Chapter Text
For Steve, it all started at 4 years old. Playing outside, with his father. Well, not so much playing as just being mesmerized by the little flame his father bounced from one hand to the other, making little Steve giggle madly. They did this often enough, and everytime, it felt like magic. Seeing his father’s hand moving arround, gracious and soft, following the flame’s dancing tip. He loved it, and to this day. it was still a memory he kept close to his heart.
So it was one afternoon, just like any other. That’s when they realized that Steve had gotten his father’s genes as far as abilities were concerned. People with special powers were still pretty rare, but as soon as Sarah Rogers had seen her little blond boy, wrapped up in his very first blanket, she had known then and there that he had greatness in his vein.
So at four, in the backyard with his dad, it started As his father was playing around with fire, litteraly, little Steve’s eyes turned from light blue to deep gold, and then, just like that, a second flame was bouncing between them, only this one was all of Steve’s making.
Proud and amazed, His dad took him in his arms and flung him up, making the giggles grow bigger, just as the flame did the same. Jerome, Steve’s dad, looked at his son, then back at the window of their small welcoming house where he could see Sarah Rogers fixing up diner. He gave her the happiest grin and as he tickled his son’s belly, shouting “You were right! He’s like me!”
After that,Jerome tried his best to teach Steve some facts about managing fire, holding it in, pushing it out, but 3 weeks after the first bouncing flame appeared, disaster struck in the form of a structure fire, taking out their little home in all but a couple hours. Sarah made it out with Steve in time, But Jerome never saw his son giggle again.
After the incident, Sarah took Steve to the only place they had left. Her parent’s old cabin in the woods. Fires were expected but never came. For 14 years, she homeschooled her boy, worked when she could and took care of him. She never quite felt at ease, always waiting for a spark, literally . She did her best to teach him wrong from right. From the get go he had an intense sense of justice and the spirit to go with it, but he was also his own worst critic. He was hard on himself and never quite dealt with his father’s passing. Sarah did her best to keep him happy, but slowly, her energy was fading.
So it really shouldn’t have been a surprise when her heart gave out. Worry and love could only share a heart for some time before one took over the other. She was buried next to the empty grave of her husband, with a son crying silently as he walked back to the only place he knew, the lonely and excluded cabin he called home.
There he stayed for a couple years, only going out once every week to get food, charcoal and clothes as he grew up. He learned to fish, and make fire by himself, to limit his visits in town to a minimum. He felt lonely and believed that he deserved it all. Having a parent’s death (or two?) on you did at apparently.
At 18 he decided to go explore the world. He knew about his power, he also knew it had gone dormant.
Or so he thought.
********
Bucky’s story was a little simpler, yet still lonely. At 14, he realized that Ice cream never melted in his hands. At 15, he kissed his first girlfriend under the rain. When he opened his eyes, it was only to see her hair completely frozen from root to tip. That night, after the girl ran home, mortified, he experimented and understood that he was a walking freezer, more or less. His family understood his powers and were good with them. The one thing they couldn’t get over though was Bucky’s bisexuality. It came to him when he watched National treasure… No, he didn’t have the hot’s for Nicolas Cage… But Riley? The quirky guy, not too muscular but with brains enough to be funny and sarcastic? That made his heart beat fast. So yeah. He found himself watching National treasure a lot… Sue him. Then it was Spencer Reid in Criminal Minds, or Neil Patrick Harris, everywhere (Blond hair did things to him).
Anyway. His family never accepted that part of him. Freeze our entire house while you discover your ability, fine. Kiss a boy under our roof? You are dead to us. So at 16 he ran off, never looking back. He lived on the streets for about 4 months before a weird bald guy in a wheelchair came and asked how a teenager could survive, homeless during the winter nights in brooklin without a coat.
That’s when he found his real family.
The bald guy, who’s name turned out to be Charles took him back to his mansion and there he met Natasha, Clint and Thor. After showing them how he could turn their fountain into an ice ring, he was welcomed to be a part of their close knitted group. Nobody ever cared if he put up a poster Leonardo DiCaprio (One from the Titanic) in his room so he was happy enough.
For years they learned how to be themselves, completely and safely, which eventually led to Charles making them in charge of recruiting new students, lost souls who didn’t understand how their powers could work.
They recruited many and helped them realize their full potential in a short amount of time. Most of them even were able to go back into the city and live their life as normally as they could, being now in control of their powers and all. Kids came and went, some stayed longer than other, but it always came back to the four of them, all having found a much better fitting family with Charles than they ever had before.
Bucky felt happy, really, and as bizarre as this life was, it felt simpler than being in the city somehow.
Thinking back on it, simple wasn’t the way to go for Bucky.
For simple just ain’t as fun. Right?
********
Steve was now 21, and he understood his power a little better than he did when he had been alone in the cabin. But really, understanding wasn’t the proper word. Here are the things that he knew for a fact :
He had a mutation that gave him some power that manifested sometimes.
That’s it. Real fucking great. He didn’t know how to tap into it, not to mention regulate or control it at all.
Fire never came back, but other things came. Once, he had been out. Getting into his very first bar, drinking his very first beer silently, and everybody had frozen in place apart from him and some other girl who had gone off running. After he caught up to her, they talked and that’s how he understood that the girl could freeze any person she touched. That gave him more questions than answers really. Like... why did everybody freeze that night? Why did Steve not freeze as well? Why couldn’t he do it on his own?
So they met every once in a while, mostly at the cabin, trying to figure out Steve’s role in all of it. They experimented, froze (and unfroze) birds that were flying close by. But it never really got untangled. Steve could do it when they were together, never when he was alone. And when she was with Steve, the girl could freeze things without touching them, only when she got back into the city, she couldn’t do it anymore. The mystery kept them both fascinated and they saw each other more and more. He grew to like the girl. It was nice to have a friend, someone who understood what it felt like to be different, lonely because of genetics. But things were short lived. Friendship turned into a bit more and Steve finally managed, one night as they were just chillin, to gather all his confidence. He tried to kiss her that night but when their skin touched, she froze, right there on the bench where they had been talking and looking at the stars together. In a panic, Steve stood up and ran as far as he could, knowing that eventually, his hold on her power would fade. At some point, she unfroze, but Steve was long gone. From then on, they didn’t see eachother again, Steve made sure of that. That’s how he lost Peggy.
So his own personal puzzle was coming together.
1. He had a mutation that gave him some power.
2. He was some kind of a mimic, catching on to other people’s power when they were close.
3. When he touched people, their powers went out of control.
Another time, late at night, to avoid being around to many people with abilities, he was simply running around central park trying to fight off loneliness by doing something casual...alone. Yeah he tried not to dwell too long on that logic. As he got lost in his thoughts, he felt himself lift off the ground. As he thought “What the actual fuck?” he noticed that everything around him was also flying. He looked around for a murant and found this guy floating about a feet over the tallest tree looked at him funny.
“Hey i’ve heard of you. You met Peg’s! Froze the entire Club 96!”
Steve looked at his feet and at all the small things floating around him (mostly empty coffee cups that had missed the trash) and gave the guy a worried look but didn’t speak. That required social skills and really, he seemed to lose those a bit more everyday.
When the guy noticed that Steve had about 6 Starbuck’s cup floating with him, he frowned.
“Funny, I can only fly myself… Seems like you found a way to carry stuff with you! How do ...”
And then the guy flew off, although it didn’t seem planned. Steve got that part from the high pitch scream that flew away with the guy. Then he fell back down on his ass, coffee cups hitting him one after the other.
He thought about it for a while, but then he got it.
4. He seemed to make powers more intense the closer he got to the person owning them.
That’s the moment he decided that life would be better for everyone if he got back to the cabin and stayed there forever. He had been a danger to people with powers too much already and seeing this guy lose his cool and fly away was the last straw. So why not just stay out of their way? After all he knew how to take care of himself, knew how to fish and build a fire, he could even draw without any papers or pencil with the burnt firewood. Yeah, living alone forever. Sad, lonely, but safe. Safe was good.
On his way back though, he came across this huge mansion. It was tall and looked a bit old. Red bricks and a tall gate surrounding it. He only stopped for a second to look. He was still curious after all and the architecture intrigued him… It’s like the whole place was buzzing with something untouchable. He took a step forward to see what kind of estate it was, and suddenly, he got the biggest migraine, sharp in his head. Then he heard panic in his mind, people screaming, calling for help. Nothing like the usual panic attacks he got. When he looked at his hands, they were slowly turning green and fuming. His eyes lifted to look for the mutant inducing this to his body, and then he found himself staring at 3 people, a red head, a tall blond man and a guy in a wheelchair. Then he saw the tall man looking at his hands too, only his were looking… electric?
“Charles do something!” The man yelled as his eyes turned bright blue and lightning struck him, or did he struck lightning?
Steve tried to run away, panic and fear overtaking him, only he too got struck. He felt the current flow inside him and fill his body from head to toe, making him feel those sharp tingles everywhere. It was getting harder and harder to move, or think or even breath. It was like as seconds passed, he was getting filled with more and more energy, way more than he could handle. Without knowing what else to to, he moved his hands towards the forest and lighting exploded out of his fingers, electricity transfering from him to the trees surrounding him.
Then, over the sound of his own agonizing screams and all those voices in his head, he heard one soft tone. “Sleep” it said, soft and calm. And everything went black.
When he woke up, the voices were gone, so was the tingling in his fingers or their green color. He was in something that looked like a normal room only without any personality. White walls, white door, wooden floor… beige bedding. Blue soft pants, wait. Thoses weren’t his. “The fuck?” he said out loud as he stood up and looked outside. He was in the mysterious mansion, only he must have been in a part that he had not seen before since he was way higher than the second floor. His eyes took it in and then he resigned himself. If he was here, he wasn’t out there, and if he wasn’t out there, he couldn’t make everything go ape shit again.
Then he thought about the lightning, the force of it, the way it made his entire body shake from the inside and the way he found to let it go in the the forest.
When he looked back outside, he noticed it. 50 yards of trees were split in half, like lightning had struck them. Just outside the gate, the place where he presumed he had been standing, was a large circle that looked like a burnt mark and a few feets away, there was another circle of burnt grass. He remembered the way the other guy had looked at his own hands, the way he dealt with the lighting and the way trees were split there too, and then he got it. He added one last thing to his mental list.
6. He made people lose control.
That explained his father dying in the fire, Peggy freezing, the boy flying away unwillingly… the electric blue eyes of the man last night... “That’s just great” he said, flopping back on the bed. What kind of power was that? Who even needed to get supercharged unwillingly?
He stayed in his room all day, alone, feeling like it was exactly what he deserved. His thoughts wandered tho. Like always, Steve Rogers, alone with his thoughts. He looked all around, taking in the place he had been taken to. This room was going to get really boring really soon if he couldn’t at least get something to write or draw with. All his life, it had been a way to escape. Drawing made his thoughts of self hatred and anxiety dial back and gave his brain a break. It was simple, no rules in art right? That’s what his mother always said. Pushing away the painful memory of his late mother, he closed his eyes and sleep eventually claimed him.
In the middle of the night, Steve suddenly woke up, his entire beige room covered in a thin layer of ice. Half asleep but already alert, he instinctively pushed himself as far away from the door that he could and yelled “ Get away! ”, knowing that someone must have been outside the door for him to catch on this power.
“Get away please…” he cried out again, tired of being so damn dangerous. He was exhausted. He waited for a couple of minutes, trying his best not to cry but feeling some tears turn into ice as soon as they were out. Then, temperature went back to normal and the ice slowly disappeared. The mutant must have gone away then, good. Safe.
Calming down, he let his shoulder release the tension they were holding and lied back on his bed, only this time, he couldn’t close his eyes. So… mutants were around. Why would mutants put him in this room if only to trigger his power in the middle of the night. That made no sense to Steve.
As he was trying to wrap his mind around it all, he heard something but he had to concentrate to decipher what it was. He couldn’t understand the sound, but it seemed to be coming from the nightstand. Great. Now objects could talk to him. Maybe he wasn’t just a mutant, maybe he really was batshit crazy AND a mutant.
He slowly pulled the drawer and saw that he wasn’t crazy. There was really a talking object waiting there for him to pick up. It was one of those walkie talkies only not a toy for kids. It looked old and used. But it was working just fine.
“...Okay? ...Sorry.” the objecte buzzed again.
He carefully rotated the thing that he presumed could control the volume, and pressed the button that was on the right side of the device.
“Hello?” he asked, not really knowing what to expect.
The response came quickly.
“Hey! Good to know you are okay. Sorry about earlier, I wanted to wee if you were awake and I just didn’t think…” the voice said, sounding casual and… happy?
“I… I don’t get it, where am I? Who are you? What’s going on here? Am I in trouble?” Steve replied.
“Aww no, not in trouble. We brought you here after last night’s incident. The professor had to put your brain in a weird coma before we could transport you but hey he’ll explain it all in the morning.”
Then there was a pause, for about 12 seconds, Steve was looking at the object in his hand, not understand one bit of it.
“Oh and I forgot to tell you. I’m Bucky. You are in Charles Xavier’s mansion. Get some sleep, tomorrow we start training.”
What the actual Fuck.