look you guys. i dunno what the hell kinda history books youve been reading about pre-serum steve, but ‘poor sick’ steve was pretty much the literal devil.
i am not joking. he was pretty much the definition of ‘lead you right into temptation’ if you assume that what youre being tempted to do is get in so many fistfights.
so. many. i coulda really used a sickass robot arm back in the day, because my goodness did i do a lotta punching.
anyway, sick steve went through four stages, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, except he turned from a tiny angry man with the ability to breathe into a tiny angry man with the ability to pass out with zero warning. stage one was called ‘Im Not Sick, I Always Breathe Like This,’ and did indeed involve steve wheezing a lot. usually that was the first sign. but tiny steve had asthma, so sometimes he really did just breathe like that. at this stage, steve would insist that he was ‘fine, bucky, honestly stop glaring at my lungs. you cant even see them.’
the second stage was called ‘So Maybe I Might Be Sick But Im Still Fine Though,’ and pretty much came into play when steve stopped being able to get a whole word out without gasping in the middle. fun fact? steve’s eyebrows did not grow when he got the super serum, so if you think his angry face is bad now, just imagine allll that scowl packed into steve’s itty bitty please-punch-me starter face.
stage three was ‘If Im Dying Im Gonna Go Out The Way I Came In, Screaming And Covered In Blood’ which was the stage where steve, despite the fact that he was supposed to be in bed, would try to sneak out and go do things. this wouldnt be so bad if 1. he wasnt prone to just suddenly passing out when he was sick, or 2. had had any control at all over what came out of his mouth. that thing steve does where if youre doing something he objects to morally, he will 100% of the time come over and inform you that you should be expecting a punch in the near future? yeah. tiny steve did that too. luckily his brain-to-mouth filter was improved by the serum, or im pretty sure he’d have started fights with a lot more than 117 countries and literally every nazi ever. Anyways, he’d try and sneak out, and if he succeeded, he would almost always wind up picking a fight with somebody, because having bad luck and terrible impulse control is what steve do.
the final stage was called ‘Bucky I Promise I Wont Do Anything Stupid, Please Stop Sitting On Me,’ and it was the point at which i started ignoring everything he said until he could say a whole sentence in one breath.
Chapter 10: Small but Full of Rage (and diseases) is updated on the Ao3!
Fox News has no idea how to handle it because he’s Captain America and he’s literally from the 40’s like how do that handle that
He refuses to go on half of the news shows because they lie
Mostly ends up on the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and the Young Turks
Starts charities that focus on kids and the poor
Donations to veterans charities go through the roof
Treatment for PTSD in veterans suddenly gets addressed after he admits to being diagnosised with it
Steve Rogers starting a twitter specifically for linking people to horrible news stories and calling news stations out on their lies and scare tactics
Using his twitter to complain about the state of public news and how it should be a space of change and value and honesty for the American public, and how he’s so ashamed of it all
He accidentally becomes like public face for the new generation of politically savvy people
They make of shirts like WWCD “what would Cap do?”
Tony is thrilled and proud and hires of team of lawyers exclusively to handle the news stations screaming about Steve
Fox news gets slapped with so many libel fines and law suits
Going on a show and regretting it the moment an offensive question or comment comes up and decides he’s completely done and just tears the interviewer a new one. It goes viral.
The public face thing is just the start. It starts this whole new wave of people that shut down offensive shit during interviews and holding their own.
There is a short time period once he turns 35 where there is a rally cry of “Captain America for President” that he gracefully turns down.
But politicians starting courting him, trying to get him to publicly state that they support him because his influence is just so massive, and they keep getting shut down hard
Talks about growing up in the depression when people bring up financial issues – says things like “With all due respect, ma’am, what others may remember as being over 80 years ago was less then 5 ago to me. Things were supposed to get better. Those issues we thought we fixed were supposed to go away – we were supposed to work to a future where it was gone – and instead it seems to be worse then ever.”
And of course he’s a raging feminist and is absolutely appalled when Natasha tells him about rape statistics
Bruce takes a lot of time to fully educate him about the social and medical side of abortions, teaches him about the various birth defects and medical issues the mothers can face, shows him the demographic information of access and need, and Steve is horrified by that too
Then Tony walks him through gay rights and other LGBTQ issues, all of them helping him understand how sexuality can manifest differently and the difference between sex and gender identity
Steve just REAL FUCKIN DONE with everything.
Angrily stands in protest rallies and dares people to start something with peaceful protesters. Just DARES them.
Rolls his eyes at baby boomer articles about the newer generations. He’s heard that mess before. He’s done with it.
Understanding people have problems with medical bills, having been there himself.
Fucking standing up for single mothers becaUSE LIKE WHOA THAT’S HIS MOTHER YOU JUST DISSED.
Steve Rogers hating bullies. Hates that kids are actually KILLING THEMSELVES because of bullying and people are just “oh boys will be boys” about it and he’s just LIVID.
I would go into debt to read this comic. This is what Captain America should be. This is what America should be.
cries i want to embrace this post forever
Peaceful protests staying peaceful because when the cops try to start something it doesn’t matter how many of them there are, Steve’s there and he will shut them down, but more than that: Steve gets pepper sprayed. Steve gets chemical burns. Steve on shaky iphone video blind and disoriented and still using his body to protect others as the cops close in. And suddenly the heroes who stay back because they don’t want to get involved – because they shouldn’t use their powers ‘like that’ start showing up in droves.
Peter gumming up the smoke and pepper bombs before they go off. Thor becoming a one man blockade. Natasha working with organizers to help plan for escapes if things do go badly. Tony’s not only keeping Cap up to date – he’s putting considerable money behind the political candidates who will actually work to improve things, because we all know you need money to represent at the polls. They’re not there attacking the police – even if the officers are being assholes, they understand they have a job to do and often bad orders – but they will protect the protesters who have done nothing but show up.
And the more they do, the more heroes join in. Because it’s not just about using your powers against the mighty evil empire Strexx or taking down some guy calling himself the Boomerang. It’s about making sure you want to keep living in the world you keep saving.
Besides the fact that I love this post already, I’m keeping it solely for the quote “It’s about making sure you want to keep living in the world you keep saving”
THIS IS THE STEVE ROGERS CHARACTERIZATION I AM HERE FOR
There’s a reason that Captain America is canonically the one person ALL the various superheroes and superhero teams of the marvel universe can agree to be their collective leader in times of crisis. This is that reason.
Trying to write 27 school reports. I will appreciate motivation in the form of cheerleading, gifs of Hawkeye and ficlets about Cap hating paperwork ❤️
“We never had to do paperwork in the war, you know.”
Cap’s grumbling, while perhaps justified, was also hilarious; maybe it was just that they’d all been in the conference room for hours, filling out belated after-actions because Hill had finally Had Enough, but something about Steve grumbling that things had been easier In His Day struck Clint as hilarious.
He tried to stifle a laugh, but it was rough; a second later Steve continued, “Not that we could have if we’d wanted to, it was hard to get a working damn pen what with rationing.”
Clint wheezed,very softly, trying to contain it.
“And DumDum hoarded pencils like they were going to be his postwar pension,” Steve finished, with grim vindictiveness and an extra-hard jot of his pen.
Clint lost it; first a giggle, then a full-blown laugh, and then Natasha went “ahahaSNORT” and both of them lost it.
By the time Clint was wiping his eyes, the laughing fit over, Steve was looking triumphant; he pointed at Clint and Natasha, then at the clock, looking at Bucky the whole time. Bucky rolled his eyes and waved a hand in some kind of defeat, and Steve stood up, carried his paperwork over to Bucky, and dropped it in a heap in front of him.
“What was that all about?” Clint managed, as Bucky pulled the paperwork over and Steve walked out the door.
“We had a bet. If he could get Natasha to snortlaugh in the first four hours he won,” Bucky said. “Thanks, by the way.”
“No problem,” Clint replied, while Natasha looked annoyed. “Wait, he won you doing all his paperwork? Can we make that bet next time?”
“No, you know all you have to do is shove a pencil up your nose,” Bucky replied. Natasha made a little snorting laugh. “See?”
“Unfair to all concerned,” Clint announced.
“Joke’s on him, actually,” Bucky said. “In about ten minutes he’ll start feeling bad he saddled me with all this and go buy me one’a them frozen chocolate drinks from the donut place.”
“Yeah, but you still have to do all his paperwork.”
“Pfft.” Bucky rolled his eyes again. “We never had to do paperwork in the war,” he mimicked Steve. “Of course we had to do paperwork in the war, he just always shoved it off on me and then his super soldier brain wrote it out of existence.”
“Seems unkind to you,” Bruce put in, from behind his own stack of paperwork.
“Well, I didn’t mind it, and it meant it got done,” Bucky said philosophically. “Plus I kept a pen chained to my body at all times so the joke was I was the only literate fella in the 107th. Anyway, I put a bunch of jokes in to keep me entertained.”
“You put jokes in your World War 2 after-action paperwork?” Clint asked.
“Can you think of a better place?” Bucky asked. “Hey, knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Nazi.”
“Nazi who?”
“Hitler did nazi us coming,” Bucky said, deadpan, and pulled the first sheet of Steve’s paperwork off the pile. With perfect timing, Steve returned.
“I got you one’a them frozen chocolate things from the donut shop,” he announced.
Natasha snortlaughed so loud it startled Tony, who had been sleeping while pretending to work on a StarkPad.
OMG SAM ♥️ you’re the literal best, I just finished number 27 and found this. May the image of Steve avoiding paperwork and Clint sticking pencils up his nose live forever.
so i’d like to talk about the best day of tony’s life – aka the day he discovered captain america’s criminal record
so tony’s constantly digging where he shouldn’t, yeah? always rooting around through shield most classified files both for the hell of it and for actual information, so imagine his absolute delight when he discovers a file concerning one Steven G. Rogers, a file that’s completely sealed and has been since Cap himself first appeared on the scene.
Jarvis informs him that it appears to be a criminal record, and after a brief bit of laughter tony figures that thats actually not that suprising; after all, steve used to get beaten up a lot before the serum, there must be quite a few incidents that old stevie’s been included in, the poor kid.
but tony being tony, he’s gotta crack that thing open anyway, for funsies. it might just be a list of times steve got picked on but you never know, maybe one day he snapped and beat someone to death with a trashcan lid or something. so tony un-seals the document – which he really shouldnt be able to do but he’s tony stark, and he can so he will – and holy actual motherfucking s h it
tony starts laughing again and this time it carries on until hes almost hyperventillating, tears rolling down his cheeks as he reads through the seventy-four separate incident reports, almost every single one of which steve initiated. bar fights, back-alley fights, protests and brawls and even a couple of lab raids – turns out that steve is responsible for letting loose a heard of cows in brooklyn one summer because some company had given them an experimental drug that ended up causing extensive skin problems.
perhaps the icing on tonys completely unexpected but unbelievebly welcom cake is that attatched to steve’s criminal record is bucky’s, which once unsealed reveals that buck was involved in almost every single one of steve’s incidents; not because bucky helped start any of them, but because that skinny little fuck could only throw a punch that would only do damage to his own fucking hand and bucky had to keep jumping in and saving steve’s ass, because that sure as hell apparently didnt stop him from throwing them at any available opportunity.
well, us howlies were willing to do downright stupid stuff for even stupider reasons, so it never took much effort to talk everybody into doing something really really dumb. usually i was the one trying to keep everyone for getting their stupid selves killed, but im proud to say that this particular occasion was all my doing.
so its july 1944, and nazis are still occupying paris. we were sent in to pick up some crucial info from a resistance informer in the heart of the city. but at this point we were already starting to be recognizable, so we needed to disguise ourselves to get through the city. the higher-ups hadnt been specific on how exactly to conduct this particular op, so, left to our own devices, we naturally concluded that we should dress one of the most overmuscled commando squads in the allied forces as women.
we were good at special ops, not logic.
i think whoever suggested it was joking, but in typical howlies fashion, we took things waaay to far, and soon enough we were sourcing dresses and wigs. dum dum and pinky and gabe and jaques and falsworth and morita had to shave their mustaches off. dum dum cried.
morita managed to get his hands on some makeup–he refused to tell us where from–which was great, until we realized that none of us had any idea what to do with it. but then steve admitted what exactly he’d been up to with the ladies of the star spangled show. turns out that aside from hauling their luggage everwhere, he’d also been on hair-and-makeup duty nearly every night. i guess the ladies decided to put his artistic skills to use, because the man knew his way around a blush brush. (the rest of us were not sure what a blush brush was.) even in 2017, he can still do a contour like nobodys business, because he apparently decided that was something worth knowing. so steve did our makeup, and all of us learned how to do lipstick. more useful combat skills for the howlies dossiers.
falsworth had a friend who ran a really fantastic underground drag show, so he negotiated wigs in return for promising to send steve over to help with a show sometime. we did not tell steve about that promise until later. gabe found the dresses, and i dont know where he got them, because they were somehow big enough for us.
except for steve, who has the waist-to-shoulder proportions of a pizza slice. he got stuck halfway into a dress–caught with one arm in, his head and other arm out–with his fully-made-up face slowly turning redder and redder. all of us tried, but we could not wedge steve into that dress.
so instead we put him into a wheelbarrow full of garbage.
the rest of us–the worlds burliest but most well-made-up ladies–set off in groups of twos and threes through occupied paris. happy sam pulled the short straw and had to wheel along the stevebarrow, which not only stunk but was heavy as hell. the nazis working the checkpoints must have liked their ladies large and muscular, because we made it through to the drop point with no problems, aside from falsworth getting a little to in to the flirting. steve kept griping, but we kept telling him garbage is quiet steve, shut up.
we made it to the drop point, this big old house on rue des grands augustins, one of those huge mansions. but what we’d carefully avoided telling steve was who exactly the house belonged to, because his birthday was the next day, and this–aside from being a crucial intelligence mission–was his birthday present.
the house belonged to pablo picasso.
so we all slipped in through a side door, and when happy sam and the steve barrow finally caught up with the rest of us, happy sam turned it over sideways and out tumbled a very irate, still made-up steve in his captain america costume.
he was pissed as hell until he realized who exactly the weird little guy covered in paint was, and then he blushed so red i thought he’d cook the makeup right off his face, and he started stammering like that time in first grade suzy miller said he was cute.
anyway, he and picasso got along like a house on fire, and the rest of us enjoyed some proper french cooking while they babbled art at each other and scribbled in each other’s sketchbooks. picasso drew steve a portrait of himself, which is why one of steve’s battered stained sketchbooks is valued at 700 thousand dollars. it’s because halfway through theres a bunch of picasso sketches, and a little painting of captain america wearing makeup in a heap of garbage.
not that you can really tell, of course. cubism.
Chapter 13: Stealthy, Not Smart has been corrected for caps/punctuation on Ao3! (And I’m gonna send a second ask from that chapter around later)
Wandering around New York City PISSED because there are all of these empty luxury apartments in a city with such a high homeless population. He just starts tearing down doors and ushering people inside (and then repairing the doors because whoops he did not think that through)
Every time a reporter tries to ask Natasha who does her hair he interrupts her snarky response with I DO
Getting dragged into tv interviews and getting weird questions he’s not really qualified to answer until finally someone asks him what he thinks the founding fathers would have to say about net neutrality and he just says “I don’t give a fuck what they’ve have to say” before this impassioned speech about freedom and information equality that everyone is too afraid to interrupt
Literally dropping everything to show up in Ferguson. Like, thanks police department for all your hard work but you can go home now because the people have spoken and they’d like you all to retire early Captain America’s got this covered
He does not tell the Avengers
He does not tell Fury
He leaves a note for Bucky but like it’s really vague “ttyl gotta go school some haters” and Bucky has no idea what that’s supposed to mean because Steve basically COLLECTS HATERS LIKE THEY’RE POKEMON
Speaking of haters remember that time in Iron Man 3 where Tony gave out his home address and basically told a terrorist to come find him? That’s not good enough for Steve. Nope. He adopts one of those army dogs with the titanium teeth and just starts jumping out of planes and knocking on doors like “hello have you accepted Steven Grant Rogers as your ass-kicking savior?” like this is a weekly occurrence. Arms dealers, the leaders of drug cartels, human traffickers, he just keeps finding things to get pissed about.
Because he doesn’t like bullies.
Like everyone in the tower sits him down and they have an intervention for him and he promises to find his chill
Starts doing Sesame Street appearances and everything seems normal
And then he disappears on a rampage and resurfaces on the news standing at the protest lines of an abortion clinic escorting women inside and covering their faces with his shield
He probably comes across Coulson at one point and he’s not even surprised he’s just like accepted the fact that nobody stays dead anymore like he’s honestly expecting to punch real hitler in the real face one of these days
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