The Captain's Lady

CHRIS EVANS — 06.13.1981

When Steve drops the shield at the end of the film, he’s not just dropping the Captain America identity; this is also a final statement that he is not, and never again will be, the property of the government.

That is, of course, the crux of the film’s conflict: whether super-powered people can be allowed to operate on their own, or whether they need to be under the control of the world’s governments - or in other words, the property of the world’s governments.

And Steve Rogers, in WW2, started out that way.  He volunteered to not only be a soldier in the U.S. Army, but to be experimented upon.  He gave up his bodily autonomy, in every sense of the word, in service to his country.  His very body is, technically, the property of the U.S. government.

He then became a symbol to sell war bonds, and then a symbol to lead men and the allies to victory.  And then decades after making the ultimate sacrifice, he was found in the ice, and thawed/woken up in the present day - adding to the government’s investment in him.

For most of his life - through the present day - the Captain America identity has been the property of the government, for all that the man Steve Rogers inhabited it.  They not only gave him his shield, his uniform and other equipment; they not only assigned agents to watch over him/protect him and bugged his apartment; but they made a fucking EXHIBIT in the Smithsonian about the Captain America identity.

And in this moment, when he drops the shield, Steve is saying - no more.  I will not be your dancing monkey.  I will not be your puppet.  I will not be your property.

Steve Rogers isn’t just dropping the shield here.  He is dropping any and all debt to the government, and any and all loyalty to the government.

Damian's claim is that the manor is so big and Damian's so good at remaining hidden that he could live in the manor without anybody else there clocking him easy. Jason just wants to see how long he can actually go because in his mind the longer Bruce goes without realising he has Damian in the house, the funnier the reveal will be. he's actually kinda rooting for Damian purely because it's funnier if he pulls it off for a really long time first. then Jason can snitch on him and the fall-out will be glorious.

he lasts about four months.

two weeks in and Alfred becomes suspicious, but chooses to believe that it's raccoons or pigeons in the attic because then he doesn't have to get involved. and he really doesn't want to get involved.

a month in and Damian almost gets caught by Tim while trying to steal some food in the middle of the night and getting cornered in the kitchen, but Tim hadn't slept in three days and was high on cold medicine at the time so he assumed that Damian was actually a hallucination of Bruce as a child, and all he did was stare Damian directly in the eye and solemnly tell him 'never ask your parents to go see a movie with you.' before going to pass out in the study.

two months in and Damian has gotten into a rhythm with it. feeling unchallenged, he starts waiting for Bruce to fall asleep in front of the batcomputer during hard cases so he can sneak out from the walls and fix whatever Bruce is getting wrong and solving the case before he wakes up.

three months in and Dick runs into him while sneaking in through a side door so he can grab some stuff from his bedroom without having to talk to Bruce, but Damian bullshits that he's one of Tim's school friends visiting to complete a school project, and Dick gives him twenty dollars to promise that he won't tell anybody Dick is in the building.

four months in and he gets cocky; starts ordering packages to the manor addressed to himself. Alfred asks Bruce at the dinner table why they've received an amazon package for 'Damian Wayne' and nobody knows what the fuck he's talking about. the next night the Red Hood snitches and asks how 'Damian's doing' and Bruce becomes convinced that Hood has the manor bugged. demands a full sweep of the building. Tim comes across Damian napping in a hammock in the attic wearing Tim's presumed-lost clothes next to a pile of supremely confidential files stolen from the batcave.

CHRIS EVANS as JOHN PITTS