[Spoiler warning if you still haven't seen CA:TWS]
"You're barely breathing, I know. Just hold your breath now darling, the light will be here in the morning." A soft, shaking voice sings.
In the dim light, barely anything is visible to a young girl as she walks down a long hallway, ignoring the screams of outraged prisoners. The girl walks with a slight limp, favoring her right leg as if she's hurt her ankle. She knows the hall like the back of her glove covered hand.
"Sergeant... 32557..." A raspy voice mumbles. This is who the girl is looking for, she spots him as she stands in a doorway her frail, trembling frame barely occupies. He's laying on a table- strapped down by leather strips that are quickly undone- and is staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes as he mumbles. "Barnes..."
She lurches forward and quickly looks around the room. Moonlight illuminates her figure, petite and covered nearly head to toe in clothes that prevent skin to skin contact.
"Just- just hold your breath now darling. You're barely breathing... I know..." Her voice cracks and stops abruptly, breaking into a shrill scream as a sliver of skin, exposed between her sleeve and gloves, comes into contact with the man.
'It hurts-! Steve- stay alive for Steve-' a man smaller than herself, blonde hair, a shock of blue eyes. A needle, pain again. 'Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, 32557038.' Her own face, a wordless question, an echo of her scream.
Automatically, her arm jerks away. "My name- my name is Mabel. I will keep you alive." A promise.
A door slams and Mabel is yanked towards a corner, a cold metal shackle clamps around her wrist and then she's anchored to the wall. Silence, followed by pain and-
'Insolent girl! When will she learn her lesson?'
silence. Darkness. Then, her name. Whispered and unfamiliar for a moment.
"Mabel! Mabel?" The man, Sergeant Barnes.
The girl groans and looks up at him through swollen, dry eyes.
"They brought you food."
Her gaze drops to the ground in front of her, occupied by a plastic tray that's soon shoved toward Sergeant Barnes.
"You need it more."
Her gloves are gone. She shrinks into her corner, totally concealed by shadows, and then there's darkness. Sleep.
A process that repeats itself several times until a tall, blonde man finds them both. Mabel half starved and a snapped tray on the cement floor. Sergeant Barnes mumbling again, strapped to the table once more.
"Sergeant... 32557..."
A hand wraps itself around her wrists and
'Who is she? She's so tiny...' An image of herself. 'Get her out of here. Peggy will know what to do.'
screaming. Mabel is screaming, bloody-freaking-murder, and thrashing around, trying to stop the mental invasion that she can't control.
"What's going on?"
"Just put her down!"
She's yanked away from the hand
'Steve never listened anyways.' The tiny blonde man, compared side by side with the face of this new man. 'I hope she's okay.'
and handed her gloves and shoes. Her sanity is handed to her with minimal skin contact.
And then they're walking and she slips into a state of blissful oblivion.
"You're barely breathing, I know. Just hold your breath now darling, the light will be here in the morning. Just hold your breath now darling. You're barely breathing... I know... just hold on." Soft words that the soldiers listen to in silence as they walk back. Nobody dares to touch her.
-
Mabel stays with Steve- Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes until they're on a train, attempting to capture a man who works for whoever was keeping Mabel and Sergeant Barnes, and both Mabel and Barnes are clinging to the railing on the side of the moving metal box.
"I'll keep you alive." A mumbled promise that can't possibly be kept.
And then they're falling.
"You're barely breathing, I know. Just hold your breath now darling, the light will be here in the morning. Just hold your breath now darling. You're barely breathing... I know... just hold on." Mabel sings as she holds on to James. He's unconscious and bleeding. She's crying, her gloves discarded in the snow as she tries to keep him warm
Silence
their death is almost certain.
-
Seventy years later is the next time she takes her gloves off, but she isn't Mabel anymore. And James is no longer Sergeant Barnes.
She's clinging to two flesh-and-blood hands, trying to stop one man from falling and to help the other keep his sanity, and the thoughts are so jumbled that nothing makes any sense.
So she sings, "you're barely breathing, I know. Just hold your breath now darling, the light will be here in the morning. Just hold your breath now darling. You're barely breathing... I know... just hold on," and they hold on until they have to plunge into the water to stay alive, then sit on the banks of a river
'the Potomac. The media will have a field day. But they're safe. They're home. Mabel and Bucky.'
and holding hands still
flashes of old memories, 'who am I?', 'is Mabel okay?'
waiting for Steve's friends to come pick them up. She doesn't know what's going to happen next but she doesn't care as long as they're safe.
-
She spends six weeks in an empty cell, waiting for whoever Steve works for to decide she's stable enough to be let out. Deprived of her gloves, she risks skin contact with everybody who steps into her cell.
When she's let out she's wearing a long sleeved shirt and shorts, no gloves and no shoes.
She doesn't come within reach of anybody but Steve and Bucky for the first three months. She works with the two on controlling the result of making skin contact with people. She doesn't talk. She's like a ghost until she can control it.
All the others hear out of her is a quiet hum that eventually evolves into the same song she's sung since before she can remember.
Then she learns how to stop the mental invasion and she starts talking, starting with "my name is Mabel and I'm a touch empath" and ending with "I kept Bucky alive."
