Little Wars ☆ Steve Rogers

09

BENEATH STEVE'S SKIN, snug inside his chest, encased in ribs and sternum and wrapped up in muscle, was his heart. And inside his heart, Steve carried, even still, the scars of rheumatic fever.

Because the scarring no longer made its presence known to him—because the constant labor of his heart was no great feat these days, and because he hadn't experienced cardiac arrest in many years—he thought about it infrequently. Almost never.

But he thought about the scarring now, as his heart hammered steadily, keeping up with him as he beat his unwrapped knuckles against a punching bag. He wasn't sure why the old heart let him get away with trying to exhaust himself all the time, or why it never had the decency to draw a limit for him. It never gave out, never let him collapse. It seemed reckless for it to let him carry on like this, practically encouraging him not to rest. He wondered if it was possible for the heart to beat out of his chest and fly itself into the sun.

He'd always felt a bitterness toward his heart. It had always been his weakest muscle. It would have been the thing that killed him.

Before, he'd resented it for being so relentlessly fallible. He thought about 1941. He thought about the time he'd tagged along to Bucky's boxing gym. There had been comments, he was sure, from the men around, but he couldn't remember what they'd said. He'd been angry—violently angry—with his own feeble, staggering heartbeat, and he'd swung until his body gave out and he collapsed onto the floor, gasping for air.

But now, he longed for that limitation. He wanted to collapse, to know that he'd done everything he possibly could, to have permission to rest if only because he couldn't physically go on.

A breaking point, he realized. He wanted a breaking point.

The Chitauri invasion, he thought, required less effort from him than he used to exert just unfolding his body out of bed, when he'd awake with a deep, painful stiffness in his skeleton, and half the time with surface level aches, too, from chronically getting his ass kicked. He'd prefer any fight over just the memory of those mornings, he thought, unable to clear his mind, with nothing but the thuds of his fists and heart to listen to. He couldn't stop weighing the way things used to be—that he'd much rather fight HYDRA and Redskull and whoever the hell else than ever relive the asthma attack he'd had at his mother's funeral, from some allergen in the chapel.

The chain of the punching bag, which was reinforced, made extra strong for him specifically, was far more likely to break than his body was. He swung a little harder, unrestrained himself like he was proving his own point, and watched the bag slam into the wall.

But it wasn't a breaking point—nothing ever was.

Five minutes later, he was freshly showered, relatively clean, relatively warm, and still restless, still dissatisfied. He'd changed into a tee shirt and running pants, which was all he had clean in his bag. He still had yet to return to his apartment since arriving back at the Tower. As he crossed the training room toward the exit, he decided he'd better stop by and at least put on real clothes—jeans or khakis or something, and a shirt with a collar and buttons or at least a jacket over the tee shirt—he'd feel more like a real person with a life and priorities.

And yet, his phone vibrated, and a rush of adrenaline had him digging it out urgently.

Ford
Here yet?

That was Tony. Steve hadn't thought twice about making his contact a last name—the name of a corporation, synonymous to Steve with mass production, consumerism, the start that he grew up with, which led into the end that he woke up to. It had never crossed Steve's mind to make Tony's code name a real scientist, a famous genius. He'd never even considered just code naming Tony after a classic rock musician, either. Ford was easiest to remember, the closest association—other than Howard—that Steve could make to Tony, a natural preface to America today as it was chronicled in his head.