thinking about how steve must've felt when he fell off the helicarrier into that lake in ca:tws, that feeling of being engulfed by cold water and the helplessness of drowning all over again while he's injured and barely conscious - and would he have just accepted it as a repeating nightmare? was he scared when he first opened his eyes in a hospital again?
One thing that pisses me off about endgame fix-it fics, is that most of them still include Steve going back to Peggy when returning the stones to "get his dance"
HE WOULDN'T GO BACK TO HER NO MATTER WHAT. BECAUSE THEY WERE NEVER TOGETHER!!!! THEY KISSED ONCE AND IT WAS BECAUSE SHE INITIATED IT!!!! AND IT WAS AFTER 2 YEARS OF KNOWING EACHOTHER (barely, because it was war, and she and Phillips canonically stayed in England in SSR the whole time)!!!!!!
HE HAD TWO YEARS TO SHOW HIS APPARENT INTEREST IN HER AND HE DIDN'T!!!! BECAUSE HE DOESNT LIKE HER!!!
She fuckin shot at him for being kissed by another woman (a kiss he didnt want). Who in the whole fucking universe would go for someone who does that shit? Not Steve Rogers, I can tell you that, for fucking sure.
She (and Howard) also canonically hired Arnim Zola (the reason why Bucky got tortured for 70 years), knowing he was loyal to hydra, and had tortured Steve's best friend.
Steve Rogers would never leave his loved ones for someone like that, go back to the fucking fifties--a time where everything he fought against and hated was legal and/or normalised--even if he was interested in her. Stop shitting on my boys name like that.
inspired by this post, here are some headcanons and meta about Steve & Bucky and queerness pre-war.
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Sarah Rogers:
This idea of Sarah's awareness/acceptance of queerness, doesn't necessarily have to be a function of her living in NYC.
If we go with the idea that Steve's parents were Irish immigrants, and Steve was born in 1918... Well that gives Sarah time to have been living in Ireland during the Easter Uprising.
Steve Rogers's mother is obviously going to be involved with that, probably a member of the Irish womens' paramilitary group Cumann na mBan. (Would've also brought her into contact with Suffragists, Socialists, and Trade Unionists to pass that onto Steve, if she wasn't into all that already.)
And y'know who else were involved? A fucktonne of lesbians, that's who (including more than one female doctor and even one butch sniper!)
(My personal headcanon is that she was a nurse on the front lines in 1916, and actually left Ireland because she was in danger of getting arrested if she stayed. She met post-WWI-injury naturalised-American Joseph, either in 1916 while he was visiting Ireland (his home country) and they fought together, or in NYC, after he had been invalided home in 1917, then they married and had Steve in 1918.)
So if Sarah was a part of the Easter Uprising, she could've come into contact with/been accepting of lesbians, at least, long before she set foot in NYC.
You could so easily have her attitude as being like 'ah so there are men like that too, are there??'
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Gay-Community Steve:
It is hard for me to reconcile 'bloody-mindedly honest, terrible liar' Steve with being gay and knowing he's gay, and not being open about it, in a self-destructive-for-the-period way.
So either he was so deeply in the closet that he himself didn't know yet, and so hadn't been a part of a gay community with gay friends because he literally didn't know to look for one.
(Like, he and Bucky are a couple and sleeping together for years, but Steve is so naive or in denial he thinks it's just a thing all bachelors do in the absence of a girl they're going to marry.)
OR...
CATFA's view is the propagandised version of events, and Steve actually did know he was gay, and was out to his friends, and the real reason Captain America kept getting rejected for active service is not because of his disabilities but because... he kept admitting to being gay?
And it was only after he got serum (and got in the news), that his public records were expunged to cover up the fact that their darling supersoldier (good and pure and Therefore straight! or perhaps asexual!) ...had broken the law; both by being gay and by falsifying his enlistment forms multiple times.
(Kind of like how how celebrities get a suspect 4F or dodge the draft, and their PR team makes up a more-palatable lie to feed to the public. Like how Frank Sinatra got rejected for active service on psychiatric grounds, but pretended it was because of an inner-ear problem.)
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So, if Steve did have rainbow connections, where are they?
Possible reasons (beyond hate crimes, imprisonment or institutionalisation), why it looks like Steve only has the one friend:
Steve could also have had friends in the disabled community and lost them to illness?
Lost friends to the Depression/poverty, or had to move away from NYC for economic reasons?
Lost friends to internment (it wasn't just Japanese-Americans!), deportation, or lavender marriages (felt their new concentration on children and straight-passing made them strangers?)
had friends who were not enlisted, but we didn't see them because when we first meet Steve it's the middle of the day and they were all busy working?
had queer friends but: they were all enlisted by the time CATFA rolls around, and/or already died in the Spanish Civil War?
had queer friends but: they were all in the Navy and kept getting in fights with Steve about the Army being superior.
had queer friends but: they were introduced to Steve by Bucky, and 9/10 were actually friendzoned guys harbouring secret hopes and weren't exactly ecstatic to find out that Bucky was taken -- or, even worse, didn't see Steve as competition at all! -- and therefore never formed a good relationship with Steve.
('Jeez Steve why can't you n' these guys ever seem to get along? He was always so nice to me!' 'I know Buck, it's a mystery.' 😏)
had queer friends but: every time he went to a gay bar the men he could've befriended avoided him to hit on Bucky, or avoided him because he was hitting on Bucky, or avoided him because Bucky was hitting on him (and giving them the stink eye), or both of them were avoided because they were too... distracted to pay attention to anyone else.
(And/or the lesbians that talked to Steve all sidled up thinking he was a beautiful butch woman, then panicked once he opened his mouth, or were only there to ask if that friend of his was 'the double-date guy.')
imagine cops running Steve down outside a gay bar to arrest him for being a woman wearing pants… (Bucky would not let him hear the end of it.) And then being like 'oh! uhh sorry sir…' (two second pause before they suddenly clock that Steve and Bucky are a gay couple) 'Wait a second-' (Steve and Bucky already running.)
Maybe Steve would even become reluctant to go to the clubs, out of a fear of losing Bucky to someone else? Or Bucky reluctant to go for the same reason, and because Steve just attracts bad luck? (See: mob-related stuff below.) Both of them just sick of having run-ins with the cops?
had queer friends but: his views were so ahead of his time that even they found him too much.
(IE. barred from the gay bath house for protesting ableist body standards, the lack of POC, fighting the police too hard during a raid, and/or criticising the mob owners... Maybe Steve eventually couldn't go to any gay club, because he was in shit with the mob? Maybe the police actually thought he was straight, because they'd seen his photo up behind the bar as a persona non grata in gay clubs?! Future idiots will say this is 'proof' he stands for 'Traditional American Values.')
Banned from politics club for criticising Stalin's regime; barred from the jazz club for fighting a white dude there; banned from the radical womens group for bringing a trans friend; banned from the trade union for attacking the mob / wanting to fix union and police corruption. (Has he been excommunicated yet? It's probably only a matter of time.)
Picture hapless social-secretary Bucky helping Steve limp home from yet another Club that Bucky got him into, and having to listen to Steve rant about why 'they're all a bunch of hypocrites, Buck!' Perhaps homebody introvert Steve, secretly wanting to stay in, while extrovert Bucky keeps trying to help him get out more, and every time Bucky thinks he's found Steve the perfect place this time, Steve's all like 'we'll see.'
had queer friends but: he was so open about it that he was alienated by potential friends who wanted to remain on the DL and considered him dangerous.
(Perhaps especially so, if they were / or about to be enlisted and didn't want to risk a blue discharge, and couldn't sanction the way Stevee blatantly proclaimed his orientation at recruitment stations? 🤔 Whereas Bucky was so invested, and had cultivated such a lady killer rep, that he can not-worry about being seen with Steve.)
Or: he was on the DL and was alienated by potential friends who weren't, and looked down on him for passing?
Or: he was estranged from gay friends who did the same thing he did (ie. declared their orientation during recruitment) but because they actually wanted to dodge the draft, etc.
Also consider: gay Steve and gay Bucky, both aware of their sexuality but not out to each other yet... independently going to any of the numerous gay hot spots in Brooklyn, seeing each other there, and fleeing in horror before they can make any friends, thinking 'omg why was he there? did he follow me?? does he know?!' And not figuring it out... because they are just genuinely that dumb.
Likewise, both of them in the pre-out phase, thinking 'well I can't risk having gay friends because they'd have to be a part of my life and then Bucky/Steve will find out!!' ...because they are just genuinely that dumb.
There are actually loads of options!
You could definitely do a have-your-cake-and-eat-it version of events where Steve has been part of a wider queer community, made friends, and yet still wound up having only one who stood by him. (There has to be reason why 'even when I had nothing, I had Bucky' would be true).
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Other Possibilities:
Steve and Bucky double-dating beards / playing mirkin to lesbian couples? = Hell yes.
(Sidenote: I also headcanon Bucky as having a gay sister, so maybe she could've been Steve's plus one, or they'd take out all Bucky's sisters to act as chaperones?)
Shit, why not turn it into a business? Bucky the Escort who gives his lesbian client a cover date, a great night of dancing, and a second cover-escort guaranteed to not steal her girl!
(Service comes complete with beautiful handwritten love letters (dictated by Bucky, penned by artist!Steve), a personalised sweetheart-style photo of Bucky, and a messy Public Break Up Scene on her stoop.😉)
RE: them moving in together: everyone talks about how queer Brooklyn was, but what if the boys went above and beyond for their own safety -- February House style -- and lived in a building exclusively populated by queer people? Maybe by queer members of the forces, or people who occupied humble positions in creative industries?
If Steve has lesbian friends from BK, and lesbian friends in the chorus line... why not both at the same time? Why not have some of those lesbian friends be Brooklyn girls who signed up to be chorus girls because- y'know -chorus girls, and were then like 'Steve?! Wtf are you doing here?!'
(Why not kill three birds with one stone: one of those chorus girls is Bucky's sister? Cue Spidermenpointing_meme and mutual assured blackmail -- she promises not to tell Bucky what Steve did if Steve promises not to tell Bucky that one of his sisters has run away from home to become a showgirl.)
Bucky as the social butterfly of the two, more likely to be out and about, especially in risky places (ie. he worked on the docks; he could actually get and keep jobs in those places), and/or the safer one, and given their later pattern of Bucky's friends becoming Steve's (ie. the Howlies)... I think Bucky would be more likely to be the one making eye-opening introductions to Steve rather than the other way around. Which could have interesting knock on effects... (see above).
Maybe he got Steve a lucrative job illustrating queer 8-pagers (maybe there's an underground queer magazine out of BK, a la The Circle, and he illustrates for that, using Bucky as a model?
Cue hilarious 'what were you doing at the Devil's Sabbath?' moments when random men come up to Bucky in the street like 'where do I know your face from??' 😱)
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Re: Extended Family
I also headcanon that Bucky had a gay Uncle Jim (maybe a tailor?) who was institutionalized for being gay, and received harrowing medical treatments like electroshock therapy that eventually resulted in his death.
So by the time Bucky -- named after his dead uncle -- started showing signs of being bi, Bucky's parents had already had their eyes opened. Or maybe, like Sarah, they had already emigrated from a specific open-minded situation, so queer Brooklyn wasn't such a revelation.
Alternatively: In Stucky fic, people often seem to think as far as 'Brooklyn was queer!' but no farther.
But why not? Why does their queer education have to have started in queer Brooklyn?
Why not have Bucky's or Steve's (or both!) parents be engaged in Lavender Marriages, and open about it? One gay parent, or both?
(This might be another reason why Steve appears to not have friends outside Bucky; he might have got all the queer community he needed from his own family unit. Imagine it! Not just connected to Brooklyn queers but Edwardian queers, darling! The Herstory!!)
What if Steve's mother wasn't single but simply... 'never married?' 👀 Or maybe she was straight, but in love with her late lavender husband?
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And during/after the war:
Re: the Howlies.
(Have brought this ficbunny up elsewhere)
The Howlies knew and were fine about it, because... maybe there was an official investigation during the war to establish whether or not any of the Howlies were gay and/or in a relationship with Steve.
So, being a bunch of professional mischief-makers, and acting completely independently, the Howlies all pulled an 'I am Spartacus!' and claimed to be gay and in a relationship with Steve, under interrogation.
Steve also admitted to being gay, because he is terrible at lying and had to stand by them when he was told all his men admitted they were gay.
(Except for Bucky. He kept his head during interrogation -- sadly, not his first rodeo.)
So Bucky went down in hastily-redacted Army Record as somehow the only straight Howling Commando??
(The interrogators couldn't tell if they were being made fun of or not, and in any case the scandal was considered absolutely monstrous and a terrible blow for morale, so it was immediately covered up and no further steps were taken.)
Ironically enough, Steve & Bucky weren't even the only queer Howlies!
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The Future:
Seeing gay marriage legalised, the Stonewall riots, openly queer films and celebrities and tv shows, queer pride parades etc. etc. would be heart-breaking for Steve... because of course by this point he has become Captain America, deluded women he barely knows have spent decades claiming to have been his true love, and the people that did know him have been loyally covering up for him claiming he's straight. He'd feel like a hypocrite for not being what they said; or like he's letting them down by unmasking all their hard work.
And of course his real beloved isn't here any more, when he's finding all this out he's totally alone, no one to share it with, (doesn't know if any of his other friends are still alive, yet). And he doesn't want to have to relive that pain over Bucky by being interrogated on his love life...
Plus, after a century of being mythologised, he associates coming out with even wider public furore and a violation of the privacy that Steve Rogers never gets to have.
So all he has is the private escape of the 20th century's queer cinema, literature, tv shows, and porn (which all feel like an embarrassment of riches) ...but without being out to anyone - he feels he has to keep it a secret.
Until Bucky comes back, and isn't in a prudent enough mental state to realise all this. So for him, finding all this out about queer rights etc. is an untrammelled joy, and that's what finally gets Steve out of his negative headspace and into the light.
(And then, yeah, out and married. Try to stop Bucky getting his citizenship back when he's literally married to Captain America, assholes! Nowadays, the only women that hit on Steve are lunatics who think they can turn him, and Steve's only other problem is all the gay men who either want in on that threesome or think they can steal him away from Bucky!)
One thing that annoys me a bit is when I have to read someone saying that Steve in the future doesn’t really know Bucky, that the way he describes him is based on the past—on the pre-war and wartime Bucky—and all I can think about those last two claims is: I think you’re just saying the sky is blue!
Obviously, the version of Bucky that Steve knows is based on the one he remembers from before they were both presumed dead. It’s obvious that when referring to Bucky’s character, personality, and morals, he’s talking about the Bucky he actually knew. In the present (especially in CATWS), Bucky is someone who doesn’t express personality because he has no agency. It’s not as if, when Steve looks at the Winter Soldier, he’s seeing a new personality that Bucky developed, because that’s not the case—the Winter Soldier is Bucky stripped of his agency, not an evil persona he consciously built over the decades. Steve spent the last 70 years in the ice, Bucky spent 70 years being instrumentalized without being able to express subjectivity. It’s not logically possible for Steve to give a deep description of someone who was presumed dead and suddenly reappears, clearly incapable of showing subjectivity.
Saying that Steve describes the Bucky he knew in the past doesn’t at all support the claim that Steve doesn’t know the present-day Bucky. Those are two statements that, in my opinion, don’t connect. Obviously, post-Hydra Bucky isn’t 100% the same person he was before the war or before Hydra, but it’s not as if the values Steve points out from the past Bucky haven’t resurfaced in the present Bucky once he’s free from mind control—the loyalty, the selflessness, the courage, the almost ontological bond they share. Of course there are changes, and of course there’s a need to adapt to trauma. Much of what we see in Bucky’s post-Hydra behavior are traits of trauma. And obviously, if Marvel were a decent studio, there would’ve been at least some proper exploration of this adaptation that both of them have to go through. But it’s not as if Bucky is now a total stranger Steve can’t recognize. There are new things he needs to understand about Bucky and vice versa, just like in any real relationship—people change, and disorders and traumas change people too. That doesn’t necessarily mean you no longer know that person.
It’s not as if Steve were incapable of understanding that Bucky couldn’t have gone through so much and come out unchanged. Steve and Bucky are two people out of their own time. In my opinion, it would be far too naive to assume Steve expected Bucky to be exactly the same person he was before the war (or even during it), when Steve himself went through something very similar to Bucky’s experience. Neither of them had the human experience of aging naturally, of feeling the passage of time and society in a way that was gradual and adaptable. In the end, both were violently thrown into a world they don’t really know. And Steve, like Bucky, has changed—he’s certainly not 100% the same Steve from World War II, and even less the same Steve from before the war.
Even Bucky, who was intermittently exposed to the world during those 70 years as the Winter Soldier, didn’t actually experience what it means to live in society over time, because he wasn’t truly living. He doesn’t remember being human; he has no conscious purpose. He’s pulled out and put back into cryostasis every time a mission ends. He isn’t truly conscious.
I think that opinion—that Steve just wants Bucky to be the same as in the past—probably comes from a mistaken reading that assumes Steve himself stayed the same, that he’s somehow free of trauma, which is a rather shallow interpretation of his character. I think one of the core aspects of Steve’s arc is precisely his adaptation to the modern world and his moral and ideological maturation, which implies change. Still, many of his core values remain—courage, selflessness, loyalty, stubbornness, and so on.
This claim is always followed by others where people try to equate any other relationship he has with any other character. I understand that seeing Steve and Bucky outside their bond is important, because those other bonds also shape their characterization. But what I mean is that it feels a bit forced to claim that any of those other connections are even remotely comparable, narratively or emotionally, to what the two of them share. Like, sure—it’s great to hang out with friends, go on a date with the niece of your decades-long crush, or trade barbs with a colleague you have ideological disagreements with. But trying to say that any of those relationships are more compatible or even comparable to the bond where Steve and Bucky are practically fundamental parts of each other’s existence, and that you can’t analyze one without inevitably mentioning the other, is really just playing the fool when you could spare yourself the embarrassment.
We’re literally talking about a relationship where the two of them are described as inseparable — in school and on the battlefield. One kept getting into street fights to save the other’s skin, one was willing to cross entire countries through enemy lines to rescue his friend, and the other was fiercely ready to die in an explosion inside a burning facility because the alternative would be leaving the other behind. One chose to stay in a bloody war while developing PTSD because letting the other fight alone was never even an option in his mind. They literally risk their lives to save each other’s without a second thought.
After 70 years, Steve was willing to die, not fighting back against the other’s blows, because the alternative would mean killing him — and he wouldn’t do it, because he was with him ‘till the end of the line.’ The only thing strong enough to break through 70 years of mind control was the memory of the bond they shared — not another friend or family member, not a shield or a suit with stars and stripes, but a single phrase, loaded with intensity and so profoundly true, born from a promise Bucky made to his friend when they were just two kids in Brooklyn, holding each other up through the worst moments. And that very visceral bond was the only thing powerful enough to give Bucky back his agency and his humanity.
Of course it’s possible to talk about other relationships they have throughout the films, but trying to equate them with the one that drives the emotional core of three movies — the one that reveals the rawest and most intimate parts of Steve, and consequently of Bucky — is honestly a bold choice, to put it mildly.
i feel like another reason i just hate endgame steve's story is because captain america is inherently a depressing tale. he's the man out of time, torn in grief and stuck in a world he doesn't know, plunged into battle, where he never gives up fighting, he never backs down, through all the pain and grief, because what is his purpose if not this? what did he sacrifice himself for? what's the point if he gives up now? he's not the man in time. his story is filled with grief, and winter soldier sets up this idea that it's about learning how to move on, and then we see cap fight for what he believes in, and throughout it all no matter what, he always gets back up. his story is something of perseverance. for somebody like that to just.. retire? to give it up? to stop the fight? to be a happy man? his whole story is about moving on, about never giving up on his beliefs. and then he just drops it all. like it never existed. like steve rogers, the scrawny kid from brooklyn, had already died somewhere.
Okay, for this I HAVE to share one of my all-time favorite Steve comics! Steve's second-ever comic was released on February 10, 1941 - and in its second story, Steve goes undercover as a woman:
This is a far cry from the toxic masculinity some modern comics force onto Steve.
The sight of Steve cheerfully knitting while wearing a dress healed something in me that I didn't even know needed to be healed, and I come back to this comic often.
Post CACW Steve has several aliases and personas he can assume for undercover work, it’s good to have a rudimentary backstory for these personas in case he needs to fake his way out. And while all these fictions men have different jobs, abilities, social standings, they all end up with one thing in common, all of them are divorced.
See, much like Nat’s whole “affection makes people awkward” thing, Steve’s found that “people stop wanting to question you if you start talking about your recent divorce”. And like, it’s different divorces for each one, infidelity reasons, finance, substance abuse, etc. and people really, REALLY don’t want to talk to you if you make it clear it was your fault it happened.
Like explicitly: “I cheated and they took the kids”, or subtextually: “APPARENTLY I wasn’t home enough or didn’t help out when I was can you believe that????” And added to the verisimilitude is post CACW Steve’s Big Divorced Energy he exudes, ain’t no one gonna say, hmmm you don’t seem like a man that has been divorced against his will and aren’t ok
Bonus points for Tony and the rest finding out about Steve’s Rolodex of divorced men he can assume at a moment’s notice and are like ??? But Sam and Nat are like, no trust us it works somehow??
(Captain Stevens in 1970 heist was divorced, it was quite the scandal at the time but it’s rude to talk about in polite company (his lavender marriage fell apart when his wife ran away with her girlfriend to France because he was away so often))
Anon I love this so much dggffh. Steve giving off Big Divorced Energy is so real 😵 (right after his Big Slut Energy!!!!! no you cannot change my mind on that!!!)
I uhh might've started writing a drabble inspired by this? 👀
