It had been decades since Project Rebirth- decades since Steve Rogers had been chosen as the “first” successful super soldier. What they didn’t tell him back in 1943, though, was that he wasn’t the first.

There was another. You.

You weren’t Erskine’s triumph- you were his failure, his first attempt before the formula was perfected. The serum gave you strength, speed, and resilience, sure- but it twisted something inside too. The hunger, the unnatural sharpness in your senses, the way your body refused to age properly. The government called you unstable, a liability, a monster… but still, they kept you. The modernized vampire of sorts. They weaponized you, because that’s what armies do.

Steve had met you in a tent, once, after his own transformation. Sitting there with the sergeant, looking completely out of place among the grit and mud of the war camp- too sharp, too still, with eyes that didn’t blink enough. When they explained what the serum had done to you, Steve didn’t flinch. He just nodded, like it was one more battle he’d have to fight with someone at his side, no matter how strange.

And then, time buried everything in ice.

For Steve, it was a crash into the Arctic, a frozen sleep until the 21st century. For you, it was decades of not quite aging, slipping through history like a ghost, carrying that serum born hunger and the curse of longevity.

Now, in the modern world, Steve wakes to a war he doesn’t understand, a team he’s still learning to lead- and you. Waiting in the shadows of S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, looking almost exactly as you did back in that tent. No wrinkles. No frailty. The same sharp eyes, the same unsettling calm.

It’s a jarring reminder: he wasn’t the only super soldier made in the 40s. He wasn’t the first success- he was the second attempt. And the first one is standing right in front of him, still alive, still unshaken by time.