he googles the center, finding it is located in a nice neighborhood on the outskirts of DC. Steve writes the address down in the little book he bought for himself to write down things he needs to remember or things he wants to do, see, watch or read. He vows to visit her soon.

Then, he bites his lip, and types 'Alzheimers' slowly into the search bar with one untrained finger. The results make him feel sick, sick enough that he runs to the kitchen sink and throws up his lunch. A progressive disease that destroys memory and other important mental functions. Peggy, once so strong and autonomous and powerful, will slowly forget everything she's ever known. It makes Steve's stomach curl.

He vows to visit her, and then he tries not to think about it again.

December 5th, 2011

Just when Steve begins to think he's doing somewhat okay settling into the new life in this new time, he starts having a dream about Bucky and Isabel. It quickly becomes a recurring nightmare.

It isn't that he's forgotten about Bucky. God, no. To him, he only lost Bucky a few months ago, and the wound is still as sore and fresh as if Bucky had just slipped from his hands. He just tries not to think about Bucky too much, or Isabel for that matter, because the days that he does too much he finds himself slipping into a depressive spiral that usually lasts a few days and consists of him lying under the covers of his too-soft bed and crying or laying in utter silence.

So no, he hasn't forgotten Bucky, he never could, but he doesn't like to think about him. Unfortunately, Steve's never been one to follow the rules, apparently not even his own.

His usual nightmares are slightly easier to deal with. They normally consist of a replay in vivid detail about what happened in the war, ranging from fighting in the forests, the Red Skull ripping off his mask to reveal his, well, red skull, and Steve's hands fumbling for Bucky's as Bucky falls into the ravine below. It's all terribly, horribly realistic, like Steve is watching it over and over again from off to the side. He can see himself and he can see Bucky and he's not a part of himself in the dream; he's a view, an observer, a bystander, and still he can't do anything to change any of it. It's all thanks to his advanced mind, which Howard had warned him about – his nightmares will always be more realistic, his memories like watching back a film, and he'll remember every conversation he ever has and everything he ever sees. It's a blessing and a curse.

But there's one crucial difference between Steve's memories of these events and the playback he's forced to watch in his dreams - the dreams have no colour to them. They've turned into a sepia, washed out version of the events, the vivid colours drained from them. They resemble the images that Steve sees now when he looks back on the past, grey scale or sepia and utterly void of colour. It doesn't make them any less powerful, he doesn't think, but he saw all of that in colour. It feels strange for the colour to have gone when that's how he remembers it.

His dreams are usual a replay of what he experienced, which isn't so bad to deal with because he knows what happens and he always knows what is coming so he can prepare himself. It's when the dreams change to things that never happened that Steve has trouble coping. It's when Bucky and Isabel start talking to him in his dreams about something they'd never discussed before that he wakes up screaming.

The first dream he has, he knows logically is impossible, but it doesn't make it any easier. He knocks on the front door of a brownstone tenement somewhere in Brooklyn and Isabel opens the door. Only she's old, in her nineties with grey hair and wrinkled skin and a hunched over spine, and Steve's still as he is now, young and strong and tall. And Isabel cries in the dream, cries for all they lost. She invites him inside and shows him photographs of the life she lived without him. In one version, she tells him how she missed him and how she wishes he'd lived his life with her. The next night, she says she was happy without him, that she met someone else and after a while she stopped missing him. Steve isn't sure which would be better.

The next dream Steve has about Isabel is very, very different. He dreams that she was kidnapped by Hydra in nineteen-forty-six, and he can see her in her cell, chained up and bleeding and thin as a rake with malnutrition. She's crying out for him, still praying that Steve will come to rescue her, even though he went down in the Valkyrie. When the guards come, she protests, says that Steve will come for her. But as time goes on and she grows increasingly older, she loses her faith. And when she's middle-aged and wasted away in that damn cell, she looks up at Steve from where he watches in the corner, and it's like she finally notices him, locking eyes. Her grey orbs are wide and solemn and lifeless when she says, "You left me, Steve. You left me to rot. You tried to save the world and in doing so, you forgot about me. And for what? Hydra's still here. You died for nothing, and now I will as well."

Steve knows Isabel would never say that, but she's almost convincing enough for him to believe her. Steve wakes up sobbing and sweating and crying and doesn't sleep for four days after.

The dream Steve has about Bucky becomes reoccurring, and it's probably the worst thing his brain could ever conceive. In the dream, Steve isn't watching on. He's conscious within his own body, seeing through his own eyes.

The sky is blue, and the air is warm and Steve walks through the cemetery. There's a gravestone, the same one he saw in the cemetery in Brooklyn that honors them both, which the Barnes' had placed after Steve put the plane down. Steve's own name and date of birth is messily crossed out with red paint over the engraved letters, leaving Bucky's alone. Sergeant James B Barnes, March 1917 – February 1945. Captain Steven G Rogers, July 1918 – February 1945. Devoted friends 'til the end of the line. Steve walks up to the grave, a small bunch of flowers in his hand to leave by Bucky's gravestone, but he pauses when he notices something strange – there's a crack in the dirt stretching from the bottom of the stone toward him in a line along where Bucky's body would have laid had it been recovered.

Steve kneels down in front of it, putting the flowers down against the stone, and runs a light finger over the crack, his head tilted in confusion.

Suddenly, a hand shoots out of the dirt, cold and blue and covered in dirt and snow. Steve flies backward away from it with a rather undignified scream. And as he flies backward, the blue sky changes with the blink of an eye to a black, stormy, ominous dome above them. Thunder claps and lightning sparks above, and snow begins to fall, heavy and fast, coating the cemetery in a blanket of white.

Steve looks around at the sudden change, and then back at the hand. It claws at the dirt and snow, trying to get a hold, trying to clear a path for itself. It wiggles its way out and then the rest of the arm appears, up to the elbow and then to the shoulder. And then the top of a dark-haired head cracks through the hard earth, the snow sticking in the hairs.

Bucky's face appears then, shooting out of the ground. He gasps for laboured breath as he surfaces into the fresh air, his breath rattling and shallow as though his lungs were too full of something else to take in any air. He's soaked with snow, covered in black dirt from the ground. The black is coming out of his nose and mouth, mixed with blood that creates a sick sort of sludge that trails slowly down his chin. It's all in his hair, making it look darker than it ever was.

His eyes have a white film over the blue irises. His skin is pale, the veins a dark purple that trail all over him like spider webs. His fingernails are black on his hand.

Bucky looks up then, locking eyes with Steve's frightened ones, eyes cold and distant and unforgiving.

"Why didn't you save me?" Bucky asks Steve, looking heartbroken. "You saved hundreds of others! Why not me? Why couldn't you rescue your best friend? Why couldn't you rescue your brother?"

Steve's mouth opens and closes but no words can come out. He makes a strangled sort of noise, somewhere between a sob and a scream. His brows have that pinched line between them. His eyes are full of pure fear.

"I thought you'd be happy to see me?" Bucky asks quietly, a tear escaping his eye.

Steve's heart practically shatters. "N-not like this. I-I tried to save you. I tried B-Bucky, I-I'm so sorry."

Bucky's eyes are still heartbroken and sad, but there's a lack of life to them, they're almost black with death. There's a new hollowness to his eyes as well, black rings around them as though they'd sunken into his face. "You didn't save me. You failed. I'm sorry the one time I was your burden, you couldn't handle it."

"Y-you were never a burden," Steve argues.

"No, only the memory of me. I haunt you, don't I, Stevie? The memory of me haunts you."

Bucky starts to crawl forward on the snowy ground then, and Steve realises he's only got one arm, the other just tatters hanging off his shoulder that leave a trail of red and black blood on the snow. He's dragging himself forward sickeningly with one arm.

"You hate the fact you couldn't save me. You wish you could forget me. You'd forget everything we ever did just so you can be free of the guilt."

Steve backs away, crawling back on his hands and shuffling himself along with his feet. "N-no! I don't want to forget you, ever. I just want to know how to live with it–"

Bucky's upon him then, clasping his arm around Steve's ankle and pinning him to the spot.

"You let your best friend die, Stevie. Have fun living with that," Bucky says, and then he looks up. He's smirking, his shark-like grin that shows all teeth almost like a sneer. And then his face is gone, replaced with a red-stained skull where his handsome features used to be, a tuft of dark hair still atop his head–

Steve wakes up screaming and rushes to the bathroom to vomit up the remains of his dinner in his stomach.