In the twenty-first century, and in the twentieth, there’s a lot that the public doesn’t know about Captain America. Most of the world doesn’t know his name and none of them know the name he’d been born with nearly a century prior, because Steve Rogers (Steven Ò Flaithearta, born in Belfast to a dead father and a working mother) is not a stupid man, nor has he ever been one.
They don’t know where he was born, because people have always held spite for immigrants. They don’t know when he was born, because that’s no one’s business but his own. None of the many, many the biographers can’t ever figure out what the ‘G’ in Steven G. Rogers stands for. They don’t know what neighbourhood he grew up in or what he was like as a child, they can’t get disciplinary records from his schools, because Steve has never been friends with snitches.
The world thinks his first experience with war was liberating prisoners in Italian Libya in the late spring of 1942. That’s a lie. His first experience with war was the war for independence in Ireland when he was a boy, and the Troubles that followed in newly-established Northern Ireland. As an adult, it was in London and Paris in the fall of 1939, when he first joined the war effort. SIS was looking for unassuming bright young people, and a twenty-one, he was exactly that. His records are still so highly classified that he couldn’t answer questions, even if people knew to ask them.
The overarching assumption is that Steve Rogers was some kind of shrinking violet before he met Peggy Carter. A rather shy, virginal young man — an impression that the world seems to have clung to for seven decades despite the fact that Peggy was an upper-class Englishwoman who went to a prestigious girl’s academy and then a Swiss finishing school and Steve Rogers was a working-poor immigrant born in Belfast and raised in the gutters of Brooklyn when that borough was first gaining its reputation as a violent mob-run area.
If anyone had ever thought to ask any of his old teammates, they’d likely have been quickly dissuaded from that train of thought. The world seems to have deluded themselves into believing that kindness and compassion are synonymous with innocence and naïveté, and therefore a paragon of those aspects must be some kind of lamb, despite the plethora of experience to the contrary. Steve Rogers always strove to be kind and compassionate because he knew exactly what it was like in the world, and he was a man who understood that while you are unable to shield people from the world’s cruelty, you can be there to soften the blows and to help them get up and dust themselves off.
The world never knows anything about him while he lives, and so it stands to reason that he will end the same way, even his death a falsehood. The falsehood was not that he had died, that much is true (no bases on the moon, even for a man more god than man), but the circumstances are a lie. The public gets to believe that he’d gone off and lived out his days in another reality, had a white picket fence and two-point-five children and a dog, because that’s what they want to believe, despite the fact that he can’t age.
They do not want to think that Captain America was speared through the chest and the throat by Dark Elves in Asgard in 2013. The public does not want to know that he bled out in his brothers’ arms, their tears dripping onto him as Wanda Maximoff, a woman as close to a daughter as he ever had, clutches his hand and sobs, begs him not to leave her too. His last words are a garbled apology to her.
And so Captain America dies the way he had lived. An unknown.
He’d have liked it that way.