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domarzione750 words | PG-ish | Steve Rogers
Steve Rogers died in 1945.
The man who was found in 2011, the soldier who returned to combat in the Battle of New York, the hero who was welcomed back by a grateful nation, that man was Captain America.
Steve Rogers was still dead and nobody seemed all that interested in bringing him back to life. Nick Fury wanted a warrior for SHIELD and the public... they wanted their hero. They lived in a world grown scarier by the day, even before aliens poured out of a hole in the sky, and they wanted someone to tell them not to be afraid so that they could believe it. And who better to believe than Captain America? History had polished his legend until all of his faults had been worn away, all of his shortcomings, all of his personality, until Captain America was a bland, anodyne, paradigm of justice and virtue to one and all. The left turned him into a radical progressive, the right into a reactionary, and the arguments about who was correct played out on news chat shows and academic texts and the blogosphere.
Nobody really gave a crap how Steve felt about it.
Which was just as well because he had quickly learned to keep his opinions and his questions to himself. The future was a very judgmental place, quick to assume and pass sentence on those assumptions, and he got tired of being guilty until proven innocent. Especially because nobody seemed to understand that "this is new to me and I find it a little weird" was not the same thing as "I disapprove."
He'd been formed, flesh and value system both, in a very different time, so different that anyone born now couldn't conceive of all of the ways it was, although the historians and the people who played pop psychologist with Captain America liked to try. There was so much of the future -- this present -- that shocked him. The technology, of course, and world events, but also and more immediately, the social norms and mores. New York City had always been a little ahead of everywhere else in that regard, but ahead in 1945 was still like a caveman now and he'd paid the price for his culture shock before he'd learned to keep it private.
Hiding behind the shield, beneath the shadow of Captain America, was safest and with so much of his energy dedicated to catching up on the outside world, it was easiest, too. He was too busy, too overwhelmed, too burdened by the weight of expectations laid upon him by everyone else and by himself to spend too much time worrying about it. It wasn't like he was bored and the only person who'd ever called him on it was Peggy and, sadly, some of the time he was with her she needed him to pretend to be someone else, too.
He didn't move through the world without attachment or interaction; he had work and work-friends at SHIELD and with the Avengers, he went on infrequent dates where his inexperience was more than counteracted by the modern woman's entitlement to her own enjoyment, and if the man living that life was Cap instead of Steve, nobody was the wiser. Including sometimes the man himself.
But Captain America was a target as much as a hero and when the shots aimed at him struck true, Steve had to be there to pick up the pieces and that's when he realized how little there was of that man, how completely he'd been subsumed by the costume and the role. He'd never meant for it to happen, of course, never meant to lose himself so completely to Captain America. But he had and now he had to fight to get himself back, to become Steve again.
It would be harder now than it would have been back in 2011, to claw through not only the legend that had ossified while he'd slept in ice, but also the accretions he'd let harden on top of that in the three years since. But everything that happened with Insight and HYDRA would make it easier, too, because in their wanton destruction, they'd made the first cracks in the foundations of everything he'd held dear. All he had to do was tear down the rest and rebuild. For himself, first and foremost, and for the people who'd come to rely on him, and for the man somewhere out there he hoped to find.
