I apologize to anyone who got confused about the chapter 35 notification that appeared about 2 hours after ch 34 was posted. I edited a line in ch 34 and accidentally posted it as a new chapter. I deleted the duplicate as soon as I got the email notification that I'd posted it.
But this is the real deal! I cranked it out in while taking breaks from lesson planning (the breaks probably ended up being longer than they should have been).
I'm kind of playing around with various X-Men universes, including the comics which I've never actually read but saw stuff about online.
Steve drifts into consciousness slowly, like a drowning man being pulled to the surface.
There's a soft bed under him with silky sheets, and the air lacks the distinct smell of a hospital or medical tent.
Opening his eyes, Steve finds himself in an ornate bedroom, large enough to house his entire apartment back in Brooklyn.
He furrows his brow. Where is he? Not Brooklyn, certainly. He hears no traffic or pedestrians besides the footsteps running down what must be a hallway beyond the door. The unmistakable shouts of children playing drifts through a window.
The last thing he remembers is sending the plane down, Peggy telling him not to. Millions of people were going to die if he hadn't.
Did he save them? Did someone save him?
Steve sits up, swings his legs off the bed, and pads across the ornate rug to the window. The sprawling expanse of lawn confirms his suspicions that, wherever he is, it's not Brooklyn. The children throwing a ball around the court below him are all dressed in strange clothing- rather than jackets and buttoned, collared shirts, the boys are wearing shirts with pictures printed on them, blue denim pants or colorful short pants, and shoes unlike any Steve's seen. None of the girls are wearing dresses.
Steve himself is dressed in a cotton shirt and soft pants. His uniform and shield are nowhere to be seen.
He frowns. This can't be the States, but he hears some New York accents in the playful taunts.
Steve crosses the room again and pulls the dark, mahogany door open. The hallway is just as extravagant as the bedroom, lined with wood paneling and oil paintings. The artist in Steve longs to stop and admire the paintings, but common sense rules he shouldn't.
Steve is alone in the hallway, but a radio broadcast of a sports game flows from an adjacent hall. Just like the clothes on the children outside, something isn't right. The cheers don't sound at all crackly or tinny. and even the way the announcer talks isn't anything like Steve's used to hearing.
Then, a high, childish voice with a British accent remarks that watching hockey on the telly is better than watching baseball. Even fighting all over Europe, Steve never heard anyone call a stadium a telly.
Steve was never a big fan of hockey, and hasn't followed it since the Amerks left Brooklyn due to the war. He quells the urge to defend America's favorite pastime as he rounds the corner.
A man and boy are walking down the hall, away from him. The boy looks to be under four, as small and skinny as Steve was as a child, with an unruly mess of black hair on his head. He's holding tight to the man's left arm, which looks to be entirely metal.
The man has the build, posture and precise movements of a soldier, but no military Steve knows of- Allies or Axis- allows soldiers to have hair falling to their chins. He must be a veteran, one of the many soldiers to lose a limb in service, but the prosthesis is unlike any Steve's seen.
The man and boy turn a corner, the boy's voice slowly fading as they venture farther away.
Steve frowns, feeling like he has a puzzle that's missing pieces. He wonders if this is one of the locations children were evacuated to from London, but that doesn't explain the New York accents he'd heard outside.
Moving down the hall, Steve stops suddenly at the sight of a familiar face through a doorway.
"Howlett."
The short, burly man looks like he hasn't aged a day from when Steve last saw him on the battlefield. Howlett's dressed in a sleeveless shirt, a beer bottle held loosely in one hand. His legs, covered in the same denim pants Steve saw on the children, are kicked up on a low table.
Howlett is staring at the wall where the radio must be, though the doorway hides it from Steve's sight. He glances Steve's way before his eyes go back to the wall. "Looks like I ain't the only one back from the dead."
"Did we win?" Steve asks. He'd defeated Schmidt, but the war wasn't over. "New York, is it-"
"We're in Westchester." Howlett doesn't even glance away from the radio this time. "War's been over for a while, bub."
Steve enters the room, and his mouth drops open to marvel at what's in front of him. Every color in the moving picture is brighter than Dorothy's ruby slippers or the yellow brick road. The image, which switches from an aerial view of an ice-hockey rink to an up-close shot of a player, is crisp, devoid of scratches or spots. The movie seems to be emanating from the flat glass screen rather than projected onto a blank canvas.
"Did you fish me from the ocean?" Steve asks, mind reeling. He must've been there for some time, for this technology to be invented, but that doesn't add up either, because the serum doesn't prevent him from drowning.
"Stark did." Howlett grunts, clearly annoyed that Steve's interrupting the game onscreen. Steve wasn't aware Howlett and Stark even knew about each other, aside from Steve mentioning Stark once on the field.
"Chuck hasn't filled you in?" Howlett growls.
Steve has no idea who Chuck is, but he's not surprised Howard searched for him after he went MIA. Though really, Howard should have known Steve would be dead upon impact.
Except, clearly, Steve's alive.
Steve stares at the fancy screen for several minutes without really seeing it. Hadn't Howlett just said he'd been resurrected?
Howlett sips his beer, silently watching the game.
"The commandos, are they-" Steve stops, no longer hearing the cheers, the announcer, the scrape of skates on on ice. He's clinging to the train in the alps, hand outstretched, his shout of "Bucky, No!" doing nothing to stop Bucky from falling. Wind rushes in his ears until Steve slowly starts seeing the room around him again. The strange screen, Howlett on the couch, his eyes now on Steve.
"Nobody's told you anything?" Howlett raises a brow, before grumbling that just because he occasionally teaches history doesn't make it his job to catch Steve up.
"Catch me up on what?" Steve demands, not even thinking about Howlett being a teacher. It has to be something about the war, but Howlett said it was over.
The man takes a drink from his bottle, eyes back on the screen. Sensing he won't get anything more out of Howlett during the game, Steve turns to leave.
Back in the hallway, he overhears voices coming from the direction of the room he just left.
"He was asleep five minutes ago." exclaims a vaguely familiar male voice.
Steve hears the British boy say "Maybe he died."
The halls must form a loop, since Steve didn't see the man or boy walk past the room Howlett was in.
"He didn't." the man says quickly. "But figures he'd wake up the minute nobody's watching. Isn't Professor X supposed to sense this kind of thing?"
Steve bursts into the doorway and sees Howard Stark holding the shield he'd made, standing around the empty bed with the boy and the soldier Steve had seen just a few minutes ago.
"Howard," Steve says. "Howlett says I was dead."
"Not dead," Stark says, turning around, and it's definitely not Howard, even if there's some resemblance. Did he have a brother he never mentioned? "You were frozen."
The boy glances at the soldier, but Steve doesn't hear the boy's question. His breath feels like it's been punched out of him when the soldier turns around.
Even with long hair, Steve would recognize that face anywhere. He thought he'd never see it again, except during nightmares where he reaches out and fails to catch him yet again. Even worse are the dreams where he does catch Bucky, only to wake up after pulling him to safety.
Bucky's gray-blue eyes are even more haunted than when Steve found him strapped to a table in the HYDRA camp.
"Bucky." Steve hugs him, thumping his back twice. It's not returned. Bucky doesn't move an inch, standing as if at attention.
"I thought you were dead." Steve breathes. He doesn't even hear what not-Howard or the boy are saying, barely registers their presence. He almost expects Bucky to repeat that he thought Steve was smaller. Even after being tortured, he'd carried on a conversation, but now his silence stretches into an eternity.
Steve's elation is starting to sink into a feeling of dread. Something is off, and it's not just the clothes, the futuristic screen or the man who looks like Howard.
Something is off about Bucky.
After another eternity, Bucky says one word.
"Steve."
I ended up doing so much random research for this chapter to try and figure out what stuff Steve would know about from the forties. I didn't even know hockey was around back then, much less that Brooklyn had their own team for a year. At first I had Steve all awestruck by the fact color movies existed, but apparently Wizard of Oz was in color when it came out in 1939 (and it wasn't even the first movie in color)
And we all know Steve's seen it, since he understood that reference :)
