── ࣪˖ ࣪ ⊹ ࣪ ˖ ──

❝ the epilogue ❞

The Smithsonian was quiet and Steve Rogers pulled the baseball cap further down his head. He had only visited the exhibit a few times since it had opened. He had woken up in 2012 but the world was strange to him. He felt like a stranger in his own body and seeing his life laid out in the museum had been even stranger.

Although it was his life, his actions and his words in front of him, he felt disconnected from them. It felt like a different person. There was a gap between who he is and who he was and he desperately wanted to bridge that gap and yet found it impossible.

Although some of his friends from then were still alive in different ways, it was truly another lifetime ago for him. He had no way of getting to it again and the entire world had changed and he was still the same man from seventy years ago.

He never really knew how to deal with that but he returned to the Smithsonian because there was one part of his exhibit he had yet to see. All the times before, he hadn't been able to bring himself to see them. To ;ook at the letters that she had written to him but he knew he had to.

He couldn't avoid it forever and he missed her. The ache in his chest never seemed to go away when she came into his mind and seeing Elsie only made it worse. Elsie was part of his current team and seeing her face took him right back to Josie and their teen years. It was terrifying and painful and Elsie looked just like Connie. Just like his lover's best friend. The ache in his heart made him feel sick.

He let his feet take him to the exhibit and the photos of her made his heart ache worse. The pain in his chest and his heart twisted. His love, the woman he had been so hopelessly devoted to was alive again but only in photos.

'Josephine Wentforth'

'January 1918 - June 1944''Affectionately known as Josie by her friends and suspected lover and devoted partner of Steven Grant Rogers throughout his life'

Her life had been summed up in such little words and none of the notes on the exhibit even came close to describing her beauty and love and the devotion they had for each other. It made Steve feel bitter that nobody would understand their love and that history has tarnished her memory. He had known her his entire life and he loved her just as she loved him, endlessly and recklessly.

Throughout his time in Europe, he never knew she had sent letters. He had never seen them but then Nick Fury informed him that they existed. That they were on display in the exhibit. She had a display and although Steve knew he had to see it, he could barely bring himself to.

He didn't want to see her whittled down to nothing because she had always been brighter than the sun in his eyes. Bucky always said that he looked at her like she hung the stars and he was right because she was angelic. Steve was convinced she was a guardian angel.

And that love is what brought him here. It was only now that he had the heart to see the exhibit. To see her face again. The pictures of them in their youth and her with her father that never approved of their friendship let alone a courtship. It was all there in front of him. A timeline of their lives for everyone to see and gawk at and question and speculate about their love. Their friendship. Their devotion to each other.

It took everything in him just to go over to the display of letters. Her handwriting, perfectly preserved and he could read it so easily. He had seen it so many times in his life. So many notes, letters, invitations written in that handwriting. It had been seventy years since she had written in that handwriting and he didn't know how to react.

So he read. He read through all the letters, trying his best to keep a straight face as he paced through the exhibit. People talked around him, calling her an admirer, a secret lover, a mistress. Everything but what she truly was to him. He almost corrected someone who called her nothing more than a fanatic.

Josie meant so much more to him than anyone would ever have known. He would have married her, he would have taken her by the hand and walked down the aisle with her if their lives had just turned out differently.

If things had been different, he would have lived and died by her side, content to be simply that. Even before he took the serum, she had loved him. Every broken bone, cut, bruise, fight, issue didn't matter to her because she loved him for who he was.

The ache in his chest seemed to increase ten-fold and his throat constricted as he buried his hands into the pockets of his jacket.

He could hear her voice so clearly. The letters were written in a way that reminded him so deeply of her. Her formal attitude but also her bravery, her tenacity. She didn't care what anyone else thought, she loved him and she knew that.

He hated that she ever doubted their love. As much as Steve thought Connie or Peggy or any of the women he had met during the war were interesting and brave and lovely, none of them ever compared. None of them were her. He wished he had been able to tell her that, he wanted to scream it at the sky in hopes of her hearing.

But it wouldn't matter. So, he continued to look over the letters as he paced up and down the exhibit, reading and re-reading every word. He wanted to take in every single part, burn it into his mind. He wanted the memories and words to be seared into the very essence of his being so when he eventually died, those memories would bring him back to her.

Fury had told him that she had died only a few days after she wrote her last letter. It was tuberculosis but she had never once said it in her letters. She talked about being ill, Steve could see that but she refused to let him know just how serious it was until merely days before her death. She seemed so desperate to bring him happiness that the war couldn't, that she never spoke about the terrible things that were happening in her life.

It was heart-warming but it also made his heart ache even more that she cared this deeply. That she wanted him to be happy whether he was with her or not. She was right in her letters. She was hopelessly devoted to him and even from across the ocean, so was he. He just wished he'd been able to return a little sooner so she knew the truth.

He loved her until the very end, he still did and he didn't think much could change that fact. But he no longer had someone to tell that to. He couldn't write her a letter and their friends were all dead or dying. Nobody would ever know his hopeless devotion to his lost love.

So he had to be content, reading her letters and picturing a past where they could have gotten married in that little Church a few blocks over from her house. A past where her Aunt hosted their honeymoon and they spent long days and nights curled up together in the cottage. A past where they had children who grew up in a world that was changing for the better.

But he could only imagine. Because that reality didn't exist anymore.

THE END...