Chapter Text
Not Home
“Well? What do you think?”
Steve stepped into the apartment, footsteps echoing against the newly installed wooden floors and the empty white walls. “It’s… big.”
Howard followed in after him, his cane more of an artifact of show than helping bear any of his bodyweight. “It was the perfect opportunity, I tell you, Steve. Match made in the heavens! The day you were found, this place was put up for sale, and I knew I had to get it. It’s the same building, can you believe it?”
The same building, maybe. But unrecognizable. The entire block was. The street. The city. Brooklyn. It wasn’t his Brooklyn. It wasn’t the Brooklyn he left for the war. The entire place felt alien. Or maybe he was the alien, the pale shadow that didn’t belong, the ghost that had returned to haunt the streets.
He was vaguely aware of Howard’s silence, for the man seldom remained silent half this long. He stared at the white walls, too white. He wondered what had happened to the wall that had split this space in half, once. It separated Bucky’s place from old Dolores’s. She had never liked them. How did the building not collapse, with the wall gone? The old fire escape had been blocked off, boarded up. If Steve focused, he could see where the wall was a shade lighter, newer, door-shaped.
The walls felt wrong. The wrong color, the wrong texture… surely no one expected to be able to keep that white that pristine forever? It was impractical. The sounds were wrong, too — too muffled, too quiet, even for his supersoldier hearing. The smells, wrong. Industrial cleaner. HYDRA bases smelled less sterile.
The light… the only redeeming factor, in Steve’s opinion. The window was clear, sunlight flowing through unhindered. The ol d glass had been wavy and imperfect, distorting everything into softer shapes. This light lit up the floor, reflected and bounced in sharp, clean angles… his fingers itched for a pencil, something to sketch the lights and shadows with, catch the geometry and freeze it on something more permanent before it shifted, never to return quite the same.
He didn’t have a pencil. Or paper.
He’d asked, earlier. Howard had given him a spy pen with ink that disappeared. And when they did give him a normal pen, it was always accompanied with enough papers to make his arm ache.
Howard cleared his throat.
Steve turned to face him.
“I know it’s a lot to take in, but you’ll love it once it’s furnished. Speaking of — the furniture’s coming in later today. I got you the best of everything. You’ll love it here. The height of comfort!”
As if comfort were the problem.
Howard continued, “Then, once you’ve had a few days, SHIELD will want to talk to you. About the future, moving forward. The world’s full of new threats to face. We’ll get you settled in no time, Steve.”
Of course there were. “As you say, Howie.”
Because things were never that easy, were they? It was the same old theme since 1943. Maybe before that. New threats, new enemies, new wars. People still fought. People still died. People still smoked, just like Dum-Dum had. They still drank, like Steve wished he could have after… after…
Grab my hand!
Ice, biting wind, sharp crags—
Howard cleared his throat.
Another awkward pause.
“Welcome home, Captain.”
Home.
What a meaningless word.
He smiled, feeling hollow. “Thanks, Howie.”
Howard left, muttering something about being back later. Steve didn’t pay enough attention to hear it all.
The door closed.
The lock clicked.
Steve stood in the center of the empty apartment. The wrong apartment, he thought to himself as he listened to the silence.
Not the silence he remembered. No creaking doors, no footsteps as Bucky returned home from working on the docks, or late from a date with some pretty lass. No cackle of old Dolores’s radio bleeding through the walls, preaching the word of God at all hours of the night.
Steve didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he could.
Outside, the city lived. Cars drove by, honking. People called out.
Inside, Steve stood still. A statue in a museum, feeling nothing at all.
The Phone
Blue tie, with thin silver stripes. Fluorescent lights overhead, humming. Bright, constant. Too bright. Too constant. The after-taste of coffee, bitter and wrong. Too strong, burnt. Nothing like what Bucky snuck home from the docks—
“Captain Rogers?”
He blinked. Looked up. Three faces stared back at him. Three? Four? SHIELD agents.
He’d been introduced.
He didn’t remember any of their names.
Time moved again.
“Sorry,” he said automatically. “Could you repeat the question?”
The woman on the left (dark hair, sharp suit) exchanged a glance with the one-eyed black man beside her. “The Valkyrie’s navigation system, Captain. Do you remember how Schmidt programmed the targeting coordinates?”
Did he remember?
He inhaled, the air colder than expected. Ice, settling into his bones. A fan with a faulty bearing overhead — or the crackle of a radio? Peggy’s voice, breaking—
“Captain?”
“I… yes.” He blinked. “There was a console, I saw him program it before…”
Before what? Before the fight? Before the plane went down? It was all a blur, sharp and painful and jagged and too clear at once. “I can describe it. If you have paper, I could draw—”
“That won’t be necessary right now,” the woman said in what he assumed was meant to be a comforting tone. “We have the wreckage. We just need to confirm a few details.”
“Of course.”
Of course they did. They didn’t need him to draw. They didn’t need him at all, really.
It was just routine. Procedure. A mission report, seventy years late.
Seventy years.
Grab my hand!
Three weeks.
(He could have jumped.)
The questions continued.
HYDRA bases. Weapons. The serum. Schmidt. The Tesseract. Zola. The Commandos.
Bucky.
Steve heard someone answering. The voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Maybe it did.
Maybe Steve Rogers had died in the ice, and this was just Captain America. The ghost in the machine.
“—get you set up with modern technology.”
The room sharpened, returned to focus. Four people. No, five. Howard was there, too. Leaning against the back wall, watching. Offering a smile when Steve’s gaze met his.
The man directly across from him slid something across the table. (Fury, that was his name. Director Fury.) “We understand this is all overwhelming, Captain. We will strive to make the transition as smooth as possible.”
Steve looked down. A black shape, rectangular. He picked it up slowly. Examined it. Turned it over in his hands. Three buttons — no, four. Each a different color. Big buttons, almost comically so. His brow furrowed.
What the hell was this?
“We’ve kept it simple,” the woman explained, her voice careful, as if walking on eggshells. She leaned forward, cautious, as if dealing with something fragile. “This button makes calls. This one opens your messages. We’ve programmed your emergency contacts — SHIELD HQ, Director Fury, Mr. Stark. If you need anything, just press this button, and someone will answer.”
A phone.
This was a phone?
He’d snuck glances at Howard’s sleek, shiny rectangle plenty of times over the past two days. Slim, covered entirely in glowing screens on the front and back. Powerful. “This, Steve, holds more computational power than we needed to send people to the moon.”
The one in his hands? A child’s toy. Buttons a child could use.
None of the other agents had a phone like this.
Why him?
His jaw tightened. He forced it to relax.
“We didn’t want you to feel overwhelmed, Captain,” Fury added, watching him critically with his one eye.
Then why can’t you figure it out, Pirate-Man.
“Modern smartphones can be complicated,” someone added. Steve couldn’t remember the man’s name. Older, lighter hair than the others in the room. Important title, secretary of some thing or another. “This will let you get comfortable with the basics. Then, once you’re ready, we can upgrade you to something more advanced.”
Once you’re ready.
As if he can’t handle a real phone.
As if he hadn’t flown a plane into the Arctic to save millions of lives.
As if he hadn’t led one of the most successful units in the war.
As if he hadn’t figured out Stark’s half-finished tech and decoded instructions that half the Army’s engineers couldn’t decipher.
As if he was too stupid, too old, too broken to figure out what everyone else in this room used without a second thought.
But, sure. Big buttons.
He was twenty-six.
He was ninety-four.
Bucky fell three weeks ago.
Bucky—
“Thank you,” Steve heard himself say. Even, polite. (What good would getting angry do? They’re gone.) “This is very thoughtful.”
Howard pushed off the wall and approached, cane swinging in his hand only when he remembered it. He pushed past one of the agents. (The one with the kind smile, who had stumbled over his words at the start of the meeting while asking Steve to sign some sort of trading cards.)
“It’s a good starter phone, Steve,” Howard said. “Once you get the hang of it, we’ll get you upgraded to top-of-the-line. No rush.”
No rush.
Steve pocketed the phone, the weight dropping in his pocket, heavier than it had any right to be.
“Is there anything else?”
Director Fury studied him for a moment. As did the other man with the name and important title that Steve forgot, Mr Secretary of whatever.
Those there are real creeps, Stevie. Keep your distance.
Leave it to Bucky’s memory to state the obvious.
“That’s all for today, Captain. Get settled. Rest. If you need anything, use the phone.” Fury then looked to Howard. “We will schedule another debrief for next week.”
Howard nodded once in affirmation.
Steve also nodded. Then, he stood. The chair scraped against the floor, too loud in the sudden silence.
He turned.
He walked out.
Howard followed, saying something about lunch, about showing him more of the city, about plans for tomorrow and the week.
Steve’s hand stayed in his pocket, fingers wrapped around the phone.
A man out of time.
He wondered if his grip alone could crush the phone, if he tried. He wondered how those agents in fancy suits would react if he did. They already saw him as less than, as fragile and broken.
He smiled at Howard, nodding along at whatever the man was saying, and felt nothing at all.