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    This One's For Bravery and This One's For Me by

    Fandoms: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America - All Media Types  

    03 Dec 2014

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    Summary

    The thing is, he's read most all of the books that have been written about Captain America. At first he was desperate to understand why people were so strange about him, why it felt like the whole world was staring at him, waiting for him to do something amazing. Before the Chitauri invasion, no one had told him that a generation of Americans had grown up watching Captain America cartoons on Saturday morning. No one had said that the stupid propaganda reels he shot with the USO and later with the Commandos would be dissected by scores of academics for cultural meaning, that every part of his life and death already had a book written about it. No one had told him what kind of symbol Captain America had become, because the answer was too complicated, and had changed every decade or so anyway.

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    Bookmarked by spikenard

    10 Mar 2015

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    Bookmarker's Notes

    The thing is, he's read most all of the books that have been written about Captain America. At first he was desperate to understand why people were so strange about him, why it felt like the whole world was staring at him, waiting for him to do something amazing. Before the Chitauri invasion, no one had told him that a generation of Americans had grown up watching Captain America cartoons on Saturday morning. No one had said that the stupid propaganda reels he shot with the USO, and later with the Commandos, would be dissected by scores of academics for cultural meaning, that every part of his life and death already had a book written about it. No one had told him what kind of symbol Captain America had become, because the answer was too complicated, and had changed every decade or so anyway.
    Later, he'd found books that theorized what had been done to his body. That maybe it had been stem cells triggering massive growth. That growth hormones made his organs more efficient and sped up his healing. That maybe it had been changes in the brain itself, triggering the rapid muscle and bone growth, increasing his intelligence, memory, spatial sense, everything that had made him valuable as a commander as well as a weapon. No one knew - they'd never found his body, and the results had never been duplicated.

    He likes those the best - they read so impersonally, as if it's anybody's brain they're talking about. (It's different when he's asked: how fast can you run? What does it take to knock you out? Were you awake when the plane hit the ice?). The worst are the ones about his childhood and life growing up in Brooklyn, which are so compassionate, so tragic, so excruciatingly researched. He always comes out of them looking like a fucking saint. Everyone does: Bucky, his mother - even Bucky's folks and their other childhood friends aren't spared. His life is painted in sepia-toned, airbrushed perfection where no one had flaws or cockroaches or lived on the dole or had people offer them money to get sterilized for the good of the human race.

    Sometimes Steve thinks that it's these books that are the real problem, because all superheroes need a tragic backstory to make them more than human. He went into the ice as a soldier and woke up to find out that Captain America had eaten him whole, every little piece. He didn't own his story anymore: not the war, not Peggy, not Brooklyn and Bucky - not questions about what, exactly, would kill him?

    Captain America's life and death had been a lot larger than Steve Rogers' had been, so much more satisfying and digestible, and sometimes even Steve preferred it to the real thing. Captain America hadn't been terrified when he put the plane down into the ice, and he'd never wished they'd just left him there.