The whole world knows his name. Half the world loves him, holds him up on a pedestal, an ideal. The other half curses him, calls him a vigilante and a traitor.
Half of them are more right than the other half, but none of them know him.
Only one person in 90 years has ever known him, and he’s gone. He’s been gone for 70 years, and the fact that he’s still alive doesn’t change that.
Captain America has blood on his hands. So much blood, in fact, that no matter how much he uses Tony’s expensive shower, he can never stop seeing it.
The ones who love him, who see him as some kind of beacon for America, don’t think about the fact that he’s killed countless people. He’d stopped counting around 50, and that’d been before 1965.
“They were all bad people! Nazis, most of them!” They defended him by saying this. By saying that those he’d murdered deserved it.
As if they didn’t have mothers and children and spouses. As if the maybe 16 year old Kraut that he’d decapitated with his shield in 1944 had deserved it. His eyes were blue like Bucky’s. Blue and still looked scared, even when his head was separated from his shoulders.
As if the fact that they were on the opposite side of a war meant that Steve didn’t wake up sweating every other night, seeing their dead eyes and the blood on his star spangled uniform.
The ones who loved him called him good and just and true.
Steve Rogers wasn’t any of those things. Mostly, he was old and tired and sad.
And lonely. Jesus, he got so lonely.
There were women, now and again. Men, once or twice.
He’s been celibate since he found Bucky again, because anyone else would be a betrayal. Because he’d betrayed Bucky enough when he let him fall, and he would never do it again. Because his hands wouldn’t stop shaking unless he was actively in battle.
Bucky Barnes. Jesus Christ. Bucky Barnes, the only person in 90 years, in the whole damned world who knew him. Who loved Steve Rogers, not Captain America.
Who loved him knowing all the blood on his hands. Who loved him in spite of it, or because of it, or because they were the only two people in the world when they were together.
Because they’d known each other when they were snot nosed kids together. Because Bucky had been Steve’s first everything. All the blood in the world couldn’t wash that away.
Because Bucky was there after Steve’s first battle, after his first and second and third and sixth kill, and he’d put his palm on the back of Steve’s sweaty neck and put his forehead to his while Steve was still shaking and shell shocked.
“I love you, punk,” he’d whispered, and kissed him until Steve couldn’t think anymore.
So Steve turned off the television when he heard his name on the news.
They didn’t know him. The only person who knew him was frozen in Wakanda, and the nice words people said about him didn’t make him feel better.
The only thing that did was remembering Bucky’s hand on his neck, his hoarse voice whispering in a dirty Army tent, his mouth soft on Steve’s trembling mouth.
When the reporters asked him why he’d betrayed his country and the Avengers for Bucky Barnes Steve had almost laughed in their faces.
He’d betray the whole damn universe for just the memory of that one moment, over 60 years ago.
No, they didn’t know him.