The Red Soldier: Captain America and the Red Soldier

ISSUE #11

The sky was pitch black when (Y/N) (L/N) found himself outside the cottage he'd called home for seventy years. His feet squelched in the mud as he tried to orientate himself. In the dark he could only just make out the outline of his old home: the misshapen bricks, the crooked chimney, the weathered thatched roof. He waddled up to the outline of the front door, his feet slipping and sliding in the wet dirt. With outstretched hands, he felt around for the doorknocker. Upon feeling its cold metal, he began to slam it against the solid wooden door. 'Hello?' he asked loudly, 'sorry if I'm waking you up, I just need some help.'

         Nobody came to his call though, and so after five minutes of knocking he turned the doorknob, surprised to find the door unlocked. With one hand on the doorknob, and the other charged with magic, he entered the cottage.  Almost immediately the smell of death assaulted his senses, but still he proceeded. 'Hello?' he called out into the darkness of the house, 'hello?' Light. Give me light. The gas lanterns dotted around the place immediately began to hiss, their flames illuminating the cramped room.

(Y/N) (L/N) dropped to his knees when he saw it. An overwhelming amount of guilt washed over him, drowning him. Tears begged to fall from his eyes, bile threatened to eject itself from his stomach, chaos magic fought to release itself from his fingers.  He held his hands in a tight fist against his sternum in an attempt to ease the pain in his chest, a primal howl escaping his lungs as he mourned the horrific deaths of the witches he'd once rescued.

         The three women lay motionless on his kitchen floor, their skin hard and grey, their hair white and fragile, their eyes dry and full of pain. (Y/N) gasped for breath as he crawled towards the corpses. 'No. No. No,' he shook his head, holding the shortest one in his arms as he sobbed, 'c'mon, no – no, you can't leave me... I SAVED YOU! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME!' His hollow cries echoed against the stone walls of the cottage, but there was no reply. 'You can't...' he sobbed, his breath escaping him, 'you can't leave me...'

         He held the young witch in his arms, his eyes darting around at their sisters who lay lifeless on the floor of his kitchen. 'I'm sorry,' he exhaled, 'I'm so sorry.' (Y/N) carefully rested the girl in his arms on the floor and picked himself up from the ground. Surveying the room he noticed the four bowls of mouldy food on the dining table, the four glasses filled with his vodka, and the four sets of cutlery.

         It was apparent that somebody had visited them. The three witches had invited somebody into their home, offered them comfort and food, and they'd been repaid in abhorrent violence.

(Y/N) stumbled over to the table, grabbed the bottle of vodka off of its surface and then sunk into the settee. His wrists shook as he twisted off the bottle cap and took a drink. The liquor burned his throat, numbing his senses and allowing him to think straight. (Y/N) knew he couldn't leave them like that with a good conscience, and so once he'd steadied his breathing and took a couple more swigs of his drink, he gathered blankets from the bedroom.

         One by one he wrapped them in the blankets he'd once took pleasure in knitting. When they were covered, he made his way outside, a gas lantern in his right hand, and a shovel in his left. He walked across his land, passing the garden which had once supplied him his livelihood, and shaking the rain from his hair as it began to fall. Eventually he reached the outer perimeter of his land, where he placed down his lantern and began to dig.

         It seemed with each crunch of his shovel against the earth, (Y/N) (L/N) mourned just a little more. He'd never truly known the women he'd helped escape Chthon's realm, but they had been his responsibility, and he'd let them die. The Red Soldier heaved each time he stuck his shovel into the ground and discarded its contents, wondering why everything he touched only ever seemed to fall apart.