Greed smelled like sunshine.
On the way home from chapel, Steve stood on a balmy hillside overlooking Central Park. Dandy Lions, milk weed, and fastidious white clover puffs combed the grass. He stooped down and plucked a Dandy Lion from the warm, weather wet earth. It smelled like sunshine.
"Look, Mama," he exclaimed, holding the tiny thing toward her. "Look at the flower!"
Sarah, draped in her Sunday best and white lace gloves, shook her head as she adjusted her hat. "Steven, sweetie, that's just a weed."
"What's a weed?"
"A weed is a greedy plant that doesn't belong."
"Why? Why don't you like them?"
"Weeds grow where they aren't supposed to, sweetheart. They're a nuisance because they take away nutrients from the other true plants, which can wither as a result."
"It looks like a flower to me."
"Look closer." Her voice trailed away, lilting on an odd, disturbing note.
Steve squinted at the bud. He watched the fluffy yellow flower shrink between his fingers. With a suspicious blink, he realized his palms and fingers had begun to thicken and stretch. His entire body grew.
The flower darkened, becoming brittle and dry, and crumbled in his grasp. A gust of wind swept the flakes of dust off his fingers. Steve, lifting his gaze, followed the flurry of ash and froze. The bleak horizon sat clogged with smog belched from smoke stacks jutting out of skeletal, slanted buildings. Over the sun loomed a star-hearted shield, eclipsing its light. Barren tree branches raped with flames reached in vain for the soot stained sky. He recognized nothing!
The surrounding hillside, its grass long gone, lay splashed in red. Where patches of clover had blossomed lay bodies, travel packs, guns, and what scattered, fleshy bits remained after grenade explosions. Outfitted for battle, Captain America staggered to his feet.
Pain lanced through his leg.
He looked down to find a wrought iron stake impaling his thigh. He followed the chain smelted to its end to an enormous iron cross embedded in a mound of corpses... awash in flies. Maggots writhed in lifeless, gaping mouths. Yellowing bones protruded from knees and sides. Sick with horror, he went to yank free. But his red gloved his hands didn't grip like leather.
Look closer, interrupted a voice barely louder than the swelling BUZZ.
Because the red was hot, viscus blood clear up to his elbows.
He found himself in a stark, blue bathed room. While his breath hung as white plumes in the frigid air, human bodies hung from hooks on the ceiling. He held a cleaver in his left hand. Recoiling, Steve let it clatter to the floor. He found his chest cavity gaping open, ribs like fingers beckoning the cold air inside. He slipped. He fell.
Suddenly submerged in a pool of warm red, Steve searched wildly around him. The liquid filled his lungs and his longings. The iron cross impaled through his thigh drifted into the abysmal blackness below him. It pulled him down with it.
Two hands cupped his face. He stared into Peggy's eyes. She kissed him as he sank. He tried to talk, to warn, to scream.
But the screaming he heard wasn't his. And he couldn't see anymore.
Look closer.
Some poor creature howled—a lonely, desperate cry in the murky distance.
Finding solid ground, Steve stood before a throne in a sanctum dripping with shadow. Like living phantoms, the shadows fled. The room suddenly shone white as milk. He had to squint against the brightness.
More iron stakes jutted out from the walls, ceiling, and sprawling surface of the floor. Bodies like pieces of paper stacked on letter spikes lined the stakes. Somehow, they formed a spiny throne. A lithe, sallow figure draped in white lounged there. Where its feet should have been snaked six sickly tentacles.
Eyeless, it smiled, beguiling and loving, but with teeth like black nails. In its left hand, it held Steve's steadily beating heart. Its right hung extended toward Steve. It seductively curled its fingers, fingernails haggard and jagged, beckoning him.
Steve took a shaken step back.
All heads adorning the skewered corpses snapped up, some cracking their vertebrae to spin and cant in his direction, their sunlit yellow eyes fused with him. Shadows poured back into the room. As a unit, the bodies surged toward him.
Steve found himself trapped in a thick second skin sewn together and carrying the stench of death, rotten and filthy in every direction. He dug, his fingertips scrapping through muscle, tendons, and tissues, searching for a way out. Slippery, stretching sinew slid between his fingers. Grew taut. Tore.
The sinew solidified. The scent of clean linens, gun powder, and cologne filled his nose. He knew the lips he kissed by the scruff scratching at his chin. A metal hand wandered over his side.
Safety and certainty swaddled him. Just a bad dream...
Steve wrapped his arms around James, fingertips reading familiar lines, until he found something he didn't recognize. Coarse. Drawn. Twine.
Look closer.
The sickly sweet of sunshine greed crept into his nostrils. Steve's eyes snapped open, met with Buck's cold, lifeless, eye-blacked gaze.
The eyeless royal figure, now gargantuan, loomed above them both, the strings suspending James' body tied around his twig-like fingers. It smiled, mouth filled with rusty black nails, as it puppeted Buck's body... and took a bite from Steve's heart.
Greed smelled like sunshine.
And he was the weed.
See?
Steve lurched awake with a wail, drenched in sweat and shivering.