It took three days for the first hit to come in. Tagged on Instagram as a #celebritylookalike, it was a picture taken by a college student who’d blown a tire on her way to visit her grandmother in the hospital. “This guy who looks just like Steve Rogers helped me change my tire!” she’d captioned. “Thanks, Grant!”
“Grant?” Clint asked.
“His middle name,” Natasha replied. “Look, she got a picture of him standing next to his car’s license plate. There’s enough for a partial plate.”
Clint mulled that one over. “I think he wants to be found. Maybe.”
One of SHIELD’s first actions, after they had retrieved him from the isolated cabin, was to install him in a small apartment in Brooklyn. Even that had felt like the worst kind of manipulation---here you are Captain Rogers, here’s an empty apartment in a city you no longer recognize--- but at least he’d been allowed to live somewhere that wasn’t the SHIELD barracks or, worse, that cold and isolated cabin.
Steve hadn’t been born in the 1820s; he was well aware that SHIELD had an agenda. It was clear enough when they talked to him; they spoke of “Erskine’s great gift to the nation” and what it would mean to the country to have him alive and allied with SHIELD and all the “greater good” his presence represented…but Steve had been born at the beginning of one war and sacrificed himself to end another and he was done. He was also not nearly dumb enough to tell them so outright, not until he got his bearings in this strange new century.
His apartment, Natasha found, was vacant. Though perhaps it had always looked that way; it certainly lacked any sign, save the lone cup and plate drying on the counter, that anyone lived here. She quickly silenced the bugs (her later report would blame this on a “mechanical malfunction”) and saw the spotless bedroom, the clean, unwrinkled bedding as a sign, and not a good one. Steve Rogers may have lived here, but he hadn’t been alive here. There were no signs of someone who was sleeping well enough or long enough to rumple a pillow. No pictures on the wall, nothing out of order the way a lived-in place would get.
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