Chapter 1
…I’ll show you how, just be there…
The brushed silver doors to the elevator opened onto a carpeted floor, stark in its color scheme and furnishings. Offices lined the hallways, as did the same sort of bright panels of light in Time Square. Glass was everywhere looking out onto the brought expanse of city beyond, and as he moved every eye on every faced turned to watch him with awe, wonder, and curiosity. Some things didn’t change, he supposed, grimly, as he walked beside the mysterious figure of Colonel Fury, meandering the halls of the SHIELD offices. They had shuffled Steve back there, of course, gently guiding him to one of the large, sleek black vehicles they called “SUVs”, like more well designed jeeps, maneuvering him through the streets of Time Square and back to the offices he had broken out of. He had registered none of it, save for the the feel of the soft fabric under his hands and the smoothness of the ride. It could have taken fifteen minutes or fifty, he couldn’t tell, following behind Fury in a haze as he was led from a parking structure to the elevator and now to these offices where everyone watched him - a man who died decades ago, now alive and breathing before them.
If Father Lonergan had still been alive, he’d have had a fit on this one, Steve mused sadly, trying to ignore the speculative looks and the open mouths. Had he been in their position, he suppose he would be the same. As it was his brain reeled with the knowledge. Impossibly, improbably, he was still alive, awake after decades. He should have died in that plane crash. He thought he would. Now...
“Come on in, Captain,” Fury called, opening a door into a lounge, glass walled like everything else in this place, a space in muted grays and whites, filled with furniture that looked both familiar and futuristic to his eyes, smooth, straight lines, but covered in tasteful pillows, comfortable and inviting. “Have a seat, relax. I have someone here who's been desperate to see you. I’ll call her and get my team to start helping you out.”
Steve nodded, silently, but he didn’t register a thing Fury said, choosing to wander around the room instead. Black and white photos lined one wall, hanging at eye level. There were several potted plants bloomed, and on the outside wall, a large bank of frameless glass windows hung, floor-to-ceiling, overlooking a forest of buildings that stretched as far as the eye could see. That, too, at least was familiar. Even decades later, at its heart, his city hadn't changed, not so much. Sure, the buildings may be different, but it was still the same New York City, fingers of steel, concrete, and glass reaching to the sky. That felt familiar.
At some point the other man left. The room became silent. Steve was left to his thoughts. Not that he could do much with them at this point. Seventy years! That was the length of a single lifetime, one he had spent trapped beneath the ice he had purposely dove into, thinking that it was a suicide mission. He thought he would die. He would have, if not for the serum in his veins. He hadn’t known that when he took it, hadn’t expected that surviving a frozen air crash would even remotely have been a thing. Had Erskine known? Had Peggy?
Peggy…
Painfully, his heart ached, stealing his breath at the thought of it, of her, the woman he had just been smiling at over the rim of his shield, fighting beside in the long, curving hallways of Schmidt's stronghold, kissing in a car racing at impossible speeds, Phillips behind the wheel. Just that morning he had been in their camp in Austria, flirting with her over the awful excuse for coffee they’d been served, a brief exchange of teasing words, masking the nerves they felt over the mission at hand. She had expected they’d finish this, end HYDRA, and spend the rest of the war mopping up as the regular army stormed Berlin and took out Hitler. It had sounded so simple then, the end of the war; kill Schmidt, avenge Bucky, pack up, go home, marry the girl of his dreams.
Oh, yes, avenge Bucky…he’d done this mission to avenge him, the man who’d been his brother, his protector, the person he’d both fought beside and looked up to as a kid. Now he was gone too. Steve had not protected him when Bucky needed it. He had let his guard down when Schmidt’s henchman fired, had allowed himself to get knocked flat on his face while Bucky picked up the vibranium shield, standing between Zola's henchman and Steve, just as he had always done in the neighborhood growing up. It had been a good thing he had, else Steve would have been blown to oblivion like all the others who had met their end at the hands of Arnim Zola’s strange weapons. For once, however, it was Bucky who paid the price for Steve's lack of awareness, getting blown out of the side of the train car, the shield taking the brunt of the blast, but flinging Bucky out of the gaping hole of twisted steel, clinging onto one of the metal railings for dear life. He had been just inches away from Steve’s reaching fingers, so close! Their entire lives together, all that they had been through, and the one time Steve could be the one to protect his friend, he had failed him. All Bucky had ever wanted for Steve was for him to settle down and live his life, to be safe and content and not continuing to throw himself into every fight that came around. Well, Steve had clearly mucked that up. Sure, he had avenged him, but at what price?
It was the story of Steve's life, really. He was very good at getting his teeth punched in, he supposed. You’d think at this point he must like it.
Feeling sorry for yourself, Steven, never gets you anywhere! Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and remember; you can do this all day if need be. Stand your ground and don’t let any of them have an inch!
His mother’s voice, clear as it had been when he was a child, a reminder of her gentle chiding as he moped after being teased or picked on by someone. She’d been dead for years now, and still he remembered her; her voice, her scent, the way she would kiss his many injuries before sending him out to face the world again, stronger for it. She had been through so much and stood tall, and hadn’t let it crumble her. Still, he doubted his mother would even know where to begin to make sense of this. Seventy years! His entire world, everyone he had known, all his friends, all gone. Only he remained, alone. Perhaps, maybe one or two of them survived. People did live to very old ages, even in his time. If they lived to see the end of the war, maybe they survived now as old men and women. Most would be in their nineties now, if they still survived. They would have lived a life, at least…a long life, without him in it.
How was he supposed to do this?
He heard a rustle at the door, the smooth, whisper sound of hinges, but he ignored them, favoring the view outside, the view of the world he had once known, now only a ghost of a memory. The Empire State Building remained, at least, still one of the tallest things on the skyline, and further out the Chrysler Building, with its unique, layered Art Deco. At least something remained from his old life, something to hold on to.
“You’re late!”
It wasn’t so much the words that caught him short as it was the accent, the timbre, the way they were said, with the crisp British accent underscored by teasing undertones that said that underneath all the prim and proper discipline that she was laughing at him. He knew that voice anywhere, would know it in his sleep, and certainly knew it from the crackling radio waves he had clung to, even as he plunged the plane into the ice below him.
He hadn’t realized he had spun around till he came face-to-face with a ghost.
She stood on the other side, looking both the same and different. Her hair had grown out, no longer in the waves and curls she had kept it in during the war, but sleek, pulled up and pinned on the sides, falling in dark folds behind her, soft and silken. The clothes were different, too. She no longer wore a uniform, but still wore a tailored suit, in slacks, even, charcoal rather than olive drab, set off by her blouse, a splash of bright red, her best color. The rest was all her, though, all achingly familiar - the way she stood, ramrod straight, crimson colored lips, her liquid dark eyes pooling with all the emotions they never managed to say to each other in words. For the briefest of seconds, he really believed it could be her. But it couldn’t be, could it? Because he’d lost 70 years, and Peggy Carter should be dead, or at the very least an old woman, withered and gray. And yet she stood there before him, or at least someone did, looking like heartbreak, and regret, and all of his longing for everything he had just discovered he had lost, an exact copy of the woman who he had promised a date to a day and many decades ago. Something broke through the stunned calm he’d felt since Fury cornered him in the streets below; anger, indignation, hurt, confusion. How dare they do something like this, play on his feelings like this! Not with Peggy! Anyone but her!
“What is this,” he spat, fearing a game, knowing it had to be one. Was all of this a lie? Was this some sort of HYDRA trick after all? Was he seeing things?
The hopeful longing on the other woman’s face melted instantly into confusion, shock, and worry. Very believable indeed, as she blinked, a single tear coursing down a suddenly shattered expression. “I…Steve…”
She even said his name the same way. It made those already cracking parts of his self-control snap even further, threatening to leave him either crazy or weeping in short order if he didn’t figure out what this was all about. “Who are you?”
The woman swallowed, grasping for a response. “Steve…you know me!”
She said it with such certainty, in the pleading sort of way that asked him to remember, as if she believed she was in fact Peggy Carter. It gave him pause. It couldn’t be her…could it? If it was real, if any of this was real, it couldn’t be her. But what if it were a dream? What if he were still in the ice, trapped, and dreaming of some impossible future in which those he loved best somehow were still alive. Was that it? Was she here because of it? What in the hell had his life become?
“What games are you trying to play,” he demanded instead, certain there was one, but unable to follow what it was or what anyone hoped to gain out of it. Rather than make her quell, or gloat, or even spill her secrets, it seemed to only pain her and break her, as true tears spilled down her cheeks. Peggy never cried, though she had come close many times. Even if this was a facsimile of her, he almost crumbled right there at the sight, unable to bear the thought of it.
“Steve,” she whispered, pleading. “It’s me! I’m me! Peggy Carter, the same woman you were on the radio with when you crashed that plane.”
She knew about that. She remembered. Doubt gnawed on his cold ire, whispering that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t a dream or an evil plan after all, that maybe this was the real thing. He quashed that hope. “That’s not possible.”
“But here I am!” She took a tentative step towards him, approaching as if he were a particularly dangerous animal. “I was on the radio with you in 1945. You told me you had to take a raincheck on that dance.”
Those words, so fresh in his memory, hit Steve like the gut punches he used to get back in the day in Brooklyn, harsh, shocking, leaving him reeling. Everything in him stilled, staring at her as she moved closer, every muscle taught, torn between rejecting whatever horrific game this may be or accepting this as the truth. He wanted to give in to what he wished it was and accept that out of this entire, horrific nightmare, something good came out of it. He wasn’t the type of guy who ever got that lucky, though.
“You told me you had to put the plane in the water,” she continued, moving around the soft chairs and glass coffee tables in the room. “Do you remember? I begged you not to, that I would get Howard on the line, we’d figure out how to land it, but you were so bloody determined!”
Aggravation underscored her words as she spoke, and he could well imagine that if she were Peggy she would be angry as hell with him and ready to kick his ass for it. She stopped, feet from him, meeting his eyes frankly, begging him to remember or accept her, maybe both. “You told me it was your choice. You threw my own words back at me, and you were right, and I hated you for it.”
He had done that. Only Peggy would have understood that significance, and only she would be angry with him for calling out the very same reasoning she had used with Bucky’s death. His fingers uncurled, his shoulders relaxed as he dared to listen to that treacherous, hopeful voice in his head.
“We planned a date,” she continued, pressing. “Do you remember? The Stork Club, 8 o’clock, I told you don’t be late.”
“I’ll have the band play something slow,” he laughed, even as the impossibly wide field of ice and snow, blinding and white, rushed up to meet him. “I wouldn’t want to step on your toes…”
After that, there was only darkness, cold, and nothing.
“After that,” she rasped, expression stricken as tears streamed harder down her cheeks, “the line went dead. I waited for hours for you to answer me. You didn’t.”
A million emotions raged within him as he tried to grasp for even just one, a single thought to latch on to. Only the real woman would know any of this, would remember any of this. He found himself gasping her name in spite of himself. “Peggy?”
Her despair broke into a scintillating smile, lighting the cold bleakness of this new and mad world he found himself waking up to. “Yes!”
And then she was in his arms, holding on to him as for dear life, as he wrapped her up as tightly as he dared, clinging to her, his one preserver in this ocean of grief, loss, fear, and uncertainty. He held onto her like a drowning man, the only thing holding him together, just as she quite thoroughly went to pieces. Steve had never known Peggy to do so before. She was one of the strongest women he had ever met, certainly one of the toughest and most composed, and yet right there she cried as she never had in the time he'd known her, sobbing loudly and uncontrollably, as if years of heartbreak and loss released in a single, explosive moment. And still, he held on to her, unable to believe that this was real, that this beautiful, amazing woman was here, wherever this was, whenever this was. How? Why?
It was some time before the storm passed, his fingers smoothing her silken hair as he murmured reassurances to her that he was alive, that it was him. All he gathered from her broken words was that it had been a long time for her, she had searched, and that it was all insane. Steve would have laughed if he weren't also crying himself, his throat burning with all of the emotions he'd grappled with since waking up in this place. Trust Peggy Carter of all people to have spent a lifetime looking for him only to find him in the end. He had no doubt she was stubborn enough to do anything if she set her mind to it.
“It’s all right,” he soothed, much as his own mother had done with him long ago, when he’d sobbed in her lap in just the same way. It was a lie, of course, he had no idea if anything was all right, but he just wanted to gain some control in all this craziness. It seemed to calm her, though, as the sobs died to small hiccups and snuffles, then she finally gained control of herself enough to pull away, her lovely face red and swollen with tears, mascara streaking it. She looked a mess, and she was still the most gorgeous thing Steve had ever seen. Tentatively, she reached a hand up to cup his cheek, staring wonderingly up at him with bloodshot eyes, sweeping a thumb across his cheek as his own tears spilled down, wiped away by her.
“Look at the pair of us,” she whispered, chuckling wetly. “What a mess we make!”
How she could find humor in this, he didn’t know, but he found himself laughing as he bent his head to touch hers, finding solace in the solid warmth of her. She was real and she was here! Peggy!
Regretfully, he slowly lowered her to the ground, holding her as she wavered and clung to him, just as uncertain in this moment as he was. “How?”
A giggle, bright and half hysterical, burbled out of her. “It’s utter madness, Steve, such utter madness.”
That was the only descriptive he could give to this day, frankly. “Any more than crashing an airplane and waking up in a new century?”
“Perhaps on par,” she muttered, letting go enough to finally begin to wipe away tears with the back of her hand, before finding disposable tissue to do a proper job. “I must look a sight!”
“You look beautiful,” he assured her, meaning it. “The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.”
It was true, even if she eyed him as if he were crazy. Right now he was. “You always were a charmer, Rogers,” she teased before blowing her nose. He snorted at that. She had absolutely not always thought that was the case, mocking him for not being able to talk to women. Still, he watched her as she pulled out a compact from a purse and despaired at the state of herself, her careful armor askew in the moment, and he couldn’t help but roll his eyes at her and her uncharacteristic show of vanity and vulnerability. God, how he adored her!
“Peggy, I’ve seen you after two weeks on patrol without a shower,” he reminded her, fondly.
She ignored him, as he could see the pieces of the composed, collected Agent Carter start to pull themselves back together, her shoulders straightening as they did. “You caused quite the stir today, Captain Rogers. Two SHIELD agents taken out like bowling pins!”
He winced, knowing he had to have caused some damage to them. “Are they all right?”
“Bumps and bruises, mostly, and a story to tell their comrades.” She moved to sink into the couch, as if she no longer could keep herself upright. “I can’t imagine you meant harm. After all, you had no idea what was even going on.”
“You can say that again,” he snorted, collapsing in a chair near her. “One minute I’m talking to you, then impact.”
She flinched visibly at that, staring at him, stricken. What she must have felt, sitting on the other end of that line, hearing it all go dead.
“I don’t remember much after that,” he admitted. “Everything is a blur. Images, I suppose, dreams. I saw you in there.”
“Perhaps it was after we found you,” she murmured. “I was in the lab a lot, everyday, actually.”
“Maybe,” he sighed, shaking his head, trying to piece together the fragments through the fog of decades of unconsciousness. “I came to in…I guess that was a hospital room? I didn’t know where I was, everything looked so strange and foreign. The first thought I had was HYDRA had captured me and I was in a bunker in Berlin. But then they had the Dodgers game playing and that threw me.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that it would,” she admitted, somewhat apologetically. “That was me, I thought...it would be something nice for you to hear while you were still recovering.”
She remembered. Despite all their fervent, and often heated, explanations on the game, Peggy never did understand baseball, had never cared for it. Yet she had remembered his undying love for his Brooklyn Dodgers. “It was great! It was just it was a game from May 1941.”
Her still damp, confused expression met his, perhaps wondering how in the hell he could remember a game from May of 1941, let alone recognize it on the radio. This had to be his Peggy, as only she could look so politely bewildered by the passion of a fan for their sport. He took pity on her, though, grinning sheepishly, “I was at the game, me and…”
Bucky.
He couldn’t say his name. It surprised him a bit he couldn’t, as the rushing numbness came back up to meet him, slamming into his guts and stealing his breath as he felt himself falling. Oh yeah, that part was still true. Bucky was dead. That had happened before it all, and no supersoldier serum was bringing him back.
Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone on Coney Island?
“Anyway,” he rasped, pushing past the awful ache spreading in his chest. “I figured out something was wrong and tried to confront the nurses. I might have scared several of them.”
“Everyone is fine, Steve, I checked before I came in here.” Despite her tear stained face, swollen and bloodshot, she seemed so..composed…in a way only Peggy only ever managed under fire. He had always joked that bombs could be falling down around them and the building on fire, and Peggy would be the one coolly leading them out as if it were a garden party. Hell, at the moment he felt like one of those Looney Tune figures, tap him in the right place and he’d crumble into dust.
“I didn’t have any idea what was going on,” he admitted, the horror of those minutes still flickering on the edges of everything. “I made for the exit and was already down the street and in Times Square before I stopped. It hit me as I rounded the corner that I knew this place; everything was in English, not German, the buildings were ones I remember. Well, at least some of them were.”
Not the tall towers of glass wreathed with clouds, so high above he could scarcely see the top. Those were new. “The signs…I mean I remember Times Square being loud and bright, but nothing like what’s out there now.”
Peggy sighed, sympathetic. “I know, it’s overwhelming. It was for me, too.”
So she had come into all of this as befuddled as he had been. Good to know!
“Anyway, that’s when Colonel Fury arrived and explained it.” More or less explained it, he hadn't said much beyond the fact that they didn't know, and suspected Erskine's formula had kept him alive. Even still, Steve wasn’t sure how any of this happened. Suspended animation? How in the hell did him being frozen like a side of beef for decades manage to keep him alive? Was the serum ever supposed to act like that? Had Peggy known?
“I got what he was saying,” he admitted, slowly, trying to work this out and flailing. “It made sense, but it was like some horrible nightmare, as if I had fallen asleep and woken up in a some strange, insane universe. And all I could think about was that date with you and how I had missed it.”
Peggy's composure threatened to crack again as her smile wobbled, eyes shining with tears she was clearly determined not to let fall. “You did, I’m afraid. The Stork Club isn’t even there anymore, it hasn’t been for decades.”
Of course it wasn’t. Time had gone on without him while he stayed the same. And now, he had to figure out how he moved forward into a new world.