Chapter Text
For Steven Grant Rogers all his life had been a fight. Born sickly, he'd begun his life in a fight for survival against his own body. The Great Depression and a father lost to World War I meant getting necessities was a struggle throughout his childhood and there were always bullies trying to take what little he had or trying to build themselves up at his expense. And every time he failed Bucky was there to fight on his behalf. Then the war began and Steve had to fight to be allowed to fight, fight not to be left behind. He fought to save Bucky and succeeded. And then there was the war and HYDRA. He fought to save Bucky again and lost and was relieved to find an excuse to stop fighting - stop existing. Only he hadn't and when he woke up from the ice there was an alien invasion to fight and HYDRA. He fought Bucky and fought to save him and was left in limbo, not knowing if he'd succeeded or failed. And still there was HYDRA to fight then Ultron and HYDRA yet again. And then the world that had always needed him to fight, demanded that he fight, ordered him to stop and he fought that. He fought the world when it threatened Bucky. After the trial, after being sentenced Steve found himself with nothing left to fight for or to fight against, nothing to do except try to work out where everything went wrong.
He found himself drawing the fight with Tony over and over again, trying to get it out of his head, to make some sense out of what had happened by putting it on paper. Between his eidetic memory and the autopsy report General Ross gleefully presented him with there was very little about the fight that he couldn’t picture, couldn’t reproduce with startling clarity or in strange abstract when he tried to let his hands work through what he wasn’t seeing.
Steve was relatively certain he’d paired up every injury, every dent in the armor with a particular moment in the fight. Tony’s armor had been strong, it protected him from so much but it had also been compact, every cubic inch packed with circuitry and servos to control and power it. Once the armor finally gave it collapsed along the path of least resistance, into the pilot’s body. It was readily apparent in the pictures from the autopsy report, they’d had to cut the chest plate off of Tony’s body because it had been too compromised to release normally. In cross-section there was no way for Steve not to see that for every inch the edge of his shield had penetrated into the armor it had pressed the metal at least three-quarters of an inch into Tony’s ribs and lungs.
During the fight it hadn’t occurred to Steve to think about what was under the metal. As the fight escalated he’d all but forgotten that there was flesh and bone beneath the armor. If Tony’s face plate hadn’t broken free Steve couldn’t honestly swear to himself that he wouldn’t have taken Tony’s head clean off in those last few seconds of the fight. Whenever that thought surfaced in Steve's mind he would find himself drawing the aftermath of the fight, the part he hadn’t seen: Tony slowly dying as his broken ribs punctured his lungs and left him to suffocate, drowning in his own blood. ‘If I'd known, if I'd realized, if I'd checked- I was so worried about Bucky it didn't even occurred to me to make sure Tony was okay. He had been conscious and talking, defeated but still defiant, still angry, lashing out with his words, still trying to avenge his parents and that was good enough for me. I gave Tony his one last strike. I dropped the shield and walked away with Bucky, never once looking back even though the first thing any teammate, any friend of Tony’s, learned was to never trust Tony to tell you if he was hurt. I should have checked but I was so certain that FRIDAY would have help coming, that Tony was okay. How was I supposed to know that Vision would chose the Accords over Tony’s safety?’
Even after Sam, Clint and Scott joined him in his imprisonment Steve didn’t stop drawing. It was obvious, painfully obvious in retrospect, that he should have told Tony about his parents years ago. ‘If I’d told Tony Siberia never would have happened. Even if I wasn’t able to make Tony see reason, understand that it was HYDRA, not Bucky who was to blame for his parents’ murder Siberia still wouldn’t have happened. Either Tony would have refused to come out of hatred for Bucky or he would have decided to put aside their differences to face the threat of the Winter Soldiers before he came, either way Zemo’s scheme would have amounted to nothing if Tony had already known about his parents. I condemned us all when I chose to hide the truth. I should have listened to myself when I was berating Tony for keeping secrets. I should have told him.’ But there was something else, something about the fight itself that Steve just couldn’t get his head around and so he kept drawing it, filling multiple notebooks with macabra sketches. He knew that he was worrying Sam. The counselor believe his behavior was obsessive, there dwelling on Tony's death so much was unhealthy.
“Councilor, this isn't post-traumatic stress and I'll thank you to step back,” Dr. Samson said, a small twitch of his jaw giving away frustration.
“I let Wanda stagnant on one stage of her treatment and I think it made her problems worse in the long run,” Sam argued.
“First you were too close to Ms. Maximoff to offer therapy and your relationship with Mr. Rogers is closer yet. As a professional you have a duty to recognize that and recuse yourself,” Samson said. “Second I'd like you to ask yourself if you have the training to offer psychiatric diagnoses.”
A faint flush colored Sam’s cheeks, “Vets were sent to my group after being diagnosed,” he admitted. “I was just trained in guiding them through group therapy. But the way Steve's fixating on Siberia…”
Steve shook his head, “Sam, killing Tony isn't a trauma I need to move past. It never should have happened and I need to understand why it did. Even if we weren't here I don't think I should be allowed in the field until I figure out how things went so wrong.”
“Where was that sort of thinking after Lagos?” Clint asked bitterly. “When you asked me to break Wanda out instead of leaving her to work out how she screwed up. Did you know she nearly broke Nat’s back at Leipzig? And she made me okay with that.”
“Mr. Barton,” Samson broke in, “Blaming Ms. Maximoff for your actions is counterproductive. She injured Agent Romanoff but if you were not bothered by that it comes from something in you. We have discussed her powers, analyzed all of your experiences with them: She could magnify or minimize your reactions to stimuli, she could dig up buried feelings but she could not create thoughts or feeling whole cloth.”
“Right. She made Nat getting hurt less important to me than it should have been. She made the part of me that resented Tony for being richer than Midas, rockstar famous and freaky smart to boot take over,” Clint said. “She did the same thing to Steve and that's what he’s refusing to see about why he killed Tony.”
“That's better,” Samson said dryly. “You stated what you disliked about Tony Stark rather than simply blaming Ms. Maximoff for your problems with him. If Mr. Rogers feels that there is something he still needs to work through about Siberia it is up to him to decide what that thing is. You can’t tell him the answer.”
And so Steve kept drawing. As the days continued to pass with unrelenting sameness and purposelessness, he found himself drawing, reliving the fight against Bucky on the Helicarrier. Juxtaposing it with the fight in Siberia.
“He’s my friend.”
“So was I.”
Steve remembered the regret he’d felt that he had to fight Bucky. There had been so many lives at stake, he had to fight, had to win. He'd known Bucky’s mind wasn't his own that any attempt to reach him was likely doomed, Bucky hadn’t even remembered his own name, but he'd still had to try. Against Tony Steve knew he’d been angry. Betrayed and angry that Tony could attack someone who meant so much to him… And frustrated, frustrated about the whole thing: Why wouldn’t Tony just acknowledge he was right about the Accords and stop resisting him? Furious that Tony was betraying the team, him, by supporting the Accords instead of making them go away. Steve signed, at some level he was sure he'd known that Tony had been the one to fix things after Johannesburg, after Ultron and he’d counted on Tony to come through for them again after Lagos but Tony had abrogated his responsibility to the team, worse he’d gone against them, joined the enemy. In retrospect, Steve had to admit that Tony had been doing what he thought was right. It hadn’t been Tony’s intent to betray them, he hadn't just been being difficult, Tony had been doing what his conscious demanded. Steve had written as much in the letter Tony never read, but even as he’d written it Steve remembered wishing he could just shake Tony until he realized the truth. He remembered wondering how someone as smart as Tony could be so stupid as to think anything Thaddeus Ross supported could be the right thing to do.
Back when he’d been writing that letter Steve remembered telling himself that it was Tony’s lack of a military background making him confused him about the sacrifices necessary to get the job done. But after the trial, after Rhodes’ testimony Steve had to face that it wasn’t because Tony didn’t understand the realities of being a soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes hadn’t sided with Tony out of misplaced loyalty he chose his side in their dispute due to his convictions. Thinking about Rhodes led Steve to worrying about what was left of the Avengers trying to handle everything on their own while being hobbled by the Accords. Clint and Sam told him about Hope van Dyne and Carol Danvers stepping up to help deal with the situation in Sudan-
And Steve wanted to say that whole disaster was Ross’ fault for going after Wanda in the first place, but Samson objected to that as surely as he objected to blaming the whole disaster on Wanda’s powers. After what Ross had done to Samson Steve felt that they had to listen when he said that it didn’t matter that their distrust of Thaddeus Ross had been thoroughly justified and it didn’t matter if they’d been influenced to distrust Tony, because the Sokovia Accords were more than two individuals.
‘We should have focused on taking Ross down,’ Steve thought, ‘Why didn't Tony just tell us he was collecting evidence against him?’ But Tony couldn't answer now and Steve would never forgive himself for that. ‘And yet, and yet… Ross presenting the Accords made me more suspicious of them but that wasn't been the only reason I opposed them, was it? Would the idea of governments, countries, wanting to decide whether or not they wanted the Avengers’ help have sounded so sinister if Ross hadn't been the face of the government?
‘And now there was SHRA and proposed mandatory registration for anyone with powers. Everything that Foggy had said that made me wrong about the Accords seems to be true of SHRA. Doesn't that imply I was right to oppose the Accords? That they were the first step on a slippery slope?’
Samson told him that there was plenty of healthy debate around SHRA. In response Steve wondered how anyone could not see what a terrible thing SHRA was. How was debate healthy when the problems were so glaringly obvious that everyone with any sense should be able to see them. And Samson handed him a stack of reading on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s.
One of the things that had most impressed Steve about the future he’d woken up in were the strides toward equality. The Commandos had been a racially integrated unit but they’d been the exception as they’d been formed from the surviving POW’s of a number of different units rescued by Steve, Peggy and Howard along with Bucky in ‘43. Within the Commandos, the time they’d spent as prisoners of HYDRA had broken down racial barriers. During their campaign against HYDRA the Commandos had mostly stuck to themselves. On those few occasions where they’d worked closely enough with other units for racism to become an issue a stern look from Steve had generally been enough to silence any objections to Gabe, Happy or Jim. And if not a less than friendly word from Bucky and Dum Dum did the trick. As for Peggy, Steve knew she’d had to prove herself twice over what any male would have, it wasn’t fair but she’d been more than up to the task.
Being in the Commandos first hand experience made it obvious that racial prejudices were just so much nonsense. It was a surprising for Steve to read about how long it had taken for the rest of the country to catch on to that fact. To read about how much work, perseverance and suffering had gone into fixing the bad laws that had existed in his tie and creating new ones to… Well, to serve the same purpose as those private talks with Bucky and Dum Dum: To encourage the necessary changes for people or societies who proved unwilling to do it simply because of principle.
It was while Steve was reading up on the Civil Rights movement that the first anonymous package turned up in his cell. That first nondescript little package contained pictures of Gabe Jones and his three daughters participating in the Civil Rights movement’s March on Washington along with notes of how all the former Commandos and their families had been involved from Howard Stark’s donations of money to Happy Sawyer’s arrest while participating in Freedom Rides in ‘61. Since coming out of the ice, Steve had been reluctant to learn what had become of the people he’d known. It hurt seeing Peggy so feeble, her indomitable will blunted by Alzheimer's, and so he hadn’t tried to find out about any of the others. But now, reading about what the Commandos had helped to accomplish after the war, it made him feel a little more tied to the history that had passed him by.
When the history lessons moved on to the Vietnam War, what Steve learned about his former team was more painful. The Commandos had been intensely proud of their military service, several had turned career military after the war ended and the youngest of those were highly ranked officers when Vietnam started. The rest had raised their children on stories of their adventures; too many of the Commandos’ children had volunteered to go to Vietnam and hadn't come home. By ‘68 the Vietnam War had divided the Commandos almost as emphatically as the Accords had the Avengers. And just learning about it after the Avengers’ Civil War ended up putting Steve and the newly thawed Bucky Barnes at odds.
“The US had no goddamn business being there in the first place,” Bucky said without the slightest doubt as he and Steve’s weekly phone call turned to their history lessons. “Trying to force your ways on people who don’t want them always ends up causing more problems than it solves.”
“The next thing I know, you’re going to be saying the Accords were right,” Steve snapped.
“Just ‘cause I got caught in Zemo’s crossfire doesn’t make them wrong.”
“What do expect?” Foggy asked when he came to visit several days later. “Bucky’s learning world history from a nation so isolationist that they make Japan’s Tokugawa Period look like a step toward globalization. Of course he’s going to end up thinking non-interference is the Holy Grail. Different cultures, different viewpoints. It’s not all black and white.”
Steve read with growing disquiet as the anonymous packages told how Howard, always one of their staunchest allies but never quite one of the Commandos, had been demonized by both factions as the war dragged on. Those who came to oppose the war savaged Howard for making money off it while those who continued to support it criticized him for failing to make weapons that would end it. Steve found himself looking at a death certificate for Terrence Dugan, age nineteen, killed in 1964 when a US bomber cell dropped their payload early. Eight days later Dum Dum was arrested for assaulting Howard Stark. Howard had tried to get the charges dropped and when that didn't work he testified, the judge dismissed the case and Howard spent the night in jail for contempt of court. With everything laid out in black and white it was easy to see how Howard had manipulated the judge and the trial to protect Dum Dum but Steve wondered if anyone one had seen it back then.
Gradually, as the war became interminable and the casualties continuing to mount while nothing was accomplished, most of the Commandos became aligned against it but it was years after the official ceasefire had been declared before the rift between the Commandos was repaired. From what Steve could deduce, the rift never healed when it came to Howard, too much pride on his side and no one who bothered to reach out from the other side. After Vietnam Peggy was the only member of the Commandos Howard ever spoke to again and even their relationship was strained. Steve wondered if Ultron would have become that for them if the Accords hadn't happened, he wonder if Tony would have just continued to drift further and further away until there was no way for either of them to bridge the divide.
The next package was different in tone from those that preceded it, it wasn’t about anything Steve’s former team had done to shape world events than Howard’s personal life set against the tapestry of the world. A series of medical records with the dates highlighted to draw attention to the fact that Howard’s wife had suffered a series of miscarriages blamed on stress and a nervous disposition as the Vietnam War escalated. The medical records culminated in an arrest report for an anti-war protester who’d broken into Howard and Maria Stark’s home followed hours later by a birth certificate for one Evelyn Stark and then a death certificate. After five failed attempts Howard and Maria finally had a child, but Tony’s older sister was born nearly two months prematurely and died only two days after her birth. During the year following Evelyn Stark’s death Stark Industries had produced a number of weapons crueler and more destructive than anything they’d ever sold before.
That same packet contained letters between Howard and a number of different generals written between 1955 and 1968, over the years Howard’s sales pitch went from promising the ‘best’ military to the ‘strongest’ and in the year after his first child’s death, Howard offered them the technology to create the ‘most fearsome’ military in the world. In some ways Howard’s response seemed to Steve like an angry ‘fuck you’ to the people who’d demanded he quit making weapons but reading between the lines he could also hear Howard telling the people who demanded better weapons from him: “Take what you want. Do with it what you will. Just don’t come crying to me afterwards,” and it wasn’t in tones of disinterest but out of active spite as if his daughter’s death had set loose a vengeful genie in Howard Stark. In those letters Steve saw the Howard he'd known turn into the father Tony had never wanted to talk about. There was also a footnote that Obadiah Stane joined Stark Industries a few months after Evelyn Stark’s death.
Then in ‘69 Maria Stark got pregnant for a sixth time and Howard changed again as the pregnancy progressed without trauma and Anthony Edward Stark was born May 29th, 1970. New weapon developments from SI trailed off and Howard’s name all but disappeared from the company’s patent disclosures. Steve wanted to tell himself that time had healed Howard’s wounds but a spreadsheet included in the new packet told a different story. It showed a yearly breakdown of the time and money Howard put into his efforts to recover Captain America from the ice. Steve felt a combination of guilt- “My dad made that shield”- and warmth at seeing in black and white that Howard had never give up on finding him. From 1946, after the government’s official search had been called off, until 1968 Howard had kept the search alive but in 1969 it turned into an obsession. Howard’s expenditures on the project leapt up sharply and would continue to rise until his death. Steve was shocked to see that during the last five years of his life Howard Stark had spent more on his search than Tony would spend financing the Avengers after S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fall and that Howard had personally overseen the search from May to September year after year.
The next package to appear in Steve’s cell was nothing more than a manila envelope containing a faded picture and an old letter. Steve instantly recognized Peggy’s handwriting on the letter:
Dear Edwin, Peggy wrote.
I’m so glad you let me know about Tony’s graduation. I’ll make sure Howard gets the video. Even though he won’t say, I know he wishes he’d been there. Try to make Tony understand that he is important to his father, even if Howard is horrible at showing it. Sometimes I wonder if Fennoff’s hypnotism had a deeper impact than we ever realized because I can’t believe that it’s really Steve that Howard is searching for after so many years. I think he’s searching for redemption… Although even I won’t say as much. Why would Howard think he needs redemption? He didn’t do anything wrong, or he won’t admit he has any regrets and it’s not worth the skin on my nose to suggest otherwise. Enough of that. If I dwell on it too long I will end up in another pointless fight with the man.
On to things that might be resolvable: When I give Howard the video I’ll do my best to explain the black eye so that Tony doesn’t get a lecture about it next fall. However you didn’t ask for my intervention with Howard, still I don’t know what advice to give you for Tony. While it would certainly make his life easier if he would learn to be a bit quieter about his intelligence I can’t bring myself to say that to him. It too closely echoes me being told to play down my abilities if I didn’t want to end up a spinster. I was fortunate enough to meet two men who didn’t need me to be less than I was to feel good about themselves and I have to believe that Tony will also be better off with friends who don’t require him to hide the depth of his brilliance to like him.
That said, while I’m glad to know Tony hasn’t knuckled under to the bullies who have made high school so miserable for him, he might have gone a bit far… His speech as valedictorian was quite obviously not the one his teachers approved. As to your concern, I don't expect any attempts to sue Tony for slander, I think the parents would rather not risk additional attention drawn to Tony’s assertions, or risk the possibility that Tony might be able to produce proof if pressed. But you should keep an eye out for any attempts at retaliation from the pair who weren’t arrested for assault on the spot. They’re obviously much brighter than the ones who tried attacking Tony in front of me and thus more dangerous.
As for Howard, Tony is hardly going to amenable to having the whole thing raked up again months after the fact and I don’t blame him for that. You deal with Tony’s infractions now and I’ll make sure Howard doesn’t stick his nose in when he gets back to the States in September. I’ll tell him that Tony won the fight, sadly, that will probably be enough to keep him from harping on it as long as I don’t mention that by ‘won’ I mean Tony induced the majority of his tormentors to attack him in front of witnesses for once and they’re facing legal proceedings. How Howard expects Tony to win at fisticuffs with boys who have six years and an average of fifty pounds on him I do not know!
Before you ask, yes I could teach Tony enough to beat-up untrained high schoolers despite the handicap of his age, but I won’t. You can’t possibly deny that Tony lacks the good sense to know when NOT to pick fights. If I teach him the dirty tricks he’d need against those brutes he’d use them the next time he was kidnapped and odds are I’d end up retrieving a body. Tony needs to learn that sometimes the cost of fighting is just too high to be born and he needs to learn that sooner rather than later.
Steve set the letter down and started laughing until he was choking. “Make up your mind Peg,” he whispered when he regained control. “Do we stand fast no matter the forces arrayed against us because we’re right? Or do we count the cost and choose our battles accordingly?”
He set the letter aside and turned over the picture. Tony was ridiculously young and tiny in his high school mortarboard and gown. From the date, Tony was a few weeks past his thirteenth birthday but he was small for his age. The graduation picture also captured his much older and larger classmates’ dark glares. Steve cringed to picture those same teenagers attacking the child Tony had been probably only moments after that picture had been taken. For Steve it was almost unreal, seeing Tony as the smallest and weakest of a group, not when Steve was used to watching Tony effortlessly work a crowd, shifting their mood, their view of the world with little more than his personal charisma. But then Steve supposed it wasn't easy to see the small, sickly Brooklyn boy he'd been either.
A few days later when Steve found himself drawing Siberia yet again he stopped after a few minutes he flipped to a clean sheet and started drawing the fight again, this time trying to draw it as it might have appeared from Tony’s point of view.