Prompt Post 1

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At least one of the characters in your prompt must have been in Captain America: The First Avenger or Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

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Update, April 22, 2014:
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Fill: Baby, You Shouldn't Be Alive [1/7?]

[twinkats]

When Steve Rogers had been born, he had been born sick. The doctors were certain that he wouldn’t survive the night. He was too weak, too small for a child of nine months. They were afraid his heart was too frail and it sounded like he couldn’t breath properly. They did the best that they could, bundled him up, but they expected to find him dead before morning.

He wasn’t. Days passed, Steve didn’t get better, his breathing didn’t improve and his heart beat somewhat erratically still, but he didn’t die. A week later, baffled, the doctors gave him to his mother to take home.

Sarah Rogers called him her little miracle child, and like that it seemed to set a precedent for his life, a precedent that no matter how ill, no matter how bad Steve’s health got, he didn’t seem to die. He caught the flu when he was five, and technically this was his second time with the flu. He’d been born in the middle of the pandemic that swept the United States and he’d been such a sickly thing it was to be expected that he’d catch it before he could even walk, expected that he’d die from it (which he didn’t) so when he was five Sarah knew the drill.

Steve got sick enough that he couldn’t move. He ran a fever high enough that he hallucinated, dangerous enough that he’d be placed in a bath filled to the brim with the coldest water Sarah could get him. After nearly a month sick and teetering on the edge, Steve recovered. He’d lost nearly all of his weight and looked more like skin and bones, and he had the hardest time of breathing afterward, but he was alive.

He’d get asthma attacks, some bad enough that he’d wheeze and cough and then pass out from lack of air. Sometimes he’d stumble, fall, hit his head because his blood sugar levels had spiked past what little insulin he’d had in him--and when he’d been diagnosed diabetic it’d been such a relief as there was something more Sarah could do to help him. It cost them a pretty penny, and she’d had to work two jobs alongside her husbands one (most of his money seemed to be spent upon booze) but she got Steve the medication he needed.

As Steve got older the more he got teased for his poor health. Kids would pity him and bully him both, but he pushed past it. By the time Steve was ten he began picking fights and would come home beaten bloody and bruised and sometimes with a fair few broken arms, legs, ribs. Sarah was certain he’d snap his neck at some point.

(Steve could actually remember one of the boys grabbing him and twisting, he could remember a crack and then he woke up, alone in the back alley sore but alive, half-certain he’d imagined it--that had been the first of many denials to come)

Then Steve met Bucky. He had a split lip and a limp, he’d taken quite a beating. He was four-eight and fifty pounds and he looked it. Bucky was five foot and almost a hundred and had a black eye and a loose tooth. His mouth looked bloodied from it when he grinned and hauled Steve up and laughed. They met in a back alley during a brawl. They became friends when Bucky took Steve home to patch him up. That simple, little moment seemed to define their lives from then on.