Chapter Text
**
prologue.
The woman in front of him, dark brown hair, cat-eye glasses, and a smile that stretches across her teeth in a way that is either charming or patronizing, he can’t really say, raises an eyebrow. Steve watches her, almost unseeingly, and he must blink one too many times because her smile falters a bit at the wide edges and she shifts from one foot to the other.
“Steve?” she tries again. She has a recorder in her hand, with a strip of tape across the front, emblazoned with the word BUZZFEED. “Did you hear the question?”
Steve is all stomach-twisting nerves and general nervous energy, his mind a chaotic array of half-images that could form an answer, if he could make his mouth cooperate long enough to form, you know, actual words.
“What?” he finally tries and laughs. He hopes it’s a light thing, but it’s as tight as he feels. “I’m sorry. I’m--”
“Oh, you must be nervous,” the reporter clucks sympathetically. “Of course, so close to Qualifiers. I asked what was it that made you want to become a figure skater?”
Oh, that’s why, Steve thinks, breathing out a little shakily. It wasn’t the nerves after all. It was the question altogether.
**
It was always just the two of them, Steve and Sarah Rogers. Steve had a father at some point, he supposes, and Sarah has assured him on more than one occasion that he was a lovely man whom she loved very dearly, except he had gone and died before Steve’s first birthday, so all he really has to remember the man with half of his DNA content is a blurry picture of himself, a mere infant, trying to slobber on a blond man’s nose. It’s Sarah’s favorite picture and she tells Steve at least once a month that he bears a striking resemblance to the man getting his nose gnawed on, but as Steve can largely only see a tiny blond gnawing on a nose, he’s always been skeptical.
Sarah Rogers was his mother, father, and best friend rolled into one small and incomprehensibly beautiful human. She had also been one of the most graceful and talented figure skaters to ever compete in the sport.
When Steve remembers his childhood, it isn’t too many memories of him and his mother at the park or him and his mother at the movies, but him and his mother at the rink, Sarah Rogers in velvet and skates and Steve, trying desperately to peer over the sides at the ice. Sarah glided across the ice as though she had been born for it, her movements so smooth and her jumps so exquisite that sometimes Steve forgot she could walk on the ground at all. She would bound from one end of the ice, lift herself into the air, and he would hold his breath until her blades found the ground again. He would always let it out fast, in a rush, as though his breath and his breath alone would keep her from falling right through. Sarah would finish her particular routine and come to the side with a slick, sharp sound and Steve would nearly tumble out from the pen trying to get to her. Sarah Rogers would laugh, take a tiny hand, and lead him out with her, carefully, ever so very carefully.
All of Steve’s best memories are from there; from the side of the ice, watching, enthralled, clapping, thrilled, and, eventually, when he was just old enough and just big enough, pulling on pairs of skates of his own.
He was seven years old when everything changed.
It was during a practice, leading up to the Olympic Qualifying Trials and despite her age--Steve would later learn that twenty eight in ice skating years was practically dead and buried--she was in the best form she had ever been. She was a contender for an Olympic spot, a judge and fan favorite on the back of a remarkable fourth place finish in that year’s World Figure Skating Championship. Sarah had just missed out on bronze medal. Steve had cheered himself hoarse from the sidelines anyway.
That had been months ago and she was still landing axel after axel. Sarah Rogers was relentless beauty and grace on ice. But, Steve also knew, she was struggling off of it. Stress, maybe, from the pressure of Qualifiers, or worry, from the virus Steve accidentally caught that had ended up with him in the hospital, or her ever-lingering anxiety, from a family history of ever-lingering anxiety. (Mental health, Sarah Rogers had taken her young son aside on many, many occasions, is very important. Anxiety? Depression? They run in our family, sweetling, you have to take care of yourself. Steve had been four years old the very first time. He had blinked at her pronouncement and then gone back to finger-painting.)
Despite her performances, Sarah hadn’t been sleeping well and she hadn’t been eating well and there was a terrible cough that she just couldn’t seem to get rid of. On this day, before she took to the ice, she even forgot to give Steve a kiss on the forehead, and Sarah Rogers never forgot to give her favorite boy a kiss on the forehead. (Good luck, sweetling, Sarah Rogers had told her son on many, many occasions. You are my good luck charm. Steve had been six months old the very first time. He had blinked at her and gurgled happily.)
In retrospect, it had been a bad omen, forgetting that kiss.
It was the start of something awful and that day, everything went wrong, one after the other after the other. Sarah's laces came untied and she slipped on the ice and she didn’t finish a spin here and she missed a rotation there. When she finally jumped for her double axel, it was all wrong.
Steve, seven years old, with the acute eyes of someone who had been watching his mother figure skate for his entire little life, could see immediately something wasn't right. Her balance was off. She didn’t have the speed necessary. Her laces were still untied. She looked pale and shaken, uncertain in a sport that required precision and, above all, confidence. It was a red flag; it was all red flags. Sarah took off and Steve, heart fluttering, stomach leaden with dread, put his fingers over his eyes.
He heard the crack of her leg before he heard anything else.
It was a devastating break, the kind that shatters dreams in a hospital bed. It was the kind of break that Sarah Rogers would carry with her the rest of her life, a twinge of pain whenever she walked too fast or the weather was too mercurial. It ended her hopes for the Olympics and, with it, her bright and beautiful career.
What it did not end was her love for her son and the brightness in her eyes--never a moment of frustration, never a breath of envy, always just pure, unadulterated enthusiasm and pride--when he took to the ice too, boots laced, arms steady, moving with the ease and delicate grace of someone who had watched the ice, who had grown up on the ice; someone who, too, had been born to be there.
**
“You were out for two years,” the BuzzFeed reporter is saying. “No excuses, no rumors, just one day you’re on the ice and the next you’re not. Do you want to talk about it? What happened at Worlds?”
Steve doesn’t think about World’s. He doesn’t think about that time at all. Where there should be two years there’s nothing but a gaping, empty chasm of time.
The woman’s smile flickers when he doesn’t answer. She does that nervous throat clearing that people do when they don’t know how to address an awkward situation.
“We’re glad to have you back at any rate,” she says. “We didn’t know if you were going to come back to skate again. What made you do it?”
This, Steve can answer. He looks up toward the sky when he does. It’s blue here, the clearest blue he’s ever seen.
He looks back toward the reporter with a distant smile.
“I wasn’t done yet.”