Chapter Text
I have, before, been tricked into believing I could be both an I and the world.
–Ada Limon, from her poem “Sanctuary”
The quinjet is on track to arrive at SHIELD headquarters in the dead of night. The mission was a success. In the corner is their target, unconscious and handcuffed to the legs of the chair he sits on, contorting him into an unnatural hunch. By the cockpit is the warlock who captured him, standing around like nothing’s wrong. Like he didn’t enter the operation without a single warning.
Steve is an active landmine. He bounces his leg up-and-down, up-and-down, until Rollins shoots him a piercing look from across the bench, clearing his throat. It’s an annoying habit, Rollins trying to assert his own authority. Steve assumes it was brought on by his own eyes, gone wide and glazed – creepy, as Rollins would say. A fish, gutted and lined up on blocks of ice, ripe for the picking.
Under better circumstances, Steve wouldn’t ignore him, but another man deserves his rage.
Steve purses his lips and unbuckles his seatbelt. He stands to attention and stares at the prisoner, staring so long that his brain tries to trick him into seeing movement, breathing artificial life into him. The twitch of a hand. The upward jerk of a knee.
He notes the slowly disappearing throb of the knife wound in his side, exposed by a rip in his black tac suit. His own pain is a weaker fuel, but fuel nonetheless. Steve reaches for his shield, stripping it from his back and holding it loosely. He lines his hand up with the vertices of the star at its center, his fingers splayed out wide, stretching the webbing between each of them translucent.
The vibranium is cool against his skin. The image is striking: his hand, fitting perfectly into the star, the motif made precisely for him. He is Captain America. Captain America is him. The thought comes sudden and unprompted. It disappears just as easily.
Steve returns the shield to his harness, then sighs. Exhaustion makes him sentimental.
In an attempt to calm himself, Steve closes his eyes, counting slowly from one, inhaling on the odd numbers and exhaling on the even ones. Absently, he wonders if his SHIELD-assigned therapist, the one he hasn’t seen since he was released into the world, would be proud of him.
Therapy was two weeks of the dullest speeches he ever bore witness to, the kind of boring where you become willing to say anything, do anything, just to get it over with. Steve felt bad about wasting their time, but there wasn’t anything to therapize – especially not with didactic droning of a sixty year-old man. Your trauma is real. Your feelings are valid. Ugh.
Sometimes, Steve even found it funny, in that distant, matter of fact way you know that the Earth is round. The Earth is round, and his therapist talks about trauma and PTSD while signing Steve’s clearance for field work. He is Captain America. Captain America is him.
Still, some things were useful. Like the counting.
When Steve reaches 3485, the inhale of breath 1743, the quinjet lands softly on the raised helicopter pad. Though he tried to tamp it down, his rage still blares red hot, filling up the inside of his chest. A searing lava.
A SHIELD officer tries pulling him into the medbay, but the slash on Steve’s side healed on breath 345, so he shakes them off and strides purposefully through the elevator doors, jabbing at the control panel before another person can enter.
****
Fury sits stoically at the center of his desk, his arms crossed to cover the contents of the paper he was scrawling on. He’s illuminated from behind, casting him into a shadowy silhouette.
Steve bursts through the door. He hears the bulletproof glass pane bang loudly against the doorstop, announcing his presence. Fury barely looks up from his desk.
Steve stands in the doorway in anticipatory silence. He refuses to speak until Fury looks at him. He deserves more respect than that. The anger clotted into his windpipe deserves more than that.
Steve counts again. Inhale on the odd numbers. Exhale on the even ones. Again, it doesn’t work.
Finally, Fury flips his paper over. He takes his time, calmly clicking the cap onto his pen and setting it on top of his desk.
“Sir,” Steve says, clearing his throat.
Only then does Fury raise his head, lifting an eyebrow condescendingly and making a small gesture with his hand. Go on.
Steve clenches his fist, a little harder and he would’ve drawn blood. “That mission.”
“What about it.” Fury’s making a statement, not a question.
“What was it for,” Steve says, his voice rough like rusted, steel rebar.
Fury looks back down at his papers. He shuffles them in no discernable order. “That’s classified, soldier.”
Steve takes a deliberate step forward, inching closer into Fury’s space until he’s a scant few inches in front of his desk. “Warlocks, Fury. You can’t drop new guys into the middle of missions and expect me to just deal with it.”
“That’s classified,” Fury repeats, irritatingly calm. “I didn’t think that you’d need a warning for magic. It’s everywhere; it has always been. Even the barista in Stark’s tower has magic, they put it into the coffee.”
“This wasn’t someone infusing lattes. It was a mission and he could’ve compromised it.”
“You didn’t need to know. It’s OpSec, Captain. You understand that.” Fury’s fingers lace together and he rests his elbows on his desk.
Steve can’t stop the heat from rising to his voice. “You can’t tell what I do and do not need to know. It’s not OpSec when it compromises the mission.”
Fury’s good eye narrows. “You don’t even know what the mission was.”
Steve leans back, fingers hanging off the loops of his belt. He takes a step back. “Then tell me,” he challenges, flicking his chin up.
“No.”
Fury’s one eye blinks.
“That’s what I thought.”
Sensing that he isn’t going to get anywhere in the conversation, Steve spins around on his heels and moves to leave. He pauses at the exit, holding the door open with his back facing Fury. “Stop calling me for missions that don’t need me. I’m not going next time.”
Fury chuckles faintly. It’s more huff than laugh, more air than sound. “Sure, Captain. I don’t believe that for a second.”
Steve hears him uncap his pen again and resume scribbling. He walks away.
****
Steve’s drive back to his apartment is soothing. The hum and rumble of the motorcycle’s engine under him is as familiar as the day he learned to ride, all of seventy years ago. For once, Stark’s sense of humor worked out for Steve; he found the same model motorcycle as the one from the USO shows, when he pretended to punch Hitler and danced for war bonds.
Stark probably expected Steve to hate it. He was right, but only partially. After the first wave of annoyance, a near-constant now with Stark’s delightful quips, Steve appreciated the gift. It called forth memories a few years old for Steve, and decades old for others.
Steve’s first kiss with a woman was during the USO tour. A dancer named Lillian, with the fluffiest blonde hair and slim calves, brought him behind the tents and kissed him right on the lips. She asked. Steve nodded. Then nothing but the waxy taste of victory-red lipstick. She was gentle with him, a little teasing, but the way she breathed him in, her lips light and gentle as it guided his, was kind most of all.
His third kiss with a man was on the prop bike. The first two were in shadowy Brooklyn bars, the ones that stayed illegal even after prohibition ended, but the third was in Europe. He never got the man’s name, but he remembers the soft give of his belly and the dull smell of cigarettes on army-issued clothes. He had the deepest blue eyes, and Steve, inside, called him Indigo. Through the quagmire of war, with its long periods of waiting punctuated only by brief bouts of violence, he called upon that memory for a kind of warmth no fire could give. Steve regrets not having gotten his name. Now, Steve doesn't even know if he made it through the war.
The cool wind slips around him as he drives. Even in New York, the roads thin during the witching hours, letting Steve weave skillfully between the sparse collections of cars.
He always takes the same route back to Avengers Tower. It’s a helpful routine, a repeating bookend separating mission and life. As he drives, he checks items off a little list of made-up landmarks in his head. The crooked fire hydrant by the third stoplight. The laundromat, which never fails to be closed for maintenance, and that Steve suspects is a front for money laundering. The club opposite it, which Steve has never seen closed, radiating purple and blue light from its windows.
Every time Steve makes this familiar drive, he’s tempted to pull over, to just stop on the side of the road and blend into the crowds of pedestrians. Maybe he’ll even stop inside the club, dirty tac suit notwithstanding. Steve spots even more landmarks – the cafe with ever-changing chalkboard illustrations, the witches’ apothecary, a flower shop with closed blinds. He doesn’t stop driving.
Steve arrives at the Tower’s parking garage and ignores the small voice nagging at him, reminding him that his time is divided between avenging, grunt work for SHIELD, and little else. He closes his eyes and stays seated on the parked bike, waiting for his mind to resurface memories, to make this monotony a little more bearable. Though sepia-toned and bathed in static, images of Lillian and the feeling of the Indigo’s calloused hands still appear.
He pulls off of his bike and runs fingers through his hair, tangled from the ride. A great sigh runs through him as he enters the elevator. He dreads seeing his apartment, especially after the calmness of the drive. It’s the worst part of this routine. It makes sense though – after the rapture, the leftovers.
Steve slips into his apartment, still in Avengers Tower a full year after he was recovered from the ice. He knows that he should move out – aside from Tony, who probably has houses squirreled away everywhere, he’s the only one that lives there. Still, the task of apartment-hunting and moving out is much too daunting when Steve barely spends time in the apartment anyway, always flitting between missions.
The apartment feels sterile. The couch is a plain white leather, and all the other furniture is nothing but harsh lines and monochrome. It’s like Steve’s gone colorblind again.
On his bedside is the brochure of a dog shelter that Sam slipped him once. Steve found it carefully folded, caught between the folds of his wallet, the day after he confessed that he maybe wanted one. He was a little embarrassed saying it, that he wanted a pet to greet him, to be happy he was home. If only he had the time to care for a pet.
The next day, the brochure materialized in his pocket, alongside a note from Sam that read, “You can have the time for one, you just need to choose to.” Steve didn’t know what he meant, but he couldn’t throw away the brochure. He doesn’t think about why that is either.
He avoids looking at the three dead succulents, each at a different state of rot on his windowsill. It’s a gradient straight out of a biology textbook. Figure 1: Cacti and its stages of death. In hindsight, the impulsive decision to buy them seems naive. He just wanted to breathe some life into his apartment, a splash of green to soften all the monochrome. Instead, he has the opposite.
Image: Steve’s wilting succulents.
****
In the bathroom, Steve slowly strips out of his tac suit. He feels each zipper tooth unwind from its partner in a quiet click, click, click. He likes this suit – at least, as much as you can enjoy layers of kevlar – because the Captain America shield is embroidered in long running stitches on the layer that touches his skin. The addition seems like an afterthought, hastily done stitches laying unevenly in front of unerased tailors chalk.
From the outside, the tac suit is indistinguishable from the rest of the STRIKE uniforms, just a heavy, bullet-proof vest over black fatigues. Inside, however, is him. The one thing he is this century: Captain America. No more Howlies, no more Agent Carter, no more Lillian, no more Indigo. Just him and Cap, the lone survivors.
The suit drops to the floor and Steve steps out of it. With careful hands, he folds it up and puts it in a garment bag, ready to be whisked away by whomever Stark pays to do the laundry and other easily-forgotten tasks. He doesn’t know if it’s a robot, but he still scribbles thank you and a smiley face on a slip of paper and drops it, along with a 10 dollar bill, into the bag.
He steps into the shower and turns the water as hot as it can go, savoring how it stings his tender, newly healed skin. The water sluices down his body, grime mixing with the rust of dried blood and sweat-soaked dirt to swirl down the drain.
His skin pinks up from the heat and his muscles release their tension in a steady stream, like air from an old balloon. If, at that moment, Steve was asked what one thing he’d keep from the 21st century, it would be this shower at this precise point in time.
Finally alone, he gives himself to recollect the mission with a clear head, only the ghost of his earlier anger remaining. A warlock appeared through a glowing, golden circle in the middle of the fight against another magic user. With the way the fight shook out, there was no reason for Steve to be there. Obviously, it wasn’t for his strategic instincts because Fury didn’t bother giving them the full details during the brief. He wasn’t even there for his strength; the warlock took care of the threat handily without their help.
Steve presses his back against the glass wall of the shower, letting it take his weight. A frustrated sigh escapes his mouth. Steve can cope with secrets. During World War 2, Phillips didn’t tell him everything; he didn’t need to know about the American troops in Manila or the movement of Russian allies. The difference was that he knew why the hell he was fighting. With Fury, missions are nothing but a black box. He could see the shape of it, could shake it and hear its contents, but he’ll never be able to peer inside.
He recalls Fury’s words. Opsec. “That’s classified, soldier.”
Outside the full heat of the moment, he suspects that his anger wasn’t even about the secrets. It was the not being needed. Him, the afterthought. Perhaps it’ll spiral from there. First, he gets relegated to the menial, grunt work. Then, no work at all. Who is he then, without the fighting?
Suddenly, exhaustion catches up with him. Steve heaves himself off of the wall and mechanically rubs shampoo into his hair. The cloying, sweet smell of artificial coconut barely registers in his brain.
He is Captain America. Captain America is him.
Briefly, he allows himself to feel the implications of the statement on the edges of his periphery, the slack in his puppet-strings, before he pushes the thought away. There’s no going back to the 40s. Only the future remains.
****
Steve is embarrassed by this habit, but he can’t stop himself from doing it anyway. It goes like this. If he sits in just the right spot on the tower’s roof and closes his eyes, if he lets his legs dangle off of the ledge, a cigarette held between his index and middle finger, then it feels just like one summer night in Brooklyn, in the July of 1935, his mattress dragged out onto the fire escape of their tenement to escape the humid heat.
The stars shined brightly against the night sky, the clouds chased away by the earlier drizzle of rain, and if he concentrated hard enough, he’d coerce his shot hearing to recognize the sounds of his ma tinkering with their old radio. The static of the broadcast would cut in and out – Brooklyn Dodgers, up 10 points in the 8th inning! – and he’d let the air float him upwards as he starfished on the mattress, his spirits as light as helium.
For just a little while, on top of the tower, Steve can feel like helium again. The people wandering the streets below him are as tiny as ants, and Steve reaches a hand out in front of him, fingers shaped like a crab’s pincers, and mimes squishing them like bugs. He raises the same hand to the sky, to press his skin against the bright dots of stars, but the sky is blank. Too much pollution and light, from billboards and electrified buildings, washes them away. So, just like helium, the daydreams must dissipate into air, and the loud engine of a commercial jet breaks him out of his reverie.
Still, Steve keeps his eyes closed for another minute. Chasing the wisps of his daydream, he takes a long drag from his cigarette. It’s a Lucky Strike, in the same packaging as the smoke rations distributed during the war, helpfully found by JARVIS off of a stranger online.
He used to hate the smell of cigarettes, the prologue to a fit of asthma. That word is so dry – clinical, even. The doctor that diagnosed him couldn’t have known how it felt to have your lungs, your alveoli, deflate and give up, to know that your body is actively working against you.
Intellectually, he knows that the cigarette does nothing for him. His asthma is gone and the serum breaks down the nicotine too quickly for that. Nonetheless, it’s crucial to the stage dressing. So, he holds the smoke inside his lungs for a beat, just to savor the ashy heat of it inside his chest, right between the slats of his ribs, then lets it out.
Steve opens his eyes and whispers, “I want to go home.”
It’s mumbled to no one, more for his benefit, and perhaps for the God he used to pray to. He doesn’t really know why he says it because there is no “going home.” Home is humid summer nights in 1935 Brooklyn; it's the static of an old Dodgers game and his ma’s presence; it's Lillian’s victory red lips behind the USO tents. Now, this is home – sitting on the rooftop that looks onto Manhattan, under a sky without any stars.
All of it – the daydreaming, the playing pretend – it’s all sickly-sweet in its sincerity, how it’s turned up to eleven in grotesque exaggeration, his life in a funhouse mirror. He has a right to it, Steve believes, his entire life is characterized by grotesque exaggeration. He can’t just have one disability, he must have anemia, and asthma, and scoliosis. He can’t just grieve his ma, after the ice, he must grieve everything. Still, having a right to it doesn’t stop it from being what it is.
Embarrassing.
Resigned back to reality, Steve swings his legs back onto the floor of the roof. It’s all rough, gray concrete except for a wooden path circling a shallow, recessed pit at the center. In front of the pit is a placard, white plastic on a black, metal post, calling itself a “rooftop oasis.”
Steve figures that Stark, or Stark’s architect, planned on fixing it into a garden at some point, but it fell easily to the wayside for more important things. Like aliens and Iron Man. He’s glad for it, honestly, because it means that the roof is just his. No one else would spend the dusk with nothing but unrefined concrete, just him, and his longing for home.
Steve walks to the corner of the rooftop to the easel and stool he set up there. Beside it is a small box of art supplies: graphite pencils, moldable erasers, brushes and paint. On the easel is a half-done painting of the Manhattan skyline as seen from the tower’s roof. Parts of it are filled in with monotone blocks of paint, and others are still messy sketches in graphite pencil, their harsh outlines covered in gray cilia.
Steve hates it. He abandoned it weeks ago. The painting’s all artifice to him. Generic. Just as easily, he could snap a picture on his phone and capture just as much feeling. He doesn’t know enough about this new city – about this new world – for his art to have much to say. Outside of missions he’s only looked on, a disinterested observer in the sky.
Still, he still sits on the stool and picks up a brush. He lays out paint on a palette, squeezing out different shades of blues and indigos for the night sky. When the sun peeks over the horizon, his brush is still dry.
He stands, stretches, and returns to his apartment. He goes to sleep missing home.
****
Later that morning, Steve enters a bookstore in Brooklyn, located a few streets away from where he grew up.
The bookstore was a comforting discovery. Like the roof, it reminded him of home. The storefront hasn’t changed since he was a kid, all exposed brick, large windows, and hand-drawn lettering on the displays in long, sweeping strokes. As a teenager, he remembers painting some signs himself. Even throughout the depression, the owner would sneak him second-hand copies of paperbacks for free if he did the drawings on the sandwich boards.
He walks in, the tinkle of a bell signaling his entrance, and the cashier looks up at him. They’re used to him by now, and coupled with a New Yorker’s indifference, they ignore him and continue scrolling on their phone. That too is comforting. No one cares that he’s Captain America, and they know him well enough to let him wander the shelves without an over-eager attendant offering their help.
For a few minutes, he flips through all kinds of novels, from thick sci-fi tomes to thin bodice ripper paperbacks. He takes the time to admire the art in the comics section, both the Western superhero collections and cutesy Japanese manga. While he enjoys looking at those, even the ones about unrealistically powerful student councils, he stacks his basket with books he, though he refuses to admit it, knows he won’t read. They’ll just join the increasingly tall stack of books on his coffee table, each with a slip of paper somewhere between the fortieth and sixtieth page, marking where he stopped reading. They’re all from the small notebook tucked into his pocket, a list of pop culture novels he needs to know about, collected from the SHIELD brief given to him in his first week out of the ice, and recommendations from the people around him.
Steve has a conflicted relationship with The List. It’s another reminder of how is separate from the world; he is a relic, meant to be painted over in a fresh, new set of cultural aphorisms and in-jokes, before he attains full humanity. He doesn’t like thinking about it in this bookstore, where he can still see the corner where he sat as a younger man, devouring new worlds through the page. He still buys the books on the list though.
The basket of novels acquired, he finds himself facing the art supply section of the store. It’s small, just two shelves tucked in front of the back wall, evidently stocked more for hobbyists than professional artists. Steve picks out a new sketchpad and a new pack of charcoals, skipping over the oil paint, and adds it to his basket. It’s momentarily satisfying, getting to pretend that the one thing stopping him from making art is supplies, a problem so easily remedied by paying for more.
Steve makes his way to the cashier, who’s still absently scrolling through his phone, and places the basket on the counter. Without exchanging words, Steve pays for his items and takes a seat at the small coffee shop attached to the bookstore.
Sipping a latte, Steve people-watches and attempts to sketch. A heavy-set man with a large, black briefcase shuffles past the store, breathless and sweaty in a suit. From the gold Rolex watch on his wrist, Steve guesses he’s one of the finance types who’s always been in New York. A family walks past too, composed of two men, one with long hair and the other with tattoos up to his neck, and a young baby in a stroller. Some of these observations make it onto the page, like the baby’s plastic rattle and a cartoon of a briefcase’s papers floating on the East River, but nothing coherent forms.
Before Steve can even finish his coffee, his phone rings with a call from Natasha. He ignores it for the first two rings, carefully closing his sketchbook and stuffing it into the shopping bag it came in, before picking up.
“Nat?” Steve’s voice verges on urgency, but it’s mostly curious.
“Steve,” Natasha replies, “how was yesterday’s mission?” In the background, the voices of SHIELD agents and Fury’s strong, commanding tone are audible.
Steve hums, considering his words. “It was fine,” he says, leaving out the warlock and all his washed-away anger. “Why are you calling? I thought you were on another mission.”
“I was. Now, I’m not.”
She’s being vague. Secrets, again. Absently, Steve wonders if it’s because she doesn’t want him to know, or because the thought of telling him never occurred to her in the first place. Steve hums his acknowledgement.
“Fury has another mission for you. It's a short one, and I’m coming.”
Steve considers the offer, recognizing the hidden question in Natasha’s statement. Do you want to go on another mission? He appreciates the consideration, the choice, even though he knows as well as Nat does that he’ll go regardless.
Ultimately, his decision is less about the missions themselves than the lack of an alternative. What else will he do all day? Just lounge about on the roof, smoking through packs of benign cigarettes, not painting? It’s missions or the hospital-white horizon of boredom and missing home.
Steve sighs. “Yeah, I’ll go. Send me the details. Do you need me to drive there or will you send someone to pick me up?”
“Look outside,” Natasha says.
A sports car has materialized soundlessly on the street outside. It’s Natasha. Then it hits him – she knew that he was going to agree.
Without replying, he ends the call and clicks his phone off. He gathers his books and his art supplies and throws his half-empty latte into the trash before joining Natasha in the car.
“Are you ready?” Natasha asks as Steve buckles his seatbelt.
Steve quiets the part of him that wants to say no. “Yeah,” he says, “I’m ready.”