Chapter Text
Tønsberg, Norway — March, 1942
The snow had not stopped falling on Tønsberg in three days, and the small fishing town had gone the particular kind of quiet that places get when the rest of the world has forgotten they exist. Woodsmoke curled from chimneys. Somewhere down by the harbor, ice groaned against the hulls of boats nobody had taken out in a week. It should have been a night like any other — the kind old Torvald Kjeldsen had known ten thousand times in his sixty-one years as keeper of the stone church that sat above the town like a watchful grandmother, its bell tower dark, its doors bolted against the cold.
It was not a night like any other. Torvald knew it the moment the trucks came grinding up the coast road, headlamps cutting twin yellow trenches through the snowfall, engines too loud, too foreign, too many for a town this size to ever need.
He was an old man, and he had spent his whole life keeping a secret that had been keeping itself for longer than Norway had been a country, so when the pounding came at the church doors, he did not run. He straightened his collar, said a short prayer to a God he was no longer certain was listening, and went to open the doors himself, rather than let them be broken by men breaking down something that had survived eight hundred winters.
The man on the other side wore a long grey coat and gloves so fine they looked as if they'd never touched anything as common as dirt. He was flanked by a dozen soldiers whose collar pins bore an insignia Torvald had never seen — a skull wound about with something that might have been tentacles, might have been roots. Behind them, snow filled the tire ruts as fast as the trucks could carve them.
"Herr Kjeldsen." The man's voice was cultured, precise, faintly amused, as though he already knew how this conversation would end and found the formality of having it anyway a small private pleasure. "My name is Johann Schmidt. I understand you're something of a historian."
"I'm a caretaker," Torvald said. "Nothing more."
"A caretaker." Schmidt repeated the word slowly, as if tasting it. "Yes. I think that is exactly right." He stepped past Torvald into the nave without waiting to be invited, boots ringing on stone that had not felt a stranger's tread in generations. His soldiers followed, fanning out along the aisles, rifles catching candlelight. "You have tended this church how long? Forty years? Longer? Long enough, I think, to know precisely what it is you are tending."
"It's a house of God."
"It is a great many things." Schmidt walked slowly toward the altar, hands clasped behind his back like a man touring a museum on his own private schedule. "The Norsemen who built the first shrine on this ground did not worship your god, old man. They worshipped older ones. Odin — the Allfather, who traded an eye for wisdom. Do you know what he saw with that wisdom, once he'd paid for it?"
Torvald said nothing. His heart was hammering hard enough that he was certain the soldiers nearest him could hear it.
"He saw a light that did not come from this world," Schmidt continued, unbothered by the silence. "A relic of impossible power, fallen from the heavens, hidden here by men who understood they were not meant to wield it — only to guard it, and to wait for someone who was." He turned, and for the first time the pleasant mask of academic curiosity slipped just enough to show the hunger underneath it. "I am that someone, Herr Kjeldsen. You will show me where they hid it, or my men will take this church apart stone by stone until they find it themselves — and either way, I will have what I came for tonight. The only question left is how much of this beautiful old building, and this beautiful old town, will still be standing when they finish."
Torvald thought of his wife, five years in her grave and, he prayed, spared this. He thought of the fishermen down at the harbor, of the children asleep by now in the houses ringing the square, trusting that nothing in the world could touch them here, in the last quiet corner of it.
He thought of the oath his father had sworn him to, and his father before that, back through a line of caretakers stretching into the mist of the town's oldest stories.
Then he walked to the altar, knelt, and pressed his palm flat against a section of floor no different from any other — and felt the stone give way beneath his hand with a grinding whisper that hadn't been heard in that church in living memory.
Schmidt's soldiers had to hold torches close to see it properly at first — a small stone casket, half-sunk beneath the altar, carved with symbols older than the building raised over it. When Schmidt lifted the lid himself, ungloved, his bare fingers trembling with something that was not cold, the light that spilled out was a blue Torvald had never once seen in sixty-one years of watching the sky over that harbor. Not the blue of ice. Not the blue of deep water. Something that seemed to come from very far away and had traveled a very long time to arrive here.
"Mein Gott," one of the soldiers whispered, and Schmidt turned on him with such sudden violence in his expression that the man flinched back into the pew behind him.
"God had nothing to do with this," Schmidt said softly, and lifted the cube free of its casket with both hands, cradling it the way another man might cradle something newborn. The light washed over his face, and for a moment — just a moment — Torvald thought he saw something underneath Schmidt's skin that had no business being there. A wrongness. Gone again before he could be certain he'd seen it at all.
"Colonel." A younger soldier had come to stand at Schmidt's shoulder. "The village. What are your orders?"
Schmidt did not look up from the cube. His voice, when it came, was almost gentle. "Herr Kjeldsen has been very helpful to us tonight. See that no word of this reaches anyone who might still be listening for it." He finally lifted his eyes to Torvald's, and in them was nothing at all — no cruelty, no triumph, nothing so warm as hatred. Only a terrible, patient emptiness, like a door standing open onto a very long drop.
"I am sorry, old man," Schmidt said, and he did sound sorry, in the way a man might be sorry about weather. "You did guard it well. Almost well enough."
Torvald Kjeldsen did not look away from him. Whatever else could be said of the last keeper of Tønsberg's church, when the soldiers moved, he met it with his eyes open.
By the time the trucks pulled away before dawn, snow was already covering the tire ruts, the way it always eventually covered everything in that part of the world. The church stood empty on its hill, doors open to the wind for the first time in eight centuries. Down in the harbor, the ice went on groaning against the hulls of boats that, this time, truly would never sail again.
Six thousand miles away, in a city that did not yet know Johann Schmidt's name, a fifteen-year-old boy with a wheeze in his chest and a head full of dreams he had no earthly right to was, at that exact moment, being told no for the third time that month.
Hosu, Japan — June, 1943
The stethoscope was cold against Izuku Midoriya's back, and he tried very hard not to shiver, because shivering made his breathing worse, and his breathing being worse was exactly the kind of thing that had gotten him thrown out of the last three offices he'd tried.
"Breathe in," said the doctor — a heavyset, tired-looking man named Fujita who had clearly done this exact examination several hundred times already that week and was not expecting this one to be any different. "Slowly. Don't force it."
Izuku breathed in. It caught halfway, the way it always did, a small catch like a hook snagging on cloth, and he heard Dr. Fujita's pen stop scratching against his clipboard.
"Again," Fujita said, not unkindly. "Take your time."
He tried again. It caught again.
Fujita set the stethoscope down, and Izuku already knew, the way he'd known the first time and the second time and every time after, what was coming, because it always came, and it had never once — not once, in nineteen months of trying — come out any different.
"Asthma," Fujita said, more to his clipboard than to Izuku. "How long?"
"Since I was six. It's manageable — I have breathing exercises, I hardly ever have a real attack anymore, and when I do I know how to bring it down on my own, I just need someone to actually let me try instead of—"
"And the scarlet fever." Fujita was still writing. "That's noted here too. Weakens the heart, in cases like this. Sometimes permanently."
"That was when I was four. I'm fine now. I run three miles every morning, I can do it, I just need somebody to actually let me try instead of turning me away before I get the chance to prove it."
"Son." Fujita looked up from the clipboard at last, and there was something almost apologetic in his tired eyes, which was somehow worse than if he'd simply been annoyed. "I believe you try hard. I believe you run your three miles. I have seen a hundred boys sit exactly where you're sitting and tell me exactly what you're telling me, and none of that is the same thing as passing a physical for combat duty. If I sign your form and they send you to the front and your heart gives out under a pack half the weight of what you're carrying right now, that isn't bravery. That's a corpse I helped make." He set his pen down. "I'm sorry. I am. But no."
Izuku sat very still on the edge of the examination table, hands flat against his knees, and made himself say what he always made himself say, because the alternative was to let the no be the last word, and he'd promised himself a long time ago that it never would be. "Is there anything else? Anything at all? I read four languages. I taught myself cryptography out of library books — I could show you, I'm not just saying it. Intelligence work, the medical corps, supply lines, anything—"
"That's not this office," Fujita said, gently but with the settled, apologetic finality of a man who'd had this exact conversation too many times to count. "Try the recruitment center on the east side. Tell them what you told me. Maybe they'll have something."
They would not have anything. Izuku already knew that too. He'd tried the east side office in April.
He thanked Dr. Fujita anyway, because his mother had raised him to thank people even when what they'd given him was a closed door, collected his shirt from the chair, and let himself out into the June heat, where Bucky Barnes was waiting for him on the front step — tall, broad through the shoulders in a way Izuku was not and never would be, sandy hair falling messy over his forehead, dressed like a man who didn't much care what he looked like as long as he could move fast in it. Bucky's family had come to Hosu from Brooklyn when Izuku was Nine and Bucky was 15, his father chasing a job with a shipping concern that had folded within two years of the move, but by then Bucky had already picked up enough of the language and enough of the neighborhood that going home again had never once come up as an option worth discussing. He'd been the biggest kid on Izuku's block for as long as Izuku could remember, and also, for exactly as long, the only kid on the block who'd never once let anyone make that a problem for the smallest one.
"Well?" Bucky said.
"They said no."
"Shocking." Bucky pushed off the doorframe and fell into step beside him as they started down the street, the afternoon sun throwing long shadows across the cobbles. "What was the reason this time? Feel like we're running out of new ones."
"Heart, this time. On top of the asthma. Apparently scarlet fever weakens the heart. Who knew."
"I believe every doctor in this city has now personally informed you of that fact at least once."
"At least."
Bucky studied him sideways for a moment, the teasing dropping out of his voice. "You know you don't have to do this every month. Nobody's gonna think less of you if you—"
"I think less of me." Izuku said it lightly, like a joke, and it wasn't a joke, and Bucky knew it wasn't a joke, and neither of them said anything else about it for almost a full block.
Bucky peeled off toward the docks eventually — his afternoon shift loading crates for an export company that dealt in something Bucky was cheerfully vague about, "boxes, Izuku, boxes, big ones, small ones, I get paid the same either way" — and Izuku walked the rest of the way home alone, past shopfronts with paper ration notices taped in the windows, past the corner where old Mrs. Sato sold plums out of a cart every summer and hadn't set up in three weeks because her son was somewhere in the Pacific and she couldn't bear the smiling that used to come with it.
He didn't go straight home. He rarely did, on days like this one — needed a few minutes first to let the rejection settle somewhere his mother wouldn't see the weight of it on his face. He found his usual spot on the harbor wall, where the fishing boats that still had captains willing to take them out sat low and patient against the pilings, and pulled a battered notebook out of his satchel — the one with a cover so soft from handling it had stopped being green years ago and become simply the color of a thing loved too hard for too long.
He wrote in it almost every day. Had since he was small enough that his handwriting used to wander uphill across the page — little accounts of things he'd seen or read about or overheard. The air raid warden three streets over who'd gone back into a burning storeroom twice for a neighbor's cat and come out both times grinning like he'd won something. The harbor nurse who'd taught herself to set bones from a borrowed medical text because the town hadn't had a real doctor since 1940. A newspaper clipping, carefully glued in, about a fire brigade in Osaka that had pulled eleven people from a collapsed building with nothing but rope and their own hands and sheer bloody-minded refusal to stop. He didn't know exactly what he was building, cataloguing all of it — only that somewhere in the accumulating weight of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, he kept hoping to find the shape of what he himself was supposed to become, if his body would ever let him.
Everyone I write about in here started as somebody nobody expected anything from, he'd written once, years ago, in handwriting still round with childhood. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think maybe that's the only kind of person brave enough to actually try.
He read the line over now, the way he sometimes did on days like this one, and felt something in his chest ease half a degree — not hope, exactly, not yet, but the small stubborn cousin of hope that had gotten him through nineteen months of closed doors and showed no particular interest in quitting now. He closed the notebook, tucked it back into his satchel, and started the rest of the way home, already composing in his head the version of the day small enough not to worry his mother more than it had to.
It did not, of course, work. It never did.
Their apartment was small, two rooms over a shuttered print shop, and it smelled the way it always smelled in the evening — soy and ginger and the particular warm dust smell of his mother's books, stacked in towers around the one good armchair because there wasn't a shelf in Japan big enough to hold Inko Midoriya's collection.
"Izuku?" His mother's voice came from the kitchen before he'd even gotten his shoes off. "Is that you?"
"It's me, Mom."
She appeared in the doorway wiping her hands on her apron, and one look at his face told her everything the words hadn't yet, because she'd had nineteen months of practice reading that exact expression too. Her own face didn't fall, not quite — she was better at armoring it than he was — but something in her shoulders eased down half an inch, the tension of hoping releasing into the familiar shape of not-hoping.
"They said no," she said. It wasn't a question.
"My heart, this time. Because of the scarlet fever."
"Ah." Inko came and pressed both hands to his cheeks, the way she'd done since he was small enough for her to have to bend down to do it, though now she had to reach up instead. She looked at him for a long moment — really looked, the way mothers do when they're checking their children for damage the children themselves might be trying to hide — and whatever she found must have reassured her, because she smoothed his hair back from his forehead and said, "Good. Sit. Dinner in ten minutes, and you're going to eat all of it, not just push it around like last time."
"Mom—"
"Sit, Izuku."
He sat.
It wasn't until they were most of the way through dinner — rice and grilled fish and the little pickled radishes she always made too many of because she knew they were his favorite — that she finally said what he could tell she'd been sitting on since he walked in the door.
"I'm not sorry, you know." She said it without looking up from her bowl, in the careful, deliberate tone of someone choosing words they'd rehearsed. "That they keep saying no. I know that's an awful thing for a mother to say to her son when he wants so badly to help, and I know you're going to look at me right now like I've slapped you, but I'm not sorry, and I won't pretend to be. Not even for you."
"Mom, I—"
"Let me finish." She set her chopsticks down. "You have spent your whole life being told what your body can't do. Since you were small enough for me to carry you to the doctor myself, wheezing in my arms, I have watched you refuse to believe a single one of them. Every time, Izuku. And I have never once tried to stop you from trying again, because it's the best thing about you, and I would rather cut off my own arm than be the reason you stopped believing that about yourself." Her voice wavered, just slightly, on the last few words, and she pressed her lips together until it steadied. "But you are the only thing I have left in this world that I am certain of. Do you understand? Everything else — the war, the ration books, whether the shop downstairs will ever open again — none of it is certain. You are certain. And I am selfish enough to want to keep at least one certain thing." She looked up at him then, eyes bright and fierce in a way that had nothing soft about it at all. "So no. I'm not sorry they said no. I hope they say no a hundred more times. And I love you more than my own life, and I am so tired of watching your heart break every time you walk through that door, and both of those things are true at once, and you're going to have to let them be."
Izuku didn't say anything for a moment, because there wasn't anything to say that wouldn't come out smaller than what she'd just given him.
"I love you too, Mom," he said finally, which wasn't enough, but which was true, and which she seemed to accept as enough anyway, because she reached across the table and squeezed his hand once, hard, before picking her chopsticks back up and informing him, in an entirely different and much lighter voice, that he still hadn't touched his radishes.
It was almost three weeks before the Stark Exposition of Tomorrow finally reached Hosu, though the posters had been going up around the city for a week before that — bright things, primary colors, a stylized eagle in mid-swoop over the words THE STARK EXPOSITION OF TOMORROW, TOURING THE PACIFIC IN SUPPORT OF WAR RELIEF, and underneath, smaller: HOWARD STARK PRESENTS THE FUTURE, TONIGHT.
Bucky had been talking about it for days, dragging Izuku past the same poster on the same corner every morning like it might have changed since yesterday, going on about the flying car he swore he'd read about in an American newspaper his father still had shipped over, weeks late and heavily creased from the journey. "A car, Izuku. That flies. Actually flies, not some circus trick with wires."
"Cars don't fly, Bucky."
"This one's gonna."
"The aerodynamics alone would require a completely different—"
"I don't care about the aero-whatever, I care about the flying car."
It turned out, in the end, that the car did not actually fly — it hovered, briefly and unsteadily, about four feet off the exhibition stage before its inventor cheerfully admitted over the microphone that they were "still working out one or two small kinks" while it crashed back down in a shower of sparks that had half the crowd gasping and the other half laughing, Bucky loudest of all — but by then Izuku had almost forgotten to be disappointed, because the man standing on that stage in the expensive suit, grinning through the failure like it was exactly as fun as the success would have been, was Howard Stark, and Howard Stark's inventions — the ones that worked — were already legend even here, six thousand miles from wherever he'd built them.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Stark called out over the scattered applause and the smoke still curling off the stage, utterly unbothered, "the future isn't always polite about arriving on schedule! Give it another year!"
The exposition grounds sprawled across what had been, a month ago, an empty lot near the harbor — now strung with lights and banners, packed with families and soldiers on leave and children weaving between legs with paper flags, every stall promising some glimpse of a world that hadn't been invented yet. There was a table selling war bonds under a hand-painted sign promising every purchase brought the boys home faster. There was a newsreel tent looping footage of factories and shipyards to a swelling orchestral score. There was, tucked at the far edge of the grounds where the crowd noise thinned out, a folding table with two recruitment officers in uniform, a stack of forms, and a hand-lettered sign that Izuku noticed roughly four seconds after he noticed everything else about it.
"No," Bucky said, without even looking where Izuku was looking.
"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to. I've known you thirteen years, I can hear you thinking it from over here." Bucky steered him bodily toward the next stall, one hand clamped on his shoulder like he could physically redirect the trajectory of Izuku's whole life if he just pushed hard enough. "We are going to look at Stark's ridiculous car, and we are going to eat whatever that is that smells like heaven three stalls down, and you are not going to spend the one night off I've got this month arguing with another recruiting officer about your blood pressure."
"It's not about my blood pressure, it's my heart, and I wasn't going to—"
"You were absolutely going to."
He was absolutely going to. They both knew it. But the grilled skewers three stalls down really did smell like heaven, and the crowd swept them along past the recruitment table before Izuku could make good on the impulse, and for a little while — long enough to watch Stark's second demonstration go marginally better than the first, long enough to laugh with Bucky over how badly they'd both misjudged how spicy the skewers actually were — Izuku let himself just be a fifteen-year-old boy at a fair with his best friend, instead of the thing he spent every other hour of every other day trying and failing to become.
It didn't last. It never did. By the time the light started going gold and long across the harbor and Bucky had wandered off to argue with a chestnut vendor about pricing he had no actual leverage to negotiate, Izuku found himself standing twenty feet from that folding table again, as though his own feet had made the decision without consulting him.
The two officers behind it had the tired, sagging posture of men who'd been rejecting people since noon and had stopped expecting anyone interesting to walk up. Izuku squared his shoulders anyway, walked up anyway, and was two sentences into an explanation of why his cryptography skills might be useful to Army Intelligence even if his heart wasn't fit for the front lines when a small, precise, faintly accented voice spoke from just behind his left shoulder.
"You've tried this before."
Izuku turned. The man behind him was not tall — shorter than Izuku, even, which was saying something — with round spectacles, a neat grey suit that had clearly been tailored somewhere far from Hosu, and eyes that were doing something no stranger's eyes had ever quite done to him before: actually looking, carefully, as though Izuku were a puzzle worth the time it took to work out, rather than a problem to be processed and moved past.
"I'm sorry?"
"This." The man nodded at the recruitment table, at the forms, at the whole tired apparatus of it. "You have tried this before. More than once, I think." A small smile. "You have the look of a man reciting an argument he's given a great many times."
"Is it that obvious?"
"To me? Yes. To them?" A glance at the officers, who hadn't looked up. "No. To them you are only one more boy who does not meet the height and weight requirement, and they have seen four hundred of you today alone." The man extended a hand. "Abraham Erskine."
"Izuku Midoriya." He shook it — the man's grip was surprisingly firm for someone who looked, at a glance, like he'd never held anything heavier than a fountain pen. "Are you with the exposition, Doctor — is it Doctor?"
"It is Doctor, yes, though not the kind who will be listening to your heart today." Erskine's smile deepened slightly, as though he'd made a small joke only he fully understood. "I am with Mr. Stark's operation in a — consulting capacity, you might say. I find these events very useful for a certain kind of observation." He tilted his head. "May I ask you something, Mr. Midoriya, and may I ask that you answer honestly, because I promise you I will know if you don't?"
Izuku, feeling strangely like he'd stepped into a conversation with rules he hadn't been told yet, nodded.
"Do you want to go to war because you want to kill somebody?"
"No." The answer came out fast and certain, with no hesitation at all, which seemed to be exactly what Erskine had been listening for. "No, sir. I've never once wanted to hurt anybody in my life — that's not what any of this has ever been about, not for one single day of it. I just can't stand the thought of people who can't protect themselves being left to face something that could crush them, while somebody who might actually be able to help just — stays home. Safe. I don't think I could live with myself if I let that be me." He stopped, aware he'd just said something he'd never quite put into words out loud before, even to Bucky, even to his mother. "There are people all over the world right now who are afraid, every day, of men who are only strong because nobody strong enough has ever bothered to stand in front of them and say no. I can't fix that from a hospital bed. I can't fix it by being told no in nineteen different offices for the rest of the war. I just want the chance to be the one who says no to them instead. That's all it's ever been, sir. I promise you, that's all it's ever been."
For a long moment, Erskine said nothing at all. He simply studied Izuku's face with those careful, cataloguing eyes, and something in his own expression had gone very still and very serious, the joking warmth from a moment ago folded away somewhere underneath it.
"Wait here," Erskine said finally. "Do not sign anything with those men. Do not go home yet. I have to speak with someone, and then I am going to come back, and I am going to ask you a great many more questions — and if you answer them the way you just answered that one—" He was already turning to go, throwing the last words back over his shoulder as though they weren't nearly as significant as they were about to prove to be. "—then I think, Mr. Midoriya, that your nineteen months of being told no might finally be coming to an end."
Izuku stood rooted to the spot as the small man in the grey suit disappeared into the crowd, heart hammering against ribs that a dozen doctors had sworn were too weak for a battlefield — and for the first time in nineteen months, the hammering didn't feel like fear at all.
It felt like hope.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Bucky said, reappearing at his elbow with a paper cone of chestnuts and the smug look of a man who felt he'd won an argument about pricing that Izuku was fairly sure he had actually lost. "What happened? They finally let you fill out a form and you forgot how to hold a pen?"
"Bucky." Izuku turned to him, and whatever was on his own face made Bucky's teasing grin falter halfway through. "I think something just happened."
"...What kind of something?"
"I don't — I'm not even sure yet. There was a man. A doctor, he said, but not that kind of doctor, and he asked me why I wanted to fight, and I told him, and he just — he looked at me like—" Izuku stopped, shook his head, tried again. "He told me to wait here. He said he was going to come back and ask me more questions, and that if I answered them the way I answered the first one, then—" He couldn't finish it. Saying it out loud felt like it might jinx the whole fragile shape of it, the way saying a wish out loud over birthday candles was supposed to keep it from coming true.
Bucky's teasing had drained out of his face entirely now, replaced by something careful and searching — the same look he got right before a fight, when he was deciding exactly how serious a situation actually was. "Izuku. Look at me. Is this real, or is this you wanting something so bad you're—"
"I don't know." It came out smaller than he meant it to. "I don't know, Bucky. But he said to wait, so."
He looked back out at the crowd, at the lights coming up gold against the darkening sky over the harbor, at the folding table where the two bored recruitment officers were starting to pack away their forms for the night, oblivious to the fact that twenty feet away, a boy who'd spent nineteen months collecting other people's courage in a battered notebook because he couldn't yet find any use for his own was about to find out that somebody, somewhere, had finally decided he was worth saying yes to.
"So we wait," Izuku said.
Bucky didn't answer right away. He just handed over half the paper cone of chestnuts, settled down onto the low harbor wall beside him, and said, in a voice that had dropped all its teasing and gone instead very quiet and very certain, the way it always did on the rare occasions he meant something all the way down: "Then we wait."
They waited together as the lights came up over Hosu harbor, and somewhere in the thinning crowd, a small man in a grey suit was already making his way toward a telephone, already composing in his head the argument he was about to have with Colonel Chester Phillips — an argument he intended, whatever it cost him, to win.