Jane Rebecca Buchanan Barnes, so named to appease both grandmothers and her father's bizarre obsession with the 15th President, stood at the back of the theater and scanned the crowd for the third time. The flickering light from the screen gave her just enough to make out the backs of people's heads and, with a sinking feeling of half-despair and half-resignation, she searched in vain for a particular blond head she already knew she wasn't going to find.
Dread fell over her, quickly solidifying into what she referred to as the "Steve Rogers Effect." She'd taken her eyes off him for five seconds and he'd promptly gone and done something stupid. Again.
She spun on her heel and pushed out of the theater and into the cold, and somewhat stagnant air, of Brooklyn. She headed toward the alley that ran alongside the building with the air of a bloodhound locked on a scent and let out a sigh of heartfelt despair as she picked up the telltale sound of a fight.
Insofar as a massive idiot beating up on a guy half his size could be called a fight.
She rounded the corner just in time to see the guy's fist smash into Steve's face with enough force to spin him completely around and send him crashing to the ground like a broken rag doll.
Rebecca's gut clenched and she sucked in a harsh gasp at how hard her best friend hit the ground, and how still he stayed after. Fear washed over her, along with a near blinding rage that had her almost literally seeing red.
She grabbed the brute's shoulder and spun him around to face her. He raised his fist, but she was prepared for it. No one willing to beat up on a guy half his size was going to give a rat's ass about hitting a woman.
She ducked under his haphazard swing and came up inside his guard, if it could even be called that. Before he could process, she snapped the heel of her hand into his jaw, stepped back and put all her weight into a kick straight into what her mother liked to call the family jewels.
Just moments earlier she'd been bemoaning the fact that her new military uniform required her to wear heels. She now thought perhaps they weren't so bad after all as she watched all the color drain from the brute's face as he slowly sagged to his knees.
She kept part of her attention on Steve as she waited for the jerk to recover and felt a rush of relief at the sight of him slowly struggling to his feet.
Guess she wasn't going to get arrested for homicide today after all.
"Get out of here," she ordered the brute as he slowly got to his own feet. She recognized the glazed, drunken look in his eyes, the same her old man used to have right before he decided knocking her mother around was a good idea.
Rebecca stood as straight as possible, once again thanking the heels for the extra couple inches they gave her, and tried to emulate the expression her mother had worn the day she'd finally thrown her husband out the door and told him to never come back.
The guy muttered something under his breath but staggered away, his awkward walk probably brought on by more than just the alcohol she could smell on his breath.
Rebecca didn't let her relief show on her face. Fights were a simple fact of life when it came to being around Steve Rogers. He had a singular knack for finding trouble, and she'd suffered more than a few cuts and bruises from a lifetime of pulling him out of whatever scrape he'd thrown himself into headfirst.
Even so, she doubted her new superiors would have been impressed had she shown up to ship out sporting a shiny black eye.
She shifted her attention to Steve, confident the bully wasn't going to change his mind and return. He was fully on his feet and the knots in her stomach loosened at the steadiness in his stance and the clear look in his eyes. He had blood on the side of his lip, and his clothing was mussed, but he didn't appear to have suffered any lasting injuries.
Mentally, she kicked herself for having been late to the show. If she hadn't gotten caught up in visiting a few old haunts she'd have made it before Steve got into a fight and he wouldn't have gotten hurt at all.
"Should you have been doing that in a skirt?" Steve asked with a slight grin, wiping the blood off the corner of his lip and pantomiming the kick she'd just done.
Rebecca rolled her eyes and managed to hide her irritation. Just once, just once , she'd like to see him put a fraction of the effort into staying safe that she did in keeping him safe. Instead it was always this, quips and jokes like he hadn't just gotten his bell rung halfway to Newark.
"Shut up, Rogers," she said, biting back what she'd really like to say. "I swear, sometimes I think you like getting punched."
It was all she could say. Anything else and he'd take it as her pitying him. Steve hated pity. He took it as a challenge to go do something stupid simply to prove he could, and that was the last thing she needed or wanted on her last day in Brooklyn.
"I had him on the ropes," Steve said confidently, blinking rapidly and bending over as a wave of dizziness assailed him.
Rebecca tensed and a muscle in her jaw tightened. Steve Rogers, the walking paradox. Hero complex the size of Brooklyn trapped in a body so frail she was sometimes terrified he'd shatter just from the effort of getting up in the morning. Always ready and willing to help anyone who needed it but hated receiving any help in return.
Except from her. Barely.
He hunched over farther, wheezing as his lungs struggled to draw in air. As she waited for him to recover, and resisted the urge to try and help, Rebecca caught sight of papers scattered on the ground. She crouched to pick one up, and frowned as she recognized the form. An enlistment sheet, with the word "rejected" stamped across the front. She'd like to say this was the first time she'd caught Steve with one, but it wasn't even the fourth or fifth.
Damn it all, why couldn't Steve accept that he wouldn't last five seconds in the military? Hell, forget that, why couldn't he accept that he had the body of an asthmatic 80-year-old? She got that he didn't want to be treated like an invalid. She even understood the sheer size of the chip he carried on his shoulder. She got it, but that didn't mean she couldn't see what was right in front of her eyes.
Steve might have more heart and bravery than half the blokes in Brooklyn but it didn't mean a thing when it came to the body he was trapped in. All the wishing and willpower in the world wasn't going to get him past his physical limitations. All it would do was get him an early grave, and that was the one thing she was determined to prevent, no matter what it took.
"How many times is this?" She waved the form at him, and then frowned down at it. "Oh, you're from Paramus now?" she asked sarcastically. "I hear the weather is lovely there this time of year."
"Pretty sure it's not," Steve muttered. He straightened slowly, eyes running and face red from the coughing fit. He reached for the form, but Rebecca held it out of his reach.
"You know, I'm pretty sure it's illegal to lie on these things."
"Only if you get caught." He reached for it again and, this time, Rebecca allowed him to snatch it from her hand. He folded it and stuffed it into an interior pocket of his threadbare jacket. He started to say something else, but paused as he seemed to notice the uniform she was wearing for the first time. In addition to the pumps she'd also been forced to put on the skirt Steve had complained about earlier, uncomfortable nylons, jacket, dress shirt, and tie. There was also a hat which she'd put on at an angle to try and look like slightly less of a stuffed shirt.
She already missed her trousers. She'd been given a pair when she started working at the factory since they were safer around the machines than skirts or dresses. The first time she'd put them on she'd sworn she would never go back to dresses, public scorn be damned.
Should have known she'd wind up back in a skirt again, and that it'd somehow end up being Steve's fault.
"You're still going through with it?" Steve asked. His face fell, and Rebecca resisted the urge to ask why it was fine for him to join, but not her. That line of questioning would just cause an argument and she didn't want her last day with him to be spent fighting.
"You knew I was," she said instead. "It was just a matter of when they gave me my orders."
Steve scowled. "Is it because of me? Cause I kept talking about it?"
Rebecca threw an arm across his shoulders and physically dragged him around to face the front of the alleyway. "Not everything is about you, punk," she lied.
Truth was it was about him, but not for the reasons he thought.
Steve tended to get sick in the winters. It was like clockwork. The weather got cold, and Steve got sick. This time around, however, Steve had gotten sick . Really sick. Sick enough that a bunch of his friends, Rebecca included, had pooled their money together so he could go see a doctor.
That doctor had written a prescription and stressed how vitally important it was that Steve get it and begin taking it immediately. Rebecca had offered to go get it, leaving some of their other friends to make sure Steve got home and put to bed safely.
In her mind it had all been so simple. Go get the medication, give it to Steve, watch him get better and continue on with their lives. Simple, right up until she'd been standing in front of the pharmacist and listened to him quote an obscene price. A price neither of them could hope to pay, not if they worked for a year, not if they hit up all their friends for every last penny they had.
He'd barely been able to breathe. That had been her last sight of him before leaving to get the medication. Propped up between Jenny Smith and Joe Harris, barely skin and bones, his face a ghastly shade of white, lungs heaving and soaked in sweat as a fever raged under his skin.
He was going to die. Without the medication, possibly even with it. She was going to lose her best friend, the person who was so much a part of her that she sometimes felt they shared the same soul.
She'd panicked. Full blown, out of control, panic. She'd threatened the pharmacist, started screaming at him, practically accused him of murder for not handing over the medication. As images of Steve dying, dead, ran through her mind her panic had risen and she'd beat her hands on the counter, rising onto her toes as if she were planning to leap over the counter and take the drug by force.
Perhaps that was exactly what she'd meant to do, would have done if not for the timely arrival of a middle-aged blonde woman wearing a military uniform. She'd listened quietly to Rebecca screaming for a few seconds, and then stepped forward and handed over the money.
Rebecca had been stunned into silence and, in those few moments, the woman had simply turned and left. It was the slamming of the door that had spurred her into motion, following and stopping the woman to thank her profusely.
It was then that the woman, who'd introduced herself as Linda Jones, had revealed she'd gone into the pharmacy specifically to find Rebecca. Linda had seen her earlier that day, she'd explained, in a fight with a boy. He'd made an advance on her, and then tried to get aggressive when she'd turned him down.
Linda had planned to step in, only to quickly realize there was no need. She hadn't had the time to speak to Rebecca after the fight but, later, had seen her again as she'd gone into the drugstore.
She'd proceeded to offer Rebecca a job interview then, refusing to explain anything about it other than it'd be for the military. Rebecca had accepted, feeling she owed Linda that much at least for the medication.
She'd made it back to Steve's in record time after that, and spent a restless night watching him fight to breathe. The next day one of their friends had come to relieve her and she'd gone to the address Linda had given her.
It had been an old warehouse, not comforting, but she'd gone inside anyway, half convinced she was about to be mugged. Instead she'd found Jones, dressed in trousers and a close-fitting shirt. The other woman had challenged her to a sparring match, where she'd proceeded to soundly beat her, several times.
Even so, the woman had apparently been impressed enough to offer Rebecca a job with something called the Strategic Scientific Reserve, or SSR, a unit dedicated to eradicating an arm of the Third Reich that went by the name of Hydra.
Rebecca had never heard of it and Jones refused to elaborate beyond saying that the position would be dangerous but, if Rebecca accepted, she'd be involved in making one hell of a difference.
Rebecca had refused. Steve needed her. What if he got sick again or got himself in over his head, which he managed to do at least once a day? None of their friends knew him the way she did, and he refused to listen to anyone else but her.
She'd started to leave, only to stop in her tracks as Jones had mentioned what the pay for the offered position was. It was high, higher than anything she'd ever dreamed of, let alone thought she could ever earn. It would be more than enough to get Steve a better apartment, warmer clothes, maybe even some of those treatments she kept hearing being touted for asthma.
She knew nothing could cure him entirely but if she could do something to help at least. Maybe stop him from getting sick every single winter, help him struggle less when he tried to breathe...
It could make all the difference in the world. Every time he got sick, every time his body took another battering from his fight to simply live, it was worse. The coughing just a little harsher, the fever higher, and the recovery slower. She wasn't stupid. She knew his body couldn't keep it up forever. She knew what that would mean, eventually.
But if she could help... Make it easier, as easy as it possibly could be under the circumstances?
So it wasn't so much of a struggle for Steve to simply live...
She'd asked if she could stay until Steve was better. Linda had accepted, and then Rebecca was filling out paperwork and, before she knew it, she'd enlisted in the Army.
She hadn't told Steve until after he'd recovered. He'd wanted to know why, and she'd made up some excuse that didn't even make sense to her, let alone him but she'd refused to explain any further and he'd finally stopped asking.
Life had seemed to return to normal after that and she'd almost managed to forget about it all, until her orders had arrived along with the stupid uniform she was currently wearing.
She'd spent most of that day going to all their friends, and all their neighbors, extracting promises from them that they would look after Steve for her while she was gone.
It scared her to think of him without her there to back him up, or notice when he started to get sick, but she tried to keep her mind on the bigger picture. Getting enough money for that apartment, and the new clothes and a Steve who didn't have to fight so hard and would live longer, and happier, because of it.
Whatever she had to do to help him, she would. Even if it meant leaving him behind for a time. Even if the thought of being separated from him made her heart feel like it was ripping in two.
Steve was still staring at her, eyes narrowed in concern, and she cleared her throat and forced a smile for him.
"107th," she said with a trace of real pride because who would ever have thought some little unwanted, nobody girl from Brooklyn would ever make an officer in the Army? She hadn't even known women could make officers. "Sergeant Jane Rebecca Buchanan Barnes." Saying her full name was always such a pain and she wished they could have just put her nickname, Bucky, on the tag instead. Steven had given her that nickname, back when he was a child and had heard her mother call her Becky. He'd thought she'd said "Bucky," and Rebecca had never bothered to correct him. By the time he figured it out on his own, the nickname was stuck.
Steve frowned. "That was the regiment my father was in."
Rebecca knew that. She also knew the 107th was the regiment Steve had his heart set on joining. He'd been trying to enlist for so long. It was probably the reason he'd gotten sick, not that he'd ever admit it. Standing in all those lines in the cold couldn't be good for anyone, least of all him. "I'm shipping out tomorrow. I'm going to help with communications."
It wasn't exactly a lie. Jones had been so vague on what she'd be doing that, for all Rebecca knew, it could well be the truth. To be honest, there was a part of her, albeit a small part, that was excited to go. She wasn't excited to leave Steve behind, there was no part of her that would ever be excited about that, but she was going on an adventure. Off to see what lay outside Brooklyn.
They'd reached the street and Rebecca tugged him around the corner to head off down the block. It was too late to go see the movie, which was fine with her. She hadn't been much in the mood anyway.
As they walked, she did her best to not think about how it felt to have Steve so close to her, his body heat warm against her side even through the fabric of her uniform jacket.
He saw her as a little sister, she knew that. Her life would have been far simpler had she been able to continue seeing him as a little brother. She'd tried, over the years, to stuff her feelings away, to convince herself that he was like a brother to her, and nothing else, but her heart stubbornly refused to listen.
She wasn't foolish enough to ever risk letting him find out. She knew he'd let her down gently. He would, but then the words would always be there, hanging between them. He'd start watching everything he did and said, convinced he'd somehow give her the wrong idea, or because he was trying to be sensitive to her feelings. Their relationship would turn awkward and strained and it would all be because she couldn't keep her stupid mouth shut.
He was trudging, she noted, dragging his feet and staring at the ground as if it held all the answers in the world. She bumped him with her hip, and then pulled a folded newspaper out from inside her jacket and slapped it against his chest.
"Come on," she said, practically manhandling him in the direction of the apartment building where they both lived. "It's my last night. We've got to get you cleaned up."
"Why?" Steve asked, unfolding the paper in confusion. "Where are we going?"
She grinned and slapped the headline on the front page of the paper, showcasing the science fair happening later that evening. "The future."