Steve comes back to Brooklyn, and it brings him to his knees.
.
If he dies someday—if they let him die, and he hopes they will—he doesn't know quite what will happen. The Catholic in him says he'll rise in spirit, and will, at the end of days, will be restored to a glorified body.
But there's the trouble.
He already has the body, already created something beyond the will of God.
That seems like judgment enough.
.
Visiting graves is a study in silence and teeth on teeth, keeping it together. If he calls attention to himself, he's learned there are a thousand snapping cameras waiting to document Captain America blinking back tears.
But—they're almost all gone. All but Peggy, and she's only there in between moments. And when she is, he has to be wholly for her, taking apart all the pieces of himself and reassembling them into something that will bring comfort.
.
This is the future Steve Rogers can't see for himself: a peaceful death, a restful ending, a silver-split cloud and all that once bound him together rising through it.
There is no future where he lets go at the moment intended. Isn't that the point? On the cliff-face train, on the edge of his shield, in the forests of Wakdanda, Steve always says he'll let go, and then he doesn't.
He doesn't.
.
Somewhere in a hazy future, he leads them to victory. And then he dies, and they mourn him only as much as people should who loved a legend and not a man.
It is so, so much better that way.
.
See—they don't remember Brooklyn. They don't know the way the dust rose off the streets in summertime. They don't know how, some days, Manhattan rose like a spine-backed creature across the ruffled waters of the river. How, some days, it looked like the city of God.
They don't know Steven Grant Rogers. He wouldn't want them to.
It is right and just that Steven Grant Rogers died when he was meant to
(He likes to think it was a peaceful death.)