Prologue - Rusted, Seventeen (Steve)
He didn’t like to think about that fateful day, but he’d be lying if the memory didn’t plague his thoughts constantly in the three years since he’d come out of the ice. Sometimes it came in pieces. A mission. A train slicing through the mountains. The phantom chill of the icy air caressing his neck. The click of a handgun fresh out of ammunition. An impossibly steep cliff, so tall he couldn’t make out the river below. Worst of all, the scream that he still felt in his core whenever his brain replayed it. The sound of the most crucial failure. Failure to save the one person who had saved him time and time again.
The pain had been unimaginable. It burrowed deep into his chest, establishing a permanent residence, an inky black coating that claimed his heart. He’d wished it had been him. Maybe that’s what he’d been thinking as he pointed the nose of the plane straight into the ocean. Maybe he’d hoped to get one more glimpse of those deep blue eyes, to be scolded one last time for doing something reckless, to be dragged out of an alley by his collar scowling and insisting that he “had him on the ropes.” Maybe he’d just been hoping for peace.
Either way, he’d been wrong. That much was clear the second he stepped into Times Square. After everything he’d witnessed in the war, suddenly waking up in the future, while shocking, was somehow believable. Hell, even the aliens and so-called gods somehow made sense. It was crazy, sure, but after the miracle that was the super soldier serum, it seemed like anything was in the realm of possibility.
Well, almost anything.
Because absolutely nothing could have prepared him for what happened on the highway a mere two years later.
Some part of him had recognized those eyes the moment he got a good look at them, but he hadn’t let himself believe it until the mask had come off. Even then, the rational part of his mind had its doubts. Until he spoke. The sound had radiated all the way into Steve’s bones and suddenly he was bedridden in Brooklyn again with that same voice urging him to please stay in bed and rest for one goddamn minute. When he came back to the present, Sam had knocked Bucky(?) to the ground and before he knew it, Steve found himself on his knees, awaiting an execution that didn’t come.
As the pieces fell into place and he poured over every scrap of information he could find in that file, something new grew to accompany the familiar black around his heart. A burning red anger. Together they forged a deadly invisible knife that buried itself in his chest. Time didn’t help. Even through all the days and nights spent searching, working himself to exhaustion more than a few times. Even through Sam convincing him to try a new approach by landing in Brooklyn and being patient to see if Bucky would find his way to them instead. The knife was just as sharp as it had been when it first pierced his chest. After their first month back in New York, he was starting to think that it might never disappear.
Until it did.