Chapter Text
The warehouse fire had been reported, investigated, then dismissed after they found out the breaches in safety regulations. The place was looked into, and when they found out about the pay being withheld they were sued out the asses for it. James got his last paycheck, plus interest.
“Don’t go getting a fat head on me now, Stevie.” he said to her, counting out the bills. He gave her a look, more playful than reprimanding and she was sure to give him her best innocent look.
They continued on, March turned to April, then June. Before they knew it, summer was in full swing.
Kore had jumped up at the end of March, using dried seeds she had saved from her ‘canning craze’ to begin a small garden on every windowsill in their apartment. She germinated tomatoes, squash, zucchini and strawberries. She hyper fixated on her tiny garden, swearing up and down it’d come in handy later on. James was indulgent, looking after her with a fond smile as she doted on her plants. He even brought her back a little thing of fertilizer and a packet of flower seeds one day, which almost made Kore tear up from the thought alone. He had ruffled up her hair and told her to ‘stick to it.’
He was so sweet it made her heart ache.
She tried not to feel like shit when he’d go out for the night, on some date or to a dance hall to pick a new one up. He was a free agent, and she had no claim to his free time. She’d look up every time he came home and cluck out a one liner about him striking out or striking home. More often than not, it was a home run. She ignored that, packing it down within her as she packed down the dirt to her tiny window garden.
James' relationships never lasted too long, and a part of her felt horrible for liking that. He’d always tell her it ‘just wasn’t a good fit’ or something similar. Kore didn’t question it, just gave him a crooked smile and said ‘maybe the next one, Buck.’
James got a new job at a factory making car parts for jeeps that would be shipped overseas to help the war effort. It was dirty and unsafe, but good pay. She made him promise to wear a rag over his mouth to keep the dust from his lungs, even going so far to (poorly) stitch him a mask to wear. He had taken it with a queer smile she couldn’t read the full of, and promised to wear it every day.
Her newspaper stand was still selling hot, the owner loved her since she brought in more customers than the other stands due to her cookies. She experimented, making quick bread using peanut butter, which was a hit. The people coming and going seemed to appreciate the variety.
Kore was able to save up and buy James a pair of sturdy work boots and gloves, which she gave to him since she had forgotten his birthday in March (which he only just told her about, damn him).
He had been shocked by the items, “These are some quality boots, Steve. How much were these?”
She waved him off, “Aint matter none, James. Your safety is worth all the clams in the world. And you better take them now before I have somethin’ to say.” she huffed, pushing the boots and gloves further into his hands.
James had laughed and accepted them, shaking his head and commenting on her fiery personality.
“Should just wind you up and point you at them Nazis, Stevie. They’d be done for in a month.”
Kore grinned, thinking about the whole ‘Captain America’ thing.
“You have no idea.” she laughed.
James was drafted right as her flowers bloomed and tomatoes started to bear fruit late June. It was a horrible day.
Kore couldn’t stop him, but she wanted to. She wanted to pull him into their apartment and bar the doors and windows, curl him up into the blankets and never let him go. But she wouldn’t, couldn’t hold him back.
So she enlists as well. Sitting through the physical exam she tries her best to put her best foot forward. She is denied, as expected, her asthma alone getting her rejected. James consoles her after.
“Gotta hold down the fort here, Stevie. I need this place standin’ when I get back.” he said softly, a hand on her shoulder.
“How am I supposed to keep this goin’, James?” she said hopelessly.
“Well I’ll be sendin’ back my pay-”
“That’s not what I mean James!” she huffed, standing up. She moved to pace along the floor, hands karting through her hair. “What if you get hurt? What if you don’t come back, James? I need you! I can’t do this shit without you!” she was becoming frantic, her breathing coming irregular.
“Stevie Stevie Stevie!” James called to her, standing up and placing both hands on her shoulders. “Calm down now before you send yourself into a fit.” he squeezed her shoulders, pulling her back down to sit.
“I can’t do this alone,” she said meekly, feeling strung out.
“You’re going to be ok, Steve. I know you will. And I’ll be back before you know it. This is just training.” he rubbed her back, pressing her into him so her head rested in the crook of his neck. “It’s going to be ok.”
James shipped out to the army boot camp a few weeks later, his pockets filled with cookies and dried flowers.
Kore puttered around the apartment, trying to keep herself busy. She harvested her garden late summer and jarred the excess. She traded mason jars of zucchini and tomatoes for apples and pears from someone a few buildings down. She made an apple pie and jam preserves. Kore shared her food with the neighbors, Mrs R next door had three kids while her husband was drafted, a few cans of squash and a bag of rice went a long way to keeping her kids’ bellies full.
She began to work out; every day she’d wake up and do all the exercise she could until her lungs screamed and her body ached. Leg lifts on all sides, crunches, jumping jacks, pushups, anything she could do on her own. It was hard to put on weight in this body, she was pretty sure Steve had some sort of Malabsorption syndrome where his body couldn’t get enough nutrition from food. It made her lethargic at best most days.
It didn’t stop her from trying, and slowly, very veerryy slowly, she saw improvement. Her stamina increased, and her body began to fill out a bit better.
This prompted her to try and enlist again, in a different area. She lied a bit on her enlistment form. She wouldn’t have been able to enlist at this location otherwise. Had she used her own address, they would have sent her to the place nearer to her home. The one she’d already been turned away from.
Unfortunately, even with her health improvements, she was rejected once again. Kore raged silently in her home, drawing furiously over a blank white paper.
She was glad her love for drawing came through in Steve Roger’s body. Her eye for art hadn’t changed, but she did have to relearn some of the techniques that came from muscle memory. Her style was very different from Steve’s, something that James had commented on a few times; he had explained it away with the amnesia.
Kore had looked through Steve’s old images, his attention to detail was very nice. She could see him becoming an even better artist through time, especially if he kept with the shading style he was using. His style was a lot more realistic than Kore's, which was more angular and nonrepresentational in a way. She started attempting a more realistic style a while back, but she was shit with a pencil when it came to that style. It wasn’t until James had brought home a package of charcoal that her realism began to improve more and more.
Maybe it was due to the fact that charcoal was more forgiving than lead: easier to push around, fade and darken with little effort. She was able to draw the shadows and gradients with a smudge of her fingers, and grasp the flickers of light with a swipe of an eraser. Kore was by no means good in the beginning, showing off her drawings to James and bemoaning the awkward lines she had mushed up or spaced too far apart. James had been kind to her even then, encouraging her to keep going, keep practicing. He had bought her more paper, more charcoal and erasers.
Their apartment was covered in her drawings, all pinned up by a determined James over the months.
“Need to liven’ the place up, Stevie.” he had said to her then, a few tacks pinched between the corner of his lips as he lifted her newest sketch up to the wall.
He was so sweet and kind, and Kore missed him with an ache that reached down to her bones.
She sketched him then, charcoal staining her fingers and smudged along the bridge of her nose where she had absentmindedly wiped. There was a picture of him propped up on the table in front of her that she used as a reference. Her practice over the past months seemed to be paying off: the face was well proportioned, the eyes were the correct shape and space apart, and the shading was coming along very well. Kore took extra care to get every part right, the ache in her bones coming out and immortalizing itself on paper.
It took her two days to finish the drawing, and when it was finished, she pinned it up in her room where she could look at it.
God she missed him.
Kore wrote to James twice a week. She traded some canned veggies for some paper and envelopes from a crafty handed lady a few doors down. The pages were rough edged and made from plant fibers she could feel when rubbing her hands over them. They went perfectly with the dried flowers she stuffed them with.
All of her letters were long, detailing her days and the news around her. She’d gossip about the neighbors like an old bitty with Mrs R as they sat on Sunday evenings, so Kore always had the latest scoop on the neighborhood dish.
Sometimes, when all her news ran dry, she’d write him stories. She liked to think she was a dab hand at writing, even if her spelling left much to be desired. Kore would write to James, chapter by chapter, a story of two lovers.
It was a surprisingly complex story. An angel named Jebediah came to Earth to guard a human soul and he ended up falling in love. But humans were short lived and the human died, only to be reborn. The story followed the angel, who in turned followed the human from life-to-life, falling for each part of them. And, even though the human didn’t remember Jebediah, they fell for him in every life.
Kore knew she was laying it on pretty thick, but she couldn’t help it. The inspiration struck and her fingers couldn’t say no. She even bought a second hand typewriter to speed it along, even if the pages were covered with cross marks and penned additives. Kore made copies of all the chapters she sent by adding carbon paper between two sheets of paper and loading it into the typewriter.
James loved her letters, or at least he wrote that he did. He told her about his training and guys that he worked with. He complained about the food and how it was no match for her seasoned cooking. The mush they got didn’t even have salt most of the time, let alone the spiced and peppered meals she made. She preened at that. Mrs R had taught her a lot about cooking on top of what she already knew. Mrs R had a taste for spice and flair in food that had Kore's mouth watering at the thought of it. She gladly parted with her hoarded spices when Mrs R invited her for dinner, which was often. Between the cheek pats and being called ‘baby,’ Kore was convinced that her neighbor had adopted her at this point.
Unfortunately, Mrs R rarely went outside of the complex’s walls. Kore didn’t blame her; segregation and the Jim Crow laws were still in full swing in the 40s, and this side of town was cheap but dangerous to live in. Kore often found herself volunteering to go out and get things for Mrs R and her kids, so that her oldest, a 17 year old boy named Dennis, didn’t have to go out past dark. It boiled Kore, down to the soul, when she saw racist shit going on. She felt a heat growing behind her teeth, a burning fire that threatened to spew out and burn the world around her to hell every time she saw it happen.
Kore stepped in when she could and got beat up a lot. She spat and snapped her teeth at dolled up women and men twice her size, spewing insults and vitriol until she was red in the face.
Every situation was different, and a part of her questioned if she was making things better or worse for the people of color around her. Did she have the right to intrude? They were allowed to defend themselves so was it her place to interfere? She knew her white skin shielded her from the backlash that someone with colored skin would get, and if someone was getting violent, she didn’t hesitate to jump in. But her mind still wondered, in a swirl of anxiety, that her help only made things worse for others later, or gave the assholes reason to come back when before they would have moved on.
She voiced her thoughts to Mrs R, who patted her on the cheek after patching her up from a fight.
“You can’t go around worrying about things outa your control, baby. Tyin’ yourself in knots over how the world works will only stress you into an early grave. Best do what you can, when you can, an’ trust others to handle themselves when you ain’t there.” she said firmly. “We been dealin’ with these problems long before you got here, an we be dealin’ with them long after you gone.”
Corvin sucked air through her teeth, leaning her head into Mrs R’s side.
“It ain’t right.” she said softly. “One day the world won’t be like this. And I hope to see it.”
Mrs R placed a hand on the top of her head, patting it softly.
“Me too, baby, me too.”
Over time, the letters Kore wrote got more responses. They would come in about four days after hers were sent out. Which was surprising but she wasn’t going to question the efficiency of snail mail when it gave her results. She’d stuff her letters with dried flowers and little baggies of dried spices. James would send back seeds from local flowers and doodled pictures of him and his new crew. He also loved her story, and would ask a million questions about the characters and their lives, motives, etc. She was happy to indulge without giving the story away too much.
One day a letter came in the spring, James was coming home. It would be brief, only a visit, before he was shipped overseas. Kore was ecstatic to see him again, cleaning up the house and baking his favorite foods.
She also tried to enlist again, and got denied once again. Kore would never admit to pouting the whole way home.
The day he returned was amazing, she waited at the train station, eagerly looking around at the faces of each man in uniform. Her mouth broke out in a large, delighted grin when the clean-shaven face of James Barns came into view.
“James!” she yelled out, waving her hands in the air frantically. Spotting her, James' face grew a grin to match her own. Dashing over to her, they embraced in a fierce hug, James lifting her smaller form off the ground. The ache of missing him fell away from Kore's bones and was replaced with euphoria.
“ Fuck , I’ve missed you.” she hissed, tears in her eyes.
James huffed out a laugh, his breath tickling her ear. “Same here, Stevie.”
The next few days were like a dream. Kore often woke up on the couch, curled into Jame’s side where the two of them had fallen asleep. They talked almost non-stop about everything and anything, filling the space with their voices and laughter. She took him over to Mrs R, who greeted James like a long lost son.
“I’ve been hearin’ so much about you through our boy Steve here, I've known you for awhile now even if we ain’t seen each other.” she said, patting James on the head just like she did with Kore.
James had blushed a pretty red shade at her words, “All good things I hope, Ma’am.”
“Only good things,” she said, giving the younger man a wink. Kore laughed at the scared look James tossed her way. She poured in some spices to the stew Mrs R and her were making, sucking in a deep whiff of the aromas that waifed off. The stew was served and the 6 of them (all three of Mrs R’s kids were there) ate around the table, trading stories and jokes.
James had let out a loud, deep groan of appreciation when he took the first bite of the stew. And if she refused to get up from the table for a while? It was completely unrelated.
The two left late at night, James lagging behind to talk to Mrs R about something she needed fixed the next day.
She placed a bowl of left overs in their little icebox for later before moving around the apartment, clearing up anything left out. She turned as she heard the door open and close to see James, looking at her with a peculiar expression.
“What's the matter, James?” she asked.
“Nothin’ nothin’...” he said, waving her concerns off. He shook his head, as if to shake away a particular thought. “Jus’ somethin’ Mrs R said got me thinkin’ is all.”
“Nothin’ crazy I hope?”
“Nah, jus’ pointed out somethin’ to me. No big thing.” he smiled at her. It was a small, but meaningful smile, one that lifted his eyes and lit up his face like a warm candle in a dark cave.
“Ok then,” she replied, finishing tossing some things away. “I’ma hit the hay then, that stew got me sleepy.” she clapped him on the shoulder, her hand lingering a tad too long to feel the muscle underneath.
“Night Stevie,”
Later that night, Kore was woken by a moment at the side of the bed. She let out a tired grunt, her hand waving outwards as the blanket was lifted off of her.
“It’s just me,” she heard James whisper into the room, barely audible over the creaking and groaning pipes in the walls.
“James,” she grumbled, still half asleep. The bed dipped, and he slid into bed next to her, his arms wrapping around her smaller, frailer body. She was pulled in, her head coming to rest on a broad chest.
“Go back to sleep, now.” he hummed, voice as light and soft as air. She was too tired to think much of it, warm and content in his arms. She could hear his tad-too-fast heartbeat from where her ear pressed into his chest, the thrum lulling her down into a peaceful sleep.
They didn’t speak of it the next day, or when it kept happening. Each night, James would sneak into her bed and they’d fall asleep curled into one another. Kore was almost exclusively the little spoon, and she didn’t mind. The chance to hold him, to feel his life humming away under her fingers, was worth everything in the world to her. She never felt more content, more full, than in those moments of peace. Every morning, when the light would trickle into the room and across their bed, she’d lay there, wide awake, staring at his face in the dawn's light trying to commit it to memory. Her eyes would trace the lines of his eyebrows, down his nose and lips, curling around his chin and up to his cheekbones and hair. He looked divine in those moments, gorgeous in a way only gods could be. In those moments she’d feel her eyes tear up and her throat constrict, the novelty of her being here, with her James, hitting her all at once. She could write poems, songs and stories about the feelings he gave her and none of it would capture the true depth of her emotions.
So she’d continue to stare well into the morning until his eyes would blearily blink open and his gaze would match hers.
Many things were spoken then, with not a word uttered.
One of them would eventually break the spell, getting up to start the day, and the other would quietly follow. Coffee and breakfast would be made and their conversation would pick up on some random topic. But never the one that hung so heavily on their minds.
On the last day of James' stay, they went to Stark Expo.
And Kore finally got to join the Army.