The room is white, horribly white.
Steve enters the clinical observation room slowly. It’s a tall room with the bottom half of the walls layered in white tile and the top half rimmed with black windows, not unlike the hidden lab where he received the serum. There’s only a bed and a metal table under a ceiling full of white lights, making it feel more like a stage set than an actual facility.
A nurse enters with him, jotting notes on a clipboard, making passing comments about charts and numbers or the weather, while stealing glances at him. Steve doesn’t really blame her curiosity. He himself feels like his new body is big enough to fill the room and bust open the horrid white walls from the inside. He might be doing that exact thing to his clothes right now; for the first time in his life they’re actually too small. The damn shirt is stretched to near transparency around his chest and arms, hiding nothing, and his newly sensitive skin feels like it’s been rubbed raw against the rough cotton.
The nurse still hasn’t stopped talking. She says no food or water until morning, they want to measure his metabolism. She’ll check his vitals every hour. There’s a bottle on the table for him to use. And to have a good night, sir, and is there anything he needs before she leaves?
A bigger shirt, Steve thinks, but he only shakes his head.
The nurse gives him a shy smile and tiptoes out of the room, locking the door.
And so the performance begins.
At first Steve intended to lay down and go straight to sleep. From the moment he climbed into the car with Agent Carter back at bootcamp, to entering this facility, to the serum injection, to the lab attack – it’s all an intangible, cluttered haze right now. Did that all happen just this morning? The injection was surely a lifetime ago, and maybe not even his own life. He still feels the buzz of the drugs in his system, pure, trembling energy, like too much caffeine. Will it ever go away? He wants to run for miles, forever, getting dizzy and high on oxygen. Maybe it won’t go away and his body will keep going until it shatters, bursting like a firework for one brilliant moment.
He considers the bed. It looks cold, stiff, and unwelcoming, a metal table with a crinkly thin mattress in clinical shades of white and blue. His eyes take a moment to adjust to the colors. Did everyone see the world like this? In white and blue alone there was an infinite spectrum of shades and delicate undertones, slightly blurred with an aura that Howard said would disappear in a day or two
Steve suddenly wants his art supplies. He can finally convey depth and texture like never before. And red! No longer colorblind, he can see traces of red in nearly everything, humming like blood beneath the skin, adding a trace of life and vibrancy to the world. When he first opened his eyes after the serum, they scoured the room hungrily for every splash of crimson. The stripes of the American flag on the opposite wall. Some stranger’s tie. Peggy’s lips. Erksine’s bullet-riddled chest.
Steve sighs and turns from the bed to the small metal table beside it. There’s nothing but the bottle the nurse mentioned – for bladder emergencies, apparently – a clipboard full of random forms, and a pencil. He picks up the pencil idly, twirling it clumsily. His fingers are at least three times thicker than they used to be. Maybe he can’t draw anymore. They seem to tremble and spasm uncontrollably, as his brain still struggles to comprehend what was literally a growth spurt on steroids.
He turns a paper on the clipboard over to the blank side and traces the surface lightly with the pencil. At first he can’t seem to get the pressure right; even the lightest touch is too strong, and his regular force would probably snap the pencil now. The lead skitters across the page and leaves a web of gray.
A frustrated sigh escapes him. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”
Steve drops the pencil and looks at his hands, clenching and unclenching them, watching the gently pulsing muscles beneath his skin.
My hands, he tries to tell himself.
Your father’s hands, his memory suggests.
And suddenly they are his father’s hands. Steve stumbles backwards and glances up. The spotless observation room has become a small apartment with dingy, peeling plaster and splintered wood floor, his enhanced memory recreating the scene in vibrant detail. He can see it, taste it, smell it. It lives on a delicate border between memory and reality, taunting him, hovering just out of reach. The stark contrast between the icy observation room and his childhood garret makes his chest constrict with homesickness.
It’s miserable but it’s home.
And home means…
“Stevie!” a familiar voice makes him whirl around. His eyes take in the room, skimming past the kitchen nook, the dining table full of folded laundry, and the open windows caked with dust and smog, finally resting on a wooden rocking chair in the corner. His memory adds the details as he stares, until there’s a woman in the chair. She’s not much older than he is now, small and blonde with a high-collared blue dress and a thick white apron.
He suddenly remembers that apron, the scratchy cotton against his teary eyes, the rich smell of borax, the dark stains along the hem from his nosebleeds. How perfectly it represents the woman wearing it, simple and practical, a gentle shield.
Steve feels a sob in his throat. “Mama.”
Mama drops the ball of white yarn in her hands into a basket at her feet and stands up. She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t hear him, living in that cursed realm just beyond his grasp. Instead she strides past him to the opposite end of the room. “Stevie, time for bed.”
Steve turns, his eyes following her. On that end of the room is a metal cot against the wall, piled high with tattered quilts. The plaster is covered in childish artwork, scribbles of random colors that he used to think was black and white.
And he sees himself sitting on the floor, twelve years younger, a scrawny kid with his mother’s pale hair and electric blue eyes. Young Stevie is bending over a sketchbook balanced on his knees, scribbling feverishly, almost in tears.
Mama sits beside him. “Stevie?”
Stevie drops his pencil and covers his face. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it, Mama.”
Mama takes the sketchbook. “Stevie, it looks amazing. The garden in the city, isn’t it?”
Stevie nods miserably, rubbing his aching eyes. “Can’t get the water fountain right. It looks frozen.”
“Well, it’s a picture.”
“But I don’t want it to feel like a picture, Mama. It should feel happy and alive and beautiful.”
Mama squeezes his shoulders. “It’s getting dark, dearie. You’re gonna hurt your eyes.”
“But Mama…”
“Tomorrow.” Mama puts the sketchbook away. At his frustrated sigh, she gently lifts his chin and looks into his eyes. “Sometimes, Stevie, you have to rest. And in the morning, you can see things in a different light.”
Stevie hesitates, then nods. “Yes, Mama.”
Mama smiles and kneels by the bed, patting the floor, motioning for him to do the same. “You want to say the prayer tonight, Stevie?”
Steve’s gaze flickers around the familiar room, revisiting the homely details, as he hears his own childish voice droning tiredly:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Amen.
He hears the rusty creak of the bed frame as Mama tucks Stevie in. He sees the misty worry in her eyes as she leans down to kiss his cheek, hovering above his little body like a guardian angel. He notices the rows of medication on his bedside and tastes the chalky pills on his tongue.
Every night of his life was supposed to be his last. Impoverished children with more medical ailments than years of their life don’t survive.
But he did.
He grew up.
He buried the mother who had kept him alive.
And he tried time and again to go to war, as if his life was a debt and death was demanding payment.
But still he survived. And tonight, he would not die, he might even live a full life. The years ahead stretch out blurry and endless, a dizzying kaleidoscope of potential. And Steve has never felt smaller and more alone.
The bed frame squeaks again as Mama stands up. “Goodnight, Stevie.”
She blows out the lamp, and turns to leave.
“No,” Steve feels the sob in his throat again, “Don’t leave me…”
Mama moves back to her rocking chair, now shrouded in darkness, fading from his sight.
Steve moves forward to follow her. “Mama!”
His foot catches and he trips to the floor. The memory slips away, and he’s again in the bright white observation room, on his knees beside the unfriendly medical bed.
His spinning mind echoes habitually, If I should die before I wake…
_______________________________
Peggy Carter waits in the loft above the observation room, arms crossed, watching through the black one-way windows. A handful of nurses are here to watch the subject’s vitals and activity. She’s here to watch Steve.
When he trips, a nurse gets up to check on him. But Peggy lifts a hand, stopping her.
She watches Steve kneel by the bed, his face covered and his eyes closed, and listens to his ragged breathing through the monitor. He’s nearly three hundred pounds of muscle, trembling with new power and energy, but she still sees the same little soldier who saw no shame in losing a fight, only in avoiding it.
“Agent Carter, should I go down there?”
“No,” Peggy says, not taking her eyes off the window, “He’s all right.”
Life had driven him to his knees before, but this time, she knew that he would stand up stronger than before. Peggy waits, watching him from above, because angels never catch you until you fall.
Slowly Steve gets back on his feet, still clumsy and awkward in his new body. And he climbs into bed to wait for the morning light.