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Chapter Text

The war didn't end when Steve Rogers disappeared.

It ended in parades and newspaper headlines, in celebrations that echoed through cities finally silenced by peace. But for you, the world came to a halt the moment his transmission cut out.

You remembered the stillness. How the hum of the radio stopped being background noise and became something else entirely -- something like a death knell. How you had stood there, headset limp in your hands, staring at the silent console while the rest of the room dissolved into chaos. It didn't matter that Hydra had fallen, or that the Allies had won. Steve was gone. And with him, the axis of your world tilted just enough to break everything loose.

There were no medals waiting for you. No interviews. No easy narratives to pin your pain to. You folded his last field report yourself, carefully, with hands that wouldn't stop shaking.

And then, you buried yourself in the one thing you could control: work.

-------

The Strategic Scientific Reserve quietly dissolved in the years following the war's end. Its greatest asset -- Captain America -- was gone, and with him, its purpose felt obsolete. But the embers of the SSR became something else: the beginning of a global peacekeeping initiative with bigger ambitions. Broader reach. Deeper shadows.

You were approached six months after V-E Day by Howard Stark himself, in a conference room in London that still smelled faintly of ash and musty linen.

"We're building something new," he told you, his tie crooked and his eyes tired. "And we need people who can see more than just the surface."

You didn't ask what "new" meant. You didn't need to. The answer was already in the room: classified filed stacked six inches high, a blueprint for something S.H.I.E.L.D., and a personnel folder with your name on it.

You opened it. Your own face stared back -- young, stern, unblinking.

"I'm in," you said.

You didn't smile when you said it. You didn't have to.

-------

The early years were chaos.

Intelligence gathering in Berlin, covert tech operations in Hong Kong, surveillance missions in North Africa. You excelled at all of it. You had the sharp instincts of someone who had learned -- under the pressure of war -- that emotions had no place in a report. That objectivity was its own armor.

But even as the years passed and your name became a ghost in intelligence circles, you never let yourself disappear. You kept one photograph tucked inside the inner lining of your field journal. One copy of a declassified Hydra schematic marked with Steve's handwriting. One compass.

You told yourself it was for memory's sake. Not mourning. Not sentiment. But the lie wore thin the longer you carried it.

-------

By the 1950s, you were one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s best assets.

Never flashy. Always effective. The type of operative who had your clearance level upgraded so quietly, even your supervisors didn't notice until the paper trail was already buried.

You refused promotion after promotion.

Leadership positions meant public exposure, and you had grown more comfortable in the quiet. You liked the shadows -- the way they let you observe, analyze, protect without the burden of recognition. You didn't need your name in briefings or your voice on committee calls. You just needed the work.

Still, there were moments you let yourself feel.

A debrief in Paris, late at night, when you'd see a poster for a Captain America cartoon plastered on a brick wall.

A weapons test in Nevada, when a prototype shield was tossed across a dusty plain and for a second -- just a second -- your breath caught.

A S.H.I.E.L.D. file labeled "Rogers, Steven G." that you flagged in the system. Just in case.

And always, always, the compass.

-------

By the time the Cold War began to simmer, you were considered a specialist in psychological profiling and cryptographic security. Your code name changed twice. Your hair darkened, then lightened again. Your accent softened from Brooklyn steel to something smoother, more adaptable. But your mind? Sharper than ever.

You were the one Nick Fury called when an asset cracked under pressure and spoke in ciphered Russian.

You were the one Peggy Carter trusted to vet double agents after a botched intelligence raid in Prague.

You were the one who quietly rebuilt Steve Rogers' classified file when S.H.I.E.L.D. started cataloging "lost" Avengers Initiative prospects, decades before the idea ever gained traction.

It felt like touching glass. Your fingers hovering over the keyboard, pulling together data you remembered firsthand. His medical reports. SSR mission logs. Personal observations you had written yourself.

Every keystroke felt like reopening a wound that never really healed.

But you didn't stop.

-------

You learned to live between the lines.

You didn't marry. You didn't stay in one city longer than six months. You had friends -- some good ones -- but never too close. Never close enough to ask the real questions.

Your apartment in Washington was filled with filing cabinets instead of furniture.

Your apartment in Zurich had nothing but a bed, a record player, and a single framed photograph: the Howling Commandos, grinning in a blur of dust and sweat. Steve, front and center, hand on Bucky's shoulder. You, just to the left, eyes squinting from the sun.

You didn't play the records often. But when you did, it was usually after midnight. After the mission reports were filed. After the weight of the day sank down on your shoulders and you could close your eyes and pretend -- for a song's length -- that none of it had changed.

That he was still out there.

That he and Bucky both were.

-------

In 1991, you saw the world change again.

Howard Stark was killed in a car crash. Peggy retired. S.H.I.E.L.D. shifted course.

More politics. More secrets. Less heart.

You stayed on, though you let yourself fall further into the background. You became a myth in some corners of the agency -- someone could disappear from a base in Seoul and show up in Cairo three days later without ever triggering a single trace.

Fury knew you. Trusted you. Asked for your advice, though he rarely admitted it.

He once said, "You're the only one who doesn't blink when the world gets weird."

And you had just shrugged. "It was always weird. We were just too busy surviving to notice."

You didn't tell him how many nights you still dreamed of snow and ice and silence. Of a voice over the radio saying, "You were always the smartest in the room."

Chapter Text

Time, you learned, wasn't something you measured in days or even in years -- not really. It was measured in the weight behind each morning you woke up alone. In the names on memos that stopped appearing. In the shift of fashion, language, music. In the way people stopped looking twice when you walked by, and then, somehow, began to look again -- not out of admiration, but confusion. Because you hadn't changed.

And that was when you began to understand the full scope of what they'd done to you.

The war had ended, and the world had tried to return to itself. Nations redrew lines and reassigned roles. The SSR folded into something new. The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. S.H.I.E.L.D. It sounded like fiction, like something out of a dime store pulp, but the work was as real and sobering as ever.

You hadn't intended to stay. But there was a void where Steve had been, a silence you didn't know how to fill -- and work, with this sharp-edged clarity and its bottomless hours, became the closest thing to survival.

That, and the serum.

It had come at the tail end of the war, in a German lab outside Düsseldorf. A final raid, an unexpected cache of stolen Allied research mixed with scattered notes from Zola's own files. You had been there for the recovery. One of the vials had been damaged in transport, leaking faintly. A subtle exposure. No dramatic transformation. No sudden strength or brilliance.

Just time, slowing down.

At first, you didn't notice. A year passed. Then five. Then ten. Your reflection remained stubbornly unchanged, even as your colleagues grayed, aged, and retired. The only person you confided in was Howard Stark.

"You're not the first," Howard had said, glasses perched at the end of his nose as he reviewed the bloodwork you'd let him take. "But you're one of the quiet ones. It's mild -- barely stabilized. But it's there."

"What do I do with this?" you'd asked, soft but steady.

Howard had looked at you for a long moment before answering. "Whatever you damn well please."

So you stayed. Quietly. Efficiently. You slipped through the decades like a rumor. Most of the younger agents assumed you were legacy -- SSR brass with a senior analyst title and too many clearances to question. You let them think what they wanted. You avoided cameras. Never used the same alias twice. Eventually, you stopped being a person and started becoming a ghost in the machine.

There were whispers about you. "She was with Peggy Carter, right?" "She worked with Stark back in the day." "She's got to be third-generation S.H.I.E.L.D., right?" But no one ever asked you outright. And if they did, you didn't answer.

You watched as the world changed around you.

You watched Peggy grow older, watched her memory flicker and fade. You visited when you could, never mentioning Steve, only holding her hand and brushing her hair back gently when the confusion took hold.

"You're the tall one," Peggy would whisper. "Or was he the tall one?"

You would smile softly. "Both."

When Peggy was put into a care home, you didn't go when they took her. You'd been at her's privately, days before, when there was still a trace of lucidity in your old friend's eyes. That was enough. You had said goodbye so many times before, it felt hollow to perform it again in front of strangers.

Your world kept shrinking.

Howard died. The Cold War ended. Helicarriers were born from paper. Aliens became more than theory. Tony Stark took his father's shadow and turned it into a spotlight. And you remained, watching from the perimeter, gathering intelligence, intercepting threats, slipping further into classified shadows.

Nick Fury had found you early on -- he'd known who you were before he even introduced himself.

"You don't want the world knowing you name," he'd said once, watching you work. "Neither do I."

That was the foundation of your alliance with him. Mutual discretion. Mutual necessity. Fury made space for you in S.H.I.E.L.D. without ever demanding your history. In return, you gave him your silence, your instincts, and your years.

You took on the assignments others didn't. You consulted on old files that no one else could read. You corrected timelines and uncovered moles, neutralized threats that had outlived their cover names. You were, to some, a myth. To others, just a woman with a weathered file and no recorded date of birth.

Still, in the quiet of your quarters -- one of the hidden floors beneath S.H.I.E.L.D. Central Command -- you kept a drawer you never opened unless you needed to.

Inside: Steve's last field report. His compass. A single photo, folded and faded, of the two of you in Italy. You were smiling, impossibly young, and yet somehow still the same age. He was leaning just slightly toward you, unaware.

You still couldn't remember who took the photo.

Some nights, you dreamed you were still there, still on that hillside with the air full of wild lavender and the wind pushing against the canvas tent.

"________," he'd said once, sleepy and open. "I think I'm going to... would you like to come back here, after this?"

You had laughed -- caught off guard by the softness in his voice, by how much you wanted to say yes.

"Cap," you'd answered, rolling your eyes, teasing. "That would require us surviving this war."

He had grinned like he'd won a prize.

You woke with that image burned into the back of your eyes more often than you admitted.

Sometimes you thought about aging yourself out of the world. About vanishing for good -- disappearing into the quiet countryside and letting the world think you'd died somewhere in the seventies. But something always held you back.

Duty. Memory. And something deeper. A sense that the story wasn't quite finished yet.

That he wasn't quite gone.

It made no logical sense. But neither did the serum. Neither did surviving everything you'd survived.

So you stayed. Waiting. Working.

You became fluent in silence -- quiet offices, late-night operations, the pulse of data through fiber lines instead of the warmth of soft conversation. The world evolved in bursts: atomic age, information age, digital revolutions -- waves you rode like a phantom. Generations passed you by, analysts younger than the jackets in your closet rising and retiring while you remained, unchanged.

You didn't mark birthdays anymore. Your reflection didn't ask for candles or cake. Only purpose.

And so you gave it purpose. Day by day. Mission by mission. You learned every shadow, every corridor of power. Alone, but never unanchored. Unseen, but never unshaped.

Chapter Text

The call came in the dead of night, as they often did. Your secure line blinked twice -- code for classified priority -- and you were already out of bed and wrapping your robe around yourself before the second ring ended.

You didn't need much sleep these days. That had been one of the side effects they hadn't predicted. Or perhaps they had, and just hadn't cared to tell you. No one ever did when you were your own classified file.

"____." Your voice was steady as you stated your last name in confirmation.

Fury's voice, always an earthquake waiting to happen, rumbled through the line. "We need you at HQ. It's about Rogers."

Your heart didn't stop -- you would remember that, later, with surprise -- but it did stutter. Your hand tightened around the receiver. You had trained yourself to hear that name without flinching. On dossiers. On reports. On commemorative events you never attended.

But hearing it now -- on Fury's lips, in the still-dark hours of morning -- hit you like a rifle's recoil.

"Copy that," you said, and hung up.

-------

The headquarters was quiet, under-lit and humming like something alive. You entered through the lower corridors, bypassing the surface agents and their coffee cups, your badge sliding into place with practiced ease. You walked with the ghost of muscle memory -- heels on tile, the smell of metal and data and buried secrets curling up into your lungs.

Fury was waiting in the Situation Room, a sealed chamber where the walls absorbed sound like grave dirt.

He didn't waste time. "They found the Valkyrie."

You stood still. The words processed like code slowly unraveling -- unexpected, but legible.

"Where?"

"Arctic shelf. Buried under tons of ice. We've had people combing that region since before I was in diapers. But it was Stark's sonar drone that pinged something unusual."

Tony Stark, you realized. Not Howard. You remembered Howard, your old... friend, you might say, from decades ago, and the idea of his son uncovering this particular tomb felt like a cosmic joke.

"And...?"

Fury's eyes locked on yours. "They found him too. Frozen. Preserved."

Silence spooled between the two of you. Long and sharp.

You exhaled, slow. "Alive?"

"Signs say yes. We've got cryobiologists and medics all over him. They're proceeding with caution. We're not thawing him yet."

You stepped forward, not realizing you had done so until your hands braced on the table. "Where is he?"

Fury gave you the coordinates. "We're keeping it black-level. Only a few of us know. I want you in on it. And I need your help."

Your breath caught. "Help how?"

"You were his analyst. His handler. His--" He paused, choosing his words. "You knew him better than anyone in the file. I want you to go through everything. Reconstruct what we have. We'll need full context if he wakes up and starts asking questions. I want him to see the truth -- not just what's on paper."

You nodded slowly. "I'll do it."

-------

You didn't go to see him. Not yet.

Instead, you buried yourself in the vaults. Old files, digitized records, mission reels. Debriefings. Classified transcripts of his post-serum missions. You corrected errors in reports that had grown dusty with age. Noted personal touches where analysts had flattened nuance into bullet points. You combed through the SSR's disbandment papers and highlighted everything Rogers had done that had been quietly erased or rebranded for morale.

You built him again, piece by piece, like a mosaic from fractured glass.

It felt like a second kind of grief.

-------

Weeks passed. You worked through the hours, skipping meals, ignoring your aching spine. You reconstructed his entire service record, annotated it with cross-referenced files, and updated S.H.I.E.L.D.'s central archive with redacted and unredacted versions.

You even found the field report he had scribbled, last of all, before the Valkyrie.

You had carried it, once. Folded it alone, hand trembling. It lived now in your private files, digitized, sealed under your clearance. You didn't give that one to Fury.

Some things belonged only to memory.

-------

One night when the moon hung like a slow coin in the sky, you stood alone in the observation deck above the containment wing you made your way to from Fury's coordinates. Through the reinforced glass, miles and meters of ice sealed chambers glinted with artificial frost.

Somewhere below you, he slept in silence.

You pressed your hand to the glass.

"You always did make an entrance," you whispered.

-------

Time became elastic. You learned to breathe again, slowly, cautiously. You stopped holding yourself so tightly. There was a strange kind of peace in knowing he was there, however far removed.

The two of you hadn't spoken in seventy years. But he existed again. That changed everything.

You found yourself thinking about him on quiet nights. Not just the mission Steve. Not the poster-boy Captain. But the man. The way he had held his sketchbook like it was sacred. The way his voice had quieted when he said your name. The way he had always made space for you in his impossible, widening world.

There had been so little time.

And yet.

So much remained unsaid between the both of you, it haunted the air.

-------

In early spring, Fury summoned you again.

"I want to bring you in when we wake him."

You shook your head. "Not yet."

"You sure?"

"No," you said honestly. "But... not yet."

Fury didn't press. He never did, when it mattered.

-------

You returned to your work. You updated protocols. Oversaw background checks on the medical team. Monitored thawing reports and silently memorized his vitals.

Every tick upward in his heart rate felt like a drumbeat inside your own chest.

Your own serum had kept you mostly whole. Slower aging. Cellular restoration. It wasn't a miracle -- not like what Erskine had perfected -- but it allowed you to walk in a world that had passed everyone else by. You had become a ghost among shadows. A figure whispered about in upper echelons of intel circles. The woman who never quite retired. Never quite grew old.

Now, for the first time in decades, you wanted to be seen again.

By him.

-------

One evening, as the sun slipped low, you took out an old compass -- not the one from him, that you'd carried for years. The one you had found among his gear, buried beneath wreckage and ice-ruined belongings. Not attached to his person, assume to have flown out of his hand at impact of the Valkyrie into the water. Recovered by the team that was sent in.

You'd kept it from the gear they wanted to put into Examinations. Justified it as sentiment, or security, or insurance against forgetting.

The photograph inside -- creased and timeworn -- had been of you.

It had been of you.

You ran your thumb over the dented case, felt the metal warm from your skin. You didn't know what it meant, that he had kept your picture. That he was now... waking up. In a world seventy years ahead of him. And the fact that you were seventy years ahead of him, too. But you did know one thing.

"If you wake up," you murmured, "I'm still here."

And you meant it.

Every syllable.

You would be here when he opened his eyes. Not as a ghost, not as a shadow -- but as yourself. Always. Still. Yourself.

Chapter Text

You had mastered the art of silence.

For decades, you had lived in the background of global history -- an echo in closed-door briefings, a shadow in inter-agency handoffs, a ghost whose clearance level outranked nearly everyone but Nick Fury himself. Your presence was never required on official logs. Your name -- if it appeared at all -- was buried beneath layers of redaction, footnoted under false aliases and misattributed fieldwork. That was the deal when you joined S.H.I.E.L.D.: loyalty in exchange for invisibility.

But the world was changing. And now the world needed to see you.

The transition was subtle, as always. No fanfare, no headlines. Just a single sealed memorandum issued internally -- one that introduced Agent ________ ____, senior strategic intelligence liaison, to those in the know. There were new recruits who thought you'd been brought in recently. Others, with sharper instincts, suspected you'd always been there.

Those ones rarely said so aloud.

You arrived at the Triskelion in quiet command of yourself. Clad in slate-gray slacks, high-collared jacket, your hair twisted into a sharp knot at your nape, you walked through security checkpoints like they weren't there. No badge. No ID swipe. The guards just nodded you through. Most didn't even meet your eyes.

You liked it that way.

"Agent ____," Maria Hill greeted, stepping into stride beside you as you both headed toward Briefing Wing C. "Director Fury said you'd be overseeing the new task force intel."

"I'm not overseeing," you replied, voice calm and clipped. "I'm preparing. There's a difference."

Hill blinked. "Preparing for what?"

You didn't answer.

-------

You worked best at night.

When the building was half-lit and the surveillance feeds flickered to black and white. When the hum of conversation dropped to a hush and all you could hear was the quiet tapping of your own fingertips across the screen. The rhythm of coded reports was a language you spoke better than most -- dead drops and aliases, timelines and triggers, threat profiles stacked like puzzle pieces waiting to be solved.

In the deepest levels of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s archives, you poured yourself into the work.

You weren't just updating intel briefs. You were designing contingency plans -- quiet, classified protocols coded with the name Project Reclamation. Not everyone knew what it meant. Most assumed it was a dormant Cold War fail-safe.

But you and Fury knew better.

"If the recovery is viable," Fury had said during one of your guys' late-night strategy meetings, "we need more than PR spin. We need a human anchor. Someone he'll trust."

You had only nodded.

You two never said Steve's name aloud in those meetings. The both of you didn't need to. The data the two of you reviewed -- vital signs, blood markers, cryostasis stability -- spoke for itself. The ice had preserved him. The serum had sustained him. The impossible had become possible.

But "possible" wasn't the same as "safe."

"He won't know who to believe," Fury said once. "Hell, he won't even know what year it is."

"He'll know me," you had answered, almost too quietly.

-------

In truth, you didn't know whether Steve would remember you at all.

There were nights you allowed the doubt to seep in, crawling into the crevices of your otherwise unshakable focus. The serum had slows your aging to a crawl -- subtle enough that you could pass for mid-thirties, even now. Your voice hadn't changed. Your mind hadn't dulled. But time, in its cruelest form, wasn't just what happened to the body.

It was what happened to memories.

Would he remember the night the two of you huddled by firelight, your hand trembling as you stitched up a would beneath his ribs? Would he remember the way he'd looked at you across the glass before Project Rebirth? The way your voice had cracked the moment the Valkyrie went down?

You'd given up hoping for peace after he disappeared. But you hadn't given up on him.

Not once.

-------

Your new office wasn't really yours. It belonged to no one. One of the off-the-books conference rooms reoutfitted with a wall of secure screens and a double-locked drawer where you kept the oldest file folder still in circulation: Rogers, S.G.

You opened it only when no one was watching.

It wasn't a shrine. Not quite that obsessive. But in form, it was close.

His SSR service record. A grainy photo of him in uniform. The last field report you ever read in his handwriting -- creases smoothed flat from the number of times you'd unfolded it. A copy of the Captain America file you were all reconstructing for public consumption.

You'd made sure it was honest. Not polished. Not whitewashed. Honest.

"People should know who he was," you'd told Fury. "Not just who they want him to be."

Fury had looked at you for a long time, one brow raised, then slid you a black pen.

"Then write it."

-------

Your visibility within S.H.I.E.L.D. increased incrementally. Slowly. Like an exposure developing under chemicals.

First, you were seen at tactical briefings. Then you began issuing recommendations -- fieldwork protocols, behavioral debrief standards, the occasional high-clearance consult. Hill started deferring to you on intel matters. Coulson treated you like a myth come to life, though he never said as much aloud.

Only Fury addressed you with familiarity. And even then, sparingly.

"You think the world's ready?" he asked you one evening, arms crossed as you both stood overlooking the helicarrier launch pad.

You glanced out over the sea. It was always easier to answer when you weren't looking him in the eye.

"No," you said. "But that's not going to stop it."

He grunted. "You ready?"

You paused. Then nodded. "As I'll ever be."

He gave you one long look. Then handed you a thin manila folder marked POTENTIAL REINTEGRATION PROTOCOLS -- SUBJECT 0385-A. 

The name inside the file was Steve Rogers. 

-------

It felt more real than seeing him in the ice. More real than the call from Fury that one late night. Seeing his name in a true S.H.I.E.L.D. folder, it brought some kind of truth into your mind that you hadn't been able to accept. 

You didn't cry. Not then.

Not when you saw the photo -- his face frozen in perfect stillness, eyes closed, color pale as milk but unmistakably him. Not when you flipped to the biometric scans. Not even when you came across the handwritten note Fury had tucked into the file for you.

We found him.

It was real. You understood why Fury had shielded you in the beginning. You weren't his operative in this moment. You were something else. Something messier.

The past made flesh.

So when you closed the file, your hands shook. But you didn't cry.

Not yet.

-------

The next day, you were back in the Situation Room.

Cool. Unflinching. All business.

"Logistics for Phase One are in motion," you told the assembled agents, your voice calm, your tone exact. "You'll have the briefing packet in your inbox by 0900."

"Excuse me," one junior analyst said hesitantly. "But... Phase One of what?"

You didn't blink. "Of history."

-------

You hadn't visited the cryo wing in a few weeks.

It would be too much. You knew that. You needed time to think. To plan. To steady yourself for the storm that would come the moment they truly brought him back.

Because you knew this wasn't a fairytale ending. It wasn't a resurrection.

It was the start of something infinitely harder.

And no one -- not even Steve -- was ready for that.

But you would be.

You had waited this long. You could wait a little longer.

So you turned out the lights in your office, placed the old file back in its drawer, and locked it with a click.

Outside, the sky began to lighten.

A new day.

Chapter Text

The Helicarrier was in motion before it ever left the ground.

You could feel it in your bones -- something was shifting beneath the surface, and this time, it wasn't just another global incident or black-ops operation. It was something personal. Intimately, hauntingly personal. And it had everything to do with why you were standing again on an operational deck instead of one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s backroom briefing halls, where you'd spent most of the last sixty years.

You stepped off the transport and onto the steel catwalk, a gust of high-altitude wind catching the hem of your dark coat. Around you, agents hurried with the kind of trained chaos that meant something big was about to happen. Your boots clicked on the deck. Unbothered. Unseen. You'd spent decades mastering that trick.

From above, Fury watched your approach. He didn't wave -- of course he didn't -- but you saw the brief shift in his jawline that meant you were expected. Behind his good eye, you imagined the calculations still spinning, the ones you'd helped him set in motion years ago. For once, you two were close to resolution.

Your ID cleared the first checkpoint before the agent could even ask for it.

"Ma'am," he greeted, startled as the system flashed Level 7 clearance.

You gave him a brief nod and kept walking. Your eyes scanned the hull interior with a mixture of clinical appraisal and long-buried memory. In another life, you'd walked onto warships made of steel and smoke. This one hovered in the sky like a dream born from madness and calculation.

It felt like stepping into the future -- one you'd helped build from the shadows, one file at a time.

The meeting room Fury directed you to was stark and metallic, no different than the hundred other secure rooms you'd been in over the years. But the folder sitting at the center of the table was anything but routine.

You didn't need to open. You already knew what was inside.

"Today's the day," Fury said from behind you. His voice had that flat calm that came with high stakes. "He's officially active."

You turned. You looked steady, composed, like you'd known it would come to this. And you had. But knowing something was coming and standing in its wake were two very different things.

"Where is he?"

"Medical clearance was finalized this morning. He's in orientation with Hill. He hasn't seen the file yet. I figured you'd want to oversee it."

Your fingers brushed the top of the folder. "What do you mean, hasn't seen it?"

"He doesn't know what's missing."

You lifted your gaze. "Which is?"

Fury gave you a long look. "You."

Silence pooled between the two of you like dark water. You exhaled softly, and with it went years you hadn't realized you'd still been holding.

"I don't need to be in the file."

"Yeah, well. I think you do." He walked toward you, unhurried. "We've both seen what happens when a man wakes up in a world where he doesn't recognize anything. Not a face, not a rhythm, not even the damn skyline. The past gets lost in translation. I'm trying not to let that happen again."

Your throat tightened, but your expression didn't shift.

You opened the file. A familiar face stared back -- clean-cut, painfully young, eyes that once blinked under a paper-thin shield of hope and duty.

Captain Steve Grant Rogers.

Alive.

Back.

Somehow, still so fary away.

-------

You watched from behind tinted glass as Steve walked past a briefing room window, trailed by Agent Coulson and one of the newer recruits. He moved carefully, alert, but not stiff -- military precision tempered by confusion he was trying hard not to show.

The world around him was wrong. You could see it in his shoulders.

You stood silent.

When Coulson handed him a tablet, Steve hesitated before tapping it awake. You could only imagine what he was seeing -- archives, photos, footage. All pieces of a life he barely remembered, now frozen and dissected by history.

He didn't know you were here.

Not yet.

You would wait. You had waited this long. A few more hours wouldn't break you.

-------

Later, Fury joined you again near the observation deck.

"The Council signed off," he said. "We're green-lit. Avengers Initiative is officially active. I'll be briefing the team this evening."

You raised a brow. "You're calling them a team already?"

He allowed a ghost of a smirk. "Optimism. Or madness. Take your pick."

"And Rogers?"

"Assigned." He paused, then added, "But he still still doesn't know about you. If you want to change that, now's your window."

You didn't reply immediately. Your fingers flexed at your side -- your only tell.

When you finally answered, it was quiet. "I want it to be real when he sees me. Not some footnote. Not a rumor."

"Then don't wait too long."

Fury walked away, coat billowing.

You stayed.

-------

You sat alone that night in your temporary quarters on the Helicarrier, boots unlaced, coat folded over the armrest. The hum of engines rumbled through the walls like a heartbeat beneath steel.

On the small terminal, you pulled up Steve's updated file -- your additions still recent, woven in like thread through the seams of official history.

You'd help write this, piece by piece. You knew how much of it was true. You also knew how much of it was still missing.

And he was still missing you.

Your fingers hovered over the keyboard.

< Insert: Operation Firebrand [TOP SECRET]

Operative: ____, _. 

Note: Personal Clearance Required

You saved it.

A small sliver of your life -- finally visible.

A whisper toward a reunion long overdue.

And still, you hesitated.

The monitor dimmed to standby, casting your reflection in the black glass: older, steadier, marked by time and secrets, but not undone. You hadn't broken when the ice took Steve. You hadn't crumbled when the decades changed everything around you. But this -- this almost did you in. The simple fact that he was here now. Breathing. Real.

You could hear faint footsteps in the corridor outside. Not his. Not yet.

Would he even recognize you?

Would he remember your voice? The way the two of you used to talk late into the night about things bigger than war -- books and old records, Brooklyn rooftops, the burden of hope?

You leaned back in your chair and stared at the ceiling. The hum of the Helicarrier buzzed around you, impersonal and cold.

But beneath that: something warmer. A tremor. A promise.

He was somewhere on this ship. Alive

And soon -- very soon -- he'd know you were too.

Chapter Text

The Helicarrier hummed beneath your boots as you stepped out of the elevator. The scent of ozone and machine oil filled the air, cool and metallic, different form the war rooms and field tents of your past -- but not unfamiliar. This was a different battlefield now. Cleaner, colder. Less smoke, more silence.

You kept your expression neutral as you followed Agent Hill down the corridor, the badge clipped to your lapel still new enough to catch light. Your heels clicked evenly, every stride steady despite the way your stomach twisted. Hill said little -- just that Fury wanted you here, that "today's the day." No explanation, but you didn't need one. You knew who would be stepping onto the Helicarrier today.

Steve.

They hadn't told you exactly when he would arrive. Part of you suspected that was deliberate. Fury always knew better than to let emotion get in the way of duty, and your relationship with Steve Rogers -- Captain America -- was nothing if not complicated. You had mourned him. Buried the version of him you carried in your mind a thousand times. And now he was back.

Back.

The world was too small.

You both reached the command deck just as the door to the bridge opened.

"Captain Rogers, welcome aboard," came Fury's voice.

You turned, slow and deliberate, heart hammering so hard it felt like it echoed in your throat. You told yourself you'd be composed. Professional. Unshakable.

You weren't.

Because there he was -- tall, broad-shouldered, wearing the star again like it never left him. Hair shorter than you remembered. Eyes still impossibly blue. You watched him cross the threshold into the Helicarrier like it was just another mission briefing and not a resurrection.

He didn't see you at first. His attention was on Fury, on the screens around him, on taking in a world that had left him behind.

And then he turned.

Your eyes met his across the command deck,

Everything else fell away.

There were people talking. Lights blinking. Agents moving.

You didn't hear any of it. Your breath caught, and for a single, stretched-out heartbeat, you couldn't move.

Steve stared at you like he was seeing a ghost.

You couldn't blame him.

"You're not a ghost," he said, his voice quiet -- just for you. As if he didn't trust the moment to hold if he spoke too loud.

You took a breath, then another. Your throat tightened. "I thought you were."

You didn't walk toward him. Didn't rush. You stepped carefully, deliberately, crossing the space between the two of you like the floor might collapse if you moved too fast.

"________..." He said your name like a prayer. Like it was the one thing he was sure of in this strange new world.

You stopped just in front of him.

Up close, he looked the same. Not frozen. Not lost. Breathing, alive. His expression -- still open, still kind -- was full of disbelief and something you didn't dare name. Not yet.

"You're real," he said again, as if saying it could make it true.

You gave a small smile. "I've been called worse."

His eyes searched yours like he didn't know where to begin. "They told me... I didn't think you could've..."

"Lived?" you offered gently. "A lot of people thought that."

He shook his head slowly, jaw tight. "I would've looked for you."

"You couldn't," you said, more gently than you expected. "You were... elsewhere. And I -- I didn't know you were alive until Fury told me. Not really."

A pause. "You were there," he said slowly. "When I crashed the Valkyrie."

Your eyes flickered. "On the radio. I never left."

You looked down, exhaled. The memory weighed between the two of you like ash. You reached out, almost without thinking, your hand grazing his forearm.

"Are you alright?" you asked.

His eyes lifted. "I've been awake less than a month. I still don't know how I got here." A half-laugh. "It's... loud."

"It's louder than it used to be," you agreed. Your voice was quieter now. "Faster. I've had more time to adjust than you. It doesn't get easier, but... you do get stronger."

He looked at you for a long moment. "How are you here? You haven't aged."

"I have," you said, eyes gentle but firm. "Just... differently. A serum. Experimental. Near the end of the war. Not as drastic as yours. But enough."

He stared at you again. "So you really did make it."

You nodded. "I made it."

He was quiet for a beat. Then: "Did you ever stop?"

"Stop what?"

"Holding on."

Your throat tightened again. "No," you said. "I never did."

Around the two of you, the Helicarrier whirred, the rest of the world edging back in. Fury cleared his throat nearby, watching you both, but not interrupting. Not yet.

"Captain," Fury said, finally stepping in. "We're about to launch. De-briefing in five. I suggest you two finish reacquainting later."

Steve looked like he wanted to argue, but didn't. You straighteed a little. Professional mask sliding back into place.

"Of course," you said smoothly. "Welcome to S.H.I.E.L.D., Captain."

Steve glanced between you and Fury, then back at you.

"Later," he said.

You nodded. "Later."

He turned and followed Fury toward the tactical screens, still casting glances over his shoulder. You let yourself watch him go for just a moment longer before you turned back to Hill and the analysts on the bridge.

There would be time.

You weren't sure how much -- but for the first time in decades, there was some. 

And that was enough.

-------

Later that evening, after briefing, after noise--

You found yourself standing at the edge of the observation deck, alone. Outside, the sky was streaked with twilight, clouds lit from below in molten gold and purple. You leaned against the railing, letting the quiet soak into your bones.

"You're hard to find," said a voice behind you.

You didn't turn right away. "Not for you."

Steve stepped up beside you, hands in pockets of his trousers. "This place is strange."

"You'll get used to strange," you said. "The trick is not letting it rewrite you."

He didn't say anything. Just looked at you.

You finally turned to meet his gaze. "Say it," you said softly.

He frowned. "Say what?"

"Whatever you've been carrying since this morning."

Steve exhaled. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again."

"I know."

"I held onto your photo. A copy of the last field report. The compass, too."

Your heart jumped. "The compass?"

"Yeah," he said quietly. "But when I woke up... it wasn't there."

You looked down at your hand. You pulled something from the inside of your coat and slowly opened your palm.

The old brass compass. Steve's. Still bearing your photo inside.

"I took it," you admitted. "From your gear. After the crash. I wasn't ready to let go."

Steve reached out and touched the edge of it with careful fingers. "Neither was I."

The silence between the two of you softened.

"We'll figure it out," you said at last. "The world.... us. I mean, you know, me, and then you. Not us. But. I mean -- One step at a time."

Steve nodded, his voice rough. "One step."

And for the first time in seventy years, neither of you felt alone.

Chapter Text

The corridors of the Helicarrier seemed to hum louder whenever you passed through them now. Not because of anything you said -- you remained composed, tucked neatly behind a polished exterior sharpened over decades -- but because of what you didn't say. There was something coiled and watchful in your silence. Something everyone around you had begun to recognize. Something they couldn't quite name.

Steve Rogers was awake. Alive. And you, long presumed gone yourself by most of the modern world, had finally been seen.

You two hadn't spoken since that moment in the docking bay. Not really. There'd been briefings. Oversight reports. An exchanged glance across the glance during a mission strategy meeting. But nothing with weight. Nothing with depth. And yet the gravity of your shared past with him hung in the air, tugging constantly.

You stood at the edge of the Helicarrier's observation deck, arms folded, staring out at the clouds rolling past. It felt familiar -- like staring out from the balcony of an SSR base in the Alps decades ago, waiting for another mission that might go sideways. Waiting for Steve to return.

"You always used to lean like that when you were thinking."

The voice startled you, though you refused to let it show. You turned, slow and deliberate.

Steve stood a few feet away, hands in the pockets of his new uniform jacket. His hair was neater now, but the uncertainty in his eyes was unmistakable.

"I'm not thinking," you said softly. "I'm bracing."

He nodded, stepping closer. "For what?"

You didn't answer right away. You hadn't yet decided if you knew. "For whatever this is now. The world."

Steve looked down, tongue against the inside of his cheek. "Yeah," he murmured. "That makes two of us."

The silence between the two of you stretched, but it wasn't empty. It was saturated -- with grief long buried, with memories preserved like glass, with the ache of people who had once been young and fearless.

"You look the same." he sad.

You gave a dry chuckle. "I've had help."

"I know. Fury filled me in." He leaned beside you, shoulders just close enough to sense but not touch. "You always were a step ahead."

"I didn't feel that way for a long time," you admitted.

The air shifted again. And still neither of you could meet the other's eyes for more than a few seconds at a time.

"I keep trying to remember what I said to you last," Steve murmured.

Your breath caught. Your fingers curled slightly against the railing. "It was over the radio," you said. "Right before the Valkyrie."

"Right." His jaw tightened. "You told me to come home."

"And you said..." Your throat tightened, old pain crawling up your spine. "You said you always listened to me. Even then."

Silence again, but it was heavier now. Laden.

"I meant it," Steve said.

You looked at him finally. "You still do?"

He hesitated -- but only for a breath. "Yes."

And that was the moment. The pivot. The line neither of you could un-cross.

"I don't know what to do with this," you admitted. "You being here. Me being... still here."

Steve exhaled slowly. "I don't either. But maybe we don't have to decide yet."

A quiet beat passed before you said, "I can't go back."

"I know."

"But I can't pretend we're strangers either."

He smiled faintly, with something cracked and hopeful underneath. "We're not. We never were."

The two of you stood in that quiet, the world rushing outside the window, modern chaos screaming around you both in distant corridors.

But in this small space, time pent again.

Not quite back.

Not quite forward.

Just enough for you both to breathe.

The corridors of the Helicarrier hummed with distant engines and nearer tension. You moved through them like a ghost haunting a world you had helped build. And behind you, Steve followed -- his footsteps solid and certain, yet strangely uncertain all the same.

It wasn't that you didn't have the words for him, and vice versa. It was that every word now felt too heavy or too fragile. Too weighted with history, too delicate to risk breaking the moment.

You broke the silence first. "You're taller than I remember."

Steve's smile came slowly. "I had a long time to grow."

You looked at him sideong. "Not that much time."

He chuckled, the sound low, quiet, and for a moment you could see the boy under the shield. The one who used to nudge you with his elbow on train rides back from missions, or smirk through his bruises like they were badges of honor.

The two of you stepped into a quiet observation bay, the stars beyond the glass smeared like distant memory. Below, the ocean shimmered darkly, caught in the Helicarrier's lights.

"This doesn't feel real," Steve said at last.

You folded your arms. "No. It doesn't."

He glanced at you. "How did you respond?"

You looked down, away. "Experimental serum. Long story." A pause. "Not the same as yours. Slower. I aged... very slowly."

Steve's jaw tightened just slightly. "You were still here. All this time."

Your voice caught in your throat. "And you weren't."

The silence that followed wasn't angry -- it was aching. A shared grief neither of you had language for yet. Steve took a half-step closer, but didn't touch you.

"I kept your file," you said quietly. "Rebuilt what I could with Fury. The truth, not the legend."

"You remembered me."

"I never stopped."

He exhaled, not quite a sigh. "Sometimes I feel like I've stepped into someone else's life."

You nodded. "You did. And I stayed in the ruins of ours."

That hung there, suspended between the two of you like a thread ready to fray. And still, no movement. Neither dared close the final inches.

Instead, you both looked at each other -- not like strangers, but not quite like old friends either. Something else. Something in-between. Something bruised and unsure.

Steve's gaze flickered to your hands, and you noticed how he clenched his own -- like he didn't trust them, or himself.

"Do you ever think," he said slowly, "that we were meant to have more time?"

You looked out the window. "All the time."

And still -- still -- the two of you did not move. The air between you both stayed taut with everything unspoken. You didn't know how to bridge seventy years of cold and silence. He didn't know how to ask you what you'd lost, what you'd sacrificed.

But you both knew this: that whatever came next, neither of you would be walking along anymore.

When the call came through the comms for the two of you to regroup, neither moved at first. Then Steve touched your arm -- lightly. Almost unsure if he was allowed.

"I'll see you out there," he said.

You met his eyes. "You always did."

You both walked side by side into the fluorescent-lit corridors of the modern world -- two shadows shaped by war, stitched back into a future that never waited.

Chapter Text

The Helicarrier never slept, but it did dim.

In the late hours, the corridors hushed to a hum, monitors lowered their glow, and most of the crew retreated to quarters or isolated workstations. Surveillance always ran. Operations never paused. But in the stillness between rotations, the ship almost exhaled.

You liked those hours best.

You weren't sleeping much -- hadn't for years, really. Old habits. Old ghosts. Instead, you moved through the Helicarrier like memory made flesh, reviewing secure data feeds, checking updates from ground intel. Every few nights, you'd steal an hour to the observation deck, hands cradling a cup of bitter coffee, gaze fixed outward toward the stars that felt more honest than most people.

You didn't expect Steve to find you there.

The first time, he didn't say anything. Just stood in the doorway, silhouetted in the low light, uncertain if he was interrupting something.

"You can sit," you said, not looking at him.

He did.

The two of you said nothing for almost ten minutes.

And then, finally:

"I've been reading your reports," Steve murmured.

You raised an eyebrow. "You sure know how to flatter a girl."

He smiled. Small. Almost shy. "They're precise. Thoughtful. You always were."

You didn't answer right away. Let the silence stretch again, not uncomfortable this time -- just full.

"I didn't think you'd seek me out," you said at last.

"I wasn't sure I should." He glanced down at his hands. "Didn't want to intrude."

You turned your head slightly, eyes narrowing. "Since when have you worried about that?"

He met your gaze. And for a moment, the two of you were back in London. In the SSR offices. Late nights over scattered files and war maps. The way you used to challenge him without ever needing to raise your voice.

"A lot's changed," he said simply.

You nodded. "Yes. It has."

But you didn't ask him to leave.

And the next night, he came again.

Sometimes you talked with him -- about missions, the old days, Fury's unpredictable mood swings. About how different the world looked when you hadn't lived through its transformations. You, for all your years, hadn't lived them the same way. You adapted as the world shifted under your feet. Steve had crashed through time and landed in the aftermath.

You both were two relics moving forward on divergent timelines, somehow converging again.

Other nights, the two of you just sat.

You never pressed. Steve never pried.

But the silence between the two of you grew warmer, no longer filled with absence. There were things still unsaid, yes -- but not because they couldn't be. Because, maybe, they didn't need to be -- not yet.

Once, in the mess, Natasha made a passing comment:

"You two look like ghosts have tea."

You raised an eyebrow. "We're not that pale."

Steve didn't say anything, but he smiled into his cup. Later, he told you: "She says things like that when she's watching. Trying to learn."

You nodded. "Then let her learn. Let them all learn. We're still here."

He looked at you then, longer than he should have. You didn't look away.

The two of you were not the same people you had been. But something -- some chord -- remained.

Late one night, nearly a week after you and him had started the unspoken ritual, you pulled an old file from a private drive and laid it on the console in front of the two of you.

Steve looked at the cover. "Strategic Reserve: Redacted Operations?"

"Something we worked on. Well, something I worked on while you were gone." You didn't flinch when you said it. "You should know what we tried to preserve. And what we let die."

He opened it. Slowly. As if every page might carry something that would undo him.

And maybe it did.

There were references to units he'd lost. Mentions of names that hadn't made it into the museum placards. Intel on enemy movements and allies who'd disappeared into Cold War silence. And peppered through it all -- your handwriting. Meticulous. Steady.

"You did all this?" he asked.

"I had help," you said, but your tone was modest. He knew you well enough to know what that meant.

The two of you sat like that for over an hour -- you sipping tea, him tracing the past through ink and memory.

At some point, he said, "I didn't expect to find anyone who still remembered all of this."

You leaned back in your chair. "I didn't expect to be the only one who could."

He looked up. "Do you regret staying?"

Your eyes didn't flicker. "No. I regret what we lost. But not what I became."

And that -- that gave him a pause.

You weren't the woman he remembered. Not entirely. You were steel now, folded and reforged by decades. But the core was still there -- the clarity, the calm, the relentless precision of someone who had seen horror and refused to become it.

"You know," Steve said, voice lower now, "there were moments after I woke up where I thought I was dreaming. That maybe I hadn't made it out of the crash."

Your expression softened. "And now?"

He looked at you across the console. "Now I'm sure I didn't imagine you."

You didn't smile. Not really. But your eyes met his, steady. "You didn't."

It wasn't love -- not yet. The ache was too fresh, the distance still too raw.

But it was something.

In the quiet, it became something.

You looked back toward the stars outside the viewport. The silence between the two of you thickened again -- not strained, but full of something unspoken. Some long-echoing truth that neither one of you could quite name yet.

Steve shifted slightly in his chair. "Do you ever wonder what it would've been like? If the war had ended and we'd just -- gotten to live?"

The question was so quiet it barely stirred the air.

You exhaled slowly. "I used to," you admitted. "Used to wonder if we'd all go back to New York, and maybe one day I'd forget how it felt to hear mortar fire at midnight." You paused, fingers curling loosely around your tea. "But I don't think I'd know what to do with peace."

Steve tilted his head. "I think you'd have figured it out. You always did. Even when I couldn't."

You didn't answer for a long moment. Then, softly, "Maybe we would have figured it out together."

Steve didn't smile, but the muscles in his jaw eased.

A quiet fell again, but this time it didn't feel heavy. It felt ... settled.

And when you stood to leave, Steve didn't stop you -- but he watched you go.

Not like someone afraid you'd vanish.

But like someone who knew you'd be back.

Tomorrow. The night after. However long it took.

The two of you had time now.

Chapter Text

The Helicarrier floated above Manhattan as if it were a ghost ship, silent except for the occasional murmur of an intercom and the hum of machinery far below. It was just past midnight, and most of the crew were asleep or on skeleton duty. In the observation deck, you stood alone.

You leaned lightly against the glass, arms folded, your reflection faint and solemn in the pane. Below, the city stretched endlessly -- light blooming across the boroughs like a living, breathing constellation. Neon shimmered along the Hudson. Traffic blinked red and white along midnight avenues. Everything looked impossibly far away, as though it belonged to someone else.

You pressed your palm gently to the glass. A reflex, not a comfort.

Behind you, the corridor lights were dimmed to night-mode blues, casting the space in a cool shadow. You hadn't bothered turning on the internal lights. The dark was better. It made the city feel closer. Like you could fall through the glass and land in it again,

You had always loved watching the world from high places -- watching without being watched. In the war, you'd done your best thinking this way, too: overlooking a map room, a rooftop, a radio tower. Some part of you liked feeling suspended. Removed from the noise and decision-making and grief, just for a moment.

And now?

Now, you didn't know what you were waiting for.

Maybe for the world to feel real again. Maybe for time to make sense.

Maybe for him.

You closed your eyes for a moment.

Seventy years. The number didn't fit inside you. You weren't even sure you'd let yourself believe it when Fury first said the words. Recovered from the ice. Still alive. Physically unchanged. You had nodded, keeping your face neutral, the way you'd been trained. But inside, your mind had gone somewhere else entirely. To a train station. A radio room. A file you'd folded with trembling hands. To the man you'd loved beside a war no one could win.

You hadn't let yourself hope -- not until you'd seen him again with your own eyes.

That had been days ago now, almost two weeks. And still, it didn't feel real.

Steve Rogers, alive. Breathing. And so changed it made your breath catch. The man from your memories stood straighter now. Moved like a soldier who had nothing to prove anymore. But his eyes...

They hadn't changed.

You hadn't slept much since then. Couldn't, really. The emotional noise was too loud. Grief, relief, guilt, awe -- it moved through you like a static field. All night and all day, just beneath your skin.

He was here. And yet not yours.

Not yet. Maybe not ever.

The two of you had talked a bit since that moment on the deck, quiet moments stolen in late nights. But that moment, that quiet, first moment, when the world dropped away, and all he'd said was -- "You're not a ghost."

And all you'd managed in return was, "I thought you were."

Now, there was a silence that hung between you like a line neither had dared cross.

But you could feel it tugging.

You exhaled, your breath fogging the glass faintly.

There was a strange comfort in this suspended moment. The world hadn't fully caught up with either of you. You were both relics, barely reassembled, ghosts pretending to be whole. And no one understood that like you did.

The door behind you slid open.

You didn't turn.

"I figured I'd find you here," Steve said quietly.

You smiled faintly, not surprised. "You remember that?"

"Of course I do."

His voice was closer now. Not beside you, but nearby. He gave you space, as he had these past few conversations, like always.

"Late hours. Quiet spots. That was always your thing," he said.

You finally glanced at him. He was in his uniform, but without the helmet. The lines of his face were sharper now, as though time had carved its mark even if the serum hadn't. But the way he looked at you -- that was the same.

"You couldn't sleep either?" you asked.

He shook his head. "Too many lights."

You raised an eyebrow. "The city?"

"No. The world."

You nodded slowly. That made sense. The twenty-first century had all the sharpness of an open wound. Too much noise. Too much change. And no time to mourn what had been lost.

The two of you stood there in silence for a while, letting the city speak for you both.

"Do you ever wish they hadn't pulled you back?" you asked eventually, your voice low.

He was quiet for a long time.

"No," he said finally. "I just wish I knew what to do now that I'm here."

You looked down at your hands. "Welcome to the club."

That made him smile.

You two were different people now, and yet not. Both of your bones remembered. Both of your silences matched. Even after everything, the language between you both had survived.

You tilted your head, watching the reflection of his profile in the glass. "You'll figure it out."

He glanced at you, expression unreadable. "Only if you're around to help."

Your throat caught.

It wasn't a confession. It wasn't a plea.

But it was something.

And that something -- after seventy years of silence -- was enough.

The two of you stayed there a little longer, watching the city blink like memory.

Neither said another word. Neither needed to.

But something between the two of you shifted -- almost imperceptibly. Not forward, not back. Just... closer.

You tilted your head slightly, enough to catch him watching you in the glass's reflection. You didn't look away.

"Do you remember Berlin?" you asked quietly.

Steve's eyes flickered, then softened. "The café by the river."

"You got us lost."

"I maintain that was a strategic misdirection."

You snorted, and for a second, the years peeled away like silk. "You refused to ask for directions."

"________," he said, mock-scandalized. "Captain America never admits defeat."

You laughed under your breath. And then: "You weren't Captain America yet. Just Steve. The reckless one."

He didn't reply right away. When he did, his voice was softer. "I still am. I think."

You looked down at the lights again. "Yeah. You are."

Silence settled again -- warmer this time, edged with something tender and bittersweet.

He stepped closer, just enough for his shoulder to almost brush yours. Almost.

"If I get lost again," he said, quieter still, "will you still help me find my way?"

You didn't answer immediately. But after a pause, you turned just slightly toward him.

"You never really lost me," you said. "I was just... waiting."

Steve didn't smile, but his eyes did. He looked out over the city again. "Then I guess I'm not lost either."

You said nothing, but you stayed.

And so did he.

Chapter Text

It was late again. Or very early -- you had stopped trying to measure time in neat packages of hours. Life on the Helicarrier moved like an ocean current: fluid, pulsing with unseen energy, everyone -- soldiers, superheroes, intelligence agents alike -- shifting with it whether they wanted to or not.

You leaned against the reinforced glass pane lining one of the quieter observation decks. Below, the world lay dark and drowsy. Somewhere beneath the gray clouds, cities blinked. Somewhere down there, people were asleep in their beds, unaware that S.H.I.E.L.D. hovered hundreds of feet above.

Your hands were wrapped around a stainless steel mug -- lukewarm tea, now. The bitterness grounded you.

"Couldn't sleep?" Steve's voice broke the hush without disturbing it.

You turned. He was walking toward you with that same careful gait he always had -- confident, but never arrogant. Measured. Respectful. A quiet man who carried the weight of too much history on too-broad shoulders.

"I don't sleep much these days," you said, voice low.

He nodded and held up his own mug like a peace offering. "Coffee," he said. "Not really my thing. But I thought it might help."

You raised an eyebrow. "Since when do you drink coffee?"

He gave a sheepish half-smile. "Since I woke up in a century that doesn't serve anything else."

That pulled a small laugh from you, dry and genuine. You gestured to the space beside you. "You planning to drink it or just carry it around looking brave."

Steve settled beside you, close but not too close. Just enough to share the view. He sipped. Winced. "Still awful."

"Tastes like burnt regrets."

"I think that's the brand name."

You smiled again, slower this time. It was easier now -- seeing him like this. Less symbol, more man, like it had been. The shield was stowed away. The weight of the world, at least temporarily, off his back.

You both sat in silence for a while. Below, a thunderstorm flared in the far distance, lightning turning cloud edges to silver.

"Some nights," he said, voice nearly lost to the hum of engines, "I wake up and forget what year it is."

You didn't look at him. "Some nights I wake up and hope I've dreamed the last seventy years."

You both let that hang there between -- like frost on a window, slowly melting.

Steve's grip on the mug tightened. "You really stayed," he said after a moment. "Through everything.

You finally glanced his way. "You did too, in a way."

"I didn't have a choice."

You looked down at your hands. "Neither did I."

He nodded slowly, absorbing that. Then, after a long pause, he said, "You've changed."

"So have you."

"I still see her, though. That woman in the alley in Brooklyn. Telling me to eat something before I fell over."

"I still see him," you murmured. "That skinny guy with too much heart."

Steve's jaw tightened. "Sometimes I don't know who I am anymore."

You tilted your head, watching the storm flicker in the distance. "You're still Steve. Even now."

He looked at you with that same expression he always had when he was about to jump on a grenade: brave, uncertain, wholly unselfish. "I was afraid you wouldn't recognize me."

You turned, leaning a hip against the railing to face him fully. "I recognized your voice before I saw your face."

That brought silence again, deeper this time. Not hollow -- just full of things neither of you could yet say.

Steve stared into his mug like it held answers. "This is the part where I'm supposed to say something profound, right?"

You shook your head. "No. This is the part where you just sit with me. That's enough."

So he did. You both sat together, two ghosts in a metal sky.

Eventually, you broke the quiet. "You ever think about going back? To civilian life?"

"Sometimes. But I think the world has other plans."

"Doesn't it always."

His lips quirked. "Do you?"

You blinked. "What?"

"Think about stopping. Letting it all go."

You exhaled slowly. "Sometimes. But it's hard to let go of something you were built to survive."

Steve nodded, his expression unreadable. "I think maybe that's why Fury brought us both back in."

"Because we're survivors?"

"Because we're ghosts," he said. "And ghosts don't sleep."

That earned him a look. "That's dark."

"I'm learning," he said, sipping again. "Modern coping mechanisms."

"Then you're supposed to follow it up with a bad joke or a sarcastic meme."

"I don't think I'm ready for memes."

You smiled again, just faintly. "One step at a time, soldier."

The storm outside had moved closer. Distant thunder rolled, slow and deep.

Steve looked down at your hand where it rested against the railing, not touching his. Not yet. But close. His voice was almost a whisper. "Does it ever get easier?"

You didn't answer right away.

"No," you said softly. "But we get stronger."

You stood, and he stood too -- you stood together a while longer, watching lightning paint the sky in brief flashes of white-gold.

Eventually Steve reached out -- not touching your hand, but letting his fingers hover just above it.

You didn't move.

And neither of you pulled away.

The coffee was cold. The tea forgotten.

But in the quiet hush of a sleepless hour, something else had warmed between you two.

Not memory. Not nostalgia.

Something present. Something real.

Not about the coffee at all.

You didn't move your hand. You didn't need to. The space between your fingers and his crackled with something quiet and alive -- an understanding born of too many years lost and not enough time now.

Outside, another streak of lightning cut the sky in half, silhouetting the two of you in sharp relief. The world, for all its noise, held still.

"I missed this," Steve said suddenly, his voice rough, low. "Not the war. Not the mission. Just this. The quiet moments. Where it's not about saving the world."

You looked at him. His eyes were tired. But they were clearer now than they had been in days.

"I think," you replied, voice almost a whisper, "the quiet moments are what make the fight bearable."

He turned his palm up, just barely brushing yours.

"I don't want to waste them anymore," he said.

Your fingers twitched -- then, gently, you let them rest in his.

Nothing more. No declarations. No promises.

Just shared warmth in the middle of the cold sky.

For tonight, that was enough.

And maybe tomorrow, there would be more. Another quiet hour. Another unspoken comfort. You and him didn't have to name it. Not yet. But the silence between you wasn't empty, not anymore, not for a long time. It was beginning to feel like home.

Chapter Text

The helicarrier hovered high above the Atlantic, lights blinking gently in the dark. The ocean below was silent, endless. The stars above scattered in quiet indifference. It was sometime past midnight when you stepped out on the observation deck, your breath catching faintly at the view.

Your uniform jacket hung open, loose over your shoulders. You were off-duty, but sleep hadn't come. Not for a while. Too many thoughts curled tight in your chest. Too many ghosts threading through your pulse.

Behind you, the soft hiss of the automatic doors opened.

"I thought I might find you here," Steve said, a familiar line that had you smiling.

You didn't turn immediately, as always. You knew that voice too well, even now. It still startled you -- how alive it sounded, how warm. And still, after all these weeks, it felt like something torn from a dream.

"Couldn't sleep?" you asked.

He came to stand beside you, not too close, as always. Just near enough that your shadows overlapped faintly in the window's reflection.

"I keep trying," he said. "Then I remember.... everything."

You exhaled, quiet. "Yeah."

The silence between the two of you wasn't uncomfortable anymore. It had changed. Become something worn in, like a shared coat against the cold.

"I waited for you," you said suddenly.

Steve turned his head toward you.

Your eyes were still on the sea.

"I waited," you said again, "and then the waiting became something else. A kind of... shape I lived inside. Not grief, not hope. Just... routine. Days stacked on days. Doing what I could."

His gaze dropped. "I'm sorry."

You shook your head. "Don't be. It wasn't your fault."

"I should've died on that plane," Steve said quietly. "That was the plan."

You swallowed. "I know."

A long moment passed.

"I never stopped thinking about you once I woke up," Steve said at least, voice low, like a confession. "But I thought you'd lived your life. That maybe forgetting me was a mercy."

You turned toward him now. "Don't you dare," you said, not unkindly. "Don't you ever say that again."

He blinked, surprised.

"I didn't forget you," you said. "I couldn't. You were the one thing I kept -- when everything else fell apart."

The glass shimmered faintly as lights blinked beyond. Steve stared at you, heart in his throat. You looked tired. Not the kind of sleep cured -- but the kind earned, slowly, over decades of waiting and enduring.

"What do you miss the most?" he asked, almost a whisper.

You considered it. "The quiet mornings," you said. "Before everything changed. When the worst thing we worried about was breakfast going cold."

A ghost of a smile touched his lips.

"You?"

"Bucky's laugh," Steve said. "The way the city used to smell in the summer. You, in the radio room."

You looked down. Your hands, usually so steady, flexed at your sides.

"I remember," you said. "That day."

He didn't have to ask which. You both knew.

"Your voice," you said. "The way it sounded on that last transmission. I knew."

Steve closed his eyes for a moment.

"I didn't know you were listening," he whispered.

"I always listened," you said.

Another beat of silence passed between the two of you.

"Do you ever wonder what we would've been, if things had gone differently?" Steve asked.

"All the time," you replied.

And then, softly: "But we are what we are now. That has to mean something too."

He nodded.

There was something fragile about the way you both stood beside each other. Not broken. Just weathered. Familiar.

"What do you fear?" you asked.

He didn't answer right away.

"That I came back to a world that didn't need me," he said finally. "That everything I fought for... didn't last. That I'm still frozen inside, somehow."

You nodded, like you understood. Because you did.

"I fear losing people again," you said. "You. Fury. Anyone, really."

You both looked at each other then -- two figures with too many yesterdays and not enough tomorrows. And in the hush of that glass observation room, the years didn't fall away. They remained, heavy and unspoken. But something else bloomed there, too.

Tenderness. Recognition. A cautious thread of trust.

"I'm glad you're here," he said.

"So am I," you answered.

Then neither of you spoke. You both just stood, shoulder to shoulder, the city lights blinking far below. The future was uncertain, but for a moment -- just one -- the weight lifted.

Neither of you were what you once were. But neither of you were alone anymore.

And in the quiet, that was everything.

You sat down for a moment, as suddenly the weight of his presence here, next to you, hit in the stillness. You folded your hands in your lap, your shoulders tight. "Every mission, every transfer, every year..." you stopped, unable to continue.

Steve sat next to you. He looked at you for a moment, wondering about what you might have said. "I used to imagine what your life might've looked like, when I didn't know you were still here, but when I'd awoken. I wondered what you'd go on to do. I thought you'd marry someone brave, or brilliant, or both. I thought... maybe I didn't belong in it anymore. Your life."

You laughed faintly, dry but not unkind. "You still think you don't?"

He didn't answer at first. Then: "I'm trying not to. It's strange, waking up to a world that kept spinning without you in it. It's lonelier than I imagined."

"You're not alone." You reached out, not touching, just resting your fingers near his on the bench between you. "I don't know what happens next. But I'm here."

Steve looked down at your hand next to his -- so close, not quite touching. "I don't want to waste another seventy years."

You smiled, just barely. "Good. Because I'm not letting you."

Outside the glass, the lights of the city still pulsed in the dark, indifferent to the ache and wonder of two people finding each other again -- not quite as you were, not quite as he was, but still enough.

Neither of you said anything else that night. Neither of you needed to.

But neither of you moved, not for a long while. You both sat side by side in the quiet, letting the hum of the Helicarrier and the weight of the moment settle around you both like a promise.

Chapter Text

The first time you catch Steve trying to figure out the coffee machine in the Helicarrier lounge, he's got the instruction manual upside-down.

You don't laugh -- not really. Just arch one brow, fold your arms, and lean against the counter with all the easy command of someone who's seen war, peace, and bureaucratic hellfire in equal measure.

"You know," you say, voice low, "for a guy who used to build his own radio kits from scrap wire, you're really struggling with the concept of buttons."

Steve looks up, startled -- and then a little sheepish. "They keep changing them. Nothing's labeled. Everything's just... icons now."

You step forward and gently rights the manual. "Step one, don't use the manual."

"...Why?"

"Because it was translated from Korean by someone who speaks fluent sarcasm and zero English. Come here, I'll show you."

You program the machine with a practiced hand. It hums to life. Steve watches you, the frown easing from his brow -- not just because of the coffee, but because you're there. Real. Unchanged in all the ways that matter.

You both sit on the low couch by the windows, two cups between you. The Helicarrier drifts above New York. Far below, the city lights flicker like fireflies on water. Steve glances at his cup, then at you.

"I don't actually like the taste."

You tilt your head. "But?"

"But it smells like home. Like mornings in Brooklyn. The kind you didn't think were special until they were gone."

You nod, gently. "I used to drink it black in the field. Now I have to drown it in milk just to forget what cold rations taste like."

A silence blooms, quiet and natural.

Steve finally says, "I was assigned a cultural liaison. Some junior agent who told me to read BuzzFeed."

You snort into your cup. "I'm sure that taught you everything you needed to know about how the modern world works."

He looks at you sideways. "Did you know we don't use phone booths anymore?"

"I did. Mostly because of Superman."

"...He's not real, right?"

You smile.

It's been weeks since Steve joined the Avengers Initiative, and while he's been adjusting to twenty-first-century warfare, advanced weapons systems, and the occasional Norse god, you have been quietly filling in the gaps that S.H.I.E.L.D. missed. The invisible curriculum -- the part of survival they never teach in a debrief.

How to understand pop culture references without sounding like a tourist. How to tell when someone's flirting, even when they're too polite to say it. How to tell the difference between cynicism and irony -- something this new era seems to live on.

You don't give him lessons, exactly. It's more like easing him into the tide.

Sometimes it's music.

Sometimes it's food.

Sometimes it's just walking with him through Central Park when no one's watching.

"Do you ever feel like you're pretending?" he asks you once, as you both sit in the park on a day off, watching joggers breeze by in synthetic fabrics and bright sneakers.

"Every day," you say. "Even before the serum. I remember when nylon stockings were new, and everyone thought they were magic. Now there's fabric that repels water and self-heals when it tears. I can blend in, but that doesn't mean I fit."

He nods. "I'm starting to think... maybe no one fits. They just act like they do."

You glance at him then, sharp and perceptive. "That sounds like progress."

He looks back. "Maybe. But it's lonely progress."

You both start walking again, in silence for a while.

And you realize: you are both strange ghosts in a living world. Too intact to be relics, too out of place to be truly modern. But here, together, you two almost feel like people again.

-------

You don't say it out loud, but you've memorized the exact moment you saw his name on that screen. Fury had handed you the file. Told you he was awake, and advised you to get ahead of the press.

That had been months ago. You had barely gone to see him while he was still under observation. It felt too fragile. Too sacred. If you walked in to soon, it might break both of you.

So you had waited. Worked in the background. Coached Coulson through briefing him. Edited timelines. Filtered out the noise.

And when you were finally on the same ship again with him, in the same city, under the same sky -- it wasn't a miracle. It was inevitable.

You never stopped preparing for this. Not since the war.

You still wear the same chain under your blouse. A single silver tag. His old one. The other was buried in the snow. The one you kept? It stayed warm against your skin for seventy years.

-------

Sometimes, Steve stares at the world like it's a stage set -- dazzling, complex, and not quite real.

The first time he hears a smartphone notification, he actually jumps. You cover it smoothly.

"They used to call it 'progress,'" you tell him one night, as you both watch skyscraper lights blink on and off across the river. "But now everything moves so fast, we forget to call it anything at all."

"Do you like it?"

"The future?"

He nods.

You hesitate, then say, "I like that it gave me the chance to see you again."

He exhales slowly. "I'm still catching up."

"I know." You smile faintly. "But you're not alone."

-------

There's a quiet rhythm to your days now with him. Missions, debriefs, reports. Late-night conversations. Steve learns to laugh again. Not just small smiles or polite chuckles, but real, whole laughter -- the kind that starts in his chest and lifts the weight of seventy years off his shoulders, if only for a moment.

You never try to fill in the blanks for him. You know he has to build something new. But you stand close, a steady point in a world that won't stop spinning.

You still see the boy who hated bullies and loved sketching in the margins. But you also see the man who stood in fire and woke up in a time that, somehow, hadn't forgotten him.

And slowly -- day by day -- you two begin to exist not just in the same time, but in the same moment.

-------

One night, Steve pulls something from his pocket. A small card. Weathered edges.

"What's that?"

"I wrote it when I woke up. Things I wanted to ask you. In case I ever saw you again."

Your heart catches in your throat.

He hands it to you.

The top of the card reads, in careful handwriting: Questions for ________ ____.

You smile, quiet and reverent, as you read.

Then: "You'll have to ask them out loud."

He chuckles. "Eventually."

You tap the card. "I'm not going anywhere."

And this time, you both believe it.

Chapter Text

The glass of the Helicarrier observation deck hummed faintly beneath both of your guys's feet, the vibrations more felt than heard, like a whisper threading through steel. Outside, the sky stretched in dusky hues, clouds skimming beneath you two, city lights flickering faintly far below. Steve stood with his hands folded behind his back, watching the world go by in quiet contemplation.

You leaned beside him, arms crossed, your frame outlined by the soft, ambient glow of the bridge. You weren't in uniform tonight -- just a dark sweater and slacks, practical as ever. But something about your posture, the way your shoulders sloped ever so slightly, suggested you were letting yourself rest for once.

The two of you hadn't spoken much since the last mission briefing. You were both busy, and tension had simmered below the surface all day -- no argument, no conflict. Just weight. Shared and separate.

Finally, Steve broke the silence. "They gave me a tour of the Captain America exhibit yesterday."

You turned to look at him. His voice wasn't bitter -- just... distanced. Disconnected.

He didn't meet your eyes. "I stood in front of my own uniform for twenty minutes. Felt like I was staring at someone else's life."

You exhaled slowly. "You weren't."

"No," he said. "But it doesn't feel like mine either."

There was a long pause between the two of you, filled with the hum of the engines and the low murmur of activity elsewhere on the carrier. Steve's hand flexed at his side before he spoke again.

"They turned me into a symbol before I'd even had a chance to figure out who I was. And now... I walk through that exhibit and see posters and newspaper clippings and propaganda reels, and none of it tells the story of what it felt like. What it cost."

Your voice was quiet. "Symbols rarely make space for the truth. Only the story people want to remember."

He looked over at you then, his blue eyes catching the light. "Is that what happened to you?"

You held his gaze, steady. "I wasn't a symbol. I was a ghost with a file number."

He frowned. "That's not fair."

"It's accurate," you said gently, without bitterness. "I went where they sent me. Did what needed to be done. I wrote the reports and built the maps and signed the orders no one wanted to admit existed. And when the dust cleared, there was no place for people like me in the headlines."

You paused, then added, "But I chose that."

Steve leaned back against the railing beside you. "Why?"

"Because someone had to stay in the shadows. Make sure the pieces keep moving. I had already lost the thing I cared most about." Your voice went softer. "So I made usre other people didn't have to."

The words hung between the two of you like fragile glass.

Steve looked back out at the clouds. "I wish I could've done more. Been more... than just the man in the posters."

You nudged his elbow. "You were."

A breath passed between the two of you.

"Do you remember the village outside Graz?" you asked suddenly.

He blinked. "Where we took out the Hydra convoy?"

You nodded. "You carried two children out of the burning church while bullets flew overhead. You didn't know the cameras were watching. But you did it anyway."

Steve shook his head, almost amused. "I remember being terrified. Thought I'd drop them both."

"But you didn't."

You two were quiet again.

Your eyes traced the sky. "Legacy isn't what gets carved into marble or printed in textbooks. It's the choices we made when no one was looking. What we were willing to give when it didn't guarantee anything."

Steve looked down at his hands. "I just wonder sometimes if the man they think I am ever existed."

"He did," you said. "You just didn't get to decide how the world remembered him."

His throat bobbed. "And you? Do you ever wish they'd remembered you too?"

You didn't answer at first.

"I used to," you admitted, "There were nights I'd lie awake thinking about all the things I did that no one would ever know. All the ways I bent my morals for the sake of a mission. All the names I learned, only to forget once the job was done."

You looked over at him.

"But then I'd remember why I did it. Who I did it for."

Your hand brushed his gently on the railing, just a breath of contact.

"I didn't need the world to remember me. I needed to remember who I was."

Steve closed his eyes briefly, letting those words settle. "Do you still know?"

You smiled faintly. "I think I'm learning again."

He turned to face you fully, then, and you saw something in his expression that wasn't quite nostalgia, wasn't quite pain. It was the quiet ache of someone reaching toward the past without fully knowing if it could be touched again.

"________," he said softly.

You looked up at him, eyes steady.

"I used to wonder what kind of life you had. Whether you moved on. If you were happy."

You didn't look away. "And I used to dream you'd walk back into mine someday."

The raw honesty between the two of you felt both gentle and devastating.

Steve's voice was rough around the edges. "We lost so much time."

You tilted your head. "Maybe. But we're here now."

Outside, the world kept moving -- cities lighting up, engines humming, clouds drifting past. Inside, something between the two of you settled, quiet and undeniable.

You both stood there for a long time.

Not Captain America and a ghost from his past. Not a soldier and an agent. Just two people who had survived something impossible and found each other again in the stillness after.

The silence between the two of you wasn't empty. It pulsed with history. Regret. Grace.

Steve's voice broke through softly. "I know I've asked, but... you do wonder what it would've been like if things had gone differently."

You let the statement that was more of a question hang for a moment, like vapor in the cold air. "Sometimes. but it's like tugging a thread in the dark. You don't know what you'll unravel."

He nodded slowly. "Still. I think about it."

You turned toward him. "Me too. But not as often as I used to. I'm more interested in what's in front of me now."

Steve looked at you then, really looked -- at the woman shaped by war and decades, steady as ever. And for the first time in a long time, he felt grounded.

He didn't say anything at first -- just watched the way your eyes didn't flinch from his. And somehow, that said more than any flag, any file, any speech ever could.

Chapter Text

The briefing room was quiet in the late afternoon, the windows casting long shadows across the table. Outside, the Helicarrier hummed steadily through the skies above Manhattan, a city that pulsed below all of you -- loud, relentless, alive. But up here, the world slowed down.

You stood near the edge of the wide glass window, a thick file in your hands. Your heels were planted, weight tilted slightly onto one leg, an old military habit. Your jacket was unbutton, sleeves cuffed to the elbows. You looked like you belonged here. Like you'd never left.

You didn't turn as the door opened behind you. But you didn't need to.

"Afternoon, Cap," you said softly.

A pause. A smile in his voice. "Afternoon, Agent ____."

Steve stepped in with the easy quiet of a soldier trained to move without a sound. The smile tugging at his mouth was familiar -- and disarming. He had changed, yes. But not that. Not the look he gave you when he was pretending not to look too long.

You turned at last, offering him the file you'd been holding. Your fingers brushed his.

Too fast to be called a moment. But long enough to feel like one.

You pulled back gently. He held your gaze.

"This is the HYDRA cache the team pulled from Prague last week," you explained, slipping into the rhythm of the job. "Mostly old comms equipment, some blueprints, fragments of code we haven't fully decrypted yet."

Steve took the folder, flipping it open. "You think it's real?"

You leaned against the edge of the table. "The paper's old. The ink's not. Someone's trying to dress something new in old skin."

A beat passed.

"You're still good at this," Steve said.

You glanced at him sidelong. "You sound surprised."

"I'm not," he admitted. "Just... relieved, I guess. Like something familiar made it out of the wreckage."

That struck you in a place you weren't prepared for. You looked away, toward the clouds outside.

"I used to sit at tables like this with you," he added. "Map out strategy. Decode radio chatter. Try to stay three steps ahead of Schmidt."

"Now we're chasing phantoms," you murmured. "The war ended, Steve. But it didn't stop."

He nodded, closing the file gently. "I figured as much."

You reached across the table for another file, but Steve's hand was already there.

You fingers hovered for a heartbeat with his -- too close not to notice. 

You stilled.

Steve looked down at your hand next to his. And then back at you.

"You're still the best man I've ever known, Steve," you said, so quietly it felt like memory instead of speech.

He swallowed. His hand didn't move.

"Then I guess I've still got a reason to be here," he replied.

Something shifted in the air between the two of you -- subtle, unspoken. The kind of shift that had always gone unnoticed in crowded command tents or war rooms. But here, in the silence of a floating fortress above the modern world, it echoed,.

You pulled your hand back first. Not because you wanted to. But because it felt safer.

"You should know," you said, changing the subject before your voice could betray the weight behind your eyes. "I saw the file they gave you. The one Fury approved."

Steve raised an eyebrow. "And?"

"It was sanitized," you said flatly. "No mention of what you really did. Who you were to the people around you. Or what it cost you."

Steve gave a tired half-smile. "I didn't expect them to include the messy parts."

"They should have." Your voice was firmer now. "You were more than the shield, Steve. You still are."

He looked at you for a long time. Then:

"You know, I keep wondering who I'm supposed to be now."

You leaned back slightly, eyes meeting his.

"You don't have to be anyone except who you've always been."

"That's easier said than done," he said with a quiet laugh.

You smiled. "Everything worthwhile is."

A long silence followed. Not awkward. Just full.

Steve moved around the table to stand next to you, setting the file down near yours. "Do you ever miss it?"

You blinked. "Miss what?"

"The old days."

You considered it.

"I miss the clarity," you said after a pause. "We knew what we were fighting for. Who we were fighting beside. There wasn't time to second-guess everything."

"And now?"

"Now the enemy wears our faces," you said. "Now I write reports I'm not allowed to read twice."

That earned a soft exhale from him. "You've stayed in it longer than anyone else I knew. Including me."

Your lips quirked. "Didn't have much of a choice, Rogers. I didn't have the luxury of freezing out."

That caught him off guard. He chuckled, and it startled you both.

You glanced at him, startled at how good that sound still felt to hear.

"I didn't mean that the way it sounded," you offered.

"No," he said. "It's okay. You earned that one."

You both stood in companionable quiet after that, going over files and silent details -- shoulders nearly touching, posture mirroring the old rhythms of shared command.

At one point, you reached for a pen at the same moment Steve did, your hand grazing his again. You didn't pull back this time. Not immediately.

Steve didn't look away.

Neither did you.

When you did speak, your voice was calm, steady. Almost too casual.

"You still drink coffee, despite?"

"I try to," he said. "Doesn't taste the same."

"Nothing really does," you murmured.

He looked at you, like he had something on the tip of his tongue he couldn't quite form.

You closed the file and turned toward the window again.

"I should finish the incident log," you said.

"Yeah," he replied. "I'll see you tomorrow?"

You nodded.

And as Steve walked toward the door, he turned just once to glance back at you -- silhouetted against the clouds, shoulders square, eyes distant.

Not a ghost. Not a shadow.

Real.

Here.

And somehow, still his.

You lingered by the window long after he left, your fingers resting lightly on the edge of the table. Outside, the clouds shifted gold and grey, the sun slipping behind the wing of the Helicarrier.

You exhaled slowly. Pressed your thumb to your palm like you were grounding yourself.

Just a mission file. Just an old friend. Best friend, you could acknowledge, finally. Just history that hadn't quite unraveled.

But the silence he left behind still buzzed faintly in the air. As if something had been said without words. Felt, but not claimed.

You picked up the pen again -- and this time, your hand was steady.

Chapter Text

The Helicarrier thrummed beneath all of your guys's feet, a floating city in the clouds cloaked in steel and stormlight. Inside the main briefing room, the tension was tangible -- like the calm before the strike of lightning. Steve Rogers sat stiffly at the polished table, posture as straight as ever. You stood just behind him, arms folded, eyes sharp. You didn't sit. You never did in rooms like this.

Tony Stark was already lounging in his chair, legs crossed and mouth ready to go. Natasha Romanoff stood near the screen display, unreadable as always. Dr. Bruce Banner sat beside her, shoulders slightly hunched, fingers tapping an anxious rhythm on the tabletop.

Nick Fury stepped into the room, coat billowing slightly from the corridor's air pressure, with Maria Hill at his flank. The moment he entered, the low murmur of conversation stilled.

He didn't waste time.

"We have a situation," Fury began, his voice calm but clipped. "Loki's stolen the Tesseract. He's already attacked a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility and taken one of our top agents. Barton."

Your brow furrowed slightly. Clint. You exchanged a glance with Natasha, who didn't flinch -- but you knew that stillness was telling.

Fury continued, pacing slowly in front of the room's central screen. "Intel suggests he plans to open a portal. We believe it will allow an alien force to enter our atmosphere."

Tony blinked, dryly unimpressed. "So, another guy with a god complex. We sure know how to pick them."

"No offense, Dr. Banner," you murmured.

Bruce offered a half-smile. "None taken."

Fury clicked a remote, and a holographic projection of the Tesseract appeared midair, rotating slowly. Gamma radiation spiked and pulsed in shifting data graphs to the side.

Bruce leaned forward. "The readings from this thing are off the charts. It's not just unstable -- it's volatile. Even the slightest breach could rip open a wormhole without a stabilizer."

"Which Loki likely has," Natasha added. "Or will."

Steve's jaw tightened. "Then we stop him. Together."

He said it simply, but there was steel in it -- the kind that spoke of battlefield promises and a long-forgotten command voice.

You nodded, stepping forward into the table's circle. "Agreed. But charging in blind won't work. We need to understand Loki's end goal. The Tesseract is just a tool. There's something bigger behind this."

The room went quiet for a beat.

Fury studied you with a flicker of something unreadable -- respect, maybe. "You think he's working with someone."

"I think he's preparing the ground," you said. "For an army. For an invasion."

Bruce exhaled slowly. "Then we're talking about a war."

"A war that's already started," Natasha said quietly.

Tony leaned back, gaze flickering from you to Steve. "Well, I hope you two old soldiers are ready. Sounds like we're building ourselves a team."

Steve didn't rise to the bait, but his eyes slid toward you. You held his gaze -- steady, grounded, familiar.

Just like always.

He gave you the smallest nod.

You returned it.

Outside, thunder echoed in the far distance, reverberating through the Helicarrier walls like a warning shot.

-------

The streets of Stuttgart echoed with fear and confusion when Loki made his move. A crowd knelt before the god of mischief, forced to submission by threat and spectacle. But it wasn't long before the jet-black roar of a Quinjet cut across the sky, and Steve Rogers dropped into the scene like a phantom from the past -- shield in hand, commands crisp.

Tony Stark arrived seconds later, suit blazing, quipping as he landed with the confidence of a man used to being the loudest in the room. The confrontation ended as swiftly as it had begun: Loki surrendered, too easily, smirking like he knew something they didn't.

-------

The Quinjet sliced through the night sky, Loki seated calmly in restraints, that maddening half-smile still tugging at his lips. Steve sat across from him, eyes sharp, posture rigid. Tony fiddled with something near the controls -- mostly out of boredom, partly to avoid looking at the Asgardian prince.

Then the air shifted.

The storm came without warning. Clouds gathered unnaturally fast, thunder growling in their wake.

"What the hell?" Tony muttered, glancing up from his console.

You, seated near the rear, narrowed your eyes. "That's not weather."

A shockwave rocked the jet as something slammed into the hull. Before anyone could respond, the ramp cracked open with a metallic groan -- and the god of thunder stepped into view.

Thor's cape billowed, armor gleaming with stormlight, Mjölnir gripped tight in one hand. He didn't hesitate. In a flash of lightning and brute force, he grabbed Loki and vaulted from the ramp.

Steve was on his feet instantly. "What just happened?"

Tony smirked. "Now there's a guy who knows how to make an entrance."

You stood, already moving toward the edge of the ramp. "He's not here for negotiation."

Tony activated his suit mid-air, launching out after the two gods.

Steve grabbed his shield. "Guess we're doing this the hard way."

You didn't stop him. "Just don't die. I don't have time to train a replacement."

And then he was gone too, diving into the forest below.

The trees would later remember the clash of three legends: thunder, metal, and shield. Blows exchanged. Ideals challenged. The earth itself churned under their confrontation -- until, somehow, the storm cleared.

And Loki surrendered again, calm as ever, returned to the Helicarrier as if it were all just another play in motion.

-------

The Helicarrier cruised silently above the Atlantic, a steel predator gliding through cloud cover. Below deck, the so-called team was beginning to fray at the edges.

They had Loki. He was locked away in a glass prison meant for something much worse. But no one felt like they were winning.

The briefing room was dimly lit now, the only sound the soft hum of the ship's systems and the low murmur of argument.

Steve was pacing, hands on his hips, brows drawn low. "Fury isn't telling us everything."

Bruce, leaning against the table, looked up from a display of energy readings. "The Tesseract is far more volatile than we thought. It's giving off pulses even when dormant."

Tony sat at a terminal, fingers flying across keys. "And S.H.I.E.L.D. isn't just studying it. They're building weapons with it."

You stood against the far wall, arms crossed, face unreadable.

"This isn't just about Loki," you said quietly. "This is about leverage."

Steve turned to you. "You knew?"

"I suspected," you admitted. "Fury's been gathering anomalies for years. When the Tesseract resurfaced, he saw a chance to change the playing field."

Natasha leaned in from her chair, tone careful. "And if Loki's goal is chaos... this tension is exactly what he wants."

Tony looked up. "Well, it's working."

Steve shook his head. "We're not a team. We're just... people Fury pulled out of different files and threw into a room."

You met his eyes. "You're not wrong. But he did that for a reason."

Bruce sighed. "And what reason would justify turning the Tesseract into a weapon of mass destruction?"

"Fear," you said. "Of what's coming."

A silence followed that. The kind that vibrated through the room with quiet resonance.

Tony exhaled sharply. "I hacked into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s mainframe. They had Phase Two ready before we even landed. Reverse-engineering the cube's energy for weapons tech."

Steve looked disgusted. "Weapons?"

You didn't flinch. "That's the part they buried. I spent years keeping secrets in the shadows. But even I wasn't cleared for what they were doing with the cube."

Fury's voice broke through the intercom, calm but firm. "All hands, prepare for system lockdown. External energy surge detected near Loki's cell."

Bruce straightened. "That's not good."

Your expression turned sharp, calculating. "We're being played."

Steve grabbed his shield. "Then it's time we stopped reacting and started figuring out why."

The group rose. The fractures between you all weren't healed, but something had shifted.

Besides you and Steve, you knew you weren't really friends. 

You weren't a team.

But you all were starting to move like one.

-------

The Helicarrier trembled beneath.

Sirens screamed. Lights flickered. A sudden explosion rocked the lower decks, throwing Steve against a bulkhead. He righted himself immediately, shield up.

"Stark!" he barked into the comm. "The engine's down. How bad is it?"

Tony's voice crackled through the chaos. "Pretty bad, Cap. I'm already halfway down the maintenance shaft -- this bird's not gonna fly unless I can restart the turbine manually."

"Then do it," Steve said. "I'll secure the deck."

He turned to you, and you were already loading a sidearm, eyes sweeping the smoke-filled hallway.

"I'll check for any of Loki's plants," you said, voice crisp. "If they've breached comms, they could be feeding him our positions."

"Don't take unnecessary risks," Steve said, the words instinctual.

You paused just long enough to give him a look -- dry, pointed, fond. "When have I ever?"

And then you were gone, disappearing into the haze like smoke yourself.

-------

Elsewhere, alarms blared near the science wing.

Bruce Banner stumbled against a railing, face pale, chest heaving. The tremors. The red lights. The stress. It was all too much. His hands clenched.

Natasha was already running toward him.

"Bruce -- Bruce, it's okay, you're okay," she said, approaching cautiously. "Listen to me. It's Nat. You're safe."

He looked up at her. His jaw flexed. His pupils had already changed.

"I can't hold it," he whispered. "You need to -- run."

She didn't get the chance.

With a bellow that shattered metal, Bruce Banner exploded into the Hulk.

The hallway collapsed under his rage.

-------

Loki moved like a shadow through fractured corridors, grinning to himself as security scrambled. A guard lunged at him. Loki struck with a single slash of his blade, barely breaking stride.

Coulson stood waiting near the weapons locker, bloodied but upright, a prototype weapon in hand.

"You're going to lose," Coulson said calmly.

Loki tilted his head. "Am I?"

A heartbeat later, Loki's blade found its mark.

When Nick Fury arrived, Coulson was crumpled, hand still clutching the handle of the weapon.

"They needed something to believe in," Coulson murmured through shallow breaths.

Fury knelt beside him, setting a gentle, rare hand on the fallen agent's shoulder. "And you gave them that."

The light in Coulson's eyes flickered -- and then went out.

-------

Steve arrived just in time to see the chaos from above: one engine sputtering, Hulk tearing through bulkheads, Loki's signature nowhere in sight.

"Tony, what's your status?"

"Still alive. Barely. I need 30 more seconds, but I could use a hand."

"I'm on my way."

Your voice chimed in over comms. "Deck 3 is compromised. No sign of Loki -- he's already moved."

Fury's voice tuned in, hard-edged and tight. "We've lost Coulson."

Silence rippled through the channel.

Natasha sat alone in the wreckage of the lower level, scraped and bruised, breathing hard. Hulk was gone -- leapt off the side of the ship after Thor had tackled him through the hangar wall.

Tony cursed under his breath. "That son of a --"

"He wanted us scattered," Steve said. "He wanted chaos."

"And he got it," you added quietly.

But the break in your voice betrayed something else -- grief, contained beneath layers of steel.

-------

In the aftermath of fury and smoke, Fury stared at the bloodied trading cards on Coulson's desk -- now stained for real. He placed them in an evidence bag, then paused.

They hadn't been in Coulson's pocket.

They'd been in his locker.

But people needed stories.

-------

Later, as you all regrouped in the wreckage of the Helicarrier, no one spoke for a long time.

Then Steve said, "We need to finish this. Together."

Natasha nodded.

Tony didn't argue.

You stood beside Steve, still silent -- but your hand brushed his wrist as you both turned toward the war ahead.

He pretended like his skin didn't still feel the featherlight touch of your fingers when you had pulled away.

-------

The air aboard the Helicarrier was different now.

Not because of the damage -- though every corridor bore the scars of what had unfolded. It was the silence. The weight. The death that had cracked something open.

Fury stood at the head of the operations table. He set Coulson's blood-stained Captain America cards down -- one by one. A gesture calculated not for manipulation, but clarity.

"He died believing in this."

No one responded right away.

Tony leaned back in his chair, eyes unreadable. "So what, we avenge him?"

"That's the idea," Fury replied.

Clint, finally seated beside Natasha, rubbed at the back of his neck. "It's not that simple."

"No, it's not," Steve said quietly, his voice deeper, steadier than it had been. "But that doesn't mean we don't try."

You were quiet at first. Then you spoke, your voice low but clear.

"Coulson wasn't just a handler. He believed this team could be more than a countermeasure. He believed it could be... something real."

Your gaze lifted across the table, resting on Steve.

"We owe it to him to find out if he was right."

Fury's eyes flicked between the two of you. "Then let's not waste what he gave us."

-------

Steve stood beside a weapons crate, methodically re-securing his shield to his back harness. You approached without a word, just the sound of your boots on the steel floor.

He looked over his shoulder. "Didn't think I'd see you down here."

You'd think I'd let you walk into a battle alone?" you asked, brows raised.

"No," he admitted, half-smiling. "But I wasn't sure if we were ready."

"Neither was Coulson," you said, "But he went in anyway."

You both paused.

Then you reached into your jacket, pulling out a worn map -- a folded tactical layout Coulson had drawn by hand.

"He left this on my desk a week ago. Said he didn't trust digital files for something this important."

Steve took it, your fingers brushing his.

"Thanks," he said.

You shrugged. "Figure I owe him that."

You didn't need to say more, and neither did he. You both stood shoulder to shoulder in the silence, watching as agents prepped gear and teams assembled. A storm was coming.

Tony walked in from the upper gantry, adjusting the repulsors on his wrists.

"Well," he called down, "I hope you two love dramatic entrances."

"Just keep your ego out of the jet wash," you shot back.

Steve grinned. That, at least, hadn't changed.

-------

Fury stood before you all one last time.

"They've taken Loki to Stark Tower. We believe he's opening the portal there."

Tony nodded. "Of course he is. That's exactly where I'd put a monument to my narcissism. Well... it is."

Thor was already reaching for Mjolnir.

Barton spoke next, soft but firm. "Let's just make sure that portal closes before the sky falls."

Steve nodded, firm and steady. "We do this together."

Natasha looked around. "Then let's suit up."

You stepped away from the group for just a second, watching them gather, shift, move. And for a brief second, you let yourself feel it -- this thing Coulson had believed in. This impossible team.

Your hand slipped into your coat pocket.

A photo. Just an old, creased one. Steve, in his first uniform. You'd kept it all these years.

You folded it back away. The present was calling.

--------

As the jet engines fired up and the Helicarrier launched you all into your final mission, you sat beside Steve,

Neither of you spoke at first.

But then, over the low hum of the engines, he turned to you.

"I meant what I said back there. About trying."

You looked at him, eyes steady. "So did I."

A moment passed.

"________," he said, voice quieter. "If we don't make it out--"

You cut him off with a raised brow. "We will."

"But if we don't--"

"We will," you repeated. "Because for the first time in seventy years, we're not alone."

Steve nodded once.

That was enough.

Chapter Text

The Helicarrier trembled beneath your boots, not from damage, but from the immense energy coursing through it. Below you, Earth was under siege.

You stood at your post in the command center -- tall, silent, eyes sharp. Your headset crackled with the sounds of a city unraveling, but your hands were steady over the controls. In your ear, Steve's voice had just come online.

"________, I'm on the ground. Give me eyes."

You exhaled, soft but precise. "Copy that, Cap."

It was the first time you'd called him that in a live field setting since 1945.

It fit.

Outside, New York roared in chaos. Alien ships screamed through the skies, weaving between towers, firing blasts into buildings. The portal above Stark Tower glowed like a wound in the sky, the Chitauri flooding through it in endless waves.

In the war room, Fury barked orders, but you weren't listening to him. Your world narrowed to Steve's voice and the HUD before you.

"I've got incoming, ten o'clock," Steve said, breath slightly ragged. "Chitauri riders."

You zoomed in with a flick of your fingers. "Confirmed. Two carriers. Ground support units on 48th and 6th. If you cut east, you can box them in behind a collapsed bus line."

"Got it. Moving."

You tracked his movements across the map like second nature. A memory stirred 00 your voice in his ear during missions through the Ardennes, the Alps, across shattered ruins. Same rhythm. Same instincts. Only the battlefield had changed.

Natasha's voice crackled into the feed. "We've got civilians trapped in the subway entrance near Bryant Park."

Your fingers flew across the interface. "I see them. That structure's not going to hold. Rogers, Natasha, I'm sending you the fastest access point -- elevated line near 42nd and 5th. There's a service ladder behind the façade."

"On it," Steve replied.

You didn't hesitate. The world didn't allow it. But in the breath between transmissions, you blinked -- just once -- at the way his voice still steadied your spine. Even after all this time.

Down below, he was a ghost come back to life. And here you were, not a ghost but a woman long believed lost to history, threading his path from above like old times.

"Tony," you said into the shared channel, "hostiles are breaching the lower Manhattan perimeter. You've got incoming behind."

"Got it. Tell Capsicle to duck and cover."

You arched a brow. "He heard you."

"Good."

A beat of silence.

"You okay up there?" Steve's voice again. Quiet. Checking in.

Your chest tightened -- split second of recognition, of worry hiding beneath the calm. "I'm fine. This is what I trained for."

"Not many people can keep cool in this."

"Not many people are me."

He chuckled through the comms. "True."

In the command deck, Hill passed you and gave you a glance -- respectful, curt. You had earned it. You weren't just a ghost from another war. You were a tactician with a half-century of experience and a keen understanding of field coordination under pressure.

"Rogers," you said again, watching a Chitauri warship veer dangerously close to a collapsing bridge. "Avoid the 59th Street Bridge. It's compromised."

"Copy. Rerouting."

An explosion echoed through the comms. Screams. Gunfire. The battle surged.

"________," came Natasha's voice again, edged with strain. "Is there an evac corridor?"

Your eyes flew across the holographic feed. "Yes. West 45th -- medical vehicles forming a triage line at the north side. But you'll have to clear a path."

"I'll handle it."

Another voice joined in -- Clint, calm but low. "I'm trying to contain the larger ones. They don't respond to pain. They barely even register it."

You replied evenly, "Use force over finesse. They're tech-enhanced, but the joints are vulnerable. Target the knees, back of the neck -- structural weaknesses."

"Got it. Thanks."

Outside the hull of the Helicarrier, the world looked deceptively peaceful. But the command deck screens told the real story. Fire. Screams. Sky torn open like skin. And through it, Steve Rogers ran -- shield up, voice clear, saving lives in real time.

And you were with him. Even now.

He didn't need you to be in the fight physically. He needed you here -- focused, unflinching. The voice he could trust when the world went to hell.

A memory surfaced -- you, bending over maps with him in candlelight during the war. Arguing tactics. Scribbling in margins, Your laugh when he pushed the salt shaker like it was a tank.

Now, you two moved as you had then. Not lovers... but a unit -- fluent in the other's rhythm.

"Cap," you said again, keeping your voice level, "Central Park -- civilians sheltering near the statue. Two riders approaching. You're the closest."

"I see them."

You watched as his little beacon moved, swift and certain.

He didn't hesitate.

"________," he said after a beat. "Thank you."

You swallowed. "You don't need to thank me."

"I do."

Above you, the command lights flickered -- the Helicarrier shifting slightly under the strain of its own systems. Fury barked at another technician. Hill directed an air unit to sweep lower Manhattan.

You remained still, calm in the chaos.

"Status?" Hill asked as she passed again.

"Cap's clearing the sheltering zones. Stark's engaged the Leviathan-class ships midtown. Widow and Barton are working evac routes. We've kept loss minimal -- so far."

Hill nodded. "Keep it that way."

You returned to the screen, gaze narrowing as you spotted another surge of Chitauri on the west side. "Rogers, more incoming at 10th. They're trying to flank."

"On it."

Your eyes followed the beacon. The map changed again.

And you realized -- 

They were winning. Barely. But they were. You were.

Just like old times.

Steve's voice crackled back over the comms, low but steady. "You still with me?"

You leaned closer to the panel, your fingers hovering just above the surface of the console, ready to pivot to the next feed. "Always," you said, softer than you meant to -- but it carried across the distance anyway. You cleared your throat. "Next wave is coming in from the east. It looks like they're flanking Stark Tower -- watch your six."

"Copy that." A pause. Then, quieter: "Thanks, ____."

You smiled faintly. "We're not done yet, Cap."

Outside the glass, the sky over Manhattan burned with streaks of light and smoke, a war unfolding in layers. You could make out the trail of Iron Man's flight arc in the upper atmosphere, the glint of Mjölnir in a flash of lightning, and below it all -- Steve, cutting through the chaos like he was born for it.

You watched, heart in your throat. This was the war none of you had prepared for. And somehow, impossibly, you were still fighting it together.

Still together.

Chapter Text

The city was chaos.

From your post aboard the Helicarrier's mobile command center, your hands danced across the console as your voice relayed critical intel. "Rogers, incoming hostiles at your six -- rooftop elevation."

"Copy that," Steve's voice crackled through your earpiece, low and controlled despite the cacophony in the background -- screaming civilians, crumbling stone, the alien roar of Chitauri mounts.

You leaned closer to the monitor, tracking Steve's location. He was a blur of motion, shield in hand, commanding the battlefield as though he'd never left it. And maybe he hadn't. Maybe that war never really ended for him. Maybe it never had for you either.

"Tony's rerouting power grids uptown -- temporary delay in the east corridor," you continued, eyes scanning feeds and field notes. "Thor's taking care of the Leviathan above the Stark Tower zone. Banner's headed to street level near Grand Central. You've got a thirty-second window before the next wave."

"Understood. Tell Thor to duck this time."

You exhaled -- something close to a laugh in your chest. "He doesn't listen to me."

"Guess we've got that in common."

For a heartbeat, yours and his voices lingered. Steve was gone again before you could say more, swallowed by the warzone stretching through Manhattan's broken skyline. And for a second, it was like watching him from the war room in London -- same stance, same grit, same stubborn brilliance.

But this time he wasn't a ghost of the past. This time he was real.

He made it. I made it. And we're both still here.

You didn't let yourself feel the emotion fully -- not yet. Not while there were civilians still trapped in buildings, not while alien weapons fired down Fifth Avenue, not while the sky had opened like a wound above everyone.

You keyed in new coordinates, directing SHIELD teams to evacuation routes. Every breath was timed between updates, every heartbeat counted in intel relays and coded warnings.

"Agent ____," Hill's voice called from the main platform, "we need extraction planning for Stark Tower radius. Can you run the scans?"

"I'm on it."

Your fingers flew across the interface. At the same time, you kept Steve's signal pinned at the top corner of your screen -- watching the red-white-blue marker as it moved like a steady drumbeat across the map. It was comfort. It was history rewritten. 

It was him.

The Helicarrier trembled beneath another impact far off the bay, but you didn't flinch. You barely noticed. Your focus narrowed as the battle intensified.

"Cap," you said through the comms, falling back into a rhythm you hadn't used in decades. "Intel confirms the next Chitauri dropship is targeting the bridge over Park. You've got twelve minutes before it lands."

"Then we've got twelve minutes to clear it."

He sounded tired. He sounded alive.

You almost smiled. Instead, you relayed the next orders, sharp and measured.

Tony's voice came through moments later, tense with strain. "Hey, 'vintage analyst'? Nice call on the dropship."

You didn't blink. "It's ________."

"Right. ________. You got anything else up your sleeve?"

"Only the rest of the war."

"Great. Because I'm running out of repulsor charge, and I really don't want to die wearing this suit in front of an audience."

Steve cut in before you could respond, "You're not dying today, Stark. We've got your back."

"Didn't realize I was included in 'we', Cap." 

"You are now."

The comm line held a strange kind of warmth after that. Even through the fire and fury, you all were becoming something closer to a team.

You watched Steve drop into frame on a street cam -- shield raised, leading civilians through broken glass and smoking pavement. The children looked at him like he was a storybook come to life.

You watched, and time slipped.

That's the same man I first saw pull a Howling Commando out of a Hydra lab with blood on his face and kindness in his voice. That's the same man who kissed my cheek before we split up in Salzburg, promising he'd make it back. And now he's here. Still making it back.

It was dizzying.

Past and present collided in the lines of his shoulders, in the grit of his jaw. The uniform had changed -- sleeker, reinforced, shaped by modern design -- but the heart beneath it hadn't. Not to you.

Hill's voice broke through your thoughts again. "Agent ____, we've got incoming orders from Fury -- council's calling for a contingency."

Your gaze snapped to the feed. Your stomach turned cold. "Nuclear?"

"That's the implication."

"Absolutely not," you snapped. "We're stabilizing the field. If they do that, they'll kill thousands who are still trapped."

Hill looked at you, measured. "Then we stop it. Somehow."

You nodded. You keyed the emergency override codes into the communications matrix -- beginning the process of sending intercept data directly to SHIELD's missile tracking systems. Fury would fight it. You knew he would. But if they lost that battle, you were going to give Steve -- and everyone else on the ground -- a chance.

You rewrote the orders behind the curtain while the war continued below.

On the main screen, the Leviathan roared past Stark Tower again -- its silhouette like something from a nightmare, brushing the edge of the clouds. You watched Thor vault from one rooftop to the next in pursuit, lightning flashing at his heels. Bruce -- transformed -- tore through a Chitauri skiff on the ground. Natasha ducked into cover behind an overturned police car, her aim lethal and precise.

And at the center of it all, Steve Rogers. Standing. Fighting. Leading.

You felt the moment in your bones. This is what we were always meant to be.

Together. Even if separated by seventy years and scars you still hadn't named.

You glanced down at the cracked watch face on your wrist -- an old relic, kept not for time, but memory. The second hand ticked forward. And you breathed in.

Still working. Still standing.

Still his.

And the battle wasn't over yet.

The reports kept coming -- injuries, near-misses, flare-ups of combat across the boroughs. But with every update, the tide shifted. The city was holding. Barely, but holding. You leaned back for a moment, fingers still poised above the keys, and let yourself feel it. The impossible had happened. The world had changed, and yet -- he was still Steve. Still charging into fire when everyone else fled. Still believing in something better.

You pressed your fingers briefly to your earpiece. "Cap," you said quietly, knowing he'd hear you between orders. "You're doing good. Just... don't forget to come back."

The comm stayed silent for a heartbeat longer than usual.

Then: "I never do. Not when you're waiting."

You smiled. Just once, then got back to work.

But the smile stayed in your chest, and his words stayed in your mind longer than you'd like to admit.

Chapter Text

The smoke had not yet fully cleared from the fractured skyline of Manhattan. Fires glowed in the distance like the last embers of some dying god, and the streets -- littered with alien wreckage and twisted steel -- were far too quiet for a city that had screamed just hours ago.

You stepped over a glowing, broken Chitauri weapon, your boots crunching through soot and glass. Your headset buzzed with disjointed chatter from S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives still sweeping the perimeter, but you'd turned the volume low. For the first time in what felt like days, you moved without direction. No orders. No calculations. Just a singular instinct pulling you forward.

Steve.

You found him sitting at the edge of a S.H.I.E.L.D. transport truck parked along what was once a thoroughfare. His shield lay beside him, scratched but whole. His uniform was torn at the shoulder, blood darkening the blue fabric. He looked down at the pavement like it still held the echo of war.

You stopped a few feet away. He didn't look up.

You didn't speak.

Instead, you stepped into the open back of the truck, found the emergency med kit stowed in a side compartment, and climbed up beside him. You perched on the tailgate without ceremony. There were no salutes here. No protocols. Just the aftermath.

Steve finally turned his head. His voice was gravel-soft.

"You okay?"

You nodded. "You?"

He tilted his head, and winced slightly as the motion pulled at the torn muscle. "Still breathing."

You gave him a look. "Not exactly the gold standard for health."

He smiled faintly, and you knew that smile. It was the same one he'd worn after missions in 1944 when came back bruised and too stubborn to sit still. You pulled a pair of gloves from the kit and gently peeled the remnants of his torn uniform away from the wound.

"You don't have to -- " he began.

"I know," you said. "But I'm going to."

Steve didn't argue.

Your fingers moved with the ease of old routine -- clean the wound, assess, patch, tape. You didn't look at him while you worked, and he didn't speak.

Silence sat between the two of you like a third soldier.

But it wasn't uncomfortable. Not exactly. Just... full. Heavy with everything neither of you were ready to say. He watched your hands, steady and familiar, and you felt the weight of time stretch between you two like thread drawn taut.

This was how it used to be. And how it could never be again.

You pressed the final strip of gauze into place and leaned back just slightly, brushing hair from your face with the back of your glove.

"You patched me up once after that skirmish in Prague," Steve said. "In that church with no roof."

Your lips curved. "You were bleeding like hell and tried to convince me it was just a scratch."

He nodded. "You rolled your eyes so hard I thought they'd fall out."

You let out a quiet laugh. Not sharp, not loud -- just a small exhale of memory. "You still do that. Try to pretend you're made of iron."

He looked at you then, really looked. "You still see through it."

"I always did."

Another pause. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed, rising and falling like a breath through the wounded city. Steve let his gaze drop to the ground again, fingers flexing on the edge of the tailgate.

"You found me," he said quietly. "Back then. You kept looking."

You nodded. "I didn't stop. Couldn't."

"I didn't think -- " His voice caught slightly. " -- I didn't think anyone would still be here."

Your voice was steady. "I am."

He met your eyes. The weight of decades passed between the two of you like the tide: full of lost chances, of buried things neither had words for. The war. The ice. The years.

Your throat tightened. "I thought I lost you forever."

Steve's reply came as a whisper. "So did I."

There was something sacred in the stillness of this moment. Grief shared, not spoken. A presence that didn't have to prove itself. Not even romantic, although the flutter in Steve's heart -- mirrored in yours as you looked into his bright blue eyes --spoke otherwise. But more than that, it was some kind of true friendship, that had lasted the decades lost.

You touched his arm lightly -- not to comfort, not to lead, but simply to say: I'm here. You're not alone. Not this time.

The battle was over. The world was still reeling.

But for a single, fragile breath, neither of you were soldiers or symbols. Just Steve and you.

And that was enough.

Both of you sat there longer than either of you realized, backs pressed lightly to the steel wall of the truck bed, the weight of a war just barely survived sinking deeper into the muscles neither of you had yet relaxed. You let the silence stretch; Steve didn't break it. The world was catching its breath, and so were the both of you.

"You did good," you said softly, watching the smoke curl against the skyline. "You led them."

He gave a quiet huff of air that might've been a scoff. "I still don't know what I'm doing half the time."

"You never did," you replied. "Didn't stop you then, either."

That earned a real smile, crooked and tired. "I missed this," he murmured.

"What part?" you asked. "The rubble or the gunfire?"

Steve turned his head toward you. "You. Us."

You blinked, then looked down at your hands. The bandages were stained with his blood. Your palms still bore the memory of war.

"Sometimes," you said slowly, "I'd dream of this. Not the aliens, or the flying suits, or even the Helicarrier. Just... patching you up after a fight. Hearing you talk."

"I dreamed too," he admitted. "But in mine, you had a family. A life. I figured you moved on."

"Maybe I did," you said, voice catching. "In pieces. But not really. Not from you."

He was quiet a long moment. "I hate that you had to carry this all alone."

You shook your head. "I didn't carry you. I remembered you. There's a difference."

Steve reached for your hand. He didn't take it -- just let his fingers brush against yours, a fleeting contact. Not a question. Not yet.

You let them linger.

The sound of a Quinjet rumbled overhead, signaling that cleanup was beginning. The moment would pass soon -- duty would call again, questions would come, attention would return to Steve Rogers and the wreckage left in his wake.

But for now, in the shadow of what they had survived, two soldiers sat on a tailgate beneath a scarred sky, hands nearly touching, and remembered what it was to matter to someone.

Even after the whole world had changed.

-------

The air still carried the metallic tang of ozone and smoke. Bits of rubble crunched underfoot. New York's streets were cracked, cratered, and eerily quiet. For once, the city had gone still -- not asleep, just... holding its breath.

The six of you stood in the lingering silence where a portal had once torn the sky open. You and Steve had made your way back to the others a few minutes ago, everyone looking in relatively okay shape for pretty much singlehandedly fighting off an alien army and one bitter god-prince. Tony exhaled loudly, brushing soot off his arc reactor.

"Anyone else starving, or is that just me almost dying?" he asked, voice hoarse but flippant.

Thor grunted. "I could eat."

"I saw a shawarma place two blocks from here," Tony said. "We should try it. I mean... if it's still standing."

Steve blinked, caught off guard. "Shawarma?"

Tony clapped him on the back. "Trust me, Cap. It's like a warm hug in pita form."

Natasha raised a brow. "Food does sound good. Provided it's not radioactive."

Clint groaned. "I'm in. My legs don't work, but I'm in."

You all looked to Bruce, who adjusted the torn remains of his shirt. "... I could eat, too."

Steve turned slightly, catching your eye.

"You coming?" he asked.

You crossed your arms and smiled faintly. "Since when does Captain America eat street food?"

Steve smirked. "Since Stark started making it sound like a diplomatic mission."

Tony pointed dramatically. "You get me."

And so you all went -- bruised, dirty, armor dented, stitches pulling, walking past shattered glass and awestruck civilians. None of you said anything heroic. Just limped down a battered street to a tiny, miraculously intact shawarma joint with two flickering lights in the front window.

The owner said nothing -- just gestured to the back.

And there you all sat. Around a battered table. No press, no orders, no headlines. Just chewing.

You sat beside Steve, thigh pressed to his, unbothered. He leaned over and passed you a npaking without speaking.

It was quiet.

It was mundane.

It was peace.

Even if just for ten minutes.

Chapter Text

The sky over New York still bore the faint gray pall of smoke, even days after the battle. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Rubble crunched underfoot. Though the Chitauri were gone, their mark on the city lingered in broken buildings and shattered windows. In the midst of it all, life moved on. Cleanup began. Reports were filed. The Avengers disbanded.

You stood near the edge of a S.H.I.E.L.D. operations tent, your arms crossed as you spoke quietly with Nick Fury. Your posture was straight-backed, your eyes calm, but Steve could see the weariness under it all. It was the same expression you used to wear after long missions in the war -- collected, composed, but carrying the weight of it all beneath your skin.

He didn't approach right away. Instead, he stood across the plaza, watching. For a man who had survived being frozen in ice for seventy years, there were still moments where time felt too fast, too fragile. Watching you now, speaking with quiet authority to Fury, he wondered again just how long you had been holding the world together without him.

The two of you hadn't spoken much since the battle ended, you had patched him up at the truck, and the Avengers had gotten shawarma. Only fragments. Glances. A brief exchange when he'd emerged from medical with a more professionally stitched shoulder and a cracked rib. You had been there, just long enough to hand him a cup of water and press a cool hand to his temple. Then gone again. Always moving.

"She's impressive," a voice beside him said.

Steve turned. Natasha stood there, arms folded, her posture casual but eyes sharp. "________," she added. "She's been running intelligence grids better than most of the techs we've got."

"I know," Steve said quietly.

"Didn't realize you two had history."

He didn't answer right away. Natasha didn't push.

Across the square, you nodded at something Fury said, your hand gesturing to a field tablet. Your hair was pulled back, your jacket unzipped just enough to show the standard S.H.I.E.L.D. tactical gear beneath. Steve had no idea where you'd found the time to clean up. Maybe you hadn't.

"She's been doing this a long time," he said finally.

Natasha tilted her head, studying him. "So have you."

Maybe. But the time hadn't passed the same for him. For you, every day had been lived. Every year endured. The difference was a shadow between you both.

By the time he walked over, Fury had already stepped away. You stood alone, reviewing a map of infrastructure damage.

"You always did know how to take command," Steve said quietly.

You looked up -- and for a heartbeat, there was the faintest break in your expression. A flicker of something warm and surprised. Then you gave him a soft smile.

"You always did know how to show up when the hard part's over."

He huffed a breath, almost a laugh. "You were never easy on me."

"Wouldn't have helped if I had been." You turned the tablet off and tucked it under your arm. "How's your shoulder?"

"Hurts."

"You need me to take a look at it?"

"No," he said. "Not this time."

You nodded, and the silence between the two of you was different than it had been before -- not tense, but thoughtful. Still colored with everything left unsaid. You both walked a few steps together, toward the edge of the plaza where a S.H.I.E.L.D. transport truck idled with its back doors open.

"Tony's already gone," you said after a while. "He didn't stay for the debrief."

"Does that surprise you?"

"No. Just reminds me how much of this is already slipping past us." You glanced sideways at him. "You thinking about staying?"

Steve didn't answer right away. Instead, he looked out at the city -- the skyline scorched in places, but standing. Resilient. Like you.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do now," he admitted.

You were quiet. Then: "Neither do I."

That surprised him.

"You seem like you've got it all figured out."

You smiled again, but it didn't reach your eyes this time. "Only because I've had to."

You both reached the tailgate of the truck. You didn't say anything as you sat down on the edge, bracing your hands against the metal. Steve sat beside you. His shoulders didn't touch yours.

"I keep thinking I'm going to wake up again," he said softly. "Not from the ice. From this."

You nodded slowly. "You ever read The Time Machine?"

"I remember the title."

"There's a line in it -- about how when everything changes too fast, people stop noticing. You just... stop trying to catch up."

Steve looked down at his hands. "Feels about right."

You looked at him carefully, searching his face like you used to during strategy briefings, trying to determine what you could trust him to carry. Then, gently: "You don't have to know what's next, Steve. You just have to decide if you want to be part of it."

"And you?"

You looked ahead again, where the city stretched out under the glow of afternoon light. "I'm not going anywhere."

That hit him harder than he expected.

"You mean S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

"I mean this," you said, motioning faintly to the world. "The fight. The work. The reason we got up in the morning back then. It didn't end. It just got... more complicated."

You both sat in quiet for a while, just the two of you. Every so often, a medic or agent passed by, but no one stopped the two of you. The city kept moving. The wind picked up slightly, tugging at the edges of your jacket. You didn't flinch.

"You looked different on the battlefield," you said suddenly. "Not just the uniform. There was something else."

"What do you mean?"

"You didn't hesitate. Not once."

Steve exhaled slowly. "Didn't feel like there was time to."

"There never is." You glanced at him again. "But you're not the man they made. You're still the one I remember."

He turned to you, something in his expression softening. "You never stopped being the one I trusted."

You gave a quiet breath of laughter. "Then I guess we're even."

You both stayed there until the sun started to slip behind the jagged Manhattan skyline. When Steve finally stood, you rose with him. 

"What happens now?" he asked.

You paused.

"I think Fury wants to keep the Initiative open."

"Do you?"

"I think the world just changed. And if we're going to help shape what comes next... we'll need each other."

Steve nodded slowly. "Then I guess we'd better get to work."

You held his gaze. The years didn't fall away, but for a moment, they didn't weigh quite so heavy.

"I'm in," you said.

And Steve smiled.

Chapter Text

The dust had barely settled.

New York smoldered in the aftermath of an alien invasion, and the world had already shifted its axis. News feeds buzzed. Footage of the Avengers played in loops across every screen you passed. The names and faces were being etched into history in real time -- Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the Black Widow, and Hawkeye.

Not you.

And that was fine. It had always been that way.

You stood just outside the temporary S.H.I.E.L.D. command tent, arms crossed, watching as agents packed up equipment and loaded the last of the intel files. Steve stood nearby, half in shadow, talking to Natasha in hushed tones. His uniform was clean now, though torn at the shoulder -- you'd stitched it a few days earlier. A trace of blood still stained the fabric. The aftermath clung to him, even in stillness.

He glanced up. Your eyes met his across the open space.

There was so much neither of you had said since the battle ended. In the chaos, you both had moved like clockwork -- old rhythm reborn, instincts honed by war and softened only by memory. You two had fought together, just like you had in another century. Only this time, you guys weren't fighting the Reich or Hydra. The stakes were stranger. The world louder.

You looked away first.

Fury emerged from the tent behind you, mid-conversation with Hill. His voice was low, clipped. Orders, mostly. The Avengers had disbanded -- for now. Stark had flown off with Banner. Thor and Loki were already en route back through the Bifrost, leaving little more than scorch marks on the landing pad.

And Steve --

You knew he wouldn't linger. Not long.

You walked toward him slowly, hands buried in the pockets of your field coat. Your steps were measured. Each one deliberate. Steve turned fully toward you, standing straighter.

"I guess this is where we all scatter again," you said, nodding toward the distant skyline where the tower still bore Stark's name in tall, gleaming letters.

Steve gave a faint smile. "Seems that way."

You studied him -- really looked at him. His hair was mussed, darkened slightly with sweat. The bruises along his jawline had already begun to fade, though the look in his eyes hadn't. He looked like the man you remembered and nothing like him all at once.

"I talked to Fury," Steve said. "He's still figuring out what comes next."

You nodded, unsurprised. "He always is."

"I know you said you would stay in the fight, but... what happens to you now, at this moment?" Steve asked.

You hesitated. The question hung there, more complicated than he realized. You'd been with S.H.I.E.L.D. since the beginning. Decades in the dark. Your name erased from every surface. You could disappear again in the blink of an eye.

"I'm not sure," you said. "But I'll know when I need to."

Steve nodded slowly, as if that made sense.

You both stood in silence for a long time. The breeze stirred the edge of your coat. Somewhere in the distance, a jackhammer started up as crews began city-wide repairs.

"I never got to say thank you," Steve said finally. "For everything. For... waiting."

You didn't answer. Not at first.

Instead, you reached into your coat pocket and pulled out something small -- creased at the corners, carefully wrapped in waxed paper.

You held it out.

Steve took it, puzzled. When he unfolded the paper, his breath caught.

It was a black-and-white photograph. Faded with age. Three people grinning, arms slung around each other on a crumbling brick street somewhere in occupied France. Bucky, Steve, and you. Dust on your uniforms. Mud on your boots. Light in all of your eyes.

He ran his thumb along the edge, reverent. "Where did you--?"

"You gave it to me," you said softly. "Right before Azzano."

Steve didn't speak. His jaw flexed once, and he looked down at the photo again, the weight of it overwhelming."

"I kept it," you added. "Even when I wasn't sure you'd ever come back. It reminded me of who we were. Who you were."

He looked up at you, eyes shimmering with something deeper than grief. "You don't know what that means."

"I think I do."

There was another long pause.

You wanted to say more. You wanted to say everything. The decades you'd lived without him carved into your ribs. The nights you sat in cold, windowless rooms, listening to old field transmissions, memorizing the sound of his voice because you were afraid you'd forget. The war that never truly ended.

But you didn't say any of it.

Instead, you smiled faintly. "Don't lose it this time."

"I won't," Steve said, folding the photo carefully and tucking it into his uniform.

You turned slightly, half expecting him to say something else. But he didn't. He just stood there, watching you, like maybe you were the ghost now.

"Take care of yourself, Cap," you said.

He smiled -- faint, quiet. "You too, ____."

The sun was beginning to rise again over New York.

Steve lingered, the photo pressed against his palm like an anchor. He didn't move, not even as you turned to go. Your steps were slow -- reluctant, almost. Not quite ready to break whatever fragile line still held the two of you in orbit around each other. 

"________," he called softly.

You paused mid-step.

"I used to look at that photo and think... we made it. Somehow. Even if just for a moment."

You glanced over your shoulder, lips tugging into something too bittersweet to be a smile. "For a moment, we did."

Silence stretched again, heavy and tentative.

Steve's hand tightened slightly at his side. "If things were different --"

"But they're not," you interrupted gently. "They never really have been."

It wasn't bitterness in your voice. It wasn't regret, either. Just truth. The kind that had weathered decades and war and the slow bleed of time. You knew that truth, that truth that maybe Steve didn't even realize -- there was no perfect moment, not in this world of violence and war. The war never ends, and you have to keep moving with it, or you risk never taking those chances you might otherwise have taken. But Steve might not be willing to accept that.

You said none of this.

And Steve nodded. "Still."

Still.

A whole conversation folded into a single word.

A single word that might have destroyed that truth you had spent so long building up around yourself.

You stepped closer, only a fraction, but it was enough that he could see the light catch in your eyes. "You'll do what you always do. You'll carry on. You'll lead."

"And you?"

You exhaled. "I'll be where I'm needed."

A pause.

Then you reached up, fingers brushing lightly against the tear in his shoulder seam, where your stitches had held through gods and monsters. Your touch was light, brief, but familiar in the way that made his heart twist.

If you stay where you're needed, stay with me, he thought.

But he said none of that.

"Stitches are holding," you murmured.

"Always did," he replied.

You smiled then -- small, real.

Steve looked down at the photo one last time.

Three ghosts in black and white.

He tucked it into his chest pocket, right above his heart.

And stood there, as New York woke slowly around him, and you, as you turned away for what you thought might be the last time.

Why did goodbyes with this man always seem to take so long? 

Chapter Text

The city hummed. 

It wasn't the chaos of battle or the roar of Chitauri engines ripping across the sky. It was the soft, persistent kind of hum -- recovery. Traffic reemerged. Jackhammers. The grind of repair trucks. Life clawing its way back into the bones of Manhattan.

Steve stood alone at the edge of the old S.H.I.E.L.D. field HQ, now just a shell of tents and emptied crates. The team had disbanded. The mission was done. 

But he hadn't moved.

Not yet.

His uniform still bore the crease of the photo tucked inside. His shoulder ached where the stitches pulled -- yours, careful and even. Every breath felt suspended in something not quite the past, not quite the present. Like he was still chasing a moment just out of reach.

And you were walking away.

You.

Same measured stride. Same sharp posture. Decades gone and you still moved like you carried a field report under one arm and the weight of command in the other. Your coat flared slightly in the breeze, collar high. Your hair had fallen a little from its usual knot, wind teasing loose strands as you crossed the S.H.I.E.L.D. transport truck idling at the curb.

He knew he should let you go. That was the agreement -- unspoken but understood. You two had had your moment. You two had said enough. It was always enough... and never.

But his voice found him anyway.

"________."

You stopped.

Didn't turn, not right away. But your head dipped just slightly, like you'd expected he would call out. You waited.

He took a step toward you, boots scuffing on broken asphalt. "I--"

You turned then, slow, with something faint and unreadable in your expression. Dust and sunlight framed you in gold.

"You'll never lose me, Cap," you said, voice soft but sure. "Not really."

It hit him in the chest. That name -- Cap -- from your lips, not as a title, but a memory. It was the way you used to say it when you both were kids in uniform, when he was still figuring out how to lead and you were already three steps ahead.

He blinked once. "I don't know what happens next."

"None of us do."

You stepped toward him this time. Just one pace closer.

"But I do know this," you said. "What we were -- what we are -- isn't erased by time. It's not rewritten by new wars or new uniforms."

He searched your face, memorizing the lines the years hadn't erased. "Then why does it feel like we're always saying goodbye?"

Your eyes softened. "Because we're always running toward the next fight." A faint smile curved your lips, though it didn't quite reach your eyes. "It's who we are."

"I hate it," he said simply.

"I know."

Another beat. The kind of silence full of too much.

He stepped closer. Not quite touching. But close enough to feel your presence steadying his pulse. "You never lost me, either."

You held his gaze. "I know."

You both stood like that for a while. Surrounded by the sounds of a world rebuilding. Around the two of you, agents finished loading gear. Sirens wailed faintly in the distance. A helicopter banked low overhead, kicking dust in a slow spiral.

You glanced toward the truck. Your driver stood at the ready, hand on the door. You had places to be. Always did.

"I should go," you said.

"Right."

But neither of you moved.

Then, you reached into the inside pocket of your coat and pulled something out -- a slim, silver disc. You placed it gently in his hand.

"What's this?"

"Private channel," you said. "Untraceable. If you ever need a voice that doesn't come with orders."

His thumb brushed over the device. "Will it reach you?"

"Always."

You stepped back finally. Your hands fell away from his, and the space between the two of you grew again. You turned toward the truck, then hesitated one final time. Your eyes found his.

"Don't disappear, Steve."

"I won't," he said. "Not from you."

Then you were gone. The door shut. The vehicle rumbled to life and turned down the avenue, disappearing behind a column of repair crews and news vans.

Steve stood there a long time after.

Eventually, he pulled the photo from his pocket and unfolded it. Three kids grinning like they'd beat the world already -- you in the middle, Bucky's arms slung over your shoulders, and Steve himself laughing, uniform still too big for his frame.

He smiled.

The wind tugged at the corners of the photograph, but he held it firm.

The world had changed. But not everything had been lost.

Not really.

He stayed there long after the transport vanished from sight, the silver disc still in his palm. It was smooth and small -- deceptively simple, but it pulsed with promise. You didn't give anything lightly. This was a lifeline, unspoken and absolute. It said: You're not alone. Not really.

Steve turned it over between his fingers, thinking about everything you hadn't said -- the words stitched into your silences, the years folded into your stillness. For decades, you'd kept going without him. You had built something, survived something. Not just the war, but the long shadow it left behind. And you had done it without needing recognition, without applause.

He tucked the disc into the same inner pocket where the photo lived now. It felt right -- two anchors from the same soul. The photo reminded him who he was. The disc reminded him who still remembered.

The wind picked up slightly, and Steve looked up, scanning the skyline. Stark Tower -- or what was left of it -- loomed in the distance, its arc reactor dim against the daylight. Somewhere out there, the others were scattering to corners of the world again, trying to find purpose after destruction.

He wondered what came next. For him. For any of them. The battle had ended, but the war... he wasn't sure it ever truly stopped.

But he didn't feel quite so lost anymore.

He exhaled slowly, shoulders relaxing by degrees. The aches in his body were real -- bruises, burns, fatigue. But the ache in his chest had dulled, just enough. 

You had walked away, yes. But you'd also stayed. In ways that counted.

He turned and began walking -- not toward the past, but not away from it either. With every step, the memory of you steadied his stride. Not a ghost. Not a dream. Something real. Something still his.

You had said it, after all: You'll never lose me, Cap.

Not really.

Chapter Text

The radio in the back corner of your apartment crackled softly, a low hum beneath the noise of the city drifting in through a half-open window. New York never truly slept. Even after everything -- the aliens, the craters left in its streets, the cost -- it had settled back into its noise. Its heartbeat.

You stood at the windowsill, a cup of tea in your hands, steam curling like memory. You watched as headlights swept across wet pavement. Distant sirens, laughter from someone on the street. Life went on. It always did.

But tonight, it felt slower.

Your eyes drifted toward the table beside the radio.

There, nestled between old books and sealed manila folders, sat a framed photograph. The same one you'd carried for decades. Although the first one was now in Steve's hands, you hadn't let the memory go, and of course, had made a copy. Bucky's grin wide and boyish. Steve's arm slung around your shoulder, both of you muddy and proud, frozen in time before Azzano.

Next to it now was something new: a folded note, simple and unsigned but unmistakably Steve's.

"You were always the one who remembered who we were. That matters more than you know."

You hadn't seen him since the day by the trucks.

Fury had kept you in the loop -- barely. Tony had sent you cryptic messages from time to time, most of them too sharp-edged to be comforting. Natasha reached out once, in her own guarded way, to say Steve was "doing okay".

But you had known Steve long enough to recognize the weight of doing okay.

And still... you hadn't reached out again.

You didn't feel like you needed to.

What you two had didn't require constant reinforcement. Some bonds, once forged in fire, held steady no matter how far the battlefield moved.

The radio buzzed again, and then, faintly -- like the past breathing through static -- music began to play. Slow. Gentle.

"It's been a long, long time..."

You closed your eyes.

The world had changed. Your body ached more than it used to. The shadows under your eyes were longer now. But the song still meant something.

It always would.

You walked over and turned the volume up just a little, then sat down beside the photo.

Somewhere out there, Steve Rogers was still moving forward.

And you were still with him.

Not in uniform. Not in the spotlight.

But in the ways that mattered.

Always.

But still.
You missed him. And that ache in your chest, no matter how many times you convinced yourself not to contact him, to let him come to you, with that radio you had given him -- that ache never quite went away.

And his eyes never left your dreams.