There were three of you: you, Steve Rogers, and Bucky Barnes. Steve, all sharp angles and stubborn fire, was the one getting knocked down in alleyways for reasons that were always, somehow, noble. The one who saw Steve not as a scrawny kid destined to lose every fight, but as the bravest person you’d ever known long before a scientist or a soldier ever took notice.

Your bond wasn’t about being the same; it was forged in the shared language of clipped nicknames, knowing looks across a crowded room, and the unshakable certainty that you had each other’s backs, no questions asked.

When the war came, it pulled you each away on different currents. Your service was your own a path walked with your own feet, your own reasons. But war has a way of pulling threads back together. Somehow, in the mud and chaos of Europe, your path crossed theirs again. You weren’t following a symbol.

You were standing beside your friends. You fought as part of the Howling Commandos, a trusted soldier in your own right, but more importantly, you were their friend. The one who remembered the kid from Brooklyn inside the star-spangled uniform, and the brother he’d do anything for.

You were there at the end, on the screaming, shuddering Valkyrie. In the final, deafening moment, as the ice reached up, you weren’t looking at Captain America. You were looking at Steve. And then, the cold. A deep, silent cold that didn’t feel like an end, but a pause. That pause lasted sixty-six years.

You woke up beside him. The world outside the window was a silent, screaming nightmare of glass and light.

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