Chapter Text
The first thing Steve remembered was the cold. Not the frost of winter air or rain-soaked armor, but something deeper. A chill that settled beneath his skin and stayed.
It lingered in fragmented memories: the clash of steel, a shouted name that might've been his own, the scent of blood, and the unmistable arc of a blade meant for the squire behind him. He had stepped forward without thinking, that much at least was certain. After that, everything blurred.
The impact hadn’t hurt the way he expected. There was no clean slice, no immediate collapse. Just a strange, seeping chill that spread from the point of contact like frost crawling over glass. Looking down, he had expected blood. Instead, he saw something wrong. It wasn't quite visible yet, but it rooted itself in his mind even as the rest of the world slipped away.
By the time he returned to the capital, the cold had claimed his hands. Outwardly, nothing seemed amiss. But when he reached for his sword, his horse's reins, or even the clasps of his armor, his fingers resisted with a stubborn stiffness. He told himself it was battle fatigue or a bad night's sleep, the kind of lingering ache knights routinely ignored. He had pushed through worse.
Except this didn't fade.
Mornings became an ordeal. He would wake to find his hands heavy and unresponsive, feeling entirely detached from his body. He sat on the edge of his cot longer each day, flexing his fingers and waiting for the stiffness to ease. It always did, eventually, but never completely.
Steve ignored it. He kept training, sparring, and going through the motions of duty, hiding the small adjustments that crept into his movements. He switched grips more often, favored his left side, and moved through drills with a fraction less precision than before. If anyone noticed, they stayed silent.
However, the truth caught up to him one evening while he was unbuckling his armor.
At first, he mistook the smear of gray along his forearm for dirt trapped beneath his leather bracer. After all, he was no stranger to the filth that would cling after training. Yet when he tried to rub it away, it remained unblemished.
He frowned and applied more pressure, only when the pads of his fingers pressed against it, he found that the texture was entirely wrong. It didn't feel like skin, it felt eerily like that of his armor.
He drew his hand back to look closer. His skin had drained to an ashen, deathly pale, shot through with faint lines that traced his veins like threads of marble in stone. He blinked and shook his arm, desperately waiting for the trick of the eye to fade, but the marks remained.
That was when he finally went to the healers.
The court wasted no time. They stripped him of his duties with an efficiency that suggested concern—though whether it was for him or for the asset he represented, he couldn’t tell. He was ushered into bright rooms smelling faintly of herbs and smoke, forced to sit still while hands prodded his arm and voices murmured just out of earshot.
They tried everything. Poultices burned against his flesh but left the color untouched. Incantations spoken in practiced tones settled over him like a thin veil before dissipating without effect. Relics humming with ancient power were brought out, casting a faint glow against his graying skin. Nothing worked.
The gray didn’t spread during those early days, but it didn’t retreat either. It remained unnaturally still, indifferent to magic and medicine alike. That stillness, more than anything, unsettled the healers. Steve watched their urgency melt into uncertainty. The consultations grew shorter, the attempts less frequent, and the whispers quieter. By the end of the second week, the relics were put away. By the third, they stopped trying altogether.
The official explanation was that they needed time for research as the curse was unusual. But Steve had heard enough court politics to know the translation. They didn’t know how to fix it, and they weren’t sure they ever could. When he stopped showing up to the infirmary, no one questioned it, and that silence spoke louder than any diagnosis.
He returned to his duties as if nothing had changed, and at first, the denial worked. He learned to anticipate the stiffness, compensating for his rigid right arm with sheer strength and precision. The limb grew heavier as the gray crept past its original borders, but it still obeyed.
Mostly.
He told himself that was enough. Knighthood wasn’t about perfection, it was about endurance. It was about pushing through what hurt and what threatened to break you. If his movements slowed, he trained longer. If his arm ached, he ignored it. If the cold settled into his bones, he pretended it wasn't there.
It was manageable. It had to be.
He refused to let himself finish the alternative thought. Instead, using only his left hand, he tightened the straps of his armor, ignoring the way his right fingers refused to curl around the leather. The task took twice as long as it should have, but Steve refused to acknowledge the delay.
When he stepped back out into the courtyard, his armor was secured and his expression was steady. His movements were just precise enough that no one looking quickly would notice the missing fraction of a second in his swing. And if they did notice? Well, he was still standing. That had to count for something.