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cap_ironman2010-02-03 01:24 pm
americanaviator.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2010-02-03 01:24 pm
Entry tags:
fic [stevextony] - a bright light up ahead
title: a bright light up ahead part 1/?
author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theaviatorfifi
rating: pg
warnings: none
pairings/characters: steve, sort-of-bucky, mentions of tony and pepper
word count: 2073
a/n: the title is from owl city's tidal wave. the cut text is from assemblage 23's lullaby. this fic is actually kind of movieverse, cross-universe where it suits me :B, but since we don't have a movie steve yet i won't be held accountable for mistakes that exist here when they make his movie. (; this is multichapter, much stevextony to follow.
summary: only recently revived by s.h.i.e.l.d., and put in the care of industrialist-inventor tony stark by colonel fury while he acclimatizes to the modern age, steve struggles to reconcile the past with the present, and the present with the future.
--
The first thing Steve was aware of was cold. It was biting, freezing air and freezing wind, seeping into his bones and settling there. He was in the midst of a blizzard, he realised belatedly; he didn't know where he was, or why - there seemed to be no prelude or explanation for his circumstances, but he found it did not matter and he did not care.
He did know that he was alone.
He took a step forwards, and the line of his body resolved itself through the snowstorm. He could make out the bright colors of his uniform, and felt the familiar weight of his shield on his back. He found those two facts immeasurably comforting.
"Hello?" he called out - just in case he was wrong, but of course, there was no response. He squinted, the wind cutting at his face, the cowl of his costume providing insufficient protection, and took stock of his situation. Alone, location unknown, but in good shape for a fight bar the weather. Visibility more or less zero, the temperature very much below.
The best thing to do was to keep moving.
It was difficult to walk in the snow, which rose high above his ankles; his boots were resilient but not made for these conditions. He kept going without faltering. He could take it, and it was preferable to death, which Steve knew full well was a very real risk in these conditions.
He walked for what felt like hours, though he had no way of telling how long it had really been, and the blizzard was not letting up even a little. Mercy came in the form of a dark silhouette up ahead that could only have been trees. The possibility of cover of any sort gave Steve new strength, and he renewed his struggle through to snow and made for them - he would have run if he could.
As the forest began to resolve itself through the blizzard, though, Steve became aware of a dark shape in the snow at the forest's edge. At first he thought perhaps it was a log, and when he was close enough to see that it was a creature of some sort, perhaps wolf or a horse - but ten paces away he realized what it was, and within two steps he stopped dead in his tracks. His shoulders slumped with slow, unwanted realization, and he found he did not want to take a single step further toward that forest, that person - for it was a person, a horribly familiar one at that - collapsed in the snow.
All of a sudden, he knew where he was.
Siberia.
He made himself move, keep walking, slowly approaching the fallen man - no, barely a man, more a boy - and kneeling by him, laying a hand on his shoulder. He tried to talk, but the shriek of the snowstorm stole his voice away, even from his own ears. He took a deep, frozen breath, and shouted.
"Bucky!"
Bucky shuddered, and although visibility was too poor to see it, Steve felt it even through the leather of his glove and his frozen hand. Finally he raised his head, his skin pale and blotchy with cold, his lips blue. If he stays out here much longer, Steve thought, he's going to catch hypothermia. I need to get him into the forest, out of the wind. Warm him up slowly, keep close to him, I'll give him my gloves and keep my hands on his face…
Bucky reached out and seized Steve's forearm, pulling him down and trying his best to sit up. Steve bent, his ear to Bucky's mouth - his friend obviously wanted to say something, too weak to shout it.
"Steve," Bucky said quietly, and he sounded like he was dying but his voice was urgent. Afraid. "Get out of here."
"No!" Steve cried immediately. "No, come on, Buck, you're going to freeze out here! We've got to get you into the warm - let me carry you! Are you hurt?"
"Get out of here. It's dangerous, you can't stay."
"I can damn well stay!" Steve's hand tightened on Bucky's shoulder. "Come on, kid, you're not thinking straight..!"
"You can't stay," Bucky insisted, and his voice was growing quieter but Steve could still make out the words more than plainly. "You can't stay, you can't help me. You have to go, you have to keep moving, Cap. There's nothing you can do."
Steve looked down and saw that the snow Bucky lay in was dyed red. Blood. Steve felt his heart stop - he looked Bucky over frantically for the source of the injury.
He realised belatedly that the kid's left arm was… gone. Blown clean off, a fatal wound. There was so much blood…
"No," Steve cried. "No, come on, Bucky, you can make it. Just come with me, get out of this storm, c'mon…"
Bucky gazed up at him mournfully, and shook his head - and then slumped over into Steve's lap, the strength leaving him.
Steve pulled him close, sharing heat, taking care not to hold him too tightly, but his hands were shaking.
"No," he whispered, lips against Bucky's ear. There was a sense of urgency in the air that Steve associated with an imminent attack, though to the best of his knowledge they were entirely alone. "Bucky… c'mon, soldier, you're gonna be fine," he insisted. "You'll be just fine-- I promised myself I'd look out for you, Buck, I'm not gonna leave you here!"
Bucky shuddered, his remaining hand tightening briefly on Steve's arm before slackening off again. Steve felt cold in a way that made the blizzard seem insignificant.
"Bucky..?" he choked out, and he knew his voice was shaking but he wasn't going to let go, that was all he had to do, just keep Bucky with him, keep them together. "Say something, kid…"
Bucky shuddered, and he was whispering, too quiet for Steve ever to hear, but impossibly he heard it as clear as if Bucky had screamed it.
"…Do svidaniya..."
--
Steve awoke to darkness with a yell, sitting upright, one hand stretched out in front of him. For a moment, he felt blind, as though the darkness was all-consuming, and the adrenaline that shot through him was enough to leave him shaking. He still felt numb and frozen, still felt the wind slicing his cheeks and Bucky's weight in his arms. Slowly, however, the dream began to fade and the details of the room began to swim into focus.
Dappled light on the walls and ceiling, shadows cast by the venetian blinds covering the one wall of floor to ceiling glass in the room.
The temperature air-conditioned to a pleasant 65 degrees, or thereabouts.
The white numbers of the alarm clock on the nightstand read 02:47.
Stark Tower finally swam to the front of Steve's mind, and the last of the dream's grip on his heart faded away. He sighed, drew his knees up and slumped across them, exhaling slowly. He was still shaking like a leaf, and he was aware of a horrible tightness in his throat, his eyes prickling with tears.
He resolved not to cry.
To the rest of the world, Bucky Barnes was schoolroom history. To Steve, he'd been fighting alongside the kid scant weeks beforehand. The information regarding Bucky's disappearance - and subsequent reappearance as the Soviet agent codenamed Winter Soldier - had not been included in Steve's briefing pack. Colonel Fury had taken the time to tell him in person, with a somber tone, a stiff whiskey and a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. Steve had held it together for as long as he could; he'd expected Bucky to be dead, once he'd heard the date, and the news that he wasn't was at least something to take comfort in - but Steve couldn't help but think that death would have been a kinder fate than being kidnapped and used as a mindless weapon of the Communists. Bucky didn't deserve an end like that. Steve had finally slumped on to the table, hiding his face. Fury had understood and said nothing. He'd rested his hand on Steve's back for three seconds, and then turned and left the room.
When Steve had left the room fifteen minutes later, he'd been dry-eyed and steady on his feet.
He'd dreamed about Bucky the most in the weeks since his revival. He had more than one recurring dream, certainly; friends and fellow soldiers suffering and dying at the hands of cold-eyed Nazis with their soulless 'scientific' experiments, or devilish Japanese with their cruelly creative tortures, or in which he was plunged back into the midst of the chaos of a battle, the Great War's legacy of mechanised warfare coming into its own around him. But despite the bloody, filthy maelstrom of death that had been active front line service, Steve had always, always been sure that he was doing the right thing. He had never once felt guilty for fighting, had never truly wished to be anywhere else in the world in those moments than side by side with the American Army, stopping at nothing to defend freedom and the way of life he loved.
The cold, guilty, utterly accountable desolation of the dreams with Bucky were a different matter. They left Steve cold and sick and shaking, wishing desperately for things to have been different, knowing he was a good six decades too late to change anything at all.
Alone and in the dark, Steve drew his knees to his chest and hugged them, trying his best to breathe steadily and let the trembling ebb away.
Eventually it did, but Steve knew very well that he wouldn't be getting any more sleep that night. He sighed, swinging his legs out of bed, his feet sinking into the luxuriously soft, thick carpet of the bedroom floor - Steve was still having a little trouble adjusting to the idea of it being his bedroom, because it was just so luxurious and possibly contained too few personal effects at this stage to really feel like his, though the notion was slowly growing on him the longer he spent at Stark Tower. He thought maybe he'd go down to the kitchen and find himself something to drink - he wasn't hungry but his mouth was dry and tasted bad - and after that… he wasn't sure. He felt nosy looking around the Tower without either Tony Stark or Ms Potts to accompany him, despite how many times both of them had told him repeatedly to treat it like his own home, and despite how much he knew he wouldn't nose. Maybe he'd go out for a walk; it was late october and the weather was turning, but it wasn't so cold that a walk around Manhattan wouldn't do him some good, not to mention get his mind back into the present day.
His mind made up, he changed out of the blue silk pajamas that were part of the enormous order of new clothes Ms Potts had made out for him, which he found a little over-luxurious but would have thought it awfully ungrateful not to wear, and into a pair of jeans and a cotton shirt, leaving the collar unbuttoned and rolling up the sleeves. He hadn't fully got into the swing of modern-day dress, and felt just a little uncomfortable in t-shirts, but after a week under surveillance in SHIELD's medical facility wearing only military-issue fatigues, these clothes were an enormous improvement. He fixed his hair in the mirror - it was getting long, would need cutting soon - and made his way carefully down to the kitchen.
There were three floors of penthouse at the top of Stark Tower, and another two floors below it that were sealed off from the outside with high-impact-resistant plating. It felt like a basement to be inside, as though Stark Tower were merely three storeys tall and the workshop was below ground level. Steve's room was on the second floor, the kitchen on the first - except they were really the ninety-second and ninety-first floors - and Steve padded down the staircase without making a sound. He opened the fridge, looking over its contents, and finally decided on a glass of ice cold milk. He had barely taken a sip, however, when a small but definitely powerful contained explosion made the floor shudder underneath his feet.
Steve smiled fondly before he could catch himself. Tony Stark couldn't sleep again, it seemed.
author:
theaviatorfifi rating: pg
warnings: none
pairings/characters: steve, sort-of-bucky, mentions of tony and pepper
word count: 2073
a/n: the title is from owl city's tidal wave. the cut text is from assemblage 23's lullaby. this fic is actually kind of movieverse, cross-universe where it suits me :B, but since we don't have a movie steve yet i won't be held accountable for mistakes that exist here when they make his movie. (; this is multichapter, much stevextony to follow.
summary: only recently revived by s.h.i.e.l.d., and put in the care of industrialist-inventor tony stark by colonel fury while he acclimatizes to the modern age, steve struggles to reconcile the past with the present, and the present with the future.
--
The first thing Steve was aware of was cold. It was biting, freezing air and freezing wind, seeping into his bones and settling there. He was in the midst of a blizzard, he realised belatedly; he didn't know where he was, or why - there seemed to be no prelude or explanation for his circumstances, but he found it did not matter and he did not care.
He did know that he was alone.
He took a step forwards, and the line of his body resolved itself through the snowstorm. He could make out the bright colors of his uniform, and felt the familiar weight of his shield on his back. He found those two facts immeasurably comforting.
"Hello?" he called out - just in case he was wrong, but of course, there was no response. He squinted, the wind cutting at his face, the cowl of his costume providing insufficient protection, and took stock of his situation. Alone, location unknown, but in good shape for a fight bar the weather. Visibility more or less zero, the temperature very much below.
The best thing to do was to keep moving.
It was difficult to walk in the snow, which rose high above his ankles; his boots were resilient but not made for these conditions. He kept going without faltering. He could take it, and it was preferable to death, which Steve knew full well was a very real risk in these conditions.
He walked for what felt like hours, though he had no way of telling how long it had really been, and the blizzard was not letting up even a little. Mercy came in the form of a dark silhouette up ahead that could only have been trees. The possibility of cover of any sort gave Steve new strength, and he renewed his struggle through to snow and made for them - he would have run if he could.
As the forest began to resolve itself through the blizzard, though, Steve became aware of a dark shape in the snow at the forest's edge. At first he thought perhaps it was a log, and when he was close enough to see that it was a creature of some sort, perhaps wolf or a horse - but ten paces away he realized what it was, and within two steps he stopped dead in his tracks. His shoulders slumped with slow, unwanted realization, and he found he did not want to take a single step further toward that forest, that person - for it was a person, a horribly familiar one at that - collapsed in the snow.
All of a sudden, he knew where he was.
Siberia.
He made himself move, keep walking, slowly approaching the fallen man - no, barely a man, more a boy - and kneeling by him, laying a hand on his shoulder. He tried to talk, but the shriek of the snowstorm stole his voice away, even from his own ears. He took a deep, frozen breath, and shouted.
"Bucky!"
Bucky shuddered, and although visibility was too poor to see it, Steve felt it even through the leather of his glove and his frozen hand. Finally he raised his head, his skin pale and blotchy with cold, his lips blue. If he stays out here much longer, Steve thought, he's going to catch hypothermia. I need to get him into the forest, out of the wind. Warm him up slowly, keep close to him, I'll give him my gloves and keep my hands on his face…
Bucky reached out and seized Steve's forearm, pulling him down and trying his best to sit up. Steve bent, his ear to Bucky's mouth - his friend obviously wanted to say something, too weak to shout it.
"Steve," Bucky said quietly, and he sounded like he was dying but his voice was urgent. Afraid. "Get out of here."
"No!" Steve cried immediately. "No, come on, Buck, you're going to freeze out here! We've got to get you into the warm - let me carry you! Are you hurt?"
"Get out of here. It's dangerous, you can't stay."
"I can damn well stay!" Steve's hand tightened on Bucky's shoulder. "Come on, kid, you're not thinking straight..!"
"You can't stay," Bucky insisted, and his voice was growing quieter but Steve could still make out the words more than plainly. "You can't stay, you can't help me. You have to go, you have to keep moving, Cap. There's nothing you can do."
Steve looked down and saw that the snow Bucky lay in was dyed red. Blood. Steve felt his heart stop - he looked Bucky over frantically for the source of the injury.
He realised belatedly that the kid's left arm was… gone. Blown clean off, a fatal wound. There was so much blood…
"No," Steve cried. "No, come on, Bucky, you can make it. Just come with me, get out of this storm, c'mon…"
Bucky gazed up at him mournfully, and shook his head - and then slumped over into Steve's lap, the strength leaving him.
Steve pulled him close, sharing heat, taking care not to hold him too tightly, but his hands were shaking.
"No," he whispered, lips against Bucky's ear. There was a sense of urgency in the air that Steve associated with an imminent attack, though to the best of his knowledge they were entirely alone. "Bucky… c'mon, soldier, you're gonna be fine," he insisted. "You'll be just fine-- I promised myself I'd look out for you, Buck, I'm not gonna leave you here!"
Bucky shuddered, his remaining hand tightening briefly on Steve's arm before slackening off again. Steve felt cold in a way that made the blizzard seem insignificant.
"Bucky..?" he choked out, and he knew his voice was shaking but he wasn't going to let go, that was all he had to do, just keep Bucky with him, keep them together. "Say something, kid…"
Bucky shuddered, and he was whispering, too quiet for Steve ever to hear, but impossibly he heard it as clear as if Bucky had screamed it.
"…Do svidaniya..."
--
Steve awoke to darkness with a yell, sitting upright, one hand stretched out in front of him. For a moment, he felt blind, as though the darkness was all-consuming, and the adrenaline that shot through him was enough to leave him shaking. He still felt numb and frozen, still felt the wind slicing his cheeks and Bucky's weight in his arms. Slowly, however, the dream began to fade and the details of the room began to swim into focus.
Dappled light on the walls and ceiling, shadows cast by the venetian blinds covering the one wall of floor to ceiling glass in the room.
The temperature air-conditioned to a pleasant 65 degrees, or thereabouts.
The white numbers of the alarm clock on the nightstand read 02:47.
Stark Tower finally swam to the front of Steve's mind, and the last of the dream's grip on his heart faded away. He sighed, drew his knees up and slumped across them, exhaling slowly. He was still shaking like a leaf, and he was aware of a horrible tightness in his throat, his eyes prickling with tears.
He resolved not to cry.
To the rest of the world, Bucky Barnes was schoolroom history. To Steve, he'd been fighting alongside the kid scant weeks beforehand. The information regarding Bucky's disappearance - and subsequent reappearance as the Soviet agent codenamed Winter Soldier - had not been included in Steve's briefing pack. Colonel Fury had taken the time to tell him in person, with a somber tone, a stiff whiskey and a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. Steve had held it together for as long as he could; he'd expected Bucky to be dead, once he'd heard the date, and the news that he wasn't was at least something to take comfort in - but Steve couldn't help but think that death would have been a kinder fate than being kidnapped and used as a mindless weapon of the Communists. Bucky didn't deserve an end like that. Steve had finally slumped on to the table, hiding his face. Fury had understood and said nothing. He'd rested his hand on Steve's back for three seconds, and then turned and left the room.
When Steve had left the room fifteen minutes later, he'd been dry-eyed and steady on his feet.
He'd dreamed about Bucky the most in the weeks since his revival. He had more than one recurring dream, certainly; friends and fellow soldiers suffering and dying at the hands of cold-eyed Nazis with their soulless 'scientific' experiments, or devilish Japanese with their cruelly creative tortures, or in which he was plunged back into the midst of the chaos of a battle, the Great War's legacy of mechanised warfare coming into its own around him. But despite the bloody, filthy maelstrom of death that had been active front line service, Steve had always, always been sure that he was doing the right thing. He had never once felt guilty for fighting, had never truly wished to be anywhere else in the world in those moments than side by side with the American Army, stopping at nothing to defend freedom and the way of life he loved.
The cold, guilty, utterly accountable desolation of the dreams with Bucky were a different matter. They left Steve cold and sick and shaking, wishing desperately for things to have been different, knowing he was a good six decades too late to change anything at all.
Alone and in the dark, Steve drew his knees to his chest and hugged them, trying his best to breathe steadily and let the trembling ebb away.
Eventually it did, but Steve knew very well that he wouldn't be getting any more sleep that night. He sighed, swinging his legs out of bed, his feet sinking into the luxuriously soft, thick carpet of the bedroom floor - Steve was still having a little trouble adjusting to the idea of it being his bedroom, because it was just so luxurious and possibly contained too few personal effects at this stage to really feel like his, though the notion was slowly growing on him the longer he spent at Stark Tower. He thought maybe he'd go down to the kitchen and find himself something to drink - he wasn't hungry but his mouth was dry and tasted bad - and after that… he wasn't sure. He felt nosy looking around the Tower without either Tony Stark or Ms Potts to accompany him, despite how many times both of them had told him repeatedly to treat it like his own home, and despite how much he knew he wouldn't nose. Maybe he'd go out for a walk; it was late october and the weather was turning, but it wasn't so cold that a walk around Manhattan wouldn't do him some good, not to mention get his mind back into the present day.
His mind made up, he changed out of the blue silk pajamas that were part of the enormous order of new clothes Ms Potts had made out for him, which he found a little over-luxurious but would have thought it awfully ungrateful not to wear, and into a pair of jeans and a cotton shirt, leaving the collar unbuttoned and rolling up the sleeves. He hadn't fully got into the swing of modern-day dress, and felt just a little uncomfortable in t-shirts, but after a week under surveillance in SHIELD's medical facility wearing only military-issue fatigues, these clothes were an enormous improvement. He fixed his hair in the mirror - it was getting long, would need cutting soon - and made his way carefully down to the kitchen.
There were three floors of penthouse at the top of Stark Tower, and another two floors below it that were sealed off from the outside with high-impact-resistant plating. It felt like a basement to be inside, as though Stark Tower were merely three storeys tall and the workshop was below ground level. Steve's room was on the second floor, the kitchen on the first - except they were really the ninety-second and ninety-first floors - and Steve padded down the staircase without making a sound. He opened the fridge, looking over its contents, and finally decided on a glass of ice cold milk. He had barely taken a sip, however, when a small but definitely powerful contained explosion made the floor shudder underneath his feet.
Steve smiled fondly before he could catch himself. Tony Stark couldn't sleep again, it seemed.