Just watched Age of Ultron and realized that I never wrote the Captain America piece that I meant to write.
The soft leather of the chair seemed somehow wrong in the office it had been placed in, rounded and with a velvety texture as opposed to the hard corners and shiny steel and glass of the rest of the office. He settles back and stares out the window at the New York skyline, waiting. This isn't New York.
As he waits, he produces a small notebook from the pocket of his jeans and a pen; simple, ballpoint, black ink, with S.H.I.E.L.D. emblazoned on the side. It's a pen from this office, a pen from his first time here. The pen touches the paper, scribbles, and traces absently. A building is built with those few strokes of the pen. Two more strokes and the building is gone. Just like lives. The analogy is pushed away. The building was wrong anyway. It is there, but it wasn't there. It wasn't New York.
"How are you feeling, Steve?" He looks up from the book and pushes it into his pocket. The director's face is framed against the mass of buildings in the glass behind. "How are you adjusting to New York?"
He doesn't answer. Not immediately. Then he does. "This isn't New York."
The director says that these feelings are expected. That they are part of reconciling what has happened. He says to meet him the next day, and he looks at the circles beneath Steve's eyes. Circles as deep as the shadows in the back alleys of New York.
He stretches out that night, eyes on the ceiling, cold sweat already beginning on his forehead, at his collar, on his palms that grip the sheet as he waits. Sleep doesn't come anymore. Not in the City that Never sleeps. As he stares up, the room he has been given seems like a prison. A prison inside a larger prison. A prison in New York.
His eyes close and there is blood. The ground seems to melt and swirl with dirt and the bodies of men laid out in it. Not men. Boys. Like he had been before the Serum. Their faces are speckled with nicks to lacerations from shrapnel. Their uniforms are torn, crusted and stained by blood, always mud, occasionally vomit. One face, blue eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream, has a slim trail of blood and saliva dripping over his cheek, a bullet between his eyes, and more in his trunk. A machine gun, then, had been his end. His skinny limbs are splayed like those of a neglected marionette, left in a trash heap to burn. Steve kneels to place a dirt caked glove on the face, to close the eyes. The trail of blood is demolished by a single tear falling on the boy's face. Steve moves to stand up again and stops. The letters NYC have been scraped crudely into the helmet's paint, presumably with a knife. By a child from New York.
His eyes fly open, his chest rising and falling in rapid gasps. A moment later his face is in his hands and his powerful shoulders are shaking like an old man's. He nearly laughs at the irony, catching himself at the brink of hysteria before he falls farther. He forces himself to his feet and takes stumbling steps to the window to look down at New York.
This city is not New York. Not the New York he knew. That city is gone, buried beneath layers upon layers of memories, layers of war, layers of the dead. It will never be his New York. It will never be home, never be a place he knows. It's as far gone as the Steve who got beaten up regularly, who was skinny, who was invisible. This was the new New York, and it terrified him. Because it meant that he was new too. Because it meant that he knew himself as well as new New York.
It isn't until dawn that he leaves the window and the horrors of the night. The city that never slept stirrs in its endless hum. Steve is no longer just Steve. He is Captain America, and although he doesn't know what else it can be, he sees now that New York is no longer New York.
Cuz that transition can't be easy, and Steve needs sympathy.