Do you have some sad HCs about when Steve first wakes up and has to come to terms with everything?
*cracks knuckles* listen my dude sad HCs are my bread and butter lemme have a think here.
- He hates the food, first of all. Not because it’s bad, per se, and he comes to like plenty of it over the years as he adjusts. But when he first comes out of the ice everything is wrong. There are too many flavours, too many textures, and a lot of it is just plain alien to him. Bucky would have been excited about ‘astronaut food’, everything being dehydrated or liquidised or disguised as something else, which actually makes it worse because to Steve it’s just overwhelming. He lives on spam sandwiches and boiled eggs until he figures out farmer’s markets. Organic is about as close to familiar as he can get.
- SHIELD do pretty much fuck all to help him, but not because they don’t try. He’s thawed out and given a psych eval, obviously, but Steve can cheat his way through that with his eyes closed. Does he feel depressed? Why would he admit to that? He doesn’t want to get discharged, not when he’s trying to cling onto the only familiar thing - the chain of command - that he can. They set him up with an apartment, they offer him all the therapy he could ever want, but he doesn’t want it. He retreats into himself and goes to ground, hides.
- He doesn’t want to live in Brooklyn. It actually takes him almost a year before he even goes to visit, too many ghosts hanging around on every unfamiliar corner. The night after he finally goes to see where he grew up is the first time he tries to get drunk since Bucky died. Not that it works. He makes jokes about the price of rent afterwards and lets SHIELD move him out to DC at the first suggestion. He’s not sure he can handle this new New York on his own.
- The biggest problem is that he can just imagine how excited Bucky would be about it all. He was the one who read the science fiction pulps, the one who talked about flying cars and bullshitted about the constellations when they lay up on the roof at night. Nat thinks Steve gets emotional when he finds out man has landed on the moon because it’s so far beyond his imagination, but really it’s because Bucky always said he wanted to go to the moon and meet an alien.
- He writes Bucky letters about it all, tells him about the man on the moon (and Thor’s technically an alien, so he can say he’s met one) and astronaut food and apologises about the lack of flying cars. He doesn’t keep the letters he writes late at night, when the world is too loud with traffic noise and static and he can’t sleep in his hulking great body burning hot. He writes them all out and takes them up to the roof, holds them up to the sky so Bucky can see them before he tears them up and throws them to the wind. Bucky would have loved the future, Steve’s sure.
