Becoming Captain America

Disclaimer: Marvel owns Captain America, not me.

"So what really happened?"

"Huh?" Bucky's question had come out of nowhere, startling Steve out of his reverie. He'd been staring into their campfire, thinking of Peggy—Agent Carter. Wondering if she and Stark had made it back to base camp. And if they'd really stopped in Switzerland to…fondue, whatever that meant. He hadn't even heard Bucky approach.

"C'mon Steve, you can't expect me to buy that crackpot story you fed me at the HYDRA prison camp yesterday. Guys don't just join the army and grow a foot. Or put on a hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle in less than six months. Or mysteriously no longer have asthma. So let's hear it, my friend."

Steve hesitated, thinking of his promises of secrecy about the project that had turned him into Captain America.

Bucky clearly sensed his best friend was on the verge of clamming up. "Steve, it's me. When did we not tell each other everything?"

So Steve explained, about meeting Erskine at the recruiting station after Bucky left with the girls, about boot camp, and about being chosen for the project. He couldn't go into much detail about the science that had brought about the changes in him; not a lot of it had been explained short of Erskine inventing a serum that boosted a man's capabilities to their maximum capacity. Not that Bucky would be able to understand even if Steve could explain. Science wasn't Bucky's thing, either. Stumbling over that part, Steve continued on with the underground bunker in Brooklyn where the procedure had been performed.

"Wow," Bucky chuckled. "All those times I was saving your ass in those back alleys we were running around over a secret military installation. Where else does the government have places like that hidden, I wonder?"

"I could probably find out," Steve offered. "Senator Brandt—"

"I was kidding, Steve. Kidding. I don't really want to know. Did this formula suck away your sense of humor, too? Oh, right, you never had one."

Steve chuckled. Same old Bucky. And Bucky wanted reassurance that it was indeed the same old Steve inside this tall, musclebound model. Steve had to remember that while he himself had now had months to get used to his new body, Bucky was seeing him for the first time. It must be a lot to take in.

Clearing his throat, Steve continued the story. He explained the procedure.

Bucky's eyes went big when he got to the part about being bombarded with Vita-Rays. "I think I asked you before, but I don't really remember what you said. I was kinda out of it. Did it hurt?"

"Some." Steve shrugged a little. The Rays themselves hadn't been too painful—it had felt like hot electric lightbulbs being rubbed all up and down his body, fast. Fleeting pain, but bearable. The real agony had been within. He had thought his skin was tearing apart, no longer large enough to hold everything in. He could literally feel all his bones lengthening and strengthening. Feel every single muscle expanding to the maximum a human body could support. Years of pumping iron piled into less than sixty seconds. Pain like that, he couldn't help screaming. But he'd insisted on continuing, forcing himself to just keep breathing until it was all over.

And he'd staggered out of the Vita-Ray chamber into a new world.

"What was it like once the procedure thing was done?" Bucky asked, as if reading his thoughts.

"Strange," Steve admitted. "Peoples' faces were further away. The ceiling was closer. It was…disorienting, to put it mildly. Agent Carter asked how I felt, and I said the first thing that came into my head: "Taller.""

Bucky snickered. "Sounds like you. So how great was it, suddenly being huge and superstrong?"

"I didn't really notice at first."

"What? You turn into pure muscle and you don't go punch something right away just to see how it feels? Are you nuts?"

"I had other things on my mind." He explained the HYDRA agent blowing up the lab and shooting Erskine. "Erskine had been really nice to me. He believed in me when all anyone else saw was a ninety-pound asthmatic barely worth his feed. And then he was dead. The guy that killed him was getting away. I went after him." It was what Steve Rogers the ninety-pound asthmatic would have done, and both Steve and Bucky knew it. He didn't have to explain that part.

"So there I was barefoot in the streets of Brooklyn—"

"Wait. You were barefoot? What happened to your shoes?"

"I didn't wear them during the procedure. What was the point? I would have grown right out of them. And afterwards, I had time to put on a shirt. That was it before the lab started blowing up. I could barely walk in a straight line at first, but things got clearer the more time went by. I kept Agent Carter from being run over by the HYDRA guy in a taxi. The next thing I knew, I was sprinting down the street through traffic after him."

"You are nuts," said Bucky.

"That was when it really started to hit me. The changes, I mean. You know I'd never been able to run more than a few steps in my life without wheezing. But it seemed like I blinked and I was at the end of the street. It was amazing. Like riding a jet engine I had complete control over. I just had to think about it, and my body would do it. If I wanted to catch up to a speeding car, it was done. If I wanted to leap a six-foot fence, over I went. If I wanted to pick up a whole car door, swim after a submarine in the Hudson, smash through a window with one fist, I could do it all. Bucky, I can lift a motorcycle with three dames sitting on it over my head without breaking a sweat."

Bucky tried to picture this and clearly failed. "I'll believe that when I see it. Nobody's that strong."

"It's true," Steve insisted. "I've done it a bunch of times."

"Why—"

"That's later in the story, though. I'll get to it."

"Oh right. You were chasing some crazed Nazi—"

"HYDRA."

"HYDRA, right. There's a difference, you told me. You were chasing some HYDRA goon barefoot down a street in Brooklyn because he killed the guy who made you superstrong. Didja catch him?"

"Sort of. I caught him before he got away, but he broke off a tooth and bit it. Died foaming at the mouth right in front of me. They told me later he had a little thing of cyanide hidden in that tooth."

"Cyanide, huh?" This was more to himself than a question aimed at Steve. Both of them stared at the campfire contemplatively for a moment. "So this superstrong stuff is that serious?"

"Yeah." Another pause. "I wasn't supposed to tell anybody. It's dangerous to know. But you're the only once besides the military higher-ups who knew me before, so—"

"Thanks for putting me in danger."

"Hey, you asked."

"Kidding again, Steve. I appreciate you telling me when you weren't supposed to. I feel better knowing. And as far as danger, we're in the middle of a war in enemy territory. What about that is safe?"

"Not much."

Again, a silence. Steve listened to the sounds of animals moving around in the nighttime forest. He tried to pick out anything unusual that might indicate enemies were sneaking up on them, but being a city kid he'd never spent much time in the woods growing up. To him it all just sounded like things rustling around in the leaves. Something else he had to learn if he were ever allowed in the field again after his insubordination. For now he'd have to rely on the Allied combat veterans camping around them to be alert to any real danger.

"So what was it really like once all the excitement from chasing the HYDRA guy died down?" Bucky asked after awhile. He continued to stare lazily into the fire as he said it.

"Weird," Steve answered. "Really weird. I hadn't really put much into imagining what it would be like beforehand. I was so nervous about the procedure itself, and that's what everyone around me was focused on, too, so I didn't think about afterwards. Besides, the only one who could really tell me what to expect is Schmidt. Even Erskine wasn't sure, since he wasn't around when Schmidt dosed himself with the serum."

"Schmidt—oh, you mean that guy who tore his face off at the camp yesterday? He took this serum, too?" He glanced at Steve in alarm. "Don't tell me your face really is fake. I meant that as a joke. Dammit, Steve—"

"No, no. This is my face," Steve said, pinching his chin and pulling the skin a little to prove it. "Erskine told me the serum Schmidt used wasn't ready and something went wrong. That's why his face is like that."

"Oh." Bucky sighed in relief. "I guess that's good. So what was it like suddenly being—this?" Bucky waved at Steve's physique.

"It took getting used to." Steve shrugged. "Yeah, this body will do whatever I ask it to, but it didn't come with a manual. Erskine wasn't there to help, either. I felt like I was walking around on stilts. I still do sometimes. People look different from this high up. And I kept bumping into things, hitting my head on stuff I didn't realize I should duck for."

Bucky snickered loudly.

"Yeah, you laugh. Try going from being as little as I was to being this big in a few minutes, see how you fare."

"You're right. I shouldn't laugh. But you gotta admit, it is kinda funny."

Steve allowed himself a small smile. "Maybe a little." It felt good to have Bucky back. Bucky would manage to find the humor in all of this. Now that the shock of a six-foot-three, two-hundred-fifty pound Steve was wearing off, you could tell Bucky was already seeing the whole thing as an enormous joke of fate. Some men would resent the little guy they used to protect from bullies suddenly showing up bigger and stronger than them. Not Bucky. That was what Steve liked about him.

"So have you been out here on the front the whole time and I never knew?" Bucky asked.

"No," Steve said bitterly. "After Erskine died, they couldn't rebuild the project. They wanted their precious test subject as far from the front as possible. I was being sent to a lab, but Senator Brandt made a deal with Colonel Phillips. I was the headline act of a war bonds campaign. Traveling around in this suit," he gestured to the Captain America garb he still wore under his leather parachutist's gear, "parading for money for the war effort."

"Hey, I've seen some of those shows. Lots of gorgeous dames dancing around. Must have been a pretty great life."

"Not for me."

"Oh, right, because you wouldn't know what to do with a dame even if you had one. I bet you were so itching to get out here you didn't even notice." He chuckled at Steve's silence, correctly taking it as affirmative. "Thought so. How'd you talk them into letting you come rescue us alone, if you were so special, then?"

"I didn't. I was performing for what's left of the 107th when I heard what happened. I had to come."

"Of course."

"I got Agent Carter and Howard Stark to fly—"

"As in, flying car failure guy Stark? From the Expo?"

"Yeah, that's him. Turns out he's better at flying planes than flying cars. He works for the government as a weapons contractor. His gadgets powered the Vita-Ray machine. He flew me out here and I dropped in."

Bucky turned to him, his face very serious. "You're gonna be in one heaping pile of shit when we get back. You know that, right?"

"I know," Steve replied. "But at least you're safe. I couldn't live with myself if anything happened to you and I could have stopped it."

"Figured you were gonna say something like that." A pause. "Thanks for coming to get me."

"Anytime," said Steve.

Bucky snorted. "Hopefully there won't be a next time. Last time I plan to get captured and experimented on."

"They didn't do anything to you, did they?" Steve was suddenly anxious.

"Not too bad. That I can remember, anyway. A lot of it's sort of a blur. I have no idea why they picked me, but I had it better than the rest of 'em in some ways." Bucky gestured to the dark figures seated around various campfires near them, appearing and disappearing as flames flickered. "Slave labor to build the HYDRA war machines, all of them. So many were already sick or wounded, or couldn't take the pace…all dead."

Bucky and Steve both stared bleakly into their fire for awhile. Steve tried not to think about the horrors every man around him had seen. It made him feel weak and useless despite his new gifts.

He finally broke the silence. "We have to stop them. We have to stop Schmidt and everyone who works for him."

"And how do you plan to do that, Captain America?" Bucky wanted to know. "You know you're probably headed for a court-martial."

"I don't know. I'll find a way. I have to."

Bucky grinned. "That's the Steve I know."

"I am the Star-Spangled Man With a Plan, after all."

"What?" snorted Bucky. "Where the hell'd you pick that crazy line up?"

"It's my theme song."

"You have a theme song?" Bucky's laugh bordered on hysterical. Steve wished he hadn't brought it up, but decided hearing Bucky laugh after all he'd been through couldn't be a bad thing.

"Yeah, I have a theme song. So?"

"Now I want to hear every detail of this show of yours. Don't leave anything out."

More men started to gather around, attracted by Bucky's laughter. "Yeah, tell us about it!" a big black man with a wide grin said. "We haven't had any entertainment in forever! Hearing you tell it will be almost as good as watching it."

Steve struggled not to blush and slouch away, forgetting for a moment that at his size fading into a crowd was now almost impossible. "Well, I don't see much of the beginning of it—I'm backstage."

"Tell us anyway!" someone yelled from the back of the crowd.

"Yeah, and don't skimp on the details!" someone else called.

As Steve began to describe the show, to appreciative whistles and hoots at all the right times, he tried not to reflect on what was ahead. Bucky was right; it was probably court-martialing. They might make him go back to doing shows, or they might send him to a lab to be experimented on. Either way, he planned to fight hard to make them let him come back to the front. Now that he'd seen how desperate the situation was here, he knew he could be useful. They needed him to take down Schmidt. No one else had the power, not with Schmidt's enhanced abilities. Better yet, he was fairly certain Schmidt feared him, his bravado about being Erskine's greatest creation aside.

There was no question. Steve had never liked bullies, and Schmidt and his crew were the biggest bullies he'd ever faced. Was he, Steve Rogers, Captain America, up for the challenge?

There was no question of that, either.

He would do what needed to be done. It was time for Captain America to become more than a symbol. More, as Peggy had said, than a performing monkey.

Past time.

Author's Note: I hope you enjoyed this little addition to the movie where Steve and Bucky are getting to know each other again. This started out as a piece solely about Steve's reactions to suddenly becoming this enormous guy with a ton of physical skills (and was originally set after the HYDRA assassin committed suicide), but it evolved into a dialogue between Steve and Bucky as Bucky, too, tries to match up shrimpy Steve versus Captain America Steve. Every so often a moment, or a group of moments, in a movie catches my imagination and I have to write about it.

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