Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 1

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.

"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 Carter? 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."