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Steve is ten when he sees it the first time. He’s sitting on the front stoop of his building, scuffing his shoes against the dusty cement and drawing in the dirt with a stick when he hears the whirring noise, loud as a gunshot, muddle the quiet of the summer day. He looks up from the pavement and sees a blue box, bright and gleaming, sitting resolute against the daylight.
His mother says something from inside, and Steve turns, for just the slightest of moments, and when he looks back the box is gone, quickly as it came.
---
Steve dreams of the rich color of the paint, of the clean spinning sound in the air, for weeks on end. In the journal his mother bought him as a young child, he draws countless pictures of the box until his cerulean blue crayon is down to a bare stub and Steve has to save his allowance to buy a new set.
---
When Steve turns thirteen, he paints his room deep blue with an old, dull-bristled paintbrush he finds in the basement of the apartment building. His mother complains about the fumes and the cost of the paint but Steve just paints and paints until his fingers stain dark and the room looks like some sick homage to the box that Steve doubts he will ever see again.
---
He is seventeen and bleeding in a dark alleyway. Typical Tuesday, or least it has been since almost every person he grew up with put on fifty pounds and a foot or more and Steve was left behind (always left behind). Steve touches the bridge of his nose gingerly, wincing as he hears the unmistakable sound of broken cartilage ring in his ears. Blood dribbles down his face, and he taste the tangy liquid at the edge of his mouth as he stands and turns to head home.
The box is there, in the corner of the alleyway, tucked snugly in between two putrefying garbage cans. A man stands next to it, looking lost and fumbling with a pocket watch and a red metallic stick that glows bright yellow at the tip and makes an unpleasant buzzing sound.
“Hello?” Steve calls, cautious of strange men out this late. “Do you need any help?”
The man wears odd looking glasses with a purple tinge and a sleek suit grey suit that almost simmers in the moonlight. His chin is covered in a trimmed beard, and Steve thinks vaguely that he looks an awful lot like that scientist fellow he always sees in the papers. “My TARDIS,” he says pointedly, knocking on various points along the box’s edges, “is very, very broken. And unless I’m mistaken about the time and place she’s decided to drop me in, there’s absolutely nothing anybody can do to fix her.”
“You’re in Brooklyn,” Steve says, trying to be helpful. “Not much going on here, even on the most interesting of days.”
“And yet there’s a young man sitting with a face full of blood and bruises at near midnight who isn’t even a little wary or scared of a madman with a box.”
“Wary, yes. Scared…” Steve shrugged. “I stopped being scared of things a long time ago.”
The man gives him a look like he thinks Steve’s lying to him, but then shrugs and shakes his head. “I’m the Doctor,” the man continues, sticking out his hand with a bit of a flourish. “You can call me the Doctor.”
“Steve,” Steve starts. “I’d shake, but…” He gestures to the blood coating his hand and blushes, just a little bit. “The Doctor, you said? There a last name to go with that?”
“Just the Doctor. Short and simple. Not quite like me, but still.”
“I’ve seen your box before,” Steve begins, inching closer to the Doctor. “Seven years ago. It was outside my building for a moment and then it was gone.”
“Ah! I knew she had landed someplace near here a few minutes ago.”
“A few minutes?”
“Well yes. She’s a time machine too.”
“Too?”
“Yes of course. Couldn’t just have a spaceship that jumps from Point A to Point B. I needed one that jumped from Time A to Time B as well.”
“Wait, space what?”
Just as the Doctor gets another gleam in his dark eyes, a loud cracking sound from inside the box makes him jump. He rushes over to the box, his hands touching the blue wood with a bizarre reverence that makes Steve slightly uncomfortable. He shifts, running his shirt sleeve over his nose, catching some of the blood that’s still wet on his skin with the fabric.
“Ah ha!” the Doctor exclaims, pulling his metal stick out and running the edge over the door handle until the light on the end starts blinking. Steve hears the buzzing again when the Doctor turns back around. “She’s a smart one. Repairs herself and everything. Took less time this go than normal, and she’s good as new.”
The Doctor’s face contorts slightly, touching the door again with the metal stick. “Got to give her a whirl now. Not quite broken in yet.” He grins at Steve’s obvious confusion. “It’ll only take a few minutes,” he promises. “Five, ten at the most.”
“And then?”
“Then I’ll be back. Time Lord’s word. And then you can tell me all about how you ended up with a broken nose and what looks like a slightly displaced cheekbone.” The Doctor grins again, holding the door open for a moment. “It feels like there’s a good story behind that one, and I want to give you the chance to tell it to me in all its grandeur.”
“But Doctor…”
The door closes, and Steve is forced to step back and watch as the box dematerializes, only now realizing the steady sound of his own heart pounding through his head. The leaves from the most recent rainstorm scatter across the pavement, and Steve sits on the corner, waiting with his hands pressed against the damp cement.
---
Seconds turn to minutes, minutes to hours, and so on until Steve finds himself utterly alone in an alleyway, coagulated blood coating his hands and no Doctor and no box. He shivers, his breath catching in the cold night air, and he fumbles around for coins to take a cab home.
---
He thinks about the Doctor and his blue box for days on end and then he doesn’t think about them at all.
---
Chance.
Steve relishes the word, the way it rolls off his tongue when he’s packing the very few possessions he’s allowed to bring with him to boot camp. He knows that he’s not somebody that a lot of folks are willing to put their faith in up front, but he wants to make damn sure that he’s somebody that folks just can’t ignore after the fact.
Because that’s what he’s really about, in the end, after Erskine chooses him: Chances and opportunity. The two most American things in the world, and Steve Rogers is going to embody them no matter what the cost might be (and the costs become so, so high, because watching the first person in the world who gave him a second thought when everybody else slammed the door in his face just stop living on a cold cement floor will never leave Steve, no matter how hard he’ll try).
When Steve goes home that night, after Brooklyn changes every atom in his body, he touches the muscles on his stomach, on his arms. They feel wrong, alien somehow, and he pulls off all his clothes until he’s naked and shivering in the middle of his bed. Even the fabric of the cotton sheets against his skin feels wrong, and his mind staves off sleep until the dawn light touches the bottom of his door.
(It was not lost on him how much the Howard Stark looked like the Doctor, all sharp teeth and dark features, but he didn’t let the thought linger.)
---
He keeps the Doctor in a delicate place in his head, one where he’s still little Steve Rogers with the big heart and stupid, stupid mouth. He thinks the Doctor would like him better that way, honestly. He’s not sure why.
---
Life is one mission after another. It’s repetitive and strangely succinct. Steve begins to lose track of the days that pass by and the men who die around him (never his men, he’s been so very lucky so far, but men nonetheless, and every single body on the ground, American or otherwise, stings him inside.)
“Sometimes I want to get away from all this,” Peggy confides one dreary afternoon, as they sift through mountains of paperwork that seem so irrelevant in the scheme of things. “Be a normal person with a normal life and family and do lovely, normal things.”
“Dancing, right?” he asks when he puts his hand on hers, touching the worn contours of her fingers and imagining what the shiny diamond ring he wants to put on it someday will look like. It’s a promise to himself that he intends to keep, and he knows that he would die for her and that makes him proud and sad at the same time.
He misses the sound of the box, just outside, the worn look of the Doctor as he steps into the warm air and stares at the nighttime sky.
---
He and Bucky are drinking (well, Bucky is drinking and Steve is watching him drink which is the best he can do these days, live vicariously through Bucky’s oft-ill begotten behavior), which means Bucky is being friendly and affectionate to everybody, even touching Steve’s hair and the frilly lines of women’s dresses as they pass by.
There’s one girl, a tall thing who works in the typing pool downstairs, who comes in wearing a shimmering blue thing that swishes around her knees. All the men in the room ogle freely, watching as she orders something she certainly won’t have to pay for, and then takes a seat next to a guy at the end of the bar, chatting enthusiastically about something Steve can’t hear.
Steve can’t help it: He stares at the dress, fixated on the rich blue against the yellow light.
“What about precious Peggy?” Bucky teases, taking a deep drink from his mug.
“I met this man, once. He lived in a big blue box. Same color as her dress.”
“Man in a blue box, got it,” Bucky grins as a blonde sits on his laps, kisses his cheek. “You have some really weird friends, Steve.”
“I’m serious,” Steve says, the memory of the Doctor and Brooklyn bubbling up freely. “He was really something, Bucky. I wish you’d have met him.”
“You have problems,” Bucky counters, letting the fair-featured woman run her hands through his hair, and then kissing her neck quickly as she squeaked. “Big problems. A bar full of dames and all you can think about is a man in a blue box.”
Steve laughs, but deep down inside, he knows he’d take the Doctor and the blue box over almost any dame, any day.
---
Bucky dies. Steve wonders what the point of everything has been if he can’t even save one of the only people in the world who trusted him with everything.
He dreams of the box that night, of running away to a place and time where Bucky is still laughing and smiling, pointing out girls in a crowded bar as he drinks a cold beer and regales the table with stories of his wartime exploits.
---
Steve is dead, dying, and he swears he sees the blue box and the Doctor out of the corner of his eye as the water rushes in through the broken windows of the aircraft.
“Doctor…” he says, and then it’s over.
(He was right, in the end: He would choose to die for Peggy a million times over.)
---
He’s in a little white room when he comes to, and everything changes again.
---
One night, maybe a week after Steve wakes up, Nick Fury sits across from him at a broken down little diner that serves greasy hamburgers and fries all night long. Steve’s been having problems sleeping again and when he got the call on the cellphone he’s become surprisingly adept at using, and, in the absence of rest, he walks the three blocks alone.
It’s more than a little unnerving to watch his boss (is Fury his boss? Steve’s still sifting through this new hierarchy that he’s had explained to him a hundred and one times and still can’t comprehend) just reclining against the vinyl seats, drinking a strawberry milkshake like he hasn’t put a thousand and one bodies in the ground just through his mere existence.
They talk for a long while about how Steve has been adjusting (“It could be worse”), what he thinks about his apartment (“I really don’t need that much room, Sir”), and whether or not he’d like Fury to contact somebody for him (“Who do I know here to contact?”). It’s a quiet give and take, and Steve takes solace in the fact that Fury isn’t pushing him to share more than he’s comfortable with. Of course, there are moments when Fury looks like he wants to say something, anything else, but he always stops and sips the milkshake instead.
It doesn’t take long before a slightly uncomfortable silence permeates the air between them. Fury taps on his phone, watching as Steve picks at the last of his hamburger.
“You can do great things, Captain,” Fury says quietly, hands motioning for the redheaded waitress to bring the check. “You have to remember that, or this is never going to work.”
Steve wants to ask what this is, but he holds his tongue and pushes the tomato and lettuce from his burger around on the white plate.
---
What Steve doesn’t tell Fury is that there’s an emptiness, like something’s missing from his life (which is weird to Steve because everything is missing from his life, which he thinks would feel different.) Some days he thinks it’s Bucky, other days Peggy, others still he wonders if it’s the box and the man who promised he would come back, but never did. He lets himself ruminate on it more than he should, he knows that, but it doesn’t stop him from letting his mind wander over the emotions and people he lost.
He paints his apartment a somber shade of yellow-grey and tries to forget about the blue box and the handsome man and Peggy and Bucky and absolutely everything he left behind so many years ago.
---
He doesn’t hate the Avengers, but perhaps he doesn’t love them either.
It’s all too easy to say yes when they ask him if he wants to join. After all this time, he still feels like he owes the United States government something, and if being a hero (they keep calling him that, and he still hates the way is sounds on his lips) who flies under red, white, and blue stars and stripes is the way to repay his debts, he’s willing and able. And yes, he likes his teammates, and he likes being part of something that’s bigger than himself again, so it’s not all bad, in fact, on paper, it’s very, very good.
But the blue of his suit reminds him of the TARDIS when the sun is high. He doesn’t tell anybody, but he fingers the fine, stretchy fabric with a certain amount of veneration, and wonders what the TARDIS looked like inside, if the walls were as blue as they were on the outside, or if they were white, like clouds after rain.
He likes Bruce and he likes Natasha and he likes Clint and he likes Thor and he even likes Coulson (though the fact that he seems to know more about Steve than Steve knows about himself will never stop making him self-conscious.) They’re a good team, filled with people who genuinely like one another, but there are…gaps. Sure, they have leaders and followers and people who are smart with books and people who are smarter with weapons, but it’s like there’s a piece of the puzzle that was left in a box somewhere, never to be found. He tries not to bring it up, because he thinks it can only be bad for team morale, but sometimes he has this sensation in the back of his head like somebody is just missing.
---
Agent Coulson corners him outside one day, as Steve’s leaving some promotional event that the team got wrangled into at the last minute. His face hurts from smiling so much, and he’s sweating from the body heat generated by the crowd when Coulson grabs him by the shoulder, and directs him over to a black car with tinted windows.
“You seem really unhappy, Captain,” Coulson says quietly. “If you ever need to talk…”
He hands him a card with a cell phone number for a Doctor Dawson, M.D. & PhD and hops into the car before it drives away.
Steve knows that Coulson means well (he always does, something that Steve so fervently respects that it aches sometimes), but, nevertheless, he spends the next ten hours in his room, looking at the sun shine on his suit in the closet.
---
He’s alone, beaten down in the middle of some field that’s been set ablaze, with no backup to speak of. From the way his leg screams in pain whenever he so much as twitches, Steve assumes he’s shattered a couple bones (no easy feat since his transition). His comm is making little crackling noises and his earpiece is busted beyond repair, sitting on the ground in a forming pool of blood.
This is it, Steve thinks to himself as his vision begins to blur and darken. This is how it ends.
And that’s when he hears it again: The distant whirring sound, even in the midst of the deafening gunfire and screaming. His body, so tense from the agony in his leg, almost relaxes as he sees the blue box appear about a hundred yards away, near the outskirts of the melee.
The Doctor, seemingly not a minute older than he was when Steve last saw him, steps out, and makes a beeline to Steve, his little metallic stick buzzing as he waves it up and down.
“Doctor…” Steve makes a pathetic move, his body seizing up as his leg twists under him.
“We don’t have any time for niceties. You have to come with me,” the Doctor calls as Steve hesitantly pushes aside his shield and gun and groans when he sees blood seeping out from his side.
“I waited for you. That one day. In the alley. You never came back.”
The Doctor smiles sadly as he fingers some of the blood on Steve’s suit, then winces as he notices the unnatural bend in Steve’s leg. “I didn’t know that would happen. The TARDIS…she’s a little temperamental. Sometimes I try to end up one place and she just takes me to another entirely.”
A distant boom forces Steve to lie flat on the ground, the resonance ringing in his ears.
“Doctor, I can’t…”
“Yes, you can.”
“But my leg…”
“Yes, it’s broken. And you have at least five shattered ribs and a fractured bone in your left arm and don’t get me started on the amount of blood you’re losing every second, but none of that matters at the moment because you have to stand up, Steve. We have to go right now.”
“But…”
“Now.”
The Doctor reaches down to him. Steve takes his hand, lets the Doctor pull him up until he stands on one shaky leg, the other just dead weight behind him. He breathes in, inexplicably tasting hard metal in the air. The Doctor is strong, much stronger than he looks, and Steve lets himself slump against the hard lines of his body as they move toward the TARDIS’s wide-open door. The Doctor grunts, and pulls Steve along, hoists his limp body into the TARDIS, and lets him spill on the floor.
Steve doesn’t get a chance to see if the walls are white: He blacks out from the pain almost instantaneously.
---
He doesn’t get around to asking how the Doctor knew his name until much, much later.
---
Steve wakes up in a large room with warm orange-yellow walls and a white, feathery bed. There are mysterious odds and endless ends stacked up against the perimeter, and shelves of books near the rounded door across from him. Steve grins when he sees his suit and shield in the middle of the floor, still stained with the blood and dirt. His gun is missing, probably forgotten in the middle of the battle.
He shifts and notices that his leg is not only pliant, it’s totally devoid of any marks whatsoever. He touches his side, where he still expects to find broken ribs and a marring wound from the gash, but his skin is soft and unblemished.
Steve stands up, knocking a small golden key off the bed. He picks it up, and, noticing the chain attached to it, winds it around his neck.
There’s a swift knock on the door, and before Steve can pull on a sheet or something over his boxers (just when he lost the clothes under his suit is a mystery he supposes he will never have the answer to), the handle turns and the door opens.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” the Doctor says, a crooked grin on his face. “Did you know that you snore?”
---
They make what feels like a hundred and one twists and turns between Steve’s room and the TARDIS control room. Steve wonders meekly how he’s going to find his way back, but decides not to worry about it until absolutely necessary.
“People are usually impressed,” the Doctor announces as Steve steps through the door and gives the inside of the box an appraising look. “’It’s bigger on the inside!’ is a personal favorite of mine, favored by surprised humans the world over who have had the distinct pleasure of seeing her inside.”
The inside, though beautiful, doesn’t appear to be as sophisticated as some of the rooms he’s peeked into at the S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. “Very little surprises me anymore,” Steve admits, putting his hand on the counter and touching the gilded control panel. It’s soft in a way that metal shouldn’t be. “Sorry.”
The Doctor frowns, and leans back against a railing. “No, it’s… fine. Just different.” He snaps his fingers, and pulls what looks like a television monitor around. “Different is good. I’ve been in here alone for so long that I forget that sometimes. Got too familiar with the status quo.”
Steve smiles at him. “We all need a little change sometimes.”
---
The Doctor takes him to an intensely populated planet that looks and feels remarkably like Earth, but which the Doctor assures Steve is filled entirely with cloned and genetically enhanced life forms.
“Genetic engineering at it finest,” the Doctor adds as they pass three women wearing tight white dresses that Steve, upon further inspection, realizes are almost completely sheer.
They end up at what looks like a dive bar on the outskirts of what looks like a city where they serve what look like regular drinks. The only thing that’s not regular? Every waitress in the joint looks precisely identical, with glistening brown hair and aquamarine eyes that seem to sparkle whenever they catch in the low lighting.
“You can tell me your story,” the Doctor says, holding a martini glass out to Steve. “If you like.”
Steve shrugs, and waves away the glass with one hand. “Not much to tell.”
The Doctor quirks an eyebrow and scratches at his beard. He puts the martini glass down on the table, and one of the waitresses (her nametag says “Mindy”, but it looks like she’ll answer to anything remotely resembling a name) takes the glass and wanders to another table. “The shield and the suit would tend to disagree.”
Steve can feel a faint blush creeping on his cheeks. “It’s nothing. It’s a uniform. I’m in the army.” Sort of.
“What, you’re a solider? Private Steve Rogers?”
“Captain.” Steve hesitates. “Captain Steve Rogers. I’m Captain America.”
“Captain America, eh?” The Doctor smirks, sipping from his own martini glass. “I’ve had captains on the TARDIS before. One captain, in particular.” The Doctor glances at Steve, gives him a through once-over that makes Steve feel hot under his collar. “Handsome guy. Very…friendly. He would have loved you.”
The waitress brings the Doctor another drink, and he winks at her and pats her ass when she turns. Steve can’t help but feel that he’s interrupting something.
---
They’re sitting in the TARDIS console room, the Doctor yammering on and on about being 900-odd years old (“You look good then,” Steve observes once, and the Doctor gives him this look that just rushes right through Steve’s body like poison) and too old to just keep fucking around the Universe all willy-nilly, and Steve is really, really trying to pretend that he doesn’t feel more at home here, in the middle of all of time and space, than he ever did back in Brooklyn.
Because he’s caught up in his own thoughts, it doesn’t occur to Steve until about ten minutes into the meandering conversation that the Doctor is absolutely, one-hundred percent serious about the whole 900 years old thing.
“Then…you’re not…human, are you?”
The Doctor grins. “You got me. Time Lord. Told you that once, didn’t I? You don’t have a problem with aliens, do you?”
Steve shakes his head. “Back on Earth, I fought alongside a man from Asgard. His name was Thor and he was a God.” Steve smiles at the memory. “He carried a hammer.”
“Ah, Asgard. Been there once or twice, a couple hundred years ago. Lots of mead. Lots of beautiful, incredibly scary women. Seriously, some scary, scary ladies. The kind who can kill you with a nail file. Lots of bizarre capes too. And Odin’s a real piece of work when you beat him at a game.”
“You played games with Odin?”
The Doctor shrugs. “I wouldn’t call it playing. He takes everything so seriously. For awhile there I thought I was in the middle of a deathmatch.” The Doctor grins at the memory. “Thought he was going to thunderbolt my ass when he lost.”
They laugh, shallow and warm. Steve likes the sound.
“If you’re not from Earth, where are you from?”
“Gallifrey. Beautiful place, with soaring buildings and songs in the air.”
Steve mouth twists. “Why did you leave?”
The Doctor shrugs. “Can’t go back anymore. It’s gone.”
“Gone? How?”
“Long story,” the Doctor sighs. “Long story for another day entirely.”
Steve scuffs his shoes on the floor, acutely aware of the way the Doctor is fisting his hands at his sides. A little part of him wants to walk over, touch the Doctor’s shoulder, maybe even throw his arms around and hug him, but the smarter part of Steve, the one that stopped him from doing a hundred and one things in the past (or future or present, he doesn’t know anymore), stops him again.
“I’m sorry that you lost your planet.”
The Doctor smiles, somber. “We all lose things, Steve. The point of existence is to find other things that fill the void when they’re gone.”
Steve wishes that were true.
---
The Doctor flirts shamelessly with almost everyone they run across. Male, female, slightly deranged, disturbingly grounded, it doesn’t appear to matter much. The Doctor will lower his tinted glasses and put his hands in every quasi-inappropriate place possible until the other party is sputtering or blushing or pushing the Doctor into the nearest available empty room. It makes Steve uncomfortable at first, but then he realizes how much more relaxed the Doctor seems, afterward, and chalks his discomfort up to what the Doctor likes to dub his “old-fashioned sensibilities” (something Steve will sometimes dispute, but which he will more often concede to).
Every so often Steve ends up in the TARDIS alone for an evening, and the Doctor won’t return until Steve is sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast, the Doctor stinking of sex and fragrant foreign perfumes. He’ll have contented grin on his face, and give Steve a pat on the back before passing out for a couple hours in a seat next to the control room.
Steve isn’t jealous. Not really.
--
On Saturnailii Four, they meet a woman who dresses like a gypsy and smells like a rainy day in Manhattan. She has four silver-green eyes and a blue tongue that the Doctor tells Steve can wrap around a man’s fist three times.
“How do you know that?” Steve asks under his breath as the woman gives him a calculating look.
“Some events from my life are better left in the past,” the Doctor whispers back. “This is one such event.”
The woman sweeps her broad fuchsia scarf around her neck, and motions for Steve to sit across from her. He does, recoiling slightly at the jagged rocks that appear to be pasted on the back of the chair, and puts his hands out, palms up.
Her fingers trace absently over his lifeline, up to the tips of his thumbs. Steve suddenly feels lightheaded, and he wonders faintly if it has to do with all the incense in the room.
“A hero, or so you are called.”
Steve nods, the deep scent of jasmine and something he can’t quite put clouding his mind further.
“A man out of time with a lost love.”
“Yes,” Steve manages to croak back. “Her name was Peggy…”
He’s not sure how much longer the woman goes on for because the intricate designs on the walls now incredibly fascinating and Steve can’t take his eyes away from them. Eventually, the woman gives up and the Doctor nudges Steve out of the way.
“Humans!” the Doctor quips, pulling up his sleeves. “Can never handle too much Saturnailli daisy, can they?”
When the Doctor finally switches spots with Steve, the woman holds his hand almost angrily, digging her claw-like nails into the rough flesh of his skin.
“You could be someone else, I think,” she mutters, her other hand stroking the hair on the Doctor’s chin. The Doctor tenses up, and look like he’s about to make a break for it, when the woman reaches out again, grabs the back of the Doctor’s scalp and pulls him forward. “A man of the Earth, an infinite time and space away.”
The Doctor starts edging away, pulling his hand from her grasp. As he does, the woman’s eyes flash fluorescent yellow, and her skin begins to glow.
“You can’t do it, Doctor,” she hisses, her fingers drawing blood from his arms. “You can’t do it because it has to happen!”
“I don’t have any time for charlatans,” the Doctor sneers back. He pulls himself free of her clutches, and stumbles back. “Come on, Steve, we’re out of here.”
Steve, who is still somewhat sedated by the incense, makes a hapless gesture toward the woman, and walks, dragging after the Doctor as quickly as he can. Once he’s outside of the woman’s store, he sees the TARDIS, door ajar, a couple feet away, and hobbles toward it.
“Doctor!” Steve calls once he’s inside, but all he hears is the whining of the TARDIS engines.
---
There’s a little stairway at the end of the hall where Steve’s room is. Normally he doesn’t bother exploring the seemingly infinite reaches of the TARDIS (the one time he really tried he ended up trapped in a library with a pool and no food for twelve hours and the Doctor had laughed for a solid ten minutes when he found him later, huddled near the deep end and pondering whether or not his new metabolism could handle a chlorine chip), but sometimes his head thrums with memories of his life back home that he just can’t shake, so he’ll wander for a couple hours until the roaring in his brain dies down enough to rest in the absence of sleep.
Tonight, Steve wakes up with a scream on his lips, a faint sheen of sweat covering his face. The sheets around him, normally light and airy, feel heavy and damp, so he pulls himself up, grabs a threadbare sweater from the closet (where the clothes come from he’ll never know) and pads out into the hall, listening for any sounds of life.
He hears them almost immediately, coming from downstairs, and lets his curiosity get the better of him. Stepping quietly on metallic floor, he steps down the winding staircase to the Doctor’s workshop.
The Doctor is hammering away merrily at a piece of what Steve can only assume is amour, bright red and gold like his Sonic Screwdriver (Steve still has a hard time thinking about it that way, but the Doctor insists and what the Doctor says usually goes). It shines in the low lights of the room, and the Doctor touches it every so often like he would touch a person.
“It’s rude to enter a room without knocking,” the Doctor calls, never looking up.
Steve ignores him, and taps on a discarded piece of red metal. “Why do you need armor? Are we going somewhere dangerous?”
“Better to be safe than sorry,” the Doctor says, examining the ridges of the gold plating.
Steve has a hundred and one questions (he always does), but the Doctor is already pounding away at the metal again. A small streak of sweat trickles across his brow, and Steve has to try very hard not to reach up and wipe it away.
Steve doesn’t know how long he stays, but he wakes up in his bed, wrapped in a red and yellow down blanket.
---
They’ve somehow meddled themselves into the middle of some bizarre civil war on a red planet called Denalla. The Doctor has been working on an incredibly complicated temporary colonization plan with the warring native peoples, and it looks like the two factions might just scrape by an impending quasi-nuclear war when the whole thing just goes to shit, and the Doctor and Steve end up with two guns shoved in their faces and rusty manacles attached firmly across their wrists.
“You don’t know what you’re doing!” the Doctor insists, pulling against the restraints, even as short purple men circle them both. “If you don’t stop this now, this feud is going to destroy your entire planet!”
“How would you know?” a grunt says, his gun pushing up against Steve’s temple.
“I’ve seen it!” the Doctor pleads. “Please, you have to…”
“Sometimes,” a very gruff voice says from behind them. Steve twists as much as he can with the gun against his head. A tall man brandishes a sterling pistol and thrusts it prone against the Doctor’s chest, “Sometimes the Doctor doesn’t get what he wants.”
The Doctor doubles over at once, hands clutching at his heart as his knees hit the ground, hard. Steve hurries over to him before he’s knocked out by a blunt blow to his head.
---
Steve wakes up in a filthy cell, nothing but a small blanket on a hard slab and a bottle of water to keep the Doctor and him company.
“What happened?” Steve asks groggily, touching a hand to his forehead to find a large and possibly concerning cut. “I don’t remember anything past that guy hitting you with the…”
“Steve,” the Doctor cuts him off. “Steve, I need you to…”
But he never finishes his request. In the middle of the cell, the Doctor keens against the ground. His feet push against the dirty floor, his body writhing freely as he sobs, frantically pulling at his shirt like it’s on fire. And at first, Steve doesn’t see it: But then the faint blue glow is unmistakable, and Steve rips at the torn hem until he can see it, bright and metallic and flush against The Doctor’s convulsing chest.
“Back pocket of my coat,” the Doctor forces out. “It’s a silver bar, you can’t miss it.”
“What’s…”
“It’s my penance,” the Doctor finishes for him, unbuttoning the last of his shirt with the little control he has left over his motor skills. “Got carried away, once, and this is the result. Not a big deal.”
“Doctor, you have a…”
“An arc reactor,” he cuts Steve off again. His face is taking on an ashen shade as he rights himself, his head pushing against Steve’s chest insistently. Steve holds him fast, his own heart pounding against his ribs. “Also, and I think I mentioned this before, it’s not a big deal.”
“Doctor, you have…something in your chest. That’s a big deal whether you want it to be or not.”
“It was a long time ago, Steve. Ten thousand lifetimes ago.”
There’s a moment, as Steve is fingering the arc reactor and the Doctor is turning blue when Steve gets scared. He remembers now what it felt like when he went down in the water so many years ago, wondering if everything would be okay after he was gone.
“Silver bar. Right.” Steve sticks his hand into the back pocket of the Doctor’s coat, pulling out five identical small silver bars that are warm against his skin. The Doctor grimaces and then grabs one before pulling another identical silver bar from the arc reactor. Steve helps him steady his hands, and there’s an almost inaudible click as the new bar is snapped in place.
The Doctor shivers and then stills. “That’s better.”
Steve presses his hands against the Doctor’s chest, trying to get a catch on the rhythm of the Doctor’s heart. When he presses down, however, he instinctively pulls back.
“Two hearts,” he breathes softly, ignoring his smarter side and touching the Doctor’s face. “You never told me.”
The Doctor bites out a laugh, wheezing slightly with the effort. Steve doesn’t move his hand. “You never asked.”
---
The TARDIS shows up in the cell a couple hours later, whirring happily like nothing’s happened at all. By that time, the Doctor is sprawled over Steve’s chest, sleeping, and Steve has to carry him into the TARDIS, fumbling to put the key into the lock as the Doctor drools against his shoulder.
In a way, this is their life: The Doctor carries Steve and Steve carries the Doctor.
---
The Doctor takes him back to Denalla when he wakes up. There is an empty void where the planet used to be.
“They destroyed themselves,” the Doctor whispers. “All those people…”
Steve knows what it’s like to lose, but he thinks the Doctor knows loss more intimately than Steve ever will.
---
For days on end, Steve finds himself staring at the Doctor’s chest, looking for any hint of the glowing arc reactor. But the Doctor appears to have begun wearing thicker shirts because Steve can’t pick out even a ray of the faintest light from the Doctor anymore.
---
One quiet day they are sitting on the edge of the Universe, their legs hanging outside the TARDIS. Steve drinks a very sugary lemonade, remembering hot summers in Brooklyn when he would do virtually the same thing every afternoon, Bucky by his side.
“I’m named after my grandfather,” Steve says as they watch the stars drift lazily by. “Steve Rogers, Senior.” Steve frowns. “I think I like Steve Rogers better than Captain America.”
“A man who isn’t obsessed with rank.” The Doctor grins. “Do you know many galaxies I had to visit to find you?”
Steve chuckles despite himself. “Did your parents name you The Doctor?” he segues. “Is that a common name on Gallifrey?”
“Wow, you think my parents really hated me, don’t you? Honestly, what kind of sane being names his kid The Doctor?”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Steve reminds him. “Name?”
“I had one. Once.”
“Care to share?”
The Doctor is quiet, and takes another sip from the silver flask in his hand.
---
A woman with light red hair and two silver guns shows up every so often, most often at the least expected of times. Sometimes she calls herself Pepper, sometimes River, sometimes Melody, and sometimes something that Steve can’t catch at all. She’s smart and sexy and reminds Steve in a million different ways of Peggy when he first met her, strong and certain in herself and her place in the world. The woman doesn’t talk much, but she and the Doctor are clearly…something to one another, and Steve feels all too uncomfortable whenever she presses herself to the Doctor’s side or whispers something into the Doctor’s ear, tongue brushing against the unattached lobe until the Doctor’s face flushes and he tightens his hand along the Sonic.
“Who is she?” Steve asks one afternoon, after the woman leaves, handcuffed, in the company of three men holding gleaming bayonets and what looks like metal boomerangs.
The Doctor frowns. “Don’t know, haven’t learned that bit yet.”
Steve’s eyes widen.
“Never ask too many questions of a woman,” the Doctor suggests as the woman blows them both a kiss. “It never leads anywhere worth going.”
---
The Doctor has been looking a little frayed around the edges since Denalla and has been muttering and hammering metal into the wee hours of the night (or what Steve pretends is night because the Time Vortex doesn’t exactly discriminate between night and day in the usual manner), so when the Doctor pops into his room in the middle of the night and suggests that they take a trip back to Earth, Steve readily agrees.
Steve assumes it’ll be somewhere exotic, perhaps even dangerous because the Doctor’s favorite sort of place is one where ten million things are liable to go wrong at once (“what’s life without a little excitement, eh?” he had said once, when Steve found himself wrapped in the clutches of what Steve swears was a boa constrictor-lion hybrid six months ago), so when the TARDIS settles in what sounds like a metropolitan area, Steve is understandably confused.
“Put these on,” the Doctor requests, handing him a small duffle bag and a pair of black shoes. “For this one, it’s important that we blend in.”
“Oh.”
Inside the bag is Steve’s old army uniform, the olive green material peeking out from the canvas cloth of the bag. Steve touches the golden pins that litter the chest of the jacket, exactly as polished as they had been the day that Steve had left it behind. Steve wants to ask how the Doctor was able to find it, but instead, he asks something else.
“Doctor…” he says quietly, still fingering the material. “Why?”
“You could say hello,” the Doctor answers obliquely, fumbling with the TARDIS key as he puts it in his pocket. Only then does Steve notice that the Doctor is also dressed in army green, down to the polished pair of standard issue shoes. His purple glasses remain. “Or goodbye, if that makes more sense.”
The door opens and Steve sees it: New York City, in its immeasurable nighttime splendor. Steve can hear the beeping of the taxis, the clipping sounds of rubber-soled shoes against the pavement, and the laughs of children as they dart across thin, rickety roads.
“The war’s over,” the Doctor adds. “Seven months, now. Most of the soldiers are back or in the process of coming back home.”
When Steve steps out, he’s in a familiar part of town, perhaps three or four blocks down from where he grew up. He breathes in deeply, the scents filling up his lungs, and he seriously contemplates rolling around in the middle of the street, to cover his entire body in what can only be described as pure, unadulterated Brooklyn.
He’s busy looking at the bodega across the street, where three little kids are splitting a small chocolate candy bar when the Doctor taps him on the shoulder. “She moved here, afterward.”
Steve turns, and sees her through the window of an apartment, checking her reflection in a mirror. She has rose-red lips and is applying more lipstick, opening her mouth a little bit as she applies mascara.
“She’s beautiful,” the Doctor offers as they watch Peggy exit her apartment building, her navy blue dress flowing in the slight wind. Her heels, always impractically high for somebody in the army, click impatiently against the pavement as she walks due west.
“As beautiful as they come,” Steve murmurs.
The Doctor and Steve flit through the early evening shadows, making sure never to stay in one place too long. Peggy walks briskly for a woman in heels, and Steve hears a slight rasp in the Doctor’s voice as they continue following her.
When Peggy finally stops, she smiles up a bespectacled fellow in a naval uniform. The man is tall, probably even taller than Steve, and he has an easy smile and dark curly hair that just touches the top of his starched collared shirt (not exactly military standard, Steve’s mind thinks darkly). Steve’s chest aches as he watches the man kiss her once, twice, three times on the mouth, and she sighs and drifts into his arms outside a sparkling dace hall that’s bustling with life.
“Steve…” the Doctor starts, his hand reaching out to grab Steve’s arm. Steve ignores the Doctor, and presses his face against a window, looking into the main hall, careful to stand in the darkness of the overhang. The Doctor doesn’t say anything else, just watches as the man takes Peggy’s hand and leads her onto the crowded dance floor.
---
Steve keeps his shield and his suit in the closet by the door to his room. The Doctor asks him every so often if he’d like to wash it (where the Doctor keeps a washing machine is far beyond Steve’s normal comprehension so he doesn’t dwell on it), but Steve likes it hanging in the closet, the red stain of his blood reminding him the moment he let his life change, again, forever.
---
“I always wanted her to move on,” Steve starts one morning, a couple days after they see Peggy. “I always knew I might not come home one day, and I wanted her to be okay. More than anybody I’ve ever met, she deserved to be happy.”
The Doctor hands him a plate piled high with toast and jelly. “We always want what’s best for the people we love.”
“Do we?” Steve starts, spreading the red substance over the bread. “I don’t think so.”
“You want what’s best for your girl.”
Steve takes a bite, savors the sweet-sour taste of the alien berries. “I’m an exception.”
“Yes,” the Doctor says quietly, stirring a cup of coffee. “Yes you are.”
“You are too,” Steve insists.
“Hardly.”
“But that’s why you leave, isn’t it?” Steve offers. “That’s why you leave the people who travel with you. Because you know that it’s better for them to be away from you.”
The Doctor considers his hands for a moment. Steve notices the grease streaks between his fingers, and imagines in vivid detail what the Doctor’s been doing in the workshop with the armor.
“I wish I were that good of a being,” he begins. “But it’s really much simpler than that: Once and awhile, I just miss being lonely.”
Normally Steve meditates on moments like that, when he sees just how human the Doctor is. But today, he’s just too tired for that.
---
The Doctor talks about time like it’s some big mystery that the lesser beings of the Universe can’t ever hope to comprehend, no matter how very hard they might try. He particularly likes using the phrase “wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey”, which Steve always thinks sounds a little stupid (or as stupid as anything the Doctor could say). Sometimes the Doctor will ramble on for hours about what it all means, how time can be affected or not affected, fixed points that must always be the same and those points that can be changed in marvelous and startling ways, and what it means to be a Time Traveler, what it REALLY means to be a Time Traveler (it means loneliness that doesn’t subside no matter how many sunrises and sunsets you see on an infinite amount of planets).
“I don’t expect you to understand,” the Doctor almost always ends his rants, playing with his screwdriver and clicking his heel against the floor. “Maybe you will someday, if you stay long enough. But then again, most people just don’t.”
No matter what the Doctor may think, Steve knows exactly what time is: He feels it breathing, down his neck, hot and sinister, every single moment of every single day.
---
Every so often, the Doctor asks him where he’d like to go. Normally, the Doctor just putters about and pushes buttons and levers until they end up somewhere bright and shiny and (a disproportionate amount of the time) metallic, and Steve is left to wonder about the customs and traditions that could very well get him killed (or at least strung up in some humiliating manner that the Doctor will laugh about later). So when the Doctor rouses him from a deep sleep and asks, excited as a child, “where to, Captain?,” Steve has to take a moment to himself before he can answer.
“Can we…” Steve wavers, the Doctor’s face decidedly too close to his. “Bucky. Can we…?”
The Doctor gives him this look, one that Steve has only ever associated with his mother the first time he came home with a black eye. “All of time and space,” the Doctor drones. “And you want to visit a grave?”
“It’s just…I have to see it.” Steve touches his forehead. “I mean…I do. I have to try and…I mean, I have to, you know?”
He pulls on a pair of long jeans and some snow boots that the Doctor rummaged up months ago when they made a trip to Alaska to see a dog sledding race in 1910. He spends extra time looking for the woolen socks he keeps rolled up under the bed, and only finds them after a bit of poking and prodding with a wire hanger.
“For you.”
Steve pulls his head up from under the bed, and stands next to the Doctor. The Doctor pulls out an oversized coat filled with some sort of heavy lining. His fingertips brush against Steve’s neck as he drapes the jacket over Steve’s shoulders, tucking the collar gently in. Steve forces himself away from the touch, and the Doctor, sensing Steve’s limit, pulls back as well. He straightens his own collar, and hands Steve a pair of thick gloves.
“You can’t interfere, Steve,” the Doctor whispers. “Rewriting time…it’s not as simple as it seems.”
“Nothing with you is simple,” Steve argues, pulling the gloves on and not meeting the Doctor’s eyes. “Just let me try.”
---
They stand on an overpass overlooking Steve’s unit. Steve sees himself, tall and strangely dark against the bleak white snow, pointing and tugging on the zip line. His men stand behind him, steadfastly loyal as always. Even from the distance, Steve can feel their faith radiating toward him (faith he never ever thought he was worthy of, but took graciously nonetheless). He watches himself and Bucky as they dip over the train, each death-defying step on the icy roof looking more precarious than the last. He sees Bucky, handsome even from the distance, cocking his gun. He sees himself grasp the shield’s edge with an almost-smirk.
And, what feels like a lifetime later, he sees Bucky fall.
(Steve wanted desperately to move, to run and jump and find the train and pull Bucky out and do everything, anything to stop it, but something keeps him anchored to the ground, some invisible force that rips the breath from his lungs and the strength from his legs and he knows, he just knows that the Doctor was right and he hates him just a little bit, just for a moment.)
---
Steve feels the tears well up before he can curb them, and he allows himself pitch forward onto the ground. The Doctor’s hand is right there, steadying him, and after a few moments of rough breathing, Steve hears the Doctor settle next to him in the snow.
“I suppose you’re sick of hearing that it wasn’t your fault?”
He bites his lip, tasting the bitter salt from his eyes. “I didn’t believe it when people said it to me seventy years ago, and I don’t believe it now.”
“You have to know that you couldn’t have stopped this.”
Steve runs his hand through his hair. “I tried to move and I couldn’t. I couldn’t save him.”
“No. We can go back a hundred times and Bucky will still die.”
“Why then?” Steve posits, suddenly furious. “Why bring me back if you knew that no matter what I did, I would never be able to save him?”
“You needed to know that Bucky falling…it’s a fixed point in time. It has to happen like that, every time, no matter the universe.”
Steve shakes his head. “I still don’t understand why you would bring me. You could have told me this beforehand. I wouldn’t have wanted to come if I knew that I was going to have to watch him die again.”
“Because,” the Doctor breathes, fussing with the leather jacket until Steve feels the warmth of the Doctor’s fingers bleed through the thick fabric. “You needed to know that not only was there nothing you could have done, there was nothing you should have done. You start playing with time and then time starts playing with you.”
Steve pulls away, letting the Doctor’s hands fall to the ground. The biting cold surrounds him again. “You’re more than nine hundred years old, Doctor. You must have messed with time a little now and then.”
---
They’re running across a field, a wall of arrows headed directly for their heads, and Steve pulls out his shield, gleaming again from the warm rain, and deflects a particularly impressively shot arrow before it pierces the Doctor’s arc reactor. The Doctor looks at him, wide-eyed, before they both break into a spring toward the TARDIS.
In the end, the Doctor scrapes by with a couple scratches and bruises and a little bit of blood on his forehead. Steve pulls out the first aid kit he bought in Montana (Steve’s idea, not the Doctor’s) and wraps some gauze around one of the deeper gashes on the Doctor’s hand, noting the toughness of the skin on the Doctor’s palms.
“Thanks,” the Doctor says through slightly gritted teeth. Steve would tease him about being a baby, but it feels like the wrong time for that. “Sometimes I forget that you’re a superhero.”
Steve senses the red creeping onto his cheeks and finishes wrapping up the Doctor’s hand. “Hey, the shield does most of the work. My contributions are pretty limited.”
It’s not until the Doctor is up again, fiddling with the TARDIS controls that Steve notices that his leg is, again, bent at and odd angle.
“It’s probably broken,” the Doctor calls at him from across the way. “No good deed goes unpunished, Steve.”
Steve shrugs, taking his own turn with gritted teeth “It was worth it.”
---
He hears the word once, when the Doctor has his back to Steve and a tall man with chestnut hair and a heavy military jacket pressed against his front. The man smirks at the Doctor, kisses his hard, and clicks a red button on what the Doctor later assures Steve is a quite capable time travelling device in its own right (“though nothing compared to this one,” he chuckles, patting the door to the TARDIS’s roaring engine room).
When Steve questions him about it later, the Doctor moves, tinkering with a dial on the bright blue handle of the TARDIS’s control console. “Regeneration. Nasty business, really. Lots of screaming and energy discharge and…” He trails off, cracking his knuckles absently. “Nasty business, that’s all.”
Steve frowns. “I don’t get it.”
“When Time Lords begin the process of dying we Regenerate. Turn into a whole new person instead of moving into the big beyond.”
“So you’re not you anymore.” Steve frowns again. “You just…change?”
“You’re still the same person, deep down inside. It’s the superficial things that change. Hair color, eye color, skin tone. Nothing else. Same soul. Sort of.”
“Oh.” Steve wrings his wrists, still lost. “That’s…nice?”
“Yeah.” The Doctor sniffs the air. “Nice.”
Steve doesn’t miss the light look of resignation on the Doctor’s face.
(Steve knows exactly what that’s like: To be exactly the same, but not really.)
---
They’re in the middle of New-New York on a sunny day, walking around a newly refurbished Central Park. Steve has been gazing at all the vendors with their multi-colored foods that look like they would be more at home on one of the more subversive cooking shows that Steve secretly enjoys watching in his admittedly limited free time.
“I can’t get over how much it looks like the real place,” Steve says after awhile. “Sometimes I just let myself get lost in it, you know? Because it’s so similar.”
“Similar, but with the cat people,” the Doctor replies.
“Yeah.” Steve scratches his temple, contemplative. “I’ll never get used to that.”
“Best doctors in this Universe,” the Doctor promises. “So at least give it the old college try.”
They sit on a park bench, the Doctor clutching what looks like a pink-spotted hot dog in a green bun. He chews on it thoughtfully as they watch dozens of people walking by, many hand in hand, taking in the weather and sights and sounds that litter the day. Steve sees a couple, both short and blue-eyed, sitting across the way, kissing like their world is ending, and for a moment, Steve misses Peggy down to his bones.
---
The Doctor kisses the red-haired woman the next time they meet up with her. Steve watches because he can’t look away.
---
Steve’s sick and tired of being shot at by alien who hold grudges, and he’s sick and tired of the way the Doctor keeps acting like it’s not a big deal at all (because, hey, somebody else the Doctor traveled with probably got shot at before so it shouldn’t be a big deal, right? Right?), so he hauls the Doctor up against the side of the TARDIS, and just explodes.
“Would you go?” he demands. “Just leave? Not say goodbye?”
“Look, I’m sorry you almost got clipped again but…wait, what? What the hell, Steve?”
“You’ve left others, before.”
“Circumstances sometimes get away from me,” the Doctor says by way of explanation. Steve doesn’t let him go. “I can’t be held accountable for things beyond my control.”
“So you could leave me. Just pick up and leave, after I get shot at, again.”
The Doctor’s grip is hard on Steve’s unsuspecting hand, and Steve cringes as the fingers around his skin twists. He forgets just how strong the Doctor is sometimes.
“I’m not going to leave you, Steve. I give you my word.”
Steve’s other hand tightens against the fabric of the Doctor’s shirt. He can feel the arc reactor, warm and pulsing, under his skin.
“Yes, you will.”
---
Steve knows the Doctor doesn’t really expect much from his Companions. He expects their presence, expects (obviously) companionship, expects a little bit of hero worship here and there with a health dose of awe mixed in. The Doctor doesn’t expect competence in anything useful. So it’s only natural that the Doctor comes into the TARDIS control room with a baffled expression on his face when he sees Steve handling the controls like a seasoned expert.
“So where we off to, Cap?” he says, clapping a hand on Steve’s shoulder.
Steve slugs him, once, right across the mouth, and the Doctor crumples to the floor,
---
When the Doctor comes to, Steve is holding the few personal items he has on the TARDIS. His shield, newly buffed and shined, goes into a large cotton bag along with the suit and a couple trinkets he’s picked up over the last eight months (Steve doesn’t actually know how long it’s been, but eight months always seems like a reasonable guess so he says it, with a smile on his face, whenever he’s asked).
“Don’t follow me,” Steve says, throwing the TARDIS key to the ground as he slams the door.
The Doctor, still bewildered, forces himself up on his palms. He clutches at the railing around the control panel, and lifts himself up.
“Steve!” he shouts, again and again, until his voice becomes hoarse. But Steve just keeps running, the shield clanking against his body, the Doctor’s voice becoming nothing more than a whisper in the back of his mind.
---
“Really, it’s bloody four-thirty in the morning…”
Peggy opens the door to her apartment, her hair tousled and undone and her robe slipping slightly down her shoulders, a cross look on her face. Her eyes widen and her hands fly to her chest when she sees who her visitor is.
“Steve!” she squeaks. “But you’re…”
He kisses her, full on the mouth, pulls her flush against him. She squeaks again before opening her mouth to his, and pulling him closer.
“I love you,” he breathes into her mouth. “I love you, Peggy.”
“But…how…?” she continues stuttering over her words, even as Steve steps into the apartment, and starts tugging at her robe.
She is perfect, sweet and tender and laughs when he blushes as she unbuttons the shirt he has on. She gasps whenever his hand touches her, and moans in time with his tongue on her body. When he moves inside her, it feels right and he wonders how he’s lived a moment of his life without this, without her all around him.
“Steve,” she whispers once, her hand clasping around his as he kisses her temple, mouths at her neck and pulse points.
After, he touches her hair and takes in the faint glow from the streetlights that dance across the apartment walls whenever a car drives by. Peggy smiles at him when he pulls her close, pushing the hair back from her face.
“This isn’t a dream, is it?” Peggy murmurs. “Feels too real to be like the dreams I used to have.”
Steve grins, kisses her again. “No,” he whispers, his hands drifting over her breasts. “It’s not a dream.”
---
“I thought I saw you, once,” she confesses, hours later, a thin sheet of sweat covering her bare chest. “I went dancing and I thought I saw you standing outside the hall with a man wearing purple glasses.”
“You did.”
“I did?” she sits up in the bed. “Were you stalking me from beyond the grave, Steve Rogers?”
“Not quite.” He rolls over, adjusting a pillow under his arm. “I was with the Doctor.”
“The Doctor?” she says, sudden wariness tainting her tone.
“I’ve been traveling with him.”
“Traveling? I don’t understand.” She sits up. “Weren’t you dead?”
“It’s complicated.” He touches her face again. “Not really a story for tonight. Later, probably. We have all the time in the world, Peggy.”
She runs her palm up his arm. “We do?”
“Marry me,” he says. “And we will.”
“But I thought you were traveling with this Doctor fellow.”
Steve shakes his head. “Not anymore. I’m going to stay here. With you. Forever.” He holds her hand against his heart, and tries to ignore the empty feeling growing in his chest, the one that’s usually filled by the dull buzz of the TARDIS engines.
---
Steve wakes up in the TARDIS, alone and half-clothed in his bedroom. There’s a note on the table that’s in the Doctor’s childish penmanship, pale blue ink on faded parchment. On top of the note is his key, shiny as the day the Doctor gave it to him.
His shield and suit are in the closet, swaying as if they’ve just been placed there.
He burns the note with the lighter he keeps in his back pocket. He wouldn’t read it for the world.
They don’t speak for a week.
---
“Why do you build it?”
These are the first words Steve speaks to the Doctor, afterward. He’s sitting on the top of step of the stairs that lead down to the Doctor’s workshop, wearing sweats that are a couple sizes too small, and sipping from a coffee mug that has a picture of a lily on the side of it.
“Just a small side project,” the Doctor assures him, tapping the red armor twice until the face mask glows. “Nothing but a Time Lord’s genius at work to stave off boredom.”
Steve puts the coffee cup down and descends the stairs, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Will you ever use it?”
The Doctor smiles softly. “What, and be some sort of iron man in a suit? No, no, I prefer being just a madman in a box, thank you very much.”
“Iron Man,” Steve wonders aloud, touching the helmet. He likes it way it feels under his fingers. “Sounds like a superhero.”
“What a sad superhero,” the Doctor responds, pulling a pair of pliers out of red box. “Without the suit, what would he be?”
---
Steve never gets around to asking how he ended up back on the TARDIS, why Peggy never said goodbye, and the Doctor never gives him an explanation.
---
“Doctor, they’re getting closer.”
Steve is in the middle of a room with a thousand walls that twist and turn and morph into things Steve couldn’t muster up in his most horrifying of dreams. He can hear the distant sound of things exploding, and the hum of steam being let out under pressure, all of which leads him to believe that this warehouse, which the Doctor had promised him was secure, is about to explode under the weight of several trillion tons of water.
Not exactly his worst day, but obviously not one of his best, either.
Steve pulls against the metal rope that binds his hands together, flinching as the rope cuts into his wrists and pokes up against his bone. The Doctor, who looks as if he’s run a marathon judging by the sweat pouring down his face, pulls out his screwdriver, and points it at the bound points. The rope falls off, and Steve rubs his wrists where they feel raw.
“We have to get out of here,” the Doctor exclaims. “This place is gonna blow in two minutes.” He checks the watch that hangs from his waist, and then clicks it shut before Steve can look. “Three minutes max.” He turns on his heel, and starts running toward what Steve vaguely remembers is the control center of the building. “I’m going to rig the mass transport device for the workers. The TARDIS can’t carry them all.”
“And I…?” Steve calls out.
“You run like hell.”
Steve takes a quick look behind him, before chasing after the Doctor.
“Doctor!” Steve says, strangely breathless once he catches up. “Is this going to work?”
“Only one way to find out.”
And then, with no further preamble or pomp and circumstance, the Doctor grabs him, kisses Steve’s mouth, quick and dirty, before he sprints off in the other direction.
The workers live, even though the warehouse becomes a memory at the bottom of an ocean. Steve and the Doctor live too, somehow, though Steve is momentarily turned back into the squirt from Brooklyn and the Doctor into a younger man who really favors red suspenders and bow ties and asks constantly for fish fingers and custard and won’t shut up about somebody named Rhodey.
They don’t talk about the kiss later, when they’re back in the TARDIS and chuckling about the crazy business of being a time traveler these days, but Steve remembers it, remembers him like a burn on his lips.
---
Steve sees them, has always seen them: The remnants of the others who came before him. A stethoscope hidden near the back of a shelf, a ladies bomber jacket in the front of a closet, a pistol that smells like tobacco and sweat tucked away with an absurd amount of disregard in a cupboard. They are all reminders, Steve thinks, of things the Doctor would rather forget.
In the corner of Steve’s room there’s a picture of a man with a big nose and a woman with a wide mouth and sparkling blue eyes. They are smiling and laughing and look like they’re stupidly in love with one another. Steve likes looking at them: They seem friendly, like they don’t have a care in the world. Steve doesn’t know that he’s ever felt that way.
He asks the Doctor, once, about the man and the woman, and the Doctor mumbles something about time being rewritten and loss that can’t be reversed and then locks himself downstairs, the sounds of metal on metal ringing through the main cabin of the TARDIS.
---
They go to a bar on a red planet where the Doctor gets Steve rip-roaringly drunk from the local liquor, and then he kisses him again, and tugs at the front of his shirt until they’re pressed together, the entire bar hollering loudly as the Doctor gropes Steve with a youthful exuberance that Steve imagines few 900 year-olds could muster.
---
They live in the space between spaces, the time outside of time.
---
Sometimes the Doctor will grab him and shove him into a dark corner for a kiss, one that lingers and makes Steve embarrassingly hard but never goes further, and sometimes Steve wonders if the Doctor wants him there at all.
---
The Doctor sits opposite a tall man wearing a crown embellished with sapphires and rubies and emeralds. His hands are folded neatly in front of him, like he’s waiting for a meal at a high-class restaurant or for afternoon tea with the Queen (Steve has noticed that the Doctor really likes Great Britain, and more than one person has made mention of the Doctor’s former escapades with the British royal line, so it’s really not that far of a stretch).
“This Universe isn’t coming to an end,” the Doctor says resolutely. “Don’t you think if the Universe were ending, I would know about it?”
“It’s not just this Universe,” the man replies. “All Universes, Doctor. Did you really think you just could mess around with inevitable things and not be privy to the consequences?”
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
The man smiles, menacing. “Oh, Doctor. You’re been playing this game for far too long to pretend that you don’t comprehend the magnitude of what you’ve done.” His expression changes suddenly, from merely menacing to impossibly angry, and Steve takes the slightest of steps back to get away from him. “You broke the rules, Doctor,” the man growls. “You broke the rules, and now you have to pay.”
The Doctor stands, pushes over the wooden chair he was sitting on. The man across the table balks, but doesn’t move. “We have to go, Steve.”
“But...” Steve starts, but the Doctor is already walking away.
The man looks at Steve, blue eyes sparkling. “You should consider yourself special, Captain. The Doctor doesn’t cheat the system for every pretty face he passes.”
---
“Doctor!” Steve shuts the TARDIS door behind himself. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
The Doctor waves his hand, flippant. “Trust me when I say it matters so much less than you can even imagine.”
“What did he mean about breaking the rules?”
The Doctor won’t even look at him. “He means that in a different life, we were friends, Steve. We fought together, side by side. In another world, we were everything to one another.”
“I still don’t understand.”
The Doctor slams his fists against the wall of the TARDIS. “Of course you don’t, because you’re Steven goddamn Rogers, Captain fucking America, heart of solid gold and brains of absolute mush.”
“Please,” Steve hears himself beg. “Please tell me what’s going on.”
“Parallel universes,” the Doctor starts. “Easy enough concept, right?”
No, Steve thinks privately.
“Except how they’re absolutely not.” The Doctor fists his hands in his own hair, looking a little bit crazier than normal. “That’s the problem with the TARDIS, you sometimes forget that things are more complicated than you could have ever imagined, and you see things that you think you can change, but you can’t, but, really, you absolutely can, you just have to give it enough effort and time and know that, no matter the cost, it’s going to be worth it.”
The Doctor pushes forward and kisses Steve. And this time, the Doctor doesn’t let go.
It’s a total mess. The Doctor is all hands and frenetic movements, and Steve finds himself hauled back against the control panel until a blue lever starts digging into his spine. He groans as the metal brushes against his back, and the Doctor sticks his hand in his pants, the rough calluses of his hands tingling against the skin of his cock.
“I’ve wanted you since I met you,” the Doctor hisses in his ear. Steve grunts, pushing forward into his grip, the Doctor’s hand slippery against his body. “Even when you were that small, little thing so many years ago.”
I love you, Steve wants to scream, but the words catch in the back of his throat, tangled and lost in the din around them. All that comes out is a whine that Steve’s never heard from himself before, and he gives up, just thrusts into the Doctor’s grip as if his life depends on it.
“He couldn’t save you,” the Doctor says, biting into his mouth. He pulls faster, merciless. “He tried, but he just couldn’t. I saved you, though. I saved you and I get to keep what I’ve saved.”
Steve comes hard, wordless, his chest pressed against the fabric over the arc reactor and his hands buried in the Doctor’s hair.
---
They lay naked in a bedroom that isn’t the Doctor’s and isn’t Steve’s. There’s a pleasant aroma in the air, like a grassy park in the New York countryside right before the weather gets really hot and sticky during the summer. Steve thinks a hundred times that he should get up, find a shower and rinse the mess off of his legs and back, but the Doctor keeps sighing in his waking-sleep like he has a secret that he would share if Steve asked.
Finally, after what feels like years in between the soft sheets, pressed from head to toe against the Doctor, Steve moves.
“Why didn’t you Regenerate?” Steve asks softly. His fingers rub the skin that surrounds the Doctor’s arc reactor, noting how the Doctor moves unconsciously into the touch of Steve’s hand. “When that stuff happened to your hearts, why didn’t you just Regenerate?”
The Doctor touches the back of Steve’s hand and runs his fingers over the raised veins near his knuckles. “You lose your life, Steve. You’re not really yourself anymore. Not really.”
“And you’d rather die than Regenerate?”
The Doctor shifts in the bed, letting his legs splay open. He’s hard, and Steve wants so much that it makes him feel sick. “It is dying Steve, don’t you see that?” He touches Steve’s lips with a lazy hand, and smiles. “I don’t want to lose you now.”
It’s a good answer, but not a real one.
---
There’s almost nobody in the joint, just a barkeep and a couple sad drunks hammering away at their third or fourth of the night. A man in grey trousers and suspenders sits behind the piano, smoking a cigarette and singing to nobody in particular. Peggy wears a red dress and sits in the corner, swaying her legs in time with the music.
She doesn’t seem surprised this time when Steve walks in and holds out his hand for hers. She puts down her drink (scotch, neat, with a tiny red straw) on the counter and smoothes her skirt down over her thighs.
“I can’t stay,” he whispers against her cheek.
“I know,” she whispers back, holding him closer.
The man behind the piano starts playing something slow, smooth. It’s a song Steve’s never heard before, will probably never hear again, and he holds Peggy in his arms and lets himself feel the flutter of her heart against his chest as they move with the rise and the fall of the tempo. In his head, Steve can see a hundred and one different images of the life they will never lead together, children they will never have, places they will never visit, houses they will never turn into homes. It hurts, but the pain is tempered, dulled by time and space and the Doctor.
“Take care of yourself,” she says when the song ends, and Steve promises that he will.
---
“You found me,” Steve says one night, after the Doctor rolls off him, his breath fast and erratic. “On the day that my plane went down, you were there. I could see you out of the corner of my eye.”
The Doctor blinks once, the light from the arc reactor illuminating the room just slightly. “I couldn’t just let you die alone.”
---
They’re running again (always running), Steve holding his shield and wearing his suit because the Doctor had been in a playful mood and Steve had obliged because that’s what he does now. But what had started as a quick stop on a faraway planet for lunch had turned into a full-out race away from what looks like a gaping black hole in the sky.
“Doctor,” Steve calls from the far end of the field. “What’s that?”
The Doctor pulls out the screwdriver, and points it at the whirling mass. His face pales when he looks at the screwdriver’s reading, and he points with his finger to the TARDIS and makes a break for it.
Doctor, a voice booms from inside the black hole. Doctor…
Before the Doctor can open the door, a shot of what looks like white lightning shoots out from the black hole, and hits the Doctor square in the chest. Even from the distance, Steve can see a small trail of smoke emitting from the arc reactor.
“Time catches up to everybody, Captain.”
The voice comes from behind him. Steve turns, and he sees the man with the bejeweled crown standing there, solid and palpable until he isn’t.
And suddenly, Steve gets it.
---
Steve tried to kill himself, once, after Bucky died. It wasn’t pretty and it obviously wasn’t successful, but he remembers wishing that he was still the small guy from Brooklyn, weak and frail and able to succumb to three vials of undiluted arsenic.
---
They are sitting on the floor in the control room of the TARDIS, the Doctor’s head cradled in Steve’s lap. The Doctor is heaving up and down, his hands clenching and unclenching as Steve struggles to get the Doctor’s shirt off to assess the damage.
“Tell me.”
The Doctor moans as Steve rips the fabric. ‘Tell you what? I have a couple stories about fast blondes and faster red cars if you’re interested.”
“You changed time. For me. Why?”
The Doctor sputters a laugh, a few stray drops of blood flying out from his mouth. “Why do you think, Steve?”
---
For the record, Steve never believed that the Doctor needed the armor to be a superhero.
---
The Doctor groans when Steve lays him in his bed. The arc reactor is making a small, droning sound that Steve can barely hear above the Doctor’s sharp inhalations.
“In another world, I’m just some asshole with a lot of money. Some guy who gets every chance a hundred times over and still fucks it all up. And in others, I got lucky, and I figured it out what an asshole I was and became like you: A superhero. An Avenger. Your friend. More, depending upon the Universe.”
Steve pushes back the Doctor’s black hair. He sees the arc reactor spark, just slightly, so slightly that he wonders if he’s actually seeing it.
“I think I’d like that.”
“But I always lost you in those world,” the Doctor explains. His head rolls to one side, and Steve touches the hyperextended muscles on his neck. “You always died. Your death… it’s a fixed point,” he gasps, the arc reactor sparking again. “Can’t change what’s inevitable.”
“But you did,” Steve breathes. “I’m here.”
“Yes,” the Doctor says. “A hundred Universes later and I changed it. And now time is catching up with me.”
---
Steve actually bought a ring for Peggy. It wasn’t much, just a small, solid diamond on a gold band that he saved up for and bought on a down day in London. It was on him when he went down in the plane. He wonders if S.H.I.E.L.D is keeping it hostage in some dark room, never to be seen again.
He wondered one restless afternoon if the Doctor was ever married. He didn’t think so at the time, but now he’s not so sure.
---
“Your name. Please, tell me your name.”
“Anthony,” the Doctor grimaces. “Tony, sometimes. On another world, in another life. Tony Stark. Playboy, billionaire, genius, philanthropist.” He grimaces again, the blood starting to seep onto the fine fabric of his pants. “It’s a shitty title, no matter which way you slice it.”
“Tony…”
The Doctor…Tony shoves Steve’s hand away.
“You have to move back,” the Doctor grits out. “The regenerative energy…you have to move, Steve. It’ll kill you if you’re too close.”
“You’ll be fine,” Steve says. “Tony, you’ll be fine.”
“Don’t forget me,” Tony says, and then he screams.
---
There was a day, right near the beginning, when Steve was sitting outside the TARDIS with a sketch book, watching as the Doctor examined some sort of sentient purple flower that seemed to be in a perpetual state of blooming. The almost-violet petals fell off into a ring around the Doctor, and he sneezed, his eyes watering and the flower, cross, hopped away.
“Never let life stop amusing you,” the Doctor had said as he watched the flower run toward the fiery sunset, and Steve had grinned and painted the lines in vibrant red, orange, and yellow. “If it does, it’s probably not worth living anymore.”
---
The light from Tony’s hands and face nearly blinds Steve, and it hurts, hurts so much to just listen to Tony’s pained cries. The bright yellow light flares out of his body, and Steve can feel the heat of it, intense against his skin. He blocks his eyes with his hands, and backs into the corner of the TARDIS control room.
“Tony…”
---
Steve would have died for Peggy a million times over, but he would have waited for the Doctor until the end of time itself.
---
And just like that, it’s over. The heat recedes, and the Doctor stops screaming.
---
The woman with the red hair had pulled him aside once, when the Doctor was busy negotiating his way between two large rock cliffs in the northern Atlantic Ocean (Steve still can’t remember how he got on the boat in the first place, but he knows that it doesn’t matter) and told Steve that he needed be prepared to give his life for the Doctor.
“Other have,” she had assured him, a sad look in her eye. “I hope you won’t, but you need to know this now before you get yourself in too deep.”
---
Steve opens his eyes.
The arc reactor, small and sustaining, sits in the middle of the floor, broken.
---
Steve has almost died one hundred and sixty five times in his life. He counted one night, when he was fidgety and the noises of the TARDIS howled rather than purred in his ears. He pulled out a pencil and paper and wrote each time down, in gruesome detail, until his hand ached.
He’s glad he didn’t kill himself after Bucky died. He found much better things to give his life for.
---
In the workshop, the red and yellow armor flickers to life.