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Steve Rogers wakes up and it's all pain and chaos. Bucky's name is ripped from his lips as he reaches out and grasps at.. nothing. They sedate him and hours later when he opens his eyes to a baseball game being broadcasted into his room his world unravels once again.
For a while Steve is suspended in time, but this time everything's in color and he's awake. When he finds Peggy the cold in his bones makes him feel ancient, he knows it's ridiculous but with every step he hears them creak and wonders when they'll give out under him. Peggy scolds him and tells him to get over himself, tells him to move on, to live again.
"I didn't fight tooth and nail to make this world a better place so you could spend it feeling sorry for yourself Rogers."
So he heads her advice and tries.
He starts small, with a coffee shop down the street from his apartment. Really interesting people always go there and they have free wifi so it's a great place to catch up on current events. There he meets Rachel.
She's half a foot shorter then Steve but something about the way she approaches him with a cup of coffee in each hand reminds him of Peggy. Rachel loves the beach and is in New York for art school. She hates pidgins and makes Steve laugh.
She invites him out to dinner and when Steve hesitates she gives him the warmest smile, it almost soothes the ache seventy years of ice left.
"Whoever they are, they're very lucky."
Steve tells Peggy and once again she scolds him, tells him that in this day an age if a pretty women thinks you're worthy of her time, you take her out to dinner and prove it.
The next time Rachel asks he says yes.
While it goes no further then a kiss on the cheek goodnight, Rachel is Steve's first kiss since 1945.
Rachel makes Steve realize that he missed human interaction. Misses bonding with someone over a warm plate of food, misses going out dancing, and having a good time. So this time taking Peggy's advice he dives in. This is how he meets Matt.
Matt is not gentle and small like Rachel, he is boisterous and seemingly unafraid. This time Steve buys him a drink.
Matt is fun. He and Steve talk about baseball and tease each other about music, and whenever Steve looks into Matt's eyes he doesn't feel the cold in his bones. Matt kisses him underneath a street light one night as he's walking Steve home. Later Steve lays awake and wonders how life could have been different had he never gotten the serum.
After Matt is Jacob who is silent and writes poems about boys with sad eyes. Steve kisses Jacob at an art show.
Then it's Lindsey who's never seen without her camera. Steve kisses Lindsey after a movie.
All this Steve tells Peggy and she smiles at him knowingly before finishing her story about the time Jarvis tried to teach Howard how to make lasagna.
Steve meets lots of people, kind people and not so kind people, and he kisses them and experiences life, but nothing ever sticks. No one ever stays and Steve never really makes the effort to stop them from leaving.
And then everything changes.
Fury shows up and the attack on New York happens and there he is working for the man and it's 1945 again except it's not because there's no Peggy and there's no Bucky, and there are aliens.
He continues to live in suspended time and Natasha notices what Peggy did and tries to set him up, except Steve doesn't really need it, not when nothing will stick and no one will stay-including himself.
And then he finds himself in a mall and Natasha's lips are on his and he remembers Rachel and Matt and Jacob and Lindsey and Peggy and Bucky and his heart clenches.
"Am I your first kiss since 1945?"
Steve knows Natasha's only teasing but in that moment he wants to tell her, about how his first kiss since 1945 is a beautiful artist who will one day be featured in every museum known too man, how she has 3 sisters who are all lawyers and meet up for every single holiday and every single birthday. He want's to tell her about his second kiss since 1945 and how he grew up on Queen and Freddie Mercury inspired him to start a band when he was sixteen and he has still yet to have a slice of pizza worth dying for.
He wants to tell Natasha everything about his last kiss before 1945 and how if there's anything Steve regrets more is not showing up for that dance.
But he doesn't, because if he does he won't be able to stop himself from telling Natasha about his very first kiss, back in Brooklyn, in the house he grew up in, way before the war and the serum. The very first kiss, the one that changed his life.
He'll tell her all about the boy with the black hair and crooked smile and dreams of becoming something big. He'll tell her about the way his soft hands cupped his face and how he fell into that kiss with so much desperation it was almost embarrassing. How that kiss was the beginning of a promise that Steve never forgot.
But he's not ready to remember that, so instead he laughs and teases and for the moment Natasha let's it go, because Steve's positive she somehow gets it.
And then everything changes again.
Because the boy with the black hair and crooked smile is somehow alive and standing right in front of him, and Steve is no longer suspended in time. Everything is rushing at him, full force, he feels it, the weight and ice on his bones-
"Who the hell is Bucky?"
-and they give out under him.