Liberty Is Mine |2| The Liberty Saga

Prologue

Seventy years. Seven decades, gone by in the blink of an eye.

When he'd put the Valkyrie in the water, Steve had thought he was sacrificing himself. It had been a tough decision, of course it had, and especially so with Peggy on the radio begging him not to do it. But he'd done it, because it was that or risk millions of lives.

The thing was, he'd come around to the idea. He'd prepared himself—this is it, Rogers, this is the end. And now it wasn't. It was hard, once you'd committed yourself to dying, to fathom having survived against all the odds.

The only thing he had to hold onto was that even though the world had changed completely, he still had one little touchpoint of normality. One friendly face, one thing he recognised.

Even if she, too, had changed.

She'd asked him to come back with her to the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility from which he'd escaped, so she could explain everything. And since he had nowhere else in all the world to go, it was an easy sell. As they walked in, he noticed more than a couple of agents stopping and staring.

Maybe not everything was so different.

Just like she had back in the day, Elke had a stare on her that would make even the nosiest of individuals regret their interest, and she employed that stare now to great effect. Most agents seemed to know her, or perhaps just knew what she was capable of. All tended to get out of her way pretty quickly.

Except one. "All go alright, Ellie?"

"Ja, everything went to plan," she replied, shrugging. "I mean, plan Z, sure, but it was a plan, I suppose. Do you know if there is a meeting room anywhere we could use? I think this is going to be a very long conversation."

"Sure, the conference room on fifth should be free," Coulson replied. He eyed Steve, who had drifted away from them slightly, staring in wonder at the bustling facility around them. "Is he gonna be okay, do you think? I'd hate for him to go cuckoo after all this time."

Elke raised an eyebrow. "Cuckoo?" Coulson grinned, and her expression softened. "Well, he recognised me, at least. I think he just needs a little time to come to terms with everything." Her lips twitched. "Maybe wait a while before you get your cards out."

Coulson nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

Their earpieces crackled, and Fury's voice filtered in. "Coulson, when you're done making eyes at Rogers, I want you in my office."

"Wow," said Elke, holding back a grin with some effort. "He really knows you, huh?"

"Hmm." Coulson raised a hand to his earpiece, rolling his eyes. "I'll be right up, sir."

Elke clapped him on the back. "Good luck."

"And you," he returned. As Coulson went off on his way, Elke went back over to Steve, who seemed pretty stunned, understandably. She put a hand on his arm, not wanting to startle him.

"You okay?"

"Uh... I think so," he replied, swallowing. "What happened to the SSR?"

"It was absorbed into a larger organisation, a while after the war," Elke explained. "This organisation. The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, or S.H.I.E.L.D. for short. I told them it was a stupid name, but Peggy, Howard and Phillips were pretty set on the initials."

Steve nodded, taking it all in. "Right." He blinked. "Oh, because it spells...?"

Elke tilted her head. "You changed the world, Steve. Dying didn't take that back. But you should know, it wasn't just you they remembered. Look over here." She walked him over to a glass memorial monument, the likes of which stood in every major S.H.I.E.L.D. facility in the world.

"Wall of Valor," Steve read, his brows knitting together. "A memorial?"

"To all the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. who have lost their lives in service," Elke confirmed. "All the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and one other." She ran her fingertip over the very first name engraved into the glass—the same name that had been on her lips for every second of the last seventy years.

James Bucky Barnes.

All the tension seeped out of Steve at the sight of his best friend's name. If Elke didn't know better, she'd have said he was about to melt. "You did this?" he asked, and she could taste the grief in his voice.

Her voice, too, caught in her throat. "No. No, I was... I wasn't around. But Peggy and Howard and Colonel Phillips, and the rest of the boys... They made sure he would be remembered as a hero."

"They got that right."

"Yes." She watched him for a moment, then touched his arm gently. "Come on. Let's go somewhere we can talk properly, ja?" She led him into an elevator, where she hit the button for the fifth floor. A message flashed up onscreen, asking for identification, and she pulled out a black wallet, showing the badge inside to the computer. The light turned to green and the elevator started to move as an image of her badge flashed up onscreen.

"Welcome, Lieutenant Fischer."

Steve's brow furrowed. "Lieutenant? You got a promotion?"

"Well, sort of. I'm about as much a lieutenant as you are a captain," she explained, tilting her head. "It's honorary, really. They just wanted to change it so they didn't have to refer to me as Lady Fischer. Lieutenant just started with the right letter." The elevator stopped at the right floor and she led him along a glass corridor into a glass-walled meeting room, closing the door behind her. "You're not going to faint on me, are you?"

He almost cracked a smile. "No, don't worry. There's, uh... a lot of glass around."

She followed his gaze, lips twitching. "Ja, they seem to like that sort of thing these days. Most places still have proper walls, though."

"Good." He couldn't deny that the view was spectacular. When he crossed to the outer wall and looked out over the city, it almost took his breath away. And if he squinted, he could almost pretend nothing had changed.

But of course it had.

He turned back to Elke, not missing the careful way she was watching him. Analysing him, waiting to see if he'd crack. "So, you took the serum? Again?"

She nodded, perching on the corner of a table. "About a year after you died. They distilled a version of it from your blood samples, tested it on about a dozen of us. It only worked on me, God knows why. Maybe because I'd had one before. Anyway, they said I could destroy the remnants of Hydra, so I had fun with that for a while. And then... peace came and they didn't need a supersoldier. I went into cryostasis—uh, they put me in the freezer, so to speak—and then for the last seventy years, they have been waking me up whenever they needed my skills. Then when they found you in the ice, realised you were still alive... they pulled me out to be a friendly face." She smiled suddenly, briefly. "You can imagine my surprise when they told me about you."

He huffed in something close to amusement. "I bet. But you're not Captain America?"

"There was only ever one Captain America to me," she replied, shrugging.

At that, his expression softened. "Come here." And as soon as she was close enough, he wrapped his arms around her, holding her close. She might have been bigger, stronger, more imposing than she had been back then, but neither of them could shake the memory of the last time they had embraced, fresh with the grief of Bucky's death. "You've been alone all this time?"

He expected her to reassure him, to wave off his concern with a smile. But perhaps he was the only person left in the world she could truly be honest with. So, with her chin resting on her shoulder, she simply said, "You get used to it, after a while."

~~~