AN. I wish I could include three categories… because Doctor Strange's The Ancient One is a major component of this tale. And maybe Stephen will pop in, too. Maybe Thor. *throws arms up haplessly* Come to think of it, shipping Thor and Steve in this plotline would be sinfully easy…
Love Triangle? Love Cube? I can see it now! Two aliens, a Master Sorcerer, and an earthling shamelessly better the relations between their peoples with raucous, unapologetic sex.
Yes, I'm ignoring the elephant in the forum.
*sigh* I know what you're thinking…
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THIS MARVEL DC TRY TO BE WITCH SHIT. IT'S TRASH. YOU FREAK. 0_0
Psh. Same train here.
I can't say how, exactly, this story snuck into my mind. I've spent the beginning of my summer immersed in Sarah J. Maas's Throne of Glass series. Nearly finished with the third book. This coupled with the fact that I practically live to ship the Comic Cinematic Universe must be the culprit. I've been on a Super America kick for a hot minute.
If you have or want to wade through my other stories, I would be remiss not to admit that this is probably a sequel… or spin-off of Spangles of Steel. My Steve, regardless of the story sea I pitch him into, is the same Steve—a veteran suffering from PTSD, emotional malfunctions, suicidal tendencies, and a general lack of self-worth. That said, he's still a big, gritty badass who will always fight for the weak. In addition to Spangles of Steel, I direct you to Greed Smelled Like Sunshine if you want to toe the waters of his mind.
Scary place.
Anyway. I need to update a lot of my other tales. Sadly, I'm fixated on the deliciously endless possibilities for Steve's new superhero identity. It is my understanding that canonically, he dons the mantle of Nomad. Buuuuuut I may break all the rules, and the feels, and give that name to Supes. And now, back to the story.
Excelsior!
For three weeks, Steve had familiarized himself with what had been his mother's home. He paced the floors and mapped the moor until he could walk them both blindfolded. With the dissolution of the protective spells, the cottage began to deteriorate at an alarming pace. It had stood alone against torrents of rain and pervasive, clinging mists and mud for a century.
After careful study and instruction from Berit, the barman of Boar and Saddle, Steve tried his hand at repairing the thatched roof, its stalks rotted through. It took him three tireless tries before he realized the entire thing would need replacing. The wall ringing the garden lost more stones to dust by the day. And in spite of the consistent moisture, the garden withered.
After a month, the cottage had become all but uninhabitable.
"Useless!" In sheer, maddening frustration, Steve chucked his tools aside and seethed. "Why are you fighting me?" he barked.
Talking to himself had become a daily occurrence, a comforting habit in his solitude, but this time, he spoke to the house. To the eyes and shadows and shifting things always just outside of focus. The whispers, howls, and shuttering sounds.
Honestly, he should promptly march right back to Dublin and check himself into the nearest loony bin…
Fed up, he spun on his heel and stalked over to a sunken stone bench.
Steve plopped down and scrubbed his dirt darkened face with his calloused hands. "What am I doing? This is the dumbest task I've ever undertaken. Just a lot of… hocus pocus and nonsense. If anything did live here, its long dead. And it died long before I came. I… I don't believe... I don't believe any of this! I knew a good Christian woman who sang Psalms. Who sent me Catholic school. Who worked in a TB ward. This is all wrong! Why? How could you lie to me for so long?"
It was creeping back—resurfacing—the regret, despair, and utter, abysmal emptiness that had consumed him after his chilly undeath. He could feel it like a snake in the grass, growing by the day and coiling from his ankles upward, gawking on his strength and squeezing what little purpose he had left in his heart.
His heavy shoulders sagged as he sighed. "What did I expect? I don't belong here. I don't belong… anywhere," he choked out. With his elbows on his knees, he hung his head and tried to steel his resolve by shutting his eyes tight enough to cause splashes of color to burst behind his lids.
He opened them.
Steve blinked. Stared. Blinked again.
There, between his crusty boots in the midst of the gray, soggy grass… stood a little blue flower, peering up at him with its bright petals outstretched. A breeze kissed his cheek. Steve sat back and stared at the house and looked at it through fresh eyes and noticed the rampant imperfections—not a single perfect angle. Asymmetric, almost. Amateur.
So how the hell had it withstood the cruelty of this landscape, battered by the winds and wet weather?
Wrong.
He was doing this wrong.
The cottage hadn't been crafted by some master builder, or an architect with a lick of sense. But by a person interested in blending with the land, asking permission to share a piece of this wilderness, not to own the plot. This wasn't a place of man's law, or man's order.
He couldn't just waltz in here and expect to repair, to rebuild, a thing of faith with tools and time while the borrowed ground lay in such disarray.
He had to believe in it.
"OK," he said to the little flower. "OK."
Renewed, Steve stood, crossed the garden, and dug through the sunken shed adjoining the cottage. He could belong here, but he would have to work for it.
He had to tend to and heal the land before he fixed the house.
After combing through the shed adjoining Star's Shelter, something he had taken to calling the cottage in his secret heart, Steve laid his inventory of tools out before him.
Rakes. Brooms. Hoes. Rope. Water yokes. Three buckets. Shovels of three different sizes. Watering cans. A plow. A handful of unbroken pots. A few mice. And about twelve different species of spiders.
The task didn't seem daunting. How hard could it be after all his other impossible undertakings? He'd fix up the yard, tend the garden, and then shift his focus to the house that borrowed resources and space from the land. A couple days' worth of work, at most. Easy as pie.
After piling all his supplies in the wheelbarrow and trying to push it across the lawn, he found the stone wheel cracked and its squeaking hinge broken. Steve sighed, carefully studying the mechanism. He could smith it back together with a hot enough fire. For now, carrying the tools would have to suffice.
To care for the land, he needed the tools. And the tools needed a custodian of their own. He put his ambitious plans aside, seized the wash pale from his pile, and marched over to the water pump… only to find the hand pump rusted shut. After he dragged a hand down his grizzled face, he stood back and appraised the press, following a line of weeds to a squat stone well. He tied the bucket's handle off with a length of rope and let it down into the hole. He pulled up half a pale of silt, murky water, and a dead raven.
Steve grumbled, stalked through the yard, and set out across the moor on a quest to find the fresh water stream.
From the crest of a hill beyond the moor, Berit the barman pounded the replacement fence post into the ground. He shook his head at the stubborn fool porting pale after pale from the stream.
"Poor lad. Hopeless, this lot. Been sleeping since the sisters left. He'll sooner die than see it live."
"Who is he?" Kal asked.
"Not too sure. One of Joseph's, I think. Not a drop of magic in him, far as I can tell. Grandson, maybe. Could be more distant relation."
"Magic." Kal turned an incredulous smirk, shouldering his driver.
Berit's mustache twitched as he bristled. "Gah. You're all the same. Once you touch down in America, they suck it out of ya. That place feeds on the soul, squeezes every last lick of what makes the soul mean anything out, mark my words."
"Nothing beats hard work and determination, boss. See quite a bit of both from him."
Berit turned toward the moor again, drinking in the fog weaving through the wilderness. The cries. The calls. The croaks and collective eerie air of it all. "That place clings to the old country. The old magic. Needs a steward. Not a contractor. But some just aren't open to it, like Jo Rogers. I was a little lad when I met him. Christ. That man hit the drink hard before they shipped off to America. Nearly spooked the horse I was shoe'in half to death one night. Somethin' rotten killed him before America could. Farm was washed out not long after he uprooted his family, too." He peeled off his cap and wiped the sweat form his pockmarked brow. "Why this buck is hellbent on the O'Rinn property is beyond me. All I could direct him to though. All that's left. Fellow has to be plenty lonely to need a place like this to wallow, if you ask me."
Kal dropped a lazy grin and planted his hand on his hip. "I think you owe him a round or two at the Saddle when he proves you wrong."
Berit howled with laughter. "I'll tell you what, sonny. If he restores that cesspit, he has an open tab on board and brew at me pub for the rest of his livin' days."
Kal lingered as Berit, chuckling and muttering beneath his breath, trudged back through the heather. He watched the stranger. The way the exertion of his work made his clothing cling to him, Kal confirmed that the wayfarer was no small man. Standing at a breath or two shorter than himself, the stranger had fair hair, sure feet, and no shortage of muscle. He followed Berit when the man hoisted his yoke over his head and started back to the O'Rinn cottage.
But Kal, unlike Berit, held out hope for him.
It took two days, a near obliteration of the kiln, and several accidental arm scorchings before Steve could fan a flame in the forge hot enough to heat and pound out all the cracks in the garden tools. He spent the next day scrubbing the crust and grime from their blades and handles. On Sunday, he rested, replenished his pantry, and puzzled over the necklace his mother Sarah… his mother Shaela… had left him.
How could something so old, so unfamiliar, resemble the symbol that had adorned his chest for decades?
The real work began that Monday morning. Before he got started, he put the necklace on for the first time, its clasp ridiculously small between his calloused fingers, the chain laughably frail in comparison to the metals he brandished in his time with SHIELD, its weight less than a grain of sand when pitted against his standard issue equipment.
But when he put it on… when he stood tall and measured himself against the man he had been and the man in his shoes, he felt impossibly stronger.
As if this wasn't plain silver at all.
As if this necklace amounted to an item more powerful than all his weapons combined.
The pills; a distant memory. The nightmares; beyond reach. The doubt and indecision; dead and gone.
One by one, Steve dug up every stone that had comprised the pathway, uncovering more roaches than could ever be comforting. Using the rake, he churned the neglected soil and had a hell of a time pulling up a weed that had rooted from the front gate to the front door. He also unearthed the bench and dragged its pieces to the breaking place he had discovered.
Because those beautiful things, those reminders of what had been lost, were not his.
He had not sang to the slabs when they had been carved from the cliffside. He had not fed his sweat into their transport and installment. He had, however endured an array of bites that afternoon.
He couldn't subdue the illusion of skittering legs and tickling antennae across his body that night and awoke aching from all the tossing. Groggily, he made his way down the stairs, stooped over a kitchen basin, and scrubbed his face.
Instead of reinstalling the same stones on Tuesday, Steve hauled the best sledgehammer from the forge and reduced the old path to dust, dust he would mix into an experimental blend of clay and water to repair the wall.
Swaddled in heat too real to be imagined or the result of tedious labor, Steve became aware of being watched on Wednesday—half a dozen wolves sunning themselves on a crag. Was it his imagination, or had the moor become brighter this week? It must have been seasonal. Ignoring the curious eyes, he resumed his wall repairs, carefully filling in the cracks between the stones that had guarded this place for a hundred years.
When Thursday came, he turned his attention to the garden. Try as he might to be discerning about the plants he weeded free and the ones he kept, Steve found that he could not recognize wildflower from garden glory. So, eventually, he pulled them all. He ripped the roots, thick and thin, that wrenched the deepest from their complacency, their stems cutting into his hands, his blood mingling with the soil.
When the plot had been cleared and cleaned, he heaped the mess of plants harvested from their wilting mounds at the heart of the garden. There, he burned them the flames soaring higher than he anticipated, practically licking the sky.
Because of his body's incredible resistance to toxins, he didn't need to worry about drinking the water straight from the stream. Strangely, it tasted familiar. But trudging to the stream every day would prove cumbersome, he knew, if this place would become the home he wanted.
The well.
He had to fix the well.
The next chapter will be predominantly about Kal. Much excite.
