“His Part to Play” - 3. Reaching
Mar. 31st, 2020 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breakinglight11Forever Captain:
“His Part to Play”
By Phoebe Roberts
~~~
Summary: “Steve Rogers has retired to the 1940s to build a new life with Peggy. In leaving behind the mantle of Captain America, at last he’s got a measure of peace. Still, Steve will never stop feeling the responsibility to step up as a hero— except he's not sure how much power his actions have at this point in the timeline. Somehow he must reconcile his new life and identity with the responsibility and burden of being a hero out of time.”
Previous chapters:
1. Lost Time
2. Building
Chapter summary: Steve reveals himself to some select few people.
“His Part to Play”
By Phoebe Roberts
~~~
Summary: “Steve Rogers has retired to the 1940s to build a new life with Peggy. In leaving behind the mantle of Captain America, at last he’s got a measure of peace. Still, Steve will never stop feeling the responsibility to step up as a hero— except he's not sure how much power his actions have at this point in the timeline. Somehow he must reconcile his new life and identity with the responsibility and burden of being a hero out of time.”
Previous chapters:
1. Lost Time
2. Building
Chapter summary: Steve reveals himself to some select few people.
~~~
3. Reaching
He took up other skills besides cooking; painting, woodworking, piano playing, learning from library books and neighbors in the community. Time seemed so open to him now, so full with possibility, that he found himself leaping into new things with unheard of relish. It was also around this point that he started drawing again. He’d never really stopped, not entirely anyway. When he’d first woken up in 2011, he sketched almost compulsively, in an effort to interpret all the newness in a manner that felt familiar and real. But in later years he had slowed, uninspired to do more than scrawl in the margins of notes taken in the war room. He’d hardly touched a pencil in the years following the snap. But now he felt inspired as he hadn’t in forever, making certain to have his pad on him at all times, to capture anything for which the mood struck him.
He drew everything that passed before his eyes, important and mundane— Jackie Robinson stealing a base, Mrs. Cantelmi as she gutted a fish, the orange tabby cat that sunned itself on the front stoop. Previously not much one for fantasy, now he drew straight from his own imagination too, from coiling dragons to mythological figures to spaceships navigating planets of his own design. He carried his notebook and pencils with him everywhere, to capture an interesting face or a window box of flowers, filling one after the other in a sudden creative flood. He could have drawn a portrait of Peggy every day of the week, breathless at the chance to observe her, just living her life alongside his every day. He felt free, free in a way he never had since he’d taken up the cowl and the shield.
For a time he was haunted by the fear of being recognized. There wasn’t much he could do about the unique figure he cut, and he tended to tower above most of any crowd. Still, he made some effort to at least draw less of people’s attention. He’d lived on the run long enough that aiming for unremarkable was much less conspicuous than disguised. He had never been an ostentatious dresser, and there was always his trusty Dodgers cap. Eventually, when he went out, he took to wearing spectacles with plain glass lenses, and started parting his hair on the opposite side.
Peggy had laughed at him at this. “And who do you think you are?”
He grinned. “Worked well enough for him.”
“I suppose.” She trailed her fingers through his freshly pomaded hair. “If you’ve got to pretend you’re not Superman.”
They joked about it, but to him it was serious. If he was to truly leave Captain America behind, then he had to remain dead to the world at large. His image had been widely disseminated once, in films, on posters, on goddamn lunch boxes. He occasionally ran into a kid that had his trading cards shoved in a back pocket or clothes pinned to the spokes of a bike. But famous as his face was, it was not always in front of folks the way it could be in the days of the Internet. And more than that, the reality of him was obscured in the wake of all the mythologizing— from the hagiographic tone of his mentions in the newsreels, to the ridiculous radio program that turned his service into some kind of pulp adventure in between ads for sewing machines. That figure wasn’t a person, couldn’t be in the wake of all the symbol they needed him to be. Captain America didn’t burn the garlic or shave the shank too thin. Of course they did not attach that to the guy they knew only as Grant.
Grant; it had slipped out on the fly, his middle name, the first time a stranger had asked him. Not the cleverest alias admittedly, but it was easy to remember, and he doubted there were many who knew that much about Captain America. There was only the occasional somebody who said he reminded them of someone, someone they couldn’t quite name.
Folks like Nick Johnstone, a fellow lingerer at the pondside park bench where Steve would often come to draw. He was a distinguished older black gentleman, retired now, but who had been a carpenter until age took the majority of his sight. It was he who taught Steve how to work wood and build furniture. Chatting in the park became coffees in nearby shops became Steve visiting at Nick’s downtown apartment, much of the utilitarian space given over to his small workshop of woodworking tools. He no longer built cabinets or large furniture, but kept his tools near to hand to carve small pieces or do repairs even in his retirement.
“Got to keep my hands busy,” he explained to Steve, still handling the planes and chisels with the skill of all his years. “Devil’s workshop, and all.”
As he did for his passel of grandmothers, nominally Steve traded errands and chores, but in reality he paid in conversation. Nick had led an interesting life, having traveled all over the United States, and had once had a large, far-flung extended family who were the source of no end of amusing anecdotes. Now he was alone, his wife Marlene having passed of stomach cancer about ten years back, and their son, Charlie, an infantryman who’d fallen in the countryside of Germany. Steve was a good listener, and Nick was happy to have someone to remember them to.
Nick guessed fairly quickly that he was a veteran himself, from the way he seemed to understand the life. It happened he’d even been some of the same places that Charlie had. Steve wondered briefly if he’d ever met the man; people always loved it when Captain America remembered them. He’d tried his best, but there’d been so many over the years of the war.
“I’m real proud of him. Dying a hero,” Nick mused, as he demonstrated the technique for mitering an edge. “But God almighty knows, I might have rather he’d run like a coward and stayed alive.”
Steve accepted the miter saw as he carefully passed it over. “I don’t blame you. I wish more of us could have been.”
He snorted, skeptical. But Steve had no judgment for him.
“Life’s hard enough. We’re here to do more than suffer.”
Nick chuffed, considering. “You really believe that?”
Steve lined up his cut in the box frame with care. “Trying to.”
It occurred to him this must have been what Frankenstein’s monster felt, in a novel he’d finally gotten around to reading in his hours in the public library. For a little while, he was permitted to be normal. He was shocked at how easy it was, without the weight of Captain America. He could be himself, and the world could simply take him for that man.
He revealed his true identity only once. He and Peggy discussed it, and after careful consideration they concluded it was the right thing. And so, once he had settled a bit, they went to go see Howard Stark.
Peggy had done him quite a few favors at this point, so she was able to get a hold of him on shorter notice than most. Apparently when she contacted him he was about to go to Washington, D.C. on some government contract or other. Steve thought it could wait, but Peggy insisted over Howard’s apparent protestations.
“What’s the point of a private plane if you’re a slave to travel schedules?” she told him. “For this, the Defense Secretary can wait.”
“The Defense Secretary, maybe,” Howard groused. “But the Defense Secretary’s secretary I had to book three weeks out, and she’s got a hell of a cancellation policy.” Steve wasn’t sure he could compete with that, but with Peggy’s assurances, Howard agreed to meet. He would be waiting for them at his guest apartments, a place where Peggy had stayed on maneuvers when she’d needed to lay low.
Steve couldn’t resist giving her a hard time over that. “Kept in secret by a man,” he teased. “If you’re not careful, people will think you were… what’s the word? Fondueing.”
Peggy laughed. “Is that more or less disgraceful than smuggling a man into my boarding house?”
“Definitely less,” he declared, nuzzling into her neck. “In that case, everything they’re thinking is true.”
The levity put him a bit more at ease. He was apprehensive of anything that might draw him back into his old life, for all that he might not have anything to fear from Howard. But it was more than that, because he wasn’t just revealing himself to his old comrade in arms. On Peggy’s urging, would also be revealing himself to Stark’s right-hand man and his wife, Edwin and Ana Jarvis.
He’d heard of Jarvis, of course, the Starks’ butler that Tony had grown up with and had enough affection for that he’d named the AI assistant he’d invented in his honor. Steve had been apprehensive about that, but Peggy felt it was something he should do. The Jarvises had been good to her, been there for her to rely on in a very difficult time, and had earned her confidence enough that she wanted them in on this part of her life. She wanted him to have good people like them in his life, just as she had.
“Besides,” she added. “You know that Howard can’t keep a secret without someone nannying him. Jarvis can ride herd on him before that horse leaves the barn.”
Peggy got them past the gate, led him through the grounds, took him into a sitting room, decorated with just a little too much of the elder Stark’s flair for the ostentatious. The man himself was in there pacing, griping to two other people, one a suited gentleman waiting at attention, the other a woman sitting primly on the sofa.
Howard turned, still grumbling. “Well, Agent Carter, what’s so damned important as to get bumped by Miss Hightower for another three months?”
Steve removed his glasses and his flat cap. “Hello, Howard.” He looked past his old friend to the butler and his wife standing just behind him. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis. I’m Steve Rogers.”
For a moment no one made a sound, every eye in the room on Steve. Then Howard staggered close to him, gaping in a way he hadn’t since Steve’s transformation at Camp Lehigh. He reached up and laid his hands on Steve’s cheeks, as if to prove to himself he wasn’t imagining things.
“Jarvis,” he choked out at last. “Does Carter just have a type, or am I having a stroke?”
Howard’s man took a step forward, then abruptly stopped. When Steve’s eyes met his, Steve faltered. Jarvis had that look on him, that sort of awestruck cast that people got when they were seeing the super soldier, imagining the cowl and shield, instead of the man in front of them. But his wife, a tiny, russet bird of a woman impeccably dressed, strode right up, disentangled him from Howard, and took his hands in hers.
“Mr. Rogers,” she said, with just a hint of some European accent. “It is so nice to finally meet you.”
Relief flooded through him as he looked down into her sweetly open face. Her ease seemed to pull her husband out of his shock, and when Steve turned back to him, that distant awe was replaced by a genuine smile of welcome, eyes crinkling kindly at the edges.
“Steve,” Howard breathed, still rooted to the spot. “How?”
“It’s a long story,” he answered, then paused. “I’m not sure where to begin.”
Ana Jarvis did not miss a beat. “We would love to have you over to supper. You can tell us then.” She wove her arm through his. “Have you ever had Hungarian food?”
~~~
Next chapter: 4. Bonds
3. Reaching
He took up other skills besides cooking; painting, woodworking, piano playing, learning from library books and neighbors in the community. Time seemed so open to him now, so full with possibility, that he found himself leaping into new things with unheard of relish. It was also around this point that he started drawing again. He’d never really stopped, not entirely anyway. When he’d first woken up in 2011, he sketched almost compulsively, in an effort to interpret all the newness in a manner that felt familiar and real. But in later years he had slowed, uninspired to do more than scrawl in the margins of notes taken in the war room. He’d hardly touched a pencil in the years following the snap. But now he felt inspired as he hadn’t in forever, making certain to have his pad on him at all times, to capture anything for which the mood struck him.
He drew everything that passed before his eyes, important and mundane— Jackie Robinson stealing a base, Mrs. Cantelmi as she gutted a fish, the orange tabby cat that sunned itself on the front stoop. Previously not much one for fantasy, now he drew straight from his own imagination too, from coiling dragons to mythological figures to spaceships navigating planets of his own design. He carried his notebook and pencils with him everywhere, to capture an interesting face or a window box of flowers, filling one after the other in a sudden creative flood. He could have drawn a portrait of Peggy every day of the week, breathless at the chance to observe her, just living her life alongside his every day. He felt free, free in a way he never had since he’d taken up the cowl and the shield.
For a time he was haunted by the fear of being recognized. There wasn’t much he could do about the unique figure he cut, and he tended to tower above most of any crowd. Still, he made some effort to at least draw less of people’s attention. He’d lived on the run long enough that aiming for unremarkable was much less conspicuous than disguised. He had never been an ostentatious dresser, and there was always his trusty Dodgers cap. Eventually, when he went out, he took to wearing spectacles with plain glass lenses, and started parting his hair on the opposite side.
Peggy had laughed at him at this. “And who do you think you are?”
He grinned. “Worked well enough for him.”
“I suppose.” She trailed her fingers through his freshly pomaded hair. “If you’ve got to pretend you’re not Superman.”
They joked about it, but to him it was serious. If he was to truly leave Captain America behind, then he had to remain dead to the world at large. His image had been widely disseminated once, in films, on posters, on goddamn lunch boxes. He occasionally ran into a kid that had his trading cards shoved in a back pocket or clothes pinned to the spokes of a bike. But famous as his face was, it was not always in front of folks the way it could be in the days of the Internet. And more than that, the reality of him was obscured in the wake of all the mythologizing— from the hagiographic tone of his mentions in the newsreels, to the ridiculous radio program that turned his service into some kind of pulp adventure in between ads for sewing machines. That figure wasn’t a person, couldn’t be in the wake of all the symbol they needed him to be. Captain America didn’t burn the garlic or shave the shank too thin. Of course they did not attach that to the guy they knew only as Grant.
Grant; it had slipped out on the fly, his middle name, the first time a stranger had asked him. Not the cleverest alias admittedly, but it was easy to remember, and he doubted there were many who knew that much about Captain America. There was only the occasional somebody who said he reminded them of someone, someone they couldn’t quite name.
Folks like Nick Johnstone, a fellow lingerer at the pondside park bench where Steve would often come to draw. He was a distinguished older black gentleman, retired now, but who had been a carpenter until age took the majority of his sight. It was he who taught Steve how to work wood and build furniture. Chatting in the park became coffees in nearby shops became Steve visiting at Nick’s downtown apartment, much of the utilitarian space given over to his small workshop of woodworking tools. He no longer built cabinets or large furniture, but kept his tools near to hand to carve small pieces or do repairs even in his retirement.
“Got to keep my hands busy,” he explained to Steve, still handling the planes and chisels with the skill of all his years. “Devil’s workshop, and all.”
As he did for his passel of grandmothers, nominally Steve traded errands and chores, but in reality he paid in conversation. Nick had led an interesting life, having traveled all over the United States, and had once had a large, far-flung extended family who were the source of no end of amusing anecdotes. Now he was alone, his wife Marlene having passed of stomach cancer about ten years back, and their son, Charlie, an infantryman who’d fallen in the countryside of Germany. Steve was a good listener, and Nick was happy to have someone to remember them to.
Nick guessed fairly quickly that he was a veteran himself, from the way he seemed to understand the life. It happened he’d even been some of the same places that Charlie had. Steve wondered briefly if he’d ever met the man; people always loved it when Captain America remembered them. He’d tried his best, but there’d been so many over the years of the war.
“I’m real proud of him. Dying a hero,” Nick mused, as he demonstrated the technique for mitering an edge. “But God almighty knows, I might have rather he’d run like a coward and stayed alive.”
Steve accepted the miter saw as he carefully passed it over. “I don’t blame you. I wish more of us could have been.”
He snorted, skeptical. But Steve had no judgment for him.
“Life’s hard enough. We’re here to do more than suffer.”
Nick chuffed, considering. “You really believe that?”
Steve lined up his cut in the box frame with care. “Trying to.”
It occurred to him this must have been what Frankenstein’s monster felt, in a novel he’d finally gotten around to reading in his hours in the public library. For a little while, he was permitted to be normal. He was shocked at how easy it was, without the weight of Captain America. He could be himself, and the world could simply take him for that man.
He revealed his true identity only once. He and Peggy discussed it, and after careful consideration they concluded it was the right thing. And so, once he had settled a bit, they went to go see Howard Stark.
Peggy had done him quite a few favors at this point, so she was able to get a hold of him on shorter notice than most. Apparently when she contacted him he was about to go to Washington, D.C. on some government contract or other. Steve thought it could wait, but Peggy insisted over Howard’s apparent protestations.
“What’s the point of a private plane if you’re a slave to travel schedules?” she told him. “For this, the Defense Secretary can wait.”
“The Defense Secretary, maybe,” Howard groused. “But the Defense Secretary’s secretary I had to book three weeks out, and she’s got a hell of a cancellation policy.” Steve wasn’t sure he could compete with that, but with Peggy’s assurances, Howard agreed to meet. He would be waiting for them at his guest apartments, a place where Peggy had stayed on maneuvers when she’d needed to lay low.
Steve couldn’t resist giving her a hard time over that. “Kept in secret by a man,” he teased. “If you’re not careful, people will think you were… what’s the word? Fondueing.”
Peggy laughed. “Is that more or less disgraceful than smuggling a man into my boarding house?”
“Definitely less,” he declared, nuzzling into her neck. “In that case, everything they’re thinking is true.”
The levity put him a bit more at ease. He was apprehensive of anything that might draw him back into his old life, for all that he might not have anything to fear from Howard. But it was more than that, because he wasn’t just revealing himself to his old comrade in arms. On Peggy’s urging, would also be revealing himself to Stark’s right-hand man and his wife, Edwin and Ana Jarvis.
He’d heard of Jarvis, of course, the Starks’ butler that Tony had grown up with and had enough affection for that he’d named the AI assistant he’d invented in his honor. Steve had been apprehensive about that, but Peggy felt it was something he should do. The Jarvises had been good to her, been there for her to rely on in a very difficult time, and had earned her confidence enough that she wanted them in on this part of her life. She wanted him to have good people like them in his life, just as she had.
“Besides,” she added. “You know that Howard can’t keep a secret without someone nannying him. Jarvis can ride herd on him before that horse leaves the barn.”
Peggy got them past the gate, led him through the grounds, took him into a sitting room, decorated with just a little too much of the elder Stark’s flair for the ostentatious. The man himself was in there pacing, griping to two other people, one a suited gentleman waiting at attention, the other a woman sitting primly on the sofa.
Howard turned, still grumbling. “Well, Agent Carter, what’s so damned important as to get bumped by Miss Hightower for another three months?”
Steve removed his glasses and his flat cap. “Hello, Howard.” He looked past his old friend to the butler and his wife standing just behind him. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis. I’m Steve Rogers.”
For a moment no one made a sound, every eye in the room on Steve. Then Howard staggered close to him, gaping in a way he hadn’t since Steve’s transformation at Camp Lehigh. He reached up and laid his hands on Steve’s cheeks, as if to prove to himself he wasn’t imagining things.
“Jarvis,” he choked out at last. “Does Carter just have a type, or am I having a stroke?”
Howard’s man took a step forward, then abruptly stopped. When Steve’s eyes met his, Steve faltered. Jarvis had that look on him, that sort of awestruck cast that people got when they were seeing the super soldier, imagining the cowl and shield, instead of the man in front of them. But his wife, a tiny, russet bird of a woman impeccably dressed, strode right up, disentangled him from Howard, and took his hands in hers.
“Mr. Rogers,” she said, with just a hint of some European accent. “It is so nice to finally meet you.”
Relief flooded through him as he looked down into her sweetly open face. Her ease seemed to pull her husband out of his shock, and when Steve turned back to him, that distant awe was replaced by a genuine smile of welcome, eyes crinkling kindly at the edges.
“Steve,” Howard breathed, still rooted to the spot. “How?”
“It’s a long story,” he answered, then paused. “I’m not sure where to begin.”
Ana Jarvis did not miss a beat. “We would love to have you over to supper. You can tell us then.” She wove her arm through his. “Have you ever had Hungarian food?”
~~~
Next chapter: 4. Bonds
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