Steve Rogers/Captain America One Shots

Time Takes It's Toll

(Listen to The Rest of Our Lives By: Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, while you read this one. This song is beautiful and really gives another level of emotion to this one shot. This was the only song I listened to as I wrote this one!)

Her hand felt fragile as it rested weakly inside Steve Rogers' much stronger one. Thin and nearly weightless, as though a sheet of paper that he could easily crush in the fist of his hand. Yet he held her hand with a tender strength, and never feared that his muscle would hurt her. Because how could he? It wasn't in him, even with the power that ran through him more than the average man, he could never hurt the person who's hand he held now. Steve would much rather take on whatever pain could plague her, than watch her suffer it herself. 

And in the slightest fraction of a way, he felt as though he already had. 

Draped in pale pink sheets, and a quilt that she carried with her since her childhood, she slept soundly. Her soft breaths echoing in the small and warm bedroom, and Steve watched the way her eyelashes still flickered with each moment of sleep. Her dreams still very much alive behind her closed lids, and he could only vaguely begin to imagine what kind of images were running wild in that head of hers. She looked ever so peaceful in her sleep, and it frightened Steve. All the troubles and fears that had etched their way onto her face, blending with the wrinkles on her now paler skin, had now faded as she dreamt serenely. Her youth seemed to glow as she slumbered, the age that had manifested itself in many different ways over the years, seeming to suddenly melt away. Leaving behind a woman who's beauty and youthful light hadn't changed. But it wasn't just in sleep that Steve saw the young woman he had met all those years ago, he still saw her every day when she looked at him. 

"I can feel you staring, you know."

Her voice was slower now, weighed down but nonetheless singsong melodic as the first time Steve had ever heard it. And with every word she spoke, no matter if it was a scolding towards their rambunctious grandchildren or a loving compliment towards him, it made Steve smile to hear it. The sound never growing old in his ears.

"I can't help myself sometimes." Steve replied softly with a warm smile, watching as her eyes slowly opened. She glanced around the room, her untouched green eyes bouncing from one corner to another. As if to remind herself of where she rested. 

"I don't know what it is you could possibly be staring at." She said with humor in her mellowed yet lovely voice. 

Steve couldn't help but let out a soft chuckle, "Not even the slightest idea?"

"Not a clue." She responded instantly, her smile mirroring his own. 

And it were those smiles, the ones that looked faded and worn against her chapped lips, that still made his heart swell with warmth. They were the reason, he told her time after time, for the lines that appeared in the creases of her eyes. She blamed age for the marring of her once beautiful skin, but Steve was convinced her lines and wrinkles came from all of the laughter and happiness she experienced over the years. They were magical to Steve; for they seemed to be a scrapbook of memories forever carried with her. She viewed them as a burden, but he saw them as a look into the past. For some of the lines, he swore he could name the exact date she got them. 

"I was staring at you," Steve told her lovingly. "I always have. And I don't think it's possible to train my eyes not to now."

Her eyes were a deep evergreen shade, and just as the very first time he looked into them, they sparkled like sunlight coming through the branches. And even as her vision blurred, their stunning sparkle had been left untouched. 

"I can't begin to imagine why." 

She never could see it... her breathtaking beauty. All she was capable of seeing when she looked into the hand mirror Steve would hold up for her, was the grey hair that cascaded down her shoulders in loose and brittle curls. Or the way her skin had loosened over the years, and crinkled like an over used plastic water bottle. She saw the way her body shrunk as the years continued to creep up on her, and the way she looked like a cripple beside her still youthful looking husband. A man older than her, yet looked like a boy who could've been her child.