Steve woke up, he just woke up.
In somebody else's bedroom.
He obsessively tried to check, double-check and triple-check the date to reassure himself he hadn't been asleep for decades again, and was nearly jumping out of the window to he sure, when he realized he was was being watched.
His neighbor, Kate.
"Morning, Steve"
. . . ?
"I found you passed out under the stairs. What happened?"
So, Kate didn't know he was Captain America? Where had The Shield and the uniform gone? How had Steve gotten back home?
"I .... I think i drank too much.... Sorry to bother you like this" A lie, The Serum had made Steve incapable of getting drunk, but she had no way to know that. He'd figure things out after getting back to his apartment.
~ • ~
Steve laid on a bed again, this time on his own, in the dark. He was damn tired and come to the conclusion that Zemo had somehow escaped, he had hotten a concussion and tried to stumble his way back into a familiar place. Made sense.
Steve started to get a sudden compulsion to, erm, "charm the cobra" (...... Forget that, it sounds idiotic. Let's just say Steve wanted to wank). He was tired, bored, and depressed, so he did. It gave him a strange feeling in the back of his head, but he had came to regard that as normal so he didn't really care.
Somebody knocked on his door at the worst possible moment.
He should really have gotten that cellphone Tony had had offered.
Steve hastily yanked his his pants back on, panickedly wiping his hands to a curtain and answered the door. It was the man Fury had assigned to help help him adapt to the present, his contact guy whose name he still did not know, the one who who had ranted to him about "the mutant problem". Not "issue", "problem".
He almost slapped himself when something inside his head 'told' him the guy wwas right, but but this wasn't really the moment to do that.
"It's about Purple Blade"
'Purple Blade' was the code word for Zemo.
~ • ~
"Zemo was found dead few blocks away rrom the scene of the battle."
Steve blinked.
"He had been tortured and raped, got his face skinned off"
Steve's hair stood up under his shirt. Fury stared at him with his one good eye.
"You know something about that?"
!
"What? No! Why would i have done that? I didn't even know him"
"Where were you, then?"
"Zemo slipped away when the embassy collapsed on us, i got a concussion, crawled back to Brooklyn, collapsed in the staircase, and my neighbor found me"
Fury nodded, but his expression didn't change.
~ • ~
It was all over the news during the day, at least a dozen corpses, killed in a similiar manner. A serial killer. A similiar phenomenon had occured during the war in a village near their base, but the murderer was never caught and there were a very few people alive who knew of this, so an imitator was unlikely option.
The reporter called the killer ''The Red Skull", because all the corpses were were left looking like that.
~ • ~
The doctors had told Steve Peggy didn't have much time left. She already had Altzheimer's and was very old.
Why not speed things up? Time to make Rogers aware of his presence! He was his, not Carter's!
The Red Skull waited quite quite patiently as Steve and Carter chattered, about the world having changed so much, until Carter suddendly had a coughing fit. When she recovered, she had forgotten at least that Steve was supposed to alive and thought he had returned from the dead.
What a moment to ruin.
Skull subtly made his and Steve's shared muscles move move so that Steve could see them from the mirror, and started to take the control from Rogers.
"Steve, you.... You came back! You You came back..."
Skull could feel Steve's tears on their face, but Rogers had yet to notice anything from him.
"It's been so long... So long..."
His eyes started to turn red. Skull spoke, still with Steve's face and voice, but his own accent.
"Yes... How could i leave my best girl?"
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