Philia. Storge. You remember seeing those words in one of your textbooks, years before the war began (again) and he enlisted, and you followed alongside him, trying to enlist once, twice, four times before it finally made a difference.
If ever there was anyone (any two) who understood philia and storge, it is you and him. You have the bond of brothers, of family, and your love for each other is unconditional - nothing will ever break it.
This is love: you grow up together, knowing poverty and fear and illness, and you stand shoulder to shoulder, you stand head to shoulder, and there is an arm wrapped around your shoulders, and hands grasping them, and a hand grabbing yours, pulling you toward a pretty dame, pulling you out of a fight with a guy twice your size, pulling to get you to slow down because you’re bigger and better and faster, now, but you’ll never leave him behind. Only, you don’t get a choice; he follows you and you follow him, and one day, there is a train, and icy tracks, and a fight (there is the sound of gunfire, the heat of an explosion, the listing of the train as its side is peeled away in a shriek of metal), and you hold out your hand, and you shout for him, and desperation drowns you as he reaches out, as he reaches out so you can grab his hand and pull him to safety, because the wind and the speed of the train and the slick metal and the cold winter air are more than twice his size, and you remember how many times he saved you. You reach out, ready to pull; he reaches out, ready to be pulled, only this time, you do not - cannot - catch him.
He falls into a snowy abyss, and you can feel yourself falling right alongside him. He is lost, dead, maybe, and you are lost and dead right behind him. (For whither thou goest, so too will I go, and I will follow you to the ends of the earth - to the end of the line.)
There is a plane, and a photo of a serious woman, and a woman’s voice begging you, pleading with you, and you make a promise you know is impossible to keep, and you follow your heart - follow your family, your brother - into cold winter, into a freezing, terrifying fall, into death, and you drown and freeze beneath the waves.
You wake up the better part of a century later - your body thawed long before your heart is - in a world that will forever be out of your grasp, just as death is. The world is not always out of reach, you find, and death is not always so unattainable as it first seems. It lunges for you in the form of gaping maws and technology far beyond your understanding, attacks you from behind, where instinct takes over and forces you to shield; it comes wearing the face of a god - not your god, you cannot help pointing out of his brother - with armies unlike anything you’ve ever seen at its back, through a wormhole that you order closed with a man still inside. You do not die.
You do not live, either. Not really, and certainly not like you used to, before. You suppose that flying and falling and loss will take its toll on anyone, even men with plans.
You learn of deaths in the family, and you have your suspicions, you think you know who, what, the video years later tells you where and why, gives you a distinct impression of when, and you know far more than you ever wanted to know of how. But here’s the thing: brothers-in-arms is different from philia, from storge. This is not to say that you do not love this man with the star that once hung in his chest, the man who loves fully and completely and destructively (because stars are beautiful, stunning things, but they are dangerous, and even the smallest and coldest of them can - will - disintegrate anything and everything that touches it), but you do not love him nearly as much as the man who fell and took part of you with him.
The muzzle is torn away from the face of your would-be killer, and the eyes that have been staring at you unforgivingly are suddenly recognizable. The world around you is drained of noise, is leached of color, until the only thing left is this: in the background, a colorless, unimportant office building, cars, civilians lining the streets as they rush away from the destruction that surrounds you. In the foreground, there is only him, a stark form standing out against sameness, stealing the color from the world around him, thieving away the oxygen from the air around you, and all you can do is sink to your knees and stare because you know him. You know this man standing in front of you, walking away from you, his back towards you, looking over his shoulder - you know him, and he doesn’t know himself, you know him, but he doesn’t know you. (You can’t help thinking that you know the feeling; you haven’t known yourself since he fell. That doesn’t stop it from hurting.)
The helicarriers are burning around you - your doing, the Widow’s doing, the Falcon’s doing - and you are falling, crashing, catapulting toward the water as you did toward the ice all those years - not so long - ago. And he is trapped beneath metal, is trapped in his own mind, is held captive by a many-headed snake (cut off one head, and two more grow back), and you are trapped with him, you are crashing to earth beside him, your legs are his legs, and together you are held captive by metal and glass, and you cannot let him die again.
There is a great spray of water, and billowing fire, and it is all around you, and all you can see is blue: blue eyes set in marble. And you have found him, and with him you have found yourself.
This is something you know: he is - was - a sniper. He knows how to shoot, knows how to kill. But you also know this: that was war, that was life and death, that was patriotism, and loyalty, and a willingness to serve, no matter what might be lost (innocence, morality) in the process. And, look. You know him. You have grown up with this man, you know that the first time he killed someone, he was sick. You know, and the files prove, that he is not - was not - doing this willingly.
“Did you know?” he asks you, face like stone, eyes showcasing a shattered, bleeding heart.
“I didn’t know it was him,” you reply, and this - this is an important distinction. You knew that not everything was as it seemed, but you also knew - know, though you cannot always live with it - that the past is best left in the past, where it shapes the people of today in memories, where it harms no one. He asks again, angry now, and not just heartbroken and devastated, and you realize - this is not about the who, this is about secrets, about sometimes my teammates don’t tell me things. And so you tell the truth, say “Yes,” even knowing that it is too little, too late, especially regarding secrets and lies that were far better left in the past where they hurt no one and destroyed nothing and shaped one man into the kind of man who is always trying to make up for his mistakes (does he even know what he’s making up for, anymore? Do you?). His knowing changes nothing, solves and resolves nothing. The past is sealed in ice, frozen in time where it belongs; the ice is melted, and the past is introduced into the modern world, and it flounders, tries to find its feet, tries to cling to anything and everything from whence it came. You can see the punch (the invasion, the conflict, the problem) coming from a mile away. You stand tall and you grit your teeth and you take it.
There is a difference between respect and love, something you know all too well. You respected the father, and the Founder (though you could have loved her if you had had more time), and you even respect the star because you have heard his story, and you realize that even though he makes mistakes, he is throwing his entire being into protecting the world, and that is something you understand, something you can relate to. He is very similar to you, and so you respect him. But you do not love him beyond that base, vague love that you feel for everyone in the universe because you must. Respect is not love, and you respect him, but you love the man who had your front and back and sides while you grew up. You will not let someone you respect kill the person you love.
You are too much alike, you and this glowing star; the two of you love completely, unconditionally. You would both kill for the ones you love, would kill for family, would sacrifice the world for them whether they wish it or not. You know this. You know yourself, know him. You know stars the way you know the tesseract: intimately. You know their destructive tendencies, with their destroy first, ask questions later attitude, and though you knew that this particular star is not like that (not always, at least), you could not risk it, and so you kept your mouth shut, and you buried your secrets and suspicions. (You knew what would happen, and it still catches you off guard, and you still leave a man behind.)
Here’s the thing: you know yourself. If there is one thing you are good at, it is reading people, it is seeing the details as well as the bigger picture. So yes. You know yourself intimately, and you know that you are not perfect. You know that you have made mistakes. You think that this is what people forget about you - this is what you forget about yourself, sometimes - underneath the titles, underneath the red and the white and the blue, underneath the forgiveness and the plans, you are just a man. You are only human.
It is this understanding, this acceptance, this peace you have come to with yourself, that is what allows you to hold out your hand and be called worthy.
You are given a second chance, and you think about it. You have already gone against the will of one hundred seventeen nations for this man - you have already almost torn apart the world for him, you have already sacrificed everything for him. You know how this story goes: you are the knight in red and white and blue, in stars and stripes. You are the one with the shield, meant to defend the world (so why is it that you - and they - are avenging it, instead?) from outsiders, from itself. He is the war prisoner who is just learning his own mind again. You chase after him and you bring him in, you protect him, and you abandon your allies and destruction follows in your wake. You know how this story goes: you save him, and he becomes the center of your universe, and people get hurt - physically, mentally, emotionally. You are given a second second chance - a third chance, really, coming up on four, and you have a choice to make. Do you save him when you have already lived through the consequences? Or do you save the world and leave him behind?
You know how this story goes, and you think of infinity in your past, think of spiders and birds and ants. You remember men made of iron, men and women created by an alien mind. You think of the reality you have lived, of the fragility of time, the threat of space. You think that this situation gives you quite a bit of power over the souls of the entire universe.
Worthy, you acknowledge years later in your past-present, does not mean unselfish. And so you hold her close, and you remind yourself, as the years go by, that philia and storge do not make this your fight.
You choose. You dance with opportunity held tight in your arms, and you leave the difficult conversations for the future.
(You let the world save itself.)