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“Steve!” calls Rebecca Barnes as she opened the door to their Brooklyn apartment. “Steve, there’s a letter from Bucky!” She’s closed and locked the door behind her before she realizes that Steve is nowhere to be seen.
“Steve?” she calls again, already concerned at the young man’s absence. He’s been sounding hoarse for the past couple of days and she’s ordered him to stay inside to work on whatever illustration projects he can get. Rebecca taps on the door to the bedroom before opening it. “Steve?”
The room is empty but the window is open; Rebecca only notices after she shivers, the air in the small space colder than that in the outer room. She rolls her eyes and sticks her head out of the window, already directing a fondly exasperated tirade at the slight blond man sitting on the fire escape.
“Steven Rogers, I told you to stay inside today! You’ll catch your—” She stops abruptly. Steve turns to her, his huge blue eyes red and puffy, tear-tracks shining on his pale face. “Oh, God, no.” She reaches out to him but freezes at the sight of the crumpled paper in his right fist. That’s all she needs to know that the news is the worst they could receive.
“Becca?” Steve’s surprisingly deep voice is almost inaudible. He clambers stiffly to his feet and eases inside, pulling her to sit on the bed.
“It’s Bucky, isn’t it?” she asks. She doesn’t need the confirmation, but she asks anyway, out of the blind hope that maybe, just maybe, it isn’t the news she thinks it is. Steve takes her hand in his free one and nods, fresh tears clinging to his lashes. Becca lets out a noise she’s never heard herself make before.
“When? How?” Her throat aches and her eyes burn, but she needs to know the details of her brother’s death. Steve smooths out the telegram and passes it over, unable to speak. Becca reads it, the letters blurring together through her tears. Phrases leap out at her and she stifles a sob.
...Regret to inform you…killed in action…1st November…Italian front…hero…
She lets the paper flutter from her limp fingers onto the scuffed floor. Steve’s frail arm goes around her and she tucks herself into a ball against his side, staining his worn shirt as she wails her grief. She feels Steve’s tears in her hair and clutches him tighter; she knows what Bucky and Steve are—were—to each other, and Steve is going to take this at least as hard as she is.
They cling to each other, crying and reassuring each other in equal measure. Becca resurfaces eventually, brought back to awareness by the wheezing in Steve’s chest.
“Come on, Steve,” she croaks, rubbing his back in soothing circles, just like Bucky had taught her. “You have to breathe, honey.” Steve manages a shuddering gasp that breaks into a harsh, barking cough. “I told you not to go outside,” Becca chastens, trying to inject the usual sternness into her tone. “Now you’ll get sick again.” A sudden thought has another sob catching in her throat. “Don’t you go dying on me now, too. You’re the only brother I have left.” Steve turns to her and attempts a smile.
“You know me,” he whispers, “too stubborn to die.”
&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&
A week later, Steve’s lungs are barely functional. He fights for each breath even as he burns with fever. Becca’s tried to get him the medicine he needs, but there are rules about how many shifts she can take on at the factory and everything is grossly expensive with the shortages from the war. All she can do is beg one of their neighbors to watch him while she’s at work and sit vigil by his bedside, praying and wiping his brow with a cool cloth.
“It’s okay, Becca,” Steve gasps one night, fighting to get the words out and weakly waving off her admonishments to stay quiet. “Knew I’d…die young. Just…thought Bucky’d…outlive me. This…is better. You won’t…have to…worry…anymore…”
“I don’t know what I’ll do with myself when I don’t have you two knuckleheads to worry over anymore,” Becca tells him, trying to smile. One corner of his mouth kicks up before his body convulses in another coughing fit. Blood sprays bright red across the sheets.
The next day, when Becca gets home, Mrs. Erskine from across the hall smiles sadly at her and hands her a small package.
“This came for you from the War Office today,” she says. Becca thanks her absently; Mrs. Erskine hugs her and pats her head before returning to her own apartment. Becca sits in the chair beside Steve’s bed and absently opens the package. Something metallic glints at her from the box, and she pulls out a set of dog tags.
“Look, Steve,” she whispers; Steve’s eyes are half-open and she doesn’t know if he’s awake, asleep, or somewhere in between, but she needs to share this with him. “Bucky’s dog tags.” Steve’s hand twitches towards her, but he’s too weak to reach out. Becca picks up his hand, drops the tags into it, and curls his fingers around them. She squeezes her eyes shut and presses a fierce kiss to the back of his hand. When she opens her eyes again, Steve is hazily focused on her and the corner of his mouth is lifted. She tries to smile back through her leaking eyes.
An indeterminate amount of time later, Becca realizes that Steve’s hand has grown heavier in hers. With a start, she realizes that she can no longer hear his labored breathing. She puts her fingers to his pulse, just like Dr. Erskine had shown her before he died last year. Steve’s heart is no longer beating, but Becca thinks that his mouth is still curved in a slight smile. She gently places his hand, Bucky’s dog tags still clutched inside, on his chest above his heart. Then she puts her head down on the side of the bed and sobs.
&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&
The ground is barely soft enough to bury Steve. It’s cold but dry and sunny on the morning of his funeral. There aren’t many people there; Becca is accompanied by Mrs. Erskine, who also brought flowers to put on her husband’s grave after the service. A few other neighbors huddle around the grave. The casket is heartbreakingly small; Steve, for all his heart, never grew much taller than he’d been as a boy. His boss from the paper he drew for is there, as well as the man who’d commissioned patriotic posters. Both look faintly bored, but their words, however gruffly delivered, are kind enough.
Becca is the only one who knows that Bucky’s dog tags are still tucked into Steve’s hand. She’d taken them out before the coroner came, but slipped them back in as she leaned over the coffin to kiss Steve’s forehead one last time. She had used some of Steve’s charcoal to make a rubbing of the tags, which she slipped into one of their battered, much-loved books for safekeeping, but the actual object belongs with Steve. He and Bucky won’t share a cemetery plot, so this is the least she can do for her brother and the boy who might as well have been one.
After the funeral, Becca walks home with her neighbors. She sees Mrs. Erskine to her door and waves off kindly-meant offers of coffee and companionship. She has to go back to work tomorrow, and she wants to be alone for a while. She hangs up her coat next to Steve’s—she should gather his clothes and things and take them to the orphanage, or the church, but she isn’t ready to let go of them yet. Some of Bucky’s things are in the closet, waiting for his return; those need to go, too. Sunday, she promises herself, she’ll do it on Sunday.
She sinks onto the battered couch and looks around her now-lonely apartment. A pair of Bucky’s work boots still rest in a corner, and Steve’s sketchbook is laid on the crate that serves as an end table. Aching to feel closer to her brothers, Becca pads into the bedroom and wraps herself in an old sweater of Bucky’s, then returns to the couch and curls up with Steve’s sketchbook.
She doesn’t open it for a moment, just brushing her fingers over the cover and smelling the familiar odor of charcoal. When she does open it again, tears well up in her eyes again as she flips through the beautiful cityscapes and portraits. Bucky’s face looks back at her from several of the pages, head cocked and eyes sparkling just as he was in life. She sees her own face, too, and laughs wetly at Steve’s overly-romantic vision of her. She’s just plain Becca Barnes, not the knockout Steve had drawn.
On the last few pages, there’s an unfamiliar man. He’s tall and broad, clearly well-muscled even under his army uniform. He has a shield on one arm, bearing a star in the center of concentric rings. In the very last drawing, he’s in a uniform with a matching star and a cowl with an A on it. The drawing is captioned, but the writing has been crossed out; Becca manages to decipher “Captain America” beneath the heavy charcoal lines. Looking more closely, Becca realizes with a start that the man is Steve, or, at least, Steve as he wished he was.
“Oh, Steve,” she whispers, brushing her fingertips across the man’s profile. You were perfect the way you are, you dope. But if this was a fair world, and your outside matched your heart, this is what you’d have looked like. She hugs the sketchbook to her chest.
It’s not fair, she thinks. It’s not fair that my brother died half a world away, that Bucky and Steve couldn’t have been together. It’s not fair that Steve was the best person we knew and he died of pneumonia. They were meant for so much more than this. She allows herself to cry, soaking Bucky’s sweater with her tears.
“It’s not fair!” she exclaims aloud, dashing the sketchbook to the floor. It flops open to the Captain America page, and she reaches for it, needing to tear Captain America and all of Steve’s insecurities to shreds, but something makes her stop. She picks the book up gently and smooths her hand over the page. Then, she rips that page out, finds a good drawing of her brother, and rips that out too. Toting everything over to the kitchen table, she finds a pencil and begins to draw.
&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&
A month later, Becca Barnes hears a knock on her door. She gets up from the table and answers it to find a tall, red-haired man in uniform. He’s holding a bowler hat with corporal’s stripes sewn on.
“Rebecca Barnes?” he asks.
“Who’s asking?” she replies, eyeing him suspiciously. He holds out his right hand.
“Timothy Dugan, ma’am,” he says. “I served with a man named James Buchannan Barnes. War Office tells me his sister lives here.” Becca smiles slightly.
“Then you’ve found her,” she says, shaking Dugan’s hand. “Actually, you could be just the man I wanted to see. Come in, come in.” She stands aside to let him pass and closes the door behind him.
“Do you have a friend at the War Office, by chance?” she asks, herding the confused corporal into the kitchen and steering him into a chair.
“Yes, ma’am, my former CO—that is, my commanding officer—”
“I do know what a CO is, Mr. Dugan,” Becca snaps. He looks abashed.
“Yes ma’am. My former CO was injured too badly to return to active duty, but he knew someone who pulled some strings and got him a desk job. He remembered me well enough to give me your address when I asked,” Dugan explains. Becca nods.
“Right. Well then, have a look at these, and tell me they wouldn’t make wonderful comic books to raise money for the war effort,” she orders, and plops a cardboard box on the table in front of Dugan. He raises his eyebrows at her but complies.
“Captain America?” he asks, half-snorting, but looks back down at the pages on offer when Becca glowers at him. He starts slowly, but soon he’s paging eagerly through the adventures of Steve Rogers, the little guy from Brooklyn who Dr. Erskine’s serum turns into a super-soldier known as Captain America.
The Captain is the perfect soldier, but he’s good to the core and does what’s right even against orders. He launches a one-man rescue mission to save his childhood friend Bucky Barnes from a rogue Nazi division known as Hydra, helped by the fierce and intelligent British Agent Carter. After this first successful mission, Captain America teams up with Barnes and they lead American soldiers to victory after victory over Hydra.
Dugan finishes looking through the box and can only stare at Becca, who gazes levelly back at him. He nods once, slowly, before bobbing his head more enthusiastically.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think I can convince my CO that these would sell.”
“There’s more,” Becca tells him. “It’s all up here.” She taps her head. “I have enough material to last for years.” She takes the pages from Dugan and places them neatly in the box. “Now then, back to the reason you’re here. You said you knew my brother?”
“Ma’am, your brother saved my life,” Dugan says fervently. “He got hit pulling me out of the line of fire. We all thought he was gonna make it, but he was hiding how badly he was hurt. Infection set in and by the time our medic found it, there was nothing we could do.” He fumbles in his pocket and pulls out two envelopes. “He made me promise to give these to his sister and his brother. He loved telling stories about Stevie Rogers.” He catches sight of Becca’s expression and stops abruptly.
“Steve died,” Becca says, managing to keep her voice level. “Not long after Bucky did, actually. Pneumonia.”
“I sure am sorry to hear that,” Dugan tells her. He nudges the envelopes towards her. “I guess this Captain America thing is your way of memorializing them?” Becca nods, too overcome to speak. They sit in silence for a few moments, and then Dugan looks at his watch.
“If we hurry, we can probably still catch my CO before he leaves,” he says. “We’ll pitch him this comic together, what d’ya say?” Becca smiles at him, wipes her eyes, and puts the lid back on her box of drawings.
“I say yes, Mr. Dugan,” she responds, and allows the man to help her on with her coat.
&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&
The Captain America comics are a smashing success. Becca insists that they publish under Dugan’s name, because she knows that little boys won’t want to read a comic book written by a woman. She has a contract to write one book a month, and she never runs out of ideas for missions for her boys.
On V – E Day, Becca visits Steve’s grave and sits there for a very long time. She finally reads the letter from Bucky that had arrived the same day as the telegram notifying them of his death. She laughs through her tears at Bucky’s description of Dugan and his strange attachment to his silly hat. Before she leaves, she digs a small hole next to Steve’s headstone and buries Bucky’s last letter to him in it. No one will ever read it, but she thinks it belongs with its intended recipient.
She has one more story to write about Captain America and his loyal partner Sergeant Barnes. They defeat the Red Skull, leader of Hydra, but have to put his giant bomber in the icy Arctic waters to prevent the destruction of the United States. In the last panel, Agent Carter holds their personnel files. They’re both stamped MIA, not KIA. There is hope, she likes to think, that Captain America and Sergeant Barnes will return one day.
&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&
Many, many years later, Rebecca Barnes Dugan is lying in her bed waiting to die. She’s surrounded by pictures of her children and grandchildren; framed copies of original Captain America comics line her walls. Someone had recently bought the rights to it and started a new series, one where Cap and Sarge wake up in 2010 and have to save the world while adjusting to a new time. Becca thinks that Bucky and Steve would love being young men in the future; Steve would have gotten into all sorts of activism, and Bucky would have loved the noise that passes for music these days. They would have gotten married and adopted kids—Bucky had always loved kids.
Becca’s interrupted in her musings with the feeling of someone sitting on her bed on either side of her. She opens her eyes to her brother’s grinning face.
“Hiya, Becca,” he says. “Long time, no see.”
“Bucky?” she gasps. “Is it really you?”
“In the flesh!” he smirks. “Well, sorta.”
“You’re confusing her, you jerk,” says Steve, leaning in from her other side. “Hey, Becca. It’s wonderful to see you.”
“It’s wonderful to see you, too,” Becca says, reaching for both of their hands. They’re cool to the touch, but substantial. “Am I dead?”
“Almost, doll,” Bucky tells her. “You’re heading that way. But see, you gotta have someone to show you the way.”
“And I go where he goes,” Steve adds. “That’s a rule. They tried to separate us, but we took care of that first thing.”
“Who’s they?” Becca asks, but Steve shakes his head.
“You’ll find out soon,” he promises. “We’re just a little early because someone was impatient.” He aims a glare at Bucky, who holds up his free hand and gives him an innocent look.
“Not my fault my sister’s so talented that I couldn’t wait a minute more to come thank her,” he protests. He squeezes Becca’s hand. “We do, you know. We really want to thank you.”
“For what?” Becca asks, confused.
“For Captain America and Sergeant Barnes,” Steve says. “You gave us a life we never could have imagined. You didn’t have to do that, but you did, and now people everywhere know our names and how important it is to us to stand up for what is right.”
“We’re proud of you, little sister,” Bucky continues. “We’re so proud of everything you did with your life. We know it was so hard to lose both of us, but Tim’s a good fella, and we’re so happy you had such a wonderful life with him.”
“Is he…where you are?” Becca inquires. Bucky disentangles his hand from hers and stands up.
“Why don’t you come with us and find out?” he says, the same sparkle in his eye as when he used to dare her to do something that would have their mother yelling herself hoarse at them. She looks at Steve, who smiles and nods. Becca allows Bucky to pull her to her feet, and Steve follows, taking her other hand.
Standing between her two brothers for the first time in seventy years, Becca allows them to pull her forward into the next great adventure.