Disclaimer: I do not own the original canon nor am I making any profit from writing this piece. All works are accredited to their original authors, performers, and producers while this piece is mine. No copyright infringement is intended. I acknowledge that all views and opinions expressed herein are merely my interpretations of the characters and situations found within the original canon and may not reflect the views and opinions of the original author(s), producer(s), and/or other people.
Warnings: This story may contain material that is not suitable for all audiences and may offend some readers. Please utilize understanding of personal sensitivities before and while reading.
Author's Note(s): So, the last of the Connection series that I'm likely to get out before Infinity War hits theaters in less than twenty-four hours. Honestly, I had something else entirely in the works but I got into it with a Cap stan over what exactly counted as a spoiler for movie that hadn't come out yet and lost my already frayed temper. Literally the only reason Steve lived to the end of this fic is because dead men can't learn anything.
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Not His Hands
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The world at large was shocked at the suddenness of the destruction. In the blink of an eye, the entire Eastern coastline of the Mediterranean (and a sizable chunk of the Syrian Desert region of the Arabian Peninsula) was just gone and no one knew why. There was just an explosion that turned the entire region to a collection of glass and scorched earth. Syria, Lebanon, and Israel were completely gone as was most of Jordan and a good half of Iraq.
Over forty million lives lost in an instant, before even considering any other losses from the region.
It was only later, when they found the sole survivor, that they began to parse together an idea. At first, when Steve Rogers was still unconscious and the UN medical force dedicated specifically to superheroes was doing the best they could for the radiation burns and broken everything, they believed that it must have been an attack of some sort. After all, SHIELD had had a team in the area investigating a purchaser of a homegrown super-villain's weapons. If the covert agency had managed to get Steve Rogers back on their roster, then the man's presence in the country made sense.
SHIELD was quick to deny any association with the rogue Avenger. Especially after Bobbi Morse, the Head of the UN's newly created Strategic World Observation & Response Directorate (SWORD), had announced via the world's press that Rogers was still a person of interest to the United Nations for a growing list of Accords violations. Ms. Morse's coolly expressed disapproval of the former Avenger triggered a flood of other organizations denying him. Tony Stark remained unavailable for comment, but Pepper Potts issued a formal denial of involvement on his (and the remaining Avengers') behalf. No one thought to question the silence from Wakanda, not with the still relatively recent change in leadership. As the weeks passed without answers, there was a growing sense of restlessness and worry.
A teenager out of South Africa was the first to mention the idea. Barely old enough to be on the internet let alone Twitter, the girl posts the question "What if Syria is Rogers' fault?", the rest of the characters used for the still trending hashtags. The South African teen is easy to dismiss after someone went through her feed and saw that her other tweets (a shocking number for only having the account a few months) were praising the work of the Stark Relief Foundation on her native Johannesburg or her involvement with the local chapter of the September Foundation. Other comments were less polite than simple dismissal because of her connection to organizations created by Tony Stark. Other commenters focused on her youth, her gender, her ethnicity and nationality, all as reasons her question was not worth asking, let alone consideration.
The flack the girl received didn't stop the idea from spreading.
Social media circulated it as they had the phone videos that had captured the different parts of the now infamous "Civil War" of the American superhero team known as the Avengers, and much of the criticism of the various members of the mostly defunct group before that. From Twitter to Facebook and Tumblr, the people of the world began to argue over the answer as the UN stayed silent while in their vigil over the slowly recovering super-soldier.
In nearly no time at all, the entire world was convinced that Steve Rogers had either been abandoned by whoever had been backing his mission due to unfavorable public opinion, or he had deliberately caused the explosion that had destroyed Syria. There wasn't any middle ground in the opinions. The two camps were vicious in their attacks of the other side, even against opponents who didn't wish to fight. To individuals paying attention the information the groups were using, a distinctive trend began to show itself.
The record of Steve Rogers' actions in the modern day, along with his released personnel file (as part of the SHIELD file dump that he had been a part of), did not lend itself well to any possible defense beyond willful ignorance and wishful thinking.
When Christine Everhart managed to get interviews with first Scott Lang and then Clint Barton, the number of people backing the argument that Steve had been responsible swelled like a tsunami approaching the shore. Lang talked about the greatness of the Captain America, but it was clear that he was mostly discussing things from the old comics and cartoons. It only cemented in people's minds that while he had been present at the confrontation at the Leipzig airport, Lang had only actually known Steve Rogers for less than a day. Barton's interview quickly became derailed as the archer blamed everything on Tony Stark, growing so vehement that the term rabid would have been accurate had the interview been allowed to continue by the guards of the facility where he was being held.
It was the interview with Wanda Maximoff that made the wave finally crash against the straggling defenders of Rogers' honor. If Barton had been rabid in blaming Tony Stark for anything and everything, then Maximoff could only be classified as unhinged. The twenty-eight-year-old (almost twenty-nine) spoke of Rogers as if his only flaw was continuing an association with Tony Stark. Almost unprompted, the woman gave up the story of how she had joined the Avengers to defeat Ultron after having helped him up to the point she had read his transferring consciousness and discovered he planned to destroy the world. Without any qualms, Maximoff told about joining Hydra in the first place, motivated by a desire for revenge against Tony Stark's misdeeds, much like why she joined Rogers at Leipzig because Stark had allegedly locked her in her room.
Everhart looked increasingly alarmed throughout the interview as Maximoff's fingers continuously moved as if she was itching to weave her destructive magic once more. The wide grin on her face was very disturbing to view. (It became the main screenshot that people used for memes.) The woman had had no issue interviewing a wide variety of metahumans in the course of her coverage of the Sokovia Accords and the various American responses to it. She had even been as cool as a cucumber to the Watch Dog who had literally spit in her face for having once slept with Tony Stark. Yet as the horrific nature of the Hydra agent cum Avenger continued to reveal new depths, the reporter looked increasingly ill.
By the time Steve Rogers finally woke up, in the public's eyes it was not a question of if Steve Rogers was responsible for the Syrian destruction. It was a question of if he had done it on purpose or if it had just been another unexpected casualty of war.
No one liked his answer.
Then again, willful violation of a ratified treaty that over sixty percent of the world (including the very country he had entered for his self-appointed mission) had agreed to made it hard for anyone to like his answer. Any sympathy he may have garnered had been laid to waste like the region he had accidentally destroyed. Rogers' blasé dismissal of the lost lives didn't soften any hearts either.
Steve didn't seem to understand why people no longer saw him as the hero he saw himself as.
In the end, the hands of Steven Grant Rogers weren't hands that anyone wanted to entrust with the world.
And he had no one to blame but himself.
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An Ending
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