Title: Change

Summary: Steve gets out into the world... and is depressed by all the change.

Disclaimer: I still don't own anything

Inspiration: I was out getting my Chai Tea Latte at my fav espresso stand and I drove by this old abandoned bar and saw this mom walking her kid and it was really cute and I was like, "awww... I gotta write about this." So I did.

This is probably going to be two chapters, and it's gonna be a Tony/Steve (but not in this chappie... it's just Steve here ;))

It had been a shock.

A shock to hit the freezing arctic water, the cold burning into his body.

A shock when he woke up in a plane, a robot, a god, and a man with a weird ant helmet staring down at him.

A shock when he saw the statue of Bucky and him, the plaque.

And that was just yesterday.

He was now an Avenger. It felt like just two days ago he was going in to defeat the Red Skull, now he was training in the Avengers Mansions, seventy years in the future.

Well, not really right now, but, you know.

Tony had advised him to learn the bus schedule (and system) until they could teach him how to drive and get him a license. Today, he decided he'd hit up a local art store and see if they had any good drawing supplies in this oh so advanced future he had here. Wasp had willingly searched up the address of a good art supply store nearby, Tony gave him a ridiculously large amount of cash (which he had felt really bad taking, but Tony insisted, reminding Steve how rich he was and how his money would probably go to waste otherwise) and he'd walked to the store, trying to remember the way.

It had been huge. Aisle after aisle of just art supplies- pottery, painting, sculpting, decorating, quilting, crafts, holiday crafts, decorations, and sketching. It took Steve a while to find the drawing section. He was a bit taken back by the variety of different sketch books he was presented with. He stared at the different sizes and brands and thickness and types of paper combinations he had.

How did people decide these days? He frowned.

Then, he closed his eyes, and reached forward slowly until his finger bumped the textured cover of one of the sketchbooks. He opened his eyes. It was a medium-sized hardbound book with a hundred and ten sheets and an attractive black cover.

Then he moved over to the pencils section.

Why did they need such a large selection? There were the basic sets, the sets with basic plus erasers and special pencil sharpeners, there were basic sets that were slightly different, large sets of twenty pencils, and huge sets with every type of pencil imaginable. One that caught his eye had charcoal and lead sticks and pencils and blending tools, erasers, sharpeners and sand paper. That is, until he looked at the price. Gee, he didn't think he'd ever be able to afford this. He bit his lip when he remembered the lump of cash in his pocket. He pulled it out and counted it.

His eyes grew wider and wider as the number kept going up in his head. Three hundred dollars! All in fifties! He remembered how Tony had insisted he use his money. He hesitantly grabbed the box of drawing supplies and made his way to the register, feeling guilty but excited at the same time.

It was probably the most expensive thing he'd ever bought himself, which is really sad once he thought about it. A box of pencils- his most valuable possession.

He sat at the bus stop. His bag was sitting on his lap, and his looked down at it with happiness he had not had since before he joined the army.

Steve felt as if he recognized the area- he felt like something was missing. Across from him was an abandoned parking lot, rubble and concrete tossed across it like nothing. He tried to remember if he knew what it might've been before, and realized it must've been the drug store his mother's friend had worked at when he was young. He frowned.

A lot of things have changed, he guessed. And suddenly, a wave of depression flowed over him once again, very much like yesterday, when he was talking to the strange flying lady named Wasp (who's real name he learned later to be Jan Van Dyn). He couldn't see how a world that has changed so much needed Captain America. He was a hero of World War II, not some futuristic protector of the Earth. That's Mr. Stark's job.

He stared at his bag again. What was he doing here? He didn't belong in the future. He belonged at the bottom of the ocean, with Bucky. Like he had said to Jan, he's no future man.

The bus rolled to a stop in front of him, and he stepped aboard. He paid the driver and took a seat on the side facing the abandoned parking lot.

There were a lot of people coming onto the bus, so he had a couple of seconds to look out at the parking lot.

He smiled at the scene before him, forgetting his previous state of depression. A young woman, obviously pregnant, walked through the mess, holding hand with her five-year-old daughter, who was wearing a Dora backpack and jumping up and down. The mother smiled down at the girl and laughed along with her. They stopped at the bench by the bus stop across from the one Steve had been at just now.

There was already three people sitting on the bench- a teenage boy wearing a green hoodie, an elderly women wrapped in a maroon scarf, and a man in a suit and sunglasses. When the teenager and the businessman saw the two, they shifted awkwardly. Then the boy smiled and stood, offering his spot to the mother. The elderly woman smiled at the girl, who sat on her mother's lap, and pulled a little candy out of her pocket and gave it to her. The girl smiled and thanked the woman, holding onto it in her stubby little fingers.

Maybe things didn't change all that much in the last seventy years. Little girls still sat on mother's laps and elderly women still carried around candy for children. Men still gave up their seat to women.

Steve couldn't stop the smile from spreading on his face and sticking there the entire ride home.