Chapter Text
Steve hears the hum of machinery and over top of it a distant, rhythmic beep-pause-beep-pause that matches the pulse he feels in his fingers and toes. He smells bleach and something that's not quite the tang of antiseptic powder, but the air feels dead, like he's in a building, not a medical tent. He doesn't hurt as much as he expects to, so he must've been out at least a couple of days. Steve takes stock of his body as best he can – nothing feels like it's still mending, there's a smooth shift of blanket against his cheek when he breathes, so someone's shaved him – before hitting on a really important thought. He's warm. Not just the running-warm from the serum that changed winter into something bearable for the first time in his life, but actually warm in a way that means there's no way he's still on the front unless it's been a couple of months.
His throat aches with dryness and a little bit of panic and he fights the urge to cough. There's probably somebody watching and if they haven't noticed his pulse speeding up, there's no reason to draw their attention.
The business-like tap tap tap approach of shoes on tile shoots that down hard. “Captain Rogers, can you hear me?” The voice is female and definitely American – something Southern and drawly, like Missy from the chorus – but Steve isn't dumb enough to believe that means he's safe. “Captain, I've been given an authorization code from SSR files to...reassure you.”
Steve keeps on breathing, slow and even.
“Captain,” she says, sounding a little peeved, “as important as you are to the United States, you are not the highlight of my day.” She waits another few seconds, then hmphs. “Code 4-F-A-E-1-A-L-H-H-S-V-R-J-B-0-0, code phrase Stark Expo Daisy End 1895.”
He lets his eyes fall open and blinks up at too-bright lights. “Captain Steve Rogers, reporting for duty, ma'am.” He tilts his head to look over at her.
“I was getting tired of you pretending I didn't exist,” she informs him. “Doctor Iyana Martin, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division.” Dr. Martin is a black woman, probably in her early fifties and poised as a bird about take off. She has a smooth-sculpted face and graying hair curled in long strands pulled into a tail at the nape of her neck and she looks at him like she's a drill sergeant and Steve is a smart-ass private.
“Sorry, doctor.”
She softens incrementally. “Captain, I've got some news for you that is going to be upsetting.”
It's an understatement.
Dr. Martin's kind enough to leave him alone after she calls in a nurse to first explain, then unhook him from all the tubes and wires they've got him attached to. He sits on the edge of the bed and stares at his feet – fish-belly pale against white tile – and feels himself falling into the ice and snow that took Bucky.
***
S.H.I.E.L.D. does lay out some options for him. Steve's not dumb enough to think they'll just let him walk away and disappear into Brooklyn's streets without a fight, but there are choices.
He can stay in the Army, they tell him. War has changed, though. The summaries and news footage he gets on the end of his war, the extent of the deathcamps and Stalin's purges, the atom bombs, then the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars make that abundantly clear even before he gets to drones and suicide bombers and genocides. Steve knows he'd be a joke. They don't bother saying it, but there's a clear implication that to the Army, he'd be as much a dancing monkey as he was before he talked Peggy and Stark into dropping him into enemy territory the first time. He's kind of hard to kill, but he's one person.
Steve's been offered an honorable discharge too, which S.H.I.E.L.D. would be happy to have him take. There are “certain opportunities in their organization for people with extraordinary abilities and no other-” which is when the man who'd been talking got a vicious-looking elbow in the side from AD Hill, who had added “current duties”. Steve's pretty sure that sentence was going to end with “ties” or “commitments” and boil down to “you don't have anyone or anything to lose”.
S.H.I.E.L.D. seems okay. He's gotten the low-security clearance version of the tour, heard about how Peggy and Stark had helped build it up out of the ashes of the SSR, met Director Fury, who could almost give Howard Stark pointers on dramatic entrances and had Colonel Phillips beat on intimidating glowers. Fury says the world needs him, needs somebody who can be a hero. Steve's only ever felt like a hero a couple of times in his life, for about ten minutes a pop.
When he agrees to think about it, Steve gets more recordings, starting with the Battle of New York and working backwards, and the world changes again.