Here's the second story in the Junior Initiative Division series; hopefully you guys like it. It'll be eight chapters long, and there are a few time jumps - both forwards and backwards - just so that you know. Enjoy!:)
British countryside, 1960
Sixteen-year-old Ryan Rogers was exhausted. He and his mother, former Lieutenant Margaret Carter, had trained especially hard that day. The whole week, actually…
He was getting close to being ready, and both mother and son knew it. He could feel it – and it terrified him.
His mother wasn't entirely mentally stable; although he would never say so – didn't really even like to think about it – he knew it well enough. How else would the woman who had given birth to you come up with the idea of training you to be another super soldier and then freezing you into the Arctic beside your unconscious father? To say nothing of the fact that she knew exactly where Captain America was froze, but had done nothing to have him unfrozen?
No, regimentation might have been the lieutenant's strong suit, but stability? Well, not by all definitions of the word.
Sometimes – most of the time – Ryan even wondered if she actually thought of herself as his mother… or was she supposed to be just his drill sergeant? He sure knew what it seemed like, but, regardless of appearances, Ryan still considered her to be his mother, and he still loved her like a son would, even if his chances to show it were rare.
When those chances did come up, though, he took them – like just now. She had fallen asleep on the couch after supper while he had been cleaning up in the kitchen, and he had come around the corner to the unusual scene of her completely at ease in a place where he could see her. It was moments like this that made it easy to love her.
Ryan smiled softly and approached the old couch on silent feet. Taking the afghan off of the back of the couch, he draped the knitted cover over her shoulders. Apparently she wasn't as out cold as he had thought she was, because she smiled sleepily and reached out with her eyes still closed and squeezed his hand.
"Thanks, soldier," she whispered.
"You're welcome, Lieutenant," he answered as her breathing evened out. When he was absolutely certain that she wouldn't register what he said, he murmured, "I love you, Mom."
And he did love her. He loved her enough to do whatever she wanted him to do – even submit himself to being frozen for who knew how long…
A few months later, his greatest test – the one that he had been preparing for years for – finally came. Ryan, his mother, and two of her shady, paid-into-silence science friends were in the Arctic, preparing to lower him into the hole carved out of the ice.
Ryan glanced at the hole, hardly able to breathe past his swirling emotions, and refused to allow himself the thought that it looked like a coffin. After all, although the plan had been gone over innumerable times it wasn't absolutely guaranteed to work. If even one little thing went wrong, there was a good chance that he could freeze to death or suffocate or simply run out of oxygen down there.
But it would destroy his mother and her already fragile health if he refused to carry out the mission that they had been training for so many years for him to do. He knew that far too well; he'd thought through it all far too much in the last couple of months. The truth of the matter was that, at the end of the day, his choice could well turn out to be between letting his mother live – thereby chancing his own life underneath the ice – or walking away from his extremely sheltered, isolated life with his mother and out into the wide unknown without her. Considering the mental state she was already in, his walking away could leave her quite possibly so upset that she ended up in her deathbed.
His life with his mother had been something like living in a time warp. She had homeschooled him – a thing that was next to unheard of – so that they could concentrate on his training. They had lived deep in the country since the lieutenant had started to hate being around people after having him. They had grown their own food in a garden, even kept some chickens, so they rarely had to go into town, and even then Ryan only went half as often as his mother. She had tried her hardest to keep their house – and the way he grew up – in the era of the Second World War. To the best of his ability to understand her reasoning, all of this had been – in her mind – to make him more like Captain America, and if you didn't consider why she was doing it, it really hadn't been a bad way to grow up, had even left him much more mature then other children his age.
It had also left him a little intimidated by the idea of striking out on his own. Soldiers were used to – even conditioned to – taking orders, and Ryan had long thought of himself as a soldier. His mother called him a natural-born leader, but she had made certain that he knew how to follow orders too.
Another thing that soldiers did: they didn't fight for themselves; they fought for the guy who was fighting next to them – for their backup, their partner. The lieutenant had been all of those things to Ryan for all of his life, and he couldn't quite bear the thought of letting her down now – not after they'd come so far together and put so much into this plan. Somehow the idea of walking away from her – from this all – and leaving her hurting hurt him more than the idea of allowing himself to be lowered into the ground scared him.
So he took a deep breath, nodded resolutely, and laid down on the plank of wood that had been set out for him beside the hole. One of the scientists, or doctors, or whatever they were slipped a mask over his face – a sedative that would slow down his heart rate. Ryan paid the men no mind though, just looked past them and kept his eyes locked on the lieutenant as his eyelids got heavy, raising his hand to his head in a salute.
He was still saluting when the world went black.
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