We interrupt your regularly-scheduled programming to bring you –

(or: an alternative history)

.

[fair warning: short but serious, for once]


#5:
oh, how the tables turn

The posters call her Lady Liberty.

The Howling Commandos call her Cap, whatever noises the Army still makes about her rank being purely decorative (even though she'd surely earned it thrice over by now), although Morita sometimes says Nakamori-san when they're on a rare shore leave. It's nice, to hear something familiar, so Aoko doesn't mind.

Then there's Kaito, who calls her Aoko when they're off-duty and Ahoko when he's trying his damnedest to pretend that they're the same kids they were before going to war.

(That last part, Aoko minds, but Kaito hadn't let her in after his father died and he certainly isn't going to now.)

.

And then, of course, no one calls her anything anymore, because the dead do not speak and Aoko is seventy years too late to hear them anyway.

"He's a ghost story, Nakamori-san," Akako had said at the hospital, after Aoko crashed through a dozen stories of the Triskelion with ice in her bones and tears in her eyes, and later she will look back and wonder if she'd ever stopped falling, on the way.

.

Aoko's been in a lot of fights: against the same illness that took her mother, against bullies thrice her size, against a hallway full of enemy operatives armed with nothing but the contents of a broom closet.

Aoko knows how to fight, knows it like breathing, and yet –

"Who the hell is Kaito?" says a man with the face of her best friend, with the voice that she still hears screaming in her dreams, and Aoko thinks: anything, anything but this.

The shield doesn't fall from her numb fingers, but it's close.

.

(A phantom, Widow had said, her hair burning bright red like a beacon in the dark, but neither of them had expected this shadow to haunt her so.

Because she had been right: the Winter Soldier is Aoko's very own ghost story, but perhaps Kuroba Kaito is his. Perhaps both of them are ghosts, now.

Aoko lets go, and the shield tumbles, falls – )