Part II
Steve Rogers was two when his mother first told him what his soulmate’s name would be, reading it off of his dominant arm because he was too young to spell. Kiara. He learned to draw it so that he could wear it on both of his arms, and invariably, his left arm would be scrubbed clean by his mother at the end of the day while she scolded him about drawing on himself. Because of that, he preferred his dad, who never bugged him about washing off his markers.
By six, Steve could barely remember what life was like without Bucky. His young self was thoroughly convinced that they were bonus soulmates, destined to be best friends for life. Bucky didn’t have a dad and Steve was willing to share his, but his mom disagreed and so Bucky still had to go home most days.
The other boys at school teased Steve for writing Kiara’s name when he was bored in classes because girls were gross. He didn’t listen to them because girls might be gross but honestly, Bucky could be kind of gross too, and he was a boy, so Steve thought it probably had nothing to do with whether a person was a boy or a girl.
There was no one in his class, Bucky’s, or any of their other friends’ classes named Kiara.
“You have to be patient,” Bucky scolded him, pretending to be really smart. Steve said pretending because Bucky still got lower scores on their reading tests. “Your soulmate is a promise so you have to be patient.”
“I don’t like being patient!” Steve loudly complained. He was smaller and shorter than Bucky, and his friend never let him forget it, so he made up for it by being louder. That way no one could forget he was there, too.
“I don’t like being patient,” Bucky mocked. Steve growled at him and punched his shoulder, so Bucky took him down to the floor.
Steve’s dad left when he was eight. He just walked on out him and his mother without a second look. It took him almost a week to stop asking when his dad was coming home.
He started to wish his dad had cared when he drew on himself. His mom hadn’t made him happy all the time or let him do whatever he wanted, but at least she was still there when he walked home from school with the other boys who lived in his apartment building.
Bucky was the one who first questioned why Steve and his mom didn’t have the same name as the man who had left them. He brought it up to his mother when he didn’t hear her cry as often and when she seemed able to spend more time with him without feeling so sad. At first she was angry and Steve ran out of the house and spent the rest of the night sleeping on Bucky’s bedroom floor. Then, when he went back home and she was calmer, they both apologized for upsetting the other and she explained that his father had died while she was pregnant with him during the Great War, and the man who had walked out had married her when he was too young to remember.
Steve sat at their table for a long time, frowning at chipping paint on old wood. “I don’t understand,” he said slowly, feeling more confused than he could ever remember. “Why would he leave his family?” Family was supposed to be forever.
His mother reached over and set her hand on his. He looked at her neatly manicured nails and her favorite pink color, and then at her hair which she had stopped curling since his not-father left. “A lot of men leave their families, Stevie,” she said, gingerly explaining. He could see wrinkles around her eyes that didn’t used to be there and it made him so angry that someone had made his mother so sad. “I wish I could tell you why, but there is never a good enough reason.”
He thought about the markers he drew on himself with, his stepfather’s nice shoes he had unintentionally ruined when he tried writing his mother’s name on them years ago. (He liked Kiara’s name on his own things; he thought his dad would like his wife’s name on his.) His dad had gotten so angry. It was worse than when he had ignored the markers on his arms or refused to go into Steve’s room when he was sick. He was sick a lot.
“Did he leave because of me, Ma?” He asked guiltily. He hadn’t been a great child, drawing and writing on his parents’ nice things and always taking up their time and money with needing medicine and attention.
“No,” she said quickly, squeezing his hand. “He left because he wasn’t ready to be part of a family.”
“How can he not be ready for family?” Steve argued. He never argued with his mother. He respected her more than anyone else in the world. Except she had apparently gone crazy because nothing she said made sense. “Soulmates are for forever. He can’t just not be ready.”
She was quiet for a moment before she let go of his hand and told him that his biological father was her soulmate, and his stepfather lost his first wife in a horrible accident. They had thought they loved each other and tried to be each other’s second chances, but after almost ten years, the man he’d called his dad gave up and left without even apologizing for wasting so much of her time.
That was the end of the conversation. He helped his mom to start dinner and listened to her sing with the radio when the music was on.
Bucky said once that he missed Steve’s dad because he’d been a good guy. It hadn’t even occurred to Steve until after he broke his best friend’s nose that Bucky didn’t even know that he had been too much of a coward to stay after making promises he wasn’t man enough to keep.
Thankfully, he didn’t hold a grudge. “Wow,” he said, sounding both nasally and impressed while holding a cold, wet rag underneath his nose. “For a tiny midget, you hit hard.”
“I’m gonna be bigger than you,” Steve muttered under his breath, crossing his fingers behind his back.
“Oh, yeah?” Bucky laughed loudly. Steve only let him get away with it because his nose was already broken.
“Just wait,” he glared.
As a young man, Steve had been looking forward to growing up and getting bigger. He was tired of being looked down on as the small, sickly kid all the time. Except growing up and getting bigger never really happened. His voice went down and he thought of women differently, but he only grew a few inches taller than he had been and he gained virtually no muscle, no matter how hard he worked. He got sick just as easily as before, and any progress he had made was lost when he had a fever and couldn’t keep anything in his stomach every few weeks.
It was embarrassing, really. Especially because all of his friends, not just Bucky, got more than a foot taller than him by the time they were adults. It made going out very difficult, especially with Bucky, who had been flirting with girls since they were thirteen. Now they flirted right back and sometimes Steve was left abandoned at whatever venue they had been visiting.
He hoped Kiara liked small guys. However, just because he was short didn’t mean he had to be a letdown. He was just as capable of being a man as anyone else and there was no better way to prove it than by serving his country like his real father had done. Steve just kept his head down and worked hard in school, waiting for his opportunity to arrive.
Steve was eighteen when his mother passed, with no plans for college and barely any money saved up. He had never felt more useless or helpless in his life.
It was thanks to Bucky that he kept himself together. The two of them made plans for his mother’s funeral and Bucky helped Steve to find a job and come up with the money to keep the apartment. Steve used to love the apartment where he grew up, but without his mom, it just felt haunted and lonely.
Less than a month after she died, a couple of burglars came by to steal her jewelry and nice clothes. They must have known she was dead because they didn’t expect anyone to still be in the apartment. Steve took one of them out with a bat that he and his mother had kept in the closet since his stepfather left them on their own. The other ran, and he called the police on the one who was knocked out on the floor.
After that, Bucky stayed over with Steve for a couple of nights, until they had safely locked everything valuable in a box at the bank or hidden it under a loose floorboard in the dining room.
Hitler’s rise to power started out like a slow car crash. Americans looked on with some empathetic concern for their European allies but assumed it wouldn’t go too far. And then suddenly he was in control of Germany, Germany was putting pressure on their geographical borders and political allies, and Jews, gypsies, blacks, Poles, gays, and everyone who wasn’t Hitler’s idea of the perfect race felt a little less safe.
The war wasn’t only because of Hitler. He was responsible for the Holocaust aspect, but there were issues with Japan that got America involved. Once they bombed Pearl Harbor, neutrality was off the table. America was a superpower! They had to show they had a spine. It didn’t help that Japan had been brutally going after their Chinese allies for years, and Sino-Japanese conflicts were at a violent high. At the same time, Germany was mounting attacks against England, one of America’s most important trading and political partners.
Steve didn’t understand all of the politics involved in the Asian and European sides of the debate, but he did know that the war had been a long time coming, and that it was going to grow to massive proportions. It was important that able-bodied men step up and serve for the sake of not just their country, but for the rights and lives of people all over the world who were being hurt in this global war.
He tried over and over to enlist. First he went to every recruiting station in Brooklyn, then in New York City; when that didn’t work, he tried crossing the Hudson and enlisting in New Jersey. That failed. Everyone he knew was preparing to go to training camps and earning the respect and love of their neighbors and country, except his body was too frail. Recruiters and military doctors looked at him and turned down his paperwork.
Bucky was drafted. He wore his tags and boasted about going to training with pride and honor, but Steve knew his military ID number. He knew the prefix was assigned to conscripted soldiers. He never confronted his friend about the lie because if Bucky needed to pretend he was going voluntarily, Steve didn’t want to take away the comfort. War was scary and Bucky didn’t have anything to prove the way that Steve did.
He started using fake paperwork. It wasn’t ethical but neither was staying at home because he might get a little sick in Germany. He was willing to fight and he deserved to have the chance. People were dying out there anyway; what was the harm if a Brooklyn orphan died too, as long as he got to do some good on the way out?
Faking the papers didn’t go quite as he had planned, but it led him down the path to meeting Lieutenant Carter and Dr. Erskine.
Steve thought for years that if he were bigger, taller, and stronger then it would make him braver, smarter, and better. He was wrong. He was bigger, taller, and stronger and still just as afraid as he had been before, just as naïve with women, and just as bad at flirting. The only thing he was better at was exercise. He could hold his breath longer than anyone he knew, could run faster and farther, could swim further and deeper, and could punch a heavyweight bag right off the hook.
Some days it felt awful to have lost the thing he could blame his shortcomings on. Now he had no excuses, nothing to blame but himself and his own mind. Other times it was a relief. Now that he knew it wasn’t his body that had made him so unhappy, Steve was free and able to work on the things that had.
He drew more. He liked to exercise but he liked using his hands to create a lot more than he liked using his fists to destroy.
Peggy helped teach him that the body wasn’t what made the man. He was tall and muscled and attractive, and she still put up with absolutely none of his bullshit. Whenever she gave him positive attention or even fondness, it was for something he had said or done that had absolutely nothing to do with the serum.
Sometimes – and he hated to think it, even to himself – he wished that Peggy was his soulmate. It wasn’t that he was tired of waiting, or even that he couldn’t imagine anyone better. It was that he was going through stressful experiences which both hurt and helped him grow as a person, and Peggy was the one who trusted him with responsibility over and over again. She found her soulmate in one of the American soldiers Steve rescued from a Nazi compound and he was happy they were still close friends.
He did hope that Kiara had some of the qualities he so admired in Peggy. Her intelligence, determination, and integrity were powerful forces to be reckoned with. They got her into a position of power in the military. For a woman in what people were calling World War II, that was no small feat.
Captain America would have been a great deal if he were a real captain instead of some actor on a stage, far, far away from the actual fight. It was easy to resent the people who put him there. After singlehandedly stopping a Nazi espionage agent, they immediately disregarded everything he could do and made him put on a play to sell bonds.
He was raising money for the military, so it was better than nothing. That didn’t make it what he wanted to be doing. It was a waste of a valuable resource and Dr. Erskine would be rolling in his grave. Every time he faux-punched the fake Hitler for the enjoyment of the children, he felt more and more like punching Senator Brandt.
Sure, he could lift a motorcycle over his head. Great. What was the point of doing it on a stage when he could be putting that strength to work for the cause?
Captain America’s persona felt more like a burden than a gift. Steve hated being reduced to a dancing monkey. It was about time he changed how he was perceived by the military. He started to have these more articulable feelings around the time that the Nazis captured Bucky’s unit in Italy.
Once he had rescued the full troop and marched them back to their base, Captain America got on the news again, this time as a war hero instead of as a theater advertisement. He was very proud of himself for what he achieved and even prouder of his unit for having each other’s backs and surviving enemy territory. He would have preferred his real name be used for his real accomplishments, but he couldn’t deny that Captain America sounded good and sent a very clear message.
Bucky, Steve, and some other guys who had been up close and personal with Nazi captors shared their information with Peggy, Brandt, Stark, and other personnel. They uncovered Hydra and started planning operations to take them down. Finally, a real mission. Steve recruited a small group of guys to be his partners in a small, secretive unit they called the Howling Commandos and they would work with units in whatever area they were sent to in mounting invasions and attacks on Hydra facilities.
Captain America became a meaningful role that Steve was honored to call his own.
Bucky died without ever having met his soulmate. Steve started to pay more attention to the names of girls he met in places where Bucky might have gone with him. He waited to find someone named Natasha but it hadn’t happened yet.
Steve was more upset about Bucky’s death because it took his best friend away than because it deprived two people of an opportunity to meet their matches. Maybe that was selfish of him.
As his plane torpedoed closer and closer to the freezing cold ocean water, Steve thought about his father and his best friend, his own real-life heroes who had died fighting for his freedom. He was sorry that the war was taking him away from Kiara, but he couldn’t ever regret the decisions that led him to this point.
Getting out of the ice was a miracle, a blessing, and a curse all at once.
Raised into a religious family, Steve believed that something so incredible as his survival in ice for more than half a century earned the title of a miracle. When he wondered why he wasn’t allowed to rest in peace after saving the world as he knew it, he made himself remember this. He lived through a fatal crash into the ocean because he was needed in another time.
Having known many veterans of the Great War – which Steve now had to call World War I – as a youth, he knew that something many veterans struggled with was wanting to know what their suffering and trauma was worth, how it played out in the end. Most historical reports indicated the defeat of Red Skull and Hydra as a crucial point in the war; not vital enough to be the sole reason the Allies won, but notably critical as it took away one of Nazi Germany’s most promising threats.
Steve didn’t have to guess or pray for the outcome because he could see it for himself. The Internet and large Brooklyn libraries helped him to investigate what had happened since he went in the ice, and every single day he continued to live was a testament to the rapid change the world had gone through.
It was incredible to see the strides people had taken. Black folk were granted the same rights as whites; segregation and Jim Crow were very much illegal. Homosexuality, bisexuality, and what seemed like countless other orientations were legally protected. Steve still remembered when being accused of being a faggot (which he had very, very quickly learned was not acceptable to say ever) could actually threaten someone’s life. Women were in positions of political, social, and economic power that Steve had only been able to imagine. Gone were Nazism and fascism from Europe. Gone were the imperialist powers who managed to survive on shaky feet through World War I. NGOs and intergovernmental organizations actively investigated and condemned violations of human rights. And even these massive progressions through complicated arenas only scraped the tip of the iceberg.
And yet, the future becoming his present didn’t always feel like a miracle or a blessing. Sometimes it felt like a punishment for a crime he hadn’t known he committed.
He hadn’t had family since his mother passed (bless her strong soul), but he had still had friends. Now they were all gone. He was still seriously grieving for Bucky; he hadn’t been emotionally prepared to handle suddenly losing almost everyone he had ever known.
Peggy was still alive. That was something. She lived in a retirement home where she was cared for by kind people who showed her the respect she deserved. Steve got to have the dance he asked for, but he was very painfully aware that physically dancing was only the surface of the promise he had made. Everything else – the memories and potential relationship – had been lost to time.
His soulmate’s name was as present as ever and that was definitely cruel. He discovered tattoo cream was affordable and accessible and started using it to cover up Kiara’s name. It was 2011. Steve was convinced that his chance with his soulmate was gone the moment his plane sank through the water. Seeing the reminder every day was a twisted form of exquisite torture. He had managed to honor his promise to not be a coward like his stepfather while simultaneously breaking his oath to be a better man for Kiara. He couldn’t be any kind of man for a woman he never met.
There could only be so many alien soldiers, but the speed of their arrival wasn’t decreasing. The Avengers had quickly realized that they couldn’t rely on fighting off the influx, and divided into teams to mitigate damage and death.
Steve and Natasha paired up to evacuate the buildings on a city block, with the help of Tony over the communicators liaising with the NYPD. The soldier and the spy brought civilians out of facilities and officers ensured that they made it past the police barricades, where they were being transported to other parts of the city.
Natasha entered a coffee shop ahead of Steve. Her eyes caught everything, so Steve watched their back. The bell above the door chimed loudly in the otherwise quiet café, and in response, a child started to scream from the stock room behind the service counter. Natasha looked at Steve and he gestured for her to investigate while he checked around the corner of the dining area.
He cleared the rest of the café in less than a minute while Natasha stood half inside the stock room. He could see one of her feet and her elbow through the doorway. After a pause, she leaned out.
“We’ve got civilians back here, Captain!” She announced.
Steve pushed open the swinging, waist-high door to get behind the counter and made for Natasha. The spy moved further into the stockroom to collect more of the hiding citizens while Steve reached for the nearest person, a young woman who was crouching against the wall.
“Come with me, ma’am. We’re evacuating this part of the city.” he said in his captain voice. It was just a bit lower than his real voice. Especially in this strange age of Internet and smartphones, he wanted to differentiate between Steve Rogers and Captain America.
The woman took his hand while looking at him with confusion and awe. He was used to that reaction by now, especially in his super soldier gear. He helped pull her to her feet and put his hand behind her, near but not touching her back, and called to his partner while ushering the civilian out.
“Natasha, I’m sending Barton in here,” Steve called. “He can help get people out the perimeter.”
He brought his cargo out through the swinging door. “What’s going on?” She asked, bewildered, as he reached the front doors of the café and pulled them open again.
Before he could answer, Clint was there, a few arrows shorter than last time Steve had seen him. Communicating with his team was more important than answering her question, but before he could even start, the agent was reaching for the woman’s other side and taking her by the arm.
“This one of them?” Barton didn’t wait for confirmation before continuing, “I got her. Go get the others. Stark says he can’t hold them off much longer.”
Steve nodded and let go of his latest rescue. Barton would see her to safety; he had to help Natasha empty out the café and finish clearing the street.
He caught himself wondering if Natasha Romanoff had anything to do with the Natasha Bucky said was on his arm. He wished he’d asked his best friend for his soulmate’s last name. And then he wished he could just stop thinking about soulmates altogether. He and Bucky, and their soulmates, were from a time long past.
When Tony told Steve there was someone there to see him in Pepper’s waiting room, he didn’t know what to expect. Iron Man’s refusal to tell him who it was or why they were visiting raised some red flags and he almost refused. It smacked of a practical joke.
“You’re not inspiring much confidence,” Steve informed Tony when the billionaire evasively gave another very vague answer.
“Look.” The self-proclaimed superhero turned to Steve and put his hands out, showing that he had nothing up his sleeve literally and figuratively. “The lady’s a personal friend who wants to meet you. Her name’s Kiara, she has your name on her arm, I thought you might want some privacy. But, since you’re so opposed, JARVIS, please direct Kiara to the elevator-“
“No!” Steve yelled to contradict, almost dropping the mug he had been carrying. Tony raised his eyebrows in a way that made it perfectly clear that he was going to bring up Steve’s shout later on. “I mean, no. I’ll see her.”
Steve put his mug down right on the counter and left it there. Trusting Tony was usually a gamble, but not with this. Or maybe it was, but this wasn’t worth assuming the worst.
“You’re welcome,” Tony dryly said to his back while Steve waited for the elevator.
Pepper’s office was several floors below the sections of the tower that the Avengers had taken over as a living space. The ride down was simultaneously way too slow and way too fast. Elevators in Steve’s time would have taken a lot longer, but each floor closer he came was another floor closer to a woman to whom he had no idea what he was going to say.
He went to the door and stopped for a moment, looking at Virginia Potts’ name on the plaque. The doors were made of glass but covered by closed blinds on the inside. Steve gave himself just a minute to collect himself. Either a fanatic had found a photo he didn’t know existed that showed his arm, or his soulmate was on the other side of the door. It was scary – a kind of scary he hadn’t felt since before he took the serum: the fear of rejection.
No matter what kind of fear it was, there was no excuse for stepping away. He wasn’t going to be a coward like his stepfather. He wasn’t going to make the mistake of wasting a minute he could have creating his relationship with Kiara. He had already learned from his mother that those bonds were precious but could be lost far too easily.
Steve opened the door.
The woman inside had been sitting on Pepper’s black leather couch. She jumped up when he entered. On her right arm, her sleeve was still pulled up to show his name. His real name, not “Captain America”.
She looked so nervous, and so beautiful. He had seen her before, but only now did he stop to actually look. Tall, but shorter than him (everyone was shorter than him, though). Long hair, a sweet face, kind-looking eyes. She bit her lower lip between white teeth and held her hands up in front of her chest, fingers laced and curled unsurely. Kiara was looking at him and had moved her eyes back to his face, reading the expressions he didn’t bother trying to hide. He shouldn’t have to hide them from her.
One of them needed to say something. “So you were-“
“How are you-“ Kiara started to say at the same time. He cut himself off so she could continue, but she just looked down to her feet while her cheeks and ears turned red. He laughed a little bit. Was this a meet-cute? “Go ahead,” she invited, gesturing.
Steve tentatively went ahead with what he had been planning to say. “So you were at the café,” he started, taking a step closer. Kiara did the same, as if magnetized, until they were somewhere between the door and the couch. “I’m sure you have questions…” He reached up to the back of his neck and rubbed, embarrassed. What an obvious thing to say. “I don’t really know where to begin answering them,” he warned her honestly. “But I’m so glad I’ve finally met you, Kia.”
She had tilted her head back to look up to his eyes. “Kia?” She asked, slowly blinking and looking puzzled.
“Sorry,” he said quickly, backtracking. It had completely slipped his mind that he shouldn’t use a nickname for a woman he was only just meeting. “I, uh – well, I’ve been looking at your name every night for as long as I can remember, and I – I guess I just felt like I already knew you.”
Instead of being offended or unsettled, Kiara smiled at him. He felt like he was in the 1940s again, butterflies circling in his stomach in front of some beautiful lady he had no chance with. Now he knew that surviving the ice was a miracle and a blessing. His soulmate was a woman of the future he had somehow earned the chance to meet, despite all odds of impossibility.
“No one’s called me Kia since elementary school. It’s a car thing, so the teasing got a little out of hand,” she explained, and turned a little bit pink as she ended her tangent. “It’s okay, though,” she assured him. “I like it. And I’m really happy that you’re here.”
Steve beamed at her brightly. He was glad she was happy, because he couldn’t even imagine walking away.