wingborne | it's the moment of truth and the moment to lie;

America wants to be Captain America.

Captain America saved the day. He saved everybody. He fought with his heart on his sleeve and he did his best and everybody liked him because he was big and strong and he helped everyone. America kneels in the muddy trench with the mud creeping up his thick socks and over his fingers and watches the man next to him get shot in the head with bits and pieces splattering over his uniform, a gaping wound the size of a grapefruit through the sticky dark hair, and he wants to be Captain America.

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America wants to be Captain America.

See, Captain America had a buddy. His name was Bucky. Bucky the buddy, and they were good friends. America has friends, too. Except sometimes he thinks they’re not—they don’t always think of him as a friend, too. But he gives them stuff and he’s in the war to save the day, and he’s going to save them all, so he thinks they should look at him more. But sometimes he sits in the back and watches his president talking softly with his advisors and when he looks, when he really looks, he sees England is always busy talking to everyone else and shucks, he didn’t really need much.

But he gave him supplies and now he was fighting like equals, and England still sometimes looks through America and calls out some other country’s name to sign some papers, sign some forms, and sometimes America hovers because England has a hard time with his pen and he swears as his stitches break along his forearm and bleed through his crisp but smudged uniform, and watches the blood drip on the paper like ink, and he waits for England to ask for his help because America is there to save the day using his superpowers, but England just gets a new pen and a new paper.

Bucky was a great buddy, he thought. And maybe he shouldn’t be looking for a Bucky in that furry eyebrow freak who didn’t realize he was being saved. But if he looks for Bucky in his men with their smooth cheeks and their high voices, then he just watches his Buckies disappear half in rank in one swift move, and America is left without a Bucky when he’s pissing in the mud and listening to the shells go off in the distance and thinking it might be nice to know someone who plays cards.

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America wants to be Captain America.

Because Captain America always does the right thing and he always does his best, and that’s why he wins. He doesn’t sit and think about whether he’s done the right thing because he’s always done it. He doesn’t sometimes lie in the cot after the war is won and try and dig his fingernails deep into his arms and tell himself that he should just sleep, because Captain America always gets a good night’s rest. He’s a good kid. He’s a good kid from Brooklyn who went into the war to do his duty, because he’s a good kid, and good kids don’t die. Good kids don’t return home and can’t sleep at night, good kids don’t try to find a job when nobody’s hiring, good kids don’t sometimes take the pistol and shove the cool barrel into their throats. Good kids do the right thing. Captain America wouldn’t wonder, not with the images of burnt bodies and screaming children flickering on the back of his eyelids. He’d never wonder.

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America wants to be Captain America.

Even though Captain America got frozen for some years, then he went and became the first Avenger and that was pretty cool. It was like he was starting up his own club of friends. America wants to do that. He tries to do that. He goes every meeting and he tries to talk but nobody ever listens to his cool plans. Captain America would think his plans would be cool. Captain America would want to be friends with him, because he knows that giant robots are the future. Captain America wouldn’t ignore him and tell him to shut up and sit down.

Nope, nosirree, Captain America would just fight evil with his friends. Because he’s a good guy.

And there’s no gray here, just black and white morality, because there were bad guys in the world and if they were good, they could defeat them. Good always wins, with flying red white and blue colors. And it’s not like sometimes they needed to team up with the bad guy to fight other bad guys. It wasn’t like sometimes they were friends with bad guys and fought against a guy who sometimes might do good things, but he was still a bad guy on the inside. And Captain America would never, ever wonder if maybe, sometimes, there weren’t really good guys and bad guys after all, just guys who do good things and guys who do bad things and it was just more practical to kill the guys who do the things that get in the way. Captain America wouldn’t think like that.

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America is sometimes glad that he isn’t Captain America.

Because Captain America lost Peggy. He feels bad for Cap, and sometimes when he dresses up like Captain America, he tries to tell England to dress up in Peggy’s dress but England always tells him to sod off and other weird words like that. He thinks England is lonely a lot, so he goes over and visits him, even if those just happen to be the days that America might be feeling a little bit lonely too. And he sits with England on the couch and America sips on his cup of coffee because it’s a good drink and England keeps it around for him and he can smell England leaning a little closer to him, smelling like old books, and they watch a movie together and it’s about cool explosions and England makes some comments about that’s not how it was even as he picks through his biscuits.

And maybe he says something like, “I guess Captain America really liked Peggy a lot.”

And maybe England says something like, “If your blockbuster cinema can’t make that transparent romance obvious to you, then it’s not doing its job” or something stupid like that.

And maybe he says, “What if I really liked you a lot?”

And maybe England says, “If,” with such a scoff, and he goes back to his tea without looking up even as the movie rolls on and maybe America leans forward a little.

And says, “What if it wasn’t an ‘if’?”

And maybe when England stills and then looks up at him with large eyes and the tea forgotten, maybe, America will be glad that he isn’t Captain America.