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Rebecca Pamela Barnes was born in June of 1919 to George and Winifred Barnes of Shelbyville, Indiana. She followed her brother, James, who had been born to the young Barnes couple fifteen months prior. She arrived right on time, not a minute later, much to the joy of the small family. Winifred had wanted a daughter very much, and James? -- Well, James had been born to be a big brother. He took to the job like it was as easy as breathing, carefully looking at the small kit his sister slept in, promising to look out for her.She was born healthy, but born small. As a little girl, she never put on weight very easily, and when her mother sent her to school, her dark brown hair pulled back into a braid by each ear, she was always the smallest in her class. But she was a BARNES, and she was just as stubborn as any Barnes before her. Her big brother, Jimmy, often found himself pulling a tiny but furious Becca Barnes off of whichever kid was trying to beat up on the smaller kids on the playground. It was around that time that she learned how to throw a proper punch so as to not hurt herself. Though the small boxing club in their neighborhood did not allow girls to practice, Becky stubbornly showed up and sneaked in enough times that the owner finally made an exception for the tiny girl with long braids who liked to practice on the one hanging bag that was at her height.When she was ten years old, the Stock Market crashed. She didn’t really know what a stock market was, but the crash sent the nation reeling. The Barneses had never been particularly affluent -- they had enough, but only just, especially since two more little girls had joined the family after Becky, bringing the number of Barnes children to four and number of Jimmy’s little sisters to three -- and the Depression made it difficult to find anything by way of resources or work.Still… as likely as Becky was to try to fight someone bigger than her when they were picking on those smaller than themselves, so too was she apt to take the shirt off of her back to help another. She was uncommonly generous, giving even when she did not have anything to give. During the Depression, Becky often skipped meals or hid her food in order to give to her little sisters, or a hungry friend she knew within the apartment building. Doing this as often as she did, however, left a permanent mark on her health. After being undernourished for so long, her body didn’t want to put on any more weight, and the doctor said that her heart was just a little weaker.When she was twelve years old, her second-youngest sister, Abigail, died in the summer polio outbreak. Back then, every summer brought with it the risk of polio, and their corner of the neighborhood was hit rather badly that summer. She was the first experience Becky had, close-hand, to death.When she was fourteen years old, the Depression ended. People started to find jobs again, the Hoovervilles were cleaned up, and the Barnes children started going to school regularly once again. Becky always fell in the middle in school; she certainly was no slouch, but no shining reports of her aptitude were sent home to her parents. There was, however, one place -- just one -- where she came alive. Becky had an artist’s eye, and the kind of soul that went with it. Wherever she went, she was scratching drawings into whatever she could get her hands on, and during the Depression, what she missed the most was art. As those supplies slowly became more and more available, Becky did everything she could to provide herself with meager supplies, and she got better. The charcoal drawings she used to do (since charcoal was easier to find than most anything else) evolved into abstract pieces and symphonies of shapes as she tried her best to get everything she felt OUT into the world so she could breathe better.When she was fifteen, all of the girls in her class began talking about the boys in the school, and the boys started looking at the girls in earnest. Becky had no callers. Her father died that summer, sending the family reeling. Becky loved her father, and had idolized him. He was strong and worked hard, and loved his family dearly. Having him gone felt like the air had been pulled out of the room. Everything felt quieter after he left.When she was sixteen years old, she finished high school and got a job at an art studio in Manhattan, helping the artist label and inventory his paintings. If there was time at the end of the day, he allowed her to use canvases he’d scrapped for her own devices. Her mother died that fall; she just… faded. The woman who Becky had always seen as unshakable laid down to sleep one night, and did not wake up the next. The coroner said it was a heart attack. Becky thought it was a broken heart.When she was eighteen years old, her youngest sister passed away in the winter due to a fever that she just couldn’t shake. She faded slowly, with Becky pooling every penny she made at her job to send her to the doctor as often as she could. When Margaret passed, it felt like some of the colors had been sapped from Becky’s world.When she was twenty years old, another war broke out in Europe. Becky’s heart caught in her throat, and she tried not to think about it. When she found out her brother was taking a German class, she slapped him.When she was twenty-one years old, her brother came home with a draft card. It was the first draft during a time of peace ever in America. Becky wrote a letter to the Nurses Corps to apply.When she was twenty-two years old, America entered the war. Becky started making plans, her hands shaking. Nursing school started.When she was twenty-four years old, Jimmy was drafted by the Army, and Becky felt the wind get knocked out of her. Steve, the only person she had assumed would remain out of reach of the war, suddenly became the quintessential, perfect American soldier. She slapped him when she saw him in his uniform for the first time, and cried when he left. She was so angry -- at the world, at him, at herself for being angry -- that she never told him that she was proud of him.Becky was sent to the European Theater during the war as a field nurse, working primarily within evacuation hospitals and surgical hospitals, seeing some of the worst of the damage wrought upon young men in the war. She was often doing her work where the firing of guns could still be heard, keeping time with her desperately thudding heart.At the beginning of 1945, when she was still twenty-five, the year she would turn twenty-six, Becky received a telegram and her life ended. Her brother had fallen, and no body could be recovered. Before she could make it back to New York to bury his empty coffin, Steve was involved in a plane crash. She had been the only one left to arrange a funeral, to bury both coffins.A month after the funerals, a man named Howard Stark arrived at her door and offered her a job. He knew her brother, he explained. He had known Steve better, and he couldn’t leave the only piece of their roots left in Brooklyn to starve. He had a laboratory and wanted to give her a job. She explained that she was a nurse, not a scientist, and she didn’t even think she could be a very good nurse now.“I could use a nurse or two,” he said. “There are always little accidents in the lab. At any rate, there are jobs -- good-paying jobs -- at the lab, and I know we can find a place that’ll work for you.”She started working at the lab, if only to get him to stop showing up at her doorstep.When she was twenty-seven, there was a strange accident at the lab. Caught in the explosion, Becky only felt very hot, and then she felt nothing at all.Rebecca Pamela Barnes died, and there was no one to arrange her funeral. It was alright; there hadn’t been a body to bury. To the best of Howard’s own figuring, the entirety of her body disintegrated at the force of the explosion.Howard visited a Brooklyn graveyard where two headstones sat, and apologized for losing a sister and a friend when he had tried to do some good.Deep in an old lab at Stark Labs, in the middle of the day, in late 2012, a blinding orb of light appeared for twenty-seven minutes. In those twenty-seven minutes, SHIELD was called to investigate, and, when the light faded, a woman lay on the ground, not breathing, dark brown hair covering her face.It took some time to correctly-identify the young woman as the long-dead Rebecca Barnes. If Steve Rogers hadn’t already shown how possible it was for the dead to come back to life, the agents wouldn’t have known where -- or who-- to look for answers. They had had plenty of time to investigate, as Becky showed no signs of waking. Most of the doctors couldn’t imagine how she had survived whatever had flung her into their time, but survive she did, albeit barely.She lay in a coma for seven weeks after the doctors performed life-saving surgeries on her to try to heal wounds that had formed in her travels. When she did wake, she woke slowly, for moments at a time, never remembering that she had already woken.When she finally did wake, she thought that the doctors were playing a cruel trick on her, and when she did finally believe the bizarre story they told her, she refused to see anyone for two more weeks, reeling and hurting and, according to the doctors, too weak to take any visitors. They treated her like she was made entirely out of butterfly wings, monitoring her every moment, making sure her heart didn’t give out from the injuries or the stress she was under.When she was twenty-seven, Becky entered into the crazy world of the future, though to her constant frustration, she was forced to do so with careful supervision, both for her health and because she was now labeled as a LIABILITY. She was someone for whom Captain America (and, later, the Winter Soldier) would go to extraordinary lengths to keep safe. For the sake of their missions, and for what was claimed to be HER OWN SAFETY, Becky had an apartment which SHIELD was able to monitor, with a heart monitor sending them information, and an agent who lived right next door.It was for her own benefit, they said. She believed them, a little, but she also thought that it was convenient for them to have her under their thumb, if they ever were to get mad at Steve or Jimmy.When SHIELD fell, Rebecca Barnes was left alone. Whether someone had purposefully rid the system of her files or whether she simply wasn’t high enough priority to maintain interest (she suspected the latter), she was finally free to succeed or fail all on her own. Using some of the money that had compounded over the years from what little she had had in the bank, Becky bought an apartment in a small brownstone in Brooklyn, setting herself up as well as she possibly could.She never found out who, but someone started giving her name out to other vigilantes in New York as a safe place to go. And, much sooner rather than later, the existence Becky had expected to be incredibly lonely ended up being full of people falling through her window, needing stitches, needing a soft hand and a warm drink and someone to tell them that everything would be alright. The murphy bed she set up in her living room rarely ever passed a night without a guest on it, and Becky Barnes quickly became New York vigilantes’ best kept secret.When the entire universe was threatened, Becky was there in Wakanda, using her experience from the war to set up a field hospital. She may have been far out of her league with the Wakandan technology and medical practices, but she could help the doctors and nurses set up an effective system for wartime medicine. She was in the hospital, doing what she could, when the snap happened.And she disappeared.She returned five years later, feeling only like an excruciating moment, with several still-injured Wakandan warriors still needing help. She did what she could, how she could, and when Steve and Jimmy walked through a portal back to Wakanda, looking far worse for wear, she collapsed. In exhaustion, relief, grief… all of it. She then got back up and got to work.She can be found at her apartment with the window unlocked, patching up whoever needs her help.

QUICK STATS

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TIMELINES

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MAINS

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main partners are non-exclusive mutuals with whom i have mutually-committed to developing our unique and individual dynamics between our muses. if i have general ideas for a plot with the character they play, i will go to them first to see if they would be interested in developing that plot. i will accept multiple blogs of the same character if i feel i have uniquely developed plots with more than one version of that character. at this time, i have not chosen to pursue exclusivity with anyone.

♡ webheadedhero: peter parker
♡ antibullies: steve rogers
♡ shesdaylight: rapunzel carter
♡ wnterslder: buckybarnes