Steve Rogers knew everything about loss. He'd lost his family, his friends, and perhaps worst of all, his understanding of the world around him. He's a stranger in his city, his New York. The people walk and talk faster, eyes glued to little electronic things and hands constantly flying over keyboards. Steve is a man alone, lost in a crowd of people.

Sometimes it's alright because his job isn't much different from what it was 70 years ago- there's a bad guy, and his minions, and a diabolical mission to take over something which is not his.

Or maybe it has changed. The villains are no longer black, and the good guys are never completely white.

He only need look around him to see that-
Take Tony Stark. From the moment Steve met Tony, his teeth were set on edge.

He may be a perfect human specimen now, but he can remember being a puny sickly boy-man with all the odds against him.

Tony seems to be the exact opposite- even before he was Iron Man, Stark was a charming and handsome billionaire who also happened to be a genius. Add the suit, and you have a man with luck, chance, and fortune on his side.

Also add to that a bucket of narcissism, borderline alcoholism, and an insane attitude towards life, which to someone who had lost an entire lifetime was unbelievable.

Steve saw the flaws in Tony Stark as easily as his shiny arc reactor- they glowed out of him, as if Tony was proud and willing to flaunt them.

Things change though. This new world is filled with multi-faceted beings, with different faces for different people.

Joining the Avengers showed Steve the good in Iron Man.

Loki's army of Chitauri was deafeningly huge, almost impossible to defeat, and yet they managed to slow down the flow of destruction.

And then the US government higher ups sent a nuclear- repeat, nuclear bomb at Steve's beloved city. She was nearly gone were it not for Tony's selfless transport of the nuke into the Tesseract's worm hole- Steve could relate to that all too well, the desperate sacrifice of everything for the sake of something bigger than yourself.

This new world is filled with strange surprises, too.

Tony Stark won over Steve Rogers completely unintentionally- while soaring into the sky with the nuke, he dialed Pepper Potts, unawares that the team was still hooked up via com system- they heard his resignation, his controlled sorrow at the sound of a brisk feminine voice asking him to leave a message.

Steve could write a thesis on what Tony Stark had felt at that moment.

Instead of doing that, he chose to accept the 21st century's people, changes and all. It wasn't like he had a choice.