The first time we saw Steve without beard for Endgame was extremely interested what led him to shave if he hadn’t bothered doing before. Than we got this image and now I’m even more curious! Can you write about it?
Ghosts
It’s Thor, of all people, who sits him down, and tells him that what he is doing is not healthy. That he is only prolonging his own suffering, feeding the pain. Steve wants to tell him that maybe that’s exactly the point. Why should he not suffer? He failed. Thanos got all six infinity stones and half the world vanished in the blink of an eye. Bucky disintegrated right before his eyes, Vision nothing but a cold shell in their midst. Countless missing, not being able to determine whether they were simply unable to contact their loved ones or if they were truly gone.
“Steven, you cannot stay in this place. It will consume you, and we need you.”
“Yeah, I’ve gotten used to that.”
It came out harsher than he perhaps intended, but Thor merely shrugs it off with a small smile, setting one heavy hand on his shoulder.
“We will find a way, Captain. We will get them back.”
He remains in his room, still clad in his ragged uniform, hair unkempt, for another three days. They leave Wakanda after that, returning to a New York that is a ghost town. Flyers are taped to every lamp post, every mailbox, every neighbourhood bulletin board. Have you seen..?
Natasha is the one who urges him to go to the meetings. Support groups. Steve feels so incredibly out of place. They look at him, sideway glances like they can’t believe it’s him, that Captain America is sitting there, looking like a homeless person. He doesn’t think it does much for him, but one morning he looks at himself, and he’s scared of what he sees. It’s been... Hell, he doesn’t even know. It’s been too long since he felt like himself, like Steve Rogers.
He shaves off his beard, trims his hair.
He goes to meetings, doesn’t say anything, goes home feeling hollow.
They plan, and he doesn’t know how they’ll ever find their way back to normal.
He shaves, goes to meetings, finally introduces himself. Goes home feeling a little lighter.
The day comes, the reckoning for all of them. Steve shaves, looking one last time in the mirror. There’s... a shadow of something in the reflection, it throws up an echo from a past long since forgotten.
Not a perfect soldier, but a good man.
