SHIELD released Captain America’s identity in 1953. Keeping it secret hadn’t had much point since Steve Rogers took that plane down, but Peggy had still held a shred of hope the serum might have let him survive, and although it went unspoken she believed Howard shared it. Steve had appeared in a few propaganda clips with his helmet off, but the serum had changed him so much they all doubted many people who had known the little guy from Brooklyn would make the connection, and as far as Peggy knew nobody had.
The catalyst for release was a man running around in a Captain America costume, claiming to be an official government commie basher, and beating up a lot of people, some of them Communists, some of them socialists, and some of them not political at all. Steve, a committed socialist, would have been outraged.
Once he landed on SHIELD’s radar, the false Captain America wasn’t hard to bring in. His name turned out to be William Burnside, he was unusually strong but no supersoldier and he was certainly mentally unbalanced. Having satisfied themselves as far as possible that Burnside was acting alone, SHIELD had to face the fact that there was nothing to prevent more false Captain Americas appearing, some of them perhaps with more organised backing. The best way to prevent that was to make it public that Captain America was dead.
A book was released, a carefully scrutinised account of Captain America’s SSR career. A documentary accompanied it, including interviews with Peggy, with Howard, and with the three surviving Howling Commandos who lived in the US. Of course there was a certain amount of editing, some to remove matters still kept secret, some to obscure Steve’s more reckless rule breaking. Peggy accepted it. Steve was unique, Steve walked a charmed path right up to the moment when he didn’t any longer; she had admired that but did not want to be responsible for anyone trying to emulate him. Even so she felt unease at the way that first rescue was cast. No direct lies, yet the account read as though it had been an authorised mission and the presence among the rescued soldiers of Steve’s lifelong best friend was an unexpected coincidence. Peggy understood the reasons, but it nagged at her.
Releasing the information that Captain America had sacrificed himself to save so many other lives paved the way to a proper memorial. It was made of white Portland stone, with the design of Steve’s shield carved at the top and the wording kept simple, though Howard made a joke about including a verse of ‘Star-spangled Man’ that made Peggy smile ruefully. The memorial ceremony itself was far from simple, as far too many people wanted to be present. Of course Senator Brandt managed to get in on the act, reading out a message from President Eisenhower. Peggy had the notes of ‘The Last Post’ sounding in her head throughout. To her no military memorial felt right without it, but Steve wasn’t British, so it wouldn’t have been appropriate.
Steve would probably have been embarrassed by the grand memorial anyway, which was why Peggy had paid the private tribute of tracking down Steve’s parents’ grave in Brooklyn, putting up a tombstone, and having Steve’s name and dates carved below theirs. There was a grim finality to the carved figures 1918 – 1945, which was why she’d kept putting it off.
When she got back after the memorial service Mike mixed her a gin and tonic while she took off her dress uniform and make-up. “Do you need a bath after shaking hands with Brandt?” he asked wryly.
“Oh, he’s not so bad. There’s something very reliable about that relentless self-interest. I’d rather deal with him than some of the ideologues any day.” She put her feet up on Mike’s lap. “Ah, that’s much better.” Of course he had to tickle her instep.
Mike knew about Steve of course, although Peggy hadn’t told him Steve was Captain America until SHIELD decided to make it public. She’d been dating Mike for more than four months before she’d found out he’d been one of the men Steve released from that HYDRA camp at Azzano, and had wondered at life’s strange coincidences. He hardly ever spoke about it, but just once he’d said it had been the only time in his life he’d wished he wasn’t a doctor.
The edited version of that rescue at Azzano was still bothering Peggy, and she thought now that perhaps there was a way to make it up to Steve’s memory. Steve would have insisted he couldn’t have done all he did without help, and that wasn’t wrong.
They’d never found Sergeant Barnes’ body. Never looked in fact. There had been some brief discussion, but it hadn’t taken much time to establish it would be hopeless; there were a lot of ravines along that train line, and no way of knowing which one they should be looking in. Steve might have been able to pinpoint exactly where Barnes had fallen, but Steve was gone himself before anyone thought of it. Barnes’ name was on the memorial board at Headquarters, of course; when the board was first proposed it hadn’t taken much discussion to agree that fallen SSR agents should be included, as SSR had been SHIELD’s precursor, and perhaps more important everyone from SSR had wanted Steve Rogers’ name on it. Peggy could do a bit more for Steve’s oldest friend than that.
SHIELD put up a headstone in the plot next to the Captain America memorial, and held a ceremony. It was smaller and quieter than the one for Steve had been, but also more personal as they had been able to trace Barnes’ sisters. Dugan, Morita and Jones came and perhaps Peggy shouldn’t have been surprised that Dugan, that bear of a man, sobbed like a child.
Mike came as well, partly because he and Morita turned out to have known each other pretty well in the HYDRA camp. “Last time I saw Jim was right after we were busted out,” he told Peggy. “I heard he’d joined some wild Commando unit, like a crazy man.”
Morita grinned. “What can I say? Cap laid on free beer.”
Peggy knew, though, that it wasn’t entirely the choice to bear an old friend company that brought Mike to the service. A few days earlier he had casually picked up an SSR file photograph Peggy had brought home with other material that might help with the memorial – James Barnes’ SSR involvement was declassified now – and stood staring at it, very still.
“I remember him,” he’d said. “I didn’t know he’d got out. Didn’t ever know his name. There was a kid who’d collapsed, worked too hard most likely. He tried to stop the guards dragging the kid off to the isolation ward, so they beat him bloody and dragged him off as well. I didn’t think anyone had got out of there.”
“Sergeant Barnes was the only one.”
“Do you know what they did there?”
“Not really.” Getting anything out of Barnes had, by all accounts, been extremely tough, as he’d developed a profound mistrust of all doctors and scientists. “From the little we were able to learn, it seemed they might have been testing the human body’s reaction to extreme cold. Among other things, perhaps. “
“There were experiments like that at Dachau and Auschwitz.” Mike had still been staring at the picture. “Damn it,” he said softly. “He got out, and he still didn’t make it through.”
After the service Mike and Jim Morita got very drunk together. Peggy left them to it, feeling dirty in the way she hadn’t after Steve’s memorial. There was a document on her desk burning a hole in her conscience.
She went in the next day and authorized a budget increase for Arnim Zola.
Zola had presented a good case, his research was showing results, and his results were helping justify SHIELD’s existence to government officials who thought there were too many acronym agencies on the block. Peggy watched a demonstration in his lab. It was impressive, and his enthusiasm almost infectious.
“Soon, Fraulein Carter,” he assured her, “I believe we will see real success on the revived supersoldier research.”
Peggy smiled politely. You had to compartmentalize.