It had been four days since they recovered Steve from the ice. It had also been four days since the last time Peggy had lain down to sleep.
She was waiting in an empty corridor at the military hospital. Even though she had been the one finding the location of the plane, no one had let her see him. Peggy flattened her pants against the top of her thighs, lost in thought. Howard was taking care of him with the best team of doctors the Allies could offer, so she knew he was safe. According to others, Steve was alive and well but for all she knew, they could be lying to her.
Peggy had never felt this weak. She wasn't doing a thing to help Steve and she had never been the kind to sit around while others did things for her. The stillness of the green coloured corridor was making her the worst kind of uneasy, restless even.
Every time she heard footsteps her heart raced and all of her body became stiff with alertness. Even after days without sleeping a full night, she felt able to fight anyone or anything that came into the door uninvited. The war could be over but HYDRA's threat lingered; it would not go down as easily as the Axis.
Quietly, she stretched her body, raising her arms above her head. Peggy thought of things to say Steve; usually that's how she tried to distract herself from her current uselessness. Resuming her position, she put her hand on her pocket, feeling the coldness of Steve's compass. She closed her hand around it, the only proof that they'd actually taken Steve and his belongings out of the Valkyrie.
When she found his location, Peggy had tried to get there herself but she was quickly taken into a vehicle and kept there, in the company of two privates. Apparently, "women in love do crazy stuff" and she "could ruin the whole process if Captain Rogers happened to be dead". At the time she thoroughly thought about those words: if Steve was dead, which was likely, there wasn't much she could do to make the process of removing him out of the ice take a wrong turn. Not unless the SSR had other plans. Maybe there were other items inside the Valkyrie they'd want to retrieve... In that case, Steve was being treated as the tin soldier, Howard's science project, not has the human life that deserved respect.
In a couple of hours, she was notified that Captain Steven Grant Rogers was in fact alive and was to be taken to a military hospital.
The following days were simple fragments in her mind. After fighting a couple of sergeants, she managed to be taken along to the hospital. She waited. She saw Howard, passing by, emerging from an observation room in the company of two other men in uniforms. Then she waited a little more. She spoke to Howard for a couple a seconds, in which he told her not to worry.
Green linoleum, white uniforms, beige plastic chairs. The faint sound of laughter in the nurses' room, the radio, the constant buzz that haunted her. Water, bland meals, apples. Sanitation products, metal. That's all she could see, hear, taste and smell. She didn't remember much of feeling.
Peggy pulled her brown hair back, tapping the floor with the point of her shoe. She had tried to put a list together of all things she wanted to tell Steve as soon as she could see him. She wanted to tell him about the end of the war! She hoped he wouldn't feel too bad about missing it out, but she was sure he'd feel happy and relieved.
Steve. His kind ways and his greater-than-life wish to do the right thing made him the most special human being. It was funny, the feeling she got when she thought of Steve. She wanted to keep him, to live with him somewhere private. The two of them secretly hidden from the world, safe from it.
Smiling, Peggy thought of the time she'd met him. The scrawny but brave boy from Brooklyn who'd throw himself into the menace of a grenade in a vain endeavour to keep others protected. The heart of a soldier that now had a fitting physique.
