The compound echoed with the sound of silence. The hallways still and the atmosphere unmoving within the secure walls, and yet, the once comforting quiet of the nighttime hours, felt unsettling to Steve Rogers now. For the silence that swirled around him seemed to whisper to him in the darkness. Voices... so many voices... that sent shivers up his spine at the memories of the faces triggered in the very core of his mind. It was like he was walking through a nightmare, the friends he lost haunting him like a ghost sent from beyond the grave. They cried out to him in the silence, and the noiseless void felt heavier than anything Steve had ever experienced. For the further he walked through the daunting nightmare, the more he felt his chest constricting. As though someone had a grasp on his lungs, and held them so tightly that he had to gasp for each breath. Steve willed himself to wake up; from the physical pain burning through his body and from the heart-retching agony in his head. But he was already awake. This wasn't a nightmare... this was real life. 

Steve's bare footsteps slowed down, as he began to turn the corner leading into the first level living room. It was a small room, something rare in the large scale in which the compound sat. But it was warm, and intimate and a small space that Steve valued from time to time. But what brought his wandering steps to slow, was the sight of the lamp beside the single couch glowing in the darkness that encased it. It was a dim lightbulb encapsulated in a cream colored shade, but the little light was enough to paint rays against the far wall and cast shadows against the single soul who sat beside it. The left side of her body bled into the darkness of the night, as though she wasn't even there. But the right side of her was lit by the soft glow. And it made the tears that slid down her pale flesh sparkle faintly in the light. Like that of headlights shining upon a rain puddle along a slick backroad. Glimmering just faintly as the single beam of light grazed upon the water. 

"What has you up so late?" 

His soft voice traveled through the small room, from where he leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed loosely. But his words hit the air louder than he had intended them to, for he watched as she nearly jumped out of her skin at his sudden presence. Her head whipped around, and her eyes fell upon him. And the glow of the light graced all of her face now, allowing Steve to witness the fresh tears and the raw redness and the swollen nature of both her beautiful eyes. But her lips were parted in surprise, and Steve watched as her hands lifted to quickly flick away any evidence of her sadness. But even as her fingers wiped at the teardrops that had yet to dry against her pale complexion, she couldn't erase the pain that had presented itself across her face and in the depths of her eyes. She could get rid of the physical remnants, but when it came to what she was suffering from inside, that she couldn't keep from releasing into her appearance. 

"I could ask you the same thing." She replied softly. And Steve could hear the faint tremor still trailing in her voice from the constriction of unreleased tears in the back of her throat. 

Steve blinked and dropped his gaze to his bare feet, nodding his head imperceptibly at her choice of an answer. And letting a soft sigh pass through his dry lips, Steve walked slowly towards her. His hands buried deep in the pockets of his deep navy pajama pants, as he shuffled against the cool hardwood beneath him. He could feel the warmth of the light as he reached the couch, and watched as she scooched timidly over to allow him to sit beside her. But he stood there a moment, in the dense silence, as he looked at his feet and the edge of the coffee table that had entered his view line.   

"It's too quiet for me."

Steve squeezed his eyes together tightly as he breathed a harsh breath out from his nostrils, before reopening his eyes just as his head lifted. His right hand escaped from the pocket of his pants, and ran a messy trail through his already disheveled brownish-blonde locks.  Pulling slightly at the strands, for he could feel the faint sting of the protest coming from his roots. 

"The second my head hits that pillow, and I close my eyes, I'm right back in that place."

"I'm right back where we lost. I'm there in that place; where only we remember they even existed. That place where I watched their faces, just dissolve as though they were salt in a glass of warm water. Fizzling into the air as though their bodies, their souls... what made them who they were, meant nothing in the end." 

Steve's hand slid down from his harsh clench on his hair, and he felt his warm clammy palm glide down across his face. Feeling the scruffy facial hair that still lay covering the bottom half of his face. 

"And when all I can do, is simply lay there in the darkness... I hear--"

"Voices." She stole the word straight from Steve Rogers's mouth, and he listened to the way the single word fluttered so heartbreakingly into the air between them. Breathlessly and broken.

His eyes fell upon her as she looked up with tears glistening like dew on the very tip of a blade of summer grass, waiting to fall. Her chapped lips were parted, and her body curled tightly against the back of the couch. But her gaze didn't falter as he looked at her, for she looked at him with understanding and wonder. Pain and sorrow. She shared with Steve the expression of loss. 

"I hear them too."

Steve's last few shuffling steps to the couch were nearly undetectable, despite the pounding silence that ensued around them in the small living room they occupied. And his legs bent swiftly, resting on the soft cushion in the spot she provided for him beside her.  

She didn't move, and Steve hadn't intended for her to. Instead, she stayed completely still in the curled up position in which she rested against the soft cushion of the couch, but her head turned to face him. The right side touching the warm fabric, as her reddened eyes looked to him just as strongly as they had when he had been standing above her. And as Steve slowly began to relax himself into his spot beside her, he watched with compassionate eyes as her lips began to move. A soft quivering that told him that her thoughts were on the very tip of her tongue. 

"I hear them calling out my name," Her eyes don't falter from where they hold Steve's steady gaze, however as he watches her as she speaks up softly, he knows they aren't seeing him clearly. The glaze over her eyes, it's as though she's looking straight through him as though he doesn't truly sit beside her. "and I can feel it."

"God, can I feel it." An exhale of sadness and held back tears hits Steve's ears, and he watches as her eyes finally fall. No longer strong enough to keep up their strength; their façade of security. 

"It feels like I'm paralyzed. Like all I can physically do is lay there and listen to their voices screaming out to me. And it's tortuous." Her eyes are casted towards her bare toes that wiggle unconsciously against the couch cushion, and she wipes her nose with the back of her hand before she continues.  "Because they call out for me to help them, to in some way save them from disappearing. From leaving this world, from leaving us, from leaving me. And it's never just one; it's a harmony of all of them. One after another until my name sounds like a known chorus, for they're all screaming it louder and louder until my own screams fill the room. I'm screaming for them to stop, screaming for the pain to just end because... I can't help them." 

Steve watched with heavy eyes and an aching heart, as she was reduced to a puddle of tears beside him. His ears burning as he listened the sobs choking her from the inside out, and reached his left hand out slowly. Extending it her way until the warm tips of his fingers felt the cold and shivering exposed skin of her knee. The wool blanket she was wrapped in, had bunched away from her bent leg that left skin open to the circulating air in the shorts that she wore. And Steve could feel the goosebumps that trailed against her flesh. 

"I feel it too." Steve's voice broke through the dense silence that had only been shadowed by the sound of her tears. 

"Every second of every minute, every hour of every day, that I want to keep from passing somehow. I feel the voices just as much as I can hear them." Steve expressed in a calming voice, looking at the broken girl with empathetic eyes. "it feels as though, someone's stabbing me clean through the heart. Whisper after whisper, I swear I must be bleeding out in my bed. But every time my hand moves to feel for the wound that must be tearing through me, I feel nothing. No blood seeping onto my hand when I lift it. Nothing."

Steve shakes his head, and watches as she slowly raises her head. Her eyes swollen and still dripping with salty tears that leave trails staining the soft porcelain skin of her face. But her sobs had slowed, and she didn't sound as though someone had a hand around her throat. 

"But it isn't nothing. We are wounded by their voices, by the paralyzing feeling they bring. We just can't see with our eyes, the damage that's been done."

Bloodshot eyes lock with his own, and it feels as though this single intimate moment is enough to drown out everything else around them. As though the two of them float in a bubble of darkness and pain, for the way she looks at him, it makes his chest lurch with pain he had tried his best to hide away. As though she's drawing it out of him, like his blood into a vile, the way she simply stares at him with a glimmer of something in her eyes that pricks his heart like the needle. And just like that, all of his pain seems to drain out to her.

"How do you do it?" Her voice wasn't completely her own, for it cracked with the sound of her recently released tears. But it fluttered with the softness that reminded Steve of lighter times in the world. 

"How do you... live with it? The pain? The damage?" 

Steve watched the tear she blinked free roll down her cheek, like a raindrop gliding down a windowpane, until it dropped off and disappeared into the cream blanket. 

"Steve, how do you live with the voices?" 

The hand Steve had rested against her knee in a comforting fashion, had since been clutched by a tighter grasp. A hand that squeezed his fingers, and held it tightly in a capsule of warmth that his fingers itched beneath the heat. But he let her hold onto him, as harshly as she needed to. 

"I can't do it anymore," She cried out to him. "I can't, listen to them night after night. I haven't slept since the day we lost them Steve. I need them to stop, I need the voices in my head to stop!" 

Her voice had grown hoarse from the tears and the pain that wrecked havoc inside her throat, and she shook with a frightful strength that caused Steve to instantly reach both of his arm out, and wrap them tightly around her trembling body. She convulsed inside his embrace, but he didn't let her go. He listened to her incoherent screams as she cried out in aguish against his chest, feeling her hot tears soak into his shirt. And he gripped her shoulders so tightly he feared she may find marks in the morning, but he wrapped his presence around her as much as he could to slow her body's painful shakes. His muscles were tense, and her head bucked against his chin roughly, but the most painful thing was the way her breakdown ate away at Steve's heart. 

As his eyes slowly fluttered shut, squeezing together almost painfully as the sound of her anguished cries echoed louder in the sudden darkness, he realized that you could never truly know the extent of suffering inside another one's soul. Not from looking at them from the outside. For he shared the room right beside hers, and as he himself laid upon his mattress that felt like a marshmellow he might sink straight through, staring wide eyed and troubled by the screaming voices in his mind, he had no idea that she was doing just the same. That the ceiling he found himself gazing up at night after night, never once being able to shut his eyes and find peaceful rest, was the same ceiling that she stared up at every night too. All this time, he had no idea the extent of the suffering happening just on the other side of his bedroom wall. And tonight, her soul finally opened up and shared the pain with another human being. One who knew the pain well enough to take on some of her suffering as though it was part of his very own. 

As Steve slowly opens his blue eyes back up to the soft hue of the nearby lamp, he gazes down at the woman wrapped tightly in his arms. Careful not to shift his body in an attempt to keep her still, his blue eyes fall upon her figure that was balled up into him. But it was the way her shoulders rose and lowered in a much gentler motion, that drew his eyes. And in the still air that encapsulated the two beings, he listened to the quiet that had suddenly returned to the cozy little living room. The peircing sound of her cries were only distant memories that continued to echo in the background of Steve's mind, but as he listened closely to the room around him, a soft whistling exhale hit his ears. And it was one of the most calming sounds he had ever heard in his life. For he felt as his entire body exhaled a sigh of relief, his shoulders relaxing back down to their normal level and the knots in his gut slowly untwisting. As her body calmed so did his. Her sudden found peace left Steve eased of the anxiety her distress had casted upon his racing heart. 

Her fingertips still grazed across the warm flesh of his hands, the pads barely brushing against the thick veins running through the middle, but they didn't grip to him as though he was a lifeline. Her nails no longer dug into his skin, although the marks were still there, clearly seen even in the low quality of given light. And her eyelids weren't scrunched together in a way that made him fear she'd burst a blood vessel. Instead, her eyelashes were the only movement seen from her once tearful eyes. Fluttering across her red and blotchy cheekbones softly, as sleep had finally found the exhasted soul. 

Reaching his right hand outward, as carefully as he could, Steve grabbed the edge of the wool blanket that had long ago fallen from her legs. And slowly, he rested it back over her body. Tucking it in around her, bundling her in a new layer of warmth. And as Steve stared down upon the woman who had finally found a sense of peace, even if only from the tear and pain filled exhastion, he smiled softly to himself as he listened to the light breaths passing through her no longer trembling lips. And even as his neck began to tighten from it's twisted and uncomfortable position, and the couch began to dig into the side of his thigh, Steve Rogers didn't dare move a muscle. 

And as he slowly reclined his head backward onto the very top edge of the backrest, his blue eyes fluttered shut. And for the first time, since the voices in his head of the lost and mourned began, Steve found rest. 

A/N: Wow, this one turned out longer than I had originally thought it might! But I'm so happy with the detail I've created in this one, and the vulnerable and intimiate moments in this one shot! It took me awhile to actually complete this one, I had to walk away from it for a few months but after revisiting it this week, I was able to give it an ending I'm very happy with! I hope you all enjoyed it!💙