Just a Blast from the Past

Final Chapter

"You found something?" Bucky asked.

"I might have," he said and stood up to show them what he had found.

Peggy, Bucky and the colonel frowned in confusion.

"A hairpin?" Bucky asked looking at the long pin stained with blood.

Steve was more impressed with the intruder than he was ten seconds ago, and so was Peggy – who would have had a smug smirk if she knew the female agent's intentions weren't hostile.

"I think our guy is a she," he said.

Weeks then months went by and the train female agent mystery remained unresolved in the files.

Weeks and months went by and Steve kept his promise.

He forgot about Natalie. Or let's say, he never mentioned her name again. Bucky followed the tacit deal that was never officially voiced out loud and never brought her up again either. As the days and the weeks passed by, one day arrived when she stopped haunting his thoughts, not unless he willingly thought of her. It somewhat comforted him to think he had moved on as he realized that Nat would probably never come back.

Peggy became his biggest support and his listening ear again as he came to conclude she was the choice of reason; the kind that would last. He treasured every moment he spent with her and still felt that flutter in his stomach every time she walked into a room. It nearly felt like old time, except that it was all different now. The flutter was accompanied by a feeling of guilt and uneasiness he couldn't shake off.

On March 4 1945, Steve shared his first kiss with Peggy. And the same day, they shared their final goodbye.

The kiss was very much tender and definitely agreeable, and yet lacked the consuming passion he had once felt and couldn't forget the taste of.

The final goodbye was gut-wrenching and cruel, and yet again a feeling he wasn't unfamiliar with. He had had painful goodbye before, the kind that had had his heart broken.

Steve put his compass on the command board and looked at the photo of her he kept in it.

Death was a strange thing. It brought every feeling you didn't suspect and memories you thought you had gotten over to the surface. It was in his last minutes that Steve yearned to see the face of the woman who had walked into his life and turned it upside down in the most pleasant way possible before walking out of it just as quickly. He opened the zip of his thigh pocket and reached for the paper folded in four that was in it.

His fingers delicately unfolded it as he held back his breath. In the turmoil of the alarms squealing endlessly, the engine roaring and the inevitability of his upcoming death, his ears shut everything down as he looked at the portrait he had drawn of Natalie.

He smiled to himself, stroked the spot where he had drawn a lock of her hair – he had always longed to brush that curly lock of hair that constantly fell on her temple and grazed her eyelashes – then down to her face. He relished the memory of their kiss that was playing in his head again. His whole being hoped she would never find her way back to him as she promised. Not so long ago, he feared she wouldn't keep her word, and here he was afraid she would actually return to find he had perished on a mission.

He put the paper on the control board, right next to Peggy's picture and looked at the two women who had put their entire faith in him, who had taught him love in the two different shapes it could take and who had made him feel like a man.

He carried with him the regret of waiting too long and not disclosing his deepest feelings to either of them when he still could as he steered the quinjet down towards the ice of Greenland.