Remember Them Summer Days
Steve Rogers wasn’t always the Captain, one of the greatest heroes the wizarding world has ever known. He wasn’t always the man the Dark ran in fear from, defender of the weak, avenger of the fallen.
No. Steve Rogers began life as a lonely, sickly Muggleborn, living in a run-down tenement apartment.
When he was born, the doctors told his mother he wouldn’t survive. Mrs. Rogers, so recently widowed she still checked the mailbox for her husband’s letters, just out of habit, knew better. “He’ll be fine,” she’d say to doctors, to nurses, to herself. “He’s tough. He’s like his father.”
Steve was four the first time Father Murphy gave him the last rites. He lay there gasping, tiny body shaking, eyes wide and confused as he tried to work out why he couldn’t breathe, but not crying. Refusing to cry.
He was six when his mother bought him his first sketchbook. His first lines were smudged, wavering, but as he grew older he made them clearer, until he could create portraits so real the eyes shine with laughter through the charcoal, and the whole drawing seemed to breathe. But hardly anyone saw those pictures.
He was seven when he met the boy who would become his best friend. High summer, lying in an alleyway, curled against the kicks pounding his sides, watching the mangy yellow dog he’d freed go scampering off into the sunset. Dimly he heard a shout from the alley mouth and the scuffling sounds of a fight, and then the kids kicking him were gone and a boy was walking towards him, wiping blood from his lip, hand out for Steve to take.
“Hey, I’m Bucky.”
“Steve.” A pause, “I could have handled that, you know.”
“Sure you could.”
He was nine when his mother died, struck by the same tuberculosis she treated at the hospital. He wasn’t allowed to see her. He sat with Bucky for hours on end outside the heavy quarantine door, while the other boys their age laughed and ran in the summer streets outside.
She died, and the boys went together to her funeral, buttoned up in borrowed, ill-fitting suits and shepherded by Bucky’s mother, Winifred Barnes, who carried a handkerchief pressed to her eyes. The two women had been good friends. Steve hardly stayed long enough to see his mother’s coffin lowered into the dirt before he ran, blindly, clawing at the tie that seemed to be choking the life out of him. Behind him, he heard Bucky’s footsteps following, but suddenly they faded and he was alone, hidden far from anyone. He didn’t know what had happened. He didn’t care. He curled up in the tiny bubble of space and sobbed like his heart would break, like it already had.
He stayed there a long time. And when he finally emerged from the woods, feet tapping on an old stone bridge, there was Bucky waiting for him.
“C’mon,” he said quietly. “Ma’s waiting.”
And that’s how Steve Rogers came to live with the Barnes family. With Bucky, and his gaggle of little sisters. And with Winifred, a Squib who’d seen her own son’s power show itself not long before, and now had to explain magic and wizards and a whole new world to a sickly, grieving little boy.
She handled it admirably well.
The boys got their letters on the same day – a couple of weeks before Steve’s eleventh birthday, a couple of weeks after Bucky’s. They arrived one Monday morning on the doorstep, along with a discreet note addressed to Winifred about the Hogwarts fund for poorer students. The boys danced around the living room, laughing with joy, until Bucky had to run for Steve’s inhaler.
The great grey owl that had delivered the envelopes soared away, and tiny Rebecca Barnes watched it go with a grin wide enough to split her face.