Author's note: *blushes a little* Um, yeah. This adorable idiot has partly taken over my life. And I REGRET NOTHING.

Seriously, what is wrong with me?

But yeah. I've read so many stories where Steve hates winter. HE FREAKING DOESN'T HATE WINTER! He just hates the memories it brings back. And sometimes the emotions.

Tony Stark can hate winter. Steve Rogers (for some inexplicable reason) can't.

Rant over.

Snow and Ash

Steve had always loved winter.

Its stark beauty, even when he couldn't go outside, was stunning, breathtaking—sometimes literally.

Back when rainwater was pure enough to drink, and they could find perfectly clear icicles, Bucky used to bring them back to suck, to cool the fevers that only too often accompanied the coming of winter.

One night, Steve remembered, they snuck out at midnight on Christmas eve, ignoring the straggly, transplanted tree with its meager, dingy presents, to watch the snow fall. They had huddled together under Bucky's warm jacket and watched as perfect flakes of crystal and white fire floated down on a soft diamond breeze, bizarrely almost summery through the cold. That night, winter had not been sharp or hard with freezing sleet and rain and slush and mud, but perfect and beautiful with ice rather than slush and featherlike snowflakes rather than driving ice crystals. It had sparkled with a light all its own, cloaking the world in a mysterious blanket of downy white.

Steve loved winter.

Then came the war, and change was the ever-driving current, rushing them recklessly toward an unknown and possibly dark future. And he was changing, too, thrust straight from incomplete training into a sickeningly fake show tour, and from thence with no experience into battle. And Steve adapted. It was a survival instinct, something that laid deeper than could be taught or learned. Almost as deep as the driving need to protect others, to serve.

Summers were not the blastingly hot days he was used to, when the city sweltered and the pavement reflected the heat a thousand times. But with summer came drought, making things hard for the Commandos and harder still for the people whose lives had been disrupted by war. Winters were different too; rather than the thick sheets of snow coming in from the Atlantic that Steve was used to, snow would often be wind-driven powder, not fluffy, clearly-defined, beautiful flakes. It was still beautiful, though it was beautiful in a different way.

And then there's the possibility that there are Hydra agents hiding in the snow, which though it remains beautiful also makes it dangerous.

Sometimes, flakes of ash mix with the drifting snow and embers burn through it to the frozen soil below as they fall. This is winter, perverted and twisted by the perversion of man. Perhaps of one man, who led the rest to insanity. The true villains—the leaders, the initiators, the men who came up with those ugly, vicious grand plans—are the embers. The men they lead to wreck and ruin and death are ash.

When Bucky falls, he doesn't know what to think. He is empty inside, numb, with the feeling that a piece of him has suddenly been ripped out.

He still doesn't hate the winter.

When he falls, though he desperately wants to live, he is still satisfied. He has succeeded—millions will live, due to his actions. The cold that has never been his enemy reaches out with open arms to take the pain away.

Freezing to death does not hurt. There is no pain; one's body simply goes numb, bit by bit. When he drowned, the cold was merciful. It made it less painful, it kept him from struggling in a panic and only prolonging the inevitable and prolonging the agony along with it.

It is the recovery that hurts. When limbs thaw out and circulation is restored, when prickles of agony sweep through every part of the body to wipe the frostbite away and heal the damage done by ice and cold.

And he remembered it.

Waking up was the hardest part.

The cold had, somehow, mysteriously saved him. It had prevented him from drowning; rather than being asphyxiated, he had been frozen before he could drown. His metabolism slowed, he had somehow remained alive despite being encased in ice, his body perfectly preserved by sea ice and the lingering effects of the serum.

There was no precedent for that.

The cold was not his enemy. But still, it sometimes bore the agony of remembering along its icy blasts.

Steve Rogers still loved winter.

But when snow turned to ash, he would still cry.