Avengers Preferences and Imagines

Right Where You Left Me (Steve Rogers)

Prompt: (Y/n) goes about life after Steve leaves her at the end of endgame to return to Peggy. 

A/N: First new thing I've written in AGES! I was just feeling inspired. IDK but y'all might need some kleenex for this one. Enjoy. 

"Friends break up, friends get married. Strangers get born, strangers get buried. Trends change, rumors fly through new skies, but I'm right where you left me. Matches burn after the other, pages turn and stick to each other. Wages earned and lessons learned, but I, I'm right where you left me."

The cool autumn wind wove its way through my loose hair, blowing it across my eyes. I stood at against an old oak tree, my jacket pulled tightly across my chest in an attempt to keep the wind from nipping at my skin. I don't know what I was here for, what I thought I stood to gain from being here. There was nothing here for me... and yet here I was. I had woken up this morning, jumped in my car with no destination in mind, just a desire to drive. It was only when I had shifted the car into park that I realized where I was.

It had been almost a year since I had been here last. And in that time so much had changed... I had seen and lost so much. And the people I loved had experienced the same. Some were lost to us forever now, some moved on, and some stayed right where they had always been, the marching of time continuing on without us. I took a shaky breath as many familiar faces raced through my mind, keeping their memory alive despite how hard I tried to extinguish them.

I knew it solved nothing to try and extinguish their memories; that their fates were irreversible no matter how hard I tried to wipe the thought from my mind. They were gone and there was nothing I could do about it. They had moved on and weren't coming back. They had found happiness elsewhere and had gone in pursuit of it. Whatever the situation was, the world continued to turn around me, but I stayed in the same place I was in a year ago. Stuck. Incapable of moving on, left to deal with the reality that I simply couldn't bring myself to adjust to...

"Help, I'm still at the restaurant. Still sitting in a corner I haunt, cross-legged in the dim light." 

Before I could shove it away, my field of vision was overtaken by such a vivid memory of what my life had looked like only a few short years ago. I didn't want to remember. I didn't want to do this. But the memory came hard and fast, stealing my breath as it unfolded. Multiple old memories were fighting for their moment of my attention, the nostalgia of them suffocating me, choking me, as I tried to resit. Maybe it was time. Maybe in order to move on, to become unstuck, I had to face what I had spent the last year trying to outrun and forget...

I was watching the memory as if I was a ghost: unseen, unable to say anything, only able to watch as the memory played out in front of me like a movie. I could see myself, much younger and vibrant and full of life sitting in a smaller corner booth at the back of a restaurant. My demeanor was happy and carefree, something I hadn't felt in an eternity. I was dressed casually, a white t-shirt, blue jeans, and a cardigan. I focused on myself, and how happy and young I looked at that moment. How blissfully unaware I was back then about how cruel life could be to me. I sat cross-legged in the booth, sipping on my beverage in between bursts of laughter, a radiant smile on my face the entire time I watched.

I struggled to turn my head, hesitant to glimpse the man I knew was sitting across from me, the one responsible for that smile that was lighting up my face. I didn't feel the tear slip from my eye until I tasted the slightest bit of salt on my lips. Gathering my courage, I turned my head, now able to see myself and the man I was sitting with. Another tear slipped from my eye as I studied him in detail. The way that dim lighting in the restaurant highlighted his sandy blonde hair, making it look darker than it really was. The faint lines around his eyes were always more obvious when he was smiling, and he was always smiling. The way he sat so casually and comfortably in his chair, almost as if he was at home everywhere that he went. The way his outfit mirrored mine; blue jeans, white t-shirt, the same worn pair of boots he had been wearing since I met him. The way his steel-blue eyes were always on me; always watching, never looking away.