Steve thinks of scuffed floors and high-heeled shoes. The lights are dimmed, and the room is dark. It smells like cigarette smoke and something more – husky, like maple, or possibly hardwood finish. It's an old smell. The floor creaks beneath them. Music croons in the background. His hands are wrapped around Peggy's waist. She smells like vanilla and the cold fog that settles over forests.

He has no idea what he's doing, so he copies what he used to see Bucky do with dames back at home. Hand here, feet there, move like this. He's sort of awkward, but she doesn't seem to mind. She's good like that. She really likes him. Steve thinks she might have liked him before the serum. Bucky would like that. Bucky would want them to have a future together. She can take care of Steve, and that's important, because Steve needs somebody to take care of him. He's got that serum now, but he's still Steve. He might win more of the fights that he picks, but he's still too damn heroic for his own good.

That's what Bucky would say, if Bucky were there.

Peggy laughs. It's 2013. There is a steady stream of rain hitting the window of her bedroom. She is old, and beautiful, and they have never danced together. A brief silence falls over them. It is broken by a gasp. "Steve," she says again. "You're alive!"

Later, he presses his forehead to the cold tile of his shower. The water is the hottest that it can get, and it is scalding his back. It's 2013. He's alive. "Never thought I'd make it to 95, did you, Buck?"

There is no reply. Bucky is dead. Bucky's been dead for almost two years. Bucky's been dead for seven decades. The Internet tells Steve that there's a grave for Bucky, and the other Commandos, at Arlington. It's an empty grave. They never found a body.

Steve's apartment is quiet, dark. He was never supposed to survive taking down the Red Skull, not really. He grabs a book and sits down. Peggy was always a pipe dream. He places his feet on the ottoman. He could never really imagine a life without Bucky.

This is his life without Bucky:

He does missions for SHIELD. He watches movies that people think are important. He googles a lot of things. He's okay at technology, but he thinks Bucky would probably be better at it. He was always more tech-minded. Steve was the artist. Steve still draws. He has sketchbooks filled with stuff. Like before, it's mostly stuff that he sees: the city, people, things that he does. He sketches Natasha a lot. Almost as much as he used to sketch Bucky. He still sketches Bucky, too.

Steve wakes up on the couch. Early morning sunlight is filtering in through the windows. It's still grey outside, like the sun hasn't fully woken up. Everything is quiet. Steve gets up, makes coffee, and tells Bucky about New York. He tells Bucky about New York a lot, but it's a different Bucky every time. Sometimes Bucky is eleven, with scabbed knees, and he is as excited as about real life superheroes as the kids who wear Captain America t-shirts are. Sometimes Bucky is twenty-three, with his hair slicked back, and he's offering snarky comments and worried condemnations.

Bucky is rarely a soldier when Steve is talking to him. Steve likes to remember Bucky as being happy.

Steve goes for a long run. He hasn't had a mission from SHIELD in two weeks and he's getting restless. He thinks that the 21st century is okay, but he doesn't like dwelling on it much. It gives him homesickness.

He's been back to the apartment he shared with Bucky before the war. Or, he's been back to the lot where the apartment used to be. It burnt down in the 1960s. Now there's a drug store there. Steve went in and bought a cheap pad of paper, a pen. He sat down outside and drew the street like he remembered it. After he was done, he went back into the drug store and bought a candy bar. He went back to his apartment and realized that the old lot wasn't home. Home was a boy with a cocky smile and dark hair, who dripped with good-humor and defiance. Home was trouble, and security, and those hands that held Steve as he cried after his mother died, and those hands that saved him time and time again from guys twice his size, and those hands he failed to grasp when it mattered the most.

Home died in 1944.

Steve returns to his apartment two hours later. He takes a shower. The water is hot. It fogs all the mirrors. Steve can see Bucky reaching out for him. He can see Bucky stretching into the past forever – Bucky with a gun, or in a uniform with a girl on his arm. Bucky at Coney Island, Bucky posing for sketches, Bucky laughing, and crying, and stretched out beside Steve.

Steve looks to his future and sees nothing.