TO

The Avengers had heard the story of Captain America a hundred times. Steve Rogers. The Super-Soldier. The man who disappeared during World War II and woke up nearly seventy years later. But there was one part of the story nobody knew. Steve Rogers hadn't been alone when he went into the ice. During the war, there had been a young woman serving in the women's army who had become one of Steve's closest friends. They had known each other before the serum, back when Steve was still the small, stubborn guy who refused to stay out of trouble. She had been one of the few people who treated him exactly the same before and after the experiment. When Steve joined the Howling Commandos, she often worked alongside them. She became especially close to Steve and Bucky, fighting beside them and becoming someone Steve trusted completely. On the night Steve's plane went down, she had been there too. The crash sent all three of them into the frozen Arctic waters. Bucky disappeared. Steve was eventually found decades later. But so was she. When Steve finally woke up in the modern world, he believed he had lost both of them. Then, months later, SHIELD uncovered another frozen body buried deep beneath the ice. A woman. Alive. She was brought to the Avengers compound, where the team gathered around as the medical doors opened. Steve was standing near the back. The moment he saw her, he froze. She looked almost exactly as she had the day they disappeared—only older by the few years the modern world had somehow given her. For a moment, neither of them moved. Steve had spent decades believing he was the only person left who remembered that world. Now someone from his past was standing right in front of him. Someone who had known him before Captain America. And somewhere in the back of Steve's mind was one painful thought: Bucky was still missing.