Chapter Text
FROM: Jen
so... wanna flip a coin on which major news outlet tries its hand at nazi apologism first?
FROM: Matt
Not really. ):
TOP TRENDING WORLDWIDE:
When it comes to national icons, the American public would be hard-pressed to name one more enduring and epochally American in his legacy than Steve Rogers, the face behind the legend of Captain America. The name itself conjures up an image of home-baked apple pie, Washington’s cherry tree, the stars and stripes waving lazily on a white-painted porch, and the quintessential pyramid’s eye on the dollar bill. The USO war effort—of which Rogers played a crucial part in his early days, selling war bonds and encouraging enlistment among men of legal age—ensured that his legacy would be a timely one, full of traditionally patriotic images such as soldiers fighting shoulder to shoulder, red-blooded young men taking down German Wehrmacht, or even socking Adolf Hitler square in the kisser, as displayed proudly on the cover of Captain America #1, the first in a long line of comics detailing the heroic—and often hyperbolized—adventures of Rogers and his anachronistically christened “Howling Commandos.”
The story of Captain America is one that Baby Boomers latched on to as a paradigm of the American ideal: the young orphan struggling to make ends meet, fervently doing his part to help the war effort, and ultimately pulling himself up by his own bootstraps to volunteer for Project Rebirth, emerging fully fledged as the reified übermensch. The parallel can be drawn to the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, wherein Dr. Abraham Erskine plays the role of the scientist creating new life from old pieces—assuming, of course, that Dr. Frankenstein was gunned down by Nazi spies, leaving his “monster” to don the garb of a USO showgirl and perform to sell war bonds intended to put “a bullet in the barrel of your best guy’s gun,” instead of hiding in crevices and learning to read by proxy. The figurative lightning strike that transmogrified Rogers into Captain America, however, was all too real.
With a small handful of dedicated soldiers serving at his right hand, the tactical genius and SHIELD co-founder Margaret “Peggy” Carter as his “best girl,” and an arsenal of highly efficient weaponry at his disposal, Captain America was, to all appearances, the perfect American soldier. Slapped on posters alongside the likes of Uncle Sam and Rosie the Riveter, Captain America solemnly spurred ordinary citizens to support the war effort through war bonds, scrap metal drives, sock-darning at home, and even Victory Gardens—something Rogers himself, having grown up in central Brooklyn, would likely never have encountered. The world, swept up in the excitement of the apotheosized hero, forgot about the man behind the mask: before he was Captain America, he was Steve Rogers, nothing more than “just a kid from Brooklyn.”
Navrátilová, Eliška. The Persistence of Memorabilia: The Enduring Legacy of Captain America. Oxford University Press: OUP, 1997. (Introduction: Legacies, pp. 7-23)
Natasha entered the room without knocking, tossing something small and dull-metal at him that Steve only barely caught, reflexes still slow, hampered by the awkward position he was in, resting on his side. “Good news or bad news first?” she said, setting one hand on her hip.
Steve glanced down at the thumb drive, and closed his hand around it protectively. At least it wasn't bubblegum this time. “Surprise me,” he said.
Natasha sat down at the foot of the bed, carefully avoiding the trailing IVs and BP monitors. “Well, little Miss President Carter says the CIA’s recon squads haven’t managed to find our old roommate yet. But then again, he hasn’t found them, either.”
“Them?”
That earned him a flippant hand wave. “They don’t pay me; I don’t work for them. I’ve technically never worked for SHIELD as anything but a private contractor, employed through Isaiah and Maria. A mercenary, if you want to be technical about it, but that’s hardly the point, Cap.”
"What is the point, then?"
Natasha linked her fingers together and shoved both hands between her knees. “There’s a lot of shit going down on Capitol Hill at the moment that I don’t really want to be involved in any more than Maria tells me I have to or she’ll take away my M67 privileges for a whole month.”
“Yeah, I’m real sure you’d listen to her,” Steve said. “Have you talked to Sam?”
“He came over to visit when I was staying with Clint for a few days,” she said, so casually, and something inside his chest dropped into empty space at her words. “Brought flowers for the roof-top gardens. We had a nice little barbecue. Very homey. Clint took a couple pictures that he wanted me to show you, but I’ll have them printed out. Quality’s better that way.”
“I bet,” Steve said.
Photographs: evidence, a lead of some sort. Something they wouldn't be able to talk about, not where anyone could be listening—
Steve said, “Listen, Natasha, have you heard from Ni—”
Natasha talked over him like he didn’t even say anything, bright and bubbly. “I think you’d love the roof gardens, actually. They’re Clint’s baby, and he hasn’t managed to fuck it up too badly yet, even. Started when he was in a wheelchair for a while after some local mob entanglement that got a bit too heated for some of the tenants in his building.”
“He owns a building,” Steve said.
“He owns an apartment complex in Bed-Stuy,” said Natasha, as though this were normal, “and he grows flowers on the roof. You ever grow one of those Victory Gardens, back in the day? Little rows of silver bells and cockleshells?”
Steve stared at her. “I—you know I—”
“Ever plant milkweed? Clint managed to grow some in a couple pots on the roof of his apartment complex. Well, it was Kate mostly. You’ll meet her later, probably. Milkweed attracts butterflies like nothing else. Monarchs especially.”
“I... don’t think I ever grew milkweed,” Steve said.
He didn't have the foggiest idea what milkweed looks like. Natasha just smiled, like she was enjoying the little game.
Steve said, “Would it attract a lot of... butterflies?”
Natasha shrugged. “More than enough to fill up the garden. Leave the window open and they’ll get in the house; sit down outside, they’ll land on you.”
“Okay,” Steve said, slowly. “Maybe... maybe when I get out, we could... go look at a butterfly garden.”
Her smile was almost certainly fake, too wide and too bright for three days after the end of the world, but it was practiced enough to fool the butterflies hidden on—the ceiling, the BP monitor, the back of the closed hospital door, he didn't know where, or how, or who planted them.
“We could bring Wilson along, too,” Natasha suggested. She kissed his forehead briefly before standing up and pushing her shoulders back. “He knows a lot about things with wings.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. He tried not to glare at her—she was, after all, offering to do him a favor. “Yeah, he’d probably like that. I’ll ask him.”
“Don’t worry about it, baby doll, I can handle a single phone call. Besides, you need to rest up or they’ll never let you out of here.”
Steve frowned for real at that. “I’ll be out of here in a day or two, Nat.”
“Ooh, that’s got to hurt,” Natasha pouted. “What did Nurse Sayegh tell you, three weeks? A month? Even you can’t heal from a GSW overnight. Far be it from me to criticize personal technique where this particular... character is concerned—”
“You gotta know I don’t believe you.”
“—but wearing the flashy uniform was a ballsy move, Cap. I’m just sorry I didn’t get to be in the room when they literally stitched your ass back together.”
“It was my thigh,” Steve protested, wincing, “and I wanted the uniform because—”
Natasha gave the area in question a pointed, lingering look. “Speedos are off the table, then? Remind me not to take you to a nude beach on our next couple’s vacay. How about, ooh, we could go catch a game... I hear the Yankees are playing soon—”
Steve leveled her with a disappointed glare. It didn't work as well on someone who wasn't a twelve-year-old Captain America fan, or a vaudeville caricature of Adolf Hitler, but he gave it his best shot anyway. Straight out of the old films. Captain America & His Howling Commandos, or something like that. But they hadn’t been Howling Commandos, or Commandos of any sort; they’d been the 107th Tactical Team—the Invaders, when Morita was waxing drunken poetic, or a group of fucking suicidal idiots led by a madman in tights with a bouncing betty instead of a fucking brain, when Dugan was.
“Anyway,” Natasha continued, “I know why you wore the uniform, and I’m still saying it was a stupid move. Think about it, Rogers. Did he ever think of you as Captain America, or did he always see you as Steve?”
Steve opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Natasha waited, smug. Steve said, “I—”
“You,” Natasha agreed. “I’m willing to help you with your plan to track down your rowdy former house guest, but we’re going to have to set some ground rules. No self-sacrificing bullshit, or I pull the plug. Baby and the bathwater. No second chances, so zip it.”
“Natasha...”
"Zip it."
Steve zipped it.
“For now,” Natasha continued, “you’re going to stay here, for at least three days, and do your homework. I’m counting on the doc to fix you up.”
Steve narrowed his eyes at her. “The serum increased my healing factor as well as my metabolism. I don’t think the doctors will be able to do anything I couldn’t do myself, at Sam’s place.”
“Did I say that? No. No, I think you need to stay here. And if you’re worried about the doc not being able to get you ready, well—oh, I’m sure they’ll whip you into capital shape,” she said, then threw him a wink, and slipped out the door.
The thumb drive contained a single folder—not encrypted—which in its turn contained a single file. Someone with a sense of humor, presumably Natasha, had titled it entomology.docx.
"Damn it, Natasha," Steve said, under his breath.
It was, of course, pointless to be uncomfortable plugging the drive into the computer he had with him at the hospital, not in the wake of the document leak, but Steve still hesitated.
The laptop was a slim, sleek silver thing with Stark tech written all over it. After the flummoxing conversation with Natasha, Steve wasn't any more certain what in the room was bugged, and to what degree.
He still didn't trust Stark, either; Tony reminded him of the more tenacious vices Howard had displayed. They had the same quick, easy grin that shows half-teeth, like they knew something you don’t, and wanted to make it very clear how much they were enjoying that knowledge.
Steve closed his eyes.
Two seconds, he thought. He would allow himself two seconds to miss Howard. Sometimes, if he wasn't paying attention, he’d catch a glimpse of Tony out of the corner of his eye and be thrown violently back into 1943. But no: Tony was decades older than Howard ever was, back then.
It was unnerving, still, the expectation of sound—whirring gears, mechanical noises as the keys clicked into place. The laptop felt alien under his hands, quiet and mocking. He’d learned to type on Mr. O’Leary’s shabby old typewriter, doing book keeping for the store with his fingers flushed pink and white with the cold, blowing on the ribbon every other minute to keep the ink from freezing solid. Computers always reminded him of the first few months, locked away in a secluded cabin that everyone swore wasn’t a prison, pacing back and forth and tracing the outline of fist-prints on the metal wall, too large to be purely human.
It hadn’t settled once he’d been released, either. Stuck amidst the blue-white and whirling rapidity of the future, spun every which way by Fury’s firm and controlling marionette strings, still reeling in the loss of over a half a century— (but barely two weeks, his mind would whisper traitorously, eighteen days since Zola and the zip line and the Schnellzug in the Brenner Pass, eighteen days since...)
But Natasha had been there.
Agent Romanoff had arranged a place to sleep in a Brooklyn tenement owned by someone she said she knew, when Steve had blanched at the exorbitant prices of the Heights, an area that had always been stuffed to the brim with the poor Irish immigrants and Jewish families and migrant groups and queers. Natasha had fielded the phone calls—and the phone itself, an impossible little flat thing that sat easily in the palm of his hand—that came streaming in from Stark and Fury and Hill and Ross and SHIELD and endless reporters and news sources and government agencies all wanting to know the details of him.
And she had taken him shopping. Clothes, toiletries, food, dishes.
Steve remembered freezing in his tracks the first time he'd walked into a grocery store.
Faced with the seemingly endless aisles of food, more than he’d ever seen in his life—enough to feed the whole borough and have some left over for the soup kitchens and dock workers; enough to feed his whole regiment, even Morita’s bottomless stomach; enough to trade or sell for the medicine his Ma needed when she got ill, when she started coughing in a way she couldn’t hide—he’d learned how to hide his sickness from her example, learned how to put on a brave face and suck it up; enough to—
And then Natasha’s steady grip in his wrist, linking her small fingers with his. Steve hunched his shoulders, feeling a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter again, and followed her blindly into the painfully bright lights of the building.
Steve still hesitated for a fraction of a second at automatic doors. The fact that they could detect his presence made his skin crawl like there were insects underneath it.
Three days, then. Three days in the hospital to ensure his skin knit itself back together, his organs stopped spilling out onto the ground, his blood didn't seep through the bandages and out onto the floor, form a puddle wide enough to drown in. Three days with the machines pumping blood and plasma and fluids back into his body; three days, the doctors had acquiesced, and then he could go home.
Home, Steve thought, and clicked viciously on the lone document in Natasha’s file. Home was seventy years in the grave.
ДЕЛО nº17.
КГБ – ДНІПРОПЕТРО́ВСЬКА О́БЛАСТЬ
KGB DIRECTORATE FOR DNIPROPETROVSK REGION
Special Division
File #17 / Vol. 2
█████ ██████
Military record of maintenance, deployment and experimentation
Date opened: March 23, 1945
Date closed: ████████, 19██
Number of pages: 189
Registration number: TE-0623
Deliver to █████████ ██████
“It’s like a database,” Agent Romanoff said. She was lying on the floor on her stomach, doing stretches that looked like they had to hurt. “You type what you want to see, and it automatically pulls up whatever it’s got on that. Just type something.”
Steve frowned. He didn’t like the look of the keyboard.
It was too smooth, too thin. At least the letters were the same order as they were when he learned to type so he could pick up odd jobs running numbers behind the counters when the WPA money ran thin, while the owners sold candies, drugs, ribbons, shoe laces, Coca-Cola. He’d even got to use Col. Chester Phillips’s coveted typewriter once or twice, for letters requiring a degree more of professionalism than was usually awarded to the troops.
captain america
About 987,000,000 results (2.24 seconds)
“See, it’s easy,” said Agent Romanoff from the floor, while Steve was still shell shocked by the sheer magnitude of that number. “If you click on any of those links, it’ll take you to the page. Like opening a book. It helps to think of it as a library, I think. At least, that’s how I learned it.”
Steve glanced down at her, curious.
She hadn’t told him anything about her past, at least not beyond what was in her official SHIELD file: Natalia Alianovna Romanova, allegedly. Native to the once-and-future Soviet Union, birth date unknown, family unknown, allies unknown, motives unknown, mentors unknown. She could be nineteen or ninety for all he knew.
“Were you around when this stuff was... discovered?”
“Invented. And yeah, more or less. I wasn’t running around with my own cutting-edge tech, I’m not Tony Stark, but I was there. It was a shitty time for everyone involved in this line of work.” She flipped over onto her back, hair falling across her face. “You know. Cold War politics. It wasn't exactly easy, being the darling of the KGB.”
“So I’ve heard.” Then the meaning behind the words sank in, and he said, “You—you look too young to be—”
Natasha Romanoff smiled like a shark, beautiful and deadly, with too many teeth. “So do you, sweetie.”
She turned over onto her front again and started stretching her legs, pointing the toes of one foot towards the ceiling, then the other. “Tell me, Rogers, after they pumped you full of that blue juice—did you ever get sick? Bet you got sick all the time before, didn’t you, but after, well, that was different, wasn’t it? Not even a rattle in your chest or a stuffy nose during the pollen season. You slept for what, sixty-six, sixty-seven years, and not a single gray hair? Not a single scar that stuck around? You were the first, but you sure as hell weren’t the last. The only reason I got out was because I outlived the men that built me. So did you.”
Steve looked at her and tried not to let it show that he kind of wanted to walk out of the room and not come back, just keep walking until he dropped. He used to be scared to death he wouldn’t get to grow old; now it seemed he’d never have a chance.
“I’m not saying you’ll live forever,” she said, catching something about his expression. “As far as I know, a shot to the back of the head, execution-style, would still take you out. Jump on a bomb, or swallow a grenade, and you’ll still be pretty much fucked. But I can say from personal experience that there’s a hell of a lot of stuff you’ll be able to survive that would straight-up kill normal people. My file still says I was born in 1984, did you know that? I picked that date myself. Liked the irony. I don’t have a box of passports hidden in my basement; that’s not what deep cover is. This face, this body—this is who I am. This is, more or less, who I’ve been since the day I was born.”
“I shouldn’t have been given the serum in the first place,” Steve said, because it always should have been Bucky who'd been given that ability to survive, and then, “wait, did you get the—the serum?”
Natasha rolled over again and went back to stretching, unconcerned. “You know that saying, ‘ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies’?”
“I—sorry. I shouldn’t pry. Ma’am.”
“Боже мой, don’t you dare pull that line on me,” she said, sounding like she was trying not to laugh.
"Sorry," Steve said.
"Fuck it, don't apologize. You didn't do anything wrong," Natasha said. “You know, Coulson was so damn sure you wouldn’t be okay with women swearing? I won fifty bucks off him for that one.”
“Well, I was in the Army,” Steve said, and swallowed another honorific.
The language was hardly the most shocking thing he’d encountered so far; he remembered Peggy hissing curses through her teeth as she flipped through lists of grievance letters to be written, tied grimy fabric around a nasty scrape where a stray bullet had caught her calf, gripped his hand when Falsworth had cleaned a wound on her ribcage with alcohol. (Waste of good spirits, Dugan had grumbled, and Bucky had cuffed him over the head, none too lightly, and told him, in no uncertain terms, to show some more respect for your superior officer, Dum Dum, and a fire-mouthed lime to boot—)
Bucky and Peggy had never gotten along. Not really. There was the grudging mutual respect that came of knowing they were both good soldiers, but they rarely spoke beyond the occasional greeting and snappy report.
Steve thought, the last time I saw Peggy was—
The last time he’d seen Peggy had been barely a week ago. Over sixty years, for the rest of the world. He knew Peggy had married, in the meantime; had children, had grandchildren; founded SHIELD, moved back to England, helped win the war. Lived a life without him. It seemed only fair that he would be doomed to live a life without her.
“See, that’s what I told him, but he was convinced you’d be calling everyone doll or son and blushing if someone mentioned fucking,” Natasha said bluntly. “Probably still thinks you’re a bashful virgin. Civilians!”
“I—it’s not—” Steve frowned, feeling horribly wrong-footed. “You talk about... now...?”
Natasha waved a hand. “Look it up online if you want. There’re tons of information about sex, trust me. They’ve invented things you couldn’t even imagine.”
“I didn’t... yeah. Yeah,” Steve said.
It wasn't that he didn't believe her. He was just stuck, now, thinking of the stories Bucky used to recount, the jokes swapped between soldiers, the things the sailors working at the docks had boasted and bragged about. The docks were mostly gone, now; Brooklyn had been eaten up by high-rise buildings and shopping centers, towering condominiums and flashing neon lights advertising products he’d never even heard of, microwaves and sunscreen and buffalo wings and color television.
“It was—different," Steve said.
She was still looking at him like she was expecting an explanation. Steve said, "For soldiers I mean. People weren’t exactly lining up to go dancing when I was shorter than you and twice as skinny, you know? And even when I was able to swing something, it’s not like we’d get to the necking part, most times.”
“Okay, it’s pretty cute that you say necking,” Natasha said. “That’d be making out, in today’s equivalent, I guess. Hey, did anyone tell you about the base system yet?”
Steve furrowed his brows and looked down at her. “Like in baseball?”
“Something like that,” Natasha agreed, and smiled beatifically up at him.
CONSPIRACY UNLOCKED | The REAL Captain America is being kept in a government vault with Walt Disney and Ted Williams’s head
www.captruthers.cs/738243/gov_cryo_782673ghjFHJD387b. Retrieved January 09 2003.
FORUM [sort by: upvotes]
[ spottedfreckle ]
lmao your’e so dumb. The governemnt wouldn’t want to keep captain America a secret theyd want to unfreeze him to use as a weapon
[ harveydentistry ]
ted Williams played for the red sox… cap must be turning in his grave (freezer?) lmao
[ obsessive24 ]
If you actually paid attention to what I was saying instead of jerking off over your revisionist fantasies maybe you’d notice that I didn’t say anything about how useful Captain America was during ww2. He literally joined the fucking army, he wouldn’t be some sort of progressive leftist sjw like soyboy internet fags like to think
[ notsally ]
anyone in this thread smoke weed lol. but seriously i think if the goernment was keeping captian america anywhere, why would they wait?? it doesn’t make sense not to thaw him And use him to kill putin or something. stupid
Sam had asked: When do we start? and all Steve had been able to say was soon. He didn’t know how to say he’d already been looking—already been looking, for three years, for sixty-seven years before that, for two and a half decades before that. He was seeing little pieces of Bucky everywhere: in a stranger’s brown eyes, in the blue of someone’s overcoat, in the twitch of a hand holding a lit cigarette. Boys with the same haircut, men with the same shadowed eyes; people he didn't know, would never know, could never know.
As far as most of the world knew, Bucky Barnes was cold and dead in the ground.
Rebecca Winnifred Proctor née Barnes sobriquet Becca born 1922 died 1997 married 1949 had children 1951 1953 1958. Names and dates on paper that no longer matter. He could think about generations of descendants, the Barnes family line unspooling across the world, leaving footprints everywhere. His family might have died with him, but Bucky’s had spread and grown, dozens and scores and hundreds of people, none of them the one he wanted.
Not the same. It wasn't the same.
Don’t pull on that thread, Natasha’s voice whispered in his head, but Steve had been pulling ever since 1925, when Tom O’Leary shoved him down and grabbed his sketchbook—Steve wasn’t going to give up without a fight; the sketchbook had cost him 35 whole cents—but then Tommy’s shoe had been pressing down on his chest, and he couldn’t breathe, couldn't even draw in enough air to cry uncle, and then—
"Pick on someone your own size, you schmuck," Bucky had yelled, and shoved his knee squarely into the seat of Tommy’s pants, sending him stumbling away.
He’d kicked a loose rock at Tommy’s retreating backside for good measure, then snatched up the dropped sketchbook, dusted it off, and presented it to Steve like a knight presenting the queen with the dragon’s head as a trophy.
"Here ya go, kid," he’d said, like Steve wasn’t only a year and some younger.
Steve glowered.
"Hey," the other boy continued, undeterred, "’m James Buchanan Barnes, but everyone calls me Jimmy, but I don’t like that either, so I’m workin' it out still. People call me Bucky."
"I don’t need your help," Steve had snapped, instead of introducing himself, wiping his face angrily. He didn’t get up; he could feel a sharp pain in his chest, and he thought if he tried to stand, he’d start coughing and never stop.
Bucky just crouched down next to him, instead. "Tommy’s a real pill," he’d said. "What’d you do to him, say you’re sweet on his girl?"
Steve had turned red at that, and then clenched his fists, knowing his face was covered in angry pink patches. "No," he said viciously. "I don’t—I ain’t even like girls all that much, I just—he was saying my Ma was a—a—lotsa things, because we're Micks and because my Pa ain’t around."
Bucky rubbed his nose thoughtfully with one hand. He didn’t say anything about Steve’s face, about the bruise on his cheekbone that his Ma would fuss over later if she wasn’t held up late at the infirmary, about the blotchy flush creeping down his neck and making him itch, about the dirt in his hair. He didn’t say anything about Steve’s Ma, or about being Irish—or about how Steve hadn’t been able to hold his own against Tommy O’Leary, who was himself Irish as well and who, at eight, was already bigger than two of Steve combined.
Instead, he tilted his head thoughtfully and said, "Wanna put pickling brine in his soda?"
Steve considered the offer suspiciously. "May-be," he relented, "but I gotta eat lunch first or my Ma would chew me out."
"You can eat at my folks’ place," Bucky suggested. He held out one grubby hand, not to help Steve up, but to show the way. Then, as if to cement the deal, "We’ve got ice creams."
"Okay," Steve acquiesced, still suspicious, but unwilling to turn away the offer of free dessert, and he followed Bucky down the school-building steps and around the back alley and didn’t even mind when Bucky walked slower than he probably could have—taking his time to point out birds pecking for scraps, or interesting things strung up on washing-lines, or Mrs. Rosenthal’s scraggly old three-legged cat perched on the windowsill—so that Steve could keep pace with him.
He’d followed Bucky home that day, and he’d been following him ever since.
The history books had it wrong, of course. They always made it out to be Steve leading the way, with a loyal entourage close behind.
It had never been like that. He had always followed Bucky.
He would have followed Bucky anywhere. He would have followed Bucky into the ravine. He sometimes still wished he had.
The phone beeped; Natasha.
FROM: Nat
dont check the enws
*News
whoops)))
Steve contemplated texting Sam. He contemplated texting Natasha, asking her what the hell is going on. He thought if he tried to unhook himself from the monitors and IVs and machines to investigate, the nurse who came in periodically to check on him would actually have a conniption. She hadn’t reacted favorably when he’d wanted to leave the first time.
The remote was sat on the table next to him. He picked it up.
“—joining us today to discuss the current situation going on down at Capitol Hill. Anderson, could you tell us a little bit about what’s going on?”
“Well, Nicki, we’ve just rewatched the publicly available footage from Agent Romanoff’s testimony before Congress four days ago. It’s been back in the news in the wake of the government document leaks—which many are claiming is Romanoff’s doing, remember—now that it’s come to light that Alexander Pierce, the man named as the head of HYDRA, was murdered during the leak. The question at hand is, of course, is Agent Romanoff a hero or a—”
“—murderer of SHIELD co-director Alexander Pierce. Now let’s take a look at some of the protests taking place outside what is colloquially known as the Avengers headquarters in New York—Stark Tower, where over half a million citizens have joined an impromptu march calling for the immediate trial and sentencing of the vigilante group known as the ‘Avengers.’ The general consensus seems to be that it’s a he-said she-said situation—with him being Pierce, and her being Romanoff, of course. I mean, jeez, Alexander Pierce? The guy turned down the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in diplomacy and foreign affairs because he didn’t want the press for something he said was just his civic duty. I might not know everything that goes on behind the scenes, but I know for sure that he sure isn’t the villain these files are making him out to be. There's so much the public doesn't know, and the man is an obvious scapegoat for a much bigger problem. These absolutely ridiculous—”
“—rumors that Alexander Pierce, then in charge of the highly classified intelligence program known only to us as ‘Project Winter Soldier,’ was somehow responsible for the deaths of Howard Stark and his wife, long thought to be the result of a car accident in 1991. Stark, most famous for working on the Manhattan Project and Project Rebirth, the latter of which gave the world Captain America, and—”
“—some of the young people in New York apparently supporting the actions taken by Romanoff against the United States Government—it’s the middle of a school day, so I don’t know how these kids managed to beg their parents to give them the day off, but I guess if it means enough to them, their grades won’t matter in the face of—”
“—information regarding the secret government program regarding the S3 formula, known more commonly as ‘super soldier serum.’ Katie, could you tell us more about what’s going on?”
“Thank you, Mark. I certainly could. While there’s no consensus on the validity of these documents, the current evidence is certainly suggesting that Romanoff, for all her history as a double- and sometimes triple-agent, is telling the truth. The program was known as the ‘Centipede Project,’ when it was controlled by the US Government, and it was an attempt at replicating the serum originally given to Captain Amer—Captain Rogers, I mean, back in 1943. The files seem to corroborate that the original serum was entirely destroyed in the fire that damaged the lab and took Dr. Abraham Erskine’s life, but certain scientists—including Howard Stark—worked tirelessly in an attempt to recreate it. After the war, this was tied into Operation Paperclip, which is, I don’t know if you know, but the US tried to gather the smartest scientific minds from around the world, even from Germany and Austria, and that’s how we got Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atomic—”
“Yes, thank you, Katie. Could you tell us a little bit more about the other attempts at, uh, at making a new version of the serum?”
“Well, that’s the remarkable thing—the information doesn’t line up. On one page it says someone called Y——B——, the name itself is redacted, of course, even with the released documents, half the information is still confidential; on one page it references something only called the ‘Winter Soldier,’ our best guess for that one was some sort of nuclear program during the Cold War, since it’s mentioned so much during that time period; on another page, it seems to imply that there was a whole army of failed experiments, like some sort of MK-Ultra, except on a global scale, something that had to be, well, stopped. It’s certainly fascinating, Mark, that’s for sure. Once we’re able to determine if the documents are legitimate, or just very clever forgeries, we’ll have a lot more information as to how to move forward.”
“Thank you for joining us. Everyone, that was Katie Malinovskaya, author of the—”
“—police report on the shooting on George Washington Bridge in New York earlier this week is now saying that the incident was an isolated showdown between undercover police operatives and criminal fugitives. The details are classified as of now, in a twist of irony following the release of formerly classified government documents in what is being called by some ‘the greatest government leak since Julian Assange’—”
“—who, of course, is currently unavailable for questions. A representative from SHIELD declined to comment on the situation when we contacted the agency. Phil, can you recap some of the official statements concerning this scandal?”
“I sure can, Jerry. Now, this whole incident—dubbed ‘#SHIELDGate’ on Twitter, I don’t know if you’ve seen that, I think it’s still trending—is a mess of conspiracy and confusion, which is why we’ve been reaching out to government representatives to get their thoughts on the matter. Senator Josef Stern, whose constituents are calling for his resignation following damning evidence suggesting a sexual assault and coercion cover-up involving a young reporter on his personal staff, said—”
“I thought I told you not to watch the news.”
Steve started, and looked up guiltily. Natasha raised her eyebrows, smiling.
“Hey, soldier,” she said, and waved at him. “Good news or bad news first?”
“Bad news,” Steve said, reaching blindly for a fistful of hospital blanket and gripping tightly so he didn't break one of the machines attached to him.
“Aw, honey bear, don't be like that. Bad news is that I have good news for you.”
Steve’s heart dropped into his stomach without warning. He scrabbled to sit up, swinging his legs stiffly over the side of the cot. “You—did you—is he—and Sam—?”
“Settle down before you hemorrhage,” Natasha said. She was wearing a red leather jacket that matched her heels; her hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. She looked like a darker, more lethal shadow of Pepper Potts. “I’ll tell you in the car on the way to the Botanical Gardens. I’ve always wanted to tour the Bronx, if you can believe it. We can get ice pops and stupid tourist sunglasses with words on them.”
CAPTAIN AMERICA: REVIVED after SEVENTY YEARS ON ICE
Jennifer Walters | January 7 2011 | 7:37pm
(CNN) — The world is in shock following Monday’s press release confirming that the cultural icon known as Captain America has been revived after spending nearly sixty-seven years frozen in the Arctic.
“We are limited in what information we can release to the public at this time,” said Dr. Helen Cho, a celebrated specialist in the effects of cryostatic suspension on life forms.
“Our best guess as to how Captain Rogers was able to survive was a combination of the S3 formula [super soldier serum], which allowed his body to enter a sort of pseudo-hibernation as his blood flow slowed, and sheer luck in terms of temperature, location, everything,” the world-renowned geneticist told us.
“How he was able to stay in one spot for seventy years and come out looking the same as when he went under, we don’t know. We’re hoping to do some more tests, get some blood and tissue samples, to see if we can figure out how the S3 [serum] was able to keep him alive and stable for that long.”
Scientists worldwide had previously attempted to recreate the super soldier serum for decades with no success. A representative of SHIELD formally deemed the project “impossible” in 1974.
The partial founder and former director of SHIELD, Margaret “Peggy” Carter-Jones, known for her previous romantic ties to Captain America, has not been available for comment. The United Kingdom-native intelligence agent had previously spoken about her own efforts in replicating the serum, later dismissing the idea as “pointless” and “not something that our government should be spending its time and money on, not when there is so much else we could be doing.”
“Steve wasn’t Captain America because he had the serum; he was Captain America because he was a good man.”
“Steve [Rogers] was one-of-a-kind,” Carter said in 1989, the year after her retirement from her position as SHIELD director. “Not only can we not duplicate the scenario that led to the creation of Captain America, we shouldn’t even try. Steve wasn’t Captain America because he had the serum; he was Captain America because he was a good man, and no serum in the world can replace that.”
Carter, 91, currently resides in her hometown of London, England, under the care of her family. It is not currently known if she is aware of the discovery of Captain Rogers.
“There’s a very good chance that he [Captain Rogers] will be suffering from severe muscular atrophy, as well as quite possibly brain damage,” said Dr. Cho. “They haven’t let me see him yet, they just called me in about seven hours ago. I don’t know if he’s even awake, or if he’s drugged for more tests.”
Rogers was formally listed as MIA in 1945 following his final mission, which involved taking down a top-secret German plan to bomb New York City. The Captain managed to board the plane carrying the payload, but was unable to escape before it crash-landed in an unknown location—until now.
“Rogers is no ordinary human.”
“It’s miraculous,” said Dr. Jakob Kurylenko, a neurosurgeon specializing in cases involving patients suffering from trauma-related neural damage. “I haven’t been let in to see him yet—SHIELD is keeping everything pretty tight, for the time being—but the message I got said that they were reading consistent brain activity. It’s remarkable, really, there should be no way anyone could survive that long without food, or water, or even enough oxygen—an ordinary human would be dead within days, at best, except in some extreme cases.”
But Rogers is no ordinary human. First known to the public when he was selected for the experimental government program known as Project Rebirth, the enlisted soldier was transformed into the cultural icon known as Captain America in June of 1943, where he went on to star in propaganda films and commercials before eventually joining the front lines, both to inspire morale in troops and to fight with them.
Katie Malinovskaya, a journalist and historian best known for her award-winning 2004 book on Rogers (OPSEC: Decoding the Classified Files of Project Rebirth, the HYDRA Threat of the Forties, and Captain America), which detailed his life before Project Rebirth as well as after, said that Rogers is unlikely to take up his former role as Captain America.
“Who knows, maybe he’ll wake up and take to this century like a duck to water,” the author told CNN over the phone. “But for him, it’s probably going to be like the past seventy years didn’t happen, and that’s enough to confuse anyone.”
The idea of Rogers taking up the shield again is “laughable,” she said.
“The shield was found with him, that’s the picture everyone used—the shield under the ice. But think about it from his perspective for a moment—he’s lost almost two-thirds of a century. That’s going to take some getting used to.”
If he does return as Captain America, it’s “probably not going to be like what we remember. Things have changed a lot since 1945, and there’s no guarantee he [Rogers] will be the same person he was then,” she said. “And even if he is, is that something we want?”
Would the idea of a man from the 1940s playing the role of Captain America be a dangerous thing? Malinovskaya isn’t sure.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows,” she said. “We’re going to have to wait and see. The truth is, he’s here now, and—assuming he wakes up aware of who he is and what’s going on—he’s going to be here, like it or not. We’re going to have to wait. There’s really no way to know.”
If one of the most celebrated biographers of Captain America currently living (Malinovskaya won a Pulitzer for her published work in 2009) doesn’t know, then it’s safe to say there’s no way to be sure.
Read an excerpt from Malinovskaya’s best-seller here.
As to his mental state, Dr. Cho agreed it’s also “difficult to tell.”
“Neural activity doesn’t necessarily equal awareness of what’s going on. He might never wake up, and we’ll be stuck with Captain America in a coma for another fifty years. Or maybe he’s already awake, and that information just hasn’t been released to us yet. Like I said, it’s not something that I know a lot about.”
“SHIELD told me I was brought in because of my work concerning clathrate hydrates as a possible form of induced cryostasis,” Dr. Cho told us.
“I’ve done work on preserved bodies, and specimens such as bacterial strains that have managed to stay remarkably intact for decades, if not centuries, sometimes even longer. We found nematodes that managed to be revived after thousands of years. But of course, nothing could prepare me for dealing with this situation.”
More information will be released as it is known. ⍟