11. Marveling at DC
Dear Bucky,
The last time I was in Washington I didn't really see much. I did a USO tour; Senator Brandt did some photo ops. Apparently he also passed along President Roosevelt's best wishes. Those early days are all a blur. But much like New York and Philadelphia and LA, Washington has spread out. It started as an urban center, and now for a radius of several miles it's still Washington. The things you think about when you think DC are all in the center, and it just goes out from there.
I got a room at one of the nicer hotels in the city, only because Fury's people, who've been tailing me since New York (told you so) insisted. SHIELD will foot the bill; spare no expense. Very strange sentiment to me, having grown up during the Depression and the War. Eventually I'm going to have to settle down. Get a job, make a decent living like a decent person. I never wanted charity or handouts, and I still don't. I'm over 90 years old, but I've got the body of someone in his 20s. I helped defend New York from aliens recently. I'm hardly incapable. I just try not to think about the age thing. Very strange to look in a mirror after shaving and know I'm that old, but at the same time, I'm not that old. Old enough to know better, young enough to try anyway, I suppose.
It's nice here. Or, at least in the center of the city, around the monuments and museums. Like any city, go outside the main districts and you'll find yourself in trouble if you don't know what you're doing. I don't know what I'm doing; even if I could take a bunch of guys in a fight, I don't want to. Those days are behind me. I don't have anything to prove the way I used to. Now I just want to figure out an honest living.
I spent time with Honest Abe this afternoon. Watched that craggy, solemn face stare out over the nation's capital and thought, "There's a man who held it together." So much depended on him and rested on his shoulders. People died on his watch and he kept going. The entire country was falling apart and he kept going. I don't remember much about Lincoln beyond what we learned in school. But looking at him now, sitting and staring quietly out over the nation he tried to keep together, I have to wonder if, at some point he realized that this would take everything from him. That it would change him. That he would give everything he was, that he would give up a chance at being just Abe, if it meant that he was doing the right thing. And then I wondered what Erskine's serum would have done to Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln didn't have the serum, and he's been gone over 100 years. But his legacy remains.
I don't want a monument in DC, or even in Brooklyn. I've actually avoided looking up what people did with my image after I went into the ice and "died". Phil's collector cards were strange enough. I suppose that's why monuments are made after people die, usually, because it's too odd for them to live knowing that they've been memorialized. That also sets up for some pretty awful pressure. What if they make a monument, and people are marveling over it, and then you screw up? What happens to the monument? Do they take it down? Do they let vandalism happen and pretend it's warranted? I don't want that kind of pressure; I just want to do the right thing. I want to do right by my country and right by the people I cared about. If they… if you… can't be here, I want to at least honor what you all did. What you all gave up to do the right thing.
Who am I kidding? The worst pressure is what I'm putting on myself. It always has been, though.
Monumentally yours,
Steve