Disclaimers: Steve Rogers, Captain America, and the Avengers all belong to Marvel. The rest belongs to and is copyrighted to me. I write for my own pleasure and enjoyment, not for monetary gain. Copyright © 2012 Anna Erishkigal.

Man Out of Time

"We found her," Nick Fury said.

Steve Rogers paused, staring at the punching bag he'd just duct-taped back together for another round. The dim lighting of the dilapidated old gymnasium he'd purchased with sixty-six years of back pay hid his expression as he avoided looking up to see the sympathy he knew would be shining out of Nick Fury's one good eye. The musty scent of old leather and a centuries worth of dried sweat settled around him like a comfortable old blanket, the one familiar thing which had endured the three quarters of a century he'd spent frozen in a block of ice. Her. He didn't need to ask to whom Nick Fury referred.

"What cemetery?" Steve asked, staring at the worn rawhide lacing of his gloves.

He earned enough money as a superhero, especially a superhero as visible as the Avengers since ending Loki's murderous rampage a few weeks ago, to buy an entire factory full of state-of-the-art boxing gloves, but for some reason, only worn leather gloves broken in by decades of middleweight boxers ever felt right upon his fists. Back in the day … back when he'd still been a real Captain in the Army and not just some old showpiece the Avengers dug out of the mothballs to play referee whenever they needed someone to babysit the oversized egos that were the Avengers, even the best soldiers had used the same gloves used by everybody else. Rationing. Food coupons. Victory gardens. Recycling. Every man doing what they could and making sacrifices for the war effort. Nowadays, the war they fought spanned the galaxy, not just Earth, but the only thing the government wanted to recycle was him, a soldier who, for all intents and purposes, should have stayed dead.

Nick Fury paused, the low rumble in his throat not one of anger, but a man suffering from a loss of words. A rare occurrence with Fury, who only had two tones of voice. Threatening growl. Or shouting. Steve looked up, his clear, blue eyes clouded with emotion. His shoulders slumped as though he were Atlas carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

"She's alive," Fury said. His cheek twitched, indicating that wasn't all there was to the story.

"You told me she was dead," Steve said, his tone of voice deliberate and even as he clamped down upon the errant thrill of hope. "You told me she died after the war and never married."

Nick Fury stared without speaking, only the slight twitch of a single muscle in his razor-stubbled cheek giving him away. Fury's tell. Nick Fury was good at playing a hard ass, but Steve had been around too many four-star generals in his tenure, no, make that former tenure as front-man against the Third Reich, to buy it. Patton. MacArthur. De Gaulle. Marshall. Even brave Kruschev, who he'd been surprised to learn had been rewritten from allied field commander to communist villain during the time he'd been asleep.

"The Army never bothered keeping track of her once the war ended," Fury said, an expression that might be remorse, or simply frustration. "The women … they dismissed them from the WACS and the factories the minute the war was over and sent them home to have babies. It was a different world back then."

Steve punched the bag, his shoulders tense as he tightened his fist inside the worn old gloves, the leather cracked from years of abuse, and focused on the reassuring feel of the flat of his knuckles hitting the sand-laden bag. Fury wouldn't deliberately lie to him, but he had an infuriating habit of withholding information when he didn't want to tell the truth. Why had Fury lied about Peggy Lawton? Or was he lying about her now?

"She'd be … what?" Steve asked. "Ninety-two years old?"

"Ninety-four," Fury said. "She just turned ninety-four three months ago. She was a couple of years older than you to start with."

Ninety-four. Was such a thing even possible? Even now, in this day and age where things he'd once believed to be impossible were everyday occurrences, the lifespan people could aspire to amazed him. Two-way television phones you could carry in your pocket? Boxes that cooked your meals in two minutes or less? Jet airplanes that flew themselves almost entirely by computer. The unearthly technology possessed by Red Skull had been awesome, but it was still the little things mankind had achieved on its own which made Steve want to crawl inside his musty old gymnasium and never see the light of day.

"Is she … does she …"

Steve trailed off. The last person from his own time he'd dug up, an old World War 2 veteran still alive from the Great War, had suffered from dementia. He'd remembered Steve, all right. The old war vet had remembered every detail about storming Red Skull's fortress with him and his long-deceased sidekick Bucky Barnes. But everything else the old vet remembered had been dicey. The old warhorse remembered Steve, but he couldn't even remember his own son.

"She's failing fast," Fury said as though reading his thoughts. "But her mind is still pretty good. A bit forgetful. But she remembers you."

"How'd you find her?" Steve asked.

Nick shifted his stance, the movement causing the long tails of the full-length leather coat he liked to wear to flap as though it were some superhero cape. Superheroes! What a joke!

"We didn't," Nick said, the twitching in his cheek tipping Steve off there was more to the story he wasn't going to tell. "She found us. She saw you on the television after the Loki incident and went through some old channels to see if it was really you."

"I never showed my face," Steve said. "For all she knows, I'm just a copycat to make people feel secure."

What he didn't add was that they could all use a little security right now. Especially him. While America and the world looked to the Avengers to be their security blankets, Steve knew firsthand how deeply flawed they all were. Christ! They looked to him to lead them! A human with no special powers other than the millennium serum had made him stronger and faster than most other humans. It hadn't made him a billionaire genius. Or a god. Or a big green monster. It hadn't done anything except make him just a little bit more of what he had already been when Dr. Erskine had injected him.

"Her son said she insisted she knew you," Fury said. "They feared the old biddy would drop dead of a heart attack when she saw you on the television. They thought she'd finally gone senile. He finally got ahold of one of her old colleagues who recently retired from Stark Industries. The old guy still had enough contacts inside the company to get Pepper Potts to believe it was the Peggy Carter who'd once run interference for Tony's father."

"Her son?" Steve asked. His arms dropped along his sides, letting out a long, defeated breath. "Of course. She … um … her son."

He'd been believed dead. Peggy had to live her life while Steve had been frozen in a block of ice. To mourn his loss. To grieve. To live each day until it had finally become bearable, just as he'd had to keep putting one foot in front of the other each day after Red Skull had killed Bucky. For Peggy, it had been more than sixty-five years since his plane had gone down in the artic. Of course she'd moved on with her life. But for him? For him, it had only been months! How could he tell his heart, which screamed for her betrayal, that he was glad she hadn't moved through the remainder of her life with that empty feeling in his chest that he felt? Steve punched the bag, the flat thunk of a padded fist hitting a sand-filled leather bag echoing in the empty gym.

"Damn…"

Nick stepped forward, his arm outstretched with a slip of paper in it.

"You don't have a lot of time," Nick said. "Her son said she's fading fast. You might want to go over to see her sooner rather than later."

"Thanks," Steve muttered, staring down at the slip of paper Nick had placed into his hand. On it was a name that was eerily familiar. Abraham S. Miller. Abraham had been Dr. Erskine's first name. The 'S' in the middle? Steve had his suspicions. If only … they'd never … no. Steve sighed. No … they'd never been given that opportunity, though he had intended to ask her to marry him as soon as he'd completed that last mission. Had her husband been aware she'd named their son after the two men Peggy had admired most in the world?

Nick placed a hand on his shoulder, the sympathy in his dark brown eyes a stark contrast to the black patch which always made him look like he was about to go off on a murderous rampage, a look Nick favored.

"At least you'll have a chance to say goodbye," Fury said.

He whirled, the tails of his long leather trench coat slapping together like demon wings, and strode out of the gymnasium without another word. Steve stood there, staring at the name scratched into the slip of paper and a phone number with far too many digits than should be necessary to simply dial an old friend. Five numbers. Were there really so many people now living in the world that it was necessary to have ten digits in a phone number instead of the five he had grown up with? Even calling an old friend had become twice as hard as it had been in his own time and age.

Dust floated in the air, looking like tiny bursts of starlight shining in the sunlight streaming through the skylight in the ceiling of the ancient gym. Starlight. Another idea he had to get used to in this strange day and age where mankind travelled to the stars. Or at least the moon. But here, here in this ancient gym, he could pretend sixty-six years of his life hadn't simply vanished into a block of ice. Or Peggy Carter … the woman he had loved and never had a chance to tell until the day his plane had gone down.

He slipped the paper into his back pocket, a task to be attended to later, after he'd worked through some of the turmoil tearing through his gut. There was a reason he'd been put in charge of the others. Unlike Tony Stark, Steve Rogers liked to think before he acted. Tightening the laces on his musty leather gloves, he began to pound the duct tape off the old punching bag he'd just taped back together until it began to disintegrate. Just like everything else he had once loved had simple disintegrated in the anvil of time.

O

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