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The moment that the metal hand wraps around his throat, Steve realizes that he doesn’t have a choice. As he is thrown backwards and hits the pavement, he knows that there is only one way to win this fight. The man is just too strong, too well trained. He feels something sink in his chest as the metal fist comes crashing down, making a hole in the street where his head had been moments before.
He struggles for purchase, for the right angle as a knife is drawn and scarcely misses his face, finally able to reach for his shield again while the Soldier is finding his feet. The pair, they’re just too evenly matched in both strength and skill. Steve isn’t too proud to admit that this is a man who actually has a chance of besting him, and that isn’t a risk that can be taken. With this man on their side, there isn’t a doubt that HYDRA will win most of their fights.
He digs the shield into the metal arm, denting the plates and damaging some of the mechanics inside. He hears the machinery whirring, the Soldier trying to free it from his grasp. The blow to his face stuns him, enough so that Steve has a chance to get his hand around the man’s head. With one sharp jerk, an effortlessly smooth flow of muscles, a heavy, firm crack reverberates through his skull and the man becomes dead weight crumpling to the ground.
He feels something vital let go in his chest, creating a hollow, hitting him so hard that his hands find his knees as the breath is knocked out of him. He hates killing, it always hits him hard, but this is new.
Still, he pushes it back. It’s all part of the job. He accepted that he would take lives when he shook Erskine’s hand for the first time in nineteen-forty-three.
He stands straight again as Natasha and Sam join him from opposite directions, his strong hands instantly finding her shoulder and applying far more pressure to the wound than her own weakening muscles can manage. Take a life with these hands, then save one. That’s the only way he had ever been able to justify it.
She pushes his hands away briefly so that she can kneel at the man’s side. He didn’t ask her about it, because she would have shared if she wanted him to know, but he could tell by the look in her eyes that this man was more than an assassin, a job and a scar. There was a history there, and judging by the Russian he overheard, he could make a guess that they hadn’t always been enemies.
It was with gentle, skilled fingers that she found a small clasp holding the mask in place and pulled it, freeing the sculpted material and revealing the now unnaturally pale skin.
His heart thumped too hard in his chest, missing its rhythm for the first time in seventy-one years.
A rushing sound starts in his ears, and as a sharp pain shocks through his kneecaps he hears Sam’s voice in the distance asking him if he is okay.
He thinks he chokes out a denial, but he can’t be certain.
His lungs are screaming for air they’re no longer receiving.
The hollow space inside his chest makes sense.
He sees his own hand reaching out, feels the already cooling flesh as his shaking fingers meet it, knows every bump and crease as they trail to the soft spot under the hinge of his jaw.
They stay there too long, searching for something that part of his brain already knows they will never find. He lowers his forehead slowly to the now silent chest, choking on a cough that precedes the tears.
Finally, Steve manages to find a breath.
He lets it out.
Brings in one fresh.
And screams.
It ends in a choked gasp when his too-large lungs finally deflate completely, and only then does his brain catch up enough to send the message to his tear ducts, commanding them to let loose.
His hands are clutching desperately at the protective clothing encasing his body, and his entire torso is shaking with the force of his sobs as they tear him apart.
He feels a small, warm hand fall on his shoulder after what seems like a thousand moments, but is really only one. Another thousand seconds crammed into a single moment, a second spot of warmth arrives on his opposite shoulder, larger and more sturdy than the other.
Finally he finds the strength to lift his head, meet the two pairs of eyes regarding him with bewilderment, concern and sympathy. They may not understand the grief, the significance of what Steve did less than ten minutes ago, but they can feel the pain radiating off him in waves, read the endlessness of it in his eyes.
“We have to go, Steve,” Natasha says softly, her own voice breaking slightly. “Or they’re going to catch us.”
He looks down at the body lying beneath him, then back up at her. “I can’t…”
“Then bring him with, man, but we have to vanish now ,” Sam tells him sternly.
Stern is what Steve needs. Stern he can understand. He gives one nod, eyes half blinded by tears, and scoops the body up in his arms. He forces himself to remember Natasha, to think of someone outside the gaping chasm where his heart used to beat.
“Your shoulder…”
“Will be fine if we get moving. ”
He nods and sets off at a brisk jog, weaving his way through the abandoned vehicles to an alley, then a wooden door that doesn’t stand a chance against the force of his foot.
He hears them following as he finds a damp, dark basement. One of the others finds a light switch and flips it, but he barely notices. Now that they’re briefly safe, his brain is stuck on the lifeless form in his arms. Steve sinks to his knees and cradles it against his chest, head flopping around unnaturally before falling onto his shoulder in a sickening mockery of the way it once used to.
Slowly, Sam kneels in front of him, eyes falling on Steve’s arms wrapped around the lifeless form, the tears streaming down his cheeks from his bright red eyes.
“Who is he?” comes the man's soft, too gentle voice.
“Everything,” Steve answers brokenly. “He was everything.”