InsaneJournal

Please dress nicely, the card had said. So he had. Distracted as anything, he didn't notice he'd missed a button or two on his (very) white button-down. After all, he'd just gotten off the phone with Peggy(!), but before he could meet her, he'd been tasked with helping with... well, whatever this was going to be. Maybe he would have bowed out—politely, of course—but as the clock approached eight, he felt like maybe he should just go—he felt it like it was germinated from his own gut, like he wanted it, instead of some strange compulsion. It would be an hour or so, and then it would be over, and he could wait at Stark Tower for Peggy.—Of course, his attendance didn't ensure that anything other a physical presence, because, even as he walked through the buffeting of February in New York, wind slicing through his heavy leather coat, through woolen mittens, through the inband of his newly-purchased, old-timey hat—even then, his mind was... not exactly elsewhere, but more elsewhen.

The cold climbed clammy, but Steve ignored it. He couldn't help but remember the last time he and Peggy had spoken, the upward rush of the arctic waters, a grave he dug for himself, as her voice made promises softly from the speakers. It made his heart feel like someone was wringing it between two ham-sized fists, pummeling it, bullying it, as he walked, chin down, through the wash of Manhattan crowds. And if the wind froze some small pearl of tears to thick, blond lashes, he pretended not to notice.

Nothing drew his gaze, not until he got to the place—and he realized where he was. It was some pocket of green(ish, given the snow), grown on the foundation of the Stork Club, and rather suddenly, Steve felt like maybe he wasn't walking into what he imagined he might be walking into. There was an array of heaters, no orange-curling coils, but too ...modern for that. There were lights on strings. A sweep of bricks, winding without yellow back to a band and the frozen strands of a waterfall.—He couldn't help it. Stomach twisting like a sheet in the wind and his throat closed tight, one of those fists having moved on from his heart and its useless chambers, cinched there—and he stared.

Ella Fitzgerald, remade into modernity like the heaters, crooned by a woman over the blues-soft notes of her ensemble, and his mouth was open, quite literally. Confusion grew, and after a minute, Steve pulled his hat from his head in a rather youthful display of nervous politeness, and approached the wish-made dais. He looked around, gray fabric mashed between his hands.

He tugged back his sleeve to look at his watch. 8:01, and his breathing slowed. It couldn't be Peggy. She wouldn't be late.