Steve never had been good with words. She'd always preferred to draw. There was nothing, no words, no emotions, no desires that she couldn't express through her art. When Bucky had gone to war, she'd drawn for him, sending him bits and pieces of home. When she'd been on tour for the USO, she'd recorded every bit of the journey with pictures. And when she'd been at war…

Her art wasn't always pleasant, but art wasn't always pleasant. It satisfied a need. It'd kept her sane.

Which was why she was going insane now. Here she was, seventy years in the future, and she couldn't draw a line. Nothing. Not even a dot. She'd take out the sketchbook Fury had gotten her, on her request, and sit and stare at the blank page, pencil in hand. She had nothing in her. She'd tried to draw what she'd seen the day she first escaped into the city, but it wouldn't come. She'd tried to recall Peggy's face, and while every detail of her expression was burned in Steve's mind, it wouldn't come out of the pencil. Same with Bucky. Same with everything.

She couldn't breathe. She walked around with this panicked feeling in her chest, something stretched and dried out. Her heart hammered all the time and her stomach turned slow circles. Her brain felt slow and dumb and her fingers were dead.

There was nothing inside her anymore. Nothing but panic and anger.

The anger was easier to deal with. Fury got her a punching bag. And, when she'd destroyed that, a whole fleet of them. And so her days fell into a routine. She'd get up. Wander the city, searching for something familiar. Then, not finding it, she'd come back to the apartment in Brooklyn SHEILD had given her, go down the street to the gym they'd set up for her, and pummel the bags until she was exhausted.

The gym was great. She could be there well into the night and no one cared.

Tonight, her thoughts whirled. Over and over again, remembering the Red Skull and the cube. The world it had opened up when the Red Skull had touched it, and how he'd disintegrated into that world.

She punched the bag harder. Faster.

She remembered the panic she'd felt when she'd realized there wasn't enough time to divert the plane. Peggy's voice telling her there was another way, to wait for Howard, but there'd been no time. She had to put the plane down before it exploded.

She remembered the cold creeping around her. Her limbs freezing. The warmth that had overtaken her just before she fell asleep and then…

The bag flew off the hanging. Crashed across the room breaking her from her whirl pooling though.

"Trouble sleeping?"

Steve wiped her face and glanced at the door. Fury stood there, all dramatic statement in black leather and stern face. There was something new in his expression. A sort of urgency that told Steve this wasn't a welfare check. Wasn't him dropping in to see how Cap was settling in, and if she'd decided on a gender yet. This was something else.

She felt a prickle of anticipation go up her spine.

"I slept for seventy years, sir," she answered. "I think I've had my fill."

"You should be out. Celebrating. Seeing the world."

Steve snorted and began unwrapping her hands. Her knuckles felt bruised and sore, but she flexed her hands a few times and it faded. Just like all pain faded. Except for where she needed it to fade.

"I went under," she said, "the world was at war. I wake up, they say we won." She shook her head. "They didn't say what we lost."

"We've made some mistakes along the way. Some very recently."

No kidding, she wanted to say. Days not spent wandering the city were spend at the computer, trying to catch up. The world was a mess. War, fighting, terrorism. Crime and rape and murder. Not that her world had been perfect by any means, but it'd felt so much simpler. You knew who the bad guys were, who was to blame. Now days, everyone was complicit in something, and there were no clear cut answers.

She flexed her hand again. "You here with a mission, sir?"

Fury nodded. "I am."

"Trying to get me back into the world?" And maybe that was what she needed. She was a soldier, after all. She knew how to be a soldier. Maybe getting back to it would help her stop feeling so disconnected from everything.

"Trying to save it." He handed her a file.

She opened the file and blinked, a jolt of surprise going through her. She'd just been thinking about the cube, and here it was. "Hydra's secret weapon."

"Howard Stark fished it out of the ocean while looking for you. He thought what we think: the Tesseract could be the key to unlimited sustainable energy. That's something the world sorely needs."

"And who took it from you?" she asked, connecting the dots quickly. This wasn't a history lesson, after all. No reason to bring it to her attention unless it was gone.

"He's called Loki. He's not from around here. There's a lot we'll have to bring you up to speed on if you're in. The world has gotten even stranger than you already know."

Steve smiled tightly. "At this point, I doubt anything would surprise me." She'd gone into the ice expecting to die. She'd woken up in the future. Everything was new, so nothing was a surprise; there was too much to take in. If she let herself be surprised by everything, she'd be overwhelmed.

"Ten bucks says you're wrong. There's a debriefing package waiting for you back at your apartment."

She nodded. Tucking the file under her arm, she went to the rows of punching bags to lift one.

"Cap."

She froze, stomach tightening.

"I'm bringing in others. A team. Anything you want me to tell them before you all meet?"

Damn. Damn, damn, and damn.

She lifted the punching bag and slung it over her shoulder. "There's nothing to tell, sir. When they see me, they'll draw their own conclusions, just like people always do."

"So, you're going to keep…"

"I'm going to keep being me."

"It'd just help me out if I knew what that meant."

She snorted. "You and me both." She turned to go.

"Anything else you can tell us about the Tesseract?"

"You should have left it in the ocean." Adjusting the punching bag, she left the gym and headed back home.

It would be so much easier if Steve could just grab a label and slap it on herself. From what she understood, these days, it shouldn't be so hard. Gay, bisexual, lesbian. Transgender. Nowadays it seemed like there was a label and a category for everything.

The doctors wanted her to say she was transgender. They kept bringing the label up with hopeful expressions on their faces, explaining it over and over again, like hearing what it meant for the thousandth time would make it suddenly fit.

It didn't.

Because she wasn't a man trapped in a woman's body. She wasn't a woman living as a man. She was… She was…

And that's where words failed her again.

What she was, was something that didn't seem to have a label. Or, maybe there was a label, and she just hadn't found it yet. Because sometimes, she felt like she was a man and sometimes, very rarely, she felt like a woman—whatever it meant to "feel" like any particular gender. Most of the time, though, it wasn't something that she thought about. She just was whatever she was and had been whatever she was for a very long time.

She read stories about transgendered people. Some had known they were a different gender when they were very young, and some had known something was wrong but came to the realization later in life.

Steve had become a boy when she was a kid. She'd chopped her hair off, and her mother had given her boys clothes. They'd moved to a new neighborhood, and she'd just been Steve from then on. So, maybe she was transgendered.

But, sometimes, she thought of herself as a woman. Not all the time. Most of the time, she didn't think of herself as anything. But, every once in a while, she definitely felt like a woman. Not that she wanted to wear a dress or make-up or anything, but something inside her just said "girl."

But, most of the time, it was nothing. Not man, not woman, just a person.

She couldn't figure out how to explain that to the doctors. Or to Fury. Or to anyone, not even herself. So, maybe there was a label for her, but right now, she just felt wrong. Everything in this century was wrong. She was wrong.

And now, she was going to meet a team of people that she was supposed to lead. There'd always been a tinge of anxiety when meeting new people, especially after she became Captain America. If they figured out her secret, it could have spelled disaster. She still didn't know what would have happened with Morita if Bucky hadn't died. He'd said he wasn't going to tell her secret, and he hadn't, even after she was gone, but what if tragedy hadn't struck? Would he have been able to accept her as a leader, or would he have gone to Philips and told?

She still shuddered to think of what Philips would have done. Prison would have been the least of it.

But now, it didn't have to be a secret. She could let people know she was…

And there she got stuck again. Because once you let someone know that you were physically a woman, could they look past that and see anything else?

Presenting herself as a woman would feel like a lie. She'd been living like this for over twenty years. Despite not being sure if she was a man, showing up any other way would be wrong. It'd feel wrong. So, she'd continue to be what she was.

Whatever that may be.