Chapter 7
When Steve was ten, his mother had taken a posting at a general hospital in Brooklyn. It had been built to serve as a main medical facility for the city, which meant it never had money, and the nurses there worked long hours for lousy pay, which was well and good if you were a young woman barely out of school. But Sarah Rogers was a war widow with a sickly son to care for, and so she worked every shift she could get her hands on and work while still staying upright. He’d spent more nights bunking at Bucky’s house, sleeping on couch cushions tucked up on the floor, than in his tiny cot in the shabby flat he and his mother called home. In a fit of frustration and missing his mother, he’d confronted her once about it on a rare night when she was at home. She had smiled her sad, wan little smile, reaching over to tousle his mop of then golden hair.
“Because someone has got to save those people’s lives, love, and that’s my job. No matter how hard or bad it gets, I got to be the one standing there doing it.”
“But why you,” he lamented with all the frustration of a frail boy who just wanted his mother to be there.
Sarah had sighed, wrapped an arm around him, and pulled him to her side. “Because, there is no one else to do it, and I’m strong enough to.”
He didn’t understand then, not really. At the time, he’d thought his willowy mother was crazy, saying she was “strong.” Words like “purpose” and “duty,” the things that would become the bedrock of his upbringing, weren’t ones he understood fully. It took him years before he realized that his mother worked her long hours not simply to put a roof over his head or food on the table, but because she believed in the work she did, in helping people, in saving lives. She could have found better jobs, sure, ones that paid bigger salaries with fewer risks, but Sarah Rogers was never one to back down from a fight, not once. No matter how dangerous or hard the job was, she would do it to the best of her abilities, knowing that what she did made a difference.
This was why Steve found himself standing there, staring into a froth of clouds hanging suspended between a clear blue, sunny sky and the cool depths of the North Atlantic below. He tried not to shiver at the distant ripple of waves under his feet, a reminder of that long-ago flight that ended up with him losing decades of his life. He seemed to keep finding himself in this position, flying off to do something dangerous…all because someone had to be the one standing there, saving people’s lives. That was his job because someone had to do it.
He could do this, Steve told himself. He’d been handed worse, dealt with more impossible odds. Still, a small voice in the back of his head pointed out, rather rudely, that he’d gone into those odds with better-trained people. For all the Howling Commandos were a pack of misfits, they were seasoned in the field, had survived weeks in Schmidt’s work camp, and had marched by his side back to Azzano without complaint. He’d traipsed with them from France to Romania, and they had quickly formed a well-oiled machine, one Steve could rely on without question or doubt. This bunch was…not that.
The closest he had was the assassin and spy, Romanoff, who he figured would do well in a fight and follow his lead as needed, at least for this mission. But he’d figured out fairly quickly from things Peggy had said and hadn’t said she was one of Fury’s operatives more than anything, which admittedly left him nervous. For now, at least, he knew they were on the same side.
Then there was Banner and his other half, the raging beast that Erskine’s serum had unleashed in him, which at best appeared to be directable, but not precisely controllable. Steve mulled over ways of approaching that dangerous proposition and if they would even need it. It seemed Banner’s greatest asset was his intellect. His file indicated seven doctoral-level degrees in fields ranging from chemistry to physics, not including the medical degree he’d also somehow earned in the middle of all of that, which was a testament to the depth and breadth of his scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, if what Peggy told him was true, they weren’t precisely dealing with the sort of stuff you could recreate in a lab, even if Johann Schmidt had desperately tried to…and failed. Still, Banner likely had more of an idea of what the Tesseract actually was and perhaps how it worked, so it may give them more of an indication of Loki’s plan and what he was hoping to accomplish with it.
That left him with Stark. Sadly, it wasn’t the Stark he remembered. Howard had blown into Steve’s life along with Erskine’s serum, cocksure and arrogant, and from what Steve could tell the son wasn’t all that different in that respect. He had all of Howard’s genius and more, with a boundless creativity that had grown Howard’s small weapons and aviation company into something not even he could have imagined. Stark’s genius, while far more madcap than Banner’s, would be able to think outside of the box with the potential of pinpointing what it was Loki was up to, and working beside Banner the pair would be able to perhaps crack this all wide open…if Stark’s ego let up for half a moment to work with Banner, let alone the rest. Peggy had warned him that Tony made Howard look humble, which was saying something considering Howard often took credit for winning the war. As far as Steve could tell, Stark seemed to follow in Howard’s shoes, down to the gorgeous women dripping off his arms and the propensity for getting his name and face plastered all over the tabloids, often for less than flattering reasons.
This was the team Fury and Peggy had gotten him…he supposed they could have been so much worse, and he was grateful for what he got, but still, he missed having Bucky there by his side, covering his six and reassuring him that while they may be idiots, they were there idiots, and it wasn’t as if their leader was sane in the first place.
God damn, but he missed Bucky…
“I know this has to be overwhelming.” His reverie broken, Steve turned to the speaker, Phil Coulson, Director Fury’s top agent. Coulson was the type that seemed to scream “agent,” mild-mannered, direct, just bland enough not to catch anyone’s eye, stern enough to prove he was no nonsense.
Steve didn’t even bother trying to lie about it. “It’s a lot.”
“Yeah,” the other man chuffed, wandering from the bay where he’d been working at some sort of screen, looking at photographs of random people, searching for this mad god they were looking for. “I promise you that it's not every day we get the threat of an alien invasion on our planet.”
Coulson meant it as a joke, but it only pulled up a crooked half-smile out of Steve. “It’s alright. I suppose I just barely left one war where impossible, mind-bending things were happening every day only to find myself in this. It’s not as big of a shock as you would think.”
He was even in an impossibly large aircraft flying over the North Atlantic. Just like old times.
Coulson perhaps saw the ironic humor in it, snorting as he sketched a dry smile. “I don’t know which is worse, Loki or the Red Skull.”
He could sense Coulson was fishing for a story of the old days. Peggy had mentioned he was a Captain America fan with a historical bent. “Despite his face, Johann Schmidt was a human, just with the strength and stamina of a super soldier. He didn’t have…space magic or command an alien army.”
“He was trying to get his hands on space magic, though.” Coulson cocked an arch, sidelong look at him. “The Tesseract, that’s no gemstone there, that’s a matrix containing a power source only a few entities in this universe could ever understand, and he was using it to make weapons of mass destruction. Wonder what that says about us humans if the first thing we do with a magic space box is to haul it into a lab and make tools of murder and domination out of it.”
“Not all of us,” Steve pointed out, feeling the need to stand up for the majority of the human race who didn’t turn to violence as a means of getting their way. “And he wasn’t the only one at the time. Hitler was doing the same thing, only he didn’t bother with the magic space box.”
“Fair,” Coulson acceded, a delighted sparkle gleaming despite his acquiescing nod. “Thanks for reminding me not to be so cynical about the entire race.”
“I get that it’s hard not to be that way, I don’t know, just…I’ve seen a lot of hard things in this world, and I’ve seen a lot of good things, too. Growing up, it wasn’t easy in our neighborhood, but people had each other. Sure, there were always the bad apples, but then there were decent folk too, people who’d give you the shirt off their back, even if it was the only one they owned. It’s hard to think the entire human race is awful when you see things like that.”
Coulson studied him quietly. “You know, Director Carter said the one thing she always admired about you was your compassion. It wasn’t something I immediately connected with you, at least not from all the old stories I grew up with, but I can see what she means.”
“Peggy said that?” He didn’t know why it shocked him that she did. He supposed it had never come up between them, not really. After all, they’d had so little time before the end, and then after…well, he’d been flailing around, figuring this all out, drowning in a sea of doubts and confusion, watching Peggy take on this world as if she had been born into it and wondering how she did it.
“Yeah,” Coulson returned, leaning against the same railing Steve did. “She talked about you a lot while we were looking for you, you know.” Here he flushed, studying the grated floor at his feet. “Errr…perhaps I talked about you a lot, and she indulged me in it. She was always willing. I got a sense that it…helped a bit, for her, being able to talk to you.”
“Helped?”
“You know, have someone to talk to about you. I don’t know, not sure how much she processed your loss after it happened. The war ended, she came to the US and threw herself into SHIELD, and that’s where she was till she stepped forward in time and showed up, looking for you. I figured it helped on the hard days to talk about you, or someone else she knew in the past who she lost when she left.”
He winced, mulling over Coulson’s words, the fact she came forward, looking for him. A small ember of something awoke in him, a small flame of…dare he say, hope…burning in the mulled and misty confusion of his existence since waking up a month ago to find his entire world upside down. It was warm and familiar, a memory of a long-ago time - of watching her run laps around the track at Camp Lehigh, an activity he knew she hated, but did to prove she could keep up, of her shining eyes, sparkling in the wet and cold of northern Italy, fervent in her belief that he could do what Colonel Philips would not, of her broken voice, thick with tears, begging him to meet her for a dance, of Peggy in that red dress in a smokey pub, a slash of fire in a dull, drab, wartorn world, drawing him like a moth to a flame.
The rest of Coulson’s statement hit quite soon after that, however, with the fact that despite how easy she made it, none of this had come easy for Peggy. Even before he knew her, she had been forced to make her way as a woman in a man’s world, to be more polished and put together than anyone else, to be smarter, tougher, more capable than any man just to be taken seriously. He knew that well enough, as Steve had faced discrimination in his way all of his life too. Peggy was one of those rare breed who faced such adversity with determination and grit, however, an approach she took with everything in her life. And it was small wonder that the former spy would take to learning the ways of the natives as fast as she could, and in such a way she could thrive. It was her strength. Of course, she had adapted quickly to this world, it was how she had survived and thrived for so long.
Steve wished he had a fraction of that talent. It had always been the joke between him, how bad he was at it, but there was truth in it. He had only ever simply been himself, through thick and thin, whether he was small and skinny or tall and athletic. It was the last admonition his mother had given him before she died, that Erskine had told him over schnapps in his barrack bunk the night before everything changed…never forget who you are. And Steve hadn’t. Could he still be the little guy who stood up for those who needed him, even in a world where all the rules and values had changed, and alien gods felt the need to invade for the fun of it?
His mother’s words hit him once again…because someone had to save all those lives, and he was strong enough to. That part of Steve would never change.
Into his reverie, Coulson’s mild chatter finally broke. “So, I have these trading cards of you! Been collecting them since I was a kid.”
Despite himself, Steve allowed a faint smile. He supposed some things never changed.