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cuthian · 6 years

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*waves shyly* Hi! I've been a huge fan for years, and I've been reading Stucky fanfics for... God, I don't even know how long, but I never took the leap to write one myself. I was always a little afraid I wouldn't do my boys justice. This idea, however, would not leave me alone, and with some encouragement of my dearest Juulna, I was able to get it written down.

It's entirely written and just awaits editing and posting. Thank you to my darling Juulna, for giving me the courage to actually post this.

I hope you enjoy!

Love, Annaelle

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter One

—————

The story of Captain America has been shrouded in myth and urban legends from the moment he became a prominent player upon the battlefield during one of mankind’s bloodiest and cruelest wars in recorded history. There seems to be no single conclusive source that will confirm or deny any of the impossible feats that have been attributed to the man, nor anyone alive that can attest to witnessing said feats.

…the only thing that is, possibly, more mysterious than the figure of Captain America is the man behind the shield—a man whose full name is said will be released to the public in a few short weeks, on the fiftieth anniversary of our heroic Captain’s ultimate sacrifice, so that we may honor his memory as we should have been able to do for the past five decades.

—Sofia Johnson, ‘The Man Behind the Shield: Captain America, an exposé”, People Magazine, 1995

——————

S.H.I.E.L.D. Recovery room, New York City, New York, United States of America

June 2011Steve

There was music playing, somewhere in the distance, a jingling tune that Steve couldn’t identify for the life of him. He felt odd, ill at ease in his own body in a way he had not been since the first few days after he’d been given the serum.

His body felt simultaneously too big and too small, like it had in those excruciating few heartbeats in the chamber when he had been radiated with vita-rays. Like it had in the moment when his body was suspended between expanding and shrinking, falling apart at the seams while being knitted together again. His skin felt like it didn’t fit his body anymore, and he couldn’t figure out what had happened to make him feel like that again.

It took him an embarrassingly long time to realise his eyes were already open, and that he was blinking up at a stark white ceiling with some sort of fan that spun in lazy circles.

He felt unfocused and tired, and though he tried to look around the small, brightly lit room he had somehow found himself in, his entire body felt stiff and unused, and his muscles seemed to protest even the smallest movement.

Something felt wrong about the room—it looked much like one of those recovery rooms in the SSR headquarters, but not quite. The details didn’t add up, and the sounds that filtered through felt too loud—like a cacophony of superfluous sounds from New York that had been dialed up until it was all he could hear.

He blinked when he noticed an open window, sunlight filtering through the thin, gauzy curtain and falling onto the bed where he lay—

But he couldn’t feel its warmth.

He couldn’t smell anything¸ and that, more than anything, unnerved him. Before the serum, he’d been sick constantly and had suffered from a near-permanent stuffed nose, but after he’d received it, he’d been able to smell everything—even miles away.

It had been hell at times, especially when he and the Commandos were sent on stealth missions that went on for weeks without much room for bathing and cleanliness.

Knowing that he couldn’t smell anything but the dull, stale scent of old bandages and recently unearthed sheets unnerved him more than he could put into words, because he could hear the city, even as off as it sounded, and he could hear murmured conversations that blended into one another until he couldn’t tell one word from another anymore.

It was… wrong.

He sat up slowly, biting back a groan at the ache in his joints and the strain in his muscles as he did.

Before he had the chance to move, the door opened and a woman stepped in, a pleasant but bland smile on her lips, and Steve figured she was supposed to be some sort of nurse.

He noticed immediately though, that her hair was not done up in the traditional curled bun he had seen his mother don hundreds of times, instead hanging loose over her shoulders in odd, wavy curls unlike any hairstyle he had seen women in professional settings wear before.

“Good morning,” she offered with a kind smile, though there was a note of humor in her voice. She glanced at the watch on her wrist—too large, too shabby to be a woman’s—and added, “Or should I say afternoon?” Steve watched, a feeling of unease curling in the pit of his stomach, as she stepped closer to the foot of the bed he was still seated on.

As she stepped did, his eyes were drawn to her attire, and it struck him just how ill-fitting her clothes were. Her blouse was bunched awkwardly into her skirt and her tie was broad, like a man’s tie should be and, though his cheeks flushed and embarrassment burned through his veins when he noticed, her brassiere did not look like any he had ever seen Peggy or any of the showgirls wear.

Something was wrong.

For some reason, he was being held in an odd facsimile of a recovery room, with a woman who was—poorly—pretending to be a nurse. It seemed like too much of an effort for Hydra to organize something on this scale, and Steve was fairly certain that after Schmidt had… disintegrated, for a lack of a better word, Hydra had far bigger things to concern themselves with than keeping Captain America in a recovery room of all places.

If Hydra had found him, they’d have tossed him in a dark, damp cell.

And yet…

“Where am I?” he demanded, slowly pushing himself up from the bed—with a mattress that was softer and smoother than anything he had ever felt before—as he assessed the room, a little disgruntled to find the only secure point of exit was the door the woman had entered through.

“You’re in a recovery room in New York City,” she replied immediately, her voice pleasant and smooth, but Steve had been part of show business long enough to recognize when someone recited lines from a script. There was enough intonation in her voice to pass of her words as genuine, but the way her expression did not change whatsoever and the way she replied almost before he had finished asking the question in the first place raised his hackles.

He might not know what was going on, but he was not going to take it lying down.

“Where am I, really?” he insisted, stepping directly towards her, not above using the sheer size of his body to intimidate this strange woman into telling him the truth.

Before she could respond again—undoubtedly with more well-rehearsed lies—the door behind her flew open and another woman stepped in. Steve gaped at her, because he had never seen a woman dressed as boldly as she was, nor had he ever seen a woman wear this many weapons—and he didn’t doubt that she carried more that he hadn’t yet clocked.

She wore tight black trousers that made him blush even as he tore his eyes away from the way they accentuated her shapely, muscled legs, only to have his gaze linger on her torso, likewise clad in tight black fabric that accentuated her figure in ways even Peggy had not been bold enough to try. She wore several firearms and had a knife strapped to her thigh, and Steve had no idea what was going on anymore.

“We tried your way, Van Zandt,” the woman said, shoving at the oddly dressed nurse. “Told you he wouldn’t fall for it. Go brief Fury. I’ll take it from here.”

Van Zandt—assuming that was her name—seemed to consider the other woman, opening her mouth in protest, Steve supposed, before she snapped it shut at the glare the other woman shot her way. She squared her shoulders and tilted her chin as she stared the redhead down, and Steve was struck by the sudden flare of pain from the throbbing ache that had lodged itself beneath his breastbone the moment Bucky had fallen.

The way the dark-haired woman moved was eerily similar to the way Bucky had, when he’d been trying to intimidate bullies into backing down, or when he’d squared off against Howard when the older man tried to imply that Bucky or Steve weren’t smart because they’d not been able to afford college.

He watched with interest as the redheaded woman eventually withered beneath the other woman’s glare—it had worked miracles when Bucky had done it too, his mind supplied unhelpfully—drooping out of the room with the distinct air of a kicked puppy.

“Captain,” the new woman spoke again as she turned back towards him, a genuine smile on her lips, though he could see something akin to wonder lingering just beneath the surface of her expression as well. “I apologize for the poor show-and-tell.” She waved her hand at the room in general, and Steve wondered if he was supposed to say something about that—

She continued before he could, though, gesturing towards the bed while she pulled out a chair for herself. “Please, sit. I will try to explain what is happening, but I need you to tell me what the last thing you remember is first.”

“I—” Steve stuttered, plopping back down on the bed ungracefully as he stared at her. “The Valkyrie. Schmidt… disintegrated and I… I didn’t have time to land the plane, so I—”

Cold. So, so cold. Pain. He can’t breathe—

“Captain?”

The woman’s voice abruptly drew him back from the memory, and he swallowed thickly, shame curdling in the pit of his belly for showing such weakness. He did not want to give the woman any indication he might be suffering from battle fatigue—it was a weakness he could not afford to show.

“I put her down in the water,” he concluded quietly, casting his gaze down to his own hands to avoid seeing the look on the woman’s face.

“No loss of memory, then,” she deduced gently, offering him a kind smile when he dared look up again. “A few weeks ago, a recovery team in the Arctic Circle came across a large object in the ice that sent their radars haywire. Upon further investigation, they realized it was a warplane, and when they entered, they found your body.”

Steve flinched, but shook his head when she paused in her explanation. “No,” he insisted. “Tell me.”

He met her gaze head-on—and was oddly struck by the icy blue color of her eyes, a shade that was all too similar to the color of Bucky’s—until she nodded and offered him a quick grin.

“It took some maneuvering, but they determined that your heart was still beating. We’re still not entirely sure what happened, but the generally accepted theory is that the serum kept you alive, and the ice preserved you until we could find you.”

“Who are you?” he blurted, twisting his fingers together in a nervous gesture he usually tried to suppress. “Where am I really?”

The woman offered him a wry smile and leaned back in the seat and seemed to take a moment to think about her words before she replied. “You’re in New York City,” she began, holding up her hand to stall him when he opened his mouth to protest again. “You’re in a specially built recovery room inside S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ, which is an intelligence agency that developed out of the SSR after the war. You’re here because the higher ups wanted to break the news to you gently. S.H.I.E.L.D. stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division.”

Steve couldn’t help the snort that fell from his lips as she explained the acronym, shaking his head a little as he rubbed his thumb and forefinger across the bridge of his nose. “Someone really wanted that to spell S.H.I.E.L.D., didn’t they?” he said wryly, smiling a little at the entirely undignified snort that fell from the woman’s lips.

“Yeah,” she chuckled, lips curled up into a broad grin. “From what I hear, they really did.”

They were silent for a moment while Steve let her words sink in, before he swallowed thickly and asked, “You said, ‘after the war’… Does that mean—is it—did we?”

He couldn’t quite get the words past his lips, terrified of what the answer might be, but it seemed she knew what he was trying to ask anyway. “We won, Captain, in no small amount thanks to the sacrifices you and your men made during ’44 and ’45.”

The words comfort him for a long, blissful heartbeat before the way she worded her sentence finally hit him. Bucky had been the one reading any science-fiction book he could get his hands on, had been the one devouring Brave New World until the copy his mother had gotten him had been frayed at the edges, but Steve had listened, every now and then, when Bucky talked about it.

There was usually only one reason people named years the way she did.

God, please. Please, no.

“What year is it?” he asked slowly, voice hoarse and trembling. He’d been afraid to hear about the outcome of the war, but that fear paled in comparison to the outright terror he experienced while waiting for her reply.

Her smile turned strained and a little sympathetic before she replied, “2011.”

The words felt like a blow to the chest, leaving him breathless in a way he hadn’t been since the serum cured his asthma, and his head felt like it was spinning as he tried to comprehend the magnitude of what she’d told him—2011.

That would be—sixty-six years—Peggy—Dum Dum—Gabe—all of his friends—everyone—

Bucky.

“Captain? Steve?”

He snapped his head up at the sound of his given name, and he suddenly realized his breath was wheezing in his lungs and his breathing was far too fast and he was slightly lightheaded. He hadn’t realized he was falling headfirst into an anxiety attack, and while it wasn’t the first he’d had, it was the first time he had to deal with one without his mother, Bucky, or even Peggy to talk him down.

“Steve, it’s okay. I’m going to help you calm down, alright? Just listen to my voice. I’m gonna count, and I want you to try to match your breathing to it, okay?” He barely had time to nod before the bed sagged a little beside him and her hands were suddenly curled around his, her voice soothing and calm in his ear. “One… Two… Three…”

His breath slowed more easily than he had thought it would, and before long, the world had stopped spinning and he felt less like he was going to choke on thin air. He didn’t know how long they sat there, her thumb rubbing over his knuckles in a soothing gesture wholly like Bucky had done hundreds of times over the course of their lives together.

“What do I do now?” he whispered, the words slipping from him before he could stop them, before he could censor himself, before he could slip back into the Captain America mindset and make the woman forget the embarrassing display of weakness she had witnessed.

She didn’t reply for a moment, clearly deep in thought as well, before she offered him a smile and said, “Well, if you’re up for a field trip, I’m pretty sure I know someone who’ll be thrilled to see you.”

He eyed her speculatively for a moment, briefly trying to think of anyone he knew that would even be alive anymore, once again struck by how much she reminded him of Bucky—no matter how hard he tried not to think about him, because he would fall apart if he thought about him again—before he nodded.

Anything was more appealing than sitting in this room, alone with his thoughts.

“Thank you for your honesty,” he blurted when he stood, following the young woman—who was some kind of agent, he was sure, with this S.H.I.E.L.D.—to the door. “I appreciate it, Miss…” He faltered, quite suddenly realizing he had no idea what her name actually was.

She turned at the sound of his hesitation, and for the first time, he saw a crack in the confident façade she had portrayed so far. “…Barnes,” she finally said, and his heart jumped to his throat while the bottom of his stomach fell away.

“Rebecca Barnes.”

Notes:

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Until next week!

#stucky #stucky fanfiction #my writing #lisa writes #IHWSTBY #In Hell We Stand By You

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