Chapter Text
Steven Rogers was born prematurely on the fourth of July 1920 to Irish immigrants Sarah and Joseph Rogers during the flu epidemic. Small and sickly, born far too early because of his mother’s illness, the doctors didn’t give the child much hope in surviving. But he made it through his first night, then his second, then three months later they were allowed to take him home.
Over the years he grew, but Steve was always smaller and skinnier than the other boys his age, always the first to catch a cold and the last to get over it. Constantly in and out of school because of his illnesses, Steve spent most of his time with his mother being fussed over and tucked up into bed. When his father came home in the evenings, Joseph would read to him, creating wonderlands in the boy’s imagination. Heroes, knights, men of honour and bravery were Steve’s constant childhood companions, his role models, and for the longest time his only friends.
But the Depression hit harder than any of them thought it would, and took Joseph as a casualty. The chemical warfare used during the Great War had weakened his lungs and the bout of influenza had damaged them permanently, so when the pneumonia hit when Steve was eight, Joseph only had a couple of weeks between the first cough and his final resting place. A soldier in the 107th, he was buried with honours, but it wasn’t the twenty-one gun salute Steve remembered, it was his mother. Thin and pale, she kept face even as she was handed the folded flag but Steve heard her crying during the night. Creeping in the room, Steve slid under the covers and curled up against his mother. He couldn’t breathe when she wrapped her arms around him and held him close, but the emotional comfort outweighed the physical discomfort and he stayed there all night.
Steve put the next few months down to his mother’s heartache: the fragility, the lack of spark that had made his mother who she was. She was tired because she was back at work. But when things got worse rather than better as they approached the anniversary of his father’s death, Steve started getting worried.
Twelve months to the day, Steve stood to attention watching his mother’s casket be lowered into the grave beside his father’s, the folded flag held in front of his chest like a shield.
Tuberculosis, they had said.
Tuberculosis, pneumonia, the causes didn’t matter much when the end was the same.
He missed her, he missed them both, of course he did, but he couldn’t help but feel they were better off where they were. Together, and whole: he’d spent months watching the two people who should be invincible to him waste away and die. He never wanted to do that again.