"I didn't look like this when I first found the Nexus."

Steve's spoken to Thor over the years about how he was changed, different now. Thor's seen proof of it first hand over the time they've spent fighting alongside one another. Staying with each other during the brief time they called the tower Home. He's talking about the sickly waif of a man they show in the museums. As if it was by effort and not freak chance Steve ended up looking the way he does now. Capable of so much more than he ever used to be.

"If the Avengers hadn't been needed, I wouldn't have stayed back home for long." How could he? What exactly would have been there for him? Certainly not the team he has come to love as his own family. He probably wouldn't have met most of them even. "I'd have tried to find a way back to the Nexus a lot sooner. Maybe started over here, or maybe uprooted entirely and moved in to someone else's world. Someplace where they could use me."

It's easy to say now--knowing what he does-- that he would have stayed. That he would have done good however he could and been happy leading a semi-normal life. Steve knows it as sure as he does his own heartbeat that he wouldn't have wanted to do that. If he'd been forced to, stuck there with no hope of going back to the Nexus, then he would have adjusted.

He'd have made do.

"I knew soldiers here. I knew there were people I could help. I'd have tried to come back."