Work Text:
Heavy. His feet are heavy in his boots, heavy on the frozen ground. Bucky is heavy is his arm, leaning heavy on his side, wounded and staggering. Heavy hangs his head, weight behind his burning eyes. Playing on a loop in his head, the shield swinging heavily down and briefly obscuring Tony’s terrified eyes.
The shield drags heavy on his arm. It was real .
“You don’t deserve it,” Tony spits furious, voice trembling with exhaustion and the aftershocks of fear.
And Steve stops. He can’t go back, he never could, not even when it was the only thing he wanted, certainly not now when he feels himself pulled in both directions. Steve looks up, heavenward, at the frosted ceiling. The ice again, he thinks, stealing things out of my heart. A circle closing, he realizes, even as he lets the shield slide down his arm. Let another circle begin here , he thinks, not sure if he’s asking God or commanding himself, let this be a way forward that brings me back .
He tightens his grip on Bucky, reflexively, drawing him through the shadowed hallways of the bunker, into the blinding white afternoon. It didn’t seem possible, or right, that it should still be daylight out. That everything could have collapsed so quickly. That the sun should shine on him still, after what he’d done. I didn’t know then , he told the memory of Bucky falling away, reaching, reaching, how an ending could come back to you . Steve closed his eyes and sucked the frozen air into his lungs, let it dry his mouth out, a feint against the sense memory of water in his throat. Let this one be kinder .
Behind his eyelids, the shield swung down and down, with finality. The fragile bones of Tony’s face obscured behind his weaponized palms. There hadn’t been time to feel it before, but here, in the sunlight, the memory brings just a glimmer of hope. Let this one be kinder .
It was relief to have left the shield behind, the pain of it almost welcome. It had been a part of him, despite his growing resentment of what it had come to mean. Icon and mask. A lodestar now, a way back , he prayed.
When I find a way back, let us find a way to make a home for real , he prayed, dragging his feet, dragging his friend, dragging half his aching heart away.
At some point, Steve starts laying the shield against the wall with the straps facing out. There’s a few scattered instances where it saves him a split second in swooping it up, but mostly it doesn’t make any strategic difference. Mostly, what it does for him is hide the paint.
He wants it close, a reminder of both who he wants to be and who he’s expected to be, but sometimes. Sometimes, he can’t stand to look at it.
It was sometime after Ultron, when the traction he thought he’d been able to find with the team had turned to an oil slick. Sometime after Tony retired.
Sometime after Tony drives off into the sunset, to build Pepper a farm or another tower or her very own Iron Bunker on some tropical Stark Island. It’s sometime later amid Nat and Sam and occasionally Rhodes trying to help him stumble his way through training Wanda and Vision, amid milk runs and amid his continuous, desperate, fruitless search for Bucky. Amid all that as sleep remains elusive (and brings the echos of Peggy’s impossible promise in the deserted Stark Club when it comes), amid all that as each day bleeds into the next and Sam and then Nat and then Nat and then Sam ask him if he’s doing alright … it’s sometime in there that Steve turns the shield around.
“Is that your way of telling me you’re not interested in discussing business today?” Tony’s waiting for him in his office, raises an eyebrow at Steve as he sets the shield against the wall, straps out. “Or is this like covering your kid’s ears before chewing someone out? Am I in trouble for missing our last meeting?”
“It’s good to see you Tony,” Steve takes the hand he extends. Doesn’t draw him in. “You know I’m grateful you still fit us into your schedule as much as you do.”
“Yeah, well, so far retirement hasn’t been the best fit. Turns out I may not be all that great at it,” Tony says fluttering his hand. “Letting go,” he clarifies unnecessarily.
You should be here, Steve thinks, and almost reaches out. He knows a bit about hanging on and holding out. Knows a bit about the path you’re supposed to be on somehow not being the right path for you.
You gave me most of a home, Steve wants to say. It's not complete without you, and, I want you to be Ironman. As much as you want it for yourself.
But he doesn’t talk to Tony about any of that. Instead he turns the shield to face the wall, and puts his back up when anyone tries to tell him what his job is supposed to be. Once he was dead again, they’d tell it however they like anyway.
At some point, the shield moves permanently into Steve's room. It has a slot in his gear locker, and sometimes, peripherally, Steve will admit to himself that it would probably be good for him to store it there, at least some of the time. But mostly Steve tells himself that keeping it close is just part of accepting the new identity of Captain America. Absorbing all the new layers of identity the shield had accumulated while he slept.
The point comes sometime after he walks through the museum exhibit depicting those long, miserable, mud-soaked months of his life where he had felt he was maybe, finally, doing what he was meant to be doing, being who he was meant to be. Making a difference.
There was a whole section there on the shield. Some of the details on how Howard had created and, likely from Howard’s notes, some of Steve’s own original designs Steve had found himself rooted there, staring at it, recognizing it and feeling, helplessly, like it was someone else’s work. Surrounded by the glorification of the horrifying things he and the Commandos had had to do, the romantization of his death, the glamorization of his 21st century life. Hero, legend, centerpiece.
And seeing the old prop shield so close alongside the display for the one he’s claimed and designed for himself had been unsettling. As if the shield, that had felt like a part of him almost from the moment he had pulled it free, that had been his totem of freedom, freedom from the confines of his frail body, freedom from the performance, suddenly seemed like just another prop. Like all the battles he’d fought so hard to win had each been just another act in the play they’d made of his life.
The exhibit had limited his life in this new era to his defrosting and his role in the battle of New York, and even that seemed overly generous. Inflated. Tony and Natasha had turned the tide against the Chitauri. Hulk had taken out Loki. He had just been two more boots on the ground.
But then he’d walked out of the museum and on the sunlit streets had felt awfully melodramatic. He went back to his apartment, back to SHIELD, and slept a few more nights here and there with the shield in his equipment locker.
It had been better for awhile after the destruction of the Insight carriers. Taking back his old uniform from the exhibit, putting it to use, he’d felt for awhile like he could take back more. His history, his life. He’d find Bucky, and they’d take it back together.
"I know it hasn't been easy for you, here and now and all, but I'm glad to have you," Tony tells him, sweeping his arm grandly as he ushers Steve into the room Tony had designed for him, here in the Tower.
"Thanks for everything, Tony," Steve says, smiling. This could be the right place, he thinks. Next to you.
Like the battlefields of Europe, Steve gets that feeling of certainty that he’s in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing. The shield an anchor at his side, and Tony a golden beacon in the sky.
But Bucky remained elusive, and Tony's help was still impossible to accept. Steve felt the secret like a wall between them, and the feeling that he might reclaim some of what had been taken from him while the ice held him prisoner, and claim something new to hold him in this new life, faded.
So he moved the shield into his room, and tried a little harder to be Captain America a little more of the time.
In the aftermath of the Chitauri, Steve takes himself around the country and his loneliness surprises him.
He’d expected to be lonely, it’s a constant in this new life he’s awakened to, but until now it had revolved around the dead and dying from him past. Peggy, an ocean away and losing her mind and a grandmother and he can’t stop seeing her in the back of that jeep, her hair blowing, reaching for him. Was it real? Dum Dum and Morita and the others, heroes and retired and passed. Howard, a father.
Had Tony been a surprise to Howard? Had he struck him as he did Steve? One moment almost a perfect carbon copy of his father, brilliant and ambitious and just righteous enough to land on the bright side of gray, and in another moment impossibly opposite, vulnerable and obvious in his hope. Steve thinks about all of them when his loneliness shifts into something new and fresh and surprising, somethings almost painless, thinks about this new team that formed around him when he had seen nothing before him but another chance to die heroically.
Clever, closed-off Natasha, and Clint who’d started cracking jokes almost as soon as the life came back into his eyes. Steve wonders, prodding at the wound of his melancholy, if he’d reached out a little more in those early weeks, before Loki, could he have met Clint, before Loki?
Would Thor return once Loki was disposed to Asgard? Steve thinks to himself that he’d rather like to back in New York when the thunder god returned. He thinks about discovering this new age with someone equally alien to it, and almost feels anticipation.
Banner seemed patient and dry-witted, and Steve wonders if there’s parts of this new New York that he might enjoy introducing Steve to, whether he would enjoy an evening in Steve’s company, if he would want to commiserate about what science had cost them, in making them superheroes.
And Tony. Steve could hardly think of him without a prickle of shame, thinking about the words he’d thrown on the helicarrier. Magic staff or no, Steve had been thinking them, Tony’s brash voice and not quite familiar face carrying his father’s ghost, and Steve, stranded in this strange time, desperate and resentful, had thought those same things about Howard, before. Charming, reckless Howard, ready to make the drop but not the jump.
But Tony had shed Howard’s ghosts when he rose through that hole in the sky, and was haunted now in Steve’s mind by the echo of his last, whistling gasp before his comm cut out. Steve doubted any of the others had even been able to make it out, just another gift from the serum for Steve to carry and hold up and compare to the wet cough of his own final breath.
Maybe some things could be better in this new age. He could be valuble here.
Phil had been so earnest in taking credit for the uniform design, that Steve doesn’t have the heart to express himself with more than a bitten off frown when he sees it. The material is new to him, stretchy and soft, but putting it on gives him a strong sense memory of the stage. The lights, the heat, the almost deafening stamp of the girls behind him.
The shield is the same though.
The shield is a comforting weight on his back as the plan coalesces in his mind and he takes the plane’s controls in hand. Peggy’s voice is a comfort, a balm against his screaming nerves, as he turns his eyes and the plane toward the water below. The words, the lies, stick in his throat as they make new plans and he’s so grateful for the illusion. The plane is hurtling towards the water, it’s surface gleaming and almost metallic under the storm clouds, moving so fast but taking so, so long.
And like so many cliches carrying a bit of truth, bits of his life flash through his mind as the long seconds carry him down. His mother patiently scrubbing the shapes Steve had sketched in charcoal on hearth. Bucky, young and funny and kind and beautiful, and then thin and haunted and swallowed by the ravine. And abruptly the dive feels as right as it is necessary, I’m right behind you , he thinks, sorry it took me so long .
And so he let’s Peggy promise him the Stark Club, takes the fantasy gratefully, thank you, I love you . He never did learn to dance but this new body moves so easily most days, maybe he could sweep her away. Or maybe she would even like it better if he didn’t. They could laugh about it together, and she’d make it seem just fine when he stepped on her toes. Maybe she’d wear that red dress, and maybe she would like that it made him stumble. Maybe she’d offer to teach him, and they’d meet at the club every week. Two nights a week, three. Dinner before or after. Walking her home, kissing her outside her door. Seeing her lipstick smudged in the lamplight, wiping it away with his thumb.
It’s instantaneous, even to his serum-primed and adrenalin-heightened senses. Between one moment and the next he’s pressed back into the shield, forced over the seat, shards of the windshield pressed into his skin. His last breath whooshes out of his mouth as his chest compresses under the weight of the water. It bears him to back of the plane, pins him there.
Picking up the shield starts as idle curiosity, just looking for something to do with his hands amidst the chaos of Howard’s workspace. But the weight of it feels right, promising, and Steve lets it carry him forward.
There’s a lot about the image of Captain America that Steve starts off parroting from the script but eventually swallows. Believing that any contribution is meaningful. Holding himself up as a symbol of more than he really feels he can represent.
Other parts seem wrong not just for him, but for the country and for the cause. There’s a lot of things Steve would have done differently, if he’d been sure enough of himself to push back against that early construct of who Captain America would be. Steve sometimes thinks he might have avoided a lot of problems for himself if he’s taken a more active role in the original creation of the image of Captain America.
But Erksine had just died. Been killed because even like this, even being everything he could ever hope to be, even like this he wasn’t quite enough. He had still been rejected outright despite the undeniable success he represented. Because Steve was the only one, alone, and he wasn’t enough.
But mostly, it was the loss of Erksine, because who else had ever believed he could be more than what he was? Ma and Bucky had always insisted he would do what he could and it would be enough, and Steve had loved them fiercely for believing that, but … but for himself the bar of “enough” was always much higher than he could really hope to reach.
So when the General had told him that he wasn’t needed as a solider, that hadn’t sounded right, but what could Steve do? And when they told him he could best serve his country by selling war bonds, that hadn’t sounded right, but what else could he do? And when they told him he could best be selling war bonds dressed like an ostentatious flag, well, what else could he do?
So he put on the tights and didn’t ask what the fuck was up with the stripes. He didn’t say the star was a nice touch but also kind of looked like a target. It’s not like it mattered, not like he was really a soldier. Still not enough.
“I know it’s not why you signed up, but it really will help with the war effort,” Peggy says to him, instead of goodbye. She’s going to join a combat unit. Steve is headed to Baltimore.
Steve truly believes Peggy can be an unstoppable force, but she doesn’t have the time to work around the prejudice of an entire army. So she probably won’t see much direct combat, but she’ll be there, with the troops, she’ll know what they need, she’ll make a difference. She could never be anything less.
Meanwhile, Steve will be reciting his lines and smiling and smiling and smiling. You’ve got a nice smile, one of the sweeter girls Bucky had set him up had once told him. Most of the chorus girls have agreed, but most of them are plenty sweet too. Are you sure you won’t join us? they ask, when going out for drinks or dinner, or staying in. Sometimes he does.
And sometimes he passes the evening with Thomas, who wants to be in the moving picture shows someday, and who makes a grand show as Hitler dropping like a stone with one blow from Steve’s fist.
And once or twice he’ll get into the show himself and, going just a little off script, hefting the shield high. It’s flimsy, useless, just a prop, but for just a moment the whole show feels almost right, just a little true. For one lousy moment in this whole lousy charade his life had come to, he feels like he belongs in these gaudy colors, in these broad shoulders. This is part of it.
Steve likes the aesthetics of the shield. It’s as loud as the rest of his costume, but that’s just paint. He likes what it means that it’s a shield, likes that it’s not a gun or a sword or just his star-spangled fists. That’s where I should be, he thinks again and again and again. I should be out front defending folks.
“I know this is valuable work,” he tells Peggy as she leaves, “I just don’t think it’s where I should be. I don’t think it’s where I can be most valuable.”