Latent Truths - Chapter 1 - Indygodusk

Stevie Rogers came of age during the great depression as a poor, Irish immigrant's kid with bad health and would not be shamed for it. Fighting became a way of life in Brooklyn. Being female on top of it all just meant she had to fight smart and dirty.

Her father had died standing up for what was right in WWI. Her mother had dedicated her life to helping others as a nurse. Stevie couldn't help but try to live up to their examples of honor and service. Few things made her as mad as injustice and bullying and in her mind, there was no justification for apathy or cruelty.

Lots of people called her tomboy, hellion, or troublemaker for all the fighting she got up to—her best friend Bucky calling her a punk didn't count, because his eyes smiled when he said it—but a few people also called her helpful, kind, and fearless, and those were the opinions that counted. Although the parish Priest's sighs got louder and longer each time she went to confession, and the other girls avoided her as if she might be contagious, Stevie had Bucky Barnes for a best friend and a mother who loved her daughter's heart and that was more than good enough. When her knuckles and nose were bloody more often than not as the 1920s turned into the 1930s, when her hospital stays for pneumonia got longer and longer each winter, and when her body failed to develop curves like all the other girls, well, that was simply Stevie's lot in life and not worth crying about. Someone else always had it worse.

Personally, she considered herself brave, stoic, and fierce. If she wanted to do something, she wouldn't give up until she'd found a way. Unfortunately, the fragile reflection in the mirror never matched that perception; well, fragile except for her unfortunately large nose and square jaw. As other girls in the neighborhood became either sturdy or svelte, Stevie merely lost all baby fat and turned into a wire coat hanger. People either overlooked her or looked at her with pity and distaste. Very few people actually saw her for who she really was, even rarer were the people who liked what they saw.

Nevertheless, Stevie refused to let anything hold her back from living life on her terms. Better bull-headed than rabbit-hearted. She refused to passively accept things that were wrong or unfair. Even only half-grown, she knew better.

Speaking of which—"Hey Buck, do you think only boys should get to be Sentinel Captains and King of the Slide?" Talking split the scab on her lip again, dribbling a fresh trickle of blood down her chin. Her left eye also felt achy, but at least she could still see out of it, so the swelling couldn't be too bad. If Stevie pulled her hair over her that side of her face when her Ma came home, she might not even notice the signs of fighting.

Bucky plopped down on the bench facing her with a damp cloth in one hand. "I dunno, why? Is that the stupid thing you were fighting about today?" He frowned and pressed the cloth hard against her lip to stop the bleeding.

"Ouch! And it wasn't stupid," she defended in a muffled voice. "Are you saying I'm not allowed to be a hero just because I'm a girl?"

"No, of course not," Bucky sighed, lifting the cloth away, folding it, and wiping off the blood crusting her chin. "You're the most heroic person I know, Stevie. If anyone in Brooklyn was worthy to be a Sentinel Captain like in the comics, it'd be you, but you don't have to prove it all the time by getting your face bashed in."

"That's not what happened," she said, mollified by his answer and tipping her head back to look at the ceiling so he could clean the blood off her neck that she always missed. "Besides, I just meant on the playground. Everyone knows girls never turn into Sentinels with all five enhanced senses. That only happens in story books. I heard that sometimes a girl comes Online as a Guide, able to sense emotions and bond with a Sentinel to help level his senses and keep him from zoning out or getting sick from sensing too much in his environment, but even that's really rare. Nobody knows why, but there aren't many Sentinels or Guides around anymore at all, and those that do show up usually stay latent with only occasional flickers of talent and never come fully Online. The government's so desperate they draft anyone with even a flicker of a gift for service."

"There, done," Bucky grunted, sitting back and tossing the bloody rag over his shoulder to land with perfect aim in the kitchen sink. "And that's more information on Sentinels than we ever learned in class or from the comics. Where'd you even hear all that?"

"Oh, I stayed after class one day and asked a few more questions, but that's all I got out of the teacher. Well, except for how the comics supposedly got it right: that isolation, danger, and pain can activate a latent Sentinel's senses and turn him Online, but that the same will make a latent Guide go dormant and even destroy their chance to ever come Online or bond with a Sentinel. The Sentinel community is really secretive about how their senses work, maybe to keep people from using their weaknesses against them."

"Or from realizing they're lying about half of what they can do," Bucky snorted, pulling out a deck of cards from his back pocket and dealing the two of them hands. "But getting back to your ugly mug, you never said who hit you," he prompted with a fake casualness that utterly failed to hide the vindictive look in his cold blue eyes.

"No I didn't," Stevie said mulishly.

Bucky skewered her with a sharp look. "This talk of Sentinels hasn't distracted me, Stevie. I thought you were finally going back to work today minding Mr. Babcock's front counter after being out sick last week. So what happened?"

Scowling, Stevie discarded and drew two more cards. "He's got a new counter girl already and refuses to take me back. I only got him to give me my back pay because Father McLaughlan walked in while we were arguing. There're too many people looking for work in this town and not enough jobs to go around."

"Well, he's an idiot then," Bucky said loyally, discarding three cards from his own hand. "You were the best counter girl he ever had."

"Darn right I was!"

"So how did this lead to your fat lip?" Bucky circled back, refusing to be distracted.

"Fine," she sighed with aggravation. "I had time to kill until you got done with your shift, so I made friend with this cool looking spotted dog with round ears and a short muzzle."

Bucky tsked, "You know feeding strays is a bad idea."

"I'll remember that next time you're hungry," she mocked, placing a card on the table. "Anyways, me and the spotted dog went walking by the park and I saw big Mike and his friends playing Sentinel Captain. I wasn't going to go in, but then little Susie Chambers, the one who broke all the running records at school even though she's only ten," she waited for Bucky's nod of recognition before continuing. "She went over and asked if they wanted to play King of the Slide and do you know what they said?"

Lowering his cards, Bucky rolled his eyes, "I'm guessing something stupid that made you mad?"

"Darn right it made me mad," Stevie cried. "Mike stopped the game of Sentinel Captain and told everyone they were going to play King of the Slide instead, but when Susie tried to join in, he pushed her down and told her she wasn't welcome, that it didn't matter if she was the fastest kid in school, because girls aren't good for nothin' but making food and cleaning up and tending babies! He said only boys got to be Sentinel Captains and King of the Slide, that girls weren't good enough."

"So you hit him for being a jerk and he hit you back?" Bucky asked, playing his cards.

Stevie grinned, reopening her split lip with a burst of copper on her tongue. "Nothing so simple. I'm a strategist. I waited for him to get to the top of the slide ladder and yell, 'Boys rule and girls drool!' Then I ran underneath and yanked his feet off the rungs. He fell face first down the slide and landed with his butt in the air. When he sat up, Susie bounced a pinecone off his forehead and he fell over again. Everyone laughed. It was great! But I don't run as fast as Susie, so he caught me on my way over here and roughed me up some. I got in a few more good hits though. The spotted dog even sat with me until I caught my breath."

Bucky frowned. "Do you need one of your asthma cigarettes or a shot?"

"Nah, I'm fine."

Tilting his head to the side, Bucky ran his eyes critically over her face. "Least it's not too bad this time. The swelling by your eye is already going down, though it's going to bruise. The split lip will take a few days."

"Barely stings," Stevie boasted. At least, it had when Bucky was touching her, though that was more because he had to sit close enough that she could get lost in his familiar scent and catalogue the unique shapes of his freckles and inside his irises, could sometimes see the strange polygons that hid in his skin if she focused hard enough, could practically feel the vibration of his heartbeat and organs though his skin, but it would sound too weird to say those secrets out loud.

Everything was always better when Bucky was around, but you couldn't just flat out say it like that or it would be weird.

Stevie was very careful to never let their friendship get weird. They were forever friends and being opposite sexes wasn't going to change that. Bucky had already been girl crazy for years and she didn't want any of that crazy to splash over onto her. Stevie might secretly like him like him, but if things turned romantic, it would inevitably fall apart. Stevie couldn't compete with all the gorgeous girls out there. Bucky didn't see her like that anyways. Best friends with Bucky was loads better than being an ex and not having Bucky at all. Stevie had made up her mind and would not be swayed.

Bucky didn't seem to notice her preoccupation, pursing his lips, leaning back, and giving her face another once-over. "Yeah, the eye and lip will be okay, but you should probably have someone look at how ginormous your nose is—oh, wait, that's its normal size. Never mind, you're stuck with it."

"Stuck with a jerk like you, you mean," Stevie grumbled, sticking out her tongue. Her lip stung again, but she'd had worse injuries. "And it was totally worth it. You know I hate bullies." Looking down, she rearranged her winning card hand and laid it flat on the table with a smirk.

Losing the card game with equanimity, Bucky merely sighed and dealt them both another hand. "How about next time we go to the park, I'll let you be Sentinel Captain Queen Rogers of the Slide."

"Let? Ha! I will win that title fair and square." Dropping her cards, Stevie lunged at Bucky and tacked him to the floor. Since he wasn't expecting it, she managed to get him in a headlock.

"You punk!" he wheezed in outrage.

"Say Uncle!" Stevie crowed.

"Never!" Wiggling like a worm, Bucky got loose and turned the tables, grabbing Stevie around the neck and yanking her down under his arm. "Who's the King now?" he panted, grinding his knuckles on the top of her head and messing up her hair. "James Buchanan 'Bucky' Barnes, that's who!"

"In your dreams!" Stevie cried, wrenching and wiggling until she got away with a triumphant grin and wheezing lungs.

A few years later—after Stevie got fired from job after demeaning job for either getting too sick or fighting with a customer, and the art jobs she wanted wouldn't even let her interview because she was a girl and not cute enough to boot; after her vision got blurry and her heart murmur got worse, and exercising too hard could cause either an asthma attack and possible suffocation or her already high blood pressure to skyrocket and then abruptly drop, leading to vomiting and unconsciousness; after her ma's hours got cut at the hospital and money became even tighter so they couldn't afford her asthma shots or even the cigarettes anymore and just breathing while sitting still became a constant battle; after the doctor told her she'd probably not live to thirty, that her irregular periods were a sign she was unlikely to ever get pregnant, and that if she did get pregnant, both she and the babe would die in the attempt; after she found out Bucky was almost killing himself not sleeping so he could take shady midnight jobs from gangsters after twelve hour days at the docks to get the extra money needed to buy Stevie the packs of asthma cigarettes and fresh fruit that started "mysteriously" showing up in her room (as if it could be anyone but him)—that's when Stevie first became Steve.

Stephanie "Stevie" Grania Rogers had too many things stacked against her to win at life. She was drowning. Maybe a "Steve" could do better at keeping his head above the water, do better at hitting that home run. After all, if you're losing the fight before even stepping up to bat, change the rules to give yourself better odds. She put away her childish dreams of female Sentinel Captains, of ever having her reflection match her inner self, or of one day marrying and having a family with a man (more specifically with Bucky, which was a stupid dream anyways, because all the girls he charmed but never stayed with just proved that Bucky was a horrible boyfriend and would probably be an awful husband, so she should just keep him as a best friend, because he was perfectly wonderful at that).

Stevie cut her hair and put on Bucky's outgrown clothes. Stealing his second-best tie and a glob of Brylcreem to slick down her hair, Steve threw back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and looked in the mirror, finding a rail-thin, stubborn-faced young man staring back at her. Well then. When she got a job drawing advertisement posters at the first agency "Steve" applied for, one "Stevie" had been turned away from twice, she knew she'd made the right decision to become a he.

Ma cried about it, but once Steve laid out her arguments, she didn't try to change Steve's mind. She just got quiet and sad and gave Steve a better haircut. Bucky was weird about it at first, but in the end he came around too. Unfortunately, that meant he ramped up his teasing to show support. When the Parish Priest got transferred out and forgot to inform his replacement about Stevie, the last big impediment was gone. Pretty soon everyone seemed to forget Steve had ever been a girl in the first place.

When Steve's Ma died of TB and things got really dark, Bucky found a cheap room for two fellas to share and took care of everything. He curtained off Stevie's bed and a private area for her to bathe in next to the stove. To be honest, Bucky cared a lot more for Steve's modesty and reputation than she did.

The apartment was only a single room with a fire escape and a bathroom in the hall they shared with two other families. They could only afford it by paying for rent with almost all of Bucky's dockyard wages. Food and everything else came from Steve's art commissions.

That meant that when illness kept Steve from working, food got scarce. When Bucky began getting suspiciously full after only a few bites, leaving Steve the lion's share, and lost weight he couldn't afford as a dock laborer, Steve threw her pride out the window and went begging for extra paid work from her coworkers. One of them put her in contact with the seedier side of the art industry, which is how she came to start drawing pinup girls. As a bonus, it paid better than store ads and quickly restocked the pantry. Steve avoided nudes out of embarrassment and fear of what her Ma would think up in heaven, keeping to tasteful but titillating sketches a fella could hang up in a work locker.

Bucky's face turned purple when he first found out about the pinups, but after a few days of blushing every time he saw her sketching, he got over it. Pretty soon Steve missed the blushing. Instead, he started badgering her to see the self-portraits she was selling and teasing about getting a large mirror for the wall by her bed to get the anatomy right.

Bucky was such an idiot.

As if anyone would want to see, much less pay money for, a picture of Stevie's small breasts and stick legs. Annoyed and offended, Steve stubbornly refused to let him see any of her pinup sketches. It made her unhappy to think of him getting excited over some fantasy girl she'd created, especially when those girls always looked the exact opposite of Steve herself.

Plus, as time went on, she especially didn't want Bucky to find out that her most popular sketches were of a sexy, buxom brunette with Bucky's plump lips, dimpled chin, and blue eyes. Jamie the pin up girl was a best seller and had a whole series. Steve's editor was half in love with Jamie and kept angling for an introduction, certain she was a real girl. Steve was half in love with her creation herself, which was easier than being all in love with the real Bucky, so she didn't fight it too hard.