With no-one wearing their real face, it's a whiteout of emotion and I've only got my brittle bones to break the fall.
When the love in letters fade, it's like moving in slow motion. And we're already too late... if we arrive at all.
And then we're caught up in the arms race, an involuntary addiction, and we're shedding every value our mothers taught.
So will you please show me your real face? Draw the line in the horizon? Cause I only need your name to call the reasons why I fought.
~ Poets of the Fall, War
My name is Steve Rogers. I don't know why I'm writing this letter. Or maybe I do. I'm just not ready to admit it.
That's pretty sad, given that I'm now into my nineties. To most folks, I'm a ninety year old virgin. Might as well join a convent. I guess that's a little funny. I'm definitely not a virgin, but that's none of their business.
I digress. I was born in Brooklyn a couple decades ago.
I'm "older than I look".
I was small back then. I was just a scrawny guy with nothing but good parents and blind faith. I didn't really have any friends growing up until I met Bucky. I think we met in high school, but I'm not sure anymore. Bucky was the epitome of a stand-up guy. He was everything I wanted to be - tall and strong and smart and fast. He was real brave. Everyone looked up to him. I did too and sometimes I wonder if he knew just how much.
I consider him a real friend now. Although, looking back, I'm not sure that was ever truly the summation of things. I guess he was more like a big brother. I wouldn't go so far as to call me a charity project, but we certainly weren't equals. He always looked out for me. He watched my back. I got in fights a lot, but if I'm honest, none of them were initiated by me. My size, or lack thereof, made me a pretty easy target. And I just didn't know how to say no. I couldn't turn the other cheek. I couldn't walk away. I wanted to fight.
I wanted a reason to fight.
The only thing I was good at was drawing. But back then, only sissy boys did that sort of thing.
Anyway, after college, Bucky enlisted in the military. He drove all the way from upstate, eager to answer Uncle Sam's call. By that time, I wanted so badly to be noticed by him, to be considered someone worth looking at, that I decided to enlist too. Except… well…
I couldn't.
They wouldn't let me in. I didn't pass my physicals. I was too small and I had asthma and heart problems to boot. I was a medical mess and a liability that the military couldn't take on. The news hurt a lot, but I was used to disappointment. And I wasn't about to lay down and throw in the towel.
I started falsifying my identity and applying at any station I could. I had never lied before, let alone broken the law, but if they wouldn't accept Steve Rogers, I would have to become someone else. I had to get in.
I was rejected more times than I want to admit, probably upwards of 30 denied applications.
Dammit, Bucky was everything to me. His was the only opinion that mattered. And I thought getting into the military, getting in shape, training hard, and proving my devotion to my country would show him I was… worthy of him. For a supposedly nerdy kid, I was pretty stupid.
Bucky set me up on a blind date with this girl. I don't remember what she looked like. I guess it was to cheer me up or something. We were celebrating in Time Square. I don't remember why. Howard Stark had invented a flying car or something. There was a recruiting stand in the back of the crowd. I was pretty angry with Bucky, and the girl I was with was a head taller than I was and already looking for my replacement. I slipped away and marched into the booth. A foreign doctor met me in the waiting room. I didn't know at that point, but I was going to be working with that doctor for quite some time. I was pretty stunned, being that he found out about me falsifying my identity. He said fraud was a federal offence. I thought he was going to bust me, not approve me.
It was too late to tell Bucky. He had already left with the girls. But I thought I would tell him when he got back.
When I got back…
Anyway. During my time in the service, I was selected for a special experiment. The government was trying to create the perfect soldier - a super soldier, something that could turn the tide against the Nazis. For reasons I'll never understand, they selected me. I mean, I didn't think it was all that special that I knew you could pull the pin out of the flagpole to get the flag on top, or that I dived on top of a fake grenade. Anyone would do that. Right?
They strapped me up to a medical table and injected me with some sort of serum. Then they put me in a tube for a while… and shined a bunch of bright lights in my face. It hurt worse than getting kicked in the crotch. But whatever it was, it changed me physically. When I emerged from the tube, I didn't recognize myself.
I grew taller and filled out. I was faster and stronger. They told me I didn't look half bad either.
Whatever the case, I knew I was finally something Bucky could approve of. There was an enemy mole in the audience. He shot the good doctor that made me. I chased him down to the docks. He killed himself with a cyanide pill before I could get anything out of him.
That was the beginning of my career as Captain America.
I became a symbol of everything Christian America was supposed to embody. At first, I was almost like a poster child, an anti-Hitler mascot, until I proved that I could fight by venturing into enemy territory to rescue Bucky's platoon. I still don't know if he was happy to see me. I think he was more surprised than anything.
From that day on, I was an essential component of the U.S. military. We devised a strategy that could bring down Hydra, the root of the war. We were so close. And I swore to myself that when we got back, I was going to tell Bucky everything. I was going to lay it all out on the table and come clean. I was going to man up and ask him to be with me - to be mine. Because I wanted him the way a man was supposed to want a woman.
But on the way to Hydra's base, we had an accident. And despite all of my superhuman powers and the muscles and the speed and agility and the cunning I was gifted with when injected with the serum, I couldn't save Bucky. We stowed aboard a train carrying some of Hydra's key personnel. The tracks led up into the mountains. The weather was bad. Bucky fell into a snow choked canyon. Miles, perhaps. He screamed when he fell. I reached for him, but I was too far away.
Maybe I've always been too far away. Maybe I never would have reached him even if... even if I had told him how I felt. He was probably drunk. He and Dum Dum had been singing carols for hours. But for whatever reason, Christmas Eve 1944, he saw me different. But we never talked about it again.
I was pretty numb after that. I guess, in that emptiness, Peggy was the only one within reach. She was beautiful, but not the beautiful I wanted. Our strategy eventually panned out and we were able to defeat HYDRA, but an airship carrying several nuclear bombs was headed for the mainland. There was no safe place to put it. I had to bring it down into the Arctic Ocean. All I could think about as the water got closer was how Bucky must have felt when he fell.
It was a trip I didn't expect to come back from. And frankly… I didn't want to come back from it.
That was my farewell. That was my service. That was supposed to be the end of my story. I was supposed to go and be with Buck.
We had a date.
Seventy years later, I opened my eyes again, but the world I awoke to wasn't the same. It had moved on, and rightfully so, without me while I was frozen in a glacier. Everyone I had ever known, my family and my few friends… They were gone. It was just me. It was just me and this body that wouldn't age, wouldn't die, and wouldn't change. But everything else was so drastically different.
I know now that I can't keep up. I can't.
When I woke up, they said we won the war, but they didn't say what we lost. They didn't tell me how many people had died at the hands of the Germans. They didn't tell me that we were still fighting, and had been fighting since then. They didn't mention the countless Wars around the world with no point or purpose other than for power and land.
All those years of pretending, what did they get me? I am a lost ideal. I'm a relic. I stand for something that doesn't exist anymore.
I slept for 70 years. For the life of me, I don't understand why I'm still so tired.
I've cried every morning for a while now. Sometimes, I go to sleep not hoping for anything. Sometimes, I go to sleep hoping that I never wake up again.