Chapter 3
He should have died.
It was the singular thought that rambled through Steve’s brain again and again the following weeks. For all that he was alive - breathing, walking, eating - he should be dead. Those final moments, with Schmidt’s flying fortress screaming down into the ever-expanding field of white ice, he had come to accept his death, come to be at peace with his choice. He held on to Peggy’s voice as he mourned all the things that could have been, the moments with her he was going to lose doing this, knowing that out of it people he loved were going to get to live and go on and have those moments. He had been okay with that.
Now…well, now he wasn’t sure what he thought or felt. It was a bit like he imagined Rip van Winkle felt, waking up from a nap to find that everything had changed and not knowing what you were supposed to do now. It was worse than coming back from a war to see the world had changed around you. He came back from a war and found that the world had moved on past him, had changed in ways that he was struggling to wrap his head around, and finding that he lacked the context to. He floated around the city, lost and untethered, disconnected from this strange world that moved so fast, changed so quickly, that felt so cut off from him and each other.
But he had Peggy at least. He always had her. As strange and crazy as it seemed, she was there, all determined calm and compassionate understanding. Of anyone in this world, she was the one who got it, having jumped in time herself, and forced to build a new life in a world that had shifted under her feet. Still, she was Peggy, and he had never known her to not meet any challenge thrown at her with resolve and adaptability. It was those aspects which had made her a good spy in the war, always able to find ways to slip into the surroundings, to make herself so comfortable in foreign places that people assumed she was part of it all, even took her for granted. It had made her good at ferreting out what was going on around her, and she used those same skills to adapt to this world. Bodiless voices running her apartment, machines that had access to more information than he could possibly ever read, little wireless phones that doubled as cameras, these she all took to with aplomb because she had to. Peggy knew how to survive.
Steve felt himself fumbling in all of it.
“Come on,” she nudged him one day, holding out a coat to him. “We’re going out.”
He blinked at her, doing as she asked, curious. “To where?”
“Home,” she said, simply, and he knew what she meant by that.
Brooklyn…
They took the subway, which blessedly hadn’t changed all that much from his day, making the trip across the East River back to the city where he had grown up. Even from the Manhattan side, he could see how much everything had changed, but it ached to see it from the scuffed and cloudy windows of the traincar. There along the shore north of the bridge, where warehouses had once stood, now tall buildings of glass, like those on the other side of town, rose to lord over the gray waters, shimmering in the winter light. Everything that had been there once was gone.
“It looks so different.” It was obvious, yes, but somehow he felt he needed to speak it, to own that truth. His home wasn’t the same anymore.
“You know I’m still sorry about your Dodgers leaving town,” Peggy murmured, soft and sympathetic beside him. She’d told him that last week, almost as soon as she was certain he was okay enough after waking from a decades long coma. She’d broken it gently, as if it were one of the guys who passed. They’d moved to Los Angeles, of all places, and had been there for decades. They were flourishing there as a team in a way they never quite managed in Brooklyn, and while it broke his heart to see that one golden thread of his childhood ripped away and put somewhere else, at least they still existed and were still doing well.
He couldn’t say that for every piece of his childhood.
They got off the rattling train at a stop he thought was close to where his old house once was. He breathed in the air, looking around at the city he once had known like he knew himself. Quietly, cool slim fingers laced into his own. He looked down at Peggy’s smiling face, her look of quiet reassurance. She had done this once before. If she could face it, he could.
“Where to, Captain?” She surveyed the bustling brick buildings much as she had any of the number of small towns they had navigated on their search for Schmidt’s hidden HYDRA factories long ago.
Steve paused, getting his bearings. “That way, that was where the main business area was.”
“Then let’s take a look!”
He held on to her hand, trying to remember not to squeeze so tight for fear of breaking something. Steve’s heart hammered in his ears as they wandered to the crosswalk, waiting for the pause in traffic that would allow them to cross. Home!
And yet…
He recognized the buildings, the squat red brick buildings that he thought of every time someone brought up Brooklyn. What was in them had changed, however, with different signs smoothed onto the windows for products that he had never heard of before: iPhones, Playstations, organic fruit smoothies. The market was now a restaurant, serving coffee at a price that made Steve choke.
“Wait till I take you to Starbucks,” Peggy had laughed, nodding to a place across the street with a round green and white sign. “I nearly fainted at the price. You’ll be shocked at what passes for coffee now-at-days.”
Steve didn’t tell her he felt that way about most things he found in this new world. He guessed she probably already knew that, as he imagined she felt the same way. He clung to her fingers tighter, a silent acknowledgement, as his eyes roved over neon signs and hand painted images in the windows. “I imagine it was twice as bad for you. First you moved to America, then you jumped through time. It’s a lot to get used to.”
“Hmmm,” her mouth thinned as she nodded, shrugging. “It was, I suppose. When I first moved here during the war it was all so strange. Britain had been in a war for a year, and here in America it was as if nothing was going on. Only the Army seemed to know that war was inevitable. Meanwhile, Howard was putting on expos and no one believed it could happen to them.”
It wasn’t an inaccurate statement. Sure, Bucky had always suspected that America could get sucked in, and Steve had agreed, but no one wanted to think about it or even admit it, at least not until Pearl Harbor happened. “I guess we hoped we wouldn’t have to. We still remembered the last war, still had lost people in it, and didn’t want to get caught up in yet another European war.”
“I get that,” she admitted, softly. “After all, we all lost in the Great War. My uncle, your father, so many. I think that was the biggest reason Howard and I pushed for SHIELD so hard, we were a generation of children who grew up in the shadow of two wars. We didn’t want our children to have to do the same. Pity that it didn’t work out like that.”
Steve had read up on the Cold War, with JARVIS’ help of course, and known of some of the atrocities and conflicts that rose because of it. “You tried! Better than letting things go to hell in a handbasket, which was how we got into the second war. Who knows, you may be able to figure out how to bring world peace yet!”
Peggy turned her bright, dark eyes up at him, hopeful. “You think so?”
“Why not? This time wasn’t perfect, but who knows, now in this new future maybe something will be different.”
God, he could get lost in those eyes. Peggy was never one of those fawning females, the type who had thrown themselves at Bucky hoping to spend a night dancing - in either the literal or figurative sense - that they would be the lucky one he’d swing off into the night. No, she was always just herself; direct, uncompromising, forthright, and always so earnest. Peggy had always wanted to be a hero, to change the world, to do something good. It was why he loved her, because he wanted to do those things too. And right now, she eyed him as if he hung the moon. If he leaned in a little, stooped just enough to brush his lips to hers…
“Where did you live?” The words tumbled out of her, breaking the moment with a gust of icy wind that swirled around them.
Steve caught himself, pulling back and nodding, waving down the street where the old drug store used to be. “Down that way, past the alley there.”
“Another alley? You seemed to know all of those in Brooklyn!” Her expression changed to mild amusement as she dragged him past. “Another one where you got your face punched in?”
“Yep,” he smiled, faintly. It didn’t look so different, if he admitted it to himself, the space behind what had been Allan’s Drug Store, even eighty-five years on. “That’s the place where I first met Bucky, years and years ago.”
That piqued the ever inquisitive Peggy’s interest. “I don’t know if I heard that story.”
She had, but he suspected she wanted to hear it again, a way of pulling up good memories rather than the haunted ones he’d been enveloped by since waking up. “So there was this neighborhood bully, Cuddy Neill, just a beast of a kid. He liked picking on the small kids, so of course I was a prime target. One day he corners me going to the drug store and tries to get my dollar in coins. I refused to cooperate.”
“That is not shocking,” she teased, grinning.
Steve found he couldn’t help but smile at her, blushing at the truth of it. “Yeah, well, I suppose some things about me don’t change. Anyway, he beat the hell out of me, but before he can deliver the crushing blow, flying in from nowhere is this blur of arms and fists wailing on Cuddy. Kid is half of Cuddy’s size, but it doesn’t matter, he’s so fast and quick he takes him down and sends him and his crony packing. Then he turns around and introduces himself to me as Bucky, and then asks me if I wanted to see his baseball cards. The rest was history.”
Certainly, if he were here, Bucky would tell it differently, maybe highlight Steve’s smart mouth or the fact that Mrs. Barnes had nearly fainted when she looked at the mess that was poor Steve’s face and had adopted him as one of her own then and there. In the end, it was all superfluous. He had met his best friend that day, the only brother he’d ever had. It was so strange to think that he was gone. From the time he was nine-years-old, Bucky had been his shadow, his protector, his right hand man, always there beside Steve in a fight. He didn’t know if he could go into battle without him.
“Anyway, my house was down this way.” He continued walking, past the stinging memories of everything he had lost. Past that block, of course, everything changed. The old brick buildings gave way to more modern construction in concrete. When they arrived at what had once been a ramshackle block of flimsy homes of wood and gray siding once upon a time, it now was covered over by a medical office building with dark glass walls set in grim looking concrete. It was a slight improvement over what had been there before…only a slight one.
“It’s all gone,” Peggy breathed, sadly, eyeing their reflections in the windows. “Oh, Steve, I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” He wasn’t, either. Certainly, he’d had some good memories in that place with his mother, but he had left it long before, after his mother had died, her lungs failing as she faded before his eyes. “It’s okay. After Mom died, I left anyway. I moved in with Buck. We had a couple of different bachelor pads over the years. None of them were much, but they were home.”
He wasn’t sure how he felt about his old home being covered over by doctors offices. Somehow it was ironic and fitting, he supposed. His mother practically lived in hospitals far more than she lived in the shabby apartment she rented to live in, and he had spent nearly half of his childhood in a hospital bed. There was a certain symmetry to it, he supposed.
They continued to wander through the memories of his childhood - Goldie’s gym where he and Bucky had worked, the old boxer’s name, now faded, still curling proudly over the door. They’d stopped inside, the place still smelling of sweat, leather, and chalk, but oh so achingly familiar. It was now owned by his great-grandson, a young man who looked much as Goldie had when he’d been in his boxing prime, and who seemed elated that Steve seemed to know who Goldie Goldstein was. He eagerly asked Steve to come by anytime to work out.
“So will you?” Peggy was curious as she stepped out, eyeing the fading block with some doubtful asperity. “The SHIELD offices have something too, you know, very state of the art. I use it every morning.”
Steve ignored the images of Peggy running on that long ago path at Camp Lehigh, all by herself in the evening twilight, and the feelings it evoked. He cleared his throat, shifting. “I mean, sure, but I grew up in this place. It’s familiar to me.”
Peggy granted him that without a word, taking his hand again and tugging him along. “Where to next?”
In the distance, Steve could see the spire, the same one that had called all of his neighborhood to worship - the Catholic ones, at least - long, long ago. He hadn’t been back there in…well, longer than he liked admitting. It had once been the heart of his little community, the focal point of births, deaths, christenings, confirmations, weddings. He’d been an altar boy in this church, conned into it by Mrs. Barnes. After his mother died…well, he went less and less until it petered out of his life, except on Easter and Christmas, when Bucky’s mother insisted. He hadn’t been since Christmas before Bucky got called up, a whole lifetime ago.
“Do you want me to go in with you?”
They stood at the bottom of the granite steps leading up to the familiar front doors, as Steve stood rooted to the spot, his brain transposing this time with the past. The early 20th century and the early 21st mingled into a flood of half-remembered moments from Sundays past, in hand-me-down suits that were too large, with shoes so big he had to stuff paper in them to keep them on his feet. He remembered Father Longergan’s benign smile overseeing them all, the head deacon’s disapproving glare as bored children ran up and down the aisles after services, the smell of beeswax and incense, Sister Margaret’s disappointment when they didn’t pay attention in catechism class.
“Yeah, if you want,” he finally returned with a tight smile. “If it doesn’t make you feel weird.”
“I doubt I will be struck by lightning stepping in the door,” she kidded, though eyed the heavy oak panels dubiously. “I mean, I have every respect for faith, but you never know.”
“Weren’t you kicked out of church once for singing bawdy songs?”
She looked delighted that he remembered. “That was Michael’s fault.”
“Ahh, yes, blame it on your brother.”
“That was what he was there for,” she returned, trailing beside him up the front. “I can stay in the back if you like. Don’t worry, I can fake Catholic enough to not offend anyone.”
She smiled sweetly at his chuffed laugh before urging him on. He entered the sacred space, genuflecting on instinct, down on one knee, crossing himself quickly before the crucifix at the far end, still the one he remembered from the many hurried bobs from his childhood. Even now, decades later, he could still sense the quiet awe and reverence in the air, the hushed holiness of the place. As he rose, he could spy in the distance older women kneeling here and there in the pews, rosaries in hand, muttering the ancient prayers he had learned under the sharp-eyed watch of nuns so long ago.
The confession was open. He considered it. It had been since before the war since he’d been, and that only on Bucky’s mother’s insistence. Somehow, after the death of his mother, the whole church thing hadn’t seemed as important anymore. She had been the one who had hustled him to services every Sunday of his life with either her or the Barnes’ clan, and when she was no longer there to chide him into it, there didn’t seem to be much of a point. Now…well, anything he could find that was familiar in a maelstrom of change, he would take.
Steve slid into the confessional space, now grown small with his now larger body. It caught him on just how long it had been as he settled, shutting the door. The familiar click of the small window between the spaces sounded, the priest opening the way for him to speak his truths, to find absolution and guidance.
How did one begin in this sort of scenario.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he muttered, the familiar litany, the words tumbling out as familiar as the cramped space and the scent of incense that permeated the same wood. It settled on him in comfort, a reminder not everything had changed. “It’s been…so many decades since I last confessed.”
How in the world could he begin to explain that?
The priest on the other side was not Father Lonergan, the old Irish priest who had ministered to his neighborhood since his own parents had been little more than children. Still, the warmth and compassion in his voice was the same, an echo of the man he had grown up with as his spiritual advisor. “You are here now, my son. I am listening.”
Steve nodded, despite the fact the priest couldn’t see him, blowing out a long breath as he tried to find a point to begin. “I…I serve…served in the military, father. I fought in battle. I was a soldier, I did what soldiers do; fought, killed, watched good men die. I watched…”
He trailed off, his mouth going dry, Bucky’s scream reverberating in the stillness of the confession.
“My best friend since I was a kid, my…brother. He died trying to save me. I wasn’t paying attention, the enemy got the drop, I tried to take it, but they knocked me flat. He tried to defend me, because…well, because that’s what he always did, even as a kid here in the neighborhood. But he got killed for it. I tried to reach him, but I couldn’t. He slipped right out of my fingers.”
The priest was silent, allowing Steve the room to speak, but he imagined him nodding with grave compassion. It was what Father Lonergan would have done. Steve sat for a long moment, pulling himself together, trying to find words for what he even felt. “Not long after, my unit found the whereabouts of the man we had been tracking for months. We planned a successful operation, only…he’d planned a step ahead. He had put into motion something that would kill a lot of people, most of the east coast. So, I tried to stop it. I knew it was a one-way trip, likely a suicide mission, but I did it, and I accepted that. I was ready to die if I had to, all of us were.”
Steve fell silent, staring at the front of the small space, words failing, turning to dust in his mouth.
“You were ready to die,” the priest murmured, gentle and understanding, “but you didn’t, did you? And that is the problem.”
“Yes” he whispered, his hands gripping his knees painfully. “I know it sounds horrible, Father. It’s a sin to want to take our life, and it isn’t that exactly, but I thought for sure I was going to go. And truth be told, I’m glad I didn’t, if I’m honest with myself, but…I wasn’t okay for a long, long time. And by the time I woke up, everything changed. Most my guys, my men, they aren’t even here anymore. It’s just me. I’m the one surviving, by myself, in a world that’s moved on without me.”
He wasn’t totally by himself. Peggy waited outside, patient and understanding, like she always was.
“I should mention at least I have my girl still.” He flushed, hotly, the idea of admitting he even had a girl to a priest sounding scandalous. “I mean, if she will have me, I hope she will be my girl. She’s been through a lot too in all of this, has lost everything. But I don’t know, she’s managing this all so much better than I am. Me, I’m still just grasping how to function day-to-day, and she seems so…settled. She has it figured out. I don’t know if I can keep up with that at the moment, and I want to.”
He wanted to feel something, anything, other than this awful sense of disconnection from everything and everyone around him. He was alive when he should have been dead. He had Peggy with him, a second chance with the woman of his dreams. He should be taking this instead of being so…stuck.
“You’ve been through so much, my son,” the priest soothed, bringing Steve back to himself. “In service to others you have given much of yourself, and that takes something from a person. Trauma does not work in simple ways, nor does grief. One person’s response to it is not the same as another’s, and there are no time tables or scales of measure by which to judge these things.”
He sounded so wise in the moment, his words a balm. It was the sort of thing his mother would say if she were still alive. “You know, Father, I spent a lifetime with the outlook that bad things happen. We just have to pick ourselves up and keep moving forward, because what else can we do? But I have to tell you, I’m just so…tired. It seems like my whole life I’ve done that, and for once I would like to just not have to keep picking myself up and standing up against the entire world.”
The tears that skimmed his eyes surprised him, felt foolish even.
“We all feel that way. It is human to feel like this in these ties. God’s grace is large enough and deep enough to hold us even in those moments we can’t hold ourselves up. Have grace on yourself as well. You don’t have to be perfect or whole all the time, especially not now.”
Steve discretely rubbed his eyes. “My ma made it so look so easy back in the day.”
“I would wager that she had these moments as well, when she doubted, when it hurt so much she felt she couldn’t keep doing it.”
He wasn’t wrong. Steve recalled vague snippets of memory, of the sound of his mother’s tears as she sat in the other room, alone, unaware he could hear her heartbroken sobs in the dark hours of the night. She had been a young war widow trying to manage raising her sickly boy in a world where the gulf between the haves and have-nots kept growing wider and drowning the likes of her. “Yeah, I’m sure she did.”
The priest was silent for a long moment, exhaling in a thoughtful sigh before finally speaking. “Are you a member of this parish, son?”
Steve swallowed the snort that rose. “I was, once. It was a long time ago.”
“If you would like, you could always come by the office one day. We have resources for men and women like you who have served our country, ways to help, if you would like.”
What that meant, Steve wasn’t sure. “Thanks, for now I’m managing, but I will keep it in mind.”
Besides, how could he explain to anyone the war he fought in was decades ago?
“It’s there if you ever need. Please don’t feel you are alone in this.”
There was such gentle concern, Steve wanted to assure him that he wasn’t planning something dire or drastic. Instead, he kept it simple. “Thank you.”
It was certainly not the sort of confession he would have given as a boy here. Those had usually been filled with his petty worries over being the smallest and most picked on, his childish rage over the injustices committed by the bullies of the neighborhood, or the many scrapes he and Bucky had gotten into. But it still was something he felt he needed to lay open before God, and something lightened, if just a little bit, speaking it out loud to a priest, even anonymously.
“This is all I can remember,” he murmured the formula automatically. “I am sorry for these and all my sins.”
It was a long moment before the other man spoke. “As penance, I ask you to show mercy to yourself. Give yourself the space to heal and remember you are loved and you have purpose. You will find that purpose again. You are alive, and there is more good work you can do, believe that.”
Steve nodded on the other side of the privacy screen. He had to believe that, else how could he keep going through every day?
After the prayers and absolution, he slipped out, feeling…better? Perhaps less constricted was a better description. The horrible, aching numbness of it all had receded somewhat as he stepped out, breathing in the beeswax and smoke. It wasn’t all better, but it was…something. A step forward, maybe? He needed to show himself grace in this, allow himself to feel and stumble, assured in the idea it would be okay.
Looking to the last pew where Peggy sat, respectful and waiting, her face brightening the minute she saw him, made him believe it could be okay. After all, he could have waken up to a world without her in it, and that…he didn’t even want to consider how much darker and colder this situation would have been had that been the case. Whatever lay ahead for them, he at least had her as a touchstone in what felt like a storm of uncertainty.
“Feel better?”
He cocked his head, thoughtfully. “A step towards better.”
She nodded, asking for no elaboration. “This is your neighborhood, then. Where to, next?”
Steve considered, a mental map of the Brooklyn he had once known unfurling in his mind. “We could go see where Bucky and I went to high school. You’d love it, it’s old and gothic looking, just like most of England.”
“As a product of British public school education, I approve of this,” she teased, looping her arm around his, gently guiding him out the door and into the cool, gray world outside and everything in it. “I want to see more of you, Captain Rogers, and all the things that made you who you are.”
“Well, if we have time, maybe we can see what’s left of the beaches. I can tell you about how Bucky and I came to blows over a ditzy dame named Dolores when he spent all our fare money on trying to impress her.”
“That sounds like Barnes,” she laughed, dragging him into the dim sunlight.