Chapter Text
She says, “Don’t you care about him at all? You’re not even going to try to fight for fifty-fifty custody?” and John watches himself open his mouth and say, “What, the child support payments you’re gonna be getting aren’t enough? You want a babysitter too? You already got everything you’re gonna get out of me, so go fuck yourself, Olivia.”
He watches himself storm out into the sunny blue morning. It’s beautiful, too beautiful, and he feels how his younger self hates it all: the jewel-feathered hummingbirds darting around the feeder Olivia hung on the porch, the peaceful thrum of the neighbor’s lawn mower, the tinkle of an ice cream truck making its way up the neighborhood. He just lost everything, and it's a beautiful summer day. The world should be weeping and tearing itself apart for him, but it's just got to be a fucking perfect, ten-outta-ten day.
His own internal reel plays out like background music, a thoughtline embedded in this memory, and he hears his own mind bubbling hotly: it’s not fair, it's not fucking fair! Olivia gets to make plenty of mistakes and he’s still expected to be Mr. Perfect, even while he’s stumbling through the worst pain of his life, grieving Lemar like a limb while his good name gets dragged through the mud in every publication in the Western Hemisphere. And everyone wants him to grovel and apologize and pretend like he deserves it and pretend it doesn’t hurt. It's a men's rights issue, is what it is. Gotta be tough and stoic all the time, and no one ever lets you hurt. Well, fuck that. Fuck all of this. And fuck you, too, Olivia.
He slams the front door loudly behind himself to feel a little tougher, but it doesn’t work. The only thing that changes is that his son upstairs begins to cry in his crib, woken from his nap by his father walking out on his family like a coward, walking out like the kind of loser deadbeat John’s reviled his whole life. And he curses himself bitterly for ever taking that fucking serum because all he wants to do right now is drink himself into a stupor, but he’s robbed himself of even that little relief.
Reality trips over itself and he's back in the kitchen, and he's looking at himself, looking at Olivia's big brown eyes shining with tears. “Don’t you care about him at all? You’re not even going to try to fight for fifty-fifty custody?”
He loves her, and he hates her so fucking much in this moment, and he watches himself open his big fat mouth: “What, the child support payments you’re gonna be getting aren’t enough? You want a babysitter too? You already got everything you’re gonna get out of me, so go fuck yourself, Olivia.”
Then he watches himself lose everything, again.
"Hey, Bob?" he calls, looking upward at the sky. Like Bob is God. Well, in this place he might well be. "Are you doing this? Because this is extremely, uh, not cool, man. Dick move."
The kitchen linoleum splits and shifts and changes, peeling up into tiles that fly away and reveal filthy concrete under his boots. Walls grow up around him: a dank empty warehouse, shafts of afternoon sunlight piercing the dusty gloom.
Sam Wilson, steady as the Earth, tells him, “You gotta give me the shield, man.”
John watches himself say, “You don’t wanna do this.”
Bucky Barnes’ grim gaze flicks up to him. “Yeah,” he says softly. “We do.”
So: John watches himself pummel the living shit out of two good men. He rips apart Sam Wilson’s beloved wings out of pure spite. He leaves Barnes bleeding and bruised. In the end, the pair of them gang up on him and snap his arm and knock him out, which is actually pretty unfair, thanks, because it’s two against one. As his consciousness circles the drain, John watches Bucky Barnes stagger to him, take the bloodied shield, and throw it at Sam’s feet like a dog bringing a trophy to its master. Sam takes it and rubs mournfully at the dead Flag-Smasher’s blood with his sleeve. Boo-hoo, a weapon was used as a weapon, isn’t that just so fucking sad.
Time skips and runs like water, and now John’s alone in the warehouse, awake again and cradling his broken arm and gingerly trying to climb to his feet. The sun’s a little lower. Barnes and Wilson are gone. Distantly, sirens are approaching.
Okay, the younger John is thinking, so maybe this looks kinda bad, he gets that. God, the mainstream media is going to have a field day. He can already see the headlines about how Captain America murdered someone, even though he was just neutralizing an enemy combatant, a fucking terrorist who damn well deserved it, which is his job, okay? Steve Rogers killed people all the time. And whatever the bleeding-heart Twitter pundits have to say about him will be a small price to pay for avenging Lemar. But no one other than him is going to get that. They’ve all been against him from the start. They made him into this, and now they’re going to string him up for it. They’ll take the opportunity to take everything from him now, give it all to Wilson, Steve Rogers’ own DEI hire. His career. His title. His medals. His honor. Good job, boys: John Walker, combat veteran hero and all-around good guy, has been defeated, and soon he’ll be stripped of every last goddamn thing he had.
The tape runs to the end. Reality skips a beat. The sun is higher again.
“You gotta give me the shield, man,” says Sam Wilson.
“You don’t wanna do this.”
“Yeah,” Bucky says. “We do.”
So he watches it all roll out once more. The memory is stained deep with a miserable feeling so strong, he can smell it in the air like blood. Can almost hear it, like faint sour music, like his own nasty little soundtrack. He doesn’t want to look it in the eye. He has a horrible sense that this feeling got mixed into the cracked foundation of him. It goes all the way down, and is it ever ugly.
“Why the fuck are you showing me this?” John yells into the echoing rafters. “This just some kind of joke? Come on, Bobby, don’t be a dick.”
He strides forward and falls into a long black hole in the floor that definitely wasn’t there a moment ago, and—when he lands, he’s in the driver’s seat of his SUV with his foot on the gas pedal. Olivia is in the front seat beside him with a towel between her legs. The towel is red. It used to be white.
“It’s probably nothing, okay?” he’s saying. “I’m sure the baby’s fine. Hey, Liv, he’s gonna be fine, okay?”
“Please hurry,” she sobs. “Please, Johnny, I can’t lose this one too.”
“I’m going as fast as I can. We’ll be at the hospital in like five more minutes.”
“Please, it hurts!”
“Well, it’s not making it easier to drive when you’re screaming in my ear!”
“Feels like I’m dying,” she gasps, and for fuck’s sake, yeah, that bleeding doesn’t look fun, but does she have to be so goddamn dramatic about every single thing?
“Okay, no, come on,” he says. “You can get through this. Get shot a few times and then tell me how bad it hurts. Women go through this all the time, okay?”
“Jesus Christ, John!” she screams, clutching the towel closer between her legs. Mascara running down her swollen face. “Can you have just a tiny bit of sympathy for someone besides yourself, for once in your life? Don’t you care at all that we might lose—” And then she collapses into harsh sucking sobs, and he can’t even put his hand on her back to comfort her because he knows that in this moment, she wants to kill him.
He kind of does, too.
“Well,” the here-and-now John says out loud, “if you wanted me to feel like a pathetic piece of shit, Bob, mission accomplished. But guess what? Liam was fine, and I apologized, okay?”
Yes, Liam was premature but fine, and he caught up to a decent weight percentile damn fast. Walker men are always big and strong. And it’s true, he apologized, and Olivia said it was fine, and they didn’t talk about it anymore.
But, see, he also knows they won’t be fine, him and Olivia. And it’s exactly because of this. The things he always says. The way he’s always gotta throw his dick around, make it about himself, puff himself up to sound just a little bit better than he is.
Because God help him, he knows no one else will.
The SUV swerves, but suddenly John does not move with it: the backseat flies through his stationary body and leaves him behind in space, and he falls deep down into the darkness and reaches out, scrabbling, and there: a hole in the darkness, a light. His hands sink into dry earth and grass and he clambers out, gripping his way up into the world.
A soccer field. Late afternoon. The air smells of September. The game is over, the last few players drifting away with their parents, and a little golden-haired boy in a green jersey is tagging along at his father’s heels toward the parking lot.
“And then I kicked the ball right in Ryan Anders’ face! Bam, got him right in the mouth! And the ball went in the net and no one else saw but it did!”
“Johnny,” his father says without looking back, “you’re not ever gonna make anything of yourself if you keep bragging and lying.”
“But I did it!” says the little tow-haired boy. “I kicked Ryan’s butt!”
“John, for Christ’s sakes, I was watching! You didn’t. You didn’t score a single goal.”
Little Johnny falls silent and trots after his father to the car. John looks up and suddenly, dizzyingly, he’s sitting in the backseat. It’s his dad’s old 1986 station wagon, with the cigarette burn on the backseat upholstery that he liked to stick his fingers into.
“Can we get ice cream?” his little self asks hopefully, looking up at his dad.
“No,” Dad says brusquely. “Your mom’s making dinner, you’ll ruin your appetite.”
“But you said we could get ice cream if I won.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“But we won,” says John, bewildered. “We won, you said you saw it.”
“No,” Dad snaps, “your team won! Not you, John! You—you didn’t do a damn thing, you just ran around out there like an idiot. Jimmy Garcia and Kyle Waters and the rest of the kids on your team, they won. You… were just there. So no, we’re not getting any goddamn ice cream.”
There’s a soft, ragged sound from the front seat, and John leans his head back against the headrest. Breathes out. How does it hurt so bad, all these years later? Where was this ache hiding, to come creeping back into his heart so easily?
Dad sighs through his nose. “And now you’re crying. Nice. Real man-of-the-house material here. Johnny, you gotta pull it together. What’s your mom gonna think?”
“He’s eight goddamn years old,” says John to his father, who doesn’t hear him at all. Who never really heard him in the first place, even when he was alive.
Little John sniffles, and swallows hard. “I’m not crying,” he says crossly. His voice is thick.
“Uh-huh, sure,” his dad mutters.
From the backseat, John watches his own child-self’s hair turn white-gold in the setting sun as he turns his head away, facing out the passenger window. They’ll ride home in silence now. They’ll eat dinner in silence, too, and live in silence, and someday John Walker will be the first person in American history to be awarded three Medals of Honor, all in a kind of silence.
Someday, too, he’ll be the man who walks out on his child one summer morning after telling the person he loves most in the world to go fuck herself. Hey, he’ll think to himself bitterly as he drives away that day, he might be a decorated Ranger and a war hero but it's clear now that he's never going to be good enough. So why try anymore?
And then he’ll start killing for money.
Self-pity, he thinks bitterly. That’s the name of the feeling, the ugly stain, the song that won’t stop playing behind his thoughts.
He’s like this because he feels so fucking sorry for himself. Always has. So what if he sticks his chest out a bit. So what if he talks himself up. It’s not bragging if it’s true, right? And no one else ever talked him up, no matter how well he did or how hard he worked. Sure, that smarts just a little. But it hasn’t been all bad. He’s a very successful man—or he was—because he knew he’d never accomplish anything, so he had to try harder than anyone else.
What a load of bullshit, he thinks to himself, staring at the car’s stained ceiling. What a load of steaming, toxic bullshit he’s been believing.
He sticks his finger into the cigarette burn one more time, just because his dad always told him not to. His fingers aren’t a child’s anymore, and the fabric rips.
“Would just one fucking word of kindness hurt you?” he says out loud to the ghost of his father. “Would it have been so bad to say something good about your goddamn kid? Were you afraid someone else being successful would make you look bad? Did you have any idea what a prick you’d turn me into? Was that what you wanted? Was that your idea of making me strong?”
The car door is now a piece of fabric. It rolls up like a theatre curtain and opens silently into a square of endless darkness. A draft of cold air breezes up over him. He thinks there are faint voices down below.
He doesn’t want to stay in this car a goddamn second longer. He lets himself fall in.