Story goes, and it’s not in any books, not written anywhere or rememberable by anyone willing to speak, but story goes, when James Buchanan Barnes was born, his mother screamed with a fear unheard of in the small Gaelic town.
Story’s whispered, that the Mother Barnes wailed for the drumbeat song still beating in her chest, now trailing after her son.
There’s a nurse somewhere, one who burned for smuggling the Witch and her child to the New World, who went to the stake ashen faced but firm. “That boy has war in his blood, and war will break and remake him a hundred times before this world ends.”
There’s a single scrap of journal, written in quick but neat scrawl, of a nurse interviewed after Steve was laid to ice.
“Sarah Rogers was stoic, but she couldn’t stop the rivers drowning out the joy of the runtling who survived. Something was wrong with her, with the boy. Born in loneliness they were. Something no one in the room could explain. All the blood, the carnage. All the heat, and breath still clouded the air. Sarah Rogers sang a lullaby to her runtling, the boy who should never have survived his own birth. It was a somber song, full of death and loss, longing and loneliness. I believe Steve Rogers wore that lullaby on his skin, woven through his veins.”
There’s a few scribbled out stanzas of a lullaby too dark for any child.
There’s naught but silence when Natasha Romanova was ripped from her mother’s womb.
Whispers in the academy said the babe didn’t even cry as they carted her mother away, as they strapped her into a metal basket and broke her tiny fist across a blade.
That’s why, they said, she blended into the shadows.
A babe born into absolute silence will always find a home in the darkest of quiet.
There’s naught but silence said about her birth when the academy burns behind her.
The storm was brewing when Bruce Banner’s mother first went into labor. It’s been building for months and months. His mother believed it was a sign, so she carved chimes from the wood of the furniture his father smashed through in his drunken anger. She hung the chimes outside of the birthing cottage.
Bruce took his first breath as the skies let out their apologies, as they wailed with him, and the wooden chimes screamed a hollow plea.
Clinton Francis Barton is born under a heavy fist and shouted curses. Say he came out the wrong way, upside down and inside out.
Say he came out already bent outta shape, and he never quite bent himself back right.
When Clint was born, the world was so fucking loud he stripped the noise and stuffed it into his belly and maybe that’s why his ears went wrong.
‘Cause Clint was born under a cacophony of hatred he tried to swallow so no one else would suffer, and the sound got stuck in the wrong place.
But only because he held his mother’s laughter in his heart, the only sound he really remembers from his birth.
The sun was so bright when Thor was born, but Frigga could not see the shine for the cloud looming just beyond her eyes.
“This is the last of the peaceful days for him,” she says as she cradled him to her breast. “For a god for whom the thunder beats, a storm must always follow.”
Champagne pops like shots from a gun when Anthony Stark is born.
Glitz and glamor dress him up, a doll on his mother’s arm.
But the baby is a brilliant thing, too smart to be paraded around like a toy.
Maria Stark smiles, and she dotes, and she loves her son.
Howard eyes the boy and he can hear it, the death bell toll, thunder roll. There’s laughter in the boy’s belly and silence at his feet.
Tony stark will lead any army, all the way to the grave.
His is the song they will all sing.
His is the song they will all be buried beneath.
“What are you humming, darling?” Rhichard says to Mary’s swollen belly.
“I don’t quite know,” she says back. “It feels incomplete.”
“It sounds like it belongs in the catacombs,” Richard laughs.
He stops laughing when Peter is born, when the holy music spills like an omen from his son’s lungs. “He’s missing an orchestra,” Richard whispers in horror.
Mary grips her son tight, “I fear the day he finds it. They’ll stand above a stone and sing a harmony of anguish.”
Peter meets them, one by one by one, and the songs fall into place. The raucous laughter, and the heavy drum beats. The soft wood raring into an angry chime bracketed by a deadly silence. It begins with a thunder that promises floods and swells with the pop of a thousand cameras.
But it ends the same, each and every time.
A hymn forgotten until your hand is full of fresh turned earth.
