Star-struck Interviewer: “You must miss the good old days.”
Steve Rogers: “I grew up in a tenement slum. Rats, lice, bedbugs, one shared bathroom per floor with a bucket of water to flush, cast iron coal-burning stove for cooking and heat. Oh, and coal deliveries – and milk deliveries, if you could get it – were by horse-drawn cart. One summer I saw a workhorse collapse in the heat, and the driver started beating it with a stick to make it get up. We threw bricks at the guy until he ran away. Me and Bucky and our friends used to steal potatoes or apples from the shops. We’d stick them in tin cans with some hot ashes, tie the cans to some twine, and then swing ‘em around as long as we could to get the ashes really hot. Then we’d eat the potato. And there were the block fights. You don’t know what a block fight was? That’s when the Irish or German kids who lived on one block and the Jewish or Russian kids who lived on the next block would all get together into one big mob of ethnic violence and beat the crap out of each other. One time I tore a post out of a fence and used it on a Dutch kid who’d called Bucky a Mick. Smacked him in the head with the nails.”
The second best day of Bucky’s life is the day he marries Steve. The best is the day he finds that video of Steve dressed as Captain America lecturing high schoolers about safe sex.
Also, just throwing this out there to make people sad, but…
When he’s thawed out he’s laying down. He was frozen laying down. And the plane hit the water when he was in the pilot seat- we saw that.
Which means he wasn’t knocked out by the initial impact. And it doesn’t look like he drowned, either. He had time to see his expected death coming, after the impact, and lay himself down. My guess is some internal injuries from the crash, followed by freezing to death inside the plane.
So just go ahead an add a little scene in your head of Steve surviving the crash, but knowing that wet and isolated on a field of ice, in a plane that’s still sinking, nobody would get to him in time. But he knows he’s done his job. So he lays down, and closes his eyes, and maybe wonders if anyone will ever find his body, and bring it back to be buried by his mom and dad, since Bucky never was buried. But either way they’ll have a service for him, and that will be nice, and the priest will say the words and he’ll be at rest. And he feels bad, leaving his men, and he regrets everything he never told Peggy, and that he won’t be there for her now, but at least he did his part, right? He got the job done, and that’s what counts. If he dies alone, bleeding out and freezing, that’s all that Bucky got, to. So that’s all right.
Not a TON of people have read the fic I wrote about this topic, but the ones who have assure me that I am a terrible person who harvests hearts by way of a grapefruit spoon.
the1timetraveller 