MrsRogerBarnes

“Look, Stevie, a shooting star!” Sarah leaned closer to shield him from the night wind. “They say that when a curious angel lifts the curtain of the night sky to peek at the human world, we see the light as a shooting star.”

“If you make a wish while they’re peeking in, Stevie, they might hear it and make it come true.”

“Look! Another star! Stevie, quick, let’s make a wish!”

“I don’t need—”

“How about, you will make a friend at your new school?”

“I don’t need a friend.” He thought about it and added, “But it would be nice if I can find someone who lets me draw them.” It was hard to find someone who had the patience to stay still long enough, and who didn’t think he was odd for staring.

“Well, if you are friends then they’re more likely to let you draw them.”

Steve was still dubious, but obeyed anyway, “Alright then. I wish for a friend, with nice eyes.” He liked drawing eyes.

“That’s a good wish,” Sarah said encouragingly.

“And a big, big smile.”

“That’s beautiful, Stevie.”

“And curls in his hair,” because he liked drawing hair too, and curls were fun to draw.

Sarah rubbed his head affectionately, “Alright—”

“And nice hands,” he liked how expressive they were and wanted to get better at drawing them.

“Certainly, Steve, now—”

“Also,” he remembered something important, “He can’t be taller than me.”

She rapped him on his forehead. “The angel won’t grant your wish if you’re too greedy. Come on, let’s get inside before you catch another cold.”

always

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the ficback machine project is an initiative to save fanfiction on tumblr in the internet archive to protect it from being lost forever to changing urls, merked or deleted blogs, or any other tumblr fuckery. this website sucks. lets protect fandom history from its suckery

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so you gotta understand that us howlies were basically one big PR stunt. i mean, we were totally competent and effective, but not so exceptionally amazing that we were totally unprecedented. what we were was actually “the face of american soldiers overseas,” and a representation of allied unity. (thanks, dernier and falsworth.) during the war, they made howling commandoes comics, trading cards, posters, radio dramas, toys, jackets, and more, all in the interest of supporting the war effort. most of it we had no idea about. we were pretty busy fighting nazis, and the journalists and PR experts they sent to tag along with us mostly just got in the way. so pretty quickly the ‘news’ coming from the front lines about the howling commandoes was totally fabricated, because we wouldnt cooperate with them. which is how some of the more outlandish captain america stories happened. 

most of this steve and i never knew about, not until we wound up in the future. 

anyway, in the early days they would sometimes send stuff to us. not sure what they wanted us to do with it–we once got a crate full of trading cards with our own faces on them, which we promptly defaced and mocked each other relentlessly over. steve took twenty-six buckys and twenty-six steves and drew card suits on them, and we used them as playing cards. (we also had a pair of dumdum dougans as jokers.) and another time they sent us a box of teddy bears. specifically, cap-and-bucky bears. 

the cap bears were decent. pretty much just a regular bear in a stripey shirt and spangly helmet. but the bucky bears were wearing this silly little domino mask, and none of us had any idea why. we figured somebody must have snapped a picture of me while i had some greasepaint around my eyes.

obviously, the other howlies gave us some crap about this. no matter what steve and i did, teddy bears magically appeared everywhere we went. in our cots at camp, in our footlockers, in our packs–everywhere. i once watched dernier slip a cappy bear into steve’s backpack while they were both taking cover from gunfire. 

the real problem for steve and i, of course, was what to do with the bears. we couldn’t just throw them away, but it was a war zone, so we could hardly keep them all. i gave a bucky bear to peggy just so i could watch stevie awkwardly offer a cap bear to go with it. there were always a few kids around–refugees passing through, often, and we passed off bears to them as quickly as we could. 

steve got it into his head that one of the Star Spangled Showgirls, ruby, would get a kick out of the cap bears, so he mailed her one. she thought it was hilarious, and shortly he got letters from the rest of the Showgirls demanding bears as well. so steve managed to get rid of all the cap bears pretty quick. 

but the bucky bears…those things were everywhere i went, and people kept calling me “Bucky Bear,” which is not a super dignified nickname for a famous, feared sniper to have. it seemed like every lad left from the 107th had a little masked bear head poking out of his pack. the howlies all had them too–dumdum kept one sticking out of a coat pocket for a long time, until it ran afoul of some shrapnel, and then insisted we hold a tiny formal funeral for it. we got an air-drop of supplies in the field once that contained emergency rations, ammo, and a bucky bear. and one time i went to colonel phillips’ field office for a debriefing and he had one on his desk. 

i’d have been more annoyed about it all if they hadn’t been such an effective stupid-decision deterrent. i once saw steve eyeballing a tank like he was gonna go take a swing at it, glance at falsworth’s bucky bear, sigh, and call in artillery fire instead. 

but at the same time… it bothers me so much because it’s just. so. condescending. like… “awww look at this poor disabled man thinking he can stand up to people, haha, so adorable, thank god he has bucky around to keep him alive!111!”. 

(i don’t want to get too much into how this devalues the stucky dynamic bc i don’t even go here, but bucky! respected! pre-serum steve! immensely!! he didn’t see him as a reckless idiot who needed him to survive! it’s like people take the “the little guy from brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight” quote and only remember this part and forget the rest, the most important part, “I’M FOLLOWING HIM”! bucky knows pre-serum steve was way more of a hero than some dude dressed as the american flag shooting a fake gun at movies!!! that’s the POINT!!)

it’s just so… dismissive of steve’s bravery and cleverness. people take ONE scene in the first avenger where steve gets into a fight he’s clearly not going to win, ignoring that a) the framing of the moment when the guy stands up and steve’s face makes very clear that he KNOWS he’s in trouble, he has no delusions about ACTUALLY being able to win the fight; b) the dude is being an asshole and disrespecting others in the theater and steve! gets! him! to stop!!!! The guy LEAVES to beat him up in the alley, thus accomplishing the main point of Steve’s intervention, aka to let the grieving lady watch the tribute to the troops in peace. 

and that’s like… THE ONLY TIME IN THE MOVIE where pre-serum steve does something like this. right on the first enlistment scene, some dude is clearly trying to tease him with the “makes you think twice about enlisting, huh?” talk, and steve just goes “nope” and IGNORES THE GUY AND DOESN’T TAKE THE BAIT. because it doesn’t matter! it’s just some dumbass who isn’t threatening anyone! steve doesn’t need to get into a fight because someone is underestimating him - if he did, he’d fight with everyone all the time, because guess what, as a disabled man in the 40s, steve is barely considered an actual man. there’s a LEGITIMATE scientific view in this time period that argues that people like him should be murdered at birth. he KNOWS how he’s perceived. he’s aware. when he’s talking to the doctor, he’s not brattish - he asks give me a chance and is there anything you can do?. his tone in the latter line specifically is TIRED, not defiant. 

and then!! the One Scene apparently everyone who thinks pre-serum steve was a moron with a macho complex didn’t watch: the training montage! where that hodge guy deliberately fucks with the barbed wire just to get in steve’s way and STEVE! DOESN’T! REACT!!!!!!!! he just grits his teeth and tries to keep going and the officer has to be like “rogers take this rifle out of the mud”. there’s no indication that steve EVER tried to fight this guy in the movie, despite the fact that he’s constantly shown laughing/bullying steve during the training. why? because it’d be a pointless fight to pick. it’d be a fight picked out of nothing but pride and steve can’t afford to do that. he stands up for what’s right, not for everything and anything that pisses him off.

it frustrates me that people don’t seem to get this because it’s like… the very core of steve’s character. he’s not a wannabe bully. he’s kind and polite to others (meeting peggy, talking to dr. eskrine. eskrine isn’t just impressed by the “i don’t like bullies” moment, he’s clearly also very pleased by the fact steve doesn’t show prejudice against him for being german). the only moment where he adopts a “fight me” posture that gets him in actual trouble, it’s to protect and help others who can’t stand up for themselves. i get that in theory the idea of smol bean steve fighting everything and everyone might sound fun, but in reality, a person who craves violence and sees it as a prime way to achieve their goals is the opposite of who steve rogers is meant to be.

(and that’s not even getting into when people write POST-serum steve with this “fight me” attitude which is like… how… do you think… that’d be ok… how do you not see a difference between a ninety-pound disabled man and a literal supersoldier trying to intimidate people physically… which part of “a weak man knows the value of strength, and knows compassion” you didn’t understand…)

For Steve, it was never about the war itself but about wanting to do something for the people suffering for it. He doesn’t fight for the sake of the fight, but for the people caught up in it.

Steve Rogers has always fought, gotten beat up, and beaten people up when he could, to protect someone else.

Bruce has set up a makeshift lab in Wakanda, while the world takes stock of their dead and Wakanda mourns for their king. Bruce isn’t doing anything important, but he needs to do something, so he studies Wakanda’s vibranium supply and attempts to keep Shuri busy. 

Otherwise, the grief might just be too much for the both of them to bear. 

Bruce also tries very hard not to think about Tony and what form of matter Tony may or may not be at this very moment. He’s only moderately successful. 

It’s on the third day of the second week after half of the world has turned to ash that Thor brings Bruce a little green snake. Bruce is baffled, but he tried to be polite about it. Bruce is heartsick, though, so that makes everything a little harder. 

Then Thor asks for Bruce to see if the snake is Loki, and it takes every bit of willpower Bruce Banner poses to not burst into tears. Thor is so strong and so keen to smile, he makes it so easy for everyone to forget that he has lost nearly everything. 

Bruce pokes at the snake without any further complaints. When nothing happens, the grief on Thor’s face is unimaginable. 

Bruce begins spending time with both Thor and Shuri, in a desperate attempt to combat his own grief by combatting theirs. 

All the while, every second or third day, Thor brings Bruce a small green animal and asks Bruce to see if it his lost brother. Bruce checks every time, with care and precision, but the result is always negative. It’s awful for both of them, but Thor can’t seem to stop and Bruce doesn’t know how to make him. 

This pattern holds for a few weeks, until Thor brings Bruce a beaten and battered lizard. It’d been burned somehow and it looked like one of its limbs had been badly broken. When Thor presents it to him, Bruce honestly isn’t sure if Thor had just brought the little thing to Bruce to see if it could be saved. 

“Could you check?” Thor asks, the question quiet and hurt after so many weeks of negative results from Bruce’s prodding and poking. 

“Of course,” Bruce says softly, adding his portion of the call and response. 

He gingerly picks up the lizard, as the poor also looks like he’d been through the wringer, and gives him a quick once over. Bruce’d been right about the broken leg and the burns were pretty –

The lizard fucking turns into Loki. A damaged, burnt Loki who scuttles backward on a broken leg while spitting blood. 

Thor bursts into tears. Bruce bursts out laughing. Everyone has their own way of processing grief and shock and grief turned into shock, apparently. 

It’s later, when they’ve gotten Loki a little patched up, convinced Okoye not to kill Loki (”He tried to destroy the world!” she says – “He’s gotten better,” Bruce says), and Thor’s eyes were mostly dry, that Loki finally says through clenched, bloodied teeth: 

“They’re in a pocket dimension.”

“Who?” Bruce whispers, stunned.