Ready Set Breathe (A Steve Rogers Destruction Story)

2 Breathe

Steve was for a surety, very sickly.  He had a lot of near-death experiences, lying on what he almost thought was his death bed, and he had faced a lot. But in the end, even now, if you asked Steve what was the worst ailment he faced, he would tell you it was the asthma.

The problem with the asthma was it’s constancy. Steve would get better from each sickness he faced, even just barely, because he had luck and a strong will and the ailments would come and go, but he always had asthma and he could never breathe. Because it wasn’t always just the attacks, which were horrible and scary and he hated them, but it was the fact that it never quite stopped there. He could always feel inside him the way he was slowly suffocating, every second of every day, whether walking or sitting or talking. He was surrounded by air, he was breathing as deeply as he could, but something was lost in translation from his mouth to his lungs and before he knew it, he could feel the way his breath began to rattle just in the slightest and his chest was going up and down and up and down like he had been running a marathon and he managed to take his inhaler fast, behind his hand, before Bucky noticed. He would often grind his teeth together in frustration that nothing God had given him worked right.

Steve couldn’t run because of the asthma. He couldn’t walk up hills without having to take breaks. If something scared him or startled him, sometimes he’d choke and his throat would close up and then he would have to scramble for his inhaler again, humiliated.

The medicine was awful, too. Steve hated the way he could feel it, thick in his mouth, he hated the way it made him shake so bad he couldn’t hold a pencil steady, hated the way it was loud and obvious and the way it cost his mother so much money to have it refilled so often because this was the sickness that never went away. The not breathing was the ailment that he never recovered from, never simply climbed out of bed and felt a little better. This wasn’t a problem to overcome. It was constant. It was consistent. It was painful. And it never, ever, healed.

Asthma and suffocating and never having enough of the one thing in this world that’s free was simply the life of Steven Grant Rogers.

Until, of course, a miracle happened and Steve never had to suffer like that again. It was the first thing he noticed, in fact, when the pain subsided and the metal of Stark and Erskine’s machine began to move away from him. Air. It was a new experience for Steve, he could feel it suddenly filling him up, buzzing in his blood the way the medicine did, but in a good way, a better way, like he was suddenly alive for once and it was thrilling. Steve felt as though that for just a moment, as he relished the way suddenly, everything worked, that he was truly happy for a moment.

Steve never thought he’d suffocate again, but sometimes, he thought he could still feel it, choking him up, cutting off his words, making him deny everything when Bucky asked him if something was wrong. It was like a hand around his throat, or a river over his head, or like he was shaking and his vision was blurring and he just couldn’t reach his inhaler. Except, of course, that he was doing it to himself, the suffocating silence. And there wasn’t really a medicine you could take for that, there wasn’t a name for the thing that kept Steve suffocating himself again, years later, after the asthma, during a time when he thought he could breathe.