or just how empty they all seemed without you WHO: Steve Rogers (MCU) (with mentions of MCU Avengers, Peggy Carter, and Bucky Barnes (MCU)) WHAT: Bad dreams, thanks to Wanda WHEN: July 20 WHERE: In his own head, which is in South Africa WARNING(S): Some slight hints at PTSD
It'd been a long, long time.
He was walking down the stairs, heading toward the crowd of dancing, happy people. They spun around one another -- women in dresses and skirts of varying colors, hair and makeup on point to complete their entire look. Men with their hair slicked down, with easy smiles and cigars. The smoke was everywhere, so thick he could barely see through it at a certain distance.
It was a party unlike Steve had seen in a long, long time. Steve wasn't sure how he'd gotten there. He'd just been...he'd been somewhere, hadn't he? There was something very important. Something he was doing. It wasn't a show, was it? A flash of a camera nearby startled him, and he flinched involuntarily. The sound had reminded him of gunfire and -- yes, that was it. The war. He'd just gotten back from the war. They had won the war.
No. Wait. That wasn't right.
The band was playing music he hadn't heard live in a long, long time. He turned his head at the sound of particularly loud laughter; red wine spilled across a man’s chest, staining deep crimson into the tan colors of his uniform. Almost like blood. Almost like blood from a gunshot wound. Another sound, another turn of his head, and a man in darker clothes with a red band around his upper arm being shoved back by another man in lighter clothing. He almost stepped to the side to intervene and then --
“Steve, there you are.” There was a voice he hadn’t heard in a long, long time.
Bucky? The name didn’t make a sound on his lips, but the sight of the other man approaching him caused an effortless smile to tug at the corners of his mouth. Bucky threw his left arm across Steve’s shoulders, tugging him closer. Something wasn’t right about that either, but --
“Come on -- even Captain America gets to have some fun, right?” The smoothness of his voice, the way his short hair was pushed back away from his clean-shaven face. There was something, something that he was missing, but Bucky was busy shoving a drink into his hand and talking about...about a girl. Or baseball. Steve wasn’t listening. There was an overwhelming feeling of WRONG making his heart pound in his ears. His hand fell to one of his pockets, feeling around for his phone.
His phone? Why would his phone be in his pocket?
Stark. Where was Stark? He turned his head, looking for a face he wasn’t entirely clear on -- not Howard, but like Howard? -- but another face was there. Red lips, brown hair pinned up, blue dress. Beautiful. Peggy.
“The war is over, Steve.”
He knew that. It’d been a long, long time since he had to worry about bombs and gunfire and landmines and yet that sense of wrong was still pulling at him in his gut. The effort to tear his gaze away from Peggy’s face was evident. He was lost -- his first reaction was to look for Bucky when he was lost but the man was busy laughing with a pretty red headed woman he could have sworn he’d seen before.
Fingers gently pressed into his palm, interlacing themselves between his own and forcing him away from his own thoughts. He turned back to look at Peggy, mouth opening slightly while he tried to find the words to tell her --
What, exactly?
“We can go home.” She spoke instead.
Home. Home with Peggy. The war was over, it’d been over. For a long, long time, and yet here it felt like only days.
“Imagine it.”
His eyes lingered on her face, on the expression she wore. He couldn’t quite make out what was etched in her features, but he knew it was a desperation he’d never seen on her face before. Even in the trenches, even when the ground was exploding around them, Peggy Carter -- Agent Carter -- never looked so vulnerable.
This wasn’t Peggy Carter.
Steve turned to be greeted by an empty room. The sudden barrenness of the space was overwhelming. His jaw set, tensed, and he swallowed hard. His mind was swimming and he knew, he knew there was something so very, very wrong with everything.
But right now, he felt like he was drowning in his own mind. And for some reason, he felt like it’d be a long, long time before he’d make it out again.
---
He was back on the quinjet. He couldn’t say when or how he had gotten there -- someone had helped him off the metal floor, let him use them as balance, and then led him into the quinjet. Snatches of the past had continued to play before his eyes, though by then, they had begun to fade some.
A dance with Peggy. She’d spun into his arms, people were laughing around them again. Bucky stood by the table, smiling at him and raising a glass. The smoke got thicker, the haze difficult to see through, but not impossible. And the sounds -- between laughter, there were explosions in the distance, gunshots.
He’d forgotten what had been so important so thoroughly that even now with a cold weight settling into his gut, he was bleary eyed and dazed. Something horrible had happened in Johannesburg. No one went into detail -- they didn’t need to, from the sounds of the report being relayed to them from the screen.
Steve kept to himself. He’d need to know more about what happened, would need to know how to help his team but right now, he couldn’t. The look on Natasha’s face, the softer tone Tony’s voice took, the worry on Thor’s face, none of that escaped him. Right now, though, Steve knew he was useless. What he’d seen back there had shaken him to the very center of his being.
He remained still and silent for some hours. Shifting slightly, Steve reached into one of his pockets and withdrew his phone. It would need to be recharged, sitting at 3%, but it had enough for him to send only two messages: one to Bucky, and one to Peggy. His phone died not long after that, but he sat there moving it between his hands, palming it as if he was trying to remember every detail of it. Wherever they were going, he knew it’d be too long before he could shake this feeling.