@supesprint asked for four headcanons I have about our muse’s relationship.
001. soldier boy does not initially respect a-train as an individual so much as he recognizes the corporate mold around him. a-train is one of vought's newer inventions: fast, marketable, overexposed, black, and disposable once the numbers stop favoring him. he sees the speedster’s celebrity as shallow in comparison to his own. a-train fame is centered around sneaker deals, sponsorships, streaming interviews, sick children, sports, and diversity optics. to soldier boy, he's an over glorified pumped up pansy. he's even more so of a lesser man when he sees just how much of homelander's shit a-train and pissants like the deep forced themselves to eat. even though he can tell vought used both of them same way—take the body, sell the symbol, and discard the man when public opinion stops applauding—that doesn't matter if the men like a-train are forcing themselves to wear knee-pads to get in where they fit in.
002. the racial divide between them is ugly because soldier boy’s era and a-train’s era sell different versions of american comfort. soldier boy was branded as apple pie, uncle sam, white postwar victory, and the strong hand of the nation. a-train is branded as progress, proof that vought can absorb the concept of black excellence into its machine and produce and successfully sell the idea that inclusion works. all of that is bullshit to soldier boy; how he'd respond to that would be cruel, dated, or flat-out racist (remember the scene when captain america looked at the black man that entered the elevator? yeah), but the irony is that he would see a-train as "one of the good ones" because vought made him as useful as they did with him when he was "america's son/america's greatest experiment" because in another era he was a useful product. both are products of the nation. they're just fed different versions of it, because we know with your a-train, he has to contend with double consciousness, and with soldier boy, there had been varied forms of psychological conditioning, e.g., MK-Ultra and the soviet's torture, that he has to contend with. he's a veteran that struggles navigating regular society.
003. a-train irritates soldier boy because guilt has made him unstable in a way ben finds undisciplined. he's a frog in the well. reggie’s betrayal of vought, his desire to outlive the seven, his half-formed attempts at meaning, and his bitterness over being replaced all conveys the message that he's a coward trying to outrun his own shadow. there's nothing for soldier boy to pity in that. if anything, he finds it insulting. in ben’s worldview, if the system uses you, you either master your place in it or get strong enough to make yourself impossible to throw away. a-train hovering between self-preservation and moral correction makes him look, to soldier boy, like a man who wants absolution without accepting the cost of his own choices.
004. soldier boy is a old-money monument to a-train: the original-state approved supe, all flag, american violence, and generational. soldier boy views train as the newer model: better polished for the corporate world, racially marketable, faster than almost anything alive, and still trapped in vought's collar the second the company decides nostalgia is worth more than progress as far as racial boundaries are concerned. there can never be easy solidarity between them, a-train is a lamb to a den of lions, with soldier boy being the head of the pride, but if there's anything they could understand between each other is that they're both national products before a person. the difference is that a-train can hate the system and still want out, and gets out, while soldier boy still believes the system only failed when it forgot who was supposed to be standing at the top of it. HIM.
BONUS: a-train joining the resistance? that's not brave. it's an old script soldier boy read, tore up, and wiped his ass with. one more supe deciding he has outgrown the program that gave them everything and suddenly decided to become a revolutionary. a-train is no real revolutionary to soldier boy.
but he'd treat him accordingly. a dark spot in soldier boy's history is that his career was built around suppression: civil rights organizers, antiwar demonstrations, student protestors, labor unrest, black neighborhoods placed under scrutiny, and any domestic movement that could be interpreted as a sign of disorder once the right men caught wind of it.
if the state called it unrest, if vought called it instability, a problem, soldier boy was already there. birmingham and kent state does not haunt him the way people think it should. this is soldier boy, the man who canonically forced teenagers in central park (the boys version of the "central park 5")to confess to a crime they did not commit and terrorized them in the process. he's known for being a torturer. if he had to do the same in modern era, to make a point with a-train, he would.
so a-train defecting into the resistance, soldier boy seen this before. it's almost boring. because he knows the outcome he'll be ordered to produce. and he'll know how successful he'll be in getting the results. what makes a-train more irritating in this area though is the fact that he's vought property, not some college kid holding up a stupid sign. he's fast. he fuckin hates speedsters. so, being ordered to handle a-train, he'd meet him with extreme prejudice.
