Star Dust (A Paladin Adventure)

The unexpected

We'd been worried about the press from the wedding, but we stayed tight in the compound when we weren't on missions, and after a big initial hoopla, it did die down. There was a brief but intense scavenge for information about me, and some not so pleasant late-night jokes about the age difference, but I stopped paying attention.

Summer moved into autumn, then winter. Steve came back from a mission with an abdominal wound that wasn't healing well. I didn't even have to nag him to get him to go to the doctor; I was worried that somebody had developed some kind of chemical or biological agent to interrupt his augmented healing ability.

The results from the exam were not what I was expecting.

"It looks like the abilities from the serum are starting to wear off," the doctor said gently. "For whatever reason, the enhancements aren't permanent, although everybody thought that they would be." He shook his head and looked at the lab results a moment longer. "There wasn't any way to tell. For this particular ...project, you were the baseline."

"So what does this mean for me?" Steve asked after a desperate moment.

"Your speed, strength, agility, healing, all of it is going to fade away. Is fading. There's no way to precisely predict the speed of the decline, but based on the data points that we have here compared to your last physical, my best guess is that it will be a matter of months." After a moment, he added absurdly, "I'm sorry."

"Isn't there anything that can be done?" I asked.

He shook his head. "If we had the serum, we could try administering it again, but we don't. It would be a long shot anyway; the Captain is almost a hundred years old."

"I saw an earlier version of the formula," I blurted out, and recited the list of reactants that I had seen in the secret lab in Austria.

"The earlier formulas weren't successful," Steve murmured, taking my hand, and the doctor said that the formula couldn't be reconstructed just from what I'd seen.

It took us a couple of days to process the information before we told the others. Now that I was looking, I could see his hair silvering at the temples, some lines developing on his face.

Three weeks later, he had to stop going out on missions.

Not quite two months later, he had hospice care. I was shocked at the speed of his decline. I thought there would be more months.

Two weeks after that, shortly after a last dose of medication, his once vital body wasted and frail, his memory fading, asthma having returned along with other problems that he'd endured pre-serum, he let his last gentle breath leave. They removed his body immediately. Somehow I made it onto campus. They found me outside Loki's cell, where one of the guards had let him out to comfort me. Bucky found me sobbing, curled up on a ball on the floor, Loki stroking my hair.

It had always been understood that his body would be studied after his death, so there was a memorial service in place of the funeral. There was a memorial garden by the visitors center. It was spare but attractive, featuring lots of white marble; the public came in droves to pay their respects.

It was about a month before I went back to work. On top of Steve, it turned out that Sarah had had a heart defect and she died too.  It was a very tough month indeed.

Everybody pretty much left me alone, for which I was grateful. I showed up for team meetings and did the work, but I wasn't going out on missions. I cast a couple more engines for motorcycles and cars, and a prototype for one for a quinjet. This one was an entirely different animal, and the enormous challenge was just what I needed. The Paladin officially retired; I'd lost the heart for it, and I sent my costumes to the archives at the visitors center, along with Nike for display. I left the urumi in its belt sheath.