Chapter Text
They tell him he was a soldier, a leader—a hero.
He doesn’t know if he believes them, but they give him food and shelter, and something instinctive in his gut tells him this is the kind of luxury he should take advantage of while he can. He has a feeling he hasn’t always had this easily handed to him for most of his life.
Their file says his name is Steven. Steven Rogers. Steven Grant Rogers.
Steve sounds okay. Fits like a glove.
◆
They bring him in for some kind of meeting. He’s not sure what about, but it looks serious enough.
He—Steve, he has to remind himself; his name is Steve—decides he’ll take the opportunity to thank these people and be on his way. It’s been long enough that he inconveniences them and wastes their resources. Surely, someone else can use the stale, modern apartment he’s been sleeping in. It’s much too big for him anyway, though he’s been told it’s average-sized for a single man living on his own.
They take him to a room with a few other people. Two men somewhat older than him, a woman with disheveled curling red hair, and the man he’s met a few times since his rescue. Nate or Ned or Nick. Yeah, he’s pretty sure it’s Nick.
Look, Steve might only have memories stretching two weeks back when he woke up in a strange room with an even stranger-looking nurse, but he’s had a lot to take in lately—this guy’s name unfortunately ranks below the exact way he has to jiggle the kitchen window to get it to open, and the nearest bodega that sells those nougat caramel candy bars he’s discovered he really likes.
The other people in the room ogle Steve like he’s a statue come to life, and he offers an awkward smile in return. He supposes they’re allowed—apparently, Steven Grant Rogers features in a few history books. Must be weird to see a dead guy up and about.
After a while, though, the staring makes his skin crawl and he averts his eyes.
“Look at that, Cap in the flesh!” the goateed man speaks up and comes close to clap him on the back, flashing a bright, cocky grin. “Heard about the little side effect,” he taps at his own temple. “Bummer. You and my bastard of an old man were friends.”
Right; his old man, because Steve’s technically 94 years old.
Steve tries not to squirm away from how loud the sheer presence of this man is. He doesn’t know if this is one of those things where something inexplicably overwhelms him out of nowhere or if Goatee Man has this effect on everyone.
“Tony,” the other stranger in the room sighs—a tired, bespectacled guy with curls. “Focus. You can pick his brain later. For now, we need all hands on deck.”
Apparently, there’s some kind of national-level emergency. Aliens—which the woman who introduces herself as Natasha Romanoff promises him is a new thing and not something he lost along with his memories—are coming. There’s some god or other threatening world domination, and the whole thing sounds so ludicrous Steve wants to laugh. He feels like it’s all straight out of a sci-fi pulp, though of course, it’s not like he can remember ever reading any.
The instincts and thoughts bubbling up to the surface, presumably coming from memories he has no recollection of, haven’t stopped feeling bizarre. It’s like missing a step on a staircase; it always catches him off guard.
Regardless of the fact that Steve has no fucking clue how he could possibly help, they shuffle him towards some kind of armory and tell him to suit up. The room is huge, almost like a bunker, low ceilings and concrete walls. Shivers run down his spine, and he has no idea why. Steve can take a guess, given the history he’s read up on himself, but that’s all it would be—a guess.
One side is covered in tools, weapons, and other tech, and across the room are shelves of gear all in black. The place isn’t as organized as it could be, but there are more pressing matters at hand. Namely, the flying aliens.
So Steve moves his butt and winds around the stacks of crates in the middle, barely glancing at the junk laid on top. He catches sight of boxes of files, heaps of ammo, and some discarded clothes under a cymbal. Steve makes a beeline for the gear at the end of the wall, pretty much flying in blind in regards to his size.
Steve’s learned that he’s really bad at guessing what kind of clothes will fit him. This would be the perfect time for that one skill to magically come back to him—if he ever had it at all.
Twenty minutes later and he’s meeting the rest of the team—the same group as in the meeting—in front of a weird-looking plane. He’s almost certain this isn’t what planes are supposed to look like, but then again, his frame of reference is more like feeling his way through the dark. It’s a lot disorienting, he has to admit.
As soon as Steve arrives, everyone stares like he’s lost his mind. Oh fuck, what did he do now? He peeks at his reinforced suit, wondering if he put his pants on backwards or something.
“Cap,” Natasha finally opens her mouth, sounding bewildered. “Why didn’t you put on the uniform? Coulson killed himself getting you that.”
Steve frowns and looks down at his chest. “Uniform?” There’s some kind of logo in white on his chest, probably an eagle. Very American, he hears himself think, the voice in his head inexplicably feminine and harshly accented. Who is he thinking of, he wonders, an old burst of pain flaring behind his ribs.
“At least get your shield,” Natasha reprimands him, and Steve’s honestly too scared to ask what shield? lest she gives him the stink eye again. “Useless,” she huffs and stalks away. Steve stands there blinking in silence for a short while before Natasha comes back with the unusual cymbal he’d seen earlier.
Oh, that’s his shield.
Steve grabs it, plastering on a grateful smile that Natasha barely acknowledges, already leading the group into the plane. The shield is both smaller than he’d think would be efficient and more wieldy than it looks. Steve messes with it for a while, clasping it on and off, flipping it over his forearm a few times, practicing hitting invisible aliens with its edge.
Damn, that can take someone’s head off.
He realizes the entirety of the plane is watching him when he’s in the middle of trying to figure out how to use the shield in one hand and a gun in the other. Steve clears his throat and tucks the shield on his back, using the handy harness Bespectacled Bruce shows him is over by his seat. “You need help with that?”
Steve shakes his head, getting a handle on things himself easily enough. “Thanks, though.”
“Sure.” Bruce nods, then walks away to a corner by himself. Steve knows what his role is in this and wonders if he was ever given a choice in participating. Looking at Bespectacled Bruce hunched over on his own, seemingly psyching himself up for battle, Steve’s got a pretty good guess.
The shield becomes more familiar with every second that he has it, the weight on his back leaden but far from foreign. Must be muscle memory. Steve doesn’t realize how well his body remembers the weapon, though, until he’s a few hours into battle.
He remembers that it’s what the history books say he carried with him in World War II, supposedly. There’s been too much and not enough out there for him to read, every piece of writing he can get his hands on setting off an unpleasant prickling underneath his skin.
They’re all simultaneously too close to the truth, his mind instinctually knows—the clacking of shrapnel against steel helmets, yells of orders ringing through and pumping his blood, and thundering gunfire reverberating endlessly until his teeth ache—and unsettlingly wrong.
He doesn’t know if this battle is anything like what he used to encounter, but he has flashes of screams of pain, and even a whimpering that he knows means the soldier within reach is in worse torment than the faint whine suggests. Steve blocks it all out and slices through another alien.
The shield is thick and heavy but aerodynamically sound. He crushes countless aliens to bits with it and smears a considerable amount of goop across the faded surface.
“Cap, the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Tony yells at him, voice tinny through his speakers. Steve looks up and around him, at the rest of the flying robots and tries his best to express what the fuck do you think? with the set of his brows. He can’t even tell if Tony can see him clearly from that far away. “Use the goddamn shield!” he shouts, and Steve growls as he slams that very thing into another incoming attack.
“I am!” Steve yells, voice ragged and torn. It’s been hours now. Surely, this will end soon, won’t it?
Tony lands on the other side of the street and aims a blast at another horde. “Throw it like a frisbee!” Steve doesn’t get to ask what in the world a fritzbie is before Hulk feels the need to chime in with a roar of, “Throoow!”
If the giant green guy’s yelling for you to do something, you better fucking do it.
Steve pelts the shield at a flying scooter, and the thing knocks out the alien on board, turns the scooter into a fiery ruin, and bounces back his way. Steve laughs, loud and joyful, as he catches the shield with an awkward fumble. “Holy fuck, did you see that?!”
He doesn’t get to bask in throwing around a flying disc, though, because the battle ratchets up in the blink of an eye. It’s three whole hours later before all the aliens have powered down, another alien—not evil, reportedly—comes in with his magic hammer swinging to help out, and a nuke headed straight for New York gets itself sent to outer space.
Steve collapses on a detached car door and tries to regain feeling in his limbs. Jesus fucking christ, the hell did he get himself into? He’s tempted to put the blame for all this madness on Past Steve, the guy who got him into this mess.
Fuck that guy.
◆
The next couple weeks are quiet, no aliens, no battles, and no—well, not much of anything really. Steve starts figuring out what he’s going to do, what he needs. A place to live, a job, and maybe a thank you card to give Nick for the free housing the past month. The place is probably not Nick’s, though. His employer? Steve’s gotta figure out who to send that thank you card to.
He gets the chance to ask when they get him to come to yet another meeting. He hopes there aren’t more aliens.
By the end of it, however, the last thing he wants to do is painstakingly write a thanks for the assist love letter to Nick fucking Fury. Steve finds himself in a stuffy conference room, opposite the man who rescued him and being offered a job—or something resembling employment, as far as he can tell.
It’s the same one he supposedly had when he died, an operative going by the moniker Captain America. How he can be captain of a whole fucking country, no one’s bothered to tell him. Even with practically zero memories, he thinks he knows enough to realize that’s not a thing. According to his research, the team he led in WWII wasn’t even entirely made up of American soldiers.
He’s got no fucking clue why everyone’s still walking around calling him by a name made up to sell war bonds.
“The Avengers Initiative,” Nick concludes with a flourish, the projection behind him showing a picture of the team he’d fought with, even the cape-donning alien, in the middle of a rubble-strewn Midtown. Who even took the time to take that picture? They were fighting for their goddamn lives out there.
Steve has to keep from furrowing his eyebrows in distaste; he doesn’t want to be rude. What if the guy spent all night coming up with that name?
“The—Avengers Initiative.” Steve shifts in his seat.
Nick waves a hand in the air, and the projection shuts off. “The Avengers, really. Has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?” He picks up a case and pops it open, revealing a gaudy suit in the colors of the national flag and the shield all repainted in the same bright red, white, and blue. “You’re a national treasure, Cap. The world needs protectors, and you’re going to lead the best of the best. Onto the next, soldier.”
“Right.” Steve clears his throat and straightens up. He flits his eyes over to the woman at Nick’s elbow, looking for someone else’s reaction to all this. Hill, he remembers her name now, is stone faced as always. “This is all really, uh, flattering.”
Steve scratches at the slight stubble that’s grown in, clean and fresh compared to the overgrown beard he’d woken up sporting, with a hack job that was clearly borne out of only having the most basic tools for grooming when in the middle of a war.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, I hope whatever you recover from the Valkyrie will prove useful to your agency but I’m afraid I’ll have to pass on—” Steve looks at the contract he’d been presented with, ink fresh and wet on the tip of the pen sitting atop—“the Avengers.”
Nick blinks, and something complicated flickers across his face. “I see. Captain, you understand, you wanted to beat the bad guys, and these days the bad guys can look like anyone. Our neighbors, even. It’s not just Nazis looking to gain power, Cap.” Steve has to fight to keep from showing how that ticks him off. It sounds wrong. “You’ll be head of a special forces team and a high-level operative under our organization. Just like old times.”
“I haven’t signed up just yet,” he manages to get out in a level, controlled voice.
Nick tips his head to one side and purses his lips in some show of acceptance. “This is what you’ve always wanted to do,” he says, like sharing a piece of information about Steve’s past that he’s unaware of, doing him a favor—correcting a misunderstanding Steve must have had about himself. “Marching orders are here, and it’s on you to carry them out. Captain America is what this country needs to better protect the men and women at home. This is exactly the kind of thing you would’ve wanted to get in on, a directive you can follow.”
Steve doesn’t hide his displeasure then, impossible even if he wanted to. He relaxes into his seat, easily looking Nick in the eye. “That really doesn’t sound like me.”
Hill pulls out another file and musters up a strained smile in light of Nick’s stormy silence. “Perhaps this would help.” She slides over a thick stack of reports detailing the so-called super soldier serum he was injected with back in ’41. “Dr. Erskine’s work, Project—”
“Rebirth, I’m aware.” Steve cocks an eyebrow, daring her to go on. If Hill is about to spout some bullshit about fate and how the SSR breathed life into him, he’s gonna flip this fucking table, to hell with their generosity-with-strings-attached.
Nick takes over, having regained his senses. “It’s truly a marvel of science. This is something we still haven’t been able to reproduce, even almost 70 years later. Project Rebirth is unrivaled by decades worth of work.” Nick plasters on a placating smile. “We know everything must feel new and overwhelming right now, but Shield is more familiar to you than you may realize.”
“Something familiar,” Steve murmurs under his breath, devoid of the bitter humor warping his insides. What a joke.
Nick goes on as if Steve hasn’t said a word at all. “The SSR saw something in you the rest of the world had missed. The makings of a perfect soldier.”
Steve zeroes in on the picture of him clipped into the file, much too small in the oversized chamber of the Vita-Ray, looking like he’s at death’s doorstep. The far away stare of Past Steve seems to pierce through the years and strike him where he sits.
Somehow, he knows that that young man was much too accustomed to staring down death—almost bored, even, or maybe resigned more than anything—despite the fact that the experiment he’s found himself the subject of is new and out of the ordinary.
“I think I’ve had enough of being a marvel of science,” Steve starts, and he finds that his voice is steady, unwavering in its certainty.
He’s got a clean slate here, and learning to be Steve Rogers might just be one of the most difficult things he’ll ever do, but he’d rather be the guy at the helm and do it himself. He shoves the paperwork in front of him away and meets Nick’s heavy scrutiny with confidence.
“You got to have your Project Rebirth. Now I get to have mine.”
◆
Steve’s not all that sure he thought this through.
He’s got enough cash for two weeks at a motel—maybe three. Worst comes to worst, he’ll ride the subway through the night or hole up somewhere.
The motel room is fine. Not the cleanest, but it’s got a bed and a bathroom with plumbing that works. Still, the last thing he wants is to hunker down and watch shadows move across his ceiling for hours. Sometimes the things in his head are less than pleasant, and it’s even worse when you don’t know what to expect—not that he has much of a reference.
Having memory loss evidently doesn’t mean you’re rid of the monsters in your head, just that they’re faceless and you’ve got no clue how to avoid the creeping shadows when they come.
By the third night, Steve gets into the habit of strolling through the city, the blanket of a dark sky making Brooklyn a tad less flashy and hauntingly familiar. He doesn’t have a destination, per se, letting his feet take him down winding paths and enjoying the fresh air. Or at least, as fresh as it gets around here.
When he comes to a cluster of bars and clubs down a narrow alleyway, the hairs on the back of his neck stand up in instant recognition. It’s almost like walking around with a confused but very eager puppy in his head. He can never tell what’s caught the attention of his subconscious and has to poke around to satisfy the curiosity.
He walks around checking out the crowded buildings, and it takes no time at all to get the memo that these are clearly queer bars. Steve finds himself unwinding when he sees the assortment of people spilling in and out through the doors, laughter and pounding music filtering through.
This is the closest to home he’s felt since waking up and learning his own name. He can picture himself crowded against one of the filthy brick walls, though he’s a handful of inches shorter in his imagined memories, bird-boned and fucking working it, too.
Huh. That’s one thing about himself figured out. Good for Past Steve.
Steve must be lingering a little too long in front of one of the clubs, staring unseeingly at the black-painted door leading inside. A man in a bulky denim jacket smoking out front starts to glare at him and ends up spitting out, “What are you looking at, huh? You wanna see my dick? Fuck off!”
Before Steve can even think of a response, his lips are forming the words, “Well, if you’re offerin’.” The man laughs on an inhale and starts choking when the smoke gets caught in his lungs. “Fuck, I hope you can suck dick better than that,” Steve finds himself saying, still having absolutely no idea where these quips are coming from.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” the man laughs, waving Steve away when he tries to help with a gentle tap to his back. “You new around here?” he asks, giving Steve a thorough once over. He seems to balk after taking in Steve’s size and gives an appreciative hum.
Steve looks down the street again and honestly doesn’t know if it’s the area that’s got his homing beacon going crazy, the type of place he’s found, or if he’s simply going insane. “Dunno,” he ends up sighing, and it comes out much sadder and defeated than he meant.
The man searches his face and holds out his palm, sweaty from the heat of the club. “I’m Ronnie.”
“Steve.” The name has never felt so natural uncurling from his tongue. The handshake feels a touch formal, but he’ll take what he can get. “Hey, uh.” Steve has the sudden deep-seated knowledge that joints like this passed around information about shelters that are safe for people like him. They must have used to, back when he supposedly lived, a handful of decades ago. “You know a cheap place to stay around here?”
Ronnie furrows his brows, sucking on the end of his cigarette. “There’s—” He gets cut off by half a lemonade splashing onto their feet, the stranger having thrown their drink at them pulling cruel lips into a sneer. Ronnie whirls on the stranger and yells, “We get it, you hate us, find someone else who gives a fuck!”
It’s a man only slightly smaller than Steve, who starts to walk up to them and is already all but frothing at the mouth. “Alright, back up.” Steve crowds against him and keeps pushing back, gaining some distance with every step. Stragglers on the street start taking notice, and a couple people make to join him in herding the man away. Steve waves them off, though, some instinct telling him to keep from escalating the situation.
There’s panic and fear niggling at the back of his mind, the urge to scatter and keep quiet, but he pushes through.
When the stranger gets to the end of the alley, Steve makes his way back. He only makes it a few steps before the man starts mouthing off, and he can see the way Ronnie flushes red in anger. That’s not all he sees though, catching the involuntary flinch at the asshole’s scathing words. Steve turns around, hones in on the guy, and gives him enough of a sucker punch to knock him out cold.
He doesn’t know how he knows how much to hold back to keep from breaking someone’s neck, but he does.
A couple people loitering outside whistle in appreciation when Steve picks the stranger up, hauling him to a nearby bus stop to prop upright on a bench. It doesn’t look like he’s rousing awake anytime soon, so Steve leaves him be. Maybe the fucker will wake up in the morning and choose to steer clear of this area lest he get another shiner for his troubles.
Steve stalks back to Ronnie and winces sheepishly. “Fuck, sorry. I should, um, go.”
Ronnie’s got a wide grin, though, eyes glittering with merriment. “No, you did good.” He lifts his shoe and stubs out the butt of his cigarette on one heel, and holds Steve’s stare for a long time. “Steve, you from around here?”
“Uh.” Steve rubs at one disconcertingly smooth cheek, the patchy facial hair covering his face freshly shaved in some attempt at hopefully getting an even growth on his next try. He doesn’t know if it’s something he’s always had trouble with—an irritating trait he can’t shake even with the help of shady government experiments claiming to make him into the perfect man—or if it’s yet another side effect of turning into an ice cube for more than half a century. “Kind of.”
He’s not quite sure how to unpack all of that. There’s enough awareness in the public of a shield-wielding operative helping with the Chitauri attack, but Steve hasn’t put on a cowl and announced that Cap’s a-comin’ back either, the way Nick had wanted. All there is are news reports around the Battle of New York featuring him and a faded shield.
Ronnie’s not taking his half-assed answers, though. “Explain kind of.”
Steve buries both hands in his pockets and hunches his shoulders. “Just came back. Got out of—something.”
“Military?” Ronnie asks point blank. Steve nods, and chews his lip raw. He didn’t think he’d have a hard time talking about it. After all, it’s not like he remembers his time in the war. It almost feels dishonest—inappropriate, even—to claim that past. It was him, sure, but it also wasn’t. It’s a doozy to wrap his mind around.
Steve clears his throat and starts shuffling backwards. “Sorry. I um, should—”
“You need a job?” Ronnie calls out and stops him in his tracks. “We could use a bouncer.” Steve looks down the street, and sees a few people near each of the entrances, some just hanging around and lighting up or drinking, but he can pick out the guys clearly working and keeping an eye out.
Steve looks away, then back at Ronnie, taking a step closer to return within talking distance. “You don’t even know me.”
“Seen enough. Could just fire you if you make trouble, anyway.” Ronnie shrugs, a wry grin creeping slowly across his face. “The bouncer we’ve got only works weekends, and the rest of the nights, it’s just me out here yelling at assholes who lurk.”
Steve barks a laugh, and lets the smile tugging at his lips bloom in increments. “But Ronnie,” he drawls. “You do it so very well.” Ronnie cackles, and hits him hard on the chest. Steve already knows he’s going to be a great boss.
◆
Steve contemplates getting the sudoku book at the counter. It’s $6.99, and he’d like something to keep himself occupied when manning the door at Ronnie’s club. But then he’d have to ditch the ramen with REAL MEAT! and stick with the other kind if he wants to make his money stretch. He’s reasonably worried about what kind of meat is in the other packet.
“Are you gonna pay or not?” the teenager waiting for him asks, brows raised in weary impatience. He’s seen her every time he stops by after a shift, and despite his best efforts to build a rapport, she hasn’t warmed up to him at all. The woman he kicked out of the club not an hour ago for instigating a fight would be an easier friend to make.
Steve quickly switches out his chosen ramen and picks up the mysterious brand claiming to be beef flavored, and grabs the sudoku book. If he truly is a scientific marvel, he should be fine. Fingers crossed the magic serum covers his digestion. “Think that’s exact change.” Steve smoothes out his bills and drops it on the glass cabinet acting as a counter, flashing a friendly smile.
“Uhuh.” The girl swipes his money away, counting it out and tucking it in a busted-looking cash register.
Well, he tried. Steve gets the memo and keeps his mouth shut. That is, until a cat slinks out of the backroom, jumping onto the counter in front of him. “Oh, hi there.” He runs gentle hands down its back, soft fur tickling his palm. “What’s your name, huh?” The cat purrs and rubs up against him, curling up to settle in.
“Oh no, you don’t,” the girl mutters and shoos the cat away. “I don’t even know how you got in here, but you are not staying.” The cat hassles her with a hiss, winding itself around her hand, but eventually acquiesces and hops off the counter to slip outside.
Steve gets handed everything in a thin plastic bag and is all but herded out along with the cat.
Outside, heavy rain promising a storm is coming down over Brooklyn, the sky dark overhead. Steve can feel his muscles tense up in the biting wind and ducks into the rough collar of his leather jacket. It’s his most valuable possession right now—one of the few things he made sure to bring with him when leaving Shield’s custody.
The dark leather is warm and worn in, threads still holding together, the bulk easily hiding his physique underneath. Steve’s got a lot of love for it.
The steadily brewing rainstorm makes him nervous—something about the sound of water hitting dirty pavement, impossibly loud to his ringing ears, the way goosebumps erupt across his skin. He’s itching to get inside.
Before he can rush off to his motel, however, the distressed mewls of a cat cuts through the downpour, his enhanced hearing picking up on the noise easily. He catches sight of her huddled against a few discarded crates, blinking pathetically up at him and looking particularly miserable.
Steve sighs, resigned to his fate.
◆
“Ssh, keep it down,” Steve hisses when Bodega Cat lets out a loud meow.
He’d sneaked her in past Rick at the front desk with no trouble, the guy absorbed in a game of solitaire on his computer—Steve himself had gotten more than familiar with the digital version of the game during his two weeks post-Chitauri, when the days were filled with nothing but mind-numbing silence and obsessive hours of reading up on all the history he’s missed.
Solitaire is a great palette cleanser.
Then again, the lump in his jacket was glaringly obvious, and Rick might just not give a fuck what Steve brings into his room. He’s half-convinced the woman across the parking lot from him has a full-on meth lab in hers.
Steve pokes at his can of beans, wondering how long it’ll take for it to warm up on the contraband hot plate. Vera, his neighbor from two doors down, had offered full use of the thing in exchange for a smoke the other day, and Steve had come to collect as soon as he got in.
“You think it’s done yet?” Steve asks the room, Bodega Cat stretching lazily across the windowsill in response. “Alright, a little longer.” He takes out and cracks the eggs he’d picked up, stirring in an attempt for a scramble, and readies a stack of sliced bread.
The spread he’s cooking up looks pretty fucking sad, but he’s intent on eating something else aside from pre-made takeout. Even with his newly acquired source of income, his eating habits are quickly draining his cash. Besides, it can’t be that hard, can it?
According to Wikipedia, he survived for a couple years rigging a makeshift kitchen in the European forests. After that, cooking dinner in a 21st century motel room should be a walk in the goddamn park.
The knock on his door comes just as he’s frying up the eggs, and he finds Vera on the other side. He only ever sees her at sundown when he’s heading out to Ronnie’s club and she’s coming home, or in the mornings when he’s wrapped up his shift and she’s just about to start hers. “Shit, I’m still using it,” Steve looks back over his shoulder at his makeshift kitchen.
Vera waves away his concern at once. “Don’t worry about it. I’m heading out to the garage, just give it back when you’re about to leave tonight.” Steve flashes her a grateful smile, glad not for the first time that she’d spotted him looking lost a few nights into his stay at the motel, and showed him how to properly wrestle a drink from the vending machine.
“Oh, I got the thing you mentioned.” Steve grabs the sudoku book from the end of his bed, brandishing it with pride. “A puzzle book!”
“Steve.” Vera shoots him an unimpressed glare. “I said something with trivia, you idiot. How the hell are you gonna catch up on all the shit you missed in some foxhole in Afghanistan or wherever the fuck with Sudoku?”
He doesn’t bother correcting her on his military history, content to let her make her own assumptions. People easily think he’s a recently discharged vet who’s tight-lipped verging on paranoid—which is, well, close enough.
Steve blinks down at his purchase, remembering now that she’d suggested a pocket-sized crossword book instead, chock full of cultural tidbits a regular Joe—if not somewhat intelligent—would be familiar with. “Oh.”
Vera rolls her eyes and pats him a tad pityingly on the arm, and soon rushes off to work. “My boss doesn’t like me enough for me to waltz in fifteen minutes late,” she’d said by way of a goodbye. Steve tucks the sudoku book in his jacket anyway, sure it’ll get its use one way or another, and goes back to his corner table.
Instead of a delicious dinner at 7am, Steve ends up eating his words. The beans come out unattractively goopy and lukewarm, the bread somehow burnt in patches and untouched in the middle, and even his eggs are rubbery and bland.
Well, fuck.
◆
Vera was right—he’s got rocks for brains.
For one, the sudoku puzzles are great but even with increasing difficulty as he flies through the pages, his brain figures out each pattern with ease within seconds. It’s a little boring. He’s choosing to blame it on the serum and Past Steve for letting a bunch of scientists shoot him up with shady performance enhancing drugs.
He blames most things on Past Steve.
Silver lining, though, the book actually does boast five bonus! bonus! bonus! crosswords in the last few pages, and they’re hard as fuck. This is the kind of puzzle he should’ve bought.
“Elia.” The rough voice right by his ear startles him so badly he nearly falls off his stool, and Ronnie’s unrestrained laughter earns him a firm shove in return. “Sorry,” he wheezes. “Fuck, sorry, I should’ve—” Ronnie shakes his head, pulling himself together. “He’s the guy behind Marlon Brando.”
“Uh.” Steve reads the clue he was working on again. Director Kazan.
Ronnie waves a hand in the air, rolling his eyes at himself. “Right, right. Brando’s this actor guy. Back in the 50s.” Steve hums along and puts in Elia for eight across.
He’d told Ronnie he was discharged due to injury in combat, namely a severe enough TBI to mess with his memory. Steve had almost lost his job then, Ronnie fussing about him worsening his condition with a gig that will surely promise a physical altercation every now and again. Steve came close to begging, not wanting to lose the one fucking job he all but stumbled onto.
The last thing he wants is to go back to spending his nights getting hounded by faceless ghosts and the echoes of screams he never even remembers hearing in the first place. Besides, Ronnie’s been good to him, and Steve likes his job. Even more important, he needs it.
A crash course on efficiently employing the most pathetic puppy dog eyes and a couple bats of his lashes later, and Ronnie folded like a cheap road map in two seconds flat. “It’s not like it can get worse than barely remembering my own name,” Steve had argued, which surprisingly worked well enough for him to keep his sole source of income.
“Now I just gotta figure out what country starts with an L,” Steve mutters, following the next clue of his crossword.
“Go take a break,” Ronnie tells him and not so gently pushes him off his seat. “Take a long fifteen. I’ll man the door. I think James is out back.” Steve hesitates for half a second before Ronnie shoos him away again, and he scampers off as instructed. His shifts are pretty long, straight through the night, but he’s found that Ronnie’s more than willing to let him slack off when things are slow, which is often enough.
He works weeknights at a club, after all.
The back alley behind the building is occupied by James as promised, the lit end of his cigarette the only illumination for his dark stubbled face. James—James Howlett, ex-Navy SEAL, he’d told Steve when they’d first made introductions and heard of his, uh, predicament—is as much of a regular as they get. Though, he spends just as much time loitering outside the club as he does inside it.
Steve doesn’t know what James actually does, but he noticeably hangs around almost every night, a friend of Ronnie’s and most everyone on staff. Why Ronnie didn’t just hire this guy he already knows instead of Steve, he’ll never know.
It’s a couple smokes in when James leans against his side, that warm, weighty bulk pushing him against the rough bite of the brick wall. “Is that cat hair?” He picks out dark gray fur from Steve’s t-shirt. “You got some new company in that run-down motel?”
Steve flicks away the clinging fuzz and shrugs. “Found a stray. Well, not a stray. Mostly shows up at the bodega nearby.” He downs half the energy drink James had given him along with a smoke—guaranteed 24hr rush! the can promises, though he’ll be the judge of that—and looks up at the heavy gaze settling onto him, charmed and teasing as James very rarely is. “Kinda like you,” he finds himself blurting out.
James laughs, a rough bark that barely carries across the space between them. Steve likes how quiet he is, solid and unmovable. He doesn’t know why, but this stranger he’s spent the past few weeks sitting next to in silence whenever Ronnie lets him take a breather feels something like an anchor.
The way James looks at him has never been filled with pity, even knowing enough about what had brought Steve to Ronnie’s literal doorstep. Ronnie had felt sorry for him once Steve told him about his fucked up head, he could tell, and he found that it made his skin crawl, raised his hackles, made him feel like worthless shit on the bottom of someone’s shoe. But James didn’t. Or at least, he hides it real fucking well.
“Things aren’t good enough inside?” Steve asks, cocking his head towards the side door still propped open if only by a hair. They can hear faint thumping music, generic and loud, and swathes of smoky dark purple light streaming through the gap.
Steve’s never actually spent any significant amount of time inside, the cramped space and low ceilings far from ideal for traumatized Past Steve, it seems. If he has a nickel for every time some mundane bullshit made a small but overwhelming part of his brain scream bloody murder for no apparent reason, he’d—well, he wouldn’t need to be looking for a second job.
James finishes off his cigarette, flicking the pinched nub into an abandoned beer bottle to his left. “Oh, you know,” he shrugs. “Tuesday night. Not exactly the best crowd.”
Steve hums. “Better out here?” James side-eyes him curiously and takes him in with unnerving attentive scrutiny. Steve does his best to keep from shying away, choosing instead to shuffle even closer. “Come on, I can’t be better company than the guys in there.”
This time, James purses his lips like he’s holding back on an amused smile, eyebrow steadily climbing up his forehead. “I don’t know about that.” Steve doesn’t bother wasting any time, leaning in the couple inches to press his lips against James’.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing, the magnetic pull making the decision for him. The unerringly comfortable presence of the other man had slowly reeled him in with every ten-minute conversation each night, a siren call he can’t help but answer.
When James reciprocates, opens his mouth to let Steve get a hint of the bitter taste of his tongue, Steve tugs him closer almost violently, hard enough for James to stumble and press him up against the filthy wall.
“Well, kid, you sure remember how to kiss,” James mouths against his lips, and Steve laughs, light and buoyed by the feeling of—something he can’t quite name. Giddiness maybe, if it weren’t so sharp, lodged deep in his chest and burrowing even further with every swipe of James’ tongue. His lips are dry and hot against Steve’s own, sliding rough and a little painful with a bruising force. Steve revels in the dull pain of that pressure.
He feels James’ hands on him, across his torso, ghosting over his chest, trailing down to the waistband of his jeans. The rush of want almost knocks him over, and Steve gasps with the sheer intensity of that molten heat running down his spine.
He’s taken the edge off whenever he’s in the shower, before bed, on long dreary afternoons when he’s trying to block out the unwelcome noise in his head, but the feel of someone else against him, their warm, callused palms promising pleasure, makes everything inside him clench tight with pure want.
“Please,” he whispers, hips bucking forward of their own accord, searching for James’ hands or hips or thigh to push against. “I—touch me.”
James doesn’t hesitate to undo his jeans, thin and worn out as it had been when Steve picked it up from the Goodwill Vera told him about, the button popping open with barely any sound. “You want it?” James’ harsh, demanding voice rumbles against Steve’s ear, and he whines, begging without words.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t see it coming, is still thrumming with desire when he lets out a wet, “James,” and it leaves his lips with a sob, a sound much too broken to come off as anything close to enticing.
Sure enough, James pulls away, looking down at him with an expression miles off from what it was just a second ago, brows pulled together into a severe line of worry. Instead of curling over his dick, James’ hand comes up to his cheek and it’s then that Steve realizes there are tears on his face, wetting his skin in salty tracks. “Steve—”
“Shit.” Steve quickly wipes them away, cigarette forgotten and littering the dirty ground below, right next to the empty can of energy drink he’d dropped at some point in the past few minutes. “Shit, fuck, I’m sorry,” he wheezes, gulping breaths, though it sticks in his throat and wrenches out another devastating cry, and for fuck’s sake, can’t he keep it together one fumbling handjob?
He vaguely registers James trying to talk him down, telling him it’s okay, to just breathe, but there’s a ringing in Steve’s ears, and there it is again, screams and the rush of wind filling his head like a bitter reminder that he’s so fucking naive to think he could truly start over.
“Steve.” James grabs his jaw and pins him in place with a piercing stare, and somehow that helps, the disquieting pair of eyes grounding him to the present, a pungent back alley in Brooklyn where the air is sharp and tiny pinpricks of pain make themselves known as he leans further against the uneven brick wall. “Come on, sit down, you’ve still got a few minutes’ break.”
Steve slumps onto the crate next to James and takes the offered fresh smoke when it comes. He’s glad James doesn’t say anything, not when Steve uses his t-shirt to wipe away more tears, not when he has to button up his jeans once more, not even as he adjusts himself, his dick still half-hard and taking its sweet fucking time reading the room.
They smoke the last few minutes of peace away, James’ arm a steady presence against his side, the sounds of a thin Tuesday night crowd filling the silence.
Steve closes his eyes and tries to ignore the tears clinging to his lashes. The specter of men and women he’d known and loved hold onto him without his say so, unable to let go even when the soldier they knew is long gone, Steve now taking his place. Regardless of whether he remembers, there’s a war clinging to his back, dogging his steps, death and bloodshed soaking his very soul.
If he’s learned anything, it’s that Steven Grant Rogers is a man with many ghosts.
◆
A few weeks in, and Steve’s got a routine.
He works nights, stops by the corner store in the morning to grab a few things, and picks up Bodega Cat when she somehow makes her way back there and brings her home. When Vera’s around, they have breakfast together, his shitty, bland concoctions next to her breakfast burritos and Marlboro lights.
“Sexy pirates, can’t go wrong,” Vera tells him one morning, lobbing over a well-loved paperback featuring, well, he can only guess pirates. He supposes the deep v-necks and billowing hair suggests they’re supposed to be sexy, but Steve’s not sure it’s doing that much for him.
Steve flips to a random page and starts skimming a few paragraphs. It’s—well, it’s not good, but beggars can’t be choosers. Ronnie’s club isn’t the most exciting place to be, and he needs something to occupy his time in between mulling over seemingly impossible to solve crossword hints.
He’s worked through one-third of the first puzzle so far, and he’s content to take his time.
Ronnie gives him a couple weekend shifts, the old bouncer apparently busy with some other gig that Steve’s not a hundred percent convinced isn’t made up. He’d asked Ronnie about a cheap place to stay again, and Ronnie had given him that look, like Steve running out of cash is anyone else’s fault aside from Steve’s own circumstances, and suddenly told him the weekend shifts had miraculously freed up.
He wanted to refuse it, wanted to tell Ronnie he might’ve all but picked him up from the streets the night they met, but he sure as fuck isn’t some charity case. Still, Ronnie doesn’t treat him any differently than anyone else on his payroll, and he’s a become a friend, one of the very few Steve has, so he swallowed his pride and took the shifts.
Besides, working weekends means a hair more excitement. He gets to throw out give or take three drunken assholes every week or so, and Saturday nights bring the loitering loudmouths down their narrow street, overspills from the teeming bars one block over.
He doesn’t offer lingering men and women a peek at his equipment the way Ronnie did, but they scurry along with one glare if he plays it up a bit.
He’s not sure how he feels about it, but his size can be intimidating. Sometimes it feels like trying to maneuver a much larger body than he’s used to, and he knows it’s because of the size he was before, has seen the pictures in history books and websites, though it’s unnerving to feel the dissonance when he doesn’t remember ever being any other size but 6’2” and about the width of a whole goddamn door.
Though, what isn’t a mindfuck when it comes to the shit his head puts him through? His sleep is riddled with incomprehensible nightmares, and though whatever grief Past Steve carries with him is present, Steve can’t make heads or tails of any of it.
He’s almost grateful, because he knows whatever it is would’ve otherwise taken him down for good. Even now, there are moments when it threatens to swallow him whole.
The money from the extra shifts help but his cash is dwindling anyway. He’ll be able to stretch it out for another month, but then he’ll have to give up his motel room, find a place to bunk. Maybe Ronnie has a couch, or James. It’s not weird to crash with the guy who he came onto for a sloppy handjob but ended up crying on halfway through, is it? He fucking hopes not.
It’s a few days to his inevitable end of motel living when he sees the taped up homemade poster—help wanted at his favorite corner store, like a goddamn sign from the universe. He’d think himself lucky if not for the fact that Leah—the kid usually working counter—tells him to scram when he asks about it.
“You’re too friendly,” she says, giving him a scathing once over. “Encourages lurkers, people who hang around. Bad enough we got that cat, who knows what else that face of yours will bring in.” Steve reaches up to touch his cheek, not quite sure what Leah’s suggesting. Does he smile too much?
Steve puts on an exaggerated scowl, brows in a tight line and bottom lip stuck out in what some may count as a pout. “Come on,” he cajoles, “I’m a bouncer down at Ronnie’s. I can put my game face on when I need to.” He swears he can see Leah’s eyes twitch like she finds his scary face amusing. “What do you say?”
Leah taps the end of her chewed up pen on her chin a couple times, thinking it over. “Gotta ask the boss.” Steve didn’t realize there was someone else working here. He figured the store couldn’t belong to a fifteen-year-old, sure, but he’s never seen anyone else in the small, cramped store.
“Uh, okay, who—”
“Mom!” Leah calls up towards the back, where a doorway’s covered in thin lace curtains strung up on an exposed wire. When no one comes down, Leah huffs and yells even louder, “Mom! We got a taker!” Eventually, a tall, lanky woman not that much shorter than Steve comes barreling down the stairs, carrying what looks like a cardboard box filled to the brim with beef jerky.
“Hello,” Steve greets, caught between trying to put on a pleasant smile and not coming off as too friendly, if Leah wasn’t messing with him and that really is what they’re looking for. It must come out a touch bizarre because he hears Leah snort a laugh. “Um, hi, my name’s Steve.”
He doesn’t get to say anything past his name because the woman just hums, looks once at her daughter, and dumps the box of jerky in his arms. “Weekdays, whenever Leah’s at school.” She looks at him for another long moment, before asking, “You want your pay in cash?”
Steve blinks, glances at the heap of jerky, and squeaks out a polite, “Yes, please.”
Leah ends up being the one to tell him what time to come in the morning and that he’ll be off the clock at 4 in the afternoon when she’s back from her extracurriculars. “I come with a cat,” he asserts, when she’s about to tell him to beat it and show up after his next shift at Ronnie’s.
Leah rolls her eyes. “She keeps coming in here anyway. Might as well.”
So he’s indulging in one of Vera’s better romance novels, this one about a lost prince coming into his inheritance and having an affair with a stable boy, as he’s manning the counter. It’s incredibly engrossing, actually. Steve’s partial to the tall, dark, and handsome himself, and Mr. Lost Prince is coming off as quite the hunk. He can see why the stable boy would risk his livelihood warming the guy’s sheets.
He peeks at the model gracing the book cover once more. Steve wouldn’t kick him out of bed, given the choice. Yeah, he’d be all for that. Even Bodega Cat agrees, if he’s interpreting the way she rubs up against the cracked spine and purring a pleased hum right. Steve rewards her with gentle scratches, going back to his book.
A pointed grunt takes him out of the oh so sensual world of Loralynne Summers—New York Times Bestselling Author the tag line boasts—and he finds a couple people in line. The middle-aged woman waiting to pay for a container of salted nuts and three Cokes doesn’t look too pissed he had his nose buried in a book, but he sets it aside quickly anyway.
Steve flashes a grin, turns it into a scowl at the mental image of Leah scolding him, and rings her up. The woman gives him an odd side-eye, not that he blames her. With a subdued smile, she takes her purchases and leaves. “Have a great day!” he chirps then purses his lips. Huh, maybe he is too friendly. Leah sure never says that when she rang him up.
He shrugs to himself and turns to the next guy in line, shooing Bodega Cat to the edge of the counter because he can already see the overflowing basket in the customer’s arms. “Would you like a—”
“Stevie?”
Steve’s never had anyone in his very short memory call him Stevie before. Everyone at work calls him Steve, Vera calls him Steven, sometimes Grant because she thinks his middle name is funny, and no one at Nick’s Men in Black agency (he’s been recently introduced to that masterpiece via the crackly TV in his motel) only ever called him Captain.
But the moment he hears it, he can feel something click, like a part of his soul settling for the first time in about half a century. It makes no sense at all, though he’s used to that at this point.
His mind is a minefield of equal parts war wounds and small pockets of joy he’s yet to discover. The sheer delight that had burst in his chest when he smelled apple cider for the first time last week had been strong enough to almost bring him to his knees.
The man in front of him is large, towering over him until Steve straightens up from his crouch over the counter, plastic bag fluttering noisily in his hands. He’s dressed warm, in layers of shirts and jackets, like everyone else in the city lately, shoulder-length hair falling out of a messy bun. He’d come off as somewhat handsome—incredibly attractive, actually—if it didn’t look like he’d just seen a ghost.
His face is ashen, and Steve knows without a shadow of a doubt that this man hasn’t mistaken him for someone else, that the sharp puncture in Steve’s chest is far from a mistake. This man knows him. But—no, that’s not right. “Steve, actually,” he manages to choke out, “or Steven’s what’s on my ID,” he goes on.
That only seems to make things worse, the man’s face constricting painfully. “I thought they’d just—fuck, I thought it wasn’t you.” Steve catches him glancing over towards one of the tabloids nearby, a few headlines still mulling over the Chitauri attack even all these months later.
“You do know me.” The realization hits him then, and he can feel the blood drain from his own face, nearly loses all feeling in his limbs. “I don’t understand, they told me I was lost in 1944—how do you—” Steve gasps a ragged breath, vision blurring at once. “Did they lie to me?” Why would they do something like that? What could they possibly gain from creating such an intricate lie?
How can he trust anything those people told him, though, when the first memory that’s burned itself into his brain is their deception, the set made up as a mockery of an apparent home he has no way of returning to?
“No, no—” The man’s roughened voice cuts into the fog that’s fallen over him, and Steve feels warm hands gripping his bare arms. It appears he’s caught on pretty quickly that Steve’s not exactly whoever he’d known, that Steve doesn’t remember how they knew each other. The heartbroken look on his face can’t possibly mean anything else. “They didn’t,” he gets out. “Whatever they told you, it’s, well, it’s true enough.”
Steve doesn’t know if he’s thankful. For one infinite moment, the idea is horrific, that there might be people out there looking for him after all, a family maybe, that he’d deliberately been steered away from and had no clue to look for as he whiles away his time in a corner of Brooklyn.
Still, when this stranger—or not so stranger—assures him he hasn’t been lied to, calms him with a touch so overwhelmingly kind his skin prickles with it, he can feel his heart breaking all over again, the burgeoning hope crushed regardless of how awful it would’ve been had it been true.
He finds that he’s relieved and devastated all at once, thinking if only for a split second that he wasn’t as alone as he thought in this strange new world.
Steve looks back up at the man before him and tries to take him in properly. Dark, wavy curls, steel gray blue eyes, a sharp nose only slightly less ghastly than his own, and—lips. Bowed lips reddened and soft, plump where it’s been nibbled at and worked over.
The sight clicks then; Steve’s seen him before in his days of researching his own history, books and online galleries, and then real, tangible ones he’d visited once he scrounged up the courage to up and do it. Everything that had coalesced into one train-wreck of a timeline detailing his own downfall.
“You’re James Barnes.” The hands holding onto him let go at once, but Steve can tell he’s right, James’ face stricken with—fear? Is that what Steve’s seeing? “I read about you in a museum.” James starts pulling even further away, and a steadily building drum in his chest makes itself known, desperate and afraid that he’ll lose this one real thread to who he used to be. “How are you here?”
It’s then that James chooses to abandon his purchases and hightails it out of there. Steve barely gets to gasp out a panicked, “Wait!” before he’s out the door.
Steve rushes out from behind the counter, nearly knocking over the stand of newspapers and magazines, his own obscured face splashed onto a couple columns, the shield on his arm a neon sign even with barely any of its bright paint still hanging onto the sleek surface.
He’s halfway out the door when he doubles back and captures Bodega Cat’s judgmental squint. “Stay,” he orders, finger raised assertively. He hisses out a quick, “You’re in charge, don’t get robbed,” before dashing out again.
Steve searches all the way down the street, looks down a few alleys, but doesn’t find a trace of James Barnes.
By the time he’s all but sprinted down a couple blocks, he thinks he might just break down and cry. The knowledge that he let the only living person he’s found that has to do with his past slip right through his fingers feels like the biggest failure for as long as he can remember.
This feels much more soul-crushing than when he failed at whipping up a slightly more complicated dinner and ended up making himself hurl with bland, undercooked chicken breast.
Steve takes a deep breath and steels himself, squeezing his eyes tight to keep more tears from falling. Trudging back to the corner store, he scrubs at his face and tries his best to hold it together just long enough until he can cry in his shitty motel room instead.
This is fine. He’s just fine.
Well, at least when he finally returns to the store, no one’s emptied the shelves while he was gone, and Bodega Cat sticks close to him like she knows he needs the comfort. He’ll take the win.
◆
Image: Steve’s never had anyone in his very short memory call him Stevie before. || Art by: kocuria
◆
Steve’s spent the past ten days dreaming of death.
Or at least, that’s all he can make of it. Coming home after his back-to-back shift at Ronnie’s and then the bodega means the kind of exhaustion that seeps into his bones, settling deep within him until he gives into its demands of rest after gorging on a couple heaping plates of food.
He’s made a habit of heating up leftovers—not that there’s usually a lot of that—and cooking the most mediocre meals while close to dozing, holding sleep off for only long enough to then scarf down his 5pm dinner and crash.
If Steve didn’t have the serum, he’s not sure how he would have nearly enough energy to work so many hours, a lot of them often long stretches of time with not much to do.
Work’s been slow all day, so Steve’s restocking the bodega shelves of ketchup—the fact that the condiment takes up an entire corner still boggles his mind, the people of New York City incomprehensibly buying it in droves—an old but workable MP3 player blasting music as he moves to its beat.
“Heard that you were talking shit, and you didn't think that I would hear it,” Steve sings along, hips swinging from side to side, nearly bumping into the stack of Heinz products waiting to be put away. “People hear you talking like that, getting everybody fired up!” Steve palms two bottles of ketchup and holds them up like boxing gloves, feigning punches. “So I'm ready to attack, gonna lead the—ah!”
The shriek that’s wrenched from his throat is fairly embarrassing, though he doesn’t think anyone would blame him, when he’d swiveled on his heel to throw a punch to the air and found his fist landing on someone’s chest instead. He can feel laughter shaking the man’s upper body, vibrating up his arm before he retracts it and staggers back.
“You okay there?” Kind, smiling eyes meet his own, and Steve flushes crimson.
Of course, it’s James.
Steve’s been waiting for him to show up with every passing day, sure that James Barnes—or his ghost, Steve had convinced himself of the idea for a hot second—would want to know more of how Steve finds himself in 2012 working a bodega’s register alongside a cat.
Of course, he’d show up the one moment Steve’s dancing around the empty store, completely embarrassing himself. He can feel Bodega Cat watching his mortification from where she’s lounging across the counter, probably laughing at him.
“Um.” Steve sets aside the bottles of ketchup and clicks his music off. “You came back.”
James gives him a sheepish smile, rubbing the back of his neck as if out of the two of them, he’s the one who made a fool of himself not two seconds ago. “Yeah. I’m sorry about how I left the other day. I was just—”
James seems to be struggling with his words, so Steve offers up an understanding, “Hey, you see your dead friend at the bodega and find out he’s not all that dead, it’s a lot. I get it.” James huffs a laugh at Steve’s plastered-on smile, weak but there all the same. “So.” Steve reaches out to a box of Snickers, taking one out to fiddle with. “I know how I ended up here from the mid 20th century. How did you?”
James turns somber once more and looks away as if trying to hide. “It’s not pretty,” he finally shares.
“Well, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?” James’ eyebrows shoot up into his hair, considerably more put together now than when he’d seen it last. Steve can see the end of a braid curling over his shoulder. “My story, I mean.” He clears his throat. “I, uh. I guess I was in this plane crash—”
“The Valkyrie.” James swallows down whatever emotion is building up, though the lines of his face tell Steve enough about the pain James must associate with it, the weight it’s carried through the years knowing it was how his friend had met his fate. “I know.”
Steve nods, trying his best to show sympathy, even if he doesn’t quite feel one way or another about that part of his history. “Right. Yeah, the Valkyrie. Well, these government guys, they found me and revived me, I guess. Turned out I was still alive in there.” At the horror written out on James’ face, Steve quickly corrects himself. “Not awake!” he all but squeaks out. “Just… in a coma or something. I don’t really know. They didn’t tell me much. But I, uh, lost practically all my memories, which you probably guessed.”
James takes a long second processing that, then flicks his eyes over the store, rows and rows of candy and canned food, staples anyone might need to pick up when in the neighborhood. “And this is, what? An undercover Shield op where you pretend to be a civilian?”
Steve blinks and realizes then James must be familiar with Nick. Or maybe not Nick, but his people, at the very least. “No,” he starts, “I left them.” That appears to take James aback. Steve wonders if James is simply easy to read or if some part of him instinctively knows how to interpret his every move. They used to be best friends, after all. At least that’s what he’s read. “I work here.”
“Oh.” James shakes himself out of it, and a real smile starts blooming across his face. Steve’s breath catches in his throat at how it transforms him, like pure sunshine coming through. Fuck, how did Past Steve live with someone this good looking and not lose his mind? “That’s great, Stevie. That’s—you did good.”
Steve only manages a stilted nod and twists his lips into a smile that he’s sure is only halfway as beautiful. “Your turn?”
James’ face turns sour at once, and he starts tugging at his sleeve. “I, um. I don’t know that you want to hear it.” Steve wants to protest, is already opening his mouth when James carries on. “But you deserve to know. So, here.” He pulls out a large envelope bursting with documents from the inside of his jacket, holding it out in a trembling grip. “It’s all there.” James gulps and seems to fight with himself before lifting his gaze to look him in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Steve takes the file, thick and tied with a double knot to keep it from spilling open, brows furrowed and a little lost. “James—”
An odd sound leaves James’ lips, and his expression is trapped between amusement and pain when Steve looks at him. “It’s Bucky,” he forces out. “You called me Bucky.”
“Okay.” Steve holds onto the file with an iron grip, the way his body aches to do to James—to Bucky. It’s almost like a compulsion, a sensation that crawls up his spine to reach out to this man in front of him with a desperate hold to keep him right where he is. He tightens his grip on the envelope instead. “Bucky it is.”
Bucky’s smile is subdued, eyes sad with only a glimmer of hope as he looks between Steve and the documents. He only says a gentle goodbye then, a jerk of his shoulders like he wishes he could do more, maybe envelop Steve in a hug before leaving.
Steve wishes he had.
◆
The kid in front of him must not be any older than 15, face youthful even if his frame is large and bulky. Still, Steve’s no fool. Even if he bought that he’s actually an adult, there’s no way he’d hit up Ronnie’s, a place that isn’t exactly a hit with the hip and trendy.
Mostly, they get older customers or people pretty rough around the edges who are sick of the pep and energy of the teeming club at the other end of the street.
“Seriously, man, I was here last week, just let me in.” Derek, if the ID is to be believed, starts posturing like he’s ready to throw down, and Steve doesn’t bother hiding his eye roll. “Look, it probably wasn’t your shift or something. I’ve been here before.”
Steve almost wants to laugh. “Every shift is my shift.” He returns the fake ID and leans back in his seat. “You’re welcome to wait out the night here with me, but I’m not letting you through. Hell, maybe you can help me with my crossword. Know the Best Picture winner of ’57?”
Derek huffs, crossing his arms. Yeah, this kid would never pass for an adult. “I just wanna see, okay?” he mumbles with a scowl.
Steve sighs and takes in the way Derek’s curiously looking around him, cautious but excited all the same. “You live in the city?”
Derek twists his lips. “Jersey.”
“Jesus fuck.” Steve rubs at his eyes and heaves a deep breath. “First of all, do not tell anyone else where you live. Second, you don’t gotta do this. There are lots of other queer spaces aside from run-down clubs filled with people twice your age.”
Derek shrugs, a little upset but not like he’s about to try his luck elsewhere. “Well, what did you do when you were a kid?” Steve doesn’t know, but Derek takes his silence as an answer. It takes a while before Steve successfully turns the kid away, but he does and is left yet again with the company of a smattering of customers looking to blow off some steam mid-week.
He tries to focus on the latest romance novel he’d swiped from Vera’s collection but can barely get into the steamy meet-cute before his mind wanders. A stab at the mostly filled crossword puzzle doesn’t turn up anything either, and Steve ends up staring listlessly at the empty boxes.
It’s how Ronnie finds him when he shows up with a bottle of water and bag of potato chips, and he must look particularly pathetic because Ronnie doesn’t even lovingly tease his incompetence at figuring out what he deems to be mostly obvious clues, as has become habit.
“What’s with the face?” Ronnie asks, stealing a chip from his mid-shift snack.
Steve takes his time chewing his mouthful, not quite sure how to put into words what he’d spend the last 24 hours doing. He’d read the file Bucky gave him, expecting at first to find something similar to his own story, maybe even something to do with Shield.
Well, Shield had something to do with it, alright.
Steve had ended up literally spilling his guts when he read everything they put Bucky through. He couldn’t not read it. Bucky had looked scared—terrified, even—when he handed over the envelope, and the least Steve can do is read through its contents.
He had wondered—splayed on his bathroom floor, mouth still tasting of bile—if Bucky hadn’t escaped Hydra and eradicated them years before Shield found the Valkyrie, if Steve himself would’ve ended up being one of their pet projects.
Would the world have two Winter Soldiers come this year if Shield was still infested with Hydra when they got their hands on Steve Rogers fresh off the ice devoid of any memories? Just the thought had made him empty his stomach yet again.
It’s safe to say that he’d lost a few meals’ worth of money during his long hours of reading, not to mention a full night’s sleep. It’s possible he can’t focus on his book tonight because he feels like passing out right there and then from exhaustion.
“Steve?” Ronnie’s concerned face enters his vision, and he realizes he’s spaced out for long enough to worry his friend.
Steve pastes on a smile, though he doesn’t know how convincing it is. Not a lot, if he were to guess. “Sorry, I’m fine.” He takes another handful of chips and stuffs his mouth with it. When Ronnie simply waits him out, he adds, “I met—someone. From before. Someone I knew.”
“Oh.” Ronnie pulls up an empty stool and settles next to him, flashing a sympathetic grimace. “How was it?”
Steve shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s complicated.” He sighs and crumples up the empty bag in his hands. Fuck, how’d he finish that off so fast? One day, he’ll find the guy responsible for the size of these mini-bags and give them a piece of his mind. “He’s been through a lot while I was—away. And I—” Steve finds himself choking on his words, the back of his eyes burning.
He feels Ronnie’s arms snaking around him, and Steve has to bite the insides of his cheeks to keep from bursting into tears, to stay right where is instead of fully falling into Ronnie’s embrace. Something about having a friend show him some measure of care makes his insides twist with bitter longing. He finds he keeps searching for comfort, whether it be a clutching hug from Ronnie or even some misguided fumbling in the dark with James.
“It’s real bad, Ronnie,” Steve chokes out and peeks at his friend, averting his eyes when met with a stare focused on him the way he’s grown unfamiliar with. Maybe there was a time once when he was used to such attention, but these days Steve has grown accustomed to being overlooked—or maybe he’s always been rather invisible; he doesn’t know. “I wish I’d been there for him,” he forces out, “somehow.”
Ronnie cards long, lithe fingers through his hair, brushing down into his steadily thickening beard, miles better now than the patchwork it had been on his first few tries—maybe his body is slowly adjusting to life out of the ice after all. Steve melts with the feeling of Ronnie’s caresses, and gives into leaning bodily against his friend.
He wonders if there ever was a time when someone would do this for him, pull him close and cradled in such gentle care. Sitting there with Ronnie, he can’t help but feel guilt build in his chest that anyone has to spare a shoulder for him to cry on.
“You can be there for him now,” Ronnie tells him, though Steve refuses to meet his piercing look at the suggestion. “What, you’re not seeing him again?”
Steve purses his lips and rubs at his face, leaning back on the wall behind him as Ronnie lets him go. “I don’t know,” he confesses. “He left me this—” Steve pulls out the worn piece of paper he’s taken from Bucky’s envelope and stuffed in the inside pocket of his jacket, worried he was going to lose it—“his number.”
Ronnie cocks an eyebrow as if silently demanding why the fuck Steve hasn’t called him up yet.
“I don’t know how he can possibly look at me and not blame me for leaving him,” Steve finally confesses. “For him losing his best friend.”
He knows Bucky was his sergeant, even that they had apparently grown up attached at the hip—he’d put that much together. It’s for that reason that he doesn’t know how to face Bucky now and own up to the fact that Steve doesn’t even remember him. That now when they’re free from war, made it to the other side somehow, the man who was supposedly Bucky’s other half was gone, replaced instead with—whoever Steve is now, stripped of his past, of the past they’d shared together.
“Maybe you should let him decide whether or not he’s lost that guy in the first place,” Ronnie says with a not so subtle scoff. Steve huffs in frustration, throwing him a glare. “Look, you don’t know what your old self was like—you’re the least qualified person to make that call.”
Despite himself, Steve laughs, Ronnie’s absurd logic making enough sense for at least his sense of humor. “That’s true enough.”
Ronnie smoothes back his hair, and Steve’s never been more thankful of how tactile Ronnie is, his touches never failing to ground and remind him that he’s a living breathing being, with human connection and a life—its sometimes empty days neither here nor there—instead of the nameless face haunted by unfamiliar horrors he often feels like when staring at the ceiling of his motel room.
“You should call him.” Ronnie taps at the wrinkled paper in his hand and gets to his feet. “Then get back to work. We got the Rooneys tonight. They’ve got half an hour tops before you’ll need to throw them out. Word of warning, they’re mean drunks when 4am comes around, so you’re gonna wanna take cover before they start throwing shit.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Steve rolls his eyes and shoves Ronnie away to head back inside and presumably up to his office.
He runs over Bucky’s number with the pad of his thumb for a long time, the edges of the paper thin and ragged by the time he pulls out his phone. Carefully written out at the top in neat cursive, is a generous please call me if you ever need anything. love, bucky. Steve traces out the ink with his finger, wondering if they used to write each other before Steve finally caught up to him in Italy.
Is that what they used to say, scribbled on the bottom of long-winded letters? How can Bucky say that now, to a man he barely knows—a man who barely knows him, rather—like nothing’s changed? How can Bucky feel anything like love, something surely built upon years of friendship for this stranger Steve has become?
The dial tone goes on for long enough when Steve manages to force himself to press call that he worries Bucky’s not going to answer. He hasn’t missed the way Bucky acted like he might never see Steve again, like whatever was in his envelope would put him off once and for all.
So he thinks, for a moment, that this might be it.
He’s seen Bucky Barnes in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the bodega, and that sight will be all he’ll have to lull him to sleep for years to come, a suggestion of a friend, of family, that he’d had once upon a time and has no hope of ever finding again.
When a voice tinged with sleep comes through his phone speaker, a confused if completely endearing growl of, “Hello?” Steve suddenly realizes that it’s the middle of the fucking night, and he’s a certified idiot.
Well, too late now.
“Hi, Bucky,” he breathes out, low and quiet like he hasn’t already woken the guy up with zero warning. “It’s Steve. Um, Stevie.” It’s weird to say Bucky’s apparent nickname for him out loud, and Bucky must agree because he laughs, soft and full of humor.
“Hey, Steve.”
Steve closes his eyes and revels in the sound, that warm honeyed voice crackling through the line.