Chapter 2
Lisa is five when her brother is born.
Frank Jr is instantly the apple of her family’s eyes and for a while she is jealous.
Mommy has less time for her now because she is working full-time and taking care of a new baby, her grandparents want to coo over him all the time, and Daddy cut their usual talking time so he could “talk to the baby”.
Lisa was confused, the baby couldn’t even talk or play. All he seemed to do was cry and sleep.
Lisa asked Mommy if the baby was broken and if they could have another one.
She didn’t understand why her question made Mommy laugh so hard.
Lisa likes to tell Frankie stories of their daddy. She tells him about how he can play the guitar, throw her really high in the air, and how he always lets her sneak extra dessert.
Sometimes Frankie doesn’t believe her, so she tells him that he’s stupid and it always makes him cries.
Mommy puts her in time out, but she refuses to say why she insults him.
One day when Frankie is three and Daddy is almost through his latest tour, Lisa gets out of school early.
Mommy won’t say why, but Lisa catches her watching the news.
Monsters Wreck Harlem!
There are grainy videos of two big things crashing through buildings and cars.
Lisa doesn’t sleep so good that night.
She wishes her daddy was there.
Daddy’s homecoming is delayed when Tony Stark goes missing.
Lisa knows Tony Stark is really smart and rich, and her Aunt Sylvia says he’s really handsome.
She still feels a burning bitterness that he’s keeping her daddy from coming home.
Frank comes home while most of the world is watching Tony Stark announce the end of Stark Industries’ weapon making.
Frank misses it because he is trying to get his son to stop crying when he holds him for the first time.
Frankie doesn’t know who he is, and it hurts just as much as when Lisa did the same.
Frank teaches Lisa how to play the guitar and starts playing catch with Frankie.
The gaps between him and them no longer feel so big.
The whole “I am Iron Man” announcement plays on tv for weeks after it happens.
“Does this mean superheroes are real now, Daddy?” Lisa asks Frank, enraptured by the screen.
“Have I never told you about Captain America?” Frank grins.
“The cartoon?” She wrinkles her nose.
“The guy behind the cartoon, Baby.” He laughs.
At her head shake, he turns off the tv. “It all started in the ’40s when a little guy named Steve fought bullies in the alleyways of Brooklyn.”
Daddy goes back to war, but at least Frankie quits saying Lisa is making up stories about him.
Lisa gets in a fight with a boy on the playground.
His name is Tommy and he won’t leave Lisa alone. He’s constantly pulling her hair and pushing her down.
Lisa lets it go usually because Mommy says violence is bad.
But today is different.
“Lisa doesn’t have a dad!” Tommy shouts across the playground.
“Isn’t he a soldier?” Benji asks, confused.
“I bet she’s just making that up!” Tommy scoffs.
“I do too have a dad!” Lisa yells back, furious. It’s a feeling she will grow familiar with.
“Do not!”
“Do too!”
“Do not!”
“Do too!”
“I bet you’ve never even met him!” Tommy spits.
Lisa rears back just like her dad taught and punches Tommy straight in the face.
Lisa doesn’t tell anybody why she did it until her mother gets there.
With each detail she recounts, Maria grows angrier and angrier.
“Why hasn’t the administrator done anything about this behavior before?!” She erupts.
“It’s just kid stuff, Mrs. Castle.” The principal tries to calm her. “We didn’t believe it was anything serious.”
“You are lucky my husband is in the middle of Afghanistan right now, Mr. Murphy, you really are.” Maria seethes. “I will be transferring Lisa out of here as soon as possible!”
Lisa likes her new school, an artsy one for creative kids, way better.
Daddy comes home again when Lisa is 11 and Frankie is six.
He brings Billy Russo with him.
The Castle family find Billy to be a charming man. He’s also funny and a little bit sad.
They welcome him into their fold like he’s always been there.
“If you were an orphan, how do you know you were named after Billy the Kid?” Lisa asks, peering up at the man.
“Atta girl! Well done.” Frank grins at her.
“Lisa, you are way too smart to be your dad’s kid,” Billy smirks.
Lisa doesn’t see, but Frank playfully flips him off.
Frank takes them to see the Statue of Liberty.
Lisa finds her beautiful and tells Frank so.
“I read at school that she represents everything good about America.” She tells him, her warms eyes meeting his.
“That’s about right.” He smiles.
“Is that why you have to go and fight?”
His smile becomes slightly strained and the happiness in his eyes dims.
Her dad leaves for his third tour the next day.
It’s a quiet day when the world changes forever.
Lisa is at school, learning truly dreary things about math when an announcement over the intercom leads to all the kids sitting in the gym.
Someone happens to check their phone and yells out, “Check out the livestream of CNN! We’re being attacked!”
A roar begins as kids and teachers alike pull up their phones.
“Is that?” A boy beside her whispers.
“It’s fucking aliens, Dude!” Another boy answers.
“Holy shit, that’s Captain America!” A girl calls out.
“What the hell is Iron Man doing?”
“He’s sending a nuke into outer space.” Lisa finds herself responding, mostly to herself.
“The portal’s closing!”
“But he’s not out yet!”
The crowd rallies behind Tony Stark.
“Come on, Iron Man!” They yell out. “Come on!”
“Come on, Mr. Stark,” Lisa whispers.
The portals almost closed when they see a tiny speck speeding toward the ground.
“It’s Tony Stark!” They cheer.
“But he’s still falling?” Somebody questions.
The green thing jumps up and catches him, much to the room’s relief.
There’s a brief moment where CNN can’t tell whether or not Tony Stark is alive until the green thing roars and he pops up, attempting to catch his breath.
The room, the city, the country is quiet for a moment.
Then a roar of joy erupts that can be heard around the world.
Iron Man and The Hulk merchandise sell across the country, but nowhere more than New York.
“Are you okay?” Frank asks when he finally can get a call through. He’d been marching through the fucking desert for three days.
“Yeah,” Maria whispers. “The fighting didn’t get this far out.”
They are silent for a moment.
“I wish you were here.” She whispers, tears leaking into her voice.
“Me too.” Frank isn’t crying, but it’s the closest he’s come to it in years.
Another quiet moment passes.
“This is my last one, Sweetheart.” He clears his throat. “After this one, I’m coming home to you.”
Lisa’s not the same girl she was when her dad comes home, not really.
She’s too old for plastic dinosaurs and bedtime stories and too big to be thrown in the air.
This, understandably, causes some awkwardness.
The first two days they don’t say a word to each other, simply exchanging awkward smiles. Maria and Frankie roll their eyes so much that Frank begins to joke their eyes are going to roll out of their heads.
“They are too much alike.” Maria sighs to God.
Frank decides to go the range one day while Maria takes Junior to a doctor’s appointment. Lisa tags along with an interested gleam in her eyes.
“What’s the first rule?” Frank coaches her.
“Never point a gun at anybody I don’t intend to shoot.” She recites dutifully.
Maria is not pleased when she finds out.
“You let our daughter shoot a gun, Frank?” She yells at him in their bedroom that night. “Are you crazy?”
He interrupts her lecture with a calm, knowing look in his eyes. “She’s like me, Maria.”
“What?” Maria cocks an eyebrow.
“She’s got that itch in her skin, that fire.” He meets her eyes with the face of a man meeting the gallows. “She’s gonna end up on a battlefield.”
Frank sleeps on the couch that night while Maria cries herself to sleep.
She doesn’t stop him from taking her back to the range.
The end of this happy chapter comes without warning, as most endings do.
There is nothing particularly special about that April 4th.
It’s a Saturday, so Lisa doesn’t have to listen to Ms. Harris drone on about themes in the book they’re reading. They're going out to spend the day as a family. The skies were calm and blue, the birds were singing.
It was supposed to be a normal day.
“You’ll miss that kind of stuff when you’ve got an essay due every week next year.” Maria grins as she packs their sandwiches.
“Just think, my little baby is gonna be a Freshman next year.” Frank says as he comes into the room. He throws an arm over her shoulder. “She’s growing up, Maria.” He smiles. “It feels like yesterday I had to talk you out of wearing leopard tights with that pink dress to church.”
“None of you understand fashion.” Lisa sniffs as Maria and Frank laugh.
They meet Billy at the park, both kids almost miss him with their eagerness to ride the carousel.
“You aren’t too old for the merry-go-round?” Frankie teases her.
“Nobody’s too old for carousels.” Lisa scoffs.
“That’s right, Kiddos.” Maria agrees.
“Will you ride with me, Dad?” Frankie asks with a nervous smile.
“Of course, Junior.” Frank smiles back at him.
“That can’t be my niece and nephew I see over there!” Billy calls as he walks over. “They are way too grown up.”
“Uncle Billy!” The kids scramble to give him hugs.
“Ranger!” He smiles at Lisa.
“Captain!” He ruffles Frankie’s hair.
“You’re eating lunch with us, right Uncle Billy?” Frankie grins up at him.
“Of course!” Billy agrees.
Nobody sees the short glimpse of sadness in his eyes.
It happens very fast, but, to Lisa, it all feels like slow motion.
Gunshots sound.
“Get down!” Her dad barks.
She sees her mother and father cut down.
Frankie is lying so still, too still.
Her dad is crawling toward her mother now.
Lisa looks down and sees blood on her stomach.
She hadn’t even felt the impact.
Something slams into her head and everything fades into the dark.
"Lisa!"
Whispers.
“What do you mean she’s alive?”
They’re whispers.
“She was shot in the stomach and the fucking head!”
“They say the torso wound was through and through, didn’t hit anything important.”
“What about the fucking head wound?”
“The bullet curved, apparently.”
“What are the fucking chances of that?”
She fades back into the dark.
“We can make something of this, Sir.”
“Elaborate.”
“She can be a good tool of persuasion if her father ever turns his eyes toward our organization.”
“It could be good insurance.” The older man muses. “Especially with Project Insight so close to completion.”
“Its been over a year, it doesn’t look like this tool is any use.”
“Well, we could test the new serum on her?” The younger man offers. “At worst we gain good feedback, at best we have a new asset to shape.”
“Might as well get something out of this.” The older man agrees. “Start the trials.”
“She’s waking up!”
“That’s impossible.” The other voice gasps.
“The serums working.”
“Holy shit! Somebody put her back to sleep!”
Lisa is in a kitchen, bright and cheery.
It’s the kitchen from home, she realizes.
A woman is at the sink, humming as she does the dishes.
“Mom?” Lisa asks. “Mom, what’s going on?”
Her mother turns and, for a moment, Lisa sees a gaping hole where her face should be.
“Oh, Baby.” Mom sighs with a tear falling down her face. “You’ve got a long path to walk.”
Lisa wakes up.
For a second, she is blinded by the lights. She blinks her eyes and looks around to see a white room all around her, like a doctor’s office without all the posters about the dangers of smoking while pregnant.
She is naked except for a thin paper gown that does nothing to warm her.
She presses her hand against her forehead, trying to ease the ache where she feels a slight difference in the skin.
I was shot? She thinks. There were men in the park.
She makes to run a hand through her hair and notice its nearly shaved to her scalp.
“What?” She croaks out. "What's going on?"
A buzzing sound fills the room as the door in the corner opens.
A tall man walks in, his face horribly burned.
He grins.
“Welcome to HYDRA, Sweetheart.”
My family is dead. She realizes as a feeling of dread overtakes her.
She learns new depths to pain there, a pain she never thought somebody could feel. She stays covered in blood for a while, even if there are no wounds to see anymore.
She finds herself reciting the mantras they keep spoon-feeding her one day and nearly cries.
She doesn’t, because they’d beat her for showing weakness, but she hides her terror deep inside.
This is what brainwashing is. She thinks mournfully. It won’t be too much longer.
They’ve shown her videos of the chair, she knows they’re rebuilding one there. They’re going to take everything from her, even herself.
That’s when she hears the first shot.
Thirty minutes go by when Bucky Fucking Barnes burst into her “room” to find her propped up against the wall with shaking fists held out.
“If you want to live, Kid, I suggest you follow me out.” He says briskly.
Lisa only hesitates for a second.
She makes sure to pick up a discarded gun in the hallway before following him around the corner.