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His mother wholeheartedly believed in the power of the people. That when good men and women (and the people who lived by neither names in the bowels of the creaky Brooklyn buildings) set their minds on things, fought for their freedoms and their causes, that change would happen.
Maybe it was the Irish in her, overflowing with the pride for a motherland so long claimed by the British. Maybe it was the same call to greatness he heard when the war came knocking on the shores of America as the bombs blew out Pearl Harbour. Maybe it was how she’d been raised, and how she’d raised him with a taste for justice like honey in tea.
It’s not the Rogers’ who were (are) fierce by blood, patriotism burning brightly in their souls like they could ignite the whole country into flares; it was the O’Brien clan, whose culture was robbed from them like it was meaningless, who learnt Gaeilge in hedges when the British made their language illegal, who lit torches in every failed rebellion.
She taught him in secret, the wonder of her native tongue hidden and shielded in the darkness of their home, because the only why to teach something is how you learnt it yourself.
Steve remembers a time, when his mother is clearing his knuckles of loose rocky gravel, and she tells him how the world and everything will turn out okay.
He’s fifteen, and three of the neighbourhood guys beat him up so bad that he physically wasn’t able to get back up until they’d gone, spitting on him as their booted feet carried them away. Bucky wasn’t around to chase them off, and he wouldn’t have been able to, had he been; the O’Malley brothers are big rough stevedores, even though the youngest is only a year older than him.
She’s already taped up his ribs (which had bruised and maybe cracked from coming in swinging contact with the middle brother’s mammoth foot) and cleaned the blood off the souvenir black eye he’ll be sporting for the week when she says it.
“One day, yah won’t have to fight,” she whispers, kissing his bandaged knuckles. “Stevie, I promise the world’ll be a better place. But until then yah always stand up.”
Her weathered hands caress his gaunt face. He can feel the warm metal of her wedding ring, and God, it somehow makes the pain everywhere else subside enough for him to find his voice.
“Yeah, Ma,” he whispers.
That night he draws the skyline, suffocated in the dark, and hopes that she’s right
It’s when he’s painting her kind smile and soft eyes onto the wall of his studio in Avengers’ Tower, so much of her face mirrored in his own (or, he supposes, his face mirrored in hers) that he knows, looking out into the now darkened city, the buildings shifted and different from what he drew all the way back then, that she was definitely, undisputably correct, like always.
He smiles at her, and wipes the back of his hand over his forehead to satisfy an itch, smudging a line of soft pale gold across the expanse of his forehead. Glances at the computer screen he’s dragged (carefully, for the sake of Tony’s heart) across the floor, with the enlarged image of his mother, cradling a bundle of colourless blankets, that Mrs. Barnes had pressed into his hand like a secret three weeks after his mother passed on.
There’s other photos too, that George Barnes caught of her unaware. Her with hair shining silvery from the aged photo, looking down at a photo album, sitting still long enough for her to be clear in the frame. Just the two of them, standing outside the second Rogers’ apartment, bigger and cleaner, when money got better and Steve was young enough and well enough to still be growing taller. She looked matronly, with her starch white apron.
The soft light of the room, faded down like the sun which set hours ago into the horizon, makes her feel real.
I love you so much , he thinks towards the painting, I miss you, I hope you’re proud.
He knows she would be.
Steve finishes her face and neck, and steps back to look at her. There’s still more space,a lot more, to the left of her body - her own right - and Steve knows exactly what he’s going to paint next.
(She was right; the world did get better. That’s why they’ll be on her right.)
The other Avengers fill the walls in the following months.
Missions and crises pull him from his work, but they slowly build into the figures he knows well, who he fights and (hopefully) makes the world a better place with.
The anarchism of his mother blends into the pack like her clothes aren’t outdated and her colours aren’t muted - it seems that one cannot shine on the inside and out at the same time, because his mother never looked more than ordinary. Their clothes were always drab, but they didn’t have holes, and they were mended by hand when they did, and they were warm an enough to heat them when the New York winter truly gripped the streets in its icy hands.
They didn’t have much, but they always made it work.
The intense colour pallets of his fellow Avengers almost over shine her, but he knows that the knowing look on her face, the steel of her eyes and the set of her mouth - she is inarguably the strongest one in line.
His life is not easy. Sometimes it’s not the horrors he’s seen that keep him up all night, Bucky snuffing softly into the pillow, his chest, the back of his neck, but it’s the horrors he has undeniably caused spinning like a photo reel before his eyes.
He prays that she knows that he is sorry, that sometimes he had no choice. That the world often has to teeter on it’s worst before it starts getting better.
He misses her.