that which wakes
Steve was a good man. In the eyes of millions of people, he was a great one. But as S.H.I.E.L.D. woke him from his sixty-year slumber, whatever was great about him stayed in the ice, as if it were some jagged thing that had broken off his body in a sharp clink.
No, Steve did not feel great, that was it. Not in body nor mind. Not as Fury—a plausibly great man, too—confronted him in the middle of Times Square with a reality that stuck to his clothes like cigarette smoke. He did not feel great, nor good, nor amazing. He didn’t even feel possible. But what he felt meant nothing as he looked around into a city of screens and innovation—a city that mocked him with all its progress—and remembered that he, an awfully un-great man, had lost.
The world had won, no doubt about that. People walked and stared at him with their eyes of the future and breathed and moved with a freedom he once knew to only be tangible in the hands of the wealthy or the perfect. The people who peered and sought him in the disarray of cars and dark-clothed agents looked like the image he had of the world years before he ever really understood it. That was a win.
But there was one face that he could not find in the crowd. One face, he began to realize in sudden panic, he would never find. The one reason, he knew he lost.
Steve was not great, no. He did not have Evelyn to make him great.
——
His apartment was dingy. There really was no other way to describe it. Government-assigned or not, it was small and dusty and unbearably empty. Even the sunset, a thing so beautiful and colorful, bathed the living room-kitchen in a sepia brown. And sure, maybe it was better than the hole he lived in before, but the future was supposed to be better, right? That was its whole gimmick? He could not see it.
Anger filled the holes in Steve’s chest like tar, and shouldn’t he be angry? Would it not be deserved? He willed himself to die in that plane, to suffer the ice and the crush. He resigned himself in a breath to forever lose so that New York, and by extension, the world, could be free.
So that Evelyn could be free. And all of that pain and sacrifice amounted to nothing but dusty chairs and empty cupboards. Because Steve had nothing now. His clothes were in a museum. His books, his art—none of it was his. It all belonged to the man everyone had mourned and then memorialized.
“Damnit,” he muttered under his breath, a frown boring its way into his chin. Behind his eyes the past few days played like a film, a black and white horror movie.
Steve didn’t like the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility either. He could still feel the way it felt. How he sat in different rooms and offices for weeks, feeling oddly warm and dissatisfied. It wasn’t anything like the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility of his time. That S.H.I.E.L.D. was dim and analogue in a way that made him feel claustrophobic at times, but it was home. The new facility was lonely. It existed only within its function, and what life breathed inside of it never breathed out anything of comfort. But maybe he just felt that way because Fury prodded at him like cattle. The agents that constantly watched him watched with a weird sort of awe. They looked at him like he looked at statues, like they were surprised he was breathing. In a way, he was, too.
They gave him reports and files, and he did his best to swallow the bile in his throat as he read out the final report on his life. (Search Inconclusive, Officially Pronounced Dead as of 1948). He couldn’t remember if the words had reverberated off the walls or just his head. But the hardest part of the two weeks was listening as they assembled the last sixty-six years on a whiteboard, a life’s worth of history that didn’t belong to him. He watched as their stupid, black marker danced across the white, and he tried to configure that each dash on the timeline was a moment he had missed. A moment he didn’t spend getting older and wiser, and more married.
Am I selfish? He had asked himself, still listening as they bore their way into Nixon and Watergate. To think of her now?
Every breath and response he made was followed by a timid echo in the back of his mind that only recited her name. He knew Bucky was gone. He didn’t need a notch on the board to remind him of that. But, Evelyn….He sighed.
Still again, in his apartment, did he think of her. He thought of the last time he heard her voice, a delicate wonder over the phone, wondering if he had taken it, and her, for granted. He wondered if he had just held onto the line for a few minutes longer, would it have changed anything? Would they have said just one more thing? The questions of a lifetime buzzed in his ear.
“Listen, Steve.” Everlyn’s voice floated through the phone, and Steve couldn’t help the way he held it that much closer to his ear. He hadn’t seen her in months, not since Bucky…died. It hadn’t stopped feeling weird to think that.
“Yeah?” he whispered regardless of the dull ache in his chest..
It wasn’t exactly a quiet night on the base. Tomorrow, he would infiltrate HYDRA and take down the Red Skull. Tonight, though, there was endless chatter and celebration. The war was coming to an end, one way or another. The men drank, the girls danced, the music flowed endlessly. In between rounds and songs, people even prayed. It was an assured win, what with Steve and the remaining Commandos, but there was still an air of fear that muddled every drink. No one could shake it, so they prayed loudly and exuberantly. But Steve couldn’t pray anymore. He lost the ability to bow his head in prayer when he began to look down and see Bucky falling, dying. Steve wanted to call her instead. A reprieve in the thickness of what awaited him, a celebration that only he could share with her.
“You gotta come home, okay?” She said. Elegant and soft, somehow gentle in her fear and heartbreak, she cried like a dove. Bucky had left them only months prior, and her worry of losing him, too, fell like the snowflakes outside his window. His knuckles burned a furious white around the phone, and he feared he’d break it.
“I will, I promise.” His voice wasn’t as confident as he thought it’d be, as it should have been.
“Steve,” she said. A prayer, a plea.
Suddenly, he felt tiny in his suit. In mere seconds, he was sickly thin again, asthma ripping through his body like a sandstorm. Steve could crawl into her arms like he had done so many times before. He could be small and fragile, and not a soldier at all. He thought he could sink into the space between her shoulder and collarbone, and kiss the freckle under her jaw he found when he was eighteen. She knew him, and he knew her, and he, for a moment, wished he knew nothing else.
Nobody else knew it, but Steve was fucking scared. He was just as brave and courageous as all the newspapers, films, and comics made him out to be. But he was also so entirely afraid. The possibilities of tomorrow lay on the tip of a pen, threatening to fall in ways that would spill ink onto all the hopes and dreams that lay below. If he failed tomorrow, it would not just be one person who would die, but millions. Evelyn would die, and he would die. There was no mercy in that.
“Promise me,” she said, a weight settled on his chest and brought him back into himself. “Not as Captain America, but as Steve, my Steve, that you will come back.” Steve sucked in a breath and looked to the ceiling. The tears threatened to fall, and he may have let them, but he held onto the strength he knew. He gathered himself up like loose string and in a broken and terrified voice said,
“I will.” He laughed something bitter, and she laughed with him on the other end. He didn’t know where she was, and he didn’t want to ask. If she gave him a place anywhere close, he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t get up and go to her right then and there. Maybe in another life, he was less himself, and he would, and they would die together. A silly dream in the wake of reality.
“I’ll do you one better,” he said, shaking.
“Oh yeah?” She replied.
“I’ll call you tomorrow night,” he said, a hope lingering in the consonants. “I’ll give you the rundown, and you can yell at me about how stupid I am.”
The line went silent for a moment, and he could see her like she were there, standing before him in the dim light. He could see her, and the nightmare of tomorrow dwindled like a candle simmering out, the threat of its burning a mere memory.
Evelyn, within a touch’s distance, had her eyes closed. Her lashes, long and thick, curled at the ends. Her lips the same delicate pink they had been when he first kissed her, and yet she pressed them into a hard, even line. He would brush her face with the back of his hand, and she would shake her head. He knew that meant she meant business. And business it was, cause he saw the way she stood with a slight slouch, wrought from years bent over tables of fabric. He swore he could see her in the same floor-length navy blue dress she had made before all the bad things happened. It wasn’t his favorite dress, but it was Bucky’s. That was enough reason for her to wear it every day since. He would smile and let it hit his shoes. Steve smiled to himself in the silence of his room. There was a barrette in her hair; it was Captain America-themed. Above all, though, through tears and endless teeth grinding, because he and Bucky could never get her to stop doing that, she smiled. She also cried, but that was less so than the lamp light dancing across her eyes, and it didn’t startle him at all to think, to know: she was so beautiful.
“Alright,” she said, perfect. “But I’ll hold you to it.”
“Please do,” he replied, not at all teasing or joking. He meant it, and so did she.
Steve couldn’t fathom that he never saw her again. Never heard her voice or saw her picture. He woke up that next morning, saved the world, and then died. That was the end of their story.
He supposed that in the grand scheme of things, the next right thing to do would be to start another story. Maybe with someone new, someone who could never really measure up, but would try to. Maybe it was best to go with no one at all. As far as he knew, that’s what people did. They lose, they move on. Then they repeat that process until they don’t lose anymore. It’s been sixty years, too, he reckoned. Steve was willing to bet that’s what Evelyn had done. She lost, moved on, maybe lost some more, moved on a second time, and then one day, never lost again. He didn’t hope for it, though.
He drew lines on the table and hoped she would stay holding that phone, waiting for him to call until the very end. He hoped, silently and selfishly, that she loved him till he died, the way he loved her until he did. He hoped, in the only way he knew how to, that all her happiness came from within her and not from anyone else. And of his long list of hopes, he hoped she died softly. Though if he had it his way, she never would have died at all. And he wouldn’t have either. And…Bucky wouldn’t have.
They would be alive. It would be 1945. The war would be over. They would be happy.
It should have been that simple.
Steve sighed and pushed himself out of his chair. He raked a hand through his hair and shuffled into the kitchen. It should have been that simple, but he made himself a glass of water, and it wasn’t.
He sighed again. Tomorrow, he would begin therapy. It was mandated by Fury that he undergo an extensive psyche evaluation and rehabilitation. Therapy was the rehabilitation.
Therapy itself was a word that sat oddly on Steve’s tongue. It wasn’t a thing when he was younger, but so were a lot of things in this new time. Therapy seemed like it was meant to help people, though. Steve liked things that helped people. But there was also an itch at the back of his throat. Talking about his problems was never something he did lightly, it usually took several years and an annoying amount of asking for anyone to get anything substantial out of him. But the anger had not left him, and now there was no one he knew or trusted to help him through that anger. So, he reasoned that maybe this therapist of his could help him stop thinking, stop hoping for selfish things. Maybe at the end of all of it, he’d be a better man. A greater one, even.
But there was still no Evelyn. There was still no Bucky.
But there was Steve, and he figured he had to deal with that. He doesn’t run away from things; it wasn’t in his nature sixty years ago, and he knew that it could not be now. But the sun set outside his window, and his blue eyes looked sort of green in the reflection, and for a small second, he wished he had it in him to be less of himself.