The Steve Peggy keeps with her
She talks to him for years, of course, and he's different from conversation to chat. Some days he's in his dress uniform, like he was in those early days wandering the SSR labs. Some days he's ragged and roughed up, grimy-cheeked, whether in his tricolor or his rumpled bomber jacket. But the days she guards most jealously (and questions herself for, in her honest moments) are the days he comes to her small, shorter than her, that pinched, unsmiling face that was used to too little and never hoped to fill out. Dr. Erskine's Steve. Sgt. Barnes' Steve. She might be the only one who has him left.
The Captain was smart, tough, kind, compassionate, unassuming. She watched him once take stock of his surroundings and knock out eight enemy combatants, simply by applying force and calculating angles with his shield. That's what one does with an art degree, she'd thought, which still made her smile.
But sometimes, when she needs to wrestle with the hardest questions, the messiness that one can't throw oneself into on a suicide mission, the delicate compromises that became more everyday, she feels him at her shoulder, all essence, all conviction. Nothing extraneous but what's right.
Could I look you in the eye after I've done this thing? she'll ask herself.
It was hopeless, sometimes, of course. He'd always love her. She'd seen it in all his faces.