𝗗𝗜𝗚𝗜𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗦𝗜𝗟𝗘𝗡𝗖𝗘

In Your Dreams

Five years is a long time. Five years is Isabell growing up.

By 2023, she is slim and silent, her eyes beautiful and her smile infrequent. She stands small at 5,3, fierce in spite of it, with a chilling way of looking right through your soul and a temper that can rival even Tony's.

In her dreams, she is always screaming, and when she wakes up, she has sweated right through the bedsheets. Early in the mornings, she'll traipse to Steve, lay her head on his shoulder and pretend to watch the TV. He makes her coffee how she likes it. They play chess in companionable silence.

Growing up. Grown up, really, no longer a little girl but with the fears of one still left in her. Isabell hides under the bed when the storms come, cries when she's angry. On the rare occasions that she talks, it is in short, sad little sentences.

"No."

"I don't want to."

"I can't."

"Want to go home."

"Leave me alone."

She wears Maria's shirts, Nat's jewellery, Steve's sweaters, Goodwill everything else. James' boots, though. Always James' boots.

They are permanently too big for her, chafing and slicing away at her ankles, but she has learnt to breathe through the blisters and treasure the blood they leave. If she focuses her mind and closes her eyes, she can still imagine James' hands on the laces. He smiles at her, lets her tie them for him so that she'll learn how.

"Just like that. Well done, Iz. My smart girl."

Her heart hurts. She lifts the boots to her chest and cradles them, snapping at Steve when he offers to wash them for her.

Isabell is a puzzle, unfinished and permanently destined to be. The remaining pieces of herself are lost under the floorboards.

Steve tries to complete her anyway.

He sits with her for hours at a time, whether talking or silent, it doesn't really matter. They play games sometimes, simple like Uno, or he turns on the TV and watches her watch the screen. Isabell likes to draw. Little pictures across the back of her arms, and she sketches the cartoon characters she sees.

When she's especially tired, she sits opposite Steve and draws stars like bangles around his wrists.

He smiles at her. Gentle, sweet.

She swallows.

"Спасибо, что спасли меня." She writes one day, permanent marker across the cuff of his jeans. When Steve asks Nat to translate it, she smiles and tells him to ask Isabell. He does, of course, but she doesn't like to speak.

She crawls under her duvet and pretends she can't hear him.

When she's sad, she looks like James. It's a funny thing. Steve will look at her sometimes, crying or staring off into space, and they will look so alike that he has to turn away again. Something in the flicker of her eyes.

The look of somebody who has lost everything.

Nat has it too, especially these days.

She and Isabell hang out sometimes, heads pressed against each other as they whisper. Russian, usually. Nat holds her hand as she counts every polka dot on the shower curtain.

"Have to." Isabell will whisper. "Have to or I'll die."

"It's OK," Nat replies, "You don't have to explain it to me."

Hair tangled together. Red against black.

Nat misses Maria. She cries for her in her sleep.

They all miss somebody.